Tide of War (28 page)

N
ATHAN LOOKED BACK
from the stern of the gig as it pulled away from the shattered frigate. She looked like one of those prison hulks he had seen on the mud of the Medway, but not so homely.

He supposed he should not complain. She should not have been there at all. The waves should have broken her back, battered her to death and scattered the pieces over the Devil's Jigsaw, but that fatal surge had been the last. Nothing that followed had approached anything like the force of that single wave. It had torn a great swathe through their little breakwater but this in itself had contributed to their survival for if they had remained tied to the trees they would undoubtedly have been crushed by the great weight of water. Instead it had torn up the trees by the roots and hurled the ship into the shallows between the two islands where the keel had become lodged in the soft sand. They had passed a miserable few hours huddled on the dismasted hulk convinced that the next great wave would finish them off—but it never came. By first light they knew the storm was spent, the sea heaving and pitching about them as far as the eye could see but no longer threatening to their destruction.

Now it was almost calm, the sky a near perfect blue with just a few shreds of white cloud on the distant horizon to the north. And the
Unicorn
held fast by the bows amid a shambles of broken trees, the wreckage of their breakwater.

Nathan had resolved to save the ship if he could, though there were those, he knew, who had already condemned her. There was little or no tide on this side of the Barrier Islands and they would never be able to kedge her off the soft sand, Pym maintained, even if they possessed a boat large enough to carry out the anchor. He and his ally Baker advised Nathan to break her up and use her timbers to build a smaller vessel that might ferry them to safety. But the carpenter, Mr. Lloyd, for all his head-shaking air of gloom and despondency, had assured Nathan that the hull was fundamentally sound and they could patch those parts that were not. With a jury rig Nathan was confident they could sail the ship at least as far as Pensacola in West Florida where the Spanish had a naval dockyard of sorts.

But first they had to haul her off her present location.

They might not be able to use an anchor but Nathan was hopeful of finding a secure enough lodging among those few trees on Ship Island that had survived the late surge. Many of them had been snapped off at a height of ten feet or so but the roots appeared firmly embedded and after inspecting them carefully he decided they could take the strain, particularly if the cable was attached to one of the broken pines and wedged lengthwise behind three or four of the stumps.

It took them almost two hours to make ready but even with the entire crew heaving on the capstan-bars they could not move her.

“Very well,” Nathan told the first lieutenant, “we will lighten ship.”

“Using what?” demanded Pym, adding quickly when he saw Nathan's eye,”Perhaps you have forgotten, sir, that we have only the gig.”

“No, I had not forgotten, Mr. Pym, but we will build a raft. In fact, as there is no shortage of timber, we will build two rafts.”

The remaining hours of daylight were engaged in this occupation and they spent another night in the hull. At first light, they rigged lines between ship and shore to haul their homemade rafts betwixt the two but even with a hoist and tackle on the beach it took them
the best part of the day to remove the guns and most of the stores and water. The sun was low above the sea before they were ready to try again.

And once more their efforts were in vain. Nathan kept them at it for above an hour, even after they had lost the light. He had the entire crew jumping up and down on the quarterdeck in the hope of shifting her but there was not the slightest intimation of movement. She was stuck firm.

“In my view,” said Pym in a low but urgent tone when they adjourned to the privacy of Nathan's cabin and he called for wine, “we have no choice but to abandon the vessel. The people are exhausted, sir, and I regret to say very close to mutiny. If you will not permit us to break up the ship, I respectfully submit that you send to the Spanish governor in New Orleans requesting his prompt assistance. A fleet of five or six pirogues should be sufficient to convey the entire ship's company to Pensacola where we may take ship for Port Royal.”

“Thank you, Mr. Pym, I shall certainly send to Baron Carondelet for assistance. If he is able to send us a couple of hundred soldiers or labourers I have no doubt our concerted efforts will haul us off the mud.” The blood rushed to Pym's face as he turned away. “And if they do not then we will do as you suggest. But I am resolved to give it one more try.”

Pym turned back to face him, controlling his temper with difficulty. “And in the meantime, sir? What are we to do to keep the hands occupied? For if they are confined here for more than a day or two without useful employment, I fear the consequence.”

“Then we must set our minds to the problem, Mr. Pym, and between us, I am assured we will contrive something for their amusement.”

Nathan regretted this constant need to assert his authority—and the manner that appeared to come with it, which was so alien to what he thought of as his true character. Not for the first time he wondered if he was suited to the business of commanding the crew of a ship of war, or indeed any body of men, when his natural inclination
was to more solitary pursuits. He had long since come to the conclusion that he was more suited to the life of a spy—like Imlay, whose absence he rather regretted.

Where
was
the man—and what was he up to? Nathan stared out over the darkening Sound towards the invisible mainland beyond. It was quite possible of course that he had become lost in the swamp, a prey to the monsters that lurked there. Possible but unlikely. Imlay was a survivor. He was alive somewhere, Nathan was sure of it, and up to no good. And yet, in a strange way he missed him.

He was aware that his doubtful authority was ebbing fast. The hands were at best sullen, reluctant workers and Nathan knew they were not far from rebellion. If he did not succeed in freeing the
Unicorn
within the next day or two he could expect serious trouble.

His immediate concern, however, was for the casualties of the recent battle. They had lost fewer men than he had feared when he first set foot on the ship: eighteen men dead, twenty-seven wounded, several of whom were not expected to live. McLeish wanted to move some of the less serious cases ashore where he considered their chances of survival were greater than in the foetid sickbay. Then, too, there was a pressing necessity to bury the dead before they grew noxious and it was clearly not possible to bury them at sea.

McLeish was one of the few people Nathan felt he could count on but the poor man looked near dead himself. He had been on his feet in the sickbay for the best part of the two days and nights since the battle, fighting to save the lives of the wounded. His lean features now more resembled a skull than a face and his eyes were deep pits that stared dully out upon the world.

The first thing after breakfast Nathan employed the gig to search along the shore for a suitable patch of dry land where they could bury the dead and possibly throw up a tent for the wounded. He took the doctor with him to approve his choice—and to get him out of the hell of a cockpit for a while. But dry land was not much in evidence. Ship Island was become little more than a mudflat. Turtle Island, in its lee, had been spared much of the violence but it looked sorely
distressed. The sea had mostly receded but it had left a great deal of mud and broken pines stuck up from patches of stagnant water like naked stumps in a bog.

At the far end of the channel they found a stretch of beach with a stand of pines which appeared to have escaped more or less intact. Indeed, this little sanctuary appeared to have attracted a fair proportion of the region's wildlife—mostly ducks and seabirds but also a few alligators basking in the sun close to the water's edge. Although these reptiles seemed indifferent to the bird life, at least for the moment, there was no knowing how they might react to more substantial prey, but Desmarais resolved the problem by taking up the musket he had acquired after the battle with the French and firing at one of the largest of the brutes. They watched its spectacular death throes while its companion slid with rapidity into the sea and the entire bird life of the beach took to the air with wonderful alacrity and even greater noise.

“Thank you, Monsieur Desmarais,” Nathan remarked dryly when the disturbance had abated somewhat.

They landed on the now deserted shore and walked back to view the corpse. It was about seven or eight feet long from nose to tail, a good three feet of which appeared to be composed entirely of mouth, jaw and teeth.

“Can it be eaten?” Nathan enquired of its killer, who was eyeing it thoughtfully and stropping the edge of his knife against his thumb.

“But of course,” Desmarais replied cheerfully, somewhat diminishing the value of this assertion by adding that it tasted very like snake.

He proceeded to hack off large lumps of the brute while Nathan and McLeish walked up to the stand of trees. This was perfectly suited to his needs, the doctor declared, if the crew could be prevailed upon to set up tents and dig a trench which would help to drain the ground and also serve as a latrine.

They returned to the ship and despatched half the crew by gig and raft to accomplish this feat while Nathan composed a letter to Baron Carondelet describing their present plight and begging him to send what men he could spare. Though he had spoken confidently
to Pym, he was by no means certain that help would be forthcoming, the Governor having sufficient problems of his own. It took him several drafts to complete the letter to his satisfaction. Then he considered the problem of who to send with it. Reluctantly he decided it had to be Tully. Apart from anything else he was the only one of his officers who spoke French. He sent him off in the gig with six of the hands and Joseph Bonnet as his guide—being reluctant to part with Desmarais whose expertise he had come to rely upon.

Then, with a melancholy heart, he took up
The Book of Common Prayer
and prepared for his next ordeal.

They had dug a trench on the far side of the stand of trees and the bodies were stitched in canvas in the traditional manner, as they would have been at sea, with the last stitch of the needle through their nostrils to ensure that no mistake had been made but without the necessity of a cannonball at their feet. The people had been assembled in their divisions for the ceremony and they stood there with hats off in the sun while Nathan read the burial service with all due solemnity but with a growing sense of unease.

He had never officiated at a burial service before and though he had attended many, the most recent had been at sea with all the proper formalities: the ship heaved to with her topgallant yards all a-cock-bill to signify mourning and each individual body placed on a mess table and covered with the red ensign. At the appropriate point the captain, or chaplain if they had one, would depart from the conventional words in
The Book of Common Prayer
and intone: “We therefore commit his body to the deep to be turned into corruption looking for the resurrection of the body when the sea shall give up her dead.” At which point the table would be raised and the shrouded figure slide from beneath the ensign and disappear beneath the waves. And despite the mournful nature of the occasion there was invariably a sense of satisfaction, certainly among the hands, that their shipmates had been given a proper send-off.

There was none of that here. And though they used a mess table and the red ensign and slid each of the bodies individually into the
trench and Nathan repeated the same portentous lines for each, it was clearly lacking in dignity. The sea did not close respectfully over the bodies and there was something pathetic and degrading in those shrouded figures on the sand. It looked, Nathan realised with growing concern, like a pauper's grave.

“We therefore commit his body to the ground: earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust …”

After the third or fourth occasion, as Nathan sprinkled the wet sand over the recently departed, he became aware of a spirit of resentment among the living. A shuffling of feet and a muttering of voices. He distinctly heard the words, “It is not right.” And the angry response, “No, mate, it is bloody wrong.”

These phrases were not in
The Book of Common Prayer
nor, so far as Nathan was aware, any of its variants.

He heard Pym's furious bellow for silence but the damage was done. When the service was over Nathan made a short speech, informing the crew that he had sent for assistance and assuring them that they would shortly be sailing for Port Royal where the vessel would be refitted and they would enjoy a welcome spot of shore leave. But it did not go down well. Dismissed, the hands shuffled off with surly discontent, watched with suspicion by their fuming but helpless officers.

Afterwards, they were put to work on building a palisade on the western point of the island where there were a number of fallen trees and from where they could mount a battery of guns to provide some defence against attack from the sea. It was little more than a gesture but at least it gave them something to do and provided a semblance of discipline. Then Nathan spoke to McGregor and Whiteley about their marines.

“I see no cause for immediate alarm,” he told them, with more assurance than he felt, “but can you trust your own men if it becomes necessary to restore order?”

McGregor looked despondent and though this was not far off his normal expression, it was clear that he entertained serious doubts.

“In a conflict with the enemy they have nae equal,” he asserted, “as I believe you have witnessed. And normally I would say they would be willing and able to maintain discipline aboard a tight-run ship o' war. But in these circumstances …” He indicated their present surroundings with a dismissive hand. “And with men they have known since leaving Portsmouth, I doubt some o' them might prove a wee bit recalcitrant, so to speak, though I cannae speak for Mr. Whiteley's contingent that only came aboard at the Havana.”