Sea of Grey

by Dewey Lambdin

  The skies were clear and strewn with stars, the winds soughing softly, and the motion of her hull easy, a slow and stately rocking to and fro, the slightest measured pitch and toss as the dark, abandoned bulks of slightly larger Peter Island, and lower Norman Island, wafted rightward off the larboard bows.

  It was such a rare event that some of the hands begged for line and hooks, using salt-junk as bait, and soon were hauling up catch after catch, whooping with delight to land fish without battering them to bloody rags whilst the ship was underway. Bonito, red snapper, even a small shark came thrashing up over the bulwark’s, and their new Black cook, Gideon, called for more firewood and lit off the grills, expertly gutting, heading, and slicing them into steaks, pausing only to spit tobacco juice from his ever-present quid as he sprinkled salt, pepper, and lime juice over the sizzling slabs. Though there was salt-pork in the steep-tubs already, the fish would augment the usual rations quite nicely, he assured everyone, easily enlisting help among the crew.

  “Gon’ eat good, boys!” Gideon boasted. “De fish, he eat sweet! What de white folk sometime call ‘surf an’ turf,’ dey have beef wif a fish? Woll, we havin’ ‘surf an’ sty!’ Mo’ firewood, heah! Cut me a mess o’ dose lemons, too, Noble! Mistah Morley, ya done wif ’at pompano fo’ de cap’um’s table? Woll, hand dem steaks heah, fo’ he perish o’ de hungries!”

  Lewrie’s nostrils twitched and his stomach rumbled with anticipation as the heady fumes flowed aft from the galley funnel. A sweet dark whiff of rum on the wind caught his senses, as well. The senior hands and mates always found a way to cache smuggled rum. It appeared that some of it was being used to flavour the fish. His nose wrinkled as he caught the other scent, the musk-sweet and oily reek of Mr. Durant’s miasma pots along the windward side, set in hollows delved into the tubs of sand kept for gun crews’ traction, firefighting, and deck scrubbing.

  “We’ll look as lit up as a whaler with her try-pots goin’,” he groused to Lt. Langlie, as he watched Durant and Hodson proceed aft in dodderers’ crouches, bent over with prepared pots and burning punks in their hands. “So much for anonymity … or hiding our presence.”

  “Not that we’ve seen anything more than fishing boats and local traders as of yet, sir,” Langlie counseled. “Fredericksted Harbour on the west end is little used according to Mister Winwood, and Christiansted on Saint Croix’s north shore is shallow and rocky. The only good commercial entrepôt is Charlotte Amalie, yonder on Saint Thomas, so—”

  “Ah-moll-yah,” Lewrie corrected. “The locals say Ah-moll-yah, not Am-ah-lee, Mister Langlie. Aye, it was a right pirate’s hole, in the old days. Smugglers, privateers, slavers … only saw it from off shore, but perhaps tomorrow. I’m told it’s a pretty little town. We aren’t at war with Denmark. We might even request a pilot and anchor for a day and night. Our old Sailing Master once told me that above the town, on the island’s spine, there’s a vista where one may sit and look east, all the way down Drake’s Channel … Drake’s Seat. Said he sat up there himself, like a king on his throne, the old buccaneer. I’d rather like t’do that, myself. See all the isles, all the way out to Virgin Gorda and Anegada … prettiest view in the whole Caribbean, I’ve heard tell. What Heaven must seem, for sailors.”

  “For those few of us who’ll be admitted through the Pearly Gate, sir,” Langlie softly joshed, massaging his middle as his stomach emitted a genteel growling. In the dark, Lewrie could feel him wince at his unthinking words, having put his foot in it again.

  “More than you’d imagine, Mister Langlie,” Lewrie said, after a brief pause and a short snort of amusement; mostly at Langlie’s wary shadowdancing around him. “I’ve always held that sailors ain’t great sinners, in the main. Their needs and wants are simple and their sins are minor and venal … not outright wicked or cruel. Their lives and livelihoods are too precarious, and the sea’s too big for them to go off tyrannical or murderous. Oceans keep the fear o’ God on ’em, and keep ‘em looking over their shoulders. Superstition, perhaps; fear of the Lord, perhaps, as well. Who knows? There lies your true evil, sir, your true wickedness,” Lewrie concluded, pointing at the faint loom of light, roughly where Charlotte Amalie lay, on the Nor’west horizon.

  “So … shore’s the trouble, sir? And what little time a tarpaulin man spends there is … ?” Langlie puzzled out.

  “Respite, sir,” Lewrie snickered, mocking his own pretensions to philosophy. “Respite.” And Langlie chuckled with him, easier and honestly this time.

  “The stink-pots may help, sir,” Langlie said of a sudden, as an almost companionable silence extended perhaps a bit too long. “With the ship lit up like a whaler as you said, who’d imagine we’re a ship of war? Whales might be taken in these waters … if they swim through the Turk’s Passage a bit north and west of here, as you told me, sir.”

  “Accidental … camouflage, as the French would say?”

  “Pray God it’s a fortuitous choice, Captain,” Langlie answered, in all seriousness.

  “’Scuse me, Cap’um … Mister Langlie, sir,” Aspinall said as he appeared at their side on the quarterdeck, “but that Gideon fella’s got yer supper ready. Big slab o’ pompano, pease puddin’, boiled tatties, and some o’ that cornmeal sweet bread o’ his, and Toulon’s goin’ nigh frantic t’claw the dish cover off. Best come quick, beggi’ yer pardon … else he’ll have it all.”

  “There wasn’t a portion for him?” Lewrie hooted with mirth.

  “Aye, there was, sir, and not a morsel left. Gone quicker’n a wink, and still lustin’ after yours,” Aspinall warned him.

  “It appears I must go below or go hungry, Mister Langlie. Do you have a good supper of your own.”

  “Aye, sir. Goodnight. And we’ll see what fortune the morning brings,” Langlie said, doffing his hat.

  “Surely, it’ll be good, Mister Langlie,” Lewrie paused to say, returning the salute, “since we’ve already managed the miracle of the Loaves and Fishes!”

  HMS Proteus hauled her wind Sutherly and got underway one hour before Dawn Quarters would normally be stood, with only a cursory try at scrubbing decks to perfect cleanness. She stood Sou’east—Half South for awhile to gather speed and clear any shoals, until she was roughly even with the Salt Island Passage, then tacked about to take the winds on her starboard quarter, and, under reduced sail, loped Westerly, to prowl close to the southern coast of Saint John, for a peek into Coral Bay before angling off toward Saint Thomas to look into the Pillsbury Sound which separated the islands, and held several tempting hurricane holes where privateers and smugglers could lurk.

  Saint John, Lewrie recalled as he loafed by the windward rails with a spyglass, had been a productive island, with many plantations of sugar cane, before a slave rebellion had slaughtered most of the White owners and driven the rest away. With British and French help back in a rare example of “tween wars” cooperation, the slaves had been massacred, but not before the fields had been burned to stubble, the houses, presses, barns, and mills destroyed as symbols of cruel subjugation. A renascence had never occurred, and Saint John brooded in a sleepy, funeral silence, with most of the arable land going back to jungles, and left alone as if accursed. Perhaps it was, Lewrie speculated.

  Coral Bay, between narrow headlands on her Sou‘east corner, was one of the great, but unused natural harbours in the world, and were the Virgins in British hands, would have supplanted Kingston for Navy use ages ago, since it lay so much further up to windward of the main passages to the West Indies. And once out of the main channel, Coral Bay funneled out into narrow leads to North and Nor’west, into hurricane holes, the worst winds and storm surges blocked by headlands and narrow but high peninsulas.

  “If not there, sir, there’s Pillsbury Sound,” Mr. Winwood was saying, pointing at a carefully tacked down chart. “There’s eleven to fifteen fathom right up it, where it splits round Grass and Mingo, Congo and Lovango Cays. There’s a Windward Passage, narrow but practicable for in-bound vessels, of the same depths.
A Middle Passage to the west of Grass Cay, and a long, narrow but useable channel between Thatch Cay and the north shore of Saint Thomas.”

  “Great escape routes, aye,” Lewrie commented, after returning to the binnacle cabinet and the traverse board. “That last’un leads out to deep water, past Hans Lollick and Little Lollick, I see. What about Red Hook Bay, here, at the east end of Saint Thomas? And Saint James Bay … these little inlets?”

  “Very shoal, sir, and exposed to the Nor’east Trades, but with decent holding ground. Hard sand bottom,” Winwood opined. “But a wee privateer or a small trading schooner might be able to put in there. Pity we don’t have something similar, as a tender, to explore, sir. There are anywhere from four to nine fathom for anchoring, but so very many shifting sand shoals.”

  “Well, we’ll just have to stand in close as we dare, but keep our heads, won’t we, Mister Winwood?” Lewrie tried to tease the man.

  “Somewhat close, sir,” Winwood mournfully lowed; their Sailing Master was an impossible sobersides, and would not recognise a jape if it kicked him in the crutch. “And there is the matter of Danish sovereignty, Captain. Within the three-mile limit, inside which we at this very moment stand, we have no jurisdiction.”

  “Does Denmark have a frigate in these waters, sir?” Lewrie shot back. “Any forts outside Charlotte Amalie, with more than a corporal’s guard to man a few rusty guns?”

  “I have not heard of such reinforcements, sir.”

  “Then bugger ’em,” Lewrie decided. “Ah! We’re nigh to the west end of Norman Island. We’ll be able to see deep into Coral Bay within a minute or two.”

  “Sail ho! Deck, there!” a foremast lookout cried, dancing with delight on the narrow cross-trees. “’Cross the point! Two sail standin’ outta the bay! Two points off the starboard bows!”

  Lewrie sprang forward along the starboard gangway to the break of the forecastle in his eagerness, his expression joyous and wolfish, creating excitement in the hands he passed, in those clustered below on the gundeck. Perhaps it was “uncaptainly” to show feelings, exciting people for nothing, especially if he could not deliver, but he could not help himself.

  He raised his glass. It was that magical, dim time of the dawn before the sun was truly up and everything was soft twilight, the sea and clouds and sky pearly blue-grey, the isles and cays muted and dark. Against that background, two dark hulls stood out starkly, their sails ghostly white, before sunrise revealed them to be a weary and stained tan. There was a large schooner, and a chunkier, dowdier brig or snow, both bound Sou’west, just clear of Leduck Island and headed out as if to pass Ram Head, and not three miles off! And their flags … !

  One was French, the schooner; the brig was a Yankee.

  First out of his mouth was a loud whoop, followed by orders he shouted back to the quarterdeck through cupped hands. “Mister Langlie, hands aloft to set t’gallants and shake out the reefs in the courses! Mister Winwood, steer direct for Ram Head and cut them off!”

  He whirled back to face the two suspicious vessels again, experience juggling courses and possible speeds. The schooner and brig had the initial advantage, almost completely exposed to the Nor’east Trade wind, but were deep up the bay. Was Proteus partially masked from the full force of the morning winds, she could deploy thousands more square feet of sail more quickly, and her waterline was longer; slower to accelerate, but once she had a bone in her teeth she’d be the fastest off the wind.

  The American brig bore the same limitations of all square-rigged ships; she would find it hard to go to windward, to point as “high” as a fore-and-aft rigged vessel like the schooner, so the only way she had to escape would be to run like a scalded cat for Charlotte Amalie and throw herself on the mercy of the Danish authorities. She could round Ram Head and surge up Pillsbury Sound, with the winds abeam or just a bit abaft, and go for the Middle Passage or the Leeward Passage.

  Lewrie looked aloft at the commissioning pendant streaming from the main-mast truck. The Trades were weak, as they always were in good weather round dawn, weak but steady from the Nor’east, so he thought a try up the Middle Passage from Pillsbury Sound, abeam the winds, out of the question. It would be too slow. No, he thought, if she tried that she would head for the incredibly narrow and treacherous Leeward Passage. He stowed that thought away as improbable.

  The schooner, though, was much more manoeuvrable and it was not out of the question for her to spin about almost in her own length and try to run Sou’east, abeam the Trades, and pass astern of Proteus at a rate of knots, hoping that the brig would be considered the most valuable prize. With her greater speed, she might dare the risk of broadsides hurriedly ranged and fired. The schooner might dodge right past before a gun could hurt her, and show them a clean pair of heels.

  “Don’t think of that, don’t think of that,” Lewrie muttered on his way back aft, pacing sideways to keep his eyes on the brig and the schooner. “Just panic and run, you bastards.”

  “Courses, tops’ls, and t’gallants all set, sir,” Lt. Langlie reported as Lewrie gained the quarterdeck. “Outer flying jib, the inner, and the fore top-mast stays’l set, as well.”

  Lewrie looked aloft for confirmation, also noting that the main and mizen t‘gallant stays’ls filled the spaces between the masts, as they had since they’d come about off Salt Island Passage, to make best use of the weak predawn Trades without showing too much aloft for an enemy to espy and be warned off.

  “Were they smart, they’d turn and run back up the bay and get ashore,” Catterall commented, still coatless and fiddling with his neck-stock. “We’d get the ships if they don’t fire them, but the crews would escape us.”

  Lewrie spun on his heel to glare at him, freezing Catterall in mid-toilette. “Then let us pray our Chases are bereft of your great experience, sir. Let’s pray they’re bumbling idiots … sir!”

  Catterall gulped and shrugged into himself as his hammock-man held out his coat to don, and he slipped into it as if it were armour.

  “Everyone down from aloft, Mister Langlie? Good,” Lewrie said. “Now, beat to Quarters. Mister Catterall?”

  “Sir?” the hapless Second Officer replied, now dressed but still trying to shrink away.

  “Tell off an armed boat crew, with six or eight Marines, and be ready to board one of the prizes, should we be fortunate.”

  “Aye aye, sir! Mister Towpenny! A boat brought up from towing astern to short stays!”

  Lewrie turned back to their Chases, relieved to see that they were still mindlessly intent on fleeing, holding their course, aiming to get round Ram Head into deeper water and run almost due West, with the schooner ahead, of course, and steering a bit further out from the land, almost as if she would challenge Proteus and protect her consort. The French tricouleur stood out boldly from her gaff, swung by the wind to lay against her mainsail. But Proteus was hitting her stride, now, and beginning to surge forward with a purposeful bustle, the apparent wind keener and brisker, and her stout hull “talking” to him in groans and swashings as she parted the rather calm seas like a broad farmer’s plough through rich loam.

  Gun-ports were hinging up and out of the way on the schooner’s larboard side, at least five that Lewrie could see, and she was coming a point “lower” to intersect their course, her gaff-hung sails arcing away from them into mere slivers to cup more stern wind.

  “I make the range as under a mile, sir,” Langlie said.

  The schooner was most likely a French privateer, Lewrie thought, judging her lines more critically. As fine and lean as she appeared, she couldn’t bear the weight of more than eight or ten guns, and those could not be much more than 6-pounders. “Man’s a bloody Lunatick!” he grunted. “Mister Langlie, I’ll thank you to shoot his grandiose dreams to flinders.”

  “Very good, sir! Mister Catterall, Mister Adair … on the uproll, and open upon her!” Langlie shouted down to the gun-deck.

  The schooner opened first, wreathing herself in a sudden bank of sulfurou
s fumes, the sound of her artillery a muffled stutter; five guns as Lewrie had surmised, and terrier-sharp by the sound of them—6—pounders, or more likely 4-pounders.

  Shot shrieked overhead, a splash was raised far out to starboard and the ball skipped high enough to chew a small segment of a bulwark railing and strew stowed hammocks in the racks like wakened worms.

  “On the up-roll …” Catterall could be heard yelling, “fire!”

  The air was moist and cool with sea mist. Proteus’s guns roared and reeled back in-board almost as one, making not only a deep bank of gun smoke, but an instant fog of tortured air, each gun’s eruption standing for a moment as a horizontal sea-spout from the muzzles, and making thirteen distinct smoke-and-fog rings that quickly merged into a cloud that only slowly drifted away to larboard and alee as Proteus sailed beyond it, leaving a semi-opaque, surface-level cumulus astern.

  “Hit … hit!” Langlie was noting, striving for professional detachment, though almost dancing on tip-toes. “Three … four … six!”

  “There is a nasty shoal, sir,” Mr. Winwood muttered, coming to Lewrie’s left rear. “Eagle Shoal, ’tis called, almost dead ahead, by our charts. They’re coming to us, so …”

  “A turn away will not increase the gun-range, aye,” Lewrie said quickly, with only a slight turn of his head to acknowledge him. “Two points alee, and keep us clear.”

  He only had eyes for their targets, now. The schooner had taken the worst of their exchange, with holes punched in both her sails, and sections of her bulwark torn open, a low deckhouse afore her wheel shot up, and her inner jib flying loose of both controlling sheet and halliard. His hands took time to cheer as they swabbed out, thumb-stalled vents, and began to wave the powder monkeys forward with fresh charges borne in flash-resistant leather cylinders.