Captain Lewrie's good fortune!'
'Why, that fellow he shot was the very same Guillaume Choundas we dealt with in the Caribbean,' Adair added. 'Shot his arm clean off with that Ferguson breech-loading rifle, from two hundred yards away, or better. Choundas was in charge of all the privateers working out of the isle of Guadeloupe, and 'twas his frigate we battered to kindling right in the harbour of Bas-Terre before she could get a way on. And that Captain Choundas, the ugly bastard, well…'tween the American Revolution and the French'un, Choundas and the Captain crossed hawses somewhere in the Far East, too. We put paid to that ogre… even if the Americans did end up capturing him.'
'But 'twas the Captain's doing, Mister Adair,' Mr. Winwood stuck in, 'that we cooperated so closely… yet so carefully… with the new American Navy during their brief little not-quite-a-war with the French back in '98. Bless me, but we led the Yankee Doodles out of English Harbour, right to that French arms convoy bound for Saint Domingue, and Choundas's clutch of warships and privateers, too.'
'Don't forget Saint Vincent,' Lt. Devereux said, after he'd topped up his port and passed it leftwards down the table. 'Jester, I'd heard, was on her way home with despatches, in need of a refit at the time, when she stumbled into Admiral Jervis's fleet. Think of it, Mister Urquhart… Nelson in HMS Captain, with the Culloden, daunting a whole wing of the Spanish fleet, up against two-decker, three-decker ships of the line, and the Santissima Trinidad, the world's only four-decker, before they could assail the rear of our fleet. And, right by their side was Captain Lewrie, and HMS Jester! A Sixth Rate, by Heaven, which had no business engaging anything bigger than her, especially not a ship of the line, blazing away with her nine-pounders and drawing the fire of the world's biggest warship!'
'Captain'd tell ye different,' Mr. Winwood countered, coming as close as he might to an outright laugh. 'I mentioned it once whilst we dined, and he swore that Jester was just sailing along alee of Nelson, minding her own business, and acting as a signals-repeating ship, but Nelson suddenly wheeled out of line and nigh would have rammed Jester amidships, had she not hauled her own wind and come about as well. As the Captain told it, it was 'ram you, or damn you'… that Jester and he were pushed, and courage had nothing to do with it. He did fire on the Santissima Trinidad, since it seemed the thing to do, but that
she was far out of range of Jester''s guns, and far out of range of her own, and why the Dons would waste an entire four-deck broadside on his wee ship, he still has no idea. Took 'em a month to re-load and run out.'
'But Admiral Jervis thought it brave,' Lt. Adair said. 'That's why the Captain wears the gold medal for the Battle of Cape Saint Vincent. Told he was daft as bats, in point of fact, and not to do that sort of thing again, but he did put his name forward for the medal.'
'After that… before it, I can't quite recall,' Lt. Gamble said with a frown of concentration, 'Jester was in the Adriatic with a small squadron. A few months before 'Old Jarvy' had to fall back on Gibraltar and abandon the Mediterranean. Oh! That was definitely during Napoleon's Italian Campaign, and the French badly needed Adriatic oak to build new warships, or repair the ones they still had, and the Captain went through their merchantmen like a hot knife through butter. Fought a vicious pack of local pirates… Serbian or something… to save a bunch of English men and women. Got lured ashore by them, and almost lost his life before his First Lieutenant got leery, and sent a Marine party ashore. The pirates had taken a Venetian ship, just full of Catholics and 'White Muslims,' whom they hated worse than anything, and were simply butchering, for fun, 'fore the Captain got there. That is where Captain Lewrie met Mistress Theoni Connor, widow of a man in the Ionian Islands ' currant trade, and, ahem… well, saved her, and her little boy's, life. The pirates put her up for auction, and the Captain bought time by bidding her price up, /heard.'
Lt. Urquhart raised a brow over that'un, for, while he was not a rakehell, and had been raised in a strict but loving, religiously observant home, still and all, he was a young man of all his parts, and not averse to a 'run ashore,' so long as precautions were taken, and pleasures could be taken discreetly. That was one incident that he'd heard about Capt. Lewrie. A Greek woman, a hellish-fetching widow, rich as King Croesus off the currant trade, and Britons' insatiable desire for them, who lived so flambouyantly in London, had had a child out of wedlock with a Navy officer, was his mistress during the time he was ashore…? Capt. Alan Lewrie's name had been linked to her, and the boy-child was, so he'd heard, named Michael Alan Connor! Aha!
'Theoni Kavares Connor, the one you mean, sir?' he asked the only-slightly- discomfited Lt. Gamble. 'She and the Captain…?'
'Aye, that's the one,' Lt. Adair supplied. 'She came down to Sheerness and took shore lodgings, once Proteus was repaired after the Battle of Camperdown, and got orders for the West Indies. The Captain did, ah… spend a night or two ashore, but…'
'Long before that, just as Proteus was fitting out, just before the Nore Mutiny, well…,' Mr. Winwood intoned, and heaved a deep sigh. 'Now, foolish as it sounds, there was something fey about her, too, a… Celtic, pagan thing that was extremely odd and… disturbing.'
'Tell it me,' Lt. Urquhart asked of him, even more intrigued.
The Mutiny at the great naval anchorage of the Nore, which was much more dangerous and rebellious against King and Country than ever the more respectful Spithead Mutiny had been, had begun just as demands had been fulfilled among the Channel Fleet. Lewrie had just been 'Made Post' into HMS Proteus, fresh from the private yards at Chatham, where she had first tasted water under another captain, and the manner of her launching had, as Mr. Winwood had said, been extremely odd.
The Admiralty's chosen name was to be Proteus, a Greek sea-god, but, came the day when the bands, the crowds, the dignitaries, and the Church representatives had turned out for the celebration, a retired Rear-Admiral who, at the moment, had been filled with more brandy than sense, and at the nagging of his myth-laden wife, who had been simply besotted with the newly popular tales published by the blind Irish poet O'Carolan and an host of others, cried out, 'Success to his Majesty's Ship… Merlin!' as he hoisted his glass to her and drained it off, just as the last restraining props had been sawn through, and a gasp had arisen, and the band nigh-stumbled to a cacophonous halt.
One simply didn't name a Protestant Christian King's ship, one specifically built to kill Catholic Spaniards and atheistic Frenchmen in the most efficient manner, after a pagan wizard and heathen Druid… even if Merlin had been such a boon to fabled old King Arthur!
HMS 'Merlin' had begun to slide down the greasy ways into the Medway, 'til another senior officer in better mental takings, and relative sobriety (perhaps one without a termagant wife in tow!), quickly got to his feet, seized a full glass, and corrected things with a loud cry of 'Success to His Majesty's ship Proteus!'
At the instant, the frigate had stuck quite solidly on the ways!
Talk of greater consternation! It was not until an Irish sawyer who'd helped build her, with his little boy at his side, had gone down the slipway and had stood under the ship's bows, right beside her cutwater; had whispered something to her to this day unknowable, then the wee lad had given her the tiniest shove, more like a love pat, in point of fact, before Proteus/Merlin had given out a soft groan, then had allowed herself to be launched, sliding into the river, as sweet as anything!
Newly 'posted' Alan Lewrie was, in fact, her second captain. A bit after her launch, whilst still completing rigging, her first commanding officer and his cousin, her Chaplain, both Anglo-Irishmen landowners in the big way over hundreds of poor Irish cottagers, rowed back from shore one dead-calm night. Not a breath of wind stirred, with not a ripple to disturb the Medway's surface, yet Proteus had heaved a slow roll starboard, steepening the boarding battens to dead-vertical, and the first captain and her Chaplain and been heard to utter shouts, as both suddenly lost their grips-both were abstemious,
