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  WESTERLY GALES

  A Science Fiction Novel by

  E. C. WILLIAMS

  © 2011 E. C. WILLIAMS

  All Rights Reserved

  I am very grateful to the Milbridge Historical Society for their kind permission to use the copyrighted image on the cover.

  Dedication: to my wife, Sue without whose loving encouragement—and careful editing—this book would never have been completed

  CHAPTER 1

  In the predawn darkness, the Kerguelenian schooner Kiasu, thirty-three days out of French Port, drifted in a dead calm somewhere off the eastern shore of Madagascar, bow swinging slowly round the compass, sails slatting and banging with the vessel’s slight roll.

  Her master, Sam Bowditch, was uneasy. He had laid a course for the northern tip of the island, bound as he was for the Kerguelenian settlement on Nosy Be, but three overcast days without a sun or star sight had hidden from him the silent influence of a previously unsuspected south-setting current. Now he had no idea just where he was on the Malagasy coast.

  Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be a problem—or, rather, a straightforward problem of seamanship and navigation of the sort Sam was accustomed to solving. He could just wait for a breeze, bound to come with the sun, and head north until he could round the northern tip of Madagascar, and then it was a short, straight shot to the island of Nosy Be.

  But there was a complicating factor: pirates had been reported on this coast.

  Pirates: the very word was archaic, faintly ridiculous, summoning childhood images of cutlasses and treasure derived originally from an ancient, tattered copy of Treasure Island. Piracy was something that just could not exist in this age.

  For one thing, given that the pirates were not Kerguelenian—not absolutely proven, but seemingly demonstrated by the scanty available evidence—who could they be? Until the first appearance of the pirates, there had been no evidence for centuries that there were any other people in the world with the ability to build and sail ocean-going vessels. The scattered bands of hunter-gatherers who, so far as anyone knew, constituted the remainder of the human race, had regressed to the Paleolithic—in maritime technology, no more advanced than rafts and small dugout canoes.

  The pirates sailed in seaworthy vessels that were of a strange rig and design, and thus were not Kerguelenian—but clearly neither were they Stone Age savages. Quite apart from the evidence of their ocean-going ships, they also had firearms.

  This gloomy line of thought segued into another one, equally worrisome: how small a crew he had with which to fight off any pirate attack—so small it was barely equal to the task of sailing the Kiasu through the Roaring Forties on the northbound leg of her voyage. The KBS—Kerguelenian Bureau of Shipping—manning tables required, for a vessel of Kiasu’s tonnage and rig, a minimum of six able seamen. Sam had only managed to find three, plus two ordinary seamen and an apprentice seaman –a first-voyager -- and so had to plead for a certificate of exemption to maintain the vessel‘s insurance. Although not required, a bosun, plus a carpenter, and/or a sail maker, were invariably also signed on, to provide expert skills and supervision in the never-ending maintenance tasks necessary to keep the schooner seaworthy—and, as experienced seamen, to turn to in any all-hands evolution. Sam could find no qualified petty officers for these billets.

  A definite requirement for any ocean-going vessel was a second mate. Sam only had one mate—another certificate of exemption begged from KBS—which meant he had to take a watch himself in addition to the master's normal responsibility be available on call around the clock to deal with emergencies.

  Fortunately, his mate was someone in whom he had complete faith: Johnny Dupree, his best friend since their boyhood days at Captain Ong’s navigation school. On graduation, they had done their post-exam sea time together for their mate’s tickets, as cadets, on one of the big round-the-world catamaran freighters. Johnny was himself a master mariner now, and had taken this berth only as a favor to Sam—a very, very big favor, since it meant cutting short the extended honeymoon ashore Captain Dupree had planned to enjoy with the brand-new Madame Dupree. Sam had persuaded the Kiasu’s owners to pay Johnny a master’s salary, and had arranged to split with Johnny his own master’s share of the voyage profits. Johnny had not asked for this financial arrangement—he had been willing to ship out for a Chief Mate’s wage, as a favor to his friend—but Sam’s conscience, already uneasy at the thought of snatching his friend from the arms of his new bride, would not settle for less.

  To round out his tiny crew, Sam had managed to secure the services, as cook, of a seaman whose arthritic knees no longer allowed him to sail on deck, and who as a consequence was known to his shipmates as “Gimpy”. Sam sincerely hoped he had been a better able seamen than he was a cook, because Gimpy’s culinary skills were stretched to the limit by the simple task of rinsing and boiling together the standard seaman’s fare of salt fish, pickled Kerguelen cabbage, and potatoes; the more usual multiple ingenious variations on this theme at the command of any self-respecting ship’s cook were quite beyond him.

  And that was all: one (admittedly excellent) mate, three ABs, three (very) ordinary seamen, and a cook who couldn’t cook, to work a 500 ton three-masted schooner through the Roaring Forties north almost to the Equator and back again—a round voyage of 5000 sea miles, as near as made no difference.

  Sam thought, not for the first time, how ironic it was that the chronic shortage of seamen on Kerguelen was a direct result of the relative prosperity brought by a growing maritime trade with the island settlements scattered around the southern hemisphere -- trade and settlements made possible only by the boldness and seamanship of Kerguelenian mariners. Prosperity meant good jobs ashore, and the possibility of a normal family life. Before the overseas settlement surge of the past century, at a timewhen ocean voyages were simple but dangerous scavenger hunts to the ruins of ancient port cities, good seamen, trained up in the hard and dangerous life of sub-Antarctic fishing, were plentiful; anything to escape the grinding poverty of life on an icy windswept rock trying to support too many people on too few hectares of arable land.

  Sam’s musings were interrupted by a cry from the bow lookout: “Vessel on the port beam, looks like she’s puttin’ out from the land.” He realized that the pre-dawn darkness had become pre-sunrise morning twilight, with the suddenness usual in tropical latitudes. He snatched up his telescope and stared toward the still-dark blur of the shore. He could just make out a lighter patch against the darkness, rhythmic movement along each side: a vessel under oars. “Good eye, Benoit!” he shouted back to the lookout. “I can barely make it out with the glass.”

  Could this be a perfectly innocent inshore fisherman, setting out on a raft or tiny dugout? It appeared unlikely—the craft seemed much too large for anything built by any members of the tiny remnant of Madagascar’s pre-Troubles population, reduced as they were to a Stone Age level of existence. Also, he thought he saw a vertical line that could have been a mast: he had never at any time seen a Malagasy watercraft with mast or sail.

  Sam had a moment of superstitious dread Had his morbid thoughts about pirates conjured them into existence? He discarded this thought as unworthy of an educated man, and decided that, fishermen or pirates, they would not catch Kiasu asleep.

  “Call out the watch below! Break out the Lyle gun!” he shouted to his watch, galvanizing them from sleepy lassitude to sudden activity.

  In two quick strides, Sam reached the patch of deck under which lay Johnny’s tiny cabin, and stomped several times, rapidly—their agreed-upon signal that the officer below was needed urgently on deck.

  Johnny had the seaman’s knack of falling asleep immediately when the opportunity for a nap presented itself—and of coming fully awake instantly when called. His head appeared in the after companionway within seconds, an inquiring look directed at Sam. “Pirates!” Sam shouted in a one-word explanation. Johnny disappeared again, then quickly reappeared with a gun in each hand: Sam’s double-barreled shotgun in one and Johnny’s father’s seal rifle in the other. Around his neck were slung two canvas haversacks each full of ammunition for one of the weapons.

  Before sailing, they had agreed that, given the reports and rumors of pirates, some precautions were indicated. But firearms were scarce and expensive on Kerguelen. Aside from the Lyle gun, these two weapons, all they could find (and afford) before sailing, constituted Kiasu’s total firepower.

  But not her total armament. “The machetes!” they both recalled, and said, at the same time, and, Sam taking the firearms and ammo, Johnny darted back below to return quickly with an armful of sheathed machetes with 18 inch blades. They were “borrowed” from the cargo, part of a small shipment consigned to a sugar-cane grower on Nosy Be. On seeing them on the manifest it had occurred to the Mate that they would make useful close-quarters defensive weapons for the crew.

  Sam had hoped to conduct extensive drills with the Lyle gun, which was a line-throwing device, required by the KBS for ocean-going vessels over 150 tons, intended for man-overboard rescue or the passing of a tow line to a vessel in distress—but, since it was in effect a small cannon, worked as a defensive weapon, too. He had also hoped to conduct multiple drills with the machetes. But, short-handed as he was, had found the time for just one training session with each weapon type on the northbound voyage.

  The Lyle gun drill, which was required by regulations once a quarter anyway, had, he hoped, re-familiarized the designated gun crew—the three ABs—with setting up,
loading, and training the little bronze smooth-bore. But he was unsure that the machete practice had done much good, since no one aboard had any idea how to fight with what was, in effect, a short, clumsy saber. Still, they had banged away at one another (with the scabbards securely on, for safety), happily inflicting bruises and contusions on their shipmates, and presumably were at a minimum now comfortable with the heft and balance of the things. The ancient and universal propensity of seamen for brawling when ashore at least made them aggressive and not the least bit diffident about exchanging blows.

  Sam took another look at the oncoming vessel with his telescope, and got a nasty shock. A second vessel, similar to the first, had put out in her wake—he now had two presumed pirate craft headed his way.

  “It just keeps getting better, Mister Mate,” Sam called to Johnny, who had passed out the machetes and was now superintending the Lyle gun setup. “Now I see two of ‘em—well, at least two.”

  “The more the merrier, Skipper,” replied Johnny, with a wicked grin, as if there was nothing he loved better in all the world than a battle with pirates before breakfast. “Laissez les bon temps roule!” Johnny’s idea of motivational leadership was that the hairier things got the more jokes an officer ought to crack. The crew, of course, loved him.

  The Lyle gun mounted and loaded (with a handful of scrap metal and broken crockery – an ample supply of which could be found in the schooner’s ballast—instead of the line projectile); a machete now in each sailor’s hand, Johnny strolled aft to join Sam near the now-unmanned helm. The sea was still glassy, disturbed only by the low swell; an onshore breeze wouldn’t spring up until the sun was well above the horizon.

  Sam could now make out the two vessels a bit more clearly, and could now note that each had two masts with long yards, sails furled. They were virtual sister ships, although one seemed a bit longer than the other. Each was significantly shorter than the schooner, with fine lines forward and a high stern, but each appeared to hold more men than the Kiasu’s crew.

  Sam’s little band was apparently out-numbered by more than two to one.

  “Bet they’ll try to take us from each side, make us divide the crew,” Sam remarked.

  “We don’t have a prayer if we do that,” Johnny replied. “We just have too few hands to defend to port and starboard at the same time.”

  “What‘s our alternative?”

  In reply, Johnny brandished the seal rifle, a long, bolt-action 7.62 mm weapon, ancient but lovingly maintained. “My marksmanship’s a little rusty, but I think I can pick off the helmsman of one of those funny-looking tubs at a range of two or three cables. And his relief, and his relief, and so on until they give up or I run out of ammo, whichever comes first. You and the rest of the crew can defend the other side, with your shotgun and the Lyle cannon—and, if it comes to that, the machetes.”

  “Sounds like a plan—assuming, of course, that they don‘t have rifles, too. You take the starboard side, then,” Sam said. “Got plenty of ammo?”

  “I brought along about a hundred rounds, all Papa had on hand. But I’ll try to make every shot count.”

  “I have fifty shells for the scattergun, as much as I could buy. We have enough powder for about a dozen rounds from the Lyle gun. If that ain’t enough, we’ve got the machetes. And then teeth and toenails.”

  “Don’t forget our secret weapon—Chang! He can make faces at ‘em!” Johnny said this last loud enough for the crew to hear. They had been standing around, nervously eying their officers and the oncoming pirate craft alternately, and this remark raised a grateful, tension-relieving laugh. Old Chang, the eldest AB, was ferociously ugly but so kind and good-natured the younger hands called him “grandpa”.

  Sam took another look to port, at their two adversaries. As he had predicted, the leading vessel had swung wide to starboard, to pass well clear of Kiasu’s stern. The trailing vessel still headed directly for the schooner.

  The nearer vessel was now close enough that Sam could make out the face of the helmsman through his telescope. He was a small, swarthy man, outlandishly dressed: a loose garment that looked like a nightgown, and, instead of a cap or hat, a length of cloth wrapped round his head, with a short loose end hanging down. Mustaches joining a short, pointed beard surrounding his mouth, cheeks clean-shaven, and a hawk-like nose all combined to give him a fierce, predatory look. The question of whether or not the pirates were Kerg criminals was finally settled. No Kerguelenian ever dressed like that, or trimmed his beard that way; Kerg men either wore a full beard or were clean-shaven, rarely anything in between. Neither, from his complexion and facial features, was he a Malagasy or African tribesman. His strange appearance made him seem, to Sam, like someone from another world.

  “Remember, boys, don’t shoot until I do,” Sam reminded the Lyle gun crew. Although it could throw a line much further, Sam reckoned the maximum effective range of the little smoothbore as a weapon wasn’t much more than a cable length, and for greatest effect he wanted to hold fire until the target was at no more than half that distance, which would be a good range for his shotgun, as well.

  Sam now left all consideration of the vessel to starboard to his mate, and focused on his target. The man at the tiller of the vessel to port was a near twin of his colleague on the other craft. He appeared to be shouting instructions or encouragement to his crew, who were bending to their oars with a will. The little ship was near enough now for Sam to make out more details of her rig: two masts, the after one taller and thus like a schooner in that respect, but instead of a schooner’s booms, each mast bore a very long yard with sail furled all along its length, the main yard nearly as long as the vessel herself. This was clearly not a rig designed for the Southern Ocean or the Roaring Forties, but for milder, more northerly climes.

  The minutes ticked by with agonizing slowness, the schooner silent except for the rattle and bang of her rigging as she rolled slightly in the long, low swell, every man silent as each in his own way considered the looming possibility of violent death.

  Then the tension was broken by a sharp report from the starboard side, followed closely by Johnny’s triumphant shout of “Got him!”

  Almost immediately came the bark of the Lyle gun, and Sam watched in dismay as its rounds splashed harmlessly into the sea half a cable or more short of the pirate craft to port. Sam groaned as the pirates cheered derisively, then returned to their oars with new energy, the bow seeming to leap from the water with each stroke.

  The Lyle gun’s crew cursed as they realized their mistake. “Never mind, boys, just reload as fast as you can! Ignore the mate’s rifle—just watch me. When I shoot you shoot!”

  More tense minutes passed, punctuated by Dupree’s slow, deliberate fire. Sam focused on the pirate craft to port, and hoped that Johnny was taking good care of her consort.

  At last, Sam reckoned that his target was within range. He took careful aim with the shotgun and squeezed off two blasts of 00 shot. He was gratified to see the pirate vessel’s oars fall into confusion along her starboard side, and guessed that he had hit at least one oarsman, maybe two. The Lyle gun barked a heartbeat later, and the gun crew roared with fierce delight as its load of scrap and broken crockery scythed through the packed rowers, producing cries of pain.

  “Reload, reload!” Sam shouted, as he broke the shotgun and fumbled out two more shells from his ammo bag.

  The pirate vessel quickly sorted out her wounded and manned her oars again, surging toward Kiasu with renewed speed. Apparently, the Lyle gun round, although well-aimed, had only inflicted minor wounds. Several of the pirates not occupied with rowing returned fire with long-barreled guns, inaccurately—the rounds whistled harmlessly overhead, or plunked into the hull.

  The Lyle gun crew had time to load and fire only once more, and in their haste, they aimed too high with little effect. Sam fired twice more, this time aiming for the pirate helmsman, who was also apparently her commander, and had the satisfaction of seeing him fall with a spreading blotch of red on the front of his robe. Then the vessel was alongside the Kiasu, her crew using hooks at the end of long poles, or tied to throwing lines, to grapple the schooner’s rail and rigging and try to climb aboard.