The Heir Who Wouldn’t Drown
Copyright© 2026 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 15: A Song for the Dead
“Quick! Anyone still alive, get up! Reassign the rigging hands. Go aloft! It’s a Force 7 wind. We have to reef the sails!”
“Haul all the braces tight! Swing the square sails fore-and-aft!”
“Helmsman! Is the helmsman still alive? Sail close-hauled on the port tack. Three compass points east of northeast. Head into the wind! That warship’s carrying nothing but big square sails. She’ll never catch us!”
“...”
With no way of knowing how much damage the warship had suffered, the crew of the Maneater Shark did everything they could to put more sea between them.
The pirates had survived, but there was no time to rest. After hastily bandaging their wounds, they went straight to work under the captain and pirate officers. With more than half the crew lost, every task was a struggle. Only through tremendous effort did they manage to coax the Maneater Shark northeast, inching into the howling wind.
A sailing ship might look as though it simply went wherever the wind blew it, but it could, in fact, sail against the wind.
Put simply, it used the Bernoulli effect, just as an airplane did. Air flowing over a sail’s winglike curved surface produced a forward and upward pull. That difference in pressure was what drove the hull forward.
How efficiently a ship could sail into the wind depended on its sail plan. Square sails caught more wind and held every advantage downwind. Upwind, however, they were thoroughly outclassed by fore-and-aft sails.
If the wind blew from due north, for example, a fore-and-aft-rigged vessel could sail as close as thirty to forty degrees east or west of north. Sailing as close to the wind as possible was called sailing close-hauled.
With the wind coming over her port side, the Maneater Shark’s present course could be described more precisely as sailing close-hauled on the port tack.
A ship could sail close-hauled on one side of the wind, then switch to the other. Repeating that zigzag maneuver, beating to windward, allowed it to make progress against the wind.
Fore-and-aft-rigged vessels could sail within thirty to forty degrees of the wind on either side. A purely square-rigged warship, by contrast, could manage only sixty-seven degrees.
The crucial limitation was that the rigging supporting the masts obstructed the square-sail yards as they turned. They could swing only a little more than fifty degrees to either side. As a result, the warship’s course had to remain more than sixty degrees off the wind.
Anyone who understood the basics of right triangles could see the enormous difference in forward progress between zigzagging at thirty degrees and doing so at sixty.
Had the Maneater Shark tried sailing into the wind at the start of the chase, the enemy could have used its downwind advantage to intercept and destroy her with ease. Now, however, their relative positions had reversed. If they could open a gap in this Force 7 wind, the cruising warship Severe would never catch their fore-and-aft sails.
Drawing on knowledge from his previous life, Julian actually knew an even better design: a brigantine-rigged hybrid. Combining the strengths of square and fore-and-aft sails, it represented the pinnacle of small pirate vessels.
He had no intention of offering that conversion plan yet, though.
Not unless ... the Maneater Shark first belonged to House Ravenshaw!
Only when the naval ensigns vanished behind the towering waves did the pirates finally breathe freely. After a reversal that had defied one impossibility after another, many survivors still felt as though they were dreaming.
“We actually made it?!”
“Tell the others at the pirate port about this, and they’ll swear we’re making it up. Ha ha ha...”
“The sea watches over us.”
Of course, everyone knew who deserved most of the credit.
They had not understood his final intervention to stop the enemy from raising its flag, but they had seen everything else: modifying the lifting sail, stopping the loose iron cannon as it rolled across the deck, saving so many lives with his superb swordsmanship, accurately predicting the change in weather...
And dropping those incendiary bottles onto the warship with such precision.
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