I’d heard he’d deliberately married for money, Lewrie scoffed to himself; and it appears he gained a barge-load of “tin” from the bargain! There’s enough candles lit t’light a bloody ballroom!
The soup course was “portable”, the usual boiled dry and pressed into cakes vegetable soup so beloved of the Navy Victualling Board, though made more palatable with shredded bacon bits and tangy spices, served with white-bread baked rolls, globs of “fresh-ish” butter, and a sprightly German Riesling.
“Do you believe the accounts, Captain Lewrie?” General Beresford gloomily enquired after a slurp or two.
“I fear that I do, sir,” Lewrie admitted. “Lord Nelson pursued Villeneuve so hotly, there is no way that he would not bring him to battle, once Villeneuve returned to Europe from his jaunt to the West Indies. If the French put into Cádiz, as is reported, and sailed out with his Spanish ally, Nelson would have been there, right off shore, and thirsting for a fight. My main fear is for my youngest son, Hugh, who is aboard the Pegasus seventy-four, under an old friend of mine, Captain Thomas Charlton.”
“Charlton!” Popham cried in delight. “A damned good man, is Thom Charlton, and a fine sailor. Straight as a die, and as smart as paint. You chose well for your son’s first captain. Where did you serve with him?”
“He commanded a small squadron in the Adriatic, sir, about the time of Napoleon’s first invasion of Italy, and I had Jester, a French corvette that we took just after the evacuation of Toulon,” Lewrie gladly told him. “Aye, salt of the earth is Charlton, though never the life of the party.”
General Sir David Baird then spoke highly of the soup, sharing an account of how Napoleon fed his armies fresh soup and gravies, put up in magnum-sized champagne bottles and carefully sealed to remain fresh and edible for months on end. “Naturally, Horse Guards will not follow suit,” Baird grumbled. “The French thought of it first.”
“If our Army won’t, then I most certainly shall!” Commodore Popham declared. “If only for my own use. How dearly a consommé or a broth, or a good, thick gravy, is desired at sea!”
The soup was followed by individual bantam chickens, and Lewrie could boast of his fast-growing quail and rabbits kept in his frigate’s forecastle manger, and Popham swore that when dined aboard Reliant off Calais, before their failed expedition with torpedoes and fireships at the tail-end of 1804, Lewrie had been his own inspiration for the keeping of bantams.
“I found a whole new flock of bantams when we put into San Salvador,” Popham told them. “Pigeons and doves are also toothsome, and reproduce in sufficient abundance. When I dined with the Prime Minister in London before receiving this appointment, the high point of our supper, beyond the excellence of the beef roast, was a pigeon pie, hah hah! A pity, though, that, one good omelet is the destruction of one’s pigeon flock for the next six months!”
Just how well-connected is he? I wonder, Lewrie asked himself, noticing the faintest pauses and disguised sniffs from the Army officers. It appeared that Baird and Beresford had heard Popham’s casual mentions of his ties to the high-placed and powerful men in the government once too often. Then, during the next course, a roast pork loin gone “shares” with Diadem’s captain and officers’ wardroom, when Popham spoke of his connexions to the former First Lord of the Admiralty, Henry, Lord Melville, even Lewrie had to hide a snort, for Lord Melville had been turfed out in disgrace for being so corrupt that even the other crooks had noticed.
The rest of the repast passed pleasantly, right through to the nuts, cheese, and port, with sweet bisquits, and innocuous topics of conversation.
“Well now, Captain Lewrie,” Popham said, peering down the table at him rather sharply, “what brings you to become part of our little expedition?”
“When up to London, sir, I mentioned to the First Secretary that I had spent some time round Cape Town several years ago,” Lewrie told him. “I had no choice, really … a French frigate sneaked up on me in the dark and shot my rudder to bits, had to be towed in, and spent some weeks scrounging up a replacement and getting it fitted. During that time, I hired a local hunter as guide and rode or hunted all over the countryside. Mister Marsden deemed that experience might prove of use to you, sir.”
“And well it might,” General Baird pronounced, thumping a fist on the table top. “Just where, exactly, Captain Lewrie?”
“Aye, let’s bring out the chart one more time,” Popham called out. “Supper is officially over, so there’s no harm discussing ‘shop’. And I’ll request the port decanter, if you will, General Beresford.”
A large chart, more a land map than a sea-chart, was fetched and spread out atop the dining table, the corners weighted down with the cheese plate, the bisquit barge, the nut bowl, and the port decanter.
“We anchored here, sirs, under the guns of the seaward fort, near the town quays,” Lewrie sketched out, pointing his movements during his forced stay. “Our sick and wounded, we placed in a rented cottage a little way up the Lion’s Rump, South of town, where there was a fresh-water well and cool and fresh sea breezes. When it came to the rudder, we put together a train of bullock carts, with native drivers, and trekked down to Simon’s Bay, where an Indiaman had mistaken False Cape for the proper one, and ripped her hull open on the rocks. Fortunately, she was able to beach herself, and there was little loss of life. The locals at Simonstown were scavenging her for her timbers and metal fittings, but they hadn’t gotten round to her rudder, yet. We camped there several days, living off game meat we shot, sleeping rough under canvas, and playing ball in the late afternoons. After we got the rudder replaced, I did ride out as far as the Salt River, to the Nor’east, and North round the shore of Table Bay.”
“As far as Blaauwberg or Saldanha Bays, sir?” General Baird enquired.
“Not quite that far, no, sir,” Lewrie replied. “Once my ship was sea-worthy, a small home-bound ‘John Company’ convoy had come in, and its Commodore requested additional escorts, what with so many Frog raiders working out of the Indian Ocean as far North up the Western coasts of Africa as the Equator. I might’ve gone as far as the South end of the beaches of Blaauwberg Bay, but it was only a day ride, and we didn’t find the type of antelope or whatever that my guide, Piet Retief, promised. Some of my sailors, four or five of my Black hands, had run off with a circus’s hunting party, and some had come back badly mauled, so I also had that on my plate to deal—”
“A circus!” General Baird gawped.
“Mister Daniel Wigmore’s Peripatetic Extravaganza, sir. They were after strange, new beasts for their menagerie,” Lewrie explained. “They hired the biggest fool in all of Africa for their guide, and it was a total disaster. Does a Jan van der Merwe offer you his services, sir, shoot him and run like Hell. He thought that the Cape buffalo would be a good replacement for domestic oxen, and that hyenas could be tamed as guard dogs, and God only knows what other foolishness. Baboons as nannies, I expect!”
“Yes, your famous Black sailors,” Popham said with a simpering drawl. “Lewrie was tried and acquitted, don’t you know, sirs, for liberating a round dozen Black slaves on Jamaica, and signing them aboard his ship as free volunteers. ‘Black Alan’ Lewrie? Or, ‘Saint Alan, the Liberator’?”
“Oh yes, I recall hearing of that,” General Beresford said, nodding. “That must have made William Wilberforce and his Abolitionist crowd perfectly giddy.”
“They were, for a time, my patrons, sir,” Lewrie had to admit. “Once I was acquitted, though, they found a new’un.”