hours before any of the others could come about and dash to her aid.
Once North of the Bahama Banks, the trade made its best effort to stand Nor’easterly, to get as far out into deep waters as possible… where yet another parcel of merchant ships joined them from island colonies in the Windwards and the Leewards; ships from Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, St. Vincent, and St. Lucia, ships from Antigua and St. Kitts and Nevis. They had been escorted by a lone frigate and a much older three-masted Sloop of War, but, damned if those two didn’t turn round and toddle off home once they’d delivered their charges to Captain Blanding’s, and the squadron’s, care!
Those new arrivals had to have their bona fides certified, that their bonds had been paid and their signed agreements to the rules of convoying had been stamped and initialed “all tiddly”… by Lewrie and his officers!
It appeared that Captain Blanding’s revenge was endless!
Had Alan Lewrie had his d’ruthers, and had Reliant been sailing alone, he’d have preferred the much shorter route Easterly and North-Easterly through the Windward Passage, but that decision had been made by the trade’s Commodore, the senior-most and most experienced civilian master, elected by all the rest, and given the titular rank just a step below Captain Blanding for the length of the voyage.
And for each of those new arrivals, Reliant’s people had to make up fresh signals books to replace the ones they had been issued by the former escorts from Antigua, which kept Lewrie’s clerk Faulkes, Mister Cadbury, the Purser’s clerk, and the Midshipmen with good penmanship, scribbling away ’til every ship had a copy of Captain Blanding’s orders.
* * * “What was her problem?” Lewrie asked Lt. Westcott as he returned from one of the slower vessels at the tail- end of the convoy. Modeste had hoisted Reliant’s number, then sent Number 465, directing her to “enquire the reason for the ships astern, or those whose distinguishing signal is shown herewith, why they do not make sail agreeable to their situation.” Number 465 also directed them to impress a man from each of the offending ships as punishment, but… Lt. Westcott had returned alone.
“Oh well, sir, the Turtledove’s main tops’l split right down the middle, and they had to bend a new one on,” Westcott reported, calling for a measure of water from the scuttle-butt. “Not that the new one is a whit younger. But, that’s not their only trouble, sir. She’s a slow leak below, and, with only a dozen hands aboard, two of them boys, she can’t spare too many from manning the pumps.”
“Good God, who let her try a trans-Atlantic voyage?” Lewrie had to wonder aloud. The Turtledove was a short and bluff hermaphrodite brig, not over eighty feet on the range of the deck, with fore-and-aft sails on her foremast, and squares’ls on her main, and, frankly, looked as dowdy and ill-used as a Newcastle coal coaster.
“Oh, she’s not, sir,” Lt. Westcott pointed out, chuckling. “She’s leaving us when we get level with Charleston, South Carolina… Saint Lucia to there, and back again. She’ll probably be a ‘runner’ for the return passage… if she survives this one, that is.”
“And the reason ye didn’t press a man?” Lewrie asked, after he shook his head at her master’s madness.
“Not a one of them worth the trouble, sir,” Westcott told him, laughing outright. “The boys, some toothless gammers, and a spavined oldster or three? Her captain was the likeliest, but he’s not a day under sixty. Call it… Christian charity, sir.”
Before being accepted into a convoy, as the trades assembled in quarantine, they were supposed to be surveyed for seaworthiness, for a sufficiency of crew, spare spars, and sails, and for defences, but… evidently the Leeward Islands Station, knowing that such a decrepit old barge would not be bound for Europe, had let her off easy.
“Not if they get attacked, it ain’t, Mister Westcott,” Lewrie said with a mirthless bark of a laugh. “Does she have the defences to qualify as a ‘runner’?”
“Half a dozen pistols, ditto for muskets, ditto for cutlasses and boarding pikes, and three very old two-pounder swivel guns, sir,” Westcott told him with a grim look. “Though, I expect the discharges would deafen half the crew, and cause at least two of the gammers to drop stone-cold dead.”
Lewrie paced to the taffrails of the quarterdeck to hoist his telescope to give Turtledove a good looking-over. All her sails were now back in place, the ripped tops’l only slightly lighter in colour than the rest; a fresh-cured deer hide tan against the aged parchment of her other sails. At least she now had a mustachio under her fore-foot, an evident wake creaming down her starboard side… though her angle of heel to the winds revealed a strip of sickly green underwater growth on her quick-work, as if her coppering had fallen off years ago and her master and owners hadn’t bothered to heave her over on a beach to scrape off and burn off the weed and barnacles.
“Built slow, and losin’ ground ever since,” Lewrie decided as he shut his telescope and shook his head in wonder. “At least she’s hoist-up a main t’gallant, and an extra stays’l up forrud. She seems t’keep up, now.”
The last cast of the log that Midshipman Grainger had done had shown a meagre seven knots, and Reliant had had to take in canvas, else she would have strode away from her stern-most charges. She wallowed and sloughed, un-used to such slow progress, and once it became dark the merchantmen would take in sail for the night, making them bunch up and sheer away in fear of collisions, slowing the pace even further!
At dawn, Captain Blanding in Modeste would mount to his poop deck, scan about with a glass, and go into his daily apoplexy upon seeing how far the ships in the outer columns, the ships astern, had strayed, and then there would be Hell to pay, and half the morning wasted in chivvying them back into the fold.
“Christ, what a shitten business!” Lewrie groaned.
“Could be worse, sir,” Lt. Westcott said, chuckling. “Do we not get a good lift as we pass through the belt of Variables, we could end set upon Cape Hatteras.” He rapped his knuckles on the cap-rails atop the larboard bulwarks to ward off such a fate.
“You are such a joy, Mister Westcott,” Lewrie said, groaning in mock dread, turning to cock a brow at his First Officer.
“As all the ladies say, sir!” Westcott quickly replied with an impish expression on his hatchet face, baring his brief style of grin.
“As Mademoiselle du Plessis said, sir?” Lewrie teased.
“Oh, well, sir… for a time, then tears… tears and lamentations,” Westcott said with a dismissive shrug. “I fear my purse was all but empty after our last, short bout, and all I had to leave her was a five-pound note, but… she’ll find another protector. Her sort will always survive.”
“Another reason Lieutenants should not marry, or…,” Lewrie began to say.
“Marry, sir? Perish the thought!” Westcott said, shivering with mock terror, and uttering a Brring noise. “ ’Tis the ruin of many a man, in the Navy or not. No, no, sir! Not ’til I’ve been made Post. Even then I’d give it a long look and a hard try before committing myself to the one mort.”
“Well, at least I can keep you out of woman trouble, so long as we’re at sea, Mister Westcott,” Lewrie said, chuckling at his second-in-command’s irrepressible lust. “Once in England, though…”
“A ‘temporary wife’ in every port, sir… thank Jesus!”
“And Admiralty,” Lewrie reminded him.
The watch bells interrupted them; eight of them struck in four pairs to signal the end of the Day Watch, and the start of the First Dog Watch, at 4 P.M. Up forward in the limited open space between the cross-deck hammock nettings at the forward edge of the quarterdeck, and the binnacle cabinet and double-wheeled helm, Lt. George Merriman was relieving Lt. Clarence Spendlove of watch-standing duties. Happy Spendlove, who would only have to stand a two-hour watch ’til the beginning of the Second Dog, and then have “all night in” and a long rest this evening, if the weather co-operated and no crisis arose.
“You have the Middle?” Lewrie asked Westcott.
“I swapped with Merriman, sir. Just the one night,” Westcott replied. “If you have no more need of me, sir, I
