The French Admiral

by Dewey Lambdin

  Oh, Jesus, I am going to drown out here! Alan thought for the first of many times that night, his face as white as his waistcoat in his rising terror. He could easily see Feather’s boat now in all the rivulets of lightning that split the darkness, pointing almost fully upriver to try for an eventual landfall on the distant point. They had the point on their right abeam, but were not making much headway, he realized, hard as the hands might strain at the oars. Governour Chiswick sat in the middle of the sternmost thwart before Lewrie, and even he was looking a bit worried.

  “Should we put back in?” he shouted.

  “Best to keep bows on to this,” Alan shouted back. “We’re committed now!”

  He took off his cocked hat before he lost it overboard and stowed it under the stern thwart, just as the first truly fat drops of rain began to pelt at them with some force. Lewrie looked astern to Carey’s boat and saw that he was close up still, with another boat behind him bearing what looked like a party of Jagers. The lightning was so continuous that he now had no trouble seeing in any direction.

  “Goddamn!” Alan cried as the rain began in earnest. It came down in buckets; rather, it did not come down, but slanted in from the west at such an acute angle that he was almost blinded, and he envied the oarsmen who had their backs to it. His clothing was soaked right through in seconds as though he had just plunged into the river. Lightning or not, he was blinded by the force and volume of the rain and had to mop his face with a sodden sleeve. The wind picked up velocity and began to whine, and the boat began to pitch most alarmingly as it butted into the wind-driven waves rolling downstream. There was no way of seeing the face of his watch, but he judged it about midnight, and the tide was at the peak of the flood. Slack water from seaward could not even begin to counteract this sudden spate. He tasted once again over the side; it was fresh.

  He looked up with alarm, squinting in panic, having as much trouble seeing in the teeming rain as he would opening his eyes in the middle of a stinging wave of seawater. He could not find Feather’s boat ahead of him. All he could see was a tumbling field of whitecaps and small rollers. He was in the middle of the channel, he thought, right where it narrowed down and the rushing river gained speed from being confined by the bluffs and the shallows beneath them.

  “Boat compass,” Alan shouted to Governour, pointing at the box between his feet. “Hold it up for me to see!”

  The soldier did as he was told after Alan had shouted himself hoarse three times. Alan leaned over it closely, mopping his face with a free forearm. He took hold of the mahogany box and swung it about to establish north.

  Goddamme, I’m headed due west! he thought, unable to establish his position or direction now that the rain acted like a curtain beyond the reach of the oar looms. I have to bear off, maybe two points, no more, or we’ll broach. Oh, what a goddamned cow this barge is. She’s going to kill all of us!

  He sat back and put a bit of larboard helm on, and the effect was immediate and terrifying. With the slightest small increase in the bow’s freeboard exposed to the wind, she slopped crazily and began to broach to starboard, bringing cries of alarm from all concerned. He steered back to starboard to bring her bows back into the wind—it was all the direction the poor excuse for a boat would stand.

  “Stroke!” Alan wailed. “Coe, drive ’em hard!”

  For that brief near-broach, the men had lost the stroke, and it took precious seconds to disentangle the confused men, to get the oars back into the water again or retrieve them when they had been snatched out of the rower’s hand by the rush of the current. It took too much time to get the men coordinated once more, stroking together to bring the most efficient force to bear against the elements.

  Alan motioned for the boat compass again and peered into the box. They were back to a westerly heading, which was all they could manage.

  “Chiswick, keep an eye on it,” he ordered. “Tell me when I am not heading west.”

  “Right!”

  For the most part, he could discern that the storm was coming out of the west, and if he kept the boat right on the eye of the wind and the worst rain, he was heading aright. He was enough of a sailor by then to feel the difference in pressure on each cheek by rotating his head back and forth, and correct his steering by that until Chiswick would shout at him with an additional correction.

  “Stroke, damn you! Stroke like the devil!”

  They were flagging, even if failing did mean their lives. Too many trips had sapped their strength, and too much was being demanded of them now. With the best will in the world, the men were slowing down and no longer able to pull with their full force. Alan could feel how the barge was beginning to wander to either side between strokes, only kept head-to-weather when the oars were dug in.

  “Coe, make some of the soldiers to double up on the oars!”

  It didn’t help much. The soldiers were not experienced with boats or the heavy labor of a seaman’s life. Their effort didn’t crab anyone.

  But that was about all that could be said of them.

  The lightning still crashed down without pause, pulsing great pale blue glows in the curtains of rain, and the rain still came down heavy enough to sting the skin, even through a broadcloth coat.

  “Makin’ water, Mister Lewrie!” Coe gaped, pointing at the bottom of the boat. There was about three inches of water sloshing about in the bottom that had not been there before. “A little salty, I thinks!” Coe concluded after lapping at a handful.

  Sufferin’ Jesus, what else tonight? Alan shuddered. It was not bad enough they were in the middle of a storm the like of which he had not seen even in the middle of the ocean, but the quickly slapped-together barge was now working her seams and beginning to leak.

  “Bail!” Alan commanded. “Use hats, anything!”

  That took the soldiers off rowing duties so they could fill their wide-brimmed hats to scoop up water and fling it overboard, but it put all the onerous and aching burden of rowing back on the crew’s exhausted hands.

  Oh, shit, Alan thought as the boat began to yaw once more after a particularly laggard stroke. “More way, starboard!”

  There was finally no holding her. The barge rose up over a roller and sloughed off to starboard with a trembling that ran right through her. Then they were broaching to, no matter what anyone could do at oars or the tiller. She tipped wildly, almost going onto her beam ends before putting her bow downwind and throwing everyone into a pile of thrashing bodies and screaming throats. Without thought, Alan put the tiller over up to windward to ride her through and succeeded in keeping her from spinning about like a leaf in a millrace. She came back to an even keel.

  “We’re headed . . . east-south-east!” Governour told him.

  “Thort we woz goners fer sure!” Coe panted, his eyes wide in his fear. “God a-mighty, praise God!”

  There was enough way on the barge that Alan could steer easily as she was driven by wind and current. He experimented back and forth, peering over the compass box, then sat back on the sodden stern thwart.

  “We’ll be pooped if we keep on like this, won’t we?”

  “Don’t know why the stern hadn’t been driven under arready, sir.” Coe shuddered. “If we could get bows on, I’d put out a sea anchor.”

  “Make one up now, then,” Alan ordered. “Give me six hands keeping a hard stroke to keep us faster than the current until you’re ready with the drogue. Let the others have a rest.”

  Coe’s sea anchor was three oars lashed together into a complicated cross, with a wooden bailing bucket lashed to the point of intersection so it would sink once over the side and provide more of a drag through the water. There was plenty of line from the light boat anchor up forward to use for lashings. As Coe and another man worked, and the six unfortunate oarsmen stroked away to outrun the creaming river waves that threatened to swamp the stern of the barge, everyone else sagged down in abject misery, keeping their faces out of the wind and driving rain, which was still coming down thick and
hard enough to choke the unwary who looked up to see where they might be. In the quick flashes of lightning, Alan could see only with difficulty without drowning in the open air, but he was alarmed to note that landmarks or groves of trees were sliding astern at a fair clip. Not that he recognized a damned thing, but the scenery was continually changing as they raced the river current for survival.

  Finally it was done.

  “Ahoy, there!” Alan yelled. “We’re going to be coming about. Coe is going to put over a drogue, and then we are going to have to turn her into the wind. Easy all for now, but stand by!”

  “I’ll trail the line from the starboard side, sir,” Coe told him. “We’ll need everythin’ from larboard!”

  “Stand by to give way, larboard! Stand by to back water, starboard!”

  “Over she goes!”

  The contraption hit the water and began to drift away out of sight behind them as the bucket filled with water and the barge continued on, too big and exposed to the wind and moving much faster downriver. Coe eyed the remaining line as it ran out. “Ready!”

  “Helm’s alee!” Alan cried. “Give way, larboard! Back water, starboard! Pull, men, pull!”

  Just as the drogue began to exert pressure on the tow line, the boat swung about, drawn by the effort of her crew, and finally by the drag through the water of the drogue. She slewed about and ended up with her head into the wind once more.

  “Easy all!”

  They had to wait to see if the drogue would be effective. Alan could feel the tiller kicking from side to side like a live thing. With a sternway on her, they could lose the rudder if they were not careful; the pintles and gudgeons were never made to steer a boat going backwards for very long.

  “What now?” Governour Chiswick asked finally.

  “We fuck about out here until the wind dies,” Alan told him, getting some of his courage—and his color—back after the barge had steadied and no longer threatened to go arse over tit. “And don’t ask me where we are, because I ain’t got a clue. Best I can say is out in a boat on the water.”

  “Wish we’d liquored our boots before this journey,” Governour said with a sudden grin. “Do much of this?”

  “First time for everything,” Alan confessed.

  “Scared me so badly I would not have trusted mine arse with a fart,” Governour said. “I’m not a strong swimmer.”

  “You’re doing better than I. I can’t swim a stroke. Most sailors can’t,” Alan replied. Unconsciously his hand crept into his shirt to feel the small leather sack hung around his neck. On Antigua, Lucy Beauman had given it to him after one of her more trusted older slaves, Old Isaac, had made it for him. It was reputedly a sure protection against drowning or other dangers of the sea. He had been leery of it, since it smelled somewhat of chicken guts and other cast-off organics when first presented to him, but for her sake he had tied it about his neck and had forgotten its presence until then. Whatever it contained, it was desiccated and only rustled now and again when jostled. Not that he was exactly eager to inspect the sack’s contents. Some things were best left unknown.

  “Coe, can we get the hands back on the oars for a while? Just to keep from being blown out to sea?” Alan shouted over the howl of the wind.

  “Aye, sir. Mebbe four at a time’d be best.”

  “Do so, then. I don’t like making sternway this fast.”

  “Four men ta the oars, smartly now. You four.”

  There was no sign that the storm was going to cease, though. It blew as hard as a hurricane, and the rain sheeted out of the sky as though it had been flung by a hateful god. Even when the lightning zigzagged on either hand, they could not see far enough to find anything familiar. The barge might as well have been driving up the Loire River in France for all they knew.

  “Wossat?” one hand at the bows called, waving off into the night in the general direction to larboard.

  “Where?”

  “Two points offen th’ larboard bow!”

  As Alan peered hard into the driving rain, he saw a shadow appear, a shadow that looked taller and wider and thicker as it approached.

  “Coe, out oars now!” Alan screamed when he determined what the strange object was. “Row for your lives!”

  It was a ship, perhaps blown free of her anchors upstream in the anchorage and running wild for the sea under the press of wind. And it was headed directly for them. If they did not get out of the way, their barge would be trampled under her forefoot and snapped in two.

  “Row, damn you, row! Ahoy, the ship! Ahoy, there! Have you no eyes, you stupid bastard? Anyone have dry priming? Fire into her!”

  No one did; all the firearms in the boat were soaked. All they could do was scream and thrash with the oars. The barge was under the jib-boom and bowsprit. An oar was shattered on the hull of the strange ship. The stern bumped into her hull just below the larboard forechains, and a white face appeared over the ship’s rail, staring down in surprise. Then they were seized by her creaming bow and quarter wave.

  The barge thumped her stern heavily on the ship once more before being swirled out of reach, shoved aside like a piece of floating trash, and the ship proceeded on. In a flash of lightning, Alan could see that she was not running free, but was under way, with a foretops’l rigged loose, the yard resting on the cap of the foretop, and the sail billowing and straining against a crow-footed “quick saver” to keep the sail from blowing out too far to the horizontal.

  “Ahoy, you duck-fucker!” Coe shouted from leather lungs.

  “Ahoy!” came the answering cry through a speaking trumpet.

  “Give us a line!” Alan called, but before anyone aboard that ship could respond, she was almost out of reach. There was one more flash of lightning that illuminated her stern. And there, in proud gilt letters below the transom windows of her captain’s cabin, was the name “Desperate.”

  “You planned it this way, you sonofabitch!” Alan roared, quite beside himself. His ship was getting away, and he was not in her! They had been given permission to try, and the storm would be a great opportunity to blow past the guarding frigates if they were even able to remain on station in such a gale. There would be a spate of water over the shoals, and the tide had peaked and was now ebbing out into the bay. The night was black as a boot, and it would take an especially vigilant Frog lookout to even see her until she was close aboard. And she had most of her artillery to crush anyone who crossed her hawse as she flew on by, invulnerable to any answering broadside. “Forrester, you bastard, you’re aboard, I know it! Why not us? Why?”

  “Easy, Mister Lewrie, sir. Le’s just ’ope she makes it.”

  Yes, he thought. They’ll think I’m raving if I keep on. But how calm do I have to be now? We’re left in the quag up to our hats, and we’ll end up in chains for the rest of the war.

  “Ease your stroke, Coe,” Alan ordered after taking a few deep breaths. “No sense in killing ourselves now.”

  “Er, Lewrie,” Governour Chiswick said, raising one foot out of the water sloshing in the boat, “it’s getting a bit deep.”

  “Christ!” Alan exclaimed. “We must have been stove in. Coe, we’re leaking aft, I think.”

  “’Ere, sir,” Coe said after kneeling down to feel the side timbers. “They’s a plank busted.”

  “Take a soldier’s blanket and staunch it. You soldiers, start bailing again.”

  And thank you very much, Captain Treghues, for kicking me up the arse in passing, Alan thought miserably. Christ, how much worse can this get, I wonder?

  The wind finally began to drop in intensity, and the rain turned into a steady downpour. The lightning and thunder drifted off into the east toward the Atlantic, and the night became generally black once more. Alan peered into the face of his watch and could barely discern by the last lightning to the east that it was after four in the morning. The water was no longer set in rollers, but was beginning to flatten out under the press of rain, and the rudder no longer kicked like a mule.

&n
bsp; “Coe, wake ’em up,” Alan ordered, reaching over to shake his senior man awake. “I think we can begin to row in this.”

  Coe woke up, sniffed the wind, and dug a hand over the side to take a taste of the water. He spat it out quickly. “Real salty, Mister Lewrie.”

  “We must be far down the river, almost in the bay,” Alan said. “More reason to get going quick as we can.”

  There was a ration box of ship’s biscuits in the barge, along with the barrico of water, and they all had a small breakfast and a sip of the water to wake them and give them a little strength for their labors. The soldiers had small flasks of corn whiskey to pass around generously, and that woke the hands up right smartly.

  They rowed up to their drogue and pulled it in. The salvaged oars were most welcome, since three had been shattered by their collision with Desperate as she had blown past them. As they got a way on once more, the rain began to ease off to an irritating drizzle. The river was still in spate, though, from all the rain that had been dumped into it from the swollen streams inland, plus the tidal outflow, and they made painfully slow progress. There was just the first hint of grayness to the night when Alan next looked at his watch; half past five in the morning and dawn was expected at quarter past six.

  “We shall have to hurry, or we shall be spotted by the French batteries on the right, where Mister Railsford said the marines were,” he urged, though what the point of their efforts was, he did not know. Yorktown would be abandoned by then, and the Rebels and French would be ready to probe the silent redoubts and ramparts. The troops ferried to the Gloucester side during the night would probably be breaking out now.

  They would miss the boat; the army would charge into the few Rebels and French on the north side and would be well away by the time Alan and his crippled barge could make it, and they would land in a hornet’s nest of aroused soldiery who had been robbed of final victory. Their reception did not bear thinking about. Neither did the fact that he was in a boat slowly sinking from under him, possessing only what he had on his back or in his pockets. He had left his valuables in his sea-chest once he had gotten back aboard ship and had not come equipped for a long stay. Alan had thought there would be time to get back to Desperate to be part of her attempt to break out. Soon, someone unworthy would be rifling his possessions, looting his gold and thinking him dead or captured while they sailed away, showing the French a clean pair of heels.