Reefs and Shoals

That laid them all a’back, producing grimaces on the faces of the quarterdeck officers, some wide eyes on some, or slitted eyes on the others.

“What manner of French ship, sir?” Lewrie warily asked, after his initial surprise.

“Don’t rightly know, sir,” the pilot breezily admitted. “She’s schooner rigged. Might have come up from the Antilles to trade?” he added with a shrug. “Ah… let’s lay her head a point more to starboard, if you please, sirs. Steer direct for the tall church spire, helmsman.”

“Did you pilot her in, sir?” Lewrie asked.

“Not me, no, Captain. She came in almost two days ago, when I was off,” the pilot went on, pacing from one side of the front of the quarterdeck to the other, and peering close overside. When he returned to amidships, and the helm, he said, “I know the gentleman who did, though. He said she’s fairly big, for a schooner. Might’ve been built in a New England yard, he reckoned, from her lines, and the rake of her masts.”

“Did he comment on her being armed?” Lewrie further asked, his excitement rising.

“Lord, Captain Lewrie… who ain’t?” the pilot cracked, cocking his head back for a good laugh. “What with the war and all, it’s common sense to be armed. Never can tell when a warship, a privateer, or an outright rogue pirate crosses your hawse, no matter which flag you’re flying. War makes it parlous for merchant ships of any nation… the guilty and the innocent,” he pointedly added, having a dig at the British practice of stopping and inspecting any ship that they encountered on the suspicion that they might be trading with the foe.

“Brace up, Bosun!” Lt. Westcott called out. “Mind the luff of the heads’ls and fore tops’l! Cast of the log, Mister Grainger?”

“Five knots and a bit, sir!”

They were past the lighthouse and the Beacon, now abreast of Fort Johnston on James Island, with the city beginning to spread out before their bows. Lewrie trusted that the pilot, and his officers, had the situation well- enough in hand to go forward to the break of the quarterdeck and lift his day-glass for a good look at the city… and spy out the French schooner.

If she’s not a privateer, I’m a Turk in a turban! he thought, noting the rake of her masts that the pilot had mentioned, in Down East New England Yankee style, which would make her fly like a tern, and as weatherly as a witch. There was a large blue-white-red French Tricolour flag streaming over her stern, one more suitable to a frigate-sized warship, as if to proudly flaunt her nationality.

After a sniff of disgust, he swung his telescope to look over the city. The few times he’d put into Charleston during the Revolution, after General Clinton had conquered it, and given how short his shore excursions had been, he’d always been impressed by the beauty of the town, the impressive residences, and how wide were the streets; Broad Street, which ran across from the Ashley to the Cooper, was an hundred feet wide, and to a lad used to the close, meandering, and reeky lanes of London, the sense of open space had made quite an impression. Beyond that, Charleston was awash in palmettos, white oaks festooned by wreaths of Spanish Moss, in graceful weeping willows, and all manner of brilliant, flowering flora, as exotic as any isle in the Indies, but richer, grander, and more… civilised than even Kingston, Jamaica.

“Ever been here, Captain Lewrie?” the pilot took time to ask.

“Long, long ago,” Lewrie told him, smiling in reverie, “when I was a Midshipman. Back when Saint Michael’s spire was painted black.”

“Some said that was for mourning, when the city surrendered to General Clinton,” their pilot said.

Actually, the Rebels had painted it black so the British could not use it as a sea-mark or range-mark, but that had been fruitless, just as extinguishing the lighthouse and the Beacon had been.

“Always liked Charleston,” Lewrie went on “though we never stayed long. Come in with despatches, sail out the next day, mostly. I ate well, when I was allowed ashore.”

Rutted well, too, at that mansion-cum-brothel up the bank of the Cooper, Lewrie told himself with a smug grin, remembering how he and his fellow Mid, David Avery, had sought the place out to celebrate Avery’s birthday… and how they’d been set upon by Rebel foot-pads on their way back to the docks. A quick peek with his telescope up the Cooper showed that the commercial piers and warehouses had grown past where that mansion had been. Another part of his past long gone, he realised, along with David Avery, who had fallen not a year later.

“I was always inpressed by how open and wide the town is laid out,” Lewrie commented.

“That’s to catch any cooling breeze in the summers, Captain,” the pilot said with a wry snicker. “Nothing gets built too high, or too close together, if people don’t want to melt like candle wax.”

“Excuse me, sir,” Lt. Westcott intruded. “Might you wish that we come in ‘all-standing’, and anchor ‘man o’ war fashion’? Just to thumb our noses at the Frogs?”

“Hmm… best not, Mister Westcott,” Lewrie decided. “We’re a bit out of practice at that evolution.”

And, if we mucked it up, we’d never hear the end of it, Lewrie thought.

“When we come about into the wind, we’ll let go the kedge, and stand on ’til we lose way, then let go the best bower,” Lewrie said. “The depth there, sir?” he asked their pilot.

“Four fathom, and a bit, Captain. Unless we get a full gale, a rare thing this time of year, a three-to-one scope will suit,” the pilot informed him.

HMS Reliant ghosted on another quarter-mile or so before their pilot suggested that she should be put about. That brought the ship within a cable of the anchored French schooner, whose decks were now full of spectators.

“Smartly, now, Mister Westcott,” Lewrie snapped.

“Helm hard down, topmen aloft!” Westcott shouted.

Sailors scrambled up the shrouds to the tops’l yards to haul up and brail up in harbour gaskets, while hands on the gangways hauled at the clews to draw the tops’ls upwards, spilling wind from them. Other men tended the spanker over the quarterdeck, freed the stays’ls and jibs so they could fly over to the opposite tack and keep some drive going as the kedge was freed to splash into the harbour, and the thick hawse cable to run free. Reliant paid off the wind a bit, right on the edge of “stays” a while longer before the helm was put up, and the ship’s bow faced the sea breeze directly, which slowly brought her to a full stop. At that moment, the bower anchor was let go.

After that, with the squares’ls gasketed, and the stays’ls and jibs and spanker handed, it was a matter of “tweaking” on the capstans to take in on the kedge cable, let out the bower cable, to place the frigate equidistant from her anchors, at equal strain.

“Nicely done, Mister West- What the Devil?” Lewrie began to say.

The crew of the French schooner had burst into song, shouting the words of “The Marseillaise” to taunt them. French sailors were in the shrouds, atop the bulwarks and lowered gaff booms, shaking their fists, slapping their arses in derision, and making insulting finger signs.

“Quite a lot of them,” Lewrie pointed out, with a wry smile on his face. “Too many to be a merchantman.”

“Do you wish to salute them, sir?” Lt. Westcott asked, looking as if he wished that they would. Some of Lewrie’s officers and hands were scowling and cursing, already.

“Bosun Sprague!” Lewrie bellowed. “Hands to the larboard gangway!”

“Sir?” the Bosun asked, looking up at the quarterdeck, his face asquint.

“Two-fingered salute, Mister Sprague!” Lewrie ordered. “A two-fingered salute to those snail-eatin’ sons of bitches!” By example he went to the larboard bulwarks and lifted his right hand, his fore and middle finger jutted upward into a Vee, a very British insult.

And fuck diplomacy! he angrily thought.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

According to the instructions from Admiralty, the British Consul at Charleston was one Mr. Edward Cotton, an Englishman, not a local man, who kept offices at the corner of East Bay Street and Queen Street, conveniently near the city wharves. Lewrie wished to go ashore at once to see him, but there was an host of things to see to,