14-Caribbee: A Kydd Sea Adventure

by Julian Stockwin

  ‘Not to worry overmuch, sir,’ Kendall said quietly, ‘but I times these waves at less’n eight seconds now.’

  It was the master’s duty to bring sea signs to Kydd’s attention, and this was one that could be of significance in the Caribbean in the hurricane season. ‘Oh? How’s the glass?’

  ‘Fluky – we’re under twenty-nine an’ a quarter, but hasn’t dropped worth remarking these last four hours.’

  Kydd had been in hurricanes before and had no real wish to try his ship against one now; it was prudent to be wary. He glanced ahead: storms swept in from the east and all were individual in their characteristics but there were common portents. At the moment the horizon was clear and there was no high overcast. His concern diminished – it looked to be a regular blow coming in from the Atlantic, more boisterous than usual perhaps but—

  ‘Sail! I see sail – no, two – up agin the coast!’ The lookout’s hail broke into his thoughts, but already the heavier frigate with her greater height of eye was preparing to go about and Kydd lost no time in conforming. Two sail together was unusual to the point of incredible – there was every possibility that their hunt was over.

  After an hour only, the pair were visible from the deck: two pale blobs against the darker green-brown of the Cuban coast, quartering the wind and making remarkably good speed. There was movement out on the yard at Anson’s main-course – she was setting bridles to the forward leech of the sail, with bowlines stretching it out into the teeth of the wind to claw the last particle of drawing power. They must do the same, for any delay in closing with the fast-moving chase there across their bows would end with L’Aurore losing them into the distance.

  They were steering an intercepting course, paying off downwind as the two passed ahead five miles distant, then angling in to a stern chase. By now it was certain: the two were French frigates and they were declining action, preserving their ships for their primary task of hunting helpless prey.

  It settled quickly into a hard chase. The two ahead stayed tightly together and had every stitch of canvas they could abroad, barrelling into the gathering sunset. L’Aurore and Anson similarly stayed close and tried every trick they could to claw their way up on the pair, but as time passed it was clear they had little chance of hauling up on them before dark.

  Dusk drew in, the waves in contrast as they became shadowed, the white of combers startling in the gloom.

  Anson set lanthorns aglow in her mizzen-top and, without needing orders, Kydd fell in astern for the night, the weather showing no signs of easing.

  There was a moon. It was clear and bright behind them, and with its light on their sails, the enemy frigates were pitilessly revealed.

  It was an even match – the contest was anyone’s to lose, and by any man aboard: a mistake in the deceptive light, a line let go too soon putting intolerable strain on a spar, and the ship would be out of the race. Worse – for the remaining frigate it would then be two against one and a different story entirely. Of course it applied to the French as well: if it happened to them, L’Aurore had to be ready to take on the wounded bird while Anson raced on after the other.

  Nerves at concert pitch, the four ships stretched out over the sea – until everything changed. A veil of light cloud had spread up from the horizon behind them, high and innocent; now it was joined by denser, lower cloud, which crept out, hiding the stars one by one until it reached the moon. Obscured, its light dimmed, the gloom deepened, then assumed the blackness of night, and the frigates ahead were lost to sight.

  It was decision time and Kydd did not envy Lydiard the task. Because their speeds were so even, it was probable that the French would still be in sight in the morning. But they had the opportunity to get away, to make off under cover of dark. They could not turn to starboard for there lay the Cuban coast, but they could to larboard.

  The enemy commander would be weighing the advantages of a turn-away against the probability that his opponent would second-guess that he would seize the chance to strike out from his course at some point in the night, in which case his best move would be to keep right on.

  Which would Lydiard decide?

  The seas were increasing: Kydd felt their savage urge under L’Aurore’s counter, heard the muffled swearing of the two helmsmen as they fought to keep her steady, and knew in his heart what it meant. Before midnight he had confirmation – the barometer was dropping. It was the rate of fall that was the most important, and since the afternoon, it had passed the twenty-nine-inch mark with no sign of slowing.

  Somewhere out in the night bluster a storm was gathering, but whether or not it was a dreaded revolving tropical tempest – a hurricane – only time would tell.

  The lights of Anson were still ahead. The decision had been made: it was to stay on their course. Kydd could only guess Lydiard had reasoned that, all other things being equal, the French had chosen to keep on the track their mission required, quite in keeping with the overriding need to fly at utmost speed from one place to another.

  He slept fitfully in the jerking cot and woke in the crepuscular pre-dawn light, dressing hurriedly. The motion of the ship was the same but more exaggerated – could they fight a blazing action in this? He crushed the worries as they rose, for when day broke the French might well have gone, Lydiard’s decision the wrong one.

  Anson’s bulk materialised ahead as the dawn asserted itself, grey and sombre. She was plunging on regardless, a comforting sight, but all eyes were on the steadily widening circle of visibility – and then suddenly, gloriously, there were the French.

  Some way to starboard but still ahead, and appreciably closer.

  But that made for difficulties. Normally the chase would continue until either the quarry got away or were overhauled. Then it would be battle – but the conditions overnight had worsened, the winds veering even further aft. Waves were leaving long streaks as they were tumbled on before the relentless pummelling, which now had real force behind its steady streaming from the north-east, and the low cloud was starting to drive before it.

  Everything now pointed to the near certainty that a hurricane was out there and all prudent mariners would be taking steps to get out of its way. But in the fast deteriorating conditions all four still plunged on before the storm.

  ‘Mr Kendall,’ Kydd called across to the grave-faced master, ‘shall we talk?’

  ‘Aye, sir.’

  They stood together, each with a firm grip on a rope, eyeing the white-streaked seascape with concern.

  ‘Glass is at twenty-eight an’ three-fourths last time I looked, sir.’

  Kydd glanced up to the fast-moving clouds overhead. ‘Yes, it looks like a hurricane right enough,’ he said. ‘And we’re driving before it.’

  There was a rule of thumb that said to face into the wind and the whirling chaos of the centre was somewhere off nine points on the right hand.

  Kendall sniffed the wind. ‘And it veers,’ he muttered. ‘That means …’

  He didn’t have to explain it to Kydd. The winds feeding the massive gyre did so at an angle, coming in the same all around the rotating mass. Generations of mariners had learned, however, that all was not equal, finding out the hard way that while there were two directions to step out of the way of the onrushing storm only one was to be trusted.

  Turning off to the north side would find the ship up against headwinds, which by their angle would try their malignant best to suck the vessel into the centre. Not only that, as the hurricane track nearly always curved to the north, it would continue to bear down on the fleeing ship.

  A turn to the south, though, would have the same winds impelling the ship under and behind the deadly system, much to be preferred. This side was called the navigable, the other the dangerous semicircle.

  It was easy enough to find out their situation. By the same rule of thumb, it could be seen that if the direction of the wind as the storm approached continued to veer against the compass, to change clockwise, they could be sure they were in the north
; if it backed, they were in the south.

  ‘… and so we’re plumb within the dangerous semicircle,’ finished Kydd.

  ‘Sir.’

  After his two experiences of a hurricane, years in the past, every instinct tore at him to put over the helm and flee before it was too late – but he could not. While the chase went on he was duty-bound to stay with it. And while the Frenchmen had their turn-aside threatened they were staying on course, and while they did so, Anson was never going to let up the chase and Kydd must stay with her as long as he could.

  It was now a test of nerves: sooner or later they had to break and run. Who would be first?

  Meanwhile, heavy-weather precautions had to be taken before conditions worsened further.

  Royals and topgallants had long since been handed and, in conformity with Anson, a reef put in the topsails. Weather cloths were spread to give some relief to the helmsmen, and life-lines rigged fore and aft. Below decks it was vital to see to the securing of the guns, their breeching and tackles doubled and seized, while the spare tiller was laid along, and relieving tackles for its lines rigged. All that a prudent seaman should do aloft or alow was put in hand.

  As the morning wore on, a gale developed, a hard, streaming pressure that had men staggering and all canvas hard as a board, a rising doleful drone among the lines from aloft shredding nerves. Spindrift was driven from seething crests to sting and blind, and L’Aurore began to stagger, an uncomfortable surge and jerking as the underlying swell grew.

  By midday there was low racing scud above them, with an ominous thickening of the horizon to the east, an ugly darkness tinged with green edging that was the nightmare of a hurricane astern of them.

  They were now down to close-reefed topsails on fore and main but with the mizzen staysail and storm mizzen in place of a topsail on the after mast, and still she laboured. Worry set in. Time was fast running out and with it their options.

  It was crazy, but it was war. Through angry, foam-streaked seas in a hardening gale, four ships still clung to their duty, heaving and bucketing along in a chase to the death.

  Kydd looked up for the thousandth time to the straining canvas and frantically thrumming lines and knew a decision could not long be delayed. He snatched a glance astern, then at the angle of the wind on their bow and finally at the tableau of fleeting ships – and made up his mind. The first ship to break away would be L’Aurore.

  It was a giddy relief, and he could see the same in Kendall’s face when he told him.

  ‘We’s going to have a hard time of it, I’m thinking,’ he shouted, in Kydd’s ear. ‘Can’t turn aside to the nor’ard – land’s too close.’ Kydd was only too aware that the standard method of escaping the clutches of the dangerous semicircle, by taking the worst of the weather on the starboard bow and clawing out, was not possible.

  The alternative was shocking. It required that they fall in with the wind and let it drive them across the very maw of the hurricane as fast as they dared in a bid to make the opposite side before they were overtaken by the ravening storm.

  If that were not dangerous enough, there would be the fearful risk that conditions close in would be too much for their fine-lined ship and they would be forced to take in all canvas and lie a-try. When still within the dangerous semicircle, the end would be inevitable – with no ability to fight her way free, L’Aurore would be drawn unresisting into the very centre of the madness to her certain annihilation.

  Kydd looked ahead for the final time, taking in the sight of Anson, the heavy frigate still smashing her way powerfully onwards after the distant pair, just visible huddling together in the rack of flying spray and mist, then ordered, ‘Up helm!’

  Like a nervous colt, L’Aurore slewed around until the winds came in from astern and then began her mad run downwind across the path of the hurricane. Never at her best dead before the wind, she began an edgy, screwing roll that made moving about the bucking deck a trial, but she picked up speed like the thoroughbred she was. He knew that Lydiard would see them departing but he would understand what was going on. He comforted himself with the thought that, as the lightest of them all, it stood to reason that his ship would be first to break out.

  The last he saw of Anson, she was still pressing on into the wind-torn seas after her now invisible foe until all were swallowed up in the ferocious weather.

  Now it was a fight for survival, all thoughts of the chase gone. Inescapably every mile made took them closer to the heart of the storm but at the same time urged them nearer to the other side.

  This was, quite simply, a race, and one determined by the skill and nerve of the captain in keeping sail on to the last moment to avoid the dreaded lying to. And hanging over it all was the unthinkable catastrophe of but a single spar carried away under the strain, in turn throwing intolerable stress on others until L’Aurore was nothing more than a drifting wreck, to be fallen upon by the triumphant hurricane.

  The scene was grand – breathtaking and awful at the same time. Seas were lashed into a fury, their seething crests smoking white and leaving long, tiger-clawed lines of foam as they raggedly advanced in a heaving surge, seeming oddly bright under the dark, hellish sky. The heart of the hurricane was somewhere to larboard in the worst of the contrasting darkness and stinging white – it held a quality of supernatural dread, a terrible beast drumming towards them, its banshee howl making conversation impossible.

  Calmly, the master was at the compass with a slate, squinting into the wind and taking regular bearings. It was a vital task, for after plotting they would know the path the hurricane was taking. When the bearing of the centre passed across the estimated track they would know they had at last passed out of the dangerous semicircle. Until then they could do nothing but run before the blast while rolling in mad, jerking swoops.

  Then, without warning, catastrophe struck.

  Above the quarterdeck a tremendous crack sounded clear over the storm’s roar. Before anyone could react, a heavy spar swept down, with a terrifying rip and bang of straining canvas instantaneously giving way, with the tortured twanging of ropes tried beyond endurance. Skewed by the merciless blast on the ragged remnants of canvas, it crashed to the bulwark, pulping one man and sending two into the boiling sea.

  Kydd, knocked to his knees, was disoriented at first but saw the quartermaster leap to the fire-axe on the mizzen-mast and begin a frenzied hacking at the tangled mass of rope and torn canvas. Coming to his senses, he threw a glance up. The driver gaff had given way at the jaws, the hinging point of the long spar that ran out from the mizzen-mast along the top of the big fore-and-aft sail, then had tumbled down, rending the sail and leaving severed lines streaming out to leeward.

  Crushing from his mind the knowledge of the men in the sea gasping out the last of their lives, he tried to think.

  The ship was now unbalanced, beginning a fishtail slewing with canvas on fore and main only – Gilbey at the main-mast and Curzon forward would know to douse sail instantly, but where did that leave them? As near as, damn it, helpless. As if to underscore his thoughts, L’Aurore sheered to take the wind broadside; she rolled deeply and uncontrollably for she had no canvas to steady her, locked now in a drifting curve that would end in her drawn to destruction in the hurricane’s heart – the penalty for not yet having won clear of the dangerous semicircle.

  In some way balancing canvas had to be bent to the mizzen-mast, but all spars and rigging had been snatched to ruin by the plunging spar and there was nothing left on which to set any kind of fore-and-aft sail of the kind needed. It was now desperate, and minutes counted before they were drawn too far in to set anything to claw their way out. The life of every soul aboard was in his hands. What was he to do?

  Unaccountably a picture came to him of L’Aurore lying peacefully at anchor in Port Royal, the sun high and baking hot, but on the quarterdeck there was relief in the shadow cast by the tautly spread awning. At first he couldn’t see it – then, marvellously, he understood. The awning was of
the thickest grade of canvas and not too dissimilar in shape to the ruined driver, but more than that, its design incorporated a euphroe, a piece of shaped wood that allowed multiple lines to be secured to it.

  He had his sail; with the euphroe, a single block could be used to haul it up in the hammering blast and its foot could be spread by the fallen boom.

  ‘Mr Oakley!’ he yelled at the boatswain, who was heaving frantically at the wreckage. ‘Take a crew and rouse out the quarterdeck awning.’

  The distracted man goggled at him in horror and Kydd realised he must have thought his captain had taken leave of his senses. He shouted a hurried explanation and the boatswain raced to obey. Messengers were sent to the two forward masts to prepare to get under way again while the remainder of the wreckage was cut away.

  The block? Someone had to mount the shrouds to the mizzen-top to secure one tightly there or all would be in vain. Kydd gave another, searching, look up. There was the throat halliard that had previously held the jaw – it was a tackle of two blocks, now with the lower torn away, leaving the upper. It was in place. It would do.

  But how? A line had to be reeved through and sent down again to the ‘sail’ for hauling up but that line had to be strong, very strong – and therefore thick and heavy. Who could take such a weight up the shrouds one-handed? No one.

  In despair Kydd saw his idea fading on the practicalities. Cudgelling his wits he came up with a solution: a pair of seamen with a light line mounting opposite shrouds. They would use this to haul up the tail of the heavy rope, reeve it through and send it down. That was it, blast it!

  He glanced about to select those he would send. There was Poulden at his post by the wheel. It was insanely dangerous work, but the man was a natural seaman. Another? Then a mad thought entered. It was his idea: had he the right to order others into such peril? The answer, of course, was that he had the right and the duty, but a stubborn streak took possession of him.