Chapter 7

"... Stella Maris wrecked on the shoals and her surviving crewmen made prisoner."

He wrote in his lieutenant’s journal, which would also be a first draft for his report to Captain Ayscough when he came to the island, and the official account of the venture someday in far-off London and the Admiralty.

“We discovered storehouses ashore in the palisaded fortress.”

“Hmm,” he speculated. It wasn’t exactly a fortress, now, was it? A bamboo log palisade with ship’s planking for reinforcement, and built so amateurishly one could have hurled a large dog through it anywhere one wished. Still, “fortress” would read better back in official circles than “armed cattle pen.” He dipped his goose-quill pen in ink and continued, more than a little tongue-in-cheek.

“The goods amassed were considerable, both gen’l trade goods to an estimated value of £50,000, & quantities of Gangetic Opium & Silver rendered into 1 oz. bars (Chinese taels) to a value of £200,000. Also discovered were stands of arms (French Mod. 1763 St. Etienne Arsenal muskets with all accoutrements) cutlasses & pole arms (boarding pikes & espontoons), powder & shot, six 4-pdr. French naval carriage guns, powder & shot Ditto & twelve 9-pdr cannon un-mounted, Do.”

He leaned back and took a sip of a rather good Bordeaux that had traveled exceptionally well all the way from its point of origin to this dry and rocky Hell halfway around the world, and outlined to his superiors what a clever little fellow he had been.

How he had dismounted some of Lady Charlotte’s twelve-pounders and sited a three-gun battery on the point of the western peninsula to protect the harbor they now occupied. How they had finished the observation tower in the “fort” to an advantageous height, giving them a thirty-mile radius to espy the arrival of their foes, or the relief ships. How the captured guns with carriages had been sited to scour the harbor should any ship get inside, and the crew of the Lady Charlotte had been “commandeered” (he preferred that word to “press-ganged”) into serving as gunners.

Stella Maris stripped of all her fittings and useful articles, her artillery and powder that had not gotten soaked employed in further defensive positions atop the high ground of both headlands before she was burned to the waterline and the ribs and carcass towed off the shoals to sink, out of sight, in deeper water.

“Stella Maris provided material with which to refit Poor Richard. This American Whaler was restored to her Capt. one Lemuel Prynge & such of her crew as survived their seizure & cruel enforced Servitude, their rightful Cargo put back aboard & Poor Richard allowed to sail for Manila, the closest Port where they could hope to meet up with other Yankee vessels & a snr. Owner & Master bearing dipl. title of Consul, with whom Capt. Prynge assured me the most strenuous Representations against the French Govt. would be presented.”

He concluded by listing the very few dead and wounded among the Native Infantry, the utter lack of hurt to his ship or his men, the great number of French dead and wounded, the names of the Americans who had died or been hurt by capture or captivity and strong praise for those of his warrants and seamen he thought deserving.

“What else?” he muttered, leaning back in the rattan chair that creaked and gave most alarmingly as he did so. The table, the very walls of this shore house were of the same material, fetched from God knew where. Surely not from anything that grew on the island, that was for certain. Even the thatch of the roof was of palm fronds, and fairly fresh, too. So it had been a recent import to Spratly Island. He thought about putting down his suspicions that the Illana pirates had already come to visit, but decided against it. A lieutenant’s journal was for wind, tide and sea-states, for weather or ship’s routine. For a different slant on events—not for idle musings.

He closed the ink-pot, sluiced his pen-nib off in a cup of water and blew on the pages he had written to dry them. A slow process, that. Mr. Brainard had promised cooler climes at Spratly, but if this was in anyway dryer, or cooler than Bencoolen, it was a matter of degree only.

They had had several spells of freshening weather as the winds shifted more sou’easterly to the seasonal norms of the summer Monsoons. Wind, lashings of rain, cool, blustery half-gales that so far had not swelled to ship-threatening storms. The cisterns and rock-pools had filled with water, and Culverin and Lady Charlotte had caught hundreds of gallons of fresh water in canvas chutes. Enough to succor the men and animals brought to the island, enough to support all the livestock running wild or penned up for slaughter the French had brought.

Frankly, they had enough livestock to start a well-run estate, and that was just the imported animals. What ran wild on the island could keep one awake at night with their miniature stampedes and alarums. Everyone had been eating well ever since they arrived.

He finally got the ink dry enough to roll up the pages and tie them with a hank of thin rope, then went out to check on his latest project. Rather, his father’s latest project, for which he was giving up a few crew members.

No ship could take being fired upon with heated shot. Once a red-hot iron ball lodged in a ship’s timbers, the tinder-dry wood took fire like fat pine-shavings. Lt. Col. Sir Hugo St. George Willoughby had suggested a battery for that purpose, and Lewrie had concurred eagerly. Said battery was now installed above the “fortress,” halfway up the rocky slopes of the central hill. He toiled up the rough path to the battery to take a look at it.

Two twelve-pounders sat in a hollow partially dug into the slope, screened from view by a shielding wall of boulders laid loose against each other and some dry brush. There were two wide embrasures through which they could fire, and cover the entire harbor. And, being about sixty feet higher than the beach, gained an advantage in range over a ship-mounted artillery piece that might try to return fire. There was a magazine dug into the back slope, and off to one side where it never could threaten the powder supply, was a rock forge where iron cannon balls could be heated before being carried to the battery and loaded down the muzzles of the guns.

Firewood should have been a problem, except that Stella Marts had provided tons of scrap lumber, and enough bar-iron to make the cradle-sized carrying tools for heated shot. Poor Richard had also gladly sold several barrels of whale oil with which to ignite the forge. And Alan had an idea lurking in the back of his mind about the rest of the whale oil.

“Good morrow to you, Alan,” his father said as he reached the battery.

“And to you as well, sir,” he replied. “Are you ready for a test of this contraption?”

“Just about,” Sir Hugo nodded. Several of his sepoys were hacking hull and deck planking from the unfortunate Stella Maris into kindling. “Ever used heated shot?”

“No, sir.” Alan chuckled. “Not a good idea aboard a ship at any time, and during battle, well ... I’m told the French tried it but had disastrous results. Been shot at with it at Yorktown, though.”

“By my calculations, I expect to be able to fire random shot to almost the outer harbor breakers along the reef line,” Sir Hugo said.

“But there’s only two fathoms at high tide out there. Anything worth shooting at would be aground that far out,” Lewrie replied. One of his other ideas to keep his hands busy and out of mischief or boresome rumbling, was to survey the harbor at low tide and update Mr. Brainard’s chart, correcting what he found mismarked or filling in a few mysterious gaps.

Those mistakes and gaps were horrendous. Taking the average of noon sights with Hogue and Captain Cheney and his officers, they found that Spratly Island itself was incorrectly charted, out of its actual location by at least fifty miles! The coastline was half imaginings, and the soundings inside the harbor seemed to be the speculations of a terribly optimistic mind. It made him cringe every time he thought about how he had trusted that chart when he sailed into harbor, over that broken reef wall and through the pass, maneuvering free as a brainless sparrow over its entire length and breadth during the fight with Stella Maris. In a proper ship, such as a frigate, he’d have been wrecked half a dozen times over!

“I’d admire a copy of that chart of yours, then,” Sir Hugo bade. “Very useful for my binki-nabob. My gunnery officer.”

“I shall have it done directly, sir,” Alan offered.

“Sail ho!” the tower lookout screamed.

“Choundas?” Sir Hugo stiffened.

“It very well may be,” Alan agreed grimly. “ ‘Tis the middle of April. Time enough for him realize Sicard isn’t available any longer and then sail from Pondichery.”

It was a jumbled run down to the enclosed fort, then up the rickety tower’s bamboo ladders to the top platform. Easier to continue to the top of the hill he was already on, which was almost as high. Sir Hugo grabbed a spy-glass and they half-ran, half-trudged up the slope to the windswept crest.

“Where away!” Alan shouted down. He could not hear the lookout’s returning shout, but the man pointed. To the east! “Bloody hell? Now who could this be?”

“Choundas, coming back from an early meeting with his natives,” Sir Hugo snapped. “He might have never gone back to the Indian Ocean, not with us on his trail. Get an early start. And reinforcements.”

Once they had gotten their breath back, and had steady hands, Sir Hugo extended the tubes of the telescope and peered at the eastern horizon.

“Here,” he snarled. “Can’t see a damned thing.”

And, Alan noted, his hands were none too steady, either.

“If I might borrow your shoulder for a rest, sir?” he asked. “And, as the sailor in the family, I might know what to look for. A sail very much resembles what you might take for a cloud. Some ...”

There was a sail out there to the east. In point of fact, there were a lot of sails. Dark tan, they looked, almost silhouetted by the early morning sun. And fairly low to the water. With the wind out of the sou’east now as a steady Trade Wind, he was looking at the cusps of someone’s tops’ls, perhaps, angled to take the wind from the stern quarter, running almost free with a landsman’s breeze. But there were so many of them! Almost as many as the first sight he’d had from the Desperate frigate’s t’gallant yard the morning the French fleet under de Grasse sailed back into Chesapeake Bay!

“I count at least twelve, perhaps fifteen sail,” Lewrie muttered. “It could be a fishing fleet, but I doubt it. They look like praos with their one square-sail flying. If they come up over the horizon, and don’t pass on by, they’re coming here.”

“The Lanun Rovers!” Sir Hugo spat. “Come to meet with Choundas.”

“Come to the Spratlys for whatever purpose they have, yes.”

“Pray God they enter harbor,” Sir Hugo snickered, shaking Alan’s resting telescope. “With your batteries, your ship and my guns and my troops waiting ashore, we could make it damned hot for ‘em.”

“Well, let me tell you, we’ve tangled with praos before last autumn,” Alan replied. “Hold still, would you please, sir? Each one carries nearly an hundred pirates. Not much in the way of artillery, but we have to be looking at... well, closer to fifteen boats now, so that could be a force of over fifteen hundred men.”

“The more the merrier,” Sir Hugo shrugged, waving the resting telescope tube about the sky, forcing Lewrie to close it and give up. “A bloody check here could ruin this fellow Choundas.”

“How the devil do you come by that?” Alan asked.

“When you slap your invited guests in the face, they don’t invite you to their house for supper any longer, now do they, lad?” Sir Hugo boomed.

“Then we’d better make sure we leave a few to carry word back to their lairs, should we not?” Alan said, getting the drift. Choundas would not know of this until he tried to meet up with his native allies. And they just might do the English the favor of cutting the man’s heart out for spite.

“I wonder if those pirates yonder know the difference between a French and an English flag?” Sir Hugo speculated, humming some song to himself.

“Whether they do or not, sir, I do believe you’re going to get a practical test of this battery of yours before the day’s out.”