King`s Captain

damned by everyone from Land's End to John O' Groats… time runnin' out on 'em… one word'd send 'em to their knees in gratitude, most-like. We could…

Cheering interrupted him, making him snarl petulantly; a reedy, thin distant cheering from down the line of anchored ships that began at the far end and swelled towards Proteus like the onset of a gale. He went to the bulwarks to see what nonsense had them going this time. Another parade of boats and bands?

'Oh, Christ!' he gasped, espying a cloud of sail offshore. 'A glass! Now!' he bade, turning his head to see Midshipman Sevier near the binnacle cabinet. 'My glass, Mister Sevier, quickly!'

Once he had it in his hand, he slung it over his shoulder like a carbine and scampered into the larboard mizzenmast shrouds 'til he was above the cat-harpings near the fighting-top.

Dutch… French, he fretted, opening the tube out of its full extent. Panting a bit too, and damning the enforced idlness of these last few days; surely it wasn't his fault that a brief ascent winded him! There! Enemy ships, come from the Texel before Admiral Duncan could take up his blockade… the van division of a feared invasion?

No, they were beam-reaching off a Northerly, which would blow a 'dead-muzzier' for the Texel 's narrow North shore exit, so they couldn't be the Dutch Fleet.

French then? No again, he grumbled. They'd have had to come up-Channel, first, weather the Straits of Dover, the Downs, and Goodwin Sands.

Channel Fleet, itself, come to shoot the Nore ships into submission? Well, maybe, but the tail-end ships seemed as if they'd come from the North, scudding off the Northerly winds before they wheeled about inline-ahead to follow the others which were coming in for the Queen's Channel and the outer anchorage on a soldier's wind.

' Duncan!' he cried with glee. 'The North Sea Fleet, ordered to the Nore to put the mutiny down! Someone found his nutmegs, at last! Now we'll see something, by God!'

He lifted his glass again, leaning back into the shrouds, with one arm cocked through the rat-lines, smug with victory, and pitying the poor fools who were cheering the sight of the arriving ships. In a half-hour, when they opened their gun-ports and ran out their batteries, they'd be laughing out the other side of their necks!

'Ah…' He shuddered.

Perhaps not.

For atop the on-coming line-of-battle ships' foremasts, he saw a dread, red plainness to the flags they flew. No royal cantons, no cross of St. George or St. Andrew…

Plain, stark red battle flags-mutiny flags!

Aye, the North Sea Fleet had arrived. In open rebellion!

CHAPTER THIRTY

A bloody, unmitigated damned disaster!' Lewrie fumed, pacing furiously from starboard to larboard in the day-cabin of his quarters, while his remaining officers and midshipmen stood or sat.

'Enough to make a man weep, sir,' Mr. Winwood spat, looking as close as he'd ever come to letting his despair overpower him. 'Thirteen sail of the line they have now. Nigh on ten thousand seamen and marines in rebellion. Encouraged…' he trailed off in a sigh.

'There's been battles won with less,' Midshipman Catterall had the lack of tact to say almost under his breath, and even Mr. Adair's warning elbow in his ribs only caused him to grunt and glower back in ill humor. He was senior midshipman, two years older than Adair, and the cock of the orlop cockpit; ever the nudger, not the nudgee:

'Oh, yes, there have been, Mister Catterall,' Lewrie sniped back. 'Thank you so much for bringing that historical fact to our attention!'

'Uhm, sorry sir,' Catterall reddened, trying to pull his head in like a tortoise. He found something intricate in the Turkey carpet's design to be fascinated by.

The heart of Admiral Duncan's North Sea Fleet, the bulk of his two-decker, 64-gun warships- Montagu, Belliqueux, Repulse, Standard, Lion, and Nassau, along with the Inspector sloop and the fireship Comet__had come in around 5:00 p.m. the previous afternoon. Captain William Bligh's HMS Director had been part of that fleet, but had mutinied whilst anchored at the Nore, so no one expected that Admiral Duncan had much left to work with, if he still intended to blockade the Texel channels. If it came to a fight with Channel Fleet to put down this mutiny-if one could still call it a strictly naval mutiny and not a burgeoning revolution-it would be a close-run thing, even if Channel Fleet owned larger, more powerful 74s, 80s, and ships of the 1st and 2nd Rate, compared to the weaker, shallower draught 64s from Great Yarmouth, more useful near the Dutch shoals.

If it came to a fight, Lewrie glumly suspected, it'd be no fight at all. Channel Fleet might have been saved from mutiny, most of the grievances satisfied. But would that be good enough for them to fire upon other British tars? Should that come, it'd surely be the end of the Royal Navy. Most-like, he imagined, the two fleets would meet and blend, overthrow authority again, and would then be fully provisioned, at sea! beyond the reach of reason. Not just the Royal Navy though, oh, no… perhaps it would be the tiny spark in the pan, like that one at Lexington in the lost American Colonies, that had begun the revolt against the Crown; and Britain would be torn asunder. Republicans and Jacobinist Levellers versus Royalists; hard-pressed as the commoners were by the demands of the war and the new taxes, it might be wealthy against poor too! The Irish, of course, encouraged to throw off the yoke of English occupation. Scotland too, uneasily forced into submission since the last rising of the clans in 'The 45.'

'There is the possibility the new arrivals are not victualled as well as the original mutinous ships, sir,' Mr. Coote offered in a hopeful gesture. 'And with supplies now refused them… perhaps they cannot stay here at the Nore for very long.'

'I rather doubt that, Mister Coote,' Lieutenant Wyman sighed, 'though it is wishful. They were to all accounts provisioned for an extended spell of blockade duty off the Dutch coast. From what I heard from our rumour-mill, they defected after receiving sailing orders to join Admiral Duncan. Meet him at some 'rondy,' somewhere off the coast…'

Lt. Wyman did not wear disappointment well; he looked like he'd aged ten years in the last two days and was not as prone to appearing surprised or startled any longer. Most un-lieutenant-like, he slouched on the starboard- side upholstered settee with his legs out and his hands in his breeches pockets, like one of Hogarth's sketches of an idle roisterer with a killing 'head,' the morning after.

'And where do they think they'd get provisions, with every port closed to 'em, Mister Coote?' Lewrie fretted. 'Aye, most-like they are well-provisioned for up to six months at sea. Gawd…!'

'Can't last that long, can it, sir?' Midshipman Adair queried. 'Else the wind shifts, sooner or later, and the Dutch get out to sea. The French Fleet at Brest bound for Ireland… we've been fortunate in the weather so far, sir.'

'That's so, sir.' The Sailing Master nodded, stuffing tobacco into his clay church warden pipe. 'But a man who'd depend on weather for his salvation is the hugest sort of fool. I cannot but think that the Merciful Hand of Providence has controlled the contrary winds this long during our travails, sirs-to grant His most favoured nation a space in which to save ourselves. But such Divine Mercy is not forever.'

'A tiny space,' Lewrie mused, mussing his hair as he came to a stop behind his desk, for a moment envying Mr. Winwood the comfort of his pipe and tobacco. He'd never taken up the custom, and the time he had been forced to smoke, with the Muskogee Indians during the Revolution, hadn't exactly made him a devotee of the Noble Weed. 'Is it not true, Mister Winwood, that 'God helps those, who help themselves'? As you say, it's only the fools who lift their hands in supplication, depending on the Lord, not their own efforts, to save their skins.'

'Well, there are some believers, sir,' Winwood winced, 'not in the Established Church, of course, who hold that