Reefs and Shoals

panes in the starboard quarter-gallery, since it was not used as a lavatory, so Lewrie had to pull out his long shirt- tail to scrub himself a clear patch, but all he accomplished was a worse smear. His curiosity piqued, he dashed for the door to the waist and ran up the ladderway to the quarterdeck in his shirt sleeves.

“Captain’s on deck,” Midshipman Warburton cautioned the idling quarteredeck watch, and the officers who had come up before their own supper for a smoke, or a breath of air.

“Glass, Mister Warburton!” Lewrie snapped.

“Something amiss, sir?” Lt. Westcott asked, coming to the starboard bulwarks a step behind his captain.

“Those two sailin’ barges yonder, sir,” Lewrie said over his shoulder. “They’re not closin’ with those anchored ships; they’re on their way to sea. Lading’s done for the day, so where are they goin’, I wonder. Why are they bound out just at sundown, not…? Thankee, Mister Warburton,” he said as the requested telescope was fetched.

He couldn’t see all that much, even if the barges were only a mile or so off. The telescope was a day-glass, with little light-gathering strength. A night glass would have shown more detail, but its assortment of internal lenses resulted in an image that was upside-down and backwards.

“They look t’be about fourty or fifty feet, or so, two-masted, and…” Lewrie muttered. “Do they look like the run-of-the-mill barges you’ve seen, Mister Westcott?”

“I suppose so, sir,” the First Lieutenant admitted sheepishly, “I fear I’ve not given any of them more than a passing glance. Just work-boats,” he said with a shrug.

“Have any of you seen any o’ them goin’ to sea, or entering the Roads from seaward?” Lewrie asked.

His sudden appearance on the quarterdeck had drawn the other two Lieutenants, and the Marine Officer, from the idle gathering, and to stand near him by the starboard bulwarks in a befuddled pack.

“I cannot say that we have, sir,” Lt. Spendlove, the most earnest of them, confessed.

“As Mister Westcott said, sir… just work-boats,” Lieutenant Merriman seconded. “Strings of them come down- river each morning, and return to Savannah in the afternoons, mostly.”

“Or, they spend the night alongside the merchant ships, then sail the next morning, sir,” Lt. Spendlove added.

“Is their going to sea suspicious, though, sir?” Lt. Westcott asked. “There are plantations on almost every island along the coast, I heard, so… they must get goods from Savannah somehow.”

“After dark, though?” Lewrie pointed out. “It’d make more sense to sail from the Savannah docks at dawn, and get to Saint Simon’s, or Jekyll Island, or Brunswick port, in late afternoon, in safety, and not risk the barges to the shoals and such in the dark.”

“Even goods required instanter, sir?” Marine Lt. Simoock asked.

“Instanter, my foot!” Lt. Merriman scoffed with a laugh. “It would take a whole day to send an order by boat from Brunswick, and a day to fill it, then a third day, weather permitting, to ship it down to them.”

“Instanter’s what you have at hand, and snatch up quickly,” Lt. Spendlove added.

“Well, I’m no mariner, I will admit,” Simcock replied, “so I will trust to your seasoned judgement.”

“There is the possibility that those two barges are from one of the Sea Islands further South, sir, or belong to a Brunswick merchant, returning home,” Westcott slowly speculated. “If their masters know the waters well enough, and stand far enough offshore during the night, they may not think a night passage all that much of a risk.”

“An everyday or weekly occurrence, then, sir?” Lewrie asked, lowering his telescope, and wondering if he was grasping at straws in the need to discover something criminal to justify the days that he had so far wasted chasing after Will-O’-The-Wisps. “Possibly,” he allowed… grudgingly.

Wish I could send a cutter in chase of ’em, Lewrie thought; or shadow ’em and see what they’re up to.

He closed the tubes of the telescope with a thump and heaved a deep sigh, partly in disappointment, and partly to calm his excitement and appear “captainly” to his officers and men. He turned and handed it back to Midshipman Warburton with a polite “Thankee.”

I send a cutter t’board ’em in the dark, or lurk so bald-faced in American waters, I could halfway start a war! he told himself.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” Lewrie said to one and all, on his way to the head of the starboard ladderway, then paused at the top. “There will be some of those lighters alongside with the Purser’s goods tomorrow. Without appearin’ too curious, let’s take her measure, and ask about the barge trade. And, keep a closer eye on the traffic in the Roads, hey? Bon appetit!” he bade them on his way to his supper.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

The sailing barge from Savannah came alongside Reliant in the middle of the Forenoon, and Lewrie made sure that he was on deck for her arrival, as were his off-watch officers, Bosun Sprague, and his Mate, Wheeler. Lines from her bow and stern were taken aboard to be bound to the frigate’s mizen and foremast chains, and the barge crew heaved over great hairy mats of ravelled rope to cushion the contact between the hulls.

There were light articles of cargo on the barge’s deck, containing live chickens and layer hens, some squealing piglets, and sides of fresh-slaughtered beef in jute sacks, sacks of flour and cornmeal, and casks of spirits, along with wooden cases of goods for the officers’ wardroom, the Mids’ cockpit, and the captain’s cabins.

Lewrie stood idle by the mizen mast shrouds to look down into her. The barge was closer to fifty feet on the range of the deck than his earlier estimate of fourty, very wide-beamed, and flush-decked with a single cargo hatch between her masts, and smaller crew hatches at bow and stern. Her master was White, as was her helmsman, though the rest of the small crew were Black, most likely slaves.

“We’ll have the light goods, first,” Bosun Sprague bellowed to the barge crew. “Lines comin’ down, and we’ll drag them up the loading skids.”

“Is she about the same size as the barges you saw at Savannah, Mister Cadbury?” Lewrie asked the Purser as he stood on the quarterdeck with a ledger book and a pencil, to cheek off each bought item as it came aboard.

“About average, sir,” Cadbury told him. “There are some smaller, thirty or thirty-five feet or so,” Cadbury told him. “I would say that this one is representative of the bulk of the barge trade. Many of them serve plantations and hamlets up the river, as well. As for the barges you noted leaving port last evening, sir, they may have been bound for the Sea Island plantations landings, for the channels behind the islands.”

“Out to sea just long enough to enter Wassaw or Ossabaw Sounds, then go up the other rivers?” Lewrie asked, leaning most “lubberly” on the bulwarks where the quarterdeck ended and the larboard sail-tending gangway began, with his arms crossed.

“Very likely, sir,” Mr. Cadbury agreed with a primly happy expression, glad to be of assistance. “While I am not a ‘scaly fish’ of experienced seamanship, this barge does strike me that its upper rails are tall enough to weather a stiff beat to weather, well heeled over, long enough at least for a short sea journey from one sound to the next.”

“As beamy as a Dutch lugger, aye,” Lewrie judged, “so she’d be quick to make leeway. And, from here, it doesn’t look as if her hold is all that deep. She might not draw much more than seven or eight feet. Mister Rossyngton? Are you ready, sir?”

“Aye, sir,” their slyest and cheekiest Midshipman eagerly said.

“Then pray do go on and be all boyish curiosity,” Lewrie told him. Rossyngton dodged a crate of chickens and several sacks of meal to the open larboard entry-port and did a quick scramble down the man-ropes and battens to hop aboard the barge, ostensibly to oversee the ship’s working-party who would strap up the heavier items of cargo and prepare them to be hoisted aboard with the main course yard as a crane.

“And when you were on the docks, Mister Cadbury, did you see or hear anything odd?” Lewrie further asked, turning to face the Purser once more.

“Well, not really, sir,” Cadbury replied, half his attention on the goods coming up in a cargo net, and eager to go down to the waist to check items off. “I saw no war-like goods, beyond a few kegs of gunpowder in the chandleries,