by Diane Carey
As they cleared the point, the water opened up before them and there was instantly more room for maneuvering.
Boyle clapped his hands once. “All right, let’s set that fore.”
At the fore sheets, John Dieter barked the order, “On your sheets and braces, let go and haul!”
The brails were released, the sheets hauled. The graceful foresail draped out like a theatre curtain and snapped firm. Chasseur took another sudden leap forward and heeled over on her starboard shoulder.
Boyle listened the shussh-shussh-shussh of the water’s ageless voice against the hull. The hull sliced through the waves like a sword blade. There was nothing sluggish about her.
He cast a glance at the ungasketed main sail, taffy-folded on its boom, ready to be hoisted, and saw that the men were ready. “Set the main.”
The helm team eased off a little, letting some wind out of the sails so the main could be raised. Dieter sharply shouted. “On your peak and throat halyards, haul away together!”
The colossal mainsail crawled upward, tugging on the hoops, rising as if commanded by the titans until it dominated the dimming sun.
“Put us on the wind again, Paul,” Boyle ordered, and the ship screamed forward so smoothly that there was no rocking motion at all, but only a sensation of speed. Boyle began to calculate how much time at this racing speed would bring them out into the open ocean and then in danger of being spotted by the blockaders. He had originally estimated a slower pace, which would let night close around them as a shield, the clouds in the sky assisting by covering the moonlight. His mind spun with calculations and an adequate memory of the chart for these shores.
A singular cheer reached Boyle’s ears. He turned to see the people in the flotilla of escort boats and the people on the shore reveling and waving their good wishes as they were swiftly left behind. The wind pulled at his dark hair and made him blink. He waved at them and hoped he would not let them down, for his plan was a mad one this time.
Flag receipt.
Courtesy of the Star-Spangled Banner Flag House, Li1938.12.1
A Coastal War
THE COAST OF NOVA SCOTIA
“SAIL TO L’WARD!”
The lookout’s call brought Tom Boyle out of his cot. He’d slept all night, for a change.
Dieter was handing him the spyglass even before the captain was all the way out of the hatch. “Just hull-up.”
“How cooperative of them to appear at change of watch.”
“I arranged it that way,” Dieter crowed.
“Call all hands. All lowers and the square tops’l.”
“All hands on deck! Hands to hoist the foretop!”
“Oh, more than one,” Boyle observed through the spyglass as the Chasseur turned—and turned with a little jump, as if she knew.
Comet had been handy and quick, making course changes fast as a bird flying. Chasseur was something else—bigger, heavier, longer, deeper, yet so well-balanced, so ingeniously crafted that she responded to her helm’s smallest adjustment smoothly even on choppy seas. Each ship had her own good qualities, rather like the difference between a feisty pony and a long-legged racehorse. Comet had been quick and sly, hiding in the smallest, shallowest inlet, disappearing in a light fog, slipping away as if she were a specter. Then, Chasseur’s ability to accelerate was shocking and the power of her sails to drive the bigger, deeper hull carrying more men and bigger guns was a tribute to the minds of her makers. The slightest adjustment in trim could send her shooting forward and she did not like to stop. He had discovered that even completely dropping the main might not be enough to slow her down. Her design was something new in the world, a fresh idea for seafaring—this sharp hull and wave-cutting prow, and a hundred details in the minds of her designers and shipwrights, sailmakers and then those who sailed her. While Comet had been built like a typical American schooner, created to make the best of the winds, currents, bays, and rivers of North America and the Indies, Chasseur had been built as a privateer—a fighting rig balanced to carry heavy guns, designed to twist and rush and crank around, offering the widest possible changes of rigging style while underway that anyone could imagine. She was a ship of war, built to fight.
Of course, the deal was not done on the best ship in the world until her crewmen also were trained and attuned to her finest of adjustments. Then, there was the sea.
Boyle shook out of his ruminations as men piled up from below, having already eaten and dressed to take over the watch.
“Captain!”
He turned as two of the ship’s boys, chubby Yankee Sheppard and wild-haired Adam something, came bare-footing to the after deck.
“Yankee,” Boyle greeted. “Adam. Good morning.”
“An abundance of storm petrels today, Captain,” Sheppard boy said, pointing into the sky.
“Good. Thank you for being observant.”
Adam, who could never quite control all his arms and legs at one, bounced as he asked, “Why’s it good?”
“Remember that I asked you to keep watch for cape pigeons and storm petrels?”
“Yes …”
“Those are Wilson’s petrels. That puts us at the converging point of the Labrador Current and the Gulf Stream. It’s right where we want to be.”
“Just from the birds?”
“Animals can help us navigate very well. How do you think the ancients traveled the seas without charts?”
“How did they?”
Yankee asked, “From the birds?”
“Birds, fish, whales, even more. At night, the color guides in the sky are unreliable, but luminous marine organisms occur where there are reefs.”
“Water temperatures,” Dieter told them.
“Go on, John.”
“Knowledge of charting warm and cold currents, like here where the two big currents meet, one warm, one cold. We take the temperature of the sea at certain intervals.”
“Can I take it?” Yankee bubbled.
“Me too!” his scrawny shipmate demanded.
“Of course, you both can.”
“I knew a man in the Indies,” Boyle added. “He would paddle south in a canoe, absolutely nothing in sight, no land, and all at once he would finally just turn right to get to his island. I asked him how he knew when to turn. He said, ‘When the water turns warmer.’ And I think he tasted it, too, whatever that did for him.”
“Tasted it?” Dieter repeated. “Salt content?”
“Honestly, I’ve no hint. I tried it, but it didn’t work for me.”
“Can I taste the water?” Adam asked, still bouncing.
Boyle smiled and cupped his hand over the boy’s knobby shoulder. “That’s not a call I would standardize. Are you coming on watch?”
“Yes!” Yankee gulped, still excited about the birds.
“Go talk to Mr. Thompson. Have him pay out about a hundred fathoms of line for you. Braid and whip some new sail ties and another length or two of baggywrinkle. Off you go.”
The two boys rushed forward, madly spotting birds and telling the other boys what they’d discovered, but not before skinny Adam whirled around and shot Boyle a spanking good salute.
“Keep them busy below in case there’s action,” he said to Dieter. “Send your watch to breakfast, John, but bid them eat quickly and come back up.”
“Will do,” Dieter answered, and made the order for which the men on his watch were grateful after the chilly night.
They soon drew close enough to see that their prey were three ships, at least three, visible in the morning haze.
“Two brigs and a three-master,” Isaac Webb noted from his place at the helm tackles, when he could count the sails with his naked eye. “Either they’re bound for Canada or they thought they could avoid privateers by taking the northern route.”
Boyle nodded. “That’s what I think. Let’s run up on them. Close haul.”
“Close haul, aye.”
The helm was put tight toward the wind. The fore-and-aft sails were drawn i
nward as far as they could be without coming completely amidships, and the wind pressed into towers of canvas almost straight flat as dinner dishes. The schooner heeled over, then over more, until her crew clung like monkeys and her rail went down into the pale pink waves of dawn.
“You know, I’m thinking about changing our watch routine,” he mentioned casually to Dieter as his mate reappeared, precariously carrying a plate of biscuits and a pot of coffee.
“Oh?”
“We have plenty of men aboard and officers to relieve you and me of watch leading. Divide the crew into thirds instead of halves. Let the lieutenants lead the watches. Instead of two sixes, we could run eight-on, eight-off, with two dog watches at four and six. The men will be rotated in such a way that duty during the night watch is shared. They get more rest.”
“I’ve dreamed of that for years. Why the sudden change?”
“This ship’s big enough for more people to be asleep at the same time.”
“I like that,” Dieter agreed while gnawing on a biscuit. “I revile the midnight-to-six watch.”
“Do you? You never told me.”
“You couldn’t divine it from my bearlike snarling at change of watch?”
“I figured you were just nasty. After dinner, let’s rewrite the duty roster. Give it a try.”
“That’s well.” Dieter pointed at the ships they were pursuing. “They’ve seen us. Turning away. You intend to take all three?”
“Always bite the big bites, John.”
“I’ll ready the gun batteries.”
“Finish your coffee first.”
With the ship heeled so steeply, they could only load the guns on the high side. By running those guns out, and with a little help from the helm, the balance of weight brought the leeward rail out of the water and they could at least load the forward and aft guns on that side.
“Oh—look at this!” Boyle squinted, then used the spyglass. “That brig’s a man-of-war. Royal Navy guarding the two merchant ships. That puts a different color on the cake. Isaac, bring us up close, but stay out of long-gun range.”
“Understood.”
After telling Dieter his plans, Boyle moved to just forward of the main, where he could bark orders to anybody on the deck if things had to happen suddenly.
The schooner skimmed through the morning swells, which were shallow enough that the hull could cut through them rather than riding high over crests and down into troughs. Chasseur was able to close on the three-ship convoy in less than an hour.
“Fire a gun, John,” Boyle ordered.
“Larboard bow gun, fire!”
The crew covered their ears. The long gun’s heavy bark made the water quiver under it. The gun’s range was long, much longer than the carronades of Comet. If their quarries had any doubt that the schooner was a privateer seeking to raid them, they would no longer.
They waited, drawing closer with every swell—dangerously close. Isaac was estimating the range of the Royal Navy ship’s guns, with Boyle keeping a vigilant watch over movements on the warship’s deck, measuring what they might be doing by their positions on the deck. A gun answered—probably an eighteen-pounder, from the sound.
The ball soared toward them. The crew scrambled, but there was nowhere to hide. Only by the thinnest of margins did the ball miss the stern and splash into the water, shooting up a huge asymmetrical funnel of spray.
Dieter shouted, “Look out, Nanny, we’re in range!”
“Bear off downwind,” Boyle called to the helm. “Let’s run away.”
“Bearing off.”
“Ease the main out. Back the tops’l, John, brail up the fore. Take some speed off her. Let them think they can catch us.”
The schooner bore away from the convoy, running beautifully with her main sail all the way out over the water. She balked a little in the breeze from behind and tried to turn against her helm, like an anxious dog pulling at a leash. But he must rein her back, Boyle knew, as he watched the British man-of-war easily fall into the chase. The square-rigged warship was very fast in a following wind, so he moved Chasseur to a position that did not favor her—with the wind almost straight behind.
“Unback the tops’l and back the stays’l,” he ordered. “Luff the main.”
Sailors came aft to handle the main sheet and bring the big main boom, which of course was a de-branched fir tree trunk, back to the middle of the ship, where the sail did almost no good. Its leech began to flip and starve for air. The schooner stalled under them, barely moving forward. For Chasseur, that was still a good six knots, even with only her square tops’l and heads’l working. Fast banshee.
Boyle looked behind. The man-of-war was closing on them. Almost back in gun range. Farther behind them, the two merchant ships tried to escape on their western course.
For a good two miles they drew the English ship downwind. A couple of times Boyle made sure the schooner appeared to be struggling in the following wind. They had to work hard to make it look like a struggle. Chasseur just wanted to race.
Calculating maneuvers, wave strength, wind, and time, Boyle ticked off the minutes until he estimated the moment had come.
“Wear ship,” he commanded.
“Wear ship!”
“Clew up the square and set the fores’l.”
Isaac Webb brought the helm across the wind and the schooner wheeled smoothly around, turning so sharply that the square-rigged English ship could not match her movement. By the time the English ship even began to turn, Chasseur was going almost into the wind like some kind of sorcery of physics.
Boyle rubbed his hands together and put the English warship out of his brain. He looked now forward at the two fat merchant ships, probably loaded with wonderful aromatic cargoes like coffee and cotton and rum.
Dieter appeared at his side, but he was looking back at the English warship as it batted around and struggled to come back into the wind. They would find it impossible to come back at any useful angle, giving Chasseur’s crew time to capture both merchant ships. “I wonder how many times we can get away with that before they figure it out. Someday they’ll stop chasing us.”
“Someday,” Boyle agreed wistfully. “But not yet. Take care, because those merchantmen could still be armed. When we get to there, let’s take one and put a prize crew aboard, then have them get cracking to New York while we take the other one. We’ll get an accounting of the cargo when they reach a port. By the time the man-of-war gets back in range, I want both those ships under my prize captains and escaping.”
Dieter motioned for two of the prize captains to meet him amidships, told them what was expected, then let them go quickly to gather boarding implements—pikes, pistols, cutlasses—and organize their prize crews. That done, Dieter came back to the command deck.
“So what did you mean?” he asked, keeping an eye on the man-of-war, just in case.
“Mm—pardon?” Boyle turned. “’Bout what?”
“What did you mean, ‘this is it’?” the chief mate asked.
“Oh …” Holding on to the shroud as Chasseur bit down and heeled insanely over, Boyle glanced up at the taut sails, then forward at the excited collection of sailors and Marines whose lives were in his hands.
“You’re going to have to tell me,” Dieter said. “I’m your chief mate and I need to know. If anybody kills you before I do, I’ll need to complete the mission. So what is ‘it’?”
“This schooner, John.” He clapped a hand on Dieter’s shoulder. “She’s the devil I need. And by the souls of the damned, I think she knows it.”
“Right,” Dieter answered in true facts-only first-mate style. He shook his head, making the fan of hair from the knot on his head wave like a child’s toy. “No … no, I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”
“England, my man. They’re blockading our trade, so we will plunder theirs in their own waters.”
“England? The England? You mean … we’re going to England? Itself?”
“England
itself. We’ll strike where they’re vulnerable.”
“Where in hell are they vulnerable?”
“Their pocketbooks.”
Dieter’s face screwed in incomprehension. “What can sixteen guns do against the English in their home waters?”
Boyle sucked in a big, long, clear breath and turned his face into the wind.
“Attack the pound sterling.”
Respect
PORTSMOUTH, ENGLAND
“There it is!”
History’s doorway. Portsmouth, England. Lieutenant Gordon almost jumped out of the boat right over the oars when he first saw the American ship moored out, minding its own business and awaiting its fate.
This ancient and venerated place had seen more monumental seaborne happenings than any hundred lifetimes could carry. Here King John had formed a naval base. From here Henry III and Edward I had struck out against France. Here the French had raided in the 1330’s and the first dry dock in the world had turned out the first English warship. Here Henry VIII witnessed the disastrous turnover of his top-heavy warship Mary Rose, saw her sink with more than five hundred lives, including irreplaceable archers whose skills had taken their entire lives to develop. One couldn’t just go and hire another skilled longbowman. Here the founder of the Royal Navy had planned his assaults during the Dutch War and the war with the Spanish, and the first colonists had embarked. Back into the echoes of time, Portsmouth was there, with the Normans, with the Saxons, with the Romans, and all those who had walked the twisted, time-carved roads, rusty outskirts, and fog-shrouded farms.
Of all that had happened here in the past thousand and more years, James Gordon was sure another such moment was dawning as he looked with tight scrutiny at the captured American privateer ship. The rake of these two masts was almost as deep as Thomas Boyle’s Comet, against which he measured all privateer ships—the rake, the speed, the hull, the arcane maneuverability, and that American dash of recklessness that could never be predicted. There was something, though, that this ship possessed that the Comet had not. Gunports. This was no converted merchant ship tempted into service by James Madison and his desperation to have a shadow navy. This captured American ship had been specifically built for armed privateering.
