Reefs and Shoals

Warrick’s boat had come alongside, and the two lads, his sons, had scrambled aboard to peer about and josh Munsell and Rossyngton, the ship’s youngest Mids. They were bronzed by the sun, bare-legged and shoeless, in faded old breeches with the knee buttons long gone, open and sleeveless linen shirts, and straw hats much like their father’s.

“Ah, but that’s fine,” Warrick said after a tentative sip from his glass of rum. “Navy issue’s stronger than most, Strong enough to make a man’s ears itch, har!”

“We noted some compass variation,” Lewrie began to probe, and Warrick let go with a plethora of local lore. “Mistifying, that.”

There was no explaining the variations, for one thing. With a chart spread on the dining table, Warrick went over the string of islands. Some were so close to each other, like North and South Ireland, Boaz, Somerset, and Watford Islands on the West end of the chain, that if the Crown ever thought to spend money on bridges, the distances between could easily be spanned. Inside the shoals to the Nor’east there was a vast expanse of deep, somewhat sheltered water, Murray’s Anchorage, and there were at least two good deepwater channels that led to a very good sheltered anchorage in Grassy Bay, and the Great and Little Sounds, out to the West.

“During the Peace of Amiens, the Leavder anchored there, sir,” Warrick said. “She’s an old two-decker fifty gunner, and draws more than you. But, there’s not much in the way of provisions, or entertainment, for your sailors from Somerset, or Sandys Parish, either. Nor is there much joy in Hamilton, do you send your ship’s boats through Two Rocks Passage into Hamilton Bay. ’Tis a sleepy little place. You can send your people ashore with little fear of desertion, though. You will note there’s several forts, and a sizeable garrison, on Bermuda.

“Not that there’s much call for them,” Warrick went on, holding out his glass for a top-up. “Keeping order, and rounding up the drunken sailors, mostly.”

“Is Leander still here?” Lewrie asked. “Is her captain senior officer present?”

“Depends on who’s in port, sir,” Warrick said with a laugh at that notion. “Right now, you’re senior naval officer present. Does one of the brig-sloops come in, then it’d be a Commander in charge of the island for as long as he’s at anchor. If both brig-sloops are out at sea, then it might be one of the Lieutenants on the small sloops. There’s no real dockyard, no Port Admiral or much organisation.”

“How many warships are there, then?” Lewrie further asked.

“Like I said, two brig-sloops, and two smaller sloops, more like two-masted tops’l schooners, around eight or ten guns apiece,” Warrick prosed on. “Much like the Bermuda or Jamaica sloops that the old pirates like Blackbeard and Stede Bonnet sailed in the long ago. Ever hear of Stede Bonnet?”

“No, I haven’t,” Lewrie replied, pouring a tot of rum for himself to be companionable.

“Oh, he was a ‘fly’ fellow,” Warrick happily related. “He was a gentleman, an officer in the island Army garrison, married with two or more children, respectable as anything. Came of a French Protestant family, what they call Huguenots, that were massacred or expelled long ago? Well, upright as he seemed, one day he up and boarded ship for Nassau, the old pirate haven, and turned sea rover! S’truth!”

“A total ‘lubber’? I’d not imagine there’s much future in that,” Lewrie said, chuckling.

“Now, no one ever said he was anything close to a ‘tarpaulin’ sailor,” Warrick went on, “but he was a gentleman, and a leader, a man with some style about him, so he ended up captain of a small ship faster than you can say ‘Jack Ketch’. Ran with Blackbeard, ‘Calico Jack’ Rackham, Mary Read, and Anne Bonny, and so long as he could keep order and be backed up by experienced mates, he did right well.

“They caught him, though, in the end,” Warrick added, turning wistful-somber, as if telling of the end of a tragic hero. “Got him at anchor in the mouth of the Cape Fear River over in the North Carolina colony… 1715 or so? They took him down to Charleston for his trial. Now here’s the oddest bit: Were there women aboard a prize he took, they took up with him, husbands, lovers, and families bedamned, and in all his captures, there never was a single murder, nor even all that much resistance, so… the judge says since Bonnet’s hands are clean of killing, he’s of a mind to pardon him, so long as he swears to give up piracy and return to his family. Know what he said?”

“Pray, do tell,” Lewrie urged, encouraging the pilot, whether he really cared or not; it sounded promising, though, for Mr. Warrick was almost wheezing with impending wit.

“Bonnet says to the judge, ‘Well my lord, if that’s my only option, you might as well go on and hang me!’ Damned if he didn’t, hee-hee!”

“She must’ve been a real shrew,” Lewrie said, laughing.

“And damned if they didn’t… hang him, that is,” Warrick said. “They say Stede Bonnet went out with style, pirate or not.”

“No piracy round here, since, I trust?” Lewrie japed.

“We don’t get the great trade convoys to attract much of that,” Warrick said with a shrug, sounding as if he might wish that there was some piracy to liven a sleepy mid-Atlantic island’s days.

“Privateering?” Lewrie asked.

“Ours, mostly, preying on the French and the Dons, but after the war began again two years ago, not much of that, either, Cap’m Lewrie,” Warrick admitted, sounding as if that was a let-down, too. “Our two brig-sloops prowl round the island, an hundred or more miles off, and stay out nigh three months before coming back in to provision. The small sloops patrol closer in, but it’s rare that any enemy ship turns up, and they’re mostly bound for more important places.”

Can’t commandeer the brig-sloops, just in case the French do turn up, Lewrie thought; I need small ships t’make squadron; it’ll have t’be one of the little’uns.

“None of the small sloops are around, at present?” Lewrie asked, making free with the crock of rum. While rum was not his preferred aged American corn whiskey, it was a decent substitute. Lewrie was one of the few officers in the Navy who would even admit to liking a spirit issued to the common seamen.

“Well… there might be Lieutenant Bury,” Warrick told him, a scowl on his face.

“Berry?”

“Bury, like a funeral. B-U-R-Y,” Warrick corrected him. “He’s the Lizard sloop, though a fish name’d suit him more. Fellow might as well be covered in scales and fins. An odd bird, altogether is Bury.”

“How so?” Lewrie asked, topping up both their glasses.

In vino veritas, he thought; He knows the truth, and I don’t.

“He likes hydrog… hydrography,” Warrick carped; perhaps it was the rum that was tangling his tongue. “Swans about the shoals and reefs, taking soundings and making charts. Bury’s got it into his head there’s channels through the flats that nobody’s found yet, or wants found!”

Which’d cut into yer trade, and yer earnings, Lewrie cynically speculated to himself.

“And, when he’s not doing that, he’s out in a small boat with a bucket on his head,” Warrick scoffed.

“Beg pardon? A bucket?” Lewrie gawped.

“Had himself a bucket made, with a glass-pane bottom,” Warrick explained, shaking his head in wonder. “Like an old tavern tankard in the old days? Wants to see the bottoms, watch the fishes, study the coral and such, and catch samples so he can gut them and pick them to pieces and draw pictures of them. Spends more time in the water, upside down as a feeding duck, hee hee! Last anyone saw of him and the Lizard, he was off for Grassy Bay, dropping Vickers, one of the other pilots, soon as he got out of The Narrows and into the South Channel cross Murray’s Anchorage, the silly sod!” Warrick huffed up like an adder in revulsion, and in defence of his “guild”. As dangerous as Bermudan waters were, the pilots had been making a killing for years, and anything that threatened their income was stealing food from the mouths of their children!

Don’t sound like the sort I need, Lewrie thought.

“And the other small sloop, and her captain?” he queried.

“ Primrose? Lieutenant Percy’s more sensible, but he’s been out the last two months, entire, and most-like won’t come back to harbour ’til the rum runs out… another month or so,” Warrick speculated.

Damn! Lewrie thought; I may be stuck with ‘Mister Minnow’ after all!