his breeches. The boisterous seas grew steeper as they felt the shallowing seabed rise under them.
Kydd held his tongue. This was a lightly manned boat under fast sail – he feared how it would be for deeply laden craft under oars.
They approached the beach, Ferguson leaning forward in his eagerness to sight ashore. ‘Up ’n’ down, if you please,’ he rapped. Kydd chose his moment, then put down the tiller.
Broadside to the waves, the boat rolled wickedly, bringing cries of alarm from the soldiers, but Ferguson held on grimly as they wallowed and bucketed along. With the wind abeam, the boat was canted higher on the weather side, which served to keep the worst seas at bay, bobbing skyward as a massive swell drove beneath and then, with a precipitous lurch, dropping dizzily as the wave charged inshore.
They went about after half a mile and did a pass further up the coast. There was no gunfire or sudden movement, and Ferguson abruptly turned to Kydd. ‘Put these men on the land, sir.’
The two soldiers, hanging on for their lives, looked back in dismay and Kydd tried to smile encouragingly, despite his misgivings. ‘Poulden, ready the oars. I’ll bear up into the wind and at that instant brail the main, let fly fore-sheets and then out oars.’
Sail doused, it was nearly impossible to keep head to sea. The seething combers met the bow, flinging it skyward to crunch back at an awkward angle, which frantic work at the oars could only just meet. Kydd could see that even if he brought the boat to land through the surf they would never get off again, given this force of wind and sea.
‘Set the fores’l ’n’ jib!’ he roared, above the thunder of the waves. They clawed off, every man soaked and Doud frantically bailing over the side. ‘We can’t make it, sir!’ Kydd bawled, at the hunched-over figure of the general.
Ferguson looked up and met his eyes. If a well-found ship’s pinnace could not get through to the shore, then sending in heavily laden, crowded assault boats would risk catastrophe. ‘No. I’ve seen enough. We return.’
At the flagship further out, the seas gave little hint of their bull-rampaging power at the shoreline. ‘Sir, it’s my firm opinion they’ll never get on shore in this,’ Ferguson told Baird urgently, as the general came up to meet the returning party. ‘We must not attempt it.’
Baird looked at him as if he were demented. ‘Not proceed? Sir, by your own report the enemy has not reached the landing place. You’re proposing I suspend operations, recall the boats and lie in idleness while the enemy finds time to complete his deployment?’
To shoreward of
The tension on the quarterdeck was electric.
‘Sir! Might I . . . ?’ Kydd interposed, unsure of the proper form for contradicting a commander-in-chief.
‘Captain?’
‘I fear General Ferguson is right. These beaches are open to the full force of the Atlantic. Our seamen will try their best but with all those soldiers on board . . . That is to say, with their oars they’ll need . . .’ He trailed off at Baird’s thunderous expression.
‘You’re trying to say the Navy can’t find a way to land my men on an unopposed shore?’ Baird said, with biting savagery. ‘That a vital strategic move against the enemy, devised and planned by His Majesty’s War Council in Whitehall, is to be overborne by – by you, sir?’
Despite his vitriol, Kydd felt for the man – with all his detailed plans and hopes, he now had an impossible choice: to go ahead and risk disaster before his very eyes or wait for someone to tell him that he could go – and take responsibility when he was bloodily and decisively beaten on the beaches by a prepared enemy.
‘Er, may the commodore and I consult, sir?’ Kydd said evenly, seeing Popham arriving on the quarterdeck.
At Baird’s grunt, he motioned Popham aside. ‘Sir, the conditions are insupportable. This westerly has kicked up a long swell that’s pounding the sand. No boat can live in that surf. You must . . .’
The commodore’s brow creased and he paused before he replied. ‘I see, Mr Kydd. You will appreciate, however, that this cannot be received by the commander-in-chief with anything but resentment and more than a trifle of anxiety but I will speak with him.’
He approached the fuming general and took him by the arm. ‘David, I really do feel we must discuss this further. Shall we go below?’
A little later Popham returned alone. ‘Well, now. The general has a pretty dilemma but I flatter myself we have a naval plan that shall see him mollified.’
Kydd’s spirits rose. ‘Then how shall we get them ashore, sir?’ That was the nub, but the commodore probably had ideas such as pontoons on a line through the breakers or—
‘We don’t.’
‘Sir?’
‘Consider. We had notions of landing here because we had a chance of getting ’em ashore and established before the enemy had time to advance up the coast to contest the landing. Now he has the time. Therefore do you not think that our primary purpose is to dissuade him from such a course? To remain where he is and allow us to land here when the weather improves?’
Popham’s look of smug superiority irked Kydd, but he would play the game. This was the man who’d devised a radically new system of signals that had been adopted by the whole Navy and whom he’d witnessed devise an ingenious solution for delivering Fulton’s torpedoes when his submarine was seen as not practical.
‘Er, a feint as will draw his attention away?’
‘Umm?’
It was beginning to come. He remembered Baird’s reasoning behind his decision to land in this particular location. ‘Make a motion in his rear, say Camps Bay, as will persuade him we intend to cross, um, Kluffnick Pass —’
