As Lewrie trotted down the stairs to the common rooms, then to the street, Lewrie could thank her companion for one thing, at least; the Army officer’s loud voice had, in the course of his harangue, declared “Maddalena, m’dear”, so Lewrie had a name, well, part of a name, to conjure with!
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Over the next two months, HMS Sapphire spent all but two weeks at sea, still searching for a suitable vessel to serve as a transport. Lewrie took her West to Cape Trafalgar, near Cádiz, not above poaching if he had to in the blockade fleet’s patch, with nothing to show for it. They chased many coasting vessels and sea-going fishing boats, frightened many, and caught and burned several, before returning to Gibraltar to confer with Mountjoy, who swore that he had written to Mr. Peel in London asking for more money, or some influence with the Admiralty Transport Board. So far, there was no joy in that direction.
Sapphire went back to her old hunting grounds, from Estepona to Valencia, pursuing, taking, and burning what they could, with equally dismal results. In mounting gloom, Lewrie even ordered the ship over to the Balearic Islands, and ravaged the fishermen and small traders of Formentara and Ibiza, and sailed several times round Mallorca and the main port of Palma. He did manage to capture a merchant brig of about 150 tons which at first seemed promising, but proved to be dangerously rotten, her bottom nigh-eaten through by ship worms and rats from the inside, and not even wood-sheathed, much less coppered. Did he send her off to the Prize-Court at Gibraltar with her shoddy load of cargo, he doubted if the meagre prize money would pay half of the Proctor’s fees! Once again, her small crew was allowed to row away just off Palma by a mile or two, and she was set fire, as an example of what happened to Spaniards who dared share the sea with the Royal Navy.
Just after that, strong gales whipped up, forcing the upmost masts and yards to be struck down, the tops’ls taken in to second or third reefs, the main course brailed up, and when the seas thrashed and clashed in fury, all 1,100 tons of the ship got tossed so violently that the galley had to shut down two days’ running, and several of the heavy-weather storm sails blew out and had to be replaced, with men aloft in a howling gale and a continual stinging rain.
By the time the weather moderated, and the top-masts could be hoisted back into place and the standing rigging re-mounted to secure them, Lewrie was more than ready to head back to a secure harbour.
* * *
“I’ll have the twenty-five-foot cutter for my needs, Mister Westcott,” Lewrie told the First Officer, turned out in his best shore-going uniform. “You can use the pinnace and the launch t’fetch water and firewood, then the Purser’s fresh supplies.”
“With so little expended since our last port call, I expect we can have everything needful aboard by sundown,” Geoffrey Westcott said as he pulled out his watch to check the time. “And with any luck, that will include a Moroccan bullock and a couple of Spanish hogs for fresh meat, too, sir.”
“Some of those heavenly cured hams that they sell across The Lines, yes!” Lewrie enthused. He looked round the deck and found his cabin-steward, Pettus, and his cook, Yeovill, turned out in their own shore-going best, Yeovill in a civilian hat, a waist-length white-taped and brass-buttoned sailor’s jacket with a red waist-coat underneath, a clean pair of tailored white trousers, and good buckled shoes, with a pair of gaudy-coloured stockings peeking from the trousers’ hem. He had his list, and a purse of Lewrie’s passage money. Pettus was also looking very dashing and nautical, with a laundry bag at his feet. It seemed that the old laundress near Mountjoy’s lodgings had an attractive daughter, so Pettus had taken extreme care with his appearance.
“Wish we had one of those, sir,” Lt. Elmes, who had had the watch as they’d entered harbour, wistfully said, jutting his chin at several merchantmen lying at anchor up by the Old Mole, one of them flying the plain blue flag of the Agent Afloat from the Transport Board. A convoy had come in from England, supply ships bearing shot and powder, salt rations and foodstuffs, and at least two large ships that looked like the right size for troop transports.
“Wish away, Mister Elmes,” Lewrie said, giving them a covetous leer. “Pray, cross yer fingers, spit and whirl about thrice … whatever works.”
“Aye, sir,” Elmes replied in good humour.
“Carry on, Mister Westcott, I’ll be…” Lewrie began.
“Boat ahoy!” Midshipman Spears cried, hailing an approaching rowboat with only one oarsman aboard.
“Letter fer yer Cap’m!” the oarsman yelled back, letting go his oars for a moment to cup his hands round his mouth.
“Come alongside!” Spears shouted, then went through the opened entry-port and down the battens to the mainmast chain platform to take the letter, then scramble back up and deliver it to the quarterdeck.
“Ah, hmm,” Lewrie muttered as he broke the wax seal, unfolded it, and read the quick and cryptic note. “Indeed!”
“Good news, sir?” Westcott asked.
“Could be,” Lewrie said, with a sly smile. “Carry on, sir. I’ll be ashore.”
* * *
Mister Deacon, the bodyguard, answered the door at Mountjoy’s lodgings and let Lewrie in, offering a terse “welcome back, sir” with no hint of a smile, despite the good news in Mountjoy’s note.
“Mister Deacon, well met, again,” Lewrie replied before going up the several flights of stairs. “There’ll be a couple of my men calling, my cabin-steward, and my cook. Don’t break them.”
“I stand warned, sir,” Deacon replied, with a tight grin.
At the top of the stairs, the heavy iron-bound oak door to the lodgings stood half-open, for a change. Lewrie stepped through, giving out a “hallo”, and found Mister Thomas Mountjoy at a desk in his shirtsleeves, flipping through a sheaf of papers and a thick ledger.
“Lewrie!” Mountjoy cried, leaping to his feet and rushing over to welcome him in with a wide grin on his face. “We’ve done it! Well, part of it, or at least one more stop forward.”
“‘A large turnip added to the soup’, your note said?” Lewrie asked with a brow up in query.
“An hellish-big ‘turnip’, yes,” Mountjoy boasted. “Sir, we’ve gotten ourselves a ship! Come out to the rooftop gallery and have a squint at her with my telescope!”
Lewrie tossed his hat on the cushioned settee outside, rushing to the telescope. It was already fixed upon the ship in question, and all he had to do was bend down a bit and put his eye to the ocular.
“She’s the Harmony,” Mountjoy eagerly told him. “Three-masted, as you suggested, so she can load troops into all six boats at once from her chain platforms and shrouds, though she’s not a trooper, but carries general cargo. She’s a touch under two hundred fifty tons, but she was recently re-coppered, I was assured.”
Mountjoy’s telescope was powerful enough to show Lewrie that even still fully laden, Harmony had a strip of new-penny clean copper at her waterline. Her furled and brailed-up sails were as white as if they had just come from a sailmaker’s loft, and her paint had been touched up recently.
“Two tons per man, that’d let us put at least one hundred and twenty-five officers and men aboard her, all told, right?” Mountjoy pressed.
“No more than ninety to one hundred,” Lewrie had to tell him, still studying her. “We’ll have to make room below for about fifty or more sailors to handle the boats, and the rations t’feed ’em all, too. I don’t see a single gun in sight. She sails unarmed?”
Whether a merchant ship could really mount a decent defence if attacked by pirates, an enemy privateer, or a warship, given how few crewmen that cheese-paring owners and captains hired, it was Lewrie’s experience that most of them carried some armament.
Must count on muskets, pikes, cutlasses, and a few swivel guns, Lewrie thought, looking for the forked iron stanchions along the tops of Harmony’s bulwarks in which swivel guns, usually light 2-pounders, would be set if threatened. He saw a grand total of six.
No doubt they’re stowed far belo
w, and haven’t been brought up in ages, Lewrie told himself with a wry grimace; Most-like gone completely to rust, and I doubt if there’s a man in her crew who knows a damned thing about usin’ ’em!
“Well, perhaps she always sails in convoy, under escort, and her owners don’t feel the need for guns,” Mountjoy lamely tried to explain. “Does she really need artillery?” he asked.
“No,” Lewrie said with a shrug, standing back up and turning to face him. “Not as long as she sails with us, Sapphire can protect her. She looks like she has swivel guns, and anything heavier, 6-pounders on wheeled carriages, would just take up deck space.”
“Well, that’s all fine, then,” Mountjoy said, brightening over his new acquisition, and Lewrie’s seeming satisfaction with her. “I’ve found this marvellous sparkling white wine from Portugal, it just came in. Not exactly a champagne, but it gives a fair approximation. Let’s open a bottle and toast our addition to ‘Rock Soup’, hey? Now, where the Devil did I leave that bloody cork puller?”
The search for the requisite implement took several minutes, and it was finally found under a decorative pillow on the upholstered settee in the small salon adjacent to the outdoor gallery.
“Ah, that is spritely!” Lewrie commented after a sip, “not too sweet, either, not like a sparkling German white. Costly? I may go buy a case, if there’s any left t’be had.”
“I’ll show you where,” Mountjoy promised. “Or, as you sailors say, ‘I’ll give you a fair wind’ to it, hah! And no, not dear at all. Nothing like what the ship’s cost me. Well, Peel, and Secret Branch. Harmony is two hundred and thirty tons, but her owners insisted that if she’s to be used in an active military role, they rounded her burthen up to two hundred and fifty tons … evidently, they love round numbers … and demanded twenty-five shillings per ton.”
“Damme!” Lewrie exclaimed. “All our troopers that carried the army to Cape Town last January only cost nineteen!”
“Ah, but they never came under fire, and once empty, they were used to carry the defeated Dutch soldiers home, then went back to general work,” Mountjoy carped. “Peel wrote and told me that the owners had to hire a new master for her, after the first one objected to the risk. Half her old crew cried off, too. Not that there’s that many sailors aboard her, to begin with.”
Harmony’s owners, and the Transport Board, were equal when it came to miserliness; neither would pay for more than five sailors and ship’s boys for every hundred tons of burthen, which meant that she’d be handled by only ten hands, plus master and mates, cook, carpenter, sailmaker, bosun, and such, and Lewrie simply could not imagine how it was done! His whole life had been in warships in which no less than fourty sailors were crammed aboard, arseholes to elbows, even in the smallest cutters, and there were hundreds aboard most frigates, and Sapphire, more than enough muscle for even the hardest tasks.
How the Devil do they even get the anchors up? he wondered; Or reef, or strike top-masts in a blow?
“You’ve gone aboard her?” Lewrie asked.
“As soon as she dropped anchor,” Mountjoy assured him. “I met her master, a Mister Hedgepeth, and looked her over, though she still had a full cargo aboard, waiting for the barges and stevedores, so I couldn’t tell you much about her belowdecks. God, but Hedgepeth is a dour old twist! The only reason he took command of her was that he’s to be paid ten pounds extra a month than the owners pay him, and that comes out of my budget, and I’m to be liable for any and all repairs needed, if her paint gets scraped in the course of our activities, and he insists he’ll demand more in future, if the job looks more dangerous than he was first told.”
Mountjoy went on to relate how he had approached the Commissoner of the dockyards, Captain Middleton, before Harmony had arrived, and told him that he might have to use Admiralty labour, lumber, and stores to repair a civilian ship. Mountjoy’s reception had been more than cool; more like a winter’s night at the North Pole!
“By the by, your boats are ready,” Mountjoy said, pouring them a top-up as they sat a ’sprawl under the shade of a canvas awning on the gallery. “Six double-enders, he told me, thirty-six feet long and ten abeam, with room for small carronades in their bows.”
“He still thinks he’ll get ’em as gunboats, damn him,” Lewrie griped. “Well, once Harmony’s landed the last of her cargo, he’ll be busy convertin’ her innards … at Admiralty expense. Why?” Lewrie said with a laugh at Mountjoy’s expression. “Ships altered to carry soldiers need their holds partitioned, and beds built, to accommodate them. Scads of mess tables, her galley refitted t’feed at least one hundred and fifty … some cabins made for their officers? I suppose I’ll have t’give up a Lieutenant, or a couple of senior Mids, to take charge of the crews for the boats. That’ll ease the workload of her own small crew, too, when we’re on-passage.”
The list grew longer in his head, when he considered how much food and water must be carried in her, how many spare muskets, flints, bayonets, and cutlasses would have to be requisitioned from Captain Middleton’s warehouses, and … sailors released from the hospital and re-assigned, with any lacks in their kits made good, or replaced entirely.
A Purser! Lewrie realised; Someone t’sell ’em tobacco, keep an eye on the rum issues, replace their broken mugs and plates?
“I fear you’re going to be paying out a lot more, Mountjoy,” Lewrie warned him. “Or your superiors will, to recompense the Admiralty, for all that’s wanting for our little expeditions.”
“Now why do I feel as if I’ve been set upon by a pack of bully bucks?” Mountjoy said, with a sigh.
“You’ll feel like you’ve been cudgelled half to death, before all we need is rounded up,” Lewrie hooted back, then began to tick off those needs. Mountjoy held up a hand and went to the desk to fetch a pen and paper, before allowing Lewrie to begin again. By the time it was complete, Mountjoy had to shake finger-cramp from his hand, and a fresh bottle of sparkling wine had to be opened.
“Is it possible we may be asking for a tad too much, I wonder?” Mountjoy said after a long, sullen silence. “What if we can’t get any sailors from the hospital? Could you spare men from your ship?”
“Well, if I had to, I could give up fifty hands and a couple of Midshipmen,” Lewrie admitted, equally gloomy. “But, there goes the men I intended t’arm and land alongside my Marines. I could send the Purser’s clerk, Irby, our ‘Jack In The Breadroom’, t’dole out sundries and such, too.”
“With about an hundred soldiers aboard, do those men need the spare weapons, then?” Mountjoy asked.
“No,” Lewrie said. “I could send a chest full of pistols aboard, and cutlasses, so they can defend themselves after they land on the beaches. They’d stand by the boats, and not go inland, waiting for the soldiers to finish their tasks, and come back to be taken off.”
“That solves one problem, then,” Mountjoy said, “and one less request, or burden, demanded of Captain Middleton. That may mollify him a bit, once he sees the whole list. Maybe he won’t scream quite so loudly. Rations, hmm.”
“At least enough for three months,” Lewrie stated.
“Really? How long did you intend to stay out? Just rampaging up and down the coast, Will-He, Nill-He?” Mountjoy asked.
“What d’ye mean?” Lewrie queried back.
“Now I’ve a way to communicate with my agents, and … sources, via Cummings and his boat,” Mountjoy pointed out, “It seems to me that we could gather information about how well-defended certain objectives might be, and lay our plans accordingly. Strike the Dons where they aren’t? You might plan one specific operation, based on the best intelligence, load the troops aboard Harmony, sail out and attack it, then return to port so we can plan the second.
“Now, if there were two or three tempting targets within a day or two of sailing,” Mountjoy went on, perking up for the first time in an hour, “you could go after them, depending on the weather and how rough you judge the landing might be, and not be away from port for more
than a fortnight, so you wouldn’t have to cram too much aboard the transport at any given time, leaving more room for soldiers and your sailors.”
“You learn as much as you can about Estepona, say, rough hand-drawn maps prepared by your people can be copied for my Marine officers and the officers commanding the soldiers, and we plan how to go about it, one target at a time? Hmm,” Lewrie slowly grasped.
When he’d been a temporary Commodore in the Bahamas two years before, he knew nothing of what lay a stone’s throw behind the beaches and inlets of the coast of Spanish Florida, and he had rampaged up and down the shore like a blind pig rooting for truffles, sure only that there would be settlements round the inlets, and that there were towns marked on his copies of old Spanish charts. Mountjoy’s concept was a “horse of another feather” as his old Cox’n, Will Cony, would say. It was … bloody scientific!
“Damme, I like it, Mountjoy,” Lewrie exclaimed. “I love it!”
“I’ve been gathering information, already,” Mountjoy told him, “though I haven’t requested maps from my people, yet, but will do so, as soon as Cummings returns from his present trip.”
“Mountjoy, I swear you’re a bloody genius!” Lewrie whooped.
“Well, if you say so,” Mountjoy said, beaming.
More time in port, Lewrie happily contemplated; Then short, hard jabs at the Dons. Spread chaos and mayhem, in spades!
And when not pummelling the Spanish, there was a chance that he could dine at Pescadore’s more often, where Maddalena whoever-she-was complained that her keeper always took her, and learn more about her!
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