The Flag of Freedom (24 page)

The carpenter was also a Scot – Mr Cameron, another old hand from the
Unicorn
who had shifted to the
Jean-Bart
as part of her prize crew and stayed with her for the refit. He was entered on the muster book as a volunteer and was presumably very happy with the £6.12s a month Imlay was paying him, which was almost three times what he had been getting from King George.

The only other officer of warrant rank was the purser, who had been taken on by Tully in Lisbon – a Mr Harvey, half-English, half-Portuguese – the youngest son of a family said to be big in the port-wine trade. On their scant acquaintance, Nathan had formed very little opinion of his character, but unless the man was an out-and-out scoundrel he was prepared to overlook any failings in that quarter, having a great deal more to worry about than the character of the ship's purser.

Mr Harvey appeared to have made a reasonable job of stocking up on supplies, at least on paper and as far as the basics were concerned. According to the ship's books, before leaving Lisbon he had shipped twenty barrels of salt beef, ten each of salt pork, oatmeal, pease and biscuits,
and five each of butter and cheese. There was a shortage of fresh lemons and oranges, but he had taken the precaution of shipping a quantity of onions and raisins, which spoke well in his favour.

Nathan had meticulously counted the barrels, though he had no means of knowing what was actually in them. Past experience suggested that at least a fifth of the meat would be rotten, but even so, he calculated that they had sufficient supplies of food for a two-month cruise and it should not be too difficult to obtain fresh supplies during their voyage. The provision of drink was more of a problem. On a King's ship, according to regulations, each seaman was entitled to eight pints of beer a day, or a pint of wine, or half a pint of spirits, and the same would be expected of men serving on a privateer. Beer was out of the question in the Mediterranean and in any case did not keep for more than a couple of weeks. Instead, Mr Harvey had secured ten 30-gallon casks of wine and five of rum which would keep a crew of a hundred going for just thirty-six days – but both he and Imlay seemed confident of securing more supplies on the Barbary Coast, despite the Moslem proscription on alcohol.

All in all, Nathan had a great many causes for complaint. But at least he was more or less satisfied with the ship herself. In fact, the only fault he could find in her was her weaponry, and he put this down to his own prejudice and kept it between himself and Tully; certainly it would have been a mistake to mention it to Mr Wallace.

Nathan had made a thorough inspection of the ship with Tully and the carpenter when he first took command. In dimensions, she was not much smaller than the
Unicorn
,
being 135 feet long, 32 feet broad, and 14 feet in draught. Considering the corvette to be a dandified French notion, the Navy had first called her a sloop and then re-gunned her and re-classed her as a sixth-rate frigate. Fully crewed, she would have carried just over 200 officers and men; with fewer than half that, her lower deck felt positively commodious, and of course there were no Marines clumping about in their own separate quarters. The gunroom was the only disappointment – certainly for the officers who had to dine there. It was more of a passageway than a room, gloomy and narrow, with the foot of the mizzenmast through the middle, and the rest of the space taken up by a long table, with the doors of the officers' cabins opening on to the tiny gap on either side.

The Captain's quarters were luxurious by comparison, with three separate cabins and almost enough headroom for Nathan to stand upright in all of them. The day cabin took up the whole width of the stern, with light pouring in not only from the stern windows but through the gunports when they were open. The deck was carpeted with chequered canvas, and the entire space positively gleamed with polished brass and oak. The only problem from Nathan's point of view was that he had to share it with Imlay. The sleeping cabin had been divided in two by a wood and canvas partition and they each slept in cots on either side of it.

They also shared the same servant – the elderly Qualtrough – and a Portuguese cook called Balsemao with two young boys as his assistants. This was by no means an indulgence. Nathan had known frigate Captains who had no fewer than eight servants – and when he was on the
Unicorn
he had never had less than three, headed by the formidable Gilbert Gabriel.

Nathan had never missed his old crew quite so much as when the
Swallow
headed out into Gibraltar Bay. They had been so well-drilled, and worked together for so long, he had been able to take the smooth running of the ship very much for granted. This was far from being the case with the
Swallow
. With every man stood to quarters it was alarmingly apparent how short-handed they were. The wind was from the north-west so it was necessary to sail straight out across the bay, almost directly towards Algeciras, before coming about with enough sea room to clear Europa Point – a dangerous manoeuvre at the best of times. Nathan would have liked to have every gun run out and fully crewed – at least on the starboard side – in case they ran into any of the enemy gunboats, but this was impossible with the few men at his disposal. Most of the crew were standing by to brace the yards when they came about, and he could spare no more than a dozen for the guns – barely enough to fight four carronades.

The only thing that cheered him was the weather. It had closed in almost as soon as they cleared the harbour, and instead of becoming lighter as the day went by, the sky appeared to be darkening by the minute. The rain had increased in density, and visibility was down to little more than a couple of hundred yards. Peering into the murk on his starboard quarter, Nathan could see nothing of either Algeciras or the Spanish coast, not even the light at the end of the mole. Although this was very much to his advant age so far as the gunboats were concerned, he would have
liked some visual reference before he came round onto the opposite tack. If he turned too soon there was a danger of running onto the Point – an embarrassment which would have made him the laughing-stock of the Navy, if he was unfortunate enough to survive the encounter.

He left it as late as possible, in the hope of seeing the merest glimmer of light from the shore. He could feel the tension in the crew, for even the most lubberly among them knew they were heading straight for the Spanish coast, and when he finally gave the order – and it was executed rather better than he had expected – he gave an inward sigh of relief.

And at that precise moment, just as they were heeling to starboard, there was a startled cry from one of the lookouts and Nathan whipped his head round to see the beak of a massive ship of the line bearing down on them out of the rain, a great red cross emblazoned on her foresail like the curse of God.

For a moment he stood transfixed. The vast spread of canvas seemed to envelop him. He felt like a tiny rodent as some giant predator descends on him from the skies. She was so close he could see every detail of her figurehead: a saintly apparition with fanatical eyes that seemed to bore into his own, the specks of rain and spray on his black beard, the golden cross brand ished in both hands and a bishop's mitre balanced ridiculously on his head.

Time stood still. The apparition did not.

‘Port your helm!'

Nathan could hear his voice shouting the command, even before his brain began to properly engage with the problem. It was a phrase that came instinctively to mind,
as it did to all officers in the King's Navy, though it had long been rendered invalid by the introduction of the wheel.

‘Port your helm' meant putting the tiller to port – or larboard. Which would turn the ship in the opposite direction. But modern ships did not have a tiller. They had a wheel, which was connected to the rudder by a system of cables and pulleys so ingenious that if you turned the wheel to starboard, you also turned the ship to starboard. It was nothing short of miraculous, and the Admiralty, lacking an understanding of miracles, had issued no instructions on the subject. Every quartermaster in the Navy knew that ‘Port your helm!' meant ‘Turn to starboard'. What was the point in changing it?

The trouble, in this instance, was that the quartermaster of the
Swallow
was a Portuguese called Apolinario, and though he was an able seaman and possessed many excellent qualities, including a reasonable knowledge of English, his knowledge of this subtlety was less than perfect.

Possibly he thought Nathan had made a mistake. Possibly the word ‘port' evoked in his mind the image of the fortified wine for which his country was justifiably famous. Possibly he had been told the true meaning of the word by Tully but had forgotten. But for whatever reason, he did not respond to Nathan's urgent command as rapidly as might have been desired. He stood staring from Nathan to the oncoming vessel in a kind of fascinated horror.

It was Tully who saved them. With an animal cry he leaped at the immobile helmsman, shouldered him from his station, and spun the wheel.

Slowly, painfully slowly, the bows came round. Far, far
too late. Nathan watched helplessly as the gap between the two ships narrowed. Other details became apparent. The double row of gunports. The twin red stripes on the black hull, like the markings on some exotic insect. The men aloft and alow staring with the same horrified intensity as Nathan had seen on the face of the hapless Apolinario. The large red and yellow flag of Spain at her stern. The cluster of officers mouthing what might have been curses or prayers.

They missed her by a good few feet, though for a moment Nathan thought the bowsprit was going to pass straight through her stern lantern, and was almost disappointed when it did not. He heard himself utter a strange, barking laugh. Checked himself. And with clownish aplomb turned, bowed, and doffed his hat to the Spanish officers. That and the Stars and Stripes convinced them. He heard the word ‘
Americano
', accompanied by several others he did not understand but which were almost certainly impolite. He saw the name of her fanatical saint emblazoned across her stern.
San Leandro
. Then she was gone into the mist and the rain.

Nathan stood gazing after her for some minutes, waiting to see if she would turn. But she did not. She must have been on her way into Algeciras, beating into the wind as the
Swallow
had on her route out of Gibraltar. He let out a sigh.

‘Well, that was a close one,' said Imlay, coming up to him and peering into his face suspiciously and not a little anxious, as if to assure himself that Nathan was still awake and capable of making a rational decision.

Nathan gave a curt nod. He looked about him.
Apolinario was back at the helm. Tully was reminding him, with emphatic gestures, of the meaning of certain key phrases in the King's English, or at least its maritime equivalent.

Nathan caught the eye of the sailing master, who was looking at least as anxious as Imlay.

‘Very well, Mr Cribb,' he told him, ‘you may set a course for Algiers.'

They appeared to have missed hitting Europa Point, and so far as he knew there were no other hazards to navigation between here and Africa – besides those they carried aboard.

‘N
o! I will have no more figs!'

Nathan glared down at the overloaded bumboat bobbing beneath his starboard quarter. It contained a very large Arab woman, a very small Arab boy, and a very great quantity of dried fruit. Or decaying vegetable matter; it was hard to tell.

He knew he was sounding like a petulant child, but an hour or so's conversation with the itinerant traders of Algiers had done nothing to improve his temper. Above a score of bumboats pressed in on both sides of the
Swallow
, jostling against each other and subjecting the pristine paintwork of the ship's hull to grievous insult as their occupants engaged in similar transactions with members of the crew – these being conducted in several different tongues at extreme volume and involving a consider able range of goods, mostly edible, though Nathan would have
been extremely surprised if women did not figure in them somewhere. He had no doubt that the scene below decks resembled something from Dante's vision of Upper Hell – or the average seaman's vision of Lower Paradise – as it did whenever a ship-of-war moored off a sizeable port and declared itself open for trade.

‘Tell her I have enough figs to clear the bowels of Behemoth,' Nathan instructed the dragoman who had been assigned to them by the American Consul in Algiers in the hope, as this gentleman unfortunately put it, that ‘it would ease their passage'.

The dragoman frowned over the exact translation of Nathan's directive, but whatever he said it seemed to do the trick. After some muttering, the woman reached under her skirts and produced a live hen which she held up for their inspection.