Nobody’s Child

by Andrew Wareham

  “No watch, Giles? Pity. Always useful, a timepiece.”

  I opened the purse and found a dozen gold coins and some silver.

  “Lucky, Giles.”

  Captain Marker said no more but looked approving as I called my boarders to me.

  “Fair dibs, lads. Eleven of us and twelve of these - one each and put the other one in the pot for when we get ashore for a day or two?”

  Had there been a rich plunder, they would have refused. As it was, they thought me more than fair and were pleased to solemnly accept my generosity.

  It’s different on a privateer – you’d never come across that in the navy.

  The silver went into Fred’s pocket, to look after for me, part of his job as my follower.

  By midday we had the sloop cleaned up and the damage to her rigging tidied up sufficient for her to sail. Captain Marker called us together again.

  “We ain’t likely to sell more on the River here, not after this. Southern winter is coming in and I for one don’t fancy Cape Horn.”

  There was general agreement.

  “Best place for us is the Dutch at the Cape of Good Hope, first call. Then into the Southern Ocean and make eastwards.”

  We set sail.

  Chapter Four

  Nobody’s Child Series

  Nobody’s Child

  I had a sword, won in battle and all my own. I had just enough sense not to strap it on when I went on deck, but it was hard not to swagger. Jerry, who was competent with the manage of a blade, invited me to practice with him, knowing that I would be yearning to strut in view of the men.

  Fred whispered quietly that it would hardly be practice, seeing as I knew nothing of the weapon. I would be learning from scratch and must be ready for a few chuckles from the lads. It was the first time he saved me from making a fool of myself, and a long way from the last.

  We were forty days on the passage to the Cape, which was a fast run, all things considered, and gave me time enough to at least learn how to hold the blade and not to seem too much of a green boy.

  Captain Marker occasionally joined us – not too often as his brother was the more skilled swordsman and it did not do the captain good to be seen to be outclassed, particularly by the smaller man. He agreed that my sword was a fine weapon, far too good for me. He laughed and genuinely was not jealous that I possessed a better blade than his. I found a deal of affection in me for that man. He was wild and lacked the fine judgement of a risk, but he had a good heart, which was why we followed him so willingly. He should never have attacked at the Plate, thinking back on it; we all knew it had been a big risk for small reward – but it had come off. So it would next time, no doubt.

  Captain Marker called us together on a calm morning, to discuss our next movements. He left the sloop with just two men aboard, risking that no emergency would arise for half an hour or so.

  “We shall probably call in at Bombay after Cape Town, and that is the hairiest port on Earth. You will find all the pleasures you can imagine in Bombay and learn a few you had never so much as heard of! I plan that we shall take a quick look about the Ocean north of Madagascar, for you never know what may be found just there. Very often a slaver or two, and they offer a profit, taken into Bombay. The possibility of other pirate ships as well, as goes without saying.”

  I did not quite understand how we could expect to make a profit from pirate ships but judged by the laughter of the crew that they understood something I did not. It was agreed that the plan made good sense – not that we took a vote, but the sense of the meeting was, as was generally the case, that the Captain knew what he was doing.

  Jerry explained the implications that I had failed to catch.

  “If we take a ship, then it must be a pirate, because if it was not, we would not touch it. There are traders out of Zanzibar who carry rich cargoes and are certainly not British flag, and commonly not Dutch or French either. There is the odd Portuguese, of course, but the chances are we will not see one of those and we will leave them alone if we do. There are various sorts out of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, often rich and certainly fair game for us. We must not carry a European ship into Bombay, not in peacetime, but a foreign pirate will cause no eyebrows to raise.”

  “What of the slavers, Jerry? Are we to release their wicked cargo in Bombay?”

  “Well… not quite release, in so many words, Giles. We shall find them more considerate masters among the merchant population, shall we say. The Arabs will castrate the young men and boys, of course, and that will not happen to them in Bombay. Many will be recruited into the guards of the merchant houses and will become soldiers, earning a little of pay and certainly better off than they might be lining the harem walls. So, they will not be free, as such, but definitely less in bondage than might otherwise be the case.”

  I chose to say no more on the topic. I began to suspect that my schoolboy ideas of right and wrong, of black and white, needed be amended. I was, after all, no longer at risk of becoming a clergyman.

  I spent some interesting hours with Master Gunner before we reached Cape Town, sorting through the blades we had taken on the Plate. Some were no more than cheap trash, hammered iron with a rough sharp filed on; a few were works of the blacksmith’s art, fine steel to match my Toledo sword; most were useful working tools, no more. I had not realised that there were so many styles of sword, each with its specific name, almost all of which I forgot.

  The trash went into the scrap barrel, to be taken ashore at Cape Town and sold to a blacksmith, old iron always having a price in those days. I am told that the value of scrap has fallen lately, in England that is, with the big furnaces of the North Country producing so much that even good iron is commonplace. It was not so half a century ago.

  The very best of the knives and daggers were put to one side, to be taken back to England and sold for the prize fund, too fine to be spoilt by fighting. The best steel was worth almost its weight in gold in those days.

  The working knives were separated out, set out in rows of the same size, more or less, and available to any man who needed a couple. I took a pair of a weight and feel that seemed good to me – one large, one small, for working and fighting equally. Fred followed my example. It was always useful to have a pair of knives, Jerry said.

  “What of throwing knives, Jerry?”

  That, he told me, was a knack, something inborn. A man could throw a knife, or he could not and there was no learning it. Neither Fred nor I possessed that inherent skill, it transpired. We watched awestruck as Jerry threw his five blades – two in sheaths on each forearm, one behind his neck – hitting a chalk mark the size of the top of my thumb at up to twenty feet almost unfailingly.

  “You can do that with your pistols, Giles, I know. But I am silent. What of those pocket pistols you took? Have you tried them?”

  I had forgotten them, thinking them little more than toys.

  “They are very small in the bore, Jerry, a quarter of an inch at most. Short-barrelled too, so of low velocity.”

  “Catch a man in the throat they will kill him. Inside his belly, they will do him no favours. As a last resort, at hand-to-hand, they can be useful. Fetch ‘em out, Giles. Might as well see if they are worth hanging on to.”

  They were single barrel pieces and very old, both being doglocks. Master Gunner pointed them out to me, explaining that they were put to half-cock by the dog, an external safety latch that held the hammer back, for protection when you were loading.

  “Not been made these seventy years, doglocks, for it being tidier to have the half-cock internal to the lock. Was I you, Giles, I would put these to one side until you find a good gunsmith and then ask if he might wish to buy. I reckon as how they might fetch fifty guineas, this pair, for being rare now. Spanish make, I would say, from the chasing on the barrels. Might be a noble house, they belonged to. I reckon he was a lord, that fellow you shot down, Giles.”

  I shrugged. Fifty guineas was important, but a dead Spanish lord was
not, except maybe to his own family.

  Fred took charge of the pistols, wrapping them up in raw wool so that the grease would stop them rusting.

  “How do we have wool aboard, Fred?”

  “Picked up a woolfell or two at the Plate, Master Giles, thinking it might come in handy. Most of us did, once the old hands gave us the nudge, in case we was to round the Horn and the wool could be packed between layers of thin canvas, sewn together and made into waistcoats to wear close to the skin. Might be handy yet, the seamen say, if so be we fetch the Roaring Forties.”

  There was much to learn, provided I asked questions and gave my thanks for the replies. The men asked no more than that, a reasonable courtesy, and were willing to aid my education in exchange.

  Over the years I have listened to many an officer and gentleman bemoaning the ignorance and stupidity of their inferiors. I have never bothered to correct them – a waste of time: lecture a hog on mathematics and you don’t get a pig who can count. Offer the ‘lower orders’ simple respect and they will work for you; treat them with contempt and you get back all you offer. Easy enough, but the so-called nobility seem incapable of learning it. Not even the guillotine could persuade them of the error of their ways.

  Not to worry – I’m one of the rich now and I make good and sure that my people earn more than any others in the county. Not a hungry family on my estate and every child in school for free for four years. If the revolution comes then they will give me the word in time to get out in safety – more than that I don’t ask for. I’ve tried to explain to young Fred, but he listens to his jolly good pals far more than to me – I’m old and past it. He’ll go to the tumbrils and see the guillotine blade falling, if the day comes in England. Serve the silly bugger right!

  Cape Town was under the Dutch at that time. Dowdy and provincial – the poor burghers lacked the nous to enjoy themselves away from the home country. They say the men further inland were a different lot – they had imported Malay women by the shipload during the previous century, being short of frows from the Netherlands – but even they were falling back under the influence of the Bible-bashers. Calvinists, I was told, and was sufficiently green from my Divinity lessons to know what that meant; predestination and gloom and hours of extemporaneous prayer. Not like the good old C of E which reckons to give the soul a wash and brush-up in no more than sixty minutes of a Sunday morning; a quick gabble from the Prayer Book and done for the week. Month, more like, for I can normally resist my lady’s demands to accompany her three weeks out of the four.

  Not to worry about the finer points of doctrine – it simply meant that Cape Town was a gloomy harbour. Even the taverns were staid. The men all said there was no point getting drunk there – couldn’t even have a respectable brawl without a bunch of konstabels turning up and hauling everybody back to the ship and giving them a lecture on the way. As for the few brothels – the less said about them, the better! The girls were slaves, so I was told, forced to work by their masters. I chose not to discover for myself, at Jerry’s advice, preferring not to purchase that particular form of the indulgence.

  That did not mean it was a law-abiding town, far from it; they were simply better than most at hypocrisy.

  Jenny Dawes sold all of her cargo in Cape Town. It was unlawful, their Mercantile Acts forbade local men to trade except with Holland and conveyed in Dutch bottoms, but that did not stop the merchants. The brig was taken into dock and her hold was emptied so that the yard could examine her hull for a possible leak. The ironware and crockery and glass rapidly made its way into the merchants’ storefronts and the ship was discharged ‘fully repaired’, but empty. They paid in gold bullion, I was told. Small amounts of the metal trickled down to the coast, taken from rivers inland, mostly by hunters and traders who took the risk of going north.

  There was always talk of sending an expedition north to discover the source of the gold, but it would have had to be an army, so it was said, for there being a kingdom of black men there, very ferocious and willing to fight all comers. The Dutch had no army to spare, and the settlers at the Cape seemed little interested in forming one themselves.

  They were still talking it up when last I passed through the port, and nothing had come of it. One day, it will happen. There’s something about gold, you know… drives sensible men crazy when they see gold nuggets strewn about a river bed. Had that effect on me a while later, I recall. I still keep a couple of those little pebbles, thumbnail size, tucked away on my dressing table, just to remind me. I expect young Fred will sell them the day I die.

  Good water at Cape Town, or close by; could always fill our barrels there without fear – which is more than you can say for London River, for example.

  Not much else to say for the place. Plenty of fresh meat, provided you liked mutton, and a bloody great mountain to look at. A good bottle of wine, which was not especially important to me. Lucky that way – I could always take a glass or leave it, not like some of the poor fellows who had to drink themselves into oblivion every night. Still the case that I sit here with a glass to hand that hardly gets refilled more than once a day. Not many men in this country who can afford it can say that.

  Anyway, we sailed from Cape Town and found it easy to turn our backs on the harbour, making towards Madagascar and the north of the Ocean.

  It was the season for the great storms, so Jerry said, but the chances of meeting one were slight enough provided the ship did not hang about in the southern reaches. I noticed that Captain Marker chose to drive her harder than was his habit and that we made our miles in quicker time than normal.

  “Are the storms so very bad, Jerry?”

  “Seas higher than our masthead, so I am told, Giles. Winds that can pluck a man from the ratlines although he is hanging on with both hands. I have never seen a storm at close to, but I have spoken to Indiamen who have. I believe their stories. We get them sometimes off England, perhaps once in twenty years. Have you heard of Cloudesly Shovell, the Admiral of England?”

  I had not, and he told the tale of the great disaster, of the bulk of the Fleet sunk or crippled off the Scilly Islands nearly eighty years previously, a storm doing what the fleets of France and Spain could not manage.

  “Great ships, all of them, Giles. Our little brig would not fare so well even as they did. Good reason to go north in a hurry.”

  I never saw a cyclone or typhoon close to, not at sea. I was onshore at Canton once when one came past, not actually striking directly ashore – but that is a tale for another day.

  We made north of Madagascar and poked our nose about the islands there, given different names then but called Mauritius and Reunion these days. We spotted a dozen of dhows, some of them probably the slavers we were looking for, but they had the legs of us on a wind and we achieved nothing there.

  Captain Marker changed tack, literally. Jerry, as always, explained all.

  “We are to close the coast, Giles. There will be places to raid there, but we must choose carefully. The larger ports have castles with guns emplaced, too heavy for us to survive. We want a small harbour, probably no more than a river mouth, with a pair of trading dhows at anchor. No more than two, us to close the larger and the sloop to take the other. It would be better was there only the one dhow, of course. You are to go aboard the sloop, to command the boarders.”

  The sloop we had taken at the Plate was a small vessel, about eighty tons and was crewed by a master’s mate and just six men. Now, I was to take my ten of boarders and make her into a fighting tender for Jenny Dawes. Captain Marker had evidently been impressed by my action at the Plate, sufficiently so to trust me out of his direct sight.

  “Is the sloop armed, Jerry?”

  “Merchant fashion, Giles. A pair of one-pound swivels on the stern rails, to play on boarders coming up from small boats, and four old musketoons and a pair of horse pistols, more or less.”

  I wondered how a horse pistol could be something other than its normal self.

  “Inch
bore and long barrelled, Jerry, fourteen inches or so – the cavalry pistol is much of a muchness wherever you find it, so Master Gunner tells me.”

  “English horse pistols, even so, Giles, designed for use by heavy cavalry, on the caracole.”

  Master Gunner had explained that to me – the old heavy horse would ride close to battalions of foot and discharge their pistols, one from the right and then bring the horse round in a tight circle to fire the left on the opposite course. It worked well with infantry equipped with pikes and was effective enough with slow-to-reload matchlock muskets but failed disastrously in the face of flintlocks firing three or four times in a minute.

  “These are foreign pistols, Giles. Dragons, they call ‘em. I expect the horse soldiers, the dragoons, get their name from them. Eighteen-inch barrels, inch and a half in the bore and taking a load of small grapeshot. Much like a sawn-off fowling piece. At twenty feet, likely to wound a dozen men in a boarding party. At ten feet, they blow the guts out of two men, not having spread yet.”

  “Nasty, Jerry. More useful in defending a ship than in attacking. Rest them on the rail to take an aim and they could come in very handy. Clumsy if to be fired by a man running forward.”

  Jerry agreed – they were not especially practical weapons.

  “The musketoons can be useful, Giles. Like nothing so much as a long-barrelled blunderbuss. Loaded with slugs normally – pieces of lead bar cut up into triangular or squared lumps about a quarter of an inch on a side. Useful to fire a volley and then charge.”

  “Four men to exchange their muskets for musketoons, you think, Jerry?”

  It sounded sensible.

  I took Fred and my ten aboard the sloop next morning. I noticed Fred to inspect the pair of dragons and then take them away – he having a fancy for them.

  Mr Westfield, the master’s mate in command, was glad to have a person to talk to – it was lonely being sole officer and having to keep a little of distance from his crew. He was not stand-offish to an offensive degree, but the captain of a ship cannot be one of the boys, must be the source of authority. All very well to sit down with the men and share a glass of rum, but not so easy afterwards to exact immediate obedience to his commands, which is sometimes necessary aboard ship. I was not a sea-officer and so stood outside of the ordinary line of command, could be treated as a friend.