The Flying Squadron

by Richard Woodman

  It was true Baltimore clippers could outsail a heavy frigate, but the same frigate could outsail a laden India-man, and even a two-day start would make little difference.

  ‘Sentry!’ The marine’s head peered round the door. ‘Pass word for the midshipman of the watch.’

  When Porter’s red face appeared, Drinkwater said, ‘Make Sprite’s number and have her close us.’

  ‘Messages, sir?’

  ‘Just so, Mr Porter.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir.’

  Drawing pen, paper and ink towards him he began to draft new orders to his squadron.

  Drinkwater’s judgement proved uncannily accurate. Five jagged pairs of sails broke the eastern horizon two hours before sunset, an hour and a half after Sprite had delivered the last packet to Cymbeline. Thorowgood threw out the alarm signal without firing a warning gun, which proved he had digested his orders on receipt. Patrician had not yet made the acknowledgement before her marine drummer was beating to quarters and she was edging out of line, skittering laterally across the rear of the convoy, as, far ahead, Sudbury’s little Sparrowhawk fired a warning gun and signalled the convoy to turn away from the threat. With luck, Drinkwater calculated, he could close the distance between himself and the point of attack as he had outlined to Wykeham. If he could trap any of the privateers within the convoy, hamper their manoeuvrability, he might . . .

  He felt his heart thump uncomfortably in his chest. Already the sun was westering. He hoped the Americans could not see too well against the brilliant path it laid upon the sea . . .

  ‘Steady, steady as you go,’ Wyatt intoned, standing beside the men at the wheel, gauging distances as they lifted to a scending sea and threatened to overrun the plodding Indiaman, the Indus, upon whose quarter they sought to hide until the privateers singled out their quarry and struck. Two officers on the Indiaman’s quarterdeck were regarding them, their attention clearly divided between the following frigate and the predatory Americans on their opposite bow. Wyatt turned to Drinkwater: ‘We’re overhauling, sir . . .’

  ‘Let fly a weather sheet, or two. I want to cross under this fellow’s stern in a moment, not across his bow.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir. Ease the fore an’ main tops’l sheets there!’

  ‘And start the foresheet . . .’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir.’

  It took a few moments for the adjustments to take effect, then Patrician slowed appreciably.

  ‘What’s Thorowgood doing, James, can you see him?’

  Quilhampton was up on the rail, telescope levelled and braced against a shroud. ‘Aye, sir. He’s tucked in behind the Lord Mornington . . .’ With his one hand Quilhampton deftly swivelled his glass at the schooners. ‘They don’t suspect a damned thing yet.’

  ‘Perhaps they can’t count.’ Drinkwater looked at the setting sun. The privateers’ strategy of attacking from the east allowed them to escape into the darkness, and silhouetted their victims against the sunset, but it made precise identification tricky. He hoped his frigates might be lost amid the convoy and thus steal a march upon the brash predators. The sooner they were occupied by the business of capture, the sooner he could attack.

  From somewhere ahead a ragged broadside rumbled out.

  ‘Deck there,’ Belchambers hailed from his action station in the main-top, ‘Indiaman has opened fire.’

  ‘Can you see the Sparrowhawk?’ Drinkwater called, levelling his own glass at the mass of sails ahead of them. Sudbury’s little brig must be five or six miles away.

  ‘Yes, sir, she’s on the wind, starboard tack, just ahead of the eastern column.’

  It was this column which was under attack and Sudbury was doing what was expected of him, attempting to cover his flank. His puny aggression was, however, being ignored by the Americans. The two leading schooners, the stars and bars streaming from their main peaks, huge pennants bearing the words Free trade and sailors’ rights flying from their mastheads, were coming down fast upon the third ship in the column, the Lady Lennox.

  All the Indiamen in the eastern column were firing now, filling the air with dense clouds of powder smoke which trailed along with the ships, driven, like them, by the following wind. The approaching schooners shortened the range with the rapidity of swooping falcons, leaving alongside their respective wakes an impotent colonnade of water-plumes from plunging shot.

  ‘Down helm, Mr Wyatt, let us try to keep those fellows in sight.’

  In obedience to Drinkwater’s order Patrician’s head swung slowly to starboard. From the quarterdeck the end of her jib boom seemed to rake the taffrail of the Indus as the heavy frigate edged out from the column of Indiamen.

  ‘Haul aft those sheets,’ Wyatt was calling. ‘Steady there, steady . . .’

  ‘Set stuns’ls, if you please, Mr Wyatt, and bring us back to the convoy’s course,’ Drinkwater ordered, keeping his voice measured, fighting the rising tension within.

  With all her sails drawing again, Patrician increased her speed and began to overhaul the Indus on a parallel heading. Beyond the Indiamen and taking his cue from Drinkwater, Captain Thorowgood followed suit. Cymbeline made sail past the Lord Mornington, which ceased her own fire, and both frigates, in line ahead, the Cymbeline leading, bore down upon the enemy schooners, partially hidden in the pall of smoke drifting in dense wraiths about the convoy.

  This smoke, which half-concealed their approach, also masked their quarry from them. The last glimpse Drinkwater had caught of the privateers had revealed the most advanced of the pair slipping under their chosen victim’s stern preparatory to ranging up on the Lady Lennox’s port side, while her confederate did the same on the starboard beam.

  The boom of a heavy gun floated over the water and Drinkwater recalled Wykeham’s report of a traversing cannon mounted amidships in one of the schooners. The moment to press his carefully planned counter-attack had arrived.

  He swung around. The remaining three corsairs were in the clear air to windward and astern of them, working round to the southward of the convoy.

  ‘Where’s Sprite?’ he asked Quilhampton.

  ‘There, sir!’ Quilhampton pointed. In a gap between two Indiamen Drinkwater caught a glimpse of the British schooner beating up to place herself between three ships and the convoy. Sundercombe carried his little vessel into action with an apparent contempt for the odds against him.

  ‘And there’s Icarus!’ Ashby’s frigate was in silhouette. Only her foreshortening against the sunset as she swung identified her as a warship. Even as Drinkwater watched, the bulk of the Lord Mornington interposed itself as they swept past. He would have to depend upon Ashby’s steadiness in support of Sundercombe to guard the convoy’s rear.

  ‘Cymbeline’s coming up alongside the outboard schooner, sir!’ Quilhampton reported, his voice shrill with excitement, and Drinkwater whirled round.

  They had dropped the Lord Mornington astern and were almost up with the Windsor, the East India Company ship next ahead of her and directly astern of the Lady Lennox. The Windsor was hauling her yards, a row of white-shirted lascars straining at the braces clearly visible, as she pulled to port to avoid the fracas erupting under her bow. She was also still firing her guns and these presented a greater threat to the overtaking Patrician than to the low, rakish schooners grappling her sister-ship ahead.

  ‘Cease fire, damn you!’ Drinkwater roared at the offending Company officers who turned in astonishment at the apparition looming out of the smoke astern. They must have been aware of Cymbeline overtaking them, but had clearly not seen Patrician coming up hand over fist in her wake.

  ‘God damn, we’ve got ’em!’ shouted Quilhampton jubilantly, dancing a jig on the rail and bringing a laugh from the men at the wheel and the quarterdeck guns whose comprehension of events was as confused as that of the officers of the Windsor. Drinkwater drew himself up in the mizen rigging to get a better view. The pall of smoke rolled slowly along with them, lifting like fog, but at sea-level it was clear and he could see the hull
of yet another Indiaman, her name blazoned in gold letters across her stern below the windows of the great cabin which reflected the glory of the sunset: Lady Lennox. A schooner was fast to either of her sides like hounds on a stag’s flanks, except that the privateer on the Indiaman’s starboard beam was crushed between Cymbeline’s hull, and boarders were pouring down the frigate’s tumblehome like a human torrent, the air full of their shouts and the spitfire flashes of small arms.

  Even as Thorowgood’s men scrambled down the side of their frigate to board the schooner, men from the second schooner to port were boarding the Indiaman.

  ‘Mr Moncrieff!’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Your men to open fire on those boarders.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir!’

  ‘What is it?’ Drinkwater addressed Midshipman Porter, redder than usual from his run up from below.

  ‘Mr Frey says the guns won’t depress enough to hit the enemy, sir.’

  ‘Boarders, Mr Porter, through the gun ports as soon as we’re alongside.’

  Beside him Moncrieff’s marines jostled, levelling their muskets on the hammocks in the nettings, drawing back the hammers and flicking the frizzens. The air crackled with the vicious sputter of musketry and the solider boom of cannon as somewhere forward, in defiance of the laws of ballistics, several guns were fired. Amid the smoke and racket, Wyatt, Quilhampton, Moncrieff and Drinkwater bawled their orders as Patrician ranged up alongside her quarry.

  ‘Douse the stuns’ls . . . rig in the booms and look lively there!’

  ‘Steady, steady as you go . . .’

  ‘Another point to starboard, Mr Wyatt, if you please. Crush ’em, damn it, and don’t overrun her!’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir!’

  Drinkwater looked up, gauging the diminishing distance, before Patrician’s bulk sandwiched the Yankee schooner against the Lady Lennox. At the Indiaman’s stern an American officer was hacking at the ensign halliards, the last rays of the sun flashing on the sword blade. He looked up, suddenly aware the ship bearing down on them from astern was not another Indiaman, as he had supposed, but a second British frigate. Drinkwater could clearly see him turn and bellow something, he even thought he caught the noise of his order above the shouts and screams and clash of steel. Moncrieff had seen the man too.

  ‘Marine!’ he bellowed, his face distorted by excitement, ‘Hit that bastard beside the ensign halliards!’

  ‘Yessir!’

  There was a crash which sent a tremor through the Patrician as the big frigate’s starboard bow drove into the larboard quarter of the American schooner and she ground her way past. The ebb and flow of men upon the Lady Lennox where American, Briton, lascar and Chinaman contended for the deck in a dozen desperate fights, seemed to freeze for a brief moment as the impact of the Patrician’s arrival made them stagger.

  Into this mêlée Moncrieff’s marines poured a withering fire. Drinkwater saw the man at the Indiaman’s ensign halliards drop his sword, spin round and fall from sight. Men began sliding down the Lady Lennox’s side, Americans, Drinkwater guessed, trying to regain their own ship. Beyond the Lady Lennox’s farther rail, the bulk of the Cymbeline dominated the second schooner, invisible to Drinkwater’s summary gaze. He looked down. The deck of the crushed schooner lay exposed, the caulking worming from her sprung deck planking, the long gun on its traversing mounting jammed as its crew fought to swing it round at the Patrician. With a thunderous crash the main and fore chain-whales gave way under the compression of the Patrician’s hull and the schooner’s masts came down, a mass of spars, sails and cordage which obscured the marines’ targets and hid the unfortunate Americans from their vengeful enemies.

  From the gun ports below, like imps of hell intent on some terrible harvest, dark shapes in the gathering shadows, the gun-crews squeezed through, dropping on to the schooner’s decks. They rooted under the canvas with their pikes, savagely pitch forking at every movement in a wild catharsis of relief after weeks of fruitless cruising, venting pent-up emotions and repressed urges in an orgy of licensed butchery so that the schooner’s deck assumed the bloody aspect of an ampitheatre of death.

  The sight revolted Drinkwater and he picked up a speaking trumpet.

  ‘D’you strike, there?’ he shouted, ‘Strike, sir, and put an end to this madness!’

  A man, an officer by his torn blue coat and brass buttons that gleamed dully in the fading light, fought his way clear of the encumbering bunt of the huge mainsail and waved his hand. It was covered with blood which fell upon the canvas beside him. Drinkwater recognized him as the man who had, a few moments earlier, been on the point of hauling down the Lady Lennox’s ensign. Somehow he had regained his own deck under Moncrieff’s murderous fire.

  ‘Hold your fire, Moncrieff. Cease fire there, cease fire!’

  The officer on the deck below him staggered and Drinkwater realized the schooner was sinking beneath his feet.

  ‘Mr Q,’ he called, ‘have a boat lowered. Mr Davies is to take the survivors off, and pass word to the surgeon to expect some badly wounded. Mr Porter, recall your gunners before they lose their heads completely.’ He raised the speaking trumpet again. ‘Lady Lennox ’hoy!’

  An officer in the panoply of the Honourable East India Company appeared at the rail. ‘Have you suffered much?’ Drinkwater enquired.

  ‘A score or so killed and twice as many wounded, mostly lascars and coolies, sir,’ the officer said dismissively. ‘We took round shot through the hull, but we can plug the holes.’ Drinkwater recalled the heavy traversing cannon now hidden under the wrecked top-hamper of the schooner.

  ‘What’s the news from the starboard side?’ Drinkwater called.

  ‘Much the same. Your frigate’s hauling off with the enemy secured alongside. My commander, Captain Barnard, presents his compliments and his deepest sense of obligation to you, sir, and desires to know your name.’

  ‘My respects to Captain Barnard, sir,’ Drinkwater replied. ‘My name is Drinkwater, Nathaniel Drinkwater, and I am glad to be of service.’

  ‘You have saved the Company a fortune, Captain Drinkwater.’

  ‘I am glad to hear it . . .’

  ‘I know that man,’ Moncrieff’s voice suddenly announced, cutting through the calm that followed the surrender and the exchange between Drinkwater and the Lady Lennox’s officer. ‘That fellow staring up at us; he was in the Potomac.’

  Distracted, Drinkwater looked down again. The officer with the shattered hand was swaying, the stain of blood on the canvas beside him spreading darkly.

  ‘God’s bones,’ Drinkwater blasphemed, ‘get him aboard at once. It’s Tucker!’

  *See A Private Revenge.

  CHAPTER 17

  February 1813

  The Flying Squadron

  ‘Who commands you?’ Drinkwater asked. Ashen-faced, Lieutenant Tucker lolled in the chair, eyes closed, panting with pain. His roughly bandaged hand with a tourniquet above the wrist lay across his breast. Quilhampton stood anxiously at his shoulder.

  It was growing dark in the cabin and other matters clamoured for attention as night fell. ‘Come, sir, answer. You may see the surgeon the moment you have told me what I want to know. Who commands you?’

  Eyes closed, Tucker shook his head. Drinkwater and Quilhampton exchanged glances. ‘It’s Stewart, isn’t it, eh? Captain Stewart?’ Drinkwater raised his voice, cutting through the fog of agony clouding Tucker’s consciousness, ‘late of the Stingray.’

  Tucker’s eyes flickered open; the small affirmative was enough for Drinkwater. ‘Is there a frigate with you?’

  There was no doubt, even in his befuddled state, of Tucker’s surprise. ‘Frigate . . .’ he murmured, adding a second word that Drinkwater failed to catch.

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Didn’t hear, sir, answered Quilhampton, bending over the prisoner.

  ‘Come, sir, you’re a damned pirate. You ain’t a naval officer and can’t expect exchange in a cartel. Answer me and I’ll do my
best to see you aren’t thrown into Dartmoor Gaol. In the meantime you need the services of my surgeon. Is there a frigate in the offing? An American frigate?’

  Something like comprehension passed a shadow over Tucker’s face, he moved on the chair, tried to draw himself upright, shook his head and muttered, ‘Not an American . . .’

  ‘He said, “Not an American . . .” ’

  ‘I heard him, James . . . A French frigate, then? Is that it? There’s a French frigate to the eastward?’

  Tucker’s face crumpled, he closed his eyes tightly, and sank into the chair. The bandages wrapped around his stump were sodden with blood.

  ‘Good God!’ Drinkwater ran a hand through his hair, ‘ ’Tis worse than I thought . . .’ He looked up at Quilhampton. ‘James, I’ll stake my hat the lost Indiamen and a French frigate are to the eastward . . . I’ll have to explain later. Be a good fellow and see to Tucker here.’

  ‘I’ll get him below, sir . . .’

  ‘No, he’s a brave fellow, we’ll spare him the indignity of Pym’s cockpit. Have Pym operate on him here.’

  Drinkwater stood for a moment beside the wounded American and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘You’ve betrayed nothing, Mr Tucker, I assure you, merely confirmed my suspicions. Mr Quilhampton will attend to you, he knows what it’s like to lose a hand. Give him some laudanum, James, I fear I’ve used him barbarously.’

  Running on deck Drinkwater cast a quick look about him. Night was upon them. The convoy was to the north-north-west, etched black against the last gleam of twilight. Both Patrician and Cymbeline had detached themselves from the convoy and lay hove-to in its wake. All that remained of the schooner Patrician had crushed was some wreckage, dark debris on the grey surface of the ocean. Thorowgood was busy putting a prize-crew aboard the other which, a master’s mate in one of Cymbeline’s boats was just then reporting to Lieutenant Gordon, had proved to be the Shark of Baltimore.