William Price and the Thetis 20

 Internet problems again; BT are improving things, apparently

 

Chapter 20

 

There was some banging from below, and a swift burst of invective, and then a ragged cheer. Scully’s voice sounding as if it was warning, and then a sudden detonation followed by a cracking noise and a rather wild rushing sound of shot.

“Goo’ blarst!” said Walden.

“What is it, Jeb?” called William, Walden being atop the main spar of the mizzen mast.

“Mr. Scully’s taken that ruddy pirate’s head clean orf,” said Walden, peering through the telescope with which he was equipped. “Yerse, an’ it an’ the cannon ball busy playing bowls as calm as Drake.”

“Well, that saves the navy a length of rope,” said William. “Mr. Scully is plainly practising for a golf championship to drive a hole in one like that; I know that golfers talk about birdies, and eagles, but I wager he’s the first golfer to score a Sparrowhawk.”

There was much laughter.

Scully emerged on deck.

“Am I in trouble?” he asked.

“No, we’re entering you into a golf tournament in St. James’s Park,” said William, explaining why everyone was laughing. Scully sniggered.

“Well, it was sheer luck,” he said. “Though we did sight on him. But the starboard fore chaser is going to need a bit of work.”

“What sort of work?”

“We might have broken the gun carriage a little bit,” said Scully. “I take full responsibility.”

“Oh, well, it’s why we have a carpenter. I take it nobody hurt?”

“No, but there’s a nasty gouge in the deck where it recoiled, before our impromptu raising mechanism disintegrated,” said Scully, sheepishly.

“It shall be known as ‘Scully’s deep’ when being holystoned,” said William. “You took his head off.”

“I rather thought it had,” said Scully. “Look! Half of them are taking to the boats!”

William frowned.

“Watch them,” he said. “There are sufficient of them to try to board us or ‘Nossa Senhora.’ If they do, fire on the boats. Signal to the prize to be aware.”

“Sir,” his officers agreed.

“Shall I bring us alongside ‘Sparrowhawk,’ sir?” asked Erskine.

“What would Colin or I do if abandoning a ship?” said William.

“Set a slow match to the magazine,” said Erskine.

“Give it fifteen minutes more,” said William. “I doubt they’d run a much longer match. Long enough to get us to move in close but not so long we have time to put it out. But pass the word for Mr. Percival and his mate to be prepared to sound the well, and see what he can do, and a gang for the pumps to go with them.”

 

The small boats were, indeed, converging on ‘Nossa Senhora das Flores,’ and William sighed, and gave the order to fire.

The one that sheered off, and headed determinedly west, he let go.  He could sink it; but William hated wanton destruction of life.

Perhaps the former pirates would find a new life in America, if they could make it so far, and turn into model citizens. Stranger things had happened. Like the notorious pirate, Henry Morgan, who had become Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica. He had never actually been charged with piracy, and had wriggled out of charges of attacking Panama by claiming a lack of knowledge of the Treaty of Madrid, which might even have been true. At sea, it could take a long time for news to reach every ship.

But enough wool-gathering.

“Very well, Mr. Erskine, place us alongside the ‘Sparrowhawk,” said William. “I’ll go across with the boarding party to take charge of any naval documents in the great cabin.”

It was understood that Frid would run below to just check there was no slow match burning; and then see if the ship could be saved. If not, William would just remove every secret document there was.  

A gangplank being rigged, William followed the carpenter’s crew over it. Protocol dictated that the senior officer was first on, and last off, a ship, but when dealing with two ships, the point became moot, and the man with a mission to save the ship from sinking was the most necessary to go first. William made his way into the great cabin, rather cautiously, as there were a lot of splinters standing from the courses of several cannon balls. The cabin was a mess, with splintered furniture, one gun completely up-ended, the twisted bodies of its gunners attesting to how a direct hit on a gun barrel could turn that gun into a weapon against its user. Fortunately, none survived to give William a moral dilemma over whether or not to shoot a man in cold blood, or save him to be hanged. The other side of the cabin was almost untouched by the firing; it must, thought William, have been partly at least having to fire at an angle. Here, a carved rosewood davenport desk remained undamaged, and William wondered if he was justified in looting such a nice piece of furniture. The pirate had a collection of uniforms, too, which would perhaps come in useful if they ever needed a ruse de guerre.

 

The code book and book of signals was in the drawer of the desk, which had fortunately not been destroyed by roundshot. The young lieutenant whose command this had been would have been court-martialled and might have been executed had he not died at the hands of the pirates. But his name was sullied, and any relatives seeking to join the navy would be looked at askance.

There was also a box of rough stones, transparent or translucent, ranging from the size of a garden pea to several inches across.  The pirate’s account book recorded them as having been taken from a merchantman who also had ostrich feathers and ivory; and that the merchant plainly considered them worth storing carefully. ‘Need more information,’ ran Snow’s notes.

A sailor who had come to carry things for William stared at them.

“Are they going to be in our prize value, sir?” he asked.

“Well, they are part of a cargo stolen by this pirate, so I should imagine so, if they have any value,” said William.

“Cap’n sir, you are joking, aren’t you?” said the man, in a strained voice.

“Well, do you know anything you can tell me, Jepps?” asked William.

“Yessir; them’s diamonds,” said Jepps. “I used to be on an East Indiaman before I was pressed, and we had raw diamonds from time to time.”

“But some of these are a good two inches across,” said William.

“Yessir. Ugly, aren’t they? But once they’ve been cut, they’ll be worth a king’s ransom. You could buy your way into Parliament with your share,” he added, awed.

“I’d a mind to buy out the ‘Thetis’ now the war is over, and invite all my shipmates to join me, as an escort to my father-in-law’s ships,” said William.

“Count me in,” said Jepps. “If these here sell for less than a couple of million guineas, I’ll be surprised.”

“Well, I’m damned,” said William.

Jepps chuckled.

“Well, sir, if you are, you can bribe the devil with your share of these.”

William laughed.

“Jepps, I don’t think anyone aboard is light-fingered, but I’d rather not spread this about.”

“Nossir. Mind, anyone with sense ought to know we’d get a better price from a prize board than from trying to nick a couple of small stones. Not that everyone has sense, mind,” he added. “Tell them it’s useful minerals, sir; most people will lose interest.”

“Thank you, I will,” said William.  “Mr. Pollard had better go and see what, if anything, is in the hold; in case we lose this ship to leakage, I’d as soon transfer any prize-worthy goods across. The banging and hammering and sawing I am hearing, however, sounds encouraging, and with a team on the pumps we can hope to bring her into Gibraltar.”

“Yessir,” said Jepps. “Will I take them back with the other things you need me to carry, not to look as if they are anything special?”

“Yes, do,” said William. “I’ll carry the bag with the code book; it’s literally more than my life is worth to ask anyone else to do so, but you can take the pirate’s log here. And I’m having his spare hat, it’s in better condition than mine.”

“Spoils of war,” grinned Jepps.

“Hell, yes,” said William.

 

Frid Percival came in at this point.

“You know, Will, when you set out to break something, you do a good job of it,” he said.

“And can you fix it or am I going to have to get out of here before I get wet?” asked William.

“Oh! The greater part of it is fixed,” said Frid.  “I need to put in more work on it to shore it up, but the leak has stopped, and we shifted the cargo out of the way of getting damp, which as there’s a box full of the sort of feathers the pater grumbles about paying out for means our prize money should be quite pretty.”

“And ivory,” said William, absently. “I feel like some eastern potentate surrounded with precious things. All I need now is a lion skin to sit on, and a few peacocks, a snack of quails’ eggs and larks’ tongues and someone to flip grapes into my mouth.”

“John Scully could probably devise a tiny cannon to do it,” said Frid. “The gun deck is an absolute mess. It’ll take all the way to Gib to clean it up, you know. The sprung planks are at the bow where one of those eighteen pounders somehow traversed the entire length of the ship on the lower deck, through the fo’c’sle, and ditched sullenly right forrard. I could not understand what had caused the damage until I went up a deck and found out that it had been the vibration which had done it.”

“Just as well you know how it happened and what to do,” said William.

“That’s what you pay me for,” said Frid.  “Nice juicy job to earn my pay with; I feel I’ve been twiddling my thumbs half the time.”

“And sailing my tender for me.”

“Oh, but I’d pay to do that,” said Frid. “I must thank Jeb somehow for rescuing me.”

“Teach him to speak like a gentleman,” said William. “He’s pining for a widow lady of the gentry.”

“Well, I’ll do my best,” said Frid, dubiously. “You can cut his Essex accent with a knife.”

“And I wager he’s a good mimic and can learn to make it second nature,” said William.

“Well, I’ll see what I can do,” said Frid. “I like a good challenge, after all.”

 

The cargo was moved up from below.  Snow had clearly been pirating around the Canaries as well as the trade from Africa, with a cargo of Canary wine, not as popular as it had once been, but still of value, as well as some of the brightly coloured hand-woven silk from the Canaries, a cheaper alternative to Indian silks, but still worth Snow’s time to steal. A number of tusks from elephants were tied in bundles, and William sighed for the elephants, though the price of them would help his crew. Ivory was always in demand, for geegaws like snuff boxes and larger jewellery boxes, for painting miniatures, for fan sticks, dice for gamesters, fish to count score in parlour games, and the odds and ends and dust from carving still worth saving, to burn for that best of black pigments, ivory black, superior in all ways to lamp black.

And then, there were the feathers.

When Frid had said there was a box of feathers, William had envisioned something about two feet square; not a small crate. There were enough ostrich feathers for the women who attended Almack’s to put on a display for a decade, William thought. Ostrich feathers, William recalled, were something Fanny had animadverted against, wholesaling at a guinea a pound, and one could get a lot of feathers to a pound; and retailing at a guinea each.  If Jepps was right about the diamonds, and William had no reason to suppose he was not, this voyage should see that each of his men would have five hundred pounds a year, if invested wisely in the funds, or perhaps in his father-in-law’s ventures; and his own share, about thirty thousand a year. And it could be more!  William felt quite dizzy.

Of course, they still had to get their spoils back to Gibraltar safely; and if Jepps was wrong, then they would still do well, but just not as lavishly.

He preferred not to think about a box full of diamonds, especially the half dozen which were over an inch across. They might, after all, be flawed. He wondered where they had come from; Snow had merely said he had taken them from the small ship which also had the feathers and ivory, and that he presumed there was some reason to carry these pebbles with such care. The advantage of a seaman who had sailed with the Honourable East India Company, and the luck that he had been in the right place at the right time to see them.

William found a sea-chest full of ordinary clothes, and he opened the skylight.

“Send Walden down!” he called.

Walden clattered down the steps from the quarterdeck, leaping the gap where the last two were missing.

“Sir?” he asked.

“See if these fit you; if you’re serious about your lady love, you’ll want some civilian clothes to change into, so I thought you might as well have first refusal; and I don’t think anyone would grudge a couple of pairs of breeches to Colin.”

Jeb gave his wheezing laugh.

“Lost to the service; yes, he’s owed them.”

He picked through the clothes, and chose a couple of costumes.

“You might as well take the chest and let the officers have first pick of the rest, after taking out yours and Colin’s,” said William. “Not that anyone is going to have a problem buying clothing in future.”

“Now I’m intrigued,” said Jeb.

“Well, I’m not certain,” said William, “But as a warrant officer, you might be doing very nicely indeed.”

“Yessir, fank you,” said Jeb. “Thank you, I means… mean. I better start talking proper-like.”

“I asked Mr. Percival to teach you; he wanted to do something nice for you as he’s having the time of his life.”

Walden sniffed.

“Well, I don’t say it hasn’t been a pleasure to serve with you, Mr. Price. But you won’t like what’s waiting for you when we got sorted out.”

“Oh hell,” said William. “The butcher’s bill?”

“Oh, it ain’t that,” said Walden. “Free… three killed outright, and a lot o’ minor splinter injuries, an’ one as has lost his eye. Naow, it’s that y’re gwine to have to flog a man.”

“Oh, bugger,” said William. “Off the record?”

“Charley Gowan; one of our debtors,” said Walden. “Was rated gun captain to number three gun; refused a lawful order from an officer, namely, Mr. Porkins. It wasn’t mutinous, sir, nor anyfink like vat,” he added, earnestly, his vernacular reverting to his usual misuse of the language. “ʼE froze-like, an’ he couldn’t make ʼimself fire on real men.”

William nodded.

“I see; a man of compassion, but it won’t do. It won’t do at all. Thanks, Jeb. Tell Seth not to worry about it; I’ll explain it clearly to all hands including Gowan.”