by Joan Druett
Thunder grumbled, looming closer, closer. Then there was a louder clap, so deafening Wiki’s eardrums popped. Lightning fizzed sharply, destroying his night vision for a moment, and the wind gusted. Then rain came out of the blackness, hissing down with malignant force, tossed back and forth like a solid, living curtain with the gusts. Waves materialized, lifted, crashed over the stern, and rushed in cascades along the deck. The brig was fleeing before the storm, but the storm was winning the race.
Wiki worked his way to the group at the rail in short rushes, timing his movements to keep his footing on the tossing deck. Both Samoans were there, still yelling in their native tongue, pointing at a figure that was floating just a dozen yards away. The brig had unexpectedly dipped her starboard rail under the water with a particularly hard gust—every man on deck had been thrown sprawling. All the rest had finished up in the scuppers; but when they had struggled to their feet again, it was to find that the boatswain had been washed into the hungry sea.
Intermittent moonlight flickered over the small, distant figure, now being drawn past the stern of the vessel. Men, both Samoan and English, were yelling at the tops of their voices and struggling aft to reach out over the taffrail. But there was nothing that could be done—rescue was impossible. Bringing the Swallow about would simply spell a swift end to the brig, and there was no way a boat could live in that sea.
Then, to Wiki’s amazement, one of the enormous waves picked up the boatswain and swirled the struggling figure closer. For an endless moment the boatswain was poised on the foaming crest while the wave lifted, lifted, towering above the stern of the brig—and then, like a man spitting out a cherry stone, the wave threw the boatswain over the quarter bulwarks, rushing on to foam along the starboard side.
The body crashed up against a gun and finally stopped, wedged by the carriage. Somehow Wiki struggled up to where the old boatswain lay stunned and gasping, to find he was indubitably alive. As he gripped the boatswain’s shoulders and heaved, Wiki thought that was the second miraculous escape he had witnessed—but there was still the question of whether the Swallow would survive the night.
Forsythe said curtly in his ear, “Get that man below and give him a glass of grog.” Then the lieutenant took charge of the deck, barking out a stream of curt orders that flew forward in the shrieking wind. Took charge just as if the Swallow had not got into these dire straits because of the captain’s lack of responsibility. George Rochester had called Forsythe a bad seaman, Wiki remembered. His poor judgment on the Vincennes would certainly have killed Jim Powell if Rochester hadn’t interfered, and the brig would most surely have been lost if the Samoans had not roused their inattentive captain by hammering on the skylight and yelling out to Wiki.
However, half drunk though he might be, Lieutenant Forsythe rose to the challenge. All night the Swallow rolled and tumbled, the gale whistling about her, the hours punctuated with the howling of the wind, urgent shouting, and the thump of feet and the dragging of canvas and ropes as the men struggled to follow his orders. Everyone slipped and fell constantly, but Forsythe hung on, an indomitable fist gripping the vibrating shrouds.
When at last dawn crept over the horizon the sky had a wild and terrifying appearance. Great waves were still pursuing the brig as she scudded before the gale, but the Swallow lived. The deck was a grim sight, littered with torn rigging and damaged spars, but the brig sailed on as bravely as before. As the day went by the wind gradually diminished, and by sunset the Swallow was under full sail. At last, after eighteen hours of incessant labor, the order, “That will do, the watch,” was given, and half the crew could go below and seek some rest—but still Lieutenant Forsythe clung to his station on the quarterdeck. It was not until the second watch was sent below that he went down to seek his own berth.
The following morning, however, Wiki found that Rochester’s second assessment—that Forsythe was a tyrant—was right on the mark. Four bells had just struck, and Wiki was lying on his berth with his feet propped up on the locker that intruded so on his bed space, reading a book, when he heard the peremptory shout for all hands on deck. He frowned, thinking that it might be time for the morning ration of grog, but that the tone of the order did not seem quite right. Swinging down his legs, he stood up, straightened, ducked under a beam, and padded up the stairs.
When he opened the door at the top of the companionway all the men were assembled in the waist, and the atmosphere of stifled rage and disgust was almost palpable. He could see hands curled into fists. The men stood, brace legged, in hostile attitudes, and no one spoke or moved.
Then Wiki took in the scene on the quarterdeck, and his breath hissed out with shock. The two Samoans were triced up in the rigging. Their shirts were pulled down off their backs and hanging down over their spread legs, and their outstretched arms were tied high in the shrouds so that their bare toes just touched the planks. When the brig rolled they grunted as they struggled to keep the wrenching weight off their wrists. Jack Savvy let out a faint whine of pain.
Lieutenant Forsythe, in full dress uniform, the gold epaulette on his right shoulder glinting, stood facing the crew, his eyes narrowed, his right hand resting on the hilt of his sword. Passed Midshipman Kingman, also in full dress rig, stood beside him, a multiple lash held loosely in his bone-thin, big-knuckled hands. Nine thin plaits of rope trailed from the handle, each knotted at the working end. This, Wiki realized with horror and disgust, was the navy’s notorious cat-o’-nine-tails.
He pushed his way through the assembled men and went straight up to Forsythe. He said, “What the devil is going on here?”
“Punishment,” said Forsythe, his eyebrows high. “And pray get the hell off my deck.”
Wiki ignored that, staying exactly where he was. He said tightly, “Punishment for what?”
“For speaking their native lingo. Speaking their own language is against regulations.”
“It’s against regulations for a Samoan to speak Samoan?” Wiki demanded incredulously.
“Of course. It can’t be allowed. They could be plotting mutiny.”
“That’s bloody ridiculous!” Wiki could see the powerful muscles of the Samoans’ naked backs and shoulders flex and writhe as they fought to keep their weight from dislocating their wrists. “They were speaking Samoan in the panic of the moment—as you know perfectly well! And they worked as hard or harder than anyone else to save the ship—she could have gone down if they hadn’t roused us up. For God’s sake,” he demanded furiously, his voice shaking with outrage, “what do you expect of them?”
“I expect rules to be damn-well obeyed. If you wasn’t a civilian, you’d be triced up there alongside ’em, you goddamn uppity savage.” Forsythe lifted his voice. “Twelve lashes each. Summon the bo’sun to carry out the punishment.”
Wiki snapped, “Wait.” Then he went up to the Samoans and, one at a time, he laid his cheek against the other man’s so that their tears mingled with his; and in their own language, his voice low, he explained what was happening.
“I am a warrior,” Sua softly intoned:
There is a craving within me for a gun to hold,
A war club to grasp, a spear to aim—
Look and see my wretched state
Look and see a disemboweled fish
A stranded shark, a lost albatross—
Yet a warrior I remain.
Wiki stepped back, watching them both brace themselves for the ordeal. He cast a glance at Forsythe, feeling distantly surprised that the lieutenant had not interfered when he had spoken to the men, but Forsythe was merely smirking. “Put a barbaric curse on me, did you?” he idly queried, and without bothering to wait for a reply, called again for the boatswain to carry out the sentence.
Now, however, there was a hitch. When the boatswain arrived on deck he looked much the same as usual; but when he was informed of the crime, he stared at Forsythe, turned his head to spit over the rail, and then declared himself too sick and frail after his near-drowning to comply. Th
en, without waiting for an answer, he stumped back to his bed.
Forsythe did not appear to care about this, either. He nodded at Kingman and, poker-faced, the midshipman wielded the multiple lash.
There was strength in the skinny arms—by the time he had finished, blood was trailing down the smooth brown backs, staining the waists of duck trousers and marking the upper swirls and curves of the blue tattooing that indicated the proud heritage of these warriors. At long last the two men were cut down. Wiki sent a vial of salve to the forecastle and then clambered aloft to scan the empty sea.
The weather could not have been in greater contrast to the storm—while the brig still rolled heavily with the undersea swell, the surface of the water was like a sheet of glass, and there was a haze across the horizon. The wind had dropped completely. The sails hung straight up and down, slatting noisily against the masts with each pitch. After a while Forsythe sent up orders for the mainsail and foresail to be brailed up, to stop the irritating noise. Apart from that there was nothing to do but watch the horizon for a sign of the Vincennes.
The next day they located her—because of the distant sound of cannon.
Seventeen
George Rochester was in a fix. He hadn’t thought much about it when he’d been assigned a gun crew; but now that the Vincennes was beset by a flat calm, and the storm was reduced to a nasty memory, Captain Wilkes had decreed that the cannon should be exercised. And because mountain man Dave had been so efficient during exercises on the Swallow, George had totally forgotten the orders that were as much a set part of the routine as the cadences of a catechism.
He’d had troubles enough with being reduced to someone so lowly as a mere passed midshipman on the sloop of war. The supreme head of the Vincennes was, of course, Charles Wilkes, who—probably because he was technically only a lieutenant himself, without even the right to fly the commodore’s pennant, let alone wear the double epaulettes and gold lace of a captain—was a real stickler for rank. Below him was the first lieutenant, and below the first lieutenant were all the other lieutenants, all in subrankings of their own; then the sailing master; then the purser, surgeon, and chaplain, along with all their subordinates; and so on down to the humblest of the officers, the midshipmen, whose job was to summon bad-tempered, sleepy seamen out of their hammocks when the night watches were changed, muster the gun crews when the ship was at quarters, and report every blessed move to the lieutenants. It brought back horrible memories of the dog’s life of a junior midshipman. After the glory of the quarterdeck of the Swallow, it was a daily humiliation.
Faced with a great ugly cannon and an expectant gun crew, George realized that here was a problem he should have anticipated long before. Over the few months at the Gosport Navy Yard, he’d been taught mathematics, chemistry, English, natural philosophy, and French—plus, for God’s sake, the intricacies of steam machinery!—but it had been blithely assumed by his instructors that he had learned all he needed to know about cannonry during his years at sea. And that, unfortunately, had not been the case. Over his time on various ships of war, George, like his fellow junior mids, had been left to educate himself as best he could in the midst of a thousand interruptions.
He had taken part in many live exercises and had even played his part when the cannon were fired in earnest during campaigns against pirates and slavers, but his only role had been to peer out through the gunport, gauge how close the shot had come to the mark, and indicate bearings with much flapping of his hands and arms. He’d turned often to look at the men who serviced the gun—men who had looked like imps out of hell, dripping sweat rags tied above their grim, smoke-blackened faces—but it had been through a stinging fog of gunpowder fumes, and it had been far too noisy for anyone to hear what anybody else shouted, unless they were right up next to one’s ear. In the roar and confusion each man had to know without telling what job he was to do because it was impossible to work the guns otherwise. Dumb exercises, though, were a different matter, because it would be mortifyingly obvious if a fellow called out the wrong command; and, if he did make a mistake, Captain Wilkes’s scorn would be awful. Again George wished most heartily that he had paid a lot more attention during the exercises on the dear Swallow, instead of leaving it all to Dave.
His responsibility on the Vincennes was one of the two nine-pounder chasers, along with its crew of ten—a captain, a loader, a rammer, and a sponger, two side-tackle men, three train-tackle men, and a powder boy—all of whom were watching him in happy anticipation. Normally, a crew serviced two cannon, one on each side of the deck. When the first was fired, they raced across and got the second one ready, and so they went back and forth for the duration of the battle—but at least, because the armament of the Vincennes had been greatly reduced to make room for the scientifics and their equipment George was spared that. The flagship could boast just eight ugly, stumpy carronades, plus the two long, nine-pounder guns on the poop deck, so George had been assigned just one of the latter while another passed midshipman had charge of the other. That, however, was scarcely a relief.
After the Samoan’s stirring drumming to quarters on the Swallow, the tinny rattle beaten out by the ship’s drummer boy sounded oddly dissatisfying. “Wet and sand the decks, knock out ports, take off your muzzle bags, withdraw your tompions, and cast loose your guns!” cried Captain Wilkes—orders that were familiar enough, being the same ones Rochester had hollered out on the Swallow. His gun crew cast loose the lashings that housed the gun tight against the bulwarks and whipped out the tompion bung swiftly enough, but George noted with some pride that their actions were not nearly as smooth as the exercise had been on the brig. But then his five tackle men clapped onto the tackle ropes, ran the gun carriage inboard, and stared at him expectantly. His complacency abruptly faded.
George had prepared himself as best he could. After consultation with a junior midshipman named Keith—who should have been a mountain man in George’s private opinion, being quite obsessed with arms in general and cannon in particular—he had compiled a list of orders, which were jotted down on the palm of his left hand. “Chock your luff!” he began, reading it out with assumed confidence—but the men did absolutely nothing, just stood there holding tackle ropes, or with their bits of equipment at the ready, their heads turned as they continued to watch him, while overhead little fluffy clouds passed serenely over the limpid blue sky.
There was an awful pause while George’s mind went blank. Then, with a start, he realized that the instruction simply ordered the men at the tackles to maintain tension to counter the roll of the ship, something that they were doing already, to prevent the great carriage from running amuck all over the poop deck and smashing their toes. He’d been on the verge of repeating the order in a peremptory fashion but stopped himself just in time. Well, he meditated, it was a relief that he’d saved himself from that particular embarrassment, but it didn’t do much for his confidence. He had to clear his throat before shouting, “Stop vent and sponge your gun!”
At that, thank God, two of the men moved. The fellow who had been appointed captain of the gun leaned over the breech and solemnly placed a piece of leather over the touch hole, while the sponger leapt forward, dipped a sponge on the end of a long pole into a bucket of water, and pushed it up and down the barrel of the gun. The idea was to douse any sparks from the last discharge, George deduced—though it seemed rather odd, considering that the gun had not been fired yet. However, he was not prepared to ask any questions, being fervently grateful that the men seemed to know what to do.
“Cartridge, wad, and ram home!”
This led to quite a little flurry of activity, as the powder boy fished a cylindrical bag of gunpowder out of his leathern bucket and heaved it across to the loader, who shoved it up the barrel. Then the rammer stepped up, inserted a wad, and pushed it up as far as it would go. The captain of the gun bent over again to poke his priming iron through the breech and wiggle it.
Looking up at George, he said solemnly, “H
ome!”
This, George felt paramount to certain, meant it was safe to charge the gun. However, the next order on his list was confusing because it read, in tiny smeared letters, “Round shot, canister, or stand of grape”—which offered a choice of projectile. He stared down at his palm with his eyebrows high and then looked about vainly for inspiration, while the expectant silence went on and on. Single round shot was designed to smash holes in the sides of enemy ships, while grape—a canvas bag packed with shot—was used to clear enemy decks of men, and canister—a tin can filled with musket balls—was calculated to destroy enemy rigging. And who could possibly guess what kind of target lived in Captain Wilkes’s imagination?
Then, to George’s intense relief, he heard the captain of the gun hiss, “I think I’d choose round shot, if I was you, sir.”
“Round shot, dear fellow? Capital!” said George, and watched the loader heave up a great nine-pound cannon ball and roll it down the barrel. “Ram home!” he cried, and the rammer leaped forward with his wad and rammer again and worked manfully to pack another wad down to make certain the ball didn’t roll back again and thud ignominiously to the deck.
“Man side-tackle falls, run out!” The two side-tackle men hauled mightily at the ropes, running the gun up to the rail and forcing the barrel out as far as it would go. At last, to George Rochester’s huge relief, he was back on familiar ground. Squinting out over the sparkling sea as he had done many times in the past, he fixed his eye on an imaginary enemy ship and hollered, “Crows and handspikes, elevate your gun!”
This was followed by a lot of satisfying grunting and heaving, along with grinding noises as the cannon and its carriage were tackled with handspikes and crowbars and wrenched back and forth until George had it pointed at the great man-of-war he had conjured up in his mind.
“Cock your lock, blow your match, watch the weather roll, stand by … FIRE!”
But just as on the Swallow, the charge was not detonated. Instead, the dumb show was repeated ad nauseam. At about the dozenth repeat, Rochester noticed that some of his men were mimicking that confusing order to load, muttering in a chant:
