Dewey Lambdin - Reefs and Shoals

“About all we may do for now, sir, is ride this out and hope for the best,” Mr. Caldwell concluded.

“Even with bare yards and storm trys’ls,” Lt. Westcott added.

“Midshipman Grainger, SAH!” the Marine sentry outside the door to the great-cabins shouted, his usual piercing cry almost swallowed by the din of wind, rain, and the working of the hull. With luck, he might have been allowed a tarred tarpaulin coat with which to tolerate the elements.

“Enter!” Lewrie shouted back, louder than usual, too. He and the others staggered out from the tiny chart space, clinging to light deal-and-canvas partitions. Grainger entered, sopping wet and looking as miserable as a drowned rat.

“Mister Merriman’s duty, sir, and I am to report that several of the fore and main-mast shrouds are slackening,” Grainger said.

“Well, damn,” Lewrie spat. “It seems we must wear, after all.”

There was no safe way to adjust the necessary tension of the mast shrouds unless the immense load was taken off them, even on good days. Their weather shrouds must become lee shrouds, if they wished to keep the masts standing.

“Aye, sir,” Lt. Westcott regretfully agreed.

“My compliments to Mister Merriman, Mister Grainger, and he’s to have ‘All Hands’ piped,” Lewrie ordered. “With your able assistance, of course, Mister Westcott… Mister Caldwell?”

“Of course, sir.”

“I’ll fetch your foul-weather rig, sir,” Pettus, his cabin steward, offered, staggering from one piece of furniture to the next, and looking a tad green. Lewrie looked aft into the gloom of his cabins. His cats, Toulon and Chalky, were curled up on his bed-cot’s coverlet, like two furry loaves of bread, bristled up and moaning in misery. To larboard, his young cabin servant, Jessop, was on his knees inside the quarter-gallery toilet, with only his shoes and shins showing, bent over the “seat of ease” and making offerings to Neptune; rather loudly.

“Carry on, Jessop!” Lewrie called out.

“Ah… aye, sir,” the lad muttered back, between gags.

Once bundled into tarred canvas coat and hat, Lewrie staggered forward, steeling himself for a second or two before opening the door to the weather deck. When he did so, it was like barging out into utter chaos: the force and howl of the wind, the sudden chill of it, and the stinging volleys of sea spray that pinpricked his hands and face. Here, too, was the full sound of the storm, and the hiss and thunder of the waves, and the alarming groans of the hard-pressed masts, and the booming of the hull as the frigate fought the sea.

Off-watch sailors were swarming up from the relative warmth and security of the gun deck where they berthed and messed, adding to the sense of confusion as Lewrie managed to clamber up to the quarterdeck.

“Sorry about this, sir, but we must wear,” Lt. Merriman said, his mouth close to Lewrie’s ear.

“Aye,” Lewrie shouted back. “If you think the weather shrouds will hold ’til we’ve got her round on larboard tack!”

“I believe they will, sir,” Merriman hopefully replied.

At present, their frigate laboured heavily, even though the mizen tops’l had been taken in, as had the main course. The fore course and fore and main tops’ls were close-reefed, and the jibs up forward had been replaced by the fore topmast stays’l. Above the quarterdeck, the spanker had been reduced, and the mizen stays’l had been rigged.

Leave the tops’ls, for now, Lewrie speculated; they’re higher up than the wavetops, and can still catch wind. The fore course’ll get us round the quicker. Send up the main topmast stays’l, again? Hmm. Oh God, all these bloody years at sea, and I still feel like a total fraud!

He’d not wished to go to sea and be all “tarry-handed”, but his father had seen to that, “crimping” him into the Navy at seventeen, and years behind his peers in experience-for God’s sake he could not even swim !-and even the ten-year-olds in his first mess had known bags more than he had, and his bottom had paid the price for not “knowing the ropes” from expasperated officers; and all his career he felt as if he had never quite caught up.

There had been a series of small ships, where things were much simpler, where little was expected of a lowly Midshipman. Surely, he had had no business at all becoming old Lt. Lilycrop’s First Officer in the Shrike brig, where his first few months had been an embarassing pot-mess of ignorance and re-learning of his trade. There had been a whole year of shore idleness between the end of the American Revolution and his assignment aboard Telesto, and the jaunt to the Far East and China in ’84, and when he’d come back and gotten his first command, the little Alacrity, in ’86; just enough time to forget almost everything! By 1789, after paying Alacrity off, there had been years of bucolic peace ashore, with wife and children on their rented farm at Anglesgreen, and once more all he’d learned of the sea had sloughed away ’til 1793 and the war with France. When he’d reported aboard the Cockerel frigate as her First Lieutenant, he’d felt as overawed and unready as the rawest fresh-caught landlubber, unable to recall the proper names for things without long hours secretly poring over his frayed, illustrated copy of Falconer’s Marine Dictionary, just as he had done when first aboard a warship in 1780!

God help ’em all, he thought; lookin’ to me t’keep ’em safe!

“All hands are on deck, sir,” Lt. Merriman reported.

“Very well, Mister Merriman, have Bosun Sprague pipe ‘Stations for Wearing Ship’,” Lewrie said, after a deep breath and shrug into his foul-weather rig. “Let’s be about it. The men are getting cold.”

“If I may, sir?” the Sailing Master, Mr. Caldwell, intruded before Lt. Merriman could raise his speaking-trumpet to his lips. “I’ve been studying the set of the waves, and believe they’re coming in sevens, with the seventh the most forceful. Once that one is past, we’ll have an easier go.”

“Very well, Mister Caldwell. Carry on, Mister Merriman, but do you wait to issue your first order ’til the seventh has passed, as the Sailing Master directs,” Lewrie said.

“Here it comes, Mister Merriman,” Caldwell warned.

“Stations to Wear!” Merriman bawled out the preparatory orders. “Main clewgarnets and buntlines… spanker brails, weather main and mizen cro’jack braces! Haul taut and stand by!”

Reliant butted through a creaming, humping wave at a slant with a thrum and groan, surging upward toward its crest as the wave billowed under her keel, hobby-horsing upwards, then pitching bows-down into the trough with a roar.

“This is the one, sirs!” Caldwell shouted excitedly, as if he enjoyed heavy-weather sailing. His seventh wave marched down to the frigate, humping higher like a steep hill, its crest fuming white and its lee slope mottled with rippling circular eddies. “Whoo!”

“Up mains’l and spanker!” Lt. Merriman screeched once the ship had staggered up, over, and down into that great wave’s trough. “Clear away after bowlines! Up helm!”

Reliant fell off quickly, shoved by wind and waves to lie abeam the sea for a bit, slowly, so very slowly falling alee and taking that howling force on her starboard quarter.

“Overhaul the weather lifts! Man the weather headbraces! Rise, fore tack and sheet!” Merriman cried.

Further, further off the wind, ’til it was coming just about dead astern, and…

“Clear away head bowlines!” Merriman howled. “Shift over the headsheets, and lay the head yards square!”