The Cruise of the Albatros Read online

  “Sheets and braces, there!” Lieutenant Munro shouted, his voice rising almost to a squeal with anxiety. But after the hands’ initial surprise at the big sail’s power it was brought under control and the schooner settled back on to her course.

  Sam felt the surge of additional speed as the powerful sail added its impetus to Albatros’s way, and whooped with joy. He knew that if the wind freshened very much the huge expanse of canvas would become unmanageable, but so long as it could fly he intended to wring every last tiny fraction of a knot from it.

  He strode back to the quarterdeck, and said to the XO, “How much did we lose while the topsail was on deck?”

  “Not much – the angle diminished by maybe a tenth of a degree,” Ennis replied, squinting at his sextant’s micrometer drum.

  “Mister Munro! Have your gadget stand by the taffrail log and do repeated six-minute speed estimates.”

  Munro relayed that order – a formality, since the midshipman of the watch, Mr. Christie, had of course heard it, too, and was already hurrying to comply. Sam regarded Christie as perhaps their best Mid, and the candidate in his mind for the first to be promoted to lieutenant. He had his chief mate’s ticket, and would probably have the sea time to sit for master once they returned to Kerguelen. And in addition to that necessary credential, he was mature, steady, and competent.

  Christie’s first six-minute estimate showed a gain in speed of a full knot. The XO lowered his sextant and said, “We’re gaining on her, Skipper! We’ve already made up the distance lost while the topsail was on deck, plus a little.”

  Sam pounded the rail with his fist, and gave an exultant shout. “We’ve got the bastard! Pass the word to Guns to take her under fire at maximum range – maybe he’ll get lucky and knock away a mast, or her rudder.”

  The wind was just on the edge of making the big sail too much to carry, and Munro put a couple of hands each to stand by her sheet and brace, to constantly trim as necessary, the lines held by just a couple of turns on a cleat rather than made fast. The schooner leaped and plunged under its impetus, sending sheets of spray aft. It was exhilarating sailing, and Sam saw the hands on deck grinning at one another for the sheer joy of it, and occasionally laughing out loud.

  For an hour or more the two schooners raced along under the blue tropical sky, over the green sea, Albatros very slowly but steadily gaining on the chase.

  Then a cry of consternation from the lookout made both Sam and Bill whip up their telescopes. The pirate schooner had lowered her square topsail to the deck, where Sam could just make out an expanse of canvas in the middle of a group of seamen. He couldn’t make out much detail, but under the circumstances it was clear what the pirates were doing: they were copying the Albatros’s trick, and rigging a bonnet for their topsail.

  Sure enough, in a dismayingly short time a huge expanse of white canvas rose from the enemy vessel’s foredeck, suspended from the topsail yard. Through his telescope, Sam could actually see the schooner surge forward under the added sail area, and groaned aloud.

  The wind had freshened a bit more, enough to give the pirates even more trouble in setting their enlarged square topsail than it had been for the Albatros foredeck crew. The yard whipped back and forth as the wind took charge, and the pirate schooner yawed wildly off course, to the cheers of the Albatros hands.

  Then they brought it under control, silencing the cheering on board Albatros, and the pirate schooner began to settle on a steady heading. With sinking spirits, Sam realized that the Albatros could gain no more distance on her – and she was still out of range of the one-inch rifle.

  Wild cheering broke out again from the foredeck of the Albatros, and Sam brought up his telescope again just in time to see the seam between the improvised bonnet and topsail on the pirate foremast rip right across, from windward to leeward. The two trapezoids of canvas remained attached at the leeward corner for a moment, and then tore completely free, the topsail waving uselessly to leeward like a flag hung out horizontally, and the bonnet collapsing to cover the entire foredeck of the vessel.

  It was now a certainty that the Albatros would overtake the pirate vessel, barring some accident to her own rig – and Sam saw that they would be inside the maximum effective range of the one-incher within a quarter of an hour. He watched the pirates lower the topsail yard to the deck, re-attach the sheet and tack to the original sail, and set it again in record time, but they were only putting off the inevitable. They had given up on the bonnet – perhaps they had no skilled sailmaker on board, and despaired of making it work.

  There then passed a tense twenty minutes, as the XO constantly checked the vertical angle between the enemy vessel’s topmast and her waterline, and reported the angle slowly and steadily growing. Sam, as usual, paced restlessly back and forth along the lee rail.

  “Assume her mast height is the same as ours, Bill, and check the range by Table 16, will you?”

  “Aye, aye sir,” replied the XO, as he ducked into the chartroom. He returned almost immediately and said, “Still almost three miles, Skipper.”

  Sam knew that the angle of heel of the chase would make that result approximate, and in any case, it was only as good as their guess about the height of the enemy schooner’s mainmast. Still, it was almost certainly close to the real value.

  Sam paced a while longer, then said abruptly, “Mister Christie, go fetch your sextant and check our distance off from the chase by Table 16 every … say, 10 minutes.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Christie replied, and vanished below. He returned quickly, sextant in hand, immediately checked its index error against the horizon, then focused on the pirate schooner. He hurried into the chart room and returned after a moment to report, “I make it still just under three miles, Captain.”

  “Very well.” The Albatros still had nearly two miles to gain on the pirate before she was within range. He looked forward to see Mr. Du Plessis and his mates just beginning to mount the one-inch rifle on the bit of the port rail remaining forward of the damage from Marville’s surprising hit. Good timing, Guns, he thought to himself.

  He made a mental calculation, and decided that the Gunner and his mates were actually well in advance of need; he estimated that it would take the better part of two hours before the enemy vessel could be brought under fire with any hope of hitting her.

  Those two hours ground by with agonizing slowness. The pirate tried every possible trick to increase her speed. She made minute course alterations to find the exactly optimal point of sailing, experimented with different sail trim, and rigged her fire pump and wet down her courses thoroughly, in the common belief that wet sails drew better.

  Sam copied only this latter move. He was already confident of the Albatros’s sail trim.

  Then the pirates began to throw things overboard, to lighten ship. Her cargo, which the pirates had apparently left in place after capture, as ballast or loot, was rum or molasses in barrels and bagged sugar. It was roused out on deck and then tossed over the side, sack by sack and barrel by barrel. The sacks sank immediately, but the barrels came floating back on either side of the Albatros in a steady stream, the schooner occasionally hitting one with a startling bang.

  The pirates could not rig the cargo gear while all sail was set, so they had to haul the cargo up on deck by main strength, item by item. Sam hoped that this tedious and exhausting task would drain the enemy’s fighting strength at least as much as it increased his vessel’s speed.

  But the pirate would eventually be lighter by several hundred tons, and consequently faster. This was not a bet Sam could call, much less raise. Nearly all of the heavier items aboard the Albatros – fuel for the motor sloop, guns and ammunition, barrels and cases of food, the battery banks, and the two pulling boats – were things Sam was very loath to part with. The Albatros was low on stores already, because of her contribution to the relief of the Mauritius survivors, and everything else he could think of was likely to be vitally needed, either immediately or in the near fut
ure.

  Except water. The Albatros had several tons of fresh water aboard.

  She could refill her water tanks at any of a dozen creeks up and down the Madagascar coast. It might not be very wholesome, but he trusted the Doctor to come up with some bug-killing additive for it.

  “XO, be sure all the scuttlebutts are full, then open the drain cocks on the fresh water tanks and start pumping.” Ennis grasped the point immediately.

  “Aye aye, sir,” he replied, and shouted for the Boatswain. Soon two jets of water were streaming off to leeward as seamen pumped away vigorously at the fire engines, draining the bilges of the schooner’s drinking water as fast as it could flow from the tanks.

  Sam overheard the XO telling the Boatswain that water was to be rationed – that is, even more severely rationed than usual.

  “Fresh water is for drinking only, Mister T., until further notice. Any man I catch rinsing his skivvies in fresh water gets thrown over the side.”

  All hands, of course, washed themselves and their clothes in seawater. But if clothes were not then rinsed in a little fresh water, they dried into something like fine sandpaper. And dried sea-salt on the skin, if not rinsed away, especially in sensitive areas like groin and armpits, only added to the effect. Still, if they won the battle, they would only have to tolerate this for a day or two.

  And if they lost, it wouldn’t matter.

  But it was becoming clear that they would not lose the race, whatever the outcome of the ensuing battle. The extra sail area represented by the Albatros’s topsail bonnet was causing her to inch up on the enemy schooner faster than the pirates could lighten their vessel. Mr. Christie reported slowly but steadily diminishing ranges.

  When it reached a mile and a half, Sam passed the word for the Gunnery Officer, who immediately hurried aft.

  “Guns, we make the range about three thousand yards. Care to try a few ranging shots now, or would you prefer to wait until we’ve closed the range further?”

  “That puts us just within range, Captain. I’d like to take a few careful shots – we might get lucky.”

  “Then make it so, Mister D. – and good shooting!”

  “Aye aye, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  The Gunner was quickly back at his station with the one-inch rifle, and soon thereafter the familiar crash of the weapon rang out, startling the Albatros’s usual escort of sea birds into scattering with loud squawks of alarm. Sam was watching through his telescope, but didn’t see a shell splash. He hoped that meant it was lost in the pirate schooner’s wake – close astern, God is bereid – and not so wide or short as to go unnoticed.

  Another bang from forward, and this time Sam saw the splash – off the starboard side of the pirate, and about half-a-cable wide of the target. The gunner clearly saw it, too, because he adjusted aim accordingly, and the next round splashed right in the pirate vessel’s wake, close aboard, and she yawed off course. This made Sam hope for a moment that the round had damaged her rudder, but no such luck – the enemy schooner swung back quickly onto her previous course. The splash must have been so close as to startle her helmsman.

  The next shot from the Albatros was a hit – Sam could clearly see a puff of dust and a cloud of splinters as the round impacted along the pirate’s starboard side. The next round was high, but the gunner had found the range now, and fell into a rhythm of steady aimed fire which found its target now as often as it missed. At this angle on the enemy, it was a raking fire – every round that hit the stern would penetrate through several interior bulkheads, if not at this range through and through, stern to stem – creating clouds of deadly splinters inboard, and killing or wounding every man in its path.

  The Albatros had now closed to within a mile of the pirate craft, and the one-inch rifle’s gunner was now scoring more hits than misses.

  Sam noticed some unusual activity on the pirate’s after deck, and raised his telescope. Two bronze tubes now pointed aft from her stern, one on each side of the helm. As he watched, each belched smoke and fire in rapid succession, and two splashes resulted, close aboard on either bow of the Albatros. The pirate schooner was apparently, like her consort, armed with a pair of the three-inch smooth bores the Albatros had already encountered at Andilana.

  Sam snatched up his megaphone, intending to tell Mr. Du Plessis to take the two enemy guns under fire – not that he needed to be told. It didn’t matter, because he only managed to shout, “Guns...”, before there was another dual crash from the enemy’s stern. One round splashed harmlessly well off the port bow.

  But the other hit the port bow squarely, just below the point where the railing stanchions joined the hull, with a great crash and a cloud of splinters from the hull sheathing and steel fragments from a framing member.

  When the dust and smoke was blown away, Sam saw that every man on the bow was down, and the one-incher was dismounted. And Sam could tell at a glance that this time there would be no rapid re-mounting of the 25 mm rifle.

  The Albatros was now defenseless.

  CHAPTER 6

  Al Kendall and his little band waited tensely in the mud of the river bank. Half of the seaman-gunners were improving their firing positions by digging with their mess tins while the rest kept a careful watch, rifles trained on the forest. From time to time, they switched tasks, diggers becoming watchers and vice versa.

  “Keep down!” shouted Landry. “Don’t get so caught up in digging that you stick your head up!” A pirate marksman helpfully underlined this reminder by sending a round whistling just by one young seaman’s ear, causing him to bury his head in the mud so deep Kendall wondered that he could breathe.

  When the squad was dug in to LPO Landry's satisfaction, he shouted “Odd numbers, clean your weapons. Evens, maintain a sharp lookout.”

  Al Kendall decided that he was very glad to have selected Leading Petty Officer Landry to be the senior noncom of the landing force. After wallowing in the mud of the creek bank, the men of course needed to clean their rifles – but Kendall had not thought of it.

  They could hear rustling in the undergrowth as the pirates apparently worked their way along the edge of the clearing on both sides of the trail. The bush was so dense that it was impossible to move quietly. The hands were tempted to fire at every rustle of a branch, but Landry, with great bursts of profanity, ordered them to fire only at targets they could see.

  Landry wriggled along the water's edge downstream to Kendall. The LPO was covered in mud from hat to boots, but carefully held his rifle clear of the muck as he crawled. Looking at Landry, Kendall thought: well, the camouflage issue is solved. The LPO and all of the squad were so dirty that they blended in with the creek bank.

  Occasionally a single round was fired by one of the pirates, usually to be followed by a ragged volley, and then angry, guttural shouts of command. Kendall guessed that this sequence indicated one pirate firing at a target of opportunity, prompting random firing by others, and attempts by an officer to instill some fire discipline in his men. Kendall could well appreciate the natural impulse to blaze away in the general direction of the enemy. But the Albatros landing party, fearing the lash of LPO Landry's tongue more than the pirates, fired only when they saw a target. This wasn't often, since the enemy was mostly well-concealed in the dense undergrowth.

  Kendall was pleased with his men's fire discipline, not least because they had come ashore with just three hundred rounds each, had already expended some unknown but large proportion of this, and had no hope of resupply any time soon. That amount of ammunition had seemed ample when they were packing out for the landing – and, indeed, at nearly six kilos, it made up a significant chunk of the burden each man had to hump in the tropical heat – but now he wished they had brought twice as much.

  With this on his mind, he immediately asked Landry as the noncom approached him, “How's the ammo situation, LPO?”

  “We should be OK for now, Skipper,” Landry replied. “Nobody remembered to count the rounds they fired, like I told 'em,
but I looked into each man's pouch and estimated the contents – I think we have almost two hundred rounds per man.”

  “That'll be enough, s'il plaît à Dieu.”

  “Amen, sir.”

  “I've been considering what I'd do next if I were the pirate commander. I think I'd try to exploit our vulnerable points – the right bank of the creek, or the upstream direction. If he's patient – and smart – he'll send a party far enough upstream to ford the creek, then filter these men down to a point opposite us on the other bank.”

  “We'd be deep in the merde then, for sure, Skipper.”

  “And there's damn little we could do about it.”

  Both men were silent for a few moments as they considered this depressing scenario. Then Landry said slowly, “Well, we could send a small patrol of our own upstream – bein' very cagey about it, o'course – to catch 'em in the act.”

  Kendall thought about this. He hated to divide his already-tiny force – but if the pirates gained the opposite bank, les bons were as good as dead, caught between two fires, and without any cover at all from one direction.

  “How many men, do you think?” he finally asked.

  “Just two, sir – that's enough to give us plenty of warning when they bring the crossing party under fire. And I figure two of us are about equal to half a dozen of them in firepower on account of we've got better weapons.”

  Kendall took a deep breath. Was this the right thing to do? Or was he dooming his squad to death or slavery?

  “Okay, LPO – let's do it. Pick two level-headed men and get them moving.”

  “Roger that, Skipper,” Landry replied, and slithered off upstream through the mud. Kendall watched him tap two men, and lead them up toward the bend in the creek, where they paused while he briefed them on the mission of their patrol. Kendall thought the LPO had chosen well – Leading Seaman Lyons and a young AB named Bacon – both solid, reliable men.