The French Prize

by James L. Nelson

  He reached the topmast crosstrees and continued up the topgallant shrouds. Had the topgallant sail still been set, he would have had to climb all the way to the masthead to see over it. But by his orders (and he could feel that the wind had indeed built considerably, and knew he should have taken in the topgallant sail an hour before) the yard had just been lowered, the sail clewed up. Jack could feel the vibration in the mast as somewhere below him two hands were climbing aloft to stow it.

  Five feet up the topgallant shrouds Jack swung inboard and stepped onto the mast cap. Maguire, perched in the ratlines to leeward, handed him the telescope and pointed toward the western horizon. Biddlecomb could see the sails now, whitish gray with a geometric appearance that showed they were not clouds but rather something made by the hands of man, barely visible against the dawn sky. Fifteen miles or so of rolling, deep blue water separated the two vessels.

  Jack wrapped an arm around the topgallant mast. The tallow slush applied to the wood to ease the topgallant yard’s travel was sticky and black and fouled his linen shirt, but there was nothing for it. He held the telescope to his eye, swept the horizon until the sails came into view. He twisted the tube, bringing them into focus.

  “Hmmm…” he said. Schooner or brigantine … Maguire was right about that. He could make out no details, just the general profile of the distant vessel, but he had seen ships enough that he could tell a great deal from what to a landsman would be just an innocuous shape on the horizon. And he did not like what he saw. There was a pronounced rake to the masts, and the sails had a towering quality, suggesting a lofty ship. A ship built for speed. Such as a privateer might be.

  On the other hand, she seemed to be under easy sail and making toward the northward, not on a course to intercept. Jack lowered the glass. “Has she altered course at all, or made any sail change?” he asked.

  “Not what I’ve seen, sir,” Maguire said. John Burgess and an ordinary named Ratford came swarming up over the crosstrees and out along the topgallant yard, gathering up great armfuls of the beating canvas and bundling it up on the yard.

  “Hmmm…” Jack said. He raised the glass again. The sails had a pink hue, shading by the rising of the sun.

  He hasn’t seen us yet, the blind buggerer … Jack thought. From the schooner’s perspective Abigail would be right in the sun and the blazing dawn light was hiding them.

  We’d better turn and run like the devil was on our arse, he thought. It was not his decision, of course, but he reckoned that Asquith would do as he suggested. Not that it was quite as simple as that. This brigantine son of a whore was downwind of them, which meant the only way to run was a beat to windward. Any other point of sail would put the two ships on headings that would eventually intersect. But from the lean, weatherly look of the stranger, there was no chance that the tubby old Abigail would ever outrun them on a taut bowline.

  Still, if they were to haul their wind now, run off to weather while the sun was in the stranger’s eyes, they might put enough distance between them that the privateer, if such he was, would never close it. They might be gone over the horizon before the Frenchie even knew they were there.

  “Oh, he’s seen us now,” Maguire said. Jack put the glass back to his eye. He could see the distant ship was altering course, turning toward them, and he saw the gray patch of sail grow taller as they set more canvas.

  Damn … Jack wanted nothing more than to curse out loud, but he knew better than to let his building panic show in front of Maguire or any of the men. Still, he could not help thinking about what a French privateer could mean. Rotting in a prison while some wild-eyed radicals decided the fate of the ship, cargo, and crew. Fever, dysentery, starvation. The guillotine, perhaps. With everything blowing to hell in France, that possibility did not seem too farfetched. Jack swallowed hard.

  And then he had an idea.

  4

  Jack handed the glass to Maguire, grabbed a windward backstay, and slid down to the deck. The captain had gone below, and Jack was morally certain he was seated in his day cabin with a cup of tea and two slices of toast with butter and jam. It was his custom every morning, and Asquith was not the sort who liked to vary his routine, no matter what was happening beyond the confines of the ship.

  Jack ran his eyes over the sails, nodded to Lacey at the helm. “Steady as she goes.”

  “Steady as she goes, aye.”

  Jack disappeared down the scuttle, down to the little space set aside for navigation, just forward of the bulkhead that separated the master’s cabin from the rest of the lower deck. Spread out on the small table was the chart of that corner of the ocean, and spread across the chart, the smooth arc of pencil marks, tiny dark points representing Abigail’s real progress along her watery track.

  They had been dead reckoning through the night, making calculations of the ship’s position based on her speed, course, the leeway she made, and any currents setting through. Which meant her current position was a guess. A highly educated guess, to be sure, but a guess just the same. With the coming of daylight, however, Jack would be able to take bearings on Montserrat and Antigua to the east and more perfectly establish exactly where they were.

  He traced his finger along the chart. Northwest of their fix, north of their intended track, he saw the faint circle he had drawn on their voyage outward bound, two weeks before. The single word he had written in pencil. Bank.

  “Jack, what’s acting?” Asquith came out of his cabin. He had pulled on breeches and stuffed his nightshirt into them. He was still wiping his mouth with a linen napkin.

  “Schooner or brigantine, sir, and a lofty one by the looks. She altered course in our direction when she saw us, which don’t look good.”

  “No … no it does not,” Asquith agreed, though he did not seem terribly concerned. Jack figured the old man was either too cool to show any worry, or getting too infirm to recognize the danger. In the way of first mates, Jack reckoned it was the latter.

  “So, here’s what I was thinking, sir,” Jack went on, speaking slowly. “We won’t outrun him on any point of sail. But see here…” He pointed to the pencil line representing the bank. “You recall this, from when last we passed this way?”

  “Yes, I recall,” Asquith said. It was a sandbar, reaching up from the bottom to just a few feet below the surface of the sea, shifting and unmarked on any chart, one of the great hazards of navigation in that part of the world. It was invisible from deck level, and Burgess just happened to have spotted it while aloft seizing new ratlines on the larboard topgallant shrouds.

  “Well, sir,” Jack continued, “my thought was, if we set our course thus…” He traced a line on the chart with his finger that moved from the Abigail’s current position to a spot just to leeward of the bank. “We could haul our wind and scrape past this bank, still on a starboard tack. This other fellow would make to overhaul us thus…” Jack now traced out the most reasonable course for the stranger to take, if he was indeed trying to intercept Abigail. “But if we make him fall off more trying to intercept us, he’ll never weather the bank. Either he would tack and tack again, which surely would give us time enough to sail away, or, with any luck, he would not know the bank was there and run aground.”

  Asquith looked at the chart and said nothing.

  “Do you understand, sir?” Jack asked.

  “Of course I understand, I’ve not gone soft in the head quite yet, you know,” Asquith snapped. “This is all very well, but it means maintaining our present course for an hour or more, which means he gets damned close to us before we haul our wind.”

  “Yes, sir, that’s right, but there’s nothing for it. If we make a simple footrace of it, we lose. If we can hang him up on this sandbank, we might get away yet. If not, it hardly matters if we are taken within the hour or four hours from now.”

  That was the simple fact of the matter. It was geometry really, nothing more. The ships were sailing straight lines, the sides of a triangle that must meet at a fixed point. The dire
ction of the wind, the direction in which the ships could sail in relation to that wind, the location of the submerged sandbank, they were all factors in the geometric puzzle, nerves and seamanship the human aspects of the equation.

  Asquith sighed. “You make a point, Jack, you make a point. If we do nothing, we are taken, and it hardly matters how soon. Very well, we shall try this trick of yours.” He sounded resigned and not particularly hopeful. “It will be Mr. Tucker’s watch soon, but I’ll ask you to keep the deck,” he added. “I don’t think Mr. Tucker will object to having this cup taken from his hands.”

  “No, sir,” Jack agreed. He bent over the chart, marked his course, walked the line to the compass rose with the parallel rule. By the time he looked up, Asquith was already gone, up the ladder to the quarterdeck. Jack followed behind.

  The sun was well up now, the sky a cloudless blue, the distant sail considerably less distant and clearly steering to intercept them. Maguire had replaced Lacey at the helm, and Jack gave the order, “Make your course west northwest, one half west.”

  There was just the slightest catch in Maguire’s response as he repeated the order back, an order that would turn Abigail’s bow more toward the strange sail on the horizon rather than away from it, probably not the helm command Maguire was anticipating, or hoping for. His eyes shifted from sails to compass as he made the subtle adjustment of the helm. Jack called for sail trimmers to brace the yards around ever so slightly.

  “Mr. Biddlecomb,” said Asquith, who had taken a place by the weather rail, “let’s call up all hands, set up some temporary backstays, and get the t’gan’sls back on her.”

  “Yes, sir, of course,” Jack said, giving himself a mental kick for not having thought of that himself. He turned on his heel, called for all hands, called for light hawsers to be run aloft to the topgallant mastheads and set up well taut. With the temporary backstays taking the strain, the light poles would bear the topgallant sails in winds that would otherwise threaten to snap them off. Or so Jack hoped. Even with the backstays, he knew, they would be pushing their luck.

  It was here that the ship’s good reputation, and the concomitant ability to ship good men, paid dividends, as on fore-, main-, and mizzenmasts the hands swarmed aloft, sending the hawsers up on a girtline, bending them on, setting them up, with never an order given by Jack or the captain. Half an hour later, the topgallant sails, which an hour before had been stowed, were set again and straining in the twenty knots of wind blowing over the starboard quarter. Abigail heeled further over, her plunging and yawing more pronounced under the lofty canvas, but her speed was a good two knots greater.

  Jack looked across the impossibly blue water of the Caribbean. He could now see the brigantine clearly from the deck, hull up, driving hard on a starboard tack, as close hauled as she would lay. She was straining her very fabric to get at Abigail, a fat, lumbering merchantman, irresistible prey, and Abigail in turn was running for all she was worth. But not running away. And not running toward the Frenchman, either, but rather sailing for a point just beyond her bow.

  What must they think we’re about? Jack wondered. Assuming this privateer had not guessed what Jack had in mind, then Abigail’s actions would make no sense at all. Set topgallants in that wind, just so the two ships might converge even quicker? Jack hoped that his actions would sow confusion, and perhaps even suspicion or fear, in their frog-eating hearts.

  “Deck, there!” Lacey called from aloft. “She’s showing colors, sir, looks like the Stars and Stripes!”

  Jack put his glass to his eye. A spot of color was visible at the stranger’s gaff, and though it was not discernible in any great detail, Jack was all but certain it was the flag of the United States: fifteen stripes, a blue canton with fifteen white stars.

  “I think not, Monsieur Jean Crapeau,” Biddlecomb muttered to himself, his eye still to the glass. He swept the horizon to the northward, hoping to see some sign of the bank, breakers, some indication on the sea’s surface of where the treacherous sand might lie. But he could see nothing, so he lowered the glass and focused on the set of Abigail’s sails, the trim of the yards, the curve of the long wake astern.

  For twenty minutes the ships continued to converge, the details of the brigantine becoming more visible; the steeve of her bowsprit, the rake of her masts, the flash of water kicked up under her bow, the grayish-white mass of sails resolving into their individual components. They were close enough that Jack did not need a glass to see the Stars and Stripes come down, the Tricolor of France go up in its place, a switch that surprised no one.

  The sails, Jack noted, were more white than he might expect, the square sails lacking the ubiquitous black streak down the center where they had rubbed against the dirty slush of the masts. He hoped this meant the ship was new to the Caribbean, that her master did not know about the dangerous sands lurking beneath the surface to the north. It could well mean that. Or it could mean that he had been so long in those seas he needed a new suit of sails.

  Either way, this was going to be a close run thing, and it depended entirely on Jack’s being able to swing Abigail away from the privateer before the two vessels were so close that the Frenchie’s guns could do real damage, at just that point on the ocean where Abigail would be able to weather the sandbank and the Frenchman would not. He looked aloft. He looked at the ship closing with them. He looked at the horizon to the north, and he did not know what to do.

  To time this right, he had to be aloft, where he could see the sandbank, but he did not want to leave the deck, and he did not really trust anyone to handle the ship the way he wanted it handled. But he could not be in both places.

  “Captain,” he said, deciding in that moment, “I am going to the mainmast head to keep an eye out for that bank.”

  “Very well,” Asquith said.

  Jack hesitated, unsure how to say the next thing, which was not at all a proper thing to say to one’s captain, but Asquith spared him the awkward moment. “Sing out when we should haul our wind,” he said, “and I’ll set her full and by.”

  “Very good, sir, thank you,” Jack said, stuffed his hat in its familiar place in front of the binnacle, and raced aloft once more. The topgallant sails were set again, so Jack continued up the topgallant shrouds until he was able to throw a leg over the narrow yard, his heel resting on the stiff canvas that bulged with a bellyful of wind. He settled there and ran his eyes around the scene above and below.

  The sky was a great dome, stretching horizon to horizon. Off to the east was the green and rugged hump of land that was Montserrat, and to the north, Antigua. He looked down to the deck below. From that perspective it always seemed impossible to him that the ship was able to remain upright; seen from aloft it appeared too top-heavy, as if it should roll over under the weight of the masts and yards.

  Jack turned his eyes to the more pressing business for which he had made the long climb to the masthead. There, off to leeward and off the larboard bow, the French privateer was plunging along, bow rising and coming down in a welter of spray as it met each sea in succession. If they maintained this heading for another forty-five minutes, the Frenchman and Abigail would literally run into one another.

  Off to the north he could see it now, the bank, a yellowish tan stretch of sand just below the surface, a great, sleeping beast ready to wake and snatch the keels of unwary ships. The endless waves swept over it, throwing up breakers that in calmer air would have been as easy to read as a tavern sign, but with the whitecaps kicked up by the building wind and flashing across the surface of the ocean, they were not so obvious.

  Do you see that, Jean Crapeau? Jack wondered. The Frenchmen would only see it if they had a man aloft and he was keeping a bright lookout. Jack calculated the speed, the wind direction, the relative bearing of the eastern end of the sandbar. Another five minutes on this course and then they would swing around to starboard, bear up, full and by, and scrape past the sand with the Frenchie too far downwind to weather it.

  He
looked back at the Frenchman, saw a jet of gray explode from the bow, which he took to be spray kicked up by the hull, and then two seconds later came the muffled thump of the gunfire, the scream of flying metal, and a ragged hole appeared in the fore topgallant sail, forty feet ahead and a little below where he stood.

  “Damn my eyes!” Jack shouted with surprise because he knew no one could hear him. He felt something in his bowels loosen up. He had been ready for the possibility of a few long shots from the Frenchman, but he had not thought they would get so close that their shot would be up among the topgallant gear.

  His eyes were still on the hole in the fore topgallant sail when the sound of the gun and the scream of the roundshot embraced him once again and then the whipping sound of the foretopsail brace parting. The fore topsail slewed around a bit, but it was mostly held in place by the fore yard and the fore topgallant. He looked down to the deck, mouth open to shout orders, but he could see figures already heaving spare cordage up from the boatswain’s locker to reeve off a new brace.

  “Mr. Biddlecomb!” Asquith’s voice came up clear and strong from the quarterdeck. “Now would be a fine time to haul our wind!”

  Jack looked out toward the bank, and every bit of him, down to his kidneys and liver, wanted to turn the ship at that instant and run for safety. But it was not time.

  “Five minutes more, sir!” he shouted down, and that was greeted by silence at first, and then Asquith called up, saying, “Five minutes and not a second more, Mr. Biddlecomb!”

  It’s not some favor you’re doing me, Jack thought peevishly, but that thought was cut short by another shot, the ball making its noisy passage between fore- and mainmast but striking nothing. Jack’s father had described often enough the weird buzzing scream made by passing roundshot, and as a young boy Jack had always tried to imagine what it must sound like. He had often enough, in the younger days, pictured himself standing as brave and unmoving as his father on a quarterdeck with the iron flying freely. But those fantasies had fled long ago, and here was the reality at last, no longer welcome or looked for.