by Wilbur Smith
‘Mr Mate!’ Mungo St John called in his clear carrying voice as Huron settled down to reach across the wind, pulling swiftly away from the land.
‘Captain!’ Tippoo bellowed back from the foot of the mainmast, a great blurt of sound from the bull chest.
‘Take the name of the masthead watch.’
Tippoo ducked his cannon-ball head on its thick neck like a bare-knuckle fighter taking a punch, and looked up the mast, slitting his eyes in the heavy folds of flesh.
‘Twenty minutes more and he would have had us on the beach.’ St John’s voice was cold, deadly. ‘I’ll have him on the grating before this day is out, and we will get a peep of his backbone.’
Tippoo licked his thick lips involuntarily, and Robyn, standing near him, felt her stomach heave. There had been three floggings already on this voyage and she knew what to expect. Tippoo was half-Arab, half-African, a honeycoloured giant of a man with a shaven head that was covered with a mesh of tiny pale scars from a thousand violent encounters. He wore a loose embroidered, high-necked tunic over his huge frame, but the forearms that protruded from the wide sleeves were thick as a woman’s thighs.
Robyn turned quickly to Zouga as he came down the deck towards her.
‘We had a good look at the land, Sissy. Our first definite fix since Ilha da Trinidade. If this wind holds we will be in Table Bay in another five days.’
‘Zouga, can’t you intercede with the Captain?’ she demanded, and Zouga looked startled.
‘He is going to flog that poor devil.’
‘Damn right too,’ Zouga growled. ‘The man nearly had us on the rocks.’
‘Can’t you stop him?’
‘I wouldn’t dream of interfering with his running of this ship – and nor will I allow you to.’
‘Do you have no humanity at all?’ she demanded of her brother coldly, but there were bright hot spots of anger on her cheeks, and her eyes snapped clear angry green. ‘You call yourself a Christian.’
‘When I do, I speak softly though, my dear.’ Zouga made the reply he knew would annoy her most. ‘And I don’t flaunt it at every turn in the conversation.’
Their arguments were always sudden as summer thunderstorms on the African veld, and as spectacular.
Mungo St John sauntered forward to lean his elbow on the railing of his quarterdeck, a long Havana cheroot of coarse black tobacco held between white teeth. He mocked her silently with those flecked yellow eyes, infuriating her further, until she heard her own voice going shrill and she turned from Zouga, and rounded on him.
‘The man you had flogged last week could be crippled for life,’ she shouted at him.
‘Doctor Ballantyne – how would you like Tippoo to carry you down and lock you in your cabin?’ Mungo St John asked. ‘Until you regain your temper and your manners.’
‘You cannot do that,’ she flared at him.
‘I can, I assure you – that and much more.’
‘He’s right,’ Zouga assured her softly. ‘On this ship he can do virtually anything he wants.’ He laid his hand on her upper arm. ‘Steady now, Sissy. The fellow will be lucky to get away with the loss of a little skin.’
Robyn found she was panting with anger and a sense of helplessness.
‘If you are squeamish, Doctor, I will excuse you from witnessing punishment,’ Mungo St John mocked her still. ‘We must make allowance for the fact that you are a woman.’
‘I have never asked for consideration on that score, not once in all my life.’ She tried to get her anger back under control, and she shook off her brother’s hand and turned away from them.
She walked with stiff back and squared shoulders up into the bows, trying to maintain an aloof dignity, but the ship’s motion was awkward and her damned skirts fluttered around her legs. She realized she had thought the word, and she would ask forgiveness later – but not now, and suddenly she said it aloud.
‘Damn you, Captain Mungo St John, damn you to hell!’
She stood in the bows, and the wind pulled her hair out of the neat chignon at the nape of her neck and flicked it in her face. It was her mother’s thick silken dark hair, shot with tones of russet and chestnut, and as a pale ray of greenish sunlight at last broke through the cloud cover, it turned to a glowing halo around her small neat head.
She stared ahead angrily, hardly noticing the hellish beauty of the scene about her. The cold, green waters, smoked with mist banks, opened and closed about the ship like pearly curtains. Wisps of mist trailed from the sails and yards as though she was on fire.
In patches, the surface of the sea simmered and darkened, for these waters were rich in microscopic sea life, which supported vast shoals of sardine that rose to the surface to feed, to be fed on in turn by flocks of shrieking seabirds that plunged upon them from high above, hitting the water in little cotton puffs of spray.
A thicker bank of mist took the tall ship in its damp cold grip so that when Robyn glanced back she could only just make out the ghostly figures of the Captain and her brother on the quarterdeck.
Then just as suddenly they plunged out again into open sea, and sunny skies. The clouds which had covered them for all these weeks rolled away towards the south while the wind itself increased in strength and veered swiftly into the east, whipping the tops from the waves in graceful ostrich plumes of curling spray.
At the same moment Robyn saw the other ship. It was startlingly close, and she opened her mouth to shout – but a dozen other voices forestalled her.
‘Sail oh!’
‘Sail fine on the port quarter.’
She was close enough to make out the thin, tall smoke stack between the main and mizzenmasts. Her hull was painted black with a red line below her gunports; five guns each side.
The black hull had a sinister air to it, and the pile of her canvas was not shimmering white as that of Huron, but was sullied dirty grey by the belchings from her smoke stack.
Mungo St John played the field of his telescope swiftly over her. Her boilers were unlit, there was not even a tremble of heat from the mouth of her stack. She was under easy canvas only.
‘Tippoo!’ he called softly, and it seemed that the mate’s bulk appeared beside him with the magical speed of a genie.
‘Have you seen her before?’
Tippoo grunted and turned his head to spit over the lee rail.
‘Lime-juicer,’ he said. ‘I seen her last in Table Bay eight years back. She called Black Joke.’
‘Cape Squadron?’
Tippoo grunted, and at that moment the gunboat bore up sharply and at the same time her colours broke out at the masthead. The crisp white and bright scarlet of her ensign shrieked a challenge, a challenge that all the world had learned to heed, and heed swiftly. Only the ships of one nation on earth need not heave to the instant that challenge was flown. The Huron was immune, she had only to hoist the Stars and Stripes, and even this importunate representative of the Royal Navy would be forced to respect it.
But Mungo St John was thinking swiftly. Six days before he sailed from Baltimore Harbour, in May, 1860, Abraham Lincoln had been nominated presidential candidate for the United States of America. If elected, as seemed highly likely, he would be invested early in the New Year, and then one of his first actions would surely be to grant to Great Britain the privileges agreed by the Treaty of Brussels, including the right of search of American ships upon the high seas which previous American presidents had so steadfastly denied.
Soon, perhaps sooner than he expected, Mungo St John might have to run his clipper in deadly earnest against one of these ships of the Cape Squadron. It was a heaven-sent opportunity to match his ship, and to observe the capabilities of the other.
He swept one last glance about him, that took in the sea, the wind-driven lines of foam upon it, the piled white pyramids of canvas above him and the evil black hull to leeward – and then his decision was made easier. On the wind came the thud of a gun, and a long feather of gunsmoke spurted from one of the gunboat�
�s bow-chasers, demanding instant obedience.
Mungo St John smiled. ‘The insolent bastard!’ To Tippoo he said, ‘We’ll try him on a few points of sailing,’ to the helmsman beside him, softly, ‘Put the helm down.’ And as Huron paid off swiftly before the wind, beginning to point directly away from the threatening black ship, ‘Shake out all reefs, Mr Mate. Set fore and maintop, hoist studding sails and skysails, crack on the main royal – yes, and flying jib too. By God, we’ll show that grubby little coal-guzzling lime-juicer how they build them down Baltimore way!’
Even in her anger, Robyn was thrilled by the manner in which the American worked his ship. With his crew swarming out across the yards to the reefing points, the mainsails swelled out to their full extent, dazzling white in the sunshine, and then high above, seemingly at the very base of the aching blue heaven itself, new unfamiliar-shaped sails popped open like overripe cotton pods and the long, graceful hull reacted instantly to the pressures thrust upon her.
‘By God, she sails like a witch,’ Zouga shouted, laughing with excitement, as she knifed into the crests of the Atlantic rollers and he hustled his sister back from the bows before the first green sheets of water came aboard and swept Huron’s decks.
More and still more canvas burst open, and the thick trees of her masts began to arch like drawn longbows under the unbearable pressures of thousands of square feet of spread sails. Now Huron seemed to fly, taking off from the crest of each roller and smashing into the face of the next with a crash that shocked her timbers and jarred the teeth of her crew in their skulls.
‘A cast of the log, Mr Mate,’ Mungo St John called, and when Tippoo bellowed back, ‘A touch better than sixteen knots, Cap’n!’ the Captain laughed aloud, and strode to the stern rail.
The gunboat was falling astern as though she was standing still, although every inch of her grey canvas was spread. Already she was at extreme cannon range.
Again powder-smoke bloomed briefly on her black bows, and this time it seemed that it was more than merely a warning, for Mungo St John saw the fall of shot. It struck the crest of a roller two cable lengths astern and skipped across the green torn waters, before plunging beneath the surface almost alongside Huron’s tall side.
‘Captain, you are endangering the lives of your crew and passengers.’ The voice arrested him and St John turned to the tall young woman who stood beside him, and he raised one thick black eyebrow in polite enquiry.
‘That is a British man-of-war, sir, and we are acting like criminals. They are firing live shot now. You have only to heave to, or at the very least show your colours.’
‘I think my sister is right, Captain St John.’ Zouga stood beside her. ‘I do not understand your behaviour either.’
Huron staggered violently to a larger crest, driven wild by the mountainous press of sail, Robyn lost her balance and fell against the Captain’s chest, but instantly pulled away, colouring fiercely at the contact.
‘This is the coast of Africa, Major Ballantyne. Nothing is what it appears to be. Here only a fool would accept a strange armed vessel at its face value. Now if you and the good doctor will excuse me, I must attend to my duties.’
He strode forward to gaze down at the maindeck, judging the mood of his crew and the wild abandon of his ship. He unhooked the keyring from his belt and tossed it to Tippoo. ‘The arms chest, Mr Mate, a pair of pistols to you and the second mate. Shoot any hand who attempts to interfere with the setting of the sails.’ He had recognized the fear which gripped the crew. Most of them had never seen a ship driven like this, there might easily be an attempt to shorten sail rather than have her run herself under.
At that moment Huron put her shoulder into the Atlantic and took it aboard in a solid roaring green wall. One of the topmast men was not quick enough on to the rat-lines. The water plucked him up and flung him down the length of the deck, until he crashed into the side, and lay huddled against the bulwark like a clump of uprooted kelp on a storm-driven beach.
Two of his fellows tried to reach him, but the next wave drove them back as it came pouring aboard waist-deep and then cascading in a roaring white torrent over the side, and when it was gone the fallen topmast man was gone with it and the deck was empty.
‘Mr Tippoo, look you to those skysails, they are not drawing as they should.’
Mungo St John turned back to the stern rail, ignoring Robyn Ballantyne’s horrified and accusing glare.
Already the British gunboat was hull down and her sails were barely discernible amongst the grey beards of the breaking Atlantic rollers, but suddenly Mungo St John saw something change, and he reached quickly for the telescope in its slot under the chart table. There was a fine black line, as though drawn in Indian ink, extending from the tiny cone of the Englishman’s sails for a short way across the bumpy horizon.
‘Smoke! She has her boiler fired at last,’ he grunted, as Tippoo appeared at his shoulder, with the pistols thrust into his belt.
‘One screw. She no catch us.’ Tippoo nodded his round shaven head.
‘No, not downwind in a full gale,’ Mungo St John agreed. ‘But I’d like to try her on the wind. We’ll harden up now, Mr Mate, on the port tack again. I want to see if I can run up to windward of her and pass her out of cannon shot.’
The unexpected manoeuvre caught the gunboat commander completely off-guard, and he was a few minutes slow in altering course to cut the shorter leg of the triangle and prevent the Huron wresting the weather gauge from him.
Huron went streaming past him at extreme cannon shot hard on the wind, her yards sheeted around as close-hauled as she would sail. He tried a shot across her dipping, plunging bows with no visible fall of shot, and then he came around to follow her into the wind, and immediately the flaws in the design and construction of his ship were pointed up as clearly as they had been while both ships were running before the wind.
In order to accommodate the heavy boiler and machinery to drive the big bronze screw under her counter, serious compromise had been made with the design of her masts and the amount of canvas she could carry.
Within five miles it became clear that with all sail set and the boilers belching a solid greasy slug of coal smoke over the stern the Black Joke could not point as high into the wind as the beautiful tall ship ahead of her. She was drifting steadily away to leeward, and although the difference in their speeds was not as dramatic as when running before the wind, yet Huron was head reaching on her steadily.
The gunboat’s commander pointed her higher and higher, trying desperately to hold the bigger ship directly over his bows, but all his sails were shaking and luffing before he could do so.
In a fury of frustration, he took in all his canvas, stripping his poles bare and relying only on the drive of his steam boiler pointed up directly into the very eye of the wind, much much higher than Huron could sail. But the gunboat’s speed bled away when her screw received no help from her sails. Even though her mast and rigging were bare, the storm whistled and howled head-on through them, acting as a great drogue that slowed her further and Huron forged ahead more swiftly.
‘A bastard contraption.’ Mungo St John watched her battle with all his attention, judging her performance at every point of the wind. ‘We are toying with her. As long as there is a breath of wind we’ll romp away from her.’
Astern, the gunboat’s commander had abandoned his attempt to run the clipper down with steam power alone, and had come back on to a fine reach with all his canvas set, plugging along stubbornly in Huron’s streaming wake – until abruptly, with no warning at all, Huron sailed into a deep hole in the wind.
The line of the gale was drawn clearly across the surface of the sea. On one side, the water was darkened and furrowed by the talons of the wind, on the other, the humped backs of the rollers in the calm had a polished velvety gloss to them.
As Huron crossed that line of demarcation, the clamour of the wind which for week after week had battered their ears, fell to an eerie unnatural silence, and
the ship’s motion changed from the vital charge of a living, straining sea creature, to the patternless rolling and wallowing of a dead log.
Overhead her canvas volleyed and flapped in the directionless eddies created by her own rolling and pitching, and her tackle crashed and clattered so that it seemed that she might roll her masts clean out of her hull.
Far astern, the black-painted gunboat scrambled on eagerly, swiftly beginning to narrow the distance between them, the black column of coal smoke now rising straight up into the stillness of air, giving her a jubilant and menacing air.
Mungo St John ran to the forward rail of the quarterdeck and stared over his bows. He could see the wind two or three miles ahead clawing at the sea and ruffling it to a sombre shade of indigo, but between them was the oily undulating surface of the calm.
He swung back and the gunboat was closer, sending her smoke spurting high against the bright windswept blue of the sky, so certain of herself now that her gunports were swinging open and the stubby barrels of her 32-pounder cannon protruding from the black sides of her hull, the churning wash of her screw tumbling out from under her counter and sparkling whitely in the sunlight.
With no way upon Huron, the helmsman could not hold any course, and the clipper drifted around broadside to the on-rushing man-of-war putting her bows directly into the rollers.
They could make out the individual figures of the three officers on the gunboat’s bridge now. Again the bow-chaser fired, and the shell lifted a tall column of water so high and close under the Huron’s bows that it collapsed upon the deck and streamed out through the scuppers.
Mungo St John took one last despairing sweep of the horizon, hoping even now for a resurgence of the wind, and then he capitulated.
