"Your record precedes you, Lewrie," Nicely told him, obviously trying to praise, but failing badly. "Sir Hyde, the Governor-General, the Admiralty… Mister Peel's Foreign Office," he said, waving one hand in Peel's direction, prompting a brief bow from the seated Peel, "all think you can do it. Sir Hyde said you're the very man for the job, no error."
"It won't work, won't work at all," Pollock mournfully groaned.
"I can't see how it possibly could." Lewrie heavily sighed.
"Fine, we're agreed!" Nicely declared.
It went downhill from there, o' course.
BOOK THREE
Gonzalo: All torment, trouble, wonder, and amazement
Inhabits here. Some heavenly power guide us
Out of this fearful country!
– The Tempest, Act V, Scene 1
William Shakespeare
CHAPTER EIGHT
Crack!
"Shitten, goddamned son of a whore!"
Quickly followed mere seconds later by another faint crack!
"Take that, you son of a bitch!"
Crack!
"And that…" Crack! "And here's one for you, too, you!"
Phfft!
"Well, shit."
"Damn me eyes, sor… sorry," Ordinary Seaman Liam Desmond, in the stern of the ship's gig, congratulated in his own fashion. "That's five outta twelve, this time, an' on th' wing, too, sor!"
"Should've been six, but for this… thing," Capt. Alan Lewrie griped, holding the rifled musket out from him as if it were a stunned-rigid viper. "Well, let's round them up," he said with a sigh.
"Needs spaniels, we do," Landsman Furfy, Desmond's inseparable friend, commented in a throaty aside. "Warter spaniels, wot kin swim for 'em, right Liam?"
"Out oars… give way all," Toby Jugg ordered from the stern-sheets, waggling the tiller-bar a few times as if to scull the gig to faster motion, so the rudder would bite against the river current. It had been a wrench to Lewrie, but taking his longtime Cox'n, Andrews, to New Orleans would be a bad idea, Pollock had sternly advised. Cox'n Andrews was Black, a former house slave from Jamaica who'd run away to sea and freedom. Disguised as a civilian, though, his "protection" of being in the Royal Navy, and therefore untouchable by slavers, couldn't be of help to him if taken up by the Spanish authorities. Even a forged certificate of manumission would be of no avail, since it was issued by British authorities. So, volunteer to go despite the circumstances as Andrews had, as had several of the Black sailors who had "stolen themselves" from the late Ledyard Beauman's plantation on Portland Bight on Jamaica to sign aboard Proteus, Lewrie had reluctantly left Andrews and the others behind.
Lewrie, in the eyes of the bow with his rifled musket, levelled a chary gaze on Toby Jugg once again as he steered the gig towards the nearest slain duck, wondering still if the man was truly trustworthy, and dearly missing Cox'n Andrews, who'd been a strong right arm several times over. Now, though, he must place faith in the enigmatic Jugg, who had let his beard grow even longer, making him look even more piratical and outre!1
"Ware oars, larboard," Jugg grunted, hauling off to starboard as a drifting log approached on their left, from upstream.
The Mississippi looked sluggish at first glance, its surface as smooth as a marble slab under a nearly cloudless sky, reflecting blueness and the sun like a lying masquerade. But beneath that mirror, it was an onrushing, hungry beast, roiled by deadly undercurrents and eddies; and it kept its secrets, evils, and perils in its silty, brown-red depths, mere inches below its opaque surface, where no eyes but those of the dead and river-drowned could ever probe.
Now and then would come a visible danger-trees or giant snags, some entangled into rafts as big as a house foundation ripped from the banks an hundred, a thousand miles upriver, surging along deceptively slowly, and it was the wise boatman who steered very wide of them. The banks were littered with tree limbs, whole forests of them, so convoluted that geese, ducks, snakes, turtles, and other local creatures made homes in them, next to the carcasses of unwary deer, elk, and cattle.
It took two of the gig's six oarsmen, by turns, to keep the boat abreast the current, and even with all six straining to put their backs into it, upriver progress was slow. Thankfully, the Mississippi wafted most of his kills down within reaching distance. Lewrie could even reach out from the tiny bow platform on his stomach to pluck one himself and drop the duck lolling-limp and dead into the boat, leaking blood and river water.
He could not swim, had never learned. And it was a rare sailor of any nation who could, excepting the Dutch, of course. Swimming, so the old salts said, just prolonged the inevitable and attracted some finned horror to come eat you alive. Deliberately drowning might be preferable!
With brisk oarswork and much "short-tacking" about, they recovered three of Lewrie's latest kills. The Mississippi took the other two, last seen bound downriver for the Southeast Pass and the sea at a rate of knots. To chase after them would have required a half-mile descent of the river and an hour of hard rowing to get back to where they'd started!
Fetching the last fat grey-and-white goose caused their gig to stray close to the southern bank, where the tangled, dead-grey trees and snags had piled up deepest and abounded with wildlife; this set his boat crew to goggling, oohing, and aahing over the creatures new to them. Since the crack of gunfire had died away, the beasts had reemerged and acted as if they'd never seen humans this close before.
"Ooh, 'ey's another possum!" Ordinary Seaman Mannix exclaimed in wonder, "carryin' 'er babbies hangin' off 'er tail, kin ye 'magine?"
"Snowy egrets!" said burly Seaman Dempsey. "Dere's plenty o' profit dere, lads. Quality's mad f'r egret plumes, d'we shoot some."
"Cottonmouth snake," Toby Jugg laconically commented, spitting over the side. "Get ye 'fore ye get th' plumes, ya daft bastard."
"Baby raccoons, yonder!" a teenaged Irish topman named Clancey breathed in amusement. "Wee li'l highwaymen, masks an' all? Loik wee bears! Wonder do they make good pets? They do, Oi'd wish me one!"
"No, ya wouldn't," Jugg spoke up again. "They get t'be grown, they turn mean an' snappish, no matter how ya treats 'em. 01' cap'm had one… 'til it bit 'im, that is." Jugg grinned in sweet reverie.
"Warshin' their food, ain't that a wonder, though?" Clancey insisted.
He, Furfy, the plume hunter, even Desmond, looked forward, each with a silent plea in his eyes, like children at a parish fair, as if begging their captain to shoot, trap, or fetch them something, to order the boat put in so they could scrounge about among the "rarees"… to pet or adopt some adorable but be-fanged "something."
A splash and a crackling racket among the dead branches whipped their attention shoreward once more. The cottonmouth snake had nabbed one of the baby raccoons, and the rest were scurrying for their lives.
"Eyes in th' boat, then, an' mind yer stroke," Jugg commanded, as if bored with the ancient struggle of survival.
"This thing's had it," Lewrie said of his improvised "fowling" piece. "Back to the ship, if you please, Jugg. And three of our fat ducks'll be your supper tonight, lads."
That promise perked them up considerably, and, turning athwart the stream, they made the gig fairly fly across the river towards the northern bank, where Mr. Pollock's broad-beamed and shallow-draughted trading brig, the Azucena del Oeste, was anchored. Jugg kept the gig aimed a bit wide of her jib-boom, so they fetched up close-aboard and just a bit to the right of the starboard entry-port and the main-mast chain platform.
It wasn't an officer's place to do such, but Lewrie reached out with the boat-hook to play the role of bow man, snagged the fore-most dead-eyes and stays, then passed the gaff to the larboard bow oarsman as he swept the gig's painter round the after-most and tied it off; a perfect arrival, all in all.