The Bombay Marines (7 page)

The rest of the day passed without incident and, as the sun sank beyond the curving horizon, Tim Flannery emerged from the wardroom cabin and stood by the larboard railing, watching a spectacular suffusion of purple and orange in the far distance of the Arabian Sea. The Malabar Coast had not been sighted for over a day.

Flannery was a rangy man with silky white hair and a network of tiny red veins patterning his round cheeks. He held a tin brandy flask in his bony hands as he leaned on the railing, the sunset reflecting in the blank cast of his eyes.

A voice behind him asked, ‘Thinking of swimming ashore, doc?’

Flannery turned and saw one of the prisoners from Bombay Castle. Not knowing the man’s name or country of origin, Flannery held out his brandy flask as a token of introduction. ‘Want to come with me, bucko?’

The prisoner, Fred Babcock, took his first greedy drink of brandy for three years.

Handing the flask back to Flannery, he answered, ‘I’ve got nowhere to run to, even if I did make it ashore. This spot seems to be as good a place as any for a man to sort out his mind.’

‘I’d think that a spell in Bombay Prison would’ve given you time enough to do all the thinking you needed.’

Babcock laughed, pulling one of his big ears. ‘I was sentenced for life. Where was I going? What use did I have for thinking?’

‘Bucko, your voice has a twang to it. You an emmigrant from the Americas?’

Babcock nodded proudly. ‘Ohio Valley. Best bottom land in the world. But I got no home, no kin to go back to even if I could.’

‘Captain Horne’s going to take care of all your problems, bucko. He’s going to make a Marine out of you.’

‘I don’t know if I
want
to be some … Bombay Marine.’

Flannery passed back the flask. ‘How did you end up in prison, bucko?’

‘An officer started pushing me around on a ship out of Boston. He kept pushing and pushing and when I didn’t push back, he finally took a swing at me. I defended myself and landed him right smack on his butt. Only trouble was his head hit a capstan and killed him straight out.’ Babcock upended the flask over his mouth.

Enjoying the deep swallow of liquor, he asked in a brighter voice, ‘Why’re you aboard this tub, doc?’

Flannery reached for the flask and took a long swig. Smacking his thin lips with contentment, he answered, ‘Revenge.’

‘Revenge?’

‘Sweet, driving, slow-burning revenge.’

‘Revenge for what, doc?’

Flannery fixed his liquid emerald eyes on the far horizon. ‘You’re the man who wants to sort out his problems, bucko, not me. I’ve known what I want for the past sixteen years. I’m just not having much luck finding the fancy devil.’

Babcock pulled on his ear again. ‘Sorry to tell you this, doc, but according to what Captain Horne says about this Bull Island place, you ain’t going to find much sign of nobody there.’

‘Revenge, bucko, is like this brandy. It gets sweeter and stronger with each passing year. This ship will leave Bull Island one day and you can be sure as there’s a St Paddy I’ll be aboard.’

Babcock bit back the urge to say that revenge was also like a mad dog. It turned on you. He suspected that the lanky Irish surgeon might not be a safe man to befriend.

Adam Horne greeted Lieutenant Pilkington on the quarterdeck the second morning after the storm. ‘Lieutenant, I want the lifelines strung today.’

Pilkington thought he had misheard the order. The sea was barely ruffled by the breeze.

‘I also want six spools of rope brought on deck, Lieutenant.’

‘Aye, aye, sir.’ Pilkington descended the ladder.

Horne was in a foul temper this morning. Despite reports that the shot holes had been plugged in the hull, that ripped sails had been replaced or repaired, his mood had remained black for the past two days.

The fight between Gibbons and McFiddich had reminded him how isolated he was aboard the
Eclipse.
Apart from Pilkington, his commissioned officers were few, very junior, and had not as yet shown themselves to be capable of handling a difficult crew. Sergeant Rajit was the only other figure of strength aboard the frigate, but being a Sepoy and a Sergeant, he conscientiously kept his place – well down the line of command.

Horne suspected that his bad mood was caused by more than not having adequate support aboard the
Eclipse.
He was becoming lonely, and this realisation angered him.

The last voyage had been his first mission of consequence as a captain. Isolated in his command, he had begun to understand the fabled loneliness suffered by captains, commanders, any man who had to make decisions and be
responsible for the safety of human life. Unlike many commanders, Horne had no family to go home to, no one to confide in except his crew or subordinate officers. These options were pared down as the number of subordinates dwindled each passing month, or as his crew became more surly, more tired, spent in one way or another.

The success of his mission to the North Arabian Sea had become obsessive to him; the prospect of failing, frustrating. Dedication to his command became the focus of his life. He began to feel little different from Indian warriors who drugged themselves for battle, but instead of opium his drug was an incessant personal drive. Secretly, he envied men who kept their work separate from the rest of their lives. But he had no other life except work. Nor did he have any prospect of one. His memory of Isabel was so vivid, so devoted, so painful that he could not even consider offering his hand to anyone else.

Being a practical man, he kept reminding himself that a life in the Bombay Marine was his own choice, that he must pursue it with all his gusto, not question any decisions he made. The path to excellence, however, had its own variety of pitfalls; a man’s problems were doubled when his orders were tied to tight schedules.

This morning Horne had awakened realising he was losing valuable time in training a squadron for Fort St George. The thought had attacked him like some gnawing worm. Washing and shaving, he had decided to start doing something about training the men today. As he dressed, he had wondered if he were beginning to hide again in his work, but he had instantly pushed the question from his mind. He did not want to solve one worry and pass to another, to become obsessed with personal problems, a man who whined, complained, carried his troubles like a flag, some banner of misery to flap every day of his life. Oh, no. The ideal was a decisive one. He had also pondered the idea that it might be advantageous to keep himself from forming personal attachments to other people. Pain and hurt were
not only caused by enemy cannon at sea.

Horne stood on the quarterdeck, watching Pilkington ordering the lifelines being strung from starboard to larboard. He descended the ladder to direct the way he wanted the auxiliary ropes laced lengthwise across the lifelines.

Satisfied at last with the weaving of squares, he stripped off his shirt and boots and began to lead Sergeant Rajit, Tyson Lovett and four other men from the Marine unit in a high-legged run through the course created by the ropes. Then organizing a larger group – a collection of Marines, crew, and prisoners – he ordered the ropes to be raised higher, making the exercise more difficult. For the next course he raised them higher still and invited Sergeant Rajit to join him in leading the drill.

For the following exercise, Horne sent the men beneath the ropes, ordering them to crawl on their bellies, keeping their hips down, propelling themselves by their elbows and shoulders, heads pressed flat to the deck. He called for Sergeant Rajit to stand nearby with a birch rod ready in one hand in case a man raised his back or buttocks.

Before the morning ended, he had evolved the men into four groups, four combinations of crew, prisoners and Marines arranged in graduated degrees of physical stamina, quickness and brute strength.

After the midday meal, he ordered two ropes to be suspended from the top mainmast yardarm and watched the prisoners compete with the crew in a climb. He hoped the contest would release some of the hatred between them. He was not surprised by Jud’s excellence in the rope climb. Apart from being strong, the big African seemed to be a friendly, contented man, almost having a religious air to him.

The prisoners all impressed Horne one way or another with their strength. Jingee moved more quickly than Horne
had expected. He wondered if the young Tamil dubash would prove to be as gifted in physical agility as he was at cooking and cleaning. The Turk, Mustafa, never smiled but never tired from daybreak to dusk. The Dutch sailor, Groot, was strong, bright, eager to please his new
schupper.

But the men of the ship’s Marine unit greatly disappointed Horne. They lacked stamina, moving sloppily and sluggishly. He remembered, though, that they were tired, having returned from a recent voyage, some of them being far past the retirement age by the standards of the Royal Navy, only acceptable to a force as desperate for manpower as the Bombay Marine.

On the fifth day out of Bombay, the first sight of land was hailed from the mainmast. Horne ordered all men to deck. He sent for Gibbons and McFiddich to be freed from the bilboes for landfall.

Sailing under topsail, the
Eclipse
moved gracefully between large, conical-shaped islands, many covered with vegetation and palms, past smaller islands, some no bigger than a rock protruding from the clear turquoise water.

Horne had studied Bull’s chart carefully and was pleased that his calculations for arrival were proving correct. With the yards trimmed for an anchoring course, he saw the water shoaling quickly and estimated they would be dropping anchor within the hour at what had once been the French penal island.

The leadsman called, ‘By the mark nine …’

Horne felt the sun’s heat cresting in a cloudless blue sky.

‘By the mark eight …’

Men lined the rails, waiting to catch the first glimpse of their temporary home.

‘By the mark seven …’

Horne kept his eyes on a rocky promontory of the island off the larboard bow. ‘Anchor clear?’

‘Aye, aye, sir. Clear.’

‘By the mark seven …’

‘Let go anchor.’

As the cable coursed through the hawsehole, the watch scrambled to furl the topsails and the
Eclipse
began to swing in her course. The wind played with the ship like a cat toying with a leaf, gently batting the frigate on the flowing tide as the anchor dragged weight.

As the
Eclipse
continued to swing in the wind, an inlet came into sight, the view of a few roofless stone buildings and a rocky shore pocked with salt pans. The men lining the railings stared silently at the stony shoreline, at an island barren except for a few coconut palms and patches of brown grass.

The most prominent structure was a tall gallows jabbing up into the sky, the shred of a hangman’s rope tossing in the breeze from the wooden crossbeam.

North-east of the Laccadive Islands, the sun ripened dead fish and rotting fruit in Bombay’s noisy harbour. A swarm of
dongis
skimmed across the murky water towards the wharf, the oarsmen playfully shouting
‘Ram
!
Ram
!
Ram
!’ as they passed a lumbering
ulark
loaded with dung cakes. The din of pedlars and fishermen in the waterfront bazaar was cut by the bellow of an elephant, the silver
howdah
on the animal’s back decorated with yak tails brightly plaited with ribbons and a myraid of tiny jangling bells. The cacophony and sweetly-spiced stench of the harbour carried up the yellow bastions of Bombay Castle and through the closed shutters of a chamber where Commodore Watson sat in a meeting with the three Governors of the Honourable East India Company.

Commodore Watson’s superior, Governor Spencer of Bombay, tall and slim with a neatly trimmed moustache and sharply pointed goatee, sat at the opposite end of a long mahogany table from Governor Vansittart of Bengal who had crossed the subcontinent of India with Governor Pigot of Madras for the meeting at Bombay Castle.

Governor Vansittart was explaining to Commodore Watson the reason why the three Governors had decided to remove the imprisoned French Commander-in-Chief, Thomas Lally, from Fort St George earlier than scheduled. Slim, elegant, speaking in a mellow voice, he summarized Lally’s last year in India.

‘Wandewash was the beginning of the end of General
Lally. He retreated back to Pondicherry with the British Army at his heels. The Navy joined the Army’s siege of Pondicherry in June and, by the end of the year, they had brought Lally to his knees.’

Today was the first time Commodore Watson had heard in full why the British Commanders-in-Chief were squabbling amongst themselves over Lally as a prisoner, and why the East India Company planned to interfere – secretly – in the heated dispute.

Vansittart clasped his thin hands on the table as he spoke. ‘In January, General Lally saw that the French cause was hopeless. He sent an envoy to Colonel Coote, inviting him into the fortress to discuss terms for a formal surrender. Coote accepted the invitation and, whilst he studied the terms of Lally’s capitulation, Lally left the fortress and boarded Admiral Pocock’s flagship in the harbour. Surrendering a second time to the Navy, Lally submitted documents to Pocock, claiming Pocock – and
dis
claiming Coote – as the one true victor of Pondicherry.’

Confused, Watson asked, ‘Lally double-crossed Coote? He sneaked out of Pondicherry to Pocock’s flagship with a different set of documents?’

Vansittart nodded. ‘Lally surrendered twice. Once to the Army. A second time to the Navy. Both times excluding the other from the Terms of Capitulation.’

Watson was astonished. He looked at Governor Spencer at the head of the table. He glanced across the table at podgy Governor Pigot. ‘And both officers – distinguished British officers – signed documents excluding the other from a victory?’

Vansittart’s slim hands remained folded on the table. ‘I’m afraid so, Commodore, and the storm which claimed your Marine ships that day proved to be a blessing for Lally’s scheme.’

‘The winds began scattering the British fleet,’ he went on, ‘and Admiral Pocock ordered Lally off his flagship. As Pocock hurried to the rescue of the distressed ships, Coote
was informed of Lally’s disappearance from the fortress. He emerged to find him aboard the Army troop ship. Pleased with his own good luck, Coote struck out through the gale, sailing for Madras where he locked Lally in the Army Guardhouse at Fort St George and continued north to Calcutta.’

Watson expostulated. ‘How can two British officers allow Lally to … manipulate them like this?’

Vansittart reached for a decanter in front of him on the table. Splashing port into a goblet, he replied, ‘The rightful victor of Pondicherry will not only enjoy a distinguished place in history, Commodore, he will also receive more than sixty thousand pounds in prize money.’

The sum of money was a fortune. But Watson was still confused. He looked back at Governor Spencer at the head of the table. ‘How can this dispute possibly benefit Laily? What’s the cad up to?’

Setting down his goblet on the table, Vansittart replied as spokesman for the three Governors. ‘Lally is most likely trying to buy time to be rescued. We’ve had reports that d’Ache is gathering the French fleet off Madras.’

‘Where’s Admiral Pocock now?’

‘Nearby off the Coromandel Coast. Guarding Madras. Waiting to claim Lally as
his
prize. Making certain that Coote doesn’t spirit him off to England.’

Watson’s head was full of questions. ‘Why did Coote leave Lally in Madras in the first place?’

Vansittart fingered the goblet’s thick stem. ‘Coote’s knee was injured at Wandewash. Originally he was not due to sail back to England until March, so he had time to visit his surgeon in Calcutta. But since then, he’s decided to depart at an earlier date. We must act more quickly.’

Watson ran a stubby forefinger around the inside of his high-standing collar, hesitating before asking the most difficult of his questions.

‘Your Excellency, what does the Company hope to achieve by … removing Lally from the Army’s Guardhouse
and sending him to England? To steal him out from under their noses?’

The answer seemed obvious to Vansittart. ‘Why, to settle the problem of whose prisoner Lally is. The Army’s or the Navy’s. We’ll deliver Lally to the War Office in London and settle the dispute once and for all between them.’

Watson mopped his bald pate. ‘But what does the Company hope to achieve for itself? Certainly not prize money?’

Vansittart and Spencer exchanged glances down the length of the mahogany table; they both looked at Governor Pigot sitting between them.

Pigot nodded as his small red hand reached for the decanter in front of him.

Vansittart remained the spokesman. ‘Commodore Watson, when we deliver Thomas Lally to the War Office in London, we shall submit demands to Sir William Pitt for military control over all regions and territories in which the Company has powers of trade.’

It was the honesty that Watson had wanted. But the answer stunned him: the Governors were forming a coalition. Vansittart, Pigot and Spencer were laying the groundwork for an autonomy of Colonial power throughout the Orient!

Looking at Governor Spencer, he rasped, ‘But what if the mission fails, Your Excellency? What if Captain Horne’s squadron doesn’t succeed in kidnapping Lally?’

The mellowness disappeared from Vansittart’s voice as he answered. ‘If Captain Horne fails in this mission, Commodore Watson, we shall have no choice but to review the Company’s need for maintaining the existence of the Bombay Marine.’

Watson dropped both hands to his lap. He did not want the three Governors to see him trembling.

Vansittart added, ‘Commodore, we suggest you inform Captain Horne immediately of the change in plans.’