The Black Ship

by Dudley Pope

  By midnight the squadron had closed the shore and were running down to the westward. So far everything had gone well: ‘We had succeeded to my wishes’, Pigot recorded. Finding the anchorage was not too difficult: they could see the outline of Point Juan Rabal, which was low and prominent, and backed by a conspicuous mountain whose peak looked like a ruined castle. Having identified the Point, the rest was easy: the privateers and their prizes were in the anchorage two miles to the westward. Pigot therefore hove-to his squadron a mile offshore, far enough out to avoid outlying rocks but close enough to hear the weird yells and squawks of wild animals, and the half boom, half swish of the waves breaking fretfully on the beach. In each of the ships the order had been given to beat to quarters and their boats were towing astern.

  Pigot ordered the prearranged signal to be made to the other ships for them to cast off their boats. Those of the Hermione went ahead, with the launch commanded by Lt Reed leading and the rest followed on astern. Once again Reed, the Hernuone’s Second Lieutenant, was commanding an expedition, instead of Harris, the First Lieutenant. This appears an insignificant point; but in fact Reed was Pigot’s favourite from the Success, while Harris was not.

  Reed steered the launch for the shore until he judged he was only a few hundred yards from the beach and then turned to starboard to run down parallel with it until he found the anchorage. Meanwhile Captain Pigot, knowing the speed the boats would be able to row and allowing for the fact that the current against them would be weaker close inshore, where the water was shallower, ordered the squadron to proceed under easy sail so that he could keep level with the boats but a mile to seaward.

  The next half-hour was a tense period for Pigot: it was so dark that he could not see the boats as they crawled along under muffled oars, playing their dangerous game of follow-my-leader. He had planned the attack, brought the ships to the prearranged position, and sent the boats off into the night: now he was entirely dependent on the men in those boats. Supposing the master-at-arms in one of the other ships had been slack in checking that none of the men had been drinking—a shout or laugh from a drunken seaman in one of the boats would raise the alarm. So would any noise if two boats collided, or one of them ran on to a rock. A chance encounter with a native fishing craft might result in the boarding parties mistaking it for a French guard boat… Any one of these eventualities would rob him of a cutting-out expedition’s most effective weapon, surprise.

  The squadron had run almost exactly two miles and, according to Pigot’s reckoning, should have been abreast of the privateer’s anchorage. Suddenly he saw a scattering of sparks, then several red flashes, as if huge furnace doors were being hurriedly opened and shut. A few moments later the faint popping of muskets echoed across the water, followed by the dull, booming overtones of heavy cannon, as the French 32-pounders opened fire. A few spurts of water, just discernible in the darkness, showed that the cannon were firing at the ships of the squadron, although the musket fire was clearly aimed at the cutting-out parties.

  Pigot promptly ordered the Hermione’s guns to fire back at the French batteries and, as he had previously instructed, the guns of the rest of the squadron joined in. Their shot were unlikely to do the French any harm; but the tremendous ripple of flashes as they fired their broadsides would show the French that five warships were in the offing and might persuade them that, whatever the boats close to the beach were doing, the heaviest attack would develop from the warships offshore.

  Soon Pigot discovered that the cutting-out expedition had taken the French completely by surprise: that by the time the enemy had spotted the boats and opened fire with muskets the boarding parties were already ‘in possession of many of the vessels and had one actually under way’.

  ‘At about four o’clock’, he wrote to Sir Hyde, ‘the vessels were all in possession of our people and standing out with the land breeze, except two small row boats which were hauled up on the beach and could not be got off. And’, he added, ‘it is with particular satisfaction that it has been executed without a man being hurt.’

  Soon after daylight a convoy of nine ships (including eight American merchantmen) was under way for the Mole, escorted by Pigot’s little squadron. The names, home ports, destinations and cargoes throw an interesting light on the kind of trade being carried out, and the complete details which Pigot enclosed in his report to Sir Hyde are given as Table II opposite.

  TABLE II

  9

  THE SHIPWRECK

  * * *

  A FEW DAYS after Pigot and his little squadron arrived at the Mole with the convoy of prizes, Sir Hyde had to transfer Otway from the Mermaid to the Ceres. The Admiralty had ordered the Mermaid to follow the Success back to England for a dockyard refit at Plymouth, and Otway naturally did not want to return with hen Fortunately Captain James Newman of the Ceres had no such objection, so they exchanged commands.

  So far as the ships were concerned, the exchange made no difference to Otway since they were almost identical. However, when Otway went on board the Ceres, read himself in and looked over the crew, he received a shock. Reporting later in writing to Sir Hyde, he said that ‘there was a great want of regularity in her; the ship’s company were accustomed in a great measure to do as they pleased, and drunkenness seldom considered as a crime’. He found that in addition to their taste for liquor and distaste for discipline, a greater part of the frigate’s crew consisted of ‘old men, boys and foreigners’. Referring to the drunkenness, he told Sir Hyde that ‘having been from my infancy trained up in the service with different ideas’, he was ‘endeavouring to put a stop to such pernicious example’.

  By the middle of May Sir Hyde Parker had agreeable orders for both the Hermione and Ceres: Pigot was to take Otway and the Ceres under his command, and the two ships were to cruise along the Spanish Main off the coast of the province of Caracas (now Venezuela). Pigot’s orders were to seek what would be called in modern jargon ‘targets of opportunity’: any enemy craft-merchantmen, warships or privateers that he could find.

  The actual voyage to the patrol area, some 750 miles, gave Otway and his officers an opportunity to get the Ceres’s crew into some sort of shape. In the Hermione the new Master, Mr Edward Southcott, who had recently joined the ship, was proving valuable: competent in handling and navigating the ship, he knew the Caribbean well, and he also had the knack of handling men.

  The frigates arrived off the eastern coast of Caracas, finding it bold and mountainous, fringed with steep cliffs. Turning westwards they passed close to La Guaira, the entry port for the capital of the province, without sighting a single sail, and carried on past Puerto Cabello, heading north-westward towards the Dutch island of Curaçao. The mainland runs west and then north to Point Tucacas, forming the Gulf of Triste. It is well named, because for more than thirty miles the coast is low and sandy, backed by swamps of mangroves whose roots rear out of the water like tortured, arthritic limbs.

  The coastline of the Gulf makes two sides of a triangle, while the frigates’ course to clear Point Tucacas formed the third. Pigot wanted to pass twelve to fifteen miles to seaward of the Point, and he worked out a course of west-north-west, with five degrees of easterly variation to be allowed in the compass. This would keep them clear of the only navigational hazards in the area, which were three low-lying mangrove cays tucked just inside the far end of the Gulf and separated from the shore by a narrow channel. They should pass the Point next morning.

  The course for the night was signalled to the Ceres keeping station a quarter of a mile away on the Hermione’s larboard quarter, and then with its usual almost dramatic suddenness, the sun set—there is little twilight in these latitudes—and some haze added its quota to what soon proved to be a very dark night. Meanwhile the usual routine on board continued without interruption. The log was hove and showed they were making five knots with the quartering wind, and in the Hermione the officer on deck for the first watch, from eight until midnight, was John Forbes, the Master’s Mate. At mi
dnight Lt Harris relieved him. There were no special night orders, and Forbes passed on the usual information and instructions: the course was west-north-west, ‘nothing to the westward, with the same sail set’; the Captain was to be called if the weather changed; watch the Ceres in case she made any signals; and the Captain to be called at daybreak.

  With Lt Harris on the quarterdeck were, apart from the man at the wheel, two quartermasters, Thomas Dugal, a Scot from Perthshire, who had come from the Success, and John Goodier, a young Irishman from Cork. In six different positions in the ship were lookouts, and on the ship’s present course the most important of them was the one on the larboard bow, sitting on the cathead and watching an arc from ahead to forty-five degrees to larboard. This was the landward side, and the man placed there, William Watkins, later claimed that his eyesight was bad.

  The wind stayed at east-north-east, so there was no sail trimming to be done. The log was hove from time to time, and every thirty minutes the half-hour sand glass was turned as the quartermaster struck the bell slung in the belfry on the fo’c’sle. Every twenty minutes, in obedience to Captain Pigot’s standing orders, Lt Harris called out to all the lookouts to make sure they were awake and alert.

  One, two, and then three bells had been struck by Goodier, and finally, just before 2 a.m., he went to the fo’c’sle ready to strike four bells dead on the hour. The ship was still making five knots through the water, wallowing slightly with the quartering wind; and aloft the great yards creaked while the down-draught of wind from the sails arching overhead made the seamen shiver occasionally. The man at the wheel, his face faintly illuminated by the light in the binnacle, moved slightly from time to time as he turned the wheel a spoke or two, counteracting the butt of a wave on the bow or the wayward pressure of an extra puff of wind.

  Beyond the narrow world of the ship it was so dark the sea seemed to merge into the night sky without a hint of an horizon. Suddenly Lt Harris turned to Dugal and asked him if he could see land ahead. The quartermaster peered for a few moments, then said no: he thought it was only a cat’s paw of wind (which, ruffling the surface of the sea and making it appear darker, often gives the illusion of land).

  Harris was not satisfied and called out the same question to Watkins, perched on the larboard cathead over the creaming bow wave. Watkins shouted back that he could see nothing.

  Harris was deciding whether or not to alter course—perhaps unwilling to seem foolish if what he had seen was only a cat’s paw—when at that moment the other quartermaster, John Goodier, came back aft from the fo’c’sle, where he had just struck four bells. Harris went to meet him on the gangway.

  ‘Can you see land ahead over there?’ he demanded.

  Goodier turned and looked forward over the bow. ‘I am sure it is, sir’, he replied.

  With this confirmation there was no time to see if it was only the loom of the land—more of a sensation of a distant coastline than a sight of it—or the actual shore only a few hundred yards away.

  Harris gave a string of orders. ‘Fetch the Master and call all the hands!’ he told Goodier, while to Dugal he said sharply: ‘Quickly, take the wheel and put the helm hard a’port’. This would turn the ship to starboard, away from the land. (At this period, incidentally, ‘port’ was being used for helm orders although the old term ‘larboard’ was retained for other purposes.)

  While Dugal hurriedly spun the wheel, the seamen on watch ran to the sheets and braces, hauling the great yards round to trim the sails so that the ship could steer closer to the wind. Dugal could turn the Hermione some sixty degrees before the wind would be blowing too far ahead to fill the sails and keep the ship moving, forcing Harris to tack.

  The ship was still turning when the first of the officers and off-watch seamen roused out of hammocks and cots by Goodier’s stentorian ‘All hands on deck!’ came scrambling up from below, bleary-eyed and bewildered. But the Hermione was not the only ship in peril: the Ceres, a quarter of a mile away on the larboard quarter, was that much nearer the land. ‘Tell the Gunner to prepare a gun,’ ordered Harris. A shot would warn the Ceres that something was amiss, in case she had not sighted the land.

  The first of the Hermione’s officers to reach the quarterdeck after Goodier’s bellowing was Edward Southcott, the Master. Harris swiftly explained the situation and ordered Southcott to take over while he went down to the Captain.

  Southcott ran to the wheel (he said afterwards he could see land about a mile off) and told Dugal not to take the sails aback—to sail as close to the wind as possible, which meant steering due north, but not to tack the ship.

  The Gunner, Richard Searle, was by now forward on the main deck getting a gun ready for firing (only the lashings had to be cast off and the gun primed, since it was kept loaded for emergencies) and John Forbes, the Master’s Mate, had run to the fo’c’sle, which was his station at the order ‘All hands’.

  Lt Harris in the meantime had gone down to warn the Captain.

  Pigot was awake in a few moments, and Harris reported: ‘I’ve seen land ahead of us, sir—very near.’

  Pigot at once sat up in his cot and was just swinging his legs out to stand up when, as he wrote later, ‘I felt the ship strike several times’. But the noise of water gurgling past and the creak of the tiller ropes as Dugal moved the wheel showed that whatever the frigate had hit she was still under way and, what was just as important, her rudder had not been torn off.

  He ran up on deck, closely followed by Harris, to find the sea-men straining and grunting as they finished heaving round the yards and trimming the sails: Southcott now had the ship hard on the wind, beating out to the northward. Captain Pigot then glanced out over the larboard quarter (roughly in the direction the Hermione had originally been sailing) and, he claimed later, he could just see land. A gun then boomed out forward as Searle fired the warning shot for the Ceres, and Pigot listened to the steady chanting of the leadsman in the chains, telling him how much water the Hermione had under her keel. There was precious little, but very soon each successive call showed it was getting deeper.

  After firing the warning shot, Searle walked aft along the starboard gangway towards the quarterdeck, glancing across the ship and out into the darkness on the larboard beam. He was surprised to see two cays: they were small, they were low like hummocks in a flat field, and they were close to the ship: there was no mistaking them, even though it was a dark night.

  ‘Has anyone seen those cays?’ he called.

  ‘Where?’ demanded Pigot, walking towards him, followed by Harris.

  ‘Over there—on the larboard beam—two cays’.

  Neither Pigot nor Harris could see them at first; but Pigot put the night glass to his eye. ‘I see them! Two of them!’

  A few moments later, still peering through the night glass, he exclaimed that there was a third.

  Seeming no higher out of the water than the Hermione’s hull, they were in fact the three cays just inside the western end of the Gulf of Triste. This meant the Hermione was some fifteen to twenty miles too far south… And had Harris not altered course, she would have run up on the cays or the mainland beyond.

  As soon as Pigot assured himself the Hermione was heading for deep water, his next concern was for the Ceres: had she seen land or the cays in time to turn northwards to the open sea? Had she heard the Hermione’s warning shot? Or was she even then hard aground, or sunk after ripping open her bottom on some off-lying reef? She had not fired a warning shot; on the other hand she was not lighting flares.

  The leadsman, by then soaking wet as he hauled in the line and cast again and again, was still regularly calling out the depths at which the lead touched bottom: eight fathoms… ten… and finally twelve. With seventy-two feet of water under her keel the Hermione must be clear of danger, and Pigot gave the order to anchor.

  ‘I waited anxiously for the morning,’ he wrote later to Sir Hyde Parker, ‘with the hope that the Ceres had anchored, or been as fortunate as the Hermione in extri
cating herself from so perilous a situation.’

  The Ceres, however, had not been so fortunate—if fortunate is the appropriate word to describe the result of Lt Harris’s alertness. Otway’s First Lieutenant had been on watch with the usual lookouts stationed round the ship; but unlike Harris he had seen nothing. The first he knew of danger was when the frigate’s easy motion was suddenly interrupted by a heavy thud as the Ceres hit the first of a series of reefs running parallel to the shore. Before the sheets could be let fly to spill the wind out of the sails or an anchor let go, more heavy blows hit the ship’s hull in quick succession as she continued to buck herself across the reefs.

  By the time Otway had rushed up on deck the ship was in an uproar. Some men were letting the sheets fly, although a few more shocks would send the masts crashing over the side. Otway kept his head and as the off-watch men streamed up from below began giving orders. The sails could be left to flog for the moment: first he had to let go the anchors to stop the ship driving across any more reefs and ending up on the beach. The Carpenter had already hurried below with a lantern to see how badly the ship was leaking. But as Otway began giving instructions to get the anchors laid out he was startled to find that most of the crew completely ignored him: discipline had almost vanished. At the moment the Carpenter came up to report that water flooding into the ship was gaining on the pumps, some of the seamen were already smashing down the door of the spirit room to steal enough rum to get themselves helplessly drunk. Seven other men, running up on deck and hearing the Carpenter making his report, saw that a boat had already been lowered by some of the steadier sailors, ready to take an anchor out. Without a moment’s hesitation they scrambled down into it and, before anyone could stop them, cast off the painter and rowed off in the darkness, heading for the shore.