by John Drake
First we came upon the screen of frigates spread out far ahead, searching for the enemy, and even as their topmasts hove in sight above the horizon, Fydor was challenged by a hoist of flags from the distant Pegasus, 28 guns, Captain Robert Barlow. A long exchange of signals followed as Cutler explained our mission, and Pegasus passed on the news to the main fleet, dozens of miles away, under the horizon.
Cutler’s Signals Midshipman was pressed to his limits by this. With the eyes of the whole quarterdeck upon him, he grew red-faced and flustered, fumbling through the code book, fast as he could, trying to keep up with the speed of the signals coming from Pegasus. The poor wretch twice dropped the book in his anxiety. But you could hardly blame him. The Channel Fleet was mustard hot for signalling in those days.**An illuminating remark from Fletcher. Lord Howe, Commander of the Channel Fleet, was famous for his revision of the Navy’s signals, producing the Code Book of 1790 which contained the distinctive flags which still form the basis of flag signals to this day. S.P.
Within an hour the big ships themselves were in sight. And a fine sight they were too, plunging majestically forward under their pyramids of bulging sails. They were as regular in their station-keeping as a line of rail-road carriages running behind a steam locomotive. Only a seaman can understand just how hard it was to achieve that level of fleet seamanship, so I won’t bore you with long explanations. But take it from me that it weren’t done easy.
Cutler took Fydor down the line of heavy ships, and tacked her smartly to bring her around on to the same course as the flagship, Queen Charlotte. With the whole fleet looking on, this was a nervous moment for Cutler. One spar carried away, or sail split, could blight his reputation. And worst of all, should Fydor fail to come through the wind, and be thrown all aback, in irons — then he might as well go down to his cabin and blow out his brains.
But he was a good enough seaman and his men were sharp. Soon, they were hoisting out Cutler’s barge and manning her for the brief pull across to the flagship. His barge crew had puce jackets with black piping and red caps with tassels. I remember that for the vile bad taste of it. I was ordered to collect my traps (which was little enough) and accompany Cutler into the illustrious presence of the Admiral. So down the side I went, and carefully timed my final jump into the heaving boat that bucked up and down ten feet with each passing wave. It was one of those occasions when my strength was no help and my weight against me.
A bloody awful business it is too, getting into a boat at sea. It’s really hard to do without falling into the sea or breaking a bone, but nobody thinks the least of you if you do it right, while they all sneer if you do it wrong. But that’s a seaman’s lot, and one reason why I preferred dry land.
As soon as Cutler joined me (in his full dress) his men set their teeth and tried to split themselves with the maniac force of their rowing. They were on their mettle every bit as much as Cutler had been. It wouldn’t do for the fleet to mutter that Fydor’s barge-crew were a set of slack-handed idlers, and that’s what they’d be called if they didn’t sweat actual blood.
So, on 26th May 1794, I set foot aboard Queen Charlotte, flagship of the Channel Fleet, a 100-gun, first-rate line-of-battle ship and one of the biggest vessels in His Majesty’s Royal Navy. To give you some idea of just how big she was, I would remind you that a good-sized, ocean-going merchantman in those times, was a 300-tonner, like Bednal Green. A large frigate like Fydor was near a thousand tons’ burden, while the main fighting ship of the fleet battle-line was the 74-gun ship, which was a vessel of 1,800 tons, give or take a few hundred.
But a first-rate, my boys, was of another class entirely. Queen Charlotte was a beast of near 2,500 tons.* *Fletcher gives the tonnage of ships by the ancient reckoning of “bur-then”: the supposed carrying capacity of the vessel obtained by complex calculations. The modern concept of “displacement”: the volume of water displaced by the ship when loaded is obtained by different calculations and gives a higher figure. In terms of displacement, Queen Charlotte may have been a ship of some 3,500 tons. S.P. Forests of oaks had been felled to build her and she towered up in majestic height, of deck upon deck, with three full rows of great guns glaring out of her ports, ready to pulverise any lesser thing that dared to come within her reach: 32-pounders on the lowest gun-deck, 24-pounders on the middle deck, and 18-pounders on the upper gun-deck, not to mention the lesser ordinance on her quarterdeck and fo’c’sle.
There were never very many first-rates because they’were so fearfully expensive to build, and on that particular occasion, of the twenty-six ships in the Channel Fleet, nineteen were 74- or 80-gun third-rates, four were second-rates of 98 guns, and only three were first-rates: Queen Charlotte herself, plus Royal George and Royal Sovereign.
Generally they weren’t fast or nimble sailers, ‘cos they were built first and foremost as gun-platforms, and stood so high out of the water that they made a lot of leeway. But nothing on the face of the earth or the waters could match their enormous fire-power. You should think of a first-rate as a great, dense-packed fortress, bristling with guns, and given the magical ability to move at will and direct its fire wherever it chose.
And dense-packed they were too! Queen Charlotte had 900 souls embarked. Starting from the bottom up, there were 100 Marines, under their own Captain, Lieutenants, sergeants and corporals. There were fifty ships’ boys and 600 seamen. There were half-a-dozen women who weren’t supposed to be there at all and who the Navy pretended were not there at all. There were shoals of Warrant Officers, craftsmen and specialists. Every trade was present from barber to Bosun, cooper to clerk, sailmaker to surgeon, and cook to chaplain.
There were dozens of busy midshipmen and six, lofty Sea-Service Lieutenants. There were two Post Captains, both noble Knights: the Fleet Captain, Sir Roger Curtis (who was a sort of “Admiral’s mate”) and the actual, the executive, ship-commanding Captain, Sir Andrew Snape-Douglas.
So that was Queen Charlotte and the fleet that she led. But what then of the man who stood in command of all this? The man who wielded such power as was beyond the dreams of Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar? The man who stood above every Captain in the fleet and the two Captains aboard his own ship? That man was Admiral of The Fleet, Richard Lord Howe.
He stood by the weather bulwark of the quarterdeck, glittering in gold lace, with his minions and followers in attendance upon him. I recognised him at once from a hundred prints and portraits. The scowling heavy brows, the big lower lip and the swarthy face that had earned him the lower-deck nickname of “Black Dick”.
He was sixty-eight years old, a seaman from the age of fourteen and of a seniority and experience that beggared belief. He had actually been a bloody Admiral longer than I’d been alive, for he’d achieved flag rank in 1770, five years before I was born.
So when their Lordships of the Admiralty were wondering to whom they should give this choicest appointment of all those that they had within their gift, they naturally thought of Black Dick.
They thought of him for his courage and skill and his fathomless experience afloat. But there was something else too. For Howe’s mother was the illegitimate daughter of King George I. So Black Dick was King George III’s cousin, and His Majesty always acknowledged Howe as such.
As a bastard myself, I must say I approve of this. I only wish my own relatives had been half so kindly as King George. But then he was only a lunatic, while my kin (my half-brothers Alexander and Victor) were bloody maniacs.
*
Once they’d piped the side for Captain Cutler, he and I were ushered into the presence of our noble Admiral and allowed to make our bows. I’d begged a hat from Fydor’s gunner so I could doff it as I came aboard the flagship, for it’s important to take account of these trifles. The Navy sets great store by its ceremonies and, civilian as I was, I wanted to show respect. And this is no light matter. It costs not a penny to show good manners, while you can deliver a mortal insult by neglecting them, and that’s pig ignorant, plain stupi
d, and bad business.
As soon as Cutler and I came within range of his Lordship, my hat was off again and so was Cutler’s. After all, and for all the various reasons I’ve given you, Black Dick was one of the greatest men in the Kingdom.
“Good day, my Lord!” says Cutler, and drew himself up, laden with self-importance, “Cutler of Fydor, my Lord, very much at your service. I bring news of the utmost importance to England!” Black Dick’s eyebrows twitched and a stir ran through the crowd of gleaming officers that surrounded us.
Out of the corner of my eye I noted the dazzling white decks, the shimmering metalwork, the marionette-like perfection of the Marines. I think I may have said elsewhere that Cooper’s John Stark was smart as a flagship. Well, that was poppycock. Not compared with the spit and polish of the real thing, it wasn’t.
“So,” said Howe, “you claim you have the rendezvous where Villaret Joyeuse is to find the Grain Convoy?” He knew this from the signals relayed from Pegasus.
“Indeed, my Lord!” says Cutler eagerly. “I have incontrovertible evidence thanks to this gentleman’s efforts.” And he introduced me. “May I present Mr Jacob Fletcher, my Lord,” says he, “an English gentleman of independent means, who risked his very life to obtain the inestimably valuable information now in his possession.”
Well, that was handsomely said and no mistake. There were plenty of officers afloat in those days who’d have bust their breeches trying to prise some of the credit off of me. But Cutler wasn’t one of them.
“My Lord,” says I, bowing low.
“Fletcher?” says Howe, and his black brows creased halfway down his nose. “Jacob Fletcher? Your name rings familiar, sir. But I don’t know you ...” He frowned again and looked at the easy way I swayed with the heaving deck. It’s instinctive after a while. “And you have the look of a seaman about you. Are you in the King’s service?”
“No, my Lord,” says I, “though I had the honour to serve aboard Phiandra under Captain Bollington, who I believe is known to your Lordship.”
Howe nodded ponderously. “Bollington,” said he. “The Victor of Passage d’Aron. Fine seaman. Fine fellow!”
“And as for my name, my Lord,” says I, “that was put before the public in the newspaper reports of the circumstances of my inheritance …”
“Ah!” says Howe, in sudden recollection. “You’re Fletcher the Coignwood heir!” He grinned like a boy and shook his head. It was a startling thing to see in a man of such sombre appearance and enormous seniority. “You’re a rare bird, Fletcher,” says he. “Don’t you know there’s men who’d wade through the blood of their own children for the fortune you’ve set aside.”
“I know it only too well, my Lord,” says I, stung to annoyance, “for some of them have done their utmost to wade through mine!” Now that was a saucy reply to give to an Admiral aboard his flagship. But it came from the heart, for it was God’s truth, and I was fed up with being told what a fool I was to turn my back on the Coignwood money.
Every man and the ship’s cat had said that aboard Fydor, and they needn’t have bothered because I already knew it. All I wanted to do was step ashore at Portsmouth and claim the money.
But Howe slapped his thigh and laughed loudly, and his staff grinned and nodded to one another like the good courtiers that they were. I do believe that the old boy was sharp enough to guess some of my thoughts. But whatever his reasons, he took a liking to me from that moment.
In fact, to be completely accurate, Black Dick took a liking to me from a later moment about five minutes afterwards, when he and a group of favoured acolytes (plus myself and Cutler) repaired to the Master’s day cabin, beneath the poop deck, to study his charts of the Bay of Biscay.
We crammed into the small cabin, and a chart was pulled from its pigeon hole, unrolled and flattened on the chart table with round chart weights that fitted snugly into the brass-railed corners of the table to hold the chart still.
Howe had Cooper’s secret orders in his hand and himself read them aloud for all to hear. By the time he came to the rendezvous — 47 degrees 48 minutes north, 15 degrees 17 minutes west of Paris — they were hanging open-mouthed on his words. As Howe read out the latitude and longitude, every head bent over the chart and the Master made some swift calculations to render the unnatural, Froggish, Paris-based longitude into the Greenwich longitude that the Lord God had intended decent men to use. He made a neat pencil cross at the rendezvous point and we all gasped to see how far south of it we were.
“Mr Fletcher,” says Howe, “England is in your debt!” He turned to Snape-Douglas, the flagship’s Captain. “Sir Andrew,” says he, “I’ll have the fleet alter course immediately to close with the enemy!”
“Aye, aye, my Lord!” says Snape-Douglas and disappeared at once.
“See the size of the problem we faced!” says Howe. “Attempting to cover every French port from Calais to Bordeaux, with even the possibility that the rogues might pass through the Straits of Gibraltar to become the lawful prey of my Lord Hood and the Mediterranean Fleet.” He paused and looked solemnly at our faces. “At least we now know that this latter and ultimate disaster shall not occur!”
We all laughed at his joke, but you could see the impossibility of the task he’d been given. Now, you might think it an easy thing to find a fleet of a hundred ships. Especially when you’ve a string of lively frigates spread out over the ocean, all in communication with one another and signalling back to the flagship. But it ain’t like that.
Under ideal conditions, from a ship’s masthead, the horizon could be twenty miles away. So a ship could spy another ship anywhere within a circle of radius twenty miles, and diameter forty miles. But that’s ideal conditions. The weather can close down your line of sight to no more than the end of your nose if it chooses. And at night even the best-drilled ships can lose contact if they’re unlucky. And you can’t move fast, either, not when you’ve to keep a fleet together. It’s an ancient axiom but I’ll repeat it for those that may not know it: the best speed of a fleet is that of its slowest, worst-sailing member.
So what had been happening in those early days of May ‘94 was a stately blundering dance of three great fleets manoeuvring across the Atlantic like three fat, deaf, blindfolded duchesses trying to find one another by touch, starting each from a separate corner of an empty ballroom: Howe, with the Channel Fleet out of Portsmouth, Villaret Joyeuse with the Frog Atlantic Fleet out of Brest, and of course, Vanstable with the Grain Convoy out of Norfolk, Virginia. The rules of the dance were as follows: The Grain Convoy sailed in terror of meeting the Channel Fleet and was trying to rendezvous with the Brest Fleet. The Brest Fleet was trying to rendezvous with the Grain Convoy and to avoid the Channel Fleet, since the Frogs hadn’t the bottom for a fight.* *Fletcher fails to mention that Citizen Chauvelin had promised Villaret Joyeuse the guillotine should he fail to bring in the Grain Convoy and had placed a political spy, one Jean Bon St Andre, a fanatic Republican and a Deputy of the National Convention, aboard Villaret Joyeuse’s ship to report on his actions. It is hardly surprising therefore that Villaret Joyeuse concentrated on finding the Grain Convoy before all else. S.P.
The Channel Fleet, meanwhile, was straining to catch either of the other two, and was happily content to deliver the same desperate violence to either or both, separately or together, and entirely without prejudice.
And just to prove, if you haven’t realised it, that truth is stranger than any fiction, on the 17th May, the Channel Fleet and the Brest Fleet had actually passed through one another in thick fog. They heard each other’s bells sounding and the signal guns firing, but they couldn’t see one another. And on the following day when the fog lifted, they’d lost each other again.
But now Queen Charlotte was heeling over on to a new tack and the fleet was following her lead. The Master grabbed one of the chart weights as it slid across the table. He missed it and the fat porcelain lump ended up smashed on the deck.
“Never mind, gentlemen!”
says Howe. “We’ll break more than that before we’re done!” and to my great surprise he added, “Mr Fletcher, a turn about the deck with you, if you please.”
Now that was condescension. Poor old Cutler got fobbed off with Curtis, the Fleet Captain, and was hustled off back to his ship. Howe had taken Fydor under his command, as no Admiral could have too many frigates and he wanted her among the rest, out in front of the fleet.
And meanwhile I got half an hour of the undivided attention of Black Dick himself. He made me go over my tale, from Bednal Green to John Stark to Declaration and my escape with Cooper’s orders in my pocket. He listened without interruption, except once. I got to the point where I was claiming to have joined the Yankee Navy as a sort of unofficial spy (I damn near believed it myself by then) and I was about to explain my patriotic motives for doing this. But he raised his hand and looked at me down his nose.
“Mr Fletcher,” says he, “I’ll have you know that I execrate espionage in any of its forms.” But then he grinned and waved Cooper’s orders at me. “‘Tis enough that I have this in my hand. Pray continue, but spy me no more spies!”
When I was done, he nodded and he questioned me about the Coignwood money and who my friends were ashore.
In fact, I had no friends — not in the way he meant, at least. For what he was doing was feeling out where I stood in a political sense. As a great nobleman and a relative of the King, he was a Tory among Tories and was probing for any taint of Whiggery, nonconformism or the like diseases. Of course, I’d none of that nonsense about me. Indeed, I’d no taste for religion or politics at all (still don’t, neither, though like any man of business I’ve always been an Anglican Tory. That’s just plain common sense).