Westcott and Merriman had been below, napping through the day’s warmth in the wardroom, but came boiling up in curiosity to join the officer of the watch, Lt. Spendlove, and Lewrie, at the bulwarks with their telescopes to their eyes.
“Aloft, there!” Spendlove bawled. “How many sail?”
“Just the one, sir!” the lookout wailed back.
“Looks t’be a large jib… no, two jibs, and a large mains’l,” Lewrie speculated aloud. “She’s bows-on to us, so… her mains’l’s winged out, on a ‘soldier’s wind’.”
He glanced up at the commissioning pendant to determine that the winds were from the East-Sou’east, so if the strange sail was on a winged-out run, she was coming from the Bahamas.
“I think she’s almost hull-up,” Lt. Spendlove commented. “And I think I can almost make out a speck of colour at her mast-head.”
“Red and orange?” Lt. Merriman asked, wondering if the colours of Spain were in the offing.
“All I can make out is red,” Spendlove told his compatriot.
“She might be one of ours,” Lewrie said, catching the tiniest flash of colour in his ocular, too. With the wind directly astern of the strange sail, any flag aloft would stream directly at Reliant, and only a slight fluke of wind could display it properly. “It does look red.”
“Odds are, sir, no Spaniard would be coming from the Bahamas,” Lt. Westcott announced. “Any of their ships, naval or merchant, would approach Saint Augustine from the South.”
Oh, Christ! Lewrie thought with a sinking feeling; Forrester’s got the collywobbles that the Dons’re about to invade his patch, and wants my frigate t’back him up! When Bury came back from Nassau, he said the bastard was anxious about something! The fubsy toad!
“Whoever she is, she’s coming right for us, sir,” Spendlove said, closing the tubes of his telescope and returning to the middle of the quarterdeck to resume his attentive watch-standing duties.
“Deck, there!” the lookout shouted down. “She’s hull-up from the cross-trees! Sail is a one-masted cutter!”
“An aviso from Nassau, with orders, most-like,” Lt. Merriman concluded, his telescope still glued to his eye. “Aye, sir! I can definitely make out a Red Ensign at her mast-head, now. She is one of ours.”
Lewrie shut the tubes of his day-glass, too, his mouth screwed up in mild disgust. Forrester was ordering him back to Nassau, with his prime mission incomplete. He’d better have a damned good reason! Lewrie fumed.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The single-masted cutter, which proved to be HMS Squirrel, came close-aboard Reliant, within easy speaking distance as the squadron jogged slowly North up the coast a bit beyond St. Augustine, and her commanding officer, bellowed, “I have despatches and mail and some men of your squadron!”
“I will receive them all!” Lewrie shouted back, then turned to Midshipman Warburton. “Hoist signals to the other ships, sir. Make ‘Send Boats’ and ‘Have Mail’.”
“Aye, sir!” Warburton eagerly said. Reliant had not received any word from home since departing Portsmouth nigh six months before, and word of mail, or newspapers, set everyone to rubbing their hands in expectation.
The seas were running light, the winds were soft, and the space between the frigate and the cutter was not an hundred yards, with no rushing, foaming wakes to conjoin, so Squirrel ’s boat made a quick and easy transit to hook onto Reliant ’s main chains and send a Midshipman and ten of Thorn ’s long-lost sailors aboard.
“Allow me to name myself, sir-John Bracegirdle,” the new-come Midshipman said, doffing his hat and bowing from the waist.
“Lieutenant Darling will be very glad to have you and your men back, Mister Bracegirdle,” Lewrie told him, saluting him back. “You have the squadron’s mail in that bag, do you?”
“Aye, sir,” Bracegirdle replied, unslinging it from round his neck and shoulder. “And I have a despatch addressed to you, sir.”
That wax-sealed letter was brought from Bracegirdle’s pocket and handed over. It was from Captain Francis Forrester. Lewrie took a breath, held it, then let it out through pumped-out lips before he turned away to rip it open and read it, dreading the worst.
I thought I told the toad my squadron had Admiralty orders, and I ain’t his junior, but… what the Devil ? Lewrie thought, stunned by the letter’s contents.
Forrester would not hook him or net him. He had bigger fish to fry…; so did every Royal Navy warship in the West Indies! The note was more by way of a warning that the French were on the prowl!
Since early May, rumours of the presence of a squadron of Third Rate 74s, some frigates, and troop ships, had come up the island chains of the Windwards, from Trinidad, Barbados, and Grenada. Was it eight or ten warships? Or, was it only four or five? Were they come to stiffen the garrisons of the French colonies of Guadeloupe and Martinique, or would they come to invade British islands, or reclaim the islands taken from the French after the war had re-begun in 1803? No one knew.
Captain Francis Forrester’s brief letter said that he was summoning the few brig-sloops under his command, and would lead them South as far as Antigua to re-enforce any Royal Navy squadron he encountered.
Since you made it so evidently plain that you are not under my Command, I must trust that you possess enough Sense to see your Duty clearly, and, if you will not join me out of Patriotism, then in my Absence you will abandon your insignificant Quest after spurious Privateers and take upon yourself the temporary Protection of the Bahamas until my return.
“Mine arse on a band-box!” Lewrie said with a snort. “Put the onus on me, and dash off for glory, will you?” He was torn, though, by the temptation to dash off South and participate in a real battle, whether he had to place himself under Forrester’s haughty and vindictive command or not, for doing so beat his fruitless patrolling and the uncertainties of American collusion all hollow. Except for their few shore raids, he’d been doing the dullest sort of blockade duty with not a blessed thing to show for it, nothing of consequence, anyway.
It’s impossible to protect the whole Bahamas with one frigate and a handful of sloops, he furiously thought; any more than Forrester could with a pair o’ brig-sloops and his own ship… and her damned near aground at Nassau for months on end!
But, he quickly realised, if he did dash off to Antigua or St. Kitts, that would leave the Bahamas with nothing but sloops like his and a parcel of cutters like Squirrel to challenge an French invasion, not the Spanish invasion that Forrester had dreaded when he’d spoken to him in the early Spring!
And just why the Devil would the French even care to take the Bahamas? he further asked himself. If they had sent a small squadron to the West Indies, re-enforcing the islands they still held made a lot more sense. So did invading one or more of the British Windward Isles.
The big sugar trades! Lewrie thought, getting a leap of his stomach in his chest, and a touch of cold chill. If the French took Nassau and New Providence, Bimini and the Berry Islands, perhaps even Grand Bahama and the Abacos, they could dominate the Florida Straits! No convoy, no matter how well-escorted, would survive, and it would not be the odd privateer preying on them, but frigates, too! There would go a large portion of British trade.
“ Guerre de course,” Lewrie muttered, recalling the French concept of commerce raiding to disperse the strength of the Royal Navy, which would give their fleet an even chance to sail out and fight on more-equal terms, even weaken Channel Fleet to the point that their Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte’s vast invasion armada could succeed in landing that two-hundred-thousand-man army of his in England and destroying the last opponent between Napoleon and world domination!