I don’t believe a word of it! Lewrie scoffed to himself; He’s nigh-droolin’ t’take an active part! If he can’t have a victory at sea as grand as Nelson at Trafalgar, I’d lay guineas that he’s cravin’ his name featured prominently in the papers back home! Didn’t he already say the Navy’d give the nation a new Nelson … and that he’s the best candidate for that … in so many words?
Lewrie accepted a fresh refill of wine and took a slow sip or two, looking round at the other officers in Diadem’s great-cabins with an eye for other candidates to inherit the title of National Hero. It was circumstances that caused that, being at the right place at the right time, and being lucky enough, stubborn enough, or talented enough to succeed, to win. He found it nigh-impossible for a man to arrange success, and acclaim. All Navy officers were aspiring, for promotion, command, and for honour and glory, though it usually was the rare one in an hundred who gained such fame.
Lewrie had had his short stint at being well-known and even famous … or infamous, depending on how you looked at stealing those dozen slaves to man his ship at Jamaica, becoming the darling of the Abolitionists and Wilberforce and his crowd, then being acquitted at his trial for it. Stout and prosperous London businessmen still gave him the evil eye, the ones who saw nothing wrong with the slave trade and the wealth that came from it!
Aye, and look where all that’s got me! he scoffed; But … it might be nice t’be mentioned in despatches, now and again. Hmm. Me, the new Nelson? Oh, bosh!
* * *
The conference ended about half an hour later, after the last niggling details had been threshed out, and Lewrie went back to the upper deck, and the sunshine, waiting his turn to depart in order of seniority, the junior-most first, and the senior-most last, into their boats. While chatting with the others, he became even more convinced that there would be a Naval Brigade formed, whether it was needed or not … with Popham at its head, most likely!
He determined that as soon as he was back aboard his ship, he’d see to his personal weapons, oil them and clean them, and fit fresh flints in the dog’s jaws of their locks. He’d take his pair of double-barrelled Manton pistols, and his pair of single-barrelled pocket pistols, too, the ones made by Henry Nock. Of course, he’d take his Ferguson breech-loading rifled musket, which could shoot accurately almost three times as far as any Tower musket, and fetching along the longer fusilier musket wouldn’t go amiss, either. And, for hunting game, the Girandoni air-rifle, which was almost silent.
Game! Fresh game meat, roasted over a campfire on a spit. His mouth began to water at the thought, and if Popham didn’t send a Naval Brigade ashore, then By God he’d find a way to land with the Army, and Devil take the hind-most!
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“A pretty day for it, I must say, sir,” Mr. Caldwell the Sailing Master commented as Lewrie paced the quarterdeck near him, in passing.
“Pretty, aye, but a windy one,” Lewrie responded after a long squint aloft to the stiffly fluttering commissioning pendant and the thrumming and clattering of running rigging and blocks. HMS Reliant lay almost beam-on to weather, rolling alee, then upright, and snubbing at her anchor cables. “Yesterday was calmer. Better for it.”
The fleet had come to anchor just West of Robben Island on the night of the 4th. Yesterday, on the 5th, the demonstration towards Green Island had been made. Now this morning, the 6th of January, was the day selected by Commodore Popham to land the army.
At the moment, that prospect didn’t look all that promising to Lewrie, for though the skies were clear blue and the high-piled clouds were as white as fleece, there were strong winds from offshore, which had stirred up a heavy surf, combining to make a landing very risky.
Lewrie fetched a longer, more powerful telescope from the binnacle cabinet forward of the double-wheel helm and went to the bulwarks on the lee side to extend the tubes and raise it to one eye to peer deep into Blaauwberg Bay.
“Christ on a crutch,” he muttered in dour appreciation.
The bay was chopped with white-caps and white horses right to the shallows, and streaked with long, white curling waves mostly parallel to the shore where they began to break, rank upon rank of them marching onwards to crash and expend themselves upon the shingle and sand, each a little more than one hundred yards apart. Were heavily loaded boats sent in under oars, they would be hobby-horsing up and over each wave, bows-high first, then stern-high as they passed over the steep crests, and burrowing their bows in. Their final dashes to the beach would be nigh un-manageable, riding the crests if they were lucky, but it was good odds that many would broach beam-on to those waves, and be rolled over and under!
“Still no signal from Diadem?” Lewrie asked over his shoulder.
“None yet, sir,” Lt. Westcott told him.
“It might be best were the landings put off ’til tomorrow,” Lewrie said as he lowered the long day-glass, collapsed the tubes, and turned away from the rails, with a frown on his face.
“Perhaps conditions may be better in Saldanha Bay, sir,” Lieutenant Merriman hopefully suggested. “It is a bit more sheltered.”
“But, only the slightest bit, Mister Merriman,” Lewrie pointed out as he pulled out his pocket-watch to see how much of the morning had been wasted. “From Saldanha Bay, it’s more than a day’s march to Cape Town. That’d give the Dutch bags of time to mount a counter move. Daylight’s wasting. If we don’t move soon, we might as—”
The blustery morning was broken by the report of two guns, the announcement of a general signal to all ships. Two sour and yellowish-white puffs of powder smoke sprouted from the flagship, HMS Diadem. A long moment later, strings of brightly-coloured signal flags went soaring up her halliards.
“It is … ‘To Weigh … In Order of Sailing’,” Lt. Westcott slowly interpreted. “The last is spelled out letter-by-letter, sir. It is … ‘Saldanha’!”
“Very well, Saldanha Bay it is,” Lewrie said with a quick nod of his head, puffing out his cheeks in a disappointed sigh. “And God help poor soldiers. Hands to ‘Stations To Weigh’, Mister Westcott.”
“Aye aye, sir!”
Once every warship and transport had hoisted their own ‘Affirmative’ signals to acknowledge receipt and understanding of the orders, Diadem struck her string of signals, which was the ‘Execute’. On each vessel, messenger lines were fleeted to capstans, the messengers nippered to the much stouter anchor cables, capstan bars fitted to the tops of the drums, and sailors breasted to the bars and began the heaves to reel in the hawsers. Most ships were anchored fore-and-aft by best bowers and kedges, so bow hawsers had to be eased and the aft hawsers taken in to break the kedges free; then, the process had to be repeated to bring the bow hawsers to “Up And Down”, just shy of breaking the bowers from the bottom. Sail began to appear on every ship, mostly jibs, stays’ls, and spankers to begin with, to gain some control and keep them from sagging alee onto the shoals round Robben Island, and to put a bit of forward drive on.
Altogether, all those evolutions took the better part of an hour, before the first transports bearing the 38th Regiment of Foot, the bulk of the cavalry, and the artillery led out ahead of the rest on course for Saldanha Bay, up the coast.
“Hmm,” Lt. Westcott said, looking aloft. “We may need to let the tops’ls fall to the next reef point, sir. I think the winds are moderating.”