The Cruise of the Albatros

by E. C. Williams

  “Petty Officer Landry suggested that conditioning marches ashore would be helpful whenever the Albatros is in port. If the ship can spare them.”

  “We’ll have to spare them – they’ll need all the training we can give them if they are to fight and survive. And I’m beginning to realize that there’s more to being ready to fight on land than just marksmanship.”

  Kendall glanced over his shoulder, and said, “We’ll have to stop and wait for Petty Officer Martin again. That medical bag of his must weigh a ton – it’s really slowing him down.”

  Sam looked toward the rear of the column and saw that Martin had fallen a good fifty meters behind the group, and was obviously struggling. He turned and walked back to meet the medical petty officer.

  “Give me your bag, PO Martin – I’ll carry it for awhile,” Sam said.

  “No, Captain, I can manage – no, sir…!” But his protests were to no avail – Sam simply lifted the bag off his shoulder.

  “Oof!” Sam exclaimed staggering a bit under its weight. “What have you got in here – an anvil?” The great weight explained why Martin, to all appearances a strong young man, was having so much trouble.

  “No, sir – just medical supplies and instruments.”

  “Tell you what, Martin – when you get back to the ship, you’d better reconsider taking along everything portable from sick bay, and pare this load down to the minimum requirements.”

  “Captain, I’ve been thinking about that for this whole walk,” Martin said with a rueful smile. “When the Professor and I were deciding what I should take, neither one of us considered that I’d have to lug this bag for hours in the tropical heat.”

  Sam wondered for a moment who he meant by “the Professor”, then remembered that this was the interns’ respectful title for the doctor.

  They walked on together for a while, Sam wondering with every step how long he could continue to carry the bag, which felt as if it weighed at least 30 kilos.

  “Here’s another suggestion,” Sam added, after some thought. “Get Sails or one of his mates to convert this from a shoulder bag to a back pack – you might find it easier to carry.”

  “Good idea, Skipper. Thanks. And now, please give me the bag. I can’t approach the ship with the Captain carrying my load for me – my shipmates would never let me live it down!”

  Laughing, Sam returned the medical bag to Martin – they were indeed now almost within sight of the schooner.

  Back on the Albatros, Sam had Ritchie prepare a hot meal for Ainslie and his Mauritian friend, and conferred with the Purser and the Gunner about what stores they could spare. Since, with regard to food, at least, they could replenish their stores at Reunion, they decided on a generous supply.

  Then a working party broke out the supplies and stacked them neatly on the pier for later retrieval by the survivors – food, rum, gunpowder, and lead ingots. Mr. Du Plessis had queried Ainslie about the calibers of the settlers’ few firearms, and discovered no commonality with the ship’s rifles. The settlers, not surprisingly, had only shotguns and small-bore rifles for hunting game.

  Sam and Bill then said goodbye to Ainslie at the gangway, as the Albatros made preparations to get underway as soon as the detachment returned from visiting one of the survivors' camps.

  “On behalf of the surviving community of Port Louis, I thank you for all your help, Captain,” said Ainslie.

  “Think nothing of it, Mister Ainslie. And may I suggest that you try again to persuade your people to come out of the bush now, and re-establish your settlement? After all, to continue to live in the jungle on roots and frogs is to allow the pirates a greater victory than they've earned. You know now that they can be beaten – that we are doing our best to rid these waters of the scum. And your neighbors who were murdered by them deserve a decent burial.”

  “I will, Captain. I think seeing your armed party will have made that point, but I’ll do my poor best to persuade them, if further persuasion is needed.

  “And now, fair winds and good hunting to the Albatros!”

  CHAPTER 2

  Their expedition ashore had consumed the entire day, so once the detachment had returned, footsore and weary, Sam had the schooner shifted to an anchorage in the harbor, ready to sail for Reunion at first light, rather than try to negotiate the unlighted channel in the dark. A brief interview with the PO who had led the detachment that had taken news and food to the survivors in the bush revealed how touched the seamen had been at their joyous reception by them, and their pathetic gratitude for the pitifully small amount of food they had brought.

  Sam had left a note in the night order book to be called at two bells in the morning watch, and so was pacing the quarterdeck in the pre-dawn darkness minutes after being awakened, impatient, as usual, to be under way. Mr. Mooney had the watch, and was pacing with him as they discussed the next movements of the Albatros.

  “I’ve laid out a track to take us right round the island, as you ordered, Captain,” said Mooney. “I should note that there are dangerous reefs fringing the entire island. Except for the Port Louis channel, there are safe passages through them only for small craft. We’ll have to stand well offshore to avoid any chance of grounding.”

  “I’ve noticed that, Mister Mooney. And I’m now wondering if the circumnavigation of Mauritius is worth our time.”

  They had seen no evidence that the pirates had returned to the island since their raid, and none that any force had been left behind to harry the raid's survivors. Mr. Ainslie, too, had observed nothing to indicate either possibility, and he had struck Sam as an intelligent, wide-awake sort of man who didn’t miss much.

  Sam came to a decision. “We’ll shape a course directly for Saint Pierre, Mister Mooney – never mind sailing around this island.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” the Navigator replied, with obvious relief. He hadn’t cared for the look of those fringing reefs at all, and their charts of Mauritius, as of most other waters in the Indian Ocean, were copies of copies of copies of ancient examples, based on information centuries old except, in widely scattered cases, where updated by the reports of Kerguelenian shipmasters and relayed by the mechanism of “Notices to Mariners” issued by the Kerguelenian Bureau of Shipping. The prudent seaman did not place much reliance on such charts.

  “Let’s get her under way now, Pilot.” The darkness had changed to morning twilight with the abruptness common in the tropics. The Navigator gave the necessary orders, the pipe was made to “…now set the special sea and anchor detail”, and soon the sleeping schooner was alive with noise and movement. The watch below was called, the anchor capstan manned, and the stamping of the hands walking round it reverberated through the vessel; anyone who had not been called was surely awake by now.

  Doctor Girard appeared out of the gloom and approached Sam.

  “Good morning, Captain. I take it we’re leaving now?”

  “Good morning, Doctor. Yes, we’re on our way to Reunion Island.”

  They stood in silence for awhile, enjoying the freshness of the tropical morning, the air full of the scent of vegetation and wild flowers. A rhythmic clanking began, as the last of the rope portion of the anchor cable was wound in, and the cable was shifted from the gypsy-head to the wildcat, to heave in the length of chain that connected the rope cable to the anchor.

  “There is something I have wondered for some time, Captain. May I ask why the anchor cable is partly chain and partly rope? One would think it would be all one or all the other.”

  “Well, of course chain is preferable, for strength, and because it won’t be cut if you’re anchored over sharp rock or coral. Also, chain, by its weight, adds to the holding power of the anchor – by making the cable lie more parallel to the bottom. But an all-chain anchor cable long enough to be useful would add too much weight in the bows when stowed, so we compromise by using a length of chain between rope cable and anchor. A sailor’s rule of thumb is that the length of the chain portion of the cable should be about e
qual to the length of the vessel. That’s not quite the case with the Albatros. We have only 15 fathoms – 90 feet – of chain.”

  Sam was pleased at this interest in a detail of seamanship on the part of the Doctor, well-known on board as a décidé landlubber. It was the second such example in a matter of days. Perhaps she would become a sea-officer after all.

  She thanked him and moved off forward, clearly returning to sick bay. Despite his approval of her curiosity about the workings of the ship, Sam was relieved at her departure – it was about to get very busy topsides, and Girard’s presence was not required on deck, where she would simply be in the way.

  Then his mild pleasure turned to an irritation with himself – why did he have this strange reluctance to simply order her off his quarterdeck, when necessary? Perhaps her prickliness had made him wary of her tongue, a thought that irritated him further – to be afraid of what a warrant officer on his own ship would say! Damn the woman, anyway. He was always of two minds about her.

  Lieutenant Kendall, whose station when the special sea and anchor detail was set was officer of the watch, and thus had relieved Mr. Mooney, approached Sam.

  “Shall we tow out, Captain? Not much of a breeze here inside.”

  “Certainly, Mister Kendall.” They need not worry about conserving the motor sloop’s fuel for a while, since they had filled her tank, and the storage tank in the hold, with the palm oil fuel used on Mauritius, which worked just fine in the sloop's Stirling-cycle engine.

  Kendall gave the necessary orders to warm up the motor sloop's engine and rig a towline. The sloop had been left in the water overnight in anticipation of just such a need.

  “Up and down!” shouted Lieutenant Low from the bow, where he directed the heaving up of the anchor, just as the motor sloop reported her engine warmed to operating temperature.

  “Anchor’s aweigh!” came almost immediately after a towline had been passed to the sloop, and she began to take up the slack. Sam felt a deep satisfaction at the high degree of competence his crew had attained – these maneuvers had been executed faultlessly, and so timed as to happen in precisely the right order.

  The XO, whose duty when the special sea and anchor detail was set was, as always, to oversee everything at once, strode aft and echoed Sam’s thoughts: “They’re coming along nicely, don’t you think, Skipper?”

  “They’re the best crew I’ve ever sailed with, Bill,” Sam replied, with perfect sincerity, prompting Ennis to break out into a proud smile – he knew that a share of that compliment belonged to him, since his had been the task of bringing the crew to this state of training.

  There was now just enough light for the lookout in the bows of the motor sloop to pick out the buoys she had laid the day before, and the strain on the towline increased as sloop and Albatros together began to move. By the time the sun was well up, the sloop had been recovered and Albatros was leaving the green hills of Mauritius astern.

  Saint Pierre, on the island of Reunion, was fewer than 150 sea-miles from Port Louis, so it was only a day’s sail with a fair wind – but, although steady, the wind was anything but fair, a brisk force four to five out of the south-south-west. This made their course to Reunion a beat all the way.

  Sam didn’t mind, however. He loved to beat into a fresh breeze with all fore-and-aft sail set, especially in fair, sunny weather in the tropics. It made for an uncomfortable ride for those whose duties kept them below decks, with the schooner heeled well over to leeward and plunging into the oncoming waves, but that was the seafaring life for you – no pleasure without pain.

  His enjoyment was somewhat spoiled, however, by the interruptions of Mr. Robert, the Communications Officer. Not spoiled by the person of Robert, who was quite inoffensive, indeed likeable, but by the disturbing news he brought in the form of radio messages.

  “Bad news, I’m afraid, sir,” Robert said as he approached Sam on the windward side of the quarterdeck, the Captain’s domain whenever he was on deck. He handed Sam a bit of paper that he recognized as a message form. The paper fluttered violently in the fresh breeze, and Sam was careful to grasp it firmly to avoid having it fly away.

  Bad news, indeed: it was an abbreviated distress signal from the Kerguelenian schooner Marchande Austral, which reported an attack by a pirate vessel in a position he visualized on the chart in his mind as being somewhere off Cape Bobaomby, the northernmost point of Madagascar. The message ended abruptly at that point – there were no further details.

  “Did you try to raise the Marchande again?” Sam asked, but he knew the answer before he finished the question. Mr. Robert and his mates knew their jobs.

  “Repeatedly, Skipper. We’re still trying, in fact. No joy.”

  Sam re-read the message intently, as if he could change it by sheer will-power. The pirates’ latest victim, he knew, was beyond saving – the Albatros was at least 500 nautical miles from the vessel’s reported position. He could radio Nosy Be, which was obviously the port she was bound for, or from whence she had just sailed, given her position, but he didn’t know how that would help, so he chose to maintain radio silence. He initialed the message form in the box provided, and handed it back to Robert.

  “Thank you, Sparks.”

  Sam resumed his pacing once the communicator had taken his leave to return to the radio room. The pleasure he had been taking in the bright sunshine, fresh breeze, and lively motion of the Albatros was quite extinguished. He turned his mind to what this latest attack could tell them.

  For one thing, it made it quite clear that they had not yet rid these waters of pirates, as some sunny optimists on Nosy Be had opined. But Sam had never thought that three dhows and a captured schooner constituted the whole of the pirate fleet.

  A more important question was: where had the attacking pirate vessel come from? Where was she based? Sam had long ago concluded that Pirate Creek could not be a permanent base. It had no facilities for repair and replenishment, no local agricultural community to provide food. It could only be a temporary place to lurk, from which to pounce on passing Kerguelenian vessels. And, as they had also concluded, the pirates had to have a base in the Indian Ocean, not too far from the Kerguelenian trade routes between the Rock, Nosy Be, and the settled Mascarene Islands. It would be a harbor with facilities for maintenance, a population base of farmers to supply food, perhaps gunsmiths – maybe even shipyards for extensive repairs to their vessels, or for building new ones. Although the Albatros had not even begun to examine every mile of the east coast of Madagascar, it did not seem as if the base could be anywhere on that shore. The most convincing argument against a Madagascar base was the lack of any population center, and the fact that the Malagasy were hunter-gatherers, did not practice agriculture, and so could produce no significant amount of food surplus to their own needs. So a local source of food, one of the most basic requirements for a base, was lacking. This did not rule one out entirely, since a relay of transports could, at least in theory, keep such a base supplied with its needs, but then that raised the question of where the transports loaded. Surely they weren’t trying to maintain a supply line all the many weeks’ sail from their home waters well north of the Equator – that would take a fleet almost equal in size to the entire Kerg merchant marine. The only reasonable conclusion was that they must have their own settlements or colonies in the Indian Ocean.

  The XO came out of the chartroom and interrupted Sam in his musing at this point. “Sparks just showed me that message from the Marchande Austral”. It was standard operating procedure for the XO to see all radio traffic once the Captain had signed off on it.

  “No point in us trying to sail to that schooner’s aid, I guess – I just stepped it off on the chart, and it’s nearly 700 miles,” he continued.

  “Right. It would be foolish to sail up there and just wander around. The pirates, and the Marchande, if captured and not sunk, would be hundreds of miles away by the time we got there, and we’d have no idea in what direction. So we’ll press on to R
eunion, then Pirate Creek, as planned.

  “I’ve been thinking about where the pirate base could be,” he added, and explained to Bill his reasoning in support of his theory of a port offering all the logistics facilities the pirates must need, and therefore not likely to be on the east coast of Madagascar.

  “Well, Mister Andri can maybe ask the Malagasy people in the vicinity of Pirate Creek. If the pirates do have a base anywhere on the eastern shore with the facilities you describe, then the natives are bound to have noticed. It would have to have a permanent shore-side population of hundreds, a good harbor, and a lot of traffic. Hard to hide something like that.”

  Mr. Andri – this was a shortened form of a long and, to Kerguelenians, unpronounceable Malagasy name – was an intelligent and multilingual member of the court of the King of the Antankarana, the nominal ruler of Nosy Be and the northern end of Madagascar. Andri was presently a passenger on board the Albatros, having been seconded to her by His Majesty for the purpose of communicating with the Malagasy peoples in the region of Pirate creek on behalf of the Albatros and her mission, and, in particular, to help recruit local scouts and guides. Sam tried to recall when he had last seen the royal courtier. It was before they sailed from Nosy Be, he thought. Andri was apparently keeping to his – formerly Ennis' – cabin.

  “But it could be on the west coast – there’s little or no Kerg traffic south of Nosy Be, so it wouldn’t be noticed.”

  “I don’t think a base on the Mozambique Channel would be convenient for them, unless it’s in the extreme north or south – otherwise, it would too long a sail to our regular shipping routes. Worth keeping in mind, however. And that’s a good point about Mister Andri – if it’s on the extreme southwest coast, the Malagasy around Pirate Creek may have heard about it.

  “I don’t see how a pirate base on the northeastern coast could have escaped the notice of the settlers on Nosy Be, though, and their contacts among the mainland Malagasy.”