In Distant Waters nd-8

by Richard Woodman

  'D'you think we're up against logic, James?'

  'What the hell else d'you think we're up against?' Quilhampton jerked up.

  Mylchrist shrugged. 'I didn't get my wound from an enemy…'

  'No… no more you did…'

  Mylchrist's gloomy implication chimed in uncannily with Quilhampton's superstitious foreboding.

  'A nail from the hull — another in our bloody coffins…'

  'Oh, for God's sake, Johnnie…'

  'Gentlemen, perhaps a prayer is apt while we wait for the first lieutenant.'

  'What are you going to pray for, Mr Henderson?' asked Mylchrist sourly. 'Three hundred pairs of feet enabled to walk upon the water?'

  'Mr Mylchrist, I am outraged! If God abandons us in our extremity, your blasphemy will give him cause enough… happily His mercy is infinite and able to accommodate a miscreant as wretched as you.'

  'Ah, I forgot the quality of mercy,' remarked Mylchrist sarcastically, 'the recollection comes as a great relief to me.'

  Henderson drew from his nose the spectacles he kept in almost permanent residence there, a habit which intimated he was never far removed from the devout perusal of Holy Scriptures. Such a deliberate and portentous gesture augured ill for the bantering inhabitants of the wardroom as they lounged about, waiting for their orders from the first lieutenant.

  'Johnnie, what exactly did you mean just now?' Quilhampton interjected, a preoccupied look on his lean face.

  'About what?'

  'About the leak. Did you mean to imply someone may have had a hand in the matter?'

  'Well, yes, of course…'

  'Gentlemen, I have your orders… pray pay attention. You may require to make notes… we're in for the devil of a hard time.' Fraser's burr ended the conversation as the worried Scotsman hurried into the wardroom and waved aside the negro messman and his coffee pot. 'Nae time for that, King, nae time at all…'

  It was not ground of his own choosing. A light mist trailing in the wake of a rain shower was clearing as they closed the coast. Patrician stood shore wards under a single jib and her three topsails, a cable bent to her sheet anchor and a leadsman chanting from the forechains. Balanced on the rail, braced against the mizen shrouds, Drinkwater scanned the littoral ahead. He sought an anchorage beyond the flats that extended northwards from Punta de los Reyes. A long, comparatively low-lying spit of land extended for fifteen miles northward of the headland, behind which, his charts suggested, lay an inlet running deep into the countryside. He had little real knowledge of its suitability, but the preoccupation of a worried mind convinced him that to delay, to seek a more ideal spot, would be foolish.

  Ahead of him the mist had resolved itself into a low cloud of spray that hung over the pounding white of breakers where the long Pacific swells toppled and thundered on the sands of the Californian foreshore. Behind the beach low sand-dunes ran to the southward and, somewhere beyond the horizon, terminated at Punta de los Reyes. At intervals along this sand-pit higher eminences rose and, at the distal point, a low but prominent hill marked the termination of the land. The white of breakers pounded on the low bar around which Drinkwater hoped to work Patrician and seek an anchorage beyond the spit, in the safety of the long lagoon of Tomales Bay.

  The wind had fallen light, a gentle onshore breeze that ruffled the sea. The promise of sunshine earlier in the day had failed and cloud had closed off the heavens and given the sea's surface a leaden colour, as it lifted itself to the easy motion of the incoming swells.

  'Noooo bottom!' The leadsman's chant had become monotonous, though they were within a league of the shore and then, sharply insistent: 'By the mark twenty!'

  The breakers were suddenly nearer, drawing out on the starboard bow. The gentle pitch of the ship was steepening as she reacted to the shortening of the heaving wave-length compounded of the rise of the sea-bed and the back-swell, beating seawards from the rampart of the land.

  'By the mark thirteen!'

  Worms of anxiety were crawling in Drinkwater's belly. Hill came across the deck and stood below him. Without words they shared their apprehension. Tomales Point was opening all the time. A guano-stained rock had detached itself from the land as it changed its appearance with their close approach.

  'Bird Rock, sir,' Hill remarked, though Drinkwater knew the comment was an expression of caution, not topographical interest. He felt a swell gather itself under Patrician's stern, lifting it and thrusting the ship forward so that her bow dipped sharply. The sudden elevation and clearer view ahead alarmed both captain and sailing master. They were in shoal soundings now, the leadsman chanting the deeps of nine and eight fathoms. Behind the smoking barrier of the long sand-pit, the narrow placid opening of the lagoon stretched away to the southwards. On its far shore the low-lying land rose gradually, hazing into the distance and the rain-covered mountains. But across the entrance to Tomales Bay lay the whitened fury of the thwarted Pacific, roaring and thundering upon the sand-bar that blocked their intended refuge.

  Then the swell rolled under them, the stern dropped and the bow reared up, the long bowsprit stabbing almost vertically. Drinkwater felt himself jerked by the mast-whip shaking the mizen shrouds. Ahead of them the smooth back of the swell culminated in a great arch of water, soon to disintegrate in hundreds of tons of roiling water as one more breaker on the coast. It entirely blotted out their view, but both Drinkwater and Hill had seen enough.

  'Stand by the braces!' Drinkwater roared, leaping from the rail. 'Down helm! Larboard tack! Hands aloft, let fall the courses and't'garns'ls! Lively there! Afterguard, leggo spanker brails! Haul aft the spanker! Come, Mr Mylchrist, move those lubbers smartly there… Fo'c's'le…'

  'Sir?' Comley stood, four-square, facing aft-expectantly.

  'Hoist your jibs, sir!'

  Hill had moved across the deck to stand by the binnacle. He shot glances at the compass, then aloft at the masthead pendant and at the larboard dogvane.

  'Full and bye, Mr Hill…'

  Patrician began to swing with an infuriating slowness, bringing the swell onto her beam and rolling to leeward. As her bowsprit pointed round to the north it seemed to trace the curved shore of Bodega Bay. Drinkwater anxiously watched the thundering breakers get closer; the air was full of the roar of them, the air damp with the spray of their destruction upon the sand-bar. Beam-on, Patrician lifted on a mighty crest; the huge, oily swell passed beneath her and she rolled violently into the following trough. The sails slatted impotently, slapping back against the masts with a rattle of blocks and slap of buntlines. The wind dropped and, for several minutes, Drinkwater considered the necessity of anchoring, to avoid grounding in such an inhospitable spot. But the ship carried her way and the wind filled her sails sufficiently for her to maintain steerage. Crabbing awkwardly to leeward Patrician clawed slowly to the north and westwards, rounding Bodega Head, the far end of the bay, with a cable's length of deep water to leeward.

  As the headland dropped astern, relief was plain on everyone's face.

  'A damned close thing, sir,' said Hill, shaking his head.

  'Yes,' replied Drinkwater curtly. 'Stand the leadsman down now. We'll tack ship and haul to the's'uthard in an hour.'

  Drinkwater saw Marsden approaching him, his hat in his hand.

  'Yes, Mr Marsden, I presume you have bad news? Troubles never come singly?'

  'Yes, sir…'

  'Well?' Drinkwater could hear the slow, solemn clank of the pumps, sluicing water from below and out through the gun-deck ports. 'How much water is she making?'

  'The devil it is!'

  'It's an auger, sir… there's an auger missin' from my shop!'

  'Are you sure?'

  'Aye, sir, an' both my mates agree, sir… gone missin' recent, like.'

  'Anyone else know about this?'

  'Well… my mates, sir… that's all at present but…' he looked round helplessly. News such as the theft of a drill-bit from the carpenter's shop following so hard on the discovery of a leak could le
ad to only one conclusion: the leak was a deliberate act of sabotage.

  'Very well, Mr Marsden. Tell your men to hold their tongues.' Drinkwater was pale with anger and Marsden happy to quit the quarterdeck under the captain's baleful glare.

  Chapter Ten

  The Labouring Gentlemen

  April 1808

  'Drake's Bay, gentlemen.'

  Drinkwater laid the point of the brass dividers on the chart, a facsimile of George Vancouver's survey supplied by an unusually obliging Admiralty whose largesse had been prompted by the desire to see him and his frigate gone from home waters. Captain Drinkwater was, under no circumstances, to have been permitted to plead any of the customary excuses for delay. The folio of copies of Vancouver's and Cook's charts had arrived by special messenger with a smooth but pointed letter from Mr Barrow: Every consideration is being extended to facilitate the speedy departure of H.M. Frigate under your command…

  Drinkwater shook off the obsessive recollection to concentrate upon the task in hand as his officers clustered round. The spur of Punta de los Reyes jutted into the Pacific, doubling back to the eastward in a distal point behind which re-entrant lagoons, sand-dunes and an occasional hill formed the border of a bay within which shelter from the prevailing winds and the Pacific groundswell might be sought. Here, more than two centuries before, driven as Drinkwater now was by necessity, Francis Drake had refitted his storm-battered ship. Drinkwater had rejected the place earlier because there was a danger of its being exposed to view from the south-east, a mere thirty miles from the hostile Spaniards at San Francisco. Now, it offered them their only accessible refuge.

  'Ideal, gentlemen,' he said with more confidence than he felt, let us hope the ghosts of Drake and his people look kindly upon us, for we have much to do.'

  'Why didn't he go into San Francisco, sir?' asked Quilhampton, pointing at the great arrns of the harbour as it wound inland amid sheltering hills.

  'Because, Mr Q, he sailed right past it, without discovering the entrance. Now, this is what I intend we should do…' He paused to get their attention. They straightened up from the chart, coughing and shuffling. Fraser and Quilhampton had notebooks ready.

  'Immediately upon coming to an anchor we will hoist out all the boats and lower the cutters. I want Mr Q to land Mount and a detachment of marines with seven days' rations to occupy this hill…' Drinkwater pointed to a neatly hachured cone depicting a summit some two miles inland from the eastern side of the bay. 'You will establish a signal station, Mr Mount. We will give you a boat-mast and a few flags and Mr Belchambers with a couple of seamen. I want a daily runner to meet a boat with your report. Understood?'

  'Perfectly, sir,' nodded Mount.

  'Good. Usual signals for enemy in sight… any approaching ship is an enemy.'

  'I understand, sir.'

  'Very well. When you have landed the marines, Mr Q, I want you ashore here, on the point, with an hour-glass and a tidepole. We know the moon is waxing and the tides with it, but I want to know the maximum rise and fall as soon as possible.'

  'Aye, aye, sir.'

  'Good. Now Mr Fraser and you, Mr Hill, the greatest burden of the task falls on you. We will send down our topmasts and bridge the boats. I want the spare spars used for that… then I want two anchors laid out astern. We will shoe these, for I want no risk of them coming home…'

  'Your pipe, Mr Comley!'

  The boatswain straightened up from the rail and a piercing whistle rolled over the smooth waters of the anchorage. Above the heads of the men in the cutter, all activity aboard Patrician ceased. The deck parties getting the topmasts down and the spare spars over the side into the long-boat, launch and barge, the details beginning to shift stores in the hold, the running messengers, the labouring landsmen and toiling cooks all stood stock-still, pending the pipe to carry on.

  Under the larboard bow the cutter bobbed, bowsed in to the ship's side by a boat-rope. In shirtsleeves Captain Drinkwater and Mr Marsden leaned inelegantly over the side, each with a musket ramrod placed against the ship's side; they put the other ends to their ears. The operation had been repeated several times and the men, having been exhorted to work as they had never done before, were heartily fed up with the periodic whistled injunctions to stop and keep silent.

  The cutter's crew strove to hold the boat as motionless as possible, the bowman bracing his boat-hook against the downward thrust of the larboard bumpkin, an oarsman stilling the rumble of a rolling loom.

  'Got it, sir!' Marsden's eyes gleamed with triumph and Drinkwater withdrew his ramrod, shuffled further forward while the boat lurched dangerously and crouched next to Marsden, his ramrod replaced against Patrician's spirketting alongside that of the carpenter's.

  Drinkwater put his ear to the small, expanded bell that was designed to tamp the charge and ball in the breech of a Brown Bess. The dull, formless sound that was part the resonating of the ship, part the blood in his ear was dramatically displaced. It was low and indistinct, but instantly recognisable as the sound of water running through a constriction. His eyes met those of Marsden and he nodded.

  'Very well, Mr Marsden, mark it…'

  Marsden looked at the hull, reached out and scored a mark with a lump of chalk. The problem still remained to discover how far below the waterline the sea was gaining ingress. Not far by the clarity of the noise. Less than a fathom? Drinkwater fervently hoped so. He nodded at Marsden again.

  'Well?'

  Marsden was looking up at the hull. Above them the curved head-rails swept from the fo'c's'le to the massive stem timbers and Patrician's gilded and painted figurehead. Bright splashes of colour and limned streaks of gilt were encrusted with salt and the chips and chafing of ropes, while overhead stretched the gratings that formed the shitting place for the crew. Suddenly the carpenter turned to Drinkwater, comprehension widening his eyes.

  'The shot-locker, sir… the forrard shot-locker!'

  'By God, Marsden, you're right!' Drinkwater turned and the boat lurched again. 'Haul her back to the ladder there, and be quick about it!'

  Neither Drinkwater nor Marsden could contain their impatience as the boat was hauled aft along the ship's side. Noting the sudden flurry of activity below him, Comley leaned over the side.

  'Permission to carry on, sir?'

  'Yes, Mr Comley, carry on… and get two lanterns ready!'

  Again the pipe whistled over the placid water of the bay, but now it was not the imperious single note of the 'still'. Now the note hopped down a tone and men swung to work again, cursing and bantering according to temperament and the liberty that the leading hand, or petty officer, midshipman, mate or lieutenant allowed them.

  The cutter ground alongside the long-boat and launch which were being lashed into one huge raft, purlined with the spare spars to form a platform for heavy gear and guns. Drinkwater and Marsden scrambled out of the cutter.

  'Thank you, Mr Frey,' Drinkwater called to the midshipman in command, 'you had better return to assist the first lieutenant to get that second anchor laid out astern.'

  Without waiting for a reply and waving aside a pretended and half-cocked formal welcome, Drinkwater ran below with Marsden waddling in hot pursuit. It had been his strict instruction to his officers, and one which he himself saw no reason to disobey, that the urgency of the work over-rode everything else and that they would borrow the phrase of the English navigator who had first charted the careenage, for the gentlemen should labour with the mariners.

  With the activity and eagerness of a man half his age, Drinkwater sped below. Every moment that his ship lay defenceless in the bay cost him agonies of worry; now, with almost certain knowledge of the location of the leak, he was at once nervously eager and apprehensive to see it for himself. If Marsden was right, the leak might not be so very difficult to get at. If it was an act of deliberate sabotage, some ease of access could be assumed; on the other hand anyone contemplating such a deed would run in fear of a discovery that could hang the perpetrator.

/>   'Here, you men,' he hailed a working party hauling cable aft for bending on the spare anchors, 'belay that and come below.'

  The shot-locker Marsden referred to was right forward, a deep, narrow, inward funnelling space immediately abaft the massive timbers of the stem. This otherwise useless space was one of several voids about the ship in which iron shot was stowed. In the case of the two shot-lockers at the very extremities of the ship, they served a double purpose and indeed, so wet and corroded did the shot in them become, that it required extensive scaling and was rarely used for action. Instead, while it formed a reserve, its chief purpose was to provide manageable concentrations of weight at the ship's ends by which, with facility, her trim might be altered.

  Two or three men might, in such a remote corner of the frigate, shift the contents of the locker and get at the skin of the ship undetected. Drinkwater conceded the lead of the impromptu procession to Marsden who had grabbed a lantern. Dropping from the orlop into the hold they worked their way forward. Now the ship lay tranquilly at anchor, Drinkwater fancied he heard the haunting trickle of water long before they reached the hatch to the forward shot-locker, but there was no doubt half-an-hour later when the seamen he had commandeered sweated below the faint flame of a lantern he held above their labouring heads. The pungent smell of disturbed and powdery rust cut through the thick stench of bilge as the shot was handed up and rolled like reluctant footballs aft, clear of the small square hatch-coaming. Gradually the grunting men worked themselves lower until one swore and suddenly they could see the dark gleam of running water in the lamplight.

  'Look!' Marsden hissed. Drinkwater could see for himself. A partially rotten section of the ship's inner skin had been removed, the lighter colour of exposed wood showed clearly. Ten minutes later Marsden and one of his mates had swapped places with the gasping seamen and levered off the broken inner planking. The jet of water that squirted inwards from the outer hit them like a firehose.