The Cruise of the Albatros

by E. C. Williams

  “Gentlemen, I don't know about you, but I'm exhausted, not to mention half in the bag, and Bill and I both have a big day tomorrow,” Bill said. “I suggest we have a nightcap and then adjourn.” No one dissented, and after one last drink Sam and Bill saw their guests to the gangway.

  As Foch and Lee walked up the Long Pier toward the shore, hunched into their parkas against the cold wind and blowing snow, Ennis said, “Skipper, I'd like to take over the Joan as soon as possible, to over see the rest of her fitting out and get started on crew training.”

  “Okay, Bill. I'll send Schofield and your new warrant officers over as they return from leave. Want to leave in the morning? It'll be a dead shift to the drydock” – meaning a shift of berth entirely under the control of harbor tugs – “so I can manage with just the shipkeepers.”

  Ennis had asked for Kendall as his XO, but Sam vetoed that – he wanted Al to be the new XO of the Albatros. Ennis's second choice had been Schofield, which Sam had approved.

  The next morning he awoke, slightly hung over, and went on deck to find Bill Ennis standing at the head of the after gangway, all his gear in two seabags at his feet. They had agreed the evening before that Ennis would move to his new command as soon as possible, to oversee the completion of her refitting, and the training of her crew. He took with him the Albatros's Carpenter and Sailmaker, as well as LPOs newly-promoted to the billets of Gunnery Officer and Boatswain on the Joan of Arc. The Albatros's now-former engineer, Mr. Yeo, was tasked with recruiting suitable candidates for warrants as engineering officers for both the Albatros and the Joan of Arc. He would remain behind when they sailed in a new shore billet: chief (and initially the only member) of the ship acquisition, building, and repair division. He was also promoted to the just-created commissioned status of “Lieutenant (E)”, the Navy's first staff engineer.

  Both Sam and Bill found their leave-taking a strangely emotional moment. They had worked together so closely that they felt themselves as close as brothers. Although they would continue working together, they would rarely meet face to face from now on, instead communicating mostly by radio and flag hoist. They shook hands awkwardly, and wished one another good luck. Then the handshake turned into a quick embrace, after which Ennis hurried down the gangway to catch a cab to the shipyard where his new command waited.

  Then began the busiest of a succession of very busy days for Captain Sam Bowditch. He oversaw the dead shift of the Albatros from her berth at the Long Pier to a floating drydock at the Lefevre Brothers shipyard, the same yard that had done the conversion work on the schooner. There, the tugs lined her up to enter the dock, her caissons now flooded, and the dockmaster came out in a rowboat to take charge of her entry into the dock. Sam noted for the log the exact time the schooner's bow crossed the sill of the dock; this was the moment at which the shipyard took full responsibility for her.

  Once the caissons were pumped dry, and the Albatros rested securely on the cradle blocks and shoring timbers, Sam climbed down the pilot ladder to the floor of the dock, still awash with thirty or so millimeters of harbor water, waded through it, then made the long climb up the inside wall of the drydock, and the equally long climb down the outer wall to the pier – an arduous journey he was to make many times over the next week or so, resulting in a loss of five kilos in weight and a great improvement to his general physical condition.

  During this progress, he noticed just how foul was the schooner's bottom – a veritable underwater tropical garden. He reckoned scouring her clean would result in a gain of a full knot in speed.

  Once on the narrow, rickety shipyard pier, he met the yard engineer in his tiny office. The engineer – Mr. Bouchier – had sketched in the alterations required on the plans resulting from the Albatros's first conversion. They consisted of a small engine compartment to contain the motor-generator set, partitioned off at the after end of number one hold. He showed Sam his ingenious plan to turn the lower mainmast, which was built up of steel plate, and was thus a hollow column, into the smoke stack for the Stirling-cycle motor. The smoke would inevitably discolor the topsails and the upper part of the courses, but that appeared to be unavoidable. It nevertheless bothered Sam's tidy seaman's conscience, and he resolved to think about ways to ameliorate the resulting dirty look of the schooner while under sail. Quite aside from aesthetics, the mottled appearance of her sails would soon identify the schooner indelibly and uniquely in the Indian Ocean, negating any possibility of luring pirate craft closer by appearing to be an innocent and defenseless merchantman.

  Bouchier also showed Sam how the weight of the 37 mm gun – not yet delivered from the foundry, but daily expected – would be borne by reinforcing steel pillars from the underside of the weather deck to the point on the number one tween deck just above the forward partition of the engine compartment – itself a load-bearing bulkhead – and continued into the lower hold by more pillars, ultimately resting on a thwartship frame.

  The engineer also described how the gun would be rail-mounted, so it could be moved from its centerline stowed position to port or starboard as necessary to engage targets. The steel reinforcing pillars reached from gunwale to gunwale to bear the gun's weight all along the track. On each side the track ended on deck bump-outs the engineer called “gun balconies”, braced against the exterior of the ship, to allow the gun to be trained directly forward or aft without endangering one's own vessel and crew.

  Sam was impressed by the simple ingenuity of this design, and said so, to the pleasure of the engineer.

  He couldn't wait to see the gun, so he grabbed a taxi to the Kerguelen Engineering Company's foundry and machine shop, where it was being completed under the supervision of Mr. Daniel.

  He found the gun sitting in the middle of the shop floor, gleaming with a fresh coat of gray paint, as beautiful as any work of art in Sam's eyes, and ready to be transported to the shipyard. The problem now was how to accomplish that.

  “We've just decided that we'll have to build a special truck to be towed to the waterfront so the gun can be loaded on a barge,” Mr. Daniel told Sam.

  “How long with that take?” Sam asked anxiously – he wanted that gun on the deck of the Albatros as soon as possible.

  “Oh, not long. The truck will be a simple matter of welding some steel beams together, and adding two axles and four steel wheels. We've already booked the tug and barge, and it should be at the yard by the time the work necessary to receive it is done.”

  “Good,” said Sam with relief. “Now, if you will, please explain the gun to me.”

  “We have designated it the naval rifle, 37mm/L50. The L50 means that the barrel length is 50 times the caliber. The longer the barrel, the greater the muzzle velocity, and hence range and power, other things being equal.”

  The long, slender barrel, more than a fathom long, looked a bit fragile at first glance, sticking out between the steel plates that served as a splinter shield for the gun's crew, in comparison to the bulky breech and mount.

  “Show me how the loading mechanism works.”

  Daniel picked up a shell standing on-end next to the gun. “This is a dummy round we use for testing and demonstrating the action.” It was quite large – to Sam, it looked considerably bigger than one and a half times the size of a one-inch round.

  Daniel then rotated a lever on the breech a half-turn and pulled, opening it and allowing him to slide the dummy round home. He then closed it, and gave the locking lever a half-turn in the opposite direction.

  “That's simple enough – our gunners will have no trouble with that.”

  “This is the trigger,” Daniel said, grasping a lever to the right of the breech. He pulled it back, with the only result a loud “click” as the firing pin struck the dummy shell.

  “The recoil mechanism, by the way, is built into the mount. If it works as designed, the barrel should return to battery after each round with no more than a fine re-adjustment of azimuth and elevation required, if that.

  “After fir
ing, the breech is opened, as before, and the empty shell casing removed by hand. Your gunner will have to wear thick gloves to do this – the shell casing will be very hot, of course. We thought of designing a mechanism that would automatically eject the casing when the breech was opened, but there just wasn't enough time, and besides it would complicate the action, adding more parts that might fail. So we decided not to gild the lily, as it were.”

  “Quite right, Mister Daniel. The simpler and ruggeder the better.”

  “I regret to tell you that there has been no time to test-fire the weapon – it will be fired for the first time from the deck of your schooner. With your permission, I'll be aboard for the tests. We've hand-loaded sets of test ammunition with gradually increasing charges, to determine the optimum load. The ultimate set has the theoretical design load – we have no intention of testing to destruction, of course. For safety, the gun will have to be fired remotely, using a lanyard – a long lanyard, rigged to the trigger, here” – he indicated a ring welded to the top of the trigger handle – “and everyone should be below decks except for one observer, a role I claim for myself. And the man who pulls the lanyard, of course.”

  Sam the prudent shipmaster saw the wisdom of this process. Sam the avenger, Sam the pirate-killer chafed at the delay it represented. And resented the fact that if it burst in testing it would still seriously damage his vessel, further delaying his return to the Indian Ocean, even if no one was killed or hurt. He kept that to himself, however.

  “What about ammo, once the proper charge has been determined?” Sam asked. “How long will it take to make a few thousand rounds for service use?”

  “Not long. We've built up a stock of both shell casings and the various rounds – solid shot, explosive, incendiary, and case – so that we can manufacture a supply of ammunition for you fairly quickly. If you feel you need to sail before we've produced enough, we can provide you with rounds and shell casings so that your gunner's mates can load ammo on board, by hand, with the proper tools.”

  Sam mulled over this information, thinking especially about how the test firing might be conducted. “We'll have to have a couple of boats standing off at good angles, taking compass cross-bearings of the fall of shot, in order to estimate the range achieved,” he said, thinking aloud. “They can semaphore their bearings to the vessel, to be plotted on the chart. Perhaps we could use dye charges, to make the splashes easier to spot.”

  “Yes. We thought of that, Captain; the test rounds have small explosive charges, to make big splashes, and scarlet dye-marker.

  “But speaking of range-finding, I have another little gift for you, Captain. I hope it will ease some of the disappointment you so obviously feel at the delay caused by the test-firing. If we can take a cab to my shop, I'll show it to you, and give you a cup of coffee, as well.” Sam gazed curiously at the gunsmith, wondering about the “gift”, but Daniel only smiled back.

  “Well, that would be very welcome, Mister Daniel,” Sam said. “Both the gift and the cuppa, I mean. I've had no coffee this morning, because my steward's on leave, and I've become strangely addicted to the stuff.”

  They said their goodbyes to the foundry staff, and took a taxi to Daniel's shop, a large establishment at a “good” address in French Port. Daniel conducted Sam through his shop, with examples of the gunsmith's art displayed on racks and in glass cases, and into the large work spaces in back. There they found a dozen apprentice gunsmiths hard at work manufacturing rifles.

  “These are your 6.35 mm carbines,” Daniel said, picking up a partially-completed example. “I found a bolt action, clip-fed design in the Institute that we were able to merely copy, so design was simple. The action, however, is complicated, and has to be precision-machined, so I decided to contract out your marksmen's 7.62 mm seal rifles instead, that being an old and familiar design, and make these in my own shop.”

  “What's a 'carbine'?”

  “Simply a shorter, handier rifle. This uses the same ammunition as your Nosy Be 6.35 mm rifles, but I made the barrel a bit shorter to compensate for the greater weight of the action. Also, you specified that you wanted the capability to fix a spear point – a 'bayonet' – to the barrel in such a fashion that the weapon can still be safely fired. So the shorter barrel also compensates somewhat for the weight of the bayonet, to maintain a reasonable balance.”

  Daniel then described how the action worked, and how the weapon could take five rounds at once, either loaded one by one or as a unit, clipped together – hence “clip fed”. Sam's eyes began to glaze over at the barrage of technical detail, much of which he didn't quite follow. Daniel noticed this, and cut his lecture short, concluding with, “And of course, with a more complex action, it's even more important that your sailors keep the rifle clean, Captain Bowditch.”

  “Thank you, Mister Daniel. A very fine gift, indeed.”

  Daniel chuckled. “Oh, this isn't the gift, Captain – just the fulfillment of your specification. And, forgive me, I haven't yet offered you the promised coffee. Just step into my office and I'll give you both.”

  They stepped into a small room dominated by a desk and a drawing board and a bookcase stuffed with papers and what appeared to be technical treatises, and Daniel rang a small bell. One of his younger apprentices appeared almost immediately, and Daniel ordered a pot of coffee – “freshly brewed, mind” – and then took down from a shelf a metal box with a handle, a telescopic sight, and several knobs.

  “This is the gift, Captain – an optical rangefinder. It works on the same principal as your sextant, but with added features. If you sight on any object, and rotate this knob so that the top and bottom horizontal marks that appear in the scope are matched to its height, and then enter its estimated height in meters and tenths with this knob, you can then read its range in meters off this dial . If you hold it on its side, and you know the width or horizontal dimension of the object, you can use it that way, too.”

  “I see – it's like using a sextant with Table 10 in Bowditch, but quicker.”

  “Exactly. We calibrated it with Table 10, but the readings are continuous – no tedious interpolation required.”

  “So I use it the same way – I can find the range to an enemy vessel if I can estimate the height of her mainmast with fair accuracy?”

  “Yes. So long as she is closer than hull-down, of course.”

  “Of course. It's a wonderful gift, and it should prove very useful. Not merely for gunnery, but also for piloting, and station-keeping when Joan and Albatros are sailing in company. Thank you, Mister Daniel. But you must indent for payment to the council – at least for your out-of-pocket cost.”

  “Not at all, not at all, Captain. It's my small contribution to the war against the pirates.”

  “Then thank you very much. I'm very grateful. And I'd like to order another one just like it for the Joan. This one we will pay for … no, I insist!”

  Daniel submitted gracefully to this diktat, and smoothly changed the subject. “Captain, do you anticipate that the Navy will grow beyond just the two armed schooners? And if so, to what ultimate size, do you think?”

  “Why, I confess that I rarely have leisure to think that far ahead, Mister Daniel, but certainly we'll need more than two warships, barring some sudden and unexpected collapse on the part of the enemy. We need much, much more intelligence about the pirates: their strength, economic and in terms of population; their motivation, if not wholly religious and ideological; their ultimate strategic goals. Only with this information can we determine the size of the force we'll need to defeat them, or at least discourage them to the point of leaving us alone.

  “But in general, I'd have to answer your first question with a yes. The Navy will certainly need to grow beyond two vessels. To what ultimate size, I just can't say. Why do you ask?”

  “Some of my colleagues in the Gunsmiths' Guild and I have been discussing ways we can better serve the Navy, and at a lower cost. As you may or may not know, the demand for firearms on
Kerguelen has historically been so low that they have been hand-crafted, one by one, in response to customer demand. This, of course, is not the most cost-effective way to turn out large numbers of standardized weapons. My sub-contractors and I have borrowed some assembly-line techniques from manufacturers of wind generators, engines, hand tools, and so forth, but only to the extent allowed by our facilities and the size of our work force. We've considered forming a temporary consortium to serve the Navy's needs, and investing in a firearms factory that could take full advantage of economies of scale. Since this would necessarily be a large investment, we need to be assured of sufficient demand.”

  Sam considered this. His first impulse was to say, “Great idea – sure, go ahead.” But then he reflected that the decision to enlarge the Navy further rested with the Council. He naturally supported a larger Navy, but the Council had to balance this need against the resources of the Republic, and the competing demands on those resources.

  After a pause, he replied cautiously, “That's a question for the Council, I'm afraid. You might approach Mother Moreau about this issue.”

  “Of course, Captain. I understand. But will you commit yourself so far as to declare your conviction of a need for a Navy of more than two vessels?”

  “In private conversation, yes – that's my professional opinion. But I want to stress again that the size of the Navy is a question of policy, one that only the Council can address.”

  This seemed to satisfy Daniel, at least for the moment, and the conversation moved to more general topics while they finished their coffee. Then Sam excused himself with the plea of urgent business, and returned to the shipyard.

  CHAPTER 11

  The next week passed as a blur of frantic activity. Sam personally oversaw all the alterations to the Albatros, including the hoisting on board and mounting of the 37 mm gun. This was accomplished by bringing the barge on which the gun had been loaded within the reach of the shipyard crane, which lifted it onto the deck. Shipyard fitters then completed its attachment to the thwartship track which would allow the gun to be trained over either the port or starboard side.