Reefs and Shoals

“‘My old’, and ‘Cotton’, and Treadwell, are one and the same, Bury!” Lewrie hooted, loud enough to make his cats start. “Chaptal calls him ‘ mon vieux ’ not in the ‘old friend’ sense, but because this Treadwell looks old, no matter he’s no older than me. He calls him coton because he has a very full and curly head of white hair, as white as carded and washed cotton! My Purser, Mister Cadbury, met him at Savannah, and remarked on his appearance. Now!”

Lewrie sprang from the settee and went a bit forward to the starboard-side chart space, fetching a book off the fiddled shelf to bring back into better light. He sat down and opened it, running a finger down the tightly spaced entries, squinting over the wee type.

Damme, do I need spectacles? Lewrie thought, vexed; I ain’t that old, surely!

“According to the ephemeris, Lieutenant Bury, the next dark of the moon is in eleven days,” Lewrie said, looking up from the book at last. “Eleven days from now, once Thorn rejoins us, I intend that the squadron be off the Cumberland Sound and up the Saint Mary’s River t’see what we can catch. Pen ’em in and row up to destroy ’em, or catch ’em as they try to run. Either way, we put paid to this fiendish business!”

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

“We will not get far up the Saint Mary’s, I fear to say, sir,” Mr. Caldwell, the Sailing Master, cautioned as he, Lewrie, and Lieutenant Westcott huddled over the dining table two days later, where one of the purchased American-made charts was spread out.

“Not with Reliant, no,” Lewrie said, lifting Chalky off to set him back on the deck, “and not with a cat in the way. At the best, we might ascend the river as far as the narrows ’twixt Cumberland Island and Amelia Island, then come to anchor athwart the channel with springs on the cables to block any escape with our guns. If these soundings are right, there seems to be about thirty to fourty feet of depth for her. From there, it’ll be up to the sloops and gunboats.”

Actually, the American-drawn chart, told them little. The river entrance was called the Saint Mary’s, the bay to seaward was named the Cumberland Sound, but once in the entrance, the river itself was named Cumberland Sound, no matter its narrowness.

There was sufficient depth in the entrance narrows between Cumberland Island and Amelia Island on the South bank, with a width of half a mile. Once past the narrows, the Cumberland widened to about two-thirds of a mile and swung Nor’west to make a fairly large bay before trending more Northerly and narrowing once more to less than a half mile. If one followed the main course of the Cumberland Sound far enough, the chart finally referred to it as the Cumberland River, and fed into the much larger St. Andrew Sound below Jekyll Island.

Spooked privateers, pirates, or smugglers could flee up that way and make the sea, or scuttle up one of the minor rivers or creeks and run for miles before they turned narrow and too shallow.

Making pursuit worse, barely half a mile past the entrance to the Cumberland, the Amelia River fed in from the South behind the island of the same name, and snaked round before being joined by the Bells River and Lanceford Creek.

And just where the Cumberland veered North lay yet another of those joinings; the real St. Mary’s came in from the West, but not an hundred yards off the river’s mouth there was the Jolly River, which ox-bowed through swamps and marshes from the Sou’west!

“There’s more waterways than a dog has fleas, it appears, sir,” Lt. Westcott glumly said. “The privateers could flee up any one of them as soon as they spot us. We will have to block this Amelia River as soon as we enter… unless that’s where they’re anchored. Then we’ll have to be quick about it to reach this second fork, where the Jolly River and the Saint Mary’s enter. We might need double the number of boats.” Westcott was impatient, bored, and he would pick nits.

“I see no notes indicating the rate of the currents,” Lewrie complained, scanning the margins of the chart, “nor are there any tide measurements. I wonder if our privateers and smugglers lay out only one anchor, or two, depending on how strong the currents are, or if the tide flow is stronger. Depending on how high up past the entrance they moor, of course. If by one, they might be stern-on to us, and slowed by the currents when they try to cut and run.”

“But we would be slowed at the same rate in our pursuit, sir,” the sailing Master just had to point out.

“Our best bet is to catch them sleeping,” Lt. Westcott suggested, “before they realise we’re among them. We will be under sail, or under sweeps and oars, and we could catch them before they wake, cut their cables, and hoist sail.”

“Or man their guns,” Lewrie added.

“And manning their guns at the same time, aye sir,” Westcott agreed. “Just where, though…” He trailed off, making a humming noise through his nose and drumming the point of his pencil on the chart. “How high up must we go before we meet up with them, that is the question. How far would they go to feel safe from prying eyes?”

This lower-most part of the Georgia coast was much like the marshes to either side of the Savannah River; it was as flat as the top of a dining table, and most of the shoreline maritime forests were wind-gnarled and did not grow very high, though they were dense, a mix of hardwoods and slender pines. Perhaps a mile or so inland along one of the minor rivers or creeks, in still-water sloughs behind the Sea Islands, there might be cypresses and live oaks which would screen the top-masts of ships from observation from the sea, but… where?

“Recall what those two sailors told us,” Lewrie called to mind. “They boasted that if caught by an American Revenue cutter, they’d hug the South bank of the Saint Mary’s and be in Spanish territory. And, if someone like us came along, they’d row over to the North bank and be ‘safe as babbies in their mither’s arms?’” he said with a chuckle as he mimicked an Irish lilt. “The entrance to the Cumberland Sound, and the wide part of the river to the mouth of the Saint Mary’s, is divided down the middle ’twixt Spain and the United States, as is the Saint Mary’s itself. They get behind Cumberland Island and they’re out of sight from seaward. They get into the mouth of the Saint Mary’s, and go up about half a mile, and they would be all but invisible. There,” he said tapping a finger on the chart, “or here, a bit up the Amelia River, are the likeliest places, I should think.”

Mr. Caldwell pulled a brass divider from his pocket, laid its spread points along the half-mile scale on the chart and stepped off the distance from the entrance narrows to the mouth of the St. Mary’s River proper, then grunted. “We shall either come upon them almost at once in the Amelia River, or have to go about two miles further on to the mouth of the Saint Mary’s, and perhaps another half mile up-river. You will wish to strike just at dawn, I would assume, sir?”

“At murky, sleepy pre-dawn, if we can pull that off, depending on the river current and the tide,” Lewrie eagerly told him. “Are your books sufficient, Mister Caldwell, or should we gut a few chickens to read the auguries?”

Caldwell raised a brow and harumphed, in good humour over his captain’s jape. He turned to his tide table book. “That may be asking a lot, sir. Eight or nine days from now? Hmm.”

While Caldwell hummed, hawed, and pondered, Chalky hopped back atop the table and sprawled on his back, belly exposed and his forepaws waving for attention. Westcott reached out to teasingly touch him on the back legs and belly, making Chalky squirm, writhe, and lash his tail madly, trying to seize the finger for a nip and gnaw.

“Too quick for you today, hey?” Westcott gloated. “Ow!”

“Twine or a length of wool’s safer,” Lewrie cautioned too late.

“Ahem,” Caldwell announced at last, clearing his throat in preface of his “ruling” on the matter. “This part of the American coast had never been adequately surveyed, sir, and any estimates of local tides are mathematical extrapolations from better-surveyed ports up the coast, such as Savannah or Port Royal. Loose ‘lick and a promise’ extrapolations, mind. It would appear that the most desirable high tides occur two or three hours after midnight, and the rise might be between three and a half to five feet. This chart describes only the sketchiest attempts at measuring it. The low tides occur mid-morning.”

“Damn,” Lewrie groused.

“The ebb below mean low-tide depths marked on the chart, though, are reckoned to