"We, ah… stand upon it," Nicely had had the gall to confess, with what seemed a dab of chagrin to "press-gang" him out of his command, so he'd be available to fulfill the rest of his scheme.
"Christ on a…" Lewrie had spluttered, close to babbling. "We may add two cutters later on, once you've reported…" "Mine arse on a…" Lewrie had fumed, nigh to mutiny. "So, you're free, d'ye see, Captain Lewrie. Needs must-" "Black!" Lewrie had squawked, shaking his head in ashen awe at how deftly he'd been made "available"; he hadn't seen this coming!
"Sir Hyde and Lord Balcarres insisted, d'ye see," Nicely hurriedly added, "once I'd laid our enterprise's sketch before 'em, so you must adopt the old Navy adage, 'growl ye may, but go ye must.' "
"Mine… Arr!" Lewrie tongue-tangled. "Gahh!"
"So glad you understand," Nicely had cajoled. "Well, I'm dry as dust, and I fetched off a half-dozen of my best claret. Shall we go aft and toast the success of our venture, sirs?"
And, damned if, after the wine had been opened and Lewrie had sloshed down two impatient glasses, his cats hadn't come out of hiding and had made an instant head-rubbing, twining fuss over Captain Nicely, as if they'd been just waiting for his arrival their whole little lives!
Damned traitors/ Lewrie could but accuse in rebellious silence. And Nicely had been so maddeningly, bloody nice that he'd cooed, "mewed," and conversed with Toulon and Chalky, to their evident delight, even suffering Chalky to clamber up his breeches, roll about in his lap to bare his belly for "wubbies," and scale Nicely's heavily gilt-trimmed lapels to play with his epaulet tassels, touch noses with him, shiver his tail to mark him, and grope behind his neck with a paw at his ribbon-bound queue.
Christ, what a … He sighed to himself, sagging weary on the bulwarks, on his elbows and crossed forearms. What an eerie place this is!
He'd been up the Hooghly to Calcutta and had thought that lush and exotic; he'd been to Canton in trading season 'tween the wars and had goggled at the many sights of the inaptly named Pearl River below Jack-Ass Point. Both had been Asian, crowded, teeming with noise, and anthill busy with seeming millions of strange people intent on their labours. Louisiana, though…
First had come the barren shoals, bars, and mud flats of the Mississippi River delta, so far out at sea, the silted-up banks on either hand of the pass and the lower-most channels' desolate ribbons of barrier islands, with the Gulf of Mexico stretching to horizons when seen from the main-top platform, just a few miles beyond them. Skeins made from dead trees, silent and uninhabited, only heightened the sense of utter desolation.
Once past the Head of the Passes, the land spread out east and west to gobble up the seas, the salt marshes and "quaking prairies" impossibly green and glittering, framed by far-distant hints of woods; yet still devoid of humankind, and abandoned.
Now, here almost within two hours' sail of the English Turn and Fort Saint Leon, the river was darkly, gloomily shadowed by too many trees, all wind-sculpted into eldritch shapes, adrape with the Spanish moss that could look like the last rotting shreds of ancient winding sheets or burial shrouds after the ghosts of the dead had clawed their way from their lost-forgotten graves to the sunlight once again. The cypresses standing in green-scummed, death-still ponds, the hammocks of higher land furry with scrub pines, bearing fringes of saw-grasses like bayonets planted to slice foolish intruders…
Oh, here and there were tall levees heaped up to protect fields and pastureland, rough entrenchments of earth that put him in uneasy mind of Yorktown during the Franco-American siege, raised as if to hide whatever lurked behind them from an interloper's view. There might be a gap in the levees where someone had a seasonal sluice-gate to flood and replenish his secret acres. There might be the tiniest peek of a farmhouse's roof and chimneys, faint wisps of cook-fire smoke at times; the larger pall of bittersweet white smoke as a field was burned off for a fresh seeding with sugarcane or cotton.
But, all in all, it seemed such a thinly settled place, a spookily off-putting land so daunting that only the desperate, the forlorn, would dare attempt to tame it or wrest from it a farthing's profit, or sustenance.
There came a promising little zephyr of wind from the West at last, a welcome bit of coolness after the sullen, damp-washcloth heat of even a winter's day in Louisiana. Lewrie's flesh beneath the stifling closeness of his clothing goose-pimpled to that zephyr. As if to a forewarning, but of what?
CHAPTER NINE
Lewrie wasn't sure exactly what he was expecting once Azucena del Oeste weathered the last bend of the Mississippi, abeam a Westerly wind, and began a long "reach" up the centre of the river's widening channel. To hear Mr. Pollock, Capt. Coffin, and his mates gush about New Orleans, it was a blend of Old Port Royal, Jamaica, the old pirate haven, London's East End docks for commerce, Lisbon for quaintness, and Macao in China for sin.
Lazing on the starboard foremast stays and ratlines just above the gangway bulwarks, using his telescope on things that caught his interest, he watched New Orleans loom up at last. Like most realities, though, the city proved a letdown, compared to the myth.
Near the city, the levees were higher and better-kept, on the east bank at least, with a road atop them bearing waggon traffic and light carts. The road sometimes crossed wooden bridges above sluice-gates and canal cuts that led to planters' fields. Even here, though, Spanish Louisiana still looked thinly populated. One would expect a modicum of commercial bustle so close to a seaport of New Orleans 's repute, but…
The river widened and ran arrow-straight, finally, and Lewrie could espy buildings and wharves, another vast, sloping levee in front of low but wide warehouses. Dead, bare "trees" turned out to be masts of a whole squadron of merchant ships tied up along the quays, along with a confusing tangle that looked like a gigantic log-jam. Nearer up, the log-jam turned out to be a fleet; hundreds of large log rafts or square-ended flatboats that had been floated, poled, or sailed to the docks from the settlements far upriver. Those would be sold off and broken up for their lumber once their voyages were done, Mr. Pollock had told him.
But for church spires and a few public buildings, nothing was taller than two stories, though. Within the last mile, Lewrie could estimate the city as only ten or twelve city blocks wide, and might straggle north towards Lake Pontchartrain another half-dozen blocks. Within throwing distance of the town, swamps, marshes, and forests took over, again; brooding, foetid, and primeval.
"That's it?" Lewrie grumbled in disbelief. "That's all there is to it? What a bloody gyp!"
The river wind brought the tang of "civilisation" from toilets and garbage middens, from horse, mule, donkey, oxen, and human "shite," from hen coops and pig sties; and the Mississippi wafted even more evidence- drowned rats, cats, and dogs; wilted vegetables and husks of fruit; butchers' offal; and turds. Evidently, not only was no one interred belowground in marshy Louisiana, but no drains or sewers could be dug, either! The river that close to town had gone from leaf-mould and silt tobacco-brown to a piss-yellow, shit-brindle colour.
"It ain't that bad, sir," Mr. Pollock said from below him on the gangway, having heard his disappointed muttering. " 'Tis a very wealthy town, for all that. A most pleasant and delightful one, too."
"Wealth? There in that… village?" Lewrie scoffed.
"Consider it a London, Bristol, or Liverpool in their youngest days," Pollock replied with faint amusement. "So recently settled a port city, much like a new-found Ostia serving an equally unimpressive Rome a generation or two after its founding. An Athens or Piraeus in the days of Demosthenes, a Genoa or Marseilles when the Gauls had 'em? Even in their heydays, the fabled ports of antiquity were nowhere near as impressive as present-day London or, say, Lisbon, Lewrie. Ancient Alexandria, Jerusalem in the times of the temple, fabled Babylon, or the hellish-rich Troy of Homer's myth weren't all that big, either. Nothing like Paris or London. Though I doubt the modern world has, or the ancient world had, New Orleans 's match when it comes to wealth and vital location."