Nobody’s Child

by Andrew Wareham

  Master Gunner taught us – thrust and parry, slash and back cut and regain your balance. None of this elegance of the fence but simple, working swordsmanship. I can remember him now, giving his instructions.

  “Push forward. Now back into guard. Now swing the edge. Stop!”

  At the word we froze, unmoving, waiting for him to show us where we had gone wrong.

  “Giles! What do you see?”

  I was opposite Fred, the pair of us with wooden batons that would leave a bruise but no more.

  “Fred’s just swung, like you told him, Master. He missed and he’s ready to turn and come at me with the back cut. And he’s wide open, but I can’t get to the thrust into his belly, because my blade is out on the swing too.”

  “So, your weight is on your left foot. That leaves the right spare…”

  It did too and we were not indulging in a gentlemanly duel. I booted forwards, taking care to stop short of actual contact, Fred being a friend.

  “Don’t ‘ee forget that, young Giles! Just acos of you’re swinging a cutlass, it don’t mean you ain’t got no other weapons. When you can, you wants to pick up what they calls a main gauche, if they feels fancy. Used to be, they called it a bollock dagger, but that was back in Shakespeare’s days. I calls it a bloody sharp knife what’ll gut any bugger who’s wide open like Fred is just now. If you ain’t got a knife, use your boot!”

  Master Gunner always tried to be politely spoken, when he was talking one on one, but when he became excited he fell back into seaman’s speech. Never swore to any extent though – stands out in my memory for that, most sailors being foul-mouthed in the nature of things.

  I came into contact with Silly Billy a few times in later years – the Royal Tar, His Majesty King William, Fourth of that name, I should say – and he had a nasty mouth on him. Runs in the family, of course – Hanoverians distinguished by insanity, pox and booze and precious little else. Better make sure this little memoir is kept out of the public eye for a few years – I’ll put in the Will that it’s to be kept on a shelf in the library, out of sight. Twenty years from now and it won’t matter – they ran short on children and there’s a new dynasty with this young Queen Victoria. From all you hear, she’s typical of Mad King George’s get, the same habits but female. They’ve had to pick up a well-muscled Prussian as a husband to her, poor fellow! Been a soldier, I expect, with a ramrod stiff back – and that’s not all!

  Back to the tale of my well-spent youth. I learned to protect myself – not quite the manly art of self-defence, but good enough, and Fred came to stand at my shoulder as a natural sort of thing. Not close friends – we were master and man, as was only natural – but we had a good idea that we would stick together over the years.

  Fred came to be my assistant in the gunner’s room, learning as I did.

  Each of the boarders had his day of the week to bring his musket down to us in the gunner’s room to be checked and cleaned and made good as might be needed. The springs to the flintlocks were the great problem. They snapped far too easily. I learned how to replace a spring in the first week at sea and used that skill almost daily from then on.

  I made up cartridges by the tens of thousands; that took at least a half of every day. Cutting the thick, stiff paper and then twisting up a cylinder, filling it with powder and folding the top closed, work that became mechanical, my fingers moving while my eyes were elsewhere and I was talking with the gunner about something else again. Necessary work, for cartridges were far quicker than the powder horn that was still used by many, so the gunner said.

  A strange man, the gunner; I worked close to him for the better part of two years, but I never came to know him. Not even his name, for I never addressed him as other than ‘Master Gunner’. But he knew his small arms and taught me of them.

  Jenny Dawes followed the coast of the Brazils south and made no attempt to land. It seemed strange to me, but Jerry explained his brother’s mind to me as we idled along in the light inshore winds.

  “Going to the River Plate, Giles. The richest part of this eastern coast by a great way. South of the equatorial jungles. There are mines inland in the mountains that are not so far distant in the south. Add to that, the plains there carry herds of cattle and flocks of sheep and there is an expanse of wheat land. The people are well-fed and so can work hard. Makes them wealthy and wanting the goods we have in the hold and having the wherewithal to purchase them as well.”

  That made good sense. I was much in favour of selling to these good people.

  “Mind you, Giles,” said he, “they also have small ships they call garda costas, or something like. Well-armed and with heavy crews and in the habit of laying up and coming out with the moon to catch smugglers. The cargoes they take and the men they hang as pirates. Being a wealthy part of the coast, there is more by way of taxation to pay for such customsmen. So, the chance of running into a busybodying Don is there as well as the possibility of putting together a substantial sum in silver ingots. A little of imagination, of course, and you may take the garda costa and have a second vessel, heavily armed, all for free.”

  I was not at all sure this was a good risk to take, but the choice was not mine to make, and I was no more than fourteen, and at that age death is not for real – it happens to other people exclusively.

  There were fishermen out in the estuary, a huge, wide river mouth that made Poole Harbour seem tiny. Jerry said that the Amazon, to the north, which we had passed by out to sea, was far greater. I have never seen the Amazon. I won’t now. Pity.

  We made no signals, raised no flags, and I wondered why but Jerry said that we were English built and the fishermen would know what we were. He told me to watch as we put out to sea on the ebbing tide and then drifted slowly back as it made again.

  Nothing happened.

  “Watching, so they are, Giles. Just to be sure in their own minds that we are not a prize, a taken ship pretending to be a smuggler. Do the same again tonight.”

  The following day a boat sailed directly up to us.

  “English?”

  Captain Marker was at the rail, yelled back to them in Spanish, much to their initial fear.

  “They don’t believe the English speak their lingo, Giles. Most of the time, they’re right.”

  Jerry was correct in that. I’ve travelled half of the world, one way or another, and have never found the need to talk to them except in English, or maybe Pidgin or one of the other trade lingos. Nine times out of ten one of the fuzzy-wuzzies will know a civilised tongue, and in the other case you can always shout at them. They pick up your meaning quick enough with a toe up the backside to help.

  Be that as it may, Captain Marker spoke their gibberish, and I suppose it was useful in its way. He called the orders and the seamen worked their tricks up in the rigging and Jenny Dawes made her way out to sea for a couple of hours and then came inshore to a little bay soon after dark.

  I could see the lights of a village or small town a mile or two along the coast and I suppose merchants from there came across to us. A boat put out and three prosperous-seeming fellows came aboard. They wore high boots and thick leather jerkins against the night airs – money on their backs, no poor fisherman could afford such.

  An hour and they had peered at the manifest and, so Jerry said, demanded to know of quality and took Captain Marker’s Bible oath that his cargo was good. They could not buy all we had - the holds carried the better part of two hundred tons – but they contracted for some substantial part. Their boat rowed in front of us and led us to a jetty sticking out from the shore.

  Captain Marker called the boarders to the stern, aligned them in two ranks, muskets to hand. Then he ordered the hatches off and allowed a great mob of longshoremen to come aboard and quickly offload their part of the cargo. I was stood at the front of the boarders, a pair of pistols in my belt. They were loaded and I had a cutlass besides.

  It was not that we did not trust the Spanish, but the history of the previous centuries
since the Reformation suggested that any Protestant was wise to tread gingerly in Papist company.

  Two hours saw some of the cast iron and pottery and a few chests of glassware ashore and the three merchants leading a short train of slaves carrying small but heavy chests aboard in their place.

  “Watch this, Giles!”

  Captain Marker had a steelyard dangling from a yardarm, used it to weigh the ingot metal taken out of the chests, noting the precise number of ounces, though they were all much the same. Then he placed the ingots one after another into a full bucket of water and measured the displacement of each.

  “You see, Giles?”

  I did not.

  “The displacement, the amount of water they take up, tells us the exact volume of each ingot. Compare the weight against the volume and what do you discover?”

  I had not the faintest idea. Jerry was a little disappointed.

  “The density, sir, that is what you can calculate. And that will tell us whether that bright shiny ingot is silver or lead, or some bastard half-mixture of the two. It is not unknown for a trader to return to England and discover that he has ingots of lead, stone even, with a sheet of silver wrapped neatly round the outside and carefully heated so that no seam shall show.”

  The ingots were all of a standard size, presumably that used by the mine where they had been poured. All showed a density within a point or two of pure silver. Jerry explained that a degree of contamination was inevitable – anything upwards of ninety-seven parts in the hundred could be called pure.

  “So there, Giles, is the beginning of our fortune from this voyage. We have one thousand shares and even a one-share man will see as much as twenty shillings on the back of that little venture. If the rest sells as well, then you will have four pounds, more or less, written against your name in my ledger, and that before we reach the East Indies.”

  Jenny Dawes sailed out to mid-channel with the dawn, out of sight of the shore. A fishing boat went ahead of us along the coast, taking a message to merchants in Montevideo itself. The hope was that the boat would return with a rendezvous where the remainder of the cargos would be unloaded.

  “Better in a single call than to land three or four times, Giles.”

  I agreed, though I had some doubts of all I had seen overnight.

  “Jerry, is it wise to place the boarders in a double rank to the stern? Was we to be taken in ambush by a garda costa, then a single blast of grapeshot could bring all down. Might it be deemed wise to place half of the boarders on the forecastle, kneeling in the darkness?”

  Jerry grinned and said he had no idea; as well, he did not give orders aboard Jenny Dawes.

  “Speak to the captain, Giles. Come, no time like the present.”

  “So, you are to be a marine strategist, Master Jackson? What else would you propose?”

  “Load all guns with grape, sir, and run them out ready. Two gun captains with linstocks to hand, sir, just in case they might be needed. It will take only a few minutes afterwards to worm them if they are not fired, sir, but it will be more comfortable to have them ready if the night shows full of Dons.”

  He told me that young men were expected to be naïve and trusting; degrees of cynicism came with age, or normally so.

  He might have been right, for all I knew. I merely felt that I would be more comfortable if there was a gunner with a lighted match to hand.

  “Twice have I run the smuggling lay on these shores, Master Jackson, and have been treated honestly… Third time lucky? Maybe not. Would you load the chaser with grape as well?”

  “Would the garda costas lay across our bow, sir?”

  “I should wish to do so, was I them, which I am not, luckily for me. Better far to have been born an Englishman!”

  Heard that a hundred times over the years; never have understood it. I suppose there must be Frogs blessing their papist deity for their good fortune in being born in Paris, or wherever. Most peculiar!

  Back to business. There I was stood before the captain in the middle of the River Plate and trying to tell him his business at the age of fourteen years. A good thing he was a mild-mannered man.

  “If they do, sir, then a load of langrage might be more useful. Master Gunner says that will rip their rigging to shreds close-to.”

  “What then, Master Jackson?”

  That demanded quick thought, and the use of my powers of observation. I had kept my eyes open on deck, watching the behaviour of the ship when the sailors got up to their tricks.

  “Depends on the wind, sir. Blowing one way, the garda costa falls off and disappears into the night, either to run ashore or come under command when they have put sail on her again. T’other way, sir, she drops across our bows, and then it’s pistol and cutlass work, sir, and take her as a consort on our voyage.”

  Captain Marker laughed at my confidence.

  “Well, young man, so be it. The command of the half of the boarders on the forecastle is yours. If it happens that you have the opportunity, then you lead them onto the garda costa. Mind you, I don’t have any expectation that the Dons will play us false. More profit to them in trading honestly, like the first fellows did.”

  Logic said the Spanish would take a profit, but logic said that the Inquisition would never have been invented. There was little in the way of logic in the behaviour of the religious – but that’s another matter and I go to church of a Sunday and smile at the rector, whose Living I own and who is most polite to me. He knows what’s what and says not a word out of place; his lady wife, who happens to be my daughter, wants a closed stove in place of the open range in the Rectory, and that’s more important than matters of doctrinal orthodoxy. So it should be, too. No place in this country for big-mouthed priests!

  Close to dinner now, and my lady wife insists that I must change, as is proper. It’s little enough to do to keep her happy. More tomorrow.

  Chapter Three

  Nobody’s Child Series

  Nobody’s Child

  A boat came out to us a day later and offered to lead us into an inlet a few miles out of Montevideo, to the west a league or two. The skipper of the fishing smack told us there were warehouses there and a deep-water quay we could tie up to. There was a tavern as well, so he said, which would give the crew a break after their weeks at sea. The staff included young females, he told us, leering suggestively.

  Captain Marker thanked him kindly and bade him lead us inshore.

  No sooner was the Spanish skipper back aboard his little boat than Marker called us all together, clustered around him close to the wheel. A sight it was to see for a young lad – twenty of boarders, together with forty of sailors and gunners, all of us rough and hairy for not shaving at sea – not that I had more than fluff to shave. Far fewer than the navy would take aboard one of its ships of war, but all volunteers and willing to turn their hands to any job that was going.

  Captain Marker outlined to us all that the fisherman had said. Some of the men looked grave, frowning mightily; most nudged each other and muttered what they would be doing to the young females. I’ll admit, I was at one with the bulk of the men, my taste for females having, as you might say, been whetted.

  Captain Marker looked grave and opened his mouth again.

  “Well, what do ye think?”

  Jerry nudged me to silence.

  “Think, Giles! Too damned much of a good thing, so say I. That fisherman over-egged his pudding!”

  Short consideration said to me that the man had offered too much. He had been enthusiastic, and the wise man never trusted the enthusiast, that I had already learned – Binks had been an example.

  The men had started, most of them, by shouting and cheering; slowly they quietened down, glancing about them and seeing the scowls of the men they respected as thinkers – by no means all of them officers.

  The boatswain, a quiet, mild-mannered forty-year-old and a seaman who had seen and done everything, spoke up.

  “Don’t like it Captain Marker. Telling we
to tie up in a safe little harbour wi’ convenient warehouses and a boozer and a dozen lasses dropping their drawers just as soon as we gets ashore. It do sound like a jack tar’s dream of paradise to I, sir, and no mistake!”

  The message sunk home. One of the boarders raised a tentative hand. It was a strangely schoolboyish act for a man reputed to have been a cannibal. A shipwreck had cast half his crew ashore on a bare sandy isle in the Caribbees; four men had been picked up two months later, each of them suspiciously plump. Maneater Parsons spoke hesitantly, for not wishing generally to call attention to himself.

  “Beg pardon, Captain Marker. I reckons they’s pulling’ our plonkers! Time we gets tied up, any money you like to wager says they’s a ship wi’ guns run out to seaward of us, and a regiment of bloody soldiers hidin’ away in them warehouses.”

  There was a general mutter of indignant agreement.

  “They reckons we to be bloody stupid, Captain!”

  Captain Marker grinned.

  “So say I, lads. I wanted to take your mind on the matter, though. If so be it’s a trap, and I much suspect it is, either we sail away, or we sail into it and spring it. What say you?”

  I stayed silent at Jerry’s side, my face, as I suppose, showing my amaze.

  “Privateering lay, Giles. The men have shares and they have opinions too. Fight together, or don’t fight at all, that’s our rule.”

  It made sense to me then and since. I never have held with this navy way of flogging the unwilling and then hanging the mutinous. Better to talk it over first. My name ain’t Nelson.

  Ten minutes and opinion was firmly on the side of sailing into the inlet and showing every sign of being a lamb come to the slaughter.

  The boatswain summed up.

  “It might be, Captain Marker, that they Spanish chaps be honest. There be a first time for everything, so they say. More like, they got it in mind to do us over. If so be there be a ship waiting to lay across us, well, it ain’t going to be too big, for not being able to hide it away unseen. Even in the dark you ain’t going to tuck a frigate under your jumper out of sight like.”