‘Don’t go counting your chickens,’ said Ben. ‘It’ll be dark in an hour, and I don’t think we’re going to catch this corvette before nightfall. By the morning she’ll have scurried off into port.’

  Ben was right. By nightfall we were approaching the coast and the Miranda was still too far away from the French ship for us to be called to quarters. But Mandeville was not done yet. When the light was too poor to see our quarry, he had the ship drop anchor, and wait until dawn.

  We spent a restless night, with the threat of combat still hanging over the crew. Despite their bravado, I noticed that far more of the men than usual were visited by nightmares, and our brief rest was frequently punctuated by the cries of tormented sleepers. I could barely sleep, anyway. My jaw was throbbing horribly, and I was too anxious.

  The following day we took the morning watch from four till eight. When the first light of dawn crept over the horizon we peered through drifting pockets of mist and were surprised to see that the French corvette was no more than a mile ahead of us. Her sails were furled, she was listing slightly to starboard and going nowhere.

  Ben peered through the gathering light. ‘She’s grounded, Sam, or maybe caught on the rocks. I wonder what Mandeville’s got up his sleeve now?’

  Throughout those groggy early hours, we edged nearer and nearer the corvette. A sailor was placed on the Miranda’s bow, to take soundings with a lead weight. He called out the fathoms with a dull regularity, his voice piercing the silence of the grey autumn morning. Although we too were in danger of running aground, Mandeville and his lieutenants seemed coolly confident as they piloted their frigate forward.

  Ben looked worried. ‘These are treacherous waters, with shallows and rocks to navigate. We get too close in and we’re really done for.’

  Over on the quarterdeck Mandeville peered though his telescope. Then he called over two of his lieutenants. They both looked too. Ben guessed what was coming.

  ‘I’ll bet that ship’s been abandoned. Mandeville’ll keep us just out of range of her guns, and send a boat over to check.’

  A minute later, Middlewych came over to us. ‘Mr Lovett. I want your gun crew to join myself and four marines. We’re going to take one of the cutters and see what’s happening.’

  The boat, kept in the waist of the Miranda, was swiftly lowered into the water. We clambered aboard – Ben, Tom, James, Oliver, Edmund and me. All six of us shivering in the breeze that blew over the water. It was so cold I almost forgot about my aching jaw.

  We each took an oar. Fortunately the sea was still, with almost no swell. ‘You’ll warm up soon enough, Samuel,’ said Oliver Macintosh, ‘once we start this rowing.’ Then four marines joined us, sitting stiffly in the stern, each carrying a musket. Middlewych squeezed himself into the bow, telescope in hand.

  ‘Slowly does it, men,’ he cautioned us. ‘We could easily be heading into a trap.’

  As we rowed away, I heard the Miranda’s drummer boy call the crew to quarters. Mandeville was taking no chances, and had decided to rouse the men who were still sleeping. There was now a frenzy of activity aboard the ship. Within five minutes, the gun ports had been opened, and the Miranda began slowly to close the distance between herself and the corvette.

  It was an eerie feeling, pulling away from the Miranda through the mist, especially as we were looking down the barrels of all her starboard guns. We rowed with our backs to the corvette, so we relied on Middlewych to let us know what was happening. Standing in the bow and peering through his telescope, he kept up a reassuring commentary to no one in particular, partly perhaps to keep his own fear at bay.

  ‘Nothing going on on deck,’ he said. ‘She looks completely deserted. Gun ports open, but can’t see anyone manning the guns . . . Now the mist’s closed around her . . .’

  As we grew nearer, my trepidation increased. I desperately wanted to look round and see the ship we were approaching, but if I did this I would break my stroke and incur the wrath of Middlewych and my fellow oarsmen. The tension was unbearable. For now, all I could hear was the splash of oar in water, the laboured exertions of my fellow rowers and the faint crash of waves on a distant beach. At any moment I expected the crack of a musket. I was convinced the French were lying in wait for us aboard their ship and even now a marksman was training his musket on the back of my head.

  The mist cleared again and Middlewych began his leisurely commentary. ‘Still can’t see a soul . . .’

  The blast of a couple of guns cut short his next words. I nearly jumped out of my skin. James let go of his oar and cursed both our luck and his clumsiness. Tom lost his too. Middlewych ducked instinctively as cannon shots whistled low over our heads, so close we felt the turbulence in the air.

  Seconds later, two plumes of water shot up in the sea, halfway between us and the Miranda. The corvette had fired too soon.

  ‘Lie as flat as you can,’ shouted Middlewych urgently. We all knew what was coming. As we tried desperately to squeeze into the bottom of our cutter, all ten of the Miranda’s starboard 18lb guns roared out in a single broadside. It was an awesome sound and it produced an awesome result. As soon as our shots had whistled over our heads to crash and splinter into their target we peered over the gunwale to survey the damage. Judging by the still settling plumes of water, only three shots had fallen short. The rest had mauled the upper deck, leaving ugly holes all along the length of the ship.

  ‘Keep down, keep down,’ shouted Middlewych impatiently. ‘We’re quite near enough for musket shots.’ Then he peered cautiously over the bow. ‘We’ll just have to wait here, and see what happens.’ He sounded not a little rattled. Then he picked up his telescope and trained it again on the corvette.

  Much to my surprise, I heard him laugh. ‘They’re scuttling off! They’re going over the larboard side. Probably still got a boat there!’

  Relief swept over me. If this was true, we might all live to see the end of the day. ‘Keep down, though. There’ll be another broadside from the Miranda any second now.’

  But that broadside never came. Mandeville must have been able to see the French gunners abandoning their ship too. He didn’t want to inflict too much damage on his prize, and the Miranda held her fire.

  We waited another few minutes, then Middlewych stood up with his telescope to get a better view. ‘There they go, heading for the shore.’ We had drifted nearer to the bow of the corvette, and I could see a packed launch pulling away. ‘Right, then, let’s go in and have a good look at her.’

  In the panic that followed the first shots, we had lost two oars in the water. I was proud to say I’d kept a hold on mine, but James, who’d lost his, took over my oar anyway.

  ‘Brawn over brains,’ he said with a wink.

  Free from the oars, I now had the chance to have a good look at the ship. She was a beauty. Like us she had three masts, but she was much shorter in length. Sleek and low in the water, her hull was painted a fetching green, with a band of gold above and below the gun ports.

  ‘She’ll make a handsome prize,’ said Edmund.

  ‘That depends on whether we can get her moving,’ Middlewych sighed.

  But as I gazed at this beautiful ship the bright flash of an explosion burst deep inside her, sending black splinters high into the air. The noise rolled like dirty thunder across the waves. At first I wondered if the Miranda had fired again, but Middlewych called on us all to lie flat again.

  Almost at once another much louder explosion rent the air, and we all felt the heat of the blast on our backs. Something crashed into the sea right next to us, large enough to rock our boat and drench us with freezing water. When debris stopped falling, I dared to take a look. Part of a yardarm, sail still furled around it, bobbed nearby. A large plume of black smoke was billowing up from the wreckage of the corvette, and flames were beginning to gnaw at what was left of her upper deck.

  ‘Damn it,’ said Middlewych. ‘Rascals have blown up their ship.’

  Ben spoke glumly. ‘I’ll bet they put a fuse on gunpowder barrels in the magazine. There goes our prize money.’

  ‘Cheer up, Ben,’ I couldn’t help saying. ‘At least we weren’t on the ship when it blew up.’

  With the merest shrug Middlewych turned us round, to head back to the Miranda. It had been quite a morning, and it was not yet eight o’clock.

  Chapter 6

  B is for Boarder

  A month into the voyage, I was coming up the companionway from the gun deck to the upper deck when a novel thought entered my head. I liked it up here. To go from the enclosed, stifling world of the mess deck and out into the salty sea air and sunshine was one of life’s pleasures. It also dawned on me that I was no longer in a state of constant anxiety. True, at any moment the Miranda could be called to quarters, and I could never be certain when I woke that I would live to see the evening, but I had at least begun to master the duties required of me and adjust to the ship’s exhausting routine.

  When off duty I could walk freely on the forward part of the upper deck, along the waist with its ship’s boats, spare masts and yards lain over the opening above the gun deck, but I quickly learned that the quarterdeck was forbidden territory to ordinary seamen who had no business being there.

  Whenever I made my way to the upper deck I would marvel at the agility of the topmen – those of us in the ship’s crew who worked up in the sails. They seemed to revel in the danger of their work – running along the narrow lengths of the yardarms, and dropping down to the thin foot rope beneath the yard, which was all that lay between them and the dizzying drop to the deck. They would swing from one mast to another on the stays, and slide down to the deck on the halyards. They seemed as confident in the rigging as a squirrel running through the branches of a horse chestnut. Topmen had something of the flair of circus acrobats – we called their antics ‘skylarking’. I once heard Lieutenant Middlewych remark with some pride to a midshipman that he was sure people would pay money to watch our topmen perform.

  Occasionally, I would be called upon to set or furl a sail. It was here that I first met a mizzentopman called Joseph Neil. Almost exactly my age, Joseph was from Yorkshire and walked with a cocky swagger. I’d grown increasingly unsure of myself up among the rigging. Joseph noticed this when I first went up with him, and chided me.

  ‘Come on, y’ big jellyfish,’ he sneered, then winked to take the sting from his taunt. Seeing I was shaky, he drew level with me and said, ‘One hand for the Navy. One hand for yourself. That’s how to make sure y’ don’t fall off.’

  Like me he had joined a merchant ship. He sailed out of Scarborough but had been pressed into the Navy. As I got to know him better, I helped him write home. Sometimes when we talked he would drop his cocksure front, and I started to like him.

  ‘Course it’s terrifying up there,’ he admitted to me once. ‘Especially in a storm, with a gale pushing and pulling you to and fro, and all you’ve got between you and your maker is a wet slippery rope to hold on to. Last year I had to go up to the main topgallant through a freezing fog. Ice on the rigging! My hands just went numb. You always know when you go up that you’ll come down – but you never know whether it’ll be the hard or the easy way.’

  Joseph picked up his swagger from the other men in his watch. They were an evil lot, who could shame the devil with their curses. I’d occasionally sit with Joseph and them on a Sunday afternoon, and they would often talk about what they would do when we ran into a French or Spanish ship. They seemed to revel in the violence they would inflict on Johnny Foreigner, and their humour often left me wondering when I was supposed to laugh.

  They were equally merciless with their own kind, and spoke with scorn of any comrade who had fallen from the rigging. ‘Remember that pipsqueak the press gang picked up last year?’ said one of the lads. ‘Him from Dorset that fell off the fore topgallant.’ Another of them adopted an expression of sheer terror, and flailed his arms like a windmill in a gale, and they all began to laugh.

  These were men who would joke about their own execution, and believe me, it was a racing certainty that some of them would end their life dangling from a yardarm. They seemed to have a pact between them that even on the gallows they would try to outdo each other in devil-may-care japery. ‘When Stephen and George were hanged together,’ said another of the topmen, ‘after that carry on with Lieutenant Fisher, they had a little bet about who would be the last to piss himself when they were swinging from the yardarm.’ At this point Joseph filled me in – explaining that men who are hung lose control of their bladders, usually at the point of death.

  At first I thought them a crude and cruel bunch, but I knew enough to keep my feelings hidden. Living so close to death they turned their plight into an endless amusement – where even their own execution could be turned into some laddish stunt to outdo each other. Even their curses began to amuse me. One evening, I was up with one of Joseph’s watch in the mizzen topsail. ‘Stay tied, you buggering lopsided dog!’ he said, in disgust at a disintegrating rope he was using to furl the sail.

  Although I was intrigued by these rough and ready men, I felt more comfortable with my own gun crew. They seemed a more easy-going bunch. As I got to know them, I discovered that all my messmates had a special keepsake or charm they hoped would bring them luck. They kept them hidden in their wooden trunks and canvas ditty-bags. There, alongside the sewing needles, spools of thread, buttons, letters and spare clothes, lay these small tokens of life away from our uncertain world. Sometimes after supper, one of them would bring out their keepsake and tell us the story that went with it.

  Tom had a horn beaker with the face of an eagle carefully carved into the side. ‘Brought that back from New York. Red Indian, it is, though I don’t know which tribe.’

  James had a small ivory locket with the words ‘Not lost but gone before’ inlaid around the edge. It had a hinged lid with a compartment containing a short strand of braided hair tied at each end with a sliver of red cotton. One evening, when he had drunk a little more than was wise, he got out the braid and laid it over the palm of his hand. ‘There’s three strands there. Me, me missus and our Kate.’ I looked hard and there they were. One fair like James, one dark and the other brown. ‘That’s all that’s left of her, that strand of brown hair. Carried away by scarlatina, she was. Eight years old . . . We both watched her breathe her last . . .’ That was all he said. We all felt the weight of his sadness.

  After a while, Ben sought to change the mood by showing us what he kept with him. It was a small double-heart brooch, inlaid with garnets.

  ‘My missus gave us that on our wedding day. It was her grandma’s. She says it’ll keep me safe, and it’s worked so far.’

  ‘All these keepsakes – some of them are quite valuable, aren’t they?’ I said to Ben.

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘Most of them aren’t worth much, to be honest. But there’s a lot of faith invested in them. And for the man who has one . . . well, you couldn’t put a price on it.’

  Richard and me were quietly amused by how superstitious these hardened seamen were. We were certainly careful to say nothing when the men talked about the Flying Dutchman – at least three had claimed to have seen it – or mermaids.

  ‘Right up to the ship they came,’ said Ben lasciviously.

  ‘I saw ’em bobbing up and down, in the wake of the stern. Real beauty, one of ’em. And not a stitch on her, save for a seaweed necklace.’

  After these discussions Richard would take me to one side and mimic the older men’s wide-eyed superstition or lechery. ‘We’ve got to get out while we’re young, Sam,’ he’d say. I liked his cynicism for all things supernatural, although here he was almost alone among us ordinary seamen. Practically every man aboard could claim he had seen a ghost on the ship. When night fell aboard the Miranda, most of us feared the flickering shadows, and staircases that vanished into the dark pool of the hold. The ship was a man-o’-war, and a lot of terrible things had happened aboard her. Men had fallen from the rigging, been crushed by their cannon, flogged to death, and torn apart in battle. I sometimes wondered if there was any one spot on the ship that, at one time or another, had not been the scene of some hellish torment.

  Although life at sea was made up of myriad everyday trials and dangers, I learned to appreciate its pleasures too, especially when we took our rest before bed or on a Sunday afternoon. Sometimes a man would sing or play a fiddle or whistle – a gentle lament or lullaby for the dimming day. Colm played a lovely melody called ‘Wexford Bay’. The tune moved me. Music at this time of day was always quiet. But on Sunday afternoons, which we had to ourselves if we were not taking the afternoon watch, it would be more raucous. Then, some of the men would dance and sing.

  One of the most enthusiastic dancers was a fellow I had noticed on my first night on the Miranda, who had the crucifixion depicted on his back, among other tattoos. Most of these were Biblical quotations of an unforgiving nature – ‘Burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe’ and ‘With the jaw of an ass have I slain a thousand men’. I discovered his name was Vincent Thomas and I always thought of him as ‘Vengeful Tattoos’. As I tried to decipher some of the smaller quotations as he spun around, he caught my eye and dragged me up to dance. ‘My, but you’ve got a pretty mouth,’ he whispered as he whirled me around. I took care not to look at him too closely after that.

  As September turned to October we were blessed with a final spell of mild weather. Richard and I made the most of it by sitting up on the forecastle during our rest time between watches, although we were always careful what we said when officers and bosun’s mates were within earshot.

  Sometimes Richard told me about his country. It was, he said, a land of broad rivers and endless meadows and woodland. He told me about the Red Indians of America, and the troubled relationship they had with the European settlers. The names of their tribes – Cherokee, Arapaho, Conestoga – spoke of an alien yet fascinating world.