The Thunder and the Flame, page 2
Grenville frowned. “What’s amiss?”
Gawdy turned back to him. “The Gunner wished to have his shot aboard last of all, sir, so that some could be distributed to the lockers at once and not all of it sent down first to his store. The Boatswain’s crossed him by striking it down before the rest.”
Grenville nodded. “He’s right. If the Spaniards came now, I’d sooner have shot in the lockers than in the hold. Be pleased to step down there and call them both.”
Gawdy rattled down the ladder to the waist deck, and forced himself into the crowd of men at work. Mostly they were of his own age, and less; mariners – trained men – and younkers, who could work only under supervision and on the simpler tasks. The older men – the sailors – were on the fo’c’sle and elsewhere, employed on more skilled tasks such as befitted their age and experience.
The two officers, both thick-set, bull-necked and now red in their faces with anger, still cursed each other; the Gunner with his short, thick legs planted well part and fists bunched at his sides as he leant forward to bellow recriminations and abuse at the other; while the Boatswain, pretending to be entirely occupied with the work of his gangs at the lines and tackles, had turned away and only threw insults sporadically over his shoulder.
“Boatswain!” Gawdy was shouting as loudly as he could to make himself heard over the general din; the Boatswain turned, and, embarrassed, touched his hat. Gawdy nodded to the Gunner, then. “And you, Master Gunner. The Commander, please.”
Their eyes followed the jerk of his head, and both of them stiffened when they saw Grenville up there, watching. There was a clear path now, back to the ladder, and they followed him, one behind the other. Gawdy ran straight up it to the half-deck, but Grenville’s cold tones halted the others at the ladder’s foot, where they doffed their hats.
“Boatswain. When this deck’s cleared, you’ll give my Gunner as many of your hands as he may ask for, to have that shot quickly where it should be.”
The Boatswain dropped his eyes. “Aye, sir.”
“Master Gunner. If my officers so demean themselves as to abuse their fellows before the men, they’ll be levelled down, others appointed in their place. D’you hear?”
“Your pardon, sir.” The voice was Devonshire, the man from Bideford. He’d sailed before with Grenville.
Sir Richard turned aft as musket butts clattered to the deck and Langhorne shouted loudly, pointing upwards over the ship’s side, “She closes to board! There, to larboard – clear her yards!”
The men flung themselves down behind the bulwarks on that side, aiming their muskets up into the rigging of an imaginary enemy, panting as they squinted along the long, heavy barrels. But the Corporal still stood behind them, as erect as if he was on parade, and Grenville, passing, touched him on the shoulder and remarked to Langhorne, “This fellow’s done for!” There was a growl of laughter from the kneeling men, and Grenville continued aft to the next ladder, a short one that led up from half-deck to quarter-deck.
That after deck, the crown of the poop, was deserted, though it was still wet from the Swabber’s recent attentions. Right aft, on the very stern of the ship, was the roundhouse, the quarters of the Master. He’d be in there now, Pennyfeather, no doubt occupied with his charts and tables. The Master was the most able and experienced seaman in a Queen’s ship; he needed to have served before the mast and to have performed the duties of every officer in the course of his career; then to have perfected his knowledge of the compass, the card, tides, time, wind and the reckoning of the ship’s way; with these matters locked in his brain, and with formal commendations to the four principal officers of the Navy, he needed a warrant from Trinity House before he could be appointed a master in Her Majesty’s fleet. It was on him the Commander relied for the navigation and handling of the vessel; since many commanders were no seamen, but soldiers or courtiers, they had need of a man who knew his trade.
Pennyfeather had seen them from the window of his roundhouse, and now he came to greet them.
“Good day, Sir Richard!” He nodded at Philip. “Mr. Gawdy.”
“Good day, Master. But I can’t love this wind.”
“Nay, sir. While it holds, we’ll see no treasure fleet; we can be sure of that!”
“Yet—” Grenville turned, and leant on the bulwark, staring out across ruffled water towards the other ships where they rode at anchor, and, from there, due west at that expanse of ocean – empty still, after the months of waiting. This island, Flores, with the smaller one called Corvo close to the north of it, was the westernmost of the Azores group.
“Yet – something tells me we’ll be at them soon.” He laughed, and clapped a hand on Gawdy’s shoulder. “Then this young warrior will be satisfied at last. Night after night he charms us with his lute, but the music he pines for is that of guns!”
“Ay.” Pennyfeather stared shrewdly into Grenville’s eyes. “That do we all, Sir Richard; though some may more than others.”
Grenville had been looking idly down at the water; his head jerked up and his mouth was hard as he glanced quickly at the Master. But those sailor’s eyes were hooded, now, the broad face bland, as expressionless as a piece of oak.
* * *
“No doubt,” murmured Langhorne, “the fellow had some meaning. Sir Richard’s known to be of a warlike disposition. Certainly he’s not a man to cross, as Master Pennyfeather should know – and may know better presently, if he doesn’t control his tongue!”
Langhorne and Gawdy were alone, leaning on the larboard bulwark of the half-deck. Grenville had gone ashore, to inspect the sick and talk with the squadron’s chirurgeons who were ministering to them. He had not wished for company, but added that he might well be gone some hours, as he intended afterwards to climb the hill – as he had put it, “to breathe clean air”.
As Langhorne spoke, he leaned out over the sea, looking towards the bow to see the Liar at work scrubbing the ship’s side just beyond the break of the fo’c’sle. The man worked on a plank suspended from above by ropes that he’d secured to cleats inboard before descending. The ship had, by custom, two cleaners; the Swabber, whose permanent task it was to keep the inside of the vessel sweet, and the Liar, who was responsible for the outside and held his job only for seven days. Each Monday forenoon the first man caught in the act of telling a lie of any sort became the new week’s Liar, and was proclaimed such before the mast at noon by one of the Boatswain’s Mates piping for attention and crying for all to hear “A Liar! A Liar!” And a filthy job it was, for every time that a man had the need to relieve himself it was over the ship’s side that he did it.
Langhorne pulled himself back, and added, “He killed his first man before he was of age.”
“Sir Richard?”
“Yea. A brawl, in a London street. He ran him through.”
“But then, what—”
“A Queen’s pardon within hours… I dare say the fellow gave him cause – and there were others in it too. But his temper’s not slow, my dear Gawdy. It’s not slow.”
Gawdy’s spirits sank. Not because this story, which he’d not heard before, disappointed him in his estimate of Sir Richard Grenville: the reverse. He’d realized that he himself, during the years in which he and his brother had idled about the Inns of Court – years spent to no purpose other than that he’d learnt to play the lute – could no more have brought himself to kill a man in the street than he could have purchased the Tower of London. There was this difference between himself and Sir Richard Grenville, the difference that made Grenville a man of action and decision not by chance or favour or by willing himself so but by something in the blood, the force of his own character and kind; while he, Philip Gawdy, could hope for a stroke of fortune or a degree of fame by clinging to the service of one like Grenville, but never – as lately he had imagined he could – become that sort of man himself. Lately, conscious of the Vice-Admiral’s approval, he’d seen himself as forming in the same mould. The mould didn’t fit, and never would.
“It surprises me,” mused Langhorne, turning his back to the bulwark and resting his long arms out along its top, “that he should go walking alone in these islands, without attendants. He must know the natives hate him for what he did here only five years back. If I were he, I’d take a company of soldiers at my heels!”
“He sacked the place.” Gawdy shrugged. “They fear him, more than hate—”
“Both, and there’s little difference. But he’d been on the second voyage to Virginia, in the New World. Placed men there to build a settlement, the year before, with Lane as Governor – as you’ll recall? His second voyage was to their relief, with stores. But the settlers had come to grief and bloodshed with the Indians, and when Sir Richard’s squadron dropped anchors at Roanoke there were no settlers there to greet him. That’d be bad enough – but it was Francis Drake who’d embarked them! So it’s not surprising his temper had not much cooled when he touched here in the Azores on his way back to England; and these people suffered for it!”
Gawdy stared at him coldly. “The Spaniards were here in occupation, were they not? And England at war with Spain? Is it necessary for Sir Richard to be out of sorts, do you suggest, before he performs his duty?”
“Oh, I’ll agree – no need for excuses! Yet – they call him devil, hereabouts; or rather, the Devil’s kin.”
“But they’re savages, no better than the Indians you spoke of! How do they live, what do they do? Not a good alehouse in twenty leagues; they’re Papists to a man and they’d sell any one of us to the Inquisition for the price of a loaf of bread!”
“But speaking of excuses – as we were—” said Langhorne, after a pause, “there’s a story I can tell you that’s another priceless feather in Sir Richard’s hat. Or have you heard it – how he took the Santa Maria?”
Gawdy shook his head, and Langhorne smiled, glad of the chance to tell it. “It was on his return from that first voyage to Virginia – in 1585. You know he led that venture, and that it was in fact his cousin’s, I mean Sir Walter Ralegh’s, and Ralegh who gave Sir Richard the command. Well, he’d left his colony on Roanoke Island, and started homeward. But he – in the Tiger, of 140 tons – was separated by foul weather from the others of his squadron, the Lion, the Elizabeth and others, and came up astern of the galleon Santa Maria, which had also been separated, from some flota bound for Spain out of San Domingo. And when the Spaniards see Sir Richard’s ship, they regard him as one of their long-lost friends, and they shorten sail for him to come up closer. When the Tiger draws near, the Spaniard fires a gun to greet her!”
Langhorne chuckled; then he went on, “Taking the salute in good spirit, Sir Richard orders his Master to turn the ship athwart the wind, presenting her length to the Spaniards, and he gives ’em his answer in a full broadside that brings down yards and cordage and kills half a dozen of the men on her decks. She tries to run, but he’s crippled her, and she heaves-to instead. Now Sir Richard decides to board, but in the still unruly sea his Master is unwilling to lay Tiger alongside. And she has no long-boat, since it was left to be used by the men on Roanoke; all they have is a weak, crude thing made hurriedly out of planks. Well, Sir Richard being the man he is – and God bless him! – takes men with him in this cockle-shell, and they approach the Spaniard, and the boat – if it can be called a boat – smashes into pieces the moment it touches the Santa Maria’s side; so that he and his followers leap aboard her wet to their skins and lucky to have not drowned!”
Both men laughed, and Gawdy asked, “He brought her home?”
“Ay. Stayed in her himself, and took her into Plymouth, passing through an even worse storm on the way and losing the Tiger, which put into Falmouth knowing nothing of their Commander’s fate. But d’you see, England was not at war with Spain, and Sir Richard was called to account for this prize and the prisoners in her. Well, the words he wrote were these, or near enough, as I recall them: ‘On my way homewards I was encountered by a Spanish ship, which assaulting me and offering me violence, thank God, with safety of myself and all my company, after some fight I overcame and brought to England with me; her lading is such and such…’”
Grinning, Langhorne asked the younger man, “D’you think Gawdy, we’ll be assaulted, please God, by some predatory treasure ships?”
* * *
Now half-way up the long, steep rise he paused and looked back, his line of sight passing above the tents where in the last hour he’d inspected the sick and discussed matters affecting them with the ships’ doctors – chirurgeons – and resting on the green and white upperworks of Revenge where she lay close inshore, from this viewpoint just to the left and closer in by a cable’s length than the others of the squadron. She was the only one with that green paint on her; the others were chequered black and white, except for Vavasour’s ship, the Foresight of 300 tons, which had light-blue instead of the black or green. Farthest to the right were the six victuallers, and with them the barque Ralegh; then, spread in a neat line and riding with their bows to their cables and to the east wind, like hounds straining at their leashes, so that from here they were in profile, was Lord Thomas Howard’s Defiance, Captain Fenner’s Lion, the Bonaventure under Captain Cross; these were all galleons of about 500 tons. Then came Foresight, and at the end of the line Captain Duffield’s little Crane, of only 250 tons.
He looked at Revenge again. Figures which from here looked as small as puppets were at work around her mainmast; they’d lowered the yard almost to the deck and unlashed the mainsail, and Grenville could guess more than see that they were engaged in securing a bonnet to the foot of the course. Well, this wind was light enough; if news came suddenly of the flota they’d need that full spread of canvas, they’d need every square foot of it that could be mustered.
Pennyfeather knew his business, and did his job without having to be told or urged. No doubt, thought Grenville sombrely, he trades on that, on his own value, drawing courage from it for those sly, two-edged remarks…
But Revenge was in any case the best ship, for sailing qualities, in all Her Majesty’s fleet. Of 500 tons burden, she was classed as a ship “of the middle sort”, and being nearly one hundred feet long and thirty-two in the beam she was of true galleon proportions. She lay snug and low in the water with a depth-in-hold (from main-beam to keelson) of seventeen feet. She was three-masted, and fully rigged carried only six sails (mainsail, main-topsail, fore-sail and fore-topsail, mizen and spritsail) lacking the topgallants with which some newer and refitted vessels were now provided.
Her masts and yards weighed 17 tons and 7 hundredweight, and the guns of her main armament, all below decks and in two tiers, 47 tons.
There were 34 of these guns: 2 demi-cannon, 4 cannon-periers, 10 culverins, 6 demi-culverins, 10 sakers and 2 falcons; and in recent years she had already used them well, and to the Spaniards’ cost.
She’d been built at Deptford by Sir John Hawkins (Revenge was the prototype, now, for newer galleons) and launched there in 1577. Her career had been marked at intervals by mishaps and near-disasters; in 1586 she grounded at Plymouth, and before that came near to wrecking on the Irish coast, and there’d been other accidents. But she’d carried Francis Drake’s flag against the Armada in 1588, and taken there her share of honours. (She’d been first engaged with Don Juan Martinez de Recalde’s galleon Santa Anna; and later the vast Nuestra Señora del Rosario, carrying Don Pedro de Valdes who was the Commander of the Andalusian squadron, had struck to her. Then after the battle off the Isle of Wight and the fireship skirmish off Calais, it was Revenge who’d led the chase northwards, herself engaging the Duke of Sidonia in his towering flagship the San Martin.)
More lately she’d carried Drake on his expedition to Lisbon, and though the expedition had failed the Spaniards had felt her broadsides in Corunna, which Drake had first, and unwisely, attacked. On the way back to England she’d sprung a leak, and come near to drowning him!
But Drake had no command now, no deck beneath his feet. He had reached heights of success and fame too dizzy to allow for failure, and the Queen – or the Lord Admiral; but it came to the same thing – was permitting him to rest ashore in his splendid house, Buckland Abbey, near Plymouth.
* * *
Grenville turned from the prospect of the squadron and the sea, and climbed higher, towards a low wall of turf, grassed over, where he had often sat before.
Buckland, he thought. Well, Drake has my house – I have his ship!
Buckland Abbey had been bought by the old Sir Richard, this Grenville’s grandfather, who had been Marshal of Calais and from whom this present Sir Richard had inherited – his father, Roger Grenville, having drowned at Spithead when the Mary Rose, of which he was Captain, turned over and sank there in 1545. This Sir Richard, now Vice-Admiral, had been three years old when his father drowned. But in manhood he had reconstructed Buckland, making it not only habitable but a place to be proud of and to love, and indeed he had loved it as well as he did his houses at Bideford and Stowe. In that great abbey he’d laid the plans, between 1570 and 1574, for a projected voyage to the South Sea, to discover Terra Australis, to circumnavigate the globe. But Her Majesty withheld the letters patent; he must first perform certain service for the Earl of Essex, in Ireland; and when that was done, a year later, for fear of offending Philip of Spain the Queen forbade his going. So he sold his ships – all but the Castle of Comfort, for which he had some private uses in the Channel – and three years later Francis Drake was permitted to embark on a voyage with the selfsame plan and object, only with the difference that by now the Queen did not care how deeply Philip might be hurt, so that Drake’s was a voyage of plunder as well as of exploration. He came back the nation’s hero and the Queen’s favourite, and a rich man too, and after Grenville had sold Buckland to two intermediaries he learned that in fact he’d sold to Francis Drake, who had made his voyage, and a fortune, and glory – even history – with it…
