A King's Commander

by Dewey Lambdin

  Lee guns run out in-battery, though aimed at nothing; weather artillery run into loading position, and Jester forced to sail over on her shoulder, canting her deck as if she were beating close-hauled instead of sailing with the scant wind large on her larboard quarters.

  It was a thing old Lieutenant Lilycrop of the Shrike brig had taught his first lieutenant during the tail end of the American War, and it might not avail aboard a larger ship of the line—to heel a shallow draughted brig-sloop or ship-sloop in very light airs, reducing drag created by her hull, by reducing the total area of her quick-work, which was immersed.

  And it was working, for Jester was slowly forging ahead of the main line of battle, on the lee side where frigates and lighter ships belonged of course, to catch up with Agamemnon and Cumberland, which were almost up to gun range of the fleeing French. Four-and-a-half knots, at best; but that was at least a knot-and-a-half quicker than anyone else at the moment, as the fickle weather of the Ligurian Sea in midsummer played its usual coy games.

  “Deck, there!” came Rushing’s call from the foremast. “Cape Sepet, two points off th’ weather bows!”

  “Never catch ’em up,” Lewrie glumly predicted. “God, what an opportunity wasted. Again!”

  “Cape Garonne, two points off th’ lee bows!” Rushing further informed them. “Signals Cross is a’workin’ on Sepet!”

  “Four bloody days, all the way to Toulon, and . . . damn ’em!” The van squadron of the French Mediterranean fleet, now a much reinforced assemblage after ships from the Biscay ports had slipped in past the weak guard at Gibraltar as soon as milder spring weather had freed them, would be almost abeam of the Croix de Signeaux atop Cape Sepet. The wind—what wind there was—was coming more southerly, directly into the Bay of Toulon. Before noon, the main body, perhaps the lead ships of the rear squadron, would be inside the two horns of the bay’s wide entrance, able to shelter under the heavy artillery of Toulon’s many formidable fortresses.

  “Signal from Brittania, sir!” Midshipman Hyde shouted. “And, from the repeating frigates. ‘Discontinue the Action,’ sir!”

  Lewrie turned aft to watch every ship of the line hoist replies, to watch every frigate on the disengaged lee side hoist the blue-and-yellow checker. “Mister Hyde, hoist the repeat,” Lewrie ordered with a sour grimace. “So everyone knows we’re useless. Damn him!”

  On Agamemnon, of course, there flew the “Query.” Trust Nelson to dare to challenge Vice Admiral Hotham’s decision. No “Respectfully Submit . . . ” this time, as there had been after the last fiasco. Then, Nelson had gone aboard Brittania to plead that the two French seventy-fours he had taken— Ça Ira and Censeur— be left astern under guard of some frigates, and the pursuit continued. Admiral Comte Martin didn’t have the stomach for a real fight; he’d continue to run in rough disorder, and his trailing ships could be overhauled and battered into surrender in penny packets. But no, Hotham had demurred. And even days after, Nelson had been pinch-mouthed and pale with anger when he’d repeated Hotham’s words to Lewrie. “No, we’ve taken two. We’ve really done very well, Nelson. We must be content.”

  Those two taken, but Illustrious had been mauled after she had come up to aid Agamemnon and the lead frigates. She’d been taken in tow by the Meleager frigate, but blown onto a rocky shoal off Avenca on the Genoese coast, and lost. HMS Berwick captured alone, too. Tit for tat.

  And today . . . one French ship of the line shot to rags, set on fire, and her colors struck to Agamemnon and her tiny squadron.

  But she’d blown up before she could be taken as prize. And Admiral Hotham was most like content . . . again! . . with the results! One for nought. Tit for tat. What a bargain, Alan thought; why, by the turn of the century, we’ll surely’ve whittled ’em down to a manageable number!

  “He’s a glass on me, sir,” Hyde carped, referring to the signals midshipman aboard Agamemnon, not half a nautical mile ahead, and to their right. “Surely, he sees our repeat signal.”

  “I’d imagine his captain is trying to digest it first, Mister Hyde,” Lewrie snarled. “Farts! A brace of farts, the pair of them! Their Martin . . . and our Hotham. Goddamned rabbit-hearted . . . dismal, cowering farts stagg’rin’ about in a bloody . . . fucking . . . trance! ”

  There, at last; Agamemnon hauled down her “Query,” and hoisted the proper repeater reply. Cumberland answered a moment later, along with Fremantle’s Inconstant, Captain Cockburn’s Meleager, and the rest of Captain Nelson’s small detached squadron, which had ended up far in the lead of the battle line, as usual.

  “Mister Knolles, secure the hands from quarters,” Lewrie said. “Run out the larboard battery and bowse up to the bulwarks. Same with the starboard battery. Get her flat on her keel again, and ready to comply with any alteration of course Agamemnon directs.”

  “Aye, sir,” Knolles grunted in disappointment. “Uhm, I s’pose sir . . .”

  “Aye, Mister Knolles?” Lewrie snapped.

  “Well, sir. At least we chased ’em back to their kennel. That must be worth something. Kept ’em from escorting a grain convoy from North Africa.” Knolles posed with a wistful hopefulness.

  To which his captain replied with a dismissive, “Shit!”

  “Well, sir . . .” Knolles shrugged.

  “Martin came straight for us, chased us a day and a night from nigh to Genoa back to San Fiorenzo, Mister Knolles,” Lewrie commented. “As close to looking for an engagement as that mouse will ever get . . . while the grain convoy most like went sou’west, near the Balearics so we’d be feinted away from any hope of intercepting it. Four damn’ days we’ve been playing tail chase, far off to the north and east. I’ll lay you any odds you like they’re loaded by now, and heading home. And I’ll lay you even better odds our Admiral Hotham will trundle back to Corsica, as pleased as a pig in shit, and never think to detach scouting frigates to look for ’em, till they’re back in Marseilles. We’ve been buggered, in short. Again. Now, attend to my orders, sir. I’ve no time . . . nor any reason . . . to discuss tactics or strategy. Not when our commanding admiral is so bereft of understanding either.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” Knolles almost wilted under the unaccustomed heat of Lewrie’s bile. He was not usually the target for his captain’s wrath. Philosophically, he realized though, that anyone would suffice for the moment, and that it wasn’t in any way personal. Or permanent.

  “He’s having one of his days,” Knolles said to Bosun’s Mate Cony a few minutes later, once the guns had been secured; powder bags and shot drawn, flint-lock strikers removed, touch-holes and vents covered, and tampions inserted in the barrels. “Poor bugger.”

  “Ya might say that, Mister Knolles, sir,” Cony allowed, looking aft at the moody, impatiently pacing captain, all hunched over like some plow-ox brooding on remembered goads. “But, he’s had a power o’ worry t’fret on, ’side’s how we look t’be losin’ this ’ere war, so far, sir. But th’ latest news from home’z better. An’, he’s the sunny sort. I ’spect he’s weathered th’ worst. Sing small f’r a few more days, Mister Knolles. Till we’re t’Genoa proper, an’ he’ll be himself, again. But right now, he don’t need no more frustin’.”

  “Point taken, Mister Cony,” Knolles grinned shyly. “No more of our petty, uuhm . . . frustrations?” he suggested diplomatically.

  “Now ’at’s th’ very word I wuz lookin’ for, sir. Th’ very word.”

  Got to stop taking things out on the people, Lewrie chided himself, massaging his temples, and the bridge of his nose, as if trying to scrub himself into a better humor.

  But it had been a horrible winter, a miserable spring, and looked to be a dismal and frustrating summer, this fine new year of 1795.

  Both professionally—saddled with an inept, sluggard of a shit-brain fool as commander of the fleet—and lately, personally, as well. In fact, for a time it had been a terrifying time; though that was somewhat eased by his brother-in-law’s last letters.

  For perhaps the hundredth time
, he wished he’d never made that bold, smug toast to Nelson and Fremantle. How hollow that wish for victory seemed now, how rashly he’d tempted fickle Fate.

  With Corsica theirs, and Lord Hood worn down to a nubbin by the pressures of command, he’d struck his flag the previous September, just after Calvi surrendered, and had sailed for home in his flagship, HMS Victory. And had taken victory, or any hopes of one, with her. Hood had promised intentions of returning, refreshed, sometime in the new year, but “Black Dick” Howe had kept his promise to retire, and Hood had been retained as senior admiral in London, ashore. Vice Admiral Hotham had taken over the Mediterranean fleet, after Sir Hyde Parker had stood in for the interim.

  Parker was cautious and conservative, to be sure, but competent. Hotham, now, well . . . cautious was about as much as anyone might allow. Dull, dithering, slow as molasses, unable to commit, or make a decision. His favorite color was rumored to he “plaid.” But he was so senior he couldn’t be passed over, too healthy to ship home as unfit. And had far too much patronage to be trifled with even by Lord Hood, the Board of Admiralty, or the Prime Minister, Pitt.

  Perhaps Hood was too exhausted to care, Lewrie brooded in foul humor; though the signs had been evident long before. While Jester was fitting out at Gibraltar to go home in the early spring of ’94, Hotham had been at sea near Toulon. He’d loped back to Corsica just as soon as the French put out, to join up with Hood, though he’d been an equal match for Admiral Comte Martin’s fleet, and could have won himself an epic victory, if he’d even lifted one finger to try. French seamanship was abysmal back then, the jumped-up matelots from the lower decks who’d commanded hadn’t the first clue, and it could have been a proper massacre! But for Hotham’s caution. By the time Hood sailed from San Fiorenzo, Martin had staggered into Golfe Jouan, and got himself blockaded for seven months . . . as out of the game as a legless pensioner at Greenwich Naval Hospital.

  With Hood’s departure, though . . . it was like taking tea water off the boil, and setting it out on a windowsill without pouring into the pot. Their “brew” had gone tepid, unleaved; then positively cold.

  The winter gales had set in around November, and Hotham had so reduced poor Rear Admiral Goodall’s blockading squadron that once he’d been blown off-station, Martin had been free to nip along the coast to Toulon and refit toward the end of the month.

  Then, like locking the stable door after the horses had bolted, Hotham had assigned the proper number of frigates and lesser warships to watch Marseilles, Toulon, Hyeres Bay, and Gorjean Bay, when no one but an utter drooling idiot in Bedlam would have thought of sailing.

  And Jester had been one of those lesser ships, one of the very unlucky, and had spent up to twelve days at a stretch, at times, heaving and bobbing like a wine cork under storm trys’ls, or heaved-to and bare-poled, trusting to sea-anchor drogues to keep her bows-on to wind and sea so she wouldn’t broach or capsize. And a very merry Christmas season that had been!

  Then in the spring of ’95, once the weather had cleared, Martin had come out, much better armed, refitted, and trained, as well as reinforced. Probably threatened from Paris with the guillotine, he had at least pretended to try to retake Corsica. He’d left his eighteen thousand men and transports at Toulon, thinking he had to clear the seas of the Royal Navy, first. And where was Hotham and the fleet? At San Fiorenzo Bay, where they could guard Corsica? Good Christ, no, he’d taken them over to Leghorn on the Tuscan coast, no matter that the Mediterranean was so full of spies and informers you could purchase two with dinner. Surely Hotham had been told, hadn’t he? Had an inkling? And if the line-of-battle ships had needed refits, then why hadn’t he fetched the supplies to Corsica, rather than sailing over to them?

  “So everyone could come down with the pox,” Lewrie muttered in acidic jest. Leghorn was a hotbed, a paradise, of vice and venery— and hip-deep in diseased whores of every persuasion, something for just about anyone’s purse, or taste. San Fiorenzo by comparison was almost stuffy and Calvinist, and dull as Scotland on a Sunday.

  And what better way to erode the efficiency of his ships, than to expose officers and men to the debilitating effects of the pox and the Mercury Cure.

  God, even Nelson and Fremantle had succumbed! Fremantle had met some Greek doxy through old John Udney, the British Consul. Another of the Prize Agent, Prize Court set, and Lewrie strongly suspected he also lined his purse as a pimp to the visiting squirearchy. Nelson took up with one Adelaide Correglia. No raving beauty, that; no sylphlike armful! The night Lewrie had dined aboard Agamemnon at anchor, that doxy—who’d moved into the great-cabins with Nelson, for God’s sake!—had trotted out to table in little more than a sheer nightgown and dressing robe. So tight bodices or corsets wouldn’t aggravate the abscess in her side she temporarily suffered, so please you! Prating, silly, and inane, twittering and tittering—and that went for the pair of them.

  Why, the man’d made a perfect ass of himself over the mort, all but cutting her meat for her, and feeding her forkfuls, all but wiping her chin, and toasting her so lovey-dovey every five minutes it’d damn’ near made him spew. And, as Fremantle had put it on their way back to their gigs, “makes himself ridiculous with that woman. Damned bad supper, to boot!”

  No, Hotham had been just as bedazzled, and as buggered, as any of his officers, and when word finally came, he’d scrambled to sortie, with only thirteen of the line. Well, fourteen, if one could count a Neapolitan 3rd-Rate seventy-four as seaworthy, or battle-ready.

  That first set-to in March had been in weather as scant, and a wind as light, as today’s. Three days pussy-footing about— farting about!—and unable to close each other. And, even with twenty-two sail of the line, Martin had proved to be just as timorous as Hotham, And just about as benighted, with no eagerness to do much of anything.

  While the rest of the fleet had almost posed for paintings atop a mirror-smooth sea, Nelson in Agamemnon, thankfully without Adelaide Correglia, had forged ahead, dragging Fremantle’s Inconstant, Cockburn’s Meleager frigate, and a few more with him to harry the tail end of the French, who had been content to run for home and Mother, with their tails tucked between their legs. Jester had been right up with them, and for a time, it had seemed as if that epic sea battle would occur.

  Two French seventy-fours shot to lace, Ça Ira and Censeur, after Nelson fought them for two-and-a-half hours of close cannonading. Over one hundred men killed or wounded aboard Ça Ira alone, as opposed to only seven wounded aboard Agamemnon!

  Which shows what a proper-drilled ship can do, Lewrie thought; and what a barking shambles a bad’un can be.

  But what could have been accomplished if Hotham hadn’t broken off that action, too? Hadn’t said “. . . we must be content, we’ve done pretty well.”

  Then, after “saving” Corsica, Hotham had scattered his frigates and such to the four winds on patrol duties and ineffective blockades, trundling his “liners” back to Leghorn. Perhaps Mister Udney had a doxy lined up for him?

  Jester had at least scooped up two more prizes from that spell of duty, though they’d not seen a penny of the prize money for them yet, either. One of them, a supposedly neutral Danish merchant brig, was still anchored at San Fiorenzo, while the Prize Court nattered as to whether her papers were colorable or not, even though she’d been crammed to her deck heads with warlike material.

  Another bad comparison between Hood and Hotham; at least under Hood, the Prize Court had been a tad less venal and corrupt. Less so than what anyone familiar with a court’s doings could expect. Hotham in charge, though . . .

  No, not in charge, Lewrie sneered; just bloody here, but never in charge, even of his own bowel movements!

  • • •

  Now, today’s muddled fiasco. Again, there’d been rumors that Martin was to come out, this time to escort merchant ships to North Africa to pick up corn so the south of France wouldn’t starve, or riot, when their own crops failed for two summers in a row. The piratical Barbary States had
grain aplenty, and were more friendly with France than anyone else they pirated.

  Yet what had Hotham done with that information? Go look for a convoy? Cover Marseilles and Toulon so tightly that no merchant-men might come out?

  No, again! He’d sat as “sulled up” as a bullfrog at San Fiorenzo, conserving what little energy he was still thought to possess, and had detached Nelson with a squadron of the very sort of ships that should have been prowling the seas in search of the French convoy, or their fleet; not west to interdict—but east, to Genoa! To buck up the Austrians, who didn’t have a navy to play with, and were loath to advance one foot west of Genoa without a guard on their seaward flank.

  Nelson in Agamemnon, clinging to his half-worn-out sixty-four-gunner like she was a lucky talisman, even though he’d been offered command of newer, larger ships time and again. Fremantle’s Inconstant and a fine thirty-two-gun frigate the Southampton, Cockburn’s Meleager, two brigs of war, Tarleton and Tartar, the frigate Ariadne, Jester, and a small fourteen-gun brig-sloop, HMS Speedy, and the humble cutter Resolution.

  How satisfying it had been, six days earlier, to set sail for Genoa and Vado Bay, under a commander who could at least be trusted to charge into battle. And to get away from Admiral Hotham.

  Naturally, it’d turned into a farce. Not a day out, they’d run into Admiral Martin’s entire fleet, twenty-three sail of the line, and supporting frigates, stooging about northeast of Corsica! They’d spent a day and a night being chased themselves this time, turning to combine against any French frigates that got too near, then spinning away when the odds became too daunting. Chased all the way back to San Fiorenzo, and Hotham’s “aid.”

  Seven hours it had taken him to rescue them, to recall his shore parties and libertymen, to weigh anchor and lumber out on a poor wind to their rescue. Seven hours of damned fine seamanship to stand off-and-on San Fiorenzo Bay and not be crushed like bugs by the weight of the approaching French line-of-battle ships before Hotham could save them!