The Corvette

Mariner's Library Fiction Classics

S
TERLING
H
AYDEN
Voyage: A Novel of 1896

B
JORN
L
ARSSON
The Celtic Ring

S
AM
L
LEWELLYN
The Shadow in the Sands

R
ICHARD
W
OODMAN
The Darkening Sea
Endangered Species
Wager
The Nathaniel Drinkwater Novels
(in chronological order):
An Eye of the Fleet
A King's Cutter
A Brig of War
The Bomb Vessel
The Corvette
1805
Baltic Mission
In Distant Waters
A Private Revenge
Under False Colours
The Flying Squadron
Beneath the Aurora
The Shadow of the Eagle
Ebb Tide

This edition first published 2000
by Sheridan House Inc.
145 Palisade Street
Dobbs Ferry, New York 10522
www.sheridanhouse.com

Copyright © 1985 by Richard Woodman

First published in Great Britain 1985
by John Murray (Publishers) Ltd

First published in the U.S. 1988
by Walker and Co. under the title
Arctic Treachery

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of Sheridan House.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Woodman, Richard, 1944-

The corvette / Richard Woodman.

p. cm. — (Mariner's library fiction classics)

“A Nathaniel Drinkwater novel”—Cover.

Sequel to: The bomb vessel.

ISBN 1-57409-100-X (alk. paper)

1. Drinkwater, Nathaniel (Fictitious character)—Fiction.
2. Great Britain—History, Naval—19
^th
century—Fiction.
3. Whaling ships—Fiction. 4. Greenland—Fiction.
I. Title. II. Series.

PR6073.0618 C6 2000
823'.914—dc21

00-059497

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 1-57409-100-X

PART ONE: THE CONVOY

London

1    The Job Captain

2    The Corvette

3    The Greenlanders

4    The Captain's Cloak

5    Bressay Sound

PART TWO: THE GREENLAND SEA

6    The Matter of a Surgeon

7    The First Whales

8    Balaena Mysticetus

9    The Mercy of God

10    The Seventy-second Parallel

11    The Great Hunt

12    Fortune's Sharp Adversity

PART THREE: THE FIORD

13    The Fate of the ‘Faithful'

14    The Corsair

15    The Action with the ‘Requin'

16    A Providential Refuge

17    Nagtoralik Bay

18    Ellerby

19    The Plagues of Egypt

20    Greater Love Hath no Man

21    The Nore

Author's Note

For my Mother

‘. . .  and there came a report that the French were away to murder a' our whalers . . .'

The Man O' War's Man
BILL TRUCK

May 1803

‘He has
what
?'

The First Lord of the Admiralty swung round from the window, suddenly attentive. He fixed a baleful eye on the clerk holding the bundle of papers from which he was making his routine report.

‘Resigned, my Lord.'

‘Resigned?
Resigned
, God damn and blast him! What does he think the Service is that he may resign it at a whim? Eh?'

The clerk prudently remained silent as Earl St Vincent crossed the fathom of Indian carpet that lay between the window and his desk. He leaned forward, both hands upon the desk, his face approximating the colour of the Bath ribbon that crossed his breast in anticipation of a court levée later in the morning. He looked up at Mr Templeton.

Considerably taller than the first lord, Templeton nevertheless felt his lack of stature before St Vincent. Although used to his lordship's anger, his lordship's power never failed to impress him. The earl continued, his deep frustration obvious to the clerk.

‘As if I have not enough with the war renewed and the dockyards but imperfectly overhauled, that I have to teach a damned kill-buck his duty. Good God, sir, the Service is not to be trifled with like a regiment. It has become altogether too
fashionable
.'

St Vincent spat the word with evident distaste. Since the Peace of Amiens he had laboured to clean the dockyards of corruption, to stock them with naval stores and to end the peculation and jobbery which beset the commissariat of his rival, Sir Andrew Snape Hammond, Comptroller of the Navy and head of the powerful Navy Board. He had found suppression of mutiny in the Cadiz squadron an easier task. He could not hang every grasping malefactor who stole His Majesty's stores, nor break every profiteer in the business of supplying His Majesty's Navy. Yet his affection for his ships and their well-being demanded it, and his honest opposition to the worldliness of the London politicians had made him many enemies.

Lord St Vincent hunched his shoulders and wiped his nose on a fine
linen handkerchief. Templeton knew the gesture. The explosion of St Vincent's accumulated frustration would be through the touch-hole of his office, since his opponents stopped his muzzle.

‘Be so kind, Templeton, as to add upon the skin of Sir James Palgrave's file that he is not to be employed again during the present war . . .'

‘Yes my Lord.' St Vincent turned back to the window and his contemplation of the waving tree-tops in St James's Park. It was now his only eye upon the sky he had watched from a hundred quarterdecks. Templeton waited. St Vincent considered the folly of allowing a man a post-captaincy on account of his baronetcy. He recollected Palgrave; an indifferent lieutenant with an indolent fondness for fortified wines and a touchy sense of honour. It was perhaps a result of the inconsequence of his title. St Vincent, whose own honours had been earned by merit, disliked inherited rank when it eclipsed the abilities of better men. Properly the replacement of Palgrave should not concern the First Lord. But there was a matter of some importance attached to the appointment.

Templeton coughed. ‘And the
Melusine
, my Lord?' St Vincent remained silent. ‘Bearing in mind the urgency of her orders and the intelligence . . .'

‘Why did he resign, Templeton?' asked St Vincent suddenly.

‘I do not know, my Lord.' It was not the business of the Secretary's third clerk to trade in rumour, no matter how impeccable the source, nor how fascinating it sounded in the copy-room. But Sir James's hurried departure was said to stem from an inconvenient wound acquired in an illegal duel with the master of one of the ships he had been ordered to convoy. Templeton covered his dissimulation: ‘And the
Melusine
, my Lord? It would seem she was in your gift.'

St Vincent looked up sharply. Only recent illness, a congestive outbreak of spring catarrh among the senior clerks, and including his Lordship's secretary Benjamin Tucker, had elevated Templeton to this daily tete-à-tete with the First Lord. Templeton flushed at his presumption.

‘I beg pardon, my Lord, I meant only to allude to the intelligence . . .'

‘Quite so, the intelligence had not escaped my recollection, Templeton,' St Vincent said sharply, and added ironically, ‘whom had you in mind?'

‘No one, my Lord,' blustered the clerk, now thoroughly alarmed that the omniscient old man might know of his connection with
Francis Germaney, first lieutenant of the
Melusine
.

‘Then who is applying, sir? Surely we are not in want of commanders for the King's ships?'

The barb drove home. ‘Indeed not, my Lord.' The clerks' office was inundated daily with letters of application for employment by half-pay captains, commanders and lieutenants. All were neatly returned from the secretary's inner sanctum where the process of advancement or rejection ground its pitiless and partial way.

‘Bring me the names of the most persistent applicants within the last month, sir, and jump to it.'

Templeton escaped with the alacrity of a chastened midshipman while St Vincent, all unseeing, stared at the rolling cumulus, white above the chimneys of Downing Street.

Since the renewal of the war two weeks earlier, officers on the half-pay of unemployment had been clamouring for appointments. The lieutenant's waiting-room below him was filled with hopeful officers, a bear-pit of demands and disappointments from which the admiralty messengers would be making a fortune in small coin, God rot them. St Vincent sighed, aware that his very overhaul of the navy had caused a dangerous hiatus in the nation's defences. Now the speed with which the fleet was recommissioning was being accomplished only by a reversion to the old vices of bribery, corruption and the blind eye of official condonement. St Vincent felt overwhelmed with chagrin while his worldly enemies, no longer concerned by the First Lord's zealous honesty, smiled with cynical condescension. Templeton's return broke the old man's bitter reverie.