“Permission to go ashore, sir?” Lewrie’s cook, Yeovill, asked from the foot of the ladder in the ship’s waist. He held up a woven basket. “If there is parsley growing there, I could pick some, or a batch of wild bird eggs.”
“Permission granted,” Lewrie said with a nod.
“It looks deserted, sir,” Marine Lieutenant Roe commented. “Do you think the Spanish might have troops there, anyway?”
“We saw no campfires, no lanthorns or glims during the night, so I rather doubt it,” Lewrie told him, shrugging. “We might run into a Robinson Crusoe, or some Arab fishermen, but—”
“The boats are coming alongside, sir,” Lt. Westcott announced. “Bring me back a mermaid.”
“Right up to an Arabic country, I’d have thought you’d ask for a hareem, or a genie in a bottle,” Lewrie teased, for Westcott was a fellow madder for quim than any he’d ever seen.
“Oh, one or two jewels from some sultan’s hareem would suit me just as well,” Westcott allowed, pulling a face.
* * *
“Reminds me of Malta, sir,” Marine Lieutenant Roe commented as the cutter was slowly stroked towards the shore of Perejil Island, “a vertical rock wall everywhere you look but for Valletta Harbour.”
“You’ve been there, sir?” Lewrie asked, wondering how a young Roe could have served in the Med before, aboard another warship.
“Oh no, sir,” Roe said with a chuckle, “but my uncle has been, and he had an illustrated book about the Turk siege of 1565. That’s how I formed my view of it. A rather fanciful book.”
“Can’t see that fort no more, sor,” Patrick Furfy, stroke oar and long a member of Lewrie’s small entourage, pointed out with a jut of his chin to the East. “They’s tall bluffs in th’ way.”
“No, you can’t,” Lewrie realised, taking a look for himself. “Thankee, Furfy.”
“No place t’land, sor,” Cox’n Liam Desmond said.
“Let’s go round the East end of it, then,” Lewrie decided.
Close in, within a long musket-shot of the shore, the island’s bluffs looked to be as tall as the masthead of a ship of the line and just as hard to scale. There might be hand-holds for anyone determined to climb, but sea birds of a myriad of sorts had built nests where one could put a hand or foot, and the narrow ledges would be slick with guano, making that approach almost impossible, if not suicidal.
The two boats rowed round the Eastern end of Perejil, looking for a landing place, but it was much the same there, too, but—
“Damn my eyes, will ye just look at that!” Lewrie exclaimed as he beheld a wide, sheltered bay on the South side of the island, and a jutting headland that daggered at the African mainland, a headland with a pronounced slope. A few more minutes of rowing on calmer waters took them towards the tip of the headland, and Lewrie was even more pleased to see that the headland separated one bay from another to the West, just as spacious and sheltered from strong winds.
“We’ll have to take soundings, but each one looks as if more than ten transport ships and smaller warships could anchor in each bay!” Lewrie crowed, clapping his hands together.
The cutter and launch steered into the second wide bay, and Lieutenant Roe raised an arm to point. “There, sir. There’s a notch in the West side of the headland, like someone took an axe to it … and I think there’s a way up.”
“Take us over to it, Desmond, and let’s see,” Lewrie said.
“There is a landing!” Midshipman Fywell exulted.
Sure enough, the split notch began at the foot of the bluffs, by a small patch of gravelly, shingly “beach” littered with rocks the size of cobblestones, and a path led up from that spot to the top of the bluff. Low wind-shaped scrub bush and stunted trees grew in that shelter, here and there.
“Mister Roe, land your Marines from the launch, first, and go scout your way to the top,” Lewrie ordered, turning on his thwart to wave the launch ahead of his own boat.
“Fix bayonets and prime your pieces!” Roe shouted over to the Marines in the launch. “We’ll be going up first, Sar’nt Clapper.”
“Roight, sir!” Sergeant Clapper acknowledged.
“Think there’s enough room for two boats, sir?” Roe asked, anxious that he not be separated from his men.
“Take us in, Desmond, soon as Crawley’s hands have boated their oars,” Lewrie ordered. “We don’t want t’snap any more of the things.”
At least Midshipman Fywell found it funny.
First the launch, then half a minute later the cutter, ground their bows on the beach, and bow men leapt out with painters to find some place to lash their lines to keep the boats ashore. Marines filed forward to the launch’s bows and jumped overside into shallow water, not up to their shins. Lieutenant Roe leapt out of the cutter, drew one of his double-barrelled pistols, and joined them, leading them up the notch.
“Leave four hands from each boat, Crawley.… Desmond, the rest follow the Marines,” Lewrie said, stumbling forward over thwarts and stowed oars to the cutter’s bow to step ashore himself.
Stealth, should any Spanish soldiers be on the island, was out of the question. Issue boots slipped and slid on rocks and hard, dry soil, and their presence stirred up several hundred sea birds to caw and mew in protest and take wing with the sound of flapping canvas.
Have to exercise more, Lewrie told himself as he scrambled up, grasping on to the thin, stunted trees and shrub branches that were so thinly rooted that they could not be trusted, head up and ears cocked for danger. The notch was wider than it had first appeared, but deeper, and steeper a climb, deep enough to cast them all into shade from the rising sun.
“Hold it up, hold it up,” Sgt. Clapper was warning in a growl of caution, waving sailors and Marines to hunker down as Lieutenant Roe knelt at the very top of the notch with a Private Marine to each side of him, and was slowly raising his head for a wary look-see.
“Come on up, lads, there’s no one here,” Roe called down the notch to the shore party. He and his brace of Marines scrambled up to the top of the island and stood, looking round.
“Un-inhabited?” Lewrie asked Roe once he was up.
“Well, sir, there’s a rock circle where someone camped out not a stone’s throw from the top of the notch, some broken crockery, and a cast-off blanket,” Roe told him. “If anyone lit a cookfire, it’s been ages since.”
“Wild bird eggs, hmm,” Yeovill mused, looking about. “A dozen might make a regular-sized omelet. Tiny. But, there’s nests everywhere you look.”
“An’ bird shite,” Furfy said with a snort.
“Let’s spread out and look around,” Lewrie ordered. “If you run into anything interesting, give a shout. If we must run back to the boats, Mister Roe will blow on his whistle.”
“That notch, sir,” Lt. Roe said, pointing downward. “If that’s the only way to get up here, fifty Marines could defend it against hundreds. Fifty men, with a pair of swivel guns, or boat guns?”
“Desmond, you and Furfy scout the top of the bluffs Westward, to the tip of the island, to see if there’s another way up,” Lewrie told them. “And, if you find a source of water, that’d be welcome.”
“Aye, sor,” Desmond said, knuckling his brow in salute. “Come on, Pat. We’ll work some of our fat off.”
Lewrie walked off North, making a bee-line for his ship, which was anchored off and in plain sight from anywhere on the island. He discovered that the roughly flat surface of Perejil was not so flat as it had first appeared. There were rocky outcroppings here and there, and some depressions in which rainwater might gather, where the plant life was a shade greener and healthier than the dried grasses and shrubbery, which were so wind-shaped that they put him in mind of the miniature trees or stylised representations of trees that he’d seen at Canton, China, long ago. There were some wildflowers here and there, wilted by a Summer of Mediterranean heat and a lack of rain, poking up among what he could only call weeds. His late wife had been the one with a green thumb, lovingly tending the back garden of their old house, and the large circular plot before it where carriages could turn around.