Chapter 14: Adventures in Salvage

There were always men who could be hired to do work, as long as someone was paying them. With Eric’s largess I had no problem with that. It took several days to completely unload the Gift, with everything valuable going to the town. They let me keep anything used on the ship itself like lines and equipment, but weapons and loot went away.

Speaking of which, the ship had a LOT of loot. The Captain’s cabin had several chests full of money and other valuables. The town council wanted that all for itself, but it was pointed out by many that the town council hadn’t done a damned thing to capture the ship.

The Commander had the Guard take charge of the loot, and he declared that all of the captured loot, from the ship as well as all the slain pirates, would be divided into three equal parts. One part would be given to the town council to be used to improve the town and its defenses. A very loudly unspoken aside to this was that any Council member who said “We can’t afford that” before it had all been spent would probably be hanging from the nearest tree before the echos had died out.

The other two parts would be shared out equally among everyone who had participated in the fighting. The Guard, the Militia, all the farmers who manned the walls, all the hunters who scouted and helped track down the fleeing pirates, all the sailors and fishermen who had helped build the engines and then crew them, even the men who had done nothing more than help capture the ship, all would get an equal share of the loot. All who had been wounded would get a double share, and the families of all those killed would get a triple share.

He wasn’t going to differentiate between man or woman, Guard or farmer, officer or spearman. If you risked your life to help defend the town, you deserved your share. On the other hand, he wasn’t going to list farmers who died out on their farms because they wouldn’t leave, or refugees who were killed on the road. Or council members who hid in their bedrooms.

It took a few days to come up with a list of everyone who deserved a share. I made sure that everyone who had helped build the engines and then man them was on the list. Of course there were a few people who tried to get on the list more than once, but once their attempt was made public they backed down. The list ended up with more than 400 men, women, and children on it.

Me, Millie, and Jim all got 23 Shells and 3 Pinches as our share. Henry got twice that, since he was wounded in the fight at the gate, almost a whole Conch. Gina was mad that she didn’t get anything, but she had stayed in the shop the whole time, waiting to see who came to rape her. Millie had been right beside me and Jim and Henry, holding a spear and trying to kill pirates so she earned it.

I bet the next time there was a general call-up EVERYONE would come! Fighting pirates was a lucrative business!

The Gift was a mess. I guess it wasn’t really any worse than the town was, but they didn’t have to live in squalor. Some parts were actually fairly clean, but most of the ship was, almost literally, a shithole. We emptied everything out except the stone ballast and scrubbed every surface. Well, the sailors and fishermen I’d hired did. Once the rest of the ship was clean, they did the same thing with the ballast and the lower hull, taking some out and moving the rest around to clean it.

Me and the officers from a couple of the boats were going over the rigging and various equipment to ensure that we knew what everything was for. We weren’t going to take it out to sea, though. First, we were going to use it to try to raise the ship we had sunk right in front of the docks.

The other men all had full-time jobs on the town’s boats and some of them had part-time jobs in the town’s new Artillery Company, but I thought of them as my staff. While we were cleaning out the Gift, we spent a couple evenings at Gerard’s place discussing how we could raise that ship. We weren’t sure we could, but if we could we’d have a ship we could repair and then put into service, we’d have whatever cargo hadn’t been ruined yet, and we didn’t talk about it but I could tell that they were also thinking about those four chests in the Gift’s cabin.

I’d started referring to the sunken ship as the “Wrong Place” as in it got sunk because it was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And, it was definitely in the wrong place now; it was a navigation hazard right in front of the docks. If the Wrong Place had four chests that held the same treasure as the Gift had, well, that would be over 300 Conchs divided among however few of us was in the salvage team.

The town council wasn’t going to get shit from the Wrong Place unless they paid for all the work. As it was, I was paying my staff for their time and effort, and I’d be hiring their boats and crews as well as others once we were ready to start.

Meanwhile, we started talking about how to do it. We could sink a series of pilings into the mud on either side of the wreck, then use them as mounting points for pulleys for cables going under the ship. If we could lift it at all, we could start taking it apart to reduce the weight. Mast, rigging, equipment, hatches, cargo, anything we could reach.

If we could get the hull to the surface, we could put temporary patches over the ruptures and start pumping the water out. The more water we got out, the lighter the hull would become, and eventually it would float on its own. It all sounded simple, but everyone at the table knew that each step would be miserable.

How would we get the cables under the hull? For that matter, could we even get cables large enough to lift it? Around here, the term ‘cable’ meant ‘really large rope’, and we’d have to steal all the anchor cables from every fishing boat to even try this. And, if we could come up with enough cable, could we pull those cables hard enough to lift a whole ship? That plan was too hard.

Alternately, we could drive enough pilings into the mud around it to make a complete cofferdam, then pump all the water out of THAT, or enough to get to the hull and patch it. Much simpler in theory, but even more work if it was even possible. Could wooden pilings handle the pressure? At least, the highest pressure would be at the bottom where the pilings were held in the mud. If nothing else, this method would be much safer with little chance of an accident killing anyone.

They left the council to me. I was in charge. They were only doing this as my employees whenever they weren’t out at sea fishing. And they needed to do that pretty often; with all the damage to the farms, the town needed the food. Fine. I had to go talk to the council anyway about how much the Pirate’s Gift was worth, and whether I should sell my half to the town or buy its share from them.

The Council didn’t really serve the town. They ran the town, yes, but they only served themselves as representatives of the richer families. There was a disconnect between their authority and their responsibility. They weren’t interested in using the money to hire workers to finish the town’s wall or moat, which would make the town safer for all who lived in it or were close enough to take refuge in time of need, or even to outfit the ship for trading to bring in profits.

Instead, they wanted to spend the money on things that made the town nicer, like buying flagstones from a town with a slate mine and paving the streets in front of their houses. That wouldn’t benefit anyone except the people who lived in those few houses. If I stayed around here, they were going to have to go.

I let them know that I wanted to talk to them about the ship, and accepted that I’d get some time at their next meeting in a couple of days. That was fine, they needed time to think about what they wanted and how they could best screw me over.

I prepared two sheets of parchment, with a message in each and a note “Question for the Council about the Captured Ship” and “Proposal for the Council” on the two. Inside, the first said “Half ownership of the captured ship will be awkward as the council will want some say in what the ship does, and will want half of the ship’s profits. How much is the ship worth? How much would it cost to buy the other half?”

The other one said “I am an inventor, sailor, and soldier. I am not a trader, and have no desire to run a trading ship. It is an honorable profession, but it is not for me. On the other hand, the town needs its own ships in order to grow as a port. I will sell my half to the town, for whatever price the council decided that the town’s half was worth.”

I also quietly passed the word to the Commander and the Captain of the Guard, as well as the militia’s officers and several of the assorted minor shopkeepers and boat captains that I thought might be honest, that I wanted my discussion with the Council to be witnessed in case there were questions about me or what I proposed, or what was said in the meetings.

Meanwhile, I kept paying the workers who were unloading, cleaning, and reloading the ship out of my own pocket. And thinking about the Wrong Place. My advisors were pretty sure that we would not be able to raise the wreck with the resources at hand by lifting it. We could build rafts and floats, and we could hire strong backs, but we would not be able to make or get the kind of cables we would need. The ship itself, with its load of stone ballast, would be too heavy for any cables we could use.

We would have to use a cofferdam, which would be a lot of work but it was all unskilled labor and with the end of the pirate threat there was plenty of that available. The idea seemed sound to them. One of the fishing-boat captains offered to put together a pile-driving rig and drive as many piles as I wanted for a Shell each.

I had, well, 100 Conchs in the bank by 50 Shells per Conch, so... 5000 Shells? How many logs would it take? I hedged. “Half a Shell. Two Quads per pile.” Surely it would take less than a thousand piles to make a temporary cofferdam!

He accepted that, and we had a deal. I pointed out that this was a fixed price. He had to make his rig, procure his logs, and pay his workers from that Shell. “Done, Lord Jason! Where do you want them?”

Someone had come up with a slate that could be drawn on with charcoal, for our discussions. I wiped it clear, then drew an outline of the ship on it and then a dotted line around the ship. “I want a complete circle, or as close as you can get to a circle. Start by driving logs with the big end down, separated by about half of their width. Sure, the water will flow between them. Then, when you have completed the circle, drive logs up against them but on the outside of the circle, and do these with the small end down.”

The next part was show & tell. I had whittled a group of sticks into a cone shape. Not much, but they were smaller at one end and larger at the other end, and they were fairly smooth and straight. I used them to illustrate what I meant.

“Here, each of you hold one of these upright. Not quite against each other, but close. That is the original circle of logs with the big end down. Now, we go back and drive more logs with the small end down, up against them. If you do it right, the water itself will press the new ones up against the original logs, and it should seal well enough for our needs. Does this make sense now?”