“Oh well, sir, the Turtledove’s main tops’l split right down the middle, and they had to bend a new one on,” Westcott reported, calling for a measure of water from the scuttle-butt. “Not that the new one is a whit younger. But, that’s not their only trouble, sir. She’s a slow leak below, and, with only a dozen hands aboard, two of them boys, she can’t spare too many from manning the pumps.”
“Good God, who let her try a trans-Atlantic voyage?” Lewrie had to wonder aloud. The Turtledove was a short and bluff hermaphrodite brig, not over eighty feet on the range of the deck, with fore-and-aft sails on her foremast, and squares’ls on her main, and, frankly, looked as dowdy and ill-used as a Newcastle coal coaster.
“Oh, she’s not, sir,” Lt. Westcott pointed out, chuckling. “She’s leaving us when we get level with Charleston, South Carolina… Saint Lucia to there, and back again. She’ll probably be a ‘runner’ for the return passage… if she survives this one, that is.”
“And the reason ye didn’t press a man?” Lewrie asked, after he shook his head at her master’s madness.
“Not a one of them worth the trouble, sir,” Westcott told him, laughing outright. “The boys, some toothless gammers, and a spavined oldster or three? Her captain was the likeliest, but he’s not a day under sixty. Call it… Christian charity, sir.”
Before being accepted into a convoy, as the trades assembled in quarantine, they were supposed to be surveyed for seaworthiness, for a sufficiency of crew, spare spars, and sails, and for defences, but… evidently the Leeward Islands Station, knowing that such a decrepit old barge would not be bound for Europe, had let her off easy.
“Not if they get attacked, it ain’t, Mister Westcott,” Lewrie said with a mirthless bark of a laugh. “Does she have the defences to qualify as a ‘runner’?”
“Half a dozen pistols, ditto for muskets, ditto for cutlasses and boarding pikes, and three very old two-pounder swivel guns, sir,” Westcott told him with a grim look. “Though, I expect the discharges would deafen half the crew, and cause at least two of the gammers to drop stone-cold dead.”
Lewrie paced to the taffrails of the quarterdeck to hoist his telescope to give Turtledove a good looking-over. All her sails were now back in place, the ripped tops’l only slightly lighter in colour than the rest; a fresh-cured deer hide tan against the aged parchment of her other sails. At least she now had a mustachio under her fore-foot, an evident wake creaming down her starboard side… though her angle of heel to the winds revealed a strip of sickly green underwater growth on her quick-work, as if her coppering had fallen off years ago and her master and owners hadn’t bothered to heave her over on a beach to scrape off and burn off the weed and barnacles.
“Built slow, and losin’ ground ever since,” Lewrie decided as he shut his telescope and shook his head in wonder. “At least she’s hoist-up a main t’gallant, and an extra stays’l up forrud. She seems t’keep up, now.”
The last cast of the log that Midshipman Grainger had done had shown a meagre seven knots, and Reliant had had to take in canvas, else she would have strode away from her stern-most charges. She wallowed and sloughed, un-used to such slow progress, and once it became dark the merchantmen would take in sail for the night, making them bunch up and sheer away in fear of collisions, slowing the pace even further!
At dawn, Captain Blanding in Modeste would mount to his poop deck, scan about with a glass, and go into his daily apoplexy upon seeing how far the ships in the outer columns, the ships astern, had strayed, and then there would be Hell to pay, and half the morning wasted in chivvying them back into the fold.
“Christ, what a shitten business!” Lewrie groaned.
“Could be worse, sir,” Lt. Westcott said, chuckling. “Do we not get a good lift as we pass through the belt of Variables, we could end set upon Cape Hatteras.” He rapped his knuckles on the cap-rails atop the larboard bulwarks to ward off such a fate.
“You are such a joy, Mister Westcott,” Lewrie said, groaning in mock dread, turning to cock a brow at his First Officer.
“As all the ladies say, sir!” Westcott quickly replied with an impish expression on his hatchet face, baring his brief style of grin.
“As Mademoiselle du Plessis said, sir?” Lewrie teased.
“Oh, well, sir… for a time, then tears… tears and lamentations,” Westcott said with a dismissive shrug. “I fear my purse was all but empty after our last, short bout, and all I had to leave her was a five-pound note, but… she’ll find another protector. Her sort will always survive.”
“Another reason Lieutenants should not marry, or…,” Lewrie began to say.
“Marry, sir? Perish the thought!” Westcott said, shivering with mock terror, and uttering a Brring noise. “ ’Tis the ruin of many a man, in the Navy or not. No, no, sir! Not ’til I’ve been made Post. Even then I’d give it a long look and a hard try before committing myself to the one mort.”
“Well, at least I can keep you out of woman trouble, so long as we’re at sea, Mister Westcott,” Lewrie said, chuckling at his second-in-command’s irrepressible lust. “Once in England, though…”
“A ‘temporary wife’ in every port, sir… thank Jesus!”
“And Admiralty,” Lewrie reminded him.
The watch bells interrupted them; eight of them struck in four pairs to signal the end of the Day Watch, and the start of the First Dog Watch, at 4 P.M. Up forward in the limited open space between the cross-deck hammock nettings at the forward edge of the quarterdeck, and the binnacle cabinet and double-wheeled helm, Lt. George Merriman was relieving Lt. Clarence Spendlove of watch-standing duties. Happy Spendlove, who would only have to stand a two-hour watch ’til the beginning of the Second Dog, and then have “all night in” and a long rest this evening, if the weather co-operated and no crisis arose.
“You have the Middle?” Lewrie asked Westcott.
“I swapped with Merriman, sir. Just the one night,” Westcott replied. “If you have no more need of me, sir, I would wish to take a nap ’til supper is served out.”
“Carry on, Mister Westcott,” Lewrie allowed him.
Once he was alone, Lewrie peered over the taffrails to see if the cutter had been secured to a towing line, along with the launch and his gig. Convoying demanded the ship’s boats be ready for service at all hours, if a merchantman needed warning or assistance. Blanding, more to the point, demanded prompt and plentiful use of the boats!
Lewrie put his hands in the small of his back, chiding himself to look stern and “captainly” as he paced forward up the starboard side of the quarterdeck, then further onwards up the starboard sail-tending gangway, towards the bows, only halfway noting the neatness of the yard braces that were belayed and hung on the pin-rails, how the excess rope was flemished in neat coils on the gangway planking. His right hand idly rapped the main-mast stays as he passed them, satisfying himself that they were properly taut… and fighting a grin of pleasure as he told himself that he was fortunate to have Mr. Sprague as Bosun and Bosun’s Mate Mr. Wheeler, who were so particular and attentive to such things.
Lewrie went onto the forecastle and peered round the tautly bellowed inner, outer, and flying jibs at their convoy… their awful and bloody-minded convoy.
They had left Kingston, Jamaica, with eighty-odd merchant ships for the Yucatan Passage, arranged in eight columns of roughly ten apiece, with a cable of separation between ships in-line-ahead, and a cable of separation between columns, a nice, neat travelling box that, to your lubberly layman meant… once he was told that a cable was 120 fathoms in length-the convoy spanned a width of 1,920 civilian yards, and extended 2,400 yards from front to back. Easily guarded?