"Now, sir…" Charlton purred after a sip of port, "tell me how you stand. What's your strength? Besides the vessels in port at this moment."
"Uhm, d'ye see, sir…" Simpson blushed, "this is the Austrian Navy, sir. All of it."
"Aha," Charlton said, raising an expressive brow in surprise.
Thought so, Lewrie told himself, sharing a weary frown over the table with Captain Ben Rodgers, who was all but rolling his eyes.
"We've he Ferme, sir, the brigantine, and two feluccas… armed merchant ships, really," Major Simpson confessed, wriggling about in his chair like a hound might circle on a fireplace mat. "We've those two schebecks… brace of twenty-four-pounders in the bows, and some light side guns, and the Empire has authorised me to increase the number of gunboats from seven to sixteen. The same sort as was so useful during the siege of Gibraltar."
"Nothing else, uhm… cruising the coasts, or…?" Charlton asked with a hopeful, but leery, tone to his voice.
"Sorry, sir, that's the lot." Simpson grimaced. "And it's been the very Devil to get the city of Trieste to see their way clear to giving me funds enough to start the new gunboats. The governor of the port, and the mayor… the burgomeister, sir? You see, uhm…"
Here comes another, Lewrie warned himself; that "you see, uhm" sounds like a bloody dirge already! You see, uhm… I'm poxed?
"The naval budget is very small, sir," Simpson went on, wearing a sheepish smile, which he bestowed on the British captains, hoping for a single shred of sympathy. "And a fair portion of it… sixty thousand guilden a year… comes from the port of Trieste itself. And they'll not pay for more navy than they think is necessary for their own defence, sir." "These seagoing gunboats, Major Simpson?" Ben Rodgers prodded, stumbling over the unfamiliar, and most un-nautical, rank. "Uhm, d'ye see, sir…" Major Simpson began to say. Bloody Hell, another'un. Lewrie groaned to himself, pouring his glass brimming with port when his turn came.
"Harbour defence, mostly, sirs," Simpson admitted, palms up and out like a Levant rug-merchant. "Point of fact, save for La Ferme, our brigantine, the vessels here at Trieste are almost useless unless there is a calm sea and a light breeze. I've written again and again to the Naval Ministry in Vienna, sketching what vessels'd prove more useful. mean t'say, sirs, that's why they hired me on, hey? For my deepwater experience? But…" He tossed them another palm-up shrug. "The Hungarians have a better flotilla."
"Aren't the Hungarians part of the Empire, though, sir?" Lewrie just had to ask.
"Oh, aye, they are, sir! An important part," Simpson assured him. "Hundreds of years ago, the Hungarians advanced to the coast, the Croat lands, and the Croats were most eager to make alliance with them, then with Austria. Then Austria became dominant over the Hungarians, though they keep a certain measure of semi-autonomy. Most of the coast, that is the Hungarian Littoral. Fiume, Zara, Spalato, Ragusa… it extends quite far. Well, sort of Spalato and Ragusa, d'ye see. They're still either Venetian ports or independent. There's the independent Republic of Ragusa, quite old. Genoese or Spanish enclaves on the Dalmatian coast-hated Venice since Hector was a pup, so they've played everyone off against the other. Though Turkey still claims them, they're mostly Catholic, Venetian or at least Italian."
"Ah, hmm!" Captain Charlton purred, wriggling in his own chair, as thoroughly puzzled as the rest by then. "Perhaps, sir, you might fill us in on the eastern shore's doings? Its nature?"
"Well, sir," Simpson replied slowly, "it's rather complicated, d'ye see, uhm…"
First had come the Roman Empire, so Simpson carefully related to them; then the Eastern Byzantine Empire had held sway, punctuated by a series of local princedoms or kingdoms that had aspired to be empires-Macedonians, Albanians, Serbs, then Bulgars or Hungarians, what had been the Dark Ages. All had been swept away quite bloodily by another, finally by the all-conquering Turks; back when they had been all-conquering, of course. Venice, Genoa, Spain, the Italian city-states all had nosed about, warring with each other until Venice had become great and had carved out a province that had run the entire length of the eastern shore. Only to be lost, except for a few remaining bits of coasts round harbours, to the Turks, at last, in the 1400s.
Below the Hungarian Littoral was the Independent Republic of Ra-gusa, which Turkey still claimed but was too weak to conquer any longer, and let it go in semi-autonomous bliss, long as tribute was paid to the Sultan, while all inland was Muslim-Slavic, termed Bosnia or Herzegovinia. South of there was Montenegro, another semi-autonomous province of the Turkish Empire, but which still held a small Venetian enclave with a fine harbour, called Venetian Cattaro. Montenegro was almost totally Muslim, too. The Turks still ruled Albania, even more mountainous and forbidding than Montenegro; but that too was pretty much in name only, and Venice still clung like weary leeches to the harbours of Durazzo and Volona, with shallow, narrow coastal lands, as Venetian Albania.
Venice still held the Ionian islands, down at the mouth of the Straits of Otranto, off the Albanian coast: Corfu, Cephalonia, Zante and Cerigo, plus some appendages only goats could love. Off the lower Io-nians, the Turks owned the Morea, which was their name for the Greek Peloponnesus, famed in Homer's works, part of the long-ago exterminated Byzantine Empire.
"The coast is mostly Catholic… Hungarian, Croat and Venetian," Simpson related over a second decanter of port. "Inland, though, they are Muslim, all down through Albania and the Morea. Forcibly converted long ago, though you couldn't tell a Balkan Slav Muslim from a European. Now, you still have some Greeks, Eastern Orthodox Church, down in the islands, the far southern lands… sheltered by the Venetians. Betwixt Venetian ports and such, the coast is Muslim, so it's rather tricky, depending on where you go ashore. Far inland, there are many Eastern Orthodox Serbs, still clinging to their mountaintops. Turks never could get at 'em easily. Toppled their empire in a night and a day, Lord… four hundred years past. They've a Serbian Orthodox Church of their own, stead o' looking to Roosia or wherever other Slavs look to as the seat o' their religion. Oh, lowermost Montenegro, there's the port of Dulcigno. Muslim, independent, home of the Dulcigno Corsairs. Just behind them, by the Albanian border, is the Rebel Pasha of Scutari. Not quite as bad as the Barbary Corsairs, but they're aspiring people. Split off, like the Mamelukes who rule old Egypt? 'Tis a hellish stew, the Balkans and Dalmatia."
"It sounds very much like it, sir," Charlton grunted.
"Well, worse than that, sir. D'ye see, uhm…"
Don't tell me, they're cannibals! Lewrie scoffed in quiet derision; and they ate Captain Cook! He needed more port. Badly!
"So much trampling back and forth, Captain Charlton," Simpson grimly mused. "All of 'em were great, one time or another. Even with the Turks ruling most of it, the people're so intermixed. Every little valley… all those peoples, religions, languages in some places. Any slightest thing sets 'em off, and then it's holy war, neighbour 'gainst neighbour. They take their tribal backgrounds and their religions damn' serious in the Balkans, they do, sir. Red-Indian, massacreing serious. Give 'em a wide berth, that's my best advice to you."
"Yet where does the best Adriatic oak come from, sir?" Rodgers enquired. "From the eastern shore? Or from higher up, round Trieste, or Fiume?"