Richard Woodman: In Distant Waters

'For what we are about to receive…' someone muttered the old blasphemy but Quilhampton's gunners were equal to the challenge. As a row of orange flashes lit the side of the Suvorov the bow guns of Patrician , reloaded and made swiftly ready by the furious exertions of their crews, returned fire. Patrician shook from the onslaught of shot. Beside him Hill reeled, spinning round and crashing into him with a violent shock, covering him with gore. Drinkwater grabbed him.

'My God, Hill!' he called, but the old man was already dead and Drinkwater laid him on the deck. Somewhere close by someone was shrieking in agony. It was a marine whose head had been pierced by langridge.

'Silence there!' roared Lieutenant Mount, but the man was beyond the reach of discipline and Blixoe discharged his musket into the man's back. He too fell to the deck. Drinkwater recovered himself, spun round and looked at his enemy.

The Suvorov had broached. He could see much of her foremast had gone, and her fo'c's'le was a mass of shattered spars and canvas.

'Down helm! Braces there… !'

He brought Patrician back towards his enemy and raked her stern from long pistol shot. She was almost helpless, firing hardly a gun in retaliation. Nothing but her stern-chasers would bear now and their ports were too low to open in such a rising sea.

For two hours Drinkwater worked his frigate back and forth, ranging up under the Suvorov' s stern, hammering her great black hull with impunity from his position of undisputed advantage. A rising moon shone fitfully between curtains of scud and the vast ocean heaved beneath the two labouring ships. The Russians fought back with small arms and those quarter guns they could bring to bear, but it was only later that Drinkwater learned that their complement was much weakened by the length of their cruise and that Rakitin's eagerness to acquire pressed recruits from the British Navy was to make good these deficiencies. But Russian tenacity was to no avail, for Suvorov wallowed unmanageable, a supine victim of Patrician's hot guns whose captains had the range too well and whose 24-pound balls crashed into her fabric with destructive precision. For those two hours they played their fire into their quondam pursuer, rescuing their reputation and the honour of their commander.

Towards four bells in the first watch the pace of Patrician's fire slackened and Drinkwater drew off, heaving-to under easy sail until daylight. Men lay exhausted at their guns and Drinkwater dozed, jammed against the mizen rigging, wrapped in his cloak.

It was Belchambers's excited squeal that woke him. Dawn was upon them and the wallowing hull of the Russian lay less than a mile away. A shred of smoke was drifting away on the wind, for the predicted gale was upon them, the sea rolling down from the north-west, its surface streaked by spume and shredded to leeward in a mist of spray through which the dark shape of a frigate-bird slipped on swept-back wings. The Suvorov had rolled all her masts overboard, but a second defiant shot followed the first and the dark, diagonal cross of the Tsar still flew from the stump of her mainmast. In the rough sea she was incapable of further manoeuvre and awaited only the coup-de-grace .

Drinkwater roused his ship and the men stood to their guns again. There was a curiously intent look about them now as they stared over the heaving waste of the grey seas at the wallowing Russian.

'Larboard battery make ready!'

All along the deck the hands went up. 'Ready, sir!'

'Fire!'

Fully half their shot hit the sea, sending up plumes of white which were instantly dissipated by the gale, but clouds of splinters erupted in little explosions along the line of the Russian's hull.

'Ready, sir!'

'Fire!'

They timed it better that time. The concussion of the guns beat at Drinkwater's brain as his eyes registered the destruction their iron was causing to their enemy. He wondered if Rakitin was still alive and found he no longer cared.

'Ready, sir!'

'Fire!'

He raised his glass. They were reducing the Suvorov to a shambles; as she rolled helplessly towards them he could see the havoc about her decks. Under the fallen wreckage of her masts and spars a fire had started, a faint growing flicker that sent a rapidly thickening pall of smoke over the sea towards them.

'She's struck, sir!'

Belchambers pointed eagerly at the enemy ship. The boy was right. The Tsar's ensign was being hauled down. 'Cease fire, there! Cease fire!'

'Congratulations, sir,' said Fraser, coming aft.

Drinkwater shook his head. 'Pass my thanks to the ship's company,' he said tersely. Fraser drew back and left Drinkwater staring down at the body of Hill. He had executed the Admiralty's instructions, carried out his particular service to prevent a Russian incursion south of the coast of Alaska.

As he bent over the body of the old sailing master he felt the heavy nuggets in the tail pockets of his coat touch the deck. It came to him that he might be a wealthy man and he wondered if the presence of gold in California was known to anyone in London. He thought of Lord Dungarth and the infernal device. Reaching out his hand he touched Hill's face, then stood and stared to windward, mourning his friends.

Russian penetration of the Pacific coast of North America extended as far south as Fort Ross, on Bodega Bay. The posts of the Russian-American Company are assumed to have been founded in 1811, but Nicolai Rezanov attempted a lodgement in 1806 which apparently failed, perhaps for the reasons here revealed. Conditions under the Company were notoriously poor, even by contemporary Russian standards, and Indian raids were frequent. Had he lived, Rezanov would undoubtedly have achieved much needed reforms, but his tragic death in March 1807, in the obscure Siberian town of Krasnoiarsk, prevented this. He had been on his way to obtain the Tsar's ratification of a treaty to trade with the Spanish colonies which he had agreed in principle with Don José Arguello, Commandante at San Francisco. Prior to his landing at San Francisco, Rezanov had headed an embassy to the Japanese capital at Yedo as part of Kruzenstern's circumnavigation. This, too, ended in failure.

Don Alejo is my own invention, for Don José seems to have been a man of honour, unwilling to trade against the wishes of Madrid, although he had reached some form of accommodation with Rezanov. It seemed reasonable to assume his daughter had inherited her father's high-minded character and that she should be attracted to that of Rezanov, for she too existed, famed for her extraordinary beauty. She first met the Russian in April 1806, they fell in love and announced their betrothal. When she finally learnt of his untimely death, the Spanish beauty became a nun.

Descriptions of Russian merchant ships may be found in the pages of Dana, who met them in San Francisco in the 1840s, shortly before the abandonment of the posts at Bodega Bay (Fort Ross) and the Columbia River, and some twenty-odd years before the sale of Alaska to the United States. Several countries laid a spurious claim to this wild and lovely coast in the early years of the last century and it is fascinating to speculate upon the turn of events had the presence of gold been known forty years earlier than it is generally thought to have been. It is not inconceivable that its presence was known to a few who, for reasons of their own, wished it to remain secret.