The King's Privateer

by Dewey Lambdin

  “If you’d rather not watch, you’re welcome, Mister Lewrie,” Twigg replied. “Go back to the ship, then.”

  “It’s not just that, sir. Surely there’s a better way than to …” Alan protested. Both he and his English sailors were upset by this treatment. Try as they had not too long ago to cut these people to minced meat, once a foe surrendered, to their code, he was to be well treated. British tars had a strong sense of what was right or wrong, and were not averse or slow to voice their opinions, even under the threat of Naval discipline.

  “Feeding survivors to the sharks is nothing more than they expect, sir,” Twigg argued, his blade still to the struggling man’s neck. “No more than we could expect from them were we at their mercy. We are not dealing with honorable foes who’ve struck their colors, you damned puppy! They’re blood-thirsty, murdering, piratical butchers! Look over the side! Look under their bows, sir! See the skulls of their victims? Some of those are Englishmen, sure as you’re born. Aye, we can treat ’em Christian, and they’ll laugh in our faces for our pains. But we’d not know where they sailed from, nor who supplies ’em. And that’ll mean more English sailors murdered or tortured to death for their barbaric amusements. Now which do you prefer, sir?”

  “Seems to me, Mister Twigg, that one person’s barbaric amusements is pretty much like yours,” Alan drawled. “Sir.”

  “Goddamn you, you priggish little hymn-singer! Back to the ship. I’ll deal with you later! Leave the sepoys and fetch me when I’ve done.”

  “Gladly, sir.”

  They rowed back to Telesto, still lying slack and idle on the gently heaving ocean with her sails slatting and booming for want of wind. Hammers and saws thudded or rasped as repairs were made to what damage they’d suffered. Lewrie accosted Captain Ayscough on the quarterdeck and related what Twigg was doing.

  Ayscough drew his pocket watch from his breeches and studied the face, then cast an eye aloft to the coach-whip of the long, narrow private house flag, which flicked lazy as a cat’s tail in the weak zephyrs.

  “Shall we allow him to proceed, sir?” Alan asked, hoping for an order from his captain to go back and tell Twigg to leave off. As he waited for Ayscough to answer, there was a shrill scream from the prao, followed by a splash, and a sudden commotion in the water as the sharks found a tasty new tidbit.

  “I’d admire if you assisted the third officer aloft, Mister Lewrie,” Ayscough grunted, his countenance dark and suffused with repressed emotions. “There’s damage to the fore-topmast to put aright. God grant there’ll be wind soon so we may proceed, ’stead of lying here, boxing the compass.”

  “But, sir …”

  “Enough!” Ayscough snapped, then relented with a bitter sigh. “Welcome to the mysterious, and cruel, Far East, Mister Lewrie.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  The wind came up about an hour after noon sights, and Telesto made her way north once more. The prao they burned, as a warning to the others. Her survivors, those that had not suf fered Twigg’s cruel attentions, hung like plucked fowl from her lateen yard by the neck.

  Chapter 2

  They anchored at Macao two weeks later, after riding out several heavy gales of monsoon winds and rain. Twigg, Wythy and Ayscough went ashore to the Chinese Customs House, to get what they called a “chop,” which would allow them to proceed up the Pearl River to the traders’ anchorage at Whampoa, an island twelve miles below the “City of Rams,” China’s only trade outlet to the outside world. In the meantime, they would transfer cargo.

  Even before their party had returned from shore, a rickety local lorcha came alongside, with written instructions from Twigg that they should transship the opium to her. Reputable merchantmen could not be seen engaging in the opium trade; that was for the local Portugese, who did not require a “chop” to go up-river a short way.

  The captain and mate of the lorcha were filthy brutes, part Indian, part Chinee and only part Portugese. Oh, they were clean enough to not stink as bad as Telesto’s crew, but there was about them such a nefarious and desperate air of the practiced cut-throat that no one, especially after the affair with the pirates, wanted to get anywhere near them, as though they reeked of evil. The lorcha was long, low, rakish and fast-looking, armed to the teeth with swivels and lighter four-pounder guns. And her crew sprouted wickedly sharp weapons from every pocket.

  “They look as though they sleep armed to the teeth,” Alan commented to Mr. Brainard, the sailing master. Once he was in warmer waters Brainard had shucked most of his woolen clothing for light cotton or nankeen, and looked particularly keen and energetic once more.

  “If one wants to stay alive in Macao, one does,” Brainard said with a chuckle. “The most sinful city on the face of this earth, no error. Too much money to be made here, too many temptations to steal or murder for it. And engaged in the opium trade as they are, they’re on the razor’s edge. Who knows when the mandarins’ll decide to take ’em and strangle ’em for smuggling? You can’t trust anyone except the members of the Co Hong up-river not to cheat you or pirate you for your shoe buckles! Man who’ll trade with you one trip’ll have you killed the next, and them not a week apart.”

  There were eight rules for traders from the outside world in the Pearl River. No foreign-devil warships above the Bogue at the mouth of the river. No women, guns, spears or any arms allowed at the factories, or hongs, in Canton. All ships had to register at Macao, as well as all river pilots and ship’s compradores. Each factory could have no more than eight Chinese working for them, so the fewest people would be contaminated by foreign-devils. Foreigners had to forego the pleasures of sailing the river for pleasure. Only on holidays could foreigners go to the Flower Gardens or the Honam Joss House, and then no more than ten at a time and only when accompanied by a linguist. They could not stay out after dark, or carouse. Foreign-devils could not present petitions to the native Viceroy; everything had to go through the Co Hong’s eight members. The Co Hong could not go into debt with foreigners. Smuggling was forbidden. And lastly, foreign-devil ships could not loiter about outside the river but must go directly to Whampoa, instead of “selling to rascally natives goods subject to duty, that these may smuggle them, and thereby defraud his Celestial Majesty’s revenue.”

  It was also, Alan learned, against his Celestial Majesty’s law to teach foreign-devils Chinese, so trade was carried on in a mix of Portugee, Chinese and English called “pidgin,” the closest the Chinese could come to saying “business.”

  Anything, anything that upset the touchy mandarins could bring a total cessation of trade, which hurt everybody, so merchantmen had to obey “tremblingly,” as the Chinese officials concluded their documents. Yet, at the same time, a lively and illegal trade went on down-river at Lintin Island and at Nan’ao. Brainard had even told of mandarin boats ordered to enforce the ban against smuggling, and the opium trade, which contracted lucrative deals, and smuggled the stuff up to Canton themselves!

  “Tonight, this lorcha’ll be receiving a government mandarin on her decks,” Brainard explained. “He’ll get his tobacco and wine, warn about lingering in the estuary instead of going direct to Whampoa, and then he’ll get down to brass tacks. ‘How many chests?’ he’ll ask, and we’ll tell him outright. Then he’ll figure out what he thinks we’re worth and ask for his sing-song .”

  “He’ll want a serenade?” Alan grinned. “God help him if Mister Twigg takes his bagpipers along, then.”

  “No, his sing-song is his cut. His cumshaw … his custom. ‘Allee same same sing-song, allee same custom.’” Brainard laughed. “After he’s been feted and bought off, that’s the signal for the real traders to come aboard and purchase. Then the lorcha comes back to Macao full of silver. Taels and taels of the bloody stuff, maybe five or six lac with the amount of opium we have on board, young sir. A lac, let me inform you, is worth about ten thousand pounds.”

  “Merciful God!” Alan gasped in awe.

  “And you’d better believe the custom official ashore y
onder in Macao knows exactly what we’re doing here, and our ‘chop’ will conveniently not arrive aboard ’til we’ve disposed of the opium, so we can sail up-river innocent as newborn babes. Gad, what a country!”

  “So what are the chances of our suspected French privateers being at this Lintin Island, sir?” Alan asked.

  “Depends on whether they’ve arrived or not. We may ask about, but not too much, else we’d raise too much suspicion. Might even affect the price of our cargo.” Brainard frowned. “If they’ve looted all the ships we suspect they have, what they didn’t have to share out to their native associates, they might already be up-river off Whampoa, pie-faced innocent as any other merchantmen.”

  “Then they’d be a big ship, like us, sir?” Alan pressed.

  “Possibly. Something fast, like one of their latest seventy-four-gunned Third Rates converted to a merchantman, like us. But that pretty much describes half the ships in the world that could get here. If they came here at all.”

  “Well, sir,” Alan speculated, “they’d have to dispose of their ill-gotten gains somewhere. Why not here?”

  “Oh, I’ll grant you that. Sooner’r later, they’d be stuffed bung to the deck-heads with loot,” Brainard snorted. “But, they could drop it at lle de France in the middle of the Indian Ocean, at Pondichery or Chandernargore, and ship it home on a Compagnie des Indies ship with no one the wiser.”

  “But they’ve taken Indiamen and country ships loaded with silver or opium. The silver they could keep, maybe load it into a second vessel. But the opium would have to be sold here. Where else is there such a market for it, and where else on the Chinese coast would the mandarins collude with ’em?”

  “Which is why we’re here, young sir. We may not be right, but it is a strong chance. Once we’re up at Whampoa, and at Canton, I’ll warn you to keep a weather-eye peeled for anything out of the ordinary.”

  “As if China isn’t enough out of the ordinary, sir,” Alan said with a shrug. “I doubt if I’d know what to look for.”

  “I leave that to our super-cargoes, Twigg and Wythy. They know the trade well as anybody.”

  “And pirates,” Alan muttered under his breath.

  “I know, that cut a bit rough on you, to see what Twigg did,” Brainard said comfortingly. “But they’d have gotten the same after an Admiralty proceeding, stretched by the neck by ‘Captain Swing.’ Wish we’d had the time to hunt down their anchorage and chastise ’em just a bit more.”

  “I was thinking more of the way he got his information, sir.”

  “And not much of that, either. I’ve spent years out here in the Far East and the Great South Seas. It’s the way of things out here. Something to leave behind you once you get back into the Bay of Bengal, or the Cape of Good Hope. Don’t fret on it.”

  “If you say so, sir,” Alan replied. “But seeing that made me feel a lot less guilty about my own faults. I don’t think I could ever torture a man to death. Or feed him to the sharks for the fun of it.”

  “Wasn’t ‘fun,’ Mister Lewrie,” Brainard sniffed. “Just business.”

  Chapter 3

  Whampoa Reach was so densely crowded with shipping when they dropped the hook after a four-day voyage up the teeming Pearl River that they barely had room to swing. The river had narrowed from a wide estuary to a proper river at the Bogue after the first two days. The river pilot that guided them had gone hoarse cursing the sampans and junks full of fishermen, mendicants and permanently poor to get out of their way. And the closer they got to Canton, the more it seemed that the Pearl River had been cruelly inaptly named. It stank worse than the Old Fleet Ditch, the Hooghly or the Thames, bearing as it did the ordure and the garbage of untold millions of Chinese from its mountain birthplace to their anchorage.

  There were ships of every nation there, crowded into the Reach as cheek-to-jowl as the thousands of native boats that made up floating suburbs, too poor to live on land. Dane and Dutch flags fluttered above vessels so beamy they looked like butter-tubs. There were Spanish and Portugese ships, Swedish ships, and a few merchantmen from Hamburg and the Baltic, even a pair of Prussians. There were British East Indiamen as lofty and trim as the stoutest “ocean bulldogs” of the Royal Navy, and country ships looking more rakish and piratical than something from a Defoe tale. There were Russian ships, even some Austrians, and lesser nations from the Mediterranean. And there were three or four racebuilt and over-sparred vessels, a little smaller than most, flying the new Stars and Stripes of the late Rebel Colonies, now graced by the name of the United States of America. And the French, huge merchantmen of the Compagnie des Indies, and their own country ships.

  Whampoa Island, from September and the delivery of the first teas from inland, to the first of March when the Chinese would order them out and the Monsoon winds shifted to make faster passages home, would be a floating international city of its own below the distinctive island’s pagodas and towers.

  Alan Lewrie reckoned it would have to do for the next few weeks. With so many strictures on merchantmen as foreign-devil barbarians, there wouldn’t be much in the way of recreation, except for the infamous Hog Lane ashore in the factory ghetto of Canton. Bumboats came alongside in a continual stream offering whores and gew-gaws, but no captain in his right mind would put his ship out of discipline in such an alien harbor, outnumbered as they were.

  The hands eschewed these poorer offerings and waited their turn to visit Hog Lane, where they could swill and swive, no matter that the women would probably be peppered to their eyebrows with the pox. They heeded no warnings, and no captain could enforce celibacy without having a mutiny on his hands. The men had had enough of “boxing the Jesuit and getting cock-roaches,” as they termed solitary stimulation.

  There were other ships to visit, if one’s idea of fun was going aboard another ship after spending up to six months aboard one already. Most provided what little entertainment they could, and Telesto was popular since she had bagpipers, the hand-bellows organ and some accomplished fiddlers and fifers to amuse her visitors, and her own hands. But even here, they were limited by the strictures of the host nation. Once at anchor, they had put out a ship’s boat so the bosun could row about to see if the yards were squared away properly, and a mandarin’s junk had been there in a twinkling, shouting pidgin orders against “boating for pleasure.”

  Alan suspected the mandarins got a cut from the many sampans that ruled the ’tween-ship traffic, who charged exorbitant fees to ferry foreign-devils about, their prices changing with no rhyme or reason, almost from one hour to the next.

  The visiting back and forth would have made it easy to snoop and pry to find their suspected French privateers. Except that Alan wasn’t allowed to. After their last encounter, he was pretty much in Twigg’s bad-books again, and idled aboard ship most of the time. There was work to do, and he was made aware that he was, indeed, the fourth officer, the most junior, therefore the one most liable.

  Twigg and his partner, Wythy, were thankfully out of his hair. They had gone ashore to take borrowed or rented “digs” at one of the established hongs in the factory-ghetto, doing arcane trading things, such as turning their lacs of silver into checques for safer transport, arranging the purchase of teas, silks, nankeens to be woven by hand from Indian cotton, and showing patterns for sets of china and lacquerware, and diagrams for the latest styles in furniture wanted back home in England so they could be manufactured in time for departure.

  Their cargo of opium, the officers were informed in the captain’s quarters, had fetched over eighty thousand pounds sterling above what they’d had to pay out to customs officials and mandarins as bribes. Which sum made every officer lift his eyebrows and make small, speculative, humming noises. “Hmmm, damn profitable work, for Navy-work, hmmm?” Made them wonder just what percentage would be Droits of the Crown, what part Droits of the Admiralty, and what precedent there would be about shares after the expense of the voyage was subtracted. In peacetime, there was no prize-money for fightin
g and taking a ship in combat, and there never was much profit in taking a privateer, which was why they flourished so easily. Made them wonder if anyone from the Crown would mind if they laid a few thousand guineas aside … “for contingencies” … and never reported it. Never reported any profit at all, perhaps, and pocketed the sum entire … ?

  Lewrie finally got shore leave after a couple of weeks. In company with McTaggart again, he went over the side and took his ease in a large bumboat, a scow or barge practically as wide as it was long, for the twelve-mile row to Canton. They were ensconsed in capacious chairs on the upper deck, while seamen had to idle on the lower deck in a herd of expectant and recently paid humanity. They sampled mao tai brandy and lolled indolent as mandarins, though the fussy, and Presbyterian, McTaggart had some qualms about being too comfortable in this life.

  They wafted up the narrowing river between the mainland and Honam Island, a faerie-land of willows, delicate bridges, parks and ponds, where the Joss House was, and the homes of some of the richest Chinese merchants of the Co Hong. But Honam Island, to larboard, was not their destination. They were landed at Jack Ass Point, next to one of the customs houses. The sailors from several ships gave a great cheer and dashed to the right of the huge square for Hog Lane, leaving McTaggart and Lewrie to descend and alight.

  “There’s mair commerce in this ain place than the Pool of London!” McTaggart exclaimed as they goggled at the piles and piles of goods, the hordes of coolies fetching and toting and the sampans being loaded and unloaded. On the far side of the square, there was a long row of factories, broken only by Hog Lane, China Street and a creek. On the other side of the factories, or hongs, there was a wide boulevard, and the Consoo House, the headquarters of the Yeung Hong Sheung, better known as the Co Hong, and a matching row of old and delapidated minor hongs of Chinese merchants, there on sufferance from the Co Hong. The whole thing was walled in from the rest of the city to prevent the natives from being disturbed or corrupted by the barbarian traders. But the Consoo House and most of the hongs on that side of Factory Street, as they’d been warned, were off-limits for them, except for a few shops in Old Clothes Street, and Carpenter’s Square at the far right-hand end of the ghetto.