The Spitfire did not go directly into dry-dock for the Royal Naval squadron commanded by Admiral Sir Edward Hughes arrived in Bombay after several defeats by a French fleet under Suffren and requisitioned the facilities. Instead Spitfire lay at anchor, her leaks steadily worsening, her remaining hands at the pumps regularly day and night.
In due course Hughes sailed, encountering Suffren again off Cuddalore in June 1783. Suffren, having maintained his fleet far from a base but failed to obtain reinforcement from the Dutch, was compelled to withdraw and the eastern war petered out. In its more important north American theatre the British suffered defeat. The consequent independence of the United States of America deprived Zachariah Harper of his last chance of returning to his native land, but by the time the news reached Bombay, Harper had married Nisha and Spitfire had long since completed her docking. Harper had been made permanent commander of the latest addition to the ship-owning house of Banajee and Kite and subsequently took her on several voyages to Canton, running cargoes of opium to feed the Chinese addiction.
Several of the schooner’s people went home in the Carnatic, among them McClusky and his bride. Quietly married to Maggie, McClusky sailed for London with Grindley. He had been appointed as Kite’s agent, initially to keep a discreet eye on Grindley, but with instructions for a lease to be made out in his name for the house in Liverpool. Here in due course Maggie, with Mrs O’Riordan muttering about the madness of Captain Topsy-Turvy, reigned as Mistress Michael McClusky while her husband furthered the ship-owning enterprise of what, in the following century, became familiarly known as the B & K line.
When Banajee died and left his holdings to Kite, Kite found himself the owner of a dozen Country vessels. He made some shares over to Harper and Rahman, bringing the latter into the company as a director immediately, and the former after Zachariah declared his reluctance to go to sea any more, the profits from opium notwithstanding. In due time Jack Bow rose to be the commander of a Country Wallah owned by B. & K. In 1824 his ship lay discharging at Calcutta when the steamer Enterprize arrived in the Hughli River from Britain. Her passage time had not been exceptional and she had failed to win the prize of a lakh of silver for a speedy voyage, but in common with his officers, Bow recognised the potential of the little vessel’s propulsion.
Long afterwards, as an old man recounting his tale to young guests dining at his house in Bombay, Kite was apt to claim that his own fortunes took their remarkable turn for the better only after he had exposed the extent of Hooker’s perfidy. He liked to imply that no good could arise directly out of evil. It was a solecism, of course, a half-truth glossed in the old man’s memory by time and repetition, recounted with a certain bias in favour of its quality as a moral yarn. In fact Kite never quite knew for whom Hooker had acted, though in the years that followed he would glean a partial fact here and there. Hints would be made, as when Cranbrooke died and people muttered that it was impossible to know how much the man was worth; that despite the plaudits of his colleagues and the eulogious plaque raised by a public subscription for display on the wall of the garrison church, there was a suspicion that he had had a hand in murder.
Curiously, in spite of being larger than life, Hooker himself was almost entirely forgotten, detached from the memory of all but those who had known him. The actions of Cranbrooke and his putative accomplices were commonly thought to have had something, though no-one knew precisely what, to do with the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the governor whose actions the British Parliament investigated without result. Despite the fact that Hastings had been governor of Bengal, the mud that had been flung at him by his enemies reached as far as Bombay and still stuck. Both Cranbrooke and Hooker had, of course, spent some time in Calcutta during Hastings’ governorship, but this was scarcely proof of any complicity between any of the parties. Although not a shred of evidence could be found to condemn Hastings, those who recalled the Hooker affair would shake their heads knowingly, imputing a degree of half-comprehended skull-duggery to Hastings’ alleged and utterly unproven wickednesses.
‘There could be,’ they were wont to say, ‘no smoke without fire.’ Such superficial wisdom ignored the existence of malice and lies.
The ageing Kite, it should be made clear, never implied any such connection. If he strayed from the strict recounting of the truth, it was only insofar as life had taught him the manner in which men commonly conducted their affairs, namely, to their private advantage. Kite remained convinced the matter was a private conspiracy, that Hooker had acted in concert with a handful of men and that Cranbrooke, mindful of his duty in protecting the Company’s interests, was somehow a party to the disposal of Hooker. Kite was certain Cranbrooke had never been a party to the illegal private carriage of silver directly to London. As to the identity of Hooker’s co-conspirators, Kite went to his grave believing that Grindley was one and the dead Buchanan another. Though he had no evidence against the latter, Grindley’s half-confession combined with what Kite later discovered of the captain’s character to convince him that Grindley had been involved.
It was beyond doubt that Hooker’s dealings had been of a private nature and that he and Grindley had sought to double-cross their co-conspirators. How else could he have appeared in Leadenhall Street that fateful day when he first encountered Kite? Woolnough and Drysdale were not implicated, and Hooker’s refuge in obscure lodgings was an attempt to conceal the location of his treasure from the London agents of those in India whom he and his accomplice Grindley were deceiving. Kite’s guess was that Hooker wished to re-establish his good name with the East India Company, hence his visit that day, as a means of affording himself protection against the vengeance of his former conspirators. Kite had been right in attributing Hooker’s bodily stench to the constant fear of discovery. Hooker had been a man trapped by his own greed and personality; the fact that he did not wash only added to the irony of his constantly bearing his own guilt so palpably about him!
As to who had ordered the assassination of Hooker by his own bodyguard, Kite could only conjecture. Cranbrooke likely had a hand in the affair, and Kite was convinced that Banajee knew more than he ever admitted. Some of the ‘means’ which came so timely to Banajee’s hand and by which the old Parsee had bought up Buchanan’s share in the Carnatic derived, Kite thought, from a certain chest of silver Chinese ‘cash’ which had been spirited out of the partitioned cabin of the schooner Spitfire and had vanished into the tropic night a little before the wretched Hooker’s soul slipped into perdition through the same window.
Often, sipping a late night glass of arak and regarding the anchor lights of the ships in the bay below the terrace of his house, Kite used to chuckle to himself and drink to Hooker’s memory. He wondered how so unlovely a man could have mustered the courage to rescue Nisha from her first husband’s funeral pyre, and then concluded that it took a certain brand of courage to embark on so complicated a deception as he had done. It came to Kite one such night that Hooker did not lack the courage to carry out a bold and rash act, but what he could not sustain was the longer term. It was Kite’s theory that Grindley had persuaded Hooker to cheat their fellow plotters and that the impetuous quality of Hooker’s character had at first eagerly acquiesced, only to realise too late that the stress of anxiety had a profound physical and mental affect upon him.
Going in to their bedroom, Kite sat on the edge of the bed and told Sarah of his theory. She listened intently and then smiled. ‘I think you have unravelled the puzzle at last, my dear,’ she said, taking his hand and drawing it to her breast.
He looked at her. ‘You knew most of this, did you not?’
‘I knew of Grindley’s involvement and of Hooker’s regret at his weakness at having been persuaded to cheat his colleagues.’
‘Nisha told you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then why did you not confide in me?’
‘She was, and still is I think, terrified of repercussions. She swore me to secrecy…’
‘And p
retended she was the ignorant wife?’
‘Just so. I think she thought that none of the victims of Hooker and Grindley’s plot would believe that he had confided in her, particularly as she was an outcast native.’
‘But he found himself unable to resist the need of confession, so ill could he handle the anxiety of it all,’ Kite said, guessing.
‘Yes,’ Sarah confirmed.
Kite shook his head. ‘The fellow must have been in an agony of regret…’
‘It only added to poor Nisha’s miseries.’
Kite looked at his wife. ‘You were very close to her, were you not.’
‘But I loved only you, William.’
Kite remained in Bombay until his death of heart-failure in 1804. He was survived by Sarah, who lived to hear the news of Waterloo and the defeat of Napoleon. It had been a tradition that when one of Banajee and Kite’s vessels called at Bombay, her master paid his respects to ‘the Old Man’, as Kite came to be known. They were invariably invited to dine with Kite and his wife and after Kite’s death the tradition continued for, even in old age, Sarah retained her striking looks and was much sought after for the liveliness of her conversation. Moreover, as time passed, she possessed a glamour attaching to another age, for there were few British women in Bombay who could claim to have boarded an enemy vessel in action. Along with her shares, Sarah retained a lively interest in the company and no master failed to enjoy her society, nor to keep her fully informed as to what was going on in Liverpool, London, Calcutta, Canton, Penang or Rangoon.
Harper was killed in a dockyard accident when supervising the repair of the Queen of Malacca in 1807. Thereafter Sarah and Nisha dwelt together until Nisha’s death of a cancer. By then the McClusky’s eldest son had settled in Bombay and with the ancient Rahman and his son, had taken over the active running of the company’s Indian operations, for after the abolition of the East India Company’s monopoly in 1813, Liverpool had succeeded Bombay as the company’s headquarters and McClusky as its chairman.
Of the original crew of the Spitfire who had first arrived in Bombay in 1781, Jack Bow was the last survivor. He had been a regular visitor to Mistress Sarah and on his last visit to the old woman, had begged a likeness of her. The portrait had been executed by an Indian artist and was one of a pair, the other being the Old Man himself.
‘You shall have them both, Jack,’ Sarah said, smiling at the grave-faced middle-aged man whom she had once known as an irresponsible youth, sowing his wild oats with a reckless abandon. ‘But why on earth you should want them I have no idea.’
‘I am greatly indebted to you both,’ Captain Bow explained, ‘but I wished to have the figurehead of the Queen of Achin carved after your likeness, ma’am,’ Bow said colouring.
‘She is the new ship, now under construction, is she not?’
‘Aye, ma’am.’
‘That is very flattering of you,’ Sarah said, smiling at him. ‘And what memorial had you in mind for my poor William?’ she asked.
‘Why ma’am, take my arm, if you please…’ Bow bent and offered his hand to the old lady. Sarah rose stiffly and, taking hold of Bow, allowed herself to be led out onto the terrace overlooking the harbour and docks.
‘There is his memorial, ma’am. See: the Queen of Pegu discharging into lighters in the bay, the Queen of Java with the blue peter at the forem’sthead, and a pilot is ordered to undock the Queen of Malacca tomorrow. And that takes no account of the Queen of Achin lying in the fitting out berth.’
Sarah chuckled and squeezed her younger escort’s arm in appreciation. ‘You are a fine courtier, Captain Bow,’ she said. ‘You have no idea the extent of the difficulties he encountered.’
‘Perhaps not, ma’am,’ Bow said sentimentally, looking at the fine profile of Mistress Kite beside him. ‘But he brought us all safely into port.’
Will Kite emerge a hero or will fate deal him one last decisive blow?
Fear and fighting with sea-faring William Kite. On the High Seas from 18th century Liverpool to the Gold Coast and the American War of Independence, this thrilling historical series is breathlessly action-packed.
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First published in the United Kingdom in 2001 by Severn House Publishers
This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2018 by
Canelo Digital Publishing Limited
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Copyright © Richard Woodman, 2001
The moral right of Richard Woodman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781788632195
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Endnotes
1.
See The Privateersman « Back
2.
See The Guineaman « Back
3.
Now called the Macclesfield Bank « Back
The East Indiaman Page 29
