No, with any luck, such things won’t work well enough to become normal, or acceptable, Lewrie told himself.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Peel prompted upon seeing how silent and pensive Lewrie had become.
“Wonderin’ what Fulton’s torpedoes are like, compared to ours,” Lewrie dissembled; it wouldn’t do to sound fretful, even with a friend. That would be “croaking,” and might give Peel the impression that he’d no faith in MacTavish’s torpedoes and would not do his utmost to test them fairly.
“Smaller, I gathered,” Peel told him, flicking an inch of ash over the stern. “Small enough to be rolled over the side of a boat… spherical, made of copper. I think they’re to be deployed in pairs, with a line buoyed with cork blocks like a fishing net, between them. Other than that, the clockwork timers and cocked pistols to set them off are similar to MacTavish’s. This very moment, there’s probably a captain like you charged with experimenting with Fulton’s version. A competition ’tween the two versions, if you will.
“And of course, old man,” Peel sarcastically added, assuming an Oxonian accent, “can’t let the old-school side down, you know! Better the winner is British, than a benighted ‘Brother Johnathon’ from New England, what?”
“Yoicks, tally-ho, and all that?” Lewrie smirked.
“Win for ‘The Roast Beef of Old England,’ ” Peel laughed back. “Unless the damned things turn out to be a pile of manure.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The first cask torpedo was tried out in English waters, just off Mersea Island and the mouth of the Blackwater river, where the North Sea tides ran particularly strong, and the ebbs left miles of exposed mud flats. Reliant stood guardian to the Fusee bomb as she worked her way within a mile of shore as the tide began to flood, and it was Lieutenant Johns and Mr. McCloud who saw to its priming, its lowering into the waters, and its towing behind one of their new thirty-two-foot barges.
Lewrie had himself rowed over to Fusee to watch, and stood with Mr. MacTavish whilst the evolution was carried out.
“They will be setting the timer… drawing the cocking line to the pistol… and letting it go!” MacTavish narrated, a telescope to his eye, like to jump out of his skin with excitement. “McCloud and I agreed to set the clockwork for half an hour. No specific target, just a trial of all the various elements, you see, sir.”
He’ll piss his breeches, does he have t’wait for half an hour, Lewrie cynically thought, a telescope to his own eye. The twelve-oar barge was wheeling about, fending off from the torpedo with a gaff and re-hoisting its lug-sails… in understandable haste, he also noted.
MacTavish, for all his seeming urbanity, did closely resemble a squirming, tail-wagging, circling puppy which would piddle in excitement. He collapsed the tubes of his glass and became rivetted to his pocket-watch, a fine one that had a second hand in addition to the usual minute and hour hands. The fellow paced, stewed, fretted, peered at his watch, and fussed with the set of his coat and waist-coat, his neck-stock, and (unconsciously) his crutch.
The barge returned, Lt. Johns and McCloud came upon deck, and the boat crew led her aft for towing. Long minutes passed. As a half-hour slowly ticked by, Lt. Johns and McCloud caught the fidgets, too, coughing and ahumming and now and then putting their heads together with MacTavish for urgent whispered conversations.
Lewrie looked at his own watch. If MacTavish was right, their torpedo would explode in five minutes. He lifted his telescope again, looking for the device, but could not find it any longer. That black-painted upper hemisphere hid it from sight most effectively, even with a slight chop and bright sunlight shining off the white-glittering wave tops; the damned thing should have had a ring of revealing foam around it. Unless it had sunk, of course, Lewrie thought.
“Ehm, sirs…,” Fusee’s Midshipman piped up, coughing into his fist for attention. “Sirs? Ahem? That trading brig coming out from the river. Should we warn her off, or something?”
Lewrie wasn’t the only one who raised a telescope, or scrambled for one. Sure enough, a small two-masted merchantman was rounding the point east of Bradwell Waterside and standing out to sea, sails trimmed to broad-reach the Nor’easterly breezes.
“Could she be anywhere near your torpedo, Mister MacTavish?” Lt. Johns fretted aloud.
“What was the rate of the tide, Mister McCloud?” Lewrie asked the artificer. “In half an hour, could it have…?”
“Nae muir than four or five knots, I judged eet, sae…,” McCloud tried to shrug off.
“Pencil and paper!” MacTavish cried.
“My slate, sir?” the Midshipman offered.
“Think we should warn her off?” Lewrie suggested.
“Warn her, aye, sir!” Lt. Johns hurriedly agreed.
“How?” Lewrie further asked. “You have signal rockets?”
“We could fire a gun!” Johns barked, turning to order his small crew to man one of Fusee’s puny 6-pounders.
“And what’ll they make o’ that?” Lewrie snapped.
“I… don’t know, sir!” Lt. Johns replied, stunned to inaction.
“Five knots’ drift for half an hour, that’s two knots’ progress… on a course roughly Northwest…,” MacTavish was mumbling half to himself, a stub of chalk squeaking loudly on the Midshipman’s borrowed slate. He paused to raise an arm to where he judged the torpedo first had been released, his other arm to mark a rough course of drift; then he fumbled to trade slate and chalk for his telescope once more. “Well, damme, I think… yes, it’ll be wide of the mark. Sure to be wide of the mark.”
Once clear of the shoals, the little merchant brig hardened up a point or two to the winds to sail on a beam reach, angling further out to sea, as if to pass well to windward of the anchored bomb and frigate, without a clue or a care in the world.
“Safe as sae meeny houses,” McCloud predicted, his thumbs stuck in the pockets of his waist-coat. “We’ll miss her by a mile or-”
BOOM!
A gigantic column of spray and foam liberally mixed with dark clouds of exploded gunpowder sprang up from the sea… tall enough to tower over the brig’s mast-head trucks, between her and the shore.
“Oh shit,” Lewrie breathed.
Hope her owner has insurance, he further thought.
“One half-hour to the minute, sirs,” the Midshipman meekly said.
“My God!” from MacTavish.
“Weel, hmm,” from McCloud.
A shiver in the sea from the explosion was transmitted to Fusee to rattle her blocks, up through her hull to the tiny quarterdeck, to make the oak planks shudder for a second or two.
“What have we done? Dear Lord, what have we done?” Mr. MacTavish was almost whimpering, about ready to tear his hair out by the roots.
“Weel, eet deed wirk, sir, sae…,” McCloud tried to comfort him.
Lewrie took another long look. The merchant brig had hardened up to a close-reach; it was the wind pressing her sails that made her heel over more steeply, not the blast of the torpedo. She sailed off to their right-hand side, revealing that titanic column of spray and foam that was collapsing upon itself like a failing geyser, at least a mile inshore of the brig, but closer to the mouth of the Colne river than the centre of Mersea Island, as MacTavish had planned.
“That’ll put the wind up him,” Lewrie commented sarcastically. “Perhaps the whole coast. Mister MacTavish, did you or Admiralty warn the locals of your trials?”