And, after the French were expelled, the victorious ex-slave generals, Dessalines, Christophe, Clairveaux, Petion, and Moise, turned on each other, as revolutionaries do, and in the process, all the petites blancs, the lower-class tradesmen and shopkeeper Whites who had stayed, hoping against hope, were massacred in turn.
* * *
When Lewrie and Reliant returned to England in the spring of 1804, the freedom and survival of the nation were very much in doubt, and England stood alone against the might of Napoleon Bonaparte and France. After the savage drubbings that Bonaparte had inflicted upon Britain’s continental allies, none of them were eager to jump into a new coalition against him, and Britain couldn’t buy support from the Austrians, or anybody else, no matter how much silver was offered to them. The Austrian Empire was licking its wounds, the Kingdom of Naples and the Two Sicilies had been over-run, along with the rest of the Italian states, and some of them were firmly in Bonaparte’s camp, either from “progressive” Jacobin-Republican enthusiasm or from conquered subject states which went along to get along. The Netherlands was the Batavian Republic and at war with England, too. The Prussians had had the stuffing beaten from them and been rendered impotent. And Spain, which had been a British ally in the First Coalition, had early-on lost its zeal to crush anti-religious, anti-royalist “divine right of kings” and had become a French ally. The Royal Navy had cut off their control of Spain’s vast overseas empire, and all their trade, so Spain was sitting things out, too—though they would take hands with France, again, to their utter ruin in December of 1804 … the damned fools.
England might’ve turned to the Baltic states like Sweden, Denmark, and Russia under its new teenaged Tsar Alexander, had England not destroyed the Danish fleet at Copenhagen in 1801 and cowed the others (for details of which see Baltic Gambit, a preceding Alan Lewrie adventure, and a crackin’-good read, if I do say so myself!) into backing down from their League of Armed Neutrality. They were sore losers!
* * *
That summer of 1804, there sat Napoleon Bonaparte’s army, just a few miles across the English Channel, massed round Boulogne and adjacent harbours that were crammed to bursting with invasion vessels of all kinds and sizes, as I described. Those caïgues, prames, péniches, and what-nots had to be reduced in numbers … hence, torpedoes.
Believe it or not (I’d strongly advise believe it!), there were trials done with cask torpedoes, the American Robert Fulton’s copper-sphere chained-together torpedoes, and catamaran torpedoes of the size, dimensions, and explosive charges cited. All were what we would today properly call “drifting mines,” for they had no motive power and were to be carried in by a strong making tide. As they proved at their use during the assault on Boulogne in October of 1804, they were all pretty-much duds. On the night of October 2nd–3rd, Clowes’s History of the Royal Navy says that only five catamaran torpedoes got released, but hey, six is a nice round number. The last of them did not go off ’til around 3:30 A.M., and the only French vessel which was actually badly damaged or sunk was Péniche Number 267, one of those armed launches which had the mis-fortune to stumble across a torpedo that had drifted in, decks-awash, and drew their curiosity. Just as they came alongside it with much head-scratching, sacre bleu–ing, and mort de ma vie–ing, its recalcitrant clockwork timer pulled the trigger line and blew No. 267 to kindling, killing its commander and thirteen crewmen.
Lieutenant Clarence Spendlove’s worries about the use of torpedoes, along with those horribly in-accurate Congreve rockets, famed later as “the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air…,” gave Bonaparte, and France, an invaluable propaganda plum which they touted world-wide, to nigh-unanimous outrage and revulsion against “perfidious Albion.” In those days, people, and nations, took matters of honour much more seriously than we “Enlightened and Politically Correct” folk of later centuries. One did not indiscriminately bombard cities and civilians. Indeed, there were many in England, even with their backs to the wall by that point, who were disturbed. And there were many who could see the other side of the coin; if England used such sneaking and low weapons such as torpedoes, and shelled harbours with sea-mortars and rockets, how long would it be before the French, or someone else, employed such “hellish engines” against Great Britain?
Anyway, after the attack on Boulogne, the French protected their harbours, and their hundreds of invasion craft which had to anchour outside the breakwaters, with long chain-and-log booms to catch fireships, un-manned explosive boats, and torpedoes before they could burst among their vessels, making any further attempts fruitless.
* * *
Those two UFO-looking barges designed by Monsieur Forfait that Lewrie took as prize off Normandy were real, too, and built in the same numbers cited. I could find no contemporary drawings of them, but I did have good written descriptions of their two types and sizes, the number of troops to be carried, and the crews to sail them, their sets of large, fat paddles with which to beach them, and so on. An English spy in Paris, Mr. Paul Sullivan, sneaked out a report on them to Admiralty.
An un-named British admiral who inspected one called them “contemptible and ridiculous craft,” and even a knowledgeable French academician, M. Denis Decrés, sneered that they were “monstrous ideas … which are as wrong as will prove to be disastrous.” In actual fact, a Royal Navy vessel did capture one of them and brought it in for inspection, though neither Clowes, nor Robert Harvey’s The War of Wars, said just who it was that did it, so I took dramatic license and gave the honour to Lewrie … and God only knows that he’s in more need of honourable deeds to polish up his repute than most!
* * *
So here’s our hero at the tail-end of a momentous year, shivering in the November chill; shivering also in some dread that Bonaparte might still have a go at invasion in 1805; shivering, too, in anticipation of a few days ashore with the fascinating (and hellishly-rich!) Lydia Stangbourne. Should we believe him when he told James Peel that he didn’t give a toss for her dowry and has no plans for another marriage? Or might his new amour beguile him to the altar once more? We must remember that Alan Lewrie can be so easily beguiled!
Will Lewrie ever be reconciled to the fact that, for whatever use the government made of the tragic murder of his wife, Caroline, by the French, he really is Captain Sir Alan Lewrie, Knight and Baronet, justly and honourably earned, or not?
And what will he write to that ex-pirate, that murderous Mlle. Charité de Guilleri? Is her offer to play spy really a clever French ploy to pass along harmful dis-information to His Majesty’s Government, or might she really be sincere in her vow to punish the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte for selling her beloved New Orleans and Louisiana to the odious Americans, and ending her dreams for a French Creole “empire” in the New World?
And, now that his experiments with all forms of torpedoes are over, where will the new year of 1805 take Alan Lewrie, HMS Reliant, and his men … and into which new and fascinating young miss might a change of latitude take his randy First Officer, Lieutenant Geoffrey Westcott … and will Lewrie get any ideas in that direction, too?
One wee hint—it’s warmer climes than English home waters.
’Til next year, God willing, stay well-read!
Also by Dewey Lambdin
The King’s Coat
The French Admiral
The King’s Commission
The King’s Privateer
The Gun Ketch
H.M.S. Cockerel
A King’s Commander
Jester’s Fortune
King’s Captain
Sea of Grey
Havoc’s Sword
The Captain’s Vengeance
A King’s Trade
Troubled Waters
The Baltic Gambit
King, Ship, and Sword
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THOMAS DUNN
E BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
THE INVASION YEAR. Copyright © 2010 by Dewey Lambdin. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.stmartins.com
Maps copyright © 2010 by Carolyn Chu
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Lambdin, Dewey.
The invasion year : an Alan Lewrie naval adventure / Dewey Lambdin. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-312-55185-8
1. Lewrie, Alan (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Ship captains—Fiction. 3. Great Britain—History, Naval—18th century—Fiction. 4. France—History, Naval—18th century—Fiction. 5. Naval battles—History—18th century—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3562.A435I58 2011
813'.54—dc22
2010039056
First Edition: January 2011
eISBN 978-1-4299-8967-1
First Thomas Dunne Books eBook Edition: January 2011
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Diagram of Ship
Diagram of Points of Sail
Map of France
Map of West Indies
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Book I
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Book II
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Book III
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Book IV
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Book V
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Epilogue
Chapter Forty-Four
Afterword
Also by Dewey Lambdin
Copyright
The Invasion Year Page 41
