Reefs and Shoals

Hilton Head Island, and came back swearing that the channel between the island and the mainland looked to be the birthing grounds for half the sharks in the Atlantic, swarming as thickly as a creek full of eels!

He’d sent the Purser, with Midshipman Eldridge, and his boat crew in the second barge as far as the sleepy towns of Port Royal and Beaufort to see what their markets offered, and Mr. Cadbury had come back with very little to show for it, and with the depressing information that what little shipping was present was small and pacific. Mr. Cadbury had asked about, and if there was a British Consul there, a true Briton or a hired-on local attorney, no one on the docks or in the stores had ever heard of him.

“Have a nice afternoon, did you, Mister Westcott?” Lewrie asked once the First Officer had come through the entry-port in his rolled-up shirtsleeves, and doffing a wide-brimmed straw hat.

“A lovely day for boating, sir,” Lt. Westcott said with delight, “though not a one for discovery, I’m afraid. The local fishermen we encountered were stand-offish, but once we bought some fish, and gave them a few shillings for them, they did turn chatty. Do you imagine that your cats savour fresh fish, sir?”

“I expect they do,” Lewrie said, grinning back in like humour with Westcott, and looking at Toulon and Chalky, who were sunning all a’sprawl atop the cross-deck hammock nets. “Mad for it, they are.”

Indeed they were, for Westcott had come aboard with a wet jute bag that positively reeked of fresh fish. As soon as they were aware of it, Toulon and Chalky sat up, their tails quivering and their whiskers stiffly pointed forward, craning their necks. Westcott reached into the bag and tossed two live shrimp to the planks of the quarterdeck. They sprang at once, chittering madly, and sat by the shrimp, lifting and patting them with one paw, sure that they were something good to eat, but unsure of how to go about it.

“Anything else of note, sir?” Lewrie prompted.

“Not really, sir,” Westcott told him. “I enquired, as casually as I could, about French or Spanish vessels putting in here, and they said they couldn’t recall any, in years. They hadn’t seen any French money, either, though Spanish silver coins might as well be the legal tender in America. I don’t know if the U.S. Government actually has a mint of their own. Our shillings and half-crowns were more than welcome. They spoke a lot of barter, sir.”

Toulon and Chalky were making eager mrrs, slapping their shrimp in play-kill, and leaping in alarm when the shrimp limply thrashed in return. Chalky finally nipped one and ran off a few feet with it, but dropped it when its antennae wriggled.

“Just think of ’em as big cockroaches, lads,” Lewrie told them. “Ye have no trouble with those.”

“One thing in our favour, sir,” Lt. Westcott pointed out, “the land round here is so marshy and flat, and the coastal forests so low, that any ship of decent size, with her masts standing, can be spotted quite easily.”

“Unless they’re of shallow-enough draught to make their way up the maze of rivers, and round a bend or two where the trees are tall enough to hide them,” Lewrie rejoined with a glum look. “Back of the marshes, there’s white oak and live oak forests, an hundred years old or better. Hmpf! Perhaps we ought to come back with barricoes of silver, and buy prime shipbuilding oak from America. We’ve scavenged our own forests, and half of Hamburg’s exports, just t’keep the Navy in good repair… much less keep up with new construction. Come, sir… take a look at this chart of the Georgia coast round Savannah. It gives me a headache.”

It wasn’t that far South of where Reliant lay fetched-to, but it was rather daunting to contemplate how many inlets and sounds, how many rivers feeding into the ocean, into those sounds, lay before them, all of which could harbour enemy ships behind the myriad of fertile barrier islands, the Sea Islands.

Round the mouth of the Savannah River, there was Turtle Island and Jones Island on the North bank, with broad streams leading round and behind them. To the South bank, there was Big Tybee Island nearest the sea, with Cockspur Island and McQueen’s Island between the mainland and Tybee Roads. Further South was Wassaw Sound below Big Tybee Island, with another snake’s nest of tributaries, and the mouth of the Wilmington River which led deep inland. South of Wassaw Island, lay Ossabow Sound, another deep gash, with Racoon Key at its upper reach, fed by the Vernon River, and the Little and the Big Ogeechee Rivers.

“It gets worse,” Lewrie said, running a finger down the chart to St. Catherine’s Sound, Sapelo Sound, Doboy Sound, and Altamaha Sound at the mouth of yet another long, inland river. The charts showed a small port, Brunswick, near Kings Bay and St. Simons Sound, further South of there, then Jekyll Sound, St. Andrews Sound, and Cumberland Sound (past islands of the same names), where the St. Mary’s River fed into Cumberland Sound, and that river was the border between the state of Georgia and Spanish Florida.

“Good Lord, but this could take ’til mid-century, sir,” Lieutenant Westcott commented with his head cocked over in awe.

“Once we’ve recovered all our boats, I wish us to get under way and come to anchor in Tybee Roads, if there’s enough daylight to see what we’re doing when we get there,” Lewrie said, stepping off the short distance with a brass divider, and measuring the span against the mileage legend on the side of the chart. “Come morning, we will signal for a pilot… assumin’ we can get up-river with our depth of keel. That failing, I’ll take one of the barges up- river to confer with our Consul in Savannah. God, another couple of days in flummery!”

“Whilst I and the other officers can look forward to even more fishing and ‘yachting’, sir?” Lt. Westcott said with a snicker.

“Round the mouth of the river, perhaps,” Lewrie said, tossing the brass dividers into the binnacle cabinet. “To probe all of these sounds, you’d need the rest of our wee squadron, and all their boats. We’ve been away too long as it is, and God knows what they’ve gotten into.”

“Aye, sir,” Westcott replied. “I shall get way on the ship directly.”

“Lord, lord, a whole bushel o’ shrimps!” Mr. Cooke marvelled once he’d clapped eyes upon them. “Lookee heah, Mistah Yeovill! Dey be enough fo’ de Cap’m’s table and de whole wardroom!”

“They look like bugs!” Midshipman Entwhistle disparaged.

“Dey eat good, sah,” Cooke assured him, “oncet ya boil ’em up an’ peel ’em. Folks up in Charleston ain’t high on ’em, but back on Jamaica, we know how t’do ’em right.”

“Nothing for the cockpit?” Midshipman Grainger asked, sounding plaintive. “Not even a morsel for our mess?”

“Beg pahdon fo’ askin’, Mistah Grainger, sah, but… what’d you bring back?” Cooke asked. The ship’s cook, was a big and burly fellow with a rumbling and loud bass voice, and could seem quite daunting to those who did not know his pleasant nature.

“Well, a drum fish, a sheepshead, and some mullet,” Grainger tallied up.

“Yah messman kin bake ’em for yah,” Cooke told him.

“I bought a decent lot of blue crab at Port Royal,” the Purser piped up. “For a nominal sum, I could provide a few to the cockpit’s mess.”

“Shrimps, and crab!” Cooke barked in glee. “Mistah Yeovill, I do b’lieve we could do up a boil fo’ de cockpit, de wardroom, and de Cap’m.”

“I’ll add mine to that,” Lt. Westcott eagerly offered, waving his sack of shrimp. He tossed it to Cooke, who emptied it into the bushel basket, along with the rest of the shrimp.

“Beg pardon, Mister Westcott, but all our boats are secured,” Bosun Sprague reported, squinting dubiously at the basket’s contents. “People eat those things?” he muttered.

“Very well, Mister Sprague,” Westcott said after looking over to Lewrie. At his nod, he further said, “Pipe ‘Stations’ for getting under way, if you please.”

* * *

Just a bit before a spectacular sundown, HMS Reliant rounded up into wind, took in sail, and dropped her best bower to come to anchor in Tybee Roads. Once the hands of the Afterguard had brailed up the spanker and mizen tops’l and had coiled up and stowed away all of the running rigging lines, Lewrie could take a slow stroll round the quarterdeck and look outward to see what he could see, and to savour the sunset. The heat of the day was going, and the light winds blowing from the Sou’east were pleasantly, almost tropically, warm and comforting. Reliant had not yet lit her taffrail lanthorns, belfry lamp, or deck lanthorns for the night, though the other ships anchored in Tybee Roads already had. He thought of fetching a telescope, but the daylight was fading too quickly for close study. Even without one he could determine that most of the anchored