Passage to Mutiny

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by Alexander Kent




  PASSAGE TO MUTINY

  Selected Historical Fiction Published by McBooks Press

  BY ALEXANDER KENT

  The Complete Midshipman Bolitho

  Stand Into Danger

  In Gallant Company

  Sloop of War

  To Glory We Steer

  Command a King’s Ship

  Passage to Mutiny

  With All Despatch

  Form Line of Battle!

  Enemy in Sight!

  The Flag Captain

  Signal–Close Action!

  The Inshore Squadron

  A Tradition of Victory

  Success to the Brave

  Colours Aloft!

  Honour This Day

  The Only Victor

  Beyond the Reef

  The Darkening Sea

  For My Country’s Freedom

  Cross of St George

  Sword of Honour

  Second to None

  Relentless Pursuit

  Man of War

  BY PHILIP MCCUTCHAN

  Halfhyde at the Bight of Benin

  Halfhyde’s Island

  Halfhyde and the Guns of Arrest

  Halfhyde to the Narrows

  Halfhyde for the Queen

  Halfhyde Ordered South

  Halfhyde on Zanatu

  BY JAMES L. NELSON

  The Only Life That Mattered

  BY DEWEY LAMBDIN

  The French Admiral

  The Gun Ketch

  Jester’s Fortune

  What Lies Buried

  BY JULIAN STOCKWIN

  Kydd

  Artemis

  Seaflower

  Mutiny

  Quarterdeck

  Tenacious

  Command

  The Admiral’s Daughter

  The Privateer’s Revenge

  BY DUDLEY POPE

  Ramage

  Ramage & The Drumbeat

  Ramage & The Freebooters

  Governor Ramage R.N.

  Ramage’s Prize

  Ramage & The Guillotine

  Ramage’s Diamond

  Ramage’s Mutiny

  Ramage & The Rebels

  The Ramage Touch

  Ramage’s Signal

  Ramage & The Renegades

  Ramage’s Devil

  Ramage’s Trial

  Ramage’s Challenge

  Ramage at Trafalgar

  Ramage & The Saracens

  Ramage & The Dido

  BY JAMES DUFFY

  Sand of the Arena

  The Fight for Rome

  BY V.A. STUART

  Victors and Lords

  The Sepoy Mutiny

  Massacre at Cawnpore

  The Cannons of Lucknow

  The Heroic Garrison

  The Valiant Sailors

  The Brave Captains

  Hazard’s Command

  Hazard of Huntress

  Hazard in Circassia

  Victory at Sebastopol

  Guns to the Far East

  Escape from Hell

  BY JOHN BIGGINS

  A Sailor of Austria

  The Emperor’s Coloured Coat

  The Two-Headed Eagle

  Tomorrow the World

  BY DOUGLAS W. JACOBSON

  Night of Flames

  BY ALEXANDER FULLERTON

  Storm Force to Narvik

  Last Lift from Crete

  All the Drowning Seas

  A Share of Honour

  The Torch Bearers

  The Gatecrashers

  BY C.N. PARKINSON

  The Guernseyman

  Devil to Pay

  The Fireship

  Dead Reckoning

  BY DOUGLAS REEMAN

  Twelve Seconds to Live

  The White Guns

  A Prayer for the Ship

  For Valour

  BY DAVID DONACHIE

  The Dying Trade

  A Hanging Matter

  An Element of Chance

  The Scent of Betrayal

  A Game of Bones

  BY JAN NEEDLE

  A Fine Boy for Killing

  The Wicked Trade

  The Spithead Nymph

  BY FREDERICK MARRYAT

  Frank Mildmay OR

  The Naval Officer

  Mr Midshipman Easy

  Newton Forster OR

  The Merchant Service

  BY BROOS CAMPBELL

  No Quarter

  The War of Knives

  Peter Wicked

  Alexander Kent

  PASSAGE TO MUTINY

  the Bolitho novels: 7

  McBooks Press, Inc.

  www.mcbooks.com

  ITHACA, NY

  Published by McBooks Press 1999

  Copyright © 1976 by Bolitho Maritime Productions Ltd.

  First published in the United Kingdom by Hutchinson 1976

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or any

  portion thereof in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  without the written permission of the publisher. Requests for such

  permissions should be addressed to McBooks Press, ID Booth Building,

  520 North Meadow St., Ithaca, NY 14850.

  Cover painting by Geoffrey Huband

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kent, Alexander.

  Passage to mutiny / by Alexander Kent.

  p. cm. — (Richard Bolitho novels ; 7)

  ISBN 0-935526-58-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  1. Great Britain—History, Naval—18th century—Fiction.

  2. Bolitho, Richard (Fictitious character)—Fiction. I. Title

  II. Series: Kent, Alexander. Richard Bolitho novels ; no. 7.

  PR6061.E63P37 1999

  823’.914—dc21

  99-19262

  CIP

  Visit the McBooks Press website at www.mcbooks.com.

  Printed in the United States of America

  9 8

  Where lies the land to which the ship would go?

  Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know.

  And where lies the land she travels from? Away

  Far, far behind, is all that they can say.

  ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH

  1

  ALL THINGS REMEMBERED

  IT WAS almost noon, and the sun which blazed across Sydney harbour was pitiless in its intensity. The sky above the capital of the infant colony should have been bright blue, but it was blurred as if seen through a crudely made glass, and the air around the waterfront buildings and anchorage alike felt gritty and humid.

  Isolated and apart from the varied collection of local shipping and heavier merchantmen, a man-of-war stood above her reflection as if she had been there forever, as if she would never move again. Her ensign flapped only occasionally above her high poop, and the commodore’s broad pendant which flew from her main-mast truck was only a little more enthusiastic.

  But despite the heat and discomfort her decks were alive with watching figures, as they had been for some while, since another British man-of-war had been reported entering the anchorage.

  The commodore leaned his palms on the sill of his cabin windows and withdrew them hurriedly. The dried wood felt like a heated cannon. But he watched nevertheless, conscious of the unusual silence throughout his command as the newcomer crawled closer and closer across the glittering water, her masts and yards and then her curved beakhead taking shape and clarity above the haze.

  The commodore’s flagship was the old Hebrus, a small two-decker of sixty-four guns which had been ready for disposal after nearly thirty years of service. Then she and her commodore had been given just one more commission. Now, on this October day in 1789, ancho
red as senior British naval vessel in Sydney harbour, she was still expected to act if need be with her old efficiency and relish, although many of her officers secretly believed she would be hard put to reach England if her recall was ever offered.

  The other ship was a frigate, common enough in times of war and at any other place where their agility and speed might be required at short notice. But out here, thousands of miles from home and familiar faces and customs, a King’s ship was rare, and all the more welcome.

  Her presence accounted for the Hebrus’s silence. Every man watching her painstaking entrance in the merest breath of wind would be seeing her differently. A town in England perhaps. A voice. Children he could barely remember.

  The commodore grunted and straightened his back, the effort bringing a prickle of sweat across his spine. It was absurd. The new arrival was the thirty-six-gun frigate Tempest, and she had never been to England at all.

  He waited as his servant padded around him with dress coat and sword, the trappings of officialdom and ceremony, remembering what he had heard about Tempest. It was strange how circumstances could affect a ship’s purpose as well as the lives of the many who might serve her.

  Six years earlier when war with the American colonies and the Franco-Spanish alliance had come to a close, ships which had been worth their weight in gold in battle were, like most of their companies, no longer wanted. A country soon forgot those who had fought and died for it, so a ship’s survival seemed of even less importance. But peace between the great powers had never been very secure, at least to those who had been involved in the price of each bloody victory.

  And now there was renewed tension with Spain which could just as easily fan into something worse. It was over rival claims to various territories which each hoped to exploit for trading and colonial purposes. Once again the Admiralty had been directed to search around for more frigates, the life-line of every fleet.

  The Tempest had been built in the Honourable East India Company’s yard at Bombay just four years back. As with most of John Company’s ships, she was constructed of the finest Malabar teak and to the best available design. Unlike the Navy, the Company’s ships were always built with long usage in mind, and with some regard for those who had to work them.

  The Admiralty’s agents in Bombay had purchased her for the King’s service without her ever sailing under a Company flag. She had cost them eighteen thousand pounds. The Admiralty must have been desperate to pay such a princely sum, the commodore thought privately, or else, as was equally likely, a little extra gold had changed hands in other directions.

  He gestured for his silent servant to offer him his telescope. He waited for the Hebrus to swing very slightly to her cable and then trained the glass on the slow-moving ship. Like most sea officers he was always impressed by the sight of a frigate. This one was heavier than he was used to, but still retained the graceful proportions, the appearance of latent speed and manoeuvrability which made them every junior officer’s dream.

  Despite the damned haze he could see a cluster of figures around her forecastle, one anchor catted and ready to let go as she glided purposefully above her twin on the blue water, her stem barely raising a ripple. Under topsails and jib only, her canvas filling and then flapping emptily while she changed tack to take advantage of the poor breeze, he could almost feel the excitement across the water. The sight of a port, any port, always dulled the memory of hardship and sometimes brutal conditions which had got them this far.

  The commodore had been expecting the Tempest two weeks or more earlier than this. She had come from Madras, and despatches he had already received from a courier brig had left him in no doubt Tempest would arrive on time.

  But he was not irritated as he might have been with other ships. Tempest was under the command of one Captain Richard Bolitho. Not a friend exactly, but a fellow Cornishman, and that, out here in this misery of convicts and foul conditions, fever and corruption, was worth almost as much.

  He levelled the glass again. He could now make out the frigate’s figurehead, a wild-eyed girl with streaming hair, her breasts out-thrust as she held a horn fashioned like a great shell to her lips. Her hair and torso were painted in bright gilt. Only her eyes were blue and intense while they stared far ahead as if to follow the makings of her tempest. The gilt on her and the gingerbread around the part of the poop yet visible must have cost Bolitho a small fortune, he decided. But in these waters there was little else to spend your money on. He winced as he heard his marines stamping along to the entry port. Even their boots seemed loud and heavy enough to shake the poor old Hebrus apart.

  A lieutenant peered respectfully through the screen door.

  The commodore nodded curtly, not wishing his subordinate to see that he was so interested in the other ship.

  “Yes, yes, I know. I’ll come up.”

  Even as he reached for his hat the first bang of the salute echoed across the harbour, making the dozing birds lift from the water, flapping and squawking to reprimand the newcomer for disturbing them.

  On the quarterdeck, and despite the spread of an awning, it was like a kiln.

  The flag captain touched his hat and studied his superior’s mood.

  “Tempest, thirty-six, sir. Captain Richard Bolitho.”

  Gun for gun the salute continued, the dark smoke pressed down on the water as if by something solid.

  The commodore thrust his hands behind him.

  “Make a signal as soon as she is anchored. Captain repair on board.”

  The captain hid a smile. The mood was good. He had known times when he had made a dozen signals right in the middle of another ship’s last-minute manoeuvring. As if he had enjoyed the apparent confusion caused. There must be something special about this one, he thought.

  With her topsails shivering to the regular crash of her eleven-gun salute to the commodore, His Britannic Majesty’s frigate Tempest continued slowly across the harbour. The glare on the surface was so fierce that it was painful to look much beyond the rigging or gangways.

  Richard Bolitho stood aft at the quarterdeck rail, his hands locked loosely behind his back, trying to appear relaxed despite all the usual tensions of entering an unfamiliar anchorage.

  How still it was. He glanced along his ship, wondering how she would appear to the commodore. He had taken command of Tempest in Bombay when she had been commissioned for the Navy, just two years ago.

  The thought of the actual date made him smile, changing his grave expression to one of youthfulness. For it had been his birthday, as it was today. On this, the 7 th of October, 1789, after making one more in a countless line of forgotten landfalls, Richard Bolitho of Falmouth in the County of Cornwall was thirty-three years old.

  He glanced quickly to the other side of the deck where Thomas Herrick, the first lieutenant, and his best friend, was peering beneath the shade of one hand while he studied the set of the braced yards and the shortened shapes of the bare-backed topmen. He wondered if Herrick had remembered. Bolitho hoped not. In these waters, with week following week of disagreeable climate and persistent calms, you were all too conscious of the passing of time.

  “ ’Bout five minutes now, sir.”

  “Very well, Mr Lakey.”

  Bolitho did not have to look round. In the two years of his command in Tempest he knew the voice and temperament of all those who had served with him for most of the period. Tobias Lakey was the lean, taciturn sailing master. Born and raised in the spartan reality of the Scilly Isles off the tip of Bolitho’s own Cornwall, he had gone to sea at the age of eight. He was about forty now. In all those years, in every sort of vessel from fishing boat to a ship of the line, there was little of the sea’s ways he had still to learn.

  Bolitho glanced slowly along the deck, trying to recall all the other faces which had vanished in the two years. Death and injury, disease and desertion, the faces had come and gone like the tides.

  Now Tempest’s company was much like any other in a vessel which had
never touched a British port, and as mixed as the waterfronts she had seen in her voyages. Some were men who really wished to make the Navy their career. Usually they had signed on other ships in England and had transferred to any available when their own had paid off. They better than most would know that conditions in England, six years after the war, were in many circumstances far worse than life aboard a man-of-war. Here at least they had security of sorts. With a fair commander and a large portion of luck they could make their way. In their own country, for which many of them had fought long and hard, there was little work, and the seaports were too often full of the war’s cripples and those rejected by the sea.

  But the remainder of Tempest’s people were a real melting-pot. French and Danes, several Negroes, an American, and many more besides.

  As he looked at the men at the braces and halliards, the boat handlers waiting to lower his gig outboard, the swaying line of sweating marines on the poop, he tried to tell himself he should be content. He knew that if he were in England he would be fretting and worrying about getting back to sea. Trying to obtain a new ship, any ship. That was how it had been after the war. Then he had already held two commands, a sloop and his beloved frigate Phalarope.

  When he had been given the Undine, another fifth-rate, and despatched to Madras on the other side of the world, he had felt only gratitude that he had been spared the fate of the many who daily thronged the Admiralty corridors or waited in the coffee houses, hoping and praying for just such a chance as his.

  That had been five years in the past. And apart from a short visit to England he had been away from home waters ever since. When he had taken command of Tempest he had expected to be recalled to England for new orders. To be sent to the West Indies perhaps, to the Channel Fleet, or to the territory which was in dispute with Spain.

  He looked at Herrick again and wondered. Herrick said nothing of his own views now, although he had once made them plain enough. Apart from his coxswain, John Allday, Bolitho knew of no other who risked his anger by such plain speaking.

  It had all come back to him when Tempest had anchored at Madras two months ago. Even as his boat’s crew had made their desperate efforts to pull him through the angry surf without getting their captain soaked to the skin he had remembered his first visit. When he had carried Viola Raymond, wife of the British Government’s adviser to the East India Company, as passenger. Herrick had spoken out then to warn him of the real dangers, of the risk to his name and advancement in the one life he loved.

 

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