by Seth Hunter
‘So when you say, he is your own Bonaparte …’
‘Well, I confess I was thinking more of his “bombast” – as your admiral puts it. Not so clever in the military line. But with a bit of help from the French he could surprise us all. In a year’s time he could be sitting where I am now.’
‘And he thinks he can trust them? The French, I mean.’
The governor eyed him shrewdly. ‘Good question. I wonder. I would not have thought he was that naive – but he knows enough to make use of them, put it that way. Professes to have a great enthusiasm for the Revolution. A few years back he was calling himself Citizen Tipu.’ He gave a bark of laughter. ‘Oh yes. There was even a Jacobin Club in Mysore, would you believe? Man’s a bigger tyrant than King Louis and he supports the Revolution. Still. I suppose you could say the same for the men running France these days.’
‘Does he have any communication with them?’
‘With Paris? Well, that is another good question. It would have to be overland, of course, by way of Persia and the Ottoman Empire. Much the same way you came. He has sent envoys to Paris, we know that. And the French have sent officers to train his army. Two or three hundred of them.’
‘And is it any good?’
‘The army? Hard to say. Until we start fighting them. Most of his troops are Hindus, which may be a good thing from our point of view.’ Duncan noted the raised brow. ‘Nothing against Hindus – as soldiers. We have plenty of our own. But I am not sure how they feel about fighting for a Musselman. Especially one who has usurped their own rajah. He takes care not to offend them, mind, in the matter of religion. He has about 30,000 troops at his command. Not much in the way of artillery, from what I hear. Uses rockets, instead.’
‘Rockets?’
‘Things that go whoosh. Lots of sparks. Got blades on them. Scares the pants off the elephants. They’d put the wind up me, too, I don’t mind telling you, if I saw one coming at me. I hear Cornwallis took a strong dislike to them in the last war.’
‘And what about the sea?’
‘The sea?’ Duncan was puzzled.
‘Does he have any naval forces at his command?’
‘Ah. Big plans as far as a navy is concerned. Not reached fruition yet. He built a massive dockyard at Mangalore. Plans to build a navy to match our own, he says. Given time, he might. At the moment it is mostly grabs and gallivants. You won’t know them. Local craft. Gallivants are big row boats, galleys, I suppose you might call them, grabs are more in the sambuk line but bigger – two-masted dhows, lateen-rigged – coastal craft; useful on the rivers, too. Eight or ten guns at most.’
‘And they are based at Mangalore?’
‘They are. Mysore, as you may know, covers a good deal of southern India – from the west coast almost as far as Madras. Managalore is their biggest port, halfway down the Malabar Coast. Tipu has renamed it Jalalabad. It is on the backwaters, just behind the shore – very narrow entrance – and they have built a massive great fort there. We will talk more of that later.’ The governor glanced out of the window. The storm seemed to be moving out to sea. Good. The gods were on his side after all. Today, at least. He came to a sudden decision, or half of one.
‘Well,’ he said, reaching for his hat. ‘You had better come and see your squadron.’
Chapter Eleven
The Bombay Buccaneers
They were moored in a long line in the deep-water channel between two islands – Elephanta Island and Butcher Island, according to the chart – seven or eight ships of war, perhaps more, the end of the line lost in the thickening haze. A battle fleet in miniature, for most appeared to be gun brigs or even smaller vessels, built to fight pirates and catch smugglers, not to fight the French. Nathan doubted if they had one decent broadside between them, though they looked capable enough for the job they were designed to do, with their sleek lines and their chequered gunports, the company standard flying proudly at their sterns.
As the little Fly cruised down the line, a cable’s length to windward, the governor provided Nathan with a summary of their principle features and fighting abilities.
‘Antelope, brig, fourteen guns, just under two hundred tons. Captain Henry Blake. Had her since she was built in 1793. Built of teak – they all are. In the yards at Surat. Best yards in India, best in the world, so far as I am aware. Knock your Deptford and your Chatham into a cocked hat. I know what you Navy fellows think of teak. Splinters turn septic. Oak gives you a clean wound, teak you’re a dead man. All my eye. Oak or teak, they’ll both kill you, if the splinter goes in deep enough – and if the splinter don’t, the surgeon will. Better than oak any year, teak. Stronger, sweeter-smelling and lasts longer. She’s not been out the water since 1793, the Antelope, and look at her. Fastest ship in the squadron and she’ll still be going strong when she’s fifty. Can’t say that for many of your royal ships, if any. What’s this?’ As they approached the next in line they could see her name painted across her stern, but Duncan told him anyway: ‘Comet, brig, ten guns, sister to the Fly, one hundred and fifteen tons, built this year. Not been in action yet. Captain Thomas Cutler, came out in 1796. Ex-Navy man. Lost a leg at the siege of Calvi. Faster than the Fly – Hale won’t thank me for saying so, but she is. Eagle, snow-brig, sixteen guns. Jethro Foley. Another ex-Navy man. Threw a strop when his admiral called him a whore monger and came to us – we get a few like that. Nothing wrong with him except his temper. Fine seaman. Navy’s loss, our gain. Ah, now this – this – is our flagship. Bombay, frigate, thirty-eight, just over six hundred tons.’
Nathan’s interest grew apace, for this was a proper fighting ship, though he doubted if Duncan had got the tonnage right; she looked bigger than that to him – she’d be a fifth-rate in the service. Thirty-eight guns made her the equal of any frigate in the King’s Navy, though he wondered what calibre they were; the ports were closed so he couldn’t see from where he stood. If they were 18-pounders she would pack a considerable punch.
Duncan was still rattling away. ‘Biggest in the fleet – and the oldest, built in 1773. Picket is commodore. Charles Picket. He won’t be aboard now, though. That fellow waving his hat at us is his flag captain, Bevis. We had better wave back at him. Yes, very good. That will do, captain, or your arm will fall off. Bit of creep, Bevis, but a good enough seaman.’
Nathan waved dutifully, while wondering where he fitted into all of this. This was not his navy, nor His Britannic Majesty’s. These were gunboats of the Bombay Marine – the Bombay Buccaneers, the Navy called them, not entirely without respect, but with the inference that they were little better than licensed pirates. HCS was their prefix. Honourable Company Ship. This was the company navy, just as Bombay was a company port, like Madras and Calcutta. And the officers and crews swore allegiance, not to the King of England or their lordships of the Admiralty, but to the merchants of the Honourable East India Company – Hale had shown him his papers with the oath he’d signed when he’d joined.
‘I, William John Hale, being appointed an Officer of the Marine on the Bombay station in the service of the Honourable Company of Merchants of England Trading in the East Indies, do swear that I will be true and faithful to the said company and will faithfully and truly execute and demonstrate the trust reposed in me, to the utmost of my skill and power, so help me God.’
Nathan had nothing against that. The company had a monopoly on all British trade between the Cape of Good Hope and the Straits of Magellan: dangerous waters, far from the shores of Britain and the protection of the Royal Navy. They needed their own ships of war. Their own army, too. The biggest army in India, by all accounts. And why not? Nathan shared the view of almost every naval officer of his acquaintance that the East India Company was one of Britain’s finest assets. The Honourable Company, as it was widely known, had been given its royal charter in the closing years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth and it had been a bulwark of British power and influence ever since. It was nonsense, in Nathan’s opinion, to talk of divided loyalties.
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But people did. The company’s success had made it a great many enemies, and not just in India. Nathan could hardly fail to be aware of the voices that had been raised against it in recent years; the most violent were frequently to be heard in his mother’s drawing room.
Nathan’s mother, Lady Catherine Peake – Kitty to her many friends and admirers – had made her home a debating chamber and a sanctuary for the most outspoken critics of government policy. Nor was she averse to speaking out herself. Nathan put this down to the misfortune of being American – a citizen of New York – and therefore incapable of restraint. Others were not so charitable. The First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Spencer, whose good opinion was a matter of some concern to Nathan, had publicly condemned her as a harridan who should be whipped at the cart’s tail, and though Nathan was naturally offended by this slander and would have taken exception to it had it been uttered in his hearing, First Lord or no, the provocation was no doubt considerable.
To Nathan’s embarrassment and dismay, his mother devoted much of her energy and a large proportion of her income to the torment and confusion of the King’s ministers, while providing encouragement and support to as infamous a bunch of scoundrels and rebels as were ever gathered under one roof. Even the House of Commons could scarce compete. One of Lady Catherine’s greatest friends was Charles James Fox, Spencer’s mortal foe and leader of the Whig Opposition. Another was Thomas Paine, though he had been forced to flee to France so that he would not be hanged for treason. And another was Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the dramatist.
Unfortunately, Sheridan did not confine his vitriol to the stage. He was also a Member of Parliament who had singled out the East India Company as the particular target of his invective. He had denounced its directors from the floor of the House of Commons. He had called them pirates and brigands. He had brought charges of dishonesty and corruption against the Governor-General, Warren Hastings. He had accused the company of making war upon the people of India and using the spoils of conquest to corrupt the entire British political system – purchasing seats in Parliament and bribing others to support them; making it impossible for any government to survive, let alone conduct its business, without the backing of the Honourable East India Company.
This was farcical, of course. Sheridan was a writer. Of farces. He made things up. He was not a bad writer. Some of his plays were quite good. Much better than Shakespeare’s in Nathan’s opinion. Much funnier, anyway. But his political opinions were appalling. It was embarrassing to admit an acquaintance with the fellow. Almost as embarrassing as having Lady Catherine Peake for a mother.
However, there was no doubt that the East India Company had its own way of doing things and it was not necessarily the way Nathan would want to do them. Rather more to the point, it might not be the way Nelson would want him to do them.
Nathan’s instructions were perfectly clear. He was to do everything in his power to prevent the French from landing troops and supplies in support of their Indian allies. This meant stopping Bonaparte from shipping men and materiel over from Egypt. It was reasonable to assume that the governor would give his wholehearted support to this enterprise. But would he?
From the moment he had met him, Nathan had been troubled by a sense of unease. As he knew little of the man’s character, he could only assume that this was down to his appearance, which, frankly, was unprepossessing. He wore a hat now, crammed down over his forehead so it would not blow off – strands of grey hair whipping around his face like seaweed, or the tendrils of a very thin octopus – but when Nathan had first seen him at Government House he had been hatless, his long, greasy locks hanging down to his shoulders, while exposing a completely bald crown, as if the thinner it had grown on top, the more he had grown it at the sides. The effect was rather of a sheep with the mange. Nathan was not generally in favour of wigs, but if ever a man should be advised to wear one it was the Governor of Bombay. Nor did his clothing help. He wore a shabby old frock coat and a dirty linen stock and his stockings bagged round his scrawny ankles like the saggy skin of an elephant. He looked less like a governor of the East India Company and more like a miserable old miser in a counting house. Perhaps there was not much difference.
In a strange way, he reminded Nathan of Napoleon Bonaparte – the first time he had met him, when he was an out-of-work artillery officer down on his luck in Paris. Bonaparte had been much younger of course, but he had been just as shabby and as threadbare, and with the same madcap schemes in his head, except that where Bonaparte dreamed of world conquest, Duncan dreamed of turning back the sea. Making the seven islands of Bombay into one and joining it to the mainland by a great causeway which would bear his name.
Well, good luck to him. So long as he focused his energies on the land and left the sea to those who were best equipped to deal with it.
‘Cornwallis, snow, 14 guns. Named after the last governor-general … fine man, fine general, fine administrator. Best we’ve had in my opinion …’ This was the man who had surrendered at Yorktown, Nathan reflected, and lost the American colonies. Then they gave him India. He supposed they must know what they were doing … ‘Stromboli, bomb ketch—’
‘A bomb ketch?’
Duncan took Nathan’s surprise for ignorance. ‘A specialist craft – the only one we have at our disposal at present. You not got them in the Navy? She carries a thirteen-inch mortar – you cannot see it from here, it is housed in a well on the foredeck. Fires an explosive charge – a shell.’
Nathan knew the purpose of a bomb ketch. He also knew what a shell was. He had assisted in the bombardment of Cadiz after the Battle of St Vincent. It had succeeded in killing several priests of the Catholic Church and a baby girl in her mother’s arms. Nathan had written a letter of protest to the admiral, expressing the view that a British naval officer had no business to be firing shells at women, children and unarmed priests: Spanish, French or otherwise. Old Jarvey – Admiral Jervis – had taken such strong exception to this that Nathan had been relieved of his command and confined for several months in the Moorish Prison on the Rock of Gibraltar. The memory still rankled.
‘But what use is a bomb ketch to the East India Company?’ he enquired, with an air of amiable bemusement, which he hoped would remove any suspicion of censure from the governor’s mind.
‘Of very great use,’ the governor replied, ‘for it enables a fleet to stand well out to sea, beyond the range of shot from the shore, while the bomb ketch lobs its bombs over the walls of a city, do you see? We call it a bombardment. We employed her at Pondicherry in 1793, when we took the city back from the French, and again in Ceylon in 1795. She might prove equally useful at Mangalore.’
‘At Mangalore?’
What in God’s name was he talking about? Mangalore was halfway down the Malabar Coast. Six or seven hundred miles to the south. Why would they wish to bombard Mangalore? With 40,000 French troops waiting to descend on them from the north?
But the governor either did not hear or chose not to respond. He was pointing across the water as yet another vessel emerged from the haze, the last in the line, right up under the guns of the fort on Salsette Island.
‘There she is – the Pondicherry.’
She was standing at some distance from the Stromboli – and hence the rest of the line – as if she shared some of Nathan’s own reservations at the company she was keeping. A big two-decker – big, at least, compared to what had come before – with the Union flag at her stern instead of the company standard.
Nelson had told him she had once been a French ship, but Nelson had told him quite a few things which turned out not to be true. In fact, her history was more complicated than that. Duncan had told him some of it on the way from Government House. She had been built in England – at the Henry Adams yard in Buckler’s Hard – as a fifty-gun fourth-rate for the Royal Navy, and had been called the Hannibal. It was just at the start of the last war and she had been sent out East to join Admiral Hughes in the Indian Ocean, only to b
e captured by the French off Sumatra.
The French had dropped the H and renamed her the Annibal – or the Petit Annibal, to distinguish her from a larger ship of the same name – and she had taken part in five fleet actions against the British. The French kept hold of her when the war ended and she had become guardship of their colony in Pondicherry on the Coromandel Coast. Bowing to requests from the locals, the French Admiralty had agreed to rename her after the port, and she had remained there, gently rotting, according to the governor, until the beginning of the present war when she was recaptured by the British.
‘I suppose we should have given her back her old name,’ Duncan said. ‘But we never got round to it. Everyone calls her the ’Cherry, even the crew. But she’s yours now – you can call her whatever you like, I suppose,’ he added doubtfully.
The Hannibal. Nathan rather liked the sound of that. He certainly liked it better than the Cherry.
She was lying stern-to and Nathan’s first impression was of a grand old lady who had slapped on a bit too much paint and varnish. There was always a certain amount of artwork at the stern of a ship of war – anything over forty guns at least – but in Nathan’s view it was better to go light on the colouring; let the carvings speak for themselves. Gold and black was his own preference. Here they had gone for gold, red and blue, with a line of dancing nymphs along the transom, picked out in white. And as they came up alongside her he saw that the theme had been continued to some extent down the length of her hull, for though she had the classic white stripes with black gunports, the strakes at the waterline had been painted red and there was a thin band of yellow between the two gun decks. It should have looked menacing, as it did on a wasp or hornet, but, combined with the other colours, it gave her a rather raffish look, as if she was dressed for a carnival.
