H.M.S. COCKEREL - Dewey Lambdin

The beaches they saw when close inshore on patrol were pebbly, rock strewn, with only a thin rime of sand beach, and many anchorages were treacherous, rocky-bottom holding grounds-or the worst sort of semi-liquid mud that swallowed anchors, but gave no secure purchase to the flukes.

And there were the dread Levanters-brisk easterlies arising off Turkey, that could roar down in a twinkling with no high-piled bit of storm-cloud warning. At least the Siroccos out of Moorish Africa down south, which could arise just as quickly, were prefaced by bluffs of hazy, sand-coloured cloud fronts, which appeared as substantial as an arid landfall's mountains.

* * *

Positively frigid, not cool, was the most apt word for the ship's mood, though. Following the crew's brief moment of rebellion, and Captain Braxton's return from the flagship with his face suffused as a strangled bullock, floggings had abated, though not ended. Some men still had to go to the gratings for real, not imagined, offences. When they did go, their allotted number of lashes still remained high. But Lieutenant Braxton walked smaller, and morosely bitter, about the other commission and warrant officers, no longer the raging pit bull. Neither did the younger Braxton midshipmen tear through the ship, cackling with glee in their hunt for victims, though victims they still discovered, among the foolhardy and the stupid.

What was most surprising to all was the sea change in Captain Braxton. He was rarely seen on deck, and kept to his great-cabins for the most part. Most mystifyingly, those abundant occasions which had summoned him forth in the past, fretful to supervise the least evolution, looming ominously over junior officers and hands alike until they were done to his satisfaction-those he now waved off, and left to his subordinates, unless it truly was serious enough to endanger the ship.

When Lewrie reported to him now, Captain Braxton seemed careworn and spent, as if command of a King's Ship was something with which he could no longer be bothered. Their relationship, never of the best, had degenerated to a stiff, icily formal and punctilious politeness. A rigid nicety between two men of the merest acquaintance, both with the manners of lords, an observer unfamiliar with the situation might have concluded. Yet Lewrie could sometimes espy the quick-darting resentment of old in his glare, hear the tiniest rasp of abhorrence in the man's tone-as if Captain Braxton were biding his time, waiting for some unguarded moment when he could drop his sham of formal politeness, and get his own back.

And the hands… well, they were as efficient as ever they had been, on their best days, that is. They still performed their labours in silence. Yet, in the second dogs before sunset, on the mess deck, some now dared to jape and raise their voices to a somewhat normal level. Lewrie was pleasantly surprised, now and then, to hear the scrape of a fiddle, the peeping of a flageolet, a chorus of rough male voices harmonising over an old song, or a single shaky tenor lilting rhapsodic. Below decks- never on the weather-deck-Cockerel sometimes softly trembled to the stamp of bare, horny feet, as old hands taught new hands the way to do a true tar's hornpipe.

Each Sunday after divisions inspections and a perfunctory Divine Service, there was now-if only because the flagship decreed it-a "Make and Mend" in the day watches (weather and duties permitting) and once a month in the dreary three months which had followed, there had been ordained a "Rope-Yarn Sunday," a whole day in which the crew caulked or yarned, slept or chatted, repaired clothing and hammocks, carved snuff boxes and brooches out of dried chunks of salt meat (which took a high gloss and lasted long as most woods!), made ship models, or intricately woven twine articles-coin purses, belts and bracelets, brooches, rings and knife lanyards. With such until-then-unknown ease, they should have seemed a happier lot, now they were treated like an experienced and trusted ship's company. But they were not. Their grudge against the Navy, and the captain, was by then too deep. The damage done could not be undone in three months, and their resentment would continue to fester. They would serve the ship, yes… but nothing could make them glad about it.

As first lieutenant, Alan was alarmed by their continuing bad mood, almost as much as he had been by their earlier, bitter silence. A crew could be cowed into trembling obedience for only so long before an explosion occurred; they had proved that! Yet a crew allowed too much indiscipline by a slack captain was just as bad, and would result in much the same sort of explosion, if they thought they could get away with anything that entered their heads. Look at Bligh after his long idle months at anchor at Otaheiti, Lewrie thought!

Whatever had transpired aboard Windsor Castle, whatever reason for Captain Braxton's indifference, and the sudden abatement of his too-harsh taut-handedness, this particular stewpot, lidded too long, had been relieved much too quickly. It had not boiled over, thanks be to God… but it still could.

For Braxton's recent aloofness from the ship's company, and the seeming disdain he now had for how his juniors ran Cockerel, was sign to the crew that they had won some sort of victory over him. Let them think they had the upper hand, even for a moment, and they would lose respect for all authority.

Even a junior such as Lewrie knew that a man could not command a King's Ship inconsistently, blowing cool one day and hot the next, being harsh and tyrannical one moment and gentle and considerate as a mother with her babe another day. It sowed confusion and disrespect. At the moment, though, Cockerel's captain pretended to command, and the crew pretended to obey him.

Leaving Lewrie and the rest in a worse predicament as the only enforcers of authority, the ones who were forced to use the lash and restrictions to prevent the men from believing that their lot could be changed.

Sadly, Alan concluded that the tiny, too-clever "mutiny-ette" should have been the entire raucous show, complete with brass bands and fireworks, a real cutlass-waving rebellion. Or it should never have happened at all. At least, the first instance would have been put down from without, Braxton court-martialed and found responsible, and no matter the blight on one's career, it would have been over and done with, and he would be in another ship, the hands parcelled out-those not hung in tar and chains from Gibraltar gibbets until their bones fell apart-to other ships as well, where they would find new captains who weren't brutes, and would finally discover what pleasure it could be to serve under someone firm, but fair.

In the second instance, though, there had been no way to avoid it happening, not with-

"Oh, the Devil with it," Lewrie muttered sadly, taking stock of the world, far aft by the taffrails once again. "Thankee, Jesus! We need a little help here. 'Cause just when I think it can't get any darker, here we are… in the darkest!"

Chapter 2

"Penny postman," Captain Braxton sneered in disgust once he had clambered back aboard. He bore more packets than those he'd taken with him when he'd departed to die summons of "Captain Repair on Board" from H.M.S. Victory. "Here, Mister Lewrie, these, I'm told, will come in handy for cooperation with our new… allies. See the officers of the watch and the midshipmen have 'em learned, quickly."

"Our new allies, sir?" Lewrie inquired.

"Signal books," Braxton harumphed sourly, "so we may talk with the Goddamned Dons!"

"We're allies with Spain… I see, sir," Lewrie replied lev-elly, though it was hellish hard to fathom how that had come about. After so many years of war, mistrust, condemning each other as either heretics to Catholicism or brisket-beating papist

devils.

For all we hate 'em, since Drake and Raleigh's days? The Armada and all, Lewrie thought? Englishmen burned at the stake, tortured by the Inquisition, hung as pirates… well, some of 'em were pirates, o' course…

"Is the ship ready in all respects for sea, Mister Lewrie?"

"Aye, sir," he was relieved to be able to announce.

"Then we shall weigh at once," Braxton ordained. "We're bound to Naples. Despatches for the British ambassador. Crack on all sail once round Europa Point, commensurate with the weather. Inform Mister Dimmock he is to plot us the most direct course, twixt Corsica and Sardinia."

"Aye, aye, sir! Bosun! Pipe 'All Hands'! Stations for weighing anchor and getting underway!"

And, he thought sadly, so much for even finding if we've any mail from home, or getting a chance to explore fabled Gibraltar!

* * *

It was a rough passage. Days of the Mediterranean 's usual fluky winds, glowering skies, wind and rain, at least once or twice a day, between tantalising glimmers of sunlight. Butting into Levanters with green seas breaking over their frigate's beakhead and forecastle, and seething in foaming off-white sheets of water on the gangways and gun deck, soaking through the planking joins, soaking through the gaps in pounded oakum insulation and tarred seams, to drizzle clammy and cold on swaying hammocked off-watch sleepers, or the mess tables when men fed. Even the wardroom was not spared. Everyone was chilled and miserable, with no chance to dry out bedding or a change of clothing from one watch to the next. And this was only late June!

Occasionally, though, the winds veered more abeam, the skies cleared somewhat, and the dank below-decks and upper works steamed in sunshine, and Cockerel laid so thick a mist about her from drying timbers that she fumed as if on fire. Then she could crack on eastward, her shoulder to the sea, and lope like the lean ocean greyhound that she was across what the classic poets called "a wine-dark sea," power and wind humming in the rigging, her quick-work hissing and drumming as she ploughed impatiently over wavecrests, furrowing ocean to a wide frothing swath on either beam.

That was the kind of sailing that sometimes made it all worthwhile, that furious bustling, that paean to Neptune singing aloft and the dun sails stretched taut as drumheads, perfectly angled-for a time, only a time on any wind and sea-a ship making the best of her way, on her best point of sail, quick-stirring and alive.

Welcoming, warmer (well, to be frank, downright hottish) was the Bay of Naples, where they dropped anchor a week later, in the lee, so to speak, of that fuming ogre of ill repute, Vesuvius, a stone-toss away from the ruins of ancient Roman Pompeii.

As something of a classical scholar in his pre-Navy days, at a myriad of schools (and were one exceeding charitable about those scholastic attainments, mind), Lewrie was entranced. Who'd have thought, he asked himself, that he would ever have a chance to actually see the places mentioned in his duL, bone-dry Latin recitations? That Roman imperial translations would ever be anything more than garbled verbs, incorrect genders and tenses… and canings on his bottom? Yet here he was… here it was, before his eyes, a city so Roman…! He half-expected it to be a phantasm, sort of like having an ancient statue in the entry hall become animate and begin carping about the temperature, it didn't seem real. All he had to do was wake, or blink…

Even before the best bower had been let go, and the kedge rowed out, even as they sailed into the Bay of Naples on a tops'l breeze, he thought the place magical, innately more inspiriting than any of the other places he'd seen so far in the Mediterranean. Anchored a bare quarter-mile offshore of the main harbour and the quays, Naples seemed to teem with an open, exuberantly cheerful, elbowing and dodging zest.