Free Reefs and Shoals by Dewey Lambdin

the Nor’east came at last, and she hoisted sail and raised her anchors, severing her last, slightest connexion to England, and pounded out into the riotous Chops of the Channel.
    The first day and night, she could bowl along under reduced sail, pushed by the forceful following winds. Her top-hamper, all her t’gallants and royals—masts, sails, yards, and stays—had been brought down and stowed alongside the spare ones even before she left harbour, in expectation of storm conditions that might prevail right across the entire Atlantic.
    The second day at sea, the winds blew just as strongly, shifting more Easterly, allowing a slanting course closer to the Lizard and Land’s End than the French side of the Channel, and Cape Ushant, letting them stand out further to the West with the winds fine on the starboard quarter, with the frigate booming and thudding through the heaving, churning waves.
    By the third dawn, though, the fickle winds changed direction, howling an Arctic blast down upon them from the Nor’west, pushing the seas slamming against Reliant ’s starboard sides, starting a sickening, wallowing heave and roll that had even the saltiest hands gagging at the lee rails. It was the roughest sort of beam-sea, and maintaining a beam reach required hands aloft to take reefs in the courses and tops’ls, reduce the spanker, and take in upper stays’ls completely. The only good thing that could be said for that day was that Reliant could still steer roughly West, gaining even more of an offing from the dangerous lee shoal of the French Bay of Biscay coast. Lewrie could turn into his swaying bed-cot that night a bit before midnight cautiously satisfied that they were making decent progress West’rd.
    When he rolled out at 4 A.M. on the fourth day, though, his hopes were dashed, for the winds had veered ahead into West by North, half North, and Lewrie had to lay his ship onto a close-hauled “beat to weather”, steering no closer to the wind than Sou’west by South, heeled hard over onto her larboard “shoulder” with the bows rising and plunging and shipping great bursts and avalanches of cold white water over the forecastle to swirl and pool and slosh from bow to stern almost knee-deep, before gurgling and gushing out the lee scrappers, and every seam in the deck planking, no matter how firmly packed with tarred oakum, then paid over with more tar with iron loggerheads, dripped chill misery onto the off-watch hands on the mess-decks.
    *   *   *
     
    “One would think that some damned fool was whistling,” Mister Caldwell, the Sailing Master, gruffly muttered as he peered at their pencilled-in track in the chart-space in Lewrie’s cabins. “Or, someone’s snuck a woman aboard.”
    The Westerly winds had churned up the sea nigh to a slow boil, with vast grey-green rollers nearly as tall as the main course yard, a sickly snot-green sea that shed stinging blizzards of spray pellets from every wavecrest, even foamy dollops that tumbled and flew from wave to wave like fleeing rabbits. The smell of fresh fish was prominent, the reek that came from storm-wrack, as if the sea below them was stirred right to the bottom.
    “Bosun Sprague didn’t sneak his wife aboard, did he?” Lieutenant Westcott asked, striving for amusement, though his lean, harsh face and four days of stubble showed nought but grimness and a lack of real sleep; especially so in the eerie, swaying glare of the overhead lanthorn which cast long shadows over the chart.
    “I have it on good authority that the official Mistress Sprague resides in Chatham … and the Bosun can’t abide the harpy baggage,” Caldwell told Westcott with a nasty cackle. “So, whoever that doxy was he had aboard as his ‘wife’ in Portsmouth, she was young enough to be one of his daughters.”
    “Mistress Sprague’s presented the Bosun with nothing but girl children, Mister Westcott,” Lewrie stuck in. “Half a dozen now, or so I heard. No wonder he