The King's Coat

by Dewey Lambdin

“On the uproll … fire!” Lewrie shouted, feeling the scend of the sea through his feet. The first gun bellowed, now hot and leaping straight back from the sill. He ran aft with the broadside, since some gunners did not get a clean ignition on the first uproll, and had to wait for the second, each gun captain now doing his own aiming.

  “You wanted me, sir?” Lewrie said after gaining the quarterdeck.

  “Mister Lewrie, Mr. Gwynn or the gunner’s mate are in charge on the gun deck, and I’ll thank you to remember that,” Treghues told him.

  “Mr. Gwynn is dealing with the carronade, sir, and the gunner’s mate is below in the magazine, sir—”

  “You shall return forward and remind Mr. Gwynn of his duties as master gunner, and you shall summon the gunner’s mate from the magazine for the forecastle gun. I shall not have any of my midshipmen circumventing the proper chain of command.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” and Lewrie doffed his hat. Treghues turned his back on him, and Lewrie was left staring at Railsford and Monk as they shook their heads. He put his hat on, shrugged to them with a smile that seemed to say you-figure-it-out and ran back forward.

  Gwynn really would much rather have played with his carronade, but he sighed and went down the ladder to the gun deck. Lewrie took time to see that the brig was taking a real beating, half her larboard side pitted with shot holes and her sail-handling gangway torn away.

  Lewrie ran below down the midships hatch and rapped on the hatchway to the hanging magazine on the orlop deck. The gunner’s mate stuck his head out through the slitted felt curtain.

  “The captain wants you to help Mr. Gwynn supervise the guns,” Lewrie panted.

  Robinson spat. He and the Yeoman of The Powder Room were busy enough passing cartridges to the ship’s boys to run up to the guns, and no one ever allowed many cartridges to be made up, so he was busy filling silk bags and tying them off to service the hungry artillery. “What’s happenin’ up top?”

  “We’re shooting hell out of a rebel brig.”

  “Then whadduz ’e want me for?” Robinson asked.

  “He doesn’t want me running the guns, Mister Robinson,” Lewrie said with another eloquent shrug as Robinson squeezed through the felt curtain and followed him toward midships.

  “No pleasin’ officers,” Robinson said. “Nor figurin’ what they want, neither.”

  Once on deck there was really nothing for Robinson to do, since they had closed to within half a cable of the brig and the remaining Marines were having a field day shooting by volley from the hammock nettings, ramming and spitting ball down the barrel, cocking and stepping up to the nettings, aiming and firing two rounds a minute at their hottest pace.

  The brig was still fighting back gamely. Her colors now flew from her maintop, the gaff of the spanker having been shot away. It looked as though the flag had been nailed to the topmast.

  “Damned tough, they is,” a quartergunner shouted to Robinson. “Cap’n called on ’em ta strike, an’ their master tol’ Treghues ta go fuck ’isself.”

  “They’re Englishmen, by God,” Robinson said. “May be rebel Englishmen, but they’re our sort, game as guinea cocks.”

  There was another volley from the brig’s guns, three distinct barks from all her surviving guns, and three hard knocks that rocked Desperate as though she had been kicked by a giant.

  “Prime yer guns,” Robinson shouted. “Point. On the uproll…”

  There was a flurry of gunfire from the rebel ship, swivels and musket fire that struck quills of wood from bulwarks and decks.

  “They’ve men in the foretop,” Lewrie yelled to Lieutenant Peck but could not make himself heard.

  “Christ!” Robinson grunted. He had been struck by a ball in the knee.

  “Mister Gwynn,” Lewrie yelled. “It’s Mister Robinson.”

  “On the uproll … fire!” Gwynn commanded, finishing the sequence that Robinson had started.

  “They’ll take me fuckin’ leg, I knows it,” Robinson groaned as he rocked and shivered with agony. “I had ta leave the magazine fer this…?”

  There was another volley of musket fire and two Marines went limp, falling back over the starboard gangway. Lewrie remembered what he had tried to tell Peck, and jumped for the gangway, levering himself up in clear shot to speak to the Marine officer.

  “Sharpshooters in the foretop, sir.”

  “Rifles, by God!” Peck called out, spotting where the fire was coming from. The men aloft on the enemy ship were dressed in some kind of uniform, rifle-green tunics with white facings and buff breeches, and round hats pinned up on one side. This was no expensively outfitted privateer or a merchant vessel feeling overly aggressive—this was a rebel warship of the so-called Continental Navy!

  “By volley, at the foretop,” Peck ordered, pointing at the target with his smallsword.

  “Mister Lewrie!” Gwynn roared. “Lay the carronade on them!”

  It was an order he was glad to obey … he had not yet been allowed to play with the carronades and it relieved him from standing about like a supernumerary.

  “Quoin out, gun captain,” Lewrie yelled in the man’s ear after failing to get his attention any other way. “Lay on her foretop!”

  “Too close, sir, won’t bear that high.”

  “The larboard gun.”

  “Aye, might reach.”

  “Even if you hit the mast, that’ll bring ’em down,” Lewrie said, running to larboard. The carronade mount could be swiveled about in a wide arc, so it was easy to lay it in the general direction. But their activity attracted the sharpshooters, and a powder boy screamed as his eleven-year-old life was snuffed out with a larger-caliber rifle ball through his spine.

  Lewrie dove for the powder cartridge and shoved it into the muzzle, standing aside as the rammer man thrust away. They got a ball down the muzzle, but then the rammer man gave a shriek and spun about, a bullet through his brains.

  “Jesus Christ, save us,” the gun captain said, picking up the rammer and giving the ball a few taps.

  “Quoin out, there!” Lewrie told the man behind the gun. He felt a breath of air on his face, heard a hum like a summer bee and saw the larboard rail toss off a burst of tiny wood chips as a rifle ball nearly divided his skull.

  “Hot work, sir,” the tackle man nearest him said with a gap-toothed smile.

  “At least you’re getting paid,” Lewrie said, lost in a fighting fever.

  “Stand clear!” the gun captain said, lowering his linstock.

  Up close, the explosion of the powder charge was like having one’s head down the muzzle, and Lewrie’s ears rang and ached, but he saw the foretop shattered by the explosion of the carronade shot, and the cluster of sharpshooters was torn away in pieces as the topmast came down in chunks as well, and her rigging draped her like a netting.

  The foremast gave a groan, and then the thick column of the lower mast began to split like a sawn tree that had been felled badly, pivoted forward with the pressure of the wind on a loose forecourse yard and came down with a crash across the enemy’s forecastle, crushing the bow-chaser gun crews that must have been firing at them at that point-blank range but had gone unnoticed in the general tumult and chaos.

  The brig was now almost alongside, her gangways slightly below Desperate’s taller railings, and the Marines were having a great time shooting down into the enemy ship’s waist.

  “Boarders,” Railsford yelled, drawing his sword. “Repel boarders…”

  “Holy shit on a biscuit,” the carronade gun captain shouted. “I don’t believe these people!”

  Lewrie seized a cutlass from a weapons tub and went to the starboard forecastle rail. The brig was bumping into Desperate, and such of her crew as had survived were tossing grapnels to hold their ship against the frigate even as the Marines’ volleys cut swathes out of their closely packed ranks.

  A gawky, thatch-haired young man leaped up in front of Lewrie with a cutlass, and Lewrie engaged with him as more poured over.

  Th
e man was strong but clumsy. Lewrie beat his guard aside and cut back across, slashing the man’s throat. The man fell back into the sea, blood shooting out like a claret fountain. The next man up took a boarding pike through his stomach and also fell into the sea. The third, Lewrie had time to skewer with the point of his cutlass, and he too raised a splash alongside.

  The enemy had gained the midships gangway but were being cut up by boarding pikes and Marine bayonets, and the enemy’s stern was pivoting away from Desperate.

  Lewrie waved his cutlass, attracting more angry bees that rushed by him. “Fend ’em off the forecastle…”

  With rammers, with handspikes, crows and boarding pikes, about a dozen hands were there with him, some slashing the air with cutlass steel, others fighting like wild Indians with tomahawks. The rebels who had gained the forecastle began to fall back, leaping for their own decks. A Marine corporal came forward with ten privates and began to volley into them.

  “Do we board her?” the corporal asked.

  “Won’t trap me over there,” a gunner said.

  “I think she’s sinking,” Lewrie said. “Look how low in the water she is.”

  The brig was indeed very low in the water now, the sea almost up to her gun ports; her wale and chain-plates were already under. Lewrie could see the tangle of bodies on her forecastle and forward gun deck, piled up like slaughtered rabbits after a successful hunt; how two guns were shot free of any restraints and rolled back and forth on the bloody deck.

  But they were still firing. Swivels and light four-pounders on her quarterdeck, where the only resistance still stood, an occasional musket or rifled gun, and pistols still popped.

  “Cut her free,” Lewrie ordered the tomahawk men. “We’ll not be able to save her, and if we roll over she’ll have the sticks out of us.”

  The three-inch lines grappled to Desperate were already iron-hard and taut, groaning and crying with tension, and each time the brig slunk into a wave there was a pull downward on the frigate.

  Once cut with an axe, the lines twanged like bowstrings and almost snapped a man’s right arm off as they parted. The brig’s forecastle was level with the sea, and her beakhead and jib boom was under, sinking quickly now by the bows. She would not last long. Ominous rumbles came from her as the surging waves explored her innards.

  “Strike!” Treghues yelled. “In the name of humanity, strike!”

  “Hell, no, you British duck-fucker,” their young captain yelled back, cupping his hands and standing foursquare on his shattered deck. “You tell the world, we were the brig o’ war Liberty, Continental By God Navy…”

  Then with a foamy surge the ocean broke over her bows and she tilted up by the stern, gear and shattered timbers and loose guns and internal stores screaming in pain and bulkheads battered into ruin. She slipped beneath the sea, leaving a few survivors swimming in the light flotsam. Her mainmast was the last to go under, still bearing the striped rebel colors with the starry blue canton nailed to the mast. She had lost her fight, but it didn’t feel so.

  They fetched up and went over with a boat to pick up survivors, but there weren’t a dozen men left and the young captain was not one of them. Treghues offered them dry clothes and rum and put them below.

  Lewrie wished that the day was over but it was not to be. Once they had swayed up a new t’gallant mast, roved a fresh outer jib stay, taken down the damaged tops’l yard, fished it with a stuns’l boom, rehoisted it and bent on a new sail, they were off once more in search of prizes that lay tantalizingly to leeward.

  After their labor a late meal was brought up from the galley, cold meat and cheese and biscuit. The rum ration was doled out along with as much small beer as they could drink. Their dead were hustled below out of sight by the loblolly boys and the decks washed clean of blood and offal to keep up their fighting spirit.

  They came across another brig beating up to windward for Fredericksted from the west, unaware that anything was happening, and did not notice that Desperate was British until it was too late. She turned out to be French, come for a load of stores to smuggle, and was crammed to the deckheads with rum, molasses and naval stores. There was no resistance, and Mr. Monk went away with Carey in charge of her, leaving Alan as the last midshipman still aboard.

  Let it be over, he thought in weariness, and the awful letdown he had come to know as his normal reaction after each hard fight. All he wanted to do was find a patch of shade and go to sleep as some of the hands could, never mind slinging a hammock below. They had finally stood down from Quarters … every sail still in sight was hull-down over the horizon running for their lives.

  By late afternoon even Treghues had to admit that they had run out of hope of future prizes, that they had seemingly swept the ocean clean. On their way nor’west toward Culebra and Vieques Islands, they could see sails jogging along behind them, and in trail of the other warships, perhaps ten captures in all, in which all the frigates and sloops would share. Actually in material terms they had not made a real dent in the volume of imports to the rebellious Colonies, but perhaps the audacity of the raid would give the smugglers pause, or make them choose new areas in which to operate.

  Lewrie stood by the taffrail, reveling in the quarter breeze now that the strength had gone out of the sun. The wind held his coat open, and he spread his shirt wide below the neckcloth to allow the cooling wind to play on his chest and sweaty ribs.

  “Getting indecent with the mermaids, Mister Lewrie?” Lieutenant Railsford asked, coming aft to join him.

  “That would be a novel experience, sir,” Lewrie said, taking off his hat to cool his scalp.

  “That was good work you did up forrard today, Lewrie,” Railsford told him, letting his own coat spread open.

  “Thank you, Mister Railsford, I am grateful that someone appreciated it.”

  “I do not mean to pry, Mister Lewrie, but…” Railsford now spoke in a softer tone since Treghues’ cabin skylight was slightly forward of them, and was open for a breeze … “I get the feeling our lord and master no longer approves of you.”

  “No need to worry, sir, I’ll bear up.”

  “Take a round turn and two half-hitches?” Railsford grinned.

  “And as Mister Monk says, sir, the more you cry, the less you’ll piss,” Lewrie bantered, his eyes overbright and his mood a bit too chipper to pass unnoticed.

  “The captain has his … moods,” Railsford said, treading on soft ground … there had been officers who had been court-martialed for a habit of criticism. A captain could demand obedience from his officers and also a united front of one mind once he had determined what opinion should be held.

  “If it is any comfort, Mister Lewrie, those moods can be swift to change in most instances.” That was as far as Railsford would go in criticism of the captain. Any gossip passed on would undermine both Railsford’s, and Treghues’, authority.

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Remember, every captain has something to teach you, for good or ill. Life in the Fleet can be a series of disasters to be borne sometimes.”

  “I shall bear up, Mister Railsford. Thank you for that…”

  Desperate took in her t’gallants and brailed them up, lowered the yards to the caps, took a reef in their tops’ls and got the speed off her for evening sailing at the rendezvous, as well as to allow her prize vessels to catch up with her. Then it was clear-decks-and-up-spirits, supper, evening Quarters and hammocks below for the night. At dusk the masthead lookouts came down, and hands took up upper-deck viewing posts.

  Amphion ordered all prize vessels gathered in an impromptu convoy, with the sloops off to windward to guard the flank. Amphion brought up the rear and Desperate worked out ahead and to leeward of the convoy as they set off sou’east for the nearest British ports.

  Lewrie had had his supper alone. Both master’s mates and all the other midshipmen were away in prizes. The steward brought him some boiled salt-pork, a couple of new potatoes, biscuit and Black Strap cut with water. Aft, the
officers were celebrating loudly, those still on board. Their steward came through several times with bottles which had been cooling on the orlop, while Alan ate and drank in isolation, which condition he was sure was to be permanent.

  He had the evening watch, and Mr. Gwynn stood in for a deck officer with him. The sky was clear, littered with bright stars, and though there was no moon, the sea shone at each wavetop, now and then breaking into a white chop. Lewrie made a tour of the lower deck with the ship’s corporal and master-at-arms to inspect the galley and lanterns to make sure all fires were out, then went back to the quarterdeck and loafed by the forward nettings. The Trades sang sweetly through the rigging, and the hull held at a slight angle of heel to starboard, hissing and groaning as she made her way toward home.

  Gwynn was near him, looking up at the stars and the sails. There was a gurgling noise as Gwynn pulled on a pocket flask of rum, and the sweet odor wafted by like a woman’s perfume.

  “Summat ta keep yer eyes open, Mister Lewrie?” Gwynn offered.

  “That would have me snoring on the deck, Mister Gwynn, but I thankee,” Lewrie replied. “God, I am so tired.”

  “Allus like that after a hard fight,” Gwynn said. “God, they fought grand. Can’t remember the Continental Navy showin’ that much bottom. Privateers get the best men. Rebels’re too independent ta take ta Navy-style discipline.”

  “If they’d had nine-pounders, or carronades, they’d have done for us, I think, Mister Gwynn,” Lewrie said, nodding in agreement.

  “Right enough.”

  Treghues emerged on deck from aft, and the pair of them went down to leeward to give him the entire windward side of the quarterdeck for his pacing. Treghues was in breeches and open shirt, quite informal for a change, a spooky apparition in the faint starlight, pacing back and forth quite regularly; not as though he were in deep thought but as if it was a duty to walk for a while before retiring. To escape, Lewrie went forward to tour the lookouts on the forecastle and gangways and make certain they were more awake than he was. He had to shake a couple of men into full wariness. By the time he had returned to the quarterdeck, Treghues had gone below and only a dim glow could be seen from his skylight. And then as Alan watched, that was snuffed out.