Reefs and Shoals

The Boudreaus had refugeed from Charleston, South Carolina, at the end of the American Revolution, Low Country planters and grandees who’d upheld the Loyalist cause. Like so many “Torys” who had fled to the Bahamas, the West Indies, or Canada, they had faced sudden poverty, and the wrenching shock that if they could afford to purchase land, or slaves with which to work it, the island colonies could not support them for long. The sandy “white lands” were only good for truck gardening, and the richer “red lands” further inland were deceptive. Without livestock and their manure, the “red lands” gave out after two or three good crops; and Nassau could never have the grazing land large enough to support livestock herds.

The Boudreaus had quickly given up the idea of a plantation and had gone into housing, supporting themselves at a modicum of their old lifestyle from rents and the running-up of modest lodgings. They had stayed in the Bahamas, whilst so many others, heartbroken, fled.

Warily, Lewrie went to the front porch of his old home and ordered a pint of ale. “Have you ever heard of the Boudreau family?” he asked the tapster, who looked very much like a retired pirate.

“The who, Cap’m?”

“They owned all this, once,” Lewrie said. “I rented from them, my wife and I, back in the eighties.”

“Ye lived up there, ye did?” the old fellow marvelled.

“No. Here, This was our rented house. The Boudreaus lived in the house, yonder.” Lewrie corrected him. He took a peek inside the tavern, and was sorry that he did. The gleaming white woodwork, the pale tan-painted walls, had gone as scabrous as a basement dive in the worst London stew.

“Never ’eard of ’em, Cap’m. ’Tis a boardin’ house now, when it ain’t a whorehouse, hee hee. Th’ doxies board there, an’ all th’ soldiers foller,” the tapster supplied with goodly mirth.

“Ah, well. Ye go away a few years, they’ll change things all round,” Lewrie sighed, with a sad, philosophical shrug. He finished his ale, then went back to the road; he’d seen enough. He was certain that the Boudreaus were both dead and gone by now, and as French-born Huguenots-French Protestants turned Church of England-their graves could be found in some parish’s churchyard, but… he felt by then a dispiriting langour, and a desire to be away.

To make matters worse, it was a long, warm walk back to town and the docks, and no wheeled traffic from which to hitch a ride. By the time he was there, he needed another ale to quench his thirst and cool him off. He took a seat on a covered porch off the side of the public house, fanned himself with his hat for a while, and looked at the harbour and up Bay Street. The flowers, the flowering vines and bushes, and all the planters all about him! How could he have forgotten? Once more, he felt a pang, recalling how scrofulous and weedy the grounds about the old gate house and mansion were.

With help from Mrs. Boudreau and her old Black gardener, Caroline had created a new Eden, nigh a jungle! Their house had been awash in greenery, and blossoms of the most vivid and exotic colours. There had been tamarinds and flowering acacia, Tree-of-Life bush, cascarilla and red jasmine, bright yellow elder and bougainvillea vines growing up the trellises, poinsettias and poincianas, angel trumpets and flamingo flowers, graceful bird of paradise, and Jump-Up-and-Kiss-Mes in planter pots and beds. To screen their front gallery from the road, and the rear gallery from the main house, they had had palmettos, sapodillas, soursops, and guava saplings, and their own lemon or key-lime trees, their candlewoods and sea grapes, and Caroline had been so very proud of her fragrant and colourful handiwork!

Ghostlike, there was a shift in the breeze that brought scents of flowers from the nearby gardens, as sweet and intoxicating as the sunset breezes off Potter’s Cay and Hog Island had come to their old house so long ago, forcing Lewrie to recall the sweetness, the contentment, and lazy satisfaction of sitting with a young wife at the tail-ends of tropic days, and he had to squint and grimace in pain. To cover his public un-manning, he pulled a handkerchief out to dab at his eyes before even slight tears of grief came.

Thought I was beyond all that, he chid himself.

He finished his ale quickly, for he really needed to be back aboard his frigate, in the privacy of his great-cabins… where he could hide for a while.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

To Captain Sir Alan Lewrie, Bart.

Aboard the Reliant frigate

Sir;

After giving the matter due Consideration, and pursuant to Admiralty Orders received from your hand, I deem myself able to second to you only two Vessels, to wit; the hermaphrodite brig Thorn (12), Lieutenant Darling, and the sloop Firefly (8), Lieutenant Lovett, now lying at anchor in East Bay. Orders to the officers commanding in regards to their Transfer to your flag are issued, and…

“Take those two and get the Hell out o’ my sight, hey?” Lewrie chortled as he read the letter. “The sooner we’re gone, the better Forrester’ll sleep!”

Of course, Forrester made that conditional, referring to the transfer of the two ships dependent upon whether the Spanish threatened the Bahamas or Turks and Caicos and he needed them back, further claiming that if such occurred Lewrie would simply have to ignore his original orders and place Reliant under Forrester’s command, and if he, Lewrie, stepped into the “quag” up to his neck over in Florida waters and found himself over-matched by the Spanish, he’d best place himself under Forrester to, in essence, pull his chestnuts out of the fire!

“I take it that your early days with this fellow were not all that jolly, sir?” Lt. Westcott asked once Lewrie had read the orders aloud to him.

“Forrester and the Desperate, and Commander Treghues… ah, what splendid memories!” Lewrie said, the sarcasm dripping. “Well, it’s of no matter, Mister Westcott. We’ve a squadron. Don’t know what sort, yet, but it’s a start.”

“I asked about when I was ashore yesterday, sir,” Lt. Westcott told him with a sly look. “People in the taverns, civilians and Navy sorts alike, say that Captain Forrester’s Mersey has been at anchor so long, she’s not aground on beef and pork bones, but he’d have to send people overside to chip her off the coral reef that’s built up under her keel!”

“If he don’t much care for Nassau or its lacks, ye’d think he’d at least put to sea and sail round the islands,” Lewrie supposed, as he tossed the letter atop his desk. “But that might take him too far off from his fresh tucker. Hmm… while you were ashore, you didn’t pick up anything about Thorn and Firefly, or their commanding officers, did you, Mister Westcott?”

“No sir, sorry,” Westcott told him with a shrug. “Didn’t know we’d be getting them, so…”

“Oh, well. I s’pose I should go call upon Lieutenants Darling and Lovett and introduce myself… before Forrester changes his mind and snatches ’em back,” Lewrie said with a short laugh. “You see to an hour’s drill on the great guns, then the rest of the Forenoon with cutlasses and boarding pikes, and I should be back aboard by the start of the rum issue.”

“Very good, sir,” Westcott replied, preparing to rise and leave the great-cabins. “Uhm… not live firing, sir?” he japed.

“And wake all of Nassau’s drunks? Lord no, sir!”

* * *

Lewrie had himself rowed over to HMS Thorn, first, assuming that a 12-gun ship would rate the senior of the two. As his gig came to a stop under her boarding battens, he could see that Thorn was alert and ready to greet him with the proper side-party. He had served in a schooner, a ketch, then three-masted ships, but never aboard an hermaphrodite brig, which was neither a real brig-rigged vessel, nor the usual fore-and-aft-rigged schooner or cutter, but a bit of both.

“Welcome aboard, sir,” her “captain” said once the salutes and the Bosun’s calls were done. “Lieutenant Peter Darling, sir, commanding. My First Officer… the only’un, really… Lieutenant Child…”