Inquisition

by David Gibbins

  Shovel was already short-handed in the James Galley from having to release other officers for temporary commands, but he had been willing to relinquish Avery as well because he had been concerned that he was receiving too much adulation from certain wayward elements in his crew. After this temporary command, should Pepys deem him suitable, Shovel had suggested that Avery should not be found another ship but should be put ashore to await one, a circumstance that he would recognize as tantamount to dismissal; it might persuade him to turn his attention to the merchant service, where he could exercise his individuality without disrupting a rigid chain of command. That outcome was of little moment to Pepys at present, the pressing matter being the need to find captains for the evacuation, but he had wanted to see the man for himself; a propensity to violence in an officer could be a double-edged sword, one that could help or hinder equally, and he wanted to get the measure of the man before he made his decision.

  Booth returned, followed by a man in naval uniform who doffed his hat as he entered. Pepys pointed to a chair opposite his desk. “Mr. Avery, I presume. Have a seat. Will you take a glass of wine with me?”

  “If it please your lordship, I would rather remain standing, and be clear of head.”

  “I’m not a lord, Avery, just a humble secretary of His Majesty the King, and you may stand at your ease, at least.”

  Pepys picked up his own glass, taking another drink as he looked at the man. Avery had spoken with a pronounced West Country burr, very common among seamen. Among the officers, most West Country men Pepys had met had been of a highly agreeable disposition, cheerful and phlegmatic, continent rather than dominant: small, tough men with physiques that came from generations working at sea and under the ground. Avery, though, was from a different mold, much heavier-set, with a broad neck, wide-apart eyes, and long arms, somewhat ape-like, Pepys thought. He could see what Captain Shovel had meant; this was not a man you would wish to see bearing down on you with ill intent.

  “How may I be of service, sir?” Avery asked. “Our ship the James Galley is fitting out for sea, and has no deck officer other than me. I will be sorely missed.”

  Pepys always modeled his interviews on the examinations for lieutenant, beginning with a disarming question of moral intent. “Sir, were I to ask you, would you take a ship to the Gambia for the slave trade? Take your time to answer.”

  He looked at Avery shrewdly. The other letter in front of him was from his eyes and ears in Falmouth, the Admiralty agent who reported on the shipping in and out of Carrick Roads. One of the families operating from Falmouth was the Howards, heroes of the Armada battle the century before, royalists during the Civil War and therefore favored by King Charles, and like many shipping families now with their eyes firmly fixed on the New World, on the lucrative possibility of trade with the English colonies to the north and the Caribbean islands, above all in tobacco and sugar. Like most shippers concerned with that trade, they had also cast their eye on the other apex of the triangle, the one that provided the slaves who worked the plantations, though they had rejected it. All who were involved in that trade were complicit in human trafficking, but the question in Pepys’s mind was a personal one, his own moral threshold: whether a man would himself take that corner of the trade as his domain and profit from it. The question was beyond his remit as an Admiralty official, but it had always been a small luxury of his position to exercise his own moral judgment in selecting men to serve their king and country.

  Avery remained bolt upright, staring ahead. “Sir, as a midshipman on board His Majesty’s Ship Anne Prize, following the bombardment of Algiers in the Year of Our Lord 1671, I did accompany Captain Trethewey down the coast of West Africa for the purpose of providing escort for vessels of the Royal Africa Company that were being harried by Barbary corsairs, and I did witness the Moorish traders bringing slaves on board those vessels.”

  Pepys waved his hand impatiently. “Yes, yes, I mean under your own volition, sir; were it your choice, not a necessity of your fealty to the service.”

  “Sir, I remain and have always been a loyal officer of His Majesty’s Navy, and while in that employ would never embark on private trade of any description.”

  Pepys looked at him again. Avery would have been perfectly well aware of the opprobrium cast on captains who profited from the private transport of money while under the King’s commission, and the concern in the Admiralty that the temptation might induce more junior officers to do likewise. Pepys himself had worked tooth and nail to try to reduce that temptation by increasing the pay for officers, and to extend their pay to the necessary periods ashore in times of peace, but his overtures had fallen on deaf ears among the more obdurate members of the Admiralty Board. So he sympathized with the officers’ financial plight, but it was his duty to root out those who carried on the practice, to rein in those who had been tempted into dark waters.

  He leaned over the letter on his desk, his hands pressed together as he peered at Avery. “I have here a note from a reliable source concerning your presence in July last in the port of Mylor, near Falmouth, where you did meet with one Lowther Howard for the apparent purpose of jointly and severally sponsoring a venture on board Howard’s ship The White Rose for the coast of the Gambia and Niger.”

  Avery did not bat an eyelid. “Sir, I was at that juncture unemployed, out of service with His Majesty’s Navy, my previous ship, the Bonaventure, having been laid up, the war with the Dutch being over, and the crew all being paid off. I was at liberty to seek other employment at sea, and indeed did so out of necessity for my wife and two children, living as they still do in Plymouth, with no other means.”

  “You are aware that Lowther Howard’s venture was to explore the possibilities of the slave trade?”

  “I had no occasion to pursue it, sir, as I was forthwith offered re-employment by His Majesty’s Navy in my present ship, and have remained so since. But Lowther is my brother-in-law, and I know that misfortune befell him when his ship the Nancy Galley was taken by privateers off the Gambia and he and his crew were put up for ransom, thereby making the venture one I am sore pleased not to have entertained.”

  Pepys grunted, took a sip of wine, and tried to swallow the bile that suddenly rose up his gullet like a sword thrust from the belly. He picked up a handful of grapes, forcing them down. “Would you go into the merchant trade happily otherwise?”

  “Were there no longer to be employment for me in the service, sir, should wars come to an end and the King see fit to decommission his navy, then I should like above all things to embark on a trading venture to the Indies East or West, one that would of necessity see me enter into an arrangement with another party, my own resources and savings as an officer of the navy being wholly inadequate to such an enterprise, with no other private means to my name.”

  Avery was answering carefully; like most officers in the navy, he knew perfectly well of Pepys’s abhorrence for the slave trade. There was nothing to be gained by prolonging the issue; this was not the Inquisition.

  “Well, Avery, you will I hope remain in the service until you attain your own command by right, but meanwhile in this emergency we see fit to employ you with temporary rank in command of the Black Swan, a requisitioned Dutch fluyt commissioned as a Royal Navy transport, sound and seaworthy by all accounts, destined first for Porto in Portugal and then for Jamaica, the destinations both and severally of merchants of Tangier whom the King in his generosity has seen fit to recompense and resettle for their discomfiture during this evacuation, with me as his agent. She has twenty-odd crew remaining from her previous complement, and as for a master’s mate, a bosun, and others, you may temporarily promote them as you see fit, as is the right of a captain. I have discussed the matter with Captain Shovel, and he is in agreement. You will receive no censure for your action in the capture of the Schiedam. The Black Swan awaits you beside the Mole, and the fleet sails in a mere matter of hours. Now have a drink, man, to toast your new command.”

  Avery re
mained upright, not taking the glass that Pepys had poured him. “Sir, I would rather not. I must remain clear of mind for the task ahead.”

  Pepys shrugged. “My assistant Mr. Booth will follow you shortly down to the docks with the commissioning papers. You may go now.”

  “Thank you, sir. I am much obliged.”

  Avery turned and left, and Pepys listened to him clatter down the stairs and open and shut the door to the street. It was almost unheard of for an officer to refuse a glass of wine, especially on taking over his first command, but Avery was by all accounts a sober family man, and part of Pepys approved of the fact despite his own indulgence. More worrying was the ruthlessness and cruelty reported in his capture of the Schiedam, but that aspect of a man’s character at sea, when his blood was up and a sword and pistol were in his hands, was something with which Pepys was, when it came to it, profoundly ill-acquainted; his concern was the administrative machinery that propelled otherwise sober men to unleash their inner demons on the King’s enemies.

  Whatever the concerns, Pepys reflected, Avery was a clear league above the hapless Fish. Avery would have the Black Swan, and Fish would have the Schiedam, where at least he would be sailing in convoy only to England, with competent crew among the surviving Dutchmen to rescue him from any calamity, God willing. He would need to get Booth to chase down Fish and tell him, which would have the doubly happy effect of clearing Booth out of the way for what Pepys had to do next.

  Another missile came in, whistling down somewhere near the docks and detonating with a crash. Booth came in carrying a pottery jug he had brought up from downstairs. “Juice of the mango fruit, sir, unadulterated by the poisonous water of this place, a most effectual cure, I am told by my Lord Dartmouth no less, for the morning delicacy.”

  “I am too far gone in my own cure this day,” Pepys said, looking ruefully at the jug. “Maybe next time.”

  “Sir, I am mightily pleased and relieved to remind you that there will be no next time, since tonight we weigh anchor and depart this pestilential city, and that the next occasion you and I sit together will be in our office in Greenwich, where once again, God willing, you will fall into the sober and reflective habits of these dozen years past that so suit you.”

  “It’s Tangier, Booth,” Pepys replied, slumped down. “It’s this place. It casts a malignancy over men, one that afflicts us all. I have not been kind to you. Now I needs must send you to intercept Mr. Fish—or shall I say Captain Fish, God help us—to inform him of his magical transformation. And get him some epaulettes, will you? He at least needs to look the part.”

  Booth bowed slightly, took his stick, and left. Pepys looked at the untouched wine, thought for a moment, then picked it up and drained it in one go, putting it down with a satisfied belch. That was better. Far better. And it was enough. He pulled open the drawer in front of him and took out a pair of small pistols, a new form of firelock with the cock and frizzen behind rather than beside the breech, less easily caught up in the pocket, and a screw barrel to allow quicker reloading. They had arrived only the day before, from his London gunsmith, who, knowing that Pepys was in Tangier, had thoughtfully added a small dagger blade that folded back against the barrel. The occupation of Tangier had seen a boom in the production of innovative weapons for gentlemen to carry concealed through narrow streets and alleys. Even at the best of times, in broad daylight, the city was a dangerous place, and where he was heading to now, he was going to have to be on his guard.

  He carefully flipped back the frizzens, seeing that the priming powder was still in place, checked the safety latches behind the cocks and then pocketed the pistols, one on either side of his coat. He took a deep breath. It was time for his secret business.

  8

  Samuel Pepys stepped from the front door of the house, took a deep breath, and looked out over Tangier, his last chance to do so from this commanding position beside the city wall before embarking on the Schiedam that evening. Below him the city was shrouded in smoke, a result of the Moorish mortars and the fires they had caused, but beyond it he could clearly make out the great arc of the harbor, the Mole on the west side and the smaller jetty to the east where the ships were still loading. Even from this distance the colossal engineering feat of the breakwater was apparent, but even more so its colossal futility, with the sappers having laid enormous gunpowder charges at intervals along its length in order to render it useless to the Moors and their Barbary allies whose ships would be entering the harbor within hours of the evacuation. The largest detonation would be saved for last, the fuse to be lit by the final sapper to leave, and was designed not only to breach the Mole but to be heard as far away as Spain and all along the Barbary shore, to tell the world that King Charles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, but no longer of Tangier, had finished what he had set out to do.

  It was a note of defiance that had a hollow ring to it, Pepys thought, but such displays were in the nature of kings, who in Pepys’s extensive experience were inclined like disgruntled children to destroy their creations rather than see them fall into other hands, and to do it with the largest flourish and the least amount of grace possible. That, at any rate, was the King’s desire; the work of actually pulling it off fell to others, to the army of officials and soldiers, sailors and engineers who were currently withdrawing like a closing sea anemone toward the harbor, most of them as vexed and bewildered by this enterprise as Pepys himself had been, and as earnestly looking forward to seeing the place disappear forever below the horizon.

  He took out his little pocket telescope, extended it and aimed it at the jetty to the right, seeing the Schiedam and the Black Swan tied alongside and still taking on stores and cargo. The rest of the transports were either anchored in the harbor, awaiting the order to sail, or already standing offshore with the naval squadron, ready to form a convoy for England. At least he had satisfied his remit to the best of his abilities, and had done his best for the people and merchants of this place, reimbursing them for their forcibly abandoned property and seeing them on their way to their chosen destinations; all that mattered to him now was that his own belongings should be packed up and brought to the wharf, and that he should be able to conclude the last and most important of his tasks at Tangier, the one he was embarked upon now.

  He pocketed the telescope and set off at a brisk pace down the steep cobbled street, crinkling his nose at the smell of gunpowder and naphtha as he passed through the layer of smoke. He had penned a hasty final diary entry just before he left, noting the appointments of Captain Fish and Captain Avery, as was his duty, that being the main purpose of his record; too hasty, though, as he now regretted it, for he had also unaccountably noted the purpose of his present expedition, and the onward voyage planned for the Black Swan to the New World. Unaccountably, or not so: for it was the wine that had made him incautious in his writing, or the yearning for it. He had nearly turned back to amend the entry, but then had thought to delay it, as none but Booth could read his shorthand, and in any case he would be back at the house when the present affair was done to pack up his belongings, at which time he could take up his quill and black out his doodles, infelicities, and other irrelevances.

  He passed four profusely sweating, half-naked black men with their naval taskmaster and his whip behind them, rolling two barrels marked “gunpowder” up the street toward Henry Fort beyond the walls, part of the enterprise that he had engineered to placate the Alcaïd; presently to little avail, he reflected, as another burning missile seared the sky above him and plunged into the harbor, sending up a sizzle of steam like a red-hot skewer doused in a bucket. The coins in his pocket were jangling, and he quickly pulled off his cravat and stuffed it inside, muffling the noise. The last thing he wanted in the most lawless city on earth was to be walking along like a banker advertising his wares. He had grabbed the coins from the bowl on his table just before leaving his office, having remembered one of His Majesty’s more sentimental edicts in his commission for Tangier:

&nbs
p; By the King’s Direction will be buried among the Ruins a considerable number of mill’d Crown Pieces of His Majestie’s Coin, which Haply, many centuries Hence when other Memory of it shall be lost, may declare to succeeding Ages that this Place was once a Member of the British Empire.

  It hardly seemed a priority in this rapidly eviscerating city, to satisfy the antiquarian whim of a king, but it was nevertheless a curiously affecting whim that tickled Pepys’s fancy; and, perforce, he needs must put duty above all else, however ineffectual his efforts might be in the general scheme of things. Still, the sooner he dispersed coin or anything else from his person that might attract a knife in his back or a blow to his head, the better.

  A cascade of slops splattered in front of him, and he veered to the other side of the street, narrowly avoiding a second bucketload from the balcony above. He hurried on, trying to focus on what lay ahead, feeling the effects of the wine a little more now that he was moving and his circulation was flowing. Note to self, he thought. What I would miss most if I were captured by the Moors? Wine, women, and song. He put a hasty mental line through the last phrase, correcting it to: the exacting management of the affairs of His Majesty’s Royal Navy. That was better. He lurched slightly around a corner, nearly slipping on some indescribable deposit on the cobbles. The ground shook as another missile hit somewhere ahead, sending up a fountain of burning fragments that traced arcs in the sky like fireworks. He could no longer see the harbor, the upper stories and balconies crowding the street ahead and obscuring his view.