by J. D. Davies
A storm often begins as an insignificant speck of a cloud upon the horizon, growing and darkening as it approaches. Thus it was with the idea. Once I had finished the letter to Will, I sat in my stern window, looking out over the bay of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Small craft scurried back and forth, carrying wares to and from the Spanish, Dutch, Swedish and Hamburg ships that lay there. I watched a lofty Spanish galleon of some sixty guns come into the bay: a magnificent sight, but badly handled by her crew, who would be mostly unwilling conscripts, as Don Alonso de Villasanchez had explained to me during the Dunes campaign. Oh, how my grandfather would have looked upon that spectacle, and thought at once, an easy prize, my lads...
The sight of the great Spanish ship brought back memories, and the memories brought knowledge. I knew the Spanish well; better than I had remembered, if truth be told. I had lived in Spanish Flanders before my move to Veere. I had fought under the Spanish flag, albeit only because King Philip was then the only sovereign to recognise our exiled, pathetic royalist cause. I had lived very briefly in Old Spain itself, when I accompanied my brother on a mission to the Escorial. The Spanish were a people who regarded honour even more highly than we English, and respected rank above all; every peasant sought to prove himself of noble birth, only partly because nobility in Spain secured the not unattractive perquisite of lifelong tax exemption. The Spanish respected their military, too, but they were also a superstitious race, and squirmed at the memory of their terrible defeats...
The idea had grown from that tiny cloud into a mighty storm. It was unlikely and it was desperate, but ours was an unlikely and desperate cause, and what did we have to lose?
I smiled, and sent for Martin Lanherne and Julian Carvell.
The two quite different stories both began as facts. The first, told by Lanherne's men in the tavernas of the south part of the town, was the story of the Honourable Matthew Quinton, brother of one of the noblest earls of England and captain of yon royal warship in the bay, who had served nobly with the Spanish army under Don John of Austria at the Battle of the Dunes. Several hours' worth of Englishmen trading the story from one tavern to another meant that by the end of the night, I was supposedly a general of Spain to rank alongside Spinola and had received an honorary knighthood of Calatrava from King Philip himself.
The second story, told by Carvell's men in the northern part, needed no embellishment and no exaggeration. It was the simple truth that the young Englishman commanding the ship in the bay was the blood-heir of el diablo bianco himself. The natural progress of tavern communication ensured that by the night's end, most of the inhabitants of Santa Cruz de Tenerife were convinced that the ghost-ship of Earl Matthew was due on the next tide.
The net effect of the two stories combined was that by dawn, we had seven rival estimates for the new chain-pump parts. Founders competed with each other to swear upon the graves of their mothers that they would be able to fashion the esses and rowls before the sun sank again, and that the new parts would endure until the Day of Judgment.
Seventeen
The squadron duly weighed from Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Seraph falling in proudly alongside her consorts, and with a fair wind we set course for Cape Verde, a few hundred miles north of the mouth of the Gambia. This was an easy sail but for one curious incident. I was wakened one morning by Musk, who was in a state of rare agitation, demanding that I come on deck at once. Pausing only to buckle my sword-belt, I followed him out into the brilliant glare of another oven-hot day. Several of the men were standing at the feet of the masts, murmuring to each other and pointing upward—at sails that were blood-red.
I blinked at the sight, hoping that it was but an illusion that would evaporate as soon as my eyes became accustomed to the heat and light. But it did not. Overnight, the sails had turned red.
'There's murmuring of a curse,' said Musk. 'Sails of blood. Some are saying they presage the deaths of every last one of us upon this voyage. Poseidon was thwarted of his blood-sacrifice when the chain-pumps didn't sink us, so this is his way of announcing his revenge.'
If I knew one thing alone in that moment, it was that I needed no more doom-laden counsels from Phineas Musk. I needed heads that had been rather longer upon the sea .
Kit Farrell came on deck, and I silently gave thanks unto my Lord. He looked at the sails, looked at me, and said, 'Well, Captain. I've never seen the like.' This was not the opinion I needed in that moment, with the muttering of the men growing ever louder. But it was sometimes too easy to forget that Kit was but a young man of my own age; although he was a hundred times the seaman I would ever be, his experience was inevitably limited. However, he had a sharp eye and even sharper wits. Looking out to larboard, he said, 'But then, I wonder if they've seen the like on the other two.'
I followed his gaze, and saw that the sails of the distant Jersey and Prospect of Blakeney were of the same blood-red hue.
'I'll summon Mister Castle and Mister Negus to the deck,' I said.
Kit shook his head. 'No need to disturb their slumbers, I think, sir. I have an idea. I suggest bringing the ship as close to the wind as she'll go, then bringing her back again—luffing and touching, in other words. We'll hardly lose ground on Captain Holmes and the Prospect, as we can outsail them easily enough.'
I still felt a profound dread when issuing orders independently. The memory of the wreck of my first command, the Happy Restoration, died hard, and with it the irrational fear that a wrong command given by Captain Matthew Quinton would end yet again in the destruction of a king's ship and a hundred or so lives. But in truth, I sensed that on this voyage I was in danger of becoming a cipher rather than a captain. Castle and Negus were so experienced and so reliable that I had been content to defer to them, deluding myself that decisions were being arrived at by a consensus of equals of whom the captain was one. I had also started to forget how much I trusted the judgment of Kit Farrell.
'Very well, Mister Farrell,' I said. Ahoy the helm! Luff and touch her!'
I heard the answering call from the helmsman at the whipstaff, and almost at once the responsive Seraph began her turn towards the wind. Closer, ever closer to the point of no return—The sails began to flap and flutter. As they did so, the 'blood' came out in clouds. Some of it settled on the deck and on those of us who stood there. Musk brushed himself furiously. I ran my hand through my hair and looked at the red stains on my fingers and palm. Laughing, I held my hand up to the crew, who were looking at each other in bewilderment. 'Sand, lads!' I cried. 'The red sand of Africa!'
The helmsman brought the ship back round onto her original course. As he did so, I turned to my boatswain. 'Well done, Mister Farrell,' I said. 'Sense defeats superstition once again.'
He shrugged modestly. 'There seemed no other rational explanation for it, sir. But if the turn hadn't shaken it out—well, I suppose I'd have favoured the notion of a curse, too.'
I noticed Carvell and Macferran standing by the main. I had quite forgotten about the punishment I had inflicted on the young Scot; the affair of the chain-pumps and the tidings from Cornelia had driven it from my mind. I liked Macferran, and hoped that my treatment of him had not caused him, and my Cornish following on the lower deck, to become resentful of me. I said something to that effect, adding haughtily that a captain had to enforce discipline aboard ship without fear or favour, but Carvell simply grinned.
'Resentful, Captain?' said the ebony Virginian, who seemed genuinely surprised at the notion. 'Far from it, sir. Macferran couldn't be happier, could you, lad?'
The young Scot gave a shy grin. 'Aye, Captain,' he said, in his soft Scottish lilt. 'Well, for one thing, you were right, sir—I started it, and I deserved it. That was obvious to every man on the ship, me amongst 'em. Being called a ginger Scots whisky-sot is no more than truth, after all,' said Macferran ruefully. 'And getting a flogging—well, it makes you a man, that it does, in the eyes of the rest of 'em. Some of the Bristol boys even share their baccy with me now. We're all Seraphim together, afte
r all.' This, I gathered, was the by-name that my men had given themselves. It was as well that the king had decided not to christen the ship Cherub. 'And the lasses over in Santa Cruz town are mightily attentive when you've got fresh welts on your back, that they are, Captain,' said the young Scot, grinning. 'Love running their fingers over them, they do.'
I had not previously contemplated the possibility of naval discipline as either a mark of honour or an aphrodisiac, but Carvell's knowing smirk at his young Scots friend suggested that I had much to learn on both scores.
Three days later we came to Cape Verde itself, a great point of land jutting out from the hilly coast of Africa, identifiable by the two high hummocks that rose from it. Like every headland, it was an earthly paradise for the legions of petrels, gannets and cormorants that wheeled and dived around it; indeed, two high rocks were so white from their dung that they appeared like ships under sail. We edged in between the hummocks and the small islands to the east of the Cape, eventually anchoring in twenty-six fathoms some three miles off a sandy bay. Here the breeze strengthened into a gale that prevented us going immediately round to Gorée, a small isle a mile or so to the south of the Cape, which Holmes had a mind to reconnoitre. This was a colony of the Dutch, who had named it after an island I knew well, on the Zeeland coast not far from my wife's home town of Veere. When the wind backed northwesterly, early the next morning, Holmes summoned a quite jaunty O'Dwyer, an inscrutable Facey and myself to the Jersey for a council-of-war to discuss our strategy against the island. We had barely settled into his great cabin to examine the charts when his lookouts cried that there was a sail in sight, coming from northward beyond the breakers of the Cape. We strode to the quarterdeck, O'Dwyer with particular eagerness.
Holmes took up a telescope, and after a minute or so's perusal, he passed it to me.
'Your opinion, Captain Quinton?'
'A Dutchman, undoubtedly—there are the Dutch colours, flying at her main, and she would have no reason to disguise herself in this time of peace.' However long that time of peace has left to run, I thought. 'Three hundred tons or so. A West Indiaman, probably. Should be a decent cargo, I conceive.'
'My opinion exactly.' Holmes did not even bother to invite the two redcoats to use the telescope, although as an Algerine galley captain O'Dwyer must have spent much longer at sea than Holmes, the long-time cavalry officer. 'Is it not shameful,' Holmes asked, 'that a Dutch ship should dare not to salute the King of England's colours in these, His Majesty's own seas?'
With that one question, Robert Holmes made to begin a war. No English captain would then have denied that our King's dominion over the seas extended as far south as Cape Finisterre and up to the high water mark of Danish, Dutch, French and Spanish shores alike. In those waters, all ships should strike their flags and topsails to acknowledge His Majesty's sovereignty over the seas; such was merely natural justice. But we were many hundreds of leagues to the south of Finisterre. Holmes was advancing a far greater, a far more deadly proposition: that the British Seas and all the oceans of the world were one and the same.
O'Dwyer's response was immediate and enthusiastic. 'A damnable impertinence that a Dutchman should be in His Majesty's seas at all! Sink or take, my dear Holmes! Sink or take!'
Presumably the enigmatic Irishman had said the same more than once on behalf of the Emperor of Morocco or the Sultan himself. I was more wary, and said so. 'I do not recall that we were enjoined to exact the salute in these waters, Captain Holmes.'
He smiled. 'Ah, Matt, there are so many things that rulers do not explicitly enjoin their warriors to do—and yet they are done. Is that not one of the characteristics of war, Colonel O'Dwyer, Captain Facey?'
The nods of the two veterans—O'Dwyer's vigorous, the grey-visaged Facey's grudging—told their story. These three men, each of whose experience of warfare stretched for many decades beyond my own, already knew that lesson full well; and how well I have learned it since that day.
Briskly, Holmes gave the orders to his own officers, then to me. I was to proceed with Seraph and Prospect of Blakeney to the mouth of the Gambia, there to rendezvous with Holmes once he had accomplished his objective. This made perfect sense, of course, but as Lanherne's boat crew rowed me back to the Seraph, I could not help but note that it also conveniently left the prize and any consequent plunder solely to the mercies of Robert Holmes and the Jersey.
We put on sail, leaving Holmes to veer away northward. I had a perfect view of all that transpired subsequently from the poop deck of Seraph. We were moving away to the south-east on the wind, but still were barely two or three miles from the Dutchman and the Jersey, to leeward of her, when the action commenced.
'Holmes is preparing to tack,' said Kit Farrell at my side.
I nodded. Jersey's sails were loosed; she came round to the new tack, closing the Dutchman relentlessly. We saw a small cloud of smoke, and moments later the sound came to us of a single shot, Holmes' warning. There was a long delay. I imagined the consternation aboard the Dutchman, the debate among her officers, the arguments for resistance, the oaths directed against the perfidious English. And as so often from such debates and arguments, the outcome was compromise. I watched as the red-white-blue of the United Provinces was hauled down from the main. But the topsails remained resolutely in place, and the Dutch ship held her course.
'Ah, my poor Dutch friend,' I murmured under my breath. 'Against any other captain, perhaps that would be sufficient.'
At that moment, Holmes began to fire his starboard battery, one gun at a time, bow to stern. The Dutchmen were brave men—held out for more guns than good sense dictated—but they were not suicides. The topsails were struck at last, then the other sails too as the Dutchman hove to; the Jersey had her prize.
A prize from a nation with which we were not at war. A prize taken by exacting the salute to the King of Britain's flag in seas that did not belong to Charles Stuart. She was the Brill, I soon discovered; forty days out of Holland, carrying brandy, lime and iron for the Isle of Gorée, and seized most unjustly within sight of her destination.
Thus are wars made.
Leaving Holmes to secure his prize, Seraph and Prospect of Blakeney made for the mouth of the Gambia, edging south along the African coast. This was terra incognita for us all—even Negus had never been further south than Cape Verde—and he, Castle, Kit and myself spent long hours in my cabin, poring over the charts for these waters, and out on deck, relating the charts to the reality that lay before us. Fortunately it was an easy sail in good, deep water, with no dangers from hidden currents or rocks, and never passing over a shoal with less than three fathoms beneath our keel. We passed what the charts showed as towns, but seemed to me little better than stockades filled with round, cone-roofed mud huts: Rufisco, Porto D'Ale, Juala and the like. This was a less hilly coast than at Cape Verde, lined with palms for a long way inland. We had few dealings with the Portuguese, or half-breed Portuguese, who lived in those parts, but those who were brave enough to venture out to us in shallops or like craft proved friendly enough. England's alliance with Portugal was age-old, but in more recent times it had been reinforced by our assistance to that land in its long war of independence against Spain: assistance repaid in part by Portugal's provision of a regrettably barren queen for our most potent sovereign lord King Charles.
At length, we came to a great sand bar, over a league long, covered with the fat birds that the Portuguese call soldados, and stinking of their musky dung. We sailed down the bar until we came to a breach, passing through into seven fathoms of water. The mouth of a great river lay before us, some two or three miles wide; beyond it, we could see clearly that the river broadened out into an even mightier stream, perhaps five or six of our English miles wide. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of canoes thronged back and forth, along the shore, across the river, and out to two islands where it appeared salt was being mined. Three small trading vessels, a Dutchman, an Amelander and a Portugee, lay at anchor under the lee of the larger i
sland. We followed the sailing instructions given by Holmes, who had been in this river ten years before, and made for a great tree upon what the charts showed as the Point of Bayone, on the south shore, keeping it a little off our starboard bow, tacking once the lead reported less than five fathoms. This brought us over toward the north shore, avoiding the reef that obstructed that side of the channel. Dolphins sported themselves in our bow wave as we crossed the stream. John Treninnick hooted from the main yard and jabbered excitedly in Cornish; it seemed that he had a particular liking for dolphin meat. Many hundreds of men could be spied fishing from the shore with lines, spears and nets. Fish lay drying on the beaches between them and the great palm line. Sea-birds of all sorts circled overhead, shrieking loudly and occasionally plunging onto land or water. We took our noon day observation against a brilliant, cloudless blue sky: thirteen degrees, thirty minutes north.
We lowered our topsails, hauled up our courses and anchored in the brown waters offa small islet of some three acres which the charts named as Dog Island, very close to the north shore—so close, indeed, that the channel between the island and the shore was shallow enough to be forded. A smaller neighbour, named on the charts as Pelican Island, lay a little way away. The multitude of billed pink birds thronging its low shores explained its name amply enough; but on Dog Island, not one of its namesakes could be seen. Negus ordered the lead to be slung, and the report came back that we had three fathoms, in mud and broken ground. Our landfall was a mighty relief for Captain Facey and his redcoats from the Prospect of Blakeney, who spilled ashore with as much delight as if they had been given tickets-of-leave to every alehouse and brothel in Westminster. Their happiness quickly translated itself into a little piece of empire-building: by the time I got ashore myself, I found that the place had been renamed Charles Island and that the redcoats were busy fortifying it. I could hardly protest, given the mission that Holmes was about, and it was no surprise that when he arrived the following morning (accompanied by his prize, the Brill), the expedition's commanding officer expressed his entire satisfaction with our acquisition. I was less convinced. For one thing, who would conceive of setting down a fortress in such a place, when even the most foolish army in the world needed only to wait for low tide before simply walking across to it? Even worse, it was one of the most truly awful places I have known in my life: an oven set down in the mouth of a river. The heat was like nothing I had ever experienced, even at Tangier. I made the mistake of re-reading one of Cornelia's letters on deck, in an attempt to decipher one of her more illegible passages by holding it up against the sun; by the time I finished it, the wax seal had melted away entirely, the drops joining my own sweat upon the deck. Pendeen, the swabber, dozed off shirtless on the forecastle after his breakfast ale, and before the glass had turned his body resembled a potato on a spit. Humphrey the surgeon kept him alive by God knows what means, but the man's screams kept us awake for days. By night the wind came from the land, but on many days this fell away at about ten before noon. The next few hours were truly hellish, in the literal, fiery sense of that word: complete stillness, with nothing but the most sapping heat. We soon learned to follow the custom of those parts and to retreat below decks or into the shelter of our new huts ashore, and not to emerge until well into the afternoon, when the sea wind blew and cleared the stifling furnace-air.