A Hard, Cruel Shore Read online

  Thank God for Examining Boards, Lewrie thought; At least they weed out the stupid and ignorant.

  “In a way, Mister Holbrooke, your uncle and his friend did you no favours,” Lewrie told the lad. “You only have four official years t’learn all you should know to meet one of the qualifications, then must wait another two before you’re old enough to stand before an Examining Board, at the earliest. I count Captain Niles as a good acquaintance, but I give no guarantees. Both of you are now ‘on your own bottoms’, and must make the best of it that you can.

  “I will speak with Midshipman Hillhouse and enlist him to be your senior instructor,” Lewrie promised, which made both of them look as if they’d been made a present to a demon, “and I’ll speak with the First Officer, Mister Westcott, to find you each a ‘sea daddy’ to show you the basics, knots, rigging, and such. You’ll be standing Harbour Watch today … try not to be too shocked when the Easy pendant is hoisted, and the ship is put Out of Discipline at noon. I’m certain someone’ll explain what that means to you, hey? That’s all for the present. You’re both dismissed.”

  * * *

  Just moments after Eight Bells were struck to mark the end of the Forenoon Watch, up went the Easy pendant on a signal halliard, and the bum-boats which had been swanning about the harbour in search of trade began to make their way toward HMS Sapphire. Lewrie made his appearance on the quarterdeck to assure himself that the Surgeon and his Mates, the Bosun and his Mates, and the Master at Arms, Baggett, and his Ship’s Corporals, Wray and Packer, were on deck and alert, then retreated to the aloof perch on the poop deck above it all, to play with Bisquit.

  Don’t you see the ships a-coming,

  don’t you see them in full sail,

  don’t you see the ships a-coming,

  with the prizes at their tail?

  The eager whores and bum-boat traders belted out their ditty, lustily and loud, if nowhere near on-key, some sounding more like the squawks of riled parrots.

  Oh, my little rolling sailor,

  oh, my little rolling he,

  I do love a jolly sailor,

  Blithe and merry might be be!

  There was a time long before in his own Midshipman days when he had goggled and gawped over the arrival of the “wives” when one of his past ships had been put Out of Discipline, and had invented excuses to pass down a mess desk when the crew and their doxies were in full carouse, when breasts and bare bums could be seen two-a-penny, and Jacks and Polls had had sex between the guns on the deck, sometimes screened by a hung blanket, sometimes not once the rum began to flow.

  Sailors, they get all the money,

  Soldiers, they get none but brass,

  I do love a jolly sailor,

  Soldiers they may kiss my arse,

  Oh, my little rolling sailor,

  Oh, my little rolling he,

  I do love a jolly sailor,

  Soldiers may be damned for me!

  There had been times when Lewrie had been sorely tempted to get in on the carousing, though it would have meant “kissing the gunner’s daughter” bent over a gun, and a round two-dozen strokes for behaviour not worthy of a gentleman volunteer. There had been one or two young and comely waifs aboard each bum-boat not yet ruined by the life, so tempting that he, long-deprived of release, had stiffened as hard as a marling spike, and had to walk crouched over, hoping to be allowed ashore where Captains, Lieutenants, and Mids could rantipole a sweet young whore in “gentlemanly” privacy. Most of the time, though, he’d been reduced to “boxing the Jesuit” in his hammock, hoping that his mess-mates didn’t notice and tease him un-mercifully.

  “Lord, what an ugly lot, sir,” the Sailing Master, Mr. Yelland, spoke up from the bottom of the starboard ladderway from the quarterdeck, as the first of the whores made their way up the side and faced quick inspections at the entry-port. “There must be honest work somewhere, in spinning mills and such, that recruited the young and good-looking. Your typical ‘Portsmouth Poll’, the most of them.”

  A fair number of the whores were as brawny and round as female versions of “John Bull”, tawdrily over-dressed in cast-off finery. The Surgeon, Mr. Snelling, a very tall and skeletally lean fellow, turned some away at once, sure that they were poxed to their eyebrows. Once, Ship’s Surgeons had been able to deduct fifteen shillings from a man’s pay to treat venereal diseases, which explained why so few sailors admitted they’d caught it. Even now, when treatment was free at Navy expense, it was a rare sailor who would come forward, either, for the so-called “cure” was brutal, with doses of mercury shot down the urethra with a metal clyster, oral doses of mercury that turned one’s teeth to grey, brittle powder.

  “Oh, now there’s a stunner,” Mr. Yelland said appreciatively as a slim, young blond angel came aboard to be inspected.

  “Aye, she is,” Lewrie agreed, though she was no angel, if she ever truly was; she was openly flirting with Mr. Snelling and his Mates, obviously used to the routine. Bosun’s Mate Plunkett grabbed at her bottom, heard clinking noises, and reached up her gown to rip away a canvas appliance filled with pint bottles of gin or rum.

  “Off ye go, lass,” Plunkett growled, “ye’ll have no trade on this ship.”

  The girl tried to wheedle, then began cursing as she was sent back to her boat, raging at a loss of income in a Midlands accent.

  “Shiver me timbers, you’re grown so out of compass I can hardly embrace ye!” Plunkett hooted at the next to arrive, a monstrously fat older whore.

  “Damn yer eyes, I’ve come t’see me ’usband, sure!” she shouted back, “Ord’nary. Seaman McQuade, an’ ’ere’s me papers t’prove it!”

  “Poor Seaman McQuade, then,” Mr. Yelland sniggered. “She’ll crush him to death, does he allow her on top, hee hee!”

  “Too tawdry for me, Mister Yelland,” Lewrie said, trotting down to the quarterdeck, on the way to the sanctity of his cabins. “Come on, Bisquit. They won’t appreciate you sniffin’ round for hand-outs on the lower decks. Come on! Cabins!”

  “Sir!” Mr. Snelling, the Surgeon implored before Lewrie could make his escape. “Sir, I fear that this is all impossible. There are three stages of syphilis, and it is only the tertiary that can be discovered upon this sort of inspection, by which time no treatment will avail. I might just as well search for a soul!”

  “All you can do is your best, Mister Snelling, sorry,” Lewrie told him. “The last few years we’ve been lucky t’let the hands have shore liberty at Gibraltar, and what they caught there, out of sight and out of mind, well,” he threw in a hapless shrug.

  “Very well, sir,” Snelling said, pulling a rueful face, “though I wish that the Purser could stock well-made cundums, and our sailors would use them.”

  “Just stand by for all the black eyes and bruises that they’ll produce, once they run riot, sir,” Lewrie warned him, then made his way aft into the quiet of his cabins.

  “Ah, there is coffee warming on the sideboard, sir,” Pettus offered, “fresh goat milk, and I’ve ground some sugar off the cone in your caddy.”

  “That’d be grand, thankee, Pettus,” Lewrie said, tossing aside his new hat and boat cloak. “Where’s Jessop?”

  Pettus heaved a sigh before speaking. “Standing in line to pick himself a doxy, sir. There was no talking him out of it.”

  “Well, we all go to Hell in our own way,” Lewrie said, sitting down at his desk to review the latest changes in the muster book, and the re-assignments of sailors to new duty stations for every possible evolution. Some men had been moved up from Ordinary to Able, some had been advanced to petty officer status; by now, the neat and orderly lists were full of cross-outs, over-writes, and mis-spellings, and it would soon be time to start from scratch. That would take some time, and kill some idle hours.

  He was of a mind to write some personal letters, instead, and toss the mess into the First Officer’s lap, but he had already written almost everyone he knew on-passage from Corunna. A good, long book, perhaps, he conside
red.

  Somthin’ that ain’t prurient for a change, he told himself.

  There were also the pages from Mr. Posey’s report on all that the yard had done to replace the lower main mast, complete with a list of expenditures to be justified to the Navy Board, from new keelson partner blocks right to the truck of the new royal mast. He could easily kill an hour or more poring over those.

  * * *

  By three in the afternoon, he was done with all of those, and still had the fresh muster book pages to face. Thankfully, his cat, Chalky, wakened from one of his long naps and came to the desk looking for pets, and play, and Bisquit, who had been snoozing under the dining table in the coach, came out to join in with his perpetually soggy rope chew toy in his mouth.

  That took at least a quarter-hour of idleness before the both of them were tired of the game, leaving Lewrie to scowl at the muster book, shrug, and go out onto the quarterdeck for some fresh air.

  In his cabins, the sound of Sapphire’s crew at their revels had been muted, a distant background noise, but on deck, he could hear more clearly their laughter, the music from fiddles, flutes, squeeze-boxes, and womanly shrieks from the semi-drunken whores. Somewhere near the main hatchway, people were loudly singing, and he recognised the song, “Sandman Joe”.

  He stared a while then turned his quid,

  Why, blast you, Sall, I loves you!

  And for to prove what I have said,

  This night I’ll soundly fuck you!

  Why then, says Sall, my heart’s at rest,

  If what you say you’ll stand to,

  His brawny hands her bubbies prest,

  And roaring cried “White Sand O!”

  “Good Lord,” Lewrie muttered to himself, shaking his head as he recalled singing that in Cock and Hen clubs in the wee hours when he’d caroused with other Bucks of the First Head.

  “Oh, my word!” he heard Midshipman Holbrooke whisper to Midshipman Chenery in shock. They had been appointed to the Harbor Watch by their senior mess-mates. “I never…”

  “Then thank your lucky stars you never hear worse, young sir, like ‘Captain Morris’s Hymns in Plenipo’,” Lewrie sternly told them. Those songs were reckoned the absolutely filthiest in the English language. Lewrie had sung those, too, in point of fact; lustily.

  “It’s all rather … bawdy, sir,” Midshipman Chenery dared to say, as if in awe. A churchman’s son might never have been exposed to such things in the flesh, in his face, had he lived the whole of his life ashore, even in London. Lewrie would have felt a tad sorry for his plight, but for the fact that at every school he had attended (and from which he’d been expelled) it always seemed to be the sons, and sometimes the daughters, of churchmen who’d made the greatest Hoo-raw Harrys … and the wenches with the roundest heels.

  “Ehm, will this be going on long, sir?” Holbrooke dared to ask.

  “The rest of the day and night, and ’til Noon tomorrow. After that, the hands’ll run out of money and the doxies’ll try their luck on other ships,” Lewrie told them. “Avert your eyes if you have to go below for some reason, and don’t tangle with the loudest drunks, male or female. If anyone accosts you, report it at once. Don’t let anyone dis-respect you.”

  “Aye, sir,” the two Mids mumbled as one, utterly daunted.

  “I’ve the muster books to up-date,” Lewrie said, scowling as he realised that there was no more putting it off. “Try not to get corrupted. Carry on.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” they replied, as if that admonition would be an hellish-hard thing to accomplish.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Two days after the revelry ended, Sapphire still swung to her anchors without orders. The last hangovers had passed, the last of the accumulated trash had been removed, the last exhausted doxies and the few actual wives had departed, and the lower deck berthing areas were put right. The weather turned a bit warmer, and it was not snow that whispered down, but several long spells of chilly, misty rains that swept in from the sea and the Channel, driven by winds that were “dead muzzlers” that penned every ship in port.

  “How are they doing, Mister Westcott?” Lewrie asked the First Officer as they stood together on the quarterdeck, looking up to see the progress of their two newest Mids as they scaled the ratlines of the main mast, shepherded by two older hands appointed to be their “sea daddies”.

  “In over their heads, of course, sir,” Lt. Westcott told him, and pulling a face he added, “they can barely box the compass, tie a secure knot of any kind, yet, and they’ve used up most of a quire of paper, trying to draw, and name the running rigging. Oops!” he exclaimed as Midshipman Chenery clawed his way from the futtock shrouds to the maintop, dangling for a heart-stopping second or so before gaining a firm grip and scrambling to a shaky footing in the top. After one or two “Whews!” both Mids began to scale the upper shrouds so they could start their introduction to the main course yard and the foot-ropes, arms thrown over the yard and the harbour-gasketed sail, with the foot-ropes shuddering and swaying under their feet.

  “Watchin’ ’em makes my ‘nutmegs’ shrink up,” Lewrie said with a wince. “I always hated going aloft, shufflin’ out to the tip of the yardarm, passin’ the ring. Up to the cross-trees, to the royal truck? There’s people who’ll stand on the truck button, but I never did, no matter the dare, or the wager.”

  “Something to be said for holding a commission, aye, sir,” Lt. Westcott replied with a laugh, “you can always send somebody else to do damn-fool things.”

  “Well, if one of ’em goes splat I’m certain I’ll hear it,” Lewrie said, turning away, unable to watch any longer. “I’ll be aft.”

  Yeovill had prepared him a hearty breakfast of scrambled eggs, tatty hash, and several strips of bacon, with fresh shore bread in the barge, but there was still a slice or two of toast left. There was fresh butter from shore, though, and a barely opened crock of pear preserves, and Lewrie was tempted to sit back down at the table and polish it off, with a fresh cup of coffee. A bum-boat had come alongside bearing day-old copies of several London papers, and he’d bought a couple. It looked to be a grand day to stay inside, and dry, and while away the Forenoon with the latest news, even reading all the pre-printed outer pages which featured advertisements, with the news on the inner pages. After a while he moved himself to the starboard side settee to sprawl out and read on, with Chalky curled up beside him.

  “Boat ahoy!” he heard one of the Mids shout, but could not make out the reply, dismissing it at first as just another bum-boat with goods to sell. He heard the thump, though, as the boat had been allowed to come alongside, and set the paper aside, preparing to get to his feet.

  “Messenger t’see th’ Cap’um, SAH!” his sentry shouted.

  “Enter!” Lewrie called back, shooting to his feet in rising anticipation. A moment later and a Lieutenant entered the cabins with a despatch bag slung cross his chest, shaking rain from his bicorne hat before tucking it under his arm.

  “Captain Sir Alan Lewrie, sir?” the officer enquired.

  “I am, sir,” Lewrie replied, itching to hold whatever the man had for him.

  “Your orders, sir, just down from London,” the officer said as he dug into his bag, sorted through several packets, and handed over one of them, wrapped in cloth against the weather and bound with blue ribbon, secured with a wax seal.

  “You don’t know … of course not,” Lewrie said as he took it and broke the wax seal to remove the ribbons. “Sorry.”

  “No idea, sir,” the Lieutenant said with a shrug, “just one of many I’m to deliver this morning.”

  “Well, I thank you, sir,” Lewrie said as he crossed to his desk to remove the cloth wrappings. “Try t’stay dry.”

  “Aye, sir,” the fellow replied as he performed a sketchy bow and saw himself out.

  The letter inside the cloth wrapping was also sealed with wax, several sheets, it felt like. He sat down, broke that seal, and laid it out to read, discovering … “Well, just damn my eyes!�
�

  To Cpt. Sir Alan Lewrie, Bart, aboard HMS

  Sapphire, now lying at Portsmouth,

  Sir;

  The Lords Commissioners for Executing The High Office of Admiralty direct and require that you take upon yourself the Charge and Command of a Squadron intended for operations to interdict French efforts to supply their land forces by sea, into those ports under their Occupation upon the Northern coast of Spain, from Cape Fisterre East to San Sebastian, not limiting yourself from operations off the French ports of Bayonne or Archachon, as you may feel necessary to the Success of your Duties.

  To accomplish said Duty, you are appointed as Commodore of the Inferior Class, authorised to hoist a Broad Pendant representing that Grade, for which a Temporary Commission is enclosed.

  “Christ, right back to where we came from,” Lewrie muttered as he furrowed his brow and stroked his forehead. He was being shoved into “the sack” at the bottom of the Bay of Biscay, where every inch of the coast was a lee shore, and a rocky one, along the dreaded Costa de Morte, the “Coast of Death” round Corunna, and Ferrol, the Costa Verde, which might not be a whit better, the Costa de Cantabria, off the great port of Santander, and into the Golfo de Vizcaya, and the ports of Bilbao and San Sebastian, right up to the French border. The prevailing Atlantic Westerlies blew right down into that corner of “the sack”, sometimes becoming Nor’westerlies against which ships could fight hard to thrash their way to deep water, and safety. He figured that a frigate could manage, but Sapphire?

  Lewrie went back to the letter.

  Pursuant to the Accomplishment of this Duty, the following ships, now lying available at Portsmouth, are assigned to you, viz. HMS Undaunted, 5th Rate 38, Capt. R. Chalmers; HMS Sterling, 6th Rate 32, Capt. C, Yearwood; HMS Blaze, Sloop, 18, Commander G. Teague & HMS Peregrine, Sloop, 18, Commander H. Blamey.