Free Dead Reckoning by Parkinson C. Northcote Page A

with the aid of a supply ship but a privateer could rely on no such system. The Subtile had sailed from Mauritius, but could not possibly have refitted there, or anywhere so distant, between October 28th and January 21st. That period represented, nevertheless, a break in her activities. In theory, Chatelard might have been merely unlucky during those weeks. But Delancey thought that unlikely. It wasfar more probable that he had withdrawn then from the trade routes in order to refit at some chosen port of call. How long would such a refit take? Pierre Chatelard was, he remembered, a man of the old regime who had been at sea before the revolution. He would almost certainly choose to be in port for Christmas with sucking pig as the chief item on the menu. Allowing time for the seasonal festivities he would want a month ashore, roughly the month of December. His chosen port must therefore be within three weeks’ sail of the Sandheads and at no greater distance from Pulo, Pangkor. The distance might be something over two thousand miles. It could not be in the Andamans or Nicobars. He doubted whether he could use a harbour in Sumatra without the fact being known in Penang, and the same argument applied almost equally to Java. The Subtile, he concluded, must have a secret base in Bali, Lombok, or Timor. But Timor, come to think of it, was too distant . . . His thoughts turned to Borneo, to a thousand miles of unexplored and imperfectly charted coastline. But much of this, he argued, would be too far away. The ideal base would be somewhere, surely, between Cape Datoe and Cape Sambar, somewhere more or less equidistant from the Straits of Malacca and Sunda. To search that area would be to cover six hundred miles of coastline with little or no help from the primitive inhabitants. Before attempting such a search he would need better information than he now possessed.
    Delancey thought now, as he paced the deck, of Chatelard’s system of intelligence. Suppose he had spies ashore at Bassein, Penang, Malacca, and Palembang, how could they communicate quickly enough with their employer? Take the case of an opium ship, laden with rice, wheat, piece goods, and specie (in addition to the drug). She would sail from Calcutta in January orthereabouts and call at all the major ports right down to the Lingga Archipelago, collecting tin, pepper, rattan, wax, and betel-nut before going on, eventually, to China. If the Subtile had a rendevous near Lingga, how could an agent at Malacca ensure that his information would arrive in time? In point of fact the only opium ship taken by the Subtile had been intercepted off the Sandheads, in the approaches to Calcutta, but what about the Macaulay, taken off Cape Rachado? Could news of her coming have been sent from Penang? It was true, of course, that an opium ship would lose time in discharging and shipping cargo but the boat which conveyed the message might equally lose time in finding the privateer. Was there a native boat suitable for the purpose? He decided at this point to take Mather into his confidence. After all, if he himself were to go down with fever, it would be Mather’s task to destroy the Subtile. So Mather needed to know all that his captain had been told or had guessed. Nor was Mather unhelpful when consulted.
    â€œI should not have thought that the ordinary native boats were built for speed. I suspect that the bamboo slats in the sails of the Chinese craft give them some capability of working to windward. Sampans are slow, I should say, and the Malay prahus no better. But there was something I heard recently which might have a bearing on this problem. A lieutenant in the Seahorse had been ashore somewhere in the Riau Strait—maybe Pulo Bintan or thereabouts—and visited a Malay village where the men raced model boats against each other, betting on the result.”
    â€œI never heard of that. But why is this relevant?”
    â€œWell, sir, the boats were perhaps two