Bury had risen at the dismissal of the two captured sailors and still had his beer mug in hand. He looked down and seemed surprised to see it. He took a sip and set it down on the brass tray-table and exchanged it for the captured stack of Captain Chaptal’s books, sorting through them to find a journal.
“Despite the haste required to look through Chaptal’s accounts, sir, I noted that he was meticulous about listing his prisoners, by name and numbers, and how many were turned over,” Bury said, flipping through the pages. “He was also most secretive, referring to where he landed them as either ‘Loire’ or ‘Saone’, instead of the Saint John’s or the Saint Mary’s Rivers, with no way to know which is the correct river, or rendezvous. He noted how ‘ mon vieux ’ met him with proceeds from previous sales…”
Bury fumbled to pick up a second ledger, eager to impart what he had learned.
“Sit, Bury, so you don’t spill ’em,” Lewrie kindly offered as he sat himself back down on the settee.
“Thank you, sir,” Bury replied, his attention rivetted on finding the right references. “Ah. ‘ Mon vieux ’ is his code for the man behind it all on the American side, and the firm in question he calls just ’ la compagnie’! But here, sir…!” Bury excitedly said, picking up that second book and flipping through it, “are his meticulously-kept accounts for the owners and investors in his ship, to prove how successful he’s been, and how much he’s earned them, less demurrage in Prize-Court harbours, in Proctors’ fees, less operating costs and repairs, and those are not in a personal code.”
“So, you think you have an idea of who’s guilty, Bury?” Lewrie asked, sitting up straighter and scooting to the edge of the settee.
“I do, sir,” Bury said with a sly smile. “All his payments are to one firm, the Tybee Roads Trading Company, of Savannah. I also… here,” Bury went on, laying aside the accounts ledger and picking up a thicker book, nigh the size of a thick dictionary. But when Bury opened the cover, it was revealed to be a box. “To prove to his investors and owners that each purchase and outlay was legitimate, Captain Chaptal kept signed receipts. While some are signed by various factotums of the Tybee Roads Trading Company, a great many, as well as receipts from Prize Courts at Havana, Fort-de-France and Basse-Terre, are signed by a Mister Edward Treadwell, who styles himself as President of the firm. This Treadwell and his firm appear to make over ten percent of each prize, plus Chaptal’s ship’s needs. There are stacks and stacks of them, seemingly filed in this box in neat, chronological order. Though…”
“We know the firm, we know the company, and we know the bastard behind it!” Lewrie crowed in glee. “Do we take these books to the authorities in Savannah, they’ll hang him!”
“Though, sir, there may be a second unidentified man,” Bury said, frowning in puzzlement. “For the most part of Chaptal’s journal he refers to ‘ mon vieux ’ as his principal dealer, but in the last two references to prizes brought in, he mentions someone he calls ‘ coton ’, so there may be another company, and without corroborating account books, I cannot-” Bury was cut off by Lewrie’s peel of laughter, by his rocking back onto the settee’s back and slapping his knee.
“‘My old’, and ‘Cotton’, and Treadwell, are one and the same, Bury!” Lewrie hooted, loud enough to make his cats start. “Chaptal calls him ‘ mon vieux ’ not in the ‘old friend’ sense, but because this Treadwell looks old, no matter he’s no older than me. He calls him coton because he has a very full and curly head of white hair, as white as carded and washed cotton! My Purser, Mister Cadbury, met him at Savannah, and remarked on his appearance. Now!”
Lewrie sprang from the settee and went a bit forward to the starboard-side chart space, fetching a book off the fiddled shelf to bring back into better light. He sat down and opened it, running a finger down the tightly spaced entries, squinting over the wee type.
Damme, do I need spectacles? Lewrie thought, vexed; I ain’t that old, surely!
“According to the ephemeris, Lieutenant Bury, the next dark of the moon is in eleven days,” Lewrie said, looking up from the book at last. “Eleven days from now, once Thorn rejoins us, I intend that the squadron be off the Cumberland Sound and up the Saint Mary’s River t’see what we can catch. Pen ’em in and row up to destroy ’em, or catch ’em as they try to run. Either way, we put paid to this fiendish business!”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
“We will not get far up the Saint Mary’s, I fear to say, sir,” Mr. Caldwell, the Sailing Master, cautioned as he, Lewrie, and Lieutenant Westcott huddled over the dining table two days later, where one of the purchased American-made charts was spread out.
“Not with Reliant, no,” Lewrie said, lifting Chalky off to set him back on the deck, “and not with a cat in the way. At the best, we might ascend the river as far as the narrows ’twixt Cumberland Island and Amelia Island, then come to anchor athwart the channel with springs on the cables to block any escape with our guns. If these soundings are right, there seems to be about thirty to fourty feet of depth for her. From there, it’ll be up to the sloops and gunboats.”
Actually, the American-drawn chart, told them little. The river entrance was called the Saint Mary’s, the bay to seaward was named the Cumberland Sound, but once in the entrance, the river itself was named Cumberland Sound, no matter its narrowness.
There was sufficient depth in the entrance narrows between Cumberland Island and Amelia Island on the South bank, with a width of half a mile. Once past the narrows, the Cumberland widened to about two-thirds of a mile and swung Nor’west to make a fairly large bay before trending more Northerly and narrowing once more to less than a half mile. If one followed the main course of the Cumberland Sound far enough, the chart finally referred to it as the Cumberland River, and fed into the much larger St. Andrew Sound below Jekyll Island.
Spooked privateers, pirates, or smugglers could flee up that way and make the sea, or scuttle up one of the minor rivers or creeks and run for miles before they turned narrow and too shallow.
Making pursuit worse, barely half a mile past the entrance to the Cumberland, the Amelia River fed in from the South behind the island of the same name, and snaked round before being joined by the Bells River and Lanceford Creek.
And just where the Cumberland veered North lay yet another of those joinings; the real St. Mary’s came in from the West, but not an hundred yards off the river’s mouth there was the Jolly River, which ox-bowed through swamps and marshes from the Sou’west!
“There’s more waterways than a dog has fleas, it appears, sir,” Lt. Westcott glumly said. “The privateers could flee up any one of them as soon as they spot us. We will have to block this Amelia River as soon as we enter… unless that’s where they’re anchored. Then we’ll have to be quick about it to reach this second fork, where the Jolly River and the Saint Mary’s enter. We might need double the number of boats.” Westcott was impatient, bored, and he would pick nits.
“I see no notes indicating the rate of the currents,” Lewrie complained, scanning the margins of the chart, “nor are there any tide measurements. I wonder if our privateers and smugglers lay out only one anchor, or two, depending on how strong the currents are, or if the tide flow is stronger. Depending on how high up past the entrance they moor, of course. If by one, they might be stern-on to us, and slowed by the currents when they try to cut and run.”
“But we would be slowed at the same rate in our pursuit, sir,” the sailing Master just had to point out.