Dewey Lambdin - Sea of Grey
"Some African tongue from the Ivory Coast, where they came from," Cashman told him, starting to lead them back toward the tent lines. "I was told it means 'We swear to destroy all the whites, and everything they own. Let's die if we don't.' Way they fight, I'd believe it."
"Anything I can send to ease your misery?" Lewrie asked him.
"Can't thing of anything, no," Cashman sadly told him. "Keep a sharp eye peeled, mind. There's always skulkers along the roads after dark."
"Oh, thankee for tellin' me!" Lewrie barked. "I was nervous enough ridin' up here alone in broad daylight!"
"You could always stop in town at Jean-Pierre's and look up yer little Henriette." Cashman snickered. "There's a spur t'move ya along."
"Way Port-Au-Prince is fallin' apart, I'm better off aboard my ship," Lewrie admitted, a knot of unease growing between his shoulder blades-where the musket ball, spear, cane knife, or poisoned arrow might strike were he unwary, or just plain unlucky on his lone ride back. " 'Tis not a sailor's fight, this sort of…" • Cashman cocked an eye at the sky, and the place of the sun. He clapped Lewrie on the back, suspiciously near that knot of unease, as if he suspected his qualms, then chuckled.
"Nothin' like a little dread t'keep you cloppin' along faster. Think there's time for the stirrup-cup at my tent, then we'll get you on your way 'fore twilight gets too deep. There'll be a last rush of troops and officers on the road 'bout now, so it shouldn't be too bad."
"But keep my ears open and my head swivellin'?" Lewrie queried, suspicious of such blithe reassurances.
"Reins in yer left, cocked pistol in yer right," Cashman intoned.
And Lewrie made it a quick stirrup-cup, both he and horse antsy to the faint chorus and the vibrating drums.
"Canga, bafio tй! Canga, moune de le!"
Lewrie took the salutes from the side-party, doffed his hat, and stepped inboard, just as the late afternoon heat began to dissipate in the face of a freshening breeze off the sea, as the sun sank lower in the west. Lt. Langlie and the Surgeon, Mr. Shirley, were awaiting him on the starboard gangway, looking anxious.
"Excuse me, sir, but this order came aboard for you, about one hour ago," Langlie said, offering a single sheet of paper, folded over and sealed with a tiny daub of wax. Lewrie took it and split it open.
"Aha," he sighed, making a face. "I see. Well, damme."
"Bad news, sir? Pardon my curiosity," Langlie enquired.
"Seems that General Maitland and Admiral Parker have struck a bargain with our foe, L'Ouverture, Mister Langlie," Lewrie informed him, his weariness taking over after days of enforced activity and briskness. "Since we now hold untenable positions in Saint Domingue, and to spare the further 'useless effusion of blood,' " he went on, dripping sarcasm, "Maitland has proposed an armistice. Once he receives L'Ouverture's assurances that the civilian populations of Jacmel, Mole Saint Nicholas, and Port-Au-Prince will be spared any 'reprisals,' we depart."
"Depart, sir? But…"
"Strike our tents and sail away," Lewrie spat, wadding up the order. "Abandon 'em to the 'good offices' of L'Ouverture's men, tuck our tails twixt our legs, and slink off… without even a last bark at 'em. We're to prepare to embark the Army and all its stores, and sail back to Kingston."
"Well, damme, sir," Langlie groaned, removing his hat to swab his forehead and shake his head in sorry wonder. "They beat us."
"Aye, it appears they have," Lewrie said. "Mister Shirley, the Army hospitals are filled with wounded. You'd best prepare for some of them to be put aboard."
"Of course, sir," Shirley replied, hemming and hawwing a bit, though. "There is another matter that you must know first, Captain."
"And what's that?" Lewrie asked, suddenly filled with a defeatist lassitude.
"Several of our people are sick, Captain," Shirley told him in a gruff mutter, all but wringing his hands in despair. "So far I cannot tell you with any certainty whether it's malaria or Yellow Jack. Three hands show the fever, sweats, and headaches of malaria-along with the requisite icy chills-but two more also exhibit pains in the back and limbs one would expect to see with a case of Yellow Fever, so I cannot-"
"Oh God, no!" Lewrie blanched, his worst long-lingering dread for the ship at last confirmed. "Only five, so far?"
"As of the start of the First Dog Watch, sir, but it could be a dozen more by sunup," Shirley grimly prophecied. "You are aware how quickly it can spread, Captain."
"Aye, I am," Lewrie sadly whispered. "Let's hope that chichona bark extract avails, Mister Shirley. Keep me informed, and make them as comfortable as you can. Anything you need…"
He turned away and went to the quarterdeck bulwarks to peer out at the now dark and brooding shore of the anchorage. Port-Au-Prince, its docks and streets near the harbour, was lit by torches and faint lanthorns where soldiers and sailors off the stores ship laboured at the mounds of munitions and rations-this time to start reloading them for evacuation. Despite General Maitland's truce, the dull crack of a musket now and then broke the twilight's serenity along the lines deeper in the trackless jungles.
For nothing, Lewrie thought, groaning with weary cynicism; 'twas all for nothing. Nicholas and Sevier, Seaman Inman…
Toussaint L'Ouverture, a plump little Black man, unschooled in weapons and tactics, and his army of tag-rag-and-bobtail former slaves with agricultural tools, had beaten the British Army! He had no way to fathom the "how" of it, except… to think that L'Ouverture's victory, and the uneasy peace which might follow it, was for the best. Every experience he had with slavery, the more he was put off by it, just as Cashman was. In the face of such an amazing debacle, even a rake-hell as casually "churched" as he could shrug and think it God's Will.
That wasn't to say that it didn't rankle, though; the bitter cup of defeat's gall had never been easy for Lewrie to swallow, ever since his first taste of it in 1780. And pondering the disgrace of sailing away after being bested by illiterate Blacks, by hordes of beasts with the musk of over-worked demons and not a jot of Christian mercy, not a jot of civilisation to their souls…! Truce or not, what would keep L'Ouverture's hordes from butchering everyone indiscriminately… when they massacred petits blancs and townsfolk in an orgy of gore, would that be God's Will, too? What would their Inquisition be like?
The voudoun drums in the hills and forests throbbed on as they had since weeks before. Tonight, though, they sounded less funereal, though just as ominous. Now the drums almost had a lilt, a celebratory liveliness, and Lewrie could conjure images of men and women capering and leaping in the savage glare of bonfires, flaunting finery stolen from the dead, brandishing cane knives, spears, and muskets, firing rounds off at the moon and whooping like victorious Muskogee Indians in Spanish Florida.
"Just thank God I'll never have t'set foot on that shore again," he whispered. "And you bastards are welcome to it."
For now, he had a crew to worry about, another debacle blooming on his own decks. Impossible as it might prove to be, to save his men from almost always fatal plagues, he didn't think it God's Will, or a form of punishment from On High that his poor sailors should suffer so for being unwitting pawns against the Saint Domingue Blacks' eventual freedom. Perhaps God would take their innocence into account and spare them… or help him find a way to save them!
BOOK THREE
Sed ti qui vivum casus, age fare vicissim, attulerint.
Pelagine venis erroribus actus an monitu divum?
But come, tell in turn what chance has brought you
here, alive. Come you driven in your ocean-
wanderings, or at Heaven's command?
Aeneid, Book VI 531-538
Publius Virgilios Maro "Virgil"
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
We may consider ourselves fortunate," Sailing Master Winwood said, rapping his knuckles lightly on the wheel drum of the idle helm for luck, even so.
"Fortunate… aye, sir," Lt. Catterall replied with a roll of his eyes. "Eight dead so far, and thirty helpless with fever below. Why, with a run of luck such as that, I'd stake the family fortune."
"Consider the lot of those poor devils aboard the other ships," Win-wood pointed out, gesturing across Kingston Harbour. "Nigh half of their men down sick or buried. Consider the lot of the soldiers we brought off from Saint Domingue, sir. A full third of them are dead, and now interred ashore. No, sir, for my money, Proteus has come off rather easily, for all the time we spent close to that pestilential shore. Even as a good Christian, which I hope I am, I must confess I find a certain comfort in the tales told about Proteus and her almost inexplicable birthing… and about our captain. Though the tales of his last ship, Jester, and the tales about our own, smack of heathen, pagan old sea-gods, the idea of him, and us with him, being guarded by a benevolent Divine hand are a form of solace in the face of Life's unfairness."
"Comforting, aye, Mister Winwood, but…" Catterall replied with a faint shrug; it was too warm for wider gestures. Catterall, a happy-go-lucky Deist and cynic, found Mr. Winwood's mysticism amusing. "The captain may be spoken of as a lucky captain, and his ships lucky by association, but… t'would take a pagan sea-god to deem us worthy in his sight."
That left unspoken the bald fact of Captain Lewrie's adultery, his recent dalliance with a half-caste Port-Au-Prince whore, the rumour of which had made the rounds belowdecks, usually accompanied by hoots of appreciation and admiration, rather than disapproval or envy.
"Ahem," Mr. Winwood commented by clearing his throat, blushing at the unsaid reminder of their captain's human frailty.
"But God loved even his King David… Bathsheba notwithstanding," Catterall drolly posed. "Something like that, sir?"
"Ahem," their priggish sailing master reiterated, tongue-tied and unable to respond to such wordly japing without violating his vows not to curse.
"The proof of the statement that God loves a sinner, in hope of his eventual salvation, or has use of him in His majestic plan, stands before me, sir," Winwood finally answered, glowering a touch.
"Point taken, sir," Catterall rejoined with a wink and chuckle. He was, in fact, rather proud of his repute as a rake-hell and a pagan, so Mr. Winwood's comment caromed right past him. "And I will stand in humble abeyance 'til His fated use for me is revealed."
"Uhm… excuse me, sirs, but the captain is coming off shore," Midshipman Elwes informed them, approaching them from his vantage point on the starboard bulwarks. Sure enough, the quick use of a glass showed one of the ship's larger boats stroking away from the piers, where it had landed another funeral and burying detail.
"Very well, Mister Elwes. Summon the side-party," Catterall instructed.
"Permission to mount ze quarterdeck?" Surgeon's Mate Durant, more laconic and weary than ever, requested from the base of the starboard ladder from the waist.
"Aye, come up, sir," Catterall allowed. "How's old Wyman?" "I regret to inform you, sir, zat the poor man 'as just now gone away from us," Durant told him, wiping his hands on his apron, using a French phrase for departure from Life.
"Well, damme," Catterall muttered, face creasing in genuine sorrow; though taking an involuntary step away from Mr. Durant, as if to flee Death's miasma… or the noisome reek of the Yellow Jack's last agony, when the victim voided his bowels, after many days of inability, and spewed up dark, bloody vomito negro. The stench of Wyman's dying clung to Durant's apron, bare arms, and very hair, like a whiff off the River Styx.
"That will make you Second Officer, Mister Catterall," Winwood needlessly pointed out. "And young Mister Adair an acting lieutenant."
"Indeed," Catterall said in a whisper, realising the enormity of their loss, and the onerous weight placed on his shoulders as a result.
"God help us, then," Winwood sniffed. "God help us all. 'Tis a horrid toast, 'to a bloody war or a sickly season'… so we may attain our desired promotions."
"Uhm… yes," Catterall said to that, turning away and feeling like a weary Atlas, sobered for once from all sarcasm.
God, not another damn' funeral, was Lewrie's first thought, once he had gotten the dismal news of Lt. Wyman's death. The first men who had died had been buried at sea, cleanly and neatly. The last five-no, six, Lewrie had to remind himself-were interred in the military cemetery outside Kingston. They lingered longer in the mind; the plots of mounded earth and simple wood crosses not quite so… forgettable, but more permanent, and seemingly, eternally dispiriting.
In the last few days, administering the Last Rites had become a daily chore, supplanting all the other cares a captain should have for his ship, and the mellifluous prose of the Book of Common Prayer cloying and banal, the litany so familiar that he could almost recite from memory, as if declaiming passages from Caesar's Gallic Wars at school.
Lewrie looked over at Midshipman Grace, feeling pangs of sympathy as the lad stumbled about the gun-deck as if in a trance, red-faced but dry-eyed after their last trip ashore in the cutter… to bury his grandfather, the canny Nore fisherman they'd known simply as the Older Grace. Now Mr. Grace's father, too, lay insensible beneath an awning stretched over the boat-tier beams up forrad by the foc'sle belfry, by turns shivering and teeth-chattering under three blankets, or sweating buckets and thrashing for relief from malaria. Arthur "The Middle" Grace might recover, Mr. Shirley believed; it was malaria, not the Yellow Jack, and chichona bark extract was lengthening the calm periods 'twixt bouts, though he was still as weak as a wet dish-clout. Young Grace stumbled forward and knelt by his father's pallet, taking his hand and clinging and patting it.
"How's he doing?" Lewrie asked Durant in a soft mutter. "It comes and goes, sir," Durant said, heaving another of those Gallic shrugs of his. "Improving, I venture to say." "Mister Shirley?"
"He is resting, Capitaine. Ze strain 'as been 'orrible. It is a wonder, so enervated he 'as become, zat he 'as not succumbed himself. So far, it is ze old and weak, ze very young who fall ill and die." "Any more cases?" Lewrie asked, crossing his fingers. "Two, Capitaine … Seaman Ordinaire Harper and Landsman Drew," Durant mournfully went on. "Both, 'owever, display no sign of Yellow Jack. Only ze malaria. And zey are strong." "But only one death today," Lewrie insisted.
"Ze poor Lieutenant Wyman, oui.. . but zere are two more 'ands who 'ave the Yellow Jack, and near ze last stages of ze malady, sir. I cannot imagine zey will see tomorrow's dawn."
