“All’s in order, sir,” Westcott crisply reported, raising one hand to knuckle his cocked hat in salute. “Hands are ready for ‘Stations To Weigh’ and make sail.”

“Hands to the capstans, then, Mister Westcott,” Lewrie ordered.

“Bosun!” Westcott bellowed. “Pipe hands to weigh anchors!”

“And God help us all,” Lt. Westcott muttered to himself.

Even with the best will in the world, getting a ship under way took time; time to nip a messenger line to the thigh-thick anchor cable, wrap the messenger round the capstan, place sailors round it to breast to the capstan bars, and haul in the heavy cable, with more hands to lead the in-board end of the cable down below to the tiers where it would be stowed, where it could drip seawater and spread its accumulated mud and gritty bottom sand, and reek of dead fish and tidal flat miasma. The ship would be hauled in to “short stays”, increasing the angle of the cable through the hawsehole, where the strain would be heaviest, and the hands had to dig their toes in and grunt the vessel the last few yards ’til the cable was “up and down”. Then came the order for the “heavy haul” to break the anchor’s flukes, and its weight, free of the bottom. Up it would come, at last, streaming muck, to be “fished” round a fluke or cross-bar to draw the anchor horizontal, so it could be “rung up” and “catted” to the stout out-jutting timber of the cat-head, and the now-empty hawseholes be fitted with “bucklers” to plug the possible in-rush of seawater in heavy seas.

As the cable came “up and down”, more sailors, young and spry topmen, would be piped aloft to make sail, to scramble up the shrouds and rat-lines of each mast to the top platforms and beyond to the cross-trees where they would trice up and lay out along the yards, balancing on the precarious, swaying foot-ropes with their arms locked over the yards, where they would remove the harbour gaskets and let the canvas fall. Yards were hoisted off their rests while the topmen were aloft, clews hauled to draw down the bottoms of the sails, and even more men on deck manned the yard braces to angle them to the wind.

In all, it took the better part of an hour for Reliant to make sail and begin to ghost across the waters of Nassau Harbour, heading for the entrance channel, with the three smaller warships following in her scant wake.

As the sheets, halliards, jeers, and braces were belayed, then stowed in loops over the pin-rails or fife rails, or coiled on the sail-tending gang-ways, Marine Lieutenant Simcock called for the ship’s musicians, his fifer and drummer and a pair of fiddlers, to hoist the men a tune. He did not call for his favourite, “The Bowld Soldier Boy,” which accompanied the rum cask on deck when “Clear Decks And Up Spirits” was piped, but “Spanish Ladies”, and he requested a rousing lilt.

To watchers ashore who had not yet fled inland or to “Overhill” behind the town, to the soldiers and gunners who stood their posts upon Fort Fincastle’s ramparts, their little squadron made a brave but desperate show. Fresh and bright Union flags fluttered in the wind from every stern gaff or spanker, and larger ones flew from the foremast trucks of the smaller warships, and from Reliant’s main mast tip. The long red-white-blue commissioning pendants stood out like slowly curling snakes.

The thin, bracing tune reached shore, almost lost in the rustle of sails, and trees along Bay Street. A private gunner who served one of the heavy 32-pounders in a lower embrasure of the fort put his head out the stone port to cock an ear, and savour a faint snatch of cooling breeze. “Gawd ’elp ’em, Corp,” he said to his gun captain.

“Aye, them poor bastards ain’t got a ’ope in ’Ell,” the Corporal sadly agreed, and spat tobacco juice into the swab-water tub.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

LEWRIE AND THE HOGSHEADS. Copyright © 2012 by Dewey Lambdin. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

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Cover painting: Battle of the Nile, 1st August 1798 at 10 pm, 1834 (oil on panel), by Thomas Luny (1759-1837) / Private Collection / Photo © Bonhams, London, UK / The Bridgeman Art Library

e-ISBN 978-1-4668-3047-9

First Edition: January 2013