Three mismatched troop transports, lots of twenty-nine-foot barges, and an under-strength regiment of foot—a waste of Royal Navy money, a doomed experiment, or a new way to bedevil Napoleon's army in Italy? Either way, it's Capt. Sir Alan Lewrie's idea, and it seems to be working, with successful raids all along the coast of Calabria.
But it depends on timely information, and Lewrie must trust Don Julio Caesare, a lord of a Sicilian criminal underworld, and his minions, or the amateur efforts of a disorganized network of Calabrian partisans always in need of British arms and King George III's money.
When at last the fourth transport arrives with reinforcement troops, what seems to be a blessing could turn out to be the ruin of the whole thing! Lewrie has been too successful in his career at sea and he's made bitter, jealous enemies with powerful patrons out to crush him and his novel squadron, no matter if it's succeeding. And there are doings back in England that Lewrie would prefer to deal with but can't.
Lewrie has always been lucky, always finding a way to prevail—but can he this time? And if he is to be betrayed, who will do it?
Release date:
May 29, 2018
Publisher:
St. Martin's Publishing Group
Print pages:
368
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“Clumsy bugger!” quickly followed, just before a thump.
“Arr!” from another startled throat, preceding a loud splash, which drew HMS Vigilance’s Captain from the forward edge of the quarterdeck to the larboard bulwarks so he could peer overside to find a cause for the commotion.
“Think we might’ve killed somebody, sir,” Lt. Greenleaf, the ship’s Third Officer exclaimed, standing on the slide of one of the 18-pounder carronades to look straight down the ship’s side.
Vigilance’s four 29-foot barges had been drawn up alongside, manned with oarsmen, tillermen, and a Midshipman each so the Marines could practice debarkation down boarding nets, then be rowed ashore.
“Oh, God’s balls,” Captain Sir Alan Lewrie, Baronet, groaned as he beheld the near-disaster. “Fetch that man out of the water before he drowns!” he shouted down.
One Marine had lost his grip and footing on the nets and had fallen straight into a barge. Fortunately for him, his shout had forewarned the boat crew, and his mates already in the boat, to catch him before he bashed his brains out on a gunn’l, sprawling everyone into a mound of arms, legs, and muskets. The other Marine who had fallen had just missed the same fate, and had plunged into the sea between two barges, had surfaced sputtering and coughing, and was being drawn to a barge’s side and waiting hands to haul him up and drag him in. If he’d been carrying a rucksack full of rations, and eighty rounds of cartridge, as he would in a real landing, he might not have surfaced at all! As it was, his full service dress uniform, pipe-clayed cross-belts, and hat, rarely worn aboard ship except for sentry duty, got the worst of it.
“Alright, Private Quick?” Lewrie shouted down.
“Bathed, Captain sir!” Quick chirped back, which made everyone roar in relieved laughter. “Mother’d be happy!”
“Drill’s cancelled,” Lewrie snapped to Lt. Greenleaf. “Get ’em back inboard … if they can manage that without more casualties, that is. Christ, those damned nets!”
In 1807, off the southern Spanish Andalusian coast, boarding nets for the few troops that Lewrie had been allocated in one transport ship, re-enforced with the fifty Marines of his 50-gun ship, HMS Sapphire, had worked reasonably well in the raids they had undertaken, the quickest way that Lewrie could devise to get soldiers, sailors, and Marines ashore.
He returned to the middle of the quarterdeck and looked over at the three transports now under his command that lay at anchor in the sheltered bay below the Sicilian fishing port of Milazzo. Nets hung down their sides, too, but the troops of the under-strength 94th Regiment of Foot were ashore at their encampment for a day or two.
“Ahem, sir?” Lt. Greenleaf said, clearing his throat.
“Aye, Mister Greenleaf?” Lewrie said, allowing him to speak.
“It’s the tumblehome, sir,” Greenleaf said, “the transports are straight sided, for more cargo space, but this barge…” he ended in a hapless shrug.
“Aye, I know,” Lewrie growled, recalling his own experience on the boarding nets a few weeks earlier.
Rear-Admiral Thomas Charlton’s squadron, the troops and ships under Lewrie’s command, and even more ships amassed to land Brigadier Caruthers’s three full regiments had staged a massive raid all along the Italian shore, from the toe of the “boot” halfway up the insole, to take, sink, or burn the many large fishing vessels and coastal trader ships the French would use to make one more try to invade Sicily, and destroy the huge arms and supply depots assembled at the many small ports.
Lewrie had managed to get all of his soldiers, Marines, and armed sailors ashore in short order, whilst Brigadier Caruthers’s troops had struggled, only managing to get two of his three regiments ashore and that after two hours. And, he should have withdrawn them once the Navy had accomplished its part in the mission, fired the depots, and gotten away cleanly. But, the stubborn sod wanted a battle just so perishing bad that he had stayed, sent out scouts who’d found him a column of French—foot, cavalry, and artillery—on its way to see what they could salvage. With no artillery of his own, the fool had signalled to Vigilance for gunners to man the heavy howitzers that he’d turned up in one of the depots.
Howitzers! Who knew the first thing about them, their fuses, and their use? Lewrie, for one; the only one! Against his better judgment, Lewrie had scrambled down a boarding net to board one of the ship’s barges, which were just returning, and a proper disaster that had been!
Warships, proper warships built for the purpose and not taken into Navy service as converted and armed merchantmen, were the widest at their waterlines and lower gunwales. From there up they tapered in a sweet curve inwards, to reduce topweight and bring the guns of the upper gun-deck closer to the centreline to reduce the tendency to roll too much, and keep the heaviest weight as low as possible.
The effect of that laid the boarding nets so close to the hull that it was very difficult to get a toe-hold or hand-hold, even with no one else below him on the nets dragging them flush against wood.
Mind now, Lewrie had envisioned the boarding nets, but, being a Post-Captain of more than Three Years’ Seniority in the Royal Navy, which should have given him some august dignity, he had never really used one ’til then.
Barely clinging by his fingernails, assaulted by his own rucksack, sword, canteen, pocketed pistols, and a rifled Ferguson musket, and cartridge boxes for the aforesaid weaponry, it had been a wonder that he hadn’t fallen to his death into the barge, or gone into the sea like a loosed bower anchor. Even un-encumbered, he surely would have drowned, for Alan Lewrie was like many of his sailors—he’d never learned to swim! By the time one booted foot found purchase on the barge’s gunn’l, he would have not trusted his arse with a fart!
“Maybe we need jacob’s ladders, sir,” Greenleaf suggested.
That made Lewrie scowl. In his early days in the Navy, and in smaller ships that did not have wooden boarding battens built onto the ships’ sides, with man-ropes strung down each side for a grip, he’d had to use a jacob’s ladder, a set of narrow wooden steps with stout ropes threaded through each end, prone to swinging free of the hull when the ship rolled, slamming back as it rolled to the other beam, and with a sickening ability to sway fore and aft as the ship hobby-horsed over the waves. The very idea made him shiver in dread!
“What we need is some way to fend the nets off the hull ’til our people get down to the lower gunwale,” Lewrie said, instead, “so one can get firm hand-holds and several inches of free space for the soles of their shoes, so they can’t slip off.”
“Hmm,” Greenleaf pondered, scratching idly on the side of his head. “Perhaps some baulks of timber to hold the nets well off, like the catheads that hold the anchors, sir? Gad, we’d look like a porcupine. They’d have to be permanent, else there’s no way to secure ’em firm enough to take the weight of seventy Marines using them at the same time.”
“Well, it’s beyond me at the moment,” Lewrie confessed, taking off his old cocked hat to swipe at his hair. “I haven’t a clue as to how it could be done. Perhaps you and the other officers in the wardroom might mull it over.”
“Ask of the Bosun and the Carpenter first, I’d imagine, sir,” Greenleaf said. “Any way we accomplish it, it’s certain to involve lumber.”
“Aye, carry on, Mister Greenleaf,” Lewrie agreed. “I’ll be aft.”
“Aye aye, sir,” Greenleaf said, doffing his hat in salute as Lewrie made his way to the door to his great-cabins, but was halted by a cry from aloft of “Deck there! Some’un’s wig-waggin’ ashore at the Army camp!”
“Who’s signals Midshipman of the Watch?” Lewrie barked.
“Me, sir,” Midshipman Page, a lad of fourteen years, piped up.
“Well, read the signal, lad,” Lewrie prompted.
“Should have seen it first, young sir,” Greenleaf huffed.
“Aye aye, sir,” Page said, reddening.
The 94th’s encampment lay along the beach and stretched back inland for several hundred yards, into the fruit and olive groves. A signal mast had been erected right by the beach to speed communication ’twixt ships and shore without the need of shuttling boats. The Army had been loaned a rudimentary book of signals, and seamstresses in Milazzo had made up a flag locker full of the basics for the 94th to use.
“Ehm, ah … it is Send Boat, sir,” Midshipman Page stammered. “And … Mail!”
“Must have sent a rider from Messina,” Lt. Greenleaf supposed.
“Mail, well well!” Lewrie enthused. “See to it, Mister Greenleaf, and Mister Severance and I will sort it out. Carry on.”
“Aye, sir!” Greenleaf replied, eager to have news from home as dearly as any man aboard.
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