In Distant Waters nd-8

by Richard Woodman

  I am sure you meant no unkindness, Catriona had written, but I assure you that if the necessity to which you were put was painful to you, it was doubly so to me. You had the benefit of long consideration, I had only the most profound of shocks. I have burned those letters you returned but, sir, circumstanced as I am, I must risk all reputation and request you repent yourself of so rash an act.

  'God bless my soul,' he muttered, 'what a surprise! What a marvellous, bloody surprise!'

  Drinkwater read White's letter with a profound sense of horror. Following so soon upon the last he could scarce believe its contents and compared the dates. But White's was written a full fortnight after Lord Dungarth's and he had no reason to doubt its accuracy.

  My main purpose in writing, my dear Nathaniel, is to acquaint you of the event of Thursday last when, on a lonely stretch of the Canterbury road near Blackheath, an incendiary device exploded beneath the coach of Lord Dungarth and his lordship's life is feared for…

  He ruffled through the remaining papers (some routine communications from the Navy Office and an enquiry from the Sick and Hurt Board) for a later letter informing him of Dungarth's death, but could find nothing. A feeling of guilt stole over him; he had condemned a friend without cause and now Dungarth might be dead. And there was not even a letter from Elizabeth to console him. He looked up at the bare patches on the forward bulkhead and shook off the omen.

  'Is she gaining on us, Mr Hill?' Drinkwater looked astern at the big, dark hull with the bow wave foaming under her forefoot and her pale patches of sails braced sharp up in pursuit of them. There was no doubt of her identity, she was the Russian seventy-four Suvorov.

  'Gaining steadily, sir,' reported the sailing master.

  'Good,' said Drinkwater, expressing satisfaction. He swung to the west where the day was leaching out of the sky and banks of inkily wet cumulus rolled menacingly against the fading light. The pale green pallor of the unclouded portion of the sky promised a full gale by morning. For the time being the wind was fresh and steady from the north-west. 'It'll be dark in an hour, that'll be our time. So you ease that weather foretack, Mr Hill, slow her down a little, I don't want him to lose sight of us, keep him thinking he has all the advantages.'

  'Aye, aye, sir.'

  'Mr Fraser!'

  'Sir?'

  'Have you inspected all the preparations?'

  'Aye, sir, and your permission to pipe the men below for something to eat, if you please.'

  'Most certainly; and a tot for 'em, I want devils tonight.'

  'Aye, aye, sir.' Fraser touched the fore-cock of his hat and turned. Drinkwater went below himself, leaving the deck to Hill. In his cabin Mullender poured him a glass of rum and mixed it with water.

  'There's some cold pork, sir, sour cabbage and some figgy duff. Tregembo's put a keen edge on your sabre, sir, and your pistols are in the case.'

  Mullender indicated the plates and weapons laid in readiness along the sill of the stern windows where the settee cushions had been removed. Drinkwater had lost the privacy of his cabin bulkheads, since Patrician was cleared for action and only a curtain separated him from the gun-deck beyond.

  'And I found the portraits, sir, they're all right.'

  'Good. Where were they?'

  'Tossed in the hold.'

  Drinkwater nodded and stared through the windows astern. 'Put but the candles, Mullender, I'll eat in the dark.'

  He did not want to lose his night vision and the extinguishing of even so feeble a light would indicate some form of preparation was being made aboard Patrician. Drinkwater fervently hoped that Prince Vladimir Rakitin's opinion of him remained low. It had wounded him at the time it had been expressed, but Drinkwater sought now to fling it in the Russian's face.

  But he must not tempt providence. She was a fickle deity, much given to casting down men in the throes of over-weening pride.

  On deck again it was completely dark. They were near the autumnal equinox and already an approaching winter was casting its cold shadow over the water of the North Pacific. They pitched easily over the great swells, thumping into the occasional waves so that the spray streamed aft after every pale explosion on the weather bow.

  'Very well, Mr Hill, pass word for all hands to stand to. Divisional officers to report when ready.'

  When he received word that the ship was ready for action and every man at his station he gave his next order.

  'Shorten sail!'

  They were prepared for it. The lieutenants, midshipmen and mates took up the word and Patrician lost the driving force of her main and foresails. Men ran aloft to secure the flogging canvas. Neither sail had been set to much advantage, but not to have carried them would have alerted Rakitin. Now, with the onset of night, Drinkwater doubted the Russian officers would be able to see the reduction in sail. From the Suvorov, Patrician would be a grey blur in the night, and spanker and topsails would convey that impression just as well.

  'Tack ship, Mr Hill'

  The master gave the routine orders with his usual quiet confidence. Patrician turned, passing her bow through the wind so that the wind and the spray came over the larboard bow and she stood back to the north-east, slightly across the Suvorov's track, but in an attempt to elude her heavy pursuer's chase. It was precisely, Drinkwater argued, what Rakitin would assume he would do in an attempt to escape. It crossed Drinkwater's mind to wonder what exactly had passed between Rakitin and the Arguellos by way of a purchase price for his ship. He chuckled to himself in the darkness. This time there would be no humiliation, no superior sailing with which to reproach himself. This time, he felt in his bones, his ship's company had come through too much to let it go to the devil for want of a purpose.

  'Ahhh…'

  He could just see the Suvorov, swinging to starboard having seen the Patrician tack. He raised his speaking trumpet. 'Let fall!'

  With a thunderous shudder bunt and clew-garnets were let go. Ropes whistled through the blocks and the great sails dropped from the yards, their clews drawn up to chess-tree and bumpkin as they were hauled taut. Drinkwater could almost feel Patrician accelerate, an illusion that was confirmed by the sudden change in relative bearing as the two ships closed in the darkness, Patrician rushing across the bow of the swinging Russian as she jibbed in stays, taking her wind as she sought to outwit her quarry.

  'Hoist your lantern, Mr Belchambers! Mr Q, starboard battery as they bear!'

  The noise of the wind and the tamed thunder of the sails gave way to something more urgent. The rushing of the sea between the two hulls, shouts of alarms from the Russian and, beneath their feet, the sinister rumbling of the guns as they were run out through the ports.

  They were on top of her now, the range was point-blank, and no sooner were they run out than the gun-captains jerked their lanyards. On the fo'c's'le the heavy calibre carronades fired first and the smoke and concussion rolled aft with an awful and impressive rolling broadside that lit the night with the flames of its lethal explosions, yellow tongues of fire that belched their iron vomit into the heart of the enemy.

  Above and behind Drinkwater Mr Belchambers succeeded in hoisting the battle lantern that was to illuminate the ensign straining from the peak of the gaff. It reached its station just as Drinkwater looked up at the spanker.

  'Brail up the spanker! Up helm! Shorten sail!'

  Patrician turned again, cocking her stern up into the wind, shortening sail again to manoeuvre alongside her shattered victim. The Suvorov lay in irons, her head yards aback and gathering stern-way. Drinkwater had no time to assess the damage for they had yet to run the gauntlet of her starboard broadside where she mounted a greater weight of metal than her opponent.

  'For what we are about to receive…' someone muttered the old blasphemy but Quilhampton's gunners were equal to the challenge. As a row of orange flashes lit the side of the Suvorov the bow guns of Patrician, reloaded and made swiftly ready by the furious exertions of their crews, returned fire. Patrician shook from the onslaught o
f shot. Beside him Hill reeled, spinning round and crashing into him with a violent shock, covering him with gore. Drinkwater grabbed him.

  'My God, Hill!' he called, but the old man was already dead and Drinkwater laid him on the deck. Somewhere close by someone was shrieking in agony. It was a marine whose head had been pierced by langridge.

  'Silence there!' roared Lieutenant Mount, but the man was beyond the reach of discipline and Blixoe discharged his musket into the man's back. He too fell to the deck. Drinkwater recovered himself, spun round and looked at his enemy.

  The Suvorov had broached. He could see much of her foremast had gone, and her fo'c's'le was a mass of shattered spars and canvas.

  'Down helm! Braces there… !'

  He brought Patrician back towards his enemy and raked her stern from long pistol shot. She was almost helpless, firing hardly a gun in retaliation. Nothing but her stern-chasers would bear now and their ports were too low to open in such a rising sea.

  For two hours Drinkwater worked his frigate back and forth, ranging up under the Suvorov's stern, hammering her great black hull with impunity from his position of undisputed advantage. A rising moon shone fitfully between curtains of scud and the vast ocean heaved beneath the two labouring ships. The Russians fought back with small arms and those quarter guns they could bring to bear, but it was only later that Drinkwater learned that their complement was much weakened by the length of their cruise and that Rakitin's eagerness to acquire pressed recruits from the British Navy was to make good these deficiencies. But Russian tenacity was to no avail, for Suvorov wallowed unmanageable, a supine victim of Patrician's hot guns whose captains had the range too well and whose 24-pound balls crashed into her fabric with destructive precision. For those two hours they played their fire into their quondam pursuer, rescuing their reputation and the honour of their commander.

  Towards four bells in the first watch the pace of Patrician's fire slackened and Drinkwater drew off, heaving-to under easy sail until daylight. Men lay exhausted at their guns and Drinkwater dozed, jammed against the mizen rigging, wrapped in his cloak.

  It was Belchambers's excited squeal that woke him. Dawn was upon them and the wallowing hull of the Russian lay less than a mile away. A shred of smoke was drifting away on the wind, for the predicted gale was upon them, the sea rolling down from the north-west, its surface streaked by spume and shredded to leeward in a mist of spray through which the dark shape of a frigate-bird slipped on swept-back wings. The Suvorov had rolled all her masts overboard, but a second defiant shot followed the first and the dark, diagonal cross of the Tsar still flew from the stump of her mainmast. In the rough sea she was incapable of further manoeuvre and awaited only the coup-de-grace.

  Drinkwater roused his ship and the men stood to their guns again. There was a curiously intent look about them now as they stared over the heaving waste of the grey seas at the wallowing Russian.

  'Larboard battery make ready!'

  All along the deck the hands went up. 'Ready, sir!'

  'Fire!'

  Fully half their shot hit the sea, sending up plumes of white which were instantly dissipated by the gale, but clouds of splinters erupted in little explosions along the line of the Russian's hull.

  'Ready, sir!'

  'Fire!'

  They timed it better that time. The concussion of the guns beat at Drinkwater's brain as his eyes registered the destruction their iron was causing to their enemy. He wondered if Rakitin was still alive and found he no longer cared.

  'Ready, sir!'

  'Fire!'

  He raised his glass. They were reducing the Suvorov to a shambles; as she rolled helplessly towards them he could see the havoc about her decks. Under the fallen wreckage of her masts and spars a fire had started, a faint growing flicker that sent a rapidly thickening pall of smoke over the sea towards them.

  'She's struck, sir!'

  Belchambers pointed eagerly at the enemy ship. The boy was right. The Tsar's ensign was being hauled down. 'Cease fire, there! Cease fire!'

  'Congratulations, sir,' said Fraser, coming aft.

  Drinkwater shook his head. 'Pass my thanks to the ship's company,' he said tersely. Fraser drew back and left Drinkwater staring down at the body of Hill. He had executed the Admiralty's instructions, carried out his particular service to prevent a Russian incursion south of the coast of Alaska.

  As he bent over the body of the old sailing master he felt the heavy nuggets in the tail pockets of his coat touch the deck. It came to him that he might be a wealthy man and he wondered if the presence of gold in California was known to anyone in London. He thought of Lord Dungarth and the infernal device. Reaching out his hand he touched Hill's face, then stood and stared to windward, mourning his friends.

  Author's Note

  Russian penetration of the Pacific coast of North America extended as far south as Fort Ross, on Bodega Bay. The posts of the Russian-American Company are assumed to have been founded in 1811, but Nicolai Rezanov attempted a lodgement in 1806 which apparently failed, perhaps for the reasons here revealed. Conditions under the Company were notoriously poor, even by contemporary Russian standards, and Indian raids were frequent. Had he lived, Rezanov would undoubtedly have achieved much needed reforms, but his tragic death in March 1807, in the obscure Siberian town of Krasnoiarsk, prevented this. He had been on his way to obtain the Tsar's ratification of a treaty to trade with the Spanish colonies which he had agreed in principle with Don José Arguello, Commandante at San Francisco. Prior to his landing at San Francisco, Rezanov had headed an embassy to the Japanese capital at Yedo as part of Kruzenstern's circumnavigation. This, too, ended in failure.

  Don Alejo is my own invention, for Don José seems to have been a man of honour, unwilling to trade against the wishes of Madrid, although he had reached some form of accommodation with Rezanov. It seemed reasonable to assume his daughter had inherited her father's high-minded character and that she should be attracted to that of Rezanov, for she too existed, famed for her extraordinary beauty. She first met the Russian in April 1806, they fell in love and announced their betrothal. When she finally learnt of his untimely death, the Spanish beauty became a nun.

  Descriptions of Russian merchant ships may be found in the pages of Dana, who met them in San Francisco in the 1840s, shortly before the abandonment of the posts at Bodega Bay (Fort Ross) and the Columbia River, and some twenty-odd years before the sale of Alaska to the United States. Several countries laid a spurious claim to this wild and lovely coast in the early years of the last century and it is fascinating to speculate upon the turn of events had the presence of gold been known forty years earlier than it is generally thought to have been. It is not inconceivable that its presence was known to a few who, for reasons of their own, wished it to remain secret.

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  Richard Woodman, In Distant Waters nd-8