Under False Colours

by Richard Woodman

  The duty watch huddled from the hazard in odd corners, only the mate on watch and the helmsmen weathering it behind a scrap of canvas dodger. Even Drinkwater and the bare-headed Littlewood could not avoid the stinging, lancing spume bursting upon them out of the black and howling darkness.

  Ineffectively dodging one such explosion, Drinkwater recovered his balance and dashed the streaming water from his eyes, to stare astern and to leeward.

  'What the devil's that?' he asked.

  'Bengal fire?' queried Littlewood beside him.

  The thrust of the wind sent both men down the deck to leeward. They cannoned into the lee rail, aware that the deep red flare had gone, either extinguished or obscured by an intervening wave crest.

  'There's another!' Littlewood pointed, though Drinkwater had already marked the sudden glow.

  'Signal of distress from the brig, sir.' The Galliwasp's second mate staggered from handhold to handhold to make his report.

  'We see it, Mr Munsden, thank you.'

  'It'll be the brig, sir.'

  'So we apprehend,' replied Littlewood, turning to Drinkwater. 'That young fellow in command, the lovesick one, what stamp of man is he, Captain?'

  'Not one to prove craven,' snapped Drinkwater with mounting anxiety. Straining his eyes into the impenetrable darkness that followed the dousing of the second flare, his brain raced as he thought of Quilhampton and Frey struggling, perhaps for their very lives, less than a mile away.

  'Captain Littlewood! You'd oblige me if you'd put up your helm and wear ship now, sir! We should fall off sufficiently to catch a sight of the Tracker and you've enough men on deck to see to it.'

  Drinkwater sensed Littlewood hesitated, then with relief saw his white head nod agreement and heard his shout. 'Mr Munsden ...!'

  But from above their heads came a thunderous crack and then the whole ship shook violently as the main topsail blew out.

  Littlewood spun round and with a bull-roar galvanized his crew. 'Away aloft there you lubbers, and secure that raffle! Call all hands, Mr Munsden!'

  Drinkwater swore with frustration, turning from the flogging canvas to stare again into the darkness on the starboard quarter, praying that on the beleaguered deck of the Tracker they would light another Bengal fire. But there was no sign of the flare of red orpiment and Drinkwater succumbed to a sensation of blazing anger as another stinging deluge swept the Galliwasp's deck.

  'By your leave, sir,' he shouted at Littlewood, shoving past the captain and climbing into the main shrouds, suddenly glad to do something, even if the work in hand was not what was expected of a post-captain in His Majesty's Navy.

  He reached the futtock shrouds before he felt the folly of his action come with a shortness of breath and a weakness in the knotted muscles of his mangled shoulder. The power of the wind aloft was frightening. Gritting his teeth, the tail of his tarpaulin blowing halfway up his back, he struggled into the top. Here, he found himself face to face with one of the Galliwasp's men who recognized him and made no secret of his astonishment.

  'Jesus, what the bloody hell ...?'

  'Up ... you ... go ... man,' Drinkwater gasped, 'there's work to be done.'

  The mast trembled and the flailing of the torn canvas lashed about them. The air was filled with the taste of salt spray and the noise of the wind was deafening, a terrifying howl that was compounded of shrieks and roars as the gale played on the differing thickness of standing and running rigging, plucking from them notes that varied according to their tension. Each responded with its own beat, whipping and thrumming, tattooing the mast timbers and their ironwork in sympathy, while the indisciplined, random thunder of the rent canvas beat about them.

  The men of Galliwasp's duty watch scrambled up beside Drinkwater, huddling in the top until they saw their moment to lay out on the trembling yard. Drinkwater found himself shuddering shamefully, regretting the foolhardy impulse that had driven him aloft. It had been a complex nervous reaction prompted initially by the need to do something for Quilhampton and his brig. Denied of the familiar catharsis of bawling orders to achieve results, he had sought to influence the Galliwasp's small civilian crew by this foolhardy gesture. There had also been the realization that from aloft he might obtain a better view, might indeed be able to see the Tracker and direct some means of alleviating his friend's plight from such a vantage point. But neither of these rational if extreme reasons were what truly motivated him: what he sought in the wildness of that night was the oblivion of action, the overwhelming desire to court death or to cheat it, to invite fate to deal with him as it saw fit, to submit himself to the jurisprudence of providence, for the truth of the matter was that he could no longer bear the burden of his guilt for the death of old Tregembo.

  The folly of his ill-considered action came to him now as he panted in the gyrating top, clinging with difficulty to the mast as his body was flung backwards and forwards and the thudding of his heart failed to arrest the pitiful weakness that made jelly of his leg muscles, so that he quivered from within as he was buffeted from without.

  Littlewood was shouting from below, 'Lay out, lay out!' and Drinkwater realized the master had ordered the barque's helm put up so that she eased off the wind and ran before it, taking the flogging remnants of the topsail clear of the yard. The men around him were suddenly gone, their feet scrabbling for the footrope, one hand clinging to the robands, the other reaching for the stinging lashes of the wild strips of canvas. Now they were mere ghosts, grey and insubstantial shapes in the gloom, laying out along the yard that seemed to lead into the very heart of the gale.

  Drinkwater stood immobilized, unaware that he was the victim of mental and physical exhaustion. Not since the day more than two years earlier, when he had hidden in an attic in Tilsit observing the meeting of Tsar Alexander and the Emperor of the French, had he known a moment to call his own. The strain of bringing home the secret intelligence; the fight with the Zaandam; the killing of Santhonax, and the damage to Antigone; the row with Barrow at the Admiralty; the hanging of a seaman and the blight it had thrown on the outward voyage of His Majesty's frigate Patrician; the killing of the deserters beneath the waterfall on the island of Mas-a-Fuera; the loss and recovery of his ship and the consequences of their finally reaching Canton to make the fateful rendezvous with Morris — all seemed to have led inexorably to the terrifying necessity of murdering his oldest and most loyal friend. And to add to his guilt was the knowledge that Tregembo had sacrificed everything out of a sense of obligation to himself, Nathaniel Drinkwater.

  While he could drown in gin the memory of what had happened, and play the agent at Lord Dungarth's behest; while he could avoid confronting the truth by dicing fortunes with Fagan or veil his soul with the mercantile intrigues of Isaac Solomon, his self-esteem clung to this outward appearance from habit. But now the gale had laid his nerves bare and drawn him up into the top by playing upon his anxiety, pride and weakness. Now it held him fast, exhausted, robbed of the energy or courage to lay out upon the yard and serve as an exemplar to the merchant seamen even now pummelling the torn topsail into bundles and passing gaskets to secure it. He wondered if they could guess at his fearful inertia as he clung to the reeling mast for his very life.

  Why had he not reached the yard before this torpor overcame him? Why had he not dropped into the sea and the death he longed for? Why did some instinct keep his hands clenched to the cold ironwork of the doubling?

  Quilhampton ...

  The thought came to him dully, so that afterwards he thought that he must have swooned and lost consciousness for a few seconds, saved only by the seaman's habit of holding fast in moments of overwhelming crisis. Quilhampton's plight and his own deeply engrained and ineluctable sense of duty brought him from the brink of what was both a physical and a spiritual nadir.

  Reeling, Drinkwater stared out to starboard where he thought Tracker might be seen, and he was suddenly no longer the supine victim of his own fears. The wind that had desolated him now returned t
o him his vigour, for he was abruptly recalled to the present with the sinister change in the wind's note. As he sought some sign of the gun-brig he became aware of the changed condition of the sea. It was no longer a dark mass delineated by streaks of spume and the roar of breaking crests tumbling to leeward. No longer did the sea rise to the force of the gale. Now it was beaten; the white breakers were shorn as the sound of the wind grew from the scream of a gale to the booming of a storm.

  Beside him the mast creaked and with a sound like a gunshot the foretopsail blew out and the flogging of canvas began again, transmitted to the mainmast via the stays, a shuddering that seemed fair to bring all three of the barque's masts down. Below him Littlewood was bawling more orders and his men were laying in from the main topsail yard. Their faces, what he could see of them, were wild, fierce with desperation, excoriated by anxiety and the onslaught of salt spray which scoured the flesh and made looking to windward impossible. For an indecisive moment Drinkwater cast about him, conscious only of the vast power of the storm and the strain on the Galliwasp, but as Littlewood's men struggled over the edge of the top to go forward and try and secure the foretopsail, he recalled Quilhampton and tried again to make out the gun-brig in the surrounding darkness.

  Littlewood was keeping his ship's head before the wind but Drinkwater was unable to see anything more than a small circular welter of seething white water, a tiny circumscribed world in which only they existed. He was aware too, that he was having difficulty breathing, that he could no longer cling to his perilous perch and retain the strength to descend the mast. Fearful of his own weakness as much as the wind's violence, he fought his way over the edge of the top, pressed into the futtock shrouds and impeded by the updraught of the wind. Like a fly in a web he struggled until he regained the comparative safety of the deck.

  Littlewood had all hands mustered now, transformed by the catalyst of crisis into an inferno of energy. Unlike the complex arrangements on a man-of-war, with its chains of command extending from the quarterdeck into the nethermost regions of the ship, a merchantman's master was at once in supreme command but on an occasion such as this, driven of necessity to perform many duties himself. His mates and petty officers were also strained in the extremity of their situation, tailing on to ropes, heaving and belaying as they fought to subdue the flogging foretopsail and to brace the yards. Littlewood himself was struggling at the helm and Drinkwater crossed the deck to grab the opposite spokes and help him.

  'Obliged,' shouted Littlewood. 'We've three feet of water in the well ... Did you see ... ease her a point, Captain ... did you see anything of the brig?'

  'Nothing.'

  For a while they struggled in silence, Littlewood ducking and staring aloft, and bellowing out the occasional word to his mate who at the foot of the foremast stood holding a halliard ready to render it on its pin. From time to time, with a look over his shoulder, Littlewood eased a spoke to keep Galliwasp off before the wind, but no words were necessary since Drinkwater understood instinctively. There was no danger of their being pooped, for the wind prevented the high-breaking seas from rearing over the ship's stern. Their greatest worry was the strain being imposed on the gear aloft.

  Drinkwater, still shaken from his own exertions, was content for a moment to let Littlewood fret over the Galliwasp. He stared dully at the swinging compass card, still lit by the guttering flame of the binnacle oil lamp. He felt Littlewood's tug on the wheel and responded. Then, suddenly realizing that something was wrong he looked up.

  'What the devil ...?' Littlewood craned round anxiously.

  There was a sudden, unexpected lull, the booming of the wind ceased and dropped in register, and Drinkwater shot another look at the compass card.

  'We've swung her head three points in the last few — ' he began, but the explanation was already upon them.

  'Up helm!' roared Littlewood, thrusting the wheel over. Then the backing wind was upon them, striking them with the violence of an axe blow to the skull, stopping the ship dead, catching her aback and tearing the half furled canvas of the reefed foretopsail out of its gaskets and hurling the frayed mess at the men who sought to tame it.

  The first casualty was a topman, an able seaman flung from the yard, who vanished into the sea with a scream. It seemed to Drinkwater that the shriek lasted until after the dismasting, that the renewed boom of the wind reasserted itself only after the scream had finished, and it was the falling of a man who, as a last act, tore at the stays and plucked the masts out of the Galliwasp in a gigantic act of protest. It was a stupid fancy, confounded by the facts that confronted them an instant later: the man lost and the barque's three masts lying in ruins around them.

  There was a hiatus of shock, and then came the voices of men, some shouting in pain, others bawling for assistance, a few asserting their authority. Drinkwater fought his way through a tangle of rigging, aware that the wheel was smashed by a falling spar and that Captain Littlewood had been less fortunate than himself and was trapped by the yard that had dashed the wheel to pieces. Beneath their feet the barque began to roll as the tangle of wreckage, much of it falling over the side, dragged them beam-on to the wind. And its sudden shift now threw up a confused sea, buffeting the disabled ship and increasing the difficulties of her company.

  'Captain Littlewood,' Drinkwater called, as he struggled to free the master, 'are you hurt, sir?'

  'Only a trifle ... but I cannot move ...'

  Drinkwater stood up and bellowed 'Mr Munsden!' and was relieved to hear the second mate's voice in reply. 'Can you lay your hands on a handspike or a capstan bar. Captain Littlewood is held fast here!'

  They eased the weight on Littlewood after a struggle, raising the fallen yard from across his belly and dragging him out. Periodically seas crashed aboard, sluicing through the chaotic raffle of ropes, spars and torn sails like a river in spate choked by fallen trees. Elsewhere about the littered deck, other groups of men were helping to free their comrades. As Littlewood struggled to his feet they were aware that they no longer had to shout in each other's ears to make themselves heard: the storm, having done its worst, was content to subside to a mere gale again. Littlewood ordered a muster of his crew; in addition to the lost topman, two others were found dead, one was missing and three were badly injured. A dozen others had cuts, bruises and scratches of a less serious nature.

  Soaked to the skin, they took stock of their situation. The backing wind was no longer so cold and they began to sweat with the effort of clearing the Galliwasp's deck in an attempt to get her under command again.

  When it came, the dawn found them lying helplessly a-hull, rolling constantly in the trough of the sea and making leeway. The wrecked top-hamper overside laid a wide, smooth slick to windward which prevented the waves breaking aboard. The wind continued to drop during the forenoon. With a vigorous plying of axes and knives they cut away the wreckage, salvaging what they could. Captain Littlewood proved as energetic in adversity as when things progressed well. Drinkwater, stripped to his shirt in his efforts to help, recalled Littlewood's personal stake in the ship and her cargo, content for the moment to throw himself into the urgent task of saving themselves.

  It was after noon before they had brought a semblance of order to the ship, leaving her trailing downwind of her wrecked jib-boom to act as a sea-anchor and hold her head to wind and sea. The cook relit the galley range and served a steaming burgoo laced with rum and molasses that tasted delicious to the famished and exhausted men.

  His mouth full, Littlewood beckoned Drinkwater aft and the two men conferred over their bowls.

  'I don't like our situation, Captain Waters. There is four feet of water in the well, and as for our reckoning, well ...' With the back of his right hand, his spoon still clutched in his fist, Littlewood rasped at his unshaven chin. A smear of burgoo remained behind.

  'I have been giving that some consideration myself,' said Drinkwater, 'but with this overcast ...' he cast a glance at the lowering grey sky, 'we have little t
o go on beyond our wits. Let us adjourn below and look at the chart.'

  In the stern cabin Littlewood poured them both a glass of rum and unrolled a chart. The nail of the stumpy index finger he laid on their last observed position was torn and bleeding. He drew his finger tip south.

  'We'll have made leeway towards the Frisians, then, with the shift of wind, east, towards the estuaries.'

  Drinkwater looked from the long curve of islands that fringed the coast of north Holland and Hanover to the extensive shoals that stretched for miles offshore, littering the wide mouths of the Jahde, Weser and Elbe. How far away were those lethal sands with their harsh and forbidding names; the Vogel, the Knecht, the Hogenhorn and the Scharhorn? How far away were the fringe of breakers that would pound them mercilessly to pieces if their keel once struck the miles and miles of shoal they thundered upon?

  'We have enough gear salvaged to jury rig her and run before it. With luck we might reach to the norrard.'

  Littlewood's torn finger moved north, away from its resting place on the flat island of Neuwerk lying athwart the entrance to the Elbe.

  'It offers us our best chance if we avoid the Horn's Reef and Danish letters-of-marque. Of course it's a risk ...' the master drowned his incomplete sentence in a mouthful of rum.

  Beyond the island of Sylt lay the port of Esbjerg from which Danish privateers would swoop on the Galliwasp with alacrity. The Danes had not forgiven Great Britain the abduction of their fleet two years earlier, nor the bombardment of their capital, Copenhagen. A British ship falling into their hands could expect little mercy: a British naval officer none whatsoever. One caught in disguise would almost certainly be hanged or shot; Drinkwater had seen such a man, strung up by the Dutch above a battery at Kirkduin.

  'D'you have a larger scale chart?' Drinkwater asked, shying away from the hideous image.