Free Reefs and Shoals by Dewey Lambdin Page B

no safe way to adjust the necessary tension of the mast shrouds unless the immense load was taken off them, even on good days. Their weather shrouds must become lee shrouds, if they wished to keep the masts standing.
    “Aye, sir,” Lt. Westcott regretfully agreed.
    “My compliments to Mister Merriman, Mister Grainger, and he’s to have ‘All Hands’ piped,” Lewrie ordered. “With your able assistance, of course, Mister Westcott … Mister Caldwell?”
    “Of course, sir.”
    “I’ll fetch your foul-weather rig, sir,” Pettus, his cabin steward, offered, staggering from one piece of furniture to the next, and looking a tad green. Lewrie looked aft into the gloom of his cabins. His cats, Toulon and Chalky, were curled up on his bed-cot’s coverlet, like two furry loaves of bread, bristled up and moaning in misery. To larboard, his young cabin servant, Jessop, was on his knees inside the quarter-gallery toilet, with only his shoes and shins showing, bent over the “seat of ease” and making offerings to Neptune; rather loudly.
    “Carry on, Jessop!” Lewrie called out.
    “Ah … aye, sir,” the lad muttered back, between gags.
    Once bundled into tarred canvas coat and hat, Lewrie staggered forward, steeling himself for a second or two before opening the door to the weather deck. When he did so, it was like barging out into utter chaos: the force and howl of the wind, the sudden chill of it, and the stinging volleys of sea spray that pinpricked his hands and face. Here, too, was the full sound of the storm, and the hiss and thunder of the waves, and the alarming groans of the hard-pressed masts, and the booming of the hull as the frigate fought the sea.
    Off-watch sailors were swarming up from the relative warmth and security of the gun deck where they berthed and messed, adding to the sense of confusion as Lewrie managed to clamber up to the quarterdeck.
    “Sorry about this, sir, but we must wear,” Lt. Merriman said, his mouth close to Lewrie’s ear.
    “Aye,” Lewrie shouted back. “If you think the weather shrouds will hold ’til we’ve got her round on larboard tack!”
    “I believe they will, sir,” Merriman hopefully replied.
    At present, their frigate laboured heavily, even though the mizen tops’l had been taken in, as had the main course. The fore course and fore and main tops’ls were close-reefed, and the jibs up forward had been replaced by the fore topmast stays’l. Above the quarterdeck, the spanker had been reduced, and the mizen stays’l had been rigged.
    Leave the tops’ls, for now, Lewrie speculated; they’re higher up than the wavetops, and can still catch wind. The fore course’ll get us round the quicker. Send up the main topmast stays’l, again? Hmm. Oh God, all these bloody years at sea, and I still feel like a total fraud!
    He’d not wished to go to sea and be all “tarry-handed”, but his father had seen to that, “crimping” him into the Navy at seventeen, and years behind his peers in experience—for God’s sake he could not even swim !—and even the ten-year-olds in his first mess had known bags more than he had, and his bottom had paid the price for not “knowing the ropes” from expasperated officers; and all his career he felt as if he had never quite caught up.
    There had been a series of small ships, where things were much simpler, where little was expected of a lowly Midshipman. Surely, he had had no business at all becoming old Lt. Lilycrop’s First Officer in the Shrike brig, where his first few months had been an embarassing pot-mess of ignorance and re-learning of his trade. There had been a whole year of shore idleness between the end of the American Revolution and his assignment aboard Telesto, and the jaunt to the Far East and China in ’84, and when he’d come back and gotten his first command, the little Alacrity, in ’86; just enough time to forget almost everything! By 1789, after paying Alacrity off, there had been years of bucolic