Killigrew and the Golden Dragon
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Afterword
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Endnotes
Killigrew and the Golden Dragon
Jonathan Lunn
For Sam
Chapter 1
Pilongs
Commander Robertson gazed up to where Mr Strachan scanned the seas from the maintop of Her Majesty’s paddle-sloop Tisiphone with a telescope pressed to his eye. ‘Will someone please tell me what my assistant surgeon is doing?’
‘Looking for the sea serpent, sir.’ A faint smile played on Killigrew’s lips.
Robertson gave his second lieutenant a withering glare. ‘The sea serpent?’ Sightings of a monstrous serpent had frequently cropped up in the press over the past two years, but few educated men took them too seriously.
‘Yes, sir. He thinks it might be some kind of aquatic dinosaur, a species which wasn’t wiped out by the Great Flood. If he can prove it he’s going to name it strachanosaurus.’
‘I’d’ve thought that mass hysteriasaurus would be a much better name,’ snorted Robertson. A tall, burly man with a leonine head, he was old enough – and able enough – to have been promoted to captain long ago, but he lacked the necessary political connections; although rumour claimed he had been offered a promotion and turned it down. A captain could command nothing smaller than a frigate, and since the Royal Navy did not have nearly enough ships to go round all its captains, such a promotion would have seen Robertson beached on half-pay. ‘Don’t tell me you believe in this dinosaur hoax, Second?’
‘I’ve seen the skeletons in the Egyptian Hall, sir. I’m no expert, but they looked genuine enough to me. And Strachan tells me these things are taken very seriously indeed by both the Royal Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science.’
‘I suppose next you’ll be telling me you believe in dragons?’
Killigrew grinned. ‘Only the one my grandfather employs as a housekeeper, sir.’
Lean and tall, Kit Killigrew wore his peaked cap at a rakish angle, the hair beneath thick and dark. His saturnine complexion was the legacy of a Cornish father and a Greek mother who had met during the Greek War of Independence: Captain Jack Killigrew, an officer of the Royal Navy on half-pay, looking for adventure and a noble cause to serve, and Medora Bouboulina, a daughter of the great Laskarina Bouboulina, the lady admiral who had been the scourge of the Ottoman Navy. Killigrew’s parents had died when he was three, and he had been brought up in Falmouth by his grandfather – another admiral in the family – until he was old enough to go to sea as a first-class volunteer. He had served against Barbary Corsairs, fought in the Syrian Campaign, and distinguished himself at the taking of Chingkiang-fu in the Opium War. Since then he had been fighting slavers on the Guinea Coast, but he had never been able to get the Far East out of his heart. He was happy to be returning, and happier still that he was doing so in peacetime.
It was a glorious day, with hardly a cloud to be seen, and the breeze lifted the sea into a strong but steady swell. The Tisiphone, six days out of Singapore and bound for Hong Kong, sailed close-hauled on the starboard tack. The brig-rigged paddle-sloop was eight-score feet from stem to stern and thirty-two in the beam. Her figurehead, a representation of the snake-haired scourge of the damned, glowered beneath the bowsprit. A single black funnel rose between her two masts, and her armament consisted of two thirty-two-pounders abaft the paddle-boxes and a sixty-eight-pounder pivot gun on the forecastle. She was a relatively small ship, intended for inshore work rather than fleet actions, with a crew of 145. It was nearly three months since she had sailed from Portsmouth to join the South China Seas squadron in the suppression of the pirates who infested these waters.
At the maintop, Strachan stiffened as he peered through the telescope. For a moment Killigrew – who tried to keep an open mind – wondered if his friend had actually spotted the sea serpent. The assistant surgeon snapped the telescope shut and reached for the speaking trumpet, but in his excitement he merely knocked it off the platform. It fell to the deck with a clang, narrowly missing a seaman, who jumped aside with a yell.
‘Hey! Watch what you’re doing, you big, clumsy… assistant surgeon, sir.’ The seaman concluded more respectfully than he had started out when he realised whom he addressed.
‘Sorry!’ Strachan called back. He was in his mid-twenties, the same age as Killigrew, with blue eyes behind wire-framed spectacles and a tangle of light brown hair. ‘But I see some ships!’ He peered through the telescope again. ‘Three of them!’
The seaman reported to the quarter-deck with the speaking trumpet which Strachan had dropped and held it out for Killigrew to inspect. There was a big dent in it where it had hit the deck.
‘God preserve us from civilian officers!’ Robertson snapped his fingers at the seaman and motioned to be given the trumpet, which he then raised to his lips. ‘If you’re going to stand in for my look-outs, Mr Strachan, be so good as to use the correct hails! In this case you should call: “Sail ho!”’
‘Sorry, sir.’ Strachan cupped his hands around his mouth. ‘Sail ho!’
‘Where away?’ asked Robertson.
‘What?’
The commander closed his eyes as if in pain. ‘In which direction, Mr Strachan?’
‘Oh! Over there.’ The assistant surgeon pointed.
‘Two points off the starboard bow,’ deduced Robertson. ‘I hope your friend knows more about dispensing medicines than he does about seamanship, Mr Killigrew. Be so good to lend him the benefit of your more expert eye.’
‘Aye, aye, sir.’
Killigrew ascended the weblike ratlines and swung himself on to the maintop. Strachan was so startled he almost fell from the narrow platform, but Killigrew seized him by the arm with one hand and, with the other, caught the telescope as Strachan dropped it.
Killigrew balanced the heavy telescope with practised ease and held it to his eye, sweeping the horizon in the direction which Strachan indicated. He could see the sails of a three-masted clipper, hull-down below the horizon, and the mat-and-rattan sails of a large junk immediately alongside it, so close it was hard to tell where the junk ended and the clipper began. It took him a little longer to make out the sails of the second junk, on the far side of the clipper.
‘Pilongs,’ Killigrew said with gut certainty.
‘Pilongs?’ echoed Strachan. This was the first time he had visited the Orient.
‘Chinese pirates,’ explained Killigrew. He collapsed the telescope and handed it to the look-out, who had joined them on the maintop. ‘Looks as if we’ve caught ’em in the act this time. Better get to the sick berth, Strachan.’
‘All right.’ Strachan climbed down through the lubbers’ hole and descended the ratlines to the deck while Killigrew took the more flamboyant route of sliding down a backstay.
‘Two small junks grappled to a clipper, sir,’ he reported. ‘Pilongs at work, without a doubt.’
Robertson ordered the boatswain to beat to quarters and sent a midshipman below to order t
he engineer to get steam up. As the hands cleared the decks for action, Lieutenant Lord Endymion Hartcliffe joined Robertson and Killigrew on the quarterdeck. A younger son of the Duke of Hartcliffe, the first lieutenant was a stout, moon-faced man in his late twenties with curly hair and watery blue eyes.
‘What’ve we got, Killigrew?’ he asked, rubbing his hands together, more for something to do with them than as a show of eagerness.
‘Two pilong junks grappled alongside a clipper.’
A call from the look-out at the masthead alerted them that the three ships were separating. Killigrew glanced through the telescope that Robertson handed him and saw that the two junks were indeed slipping away from the clipper. Even as he watched, smoke billowed up from the clipper’s deck, already visible over the horizon, and a moment later the sails and rigging were ablaze.
He handed the telescope back to Robertson. ‘The fiends have fired her.’
The commander nodded. ‘They must’ve seen us.’
The clipper soon blazed fiercely. Killigrew guessed they had caught the pirates in the act of transferring the clipper’s cargo of opium into the junks. It was all one to him if the opium was smuggled into China by Western traders or Chinese pirates; his main concern was the safety of the clipper’s crew. They were probably dead already, he thought grimly. All that he and his colleagues could do was make sure that these particular pirates had hunted their last quarry.
Even with all sail crammed on her yards, the Tisiphone could manage no more than four knots in such light airs, barely enough to keep the two junks in sight. They were still barely halfway to where the clipper had burned down to the waterline and was already sinking, before a blast from the whistle signalled that steam was up, and a moment later the deck vibrated as the paddle-wheels churned into action. The sloop’s speed trebled almost at once.
‘Deck!’ called the look-out. ‘They’re separating!’
‘Clever,’ said Killigrew, as Robertson levelled the telescope again. The junks could not hope to outrun a paddle-sloop under steam, but if they went their separate ways then at least one of them had a chance of escape.
‘The larger one’s holding her course,’ said Robertson. ‘Probably headed for the China coast. The other’s veering off to starboard. The Paracels?’
Killigrew nodded. The Paracels were an archipelago of tiny islands and reefs, a deathtrap for any ship that did not know those waters. It was a fair bet that the master of the smaller junk knew them like the back of his hand.
‘How far, Mr Yelverton?’ Robertson asked the ship’s master.
‘To the Paracels?’ As the Tisiphone’s master, Yelverton was responsible for navigation and was the most important officer on the ship – if not the most senior – after the commander. ‘Eight miles, sir. If we go after them, we may just catch them first.’
‘We ought to stop and lower a boat first,’ said Killigrew, nodding to where what was left of the blazing clipper sank beneath the waves.
‘I hardly think anyone is likely to have survived that fire,’ snorted Robertson. ‘Still, I suppose you’re right, Second. It’s our duty to check for survivors. Make ready the whaler, Bosun.’
The whale boat was the largest boat earned by the Tisiphone, apart from the thirty-foot pinnace stowed on deck above the engine room. The boatswain ordered the whaler’s crew to assemble while one of the mates prepared to take command. It was swung out in its davits and lowered until it was just above the waves. Then the Tisiphone stopped just long enough for the hands to shin down the lifelines into the boat. The clipper’s masts were the only part of her showing above the waves, now thick with flotsam: charred timbers, a sailor’s sennit hat, a few cargo chests bobbing up and down forlornly.
Killigrew stood at the bulwark as the whaler’s crew cast off. Here and there he could see bodies floating amongst the flotsam. Sharks’ fins circled already. ‘Remember, if you can’t find any survivors, at least get a piece of wreckage; something to identify the clipper,’ he said.
The mate saluted. ‘Aye, aye, sir.’
The oarsmen pulled away from the Tisiphone and the engineer started up the sloop’s paddle-wheels once more.
Lowering the boat had taken only minutes, yet the Tisiphone had lost more time in slowing down and speeding up again. But now the engines were at full steam the sloop quickly gained on the smaller of the two junks, which was only five miles away.
‘Land ho!’ cried the look-out at the masthead.
The boatswain lifted the speaking trumpet to his lips. ‘Where away?’
‘Dead ahead! Looks like an island… no, several islands.’
‘The Paracels,’ said the master. ‘If they make it to the reefs, we’ll never catch them.’
‘We might stand a chance if we went for the other junk,’ said Hartcliffe. The larger junk was still visible on the horizon off the port bow. ‘Nothing but clear water between here and China…’
‘I think we should stick to our guns and stay with this one, my lord,’ said Killigrew.
‘Any particular reason, Second?’ asked Robertson.
‘They know we can catch the smaller junk, sir. So the larger one has to be the decoy.’
‘Don’t pilong chiefs always sail on their largest vessels?’
‘That’s what they want us to think, sir. If there’s a pilong chief on board one of those junks, he’ll be on the smaller one.’
‘Is that what your ancestors would have done, Second?’ In his gruff, sardonic way, Robertson liked to tease Killigrew about his piratical ancestors: his Cornish forebears had been notorious pirates in the sixteenth century.
The second lieutenant refused to give him the satisfaction of rising to the bait. ‘It’s what I’d do, sir.’
‘À bon chat, bon rat, sir,’ offered Hartcliffe.
‘What’s that?’ demanded Robertson. Someone must at least have tried, to teach him French once, as befitted the position of navy officer, but Robertson refused to admit it now. If he possessed any social graces, Killigrew had seen no sign of them since he had rejoined the Tisiphone with her new commander. The hands called him ‘Tommy Pipes’ behind his back, a nickname usually reserved for the boatswain’s mates whose bellows were relied upon to keep everything on board shipshape and Bristol fashion. There was little work for the boatswain’s mates to do on board the Tisiphone now that Robertson was captain: he had a booming voice of his own and was never slow to use it.
‘A loose translation would be: “Set a thief to catch a thief”, sir,’ explained Killigrew.
‘I see,’ Robertson remarked gruffly. ‘And a descendant of pirates to catch pirates, I suppose?’
‘I’m an officer of the Royal Navy first and foremost, sir.’
‘That isn’t good enough, Mr Killigrew. In my command I want only officers who are Royal Navy officers first, last and everything in between. I suppose you think we can catch the smaller one before she reaches the Paracels, and then go after the other?’
‘In an ideal world, sir, yes.’
‘In an ideal world, eh? It may have escaped your notice, Second, but we don’t live in an ideal world. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking these pilongs are nincompoops. They may be unenlightened heathens without the benefits of steam and shell, but that doesn’t make them imbeciles. While we’re chasing the second junk, the first one will run for the horizon and change course the moment she’s out of sight. We’ll never catch her then.’
‘Yes, sir. Shall I order the quartermaster to change course?’
‘Never change horses in mid-stream, Second. We’ll stand by your decision and see where it leads us.’ He slapped the telescope against Killigrew’s chest, his way of asking the lieutenant to hold it. ‘Of course, if that junk reaches the Paracels before we can catch her and we end up losing both junks, you know I’ll hold you responsible, don’t you?’
‘The thought had crossed my mind, sir.’
‘We’ll see,’ harrumphed Robertson.
Killigrew checked on the junk they
were chasing. She was barely five miles away now, but had less than three to cover before she reached the safety of the Paracels. He calculated the pilongs would be within range of the bow-chaser long before that; within the next twenty minutes, as things stood.
The Tisiphone rapidly gained on her quarry. A junk – even a pirate junk armed to the bulwarks – was no match for a Western ship in a fight, not even a mere sloop of war. A direct hit from a shell would blow a junk out of the water. Nonetheless there was a palpable air of excitement on board, as there was in any stern-chase; excitement, and tension. If it came to a fight the junk had no chance of winning, but there would always be a chance she would get a lucky hit before she went down, and even one round shot amidships would be enough to sweep the deck with splinters of wood and wreak bloody havoc amongst the crew.
‘Attend to the bow-chaser, Second,’ ordered Robertson. As second lieutenant, Killigrew was responsible for the guns, although the gunner – an officer by warrant rather than commission, and therefore subordinate – was perfectly capable. ‘Give them a warning shot to begin with, if you please, though I doubt they’ll pay it much heed. As Christians we owe them the chance of mercy, if nothing else.’
‘Aye, aye, sir.’ Killigrew made his way to the forecastle. ‘Sixty-eight-pounder’s crew close up,’ he ordered. ‘Call for silence!’
The boatswain’s mate made the call to pipe down on his whistle and everyone stopped talking; not that there had been much chatter during the tense chase.
‘Make ready! ’ ordered the gunner.
The gun crew slid the gun carriage on its racers towards one of the four gun ports in the prow. Every man of the gun crew had his number and his duties, and Killigrew had drilled them time and time again on the voyage from England. These were all able seamen who could do it blindfolded.
‘One blank shot if you please, Guns,’ Killigrew told the gunner.
‘Aye, aye, sir. Remove the tompion and search!’
One of the men checked that the gun had not been left loaded. It should not have been, but one could not take any chances.
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