A Private Revenge Read online

  A Private Revenge

  by

  Richard Woodman

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Contents

  Map of South China Sea

  PART ONE The Damoclean Sword

  The Typhoon

  CHAPTER 1 The Brig

  CHAPTER 2 New Orders

  CHAPTER 3 Whampoa

  CHAPTER 4 The Dragon's Roar

  CHAPTER 5 The Matter of Morale

  CHAPTER 6 The Concerns of a Convoy

  CHAPTER 7 Morris

  CHAPTER 8 Fair Winds and Foul Tempers

  CHAPTER 9 Infirmities of Character

  CHAPTER 10 A Small Victory

  CHAPTER 11 Blood and Rain

  PART TWO Nemesis

  CHAPTER 12 A Council of War

  CHAPTER 13 A Round Robin

  CHAPTER 14 The Winds of Fortune

  CHAPTER 15 The Bronze-bound Chests

  CHAPTER 16 Blow-pipe Creek

  CHAPTER 17 The Gates of the Fortress

  CHAPTER 18 Pursuit

  PART THREE A Private Revenge

  CHAPTER 19 The Tripod

  CHAPTER 20 A Forlorn Hope

  CHAPTER 21 A Private Revenge

  CHAPTER 22 Penang

  Author's Note

  For J.P.B.S.

  PART ONE

  The Damoclean Sword

  'Seamen are neither reckoned among the living, nor the dead, their whole lives being spent in jeopardy. No sooner is one peril over, but another comes rolling on, like the waves of a fullgrown sea.'

  Samuel Kelly, An Eighteenth-Century Seaman, 1786

  The Typhoon

  November 1808

  Captain Nathaniel Drinkwater gave up trying to sleep. His cot rocked and jerked so violently on its lanyards that his body was never still. He kicked the twisted blankets aside with a sudden spurt of furious annoyance.

  His Britannic Majesty's frigate Patrician pitched violently, her bow flung into the air as if her twelve hundred tons were of no consequence, for all her massive timbers. Drinkwater was driven to consider her fabric as a sum of many small and separate parts which, God alone knew, were now subjected to stresses and strains beyond the computation of his tired brain. All that he could consider at that moment was a vivid image of his ship flying to pieces from the pounding she was now undergoing. There was something alarmingly new about this present motion, and the thought led him to conclude that he must have been dozing. Anger had been born out of this interruption of his rest. The knock at the cabin door only increased his resentment.

  'Yes?' His voice was sharp and strained.

  'Captain, sir, if you please, Mr Fraser's compliments and would you step on deck, sir?'

  Midshipman Belchambers's face was grey with fatigue and fright, reminding Drinkwater that he was not alone in his exhaustion.

  'What is it?' He raised himself on a precarious elbow and quizzed the midshipman as the cot lanyards alternately slackened and snapped taut so that his awkwardly prone body was feather-light one second and leaden the next. The ship's stern was lifted rapidly as a sea slammed viciously under her transom and against her stern windows over which the dead-lights had been dropped. Water drove in round the sashes, squirting over the settee before running to join the mess slopping back and forth across the chequer-painted canvas on the deck.

  Midshipman Belchambers grabbed a corner of the sideboard, his Adam's apple bobbing uncertainly above his grubby stock.

  'I can't say, sir,' he gabbled and, clapping a hand over his mouth, fled from the captain's presence.

  Drinkwater stared after the boy. The grey gleam of water, mixed with fragments of biscuit from the shattered china barrel, flowed in miniature torrents round the legs of the lashed table, and overturned chairs slid back and forth, back and forth ...

  'God's bones!' Drinkwater blasphemed through clenched teeth, hoisting himself carefully out of his cot and seeking a footing in his stockinged feet amid the cold swirl of the water. The shards of porcelain grated across the deck like shingle on a beach as he felt his stockings take up the water. Drinkwater's shins were already criss-crossed with bruises, his old shoulder wound ached abominably, his mouth was foul with the taste of bile and his eyes ground grittily in their sockets, sure evidence of lack of sleep.

  He clung upright with difficulty, drawing on coat and cloak, despite the stuffiness of the air. Outside his cabin the marine sentry slithered towards him and they collided amid a confused and embarrassed explosion of apology and profanity. Patrician's motion was unpredictably irregular, a bucking, scending, rolling caused by the seas which slammed her sides and ran below by a hundred leaky routes. A rancid stench rose from the crowded berth-deck below and was given seeming embodiment by the creaks and groans of the labouring ship. Grasping the companionway man-ropes, Drinkwater climbed carefully on deck.

  He reached the quarterdeck surprised that it was full daylight. Fraser stood clinging to the starboard hammock cranes.

  'What is it, Mr Fraser?'

  The first lieutenant shook his head, concern etched in his drawn expression.

  'I cannot tell precisely, sir ... the confusion of the sea ... 'tis the worst thing I've seen.'

  Drinkwater was suddenly attentive and looked about him, the stupor of exhaustion flung away. Was it a matter of Scots caution, or did a shoal lurk beneath this monstrous confusion of water? He could not tell; his charts were totally inadequate and he had no precise knowledge of their whereabouts. For four days they had run before the storm without a stitch of canvas set and their topgallant masts struck. Two men had been killed getting the heavy lower yards lashed a-portlast so that Patrician offered as little top-hamper as possible to the fury of the wind. The decks were cluttered with lowered spars, yet the big frigate still steered downwind with the speed of a cantering horse.

  On the second night of the storm the lower masts had glowed with St Elmo's fire, the corposant running hither and thither in the rigging until their baffled compass had, in the hours that followed, circled gently in a kind of bewilderment that confused Drinkwater. He had lost his old sailing master, killed in the action with the Russian line-of-battle ship Suvorov, and had no one to turn to for advice, as Fraser had now turned to him.

  For those four days they had run square to leeward with great seas heaping up astern, their foaming crests breaking and running after the fleeing ship. They had been pooped twice, sluiced from taffrail to knightheads by an avalanche of green water that tore coils of rope from the fife-rails, swept men off their feet and dashed them into the guns. In this deluge arms had been broken, an elbow shattered and a leg snapped so cleanly that it lay like a carpenter's angle. Worst of all two men had been washed overboard. One, Midshipman Wickham, they had not seen again, the other, the marine quarter-guard, had been found clinging to the heads, his feet dragging in the water in the last extremity of distress. The experience made the ship's company more cautious and the second pooping caused less damage.

  But this morning the sea no longer drove from astern and the wind no longer roared through the standing rigging to tear the slack stays of the upper masts in great bights to leeward. Nor was the air filled with salt and spray driving downwind like buckshot. Instead, the surface of the ocean rose up in heaps; waves slopped with malignant power against each other, flinging dark columns of water high into the air, from which they fell back in a vast welter of confusion.

  In this lashing of the sea Patrician was caught helplessly, the violence of her motion whipping her truncated masts so that blocks flew about aloft with sufficient energy to brain a man sent to secure them. Abrupt enough to throw an incautious man from his feet as she lay down to a roll, Patrician's hull would be thrust back by a wave running in opp
osition to the first. This conflict of forces assailed her simultaneously, sending wracking stresses through her straining hull while the tortured bodies of her company met the onslaught with instinctive and tiring muscular exertions.

  If the air no longer boomed with the sound of the great wind, it was now filled with the huge slop and hiss of the aimless sea, and the desperate cries of exhausted birds. The deck was covered with their pathetic, flapping forms, a variety of species including brilliantly coloured land-birds.

  Looking upwards Drinkwater saw the explanation for his surprise at the daylight. For the duration of the storm they had run under a low and oppressive overcast of thick scud. Now the sky was inexplicably clear and the last stars were fading against the blue of the morning, though the horizon that ringed them was still dull under a rim of encircling fractus.

  'I tried a cast o' the lead, sir, but nae bottom ...' said Fraser, suddenly thrusting out an arm. Drinkwater grasped it, and clawed his way uphill towards the starboard rail, then immediately found himself cannoned into Fraser by the frigate's lurch.

  'Devil take it! Obliged, Mr Fraser ...'

  Drinkwater caught his breath and looked about him again.

  He had, he realised now, known instinctively that this terrible motion was not due to shoal water; the extraordinary funnel of clear and windless sky stirred something else in his tired brain. He fought to clear it, buying time with a pathetic joke.

  'Belchambers bid me "step" on deck, Mr Fraser. If it was your choice of phrase you could have bettered it.'

  A thin, respectful grin spread briefly across the Scotsman's worried face.

  'Aye, sir, 'twas ill-chosen.'

  'No matter.' Drinkwater jerked his head at the sky. 'This present lull will not last. I mind some instruction on the matter, 'tis the same as a West India hurricane, though known differently in these seas. Do you look again to the breeching of the guns. I wish we had struck some of them down into the hold, but it is too late now. I'll take the deck.'

  Aye, aye, sir. We've beckets on the wheel and clapped lashings on the tiller. All she'll do is lie a-hull.'

  'That's well done.'

  Fraser skidded off, shouting names at the duty bosun's mate, and Drinkwater jammed his body against the starboard mizen pin-rail, feeling the sore places on his back where the ropes had abraded him earlier. He looked after his first lieutenant: poor Fraser, as first luff he should have enjoyed the privilege of being exempt from watch-keeping. But with Lieutenant Mylchrist and Mr Hill dead, only he and Quilhampton remained of the lieutenants and senior officers, though Drinkwater had written out an acting commission for Mr Midshipman Frey.

  Fraser's predicament led Drinkwater's thoughts to a review of his hard-pressed command. In addition to her present plight there were other concerns that drove his mind into a remorseless circle of worry. The presence of over a hundred Russian prisoners placed strains upon the domestic arrangements of a ship and company already stretched by a long and dangerous voyage. Patrician's own people were worn out with the war, transferred from one ship to another at the whim of the almighty Admiralty and now fighting for their very existence in this dismal corner of the north-west Pacific.

  Captain Drinkwater stared bleakly ahead, noting the relative shift in the shrinking patch of blue sky and weighing up the chances of a glimpse of the sun before the cloud lowered over them again.

  The squawks of the birds drew his thoughts inboard once more as a handful of seamen, clinging on to any handhold, strove to clear the decks of some of the hundreds of dying creatures. He watched them, trying to judge their temper for though they had fought well against a Russian battle-ship in the Pacific, their mood had been uncertain off the Horn and they had been near-mutinous off California, several of them deserting at San Francisco.

  In his heart, Drinkwater knew he could expect no less. Some of them had been at sea since the turn of the century, had served as volunteers in the Peace of Amiens and had then been swept up in the turbulence of the renewed war with France.

  Drinkwater cursed the chain of events that had led them to this day, for he too suffered, suffered as personally as his men, for the secret he and they had brought back from the Baltic in the late summer of 1807. That overwhelming need for secrecy had led Their Lordships to despatch him to the Pacific to head off Britain's quondam ally Russia, whose Tsar had abandoned his alliance with the Court of St James in favour of a shoddy opportunist accommodation with Napoleon Bonaparte. This allowed Tsar Alexander to meddle with Sweden and Turkey and lend his British-trained fleet to the Emperor of the French. Had Drinkwater, despite the odds, succeeded in crushing the Russian presence in the Pacific? He had fought the Suvorov to a standstill, as the state of his frigate testified, but his cruise to locate the Juno had failed. She had slipped from him, and his nature would not allow him the reasonable excuse of having the whole Pacific to search to comfort him in his failure.

  Perhaps she was at Canton, perhaps not ...

  A watery gleam caught his attention to larboard. He turned and lifted his eyes. As the circle of clear sky moved over them a shredding of the cloud on its eastern rim exposed for a second a pale yellow disc. The sun!

  'Mr Belchambers! My sextant and the chronometer! Upon the instant, sir!'

  Transfixed, Drinkwater watched the face of the sun darken as, like dense smoke, cloud trailed across it, then lighten again. Impatiently he waited for the boy's return. The sun swam clear of cloud, hurting his eyes, and he thought its warmth struck him, though afterwards it seemed a mere illusion. Suddenly the confusion of the sea held less terrors and flashed friendly fire back at them in reflections. Amidships a man smiled and raised a low cheer. All about him there was a spontaneous outburst of relief. The watch, huddling in the lee of the boats on the booms, struggled to their feet, other seamen stopped throwing the birds overboard and even, it seemed, the birds themselves ceased their death struggles to bask in the sunlight.

  Drinkwater's patience snapped. 'Where the devil's that boy?'

  'Beg pardon, sir ...'

  His sentry's head was poked up the companionway level with the deck.

  'Eh? What is it?' Drinkwater asked the marine.

  'Begging your pardon, sir, but Mr Belchambers 'as 'ad a fall, sir.'

  'What? God-damn! What about my sextant?' Drinkwater was already crossing the deck and exchanging the ineffable sweetness of sunshine for the stygian gloom of the gun-deck. Shoving aside the sentry, he entered his cabin. By the grace of God Belchambers had not reached the Hadley sextant, nestling in its baize-lined box and lashed atop his locker. Instead the boy lay amid the swirl of biscuit and china with a sprained ankle. His small, frightened face was twisted with agony.

  'I ... I'm sorry, sir ... I acted with haste ... festina lente, sir,' the boy added gamely.

  'No matter, Mr Belchambers, are you all right?' Drinkwater bent over the midshipman.

  'Apart from my ankle, sir ...'

  Drinkwater turned to the marine. 'Get a couple of hands to carry Mr Belchambers to his berth.'

  Drinkwater reached across the midshipman who was drawing himself up against the locker. 'You must excuse me, I have urgent matters to attend to.'

  Lifting the sextant from its box he caught the strap of the chronometer case with his left hand. Sticking his elbows out for balance he gingerly made for the bottom of the companionway and shouted up for assistance.

  'Here, zur, let me ...'

  Old Tregembo his coxswain shouldered past him and took the chronometer box.

  'Mind how you go, damn it,' snapped Drinkwater as both men grabbed the man-rope at the same instant.

  'Up you goes, zur, an' I'll follow ...'

  But it was too late. Already the sun had been swallowed by cloud and the eye of the storm was passing over them. Fractus again curtained the sky and the confusion of the sea was abating. Streaks of spume were appearing upon its surface which was heaping once more in regular ridges. The calm of the dawn had vanished. Patrician, with her lashed tiller and loc
ked rudder, was paying off to lie beam on to the rising wind that came at them now from the contrary direction. Drinkwater bit off his disappointment at failing to get a sight. As the deck steadied to a roll, he crossed it swiftly and peered into the binnacle. He had at least a notion of their heading and now, as it blew with swiftly increasing strength, the direction of the gale. That brief glimpse of the sun had fed his starved seaman's instinct with a morsel of information.

  The compass had steadied and the wind blew now from the west-nor'-west.

  But it was precious little comfort. An hour later Patrician was assailed again by the violence of the storm. It no longer screamed with the malevolent harpy-shriek of a strong gale, but had risen to the mind-numbing boom of a mighty wind, and the spray tore at the very eyes in their sockets, forcing their heads away.

  'It's blowing great guns, sir,' shouted Fraser as he clawed his way towards Drinkwater on completion of his rounds.

  'A great wind, Mr Fraser. I mind now the captain of an Indiaman once telling me it was called tai-fun by the Chinese.'

  CHAPTER 1

  The Brig

  November 1808

  Drinkwater closed the log-book. Knowledge of his position at last gave him a measure of contentment. The inadequacy of his chart sent a flutter of apprehension through his belly, to conflict with the realisation that he had been extraordinarily lucky. He recalled memories of talks with Captain Calvert nearly thirty years earlier, dredging up facts imparted to the impressionable young Midshipman Drinkwater by the old East India commander. Calvert had told him of the curious revolving storms of the China Seas which were comparable with the hurricanes of the West Indies or the feared cyclones of the Bay of Bengal.

  From what his sextant and chronometer had revealed he was now able to make an informed guess at Patrician's track in a long curve that had brought her from the Pacific Ocean into the eastern margins of the South China Sea. The typhoon's eye, or centre, that funnel of clear sky in which they had experienced the severest thrashing of the sea, had passed over them, subjecting them to the violent winds beyond. They had been fortunate that their ordeal had lasted only another two days, for though the wind remained fresh and a heavy residual swell still lifted and rolled the frigate, the sea was no longer vicious. A measure of its moderation could be gauged by the smell of smoke and salt pork that was percolating through the ship. The thought of hot food, however rudimentary, brought a glow of satisfaction to Drinkwater's spirits as surely as the knowledge of his ship's position.