Book One: A Poor Man

at the Gate Series

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Chapter Two

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His head hurt; it throbbed; when he felt very gently behind his ear it was tender.

“Some bastard hit me!” The sound of his voice gave him a headache; he closed his eyes again. It put the seal on a bad week, he felt, the whole world was against him, was creeping up behind his back.

Reluctantly, he decided he should make some effort to find out what had happened, discover the worst, whatever it might be – if he was in prison he might as well know at once, and start to prepare his mind for a fairly rapid hanging.

It wasn’t as bad as it might have been – he was lying on a wooden floor, not stone, and there was a thin palliasse underneath him and a rough woollen blanket drawn up to his chin. Some effort had been made to look after him, but he wasn’t in the room he had taken in the Horseshoes Inn.

He was wearing his new clothes, and the boots he had bought the previous day; knowing it must be a waste of time, he checked his pockets. No purse. Thirty guineas up the spout – six months and a dozen runs it had taken to put that much together, saving every penny his dad had given him, spending nothing, risking his neck, all for some thieving bugger to grab and piss up against the wall! A hundred and he had been going to buy his own boat, then he could have gone out with his dad seining rather than drifting, more than doubling their catch, with a bit of luck. He swore, then shrugged, at least he was alive and what he had made once he could do a second time, easier for knowing a bit more about the way the world worked now; in any case, he wouldn’t ever be going out with dad again and it didn’t seem likely he would be doing much fishing for a while yet. He stood up and stumbled as the floor pitched.

It was a deck, he was at sea, shanghaied.

Not the navy – if a press gang had taken him and somehow got him on board a man of war then he would be waking up in a crowded mess-deck, not on his own in a cabin or store-room like this. He sat down again to think.

He had to get out of England, that was given, and he had to stay away for a year or two, until the hue and cry had died down; when he came back it must not be to the fishing in Dorset, and it might be better not to come back at all. He had no money now, could not buy a passage out, so he had to sign on as a seaman, as a forecastle hand, which had always been on the cards; he was on a ship already, one that had taken some pains to get him on board and was hardly likely simply to let him go again. Wiser to make the best of it – he’d got some of what he wanted. He just hoped it wasn’t the whaler – a three year run to the Great South Sea by way of Cape Horn was not the way out he would have chosen, though he would be a thorough-going deep sea sailor by the end of it.

The door cracked open – he had not bothered to try the handle, it had to be locked and they weren’t about to forget him and leave him to starve, nor would they leave him long in idleness.

A cautious voice called in to him.

“You awake?”

“Yep.”

“You want to come out, then?”

“On me way.”

He walked slowly out of the small cabin, hands showing clear and empty – no knife or bottle or billy - glanced about him. He was below decks, had been kept in a bos’n’s store by the looks of things, hard up in the bows, a paint room, maybe; possibly purser’s lazaretto, but neither should have been empty, leaving harbour. He could just see a figure in the half light, pointing him to a ladder.

He blinked in the sunlight, his head complaining at the brightness; he wondered if this one was the bloke who had hit him, decided to let it wait – he would find out in time and he wasn’t too concerned anyway, what was a thump on the head after all that had happened already this week?

He was on the brig, and a dirty, scruffy, ill-cared for vessel it was! Eight small cannon and two empty ports on each side, there should be twelve all told. Four pound, he estimated. A chaser in the bows, roundshot in the ready-use rack about the size of an orange, probably six pounds. Not navy, as dirty as this. Not a merchantman, they carried stern-chasers for defence, had no use for a great gun in the bows. Not a smuggler – they ran, would fight only as a very last resort, never carried broadside guns which would condemn them as pirates. Must be a privateer, and an unlucky one, at that; profitable private ships turned would-be crewmen away, never had to resort to force to make up their numbers.

He looked more openly about him as his eyes became accustomed to the light. There was a watch of fifteen or sixteen men, which suggested a crew of about forty when he would have expected the better part of a hundred, privateers needing boarders and prize crews.

Stood six feet away, out of arm’s reach, was a lean, medium-tall, hard-looking seaman, a man who knew what he was doing. He was unarmed, so he thought he had no need for any weapon; best to take him at his own price, assume that he did know just what he was doing. He was dark-haired, swarthy, brown-eyed, hook-nosed, looked more like a Spaniard or a Romany than a local Englishman, Tom thought.

“Captain wants to speak to you. What’s your name?”

“Tom Andrews.”

“I’m Jack Smith, prize master, Star of the Avon. Captain’s name is Blaine, by the wheel. You coming?”

“Yes, sir.”

Smith – if that was the name he wanted – relaxed, turned his back and led Tom aft, happy he would not be attacked from behind, not by a man who had just called him sir – he would have had other names for him if he was after blood.

“New man, Captain. Name is Tom Andrews.”

The captain nodded and coughed and sniffed; he stank of gin, explaining, perhaps, the state of the Star. He was skeletally thin, undernourished, the bottle probably his only sustenance, far gone; he was watery-eyed, fair hair uncut and thinning, blowing wildly in the light wind. Tall but stooped, Blaine would have been much the same height as Tom, looked over his shoulder, never into his face.

“How old are you, Andrews? You look big enough to do a man’s work.”

“Sixteen, sir. Last month.”

“Still got some height to make, and a lot of muscle to bulk out – you will be a big fellow before you’re finished! By the way you stand you have used the sea, Andrews?”

“Yes, sir. My dad had a drifter, a thirty footer. I crewed with him since I could walk, just about.”

“Good. You’re here now and you can make a choice – gun crew or boarder, whichever you wish. Ordinary seaman, not a landsman, so that will make you a one-and-a-half share man. If you show you’re good enough we’ll change that to ‘able’ and two shares. You don’t have to sign on, of course – if you want you can always swim back to Poole.”

Tom smiled at his wit – captains always had to be humourists. He had already seen that there was no land in sight, that they were well out into the Channel. He raised his hand, politely.

“I volunteer, sir. Boarder, if you please.”

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“Captain Blaine knows the sea, Tom, he just had a bit of bad luck which turned him sour a bit,” Smith explained. “Beginning of the war, he was doing well, a young man, I don’t know how old exactly, say twenty-five or so, but he had his own frigate, Arrow, 28, nine-pounders, was cruising off Chesapeake Bay when the lookouts called a sail at dawn, making out to sea in the fogs you get there, couldn’t see hardly nothing. Captain closed her and then made the challenge at a cable, gave her a gun across the bows as a wake up. She made no reply and set her topsails and seemed to swing towards, so he gave her a full broadside and closed and boarded. Kestrel ship-sloop, had taken damage from a big blockade runner the previous day, lost her captain and first and the youngster left didn’t know what to do when he couldn’t hoist the lights for the reply, thought to come within hail. Anyhow, the broadside killed a dozen of her men, including a midshipman whose mother was a niece of the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs! The court found for the captain, but he was beached and wasn’t never going to command a King’s Ship ever again. I was master’s mate on watch with him, stayed with him when he was offered a berth as master of a privateer. He made enough to buy Star in the first twelvemonth, but his luck’s been out since.”

Smith was resigned, philosophical almost.

“How long has he had Star, Mr Smith?”

“Eight months; long enough to fit her out and take her on two empty cruises. Not so much as a sniff of a prize. Anything we chased ran up English colours!”

Tom nodded; judging by the store-room he had seen this was not going to be a long cruise.

“So where are we bound, Mr Smith?”

“Bordeaux stream, then the Spanish coast if we have no luck. Rich waters, French West Indiamen as well as coastal traffic.”

Tom nodded; he knew nothing of those waters, having previously crossed the Channel only to run directly to Normandy to pick up smuggler’s cargoes from the smallest fishing villages. He noticed that Smith was uncomfortable, had left something important unsaid. He waited, let the silence draw out, dad had always said that the silent man heard most.

“Thing is, Tom, those are heavily patrolled waters, too. Both the French and the Spanish keep an eye open in that part of the Bay. You need to be wide awake in those waters.”

Tom thought of the picture Blaine had presented – he could have described him in several different ways, but ‘wide awake’ was not a term that leapt to his mind.

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The Star was a strangely disorganised vessel – there were two watches, but no petty officers to run them, the men splitting the work between them as they fancied, the result being that the least popular jobs simply were not done and the decks grew dirtier on a daily basis while the heads were utterly appalling. Blaine and Smith were the sole officers – there had been two other boarding masters but they had refused to sail for a third cruise on the Star, preferring to earn a living wage instead. The cook had sailed again, and he boiled the ration beef daily and issued them with biscuit and cheese for breakfast and supper; for the rest, there were onions for those who wished to cut them up, and suet and flour and dried plums for anyone who wished to boil up a pudding. Small beer was issued by Smith, thrice daily, a quart pot per man at each issue as the water was somewhat dubious, safe only when well boiled because the barrels had not been scrubbed out before filling; there were no spirits outside of the captain’s cabin. Discipline was relaxed, to the point of being effectively non-existent – the men were almost all volunteers and they could see their own interest as being best served by good behaviour, while there was no such concept as ‘desertion’ as they were all free to resign at any time, in theory, though it might have been somewhat impractical to hand in their notice in the middle of the ocean. In any case, most of the men had a reason to be where they were, at sea and invisible, not on land in their home towns or villages, though, naturally, they tended to keep those reasons to themselves.

Over four uneventful days Tom came to know the names of the men in his watch, the five other boarders particularly.

George and Joby Coles were brothers, either side of twenty, although they did not know their ages for certain. They were Diddicoy, settled travellers who claimed their families to have been Romany, once upon a time. They were short, squat, sandy-haired and kept themselves to themselves; both carried knives where they could be seen.

John Murray was an older man, nearly forty, toothless and balding, lean and slightly bent over; his back ached and he moaned that it was crippling him; he had a very short temper, it was said, with drink in him could explode in anger, blade or bottle in his fist, whatever was close to hand. He was thought to be a Scot who had come south years before; he had little of the accent of the far north, sounded to Tom very much the local man – perhaps he had been brought to England by his parents as a small child.

Dick Smithers was a big, fair Dorset man, much like Tom in appearance and perhaps ten years older, and deeply, fundamentally stupid. He had been a farmhand for years, had had to leave his village near Blandford a few days previously; he had not chosen to say why.

Luke Mundy was from Hampshire, a flash, good-looking young man, forever combing his jet-black hair, always clean-shaven and with a ready smile to show off his white teeth and sparkling blue eyes. He made no secret of the fact that he came from a little village near Southampton, Durley its name, and that he had had to run like hell for getting a leg over the squire’s daughter – very frequently, he claimed – and putting her in the family way; they would have called it rape, to save her name, and stretched his neck for his pains, he said, laughing mightily. He did not think he would go home again.

“What about you, nipper? Where’s home for you, Tom?”

“Towards Bridport, Luke. I don’t reckon I’ll be going home no more, neither. Mum’s dead these ten years and Excisemen put a pistol ball in Dad’s chest last week.”

“I heard about that,” Smith interrupted. “There was a big fight when they jumped a set of smugglers, Excise and dragoons both. They said a man grabbed a sabre and laid about him, killed three of them with it, a really big bloke. Half a dozen of them got away but they chased down four who had taken pack-horses and tried to run on them. They didn’t catch the big bloke, though.”

“So I heard,” Tom said.

They had all noticed the fading bruises he carried, chose to say no more.

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They closed the French coast, somewhere off Brittany, Tom understood, although as he wasn’t entirely certain where Brittany was, this helped him very little. They worked their way south through empty waters, not so much as a fishing boat in sight. Smith decided, belatedly, that he should make sure his boarders knew what they were about – he was not used to taking command, still wanted an officer to give him the initial order.

The Coles brothers had sailed with him twice before and sat back and watched the exercise. Neither Dick nor Luke had handled a pistol, but both knew how to load a scatter gun and quickly mastered the essentially similar smaller weapon; accuracy was of little concern, all they needed do was point and pull the trigger as they would never be more than the width of a deck from their target. Tom took his pistol, loaded quickly and expertly, hardly looking at what he was doing, and took a snap shot at a gull flying ten yards off their quarter, reducing it to a heap of bloody feathers on the waves.

“Christ, nipper! Just ‘ow did you do that?”

“Dunno, Luke. I could do that first time I ever picked one up. Dad had a pair on the boat, just in case of trouble, he always said – the Channel’s full of Frogs and you never know... So long as I can see it, I can hit it.”

“What about with a musket, Tom?” Smith asked.

“No good at all, sir,” Tom replied. “It’s all I can do to hit a barn door at twenty paces with a long gun.”

They laughed and shook their heads, said they had all heard of stranger things, but not many.

Smith ferreted about in their little armoury, came up with a wide leather belt with a diagonal bandolier attached, passed it across to Tom with instructions to put it on, right shoulder to left hip. Half an hour’s fiddling fixed six holsters, one to each hip on the belt and four to the bandolier across his chest, one left and three to the right. Two more hours and between them they had selected the six best pistols and checked their springs and flints before handing them across to Tom.

“Good thing you’re a big bloke, Tom,” Smith commented. “With a cutlass as well it will make a fair old load. By the way, have you ever handled a blade, Tom?”

A furious outbreak of coughing from Luke led him to withdraw the question, very apologetically.

Tom spent the rest of the day sat on the deck with rags and oil, painstakingly cleaning the heavy pistols and then rousting through the gunnery chest to find the tools to file down the sears and reset the triggers to a lighter pull. They were still clumsy brutes at the end of his labours, but he would trust them not to misfire and to put their ball more or less where he expected. He liked hand-guns, always had; he had never used one in earnest but he expected he would now, it was not as if people mattered, not like he had always thought; the Excisemen had taught him that.

While Smith gave brief training to the larboard boarding party Dick and Luke, both possessing farm skills, set up the grindstone and put an edge to the fifty or so of cutlasses and tomahawks they could find. The Coles sat down with their own oilstones and sharpened their knives until they could shave with them; they did not offer to assist any of the others.

Next day Tom was set to the great guns, to check and set the lock on each, one flintlock being much the same as any other. He did his best, replacing two springs and balancing the others as well as he could, but he strongly recommended Smith to find slow match and water tubs for each gun as an almost certainly needed back up.

By the end of their second day on the French coast they were ready for custom, if only they could find it.

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The luck changed a couple of days later, off the Isle de Re and the approaches to Rochefort, the Star on a rare north-easterly wind making a comfortable five knots under courses alone, not wanting the increased visibility of topsails, far less the high pyramid of topgallants, never carried by merchant hulls – the small sails added only a little to a ship’s speed but required extra, expensive hands to set them. Tacking slowly and laboriously from the south came a fat, slow, round-bowed ship, some four or five hundred tons at a distant estimate. Anxious inspection by telescope showed no row of gun ports – she was not an ancient fifth or sixth rate of the French navy.

“Set topsails,” Blaine shouted, wheezing and hacking under the strain of raising his voice.

Their speed rose to eight knots, closing a mile every six minutes until their prey should wake up and try to flee. The Star’s crew was too small to consider raising topgallants or studding sails in a hurry, but they did succeed in setting a second jib.

“Hands to chaser!”

Five men ran to the six pounder, cast the gun loose and slowly loaded it.

“Mr Smith, French colours to fore and main, if you please.”

They had been flying no flag, private men of war generally did not, in common with most merchantmen; there was always the chance that a commercial sailor might see what he wanted to – three or four hours of flight down wind, even if they escaped, would leave perhaps two extra days of tacking to make their port – and would believe the Star to be a French national ship.

The boarders armed themselves and waited in their two parties, six from the starboard watch and five from the larboard, Smith at their head and giving a running commentary, nervously twitching like a racehorse waiting for the off.

“Blind, credulous, bloody stupid! If we was Frog navy we would be looking to give them sea room, stand at least two, better three, cables off. Surely to Christ he can see we’re at a dead run for him! Two miles distant. He’s left it too late, it’ll take him at least ten minutes to change tack and we’ll be closing him before he’s round. Ready at the chaser!”

They acknowledged.

“First round across her bows. If you fire a second then hull her, no messing about.”

The gun captain raised his hand in agreement – no naval saluting or ‘aye-ayes’ on a privateer.

Blaine’s voice rose again as they came within a mile.

“Strip topsails.”

The small crew needed a full five minutes to comply with the order, as he had estimated.

“Lower French flag. Shoot, Mr Smith!”

The flags dropped and the chaser fired the moment legality was restored – to fire under false colours would make them pirates, the navy might risk shaving it, they dared not.

A quick series of helm orders, Blaine seeming alive, alert suddenly, and the Star swooped ponderously onto the merchant’s stern as she hovered, irresolute.

“Thinks we might be navy, ready to put a full broadside into her if she tries to run, expects fifty men in the boarding party, so be quick! Grapnels!”

The hooks were thrown up onto the taller ship and they scrambled up the four feet and over her rails. There was the normal thin merchant crew, most of them with weapons in their hands, waiting for orders; the bulk of them very obviously hoping the command would be to surrender.

A minute and it became clear that there was only the small party of a dozen on their deck and a voice called sharply in French. Just three of the armed men jumped forward, unwisely eager for a fight.

Tom fired three shots in less than as many seconds and the remaining Frenchmen froze, then, as one, dropped their blades and raised their hands, each trying to look innocent of intent, unthreatening, demure.

Ten minutes sufficed to disarm all of the crew and make a quick search for any hiding. Half an hour more and their one boat was lowered and they were thoroughly searched and then crammed aboard it, the master relieved of all of his keys and the ship’s papers.

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“Take her back to Poole, Mr Smith, starboard boarders as prize-crew. Keep in company.”

They were too thinly manned to do anything else, and it was wiser to keep enough men aboard Star to man the broadside if necessary, pointless to spread the crew out and have too few men to fight either vessel.

Smith glanced at the ship’s papers and manifest, hopefully asked whether anybody could read French, was not surprised to discover that none could, tucked the papers carefully away for the benefit of the prize-agent in Poole.

It seemed possible that they had been observed from shore or from fishing boats, and the French crew would be on land and raising Cain by evening, so they took a course south west to make as great a distance from the coast as they could. The French would not know their home port, would have no clues on which to base a pursuit, so it was most sensible to make their way deep into the Bay and out of sight before turning their head towards Poole. They set the courses and then the topsails, one by one, the minimum set of sails that they could manage, just, and maintain a steady five knots. The wind was veering, gaining an unusual amount of easterly, much to their satisfaction, but they told each other that when the luck changed it generally did so thoroughly, made a whole-hearted job of it.

They took a glance into the holds, came away quite satisfied with the loading of naval stores for the Atlantic Fleet in Rochefort that filled the fore, not unhappy with the commercial cargo of sheet lead, sacks of flour and beans and rice and barrels of olive oil stored dry in the main hold.

“Could have done a lot worse,” Smith commented. “Naval stores will always sell – cables, ropes, cordage, canvas, spikes and nails, pitch and turpentine and tar, powder paint – all will go in Poole or even be bought up by contractors to the navy to send to Portsmouth. Foodstuffs, always in demand just before harvest when the store cupboards are thin. Don’t know about the olive oil, foreign muck, don’t seem the sort of thing English folks are likely to have any truck with – though they might sell it in London, they’re queer folk up there.”

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Five slow days brought them into Poole and saw Blaine at the office of his prize-agent who was as surprised as he was pleased to see him. After two anxious days the prize-agent confirmed that the Bills of Lading showed that all of the cargo had loaded in Bordeaux, having originated in France, and was consigned to French ports; the ship’s papers stated that she was registered in Bordeaux and was French owned – there were no neutrals involved and no reason to suppose that the Admiralty Court would not condemn her as fair prize.

The local officials of the Prize Court had been notified of the capture and had, provisionally, agreed that it seemed to be legitimate and that some or all of the cargo might be perishable; they had therefore authorised the prize-agent to set the cargo to immediate auction and to disburse the funds so generated, the proviso being that, should unforeseen circumstances supervene, the Court might find against him and he would then be personally liable for the whole value of the cargo and hull and for demurrage and damages, not to speak of prosecution for unlawful killing of the crew members. In time the prize-agent would sue the captain of the prize-taker to recover his losses, but the law tended to be very slow.

The net effect was that any prize-agent was very unwilling to pay out more than fifty per centum on cargo and hulls generally remained unsold prior to official condemnation. A prize taken in one year might well not be fully paid for another two, and if, for example, some part of the cargo transpired to be neutral then the process could drag on for ten years and the lawyers’ fees would eat up the whole of its value before judgement was ever given. It was not unknown for privateers who discovered they had unwittingly taken a neutral to quietly sink ship and crew and sail off to another part of the ocean, claiming innocence and sometimes being believed.

Whatever the end result, a couple of thousand was very welcome to the Star, half going to the ship, half to the crew’s shares. It put seven pounds ten into Tom’s pocket, which was a good start to making up his losses, but it was only fifty shillings for each man he had shot – life was cheap, it seemed, but it was their own fault, they had asked for a fight and had no business complaining that they had got more than they asked for. It was surprising, really, just how easy it had been, how little it had mattered; he noticed that the others in the crew treated him with an overtly cautious respect now, recognising him as a ‘bad’ man – one who should not be crossed; heady stuff, for a sixteen-year-old.

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The Star tied up at the quayside and took in stores; Tom counted ten crates of two dozen bottles of gin going into the captain’s cabin. Four cannon were wheeled out of a chandlery and set to the empty ports on the broadside.

“Captain had to pledge them to get anything before we could sail last time,” Smith explained.

Tom nodded, leaning on the railing, staring fixedly out to sea, having no wish to show his face in port.

“We’ve signed on another twenty hands, a boatswain and two prize-masters. And we’re properly stored for three months. If you want off, Tom, you’re welcome – I never did like getting men from the crimps, it ain’t right! If you stay, you’re a two-share man; all the other two shares are topmen, but you’re to be leading hand of the boarding party, if you want it. Nobody’s going to argue, to say you’re too young, not even they bloody Coles got any objections, not once they  seen you with them pistols. Do you want it?”

“There’s nothing waiting for me in Poole, Mr Smith. I’ll stay.”

“Good. My name’s Jack, by the way.”

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