In Distant Waters (18 page)

‘Perfectly, sir,' nodded Mount.

‘Good. Usual signals for enemy in sight . . . any approaching ship is an enemy.'

‘I understand, sir.'

‘Very well. When you have landed the marines, Mr Q, I want you ashore here, on the point, with an hour-glass and a tide-pole. We know the moon is waxing and the tides with it, but I want to know the maximum rise and fall as soon as possible.'

‘Aye, aye, sir.'

‘Good. Now Mr Fraser and you, Mr Hill, the greatest burden of the task falls on you. We will send down our topmasts and bridge the boats. I want the spare spars used for that . . . then I want two anchors laid out astern. We will shoe these, for I want no risk of them coming home . . .'

‘Your pipe, Mr Comley!'

The boatswain straightened up from the rail and a piercing whistle rolled over the smooth waters of the anchorage. Above the heads of the men in the cutter, all activity aboard
Patrician
ceased. The deck parties getting the topmasts down and the spare spars over the side into the long boat, launch and barge, the details beginning to shift stores in the hold, the running
messengers, the labouring landsmen and toiling cooks all stood stock still, pending the pipe to carry on.

Under the larboard bow the cutter bobbed, bowsed in to the ship's side by a boat-rope. In shirt sleeves Captain Drinkwater and Mr Marsden leaned inelegantly over the side, each with a musket ramrod placed against the ship's side; they put the other ends to their ears. The operation had been repeated several times and the men, having been exhorted to work as they had never done before were heartily fed up with the periodic whistled injunctions to stop and keep silent.

The cutter's crew strove to hold the boat as motionless as possible, the bowman bracing his boat-hook against the downward thrust of the larboard bumpkin, an oarsman stilling the rumble of a rolling loom.

‘Got it, sir!' Marsden's eyes gleamed with triumph and Drinkwater withdrew his ramrod, shuffled further forward while the boat lurched dangerously and crouched next to Marsden, his ramrod replaced against
Patrician
's spirketting alongside that of the carpenter's.

Drinkwater put his ear to the small, expanded bell that was designed to tamp the charge and ball in the breech of a Brown Bess. The dull, formless sound that was part the resonating of the ship, part the blood in his ear was dramatically displaced. It was low and indistinct, but instantly recognisable as the sound of water running through a constriction. His eyes met those of Marsden and he nodded.

‘Very well, Mr Marsden, mark it . . .'

Marsden look at the hull, reached out and scored a mark with a lump of chalk. The problem still remained to discover how far below the waterline the sea was gaining ingress. Not far by the clarity of the noise. Less than a fathom? Drinkwater fervently hoped so. He nodded at Marsden again.

‘Well?'

Marsden was looking up at the hull. Above them the curved head-rails swept from the fo'c's'le to the massive stem timbers and
Patrician
's gilded and painted figurehead. Bright splashes of colour and limned streaks of gilt were encrusted with salt and the chips and chafing of ropes, while overhead stretched the gratings
that formed the shitting place for the crew. Suddenly the carpenter turned to Drinkwater, comprehension widening his eyes.

‘The shot locker, sir . . . the forrard shot-locker!'

‘By God, Marsden, you're right!' Drinkwater turned and the boat lurched again. ‘Haul her back to the ladder there, and be quick about it!'

Neither Drinkwater nor Marsden could contain their impatience as the boat was hauled aft along the ship's side. Noting the sudden flurry of activity below him, Comley leaned over the side.

‘Permission to carry on, sir?'

‘Yes, Mr Comley, carry on . . . and get two lanterns ready!'

Again the pipe whistled over the placid water of the bay, but now it was not the imperious single note of the ‘still'. Now the note hopped down a tone and men swung to work again, cursing and bantering according to temperament and the liberty that the leading hand, or petty officer, midshipman, mate or lieutenant allowed them.

The cutter ground alongside the long-boat and launch which were being lashed into one huge raft, purlined with the spare spars to form a platform for heavy gear and guns. Drinkwater and Marsden scrambled out of the cutter.

‘Thank you, Mr Frey,' Drinkwater called to the midshipman in command, ‘you had better return to assist the first lieutenant to get that second anchor laid out astern.'

Without waiting for a reply and waving aside a pretended and half-cocked formal welcome, Drinkwater ran below with Marsden waddling in hot pursuit. It had been his strict instruction to his officers, and one which he himself saw no reason to disobey, that the urgency of the work over-rode everything else and that they would borrow the phrase of the English navigator who had first charted the careenage, for the gentlemen should labour with the mariners.

With the activity and eagerness of a man half his age, Drinkwater sped below. Every moment that his ship lay defenceless in the bay cost him agonies of worry; now, with almost certain knowledge of the location of the leak, he was at once nervously
eager and apprehensive to see it for himself. If Marsden was right, the leak might not be so very difficult to get at. If it was an act of deliberate sabotage, some ease of access could be assumed; on the other hand anyone contemplating such a deed would run in fear of a discovery that could hang the perpetrator.

‘Here, you men,' he hailed a working party hauling cable aft for bending on the spare anchors, ‘belay that and come below.'

The shot locker Marsden referred to was right forward, a deep, narrow, inward funnelling space immediately abaft the massive timbers of the stem. This otherwise useless space was one of several voids about the ship in which iron shot was stowed. In the case of the two shot lockers at the very extremities of the ship, they served a double purpose and indeed, so wet and corroded did the shot in them become, that it required extensive scaling and was rarely used for action. Instead, while it formed a reserve, its chief purpose was to provide manageable concentrations of weight at the ship's ends by which, with facility, her trim might be altered.

Two or three men might, in such a remote corner of the frigate, shift the contents of the locker and get at the skin of the ship undetected. Drinkwater conceded the lead of the impromptu procession to Marsden who had grabbed a lantern. Dropping from the orlop into the hold they worked their way forward. Now the ship lay tranquilly at anchor, Drinkwater fancied he heard the haunting trickle of water long before they reached the hatch to the forward shot locker, but there was no doubt half-an-hour later when the seamen he had commandeered sweated below the faint flame of a lantern he held above their labouring heads. The pungent smell of disturbed and powdery rust cut through the thick stench of bilge as the shot was handed up and rolled like reluctant footballs aft, clear of the small square hatch-coaming. Gradually the grunting men worked themselves lower until one swore and suddenly they could see the dark gleam of running water in the lamplight.

‘Look!' Marsden hissed. Drinkwater could see for himself. A partially rotten section of the ship's inner skin had been removed, the lighter colour of exposed wood showed clearly. Ten minutes later Marsden and one of his mates had swapped places
with the gasping seamen and levered off the broken inner planking. The jet of water that squirted inwards from the outer hit them like a fire-hose.

They were lucky. Lucky in the mist that lay offshore, shrouding their activities from all but the eyes of a few curious Indians and a drunken
mestizo
that rode, legs swinging, on the swaying back of a decayed
burro
. Lucky in the location of the leak, deliberate though it was, for by discharging only eight guns and shifting stores and cannon aft, they raised it above the waterline where it could be properly repaired. And they were lucky that the wind held light, that no disturbing swells rolled around Punta de los Reyes to dislocate their tender situation.

But luck was something realised in retrospect, or perceived solely by degrees. Nothing at the time could mitigate the excoriating anxiety that churned the pit of Drinkwater's stomach and sent him about the deck to direct, encourage and chivvy. Periodically he cast an eye at Mount's distant flagpole. Once the signal for an enemy in sight lifted limply above the post, and marine runner and midshipman met at the appointed rendezvous to learn that the ship was passing to the south and appeared not to have seen the
Patrician
skulking with lowered masts in the bight of Drake's Bay.

But it was not simply the dread of being caught defenceless with his guard down and the frigate in a state of disorder, as he had once caught Edouard Santhonax in the
sharm
of Al Mukhra, that worried him.
*
Worse was the underlying anxiety of the cause of their predicament, that deliberate act of sabotage about which there was no doubt. He had inspected the hole and it had been drilled with an auger bit and possibly plugged until an apt moment arrived with a coast and refuge to leeward to compel Drinkwater to make for the land.

There was only one explanation for such a calculated act. Whoever planned it, intended to desert. The country about them was empty; a desperate man could lose himself in an hour or two of liberty. In the direction of the distant mountains, the wooded foothills suggested fast-flowing streams, game and
freedom. If a few desperate souls succeeded in such a venture it was almost certain that more would follow, that a trickle of stragglers might become a flood. He feared he would be left with a dismantled warship and lack the means of refitting or working her, let alone fighting her.

Such thoughts chased themselves about his weary brain, robbing him of sleep until, when he finally capitulated to exhaustion, they inhabited his dreams, assuming nightmarish qualities in which laughing, drunken seamen taunted him as they caroused with dark-eyed Spanish and Indian beauties, or stalked him through the dense woods, as he had once been stalked through the pine-barrens of South Carolina.
*
He would wake shuddering and sweating, steadying his nerves with a glass and sitting gloomily in his chair, ticking off the precautions he had taken to prevent desertion. Mount had been instructed to watch for a signal from the ship, so that his marines might cut off any men running from the beach; the officers had been instructed in the matter, and the one boat not needed as a platform or for some purpose concerning the refit such as holding stores, rowed a constant night-guard about them.

There had been one farcical alarm when the marine sentry on the fo'c's'le had fired at an innocent turtle, mistaking it for a swimmer, and there had been an inevitable slackening in vigilance as the days passed uneventfully. But there were Irishmen and papists aboard who were less hostile to the thought of Spanish rule, vestigial as it was; and there was a dissenting faction epitomised by the Quaker Derrick with his innocent and simplistic cant about the evils of war.

Lastly, there was Drinkwater himself, by no means unsympathetic to the aspirations of men driven by the protraction of this interminable war. Such sympathy ran contrary to his duty and his sense of the latter had been powerfully reinforced by the wanton act of sabotage, stripping from his consideration the plight of the unfortunate. In the uncompromising light of day he bore the unaltered burden of command: to bring them safe home again having first executed his orders.

‘Another heave, there, bullies . . . Waay-oh and belay! Fetch another tackle Mr Comley and reeve a bull-rope through the chess-tree sheave and take it to the jeer capstan. We'll get a better lead . . . stand easy a moment there amidships . . .'

Quilhampton wiped his face, smearing his shirt sleeve and feeling the fabric rasp on his unshaven cheek. This was only the third gun to be heaved back into position, though they had been labouring since four o'clock in the morning. They had eight more to drag forward from the after end of the gun-deck, 24-pounders, each weighing two and a half tons and each with an inert brutishness that provoked cursing from the tired men. Another eight of the damnable things had been hoisted off their carriages and laid on the impromptu decking of the raft.

They had lifted the bulkheads and deprived the captain and officers of their privacy, rolling guns aft and moving every possible weight towards the stern in order to lighten the bow. The after ends of both the gun-deck and the berth-deck were cluttered, and on either side of her waist amidships,
Patrician
looked like a merchantman loading from lighters.

‘Ready there? Very well. Stand-to!' Quilhampton concentrated again, waving up three men with hand-spikes and shouting to set the tackles tight. Slowly the heavy carriage was manoeuvred along the deck, swung through a right angle and its wheels were trundled into the familiar grooves of its station.