Dewey Lambdin - Reefs and Shoals

“ Touche , Hell, Mister Westcott, I barely grazed ye!” Lewrie said with a satisfied smirk.

A commission granted by the lords of the Admiralty or by the vice-admiral on any distant province, to the commander of a merchant ship, or privateer, to cruize against, and make prize of, the enemy’s ships and vessels, either at sea, or in their harbours.

– FALCONER’S MARINE DICTIONARY 1780 E DITION

The Reliant frigate left Portsmouth on the last Monday in January, after four days at anchor in the Sutherlymost protection of St. Helen’s Patch, near the Isle of Wight, waiting for a slant of wind, and taking aboard the last necessities and luxuries for a long winter voyage. An icy shift from the Nor’east came at last, and she hoisted sail and raised her anchors, severing her last, slightest connexion to England, and pounded out into the riotous Chops of the Channel.

The first day and night, she could bowl along under reduced sail, pushed by the forceful following winds. Her top-hamper, all her t’gallants and royals-masts, sails, yards, and stays-had been brought down and stowed alongside the spare ones even before she left harbour, in expectation of storm conditions that might prevail right across the entire Atlantic.

The second day at sea, the winds blew just as strongly, shifting more Easterly, allowing a slanting course closer to the Lizard and Land’s End than the French side of the Channel, and Cape Ushant, letting them stand out further to the West with the winds fine on the starboard quarter, with the frigate booming and thudding through the heaving, churning waves.

By the third dawn, though, the fickle winds changed direction, howling an Arctic blast down upon them from the Nor’west, pushing the seas slamming against Reliant ’s starboard sides, starting a sickening, wallowing heave and roll that had even the saltiest hands gagging at the lee rails. It was the roughest sort of beam-sea, and maintaining a beam reach required hands aloft to take reefs in the courses and tops’ls, reduce the spanker, and take in upper stays’ls completely. The only good thing that could be said for that day was that Reliant could still steer roughly West, gaining even more of an offing from the dangerous lee shoal of the French Bay of Biscay coast. Lewrie could turn into his swaying bed-cot that night a bit before midnight cautiously satisfied that they were making decent progress West’rd.

When he rolled out at 4 A.M. on the fourth day, though, his hopes were dashed, for the winds had veered ahead into West by North, half North, and Lewrie had to lay his ship onto a close-hauled “beat to weather”, steering no closer to the wind than Sou’west by South, heeled hard over onto her larboard “shoulder” with the bows rising and plunging and shipping great bursts and avalanches of cold white water over the forecastle to swirl and pool and slosh from bow to stern almost knee-deep, before gurgling and gushing out the lee scrappers, and every seam in the deck planking, no matter how firmly packed with tarred oakum, then paid over with more tar with iron loggerheads, dripped chill misery onto the off-watch hands on the mess-decks.

“One would think that some damned fool was whistling,” Mister Caldwell, the Sailing Master, gruffly muttered as he peered at their pencilled-in track in the chart-space in Lewrie’s cabins. “Or, someone’s snuck a woman aboard.”

The Westerly winds had churned up the sea nigh to a slow boil, with vast grey-green rollers nearly as tall as the main course yard, a sickly snot-green sea that shed stinging blizzards of spray pellets from every wavecrest, even foamy dollops that tumbled and flew from wave to wave like fleeing rabbits. The smell of fresh fish was prominent, the reek that came from storm-wrack, as if the sea below them was stirred right to the bottom.

“Bosun Sprague didn’t sneak his wife aboard, did he?” Lieutenant Westcott asked, striving for amusement, though his lean, harsh face and four days of stubble showed nought but grimness and a lack of real sleep; especially so in the eerie, swaying glare of the overhead lanthorn which cast long shadows over the chart.

“I have it on good authority that the official Mistress Sprague resides in Chatham… and the Bosun can’t abide the harpy baggage,” Caldwell told Westcott with a nasty cackle. “So, whoever that doxy was he had aboard as his ‘wife’ in Portsmouth, she was young enough to be one of his daughters.”

“Mistress Sprague’s presented the Bosun with nothing but girl children, Mister Westcott,” Lewrie stuck in. “Half a dozen now, or so I heard. No wonder he stuck with the Navy so long. Hmmm… we are in need of a backin’ wind. Does the current one veer into Due West, we’ll be on a good course for Spain.”

From the moment that their frigate had cleared the Isle of Wight into the Channel, while they still had clearly visible sea-marks, the chip log had been cast each half-hour, and an officer of the watch had pencilled in the course and the rate of knots recorded. The skies had been solidly overcast when they departed England, and they hadn’t seen even a brief glimpse of the sun since, so their progress and position were pretty-much By Guess and By God, all by Dead Reckoning.

The recorded course was a staggering, stuttering series of X’s strung along a jagged line, some close together, some X’s further off from each other where they’d had a good run and turn of speed.

“Not to borrow trouble, sir,” Westcott glumly said, “but does the wind veer close to a Sou’wester, we may have to wear, even in this, else we fetch up somewhere East of Corunna and Cape Finisterre.”

“It could go Sou’westerly, sir,” Caldwell cautioned. “So long as this Arctic gale rules, another day or so with any luck, we’re making ground West’rd, but does it blow out, a Sou’westerly’s not unknown in Biscay.”

If that happened, Reliant would have no choice but to wear. A Sou’westerly would smack them right in the mouth, and paying off would drive them even deeper into the “sack” between the long right-angled trap of the French and Spanish coasts. Square-rigged ships could not sail closer than sixty-six degrees to the true wind.

“We’re too far North at the moment to meet Sou’westerlies,” Lewrie said after a long moment, in which he used a ruler to measure from their latest cast of the log to the edge of the chart. “We’re still round the fourty-seventh latitude, so we’ve bags of sea-room, but it’s longitude that’s wanting. Now if…”

Their frigate smacked into yet another wave with a deep hollow boom, and rolled back onto her larboard side, then rose up, shedding tons of seawater, and wriggling a bit more upright with a sickening twist, making them all cling to the flimsy chart table and shuffle their feet to keep upright.

I won’t gag, or spew, Lewrie commanded himself, though he had a feeling that he was damned close to doing so. He tried to recall when it was that he had been in such foul weather, and in such a predicament, and realised that it had been years.

I’m worried … worried and scared, he admitted to himself, alone; I wouldn’t trust mine arse with a fart, right now. Nor a gag, either! Why didn’t Father shove me into the bloody Army, instead? Oh, aye … ’ cause he was too cheap!

Lewrie looked to his liquid barometer for inspiration, but the blue-dyed water in the fat lower flask was still rather high up the upper tube, about as high as his last peek at it an hour before, when he had made a chalk-mark slash upon it. The storm’s pressure was still low, allowing the fluid to creep upwards; no higher yet, thank God!