Reefs and Shoals (33 page)

“’E’s right clever, sir,” Jessop, the young cabin servant, shyly piped up. “Been teachin’ ’im tricks, I has.”

“Not in here, I trust,” Lewrie said, peeling off his neck-stock and shucking his dress coat.

“Oh no, sir, never!” Jessop swore.

“Cool tea, sir?” Pettus asked.

“Coffee,” Lewrie decided, removing his sash and un-buttoning his waist-coat. “Do stow all this away, and lay me out my comfortable old clothes, Pettus.”

“Aye, sir,” Pettus said, summoning Jessop to assist him, “Care for a bite of something, sir?”

“Our Consul sent me off with a solid breakfast, and his house servants washed and ironed most o’ my things,” Lewrie told him. “All I care for is coffee. I’ve a letter or two to write before dinner.”

The supper party had gone past ten of the evening, and Lewrie and Mr. Cotton had sat up past eleven in discussions, over balloon snifters of brandy, before retiring. Lewrie had slept extremely well, but had risen early, had rewarded himself with one last shore bath, and had wolfed down fried ham, scrambled eggs, thick toast, and piping-hot hominy grits with cinnamon, sugar, and butter. If he didn’t get started on his letters, he feared he might nod off over his pen.

There would have to be one letter to Admiralty to report upon what
Reliant
had done so far, and what he and their Consuls had discovered. A copy of that letter would have to be sent to the British Ambassador in Washington City. Once the official reports were done, there would be time to write his father, Sir Hugo, his sons Sewallis and Hugh—though if their respective ships were at sea it might be months before they received them—a letter to his daughter, Charlotte, who still lodged with his brother-in-law in Anglesgreen, and a fond one to Lydia Stangbourne. And one to his bastard son, Desmond McGilliveray.

It had been hard to find even a brief moment of privacy with Mr. Douglas McGilliveray to ask about Desmond, and unsure whether even a guarded enquiry might upset Mrs. McGilliveray, who might, or might not, know that Lewrie was young Desmond’s true father, not her husband’s late younger brother of the same name, who had been the family’s agent to the Muskogees Indians, and guide to a fruitless expedition into the Florida Panhandle to bring the tribe into war against the Americans, an expedition of which Lewrie was a part.
That
Desmond had claimed both the baby, and his mother Soft Rabbit, a Cherokee slave to the White Clan, after Lewrie had sailed away, marrying her at the next Green Corn Ceremony the next Spring. The elder Desmond and Soft Rabbit had both died of a smallpox outbreak not long after, and the baby had been sent to Charleston to be with his White kin by the White Clan elders.

It was bad enough for young Desmond to be half-Indian in haughty Low Country Society; for him to have a
British
father might have made things worse for him, were it known! Hatred for England and all things British were still alive, as Lewrie had already seen. Best all round for the lad was for the people of Charleston to believe that Desmond’s sire had been a daring and resourceful, Oxford-educated, “far-trader” and frontiersman, one of their own kind and class, and the inconvenience of his late mother’s race could be dismissed.

Thankfully, Mr. Douglas McGilliveray had provided an opportunity to speak, inviting Lewrie to join him in the tavern side of the establishment so he could savour a
cigarro
grown and cured Up State on the Piedmont and rolled in Charleston. Before Lewrie could declare himself a non-smoker, McGilliveray had tipped him a very broad wink.

“You wish to know how Desmond fares, I expect,” McGilliveray had begun. “He’s gotten your last two letters, but has been a tad busy to respond promptly. He’s at the North in the Chesapeake.”

Young Desmond was now a full-grown young man of twenty-two years of age, and had wangled a way to stay in the fledgling U.S. Navy after the short Quasi-War ’twixt America and France had ended, intending to make a career of it if he could. McGilliveray had proudly related how Desmond had already stood his oral examinations and had passed on the first try, making him a Passed Midshipman, eligible to be commissioned a Lieutenant in the future, should there be an opening.

“Promotion may come soon,” Mr. McGilliveray had said, winking once more, and blowing a cloud of smoke at the ceiling of the tavern. “President ‘Fool Thomas’ Jefferson just
won’t
see that we need a sea-going navy. Soon as he took office, he laid up all the good ships to rot away, and had all these damned coastal and river gunboats put into service. Lieutenant Gordon’s poor pair are lucky to live, out past the bar, on a gusty day, and wouldn’t be much of a deterrent to an enemy expedition. What little we still have in commission worth a thing are over in the Mediterranean, confronting the damned Barbary Corsairs. You know we lost the frigate
Philadelphia.
A shameful business! Stranded aground in Tripoli Harbour, and captured. Oh, we managed to board her and burn her, but it’s pitiful how weak we are. The idea of sailing
gunboats
to Tripoli is laughable! Pressure is growing that we build newer, bigger, better-armed frigates, sloops of war, and brigs to scour the Barbary Coast and stop their foul business, once and for all! All the poor, murdered American sailors, all those captured and enslaved, forced to denounce Christianity and turn Muslim? Pah! They cry out for freedom, and vengeance!”

“So, Desmond could be posted to a new ship, as a Lieutenant?” Lewrie had asked.

“A very good possibility, Captain Lewrie,” McGilliveray had imparted with a pleased smile. “Do you write him, send your letters to the brig o’ war
Daring.
She’s fitting out for the Mediterranean at Baltimore.”

Lewrie suspected that Desmond wrote his Charleston family more often than he wrote him, and had pressed for more information on how he was truly doing … gingerly asking how the young man was being
accepted,
despite his antecedents. McGilliveray had turned sombre, leaning closer. Charleston Society would always look upon him as an exotic oddity, no matter the backing and full acceptance of his kin. His prospects of making a decent match, someday, would be bleak,
but
up North Desmond’s Indian-dark hair and complexion could be mistaken for Huguenot French, for many of them had settled in Charleston and the South Carolina Low Country before the Revolution. And, having Lewrie’s grey-blue eyes was a plus. His bastard son was strong and slim, and finely moulded, his manners impeccable, his seeming sense of place and his confident air of competent, gentlemanly leadership, and his proven courage and skill with weapons, actually made Desmond a welcome guest … in the states above Virginia, at any rate.

“He could come back to Charleston, someday, with a New England bride?” Lewrie had gawped. “What would the city think o’ that?”

Mr. McGilliveray had at that juncture heaved a heavy sigh and had slowly shaken his head, before saying, “I fear that Desmond might never return to Charleston, at all, unless the Navy orders him here. He’s become more a citizen of our whole country than he is of South Carolina, despite his family’s desires that he stay a part of us.”

Poor chub,
Lewrie thought as he fetched out a fresh sheet of paper and dipped his pen in the ink-well;
though it may turn out for the best for him. And nothing that I could cure.

BOOK III

PIRATE
: A
ƒ
ea-robber, or an armed
ƒ
hip that roams the
ƒ
eas without any legal commi
ƒƒ
ion, and
ƒ
eizes or plunders every ve
ƒƒ
el he meets, indi
ƒ
crimanatly, whether friends or enemies.

—
F
ALCONER
’
S
M
ARINE
D
ICTIONARY
1780 E
DITION

CHAPTER THIRTY

This whole expedition is just bloody impossible,
Lewrie sourly told himself as he pondered the newest charts he had purchased ashore in Charleston.
Reliant
’s Sailing Master, Mr. Caldwell, had been highly dubious of their usefulness, and would put no trust in them until he had compared them to his own sets, and then only begrudgingly told Lewrie that the Yankee Doodles had done a “passably accurate” job of surveying their own waters.

I’ve too big a damned ship for this work,
Lewrie concluded.

To look into Stono Inlet, Hilton Head Inlet, Port Royal Sound, or Calibogue Sound, it had been necessary to fetch-to five miles off the coast and send both twenty-five-foot cutters and one of the thirty-two-foot barges inshore under sail, with a Lieutenant in each to keep order, on the pretense of fishing for sport, with the hope that the locals did not get too curious or upset to see British boats “poaching” upon their fishing grounds. There had been nothing in Stono Inlet larger than a ship’s boat, but that proved little. Two nights later, and an
host
of raiders or privateers could have put in to victual under the cover of the night.

The boats had returned with a few fresh fish, and about one bushel basket of fresh-trawled shrimp purchased from locals to keep them mellow. The only discovery of note was made by Lt. Merriman, who had peeked behind Hilton Head Island, and came back swearing that the channel between the island and the mainland looked to be the birthing grounds for half the sharks in the Atlantic, swarming as thickly as a creek full of eels!

He’d sent the Purser, with Midshipman Eldridge, and his boat crew in the second barge as far as the sleepy towns of Port Royal and Beaufort to see what their markets offered, and Mr. Cadbury had come back with very little to show for it, and with the depressing information that what little shipping was present was small and pacific. Mr. Cadbury had asked about, and if there was a British Consul there, a true Briton or a hired-on local attorney, no one on the docks or in the stores had ever heard of him.

“Have a nice afternoon, did you, Mister Westcott?” Lewrie asked once the First Officer had come through the entry-port in his rolled-up shirtsleeves, and doffing a wide-brimmed straw hat.

“A
lovely
day for boating, sir,” Lt. Westcott said with delight, “though not a one for discovery, I’m afraid. The local fishermen we encountered were stand-offish, but once we bought some fish, and gave them a few shillings for them, they did turn chatty. Do you imagine that your cats savour fresh fish, sir?”

“I expect they do,” Lewrie said, grinning back in like humour with Westcott, and looking at Toulon and Chalky, who were sunning all a’sprawl atop the cross-deck hammock nets. “Mad for it, they are.”

Indeed they were, for Westcott had come aboard with a wet jute bag that positively reeked of fresh fish. As soon as they were aware of it, Toulon and Chalky sat up, their tails quivering and their whiskers stiffly pointed forward, craning their necks. Westcott reached into the bag and tossed two live shrimp to the planks of the quarterdeck. They sprang at once, chittering madly, and sat by the shrimp, lifting and patting them with one paw, sure that they were something good to eat, but unsure of how to go about it.

“Anything else of note, sir?” Lewrie prompted.

“Not really, sir,” Westcott told him. “I enquired, as casually as I could, about French or Spanish vessels putting in here, and they said they couldn’t recall any, in years. They hadn’t seen any French
money,
either, though Spanish silver coins might as well be the legal tender in America. I don’t know if the U.S. Government actually
has
a mint of their own. Our shillings and half-crowns were more than welcome. They spoke a lot of barter, sir.”

Toulon and Chalky were making eager
mrrs,
slapping their shrimp in play-kill, and leaping in alarm when the shrimp limply thrashed in return. Chalky finally nipped one and ran off a few feet with it, but dropped it when its antennae wriggled.

“Just think of ’em as big cockroaches, lads,” Lewrie told them. “Ye have no trouble with those.”

“One thing in our favour, sir,” Lt. Westcott pointed out, “the land round here is so marshy and flat, and the coastal forests so low, that any ship of decent size, with her masts standing, can be spotted quite easily.”

“Unless they’re of shallow-enough draught to make their way up the maze of rivers, and round a bend or two where the trees are tall enough to hide them,” Lewrie rejoined with a glum look. “Back of the marshes, there’s white oak and live oak forests, an hundred years old or better.
Hmpf!
Perhaps we ought to come back with barricoes of silver, and buy prime shipbuilding oak from America. We’ve scavenged our own forests, and half of Hamburg’s exports, just t’keep the Navy in good repair … much less keep up with new construction. Come, sir … take a look at this chart of the Georgia coast round Savannah. It gives me a headache.”

It wasn’t that far South of where
Reliant
lay fetched-to, but it was rather daunting to contemplate how many inlets and sounds, how many rivers feeding into the ocean, into those sounds, lay before them, all of which could harbour enemy ships behind the myriad of fertile barrier islands, the Sea Islands.

Round the mouth of the Savannah River, there was Turtle Island and Jones Island on the North bank, with broad streams leading round and behind them. To the South bank, there was Big Tybee Island nearest the sea, with Cockspur Island and McQueen’s Island between the mainland and Tybee Roads. Further South was Wassaw Sound below Big Tybee Island, with another snake’s nest of tributaries, and the mouth of the Wilmington River which led deep inland. South of Wassaw Island, lay Ossabow Sound, another deep gash, with Racoon Key at its upper reach, fed by the Vernon River, and the Little and the Big Ogeechee Rivers.