“Never seen one in my life,” Lewrie told him with a shrug.
“Anyway, the most intriguing part of the written description is that there’s a long box atop the upper platter that runs the length of the boat, tall enough to allow the soldiers aboard to sit below it and be sheltered from fire,” Peel said, grimacing with mock dis-belief. “Four or five abreast, and twenty or so deep, so they can sit there in the same formations they’d form in the field… Napoleon Bonaparte is very fond of the column when attacking opposing lines. Not keen on it, myself, but it’s seemed to have served him well, so far. Now, what we are worried about is whether that protective box, and the wide slope of the upper hull from the waterline up, might be armoured somehow. If the French have re-enforced these boats, they might be the principal craft to drive themselves right onto the beaches, and be proof against shot from any of our field guns or horse artillery batteries. Our fellow in Paris describes the damned things as three-fifths of their length flat, with a rise of eight feet at the ends. They could come ashore like so many walruses!”
“Armoured? With iron plate, d’ye mean?” Lewrie gawped. “That’d make ’em top-heavy as Hell. Centre of gravity, metacentric height… all that?”
“You’ve been reading technical books?” Peel teased.
“Ye listen to others long enough, well…,” Lewrie shrugged off. “If they’re armoured, they’d be drawin’ a lot more water than three or four feet, Jemmy. I’ll allow that the breadth of their hulls’d buoy ’em up a good deal, but not that much. And if they’re that heavy, it would take a lot more sail area than a fishing boat’s t’drive ’em.”
“The report says that they only require a crew of five or six seamen,” Peel said, dredging half a roll through the juices and gravy on his plate for a last bite. “And some sort of paddle arrangement to propel them if the wind fails. What sort? The work done by soldiers? Really, Alan… if you see one, go after it, MacTavish’s experiments bedamned.”
“I’ll try and do my best.” Lewrie grinned back. “Anything else? Pick up the Golden Fleece? Slay Medusa while I’m at it?”
“What’s for dessert?” Peel asked, laughing heartily.
“I think my cook said there’s a bread pudding. Are we done on confidential topics, I’ll have my steward return,” Lewrie said, rising to go to the forward door to his cabins to speak with the Marine guard so he could pass word for Pettus and Jessop.
“Rather humble fare for a knight and baronet,” Peel mused once he’d returned to the dining-coach. Lewrie opened a covered dish.
“It comes with caramel sauce,” Lewrie said, after sticking one finger into the dish and licking it. “And don’t you start! It’s all a sham, anyway. Awarded for sympathy, not anything I did. The closest I ever got to something of note was years ago in the South Atlantic when we took the L’Uranie frigate. And the baronetcy… hmpf! King George was havin’ an off day, let’s leave it at that. Unless ye wish to hear the whole story.”
“Is it amusing?” Peel asked.
“Completely,” Lewrie assured him.
“Then do tell!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“It’s grand that Spain’s stayed out of the war, so far,” Peel said after supper. They had gone on deck to the taffrails of the quarterdeck so he could light up a slim cigaro and blow smoke rings at the night. “Do they decide to re-join the French against us, the price of tobacco will soar, and the quality will decrease. Say what you will of American tobacco, but I still think the best is from Spanish colonies.”
“Wouldn’t know much about that. Never developed the taste for it,” Lewrie said with a shrug, lounging most lubberly on the after-most bulwarks. He looked over to Fusee, about half a cable off to larboard. “They wouldn’t let you smoke over there, not with all the powder aboard her. We’re much more hospitable,” he added, grinning.
“Think those things will work?” Peel asked.
“No idea,” Lewrie replied. “I s’pose we’ll soon find out. The wind’s fair enough for us to set out tomorrow morning, and let us test the first batch. Though, after what we’ve learned of them the last few days, I think my chances’d be better were I a French matelot sittin’ on an anchored barge than bein’ in the launchin’ boat.”
“Well, if MacTavish’s don’t, there’s other designers’ ideas to try out,” Peel imparted with a knowing nod and wink. “There’s a fellow name of Robert Fulton… an American, who’s come up with a variation on the torpedo. Man’s just brimming with ideas. He claims he could build a ship driven by a steam engine. Dead-keen on steam engines, he is.”
“No thankee!” Lewrie scoffed, after a second of surprise. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t steam engines need big fires under the boilers? Fire, on a wooden ship? Brr!”
“Not only that, this Fulton fellow said he could also build a nautilus, a submersible boat that could sink down twenty or thirty feet and stay down for the better part of an hour,” Peel further told him. “A small crew, three or four, I forget which, paddle it forward in some way.”
“And do what with it?” Lewrie gawped, then shook his head. “The very word ‘sink’ makes my ‘nut-megs’ shrivel. Sounds suicidal, t’me.”
“That’s what Admiralty thought, too,” Peel said with a snicker. “He offered both, just after the war began again last May. I gather that Fulton couldn’t sell his ideas to his own navy, and couldn’t raise sufficient private funds in his own country, so he flogged his schemes on this side of the Atlantic. The last card up his sleeve was the idea of explosive torpedoes, though I believe that the submersible boat and the torpedoes would have worked together, the boat towing the torpedoes under an anchored ship, and the torpedo exploding when it came into contact, whilst the submersible paddles away on the other side.”
“Not with a timing mechanism?” Lewrie grimaced. “That would take some sort of hair-trigger pistol, and any hard knock’d set it off. You wish crew for that thing, best look in Bedlam!”
“Admiralty’s judgement, too,” Peel said, shrugging, pausing to take a deep puff on his cigaro and exhale a jet of smoke. “Mind, now. All these daft schemes are William Pitt’s doing. Soon as he got back into office as Prime Minister, he pressed for offensive action, and not sit idle, waiting for the French to invade. Admiral the Earl Saint Vincent was against them, but who knows about Lord Melville. The damned things may turn up to be tested, do we give events long enough, or they grow dire enough.”
“Christ,” was Lewrie’s sober comment to that.
“Better us than the French, I suppose,” Peel said, laughing some more. “Before he came to London, Fulton tried to sell his schemes to Bonaparte. Went to Paris during the Peace of Amiens and got an audience with the ‘Ogre’ himself… and thank God ‘Boney’ thought Fulton’s ideas madder than a March Hare, too.”
Lewrie tried to picture what the French would have done with a submersible boat and a towed torpedo. Could people be found with more martial ardour than sense to crew the things in the first place? Then this anchorage at the Nore would lie open to a creeping, unseen danger. Portsmouth, Plymouth, Great Yarmouth, or Harwich… He had to shake his head to rid himself of the image of a peacefully anchored and sleeping warship suddenly smashed open by a titanic blast, then heeling over and sinking in minutes, aflame from bow to stern!
No thankee! At least a steam-driven ship’d give you a fightin’ chance, and stay atop the sea! Lewrie thought, wondering uneasily where all this inventiveness would lead. Warfare at least had a few gentlemanly rules-not that Lewrie had always paid heed to them when needs must-but, in the main both sides went into battle with assumptions that things would go honourably, fairly, and… sporting, like knights of old at a joust. If inventiveness mated with desperation, though…