Birds of Prey

by Wilbur Smith

  Aboli stood up and lifted his canvas petticoats. ‘Now we will see to your ear,’ he told Hal, as his own fat penis overflowed his fist by half its length.

  Hal recoiled swiftly. ‘It is but a little scratch,’ he protested, but Aboli seized his pigtail remorselessly and twisted his face upwards.

  At the stroke of the bell the company crowded into the waist of the ship, and stood silent and bare-headed in the sunlight – even the black tribesmen, who did not worship exclusively the crucified Lord but other gods also whose abode was the deep dark forests of their homes.

  When Sir Francis, great leather-bound Bible in hand, intoned sonorously, ‘We pray you, Almighty God, deliver the enemy of Christ into our hands that he shall not triumph …’ his eyes were the only ones still cast heavenward. Every other eye in the company turned towards the east from where that enemy would come, laden with silver and spices.

  Half-way through the long service a line squall came boring up out of the east, wind driving the clouds in a tumbling dark mass over their heads and deluging the decks with silver sheets of rain. But the elements could not conspire to keep Sir Francis from his discourse with the Almighty, so while the crew huddled in their tar-daubed canvas jackets, with hats of the same material tied beneath their chins, and the water streamed off them as off the hides of a pack of beached walrus, Sir Francis missed not a beat of his sermon. ‘Lord of the storm and the wind,’ he prayed, ‘succour us. Lord of the battle-line, be our shield and buckler …’

  The squall passed over them swiftly and the sun burst forth again, sparkling on the blue swells and steaming on the decks.

  Sir Francis clapped his wide-brimmed cavalier hat back on his head, and the sodden white feathers that surmounted it nodded in approval. ‘Master Ned, run out the guns.’

  It was the proper course to take, Hal realized. The rain squall would have soaked the priming and wet the loaded powder. Rather than the lengthy business of drawing the shot and reloading, his father would give the crews some practice.

  ‘Beat to quarters, if you please.’

  The drum-roll echoed through the hull, and the crew ran grinning and joking to their stations. Hal plunged the tip of a slow-match into the charcoal brazier at the foot of the mast. When it was smouldering evenly, he leapt into the shrouds and, carrying the burning match in his teeth, clambered up to his battle station at the masthead.

  On the deck he saw four men sway an empty water cask up from the hold and stagger with it to the ship’s side. At the order from the poop, they tossed it over and left it bobbing in the ship’s wake. Meanwhile the guncrews knocked out the wedges and, heaving at the tackles, ran out the culverins. On either side of the lower deck there were eight, each loaded with a bucketful of powder and a ball. On the upper deck were ranged ten demi-culverins, five on each side, their long barrels crammed with grape.

  The Lady Edwina was low on iron shot after her two-year-long cruise, and some of the guns were loaded with water-rounded flint marbles hand-picked from the banks of the river mouths where the watering parties had gone ashore. Ponderously she came about, and settled on the new tack, beating back into the wind. The floating cask was still two cables’ length ahead but the range narrowed slowly. The gunners strode from cannon to cannon, pushing in the elevation wedges and ordering the training tackles adjusted. This was a specialized task: only five men aboard had the skill to load and lay a gun.

  In the crow’s nest, Hal swung the long-barrelled falconet on its swivel and aimed down at a length of floating kelp that drifted past on the current. Then with the point of his dirk he scraped the damp, caked powder out of the pan of the weapon, and carefully repacked it with fresh powder from his flask. After ten years of instruction by his father, he was as skilled as Ned Tyler, the ship’s master gunner, in the esoteric art. His rightful battle station should have been on the gundeck, and he had pleaded with his father to place him there but had been answered only with the stern retort, ‘You will go where I send you.’ Now he must sit up here, out of the hurly-burly, while his fierce young heart ached to be a part of it.

  Suddenly he was startled by the crash of gunfire from the deck below. A long dense plume of smoke billowed out and the ship heeled slightly at the discharge. A moment later a tall fountain of foam rose dramatically from the surface of the sea fifty yards to the right and twenty beyond the floating cask. At that range it was not bad shooting, but the deck erupted in a chorus of jeers and whistles.

  Ned Tyler hurried to the second culverin, and swiftly checked its lay. He gestured for the men on the tackle to train it a point left then stepped forward and held the burning match to the touch hole. A fizzling puff of smoke blew back and then, from the gaping muzzle, came a shower of sparks, half-burned powder and clods of damp, caked muck. The ball rolled down the bronze barrel and fell into the sea less than half-way to the target cask. The crew howled with derision.

  The next two weapons misfired. Cursing furiously, Ned ordered the crews to draw the charges with the long iron corkscrews as he hurried on down the line.

  ‘Great expense of powder and bullet!’ Hal recited to himself the words of the great Sir Francis Drake – for whom his own father had been christened – spoken after the first day of the epic battle against the Armada of Philip II, King of Spain, led by the Duke of Medina Sidonia. All that long day, under the dun fog of gunsmoke, the two great fleets had loosed their mighty broadsides at each other, but the barrage had sent not a single ship of either fleet to the bottom.

  ‘Fright them with cannon,’ Hal’s father had instructed him, ‘but sweep their decks with the cutlass,’ and he voiced his scorn for the rowdy but ineffectual art of naval gunnery. It was impossible to aim a ball from the plunging deck of one ship to a precise point on the hull of another: accuracy was in the hands of the Almighty rather than those of the master gunner.

  As if to illustrate the point, after Ned had fired every one of the heavy guns on board six had misfired and the nearest he had come to striking the floating cask was twenty yards. Hal shook his head sadly, reflecting that each of those shots had been carefully laid and aimed. In the heat of a battle, with the range obscured by billowing smoke, the powder and shot stuffed in haste into the muzzles, the barrels heating unevenly and the match applied to pan by excited and terrified gunners, the results could not be even that satisfactory.

  At last his father looked up at Hal. ‘Masthead!’ he roared.

  Hal had feared himself forgotten. Now, with a thrill of relief, he blew on the tip of the smouldering slow-match in his hand. It glowed bright and fierce.

  From the deck Sir Francis watched him, his expression stern and forbidding. He must never let show the love he bore the boy. He must be hard and critical at all times, driving him on. For the boy’s own sake – nay, for his very life – he must force him to learn, to strive, to endure, to run every step of the course ahead of him with all his strength and all his heart. Yet, without making it apparent, he must also help, encourage and assist him. He must shepherd him wisely, cunningly towards his destiny. He had delayed calling upon Hal until this moment, when the cask floated close alongside.

  If the boy could shatter it with the small weapon where Ned had failed with the great cannon, then his reputation with the crew would be enhanced. The men were mostly boisterous ruffians, simple illiterates, but one day Hal would be called upon to lead them, or others like them. He had made a giant stride today by besting Aboli before them all. Here was a chance to consolidate that gain. ‘Guide his hand, and the flight of the shot, oh God of the battle-line!’ Sir Francis prayed silently, and the ship’s company craned their necks to watch the lad high above them.

  Hal hummed softly to himself as he concentrated on the task, conscious of the eyes upon him. Yet he did not sense the importance of this discharge and was oblivious of his father’s prayers. It was a game to him, just another chance to excel. Hal liked to win, and each time he did so he liked it better. The young eagle was beginning to rejoice in the power of his
wings.

  Gripping the end of the long brass monkey tail, he swivelled the falconet downwards, peering over the yard-long barrel, lining up the notch above the pan with the pip on the muzzle end.

  He had learned that it was futile to aim directly at the target. There would be a delay of seconds from when he applied the slow-match, to the crash of the shot, and in the meantime ship and cask would be moving in opposite directions. There was also the moment when the discharged balls were in flight before they struck. He must gauge where the cask would be when the shot reached it and not aim for the spot where it had been when he pressed the match to the pan.

  He swung the pip of the foresight smoothly over the target, and touched the glowing end of the match to the pan. He forced himself not to flinch away from the flare of burning powder nor to recoil in anticipation of the explosion but to keep the barrels swinging gently in the line he had chosen.

  With a roar that stung his ear-drums the falconet bucked heavily against its swivel, and everything disappeared in a cloud of grey smoke. Desperately he craned his head left and right, trying to see around the smoke, but it was the cheers from the decks below that made his heart leap, reaching him even through his singing ears. When the wind whisked away the smoke, he could see the ribs of the shattered cask swirling and tumbling astern in the ship’s wake. He hooted with glee, and waved his cap at the faces on the deck far below.

  Aboli was at his place in the bows, coxswain and gun captain of the first watch. He returned Hal’s beatific grin and beat his chest with one fist, while with the other he brandished the cutlass over his bald head.

  The drum rolled to end the drill and stand down the crew from their battle stations. Before he dropped down the shrouds Hal reloaded the falconet carefully and bound a strip of tar-soaked canvas around the pan to protect it from dew, rain and spray.

  As his feet hit the deck he looked to the poop, trying to catch his father’s eye and glean his approbation. But Sir Francis was deep in conversation with one of his petty officers. A moment passed before he glanced coldly over his shoulder at Hal. ‘What are you gawking at, boy? There are guns to be reloaded.’

  As he turned away Hal felt the bite of disappointment, but the rowdy congratulations of the crew, the rough slaps across his back and shoulders as he passed down the gundeck, restored his smile.

  When Ned Tyler saw him coming he stepped back from the breech of the culverin he was loading and handed the ramrod to Hal. ‘Any oaf can shoot it, but it takes a good man to load it,’ he grunted, and stood back critically to watch Hal measure a charge from the leather powder bucket. ‘What weight of powder?’ he asked, and Hal gave the same reply he had a hundred times before.

  ‘The same weight as that of the round shot.’

  The blackpowder comprised coarse granules. There had been a time when, shaken and agitated by the ship’s way or some other repetitive movement, the three essential elements, sulphur, charcoal and saltpetre, might separate out and render it useless. Since then the process of ‘corning’ had evolved, whereby the fine raw powder was treated with urine or alcohol to set it into a cake, which was then crushed in a ball mill to the required size of granules. Yet the process was not perfect and a gunner must always have an eye for the condition of his powder. Damp or age could degrade it. Hal tested the grains between his fingers and tasted a dab. Ned Tyler had taught him to differentiate between good and degenerate powder in this way. Then he poured the contents of the bucket into the muzzle, and followed it with the oakum wadding.

  Then he tamped it down with the long wooden-handled ramrod. This was another crucial part of the process: tamped too firmly, the flame could not pass through the charge and a misfire was inevitable, but not tamped firmly enough, and the blackpowder would burn without the power to hurl the heavy projectile clear of the barrel. Correct tamping was an art that could only be learned from prolonged practice, but Ned nodded as he watched Hal at work.

  It was much later when Hal scrambled up again into the sunlight. All the culverins were loaded and secured behind their ports and Hal’s bare upper body was glistening with sweat from the heat of the cramped gundeck and his labours with the ramrod. As he paused to wipe his streaming face, draw a breath and stretch his back, after crouching so long under the cramped headspace of the lower deck, his father called to him with heavy irony, ‘Is the ship’s position of no interest to you, Master Henry?’

  With a start Hal glanced up at the sun. It was high in the heavens above them: the morning had sped away. He raced to the companionway, dropped down the ladder, burst into his father’s cabin, and snatched the heavy backstaff from its case on the bulkhead. Then he turned and ran back to the poop deck.

  ‘Pray God, I’m not too late,’ he whispered to himself, and glanced up at the position of the sun. It was over the starboard yard-arm. He positioned himself with his back to it and in such a way that the shadow cast by the main sail would not screen him, yet so that he had a clear view of the horizon to the south.

  Now he concentrated all his attention on the quadrant of the backstaff. He had to keep the heavy instrument steady against the ship’s motion. Then he must read the angle that the sun’s rays over his shoulder subtended onto the quadrant, which gave him the sun’s inclination to the horizon. It was a juggling act that required strength and dexterity.

  At last he could observe noon passage, and read the sun’s angle with the horizon at the precise moment it reached its zenith. He lowered the backstaff with aching arms and shoulders, and hastily scribbled the reading on the traverse slate.

  Then he ran down the ladder to the stern cabin, but the table of celestial angles was not on its shelf. In distress he turned to see that his father had followed him down and was watching him intently. No word was exchanged, but Hal knew that he was being challenged to provide the value from memory. Hal sat at his father’s sea-chest, which served as a desk, and closed his eyes as he reviewed the tables in his mind’s eye. He must remember yesterday’s figures and extrapolate from them. He massaged his swollen ear-lobe, and his lips moved soundlessly.

  Suddenly his face lightened, he opened his eyes and scribbled another number on the slate. He worked for a minute longer, translating the angle of the noon sun into degrees of latitude. Then he looked up triumphantly. ‘Thirty-four degrees forty-two minutes south latitude.’

  His father took the slate from his hand, checked his figures, then handed it back to him. He inclined his head slightly in agreement. ‘Close enough, if your sun sight was true. Now what of your longitude?’

  The determination of exact longitude was a puzzle that no man had ever solved. There was no timepiece, hourglass or clock that could be carried aboard a ship and still be sufficiently accurate to keep track of the earth’s majestic revolutions. Only the traverse board, which hung beside the compass binnacle, could guide Hal’s calculation. Now he studied the pegs that the helmsman had placed in the holes about the rose of the compass each time he had altered his heading during the previous watch. Hal added and averaged these values, then plotted them on the chart in his father’s cabin. It was only a crude approximation of longitude and, predictably, his father demurred. ‘I would have given it a touch more of east, for with the weed on her bottom and the water in her bilges she pays off heavily to leeward – but mark her so in the log.’

  Hal looked up in astonishment. This was a momentous day indeed. No other hand but his father’s had ever written in the leather-bound log that sat beside the Bible on the lid of the sea-chest.

  While his father watched, he opened the log and, for a minute, stared at the pages filled with his father’s elegant, flowing script, and the beautiful drawings of men, ships and landfalls that adorned the margins. His father was a gifted artist. With trepidation Hal dipped the quill in the gold inkwell that had once belonged to the captain of the Heerlycke Nacht, one of the Dutch East India Company’s galleons that his father had seized. He wiped the superfluous drops from the nib, lest they splatter the sacred page. Then he
trapped the tip of his tongue between his teeth and wrote with infinite care: ‘One bell in the afternoon watch, this 3rd day of September in the year of our Lord Jesus Christ 1667. Position 34 degrees 42 minutes South, 20 degrees 5 minutes East. African mainland in sight from the masthead bearing due North.’ Not daring to add more, and relieved that he had not marred the page with scratchings or splutterings, he set aside the quill and sanded his well-formed letters with pride. He knew his hand was fair – though perhaps not as fair as his father’s, he conceded as he compared them.

  Sir Francis took up the pen he had laid aside and leaning over his shoulder wrote: ‘This forenoon Ensign Henry Courtney severely wounded in an unseemly brawl.’ Then, beside the entry he swiftly sketched a telling caricature of Hal with his swollen ear sticking out lopsidedly and the knot of the stitch like a bow in a maiden’s hair.

  Hal gagged on his own suppressed laughter, but when he looked up he saw the twinkle in his father’s green eyes. Sir Francis laid one hand on the boy’s shoulder, which was as close as he would ever come to an embrace, and squeezed it as he said, ‘Ned Tyler will be waiting to instruct you in the lore of rigging and sail trimming. Do not keep him waiting.’

  Though it was late when Hal made his way forward along the upper deck, it was still light enough for him to pick his way with ease over the sleeping bodies of the off-duty watch. The night sky was filled with stars, such an array as must dazzle the eyes of any northerner. This night Hal had no eyes for them. He was exhausted to the point where he reeled on his feet.

  Aboli had kept a place for him in the bows, under the lee of the forward cannon where they were out of the wind. He had spread a straw-filled pallet on the deck and Hal tumbled gratefully onto it. There were no quarters set aside for the crew, and the men slept wherever they could find a space on the open deck. In these warm southern nights they all preferred the topsides to the stuffy lower deck. They lay in rows, shoulder to shoulder, but the proximity of so much stinking humanity was natural to Hal, and even their snoring and mutterings could not keep him long from sleep. He moved a little closer to Aboli. This was how he had slept each night for the last ten years and there was comfort in the huge figure beside him.