A King`s Trade

had mounted to the quarterdeck from the galley up forward, holding a black, battered two-gallon pot by its bail, with a towel-wrapped hand beneath. His breath steamed in the chilly air nigh as lustily as the pot's spout… though nowhere near as enticing a scent as the hot coffee's, Lewrie cynically thought.

'Aye, that'd be handsome,' Lewrie quickly rejoined with a faint smile of pleasure, holding out his empty mug.

'A right nippy mornin', sir, fer certain,' Aspinall said, with a long- established and casual familiarity. There were no secrets 'twixt employer and servant, master or slave, mighty captain or the fellow who quietly managed his life belowdecks, and any brusque, stand-offish, and aloof 'dignity' on Lewrie's part would have been pointless, by then, and pretentiously cruel, to boot.

'Mmm, good and hot!' Lewrie happily exclaimed after one sip.

It was a continual disappointment to go ashore, even to the best establishments in London where the coffee- house had been king for years on end, and get a tepid (tiny but expensive!) cup of semi-opaque gnat's piss. Aboard ship, it came from the galley stove still half-boiling, as stout and black as the strongest Irish brew.

Captain's second but to God at sea, Lewrie wryly told himself as he took another welcome sip; and I ordain coffee fit t'wake the dead!

'Nothin' yet, sir?' Aspinall felt fit to ask, casting a glance at the activity on the starboard gangway.

'No, not yet,' Lewrie told him, grinning once more a trifle. 'I assure you, when it happens, you can't miss hearing it. I see Mister Catterall licking his chops. Best top up the others, too, lad.'

'Aye, sir,' Aspinall cheerfully replied, then turned and walked forward to the others gathered near the cross- deck hammock nettings by the break of the quarterdeck overlooking the ship's waist, forward of the helm, and the compass binnacle cabinet and traverse board. He held out the pot in silent offering, gaining glad looks from the rest; the First Officer, Lt. Anthony Langlie, a handsome young man with what women said was romantically dark and curly hair. With a month or more between shearings, or washings, though, and with a week's worth of whiskers, those ladies might not exactly swoon over him, any longer.

Lt. Catterall, the Second Officer, their wryly waggish and sarcastic bear of a fellow, was licking his lips in avid expectation, his battered tin mug held out in two mittened hands like a dockside mendicant whining for alms. Wiry and slim Lt. Adair, long-ago a Midshipman when Proteus had first commissioned at Chatham, a less-demonstrative and better-educated young Scottish gentleman, waited his turn with a good grace, taking the time to thank Aspinall for his services. With Mr. Winwood and Midshipman Grace busy on the gangway, there was more than plenty for their resident lout, the thatch-haired and permanently unkempt little Bog-Irish Midshipman Larkin, and their new-come but much more salted 'gift,' Midshipman D'arcy Gamble, who had come aboard at the behest of Vice-Adm. Sir Hyde Parker back in the early spring after Lewrie, and Proteus, had gotten him a pot of Spanish silver from those French Creole pirates in Barataria Bay on the wild coast of Spanish Louisiana.

Lewrie hooked his left arm through the larboard mizen shrouds and cupped his everyday mug in both bare hands, sticking his snout into the rising steam,. sniffing deep before sipping. Did he gulp down the scalding coffee quick enough, he might temporarily dispel the chill he felt. Even with his undress uniform coat doubled over his chest, and the nine gilt buttons done up, even with his heavy grogram boat cloak draped over his shoulders and clasped at his throat, he shivered, for he had spent too much time in warmer climes, and had yet to be inured to North Atlantic, or British, weather. Even three months of a Nova Scotian late summer and early autumn hadn't quite done the trick.

Not for inuring, anyway, he silently scoffed, recalling long weeks spent swinging at anchor at Halifax, awaiting the yard's attentions after coming in with despatches. The boresome nature of a naval 'village' of fewer than five thousand residents, the unending diet of cod, and moose…!

'One, and two, and three, and… away!' the Bosun cried as the deep-sea lead, the heavy 25-pound hollow- bottomed cone, was 'armed' with tallow, at last, swung out, and dropped into the sea with a loud splash, and the two-cable line went thrumming out through the main-yard block, the sheave keening, and the long flakes of the line laid out atop the starboard gangway twitching back and forth, one end to the other.

'Watch yer fackin' feet, boys,' an Irish sailor cautioned, 'or Davy Jones'll swig yer rum ration 'is fair mairnin'!'

Whip-whip-whip went the flakes, racing in pursuit of the plummet as it dove for the stygian depths. One hundred fathoms of it gone, already, the ten-fathom sets of knots passing in a blur, and the Bosun and his Mate, Mr. Towpenny, already looking towards the 'bitter end' on the light, horizontal barrel-winch to assure themselves that it would not go overboard. Yet…!

The whip-whipping slowed, one last flake lazily shortening from bow-to-stern on the gangway, then stood upright to the block, its long-stored kinks no longer being stretched out, then the out-board length kinking; then, went limp and still, feeding out mere inches more with each slow roll or toss of the ship's hull!

'A hun'erd an' twenty… hun'erd an' twenty-five, an' a quarter less, t'this line!' one of the freezing hands hung in the hawse-breeches shrilled, able to count the dozen spaced knots just below the water, and the single halfway knot bobbing just above the mean surge. 'Soundin's! In-Soundin's, at a hun'erd an' twenty- five fathom!'

The cheer that that news elicited could have split the heavens, nearly equalled the volume of a well-controlled, simultaneous broadside from the starboard-side guns, or shivered the main course!

'Hoist, and haul away!' Mr. Winwood roared as the din died off. 'Note carefully the time, Mister Grace,' he told his assisting middle, to whom he had already loaned his large pocket watch.

Long minutes, it took, to winch up the length of sodden manila line, for the pair of sailors on the main-chain platform to guide the line, and the heavy plummet, to the surface, then up the ship's flanks and tumblehome to the entry-port, where Mr. Winwood, Mr. Pendarves, and Mr. Towpenny knelt down, and looked at the muck caught in the tallow in its hollow bottom.

In-Soundings of somewhere, Lewrie thought as he finished off a last cool sip of black coffee. He drifted forward to the binnacle to join his officers, who were already intently poring over the sea-chart pinned to the traverse board, tracing mittened fingers over the 'iffy' contours of the 120-fathom line. Which line bespoke an host of possibilities, from Danish Iceland to French Ushant.

Somewhere there are law courts, bailiffs, accusin' letters… court-martials and nooses! Lewrie quietly despaired. And it had been such a promising career he'd had, too, twenty bloody years of his life 'press-ganged' into the Navy with nothing better open to a gentleman of his station… well, there always had been Pimp and Captain Sharp, and gaggles of the gullible to fleece, but nothing quiet so certain… so boresomely certain, as the life of a King's Commission Sea-Officer. Dammit!

Aye, though, he felt like groaning aloud; make one little mistake, try t'do just one good turn, an 'see where it gets you! And, it was in the cause of keepin' this ship manned an' efficient, too! Ye'd think that'd earn a man a pat on the back, or someth…!

'Ah, hmm,' the Sailing Master announced, after a long, furrowed-brow study, and a peer at his sea-charts once he'd attained the quarterdeck without Lewrie noticing. 'A blue-grey ooze, sirs, a clay-ey muck, at that, I am bound. Stap me if I do not believe we're within twenty leagues of Cape Clear, on Ireland. Sixty or so sea-miles Sou'west of Cape Clear, to be more exact, ah ha.'

'The Sou'wester gale blew us further North than we had thought,' Lt. Langlie gayly opined, nodding his head sagaciously. 'If we wish to round the Lizard, not put into the Bristol Channel…'

'Captain, sir,' Mr. Winwood ponderously stated, drawing himself fully erect, 'in my humble opinion, we should shape a course abeam the Westerlies, 'til we may take a second sounding, towards evening.'

'Due South,' Lewrie replied, nodding himself. 'So there's not a risk of grounding either on the Scillies or the Lizard. Who knows? By dawn, and a clearer sky, your tables will give us the time of sunrise t' go by. With any luck at all, the weather will clear enough for the sun's height at Noon Sights!'

'Just so, Captain,' Winwood agreed, with a slight bow.

'Then we won't have to embarrass ourselves by speaking the very first ship we see,' Lewrie japed, 'and