Admiral

by Dudley Pope

  Copyright & Information

  Admiral

  First published in 1982

  Copyright: Kay Pope; House of Stratus 1982-2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of Dudley Pope to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2010 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., 21 Beeching Park, Kelly Bray,

  Cornwall, PL17 8QS, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  EAN ISBN Edition

  0755104382 9780755104383 Print

  0755117808 9780755117802 Pdf

  0755119258 9780755119257 Mobi

  0755120396 9780755120390 Epub

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  www.houseofstratus.com

  About the Author

  Dudley Bernard Egerton Pope was born in Ashford, Kent on 29 December 1925. When at the tender age of fourteen World War II broke out and Dudley attempted to join the Home Guard by concealing his age. At sixteen, once again using a ruse, he joined the merchant navy a year early, signing papers as a cadet with the Silver Line. They sailed between Liverpool and West Africa, carrying groundnut oil.

  Before long, his ship was torpedoed in the Atlantic and a few survivors, including Dudley, spent two weeks in a lifeboat prior to being rescued. His injuries were severe and because of them he was invalided out of the merchant service and refused entry into the Royal Navy when officially called up for active service aged eighteen.

  Turning to journalism, he set about ‘getting on with the rest of his life’, as the Naval Review Board had advised him. He graduated to being Naval and Defence correspondent with the London Evening News in 1944. The call of the sea, however, was never far away and by the late 1940’s he had managed to acquire his first boat. In it, he took part in cross-channel races and also sailed off to Denmark, where he created something of a stir, his being one of the first yachts to visit the country since the war.

  In 1953 he met Kay, whom he married in 1954, and together they formed a lifelong partnership in pursuit of scholarly adventure on the sea. From 1959 they were based in Porto Santo Stefano in Italy for a few years, wintering on land and living aboard during the summer. They traded up boats wherever possible, so as to provide more living space, and Kay Pope states:

  ‘In September 1963, we returned to England where we had bought the 53 foot cutter Golden Dragon and moved on board where she lay on the east coast. In July 1965, we cruised down the coasts of Spain and Portugal, to Gibraltar, and then to the Canary Islands. Early November of the same year we then sailed across the Atlantic to Barbados and Grenada, where we stayed three years.

  Our daughter, Victoria was 4 months old when we left the UK and 10 months when we arrived in Barbados. In April 1968, we moved on board ‘Ramage’ in St Thomas, US Virgin Islands and lost our mainmast off St Croix, when attempting to return to Grenada.’

  The couple spent the next nine years cruising between the British Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, before going to Antigua in 1977 and finally St.Martin in 1979.

  The sea was clearly in Pope’s blood, his family having originated in Padstow, Cornwall and later owning a shipyard in Plymouth. His great-grandfather had actually preceded him to the West Indies when in 1823, after a spell in Canada, he went to St.Vincent as a Methodist missionary, before returning to the family business in Devon.

  In later life, Dudley Pope was forced to move ashore because of vertigo and other difficulties caused by injuries sustained during the war. He died in St.Martin in 1997, where Kay now lives. Their daughter, Victoria, has in turn inherited a love of the sea and lives on a sloop, as well as practising her father's initial profession of journalism.

  As an experienced seaman, talented journalist and historian, it was a natural progression for Pope to write authoritative accounts of naval battles and his first book, Flag 4: The Battle of Coastal Forces in the Mediterranean, was published in 1954. This was followed in 1956 by the Battle of the River Plate, which remains the most accurate and meticulously researched account of this first turning point for Britain in World War II. Many more followed, including the biography of Sir Henry Morgan, (Harry Morgan’s Way) which has one won wide acclaim as being both scholarly and thoroughly readable. It portrays the history of Britain’s early Caribbean settlement and describes the Buccaneer’s bases and refuges, the way they lived, their ships and the raids they made on the coast of central America and the Spain Main, including the sack of Panama.

  Recognising Pope’s talent and eye for detail, C.S. Forrester (the creator of the Hornblower Series) encouraged him to try his hand at fiction. The result, in 1965, was the appearance of the first of the Ramage novels, followed by a further seventeen culminating with Ramage and the Dido which was published in 1989. These follow the career and exploits of a young naval officer, Nicholas Ramage, who was clearly named after Pope’s yacht. He also published the ‘Ned Yorke’ series of novels, which commences as would be expected in the Caribbean, in the seventeenth century, but culminates in ‘Convoy’ and ‘Decoy’ with a Ned Yorke of the same family many generations on fighting the Battle of the Atlantic.

  All of Dudley Pope’s works are renowned for their level of detail and accuracy, as well as managing to bring to the modern reader an authentic feeling of the atmosphere of the times in which they are set.

  ‘Expert knowledge of naval history’- Guardian

  “An author who really knows Nelson’s navy” - Observer

  ‘The best of Hornblower’s successors’ - Sunday Times

  ‘All the verve and expertise of Forrester’ - Observer

  Dedication

  For the Allinghams

  who remember Kingsnorth

  Hispaniola & the Spanish Main

  Chapter One

  Although Major-General Heffer unrolled the map with as much ceremony as he dared, the effect was spoiled when he realized that the parchment would curl up again the moment he let go of the ends. He snatched up the flattened pebbles he always used as paperweights and carefully placed them. Then he stood back and looked at the irregular scrawl of inks and colours that seemed like the pattern for a small Wilton rug.

  “There you are,” he said proudly to the two silent and unmoving men standing the other side of the table, “that’s probably the first map ever made of Cagway; I’m sure the Spaniards never bothered.”

  The two men nodded and waited without comment.

  Although the house was large, the room the general used as an office was small and uncomfortably hot, the air so humid it reminded them both so strongly of a wash house that they could almost hear the slapping and scrubbing and the pattering of water as wet cloth was wrung out. The house was stoutly built of thick stone, and most windows had heavy shutters made of bulletwood with loopholes cut in them like giant locks awaiting keys.

  Heffer had apparently chosen his office with all the care of a man doing penance: it was on the west side and the single window was small so that although the direct rays of the scorching noon sun did not stream in, neither did the cooling Trade winds u
sually blowing from the east. Even the flies seemed listless, only briefly interested in the parchment but otherwise content to rest on the flaking whitewash of the walls. With the hurricane season beginning in Jamaica, the blazing sun and humidity drained the energy of anything that moved.

  Heffer was a suspicious and bilious man who always kept a door shut; to him an open doorway was only an invitation to eavesdroppers. As one of Cromwell’s generals (although as a colonel his role in the Western Design had been minor and the recent news of the Lord Protector’s death had left him feeling lost like an orphan), he was ready enough to suffer for the cause: the Lord Protector had first ordered him to the West Indies to serve in the army intended to carry out the Western Design and then later honoured him with the appointment of acting governor of Jamaica. It was given to few men to serve both their God and their Leader, and Heffer was thankful he had been one of those chosen.

  Though quite where he stood at this moment he was far from sure, and he was even less certain about the future of Jamaica. Somehow he had stumbled (or been manoeuvred) into a position where, for the moment at least, his fate and the island’s both seemed to depend on the ideas and activities of the two buccaneers standing the other side of the table, Edward Kent and Thomas Whetheread, men who were almost strangers to him. It was in some ways fortunate that the Lord Protector was not alive to hear of it. What would his son Richard Cromwell, who now ruled in his place, think? Or supposing, as Whetheread seemed to think, Richard would by now have resigned or been overthrown by sterner officers in the army? Heffer had never met Richard, but the rumours he had heard in the last few years – that the Lord Protector’s son had neither the ability nor inclination to succeed his father – had been more than confirmed by gossip. By reports, he corrected himself.

  The man Heffer knew as Whetheread pointed at the map. “Did you draw this?”

  Heffer nodded modestly.

  “But you actually surveyed it some months ago?”

  “Er, yes, before you arrived here.”

  “You were going to send it to the Lord Protector, eh, and when you heard that the Good Lord had suddenly withdrawn His protection from Oliver, you hurriedly redrew it without your original dedication and all the New Model Army embellishments.”

  Heffer, startled and unsettled by Whetheread’s insight, said nothing. He was tall and painfully thin and had a remarkably long face. His head, with protruding teeth and odd tufts of hair clinging to the skull like a monk’s moth-eaten tonsure, reminded the other men of a poor-quality drumskin stretched over a sheep’s skull.

  The heat dried the chevaux-de-frise of teeth so that as he spoke the inside of the general’s lips stuck and his tongue, constantly darting round to wet them, gave the impression it was trying to stop loose ones popping out.

  Heffer had long ago discovered what he considered the road to success: merely surviving. From being a lowly officer in Fairfax’s army he had stayed alive, and always agreed with alacrity with his senior officers. As they were killed in battle, died of illness, or were arrested for showing Royalist tendencies, they left vacancies, steps up the ladder of promotion which the ever-pliant and ever-present Heffer had managed to climb. Having no sense of beauty, history or colour, but an abiding hatred and jealousy of tradition, honour or anything else he did not understand, he never hesitated when ordered to smash all the stained-glass windows whether in a modest church or an ancient cathedral like Ely: having his troops take axes to carved altar rails or mauls to chip away the marble of graven images gave him a thrill he never understood or admitted even to his wife: he needed only to know that he was doing the Lord’s work. He recalled arresting one rector who had protested that wrecking the Lord’s house could hardly be carrying out the Lord’s will, and proved him to be a Royalist and probably a Papist too.

  Given command of a battalion and sent out in the expedition to Hispaniola, Heffer knew that he was lucky to have so far escaped the cholera that killed thousands of men, and even luckier to escape Cromwell’s wrath over the enterprise’s failure. He survived…he had been alive and blameless and a colonel when the Lord Protector was looking for a governor of Jamaica, after the expedition’s leaders, General Venables and Admiral Penn, had gone back to England (and the Tower) to face a disappointed Cromwell’s anger. Promotion to major-general and the appointment as acting governor was not bad going, he told himself, for a man who had joined Cromwell only because he seemed to hate the same things.

  It was unlucky that his troops – particularly the officers – loathed Jamaica (the West Indies, in fact) and plotted and schemed to be sent home from the Tropics before they were killed by yellow fever or cholera. All Heffer’s attempts to have his troops plant and harvest so that they could later eat, and start doing something about capturing some of the thousands of beeves and pigs that roamed wild across the island, were a waste of time because his officers would do nothing that could lead Cromwell to decide on a permanent garrison for Jamaica. In fact, Heffer also knew that most of the officers had sent letters home by the last ship pleading with everyone they knew in London who had influence…

  Yet they were fools. Heffer saw clearly enough that the threat that could stop them ever seeing their homes again came not from cholera and the black vomit but starvation and, less imminent, the Spaniards. The only other men in the island who seemed instinctively to understand all this were the buccaneers, led by Kent and Whetheread, who so far had brought in grain (at a price) to feed the garrison and recently captured enough Spanish guns from Santiago in Cuba to build batteries to defend Cagway.

  Heffer grew angry and impatient at the thought of it. Everything was in a muddle. Two buccaneers were saving a Jamaica just captured by the Roundheads while the governor himself did not know if he was still the governor, now that Cromwell was dead. Worse still, he could not rely on the loyalty of the garrison: he was half expecting some disaffected officers to mutiny and set up a council to govern the island.

  That last fear he had yet to reveal to Kent and Whetheread, who had not heard the latest crop of rumours gathered (almost gleefully, he sometimes thought) by his ADC, Rowlands, who reported that the officers, regarding themselves as freed from their oath of allegiance to the Commonwealth by Cromwell’s death, considered that now they were serving only God.

  The man known as Kent looked carefully at the map and wished that Heffer’s wits were as sharp as his quill. It was strange staring down at the long sandpit known now as Cagway, the English rendering of the original Spanish name of Caguas. Heffer had shown the outline, a long thumb of land sticking out of the wrist of the mainland and almost closing the great natural harbour, with the sea on the south side and the almost-enclosed anchorage, like a great lake, on the north.

  Yes, Heffer had translated the Spanish name for the sand-spit, Palizados, into the Palisades, and called the tip Gallows Point – a warning, Kent decided, that Heffer intended as much for his own soldiers as for pirates. This little inked-in square represented the house in which they were standing: the next square was the military headquarters. And there was the jetty used by the fishermen and the buccaneers, with a few streets of shops and taverns in between.

  The inked-in rectangle was the fish market, with the dotted line showing the lobster crawl built out into the shallow water near the jetty. The shaded section labelled “meat market” seemed a rather pretentious name for a few square yards of blood-caked sand where a bellowing beeve or a squealing pig was lashed to a post to be slaughtered and butchered for the fortunate few who had enough money to catch the eye of the Spanish butcher, a renegade who decided to stay behind when his countrymen fled before Penn and Venables’ expedition.

  Why had the Spaniards built the capital of the island on that flat land ten miles away, well inland and a long distance from the anchorage? To be safe from marauders? They had named it St Jago de la Vega, St Jago of the Plain, although the English now called it St Jago. Still, the eff
ective headquarters for the island was here at Cagway, and Heffer had been lucky to be able to take over a strongly-built Spanish house and make it his home, with an almost identical building next door as the garrison headquarters.

  “This battery,” Whetheread said, jabbing a stubby index finger down on a point half-way along the seaward side of the Palisades, almost opposite Heffer’s house, “this is going to be the most important one, don’t you agree Ned?”

  Kent nodded and indicated the arc over which its guns should be able to fire.

  “Oh, well now, Mr Kent, I –” Heffer began nervously, and then went on as both Kent and Whetheread looked at him encouragingly, “I thought the most important one would be here, right at the tip: the guns will be able to fire at enemy ships if they try to pass through the channel between the Palisades and the mainland and enter the anchorage.”

  “No,” Kent said, “you’re looking through the wrong end of the glass. You have to prevent enemy ships getting as close as that in the first place: you need to keep up a heavy fire on them as they try to pick their way through these cays and reefs.” He pointed to the scattering of obstructions in the approach from the south. “While they’re trying to con their way up to the Palisades, your roundshot must be sweeping their decks – and they can only do that from a battery built here.” He put his finger down where Whetheread had indicated. “You cover them whether they approach along the coast or come up from the south. Then, if any ships do get through the fire from here, they have to run the gauntlet past another battery at the end. And if they get past that, then a third battery, here, will catch them as they round up into the anchorage.”