While the ships of the convoy went about their drills, swabbing, sail trimming, they might look warily over their shoulders whenever a strange sail was sighted, and would remain wary ’til whoever it was had passed on on a diverging course, and slipped back below the horizon upon their own innocent occasions.
Now and then, a strange sail might take half the day to emerge over the horizon, only five or six miles off, and on a reciprocal course; neutrals, mostly, Swedish, Danish, Prussian, or Russian merchantmen making their way home from the Mediterranean or Africa. They would dip their flags and pass on, growing smaller and smaller ’til only their upper-most sails were visible, then to disappear.
All those contacts, the solid and the spurious, were of great concern to Lewrie and his officers, for clever Frenchmen could fly a false flag to delude their prey ’til the last moment. He found himself on deck with a telescope, and fingers crossed for luck, quite often, for many a cautious hour ’til he could let out a long-pent breath of relief, and turn to pleasanter things.
Worse, perhaps, were the nights when only a pair of weak taffrail lanthorns could be made out. At night, lookouts were called down from the cross-trees, and the lookouts of the Evening and the Middle Watches were posted at bow and stern, on deck, where their range of view was much reduced, which meant that those enigmatic passing ships were much closer, and their identities could not be determined.
In the first week on passage, they had seen American merchant ships, too, crossing astern, or far ahead of Comus in the lead of the long column. Lewrie knew that they were bound for France, and should be stopped and inspected for contraband. That was Orders In Council, and the list of contraband goods expanded faster than breeding rabbits, but … Lewrie let them pass unmolested. There were whole fleets of Royal Navy frigates and “liners” much closer to the Yankees’ destinations which could fulfill that office, and he had a convoy to guard at all hazards. If he hared out of line and went after them, he’d leave the convoy on their own for a few hours, or order them all to fetch-to and idle ’til he’d boarded and inspected the suspect vessel, then get them back into order and under way, again, wasting good weather and a good wind.
Besides, he rationalised to himself, he wasn’t sure that his lumbering two-decker 50 could catch a swift Yankee merchantman if her master felt like making the pursuit a long stern-chase! The Americans built very fast ships! Being out-footed and out-sailed would just be too embarassing.
More cheering and reassuring, though, were their encounters with British convoys. One day during the second week at sea, there was an East India Company “trade” of at least sixteen tall and grand Indiamen, so big that they could easily be mistaken for Third Rate ships of the line. Those merchantmen were escorted by two frigates and a 74-gunner. Despite the war, the convoy system managed to maintain monthly departures and arrivals, spanning the East and the West Indies, North America, South America, the Mediterranean, and the Baltic. Six months or better out from Canton in China, or Calcutta or Bombay, they were in the home stretch with all their wealth assured safe docking in the Pool of London.
After a few more days of perfect isolation on an empty sea, a fresh convoy arose on the Southern horizon, one much smaller but perhaps just as rich, flying the blue-white-red horizontal-striped flags that denoted a Portugal convoy, and sure to be filled with ports and madeiras, sherries, costly liqueurs, fruit preserves and bottled citruses. This convoy passed quite close, within a mile of Lewrie’s, and both groups of ships waved hats and shirts and raised lusty cheers of welcome to each other. The England-bound sailors might have cheered to see what they might have mistaken for a squadron of warships which meant additional safety for a few hours beyond their own two escorts, and the hands of Comus, Sapphire, and the soldiers aboard the transports surely cheered the liquid delights aboard the convoy! Whether they could drink them, or not.
* * *
HMS Sapphire rang to the clatters and clangs of an hundred poor Welsh tinkers all tapping away as her hands went through the steps of cutlass drill, paired off in mock melee to hone their sword-play. On the open poop deck, Lewrie was squared off against their senior Marine Lieutenant, the stern John Keane, Lewrie’s short hanger versus Keane’s straighter and longer smallsword, and frankly, Lt. Keane was the better swordsman, very fast and darting, with a very strong wrist. Lewrie was in his shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, working up a sweat and beginning to pant at the exertion, which seemed as wearying as any real combat he had ever experienced.
Keane lunged, and Lewrie countered with a twist to bind, then stepped forward inside Keane’s reach, his left arm fending off Keane’s sword hand, bull-rushing him backwards and giving him a thump in the chest with the silver, lion-head hilt, then a mock slash with the flat of his blade that, had it been for real, the wickedly honed edge would have dis-emboweled the man.
“I trample on your entrails, sir!” Lewrie hooted in triumph.
“I expire, sir, thinking last thoughts of Mother,” Keane said in matching jest, though he didn’t look as if he approved of Lewrie’s ploy, or the hardness of that thump.
“As hellish-good as you are, sir, that was the only way that I could prevail,” Lewrie cheerfully admitted. “But, a boarding action, a melee, with enemy sailors tryin’ t’kill ye any-old-how is not as fine as the elegance of a swordmaster’s salle. That’s why I prefer the hanger … I can always get inside or under my opponent’s guard.”
“A break for water, sir?” Lt. Keane suggested.
“Gad, yes,” Lewrie heartily agreed. “I’m dry as dust.”
The First Officer, Lt. Geoffrey Westcott, also in his rolled-up shirtsleeves, had been matching blades with Midshipman Leverett, and that pairing took a water break at the same time. Westcott’s harshly-featured face was split in a grin as he delivered a final suggestion to Leverett, who had been schooled, like all young gentlemen of means, in the sword, but was learning that elegance and grace wouldn’t stand a Chinaman’s Chance if shoved nose-to-nose, elbow-to-elbow into a melee with barely enough room to employ a sword. Westcott looked as if he had handily bested the young man, with tactics as “low” as Lewrie’s.
“A good morning’s workout,” Lewrie said after wetting his dry mouth with a first dipper from the scuttle-butt. “Pretty-much the only decent excercise an officer can get, aboard ship. Several brisk turns round the deck don’t hold a candle.”
“Indeed, sir,” Lt. Keane agreed. “Though I have contemplated ascending the stays and ratlines to the tops, a time or two.”
“Your dignity, though, sir,” Midshipman Leverett jibed, as he waited his turn at the water butt. “That’s an acquired skill.”
“How’s the leg?” Westcott asked in a barely audible whisper.
“No problem at all,” Lewrie whispered back. “Not a twinge.”
Lewrie had known too many older officers who had been so long at sea who were halfway lamed by the rheumatism engendered by the cold and damp, their continuing careers a perpetual misery of aches and pains, much less anyone who had been as “well-shot” as he had been. He felt damned grateful to have avoided the rheumatism, so far, and to have healed so completely. Well, gout’s another matter, he told himself with a wee laugh.
“Sail ho!” a lookout bawled out from high aloft.
“Where away?” Lt. Harcourt, who had the watch, shouted back.
“Three points orf th’ larb’d quarter!” the lookout cried.
Lewrie and Westcott, and the curious Marine Lt. Keane, drifted to the aft corner of the poop deck’s larboard side, but even from that height the horizon up to the Nor’east was unbroken, a severely straight line of blue against a fair-weather azure sky.
“In the Nor’east by East, or thereabouts,” Lewrie speculated. He turned and looked aloft at the long, streaming commissioning pendant which stood out fairly stiffly with its outer length fluttering to the East by South. The Bay of Biscay’s prevailing Westerlys had backed a point after dawn, giving his convoy a point free of sailing on a beam reach, perhaps endowing them with another half-knot above their usual plodding pace.