With a grunt of satisfaction, Clay now turned his attention to the surf. He scanned along the line of the beach. Wherever he looked the waves seemed as fierce as earlier, except for the patch of beach opposite where he stood. Here the surf seemed to be calmer, the waves lower than elsewhere. This must be something to do with the shape of the seabed as it shelved to form the beach at this point, he thought. If so, it was extraordinary good fortune. They appeared to have chosen the only point on the coast where their ramshackle raft might have some chance of surviving on its passage out to sea.
Clay thumped his forehead with frustration – of course the waves were lower here! It was so obvious he was amazed that he had been so blind. He laughed out loud at his own stupidity, forgetting for a moment that he was not on his own.
‘My apologies, Mr Croft,’ he said to the startled teenager, while still laughing. ‘You must think that I have quite lost my senses to be laughing so?’
‘I did think it a little strange, sir,’ confessed the midshipman, unwilling to seem to criticise anyone as senior as a first lieutenant.
‘Well, permit me to set your mind at ease with regard to my sanity,’ Clay explained. ‘I was just now looking at the surf, which you will own is quite fierce in this wind, and congratulating myself that we seem to have chosen the one stretch of coast to build our raft where it is a little more temperate. Do you see how the waves directly in front are much lower and break rather farther out in the offing?’
Croft gazed out at the sea. ‘Aye, sir, now you mention it I do see that is so. It is good fortune indeed for us.’
‘Precisely what I thought,’ said Clay, ‘and then I realised why good fortune has nothing to do with it. It was always going to be the case, and I was mocking myself for not thinking of it sooner.’
‘I am not sure I follow, sir,’ said Croft.
‘On account of the fishermen!’ declared Clay. ‘Do they not have to launch their boats through these waves every day? So where on all of this long stretch of beach would they select to build their house?’
‘Oh, I think I understand, sir!’ said an excited Croft. ‘Why, they would naturally choose the spot where they could most conveniently get their boats out to sea.’
‘Quite so Mr Croft, I do believe you have it,’ said Clay with a smile, ‘and I believe I am ready to declare that my little plan might actually work.’
*****
Clay stood on the edge of the water and stared out to sea. He could see the tiny white sails of the Agrius, the yards braced right round as she beat into the strong wind. She was still many miles away, it would be over an hour, perhaps more before she would be off the beach. His attention moved from the pinnacle of nautical technology represented by the frigate to the strange craft they had just finished creating as it lay on the sand, ready to be launched.
It looked terribly vulnerable. At each end was one of the two small fishing boats, their buoyancy enhanced with the empty barrels lashed to their sides. Fixed between these hulls was a platform of beams and spars lashed together with rope, and wrapped around with fishing net. He could see various recognisable pieces of the cottage in its makeup. There was the painted door and next to it the top of a table nailed into place. It was on this makeshift raft that most of the party would need to cling, and ultimately their lives would depend on how well it had been made. Clay gave it an experimental push. The raft made an ominous grating sound, but did not immediately collapse. He next turned his attention to the fishing boats at either end. Windham had done a good job of adapting them so that they now had four oars each, all mounted on the side away from the central platform. That would provide at least some motive power to the craft.
He composed his face with care, adopted a look of confidence and turned back to the anxious group of men on the beach, as if delighted with what he saw.
‘She may not be a first rate,’ he beamed, ‘but she will do exceedingly well for us. We will not be able to take anything but ourselves. Leave all your weapons, tools, and ammunition pouches, lads.’ The men piled up the kit they were to abandon, and turned back for further instructions. The sound of small arms fire was now very near. He looked up to where he could see Munro with his line of men putting up their last fight on top of the dunes, firing away at an unseen opponent farther inland.
Clay set to rapidly organising his party of men. First he placed the wounded marines that had been brought to the beach into the two fishing boats and made them as comfortable as possible. Then he selected the strongest men in the party to go in the boats, two men to each oar. One boat was to be commanded by Lieutenant Windham, the other by Preston. The remaining men he organised in a line along the beach side of the platform part of the craft. When this was done, he turned back to the other midshipman in the party.
‘Mr Croft, you are to go directly to Lieutenant Munro and tell him we are ready to depart. His men are to leave their equipment on the beach, and then take their places on the raft. Now run boy!’
Once Croft was gone, they launched the craft into the shallows. It surged up and down with each successive wave, the constituent parts of the raft grating and shifting.
‘Easy there, men! Hold her here,’ Clay ordered when they were thigh deep in the water. Clay looked behind him. He could see marines tumbling down the dunes and running across the beach towards him. The top of the dunes was empty for a long moment, and then a line of French soldiers materialised in their place. Several shots rang out, and one of the fleeing marines crashed down on the sand.
‘Mr Preston! Mr Windham! Get your boat crews on board,’ Clay ordered. Men scrambled into the two boats and manned the oars. Behind him he could see marines pulling off their cross belts and dumping their equipment on the beach. The first few men splashed into the shallows to join them.
‘Ready to give way boats?’ shouted Clay.
‘Aye aye, sir,’ came the replies. Clay turned back to look at the beach. With a shout, a party of French soldiers appeared next to the ruined fisherman’s cottage, and began to form a line, muskets raised.
‘We need to go, Mr Munro,’ shouted Clay. All the marines were now lined up against the side of the raft, ready to help shove her off, but the Irishman had paused by the pile of equipment, and looked back at the French massed at the top of the beach. He raised his sword to his lips as if in salute, kissed the weapon, and then grabbing it by both ends snapped the blade across his knee. He dropped the pieces onto the sand, and with huge dignity turned to join his men at the raft.
‘No damned Frenchman will ever say he captured my sword intact,’ he muttered as he took his place next to Clay on the edge of the raft.
‘Give way, oarsmen!’ ordered Clay. ‘The rest of you heave for your lives!’ A volley of musketry swept down the beach. One of the sailors near to Clay gave a cry and fell down into the surf. He did not get up again. As the sea reached up to their chests, the men scrambled onto the raft. Another volley of musket balls sang past Clay’s head as he turned to pull the marine next to him up on to the platform. The men at the oars heaved stroke after stroke, hauling the unwieldy raft out to sea.
*****
‘Masthead there!’ yelled Captain Follett. ‘Tell me what is happening on the beach?’
‘Beach is full of soldiers, sir,’ came the reply. ‘They look like Frogs to me. No sign of any of our men. It’s very strange sir, but they seem to be firing at us.’
Just at that moment a large puff of smoke was visible from the deck as it rose up above the level of the waves. The sound of a volley drifted across to them from the beach.
‘What can they mean by this waste of powder and shot, Mr Sutton?’ Follett mused, turning to his third lieutenant, ‘they can’t be hoping to hit us with musket fire at this range?’ The Agrius was hove to at least a thousand yards off the beach. No musket ball was likely to even reach this far, let alone do any damage.
‘It does seem strange, sir,’ Sutton replied, trying to hide how worried he was about his friend Clay.
&nb
sp; ‘Deck there!’ The hail from the masthead was followed by a pause; as if the lookout was unsure of what it was he could see. ‘There is some sort of raft in the water, three points off the larboard bow. ‘I… I think I can see our men on board it, but it looks to be sinking fast.’
Follett issued a rapid string of orders.
‘Pinnace crew away! Launch crew away! Get the cutter in the water! Clear away the larboard side guns! Mr Booth, let her drift in a little closer. Mr Sutton, take command of the guns. Try and throw some shot among the French on the beach, but make sure you aim high. Don’t hit our men.’
The ship became a mass of activity, like a disturbed ants’ nest, but with more purpose. Knight, the boatswain, supervised launching the boats, their crews tumbling down the ship’s sides and into them as they hit the water. As they pulled away from the ship, the gun ports behind them swung open, and her long row of guns glided out.
The boats from the ship arrived just in time. One of the fishing boats was sinking fast, the other was full of water. The men who clung to the raft were cold, wet and almost at the end of their strength. Welcoming hands pulled their exhausted, occasionally wounded, comrades across to the safety of the ship’s boats, while over their heads they could hear the ripping sound of passing round shot as the ship covered their retreat.
Clay was the last to leave the sodden mass of beams and netting that had saved their lives, and flopped down into the bottom of the crowded launch. The ship had drifted close to them now. The launch gave way and rowed towards the frigate, passing under her bows so as to come alongside, sheltered from the wind. Looking up he saw the Agrius’s figurehead as it hung above him for a moment. It was a crudely painted centaur that stared out at the world with a permanent look of surprise. He had always thought it to be very ugly, but just then it was the most welcome sight in the world.
Chapter 3
Downs
A strong westerly gale drove up the Channel, pushing a heavy green swell in front of it. In the Downs, off the Kent coast, it gusted across the anchorage, making the crowd of merchant ships pitch and toss at their moorings and sent up plumes of white spray far out at sea on the Goodwin Sands. The Downs was always crowded when a westerly was blowing. The ships were waiting for a change in wind direction that would release them, either to head west up the Thames estuary to London and the end of their long voyage home, or down the channel and out to the four corners of the world at the start of the next one.
The Navy too used the Downs for shelter in weather like this. Several ships were moored in a group closer inshore. There was a cluster of massive ships of the line, their heavy rounded hulls rocked at a slower tempo than the smaller merchantmen. Nearby was a collection of sloops and frigates, shorn of their beauty with their delicate upper masts struck down on deck to protect them from the gale. Riding out the storm among them was the Agrius.
On shore the gale rattled roof tiles and polished the cobbles with sheets of driving rain. It forced the small group of officers from the Agrius on shore leave to take shelter by the coal fire in the card room of the Admiral Keppel, a tavern favoured by naval officers with time to kill in Deal. Clay and Windham were not with them; both had their captain’s permission to spend a few days away. Clay was visiting his widowed mother in Sussex, while Windham had gone up to London.
There were four of them seated around the card table. William Munro looked rather pleased with life. He was receiving his winnings from a grim-faced James Fleming, the Scottish purser of the Agrius. Edward Booth, the ship’s master, swayed in his chair. He was rapidly losing a long nodding struggle with all the wine he had drunk. His several chins had finally come to rest on his chest, and he seemed on the verge of sleep. John Sutton, the fourth member of the party, turned around in response to a question from the officers at another table.
‘The reports that you have heard are quite accurate, sir. The attack on Ostend was as complete a disaster,’ Lieutenant Sutton exclaimed, putting down his glass on top of the mess of discarded playing cards strewn across the table. The failure of the army’s attack in Flanders was the talk of the navy, and most of the room had listened with little shame to the conversation of the Agrius’s officers – the only present eye witnesses to what had actually happened. Sutton had been frustrated at the time to have not been included as part of Clay’s landing party, but this did mean that he had observed the squadron’s main landing at Ostend. It was this that made him of particular interest among the company at the Admiral Keppel.
‘Are you at leisure to satisfy us with the particulars of the action, sir?’ asked one of the onlookers, an intense-looking captain of the marines.
‘I am happy to relate the action as I saw it, although my ship was detached from the squadron for part of the time,’ Sutton explained. ‘The landing of the troops at Ostend appeared to proceed well enough, but as is too often the case, the intelligence we had been supplied with was sadly at fault.’ A growl of sympathy rolled around the card room. ‘Damned civilians,’ added a smartly dressed lieutenant from one of the ships of the line.
‘Ostend, far from being weakly held as had been expected, was packed full of troops. The squadron cannonaded the town from the sea, but the French responded very briskly indeed,’ he continued. ‘The Seahorse had to return home with no foremast and was holed between wind and water, and the Yarmouth was badly battered too.’
‘I saw the Active when she came in to Deptford. She was in a fearful state,’ added another voice.
‘We had been down the coast landing our own party of men, so were not at hand during the hottest part of the action,’ Sutton felt compelled to add, before any of the party started to wonder at the undamaged state of the Agrius. A mutter of sympathy greeted his explanation. ‘I understand that once his men were ashore, General Graves called on the governor of Ostend to surrender the town, which he refused to do. The troops then broke the canal gates, but could not make any attempt to get at the ships in the harbour, without a proper siege. Meanwhile, more French reinforcements had been arriving from Bruges, with pieces of artillery, and horsemen too.’
‘Fish the main yard!’ yelled Booth, his eyes staring around him with sudden clarity, before drooping closed again as his chins returned to their resting place on his chest. After a pause, Sutton continued speaking.
‘We were then recalled by our landing party, which had been tasked with a separate operation farther down the coast. After that, we were able to rejoin the squadron for the final tragedy. As I understand it, the decision was taken by the Commodore and General Graves to abandon the enterprise and re-embark the men, at which point it was discovered that the surf was so fierce it was impossible to get the troops off the beach. Several ships’ boats were lost before the attempt had to be abandoned. While the squadron waited in vain for the weather to improve, the French were arriving in ever greater numbers. General Graves directed his men to adopt a position to resist them on a large hill of sand, but during the night they were completely surrounded, and after a brief fight, forced to surrender.’
The mood in the room was sombre. Officers stared into their wine glasses, envisaging the chaos and defeat of the expedition’s final hours, trapped on a hostile shore.
‘Well gentlemen,’ said the smartly dressed lieutenant with a dislike for civilians, ‘perhaps we may hope that at last our Lords and Masters at the Admiralty will have learned a lesson from this gentleman’s sad tale and will stop these damned foolish descents on the French coast. It is little more than breaking French windows by throwing English guineas at ’em, what?’
‘Hear him! Hear him!’ called several voices, while others banged the table tops before them.
‘But what became of your shore party?’ someone asked. ‘Were they also captured?’
‘By no means,’ added another officer, before Sutton could answer. ‘I am just come down from London to rejoin my ship, and that part of the action is covered in the latest copy of the Gazette. The Agrius’s role in the affair and the resc
ue of your shore party is held by all to be the only creditable part of the whole debacle. I have a copy here, in which your captain’s letter to their Lordships is reproduced. He gives the credit for the success to your marine officer. Would that be you, sir?’ Munro’s face flushed with pleasure as he acknowledged the approval of his peers, ‘and more especially to the gallant efforts of your Lieutenant Windham.’
‘Windham?’ Munro and Sutton both exclaimed.
‘Why yes, I believe I have the name correct,’ continued the officer, a little startled by their reaction. ‘Would you care to see my copy?’
*****
Lieutenant Alexander Clay, like most first lieutenants in the navy, had a daily meeting with his captain. Aboard the Agrius this took place at five bells in the forenoon watch. By that time Clay had been able to speak to all of the various heads of department that made up the community of a Royal Navy frigate, and still be left with enough time to discuss his findings with the captain before noon – the traditional start of a ship’s day.
Captain Follett, as usual, was a model of politeness and courtesy. Would Mr Clay like to take a seat? Would he have some of this excellent coffee, perhaps? Or would he prefer something stronger? No? He trusted that Mr Clay’s mother had been found to be in good health? And his trip back to Deal had passed tolerably well? Clay struggled to contain his exasperation with his captain. Could he really be so unaware of the coil of suppressed rage that lay deep within his first lieutenant?
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