The Flying Squadron

by Richard Woodman

  ‘Sit down, Tyrell, help yourself to another glass, I shall be with you directly.’

  ‘Captain Drinkwater, I don’t wish to appear importunate . . .’

  ‘Then don’t, my dear fellow,’ said Drinkwater, looking up as he sanded the last sheet and stifling Tyrell’s protest. ‘Now listen, I want you to deliver this letter to Lord Dungarth when you call on the Admiralty. It is for his hand only, and if you fail to find his Lordship at the Admiralty, you are to wait upon him at his residence in Lord North Street; d’you understand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good.’ Drinkwater rose, handed over the papers and extended his right hand. ‘Good luck, and don’t get yourself taken if you can help it.’

  Drinkwater saw, from the sudden widening of Tyrell’s eyes, that he had not, until that moment, considered the possibility.

  ‘Well, Wyatt, what d’you make of the news?’ Frey asked as the officers sat over their wine and the Patrician heeled to the gathering south-easterly breeze which promised to be the long-sought trade wind.

  ‘The American ships were lucky. I expect their gunners were British deserters. It wouldn’t have happened ten years ago . . .’

  ‘I don’t mean the American victories, Wyatt, I mean the effect their being at sea has on the safety of the East Indiamen, something you were prepared to regard as . . .’

  ‘Don’t resurrect old arguments, Mr Frey,’ Simpson cautioned. ‘Let sleeping dogs lie.’

  ‘Oh ye of little faith,’ Frey said, throwing the remark at the master, who buried his nose in his slopping tankard.

  On the deck above Drinkwater dozed in his cot. Orwig’s news was worrying. He had felt as though someone had punched him in the belly earlier, such was its impact. The latitude allowed in discretionary orders could hang an officer if he made the wrong decision more certainly than it could bring him success. There were so many options open, but only one which could be taken up. He dulled his anxiety with half a bottle of blackstrap and then settled to think the matter over. Yet the more he worried at the problem, the more convinced he was of the rightness of his decision, despite its unorthodox roots.

  The logic of the thing was inescapable; as he had said to Quilhampton and repeated in substance to Dungarth, it was not only what he would have done himself had he been in Stewart’s shoes, but what he would do if given President Madison’s choices. Over and over he turned the thing until he dozed off in his chair. After some fifteen minutes the empty wine glass slipped from his fingers and the crash of its breaking woke him with a start.

  The sudden shock made his heart pound, the wine made his head ache and his mouth felt foul. He rubbed his face, grinding his knuckles into his eyes. Bright scarlet and yellow flashes danced before him.

  ‘God’s bones!’ he exlaimed, leaping to his feet and striking his head a numbing blow on the deck beams above. He sank back into his chair, his hands over his skull, feeling the bruise rising. ‘God damn and blast it,’ he muttered through clenched teeth, ‘was I dreaming, or not?’

  Mullender looked in from the pantry and smartly withdrew. Captain Drinkwater’s antics seemed scarcely normal, but Mullender knew personal survival for men in his station largely depended on feigned indifference.

  ‘I was dreaming,’ Drinkwater continued to himself, ‘but it wasn’t a phantasm.’ He sat up, dropping his hands from his head and staring straight before him, seeing not the bulkhead, but a glimpse of a room through a gap in heavy brocaded curtains and a litter of papers spread about an escritoire.

  Had Mullender chosen this moment to enquire after the well-being of his master, he would have thought him stark, staring mad; but Captain Nathaniel Drinkwater had never been saner in his life.

  PART THREE

  A Furious Aside

  ‘O miserable advocates! In the name of God, what was done with this immense superiority of force?’

  ‘Oh, what a charm is hereby dissolved! What hopes, will be excited in the breasts of our enemies!’

  The Times,

  London,

  27 and 29 December 1812

  The Admiralty

  December 1812

  Lord Dungarth set down the stained paper he had been reading and rose from the desk, heaving himself on to the crutch which bent under his weight. The reflection of his gross figure in the uncurtained window disgusted him momentarily, until he was close enough to the glass to peer through.

  Below, the carriage lights in Whitehall threw their glimmering illumination on streaks of sleeting rain that threatened to turn to snow before the night had ended. He raised his eyes above the roof-tops and gazed at the night sky. Dark clouds streaked across, permitting the occasional glimpse of a pair of stars.

  The vision of his long-dead wife’s face formed itself around the distant stars, then cloud obscured her image and he saw only the pale hemisphere of his own bald and reflected head. The onset of the pain overwhelmed him; the attacks were more frequent now, more intense, like the pains of labour as the moment of crisis approached. He seemed to shrink on his crutch, diminished in size as death sapped at his very being.

  The pain ebbed and ceased to be an overwhelming preoccupation; he was aware of the stink of his own fearful sweat. Slowly he turned and began the long haul back to his desk. He slumped into his creaking chair and, with a shaking hand, reached for the decanter. He had given up hiding the laudanum and, with a carelessly shaking hand, added half a dozen drops to the oporto.

  Sipping the concoction, he half-closed his eyes, trying to recapture the vision of his countess, but instead there came before his mind’s eye a picture of gunfire and dismasted ships: the Guerrière, the Macedonian, with more to follow, he felt certain, the imminence of death and the opiate lending him prescience, an awareness of approaching bad tidings.

  And yet . . .

  His hand reached out tremulously, seeking the travel-stained dispatch in its curious, runic cipher. He had thought, too, that disaster and defeat were inevitable from that quarter after the news of the Russians’ abandonment of Moscow following the battle at Borodino.

  But now . . .

  He frowned with the effort of focusing on the piece of paper. He was so used to the cryptography, he needed no key to decode it, but read the words as if they headlined a broadsheet: French army have abandoned Moscow. Line of retreat dictated by Russian pursuit. Attacks to be mounted at their crossing of the Beresina . . .

  Lord Dungarth looked up at the dark window. The sleet had turned to snow. The secret dispatch was already a month old.

  ‘At last,’ he whispered as the pain gathered itself again and he drained the glass.

  CHAPTER 16

  January–February 1813

  The Dogs of War

  It was high summer in the southern hemisphere, day after day of blue skies dusted with fair-weather cumulus. Sunlight sparkled off the sapphire seas and the wavecaps broke into rainbows as they tumbled. For a week the squadron tacked wearily to windward. Gulls, petrels and frigate birds rode the invisible air currents disturbed by their passage, amusing the bored lookouts who saw nothing beyond the topgallants of the ships on either flank, though the visibility was as far as the eye could see. A sense of futility was borne in upon them all with their growing comprehension of the vastness of the ocean.

  In the wardroom, grumbling and criticism accompanied every meal and even the inhabitants of the lower deck, whose burden was at its lightest in such prime sailing conditions, were permeated by a gloom begun by the news of the three British frigate defeats, and daily worsened with their frustration at discovering no sail upon the broad bosom of the South Atlantic.

  As for Drinkwater himself, he endured the loneliness and isolation of his position by withdrawing into himself. Even Quilhampton’s diligent and loyal support seemed less enthusiastic, a remnant of past friendship, rather than the whole-hearted support of the present. Quilhampton was friendly with Frey, Drinkwater noted, supposing them both to be presuming on long acquaintanceship and discussing his own descent
into madness.

  Perhaps he was going mad. The thought occurred to him repeatedly. Loneliness and guilt combined to make his mood vacillate so that he might, had Pym known it, be set fair to become a subject for the worthy surgeon’s treatise on the pendular personality. On the one hand his metaphysical preoccupations saw the quest he had set the squadron upon as a cogent consequence of all that had occurred at Castle Point. On the other loomed the awful spectre of a mighty misjudgement, a spectre made more terrible by the ominous threat explicit in the wording of his commission: you may fail as you will answer at your peril.

  He became unable to sleep properly, his cabin a prison, so that he preferred to doze on deck, wrapped in his cloak and jammed in the familiar place by the weather mizen rigging. As the watches changed, the officers merely nodded at the solitary figure whose very presence betrayed his anxiety and further amplified the depression of their own spirits.

  And yet they knew, for all its interminable nature, that such a state of affairs could not go on for ever. One morning, an hour after dawn when the squadron had tacked, reversed the consequent echelon of its advance, and sent the lookouts aloft, the hail from the masthead swept aside the prevailing mood:

  ‘Deck there! Icarus’s let fly her t’garn sheets!’

  ‘A fleet in sight!’ Frey said with unnatural loudness, rounding on the figure standing by the larboard mizen pinrail. ‘The India fleet?’

  ‘Pray to God it is,’ someone muttered.

  ‘Mr Belchambers,’ Frey said curtly, ‘get a long glass aloft. Mr Davies, rouse the watch, stand by the main t’gallant sheets and let ’em fly, and Mr Belchambers . . .’

  The midshipman paused in the lower rigging. ‘Sir?’

  ‘Make sure Cymbeline has seen and acknowledged our repetition.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir,’ Belchambers acknowledged, his reply verging on the irritated, as though weary of being told how to suck eggs. Frey ignored the insubordinate tone and approached Drinkwater, who had detached himself from support and, dopey with fatigue, his face grey, stubbled and red-eyed, stumbled before the circulation returned properly to his legs.

  ‘Thorowgood may have trouble seeing us, sir, in this light.’

  ‘You have a talent for stating the obvious this morning,’ snapped Drinkwater testily, ‘let us see what Ashby does.’

  Frey bit his lip and raised his speaking trumpet. ‘Mr Belchambers!’ he roared at the midshipman who paused, hanging down at the main upper futtocks. ‘Get a move on, boy!’

  As the morning advanced ship after ship hove over the southern horizon, the unmistakable sight of laden Indiamen running before the favourable trade wind. Far ahead of them they watched as Ashby’s Icarus beat up towards a small, brig-rigged sloop-of-war, which was crowding on sail to intercept and identify the first of what must have seemed to her commander to be a naval squadron of potentially overwhelming force.

  From aloft Belchambers passed a running commentary to the quarterdeck. ‘Eighteen sail, sir . . . The escort’s a brig-sloop, sir . . . looks to have a jury main topmast. No other escort in sight, but I can see sprite coming up from the south-west, sir . . .’

  ‘What of Cymbeline?’ Frey roared.

  They saw Belchambers swivel round. ‘She’s coming up fast, sir, stun’s’ls set alow and aloft!’

  ‘I can see her from the deck, Mr Frey,’ Drinkwater remarked.

  After the private signals had been exchanged, the Icarus wore round in the brig’s wake and the two men-of-war ran alongside each other. The brig then veered away from the thirty-two and the men now crowding Patrician’s deck saw her run down towards them.

  ‘Heave to, if you please, Mr Frey,’ Drinkwater ordered, rubbing his chin. ‘I’m going below for a shave.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir,’ Frey replied, grinning at the captain’s retreating back. The sight of the East Indiamen, splendid symbols of their country’s maritime might, transformed the morale of the Patrician. Idlers and men of the watch below had turned out to see the marvellous panorama; Frey could forgive the cross-patch Drinkwater, even provoke a grudging acknowledgement of his misjudgement from Mr Wyatt.

  ‘Told you so, Wyatt,’ Frey muttered, reaching for the speaking trumpet beside the master.

  ‘You’re right — for once.’

  Frey grinned and raised the megaphone: ‘Stand by the chess trees and catheads! Clew garnets and buntlines there! Rise tacks and sheets!’

  ‘Three ships, you say, Lieutenant?’ Drinkwater handed a glass to the young officer from the brig-of-war Sparrow-hawk.

  ‘Aye, sir, in two attacks . . .’

  ‘And the last when?’

  ‘The day before yesterday, sir. If the wind had been lighter we would have lost more, sir. As it was the India Johnnies gave a good account of themselves. We did our best but . . .’ The young officer gestured hopelessly.

  ‘You were outsailed by Yankee schooners.’

  ‘Exactly so. Beg pardon, but how did you know, sir?’

  ‘Intuition, Lieutenant . . .’

  ‘Wykeham, sir.’

  ‘Well, Lieutenant Wykeham, return to Captain Sudbury and tell him we shall do our best to assist you. Your ship is wounded?’

  ‘Aye, sir, we lost the main topmast. One of those confounded Americans had a long gun, barbette-mounted amidships on a traversing carriage. She shot the stick clean out of us and hulled us badly. We lost four men with that one shot alone.’

  ‘How many of them, enemy schooners, I mean?’ Drinkwater wiped a hand across his face as if to remove his weariness.

  ‘Six, sir,’

  ‘Any sign of a frigate?’

  ‘An American frigate? No, sir.’

  Drinkwater grunted. ‘Does Captain Sudbury anticipate another attack?’

  ‘I don’t think so, sir. We gave them a bloody nose last time. One of them was definitely hulled and with her rigging knocked about.’

  ‘It doesn’t occur to you that the hiatus may be due solely to their effecting repairs to that schooner?’

  It had clearly not occurred to either Lieutenant Wykeham or his young commander, Sudbury.

  ‘Young men are too often optimists, Mr Wykeham.’ Drinkwater paused, letting this piece of homespun wisdom sink in. ‘I have already given my squadron written orders as to their dispositions upon meeting with you. I think you had better cover the van of the convoy. Tell Captain Sudbury to act as he sees fit in the event of another attack, to throw out his routine convoy signals as has been his practice to date. My squadron will act according to their orders. However, I shall not condemn him if he gets his ship into action with one of these fellows. Tell him to aim high, langridge and bar shot, I think, if you have it, otherwise the galley pots and the carpenter’s best nails, cripple’ em, clip their confounded wings, Lieutenant, for they are better flyers then we.’

  ‘Very well, sir.’

  ‘By-the-by, in which direction did they retire?’

  ‘To the east, sir, that is why we were . . .’

  ‘To the east of the convoy, yes, yes, I understand. You had better return to your ship. Tell Captain Sudbury he is under my orders now and I relieve him of the chief responsibility, but I expect him to carry on as normal, entirely as normal, d’you see? Perhaps we may deceive the enemy, if he returns, into not noticing our presence until it is too late. D’you understand me?’

  ‘Very well, sir.’

  After the young man had gone, Drinkwater turned and stared astern. The sea, so lately empty of anything but his own squadron, was crowded with the black hulls and towering white sails of the Honourable East India Company’s ships. Craning round, he could just see Cymbeline making her way to the windward station. Ashby should be doing the same on the other wing. Once Wykeham’s boat had gone, Patrician must take up her own position.

  There was no American frigate; not yet, anyway, Drinkwater mused. On the other hand, Wykeham had informed him that the last ship to be lost was the Indiaman Kenilworth Castle and she had been carrying a fortune in specie.

/>   It cost Drinkwater no great effort to imagine Captain Sudbury’s mortification at losing three such valuable ships to the enemy; he had once been in the same position himself.*

  In the right circumstances Indiamen could, and had, given the enemy a thrashing. An unescorted convoy of them under Commodore Nathaniel Dance had manoeuvred like men-of-war and driven off a marauding squadron of French ships under Admiral Linois eight years earlier. Their batteries of cannon were effective enough, if well handled, but they could not outmanoeuvre swift gaff-schooners stuffed with men spoiling to tweak the lion’s tail and seize rich prizes to boot. During the following day Drinkwater pored over his charts, trying to divine what Stewart intended, for he was convinced Stewart commanded this aggressive group of letters-of-marque.

  Stewart would come back, that much was certain, like a pack of hounds baying for more meat once the smell of blood was in their nostrils, but with one of his vessels damaged and three rich prizes to shepherd to safety.

  Drinkwater considered the alternatives open to the enemy. Manning the prizes would not prove a problem. The privateers would have a surplus of men, indeed they signed on extra hands for the purpose, engaging prize-masters in anticipation of a profitable cruise. In all likelihood Stewart would gamble on another attack, cut out what he could, and then return triumphantly to the Chesapeake.

  Drinkwater could recapture the Kenilworth Castle off the Virginia capes, but to act on that assumption would be dangerous. Now that he had encountered the convoy he could not so easily abandon it. Yet he was prepared to wager that if another attack was mounted it would argue cogently in favour of his theory; and if events fell out in this fashion a spirited pursuit had a good chance of recovering the lost ships.