Lewrie heaved a befuddled sigh and contemplated once again just how he had been finagled into this dubious adventure. Capt. Nicely had proved to be much cleverer than Lewrie would have credited him. And not half so nice as he appeared.
Not a day after their shore supper, Capt. Nicely and Mr. Peel had been rowed out to Proteus at her anchorage and had come aboard in stately manner, with a strange young Lieutenant and Midshipman in tow.
With Nicely wearing a gruff but-me-no-buts expression on his face, and Jemmy Peel cocked-browed with a sardonic you-poor-dense-bastard look, Nicely had introduced the young Lieutenant as one Thaddeus Darling, the Midshipman as one Mr. the Honourable Darcy Gamble.
Since Proteus had lost the unfortunate (and regrettable) young Mr. Burns, Admiral Sir Hyde Parker had decided to appoint the much tarrier and more promising Mr. Gamble into the frigate. He came off the flagship, and such an appointment usually was a signal honour for the recipient captain. The lad was upwards of his majority, eighteen or so, and while attired in a well-to-do lad's best uniform and kit of the finest quality, right down to his ivory-and-gilt trimmed dirk, he was touted as a bright lad who'd been properly seasoned at sea duties since his eleventh birthday; a welcome prize, indeed!
"You're short a Midshipman, Captain Lewrie," Nicely had almost gushed in seeming sincerity, "and I prevailed upon Sir Hyde to assign you his very best… and one close to his heart," Nicely had added in a confidential whisper, with an encouraging wink, "in reward for your previous good service to the Crown."
"Honoured, indeed, to welcome him aboard, Captain Nicely, sir," Lewrie had bowed back, temporarily disarmed, though still a dab leery.
"If you do not mind, then, sir, I will read myself in, and put up my broad pendant, according to Sir Hyde's orders?" Nicely had said further, whipping an official document from his coat's breast pocket.
"Beg pardon?" Lewrie had gawped, all aback. "Say uh?"
Lieutenant Darling produced a paper-wrapped packet containing a red pendant, much shorter and wider than the coach-whip commissioning pendant that forever flew from Proteus's main-mast. He handed it off to Midshipman Grace and bade him hoist it aloft. And to Lewrie's chagrin, the red broad pendant bore a white ball, indicating that Capt. Nicely would have no flag-captain below him!
There was much too much blood thundering in Lewrie's ears for a clear hearing of Capt. Nicely's bellowing recital of Navy officialese, but the sense of it was that Sir Hyde had temporarily appointed him as a petit Commodore without the actual rank, privileges, or emoluments of a permanent promotion.
"… and take upon yourself accordingly the duties of regulating the details of your squadron, in making the necessary distribution of men, stores, provisions, and in such other duties as you shall think fit to direct!" Nicely had thundered, casting a baleful eye at his "flagship's" goggling captain. Lewrie had whirled to seek confirmation or aid from Peel, but Peel could do nothing but offer him a side-cocked head and a helpless shrug. That "distribution… as you shall think fit to direct" sounded hellish-ominous!
To make matters even worse, Proteus'?, crew thought they had been done a great honour in recognition of their prowess, and they had actually cheered Nicely's pronouncement. And his decision to "splice the main-brace" and trot out the rum keg for a drink free of personal debts, the "sippers" or "gulpers" owed among them, had raised an even heartier second! Fickle bloody ingrates! Lewrie had fumed.
"Ah, sir, um…" Lewrie attempted once Nicely had turned to face him. "You speak highly of your First Officer, Mister Langlie," Nicely had said sweetly, "nearly ready for a command of his own, as I recall you praising, so… perhaps a spell of actual command, with me as his advisor, as it were, will properly season him for better things in the near future, hey? No fear, Captain, your Order Book shall not be supplanted or amended while I'm aboard as, ah… 'super-cargo' or acting Commodore. I shall not interfere in your officers' habitual direction of your ship. Though I did bring along Lieutenant Darling to stand as a temporary Third Lieutenant, I assure you that he shall strictly adhere to your way of doing things and will be subordinate to Lieutenant Langlie, not me."
"What squadron?" Lewrie had baldly asked, after jerking his chin upwards to indicate the broad pendant.
"We, ah… stand upon it," Nicely had had the gall to confess, with what seemed a dab of chagrin to "press-gang" him out of his command, so he'd be available to fulfill the rest of his scheme.
"Christ on a…" Lewrie had spluttered, close to babbling. "We may add two cutters later on, once you've reported…" "Mine arse on a…" Lewrie had fumed, nigh to mutiny. "So, you're free, d'ye see, Captain Lewrie. Needs must-" "Black!" Lewrie had squawked, shaking his head in ashen awe at how deftly he'd been made "available"; he hadn't seen this coming!
"Sir Hyde and Lord Balcarres insisted, d'ye see," Nicely hurriedly added, "once I'd laid our enterprise's sketch before 'em, so you must adopt the old Navy adage, 'growl ye may, but go ye must.' "
"Mine… Arr!" Lewrie tongue-tangled. "Gahh!"
"So glad you understand," Nicely had cajoled. "Well, I'm dry as dust, and I fetched off a half-dozen of my best claret. Shall we go aft and toast the success of our venture, sirs?"
And, damned if, after the wine had been opened and Lewrie had sloshed down two impatient glasses, his cats hadn't come out of hiding and had made an instant head-rubbing, twining fuss over Captain Nicely, as if they'd been just waiting for his arrival their whole little lives!
Damned traitors/ Lewrie could but accuse in rebellious silence. And Nicely had been so maddeningly, bloody nice that he'd cooed, "mewed," and conversed with Toulon and Chalky, to their evident delight, even suffering Chalky to clamber up his breeches, roll about in his lap to bare his belly for "wubbies," and scale Nicely's heavily gilt-trimmed lapels to play with his epaulet tassels, touch noses with him, shiver his tail to mark him, and grope behind his neck with a paw at his ribbon-bound queue.
Christ, what a … He sighed to himself, sagging weary on the bulwarks, on his elbows and crossed forearms. What an eerie place this is!
He'd been up the Hooghly to Calcutta and had thought that lush and exotic; he'd been to Canton in trading season 'tween the wars and had goggled at the many sights of the inaptly named Pearl River below Jack-Ass Point. Both had been Asian, crowded, teeming with noise, and anthill busy with seeming millions of strange people intent on their labours. Louisiana, though…
First had come the barren shoals, bars, and mud flats of the Mississippi River delta, so far out at sea, the silted-up banks on either hand of the pass and the lower-most channels' desolate ribbons of barrier islands, with the Gulf of Mexico stretching to horizons when seen from the main-top platform, just a few miles beyond them. Skeins made from dead trees, silent and uninhabited, only heightened the sense of utter desolation.
Once past the Head of the Passes, the land spread out east and west to gobble up the seas, the salt marshes and "quaking prairies" impossibly green and glittering, framed by far-distant hints of woods; yet still devoid of humankind, and abandoned.
Now, here almost within two hours' sail of the English Turn and Fort Saint Leon, the river was darkly, gloomily shadowed by too many trees, all wind-sculpted into eldritch shapes, adrape with the Spanish moss that could look like the last rotting shreds of ancient winding sheets or burial shrouds after the ghosts of the dead had clawed their way from their lost-forgotten graves to the sunlight once again. The cypresses standing in green-scummed, death-still ponds, the hammocks of higher land furry with scrub pines, bearing fringes of saw-grasses like bayonets planted to slice foolish intruders…
Oh, here and there were tall levees heaped up to protect fields and pastureland, rough entrenchments of earth that put him in uneasy mind of Yorktown during the Franco-American siege, raised as if to hide whatever lurked behind them from an interloper's view. There might be a gap in the levees where someone had a seasonal sluice-gate to flood and replenish his secret acres. There might be the tiniest peek of a farmhouse's roof and
chimneys, faint wisps of cook-fire smoke at times; the larger pall of bittersweet white smoke as a field was burned off for a fresh seeding with sugarcane or cotton.
But, all in all, it seemed such a thinly settled place, a spookily off-putting land so daunting that only the desperate, the forlorn, would dare attempt to tame it or wrest from it a farthing's profit, or sustenance.
There came a promising little zephyr of wind from the West at last, a welcome bit of coolness after the sullen, damp-washcloth heat of even a winter's day in Louisiana. Lewrie's flesh beneath the stifling closeness of his clothing goose-pimpled to that zephyr. As if to a forewarning, but of what?
CHAPTER NINE
Lewrie wasn't sure exactly what he was expecting once Azucena del Oeste weathered the last bend of the Mississippi, abeam a Westerly wind, and began a long "reach" up the centre of the river's widening channel. To hear Mr. Pollock, Capt. Coffin, and his mates gush about New Orleans, it was a blend of Old Port Royal, Jamaica, the old pirate haven, London's East End docks for commerce, Lisbon for quaintness, and Macao in China for sin.
Lazing on the starboard foremast stays and ratlines just above the gangway bulwarks, using his telescope on things that caught his interest, he watched New Orleans loom up at last. Like most realities, though, the city proved a letdown, compared to the myth.
Near the city, the levees were higher and better-kept, on the east bank at least, with a road atop them bearing waggon traffic and light carts. The road sometimes crossed wooden bridges above sluice-gates and canal cuts that led to planters' fields. Even here, though, Spanish Louisiana still looked thinly populated. One would expect a modicum of commercial bustle so close to a seaport of New Orleans 's repute, but…
The river widened and ran arrow-straight, finally, and Lewrie could espy buildings and wharves, another vast, sloping levee in front of low but wide warehouses. Dead, bare "trees" turned out to be masts of a whole squadron of merchant ships tied up along the quays, along with a confusing tangle that looked like a gigantic log-jam. Nearer up, the log-jam turned out to be a fleet; hundreds of large log rafts or square-ended flatboats that had been floated, poled, or sailed to the docks from the settlements far upriver. Those would be sold off and broken up for their lumber once their voyages were done, Mr. Pollock had told him.
But for church spires and a few public buildings, nothing was taller than two stories, though. Within the last mile, Lewrie could estimate the city as only ten or twelve city blocks wide, and might straggle north towards Lake Pontchartrain another half-dozen blocks. Within throwing distance of the town, swamps, marshes, and forests took over, again; brooding, foetid, and primeval.
"That's it?" Lewrie grumbled in disbelief. "That's all there is to it? What a bloody gyp!"
The river wind brought the tang of "civilisation" from toilets and garbage middens, from horse, mule, donkey, oxen, and human "shite," from hen coops and pig sties; and the Mississippi wafted even more evidence- drowned rats, cats, and dogs; wilted vegetables and husks of fruit; butchers' offal; and turds. Evidently, not only was no one interred belowground in marshy Louisiana, but no drains or sewers could be dug, either! The river that close to town had gone from leaf-mould and silt tobacco-brown to a piss-yellow, shit-brindle colour.
"It ain't that bad, sir," Mr. Pollock said from below him on the gangway, having heard his disappointed muttering. " 'Tis a very wealthy town, for all that. A most pleasant and delightful one, too."
"Wealth? There in that… village?" Lewrie scoffed.
"Consider it a London, Bristol, or Liverpool in their youngest days," Pollock replied with faint amusement. "So recently settled a port city, much like a new-found Ostia serving an equally unimpressive Rome a generation or two after its founding. An Athens or Piraeus in the days of Demosthenes, a Genoa or Marseilles when the Gauls had 'em? Even in their heydays, the fabled ports of antiquity were nowhere near as impressive as present-day London or, say, Lisbon, Lewrie. Ancient Alexandria, Jerusalem in the times of the temple, fabled Babylon, or the hellish-rich Troy of Homer's myth weren't all that big, either. Nothing like Paris or London. Though I doubt the modern world has, or the ancient world had, New Orleans 's match when it comes to wealth and vital location."
"It looks no bigger than Kingston, English Harbour, or Sheerness," Lewrie said with a grunt as he jumped down to the deck.
"Think of Baltimore on the Chesapeake, sir," Pollock countered with a wry grin, " Philadelphia or Charleston. Neither are particularly impressive to look at, but rich? Oh, my my, ahem!" Pollock gushed, making another of his throat-clearing twitch-whinnies. " Port-au-Prince or that shabby hole, Cape Francois, on the north shore of Saint-Domingue. You've been to both, I'm told. Nothing to write home about, but consider the vast wealth that passes through those ports each year."
" Sodom and Gomorrah?" Lewrie queried with a smirk.
"Neither known for trading wealth," Mr. Pollock primly replied, " 'less you consider that their, ah… reputations drew hordes of rich visitors. As does New Orleans. The most, um… entertaining town within five hundred miles in any direction, ahem."
"Well, hmmm," Lewrie speculated. Though even at less than one mile's distance now, New Orleans still appeared small and sleepy, with no sign of anything wondrous, amusing, or sinful about it.
" 'Tis a mortal pity it's so hard to get at," Pollock said on, half wistful and half wolfish, "for its sacking by a British expedition would go a long way towards erasing the Crown's war debts."
"That rich?" Lewrie gawped, turning to regard the approaching town more closely, seeing it in a much better light, of a sudden.
At least I see what makes him happy, Lewrie thought, comparing Pollock's relaxed stance and evident appreciation of New Orleans to his earlier sullenness on the voyage.
"All the wealth of the West pours down here to New Orleans," Mr. Pollock nigh dreamily praised, eyes alight with Pound Sterling symbols, "from the joining of the Ohio and Missouri Rivers. Spanish Louisiana extends to the Great Lakes, and our Hudson 's Bay Company's territory, then far west across the great unknown to Spanish California."
"There for the taking," Lewrie speculated, idly fantasising if anyone would miss a wee chunk of it, the size of Scotland or Ireland, say… and dare he call it "Lewriana"?
"For the settling, eventually," Pollock mused on most happily, for once. "There's very little there now, but for Indians and game. A few wretched settlements like Saint Louis… crossroad or river hamlets. But someday… as the Americans spread out, as we spread west from Canada, the wealth flowing down to New Orleans is certain to be tremendous."
"Of course, Panton, Leslie Company already trades with the isolated rustics and tribes up yonder?" Lewrie asked smirkily.
"We, ah… and the Hudson 's Bay Company, ahem!… are laying the foundations for a British presence, should the Crown desire such, sir," Pollock assured him with a soft voice.
"Hemming the Americans in," Lewrie decided. "Even if they get to the east bank of the Mississippi, and south from Tennessee to the Gulf, in Spanish Florida. Hmmph!. Take 'em a century t'eat that!"
"More than enough room for them. Let us reclaim a bit of Spanish West Florida, as far east as Mobile, say, and we will have an unassailable buffer against any American expedition against the meat of the matter… New Orleans," Pollock speculated, fiddling at his open shirt collars and throat.
Capt. Coffin ordered the brig's hands aloft to reduce sail now that New Orleans had finally been fetched. Her helm, though, was put up, not down, to steer away from the quays, levee, and other shipping, pointing the brig towards the opposite bank.
"We never go to the town docks first," Pollock told Lewrie in answer to his puzzled look. "We go alongside our hulk, yonder, to unload the lighter goods, the, ah… most desirable luxury items."
"Why not use the piers, sir?" Lewrie wondered aloud.
"Land cargo direct to the warehouses, Captain Lewrie, and the Spanish customs officials must levy their duties," Pollock said with a wry smirk, "and not get tup
pence in bribes. A portion of our goods are always part-owned by 'em, on the sly! Bulk cargo is charged duty, which keeps their superiors in Havana and Madrid happy, and what sells on this side of the river is pure profit to the Dons in the Cabildo."
"So, you sell directly from these decks, I take it?" Lewrie asked.
"Oh, no! We transfer the goods aboard our store ship, heh heh… ahem. That hulk I spoke of, yonder," Pollock told him, pointing towards the south shore. "Damn my eyes, those bloody Yankees… they've a new store ship ahead of ours, the conniving…"
In actuality, there were four hulks opposite the city, all half sunk or permanently mired in the mud and silt of the south bank; all cut down to a gant-line, with masts above their top platforms removed, and cargo-handling booms rigged below their main-tops in lieu of course sail yards, just above their waists and main cargo hatches.
The one that Pollock had indicated, the second-most downriver, had once been a three-masted ship of about four or five hundred tons, he judged. She was very old, with a steeply steeved jib boom and bowsprit still jutting upwards from her wide, bluff bows. She had, like an aged whore, though, been tarted up to the point of gaudiness.
Her wide and deep gunwale was painted a bright but chalking and peeling red, her upperworks and bulwarks canary yellow. Remarkably, a permanent shed had been built over her long quarterdeck, making an open and airy peaked-roof awning. A second construction had been erected over her forecastle, from figurehead to the stump of her foremast, with the once-open "heads" and roundhouse toilets fully enclosed, all scaly with shingle siding and roof.
She now sported two entry-ports leading to her starboard upperdeck gangway, each with two pair of stairs and landings of sturdy wood planking and timbers permanently attached; each beginning at the waterline atop a pair of floating platforms to accommodate patrons' sailing or rowing boats, where even now a clutch of boats and some extremely long, lean, and narrow, and very low-sided strange craft were tied up.
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