The Captain's Nephew

by Philip K Allan

  O’Malley stirred at last, opened his eyes and let out a long groan.

  ‘Oh, Mary Mother of God,’ he gasped. ‘Lads, I think I am after dying. Would you go fetch for a priest? Those fecking Yankee bastards have hurt me real bad.’

  Trevan bent down next to him. ‘Let’s have a look at you, shipmate,’ he said, his voice tender as he opened the Irishman’s shirt. His torso was a mass of angry red and purple.

  ‘We need to get him back to the ship, right sharp,’ he said, looking up. ‘Him needs to see the surgeon.’

  *****

  Captain Follett walked up the companionway ladder onto the quarterdeck, just before high water. There was a sense of urgent purpose in his step. His sailing orders had come on board at last with the arrival of a naval cutter earlier that afternoon, and he was anxious to be at sea. He looked around him to check that Clay had made all the necessary preparations for departure. The Agrius swayed in the echo of the Atlantic rollers that beat steadily against the outside of the harbour’s breakwater. She was now out in the roadstead, held by a single anchor. The wheel was manned, and the watch had been turned up from below. It was a lovely sunny evening, and most of the officers were on deck.

  ‘Mr Clay,’ called the captain. ‘Who has the watch?’ Clay came over and touched his hat, betraying little of the emotion of the past few days.

  ‘Mr Windham has the first watch, sir. The gunner has number one gun cleared away to salute the Portuguese flag. The master is here to provide any assistance that may be required with conning the ship, and the local pilot is on board.’ Clay indicated a plump, heavily bearded man who stood by the wheel. As the captain looked across at him, the pilot swept his large hat from his head, placed it across the sash that covered his ample belly and bowed in their direction. Follett sniffed, and muttered in an undertone, ‘Looks more like a pirate than a pilot if you ask me.’

  Mr Knight came up onto the quarterdeck, removed his hat, and approached Windham. As boatswain, one of his roles was to pass on any requests from the crew to their officers. He tried to speak softly, but he was a large man whose thirty years’ service, first a petty officer and then a boatswain, had involved a deal of shouting. Lieutenant Windham came over to where Clay and Captain Follett stood and repeated what everyone on the quarterdeck had already heard.

  ‘There is a request from the crew, sir,’ said Windham to his uncle. ‘It seems the ship’s regular fiddler is unwell. Would it be possible for the Italians to play for the men at the capstan while they are bringing home the anchor?’

  Follett raised an eyebrow towards Clay.

  ‘O’Malley is currently on the sick list, under the care of the surgeon, sir,’ reported Clay. ‘It would seem that there was a brawl in a tavern yesterday, in which he was set on by some American seamen. Four of our men appear to have bested six of theirs.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ said the captain, ‘I did receive a note of complaint from the captain of the Maryland. Naturally we must not condone fighting... did you say, six of his bested by but four of mine?’

  ‘Yes sir, that is correct,’ replied Clay.

  ‘By Jove, no wonder he is so furious,’ chuckled Follett. ‘That’s one in the eye for the damned Yankees, what! I think we might be magnanimous in this case, Mr Clay. Have a stiff word with those involved with regards to their future conduct, and let us then pass on.’

  ‘Aye aye, sir,’ replied Clay with a smile. Follett turned back to Windham with his answer.

  ‘Yes, Mr Windham, by all means make use of my musicians,’ he said.

  Windham passed the instruction back to Knight, and shortly afterwards sad but painfully beautiful music started to flow up from the main deck, as the string quartet started to play.

  Clay looked around the quarterdeck. If it was not for the empty sensation he felt at Lydia’s departure, he would have enjoyed the scene that surrounded him. The atmosphere on the ship seemed more like that of a yacht than was normal on board a man-of-war. The tall cliffs of Madeira, honey-coloured in the evening sun and topped with a fringe of bright green vegetation, formed the back drop. In a break in the cliffs lay the cobbled streets and stone houses of Funchal, the orange mass of terracotta roofs broken by sprays of green from the occasional palm tree. All around the ship small fishing boats, brightly coloured as insects, hurried out to sea to make the most of the tide. On board the ship the gentle chatter of the officers who were off duty blended with the sound of the music to complete the picture. With infinite slowness the scene changed, sliding across his vision as the hull of the Agrius swung around her anchor. The tide was running now, and it was time for them to sail. Clay glanced across at Follett just as he turned towards the officer of the watch.

  ‘Mr Windham, we will proceed to sea please,’ the captain ordered.

  ‘Aye aye, sir,’ Windham replied. Clay strolled back to join Sutton where he leant against the stern rail, and received a smile of sympathy from his friend. Together they turned to admire a last view of the Madeiran capital in the evening sun, while both men half listened to the familiar sequence of orders and sounds as the ship prepared to depart.

  ‘Mr Knight!’ shouted Windham. ‘All hands to weigh anchor.’

  ‘Aye aye, sir, all hands it is!’ the boatswain replied.

  The trilling of the boatswain’s pipe and shouts of ‘All hands!’ was followed by the pattering of bare feet as the capstan was manned. The trim of the ship changed noticeably, the stern dropping with the weight of almost every man on board concentrated at one end of the ship.

  Up on the bows Knight organised a party of the more experienced forecastle men, ready for the tricky job of catting the anchor. Their role was to secure the almost two tons of slippery, wet, swinging iron to the side of the ship without damage to the hull. Clay knew that after the near disaster in the Bay of Biscay, Knight could be trusted to do his work well. Slowly the capstan began to turn, drawing the ship forwards through the water towards where the anchor lay on the sea bed. Clay turned to speak to Sutton, but the words never left his lips.

  ‘Mr Windham!’ roared Follett, making the officer of the watch jump at the anger in his uncle’s voice. ‘Kindly explain why the damned anchor cable is being brought on board in such a lubberly fashion? Upon my word, are you endeavouring to shame the ship in front of all these Dagoes!’

  Clay listened. The capstan was barely turning at all, each individual click of the pawl followed by a long pause. He looked forward to where the dripping anchor cable, thick as a man’s thigh, inched along the deck, with bemused hands standing beside it. This was very strange. With the combined muscle power of both watches at the capstan bars, the cable should be coming in a lot faster.

  ‘Mr Knight!’ roared Windham, trying his best to mimic his captain’s outrage. The alarmed boatswain ran back towards them from the bow of the ship. ‘Sir?’ he queried.

  ‘Eh, why in all creation is the anchor cable being brought on board in such a laboured fashion? Are you trying to shame the ship in front of all these, these... Portuguese?’

  Knight ducked under the quarterdeck to investigate. The crew shuffled around the capstan like zombies. The already lugubrious pace of the string quartets’ music was now being counter pointed by several of the black members of the crew, all former slaves, adding their own slow bass singing to the mix. Knight bristled with furry as he confronted one of his boatswain’s mates.

  ‘Jack, what the fuck is going on?’ yelled Knight, his face twisted with anger. ‘Why are the men working so slowly?’

  ‘It’s this music,’ Jack complained, an inert ropes end dangling from his enormous fist, ‘they just won’t play any faster.’

  The boatswain rounded on the Italians. ‘Play quicker! More fasto!’ he shouted. His normal baritone rose through several octaves with the strength of his emotions.

  The quartet stopped mid-phrase and the capstan ground to a complete halt. Giovanni looked up at the boatswain with artistic distain from his seat on the carriage of a gun.

  ‘We
play the slow movement of quartet by Rosetti – is to be played “largo”.’ he explained. He paced his voice at the same rate that the music had been performed at, suitable both for string quartet slow movements and for addressing idiots. ‘Impossible we play any faster. Already I explain to your philistine assistant.’ He turned his back on the furious boatswain, and thrust his violin back under his chin. Knight exploded with rage.

  ‘Get these arse-licking sodomites off of my deck!’ he bellowed. Shocked crewmen hurried to shoo the musicians away from the boatswain. An indignant torrent of protesting Italian faded away with the increase in distance.

  ‘Jack, get O’Malley up here with his bleeding fiddle – I don’t care if he is at death’s door and I don’t care what the surgeon has to say!’ Jack rushed off to the sick bay. Knight turned to the men at the capstan bars, drew out his long, silver headed cane of office, and flexed it between his powerful arms.

  ‘Right, now that the ladies have left us, whose arse shall I polish my cane on? Or would you prefer to get this cable moving. Now!’ he growled.

  ‘All has now been resolved, sir,’ said Mr Knight mildly, saluting up at the quarterdeck a few minutes later, his face still a dangerous shade of puce.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Knight.’ Windham stepped across the four feet of deck that separated him from his uncle and touched his hat. ‘The anchor cable will be coming aboard more swiftly now, sir.’

  ‘Thank you Mr Windham’ replied Follett. Both men had heard the whole, lively exchange between Knight and the Italians, which had occurred a few feet below where they stood but the traditions of the service required that neither man should acknowledge it. After a few moments a squeaky, but brisk, Irish jig rose up on the warm evening air. It was accompanied by the steady tempo of a quickly turned capstan.

  Once the Agrius was clear of Madeira, she headed due south. On her starboard beam the sun set in a wash of crimson, while on the other side of the ship night gathered in the east. The crew sweated under the urging of her captain to set more and more sail, driving the ship to move ever faster through the water. Her centaur figurehead was impassive as he led the ship into each fresh burst of spray. His dripping face was strangely cross-lit by the dying sun. The side that faced towards the west had a friendly pink blush, almost of embarrassment. By contrast, the side that faced the growing night appeared cruel and dark.

  *****

  ‘Come now Edward, will you not tell us where we are headed at all?’ asked Munro of the ship’s master, several days later. The rest of the officers around the wardroom table stopped what they were doing and fell silent; all were equally interested in Booth’s answer. Fleming and Windham looked across from their game of cards. Wynn the surgeon put down the book he was reading, and Clay glanced up from the bundle of letters that he had been sorting through. They were ones he had received from his sister over the past year, already read but now filled with new interest. He had just realised that they might contain some mention of Lydia which would have passed unnoticed by him at the time. All waited for Booth to answer.

  ‘We are headed south,’ replied Booth. A collective groan of disappointment ran round the table from his fellow officers.

  ‘I am very sorry to disappoint, I am sure,’ continued the ship’s master, ‘but the captain has not confided in me where we are bound. My only instruction from him was to plot a course to take us to fourteen degrees north of the equator as swift as can be, which request I have endeavoured to satisfy. Why do you not pester our gallant first lieutenant? He is generally a more sure source of information on matters like this?’ All eyes in the wardroom turned towards Clay, who shook his head.

  ‘I fear that the captain has no more taken me into his confidence than Mr Booth.’ Clay looked around at the officers during the awkward pause that followed. All of them were aware of the poor relationship that existed now between captain and first lieutenant, even if most were unaware of the latest twist involving Lydia.

  ‘Come now though, Edward,’ continued Clay, ‘could you not indulge us with a little speculation? What do you deduce from the information we do have – the significance of fourteen degrees north, for example?’ Clay was as interested in where the ship was bound as any of them. He even wondered if the captain’s reluctance to tell him their destination held the faint hope that they might be bound for India, a thought full of delightful possibilities.

  ‘Now that is more interesting, Mr Clay,’ said Booth, leaning back in his chair and allowing his waistcoated belly to slide out through the folds of his coat. He enjoyed his status as the senior navigator on board, and used situations like this to lecture his younger colleagues. He sent a thoughtful hand through his thinning grey hair before he replied.

  ‘Naturally, by virtue of our simply heading south, we still follow a satisfactory course for many of the possibilities we speculated upon back in Plymouth. A move south from Madeira only really excludes the Mediterranean from that list, We might still be bound for the Pacific or the Indian Oceans, for example. As for the significance of latitude fourteen, it is a point that is deep into the tropics. You might go there to pick up the northwest trade wind with which to achieve a swift crossing of the Atlantic, as the slavers do, although it is perhaps a little south for my liking. Down that far south you stand the hazard of becoming caught in the Doldrums.’ Booth’s lecture came to a stop, the master content with what he had said. An awkward pause followed, ended by Munro.

  ‘So are we to deduce from what you have said, that you have not the slightest idea as to where we are bound, Mr Booth? I think I preferred “We are headed south”,’ concluded Munro, to general laughter.

  ‘It was you and Mr Clay that pressed me for an opinion, Mr Munro,’ protested Booth. ‘I did say I had no firm intelligence on the matter.’

  ‘I have heard of these Doldrums you mention, Mr Booth,’ said Wynn. ‘As a fresh recruit to the maritime path, might you favour me with an explanation of them?’

  ‘The Doldrums, Mr Wynn?’ said the master. ‘I can certainly describe them, although explaining them is altogether a harder matter. That is our name for the band of ocean that runs around the equator, where the wind is either absent or very indifferent. It has no precise location, moving up or down with the seasons, or it can narrow or grow for reasons that are beyond my understanding,’ Booth explained. ‘It is a bad place for a ship to be caught, being brimstone hot, and with little wind. If we should be bound for anywhere in the southern hemisphere, we shall have no choice but to cross them.’

  Silence descended on the wardroom as the officers digested this. From the forecastle came the distinct sound of eight clear bell strokes, followed by the squeal of boatswains’ calls as they summoned the watch below up on deck.

  ‘Alas gentlemen, we must leave our speculations unresolved,’ said Clay, rising from the table. He turned to the younger man. ‘You have the dog watch, do you not, Nicholas? You should be aware that I will be exercising some of the starboard side gun crews for the next hour or so. I trust it will not inconvenience you at all?’ They both left the wardroom, discussing the impact of the gun exercise on Windham’s watch. Once all was settled, Clay went forward to join his gun crews on the main deck, while Windham hurried up on to the quarterdeck to relieve Sutton from his post.

  *****

  ‘Stop your locks!’ yelled the midshipmen in charge of each division of guns, followed by the remaining steps of the drill. ‘Swab out! Charge in! Ram home! Ball in and ram home! Wad in, ram home! Run up! Prime your gun! Aim! Fire!’

  After half an hour of exercises, the men sweated profusely as they heaved on the gun tackles, driving the heavy cannon across the deck in the heat of a tropical afternoon. The gun crews went through the actions of loading and firing the guns over and over again without any actually loading and firing taking place. Clay knew that this was not ideal, live firing was the best way to train gun crews, but the parsimonious navy board, alarmed by the potential cost in powder and ball, only allocated each ship a tiny amount
of ammunition for live practice. Some wealthy captains supplemented their men’s training with their own private supply of powder and shot. Captain Follett was not one of these.

  Clay blew his whistle to get everyone’s attention. ‘Stand easy gun crews. Take a drink from the scuttle butts. Midshipmen, come to me.’ While the men took a grateful break, Clay discussed with his subordinates what he had seen as he had walked up and down behind the guns.

  ‘Number four gun is a problem. The men never seem to be able to run it up square with the ship’s side. Mr Preston, please speak to the armourer, with my compliments, and get him to verify if all is as it should be with the gun carriage. With number eight gun the crew have still to master the correct use of the flexible rammer. Shall we see if we were to swap Allen and Henderson around that might not improve matters?’

  Every afternoon since he had taken over as first lieutenant, when the weather permitted, Clay had exercised at least some of the gun crews, coaching them to be able to operate their guns ever faster. It was repetitive and dull work for the crews, and Clay knew that at first the men had cursed him for the extra work he made them do behind his back. However, by dint of constant repetition, and because he always supervised the drill himself, giving as much of his time as he took of theirs, it was now an accepted part of the day’s routine. Clay did it because he knew that it would make all the difference once they were in action. Men who had practiced tirelessly in the calm of a peaceful gun deck, when the enemy were not firing back at them, could be expected to know instinctively what to do in the smoke and heat of battle.

  He called the men back to their stations, and the gun drill continued. The cannon rumbled backwards and forwards, the midshipmen shouted their orders, each cycle repeated over and over, in an unchanged rhythm.

  Clay walked along behind the guns, observing the minutiae of the crew’s actions, hunting for any more possible improvements. Just as he drew level with one of the twelve pounders, something large dropped past the open gun port and splashed into the sea. He stopped midstride with surprise, wondering what it could have been.