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by Diane Carey

“Tell me how the American privateer ships out-sail everything else on the seas,” Gordon asked. “What gives them their superior quality? How do they carry so many men in proportion to their sizes? They can’t be comfortable and they’re certainly not safe. What makes them so fast? Is it the angle of the rake? The wood they’re made of? What sorts of bulkheads separate the lower decks? The Royal Navy has captured a dozen of your privateers, then we can’t make them sail right. Tell me what it is!”

  Tarkio paused. “It’s the skill of the captains and crews. Things you can’t copy.”

  “You know what I mean! Is it the style of rigging? The gaff spars? Why are the masts so tall? Aren’t you afraid you’ll turn over?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “So it’s true that these ships are dangerous?”

  “You bet.”

  “And you sail them madly in spite of that? How do they point so tightly into the wind? How can they be so lightly built and so heavily sparred without tipping over? Is it the shape of the keel?”

  Tarkio leaned back against the aft dockline, coiled and hanging behind him. He let his arms slump and simply looked into Gordon’s intense eyes. “What would you think of me if I told you? If you’re trying to get secrets out of me, I don’t know half of them and I’ll never tell those I do. There’s no time for you to learn the skills of a lifetime. Some things are just done by instinct. Sons learn from their fathers, grandfathers. There’s no book about it and no model carved that shows it. None of you—not the best English sailor or the best admiral—has time to learn how to sail our ships. Unless this war lasts a hundred years, you’ll never prevail against captains like Tom Boyle.”

  Gordon surged to his feet again and glared down. “Tom Boyle … Tom Boyle!” He snatched the newspaper off the chart table and shook it at the other man. “The hunter has become the hunted. There’s a price on his head now!”

  He opened the paper to the article he had been reading and dashed it to the deck. The crisp paper, damaged by rain and the fingers of those who read it before him, flew apart and danced over the deck to land in a flurry around Victor Tarkio.

  James Gordon glared at the paper, his eyes unfocused, his mind fixing on a target.

  “I mean to collect it.”

  Trim to Fighting Sail

  THE SARGASSO SEA

  FORTY MILES WEST OF BERMUDA

  SEPTEMBER

  “SAIL SIGHTED, TOM. SQUARE tops’ls on two masts. Still hull down.”

  “Trim to pursue. Get a lookout up.”

  “Trim to pursue, aye. Trim for broad on the larboard reach! Pursell, put some eyes on the maintop. Ready about!”

  “Ready about!” “Ready about!” “Ready about,” the crew chanted back unevenly, with great cheer.

  Subtle, but a curious point about ships with plenty of experienced hands—the chief mate could’ve called out for hands to the braces and sheets, helm this, helm that, but with so many seasoned schooner men aboard, such calls would’ve been almost insulting. He only shouted so everybody could hear him, and it was pretty much the kind of experienced shout that traveled only along the deck, and not out along the water.

  Tom Boyle left the starboard rail and crossed the crowded deck to the other side, midships, to look for the new sighting. There he found grizzly prize-master John Hooper scouting the horizon as well, where they could just see two masts with main and fore course sails puffed out and two tops’ls each as well. Hooper was a competent captain in his own right, as were a dozen others here, and equal that many qualified mates who could be captains in a pinch, and some of those were still boys. Hooper had his own two sons aboard, aged eight and ten years, and made a good practice of ignoring them, leaving it to officers on the other watches to deal with them. It was well for a father to be aboard, but not a daddy.

  Every few waves under the schooner, they caught sight of a hull painted brick-red just coming up over the horizon.

  “She’s big,” the heavily bewhiskered Hooper said in his high voice, sensing Boyle’s presence without looking. “Cargo ship.”

  “Brig-rigged and big, I’ll be jigged. Must be headed for London,” Boyle responded, since no other destination except maybe Bermuda made sense here in the constantly clockwise North Atlantic Current. “Do you see any banner?”

  “No colors yet. I’ll bet she’s double our burden, though. Three hundred tons, anyway.”

  “Let’s assume we like her.” He cast a shout over his shoulder without taking his eyes off the prey. “Clear for action, boys.”

  “Light breeze,” Hooper commented, looking up at the state of Maryland flag flying off the topmast as a weather gauge. “Little better than the day you picked me up.”

  “You mean when we cracked out at a whopping two knots?”

  “When Yorktown tried to overtake us.”

  Boyle smiled, remembering that attempt to sail off the dock of the historic site of Washington’s victory over Cornwallis. “Well, anyone can sail in heavy wind. Where’s Ring? Tommy!”

  “Here,” Ring called from the other side of the main deckhouse.

  “Cram on all canvas.”

  “Cramming.”

  Still over there on the starboard quarter, Tommy Ring yipped a few hoisting orders and men moved as swiftly as conditions allowed without literally stepping on each other. With a crew of ninety-nine and fifteen prisoners stuffed into the ninety feet between Comet’s stem and stern and her twenty-three-foot beams, there was no room for pardon me where most of the men slept literally sitting up. The next half hour was a clatter of activity. The Marines hurriedly dived below to make room for sail handling until their muskets were needed. Seamen who weren’t manning halyards and stuns’ls and tops’ls began the process of passing up boarding pikes, swords, cutlasses, then loading pistols and muskets one by one, all of which were laid side-by-side on the decktops upon flaked ropes that would keep them from sliding off as the schooner dipped and tipped. Gun crews prepared the powder and shot for the ship’s twelve-pounder carronades and the two nine-pounder long guns stationed at the beams. With a calculating eye Boyle watched all this going on around him and was glad he had spent the last three weeks drilling every last man till his fingers bled. Sometimes he wasn’t popular for that. He hoped they had some pride in what they’d learned.

  The mid-Atlantic airs were breathy and fresh, which favored the Comet, with her much lighter body than the other ship, in fact lighter than most of their prey. In minutes the schooner was a giant puff of ivory canvas with a little yellow blade underneath. She was a pretty bird under her lower sails, but with the topsails and studdingsails set she was something out of heroic myth. Away she sliced, heeling over with her starboard shoulder down, sending her crew scrambling for the high side so they wouldn’t be bounced overboard as she buried her rail.

  This quarry, if they caught her, would be their second prize-ship. The first had been the month before, in mid-July, a good prize loaded with sugar, wine, and fustic for yellow dyes, and she’d be worth a hundred thousand dollars to the owners and crew, and another fifty thousand in duties and charges to the United States government. That had been a good day.

  Boyle thought back to their first capture and his chest swelled with anticipation for the next one. Sailing a ship for profit was a joyous thing, but add to that the blood-rush of the privateering hunt—there was nothing like this. They were raiders now, representatives of the United States, carrying a license to raid. He had an entrepreneur’s taste for risk, and the war now allowed him to bring out that extra measure of dodgery that went unpracticed before. What good is a predator, after all, if he doesn’t love a chase and a good fang-and-claw?

  These who had been merchant seamen only a few weeks ago were something else now, something on the edge of maritime law and the rules of commerce. Rather than passing other vessels with friendly salutes, a wave of a hand and an exchange of news, they were hunters and other vessels their prey. They could attack, shoot, kill, steal, seize, or destroy, and claim authority on th
e high seas to do so. They were armed soldiers how. Only one thin document kept Boyle and his raiders from being ordinary murderers and thieves. That one document was a letter, stowed away lovingly in the captain’s cabin in a leather envelope, in his desk next to the box of new signal flags Mary Pickersgill had delivered to him, to protect it and the important signatures upon it from moisture or hot shot. That little piece of paper turned Captain Tom Boyle from a merchant sailor and land speculator into a privateer—a captain with permission to run down enemy shipping and legally steal both cargo and vessel, to take and hold prisoners and sometimes to decide their fates, and to cash in on the value of both ship and load. They were armed for more than protection or salutes. Aboard were government-sanctioned heavy guns and a phalanx of United States Marines. So was he a soldier or a mercenary? Pirate or patriot or opportunist? With that piece of paper, Boyle could call himself any of those. And others would call him other things, but he didn’t care.

  Pretty sure he’d been a panther in a previous life, Boyle looked up at the patches on the fores’l where repairs had been made from grapeshot during their wrestle with their first victim. That battle had lasted twelve minutes.

  Everything depended upon factors he could not divine. What was in the minds of the other ship’s owners? Were they loading their ship so full of cargo that she was manned only by seamen, or were they betting that half a cargo was better than none and loaded the other half of her burden with heavy guns and armed mercenaries? And of what kind of spirit was her captain? Was he a hired merchant who would heave to at a warning shot across the bow? Or perhaps he was a former Royal Navy man, with twenty years’ experience and the stones for a fight? Or a combination of both—a merchant captain with part ownership of his vessel and a huge personal stake in evading the privateers or battling them down to the last man? Was he a fair-weather sailor who had enjoyed good luck and favorable passages, or was he a grizzled bare-knuckled tar who had been around the Horn and seen the notorious house-high seas?

  Quickly, but not too quickly, the schooner bobbed, leaned her shoulder into a swell, and climbed. If the tiller were swung too aggressively the schooner would go too far over, then the helmsman would have a nasty time steadying her up as she wagged back and forth in a mess, and she would lose way as the seas passed inefficiently by her rudder. A good helmsman’s touch was a light, slow, firm, anticipating touch, and Webb was a good helmsman. Handled right in the right seas, the schooner would climb a swell, lean into it, crest the top, then skate down the other side and even gain speed. She began to do this dolphin-like movement, slicing forward and a bit to the starboard with every swell and skate. At the helm Isaac felt his way along, reading the sensation of changing water pressure against the hull. The breeze against the sails and the feeling of the current on the rudder would communicate through the tiller to his hand, as if he were taking a pulse.

  A dozen possible patterns of behavior chewed at Tom Boyle as the Comet closed on her larger prey and he tried to guess the unguessable. The other ship turned northeast to bring the wind to her stern. In these light airs that square-rigged brig had also rolled out every bit of canvas.

  Boyle got a little shiver up his neck. While very few British seamen had experience aboard American fore-and-aft-riggers, he had to assume that captain knew some key facts about schooner handling.

  The schooner’s saw-up and skate-down motion began to lose its ballet and the yellow hull bobbled inefficiently as the course changed and the wind moved from a halfway decent starboard tack to a clunky gust from over the stern.

  “He knows,” Boyle mumbled. Over his shoulder he called, “Wing and wing, Tommy. Let’s run before it. Catch him.”

  “Wing and wing,” the second mate responded. “Hands to put the main over!”

  “And soak the sails.”

  Ring relayed that order and men scrambled for buckets, filled them, arranged themselves into bucket brigades on both sides of the ship, then climbed the ratlines until they were over the sails. They dumped bucket after bucket of water over the eggshell-white canvas. Swollen with water, the cloth was less porous, and the sails puffed out a bit more than before, catching a little more wind, and the ship moved that bit faster. Anything was an advantage.

  Over the Sargasso Sea’s sapphire waters, notorious for color and depth of clarity, the distance began to close between the two vessels with each commander trying to use the endless current in his favor.

  When his instincts started to buzz, Boyle interrupted the curious silence that had fallen as those men on deck settled to watch the chase and spoke less and less with every half mile crossed. When he was ready, Boyle spoke to Tommy Ring again.

  “Call all hands.”

  “All hands on deck, all hands—somebody go tell ’em.” Ring had the sense to somehow yell without yelling, and the men were trained well enough to keep their responses low. Sounds traveled over water like a skimming pelican and no one wanted to announce each movement to the other ship.

  No more than seven minutes passed, long minutes, before a crowd of drowsy crewmen erupted one by one from the crowded hammocks below, shaking away their sleep, then chief mate John Dieter appeared at Boyle’s side, carrying the box of signal flags. He blinked through the bright sunlight to the square-rigger. By now they could see its dark-red hull when the swells were right.

  Dieter was the kind of mate considered by the crew to be the de-facto captain of the ship while Boyle was just making the decisions. No one really could explain that, except that like any truly effective chief mate, Dieter was somehow everywhere at all times, aloft and below, forward and aft, wordlessly knowing what the captain was thinking, divining every change, and breathing down the neck of every jack who might be too clumsy or too groggy to do his job ten seconds before it was expected to be done. A wiry young man with stovepipe legs, a narrow but strong upper body, and arms completely covered in tattoos, Dieter went about with his long sun-brassed hair twisted up into a kind of Oriental bun from which the blanched ends fanned out above his face like a twiggy halo.

  “Standing by your favorite gun again?” he asked as he approached Boyle.

  Boyle glanced down at one of his newly acquired carronades. “Well, she is a virgin, after all.” And he patted the fat, stumpy, sun-warmed iron body under his resting foot. There were nine more like her aboard, all fresh from the foundry. “The finest of Scottish gunnery, all dressed up and never a bit of red on her lips … but she’s quaking for it, John. Can’t you feel her? She wants to do more than drill.”

  “Clement wants to do that too. He’s getting the powder boys to cheer and gambol around below.”

  “Told you he’d make a good gun sergeant. His uncle runs a powder mill.” He smiled and tried to imagine his third mate frolicking with the youngest boys below, making up gun rhymes and arming chanteys. Even at the age of thirty, Clement Cathell was a boy at heart himself, eternally in a good cheer, and could find a twig of hope in any grimness.

  “I like this business,” Dieter said, peering out at the ship they were chasing. “Any clues about how they’re armed?”

  “No ports, so guns’ll be on the weather deck. If they know war’s been declared, they’ll have some firepower aboard. I would.”

  “I know you like your twelves, but what if she’s got twenty-fours?”

  “We have speed and maneuverability.”

  “Tom, do you know what a twenty-four-pounder can do to us with one shot?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Pretty soon we’ll be near enough to find out.”

  “The schooner, the better.” Boyle felt the wind turn cool on his face, as if it were trying to tell him something. He sat down, straddling the carronade’s fat body. “She’s a pleasant companion. Just this morning, I was talking to my gun about life—”

  Dieter smiled. “Did the gun answer?”

  “You discuss your problems, then you shoot them.”

  “If we keep shooting our problems as we did last month, we’ll be famous.�
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  “I’d rather be anonymous,” Boyle said. “Leaves me free to be shrewd. And we have to do better than one capture a month.”

  One of the crewmen, a boy of fourteen, son of a watchmaker and in need of income for his crippled sister, appeared and didn’t quite approach. He had a limp when he was nervous and hair the color of fire, which made him easy to spot on deck, even in the rain.

  “Should I load, Tom?” the teenager asked. He had loaded the carronade three times for drills, and now finally would load her for a possible real engagement. He would fire her too, if needed, and learn to do the hardest thing about being a privateer. He would learn to kill.

  “Oh! Certainly. Load all of them.” Boyle cleared out and moved midships so the boy could make ready the carronade in case the other ship put up a fight.

  Dieter followed. “What’s that buck’s name again?”

  “Sigsby. Steven Sigsby. Reminds me of somebody. Makes me think.”

  “’Bout what?”

  “Lieutenant Gordon and the sea.”

  “Ah … who?”

  “That squirrel who seized our flags and pennants last year.”

  “The one who took Tarkio and Bristow? That boy?”

  “A smart boy. He was talking about Napoleon. The French have an interest in anything that draws the British off them. That’s us now.”

  “Does it give you concern?”

  “Every day,” Boyle answered. “I sent Victor Tarkio because he was the most likely to survive life in the Royal Navy. He could be anywhere by now, on any ship. Bristow too. We could fight a Royal Navy ship and discover we’ve killed or maimed our own shipmate. That’s what bothers me, and that’s all. I don’t want to help Napoleon rule the world, but I’ve no sympathy for emperors or kings. They deserve what they get.”

  “Aren’t the British right to fight Napoleon? Y’know, right, wrong, up, down …”

  “I’m no priest. But the only dictator I want to work for is myself.”

  “And a sweet tyranny it is.”