By the Mast Divided (6 page)

Ralph Barclay had found it necessary to take a deep breath before replying. ‘Well, milord, you may also be aware that I have scarce a dozen hands to send aloft on a topsail yard.’

‘Do you want your orders changed, or is it that you wish to decline the duty?’

Hood, in his expression, had made no attempt to hide the fact that he would be pleased to see Barclay take the second route. He had appointed him to
Brilliant
, not through any appreciation for either his personality or his reputation, but merely because his claim to preferment, the accumulation of past service and the letters he had received reminding him of it, had been too strong to deny without facing accusations of bias against officers who had been attached to George Rodney. Powerful
he might be, but in the tangled skein of present day politics he had a requirement to be careful. Not that he had over-indulged Barclay, who had sent in a list of subordinates he wished to take with him, a list Hood had taken some pleasure in refuting with the reply that HMS
Brilliant
‘would be provided a very decent set of officers’ with which he was sure Captain Barclay ‘would be most content’.

‘I do most emphatically not want my orders changed, sir,’ Barclay had replied, trying again for a comradely tone, ‘but I’m short of my complement to such a degree that I fear it will render my ship ineffective should I come face to face with the enemy. Should fortune favour me with the opportunity, my natural inclinations would encourage me to be bold, to go yardarm to yardarm. It would be a great sadness to have to let an enemy sail by for want of the men with which to engage.’

Hood had frowned, heavy eyebrows coming down to cloud those direct blue eyes. ‘Let an enemy sail by? That, sir, I find a startling statement to hear from the lips of a serving officer.’

‘I have heard that the Impress Service is holding volunteers at the Tower of London.’

Hood had picked up another letter then, with the intention, Barclay reckoned, of avoiding looking him in the eye. ‘Have you, by damn. I must say this is not something that anyone has seen fit to tell me.’

The word ‘liar’ had filled Ralph Barclay’s head, but he was not fool enough to mouth it. Like most other officers short of men, he knew the truth. There were two fleets assembling, one for the Channel and one for the Mediterranean. Hood wanted the Channel Fleet, the premier naval command, which would keep him close to home and politics. Service in the Mediterranean would oblige him to relinquish all the perquisites of patronage that went with his office as the senior serving sailor on the Board of Admiralty – the ability to advance officers who were his followers.

But he had a rival for the Channel in the Irish peer, Admiral Lord Howe, known as Black Dick. Hood’s superior officer on the admiral’s list, Black Dick also happened to be a favourite of the King, who was a strong advocate of appointing him to the Channel, so the matter hung in the balance. Hence the men at the Tower, and Hood’s reluctance to release them for duty; that he would do when he knew which fleet he was to command, and every volunteer would go to man his ships. Let the other lot go begging. It could be decided tomorrow, in a week, or it might take a month; all would be too late for Ralph Barclay.

‘As for being short of hands, Barclay, I don’t recall a time when I ever
went to sea in any other state than short on my complement. Every other commander would doubtless say the same. Yet I think I can safely say I served country and my sovereign despite that constraint.’

Aware of the weak and wheedling note in his voice, and damned uncomfortable because of it, Barclay had replied, ‘My deficit is in the nature of near thirty per cent, sir, and I am chronically bereft of trained seamen.’

‘Seek volunteers, man.’

Barclay had glared at Hood then, any attempt at supplication evaporating, for that he had already done, sending recruiting parties out into the countryside, with posters promising wealth and adventure, and spending what little money he had been able to borrow to purchase drink and food as temptation, the only problem being he had to compete with parties sent out by dozens of other captains in the fleet. Every party seeking hands saw it as their duty to tear down each other’s posters; to disrupt each other’s gatherings and in extreme cases to pinch each other’s recruits. Thus the lanes bordering England’s coast this last month had resounded more from blows traded between competing crews than any other noise. His parties, after several bruising encounters with cudgels and cosh had gathered some volunteers, but nowhere near enough for him to both sail and fight his ship.

Hood had been just as unsympathetic to that explanation. ‘You must, like all other officers, apply to the Impress Service without any excessive leverage from my office.’

Ralph Barclay had made pleas in abundance to the Impress Service, the official body responsible for naval recruitment, and they had fallen on deaf ears. As the agents of the Navy Board they were supposed to take in the men who volunteered, then parcel them out to the waiting ships by a process that was as mysterious as it was inefficient. They also sent out the official press gangs, made up of professional ruffians who would take up wandering sailors in the easiest place to find them, off the coast from incoming merchant vessels or in the ports that ringed the British shore. A bounty per head meant they were dead set against competition. Being both numerous and brutal enough to enforce their claim, it was a brave captain that tried to compete on their turf; he could well find himself losing hands rather than gaining any.

Whatever men were gathered – by fair means or foul – were sent aboard ships captained by those who knew how to return a favour, usually in coin. So the working officers of the Impress Service, often men of low calibre, got a bribe to go with the cash bounty paid by the government.
This was not an option for a man who had lived the five years since 1788 on half pay and had only recently got a ship, a man forced to pay usurious rates to a moneylender just to fund his first voyage. And all of that took no account of a selfish and ambitious admiral like the one before him who could keep the Press Tenders, hulks that should be full of sailors to man the fleet, empty. Indeed, keep hundreds of trained volunteers, prime seamen in the main, unoccupied at a place of his choosing, just so that he could man his own command.

Ralph Barclay had realised then that no amount of pleading would do him any good. Looking his superior right in the eye he had said, ‘I have brought my boats upriver with me, sir, and if you could write an instruction to the officer in charge at the Tower to release the men I need…’

Hood had cut right across him, quite unfazed by Barclay’s attempt to embarrass him. ‘I never knew you to be hard of hearing, Captain Barclay. I have already told you I have no knowledge of this. If you take leave to doubt that I would be interested to hear you say so, and having said it I would then ask you to put it in writing.’

Which would be suicide, you over-braided bastard, Barclay had thought, as he reached into his coat pocket for a document which he hoped would protect from what he intended to do. ‘All I wish to put in writing is in this letter, sir, which brings to the attention of the Admiralty my concerns, given the situation in which I find both myself and my ship.’ Which was as good a way of saying to Hood, as he handed it to him, ‘Court martial me if you dare when I get into difficulties, of whatever nature, and a fair copy of this letter will be introduced as evidence to justify my actions’.

Hood had proved a wily old fox, too well versed in naval politics actually to take the letter, knowing it for what it was, an attempt to blackmail him into releasing some hands. He also knew as well as Barclay that HMS
Brilliant
needed a complement of at least one hundred and forty men to both sail and fight; she was, if he was being told the truth, at present, forty short of that number. What did that matter, there were never enough men – the peacetime Navy had to expand ten times to accommodate the needs of war; the press-gangs had long since swept the country bare, and Sam Hood was not sitting with an officer he cared to indulge.

‘You may leave it on my desk, though I doubt I shall have time to read it,’ Hood had said, going back to his pile of letters, but his parting words had made Ralph Barclay wonder if he was a reader of minds. ‘I daresay
you will man your ship somehow, though I would remind you of the very necessary statutes that exist to ensure that, should you go pressing, you only take up men qualified for service at sea.’

Those very words were rattling round Ralph Barclay’s mind as he came abreast of the Tower of London. He called to Midshipman Farmiloe, to draw his attention to pinpoints of light that dotted the bank and the green behind. ‘See yonder, Farmiloe, those camp fires?’

‘Sir.’

‘I daresay you have no knowledge of who they warm?’

‘None, sir.’

‘Sailors, Mr Farmiloe, that’s who. Prime seamen, every one a volunteer, come to the Tower as the place where the Impress Service is taking in recruits for the same Navy in which it is our honour to serve.’

Richard Farmiloe would have been wary of his captain whatever mood he was in – and that was not always easy to know. But the note of sarcasm in Ralph Barclay’s voice rendered him doubly cautious. The man was capricious, and what seemed like the sharing of a witticism one second, could turn to unbridled wrath the next. So he took refuge in being obtuse.

‘Why, that is amazing, sir.’

‘It’s a damned disgrace,’ Barclay spat.

A voice barked in the darkness. ‘Sheer off you fucking swab.’

‘Damn you, Hale! Do you want to see us in the river?’ Barclay shouted, at the sound of clashing oars.

This was aimed at his coxswain, Lemuel Hale, steering his boat. Distracted by the sight of those very same fires he had taken him so close to the wherry of a Thames waterman, leading to that shouted curse. Accustomed to such abuse, Hale merely made sure his eyes did not lock with those of his captain.

They were well past Tower Green and the sparkling camp-fires before Barclay returned to the subject. ‘They are held there at the express orders of Lord Hood. What do you say to that?’

‘Words fail me, sir,’ replied Farmiloe.

‘There’s much that fails you, boy,’ Barclay spat, ‘not least that empty head of yours. Does it not occur to you to enquire why?’

‘I would not presume, sir.’

‘I doubt you know the true meaning of the word presumption.’

Ralph Barclay finally arrived at the decision that he would be safer at sea than at anchor. None of the men at the Tower would be released
until Hood had resolution of his dilemma. Even when the shackles were undone none of these men might be assigned to a ship bound for Mediterranean service. Even if they were, he did not stand high enough in the man’s estimation to be at the head of the queue.

‘I have done my duty, let others worry as to whether they have done theirs.’

His earlier concerns were not allayed – there would be hell to pay if he was caught with these pressed men, because not one of them was a sailor. Hood’s parting shot was still fresh enough in his mind to induce a chill that had nothing to do with the winter weather. He reassured himself with the thought that the punishment for the offence he had committed that night tended to fade with time. Once he was at sea with that convoy it could be years before he touched the English shore again, years in which the pressed men would be either dead or inured to life at sea. If there was one aboard who could survive and had the wit to bring a complaint against him, he had, in mitigation, that letter he had left with Hood, which stated that Captain Ralph Barclay, in order to properly serve his King and Country, now found himself in a position where desperate measures might have to be employed to get his ship to sea.

For all his determination to see things in a positive light, nagging doubts existed. His orders could be suddenly changed, he had known it happen before; by the time he got back to Sheerness that convoy duty could have evaporated and he could be stuck at anchor waiting for a new assignment with some of those men aboard clamouring for release. Even if he weighed immediately, the sea was a capricious element. Ships had been known to run aground before they ever cleared the Thames and the Channel was one of the worst stretches of water in creation, a place where vicious cross-seas or thudding westerly tempests made the prospect of losing some vital spar or mast a distinct possibility. Vessels were often forced by such mishaps to run for one of the southern Channel havens to undertake repairs.

Ralph Barclay forced himself to concentrate on the more enticing scenario; a quick clean break from the shore, a voyage blessed with good fortune that would take him to the Mediterranean and opportunity. And if, as he hoped, his service were successful, say a fleet action or some single ship success, well, what he had done this night would count for nothing. No one would bring before a court a naval captain who had proved his worth against his nation’s foes.

A tide going slack, a widening river and a cold east wind blowing up the estuary, slowed the progress of the longboat and cutter, so that the men
on the oars were obliged to pull hard, though in a steady rhythm that belied the effort they were making. As the stars began to fade, the sky going from black to the palest shade of grey, Pearce looked at his fellow victims, heads lolling forward as his had done in the night, only to jerk upright at some shock. Then came incomprehension, as if they could not acknowledge their predicament; that followed by a look around the boat, as the truth became apparent once more in their bruised faces.

Naturally he picked out those he knew. Ginger Rufus looked like death, but that was in part due to the paleness of his complexion and the unformed nature of his features. Taverner’s face he could not see – though he was hatless he was crouched over – most obvious was the black blood that stained his blond hair above the ear. Walker, at the very front of the boat, he noted was alert, those bird-like eyes never still, as though he was searching for means to escape. It took the movement of another before he got sight of Scrivens, who, not young on first acquaintance, looked even more aged now.