Reefs and Shoals (24 page)

“Once anchored, I suppose I can find passage up-river to Wilmington at Brunswick Town?” Lewrie asked.

“Lord, sir … there aren’t four buildings left o’ Brunswick Town, and one o’ them’s the tavern,” Dubden further related in amusement. “Smithville’s the main settlement, now, mostly for the pilots, cross the sound from Oak Island, and there isn’t what you’d call regular ferry service up-river. Catch as catch can, really.”

“Purser’s stores?” Lewrie asked. “Firewood and water?”

“You’ll find some at Smithville, Captain, but the main chandlers are up-river. You could send for some, I suppose,” Dubden told him.

“And the British Consul would also be up-river at Wilmington?” Lewrie pressed.

“’Fraid so, Captain, though he isn’t British,” Dubden related. “It’s a parcel o’ city lawyers who fill those posts. Well, there is a Frenchman who does for their consul duties, but the rest are local.”

“Hmmm … sounds as if I should take one of my barges, then,” Lewrie mused aloud. “Perhaps another for my Purser.”

“No need to do all your carrying yourself, Captain,” Dubden said. “Just send your needs up-river, and there’s lighters aplenty that can fetch your purchases down. I see you fly a broad pendant, Captain.… There’s not a squadron offshore, is there? Mean to say … we’re not at war with you British again, are we?”

“Still completely at peace, and in total amity, sir!” Lewrie assured him. “My squadron at present is off Spanish Florida, looking for French and Spanish privateers.”

“Well, then!” Dubden brightened, sounding somewhat relieved by that news. “If you will get your ship under way, there’s deep water and good holding ground about half a mile further on, just off yonder.”

When
Reliant
was safely anchored fore and aft, all the sails handed and gasketed, Dubden took his leave, announcing his fee for his services. “There’s also one dollar due for the gunpowder, sir.”

“Hey?” Lewrie asked.

“For the gunpowder we used to answer your shot, Captain,” the fellow explained. “State regulations for pilotage.”

“The rate of exchange would be, ah…” the Purser, Mr. Cadbury, reckoned, “about five shillings, sir.”

Five shillings, for about ten pence of powder?
Lewrie wondered;
These Yankee Doodles are nothing but a pack of skin-flints and “Captain Sharps”! When I get up-river, I’d better go with a satchel, or a
keg
o’ coin!

After consulting Dubden about the local tides and winds, Lewrie decided to sail up the river early the next morning in one of the thirty foot barges, taking the Purser along to negotiate for the goods that Mr. Cadbury could not purchase from the Smithville traders that afternoon. Mr. Cooke, the ship’s Black cook, was eager for Cadbury to buy Cape Fear Low Country rice, and corn meal, along with as many pecks of berry fruits as possible. Lewrie’s own cook, Yeovill, popped up with a list of his own wants.

“Desmond?” Lewrie called down to the waist. “Come to the quarterdeck, if ye please.”

“Aye, sor?” his Cox’n asked, once there.

“We’ll take one of the barges up-river. Rig the best’un with two lugs’ls and a jib. I’ll want you and Furfy, and only two more of my gig’s crew … men you’re sure won’t take ‘leg-bail’ once we’re at Wilmington,” Lewrie directed. “It’ll be me, the Purser, for passengers.”

“Ye’ll not be wishin’ yer steward t’see to ye, sor?” Desmond asked, thinking it odd to not “show the flag” in proper style due the captain of a British frigate.

“We’ll be among staunch republicans, almost as bad as the
sans-culottes
French, Desmond,” Lewrie explained with a grin, “and the memories of the Revolution are still sharp. The less pomp and show, the better. Besides, there’s an old friend of mine in Wilmington, one we may find welcoming. If the wind fails us, I’ll take the tiller, and we’ll have four oars t’make steerageway. Best turn-out, mind, and we will shove off round dawn.”

“Aye, sor, the barge’ll be ready,” Desmond assured him, “even do I haveta bribe the Bosun for fresh paint!”

And let’s hope Christopher Cashman’s not turned into an American Jacobin, himself!
Lewrie thought.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

It was a very pleasant day to be boating, even did it begin at “first sparrow fart” of a mid-April morning. Brown spotted gulls and white-headed gulls swirled round the mast-tops, and the black-headed laughing gulls flirted and mewed in taunting darts near the gunn’ls of the freshly-painted barge. Further off, dark cormorants hovered and gyred before twisting over to make their fish-killing dives, and clutches of pelicans winged along crank-necked further off. Flocks of white egrets and great blue herons could be seen, stalking on long legs on the nearest shoreline. Before the day warmed, the air was fresh and cool, redolent of marshes and fresh water, even as the barge breasted the surge of the making tide, leaving salt water for sweet. The boat heeled only slightly to a steady beam wind, churning a faint foamy-white bow wave and leaving only the faintest disturbance in the brown river in its wake. Looking up-river, or to either hand as it widened, the Cape Bear appeared a dark blue-green, but closer to, it was rich with leaf mould and the colour of aged tobacco leaves. All under the bluest morning sky, the whitest and least-threatening clouds, and the banks of the river lined with pine and oak brilliant with the fresh green leaves of Spring.

They passed a few landmarks that Lewrie remembered, like Orton Pond and the magnificent house at Orton Plantation to larboard, the New Inlet and Federal Point to starboard, the other riverfront manses further up-river whose names he had never learned, or forgotten, and Desmond, Furfy, and the other hands marvelled and jested as they had a snack of fresh-baked and buttered corn dodgers and small beer.

“There’s Wilmington, proper,” Lewrie pointed out at last, “and that’s the Dram Tree, that big cypress on the right bank. Sailors take a toast for a safe arrival, or at the beginning of an outward voyage, for good luck. Let’s steer for the nearest docks, the ones in front of the Livesey, Seabright and Cashman Chandlery, Desmond.”

“Take a dram, did ye say, Cap’m sor?” Patrick Furfy piped up. “An’ an’t it a foine tradition! Might be we…?”

“For our departure, Furfy, sorry,” Lewrie had to tell him. “But, if the chandlery has a keg of ale handy, we’ll take a ‘wet’.”

“Hand the jib, Hartnett. Pat, your and Thomas see to lowerin’ the lugs’ls,” Desmond directed. They were far above the reach of the making tide, in fresh water, which made Wilmington a welcome harbour where saltwater marine growth would die whilst at anchor, but a goodly current was running. Lewrie tapped Mr. Cadbury on the shoulder, and they both fetched a pair of oars from the barge’s sole, ready to be put into the tholes to maintain steerageway while the sailors saw to wrapping the lugs’ls round their gaff booms and lashing the sheets and halliards over the canvas. When it appeared that the barge would pay off and begin to be taken by the river current, Lewrie stood and took hold of the two stern-most oars in their tholes, and began to row, himself, just to keep them in place. It was not a task at which he could claim even modest expertise, but that stopped their drift.

“Ship oars!” Desmond ordered. “Take th’ tiller, sor?”

“Bows-on between those two two-masters, if there’s not room to land starboard side-to,” Lewrie suggested, trading places.

Their arrival, with a British Union Jack slanted over the transom on a short gaff—a rare sight in an American port!—
and
the sight of a Royal Navy officer plying not one oar but two, seemed to have drawn a gap-jawed crowd on the piers of Dock and Water Streets!

Should’ve brought one or two more hands,
Lewrie chid himself as he put the tiller over, once all four oarsmen were stroking hard;
This could look
damned
awkward and lubberly!

“Toss oar, Hartnett,” Desmond snapped, “an’ be ready with th’ bow line.”

“Should I do something, sir?” Mr. Cadbury asked.

“Why, aye, Mister Cadbury,” Lewrie exclaimed. “Stop sittin’ on the starb’d dock line; and be ready t’toss it to the nearest helpful soul on the pier! Mind that the bitter end’s still bound to the boat!”

Now,
there’d
been an embarassing mistake Lewrie had made, the first time he’d been given charge of a ship’s boat, not a week into his naval career; he’d been sitting on the dock line, too, and had almost put the bow man arse-over-tit into Portsmouth harbour trying to come alongside a stone quay at the victuallers’, claw the line from under his arse, and steer at the same time! The grizzled old wild-haired seaman’s words came back to him: “
Thal’t never make a sailorman!
”—making him blush anew.

“Toss oar, Pat,” Desmond whispered to his long-time mate.

There were men on the pier who took their lines and whipped them expertly round bollards or posts, and they were safely at rest.

“Wahl, hoy th’ boat, thar,” a stout man on the pier drawled. “Has Adm’rl Nelson hisse’f come callin’?”

“Looking for an old friend with a pot of ale,” Lewrie said, grinning back despite the man’s derision.

“Will I do?” Christopher “Kit” Cashman interrupted, coming from the front doors of the establishment which partially bore his name. “Hallo, Alan, old son. Welcome to America!”

*   *   *

They went back a long way, to a failed expedition to carry, then escort, a diplomatic mission to woo the Muskogee, the Lower Creek Indians, to side with England and make war against Rebel settlers in 1782, when Lewrie was a Lieutenant, and Cashman a Captain of a Light Company of an un-distinguished regiment, the both of them expendable. A few years later, when British forces had invaded Haiti, then the French colony of Saint-Domingue, they had met on Jamaica, when Lewrie was Captain of the
Proteus
frigate, and Cashman had become a plantation owner, then the Lt. Colonel of an island-raised volunteer regiment, “hired on” in essence by the rich Beauman family, the bane of both Lewrie’s, and Cashman’s, existence. Lewrie had been Cashman’s second in a duel with the unfortunate younger son, Ledyard Beauman, who had been the Colonel of the regiment, who had lost his nerve in battle in the hills outside Port-Au-Prince, shrilling for the regiment to retreat, then galloping off with his cronies in terror, and laying the entire blame for what could have been a rout and massacre on “Kit”.

It had been Cashman who’d arranged Lewrie’s “theft”, or “liberation”, of a dozen prime Black slaves from a neighboring Beauman plantation before he’d sold up and removed to the United States, and the one who’d sent a supporting (frankly lying!) affidavit to England which had gone a long way in getting Lewrie off at his trial years later for that theft, once the Beaumans had figured out who had done it.

Christopher Cashman had not changed much in the years since. His hair had thinned a bit, and civilian living and the accumulation of wealth had thickened his waist, but it only took a few minutes to remake their friendship, as cozy as an old pair of shoes.

“Now, what in the world brings you to Wilmington?” Cashman asked in amusement, over glass mugs of cool beer.

“Admiralty orders, to look for French and Spanish privateers fitting out in neutral ports,” Lewrie told him. “Show the flag, consult with our consuls … be tactful and diplomatic.”

“Tactful and diplomatic,” Cashman gawped, “you? A bull in the china shop’s more your style, as I recall.”

“The Smithville pilot said our consul here is a local fellow?” Lewrie asked. “Who is he?”

“Mister Osgoode Moore, Junior,” Cashman told him. “Esquire. An attorney, like his father, Osgoode Moore, Senior, who was a noted patriot during the Revolution … joined the Corresponding Society in the early days, the Sons of Liberty, got slung into the prison under the old Burgwyn house by the King’s agents, Fanning and Cunningham, and got treated rather cruelly. Lucky to have survived it, unlike a few others. The father took arms when the local militia marched on Governor Tryon’s house down at Brunswick to rebel against the Stamp Act.… He was said to have been one of the rebels who went aboard HMS
Viper,
seized the chests of stamps, and took back the papers of the ships held from trading for refusing to use them. Just like the Boston Tea Party, as they say, this side of the Atlantic, but
years
before Massachusetts revolted. He’s a good-enough fellow, is young Moore, but … perhaps not all
that
enamoured of the post. It pays a tidy annual sum, without too much work to do, since Wilmington’s not a major trader with England any more.”

“Hmmm … just a
paid
agent,” Lewrie gloomed. “His heart ain’t in it … enough t’turn a blind eye?”

“Oh, he’s a stickler, or would be, if anyone laid an information of someone aiding the French or the Spanish,” Cashman countered. “The interests of Britain, and the strict neutrality of the United States, are the same thing to him, I’m certain.

“Besides, Alan,” Cashman continued, “I’ve my ears to the ground, and my own eyes on the chandleries, and the port. I can’t give you a guarantee that the French or Spanish might put into one of the many inlets for wood and water, but from Lockwood’s Folly to Tops’l Island, I’m pretty sure that there’s no collusion going on.”

“The pilot told me there’s a Frenchman here as their consul,” Lewrie asked. “Could
he
be up to something?”

“
Monsieur
Jean-Marie Fleury?” Cashman scoffed, rising to go to the keg of beer at the back of his office for a refill. “I’m certain he’d
love
to …
anything
for
La Belle France
, and the Emperor Napoleon. Just so long as it doesn’t drag him from his bed too early in the morning, involve a long, secretive horseback ride, or cost him a single dollar. I’m not sure why the French waste the money to keep a consul here, at all. There haven’t been more than a dozen of their merchant ships calling here since the war began again two years ago.”