by J. D. Davies
'Gentlemen,' said I to my quarterdeck officers, 'what say you to coming to starboard by three points?'
Negus, who had joined us, was quick to respond to this most unspeakable heresy. 'Alter course at all, sir? An act unworthy of a king's ship? And alter course to starboard?"
'I think the King and His Royal Highness will forgive me the dishonour of giving way, Mister Negus, if it saves his ship from a head-on collision. And if you were he, what would you least expect Seraph to do?'
Negus and the rest saw my point, and I was mightily gratified to receive a smile and a nod from Kit Farrell, for this proposition of mine was truly stretching my infant command of seamanship to its limits. My thinking was thus. If, as I believed, the flyboat had no intention of giving way, but was determined rather upon ramming us, then he was probably gambling that we would do one of two things: either ploughing straight into him thanks to the arrogant pride, or the unvarnished ignorance, to be expected from a mere gentleman captain; or else, if the veteran navigators on the quarterdeck prevailed over their feeble chief, the Seraph, still on the port tack, would surely alter course to larboard to avoid collision, thus keeping the weather gauge. I prayed that the skipper of the approaching ship was no chess-playing Machiavel who might anticipate my double bluff.
If she had a skipper at all. For as the flyboat came steadily on, no man could be seen on her deck, or in her yards. She seemed as a ghost ship.
Francis Gale came on deck in that moment, looked at the approaching vessel, and raised an eyebrow.
I said, 'A prayer might be suitable, Chaplain.'
Gale improvised with considerable dexterity, as he always did. 'O Lord of hosts, fight for us, that we may glorify thee. O Lord God, preserve us from those who seek our destruction. O Lord, arise, help us, and deliver us for thy Name's sake. Amen.'
As many as were within earshot repeated the 'Amen', Musk with rare enthusiasm for such an ancient cynic. Gale said, 'Well, indeed. The esteemed Lords of Convocation didn't devise a special prayer for this situation, Captain. Let's hope the Lord is in a tolerant mood today.'
The two ships seemed to be approaching each other at an ever-increasing rate, the flyboat relentless in its course. Time for one last gesture—'Mister Lindman!' I cried from the quarterdeck through another flurry of sleet. The gunner, down in the ship's waist, raised his hat in salute. 'A warning shot from the bow chaser if you please!' This, after all, was the nicety that we would go through to enforce the salute to the flag on any other recalcitrant merchantman.
Lindman passed on the order to the crew manning one of the two nine-pound minions, up in the forecastle, and the gun fired. The shot tore a hole in the foresail of the flyboat, but still she came on.
Musk suggested, quite mildly, that this might be a good moment to make our move. Kit shook his head. We held our course. Every man in the rigging, every man on the deck, had their eyes trained only on the flyboat.
Then, as if they were commanded at once by some invisible lever, Kit, Castle and Negus all nodded in unison.
Helm three points to starboard!' I cried.
Now we would see if the King of England's confidence in the sailing qualities of the Seraph was well placed...
By God, so it was! With the whipstaff brought over, our bow swung to starboard almost at once—the Happy Restoration, Jupiter and Wessex had been veritable carthorses in comparison .
And in the same moment, the judgment of Captain Matthew Quinton, too, was redeemed. For the flyboat had made her move—made it, indeed, before I gave the order to my own helm. With a slower, broader ship and a more sluggish rudder, her invisible captain could only give his own order, anticipating the manoeuvre he felt we must make, a little while before I issued mine. Thus the flyboat, too, moved to starboard; but instead of ramming into us and causing untold damage, she passed harmlessly to larboard, barely a few feet away from our own larboard side.
'I will magnify thee, O God, my King,' murmured Francis Gale, 'and I will praise thy Name for ever and ever.' He smiled at me. 'Methinks the rest of the Hundred and Forty-Fifth psalm will be most appropriate for the next ship's prayers, Captain.'
Now, all was changed. For we were a ship of war, with fourteen primed and deadly pieces of ordnance on our larboard side. And the other was but a flyboat.
'Gunners!' I cried. 'Prepare to give fire!' Wait until the relative movement of the two hulls meant that all our broadside was able to bear—wait—'Give fire!'
Ours was still a raw and untrained crew, and our fire was hardly in unison. We were so close to the other that we could hear the balls striking the hull like hailstones upon a window. Many must have gone straight through, for a flyboat's scantlings are so much lighter than those of a man-of-war, but it was impossible to see until our own gunsmoke cleared—and with the wind from the north, that smoke carried back over our own deck, blinding and choking us. When at last it cleared, and we had coughed the acrid fumes from our throats, we observed that the flyboat, badly damaged and listing to larboard, was continuing her own turn to starboard, coming ever closer to the wind and to the Essex shore as she did so.
Castle saluted formally. 'Captain,' he said. 'Shall we come round, sir, take that cursed craft and arrest her murderous crew?'
Of course, that was the natural course of action for us to take; but even with as nimble a ship as Seraph, bringing her about, then beating back against wind and tide, would take no little time, especially in such raw conditions. We would then hardly get round into the Hope on that favourable ebb. And besides .
'She's going to run herself aground,' said Kit Farrell. 'We'd never get up to her in time.'
We held our course. We officers went to the stern rail of the poop as one man, and watched as the flyboat ran herself onto the mud of the Essex shore. The small boat that she towed behind her was hauled in, and six men climbed down into it. Six men; the skeleton crew that had sought to wreak untold damage on the Seraph.
But on whose behalf? My mind conjured up those same faces. Leech, Garvey, Montnoir. Whoever it was must have been mightily determined to prevent our sailing, and able to command a fair purse—for it would have cost no pittance in gold to obtain a flyboat for such a mission, and to pay a crew a sufficient wage for them to risk their lives or liberty in such a way. Discovering the answer would needs wait, for Seraph was sailing on majestically, downstream on the ebb, approaching the turn in the river at Greenhithe. Beyond that, it would be the Hope, the salute to Gravesend and Tilbury, the Nore, and finally the open sea at last.
Now, truly, the voyage of the Seraph was beginning.
PART THREE
His Majesty's Ship, The Seraph
At Sea and in the Gambia River
December 1663 to April 1664
Thirteen
The papists have a notion called purgatory. This is neither heaven nor hell, but rather a place between, where souls wait an eternity to be judged. But one does not need to be a papist, nor indeed to die, to experience purgatory: one merely has to be aboard a ship in the Downs. On a cold, foggy December morning, with but little wind—and that contrary—there are few places that more closely resemble a bleak eternal antechamber. Once again I studied the lights and fires of distant Deal, the ghostly shape of the white cliffs to the south and the squat, menacing bulks of old Harry the Eighth's castles that lined the bay, all of them appearing and disappearing intermittently as the fog swirled about us. I looked about from my quarterdeck at the shrouded shapes of perhaps a hundred ships at anchor, the souls aboard awaiting the judgment of fair winds that would bear them toward their destinations. Norwegian timber ships bound for Spain, Frenchmen bound for London with the wines of Gascony, and dozen upon dozen of Dutch flyboats, bound for every harbour on the globe; all of them congregated in that broad anchorage. To seaward of us lay Holmes' Jersey, a Fourth Rate as tough and experienced as her adventurous captain, and beyond her the Mary, a battle-scarred Third Rate that had been called Speaker in Cromwell's day. Waves broke on the Goodwin Sands, the
great barrier that kept ships safe between the open sea and the Kentish coast; one day, though, those sheltering sands and the waves breaking upon them would do for the same Mary, three other great ships and fifteen hundred blameless seamen of England, all perished in the greatest storm ever known in these isles. Even forty years before that catastrophe, I stood upon my deck and prayed that one ship, just one, would meet such a fate. She was the unkempt merchant ship of middling size that was beating down toward us from the island of Thanet.
Kit Farrell was at my side, and Kit was his accustomed cheery self, reeling off the sailing qualities and likely cargoes of ship after ship with the enthusiasm of a schoolboy. He could not know I was experiencing a kind of double purgatory that was unique to myself; for it was here, in the Downs, that Colonel Brian Doyle O'Dwyer would come aboard the Seraph.
Kit pointed toward the approaching ship. 'I don't envy the soldiers, cooped up aboard her all the way down to the Guinea shore,' said Kit. 'She's old and narrow. She'll pitch and yaw like a crazed thing in anything worse than a swell. And look there, sir, her owners must have cut her stern down at some point, and reshaped the bow. All to create a little more space to cram in a little more cargo and give them a little more profit. A botched job, that, right enough. Any carpenters' crew of the navy could fashion something better in a matter of a few watches, if not sooner. Aye, an ugly brute indeed is our friend, the Prospect of Blakeney.
The troop ship manoeuvred clumsily through the waters of Sandwich Bay and came to an anchor between the Jersey and ourselves, making the private signal with the former. The longboat that she towed in her wake was pulled in to the side, and after a few minutes, a cloaked shape descended into it. O'Dwyer.
Kit sensed my mood and fell silent before he left me, for he had his part to play in this grim charade.
The boat's crew, so many unwitting Charons, came alongside Seraph, and O'Dwyer pulled himself onto our deck, a brown face above the deep red hue of the king's uniform. He drew his sword, saluted the king's ensign, and was in turn saluted by the whistle-note of Boatswain Farrell.
My last gesture of defiance was to remain rooted to my quarterdeck, forcing the renegade to come to me. We doffed in exchange to each other, and he looked about him with an air of a contented man.
'So, Captain,' he said in that strange accent of his, half-Irish and half-Arab, 'this is your command. A fine frigate indeed, this Seraph. Named for the fiery angels guarding the throne of God, as I recall. His Majesty is judicious in his choice of names.'
If not in his choice of colonels—The blackness of my mood coloured my reply. 'Indeed, sir. One day, no doubt, she will prove mightily useful for firing at the corsairs of the Straits.'
Ah, them.' O'Dwyer remained obstinately cheery. 'You know, I had almost forgot about them?'
The innate courtesy of my kind won a close-run battle, and I said, 'You will take some refreshment, Colonel?'
I led him below to my cabin, where a glowering Musk stood over some mead and cake. The Irishman ate and drank greedily, all the while making inconsequential conversation about the weather, the Prospect's passage down from the Tower, and His Majesty's countenance (inscrutable, as ever) at their last interview. At length, though, the moment I had been dreading could be delayed no longer.
'Now, Colonel,' I said, in as matter-of-fact a way as I could manage, 'I have given much thought to the matter of our messing arrangements—'
O'Dwyer waved his hand airily. 'Oh, no matter, my dear captain! I am perfectly content with my humble berth aboard the Prospect. I know full well that honour demands you should surrender your cabin to me, as the senior personage embarked, and content yourself with one of your lesser officer's pestilential hutches. But there is no need, I assure you.'
Behind him, Musk shook his head vigorously, thereby underlining my own reaction. 'No, sir,' I replied, 'my honour would simply not hear of it.' It was not a manner of the relative status of a military colonel and a naval captain: aboard Prospect, among a body of soldiers who would be overawed by his rank and a crew free of the constraints of naval discipline, O'Dwyer would undoubtedly be better placed to essay the flight back to his corsair friends that we all expected him to attempt at the first opportunity. Holmes and I had discussed the matter at some length, and I concurred reluctantly with his assessment: to wit, it is an eternal truth that for all the temporary inconvenience, it is preferable to keep a mad dog in one's view and under one's control than to unleash it. 'Thus I have a compromise to propose,' I said gritting my teeth. 'A captain's cabin, even on a Fifth Rate, has ample space for two. Yet we both deserve the privacy due to our rank. Consequently I shall arrange for a partition to be erected, and a new door cut in the bulkhead yonder. You, Colonel—' I was very nearly sick as I spoke the words—'may even have the starboard, and the captain's quarter gallery'.
A captain and a gentleman can make no greater sacrifice than to surrender his personal place of easement, especially when it is being surrendered to a traitor of the foulest sort.
O'Dwyer seemed genuinely perplexed by the seeming generosity of my offer, but only for a moment. Then he nodded, ran his hand through his ochre hair, and spoke slowly and coldly. 'Of course, Captain Quinton. As you say. Aboard his own ship, a captain's word is as statute law.' Those cold green eyes narrowed. After all, who am I, a mere renegade, to dispute it, even if clad in the fine rags of a superior officer?'
The Irishman's acquiescence surprised me: both Holmes and I had expected roaring, or at least a venomous snarling, in opposition to my suggestion. On reflection, that acquiescence should have troubled me far more than it did. As it was, I summoned Carpenter Shish and his crew, and O'Dwyer resumed his assault upon the cake. The impressively efficient Shish and his men arrived within minutes, replete with deals, saws and hammers, and set to with the urgency that can only be witnessed in sailors endeavouring to impress soldiers. The din of their partition-building made impossible even the strained conversation between O'Dwyer and myself; at length, the renegade excused himself and indicated that he would return to Prospect to attend to the loading of his belongings and to issue orders to his second-in-command, a Captain Facey.
As we watched the longboat pull away and disappear once more into the fog that enveloped the Downs, Musk turned to me and remarked, gruffly, 'Wooden walls do not a prison make, or whatever your father's old friend Lovelace said. He'll need watching, that one.' He nodded toward the receding shape of O'Dwyer, ensconced in the stern of Prospect's longboat. 'Or, better still, filleting.'
It did not take long for me to regret my honourable gesture. I was in my truncated half-cabin, attempting to rearrange my possessions around the demi-culverin that now cribbed and confined me even more than it had done before. I contemplated the chamber pot acquired for me by Musk in Dover, and shuddered. Beyond the partition, I could hear every tiny sound as O'Dwyer arranged his own possessions, which seemed to include an unsettling number of knives, swords and other blades of indeterminate size, whistling and singing all the while. To this day, I do not know whether he did so unconsciously or as a deliberate taunt to the Captain of the Seraph; but his musical range seemed as catholic as it was tuneless, embracing a clutch of French airs, some songs of his Irish childhood and a succession of strangely pitched Arab chants. I looked about in horror, seeking some escape from my cell. Beyond the stern window and through the fog lay Holmes' Jersey, but Holmes was ashore, apparently carousing with the Governor of Dover. Jordan, Captain of the Mary, was old, godly, and insufferably dull. I could go ashore, but Deal, that very Gomorrah of Kent, would contain an entire army of mariners, most of them whoring, drinking and brawling from dawn 'til dusk and thus on 'til dawn once more. Cornelia and my friends might as well have been an eternity away. That left only my ship, a Fifth Rate frigate of but three hundred and fifty tons burthen and ninety feet in length, and where aboard her would be free of the foul presence of O'Dwyer? Francis Gale was ashore, visiting an old friend who had a parish a little way beyond Richborough...
At last, I threw open the door newly cut in the bulkhead and made my way to the quarterdeck, thence to the poop. But here, too, no saving peace was to be found. O'Dwyer was still beneath my feet, his singing clearly audible. There were a few men on the upper deck and on the forecastle, but by chance, almost none of them were familiar faces from my old Cornish coterie. I craved solitude. I craved clear air, not the fetid fogs that still swirled around the ship, albeit now rather less densely than they had. The one reassuring sight was the stocky bulk of Kit Farrell, stepping out from the forecastle .
On impulse, I strode across the upper deck to meet him. 'Boatswain Farrell,' I said formally, 'you recall the time when you told me of the noblest experience to be found on a ship? And the best way for a captain to survey the true dimensions of his command?'
Kit looked at me quizzically. 'Indeed, sir. But—'
'I have a mind to be about it.'
'Now, Captain? But it's hardly—'
'Now, Boatswain.'
'Aye, aye, sir.'
Kit's expression was curious, but he was too good an officer to argue the case. It was fortunate (or, as it transpired, unfortunate) that Musk was nowhere to be seen, for he would have had no such qualms.
We went to the starboard rail, and without a second thought I took hold of a lanyard, lifted myself onto that thin palisade, and swung myself out, over the side of the ship, to obtain a footing on the lower shrouds.
Kit said, 'Gently, sir. Make sure of your grip and your footing. It's dank weather, the shrouds are sodden—'