’Least I’m eatin’ well, Lewrie could conjure to himself in consolation. He had also thought that, for a rare once aboard a ship, he could sleep in as late as his idle nature desired. But one night out to sea and the sounds of the brig making a goodly way, the sounds from the watchstanders changing at four in the morning, had roused him, and that had been the last night he’d enjoyed a lubberly “All-Night-In.” A half of his life spent at sea had engrained wary and wakeful habits in him, and it was a rare morning when he could roll back over and “caulk” even for a slothful extra hour! Even if the brig belonged to Mr. Pollock and his company, even if she had a most competent Master in Mr. Coffin, with a full complement of tarry-handed Mates, he still haunted her deck in fretful and enforced impotence, like a coachman who was forced to ride inside for once, far from his familiar reins.
“Well, how was the air-rifle, sir?” Pollock enquired, coming up as cordial as anything in hopes perhaps that Lewrie’s approval (as if that held sway with Admiralty!) might result in a profitable contract.
“Fine, does it work, sir,” Lewrie replied as he unslung the gun from his shoulder. “When it doesn’t, it might serve as an oar, a club, or a punt pole.”
“Yet you bagged a dozen, I see… ahem.” Pollock twitch-whinnied and beamed like a horse dealer trying to palm off a half-dead sway-back for a thoroughbred, did he wink and smile often enough.
“Ah, but the ones lost to misfires,” Lewrie told him as he held the air-rifle ’twixt thumb and two fingers, as if the firearm was that aforementioned dangerous asp.
“About what the Austrians said, too,” Pollock said with a disappointed sigh. “Still, there’s hopes the Yankee long-hunters, the local swamp-runners and Indians find them knacky. So quiet-like, fast-firing? Tell you what, sir. I’ll make you a present of it, e’en so.”
Lewrie was tempted to tell Pollock where he could shove such a handsome offer, that he wouldn’t take it on a penny wager, but suspected that Mr. Pollock might think repacking it more trouble than it was worth. After all, he still had eight dozen of the Girandoni air-rifles crated up, a dozen to the crate, and stowed below.
Back in England, the Girandoni might have a curiosity value to someone, did Lewrie hold onto it long enough. Surely there would be a collector so eager he’d trample small children to lay hands on one, to say he had it, if nothing else.
There were other air-powered sporting arms made in Europe, but usually only to single custom orders, whereas the Girandoni rifle was the only one mass-produced for military service.
In 1780 the Austrians had ordered nearly two thousand of them from Bartolomeo Girandoni for sharpshooting skirmishers from several regiments’ light companies. It fired a lighter .51 calibre ball, one even lighter than Lewrie’s prized Ferguson breech-loading musket that he’d picked up during the Revolution, or the fusil-musket he’d gotten as a grim souvenir after his disastrous Florida expedition in 1783.
The Girandoni looked more like a sporting arm; the fore-stock was half the length of a typical three-banded musket, ending about one foot ahead of the trigger guard. The fire-lock mechanism looked much the same as a flintlock, but it lacked the dog’s-jaws, the flint, and the raspy frizzen to strike the flint, as well as the powder pan that ignited a powder charge. Its buttstock was detachable, made of iron, and formed the pressurised air flask—it came with three.
What was most promising about the Girandoni air-rifle was that a skilled user could get off twelve shots in about thirty seconds and never have to ram a ball down the muzzle! Twelve lead balls could be loaded down a tube in the fore-stock, all at once.
Pull back the brass lever along the bottom of the fore-stock and a ball would pop into the opened breech from below; return the lever to its slot and the breech was sealed; cock the lock, take aim, and squeeze the trigger, and a complicated clock-work spring valve opened from the buttstock, and there would come a faint, barely perceptible, crack! as the ball was propelled at 700–800 feet per second!
It was said (by Pollock, who was hot to flog them off on somebody!) that it was accurate on man-sized targets beyond one hundred yards, not the fifty or so of a smoothbore musket. Nowhere near as good as the two hundred yards of a European Jaeger or Pennsylvania rifle, but they were very slow to load and needed a greased patch to grip the rifling. Perhaps this time, quantity could make up for quality and incredible accuracy.
The main drawback was that the user might as well hire a clock-maker to go along and keep the Girandoni working properly, and the oil-soaked leather seals on the air flasks leaked like an entire litter of puppies, as Lewrie’s last shot at ducks could attest. There had been a serpentine hiss, then a phfft! of low-pressure air and sealing oils, which put Lewrie in mind of a sailor betrayed by his bean soup. And to pump the flasks back to full pressure, propping the detachable rod against a tree or wall (in his case, the ship’s main-mast) for the last, hardest strokes looked like slow, strenuous buggery.
“Well,” Lewrie responded, shamming real gratitude, “it does have its curiosity value. Thankee, sir. Most kind of you.”
Even if his round-dozen waterfowl had used up all three flasks and four dozen lead balls, and he was a better wing-shot than that!
“We’ll be under way by dawn,” Pollock informed him, turning his face northward, going gloomy again. “The wind will come Westerly or Sou’westerly, in my experience. Enough for us to weather the English Turn and Fort Saint Leon. Another stretch of river, one more big bend, and after that ’tis an arrow-shot, the last twenty-odd miles, to New Orleans.” He sounded loath to arrive.
“Then we’ll be about our business… whatever it is,” Lewrie rejoined. It had not been a joyful “yachting” voyage; Pollock was in a permanent fret of exposure, of letting his firm down, ruing the day he’d made Peel’s acquaintance, and had begun to nibble round the edges of espionage, as the Frogs called it. He had never before been asked to do anything quite so overt and was definitely “off his feed” with qualms. Ruing the night he’d dined with the forceful, brook-me-no-arguments Capt. Nicely, too, Lewrie shouldn’t wonder. On Peel and Nicely at least, he and Pollock saw eye to eye, if on little else.
“God help us,” Pollock said, all but chewing on a thumbnail.
“Might get lucky,” Lewrie japed. “Murder those two whose names we know straightaway, and put the wind up the others, hey?”
Pollock shuddered, glared at him, then toddled off without one more word to share, muttering a fair slew of imprecations, though.
Lewrie leaned on the bulwarks and plucked at his “costume” cotton shirt, most slack and lubberly fashion. Pollock had advised that he and his small band of Navy men dress as anything but sailors. They had been forced to don thigh-long hunting shirts over rough trousers, older, battered tricornes or low-crowned farmers’ hats. Ruing costs like the meanest skinflint, Pollock had issued them all powder horns and deerskin cartridge pouches, long hunting knives to hang on their hips to make them appear more like huntsmen or a pack of bully-bucks he’d hired on to escort his goods into the hinterlands … or protect his new-landed assets in his New Orleans warehouses and store. All of which—the clothing, arms and accoutrements, “surplus to requirements” infantry hangers and such—had been produced from Pollock’s warehouses in Kingston and sold at a so-called discounted price to Capt. Nicely. Lewrie could sourly suspect that he and his handful of disciplined sailors had been charged passengers’ fare just to come along, as well!
Lewrie heaved a befuddled sigh and contemplated once again just how he had been finagled into this dubious adventure. Capt. Nicely had proved to be much cleverer than Lewrie would have credited him. And not half so nice as he appeared.
Not a day after their shore supper, Capt. Nicely and Mr. Peel had been rowed out to Proteus at her anchorage and had come aboard in stately manner, with a strange young Lieutenant and Midshipman in tow.
With Nicely wearing a gruff but-me-no-buts expression on his face, and Jemmy Peel cocked-browed with a sardonic you-poor-dense-bastard loo
k, Nicely had introduced the young Lieutenant as one Thaddeus Darling, the Midshipman as one Mr. the Honourable Darcy Gamble.
Since Proteus had lost the unfortunate (and regrettable) young Mr. Burns, Admiral Sir Hyde Parker had decided to appoint the much tarrier and more promising Mr. Gamble into the frigate. He came off the flagship, and such an appointment usually was a signal honour for the recipient captain. The lad was upwards of his majority, eighteen or so, and while attired in a well-to-do lad’s best uniform and kit of the finest quality, right down to his ivory-and-gilt trimmed dirk, he was touted as a bright lad who’d been properly seasoned at sea duties since his eleventh birthday; a welcome prize, indeed!
“You’re short a Midshipman, Captain Lewrie,” Nicely had almost gushed in seeming sincerity, “and I prevailed upon Sir Hyde to assign you his very best… and one close to his heart,” Nicely had added in a confidential whisper, with an encouraging wink, “in reward for your previous good service to the Crown.”
“Honoured, indeed, to welcome him aboard, Captain Nicely, sir,” Lewrie had bowed back, temporarily disarmed, though still a dab leery.
“If you do not mind, then, sir, I will read myself in, and put up my broad pendant, according to Sir Hyde’s orders?” Nicely had said further, whipping an official document from his coat’s breast pocket.
“Beg pardon?” Lewrie had gawped, all aback. “Say uh?”
Lieutenant Darling produced a paper-wrapped packet containing a red pendant, much shorter and wider than the coach-whip commissioning pendant that forever flew from Proteus’s main-mast. He handed it off to Midshipman Grace and bade him hoist it aloft. And to Lewrie’s chagrin, the red broad pendant bore a white ball, indicating that Capt. Nicely would have no flag-captain below him!
There was much too much blood thundering in Lewrie’s ears for a clear hearing of Capt. Nicely’s bellowing recital of Navy officialese, but the sense of it was that Sir Hyde had temporarily appointed him as a petit Commodore without the actual rank, privileges, or emoluments of a permanent promotion.
“… and take upon yourself accordingly the duties of regulating the details of your squadron, in making the necessary distribution of men, stores, provisions, and in such other duties as you shall think fit to direct!” Nicely had thundered, casting a baleful eye at his “flagship’s” goggling captain. Lewrie had whirled to seek confirmation or aid from Peel, but Peel could do nothing but offer him a side-cocked head and a helpless shrug. That “distribution… as you shall think fit to direct” sounded hellish-ominous!
To make matters even worse, Proteus’s crew thought they had been done a great honour in recognition of their prowess, and they had actually cheered Nicely’s pronouncement. And his decision to “splice the main-brace” and trot out the rum keg for a drink free of personal debts, the “sippers” or “gulpers” owed among them, had raised an even heartier second!
Fickle bloody ingrates! Lewrie had fumed.
“Ah, sir, um…” Lewrie attempted once Nicely had turned to face him.
“You speak highly of your First Officer, Mister Langlie,” Nicely had said sweetly, “nearly ready for a command of his own, as I recall you praising, so… perhaps a spell of actual command, with me as his advisor, as it were, will properly season him for better things in the near future, hey? No fear, Captain, your Order Book shall not be supplanted or amended while I’m aboard as, ah… ‘super-cargo’ or acting Commodore. I shall not interfere in your officers’ habitual direction of your ship. Though I did bring along Lieutenant Darling to stand as a temporary Third Lieutenant, I assure you that he shall strictly adhere to your way of doing things and will be subordinate to Lieutenant Langlie, not me.”
“What squadron?” Lewrie had baldly asked, after jerking his chin upwards to indicate the broad pendant.
“We, ah… stand upon it,” Nicely had had the gall to confess, with what seemed a dab of chagrin to “press-gang” him out of his command, so he’d be available to fulfill the rest of his scheme.
“Christ on a …” Lewrie had spluttered, close to babbling.
“We may add two cutters later on, once you’ve reported…”
“Mine arse on a …” Lewrie had fumed, nigh to mutiny.
“So, you’re free, d’ye see, Captain Lewrie. Needs must—”
“Bluck!” Lewrie had squawked, shaking his head in ashen awe at how deftly he’d been made “available”; he hadn’t seen this coming!
“Sir Hyde and Lord Balcarres insisted, d’ye see,” Nicely hurriedly added, “once I’d laid our enterprise’s sketch before ’em, so you must adopt the old Navy adage, ‘growl ye may, but go ye must.’”
“Mine… Arr!” Lewrie tongue-tangled. “Gahh!”
“So glad you understand,” Nicely had cajoled. “Well, I’m dry as dust, and I fetched off a half-dozen of my best claret. Shall we go aft and toast the success of our venture, sirs?”
And, damned if, after the wine had been opened and Lewrie had sloshed down two impatient glasses, his cats hadn’t come out of hiding and had made an instant head-rubbing, twining fuss over Captain Nicely, as if they’d been just waiting for his arrival their whole little lives!
Damned traitors! Lewrie could but accuse in rebellious silence.
And Nicely had been so maddeningly, bloody nice that he’d cooed, “mewed,” and conversed with Toulon and Chalky, to their evident delight, even suffering Chalky to clamber up his breeches, roll about in his lap to bare his belly for “wubbies,” and scale Nicely’s heavily gilt-trimmed lapels to play with his epaulet tassels, touch noses with him, shiver his tail to mark him, and grope behind his neck with a paw at his ribbon-bound queue.
Christ, what a … He sighed to himself, sagging weary on the bulwarks, on his elbows and crossed forearms. What an eerie place this is!
He’d been up the Hooghly to Calcutta and had thought that lush and exotic; he’d been to Canton in trading season ‘tween the wars and had goggled at the many sights of the inaptly named Pearl River below Jack-Ass Point. Both had been Asian, crowded, teeming with noise, and anthill busy with seeming millions of strange people intent on their labours. Louisiana, though…
First had come the barren shoals, bars, and mud flats of the Mississippi River delta, so far out at sea, the silted-up banks on either hand of the pass and the lower-most channels’ desolate ribbons of barrier islands, with the Gulf of Mexico stretching to horizons when seen from the main-top platform, just a few miles beyond them. Skeins made from dead trees, silent and uninhabited, only heightened the sense of utter desolation.
Once past the Head of the Passes, the land spread out east and west to gobble up the seas, the salt marshes and “quaking prairies” impossibly green and glittering, framed by far-distant hints of woods; yet still devoid of humankind, and abandoned.
Now, here almost within two hours’ sail of the English Turn and Fort Saint Leon, the river was darkly, gloomily shadowed by too many trees, all wind-sculpted into eldritch shapes, adrape with the Spanish moss that could look like the last rotting shreds of ancient winding sheets or burial shrouds after the ghosts of the dead had clawed their way from their lost-forgotten graves to the sunlight once again. The cypresses standing in green-scummed, death-still ponds, the hammocks of higher land furry with scrub pines, bearing fringes of saw-grasses like bayonets planted to slice foolish intruders …
Oh, here and there were tall levees heaped up to protect fields and pastureland, rough entrenchments of earth that put him in uneasy mind of Yorktown during the Franco-American siege, raised as if to hide whatever lurked behind them from an interloper’s view. There might be a gap in the levees where someone had a seasonal sluice-gate to flood and replenish his secret acres. There might be the tiniest peek of a farmhouse’s roof and chimneys, faint wisps of cook-fire smoke at times; the larger pall of bittersweet white smoke as a field was burned off for a fresh seeding with sugarcane or cotton.
But, all in all, it seemed such a thinly settled place, a spookily off-putting land so daunting th
at only the desperate, the forlorn, would dare attempt to tame it or wrest from it a farthing’s profit, or sustenance.
There came a promising little zephyr of wind from the West at last, a welcome bit of coolness after the sullen, damp-washcloth heat of even a winter’s day in Louisiana. Lewrie’s flesh beneath the stifling closeness of his clothing goose-pimpled to that zephyr. As if to a forewarning, but of what?
CHAPTER NINE
Lewrie wasn’t sure exactly what he was expecting once Azucena del Oeste weathered the last bend of the Mississippi, abeam a Westerly wind, and began a long “reach” up the centre of the river’s widening channel. To hear Mr. Pollock, Capt. Coffin, and his mates gush about New Orleans, it was a blend of Old Port Royal, Jamaica, the old pirate haven, London’s East End docks for commerce, Lisbon for quaintness, and Macao in China for sin.
Lazing on the starboard foremast stays and ratlines just above the gangway bulwarks, using his telescope on things that caught his interest, he watched New Orleans loom up at last. Like most realities, though, the city proved a letdown, compared to the myth.
Near the city, the levees were higher and better-kept, on the east bank at least, with a road atop them bearing waggon traffic and light carts. The road sometimes crossed wooden bridges above sluice-gates and canal cuts that led to planters’ fields. Even here, though, Spanish Louisiana still looked thinly populated. One would expect a modicum of commercial bustle so close to a seaport of New Orleans’s repute, but…
The river widened and ran arrow-straight, finally, and Lewrie could espy buildings and wharves, another vast, sloping levee in front of low but wide warehouses. Dead, bare “trees” turned out to be masts of a whole squadron of merchant ships tied up along the quays, along with a confusing tangle that looked like a gigantic log-jam. Nearer up, the log-jam turned out to be a fleet; hundreds of large log rafts or square-ended flatboats that had been floated, poled, or sailed to the docks from the settlements far upriver. Those would be sold off and broken up for their lumber once their voyages were done, Mr. Pollock had told him.
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