Pistoleer: Edgehill

by Smith, Skye

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  The Pistoleer - Edgehill by Skye Smith Copyright 2013-14

  Chapter 12 - A Lion in Skegness, Lincolnshire, August 1642

  Some things were hard to find in places as distant as Bermuda, and sail duek was one of them. The clan had sent two of the Freisburn ships to the Netherlands to trade silver plate for sail cloth. It was much cheaper in Holland. Anything manufactured was cheaper in Holland because they had invented ways of using their thousands of windmills that the English had never even dreamed possible. One of these uses was to run the looms that pumped out the rough duek sailcloth and braided the miles of rope needed by their navy. The two ships had brought back tons of Dutch duek and rope of all gauges. Whatever they did not use themselves, they could easily trade in any port of the New World.

  After endless sewing, the Swift now had new sails. On her first voyage to Bermuda the Swift's three triangular lateen sails had been re-sewn and reshaped to be re-used as triangular Bermudan sails, but that meant that each was a different shape and size. Two of them had been too ragged to trust on another long journey, so the clan had decided to replace them all with new, and the new ones would all be the same size and shape so they would need to carry only one good spare.

  The old sails they would re-use as canopy and tent material. They took the opportunity to replace all the lines, and one of the booms. It was better to do it here and now, than to be forced to do it on some primitive island. Today was the first sea trial of the Swift's new sails, and so she was carrying a much larger than normal crew, just in case there were problems and they had to row home.

  There was another reason for a large crew. The Frisian families in the village of Freiston over by Boston on the other side of the Wash from Lynn, had agreed to partner the Wellenhay clan in their attempts to settle in the New World. Not that any of them would go with the first settlers, but they had agreed to populate and hold Wellenhay for the clan in case the venture was not successful. The choice of Freiston was obvious since six young Freiston men had recently married into the clan.

  The sweetener on the agreement was that the clan would leave two of the Freisburn class of Bermudan rigged ships at Wellenhay when they left. This would allow the Freiston men to continue the clan's lucrative trade with the Netherlands. It was all good, but it did mean that they needed to buy and convert two more coastal ships, and soon. Some Freiston men had found two likely hulls in Skegness on the North East mouth of the Wash just up the coast from Freiston. They would use this sea trial to put into Skegness and buy those hulls and have the extra crew sail them back to Wellenhay for refitting.

  They began the sea trials gently in a freshening breeze going through Lynn channel. Three of the men aboard had captained the Swift before, Daniel, Anso, and the clan elder Cleff, and each of them had a turn at the wheel. Satisfied that all the lines were run correctly and all the blocks were secure, they ventured out into Lynn Deeps and began doing figures of eight. That went well so they sailed out of the shelter of the Wash and tested each sail in more forceful winds.

  These new sails were yet to be stretched and so lacked the bagginess usual in sails. The three captains had assumed that would make the Swift slower than she had been until the duek stretched out, but they were wrong.

  "It must be witchcraft,” Cleff said as he tested the ship to see how close to the wind he could sail. "We should change her name from Swift Daniel to Swift Witch." The other's shushed him. Sailors were too often at the mercy of the fates to tempt them. "I don't think the wind is pushing our sails. I think it is pulling on them, sucking on them."

  "Don't be daft,” Anso told him. "Winds don't suck."

  "You mean that these are good Puritan winds,” Cleff replied, but no one got it. Again they hushed him for tempting the fates. "Look how the sails are curved. The wind is blowing the wrong way to do that by blowing into the sail. It must be sucking on it."

  "Think what you like, but swing her around on a course for Skegness,” Anso told him. "There's nothing wrong with this ship that a new helmsman wouldn't cure. Let's go and buy some ships. The earlier we get that done the more daylight we will have left to sail them back to Lynn."

  All the way to Skegness they let the Swift race. It was actually quite frightening how taught all the rigging became, how the masts creaked, how the hull heeled, and how the bow bashed through the waves, not over them. "Ten,” one of the lads yelled up from amidships. In the shallows closer to Lynn he had been using a plumb to gauge the depth of water under the keel, but in the deeper water he had replaced the weight with a float and was gauging the speed.

  "Ten knots,” Anso repeated in wonder, but then to Cleff he said. "I bet I could get fifteen out of her."

  "Not without sailing her under,” the old skipper told him. He could still teach these young captains a thing or two. "With each knot the distance between the bow wave and the stern wave gets longer. Eventually it is longer than the waterline of the ship and the ship drops down between its own waves. By fifteen you'd be doing nose dives under the sea's waves. We are close to doing that now, that is why we are bashing through them. You might get eleven or twelve, but never fifteen."

  "Thirteen then,” Anso bragged, but he had listened closely to the elder's words and was picturing it in his mind. "I'll wager I could do thirteen."

  "Twelve,” called out the lad with the knotted rope and the float. It was an astounding speed. In perfect conditions most cargo ships cruised at five or six knots.

  "Better slow down,” Daniel told Cleff. "Skegness has no harbour, just a flat beach. They use log rollers to pull their fishing boats above the high tide mark."

  Cleff gave him 'that' look. He'd been sailing to Skegness long before Daniel or Anso were born. "So are these ships we's to look at sittin' in Steeping Haven?" Steeping Haven was the tidal part of the River Steeping which entered the Wash just south of Skegness. It was deep enough for small ships as far as the village of Wainfleet and both villages shared the work of keeping it dredged and keeping up the jetty of posts and planks that kept the river mouth open.

  Above Wainfleet the river was tamed by weirs and dikes and canals so the boat that could float up it as far as Bolingbroke Castle was a punt. It was this ancient channeling of the River Steeping that had given Robert Bertie, the Earl of Lindsey, his ideas about draining the Fens.

  "Aye, I'll drop you and Anso there with the extra crew,” Daniel replied. "Don't buy them if there is any rot under the waterline. The silver for them is in the chart locker down below." Cleff gave him another of 'those' looks. As if he would ever buy a ship with the rot.

  "I'll pass close to Skegness so that some locals meet us at the haven." With that he spun the wheel one way and then slightly back. The hiss went out of the wake and the masts ceased to strain and the decks became almost horizontal again. Now they rocked over the waves rather than smashed through them. It was more fun the other way.

  As they entered the channel into the Steeping, Anso asked, "are you comin' ashore Danny?"

  "Nay, I always pay too much. I don't have the patience for bargaining. I'll take five of the men and see if we can't do twenty knots without you lot weighing us down." Daniel laughed and bashed his cousin's arm with an open hand. Anso was a very large man. A giant even amongst tall Frisians. "Take your pistols. That's a lot of silver and I've always been suspicious that Skegners are wreckers." Anso gave him 'that' look. As if he would go anywhere these days without his pistols.

  With Anso, Cleff and a dozen men set down on the raft that passed for a quay in this river, Daniel joined his remaining men on the oars and slowly backed the Swift back out into the Wash. He was excited. Without the other two captains looking on he could experiment with these new taught sails. Was Cleff right in what he said about how a ship could drop down between the bow wave and the stern wave if it went too fast? He was willing to give it a go.

  He steered her straight west across a corner of the Wash and into deep sea. Since he had no cours
e other than that which made the Swift fly along, he kept adjusting the wheel until he could once again hear the hiss of the wake. Cleff had been going more or less into the waves, but he was now wallowing diagonally across them.

  "Thirteen,” called the lad on the knotted line.

  Daniel handed the wheel off to a mate and told him to hold the course and then he ran up the leaning deck to the windward gunnels and balanced himself over them in hopes of seeing the stern wave. That didn't work so he ran down the deck and leaned out to try again. The wake wave was almost at the stern. He wondered what would happen to rudder control if the wave moved even further to the stern. Would the rudder become useless? Would it be bashed about?

  "Sail dead ahead,” came a call from the bow watch.

  Daniel almost didn't hear it because the hiss of the water was so loud. "Ease her off,” he yelled to the mate on the wheel. and the bow turned more upwind and almost immediately the hiss became softer and it was much easier to walk up the sloping deck to the wheel.

  "The ship must be dead ahead, cause I ain't seen her,” the mate told him. "You go on for'd. The watch has your looker."

  As soon as Daniel reached the bow, the lad on watch handed him his precious spectacle looker. He twisted the two pipes until the ship ahead of them came into focus. She was flying Dutch colors. He waved back to the helmsman and yelled, "She's heading north up the coast! Go behind her!" With the course change made, the Dutch ship would no longer be hidden from the wheel, so there was no longer a need for him to be in the bow.

  The Swift swished up to the other ship like it was standing still. As they got closer, Daniel checked the colors again, and searched for any signals. It was just a medium sized Dutch fluyt, likely a bulk trader and likely heading for the Humber or the Tyne to trade early German grain for late English wool. Eventually he could read the name on the stern. It was the Leeuw out of The Hague.... the Lion. The bloody Prince bloody Rupert's bloody ship that had taken Queen Henrietta and her daughters out of England.

  He looked up at his own pole to make sure the Swift was flying English colors, and then he told the mate, "take her within hailing distance." On a Bermudan rigged ship making such maneuvers was simplicity itself. She could sail rings around a cargo fluyt, literally. When they were within hailing distance, Daniel called out in Dutch to the Lion through his hailing trumpet, "Well met friend. What is your cargo and where are you bound."

  The hail that came back was cordial enough but said nothing about destination or cargo, so Daniel tried again with, "We are an English Naval yacht on patrol. You are required to tell us your destination and your cargo." This time the response was not nearly so cordial. Daniel tried again. "I have a warrant from the Lord High Admiral of the fleet that allows us to board and search any suspicious ships."

  There was no response. While he waited, the mate asked him, "Do you have such a warrant?"

  "The funny thing is that yes I do, down in the chart locker,” Daniel replied. "It is from when Warwick was using the Swift as his admiral's yacht. I'm trying to remember if there was an expiry date on it. Dutch captains are sticklers for paperwork."

  The hail finally came back, "We believe you are Dunkirkers flying a false flag. We refuse any permission for you to board us." It was not an unreasonable answer. The Swift was a galliot, a type of ship favoured by corsairs and pirates and sometimes by the Dunkirker privateers. A type of ship not used by the Dutch or the English.

  "Damn,” Daniel cursed, "damn, damn, damn."

  "Try giving her a warning shot across her bows,” the mate suggested.

  "With what? Our swivel gun. They will laugh at us." A galliot was not a gun boat. It was built with a light hull for speed and any broadside of cannon balls would spring the hull. If it were in pirate's hands the Swift would be used to catch and then board their prey by force of men rather than force of cannon. "All right, I'll go and prepare the bowchaser." The Swift carried six small cannon. Two six pounders on each side and an eight pounder both for and aft. None of them had been fired since breaking the dikes at Hull, and the bowchaser for at least six months. Even that had been a practice. It took four men to load and fire the bowchaser, and there were only six men onboard.

  While they found all the cannon gear, and uncovered the cannon, and unlocked and unsealed the cannon hatch, and unsealed the cannon so they could load it with a light charge and a warning ball made of root wood, the Swift pulled out of range of the fluyt's guns. All aboard the fluyt would probably know that they were loading the gun. When it was loaded, the helmsman laid a course to run in front of the fluyt.

  The warning ball across her course did not make fluyt slow down or even change course, so Daniel again hailed them, but this time crouched low behind the gunnels just in case someone on the Lion had a musket. "The next ball will be aimed at your rudder. I advise you to bring any passengers up onto the deck just in case we miss the rudder and send a ball through your cabins. Now heave to and prepare to be boarded."

  Instead of heaving to, the bloody fluyt made a hard turn onto a new course towards the closest land, in this case, Skegness. "I'll accept that for now for if they really do think we are Dunkirkers, they would make for the closest English port,” Daniel told the helmsman. "Sail on the same course but to the windward side of her so that she doesn't worry that we are aiming the bowchaser at her rudder. If she changes course away from Skegness then ram the bloody bow up her bum until she gets back on course."

  When the Lion was in sight of Skegness, the captain must have checked his charts and realized that there was no harbour at the actual town. Daniel allowed the change of course that would take the Lion to Steeping Haven, and once she was at the mouth of that harbour he had the helmsman block her in so that the Lion had no choice but to turn into the haven. The haven was deep enough for the fluyt only in mid channel so the Swift could not come up along side her to board her, but at least she was trapped by the Swift with no where to go, so they could board her with the jolly boat.

  The crew of the Lion did not wait to be boarded. Instead they lowered their own jolly boat and began to load chests and passengers into it to take them the short distance from mid channel to the raft-come-quay. Daniel saw that there were no women or children with the passengers so he ignored them and again hailed the captain of the Lion. "May I board you now. It is my duty to inspect your ship. Only then will I allow you to leave." While he waited for the answer he told the helmsman, "They think they've put one over on us because they've got their passengers and cargo safely ashore." His laugh was cut short by an invitation to board the Lion.

  As he climbed aboard the Lion, which was a hard scramble from the water line because a fluyt is pear shaped and the decks are high above the curve, he was heard cries of outrage from the raft. The captain ignored him as he made the deck, for he and the rest of the crew were staring out towards the raft-quay. "What is happening?" he asked the captain in Dutch.

  "Our passengers have been taken prisoner by some locals. This accursed coast. There is no way of telling which port is friendly. This is the closest port to Bolingbroke Castle so I felt for sure it would be friendly."

  "That depends on who your friends are. Who are your passengers?" There were about a dozen of them now being held at bay by Anso and the rest of the Swift's crew on shore. The Lion's crew in the jolly boat had finished unloading the chests onto the raft and some Skegness locals were carrying them to shore and placing them in Anso's care.

  "They are English mercenaries on their way home from the German wars. They were hired by Prince Rupert to guard his treasure. I don't suppose those are the Earl of Lindsey's men on the bank."

  "Lindsey has no friends in the Fens. What treasure?"

  "You will have to fight those locals for it. Look at the size of their leader. Goliath."

  "No his name is Anso. He's my man. Who is this Goliath feller?"

  "From the bible story, you know, David slew Goliath with his sling."

  Daniel walked to the bow and yelled to
Anso, "Check them for slings! Disarm them completely, and don't let anyone open those chests." The captain had followed him so he said politely, "And now please show me your ship."

  Within the hour, a dozen trunks containing the personal possessions of the mercenaries, plus twenty crates of muskets and pistols had been unloaded from the Lion and loaded onto the Swift. There were no other passengers and the rest of the cargo was early German wheat, so he allowed the Lion's jolly boat to tow her backwards out of the haven so she could go and deliver her wheat.

  Once she was gone, and out of the way, the Swift nudged up to the raft-quay and took the bound prisoners and their precious cargo aboard. Only once the chests were safe inside the Swift's command cabin was the curious Anso allowed to open them. The smallest chests were the heaviest. There were six of them and they were filled with silver coins. English silver shillings from the reign of James Stuart. Perhaps a quarter ton of silver in all.

  "Jesus,” Anso hissed.

  "This is a fine time to go all Christian on me,” Daniel said while smirking from ear to ear.

  "So who are these guys?"

  "English mercenaries hired by Prince Rupert to bring him his treasure and a load of guns. We've got twenty crates of muskets and pistols in the hold, as well as each of the men's personal trunks."

  "So what do we do with them?"

  "Which, the men, the guns, or the silver?"

  "Let's start with the men."

  "Did you buy the two ships yet?" Daniel asked.

  "Aye we did,” Anso replied. "Cleff said they were every bit as sound as our original Freisburn and should convert over to Bermudan in the same way."

  "What did the locals say about our passengers? Did they make any trouble when you captured them? Whose side do you think they were on?"