by J. D. Davies
Despite his complaints, Musk assisted me into my armour. I suspected that even if I did take on some youthful servants, they would find themselves with precious little to do; whatever his nominal rank, and however loud his grumbles, Phineas Musk would never voluntarily relinquish the proprietary rights that he seemed to believe himself to possess over the entire House of Quinton, and over Captain Matthew Quinton in particular.
Suitably accoutred for battle, I turned my attention once more to the oncoming enemy. The shrieks and ever more rapid drumbeats were louder by the minute, a hellish cacophony of approaching doom.
'Their speed, Mister Castle?' I demanded.
'Six knots, perhaps. Maybe seven.'
'And ours?'
The log-line was just being hauled in. 'Two knots!' cried a Cornish voice.
I looked at our limp sails and ensign. In desperation, I asked Francis Gale to offer up a prayer for a stronger breeze, and that generous soul obliged, although his face betrayed ample doubt in the efficacy of the gesture.
'Can we not set more sail, Mister Castle? Mister Farrell?' Their shrugs told me what I already knew. We had all sails set—even stunsails, then a new-fangled innovation frowned upon by many veteran seamen. But with such a feeble breeze, we might as well have set every inch of canvas in England, and my Lady Castlemaine's breeches with it, for all the good it would have done us.
The galleys were manoeuvring to approach from dead ahead, dead astern and from the quarters, where our formidable broadside, our one and only weapon, would be ineffective against them. Despite this, I ordered the decks cleared and the guns manned and run out on both sides; we did not need many men aloft, and perhaps some lucky shots might disable a galley or two. Yet as I gave my orders, two conflicting thoughts occurred to me. One was a memory, dim and elusive, of something that Tris had once made me read. The other was a stratagem so unlikely that it was unworthy of being spoken. Yet the prospect of being hacked to pieces by a blood-crazed horde has a way of drawing the strangest of words from a man's mouth.
So it was that I turned to Brian Doyle O'Dwyer, alias Omar Ibrahim. 'Colonel O'Dwyer,' I said. 'You have long experience of commanding such craft as those. You will know better than any of us what they can do, and what they will expect us to do. So, sir, in the name of the king and the God whom we both serve—' Francis Gale raised an eyebrow at that—'how would you advise us to evade them?'
The Irishman looked at me in seemingly unfeigned astonishment. He would have known that every man on that deck believed the Sallee fleet had come to rescue him. He would have seen in our eyes that we suspected him of arranging to bring it down upon us in the first place. If that was so, he would never assist us, his enemies, to evade the approaching galleys, his friends.
Yet as rapidly as the Salleemen were closing us, we still had the best part of a glass before they would be alongside. Ample time for Captain Matthew Quinton to order the execution of an Irish renegade who lied, or said nothing.
I looked O'Dwyer directly in the eye, and smiled. If we are to die, my friend, I thought, then you will most certainly die before us.
The Irishman returned my stare. It was impossible to fathom the emotions that might have boiled behind those eyes. Finally, he said, 'Well, now. Regardless of all else, Captain, you need headway. That will buy you a little time, and perhaps time will buy you a fresh wind. At the very least, headway will allow you to manoeuvre, and it will give the rover galleys more distance to cover. And with more distance—'
Thucydides. That was the man. 'With more distance to cover,' I said, 'the more exhausted the rowers will become. They will have to lose speed to recover their strength.'
O'Dwyer bowed his head in acknowledgement. 'Just so, Captain Quinton.'
'Then how do we gain headway?'
Before O'Dwyer could respond, Kit Farrell spoke up. 'Sweeps!' he cried. 'Take the men off the guns, and put out our sweeps. They might give us an extra knot or so, probably no more at first. But as the colonel says, it will buy us time and a little manoeuvrability.'
My order to deploy sweeps was relayed down to the main deck, and no more than two or three minutes passed before the first of the long oars protruded tentatively from the sweep ports below the main deck battery. Relatively few ships in the King's Navy still carried sweeps, which could be used to aid manoeuvring in harbours and calms; they had gone out of fashion some ten years previously, and would duly come back into fashion again some ten years later, for such is the perversity of seamen. But the half-mad master shipwright who built the Seraph had insisted on fitting sweep ports: he was convinced our ship was ordained to bring back King Arthur from Avalon, and it would not do for his mythical Majesty to be becalmed. Thus we had fourteen sweep ports on each side. We had used them a little in the Downs: most of my Cornish lads were well accustomed to rowing craft, their vessels of choice for fishing and smuggling alike, but others in the crew were not so practised in their use. I heard not a few grumbles drift up from the deck below to the effect that they were honest English or Cornish seamen, not pestilential galley slaves. Inevitably, it took several strokes for the Seraph's makeshift rowers to achieve anything like a coordinated action, with the sweeps on both sides and along the length of the hull breaking the water at roughly the same time. If our movement across the ocean was any faster, it was barely discernible. And all the while the more expert galleys came on, the shrieks of their crews and the beat of their drums growing ever louder.
William Castle pointed to the nearest craft, which was approaching fast, fine on our larboard bow. Her captain, yet another Christian renegade by the pale looks of him, had a hand raised in what might have been a gesture of defiance; or else, perhaps, a salutation to a kindred spirit that he recognised upon our deck. 'He's stretching ahead of his brethren, Captain,' said my lieutenant. 'Stretching a mite too far, I'd reckon.'
O'Dwyer nodded. 'Seeking the lion's share of the booty. My old friends favour acting in concert only until they can sniff prize money in their nostrils: then it's every man for himself.'
I whispered to Castle, for I did not wish the renegade to hear my suggestion. My lieutenant nodded and whispered an urgent reply. I then surreptitiously despatched a boy with a message for Gunner Lindman. A quiet word with Kit Farrell: he sauntered nonchalantly from the quarterdeck down to the waist, as though to attend to some urgent matter there.
Nothing seemed to change. At least, O'Dwyer noticed nothing; he was intent on the headmost galley, approaching us at a sharp angle fine on the larboard bow, safe from the arc of our guns.
Or so it thought. The Seraph shuddered. Slowly, painfully slowly, the bowsprit began to swing a little to starboard. Then the turn became sharper.
O'Dwyer ran to the starboard rail. His expression was unreadable, but after some moments he nodded grimly. 'Good,' he said. 'Very good. Very ingenious. Helm hard to starboard, only the forward sweeps on the starboard beam to row, full ahead on the larboard sweeps. A galley manoeuvre.'
'Not quite,' I said. 'After all, Colonel, in a galley you would still have rowers at the starboard rear sweeps. Chained to them, indeed. You would not—could not—have withdrawn them to man the larboard guns.'
O'Dwyer crossed the quarterdeck again to ascertain the truth of my words. The Seraph's sudden change of direction had opened up the arc for our larboard broadside. The galley, intent on riches and careless of the risks, was too committed to its course, its rowers too exhausted to respond swiftly to any countermanding orders.
I glanced at Castle and Kit Farrell, who nodded in unison.
'Give fire!' I cried.
A nearly simultaneous roar from the eight cannon of the larboard battery on the main deck.
True to his word at my first meeting with him, Lindman had drilled our gun crews relentlessly during our voyage from the Downs. Cornishmen and Bristolians had been cajoled and cudgelled into working together until their gunnery could stand comparison with any crew afloat.
So it proved now. At Castle's suggestion, I
had ordered four of the guns to be loaded with round shot and to aim low; the other four to be loaded with chainshot and grapeshot, and to aim high. The round balls smashed into the fragile bow of the galley. The range was so close, perhaps two hundred yards or less, and the scantlings of the galley's hull so light, that we could not fail to hole her fatally beneath the water line. On her upper deck, the lethal combination of chain and grape had their accustomed effect. Parts of what had so recently been men splashed into the sea or spattered the mast and deck. A few grasped hold of the crimson sockets where their limbs had been and screamed in death-agony. The waving captain's hands now covered his eyes, attempting in vain to staunch the streams of blood that flowed down his cheeks.
The galley lost momentum. A few men on her deck—her other officers, presumably—shrieked and waved scimitars at us in defiance, but their men seemed to have little appetite for a fight. Her two fellows to larboard of us slowed, appalled by what they had witnessed, and signalled to their westerly consorts. After all, rovers and corsairs alike were used to attacking fat, near-defenceless merchantmen, overwhelming them by a combination of speed, terror and weight of manpower; but against a royal warship, even one becalmed and outnumbered five to one in hulls, those advantages were at least partly negated. Lindman's gun crews returned to their sweeps and the Seraph gathered speed on her new course, south and west, toward the horizon which was bound to shelter the Jersey—and if we assumed that, then so would the Sallee rovers and their fast-tiring crews.
As I watched the stricken galley fall astern of us, a wisp of cloth brushed my cheek. A loose strand from our ensign.
The breeze was strengthening. The king himself had assured me that the Seraph could outrun anything on the world's oceans; it was time to see whether that claim was yet another example of a mad shipwright's ravings and of divine-right bravado alike. As I turned to give the order for the men to abandon sweeps and man the sails, their natural environs, I caught a glimpse of O'Dwyer. He stood at the rail, looking intently upon the sinking Salleeman. It might have been the breeze, or something else entirely, but as Francis Gale intoned the prayers for the dead and dying, there appeared to be a tear in the Irishman's eye.
We were back in company with the Jersey and Prospect of Blakeney, on course once again for our rendezvous with O'Dwyer's dubious mountain. I was in my cabin, writing a report of our escape from the rover fleet for the eyes of my monarch and Lord Admiral, when I was interrupted by Shish, the carpenter, with a sombre expression upon his young face. He reported bleakly that the chain pumps were failing fast; much faster than through natural wear-and-tear. Our precipitate escape from the Salleemen, straining every sinew of the hull once the wind was properly filling our sails, must have brought the problem to a head, he said. I summoned Lieutenant Castle, and we three went below to examine the problem.
Under the main deck was the alien world of the hold, the storerooms, and at the bottom of it all, the bilges. I have rarely been in a place so unremittingly foul. It was so low that I was bent almost double. There was little light, and the bilge-stink made me retch; on some particularly dirty ships, those rancid gases have been potent enough to kill men, and—it is said—to blow up the entire vessel. Here, beneath the waterline, the constant roar of water passing along our hull gave a real sense of the fragility of our poor craft. I knew little of the workings of our chain-pumps, but I knew all too well what the consequences would be if they failed to function: the Atlantic would seep insidiously between our planks and frames, for not even the finest caulking in the world could prevent that, and with nothing to carry it away, the water would rise within the hold. The Seraph would sink.
Shish led Castle and myself to the starboard of our two pumps; the other was in the same state, he said. The carpenter handed his lantern to Castle and then took away a panel that partly encased the chain-pump well. It was a simple mechanism. A chain belt fitted with plates named burrs was worked by men at winches upon the gundeck; the water then discharged from the burrs into a tube which carried it out of the hull.
Shish pointed to the links in the chain. 'Several of the esses are weakened, sirs. Weaker even than I suspected them to be when first I reported the defect at Deptford. It seems to me—'
'Several what?' I asked.
'Esses, Captain. The links. As I explained to you before.' I grimaced at this exposure of both my ignorance and my forgetfulness. 'Some seem to be of old, weak metal, pewtered or otherwise concealed. Others appear to have been sawn part way through, and the cuts crudely forged over. Worse, the same is also true of the rowls on both pumps, and they are our most serious problem, by far.'
Castle shone the lantern over the very foot of the pump well, where water was lapping towards our feet. 'There's the rowl, sir,' he said. 'Down at the bottom.' I could just make out a bar, somewhat akin to a horse's bit, at the very foot of the mechanism. The chain clattered around this at the bottom of its journey, plunging each burr in turn into the water, before proceeding upward again.
'We have spare esses,' said Shish, 'though God knows if there are enough to replace all the defective ones—and who knows if the spares have not been tampered with in the same way? But we carry no spare rowls, sir. No Fifth Rate does.'
'No spares?' I was incredulous. 'Why not, in Jesu's name?'
Shish shrugged. 'The rowls never fail, sir. After all, there's less strain on them than on the esses, for it's the chain that does all the work.'
'Rowls never fail,' I repeated, 'except in our present case, it seems.'
'There can only be two causes, sir,' said the carpenter. 'The likeliest is those villains in Deptford yard—one of the storekeepers, most probably, selling off the good parts to merchantmen up at Blackwall or the like and passing off this poor stuff to the navy—'
Castle was dismissive. 'Not even the most venal storekeeper would take the trouble to foist a sawn-through rowl onto a king's ship, Mister Shish. Which brings us to the second cause—'
'Sabotage,' I said. 'Someone deliberately fitted defective esses and rowls to the pump, knowing they would give way during our voyage.'
Both Shish and Castle nodded, for the conclusion was inescapable. But unlike them, I also had a culprit in mind; could hear the culprit's words, still clear in my mind.
This mission will not succeed.
Sixteen
At my request, Holmes came across from Jersey to consult with me and my Holy Trinity of accomplished seamen, Castle, Negus and Farrell, calling in Shish to discuss the specific issue of the pumps. The entire squadron, not just the Seraph, needed to take on fresh water and wine for a voyage going south of twenty-seven degrees of latitude, so there was no quibble with the principle that we should make for either Funchal or Tenerife; but the latter had rather more foundries, and with the winds as they were, we would lose less time to our voyage by making for it rather than the port of Madeira. Holmes and Negus were confident that ironfounders, coppersmiths and the like could be found on Tenerife who would be able to fashion new esses and rowls for the Seraph within a matter of days, if not hours, but Shish seemed less sanguine on that score. Holmes was apologetic that his Jersey could not assist us, but she was a much larger ship, so her chain-pumps were incompatible with ours. Otherwise, Holmes was disconcertingly jolly, abruptly dismissing the suspicions of sabotage; but then, Holmes was the kind of sea-officer who held it as gospel that every single shore official of the navy, be it the meanest storekeeper or Mister Pepys, was corrupt or incompetent or both, and intent above all on putting obstacles in the way of old Robin Holmes' righteous desire to be killing Dutchmen, Spaniards, or whoever else got in the way of his sword. Tenerife it would be.
So in due course we beat up on a clear and blustery day toward Santa Cruz de Tenerife, on the east coast of the island, a town of low houses and campaniles nestling beneath a great grey mountain. It was guarded by a fort on a promontory to the south, over which flew the red-yellow-red colours of the dying, defeated Philip the Fourth, King of Castile, Aragon, Leon, th
e Two Sicilies, Jerusalem, and God knows how many other titles as meaningless as my own royal master's claim to be the lawful King of France. Many of the men were on deck, even those of the off-duty watch, for like their captain they were keen to look upon this place where English arms had distinguished themselves so recently and so decisively. Rebel arms, admittedly, but English nonetheless. For here, only a little more than six years before, General-at-Sea Robert Blake and his men had destroyed the flota, Spain's supposedly invincible treasure fleet.
I turned to Lieutenant Castle, who had been present at that battle, and asked him to recount it to me.
'Aye, sir. Well, I was a reformado aboard General Blake's flagship, back then. The wind was a bit less southerly than it is now—more directly from the east, in truth.' Castle sniffed the air, as though hoping for a trace of the gunsmoke of that great day. 'The flota was moored in two lines, running north from the quay there, beneath the town—the bigger galleons further out, making themselves a great floating battery against us.' It was easy to conjure up the scene, for quite a number of ships lay in the bay of Santa Cruz, roughly where the galleons must have been. Among them was the Jersey; Holmes had evidently beaten us to it, which could only mean he had found no Dutchmen to annoy. 'And behind the galleons, Captain,' Castle continued, 'were all the batteries ashore—see the line of emplacements, there, all the way from Fort Saint Philip to the south of the town all the way round to the north end of the bay? I tell you, sir, not a few of us were mighty afeared to be going up against so many guns, but Blake—well, he was already a legend by then, and most of us would happily have gone to our deaths for him.'
'You knew Blake himself?' I asked.
'Aye, sir. I knew him well enough. Like all the fleet, I respected him hugely. An honest, bluff man of few words but a powerful faith. He loved his men—fought like a lion to get them better pay and conditions. A scholar, too—they say he only took to war after failing to get a fellowship at Oxford.' Robert Blake and Tristram Quinton, exchanging quips on some high table or other; now there was a vision to conjure with. 'No great seaman, of course—none of Cromwell's generals-at-sea were. But what a soldier! What a mind, Captain Quinton! When he first put his plan to the captains, all the knowing tarpaulins born to the sea, they shouted him down. Called him a madman. Didn't speak to him for a day.' Castle chuckled, the recollection of the event still evidently fresh in his memory. 'But Blake held his nerve, that he did. He kept the Sabbath holy—wouldn't attack on that for all the gold of the world. But on the Monday, he ordered Stayner in first with a squadron to get between the two lines of Spanish galleons. Reckoned Stayner could hold his own against both the inshore line and the shore batteries while he, the general himself, brought the main fleet down the other side of the outer line of big galleons.'
