These hard bargains were led by an officer, a scarred lieutenant who looked as if he might relish his job. As he walked down the deck he counted off parties of a dozen at a time and told them brusquely to gather up what they possessed and make their way to the boats waiting to take them to their new home; it was not long into this task that one man protested to his being on board as a crime and the result was swift.
The lieutenant stepped forward and grabbed him by the hair, half lifting his squealing body and shaking it; what followed was a spittle-filled diatribe that told this unfortunate if he thought he had once had rights, they were now no longer his. He was subject to the disciplines of the navy and the Articles of War, so he had a choice: move his arse or face a rope at the yardarm.
‘He’s a real beauty,’ said Rufus. ‘Happen we should go forrard and tell the fellow he’s tugging that the blue coat is talking shite.’
‘I’d hold my wind, boyo, and stay close to us if I was you.’
These words were uttered by a burly Welshman the Pelicans had come to know as Davy; they had yet to find out if that was a first name or last, not that it mattered.
‘You don’t know about hulks, look you? They’re not like rated ships and there are folk that have died from being battered on this barky and nought will be said about it. If you look you will see them buggers are carrying clubs, not just starters, and by Christ they like to employ them.’
That was followed by a loud sniff through substantial nostrils. ‘There’s safety in numbers, mind, which I might take leave to show you should they come our way.’
The near-scalped individual having been hauled away, the lieutenant, judging by the expression on his face, was now looking for another victim but there was no one willing to oblige. Slowly the impress party made their way towards the stern, groups of men being taken away by the scruff of their necks or a boot in the rear if they showed any hint of dawdling, and finally the lieutenant came face-to-face with the body of proper seamen, some thirty in number, silhouetted against the light from the casements.
‘On your feet to a man,’ he barked. ‘You’re shifting.’
‘So where are we off to, Your Honour?’ asked Davy, winking at Charlie and Rufus.
‘Does it matter?’
Davy stood up very slowly, followed by all the others. ‘It would be a kindness to be told.’
‘Kindness,’ the lieutenant scoffed, half turning to share what had to be a jest with his men, not one of whom so much as smiled.
‘You bein’ the soul of that commodity, look you.’
‘Don’t you josh me, Taff.’
‘Now would I do that to you, a man in a blue coat? And the name is Davy.’
‘As if I care.’
Charlie nudged Rufus and gave him a look, while a clasping of his fists told him to be prepared to fight; for all Davy had said about remaining quiet it was clear he wanted to challenge these men, just as it was obvious by the way his companions had gathered they were prepared to back him up.
‘The name of the ship an’ who is to command her …’ The pause was too long and that showed in the lieutenant’s face, which did not soften as Davy eventually added, ‘Sir.’
‘You’ll go aboard her, regardless.’
The way Davy slowly shook his head had Charlie on his toes – these men with whom he had messed were ready for this; pressed sailors or volunteers, they had come aboard with what every Jack tar carried in their ditty bag, which would include a knife and a folding razor. Hands were in duck pockets and it took no great imagination to think what they were holding in a place where violence could occur at any moment.
‘We are not, look you, like those poor buggers who have been pressed from backstreets or lied to when in drink. We’re worth a kindness, as I say.’
It was interesting to watch the officer’s eyes and the calculation going on behind them; with the look of a fighter himself he was backed up by half a dozen men of the same ilk, but it was a case of games and candles – was the bloodshed worth the refusal to answer a simple question, or was his authority so central to his being that he was prepared for a brawl?
Maybe it was good sense, maybe it was that he and his men were well outnumbered, that eventually made him speak after a substantial tense and long pause. ‘HMS Semele, Captain Barclay.’
‘Jesus,’ whispered Rufus. ‘I ain’t going.’
‘You are,’ Charlie replied in a soft voice as, satisfied to have won a small victory, Davy picked up his ditty bag prior to moving, that followed by the rest. ‘We are only two.’
Low as they were, Davy had overheard Charlie’s words and he very quietly hissed a response. ‘Numbers, boyos – never act against the powers that be without you are backed up by numbers.’
The boats had not long gone to where their new home was berthed, wallowing midstream out in the Medway, when a hired wherry pulled up at the gangway of the hulk, John Pearce seeking permission to come aboard, which was granted. Having asked for the commander he was led to a hutch on the upper deck, leaving Michael behind.
The man’s accommodation was a housing constructed where the wheel and binnacle might have been. Knocking and entering he introduced himself, thinking the scarred fellow looked more of the article than the man Tobias he had encountered in Dover; this fellow was a proper ruffian who would likely not be suited to the manners of a normal wardroom. The question was, would he fall for a downright lie?
‘I am, sir, in search of a couple of men who were my followers, wrongly taken up at Dover.’
There was, unsurprisingly, a pause, while the request was filtered through layers of probability, but the methods of recruiting, the law notwithstanding, did not often lead to a prior interrogation of a man’s status. Still, an officer’s close followers being pressed men was unusual, they either having tickets of leave or being too well versed in avoidance to be collared. Yet it was also a courtesy, adhered to by long custom, that any fellow officer seeking his own men should be obliged where possible.
‘Names?’
‘Taverner and Dommet.’ That saw the opening of a thick ledger and a request as to when they might have arrived. ‘Yesterday, possibly today.’
The finger moved up the list of names. ‘They are entered as volunteers.’
The rehearsed reply was smooth. ‘An error, admitted to by Captain Tobias.’
The man was not quick of mind, or perhaps he knew Tobias well and doubted the statement. ‘Well you’ve missed them, I’m afraid, Lieutenant Pearce, they have not long been taken aboard HMS Semele, indeed within the last hour.’
The ‘damn’ was inadvertent but loudly expressed.
‘So I fear you must take up their status with the man slated to command her and see if he will consent to give them over to you, though I should be quick, for she is already ordered to sea and subject to the admiral’s impatience.’
‘And that commander is?’
‘Captain Barclay is to captain her.’
‘Ralph Barclay!’
‘I believe that is his given name. Do you know him?’
It was an ill-tempered John Pearce who rejoined Michael O’Hagan – the term ‘spitting blood’ would not have been exaggeration – but there was nothing he could do in Chatham about an act of fate so hard on his friends. By the time he could stamp his foot on terra firma it was getting dark, so they made for the Angel Inn, the Medway end of the London post-chaise service, to eat a gloomy dinner and spend the night.
In the morning, prior to catching the coach from London, Pearce insisted they visit an emporium dealing in naval supplies. There he bought himself a new sword and a pistol, as well as a holster that went over his shoulder under his blue coat.
‘We were lucky with those horses, Michael, and I do not intend to be caught out again. Now what will you take as a weapon?’
‘Not a long sword, John-boy, for I would look like a fool bearing one of those, as most men do.’ The look he got from Pearce then produced a laugh. ‘I will not have a sissy weapon
but a proper hanger will do nicely.’
Short, curved and heavy of blade, when Michael stuck the sword in his waistband belt it seemed to disappear, wholly so when he closed his jacket.
‘There’s upwards of four hundred souls coming aboard with us, and more to come, I reckon,’ Charlie insisted, as they approached the side of the 74-gunner, ‘an’ I don’t reckon Barclay to know us from Adam, so we keeps our head down, our noses clean and our arses out of his path.’
‘It ain’t him that worries me, Charlie, an’ you know it. What if Devenow is still with him?’
That did give Charlie pause and he looked at the dark waters over the gunnels, barely disturbed by those rowing them to their destination, Devenow being a drunken bully whose only passion in life seemed to be to serve with Ralph Barclay. He was nearly as big as Michael O’Hagan and a total bastard.
His favourite trick was to ‘persuade’ his shipmates to give up their ration of grog, which he would hoard until he had enough to get insensibly drunk. That this often led to a flogging, handed down to him many times by Barclay, neither bothered him, deterred him or affected the regard he had for a captain he had followed from ship to ship.
‘If we was missing Michael,’ Rufus added, ‘we miss him double now.’
‘He could handle Devenow, all right,’ Charlie acknowledged, recalling the bare-knuckle fight they had engaged in aboard Brilliant, ‘so let’s hope he is still acting as Barclay’s servant, as he was aboard Grampus, though Christ knows he must be the worst in creation.’
‘There might be others who pick us out, that little shit Burns for one.’
‘No, Barclay got rid of him off Toulon; now let’s get ourselves set and pick the right mess.’
‘Davy might be a good bet.’
‘You have the right of it there. Stay close to him as we get aboard and see if we can share his table.’
‘Be a lot of folk seeking that, Charlie.’
‘Then sharp elbows are needed, Rufus, and you being a skinny bugger, yours is sharper than most. An’ when we is set, let us find a man who can write and get a message off to John Pearce to tell him where we are.’
HMS Agamemnon, of sixty-four guns and reputedly the fastest line-of-battle ship in the fleet, having raided the rest of the fleet for enough stores to remain at sea and accompanied by transports carrying a thousand troops in her wake, had weathered Cape Corse and was now beating down the east of the island to rejoin the squadron of frigates off Bastia, while on the upper deck, under the supervision of Acting Sixth Lieutenant Richard Farmiloe, were assembled a line of midshipmen newly arrived from home.
Some were barely able to see over the bulwarks they were so young and stunted. With their sextants in hand, they were shooting the sun and the horizon to establish local noon – and giving several conflicting answers – while looking out upon a sea that was the same azure blue as the clear sky, with the tiny island outcrop of Monte Cristo a smudge in the distance, while not far beyond that lay Elba and the Italian coast.
‘Which I am told you can see from the mountain tops on a day like this, Toby.’
‘Really, Dick?’ Toby Burns responded, his knees giving to try and compensate for the excessive roll of a ship lacking the ballast provided by a proper quantity of stores. ‘I saw nothing but cold mist from up there myself.’
The sling was gone and with it his excuse for being left alone for, as soon as he had boarded, Nelson had done what Hotham had clearly required of him. Agamemnon’s surgeon, a Scotsman called Roxburgh, had examined his wound and then, clearly quite mad, had suggested that fresh sea air might be efficacious in further healing the angry scar left by the musket ball, his advice that Toby should appear on the deck in nought but his shirtsleeves and that with one rolled up, for which the surgeon would seek permission.
The only good reason to be on deck was to get dry, this being a vessel in serious need of a refit. Her seams were moving alarmingly, even in what was a fairly benign swell, and the working of the pumps was a constant background to the whistle of the wind through rigging that, even to an untutored eye, was looking very worn indeed, while the deck planking had been scrubbed and sanded for so long there was a wonder if the boards would support the weight of the cannon.
‘Nelson won’t hear of the dockyard when there’s a fight in the offing,’ was the reply Toby Burns got from Farmiloe when he alluded to the state of the ship. ‘But when we have Bastia, I think it is not a task that can be much delayed.’
He had stuck close to Farmiloe, he being the only fellow he knew, and on hand to explain to Toby the difference between serving on this ship and any other, which was, of course, that the man in charge was Horatio Nelson. Toby saw a fellow not much bigger than himself, who for all his smiles and bonhomie was an odd creature, and he wondered at what everyone was on about, for his old shipmate was not in any way an exception when it came to regard for the pint-sized commodore.
To Toby’s mind he lacked gravitas. ‘But he talks to the crew as if he is one of them, I have seen him do it.’
‘He feels he is,’ Farmiloe had replied, ‘because he once sailed as a lad before the mast on the triangular passage and he knows the ’tween decks as well as he does the great cabin. We are all one to Nelson, whatever our rank.’
Fodder to his pride and ambition, Toby had thought, but he did not say anything of the sort; that would be most unwise.
The cry of ‘sail ho’ and the news that they had sighted the squadron was enough to make even Toby strain to see, for HMS Brilliant, at one time his Uncle Ralph’s ship and the vessel in which he had first gone to sea, was one of those Nelson commanded. The cry also brought the man in question on deck.
His immediate enquiry was to the lookout atop the main, this as to the presence of other transports, these being the ships he had hoped were come from Naples with the larger ordnance he needed to invest Bastia. The affirmative reply took some time to be relayed and had the commodore pacing the windward side of the quarterdeck in obvious impatience, his mood changing immediately on receipt of the good news.
‘Gentlemen,’ he cried, his bright-blue eyes alight. ‘Write your letters home this night, for on the morrow we will begin to set a fox amongst our French geese and get them a’cackling.’
The hurrahs swept along the deck, making Toby wonder if he was the only one aboard who was not a mad fool – something driven home with even more force when, later in the day, he joined a mass of red coats and blue, the captains and premiers of the remainder of the squadron and the army men from the transports, all crowded into Nelson’s cabin, to hear from his own lips his plans.
This time, Toby noticed, Nelson was abstemious in the article of drink, which he had not been at Hood’s dinner. While he had not returned to Agamemnon drunk, he had been exceedingly merry, so much so that his man, a dour cove called Lepée, had been required to help him make his cot. You did not have to be aboard Agamemnon very long to realise that if Nelson had an Achilles heel – that is apart from his lack of height, his high-pitched voice and being lightweight in the article of drink – it was in his inability to control his own cabin.
Lepée was a nuisance, at constant loggerheads with his master, a disrespectful drunk, a poor servitor and a man not in the least loved by the crew. Listening to Nelson now, and also seeing crab-faced Lepée moving about to fill various tankards, Toby had to wonder how a man who could not control his own servant could control a squadron of fighting ships.
Yet when he looked at those listening to their commodore to question that opinion, he saw the light of enthusiasm in their eyes, picked up by the glowing sunlight streaming through the casements, each admonition from Nelson to be bold, to seize every opportunity, to be brave and see obstacles as opportunities, received as Holy Writ.
‘And remember,’ Nelson piped, ‘France is not loved hereabouts. They can expect no aid from the natives of the old town and must remain shut up in their citadel, nor, I hazard, will they sally forth in strength enough to dislodge us if we ca
n get our men and guns ashore, while our Corsican allies will keep busy the northern enemy outposts.’
He had already identified the place they would land – a bay about a mile and a quarter south of the citadel walls – and it was only when first light came that Toby Burns, like everyone else aboard examining that prospect, realised that it was no more than a tiny strand of narrow beach enclosed by high crags, while between base and the top lay the same kind of dense pungent scrub that he had encountered crossing the island previously, so thick as to make progress near impossible.
Someone must have alluded to it being difficult, only to get from Nelson what Toby was to learn was a typical reply. ‘Think of General Wolfe, man. Yonder are our own Heights of Abraham and like him we shall scale them. He took Quebec, we will take Bastia.’
‘And he,’ Toby said sotto voce, ‘died in the attempt.’
The cutters of the squadron were soon in the water, each with a cannon in the bow and the appropriate shot with which to load them, this to suppress any attempt by the defenders to oppose the landing. The first parties ashore were the redcoats of Colonel Vilette’s 69th Regiment, Lord Hood’s bullocks to do with as he wished, given they had been sent out to the Mediterranean as marines. They were tasked with clearing paths through that undergrowth, while over their heads grapeshot from the cutters ensured they were not impeded.
On board Agamemnon it was all bustle. They were required to get out from the lower deck through the gun ports, on a cat’s cradle of ropes and pulleys, the twenty-four-pounders that would be used to bombard the walls, while from one of the Neapolitan transports they were lowering over the side onto rafts the thirteen-inch mortars which would send their balls over the defences to wreak havoc to the rear.
Enemies at Every Turn Page 7