The Midshipman Prince

The Midshipman

Prince

by

Tom Grundner

Fireship Press

www.FireshipPress.com

The Midshipman Prince -
Copyright © 2006 by T.M. Grundner

      
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotation embodied in critical articles and reviews.

ISBN-13:
 
978-1-935585-33-6

BISAC Subject Heading:

      
FIC014000
     
FICTION / Historical

      
FIC032000
     
FICTION / War & Military

Address all correspondence to:

Fireship Press, LLC

P.O. Box 68412

Tucson, AZ
 
85737

Or visit our website at:

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3.0

To my brother, Ken, who would have enjoyed

Reading this book as much as I enjoyed

writing it.

CHAPTER ONE

      
LUCAS Walker did not want to open his eyes. He did not even want to continue living, but that was irrelevant. He knew he had to do both.

      
His world was pitching wildly. From his position, flat on his back in his cabin, it was as if he was motionless and the planet itself had gone insane. The timbers of the old merchantman, normally softly groaning, had been shrieking in agony for the past twelve hours. This had done nothing for Walker’s head, which felt like it would explode any minute.

      
Below deck on a sailing ship was a fetid place even in the best of times. Beneath the main deck, beneath the orlop deck, beneath the cargo hold, lay the bilge. This was the nearly flat area where the ship’s floor and the ribs met the keel. Because it was the lowest place on the ship, it was the place where all forms of liquid collected. Most of it was water that had slowly worked its way in between the ship’s planks; but it contained other fluids as well—fluids that formed a soup consisting of seawater, urine, blood, decaying rats, spoiled vegetables and, more recently, vomit. It was the latter that proved too much for Walker and he knew he had to get on to the upper deck as soon as possible.

      
Walker exited his passenger cabin and, staggering with the roll of the ship, made it to the aft ladder leading to the upper deck. Crashing through a storm hatch he immediately knew he had made a mistake. He had gone from purgatory to hell.

      
At first, he couldn’t see a thing. The howling wind was blowing the rain nearly horizontally and it was attacking every inch of his exposed skin with needle sharp stings. Turning downwind he was able to open his eyes enough to locate the rail, stumble over to it, and dry-heave for the third time that night. Turning back amidships, he slid down to the deck and sat there in abject misery.

      
He was a 22-year-old failure; there was no other way to put it. He had drunk his way through three teaching positions and was now on his way to Charleston, South Carolina to try again.
Try again?
He thought.
Try again and do what? Fail again? When you go from Harvard, to getting run out of Mrs. Harrison’s Academy for Discriminating Young Ladies, you know there isn’t much left.
Still, he knew he had to try.

      
His despondent reverie ended in a curious way, however, when he suddenly became aware of a concert that was going on around him. The captain had taken down all sails except for a small storm jib that hung precariously between the foremast and the bowsprit. This scrap of canvas was intended to keep the bow of the ship pointed downwind so the ship, in theory, could run before the storm; but, the rest of the lines were barren—barren and singing.
 

      
Set into motion by the violent wind, the various ropes were vibrating, each creating their own unique sound. At the low end were the big preventer stays that ran from the bow to the main mast. In the middle were the topmast and topgallant stays; and several octaves above these were the Martingales up forward and the buntlines up high. Walker forgot his depression and seasickness; and for a moment, he was a child again. He was lost in the wonder of the world around him—the thing that caused him to become a natural philosopher, a scientist, in the first place.

      
It took him a while to stand-up again, partially because he was so sick and partially because of the violent motions of the ship. He could handle it when a ship pitched. He could handle it when it rolled. He could handle it when it yawed. However, when it pitched, rolled, and yawed at the same time, Walker was out of his league.

      
He no sooner got to his feet when he looked aft just in time to sea a huge wave tower up over the stern and crash down upon it. A wall of water was sluicing down the main deck to engulf him as he clung to the rail. He spit out a gob of seawater, and for the first time that evening felt a stab of genuine fear.

      
His fear was justified. Walker couldn’t have known it, but his fate had already been sealed by an unusually warm summer off the coast of Africa and a careless workman in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

      
That summer had been the hottest and driest in anyone’s memory on the Cape Verde Islands. They said a pan of water set in the sun would evaporate in the time it took you to turn around three times. The conditions were no different out on the ocean. Water—tons of it—was evaporating off the surface of the ocean and rising high in the atmosphere. There it would cool and condense, releasing energy. The air spewing out of this chimney would be driven by that energy back to earth, which would form powerful winds, which, in turn, would be sucked up by the newer rising, hot, moist air, and continue the cycle.
 

      
At first, it was just a very nasty thunderstorm. However, the cycles continued and it developed into a tropical depression, then a tropical storm. At this point, the coriolis effect of the earth’s rotation started the clouds spinning around a central core—and the up-draft/down-draft cycles continued. Eventually the storm dropped into one of the West African disturbance lines and, pushed by a high-pressure area over North Africa, set forth into the Atlantic headed west by northwest.

      
This storm—this hurricane—had Walker’s ship in its grasp.

      
Walker fought his way aft, toward the quarterdeck. In between gusts of wind and water, he could see the captain and first mate hanging on to the binnacle box in front of the wheel with safety ropes tied around their waists.
 

      
Moving closer he could see a look of deep concern on the captain’s face, a look of despair on the face of the first mate, and a look of sheer terror on the faces of the four helmsman who were trying to maintain control of the large, bucking, wheel.

      
The ship was taking the seas on the stern, which is just where the captain wanted them. They would be all right as long as the ship maintained that position relative to the storm; but one slip of the wheel, a parting of a rudder cable, a rogue wave running counter to the sea state, anything that would cause them to rotate sideways to the main waves, and they would be finished. If just one of those enormous waves hit the ship in that position, it would roll it over like a turtle.

      
The carpenter’s mate came on deck to report to the captain. Walker couldn’t hear the conversation; he could only make out isolated words. “Water rising.” “Pumps” “Keep-up” “If this continues, she’ll...” After a moment, the captain dismissed him and the mate began to stagger forward and down into the innards of the ship.

      
Walker looked aft. He couldn’t see very far but what he saw literally took his breath away. Huge, green, angry waves were forming behind the stern. Waves that looked threatening at a distance became more and more frightening the closer they got. As they reached the stern, some of them towered 25 and 30 feet above the poop deck before roaring down. Yet each time, miraculously, the ship would lift her tail, point it up the wave’s slope and ride it out.

      
Walker had never been this afraid. It went beyond the visceral fear he had known previously. It was a fear that numbed him—that froze his limbs and locked his brain into psychological immobility.
 

      
Still... Maybe...
he thought.
Maybe we can somehow come through this. If only... Dear God! What was that?

      
And this brings us to the workman in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

      
He was, in fact, a good workman. Well, usually he was, anyway; but this morning was different. He had had a real knockdown, drag out, fight with his woman. She was arguing about money, he was complaining about the kids, and neither was talking to the other—just yelling. By the time he got to the shipyard, his mood was foul and he was prepared to take it out on anyone who got in his way. Unfortunately, no one did; so, he wound up taking it out on his work.

      
His job that day was to nail the strakes in place that would form the starboard bow of the merchantman on which he was working. Quite frankly, he didn’t care how the nails went in as long as he could pound on something. Some went in properly, some went in crooked, some went in bent, some boards had three nails, some had the regulation two, and some had only one. He simply didn’t care that day.

      
The people who later caulked the hull noticed his workmanship, but said nothing. Other workmen who were fastening the large protective copper hull sheets in place also noticed it, but they too said nothing. After all, why get a fellow worker in trouble? Live and let live, right? And those nails stayed just the way they were for nearly eight years.

      
If the merchantman had not run into a hurricane, it still might have been all right. She might have sailed for many more years without mishap. However, she
was
in a hurricane; and it was
not
all right.