“Ha!” Lewrie barked. He could see the commissioning pendant as it lazily curled, could make out the maze of rigging, sails, yards, and top-masts once more. He could even see the tip of the jib-boom. Aft, he could see the two barges and both of Reliant’s cutters under tow. A half-hour before, all he could see was the towing lines, stretching out into nothing!
“It seems to be thinning, at last, sir,” Lt. Westcott said as Lewrie joined him by the helm. With the ship at Quarters, Spendlove and Merriman were at their posts in the waist, surpervising the guns.
“About bloody time, too,” Lewrie said with relief and evident enthusiasm. “Ye can see out-board a long musket shot or better. Any idea where we are now, by dead reckoning, Mister Westcott?”
“Uhm, about here, sir,” Lt. Westcott said, stepping forward to the chart pinned to the traverse board. “Coutances should be abeam of us to windward…”
“Windward, mine arse,” Lewrie japed. “Zephyr-ward, more like.”
“With this land-breeze and ebbing tide carrying us, I have no idea how far off the coast we are, sir… sorry,” Westcott added as he traced their course with a forefinger. “Our last sure cross-bearings put us six miles off, and I’d imagine that we’ve made enough lee-way to estimate that we might be eight miles off, by now.”
“In mid-Channel ’twixt France and Jersey, aye,” Lewrie agreed. “Does this scant breeze allow, we might bear a point more Westerly. I wouldn’t want t’run her too close to Cape Carteret, and on Due North, there’s Cape de la Hague beyond that.”
He looked up to sniff the air and peer about, then returned to the chart. “This has t’burn off, say, by Four Bells of the Forenoon and the winds’ll surely shift back from somewhere in the West, so-”
“Harkee, sir!” Mr. Caldwell barked. “Did any of you hear that?”
“Hear what, Mister Caldwell?” Lewrie asked, puzzled.
“I did, sir!” Midshipman Munsell piped up. “Over yonder?” the younker said, pointing out to starboard, his mouth agape and his eyes blared in alarm.
Moo-oo-wa!
“Sea-monsters?” Quartermaster’s Mate Malin whispered to another fellow manning the helm.
“Hist!” Quartermaster Rhys snapped back.
Moo-oo-wa! came from the fog, plaintive and hackle-raising eerie, answered a moment later by a second, then a third, and a fourth further off and fainter!
If any seals turn up, we’ll tow the ship out of here! Lewrie thought; That’s just… spooky!
“Sea cows?” Midshipman Munsell shudderingly asked.
“Fog horns!” the Sailing Master exclaimed. “Trumpets of some kind, or someone yelling through speaking-trumpets.”
“Where away?” Lewrie snapped, dreading the chance that there were what sounded like four gunboats out there, trying to find each other.
Moo-wa!
“There, sir!” Munsell cried, pointing off the starboard quarter. “I think.”
Moo-wa! And that one sounded as if it was out to larboard, out to sea of them! As the other fog horns mournfully lowed, Lt. Westcott pointed at one, and Caldwell at yet another, his arms out-stretched to encompass a section of the fog, swivelling his head and hands like an errant compass needle as his best estimate.
“Sir! Sir!” Midshipman Munsell was crying, hopping on his toes in urgency. “I think I can see a light out there, to starboard, where the loudest one was!” Without being ordered, Munsell sprang into the main-mast shrouds and scrambled up the rat-lines a few feet. “There, sir! I do see a light, a tiny one!”
Lewrie and the others peered out to find it on their own.
“Waving back and forth… hand-held?” Lt. Westcott speculated. “Like someone in a small boat?”
“A fleet of fishermen, perhaps,” Mr. Caldwell mused aloud.
So long as they ain’t gunboats! Lewrie thought.
“This far off the coast, sir?” Westcott countered. “In such a flat calm, with no wind? Were they fishing boats, they would have had to set out from Coutances or some other wee port very early last night to be caught by this fog.”
“In their home waters they know best?” Lewrie scoffed. “I don’t think French fishermen’d dare come out this far, not since the war reopened. Our close blockade keeps ’em a lot nearer port, as we saw in the Gulf of Saint Malo. It does look like a hand-held lanthorn, don’t it? So whatever sort o’ boat it is, it can’t be all that large.”
Lewrie gave it a long think, then went to the break of the quarterdeck to look down into the be-fogged waist of the ship where his men sat round the guns, ready to spring into action when ordered.
“Mister Merriman,” he called down, “see Bosun Sprague and assemble an armed boat crew. Mister Simcock?” he said to their officer of Marines, who had been idly pacing the starboard gangway behind the file of a dozen Marines posted by the bulwarks and rolled hammock nettings. “I’d admire some of your men to go with Mister Merriman to see just what’s out there, and board it, if it’s manageable.”
“Very good, sir!” Lt. Simcock replied, stiffening to attention and beaming at a chance to do something.
“May I have Cox’n Desmond and your boat crew, sir?” Lt. Merriman asked. At Lewrie’s emphatic nod, the Third Lieutenant turned about to point at Desmond, Furfy, and the rest, summoning them to the gangway and the starboard entry-port. “I’ll take one of the towed barges, sir, so we’ll have room enough for the ‘lobsterbacks.’ ”
“Very good,” Lewrie agreed. “Make sure you’ve a boat compass, and mark your reciprocal course. We’re not goin’ anywhere quickly, so we should be easy to find,” he japed.
Moo-wa! wailed from larboard, making Lewrie swivel his head to find her in the impenetrable banks of fog, and think that the source of that eldritch hooting might lay two points or more forward of abeam to Reliant. In for a penny, in for a pound, he thought.
“Mister Houghton,” he called to their oldest Midshipman, “I wish you to take the second barge, and some Marines, and seek out the boat out yonder,” he ordered, pointing off in the general direction that his ears had determined, repeating his warning to take a good boat compass.
Moo-wa! sounded from larboard again, in answer to a thin chorus of horn-amplified hoots very far out to starboard. Reliant was in the middle of the mysterious boats, slowly ghosting forward on the scanty wind. If the so-far-unseen boats were small fishing boats, as Mister Caldwell first supposed, Lewrie could not imagine them being much over thirty feet in length, with only a single lug-sail. His frigate sported acres of canvas aloft in comparison, and, once such a large ship got any way upon her, her weight and much longer hull allowed her to coast onward, when smaller boats would wallow to a stop and require a stouter wind to get moving once more. They might truly be becalmed and helpless… whatever they were!
Not gunboats, though, no gunboats, pray Jesus! Lewrie thought.
Moo-wa! and Hoo! from all quarters, some close, most distant and eerie, and Lewrie took note of his idle gunners looking at each other uneasily, a few of the ship’s boys who crouched down the centreline of the waist between the guns, leather-cased powder cartridges in their hands, peering about wide-eyed in fear.
“It ain’t whales, lads, and it ain’t sea-monsters,” Lewrie told them as loud as he dared. “They’re Frog fishermen, most-like, lost in the fog, and they haven’t a clue that Reliant’s the fox in the chicken coop!”
That seemed to satisfy most of the crew, though not all.
“Both the barges are away, sir,” Lt. Westcott reported. “Mister Houghton’s is almost out of sight, not a musket-shot off, and the other is already swallowed up. Wish you’d have sent me, sir,” he added.