Reefs and Shoals (12 page)

The Sailing Master, his Mates, and the trusted senior Midshipmen busily plied their sextants to take the measurements of the known heights and prominent sea-marks, working out the distances from shore, and the known dangers of the shallows and submerged reefs noted on the charts.

“Do we stand on as we are, sir,” the Sailing Master said after a long, grim musing over the chart pinned to the traverse board, “we will enter Five Fathom Hole. There is an anchorage area just North of there, where we can find six or seven fathoms, and firm sand and rock holding ground … or so the chart promises.”

“Right there?” Lewrie asked, pointing a finger at the chart. The area that Mr. Caldwell was recommending lay close to the infamous Sea Venture Shoals … uncomfortably close, to his lights! He took a long look about to judge the wind direction, worrying that it might be foul for entering St. George’s Harbour proper. “Mister Westcott? Best bower and stern kedge, the kedge to be let go first as we crawl on. Unless a pilot takes pity on us.”

“Aye, sir,” the First Officer replied.

“Speak of the Devil, sir,” Mr. Caldwell said, pointing towards Town Cut, the very narrow entry channel into harbour. “There’s one of the harbour pilots coming to us, just now.”

Lewrie fetched his telescope and spotted a singled-masted boat coming out of the channel ’twixt St. George’s Island, tiny Biggs Island, and St. David’s Island which formed the Southern shore of the harbour. Its jib and gaff-headed mainsail did an uncertain shiver as it left the Cut, a sure sign to Lewrie that it would be a right-bastard set of swirls and back-eddies in there, too uncertain a wind to risk
Reliant,
this day at least. Once clear, the boat’s sails cracked wind-full, and she began to bound over the choppy inshore waters like a running stag, bound for his ship. As she drew closer, Lewrie could espy three occupants; a lad about twelve or so to handle the sheets, one even younger at the tiller, and an older man in the boat’s amidships.

“I say, that looks fun,” Midshipman Munsell tittered. “Should we ever have the time, we could stage boat races.”

The pilot boat—if that was what it was—passed ahead of
Reliant,
swung about in a wide turn, and jibed about to swan close to the starboard main chains, and the opened entry-port.

“Hoy, what ship, there?” the older man shouted up, using an old brass speaking-trumpet.

“The
Reliant
frigate, Captain Alan Lewrie!” Mr. Caldwell called back for them. “You are a pilot, sir?”

“Warrick, and I am!” the fellow replied, beaming broadly under a wide-brimmed straw planter’s hat. “Shall I come up, sir?”

“Aye! Come alongside.”

The lad at the tiller, no older than ten, deftly put the tiller over and brought the boat to within inches of the channel platform as the slightly older boy hooked on with a gaff. A second later and Mr. Warrick was scrambling up the boarding battens, and the boat sheered off to stand alee.

“Good morning, all,” Warrick said, doffing his hat to the officers gathered on the quarterdeck.

“Good morning, Mister Warrick,” Lewrie said, stepping forward and doffing his own hat in salute. “Your servant, sir.”

“Nay, I’m more yours, Cap’m Lewrie,” Warrick replied, “if you wish to enter port. Though the wind’s not good for that, today. We can find you a good anchorage, just off yonder, ’til the morrow, and guide you in then. What’s your draught, sir?”

“About eighteen feet, right aft,” Lewrie supplied.

“Good, long scope, to a bower and kedge, I’m thinking? Good,” Warrick said, noting that the hawse-bucklers had been removed, a kedge was already attached to a stern cable, and the best, larboard bower anchor was swinging free of cat and fish lashings. “There’s many the cautious masters that’ll anchor out, anyway, and send their boats in through the Cut for provisions. Do you not have need of lading cargo, or landing goods, the anchorage’ll suit you fine.

“Mind, sir, my fee’s the same for either,” Warrick said with a smug grin, naming a goodly sum for his services, one which made every officer, and Lewrie, wince. “These are dangerous waters, gentlemen, more so than most. Without a pilot aboard, you’d be lost and wrecked in a twinkling.”

“Carry on, Mister Warrick,” Lewrie said. “Do you require cash, a note of hand, or an Admiralty chit?”

“Cash is topping fine, Cap’m Lewrie,” Warrick breezed off, then turned his full attention to the sails, the course, and the sea-marks. “Hoy, lads. A half point loo’rd, if you will,” he said to the men on the helm, bypassing the watch officers.
Reliant
was now wholly in his hands.

The frigate swung off to starboard a bit as she came level with Little Head, standing out to avoid a shoal noted as the Spit. To the West was revealed a maze of islets; Paget and Biggs, the larger Smith’s Island, and behind that, in the harbour proper, little Hen Island, all in clear green waters as shallow as six to nine feet, and even the Town Cut entrance looked suspiciously shallow, to Lewrie.

Damned
right
I’ll not move without a pilot aboard,
he vowed to himself;
no matter
how
much they charge me!

“Cap’m sir,” Warrick said at last, “do you let go your kedge and let it pay out half a cable about here, then you’re good to swing up to windward, go flat a’back, then drop the bower on a short scope for the nonce, ’til you’ve balanced between them, you’ll find good holding ground.”

“Very well, sir, and thankee. Mister Westcott? Let go the kedge, half a cable scope.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Do you wish to enter port proper tomorrow, sir, it’s good odds that the wind’ll shift astern of you, and you can trust your kedge to hold you at full scope whilst you take up the bower,” Warrick suggested. “Then, it’s smooth sailing right up the Cut, holding Sugarloaf Hill fine on your bows. You hoist a flag for a pilot, and me and my boys’ll see you right.”

“I’d not try it on without you, Mister Warrick,” Lewrie said, which seemed to please the man. “Once we’re anchored, might I offer you a glass of something, and ask you a few questions about Bermuda? This is, I believe, the first time any of us have put in here.”

“That’d be right kindly of you, sir,” Warrick replied.

It lacked half an hour ’til “Clear Decks and Up Spirits” by the time
Reliant
was safely anchored, and all her sails at long last brailed up in harbour gaskets or handed and stowed. The crew would get the rum issue a bit later, but Lewrie’s wine cabinet was open, and he kept a stone crock of rum for just such a purpose.

Warrick’s boat had come alongside, and the two lads, his sons, had scrambled aboard to peer about and josh Munsell and Rossyngton, the ship’s youngest Mids. They were bronzed by the sun, bare-legged and shoeless, in faded old breeches with the knee buttons long gone, open and sleeveless linen shirts, and straw hats much like their father’s.

“Ah, but that’s fine,” Warrick said after a tentative sip from his glass of rum. “Navy issue’s stronger than most, Strong enough to make a man’s ears itch, har!”

“We noted some compass variation,” Lewrie began to probe, and Warrick let go with a plethora of local lore. “Mistifying, that.”

There was no explaining the variations, for one thing. With a chart spread on the dining table, Warrick went over the string of islands. Some were so close to each other, like North and South Ireland, Boaz, Somerset, and Watford Islands on the West end of the chain, that if the Crown ever thought to spend money on bridges, the distances between could easily be spanned. Inside the shoals to the Nor’east there was a vast expanse of deep, somewhat sheltered water, Murray’s Anchorage, and there were at least two good deepwater channels that led to a very good sheltered anchorage in Grassy Bay, and the Great and Little Sounds, out to the West.

“During the Peace of Amiens, the
Leavder
anchored there, sir,” Warrick said. “She’s an old two-decker fifty gunner, and draws more than you. But, there’s not much in the way of provisions, or entertainment, for your sailors from Somerset, or Sandys Parish, either. Nor is there much joy in Hamilton, do you send your ship’s boats through Two Rocks Passage into Hamilton Bay. ’Tis a sleepy little place. You can send your people ashore with little fear of desertion, though. You will note there’s several forts, and a sizeable garrison, on Bermuda.

“Not that there’s much call for them,” Warrick went on, holding out his glass for a top-up. “Keeping order, and rounding up the drunken sailors, mostly.”

“Is
Leander
still here?” Lewrie asked. “Is her captain senior officer present?”

“Depends on who’s in port, sir,” Warrick said with a laugh at that notion. “Right now,
you’re
senior naval officer present. Does one of the brig-sloops come in, then it’d be a Commander in charge of the island for as long as he’s at anchor. If both brig-sloops are out at sea, then it might be one of the Lieutenants on the small sloops. There’s no real dockyard, no Port Admiral or much organisation.”

“How many warships are there, then?” Lewrie further asked.

“Like I said, two brig-sloops, and two smaller sloops, more like two-masted tops’l schooners, around eight or ten guns apiece,” Warrick prosed on. “Much like the Bermuda or Jamaica sloops that the old pirates like Blackbeard and Stede Bonnet sailed in the long ago. Ever hear of Stede Bonnet?”

“No, I haven’t,” Lewrie replied, pouring a tot of rum for himself to be companionable.

“Oh, he was a ‘fly’ fellow,” Warrick happily related. “He was a gentleman, an officer in the island Army garrison, married with two or more children, respectable as anything. Came of a French Protestant family, what they call Huguenots, that were massacred or expelled long ago? Well, upright as he seemed, one day he up and boarded ship for Nassau, the old pirate haven, and turned sea rover! S’truth!”

“A total ‘lubber’? I’d not imagine there’s much future in that,” Lewrie said, chuckling.

“Now, no one ever said he was anything close to a ‘tarpaulin’ sailor,” Warrick went on, “but he was a gentleman, and a leader, a man with some style about him, so he ended up captain of a small ship faster than you can say ‘Jack Ketch’. Ran with Blackbeard, ‘Calico Jack’ Rackham, Mary Read, and Anne Bonny, and so long as he could keep order and be backed up by experienced mates, he did right well.

“They caught him, though, in the end,” Warrick added, turning wistful-somber, as if telling of the end of a tragic hero. “Got him at anchor in the mouth of the Cape Fear River over in the North Carolina colony … 1715 or so? They took him down to Charleston for his trial. Now here’s the oddest bit: Were there women aboard a prize he took, they took up with
him,
husbands, lovers, and families bedamned, and in all his captures, there never was a single murder, nor even all that much resistance, so … the judge says since Bonnet’s hands are clean of killing, he’s of a mind to pardon him, so long as he swears to give up piracy and return to his family. Know what he said?”

“Pray, do tell,” Lewrie urged, encouraging the pilot, whether he really cared or not; it sounded promising, though, for Mr. Warrick was almost wheezing with impending wit.

“Bonnet says to the judge, ‘Well my lord, if that’s my only option, you might as well go on and
hang
me!’ Damned if he didn’t, hee-hee!”

“She must’ve been a
real
shrew,” Lewrie said, laughing.

“And damned if they didn’t … hang him, that is,” Warrick said. “They say Stede Bonnet went out with style, pirate or not.”

“No piracy round here, since, I trust?” Lewrie japed.

“We don’t get the great trade convoys to attract much of that,” Warrick said with a shrug, sounding as if he might wish that there was some piracy to liven a sleepy mid-Atlantic island’s days.

“Privateering?” Lewrie asked.

“Ours, mostly, preying on the French and the Dons, but after the war began again two years ago, not much of that, either, Cap’m Lewrie,” Warrick admitted, sounding as if that was a let-down, too. “Our two brig-sloops prowl round the island, an hundred or more miles off, and stay out nigh three months before coming back in to provision. The small sloops patrol closer in, but it’s rare that any enemy ship turns up, and they’re mostly bound for more important places.”

Can’t commandeer the brig-sloops, just in case the French
do
turn up,
Lewrie thought;
I need small ships t’make squadron
;
it’ll have t’be one of the little’uns.

“None of the small sloops are around, at present?” Lewrie asked, making free with the crock of rum. While rum was not his preferred aged American corn whiskey, it was a decent substitute. Lewrie was one of the few officers in the Navy who would even admit to liking a spirit issued to the common seamen.

“Well … there might be Lieutenant Bury,” Warrick told him, a scowl on his face.

“Berry?”

“Bury, like a funeral. B-U-R-Y,” Warrick corrected him. “He’s the
Lizard
sloop, though a fish name’d suit him more. Fellow might as well be covered in scales and fins. An odd bird, altogether is Bury.”

“How so?” Lewrie asked, topping up both their glasses.

In vino veritas,
he thought;
He knows the truth
,
and I don’t.

“He likes hydrog … hydrography,” Warrick carped; perhaps it was the rum that was tangling his tongue. “Swans about the shoals and reefs, taking soundings and making charts. Bury’s got it into his head there’s channels through the flats that nobody’s found yet, or
wants
found!”

Which’d cut into yer trade, and yer earnings,
Lewrie cynically speculated to himself.

“And, when he’s not doing that, he’s out in a small boat with a bucket on his head,” Warrick scoffed.