by Jason Vail
“All right then,” I said, naming a sum that made Crequy blink. But he agreed, and I called down into the waist for Willie. “Get six men, ones you trust not to get into any trouble, and have them report to the quarterdeck.”
Adele de Crequy came to my side, a shawl wrapped about her shoulders against the cold, and we watched the ship’s boat cross the gap to the village, her brother and Austin in the bow and Willie at the tiller with the passage money. I lit my pipe, thinking about the supper that waited below. Before I could shake out the match, Adele caught my hand.
“A moment, sir,” she said.
I was astonished to see the stub of a cigar in her slender fingers. She pulled my hand to the stub and sucked it alight.
She blew out the match with a jet of smoke, and smiled. “Do you think me any less a lady?”
“Do you really care for my opinion?”
“I don’t have enough cigars to last the voyage,” she said, avoiding the question. “There was a lack of them in New Orleans. Too bad we can’t stop in Havana.”
“I hear they have plague there.”
“That isn’t the reason you avoid it.”
“Well, we have our differences with the Spanish, but they only involve money.”
“I have learned otherwise in the short time I’ve been aboard.” She waved a hand. “So many men from the west, and they talk of independence from Spain. Just day before yesterday, a ship full of people from Georgia was leaving for Texas. It’s very strange. Georgia is a garden compared to Texas. I cannot imagine why anyone would want to go there.”
“I’ll give you that.”
The cigar stub was now so small that it threatened to burn her fingers. She tossed it over the side. “Dice and cards, you said.”
That came out of nowhere and it took a moment to realize she had changed the subject to the amusements available in the village. “So I’ve heard.”
“Are they honest games?”
“I don’t know.”
She sighed heavily. “He will probably lose anyway.”
“Most people do. But you are nobility. You can afford it. It is the price of excitement.”
“It can be an expensive price, and we haven’t the money to waste on it.” She cocked her head and looked me in the eye. “We are not going to France merely to recover our lost heritage. We left just a step ahead of the process servers.” She looked away, her mouth a bitter line. “We had a plantation on the river above Baton Rouge. Father bought it when he fled from the Republicans just before they could lop off his head. He had actually got to the point where it made money.” She sighed. “Thirty years of struggle. Then he died. Jean is more interested in his amusements than business. We had much debt. And the cost of the recovery of our barony! You have no idea! The government drives a harder bargain than any merchant. We shall never see the end of debt, I’m afraid. Do you have any idea how difficult it is for a woman from a family wracked with debt to make a decent marriage? No, I suppose you’ve never given the matter a bit of thought. I wonder what France will be like.”
“I suspect you will find it rather different.”
“How so?”
“As different as British America is from England.”
She chuckled. “I’m afraid that does not help much.”
“I am not an expert on France.”
Again she abruptly changed the subject. “I begged him not to go, but he wouldn’t listen. He never listens,” she said, turning away from the rail. Across the water, the men in our boat were climbing the stairs to the village platform. “He is uncontrollable. He never thinks about the future.” She half turned. “Isn’t it suppertime?”
“It should be on the table.”
“I hope the others have left something for us.”
“If they haven’t, I’ll have them thrown overboard.”
She laughed. “You are such a cruel man.”
After supper, the two of us returned to the quarterdeck for another smoke. The moon had risen, and, being just past full, it threw down white light so that when our eyes adjusted, we could clearly see the village, the neighboring ships, and the men upon them in a brilliant pastel of light and dark.
Voices cut through the clamor of the village tavern from one of the schooners above Wasp. There was something urgent and sad about them; then one predominated, rising and falling with an odd rhythm in what sounded like Spanish.
“I wonder what’s going on?” I mused.
“It sounds like a prayer, but I don’t speak Spanish,” Adele said.
The voice fell silent. The figures on the schooner struggled with a long package. They lifted it to the rail and rolled it into the water, where it struck with a loud splash. It was followed by a similar package.
The bundles, held up by air trapped in the wrapping, floated toward us. They bumped against Wasp’s hull, then went by and disappeared downstream.
“That looked like corpses,” Adele said. “How sad.”
“Yes,” I said. It was not unusual for a man to die on ship, but two at once was odd, especially since a schooner of that size might have a crew of no more than six men. I pondered this only a moment, and then dismissed it from my mind.
Adele went below, but I stayed on deck.
There was quite a bit of noise from the tavern which rang out in the darkness with all the more intensity for the surrounding desolation. Occasionally a choir of voices burst into song, with thumping that suggested dancing. Someone emerged with a candle and urinated into the river. From time to time, fellows came out for a smoke, orange embers of their cigars flaring against the shadows of the building. At one point, a fight broke out and spilled onto the walkway, and someone was tossed into the river. The victim saved himself from being swept away only by clinging to one of the piles. He could not swim, and his calls for help were pitiful. For a time they were met only with jeers, as even his friends seemed to enjoy his predicament. Finally, someone mounted a rescue and got him to the landing platform where he was instructed by two large fellows with bats to remain in order to avoid further trouble.
Toward midnight as the first watch ended, there was another outburst of shouting from the tavern, and the thud of steps on the planks. The moon was high so that I could plainly see a crowd rushing down to the landing platform and leaping into our pinnacle, which immediately put out toward Wasp, while a group shouted a protest at their departure.
Our boys had grown fairly experienced at the handling of small craft, but the performance of the rowers was a disgrace. They could not get the rhythm and the oars clattered together, and I feared the current would be too much for them and they would have to spend the night on the river. But somehow, they finally managed and Austin in the bow was able to grasp the rope that dangled beside the ship’s ladder.
“Are you sober, Mister Austin?” I called down to him.
“I am, but the baron will need some assistance getting aboard. I fear that the ladder may present too insurmountable an obstacle in his present state.”
“What about the rest of you?” I called to the crew and was met with a chorus of “we’re fine, we’re fine.” I didn’t believe that for a moment.
I ordered the officer of the watch to have a cargo hoist rigged for Crequy, and stood by while the watch hauled him up with our keg of whiskey.
Meanwhile, Austin clambered up the ladder followed by Willie and the boat crew. One of the crew had blood on his shirt and marks on his face that looked as though someone had bitten him. But he seemed none the worse for it.
“I trust there was no trouble,” I said to Willie as Austin helped the baron down the gangway and the crew melted away before anyone could be reprimanded.
“Just a little scrap,” he said. “Nothing much.”
“I’ll have someone wake our good doctor to look at that fellow with the marks on his face. What happened at the end?”
“The baron had a good night at dice and decided to call an end to it after he had taken almost everyone’s money. There
were some who wanted a chance to win it back.”
“His sister will be pleased to hear that.” I nodded. “It was a good time to leave.”
“I thought so.”
“Did he tip the men?”
“Not yet.”
“Go get into his purse and take a guinea or two for them. He owes them something for having got him away safe. Oh, and have that keg of whiskey taken to the day cabin.”
“My pleasure.”
Chapter 7
The Florida Straits
October 1820
After six days of leisurely sailing, Wasp reached the Straits of Florida. Spanish vessels pass through the narrow strait everyday, many of them warships, as the naval base at Havana is only ninety or a hundred miles away. So we hove to near an island called Tortugas to await the night.
The island was a scrub covered lump in the distance, but Willie kept an anxious eye on it in case we drifted close. He had been shipwrecked upon it for two months with five others. According to the tale, they survived on birds’ eggs, whatever fish they could catch in the lagoon and rain water. The story was that, at the end, the men had eaten each other, but Willie denied it, although he once confessed to me that they had used one of the dead for bait, spearing the fish that came to feed upon the corpse in the shallows. “He drowned himself,” Willie insisted when I asked him about it. “We didn’t put him there.”
“But you didn’t take him out, either.”
“Well, no. We thought it prudent not to disturb the fish. There were some really big ones there, you see.”
“No sense in spitting on the favor, I suppose.”
“That’s how we looked at it. It’s a pity people don’t understand.”
“Best not to talk about it, though.”
Both of us retired to our hammocks even though it was early in the afternoon, since we would take the night watches. I didn’t trust anyone else to conn Wasp through the perils she would face this evening.
A steward’s mate shook me awake shortly after eight.
“Go away,” I said.
“You told me to get you up now.”
“It can’t be that time yet. I just fell asleep.”
“It’s that time,” he insisted. He held out a tray of biscuits and tea.
I prodded a biscuit with a finger and found that it was soft and fresh, not the stony thing the cook usually produced that had to be soaked in water before they could be eaten. “Thank you, Mike,” I said. “Is Mister Harper up yet?”
“Already on deck.”
“Tell him I’ll be right there.”
Mike put the tray on the table and went out, as I climbed from my hammock and struggled into my trousers and coat. I tossed back the tea, which had cooled, stuffed the biscuit in my mouth, took a quick look in the mirror so as not to appear in public with my hair standing out every which way as it was prone to do, and then made my way up to the quarterdeck.
We were entering the last dog watch and the bronze disk of the sun was only a finger’s distance from the horizon, throwing off golden rays against the tops of towering storm the clouds, where flashes of lightning lit up the interiors.
Willie stood by the binnacle, where the ship’s compass turned upon its pinwheel, a sheaf of papers and his astrolabe in his hand. He glanced at the storms. “I hope this clears up,” he said.
“It should the farther south we get. You have our course worked up?”
Willie nodded.
“Mister Halevy!”
“Sir!” young Halevy called from the taffrail.
“Prepare to wear about. Jib, topsails, main, forecourse, and spanker.”
“No reefs, sir?”
“No, we shall go quickly tonight. We have much distance to cover before dawn. Make sure there is a double watch forward and in the tops.”
“Oui, sir.” Halevy began shouting orders and the men on watch leaped to the work.
“Not likely that they’ll see anything,” Willie said, peering at his papers. “It will be a dark night.”
“Well,” I said, “if we can’t see them, they can’t see us.”
“It’s not ships that concern me,” he said morosely, not liking the fact we had to make a night passage. It was how he got shipwrecked himself as a boy.
Wasp ran southeast over a calm sea, leaving the clouds in the north behind. Above our heads, the night sky blazed with stars that seemed to float apart from one another like the candles on a chandelier, the Milky Way a shimmering swath across the heavens.
After two hours, I checked my watch. Willie shot Polaris to confirm our latitude, and I saw him nod and relax a bit at the knowledge we were at least fifteen miles from the Florida coast, far enough out to sea not to have to worry about shoals for now. He would shoot Polaris every fifteen minutes to ensure we stayed along this track. I clicked my watch shut and ordered the turn to the east.
I gave Halevy permission to turn in, and it was just me, Willie and Hammond our quartermaster at the wheel on deck apart from the lookouts, for the wind was steady out of the southwest and the sails needed no trimming that we could not do ourselves, so we did not have to wake the crew.
Toward midnight, the sky clouded over and the night became as black as the inside of a sack. I couldn’t even see Hammond’s shaggy white hair until I was close upon him and had to feel my way about the deck. We could not tell our latitude any longer by the stars and had to steer by the compass, which was illuminated by a single candle hung on a hook upon the binnacle. But that was less of a concern because we had to make a northerly turn in the wee hours in order to head up the narrow gap between Florida and the Bahamas. The timing of the turn was important, for we did not want to make it too soon, and judging the right spot was difficult, as the ship made about seven knots but the current could add another three or four and grew stronger the farther west and north we traveled.
Some men hate the night watches. The clock slows down, time drags, the monotony of an easy sea can hypnotize. But I have always liked night sailing, especially once I had grown enough as a sailor to be given charge of the watch. Here, now, I was master of my ship, and I loved her better than any woman, for I believed that a ship unlike a woman can never betray you. I was bitter then at what the neighbors had told me about my wife Susan’s last days, you see — angry at her for turning to another man in my absence. I refused to admit then that I had any blame in that. A quiet moment came when I put my hand in my pocket and caressed the toy horse, all that remained of the house on a hill above Baltimore, which I had burned before Wasp left for our first voyage, and I thought about how she had died alone on the sofa, the children already corpses above her head. It’s odd how I could resent her betrayal yet grieve so at her death. Normally, I sent these thoughts away with whiskey or rum, but I could not do so this night. So I strained to hear what Wasp had to tell me as she rode the swell, the rigging humming gently, the canvas tight without any flapping. The creaks and groans that are a healthy sound of a ship bending to its task, her deck boards fairly vibrating underfoot as if she was eager to make more speed, looking forward to making the crossing, for she had never been to Europe.
After seven hours’ cruising, I judged us to be south and eastward of the large Florida island shown on the charts as Isla de Pinas. It was a guess, admittedly, but based upon it, I ordered Hammond, “Come north four points.”
As Hammond leaned on the wheel to make the turn, Willie, I and the men on lookout ran to trim the sails to the new court to the northeast.
Before long, the sky began to lighten. A brief puff of smoke from the flue, followed shortly by a steady dribble, told me that cook had revived the fire and had breakfast underway. At the thought of it, my stomach growled. He brought up a plate of pan-fried sausages and pancakes and I was eating them in the stern while watching the bubbles of the wake, imagining what it would be like to take Wasp up the Thames to London, when Willie came running back from the bow.
“Paul,” he said, concerned, “you need to take a look a
t this.”
“At what?” I had half a mind to tell him to come back when I had finished breakfast, but he was not the sort to bother me over trifles.
So I hurried forward after him.
And there just becoming visible in the gray of dawn, arrayed in an arch across our bow no more than eight hundred yards away, was a fleet.
“Merchants, most of them,” Willie said, his right eye glued to his glass.
My plate of sausages and cakes rested forgotten on the forecastle deck as I made my own inspection with my glass. “And nobody saw them until just now?” I asked furious.
“It was dark,” Willie said. “You didn’t see them either.”
He was right about the fleet: it was a convoy of merchants. But it had two escorts, a fore-and-aft rigged schooner and, off to starboard, a frigate.
“Spanish, you think?” Willie murmured.
“I doubt they’re Danish,” I replied, as I examined the frigate. She was two-hundred feet long at least with twenty-two gun ports on her port side that I could make out. We had overcome a similar frigate last summer, but only by luck and reckless courage. I never wanted to pit Wasp against such a ship again.
The convoy was making less headway than Wasp, so it was clear we had caught them in the dark. And we were still gaining.
“Back sail a little,” I said. “Slow us down before we run among them.”
Willie went off to give the orders and, with canvas flapping, Wasp’s headway diminished.
He came up beside me. “This is the first time I’m sorry we have such speed.”
“We’ll need it before this is over with,” I said, still watching the ships ahead of us through my glass. My shoulders ached from holding it up. “They haven’t noticed us yet, but it won’t be long.”
“Maybe they won’t,” he said hopefully.
I snorted. “A three-masted wolf among two-masted sheep . . . someone soon will realize something is wrong.”
