The Invasion Year Page 4

  The Frogs could row their anchors out, and warp themselves off, he reckoned in his head; Or, we could rig tow-lines of the stern anchor cables, but … that’d put us on a lee shore, in those rocks.

  “Mister Caldwell, how close could we anchor to her?” Lewrie asked the Sailing Master. “Near enough to pass her towin’ cables?”

  “Sadly, no, sir,” Caldwell told him. “None of our cables are as long as would be needed … less the warps taken round the mizen mast or capstan.”

  One hundred twenty fathoms was the length of the fleet and the bower anchor cables; 720 feet, and Reliant would put herself in that French frigate’s predicament did they try to get that close.

  Lewrie took another long look with his telescope, pondering and measuring. “She might need a lateral haulin’ off, in addition to what forward haul they might get with their own anchors. We enter the harbour, tack round, then come to anchor abreast of her…,” he schemed aloud. “No,” he decided, lowering his glass. Did he sail Reliant in, it was good odds that Dessalines and Christophe would mis-interpret it as a bloody raid, and fire all that waiting heated shot at them. Even if they could dash in, swing wide, and tack round, to try and anchor in the entrance channel by the second, starboard, bower, would leave their stern swinging Sou’west, driven by the Nor’east Trade Wind, and no good for the French would result from that.

  “Signal from the flag, sir!” Midshipman Grainger called from the taffrails, right aft. “Our number, sir, and it’s ‘Render Assistance.’ ”

  Oh, fuck me! Lewrie groaned; We would be nearest! Loring won’t give up better than fifteen thousand pounds o’ prize-money that easily!

  “Very well, Mister Grainger,” Lewrie replied with a false air of enthusiasm. “Hoist a positive reply. Mister Westcott, Mister Caldwell … haul our wind and shape a course for the main channel. I wish to come to anchor a safe distance from the frigate, but within decent rowing distance. Mister Spendlove, ready the second bower for dropping, once we’ve come about. Mister Merriman, see that all our ship’s boats are brought up from towin’ astern, and ready t’be manned.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Bosun Sprague!” Lt. Westcott called out. “I’ll see two hands on the fore channel platforms, with sounding leads!”

  Why couldn’t Commodore Loring call on somebody “tarry-handed,” ’stead o’ me? Lewrie gloomed; I’ve never done this in me life!

  CHAPTER FIVE

  HMS Reliant obeyed the flagship’s order, but cautiously, feeling her way shoreward under reduced sail, with Lewrie fretting over a chart pinned to the traverse hoard by the compass binnacle cabinet, a ruler and a pair of brass dividers handy.

  “Do we come about here, Mister Caldwell,” Lewrie posed, “about two cables off the breakwater, in the middle of the channel … then, clew ev’rything up quick in Spanish reefs…”

  “Uhm-hmm, sir,” Caldwell replied, already sounding dubious.

  “… we’d glide forrud for a bit, perhaps half a cable more, as the sails are taken in, still in six fathoms o’ water,” Lewrie went on. “Let go the second bower and lay out but a four-to-one scope, we’d be … about here?” he said, tapping a tiny circled X in the middle of the entrance channel, just outside the breakwaters.

  “In my professional opinion, Captain, I’d not risk it,” Caldwell said with a quick shake of his head. “Does the anchor not get purchase at once, we’ll drag astern God knows how far. And, does it get a firm grip, it would be the departure just as bad … streaming bows onto the Trades, our stern a’slant the channel without a kedge anchor laid out to keep her head Due North or Nor’west, sir? Soon as we broke the bower loose, we’d drift aground on the western breakwater shallows. I’d not recommend it, sir. Strongly.”

  “Then there’s not much we can do to aid them, is there, Mister Caldwell?” Lewrie gravelled, standing fully erect and looking forward over the dipping jib-boom and bow-sprit at the stranded frigate, that was now only a mile off. “Come about and fetch-to, in ten fathoms of water, a mile off, and launch our boats, is all.”

  “Sadly, that would be best, sir,” Caldwell grimly allowed.

  “Very well, then. Relate that to Mister Westcott, and advise him to when you wish us to put the helm over,” Lewrie directed.

  Damme, if the Frogs can’t get themselves warped off, do I end up with all her people crowded aboard my ship? Lewrie thought. If all else failed, the French refugees had to be saved, even if the valuable frigate was lost to the rebel slaves … and what the Commodore would make of that didn’t bear thinking about!

  I’m deep enough in the “quag” already, over refugees, Lewrie lamented to himself; French refugees, in particular.

  “Almost there, Mister Caldwell?” Westcott enquired, rocking on the balls of his feet, and his eyes dashing to take in everything that could affect their ship at once.

  “Uhmm … about half a minute more, sir,” Caldwell told him.

  “Once we’re fetched-to, Mister Westcott, you will have the ship ’til I return,” Lewrie announced of a sudden, just after the idea came to his mind. “I’ll take my gig over t’see what needs doin’.”

  “Ah … aye aye, sir!”

  “Ahem!” from Caldwell.

  “Ready about!” from Lt. Westcott in a quarterdeck bellow, with the aid of a speaking-trumpet.

  “I’ll save you a jeune fille,” Lewrie told Westcott with a smirk.

  “Ready all? Ready all? Helm’s alee!”

  And round Reliant swept, even under reduced sail, rapidly going about. “Rise, tacks and sheets!” And she kept on swinging, cross the eyes of the Trade Wind, sails rustling and slatting like musket fire, her jibs and stays and spanker whooshing over to larboard, and quickly hauled taut to keep forward drive on her on the starboard tack, whilst the square sails were wheeled about, pivotting on their rope-and-ball parrels about the masts, most clewed up into untidy bag shapes, “Spanish reefed,” and the fore-course and fore tops’l braced flat a’back to keep her from driving forward under the jibs’ pressure. She ghosted on for a bit, slowing, slowing, then …

  “Do the Trades pipe up, Mister Westcott, use the second bower, if you think it truly necessary, and we’ll use our boats to haul her bows off-wind enough to get way back on her,” Lewrie said, readying himself to debark. “If we can’t get that Frog frigate off, then … well, we may end up with a horde o’ guests aboard, ’til we parcel ’em out to the rest of the squadron.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” Lt. Westcott said, nodding in surprise, teeth bared in a “news to me” grin.

  “That way, you can choose your own young lady, without trustin’ my taste,” Lewrie said, leaning close to mutter.

  * * *

  Lewrie took all four of Reliant’s boats, his gig, the cutter, the launch, and the jolly-boat, each with a Midshipman aboard: Mister Houghton, his competent but dull twenty-one-year-old; Mister Entwhistle, “the honourable” nineteen-year-old; Mister Warburton, their cheeky sixteen-year-old; and lastly, Mister Munsell, only thirteen, but shaping main-well as a tarry-handed tarpaulin lad, all his most experienced.

  The French frigate, Chlorinde, Lewrie noted from her name-board, seemed to be in decent shape … so far. She sat fully upright on an even keel, and did not seem to have taken the ground so jarringly that her masts had sprung; her upper masts and yards still stood, her lower mast trunks were picture-perfect vertical. She just wasn’t going anywhere, and, though she was solidly aground and seemingly at rest, her hull gave off alarming groans of timbers and thumping, strained scantling planking as her outer hull rose and thudded on the rocky bottom.

  “Hoy, the ship!” Lewrie called as his gig came alongside of her larboard entry-port. Irritatingly, no one paid him any mind. Instead, he could hear rhythmic chanting of French “pulley-hauley,” then noted that Chlorinde’s main course yard was being used as a crane. Slowly, a 12-pounder or 18-pounder gun was hoisted clear above her starboard bulwarks, even more slowly swung clear of the hull, and lowered. They were lightening ship by
jettisoning all her artillery overside, to the shallow side.

  There were more basso grunts as more of her crew laboured on the capstan. Her best bower anchor had been rowed out towards the channel depths, and the cable was now bar-taut, in an effort to drag her bows free. No matter how strongly her people breasted to the capstan bars, though, dug their shoes or bare toes into the deck and pressed forward with all their strength, that didn’t seem to be of any avail so far.

  “Bugger their side-party,” Lewrie muttered. His bow man had a good grip with a gaff on the frigate’s main chain platform, and his gig was close alongside. Lewrie stood and made his way through his oarsmen, stepped onto the boat’s gunn’l, and hopped onto the platform. “With me, Desmond, Furfy.”

  “Aye, sor!” his Irish Cox’n replied.

  The battens were not sanded, and the man-ropes strung loose on either hand of the battens were old and grey, but they held. Lewrie made his way upwards, step at a time, thinking that stringing the man-ropes through the battens to make taut hand-rails, as his own Navy did, made a lot more sense.

  “Anybody home?” Lewrie asked once he’d gained the larboard gangway. “Anybody bloody care?” As he’d judged the day before, there were at least a thousand people aboard the Chlorinde, sailors, soldiers of Infantrie de Marine, survivors of infantry regiments from shore, and civilians everywhere, all intent on heaving things overside on the far side of the ship.

  “Qui vive, m’sieur?” a French Midshipman asked him, eyes wide in surprise. “Uhm, M’sieur le Capitaine?”

  “Lewrie … Royal Navy … here to … pourvoir assistance? Or, secours?” he answered, pointing out towards his fetched-to frigate.

  “Ah, mais oui! Lieutenant Veeloughby? M’sieur?” the Midshipman said with a relieved smile, then turned to bellow.

  “What the bloody…! Aha!” a Royal Navy officer, his hat off and his waist-coat undone, barked, crossing the quarterdeck through a throng of furiously labouring people to Lewrie. “Josiah Willoughby, sir, of the Hercule, seventy-four.”

  “Alan Lewrie, the Reliant frigate,” Lewrie replied. “Sorry we can’t get her close aboard you, but … we’d end up in the same predicament. I’ve four boat crews and some spare hands with me, so … what needs doing, first, Mister Willoughby?”

  “Just about everything, sir!” Lt. Willoughby quickly replied with a disarming grin. “Cast her guns and carriages overboard, and may the rebels have joy of them … all her roundshot. We’ve started her water butts, gotten a bower out. No joy there, yet, but we’re trying, and the French sailors are doing their best.”

  “My cutter could take her kedge out to mid-channel, to wrench her stern free, if there’s something that could serve as a capstan, or a purchase,” Lewrie offered.

  “That’d be grand, sir … though, she’s already beat off her rudder, so, do we manage to get her off before the rebels open fire on her, there’s no telling of how she’ll handle.”

  “We’ll get right to it. Desmond, summon all our boats under her transom, and tell Mister Houghton to be ready to take aboard a kedge.”

  “Right away, sor!”

  A chorus of axes rang out as a gun carriage, too heavy to bear up in one piece, was being hacked to bits below on her gun-deck, with the resulting chunks heaved out open gun-ports.

  “I’ve cut away her second bower, sir, and jettisoned its cable, and was just about to jettison the kedge and its cable, before your arrival,” Willoughby related, taking a second to mop his streaming face with a handkerchief and allow himself a rueful grin. “Don’t quite know if we can get her afloat before the forts set us all afire.”

  For a fellow in his straits, Lt. Willoughby was in a damnably good mood, as if danger and difficulties were his meat and drink.

  “If you can’t, I s’pose we could ferry her people out to my ship,” Lewrie offered. “Women and children first, though I don’t know how the rest would feel about standin’ passive and takin’ heated shot as we do so.”

  “It’s a wonder the rebels haven’t already, sir,” Willoughby said with another of those beaming grins. “The deadline’s long past.”

  “Well, you keep on doin’ what you’re doin’, Mister Willoughby, and I’ll see to her kedge,” Lewrie told him, tapping the brim of his hat as Lt. Willoughby knuckled his own brow in shared salutes.

  Once back in his gig, Lewrie had himself rowed aft to the tuck-under of Chlorinde’s squared-off stern, where Midshipman Houghton and his cutter were waiting. A leather hawse-buckler was torn free, then a kedge cable was passed through the hawse-hole, then taken back onto the deck to be seized to the upper ring of the so-far-unseen anchor.

  Long minutes later, and the kedge appeared, suspended from its cable, with handling lines bound to its upper cross-arms to ease the thing down. Midshipman Houghton, an excellent boat-handler, chivvied the cutter forward a foot or so, aft a foot or so, then starboard for a few feet ’til the kedge—nowhere as monstrous-heavy as a bower, but still a weight to be reckoned with—could be lowered into the midships of his boat.

  “No after capstan, sorry, Captain Lewrie, but, they’ve a fair-heavy windlass, for purchase!” Lt. Willoughby called down, sticking his head and shoulders over the taffrails for a second; now coat-less, to boot.

  “Pass me two more lighter lines, Mister Willoughby, and we’ll see what we can do towards haulin’ her stern off,” Lewrie said back.

  “Done, and done, sir!” Willoughby right-cheerfully shouted.

  Ye’d think he relishes this! Lewrie sarcastically thought, as two more four-inch lines were heaved over, through after gun-ports as if by magic. “One for you, Mister Entwhistle, and one for you, Mister Warburton,” Lewrie ordered. “Lash down, and haul away!”

  Eight oarsmen in the launch, only six oarsmen in the smaller jolly-boat, could not generate much effort with those lighter lines; once extended to their full length, the boats remained in one place, no matter how hard Reliant’s people strained. It was the kedge cable that bore the bulk of the draw, once Midshipman Houghton let it go over the side at mid-channel, at right-angles to Chlorinde’s hull. The cable went bar-taut, rising from the water, dripping water, then spraying droplets and groaning as it was wrung like a wash-rag by the strain put on it by the lower-deck windlass aboard the French frigate.

  “I could take one of those light lines, sir,” Houghton offered once he’d returned from deploying the anchor. “I’ve more hands aboard than the jolly-boat.”

  “Aye, go close aboard her, and call for Lieutenant Will…,” Lewrie began to say, before he spotted what he took for an abandoned admiral’s barge being rowed out to them from shore by a crew of shirtless, dark brown oarsmen. “Willoughby!” he bellowed aloft, instead. “Trouble coming!”

  “I’ve seen them, sir!” Willoughby shouted down to him. “What should we do? Begin evacuation?”

  “I’ll try to stall them,” Lewrie replied, wondering just how he’d pull that off. “Hold on a bit … I know that bugger!”

  In the stern-sheets of that gaudy barge was Colonel Mirabois, their interpreter of the day before.

  “Row us out to the barge, Desmond, meet her as far from the Frog ship as you can,” Lewrie urged, standing up in his own stern-sheets, a hand on Midshipman Munsell’s shoulder. He waved his hat and dug a white handkerchief from his breeches’ pocket to wave, too, in lieu of a proper flag of truce.

  “Hallo, Colonel Mirabois! Comment allez-vous, ce après-midi?”

  “Ah, bonjour, Capitaine Le … Capitaine!” Colonel Mirabois said back as his barge slowed. The barge was commanded by a young fellow in the uniform of an Aspirant of the French Navy, its Cox’n a cigaro-chomping brute in a sleeveless shirt, two bandoliers for cartridge boxes, and a cutlass, his phyz as a’squint as a pissed-off pirate.

  “Let us talk, Colonel,” Lewrie offered with a false grin on his face, once he’d determined that they could confer at least an hundred yards short of the frigate. “Easy all on yer oars, hey?”

  “Capitaine Le … Lu
ray … pardon, soulement, z’ere ees une difficile, n’est-ce pas?” Mirabois said, seated amidships of his padded thwart, booted feet planted primly together, and his hands gripping the edge of the thwart in a death-grip. Even his dark complexion looked ashen, as if he was terrified to be out in a boat on the water.

  “A difficulty, Colonel?” Lewrie genially asked as the oarsmen of the barge, and his gig, tossed their oars so the two boats could come gunn’l-to-gunn’l. “What sort?”

  “Z’is ship ees still in ze ’arbour, Capitaine, et eet ees long pas’ ze deadline for departure,” Colonel Mirabois said, his smile the sort of rictus seen on a corpse who’d died terrified. “Mon generals, Dessalines, Christophe, Petion, z’ey send me to deman’ eet’s surrender, et ze surrender of all Blancs in ’er. If z’ey do not ze surrender, ze forts are prepar-ed w’iz ze ’eated shot, comprendre? If z’ey do not ze surrender immédiatement, I weel signal for such to be done. Z’at ees ze difficile, M’sieur Capitaine.”

  “She’s aground, Colonel … we’re tryin’ t’ warp her free,” Lewrie told him. “It’s not their fault they haven’t left harbour.”

  “Z’at ees of no matter, Capitaine,” Mirabois told him, somewhat firmer than before.

  “There are British sailors aboard her, rendering assistance,” Lewrie rejoined, stiffening his back and turning grimmer, himself. “I must protest. Royal Navy sailors of His Britannic Majesty aboard her, comprendre, Colonel? His Majesty, King George the Third, would deem such an action on your part as an act of war against Great Britain. We’ve been here, before, Colonel … do you want another ten years of foreigners in Hayti?”

  “Vous v’ould perish as ze French ’ave perish-ed!” Mirabois shot back, getting his own back up.

  “We get her warped off and under way, this little emmerdement is solved, Colonel,” Lewrie suggested. “Give us ’til sundown. If we can’t save the ship, then we are determined to rescue the Frenchmen aboard her.”

  “Défendu!” Colonel Mirabois barked of a sudden; it was a word that Lewrie had never encountered. “Z’at ees … forbidden! Ve mus’ ’ave z’em all, eef z’ey weel not sail away! Non, non!”