The Invasion Year

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

“It’s grand that Spain’s stayed out of the war, so far,” Peel said after supper. They had gone on deck to the taffrails of the quarterdeck so he could light up a slim cigaro and blow smoke rings at the night. “Do they decide to re-join the French against us, the price of tobacco will soar, and the quality will decrease. Say what you will of American tobacco, but I still think the best is from Spanish colonies.”

“Wouldn’t know much about that. Never developed the taste for it,” Lewrie said with a shrug, lounging most lubberly on the after-most bulwarks. He looked over to Fusee, about half a cable off to larboard. “They wouldn’t let you smoke over there, not with all the powder aboard her. We’re much more hospitable,” he added, grinning.

“Think those things will work?” Peel asked.

“No idea,” Lewrie replied. “I s’pose we’ll soon find out. The wind’s fair enough for us to set out tomorrow morning, and let us test the first batch. Though, after what we’ve learned of them the last few days, I think my chances’d be better were I a French matelot sittin’ on an anchored barge than bein’ in the launchin’ boat.”

“Well, if MacTavish’s don’t, there’s other designers’ ideas to try out,” Peel imparted with a knowing nod and wink. “There’s a fellow name of Robert Fulton… an American, who’s come up with a variation on the torpedo. Man’s just brimming with ideas. He claims he could build a ship driven by a steam engine. Dead-keen on steam engines, he is.”

“No thankee!” Lewrie scoffed, after a second of surprise. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t steam engines need big fires under the boilers? Fire, on a wooden ship? Brr!”

“Not only that, this Fulton fellow said he could also build a nautilus, a submersible boat that could sink down twenty or thirty feet and stay down for the better part of an hour,” Peel further told him. “A small crew, three or four, I forget which, paddle it forward in some way.”

“And do what with it?” Lewrie gawped, then shook his head. “The very word ‘sink’ makes my ‘nut-megs’ shrivel. Sounds suicidal, t’me.”

“That’s what Admiralty thought, too,” Peel said with a snicker. “He offered both, just after the war began again last May. I gather that Fulton couldn’t sell his ideas to his own navy, and couldn’t raise sufficient private funds in his own country, so he flogged his schemes on this side of the Atlantic. The last card up his sleeve was the idea of explosive torpedoes, though I believe that the submersible boat and the torpedoes would have worked together, the boat towing the torpedoes under an anchored ship, and the torpedo exploding when it came into contact, whilst the submersible paddles away on the other side.”

“Not with a timing mechanism?” Lewrie grimaced. “That would take some sort of hair- trigger pistol, and any hard knock’d set it off. You wish crew for that thing, best look in Bedlam!”

“Admiralty’s judgement, too,” Peel said, shrugging, pausing to take a deep puff on his cigaro and exhale a jet of smoke. “Mind, now. All these daft schemes are William Pitt’s doing. Soon as he got back into office as Prime Minister, he pressed for offensive action, and not sit idle, waiting for the French to invade. Admiral the Earl Saint Vincent was against them, but who knows about Lord Melville. The damned things may turn up to be tested, do we give events long enough, or they grow dire enough.”

“Christ,” was Lewrie’s sober comment to that.

“Better us than the French, I suppose,” Peel said, laughing some more. “Before he came to London, Fulton tried to sell his schemes to Bonaparte. Went to Paris during the Peace of Amiens and got an audience with the ‘Ogre’ himself… and thank God ‘Boney’ thought Fulton’s ideas madder than a March Hare, too.”

Lewrie tried to picture what the French would have done with a submersible boat and a towed torpedo. Could people be found with more martial ardour than sense to crew the things in the first place? Then this anchorage at the Nore would lie open to a creeping, unseen danger. Portsmouth, Plymouth, Great Yarmouth, or Harwich… He had to shake his head to rid himself of the image of a peacefully anchored and sleeping warship suddenly smashed open by a titanic blast, then heeling over and sinking in minutes, aflame from bow to stern!

No thankee! At least a steam-driven ship’d give you a fightin’ chance, and stay atop the sea! Lewrie thought, wondering uneasily where all this inventiveness would lead. Warfare at least had a few gentlemanly rules-not that Lewrie had always paid heed to them when needs must-but, in the main both sides went into battle with assumptions that things would go honourably, fairly, and… sporting, like knights of old at a joust. If inventiveness mated with desperation, though…

No, with any luck, such things won’t work well enough to become normal, or acceptable, Lewrie told himself.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Peel prompted upon seeing how silent and pensive Lewrie had become.

“Wonderin’ what Fulton’s torpedoes are like, compared to ours,” Lewrie dissembled; it wouldn’t do to sound fretful, even with a friend. That would be “croaking,” and might give Peel the impression that he’d no faith in MacTavish’s torpedoes and would not do his utmost to test them fairly.

“Smaller, I gathered,” Peel told him, flicking an inch of ash over the stern. “Small enough to be rolled over the side of a boat… spherical, made of copper. I think they’re to be deployed in pairs, with a line buoyed with cork blocks like a fishing net, between them. Other than that, the clockwork timers and cocked pistols to set them off are similar to MacTavish’s. This very moment, there’s probably a captain like you charged with experimenting with Fulton’s version. A competition ’tween the two versions, if you will.

“And of course, old man,” Peel sarcastically added, assuming an Oxonian accent, “can’t let the old-school side down, you know! Better the winner is British, than a benighted ‘Brother Johnathon’ from New England, what?”

“Yoicks, tally-ho, and all that?” Lewrie smirked.

“Win for ‘The Roast Beef of Old England,’ ” Peel laughed back. “Unless the damned things turn out to be a pile of manure.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The first cask torpedo was tried out in English waters, just off Mersea Island and the mouth of the Blackwater river, where the North Sea tides ran particularly strong, and the ebbs left miles of exposed mud flats. Reliant stood guardian to the Fusee bomb as she worked her way within a mile of shore as the tide began to flood, and it was Lieutenant Johns and Mr. McCloud who saw to its priming, its lowering into the waters, and its towing behind one of their new thirty-two-foot barges.

Lewrie had himself rowed over to Fusee to watch, and stood with Mr. MacTavish whilst the evolution was carried out.

“They will be setting the timer… drawing the cocking line to the pistol… and letting it go!” MacTavish narrated, a telescope to his eye, like to jump out of his skin with excitement. “McCloud and I agreed to set the clockwork for half an hour. No specific target, just a trial of all the various elements, you see, sir.”

He’ll piss his breeches, does he have t’wait for half an hour, Lewrie cynically thought, a telescope to his own eye. The twelve-oar barge was wheeling about, fending off from the torpedo with a gaff and re-hoisting its lug-sails… in understandable haste, he also noted.

MacTavish, for all his seeming urbanity, did closely resemble a squirming, tail- wagging, circling puppy which would piddle in excitement. He collapsed the tubes of his glass and became rivetted to his pocket-watch, a fine one that had a second hand in addition to the usual minute and hour hands. The fellow paced, stewed, fretted, peered at his watch, and fussed with the set of his coat and waist-coat, his neck-stock, and (unconsciously) his crutch.