The Flag of Freedom (32 page)

‘He says it was assumed that we had arranged it,' he reported.

Imlay let out an oath. ‘The old buzzard! I have a mind to give them a few parting shots before we leave.'

‘We are wasting time,' Nathan pointed out. ‘The
Meshuda
already has a day's start on us. If we are to stand any chance at all of catching her, we must set sail in the next hour, while we can still see the shoals.'

The two ships crept out of the bay with the benefit of the offshore breeze but under reefed topsails for fear of running upon the rocks, and the sun slipping down behind Tripoli. From Nathan's vantage, the city resembled the backdrop for a stage setting of
The Arabian Nights
, the domes and cupolas, battlements and watch-towers like so
many wooden cut-outs against the crimson sky and the first lights flickering in the windows of the houses and along the ramparts of the Red Castle.

T
hey parted with the
Saratoga
a little after daybreak. It had been decided she would head for Malta, some 200 miles to the north, to replenish her supplies and obtain medical attention for those needing it before resuming her long, interrupted journey to Philadelphia.

While the
Swallow
turned eastward and began her own long journey in search of the
Meshuda
.

Imlay was convinced they were on a fool's errand. ‘We can never hope to find her,' he insisted, staring gloomily at the charts. ‘She could be heading anywhere in the Eastern Med.'

But Spiridion was confident his information was correct, and that the schooner had been hired by Xavier Naudé to find a beachhead for the French invasion of Egypt.

‘That still leaves us a lot of beach between Tripoli and Alexandria,' Nathan pointed out, for though he hated to agree with Imlay, he was inclined to share his doubts.

‘About a thousand miles,' Spiridion acknowledged. ‘But why march a thousand miles through a desert when you can sail straight to Alexandria – barely a hundred miles from Cairo. A five- or six-day march along the Nile, say, with a fleet of boats to carry your supplies. That would be my choice, and I cannot believe I am a better General than Bonaparte.'

The map argued his case more eloquently than words, but Nathan was not entirely convinced.

‘I thought Naudé came to Tripoli to make a treaty with Yusuf Pasha?' he said.

‘This was one of his reasons,' Spiridion agreed thoughtfully. ‘What of it?'

‘So what if Yusuf has offered the use of his own ports – Tobruk perhaps, right here on the Egyptian border.' Nathan indicated its position on the map. It was still a fair way from Cairo – about 400 miles, he reckoned, as the crow flies, but at least they could disembark in an orderly fashion at a friendly port. ‘Bonaparte might prefer that to wading ashore on an open beach,' he observed, ‘with the Mamelukes waiting for him, sharpening their blades.'

‘Indeed,' Spiridion nodded. ‘But if that were the case, Naudé would have no need to conduct a survey. Murad Reis would supply him with all the charts he requires. No, my friend, in my view the
Meshuda
will head straight for Alexandria and conduct a leisurely survey of the beaches between El Alamein and Rosetta.' He described an arc
with his finger, covering a distance of around 100 miles. ‘And that is where we will find her.'

He made it sound relatively easy. ‘Why leisurely?' Nathan queried.

‘Because they have two of the most beautiful women in Venice at their disposal,' Spiridion declared morosely. ‘Why would they wish to hurry?'

Nathan could think of several reasons, not least the temper of an impatient Bonaparte back in Paris, or Toulon, or wherever he was at the present moment in time.

‘How long will it take to reach Alexandria?' Imlay asked him – as if Nathan were a coachman delivering the Royal Mail.

‘Depends on the wind,' Nathan told him with shrug. But seeing Imlay's expression, he relented a little. ‘The prevailing wind being westerly,' he informed him, ‘if it remains light and from the present quarter, we might expect to sight Pompey's Pillar in anything between eight to ten days.'

Imlay echoed these figures with dismay.

‘If it is any consolation, I do not suppose the
Meshuda
will be any quicker,' Nathan assured him dryly.

‘Well then,' Imlay sighed, ‘if we are all agreed, let us set a course for Alexandria. And with good fortune we may overhaul her on the way.'

It was never a good idea, in Nathan's experience, to presume upon the wind. Within a few hours of their parting from the
Saratoga
it had dropped to a mocking whisper that left the sails flapping limply at the yards and the crew almost as lifeless in the heat of the afternoon sun.
Below decks it was like an oven, and the only relief that could be obtained was under the canvas awnings Tully had rigged between the masts, with the fire engine playing water on them from time to time so that, as Nathan put it, ‘at least we may be wet whilst we fry.'

But Tully could do nothing about the wind. The first day, they barely moved. As the sun set, they could still see the sails of the
Saratoga
on the northern horizon. The next day they made barely ten miles between dawn and dusk. Overnight the wind picked up a little but by morning, perversely, as if playing with them, it had backed to the south-east and came on so strongly they were obliged to strike down the topgallants and struggle on under reefed topsails with the boats brought aboard, everything battened down, and the sea breaking over the decks.

Nathan's only consolation was that as conditions worsened, the attitude of the crew improved perceptibly. Even his waisters showed a dogged resource he had not expected of them as they endured a constant battering of wind and rain, fighting their way along the decks with the water pouring off their sou'westers, clutching at the lifelines as the sea threatened to carry them off wholesale, and the wind howling through the rigging like a demented wolfpack on the rampage. Time and time again he struggled to bring the ship's head round to the east, only to be beaten back by the sea. Twice they were almost broached. As if scenting victory, the wind increased in violence, obliging them to run before it on bare poles or with the merest scrap of a staysail to keep their stern to the wind. For three days it harried them without mercy, driving them further and further to the north-west.

‘At this rate,' Nathan complained to Tully, ‘we will soon be back in Gibraltar.'

‘If we are so lucky,' Tully muttered, with an eye to the scudding clouds.

The sky remained overcast night and day. Being denied the facility of a horizon or a single celestial body from which to take a reading, they could only judge their position by dead reckoning, or even more primitive guesswork. Tully and the sailing master, Cribb, feared they might run upon the south-western coast of Crete or one of its outlying islands. Nathan put them further to the west, just off the tip of the Morea. And Spiridion, who had a more supernatural view of the world and its winds, believed that, with a malign sense of irony, it might drive them onto the shores of Zante, his birthplace in the Ionian Sea.

In fact, when the sky cleared sufficiently to take a reading, all four of them agreed within a small margin of error that they were at 35° 27´ North, 22° 24´ East – which put them about 100 miles to the west of Crete and about the same distance south of Cape Tainaron on the Morea.

‘So we were both right,' Nathan remarked to Tully, not with out a degree of complacency for he was aware of his deficiencies in the matter of navigation, especially when it was based on pure instinct, unsupported by his painstaking mathematics.

‘It could have been worse,' Tully commented.

In truth, it was a lot better than Nathan had expected, for although they had been driven much further north than he would have wished, they were only 300 or so miles from Alexandria, and if the wind would only maintain its
present speed and direction, they might hope to reach the port within three to four days. But being the wind, of course, this was no more likely than a mule might grow wings and fly. It did, in fact, veer westward overnight, but dropped away altogether by daybreak, leaving them stranded off the southern coast of Crete. And off Crete they remained for the best part of a week; the wind, when it could be bothered to blow at all, herding them slowly and sullenly along the length of the island, making scarcely thirty miles from noon to noon.

It was an island Spiridion knew well, though he called it by its Venetian name of Candia. Once the cradle of Minoan civilisation, it had been part of the Venetian maritime empire for 400 years until it fell to the Turks, since when many of its inhabitants, who were Greek in origin, had converted to Islam. But they were friendly enough, according to Spiridion who did a great deal of trade with them, and he was able to replenish their dwindling supplies in Selino with the tacit consent of his friend the Turkish Governor, who had been oiled by a large bribe. They were even able to replenish their supplies of wine, acquiring a local variety mixed with pine needles which was something of an acquired taste but which the crew tolerated with admirable fortitude. It proved an excellent accompaniment to the fish, and even turtles, which were plentiful in these waters. Indeed, with food, wine, sunshine and calm seas, it might have been an idyllic cruise – and for most of the crew it probably was – but Imlay was in a fever of impatience to catch the
Meshuda
and Nathan even more anxious to report back on what he had learned of the French intentions. It was only Spiridion's
insistence that they needed the
Meshuda
's charts that kept him from abandoning the chase there and then, and turning back for Gibraltar, though it would have gone hard between him and Imlay.

Finally, after five days of crawling along ‘that damnable shore' as Nathan described it, the wind picked up, and for the first time in almost two weeks, the
Swallow
began to spread her wings and fly, with studding sails spread aloft and alow, a bow wave at her head and a long creamy wake spreading back to the rapidly dwindling island at her stern.

But they had lost a great deal of time, and after studying the map, Spiridion prevailed upon Nathan to set his course south-east by east, heading directly for the little port of Rosetta, some forty miles east of Alexandria on the Nile Delta.

‘For in my view that is the most likely place for the French to land,' he argued, ‘and if I am wrong and the
Meshuda
is not there, then we can head westward towards El Alamein and hope to run into her on the way.'

And so, on the morning of 18 June, twenty-one days after leaving Tripoli, they entered a wide bay Spiridion pronounced as Abukir – the Bay of the Castle.

They approached from the north-west with the wind on their starboard quarter, but blowing so mild and desultorily, their stately progress seemed hardly to break the surface of the water. The sky was a cloudless blue and the sun rising behind them bathed the long sandy shore in an indolent golden haze.

They could see the castle – more of a small fort of some
antiquity – on the western and nearmost headland, with the Ottoman flag drooping listlessly from the flagpole. There were about a dozen cannon on the ramparts facing out to sea, though Spiridion doubted if they were less than 100 years old and had probably never been fired in anger. There seemed to be little for them to protect besides the ruins of ancient Canopus, a small distance inshore, and a few isolated clumps of palm, and nothing of any substance on the sea but a solitary coastal trader of a type Spiridion called a Scandaroon. There were a few fishing boats dragged up on to the beaches but no sign of any fishermen.

Directly ahead was a small island – shown on the chart as two adjoining islands with a narrow channel between and called by a single name: the Isle of Abukir. Between that and the headland was a line of breakers indicating a hidden spit of sand, cutting off access to the bay. The curving coastline beyond was broken by a small rivermouth which Spiridion said was the mouth of the Nile, or at least one of its many mouths in the Delta, and the current, though invisible, stirred up a great quantity of sand so that the waters closest to the shore were as murky as a millpond and almost as flat. And almost certainly not as deep, Spiridion had warned them. He also advised against placing too much trust in the chart – their
only
chart of the coastline in these parts – which had been brought from Algiers by Cathcart. The shoals were constantly shifting, he said, owing to the force of the winter gales and the volume of water being emitted from the Nile when it was in flood.