1805 Page 2

  ‘Not such a bad idea, sir, beggin’ yer pardon,’ answered one of the helmsmen behind him.

  And then the ship began to turn. For a moment he thought she might go the wrong way, for he had let go the lee anchor and that from a port well abaft the bow.

  ‘Hard over now, my lads . . .’ He began to spin the wheel, aware that the anchor and cable were snubbing the ship round into the wind and thus assisting them. With the courses furled there were no tacks and sheets to raise and she was suddenly in the eye of the wind. There was a thunderous clap which sent a tremble through the hull as the fore-topsail came aback and juddered the whole foremast to its step in the kelson.

  ‘Main-topsail haul!’ Thank God for his crew, Drinkwater thought. They were only a few days out of Chatham and might have had a crew that were raw and unco-ordinated, but he had drafted the entire company from the sloop Melusine, volunteers to a man. The main and mizen yards came round. So too did the ship, she was spinning like a top, her bow rising and her bowsprit stabbing at the very moon as she passed through the wind. The main-topsail filled with a crack that sent a second mighty tremor through the ship.

  ‘We’ve done it, by God!’ yelled Rogers.

  ‘Cut, man! Cut the bloody cable!’

  With the ship cast upon the other tack they had only a few seconds before the action of the anchor would pull the ship’s head back again, but the backed fore-topsail was paying her off.

  ‘Haul all!’

  The foreyards came round and Rogers came aft and reported the cable cut. Drinkwater caught a glimpse of rock close astern, of the hollow troughs of a sea that was breaking in shallow water.

  He handed the wheel back to the quartermasters. ‘Keep her free for a little while. We are not yet clear of the shoals.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir.’

  ‘Ease the weather braces, Mr Rogers.’

  They made the final adjustments and set her on a course clear of the Mountamopus as a dripping party came up from the gun-deck and reported the port closed. Relief was clear on every face. As if cheated in its intention, the storm swept another curtain of cloud across the face of the moon.

  ‘You may splice the main-brace, Mr Rogers, then pipe the watch below. My warmest thanks to the ship’s company.’

  Drinkwater turned away and headed for the companionway, his cabin and cot.

  ‘Three cheers for the cap’n!’

  ‘Silence there!’ shouted Rogers, well knowing Drinkwater’s distaste for any kind of show. But Drinkwater paused at the top of the companionway and made to raise his hat, only to find he had no hat to raise.

  Squatting awkwardly to catch the light from the binnacle, Mr Frey made the routine entry on the log slate for the middle watch: Westerly gales to storm. Ship club-hauled off St Michael’s Mount, Course S.E. Lost sheet anchor and one cable. He paused, then added on his own accord and without instruction: Ship saved.

  The weather had abated somewhat by dawn, though the sea still ran high and there was a heavy swell. However, it was possible to relight the galley range and it was a more cheerful ship’s company that set additional sail as the wind continued to moderate during the forenoon.

  Drinkwater was on deck having slept undisturbed for four blessed hours. His mind felt refreshed although his limbs and, more acutely, his right shoulder which had been mangled by wounds, ached with fatigue. It was almost the hour of noon and he had sent down for his Hadley sextant with a view to assisting Hill and his party establish the ship’s latitude. The master was still frustrated over his failure of the day before, for he could find no retrospective error in his working.

  On waking Drinkwater had reflected upon the problem. He himself did not always observe the sun’s altitude at noon. Hill was a more than usually competent master and had served with Drinkwater on the cutter Kestrel and the sloop Melusine, proving his ability both in the confined waters of the Channel and North Sea, and also in the intricacies of Arctic navigation.

  As Mullender gingerly lifted the teak box lid for Drinkwater to remove the instrument he caught the reproach in Hill’s eyes.

  ‘It wants about four minutes to apparent noon, sir,’ said Hill, adding with bitter emphasis, ‘by my reckoning.’

  Drinkwater suppressed a smile. Poor Hill. His humiliation was public; there could be few on the ship that by now had not learned that their plight last night had been due to a total want of accuracy in the ship’s navigation.

  Hill assembled his party. Alongside him stood three of the ship’s six midshipmen and one of the master’s mates. Lieutenant Quilhampton was also in attendance, using Drinkwater’s old quadrant given him by the captain. Drinkwater remembered that Quilhampton and he had been discussing some detail the previous day and that the lieutenant had not taken a meridian altitude. Nor had Lieutenant Gorton. Drinkwater frowned and lifted his sextant, swinging the index and bringing the sun down to the horizon. The pale disc shone through a thin veil of high cloud and he adjusted the vernier screw so that it arced on the horizon. He peered briefly at the scale, replaced the sextant to his eye and noted that the sun continued to rise slowly as it moved towards its culmination.

  ‘Nearly on, sir,’ remarked Hill who had been watching the rate of rise slow down. The line of officers swayed with the motion of the ship, a picture of concentration. The sun ceased to rise and ‘hung’. Its brief motionless suspension preceeded its descent into the period of postmeridian and Hill called, ‘On, sir, right on!’

  ‘Very well, Mr Hill, eight bells it is.’

  By the binnacle the quartermaster turned the glass, the other master’s mate hove the log and eight bells was called forward where the fo’c’s’le bell was struck sharply. The marine sentinels were relieved, dinner was piped and a new day started on board His Britannic Majesty’s 36-gun, 18-pounder, frigate Antigone as she stood across the chops of the Channel in search of Admiral Cornwallis and the Channel Fleet.

  ‘Well, Mr Hill,’ Drinkwater straightened from his sextant, ‘what do we make it?’ Drinkwater saw Hill bending over his quadrant, his lips muttering. A frown puckered his forehead, something seemed to be wrong with the master’s instrument.

  To avoid causing Hill embarrassment Drinkwater turned to the senior of the midshipmen: ‘Mr Walmsley?’

  Midshipman Lord Walmsley cast a sideways look at the master, swallowed and answered, ‘Er, thirty-nine degrees, twenty-six minutes, sir.’

  ‘Poppy cock, Mr Walmsley. Mr Frey?’

  ‘Thirty-nine degrees six minutes, sir.’ Drinkwater grunted. That was within a minute of his own observation.

  ‘Mr Q?’

  ‘And a half, sir.’

  The two master’s mates and Midshipman the Honourable Alexander Glencross agreed within a couple of minutes. Drinkwater turned to Mr Hill: ‘Well, Mr Hill?’

  Hill was frowning. ‘I have the same as Lord Walmsley, sir.’ His voice was puzzled and Drinkwater looked quickly at his lordship who had already moved his index arm and was lowering his instrument back into the box between his feet. It suddenly occurred to Drinkwater what had happened. Hill habitually muttered his altitude as he read it off the scale and Walmsley had persistently overheard and copied him. Yesterday, without Quilhampton and Drinkwater, Hill would have believed his own observation, apparently corroborated by Walmsley, and dismissed those of his juniors as inaccurate.

  Drinkwater made a quick calculation. By adding the sum of the corrections for parallax, the sun’s semi-diameter and refraction, then taking the result from a right angle to produce the true zenith distance, he was very close to their latitude. They were almost upon the equinox so the effect of the sun’s declination was not very large and there would be a discrepancy in their latitudes of some twenty miles. Hill’s altitude would put them twenty miles south, where they had thought they were yesterday.

  ‘Very well, gentlemen. We will call it thirty-nine degrees, six and a half minutes.’

  They bent over their tablets and a few minutes later Drinkwater called for their computed latitude
s. Again only Walmsley disagreed.

  ‘Very well. We shall make it forty-nine degrees, eleven minutes north . . . Mr Hill, you appear to have an error in your instrument.’

  Hill had already come to the same conclusion and was fiddling with his quadrant, blushing with shame and annoyance. Drinkwater stepped towards him.

  ‘There’s no harm done, Mr Hill,’ he said privately, reassuring the master.

  ‘Thank you, sir. But imagine the consequences . . . last night, sir . . . we might have been cast ashore because I failed to check . . .’

  ‘A great deal might happen if, Mr Hill,’ broke in Drinkwater. ‘There is too much hazard in the sea-life to worry about what did not happen. Now bend your best endeavours to checking the compass. We have an error there too, or I suspect you would have tumbled yesterday’s inaccuracy yourself.’

  The thought seemed to brighten Hill, to shift some of the blame and lighten the burden of his culpability. Drinkwater smiled and turned away, fastening his grey eyes on the senior midshipman.

  ‘Mr Walmsley,’ he snapped, ‘I wish to address a few words to you, sir!’

  Chapter 2

  March 1804

  The ‘Antigone’

  Captain Nathaniel Drinkwater turned his chair and stared astern to where patches of sunlight danced upon the sea, alternating with the shadows of clouds. The surface of the sea heaved with the regularity of the Atlantic swells that rolled eastwards in the train of the storm. In the wake of the Antigone herself half a dozen gulls and fulmars quartered the disturbed water in search of prey. Further off a gannet turned its gliding flight into an abrupt and predatory dive; but Drinkwater barely noticed these things, his mind was still full of the interview with Lord Walmsley.

  Drinkwater had inherited Lord Walmsley together with most of the other midshipmen from his previous command. They had already been on board when he had hurriedly joined the Melusine for her voyage escorting the Hull whaling fleet into the Arctic Ocean the previous summer. The officer responsible for selecting and patronising this coterie of ‘young gentlemen’, Captain Sir James Palgrave, had been severely wounded in a duel and prevented from sailing in command of the Melusine. Now Drinkwater rather wished Walmsley to the devil along with Sir James whose wound had mortified and who had paid with his life for the consequences of a foolish quarrel. Walmsley was an indolent youngster, spoiled, vastly over-confident and of a character strong enough to dominate the cockpit. Occasionally charming, there was no actual evil in him, though Drinkwater would have instinctively written bad against his character had he been asked, if only because Lord Walmsley did not measure up to Drinkwater’s exacting standards as an embryonic sea-officer. The fact was that his lordship did not give a twopenny damn about the naval service or, Drinkwater suspected, Captain Nathaniel Drinkwater himself. The captain was, after all, only in command of one of the many cruisers attached to the hastily raked-up collection of ships that made up the Downs Squadron. Lord Walmsley knew as well as Captain Drinkwater that, whatever hysteria was raised in the House of Commons about the menace of invasion across the Strait of Dover, it would not be Admiral Lord Keith’s motley collection of vessels that stopped it but the might of the Channel Fleet under Admiral Cornwallis. Since Cornwallis’s squadrons were bottling up the French in Brest it seemed unlikely that Keith’s ships would be achieving anything more glorious than commerce harrying and a general intimidation of the north coast of France. It was well known that Keith himself did not want his job and that he considered his own post to be that usurped by the upstart Nelson: holding the key to the Mediterranean outside Toulon.

  Drinkwater sighed; when the Commander-in-Chief of the station made common knowledge of his dissatisfaction, was it any wonder that a young kill-buck like Walmsley should adopt an attitude of indifference? What was more, Walmsley had influence in high places. This depressing reflection irritated Drinkwater. He turned, rose from his chair and, taking a key from his waistcoat pocket, unlocked his wine case. He took out one of the two cut-glass goblets and lifted the decanter. The port glowed richly as he held the glass against the light from the stern windows. Resuming his seat he hitched both feet up on the settee that ran from quarter to quarter across the stern and narrowed his eyes. Damn Lord Walmsley! The young man was a souring influence among a group of reefers who, if they were not exactly brilliant, were not without merit. Midshipman Frey, for instance, just twelve years old, had already seen action off the coast of Greenland, was proving a great asset as a seaman and had also demonstrated his talents as an artist. Drinkwater was not averse to advancing the able, and had already seen both Mr Quilhampton and Mr Gorton get their commissions and placed them on his own quarterdeck as a mark of confidence in them, young though they were. Messrs Wickham and Dutfield were run-of-the-mill youngsters, willing and of a similar age. The Honourable Alexander Glencross was led by Lord Walmsley. The sixth midshipman was even younger than Frey, a freckled Scot named Gillespy forced upon him as a favour to James Quilhampton. In his pursuit of Mistress Catriona MacEwan, poor Quilhampton had sought to press his suit by promising the girl’s aunt to find a place for the child of another sister. Little Gillespy was therefore being turned into a King’s sea-officer to enhance Quilhampton’s prospects as a suitable husband for the lovely Catriona. Drinkwater had had a berth for a midshipman and James had pleaded his own case so well that Drinkwater found himself unable to refuse his request.

  ‘I believe Miss MacEwan is kindly diposed towards me, sir,’ Quilhampton had said, ‘but her festering aunt regards me as a poor catch . . .’ Drinkwater had seen poor Quilhampton’s eyes fall to his iron hook which he wore in place of a left hand. So, from friendship and pity, Drinkwater had agreed to the boy joining the ship. As for Gillespy, he had so far borne his part well, despite being constantly sea-sick since Antigone left the Thames, and had spent the first half-dozen of his watches on deck lashed to a carronade slide. Drinkwater wondered what effect Walmsley and Glencross might have on such malleable clay.

  ‘Damn ’em both!’ he muttered; he had more important things to think about and could ill-afford his midshipmen such solicitude. They must take their chance like he had had to. Whatever his misgivings over the reefers, he was well served by his officers, Hill’s error notwithstanding. That had been an unfortunate mistake and principally due to the badly fitted compass that was, in turn, a result of the chaotic state of the dockyards. They had found the error in the lubber’s line small in itself, but enough to confuse their dead-reckoning as they steered down the Channel with a favourable easterly wind. That was an irony in itself after two months of the foulest weather for over a year; gales that had driven the Channel Fleet off station at Brest and into the lee of Torbay.

  ‘Disaster’, he muttered as he sipped the port, ‘is always a combination of small things going wrong simultaneously . . .’ And, by God, how close they had come to it in Mount’s Bay! He consoled himself with the thought that no great harm had been done. Although he had lost an anchor and cable, the club-haul had not only welded his ship’s company together but shown them what they were themselves capable of. ‘It’s an ill wind,’ he murmured, then stopped, aware that he was talking to himself a great deal too much these days.

  ‘Now I want a good, steady stroke.’ Tregembo, captain’s coxswain regarded his barge crew with a critical eye. He had hand-picked them himself but since Drinkwater had read himself in at Antigone’s entry the captain had not been out of the ship and this was to be the first time they took the big barge away. He knew most of them, the majority had formed the crew of Melusine’s gig, but they had never performed before under the eyes of an admiral or the entire Channel Fleet.

  He grunted his satisfaction. ‘Don’t ’ee let me down. No. Nor the cap’n, neither. Don’t forget we owe him a lot, my lads,’ he glowered round them as if to quell contradiction. There was a wry sucking of teeth and winking of eyes that signified recognition of Tregembo’s partiality for the captain. ‘No one but Cap’n Drinkwater ’d’ve got us out o’
Mount’s Bay an’ all three masts still standing . . . just you buggers think on that. Now up on deck with ’ee all.’ Tregembo followed the boat’s crew up out of the gloom of the gun-deck.

  Above, all was bustle and activity. Tregembo looked aft and grinned to himself. Captain Drinkwater stood where, in Tregembo’s imagination, he always stood, at the windward hance, one foot on the slide of the little brass carronade that was one of a pair brought from the Melusine. Ten minutes earlier the whole ship had been stirred by the hail of the masthead look-out who had sighted the topgallants of the main body of the Channel Fleet cruising on Cornwallis’s rendezvous fifty miles west of Ushant. In the cabin below, Mullender was fussing over Drinkwater’s brand new uniform coat with its single gleaming epaulette, transferred now to the right shoulder and denoting a post-captain of less than five years seniority. Mullender at last satisfied himself that no fluff adhered to the blue cloth with a final wipe of the piece of wool flag-bunting, and lifted the stained boat-cloak out of the sea-chest. He shook his head over it, considering its owner would benefit from a new one and cut a better dash before the admiral to boot, but, with a single glance out of the stern windows, considered the weather too fresh to risk a boat journey without it. Gold lace tarnished quickly and the protection of the cloak was essential. Drawing a sleeve over the knap on the cocked hat, Mullender left the cabin. He had been saving the dregs of four bottles to celebrate such a moment and retired to his pantry to indulge in the rare privilege of the captain’s servant.

  Drinkwater lowered his glass for the third time, then impatiently lifted it again. This time he was rewarded by the sight of a small white triangle just above the horizon. In the succeeding minutes others rose over the rim of the earth until it seemed that, for half of the visible circle where sea met sky, the white triangles of sails surrounded them. Beneath each white triangle the dark hulls emerged with their lighter strakes and chequered sides. The gay colours of flag signals and ensigns enlivened the scene and Antigone buzzed as officers and men pointed out ships they recognised, old friends or scandalous hulks that were only kept afloat by the prayers of their crews and the diabolical links their commanders enjoyed with the devil himself.