Chapter 17: Building a Warship

With the Wrong Place finally afloat again, we needed to get it out of the cofferdam and over to my new shipyard. First, though, while the pumps were still keeping the water as low as possible, I had some crews rake the bottom all over the inside of the cofferdam for anything they could find. I figured that the crew probably dropped anything in their hands as they tried to swim ashore, and we’d probably find enough weapons and armor to be worth the effort.

What I didn’t expect, although I would have if I’d thought about it, was more than twenty drowned pirates, still on the bottom where their armor and equipment had sunk them. That was gross. They’d been down there for about two months now and most soft tissues had been eaten by something.

Still, these were the successful wealthy pirates, the ones with metal armor and heavy purses. Between the bodies, the other things they raked up, and what was still on the ship, we got thirty or so sets of armor, almost a hundred swords and more than a hundred and fifty throwing axes. And more than 20 Conchs in assorted money. After all that time in the water everything except the coins needed repair, but, hey, I know someone who works at an armorer’s shop.

All together, the value of what we raked up from the mud more than paid me back for everything I had invested in the Place to date even before we went through the cargo. And I think that everyone in the town knew that I’d footed the bill for this all by myself. In fact, more than one drunk had helpfully told me that I was wasting my money trying to raise a sunken ship.

We also found two locked chests or strongboxes in the cabin. Both were pinned in place by wooden pegs that fit into holes in the deck. One was fairly light as if it might be empty, but the other one was too heavy for two men to lift. We could slide it, though, so we knew it wasn’t bolted to the deck. And we put it back where we found it, as the deck was sagging. We checked the hold, and there was a frame under where the chests were. That heavy one needed to stay where it was until we got it off the ship.

Anyway, as soon as the raking crews were done finding everything they could, we stopped the pumps and let the cofferdam fill up again. It took more than a day, we had done such a good job of plugging all the leaks.

As much as I wanted to take the Place to the town docks and unload it, I was afraid to take any chance of the temporary hull repairs getting ripped and having to start all over again. We couldn’t move the ship very far; it was a long skinny thing inside a circle that wasn’t much bigger. All we could really do was turn it until it pointed away from the town and moor the stern to the cofferdam nearest the docks.

We unloaded it across the cofferdam onto the two ferries while Erna pulled enough of the pilings to let us out. That was a good deal more complicated than driving them in had been. We talked it over for awhile. First, he had to make a pivot. That was just a big fat tree trunk with a groove on top and the root-ball still on the bottom acting like a foot so it wouldn’t sink into the muck too fast. Then, he had to wrap the piling coming out tightly enough to not slip. Last, he could lay a beam across the pivot and under the wrapping and use his driver to drive the free end of the beam down.

That drove the end under the wrapping up, and that piling soon came loose. Once he had a couple pilings out everything became a lot easier. It was more like pulling them out of a slot than out of a hole, because the piling beside it was already gone. A lot of the pilings simply came out by being pulled over on the free side.

Since we weren’t taking the ship out into the waves, we even rigged a net hanging from the yard to remove some of the ballast. After we re-mounted the yard just to be able to do it. Anything to make it lighter before we beached it. Besides, every little bit got those two holes that much farther out of the water. We didn’t pull much, though, as we couldn’t swing the net past the stern. All we could do was swing it over the side and that didn’t do us any good.

Much of the cargo was ruined by two months in the river. Still, some of it had value. If I didn’t need it someone would. We decided that the ship must have come from somewhere not known to the island, as we pulled out quite a few soggy bales of a cloth that they didn’t recognize, as well as about sixty smaller packages of something that might have been some kind of tea but they were all worthless now. Well, it was a bigger world than they knew about, right?

Frankly, almost none of it had any value. Much of the cloth was usable, but it was nowhere near as nice as it had been before soaking in fish-shit for two months. It was pretty soft, though, and it would be popular for underclothes.

By now, I had collected a growing group of men who were beginning to see that machines could be built for just about any purpose. They’d seen me build machines to throw rocks and arrows and tree-trunks. They’d seen Erna build machines to drive pilings down into the river. They’d seen me build huge pumps that used the river’s own current to pump a hundred-foot circle in the middle of the river down about eight feet. They’d seen Erna build machines to pull pilings back out again.

I asked a carpenter and a couple of sailors who wanted employment to see if they could make some kind of shallow tub, fill it with CLEAN water, not river water, and wash some of that cloth out until it didn’t stink. For that matter, I found the town’s herbalist, an older woman referred to as “ol’ widder Ellis” and asked about soap or detergents, anything to help clean with. “We got nuthin like that.”

Well, I didn’t know how to make soap, but I had a clue and that was a start. I told her that if you mixed ash from a fire with the grease from cooking meat, then you got something that helped clean things. It would also slowly burn your skin, so you could use it to bathe but you had to rinse it off when you were done. It should be sorta a thick liquid or a soft solid that could be pressed into cakes for storage or sale. I admitted that now she knew everything that I knew about it, and I’d help her with supplies if she wanted to try but beyond that she was on her own.

Getting back to the ship, any cask that was open was probably ruined for human use, although they could be cleaned and used for washing water or any kind of liquid or powder that had value but wasn’t edible. Soap? Once we got that straightened out, soap could be a big export product for Widemouth. That would make the town rich, at least until the secret got out and other people started making their own. Or the casks could even just be sealed back up empty, as they would make good floats if we needed some.

We did find quite a few sealed barrels that were still good. Some of them held water, which we just dumped. Those barrels could be rinsed out and refilled for drinking water during a voyage.

We found six barrels of a very drinkable ale, and once we recognized the markings we realized that several of the opened barrels had held the same thing but had apparently already been drunk empty. Did they come from a local source and the pirates had taken it as booty? Did the pirates themselves brew and jug it? Or were they part of the original cargo, taken with the cloth and the tea? One each went to Gerard’s tavern, Pertic’s tavern, and the town guard’s armory, with my compliments. The other three went to the shop for my private use. They were mine, right? Millie, Gina, Henry, and Jim all promised to help me drink them before they went bad.

I spent a little time talking to the pirates we had captured, many of whom had been on the ship when we sank it. The pirates had called it “Mary’s Ransom”. None of them knew anything about where the ship had originally come from, as they had captured it from another group of pirates. There was no way of knowing how far back that set of ‘begats’ went.

The ale, now, that came from Long Cut, one of the cities on the mainland. The city exported it, and the pirates tried to make a point of capturing a ship leaving that port at least once a year. They would transfer all the cargo to the pirate ship and release the ship and crew to go on, thanking them for their cooperation. The pirate ship would then take the place of the cargo ship, selling some in different ports before returning home with most of it.

And, where was home? Here, now, if the people would accept them. The pirate isles were many days’ sail to the west. If they had to row into the wind, it was many, many days. Only the officers knew how to find the islands and they were all dead. They were the rich bastards with armor and swords and five throwing axes, and they all drowned when the ship sank.

They knew a little about the other two ships. One had been left beached where the pirates had landed, with nothing but an anchor watch to keep anyone else off it. It didn’t have enough men to float it or sail it either. The one in the lead, the one we had damaged, had held the leader of the expedition.

He was accounted a noble among their people and that was his personal ship. He had probably taken his ship back to where the fourth one was, and either repaired his own for the trip or abandoned it and moved onto the fourth ship. Probably repair it, if he could, as losing three ships including his own would mean a huge loss of prestige; one that he probably would not survive. Coming back with no loot and only two ships would be bad enough; he would not be able to command another expedition until he had done something to regain his standing.

None of the prisoners wanted to be convicts, but they didn’t want to go back to the pirate isles, either. You weren’t counted as a man there until you had gone out on a raid and come back with loot. They were all on their first voyage, so there was nothing back home for them except ridicule. The reason they had all been able to swim to shore was that they were the men who had not yet been able to afford heavy armor and weapons. All the successful veterans had drowned.

Was there any chance that the pirates would come back with a larger fleet? How many ships did they have? They didn’t know how many ships the isles had, but in total it was probably around fifty or so. The pirates would not come back here; they would know that having held them off once we would be even more ready for them a second time, and they didn’t want to risk that many men again. The landing party had been the entire crew of the fourth ship, plus half of the crews from the other three ships. If only the leader’s ship and the anchor watch from the fourth ship had survived, they had lost more than 400 men attacking Widemouth.

The leader would probably be challenged to duels, one after another, by men who had lost brothers and fathers and sons. He was accounted a fierce and skilled fighter, but eventually even he would be slain. 400 men was a lot to lose when the Isles got nothing back from it. That would hurt them even more than losing the ships would, as they could always capture more ships.

In my mind, I doubled or tripled the number of ships they had available to them. Most would usually be out at sea and forgotten about. If they ever gathered, though, their combined fleet would probably be much larger than these men expected.

I did get the name of their leader. He was Lord Howard, Prince of the North Isle. I’d have to ask after him, the next time I ran into some pirates. And I thought about inviting the prisoners to join my crew, when I was ready to take the Wrong Place out to sea.

It would be a while before I trusted them, but they were skilled if inexperienced sailors, and they certainly knew the ship. Many navies on Earth had pressed landsmen from the nearest tavern to fill out their numbers, but they also had endless trouble because of it. I wanted to avoid that if I could.

Besides, I didn’t have England’s expert officer corps and Royal Marines to back me up. The only way I could do this was with volunteer crews. Pay them well and show them victories and they would stay loyal.

It took Erna’s people several days to make a large enough gap in the cofferdam to safely tow Wrong Place out of it and over to the shipyard. Whether we ever had to do this again or we found some other use for them, I paid Erna a quad each to pull the rest of the pilings all up and bring them to my shipyard. If nothing else they were fresh timbers, seasoning until they could be used on a ship.

I didn’t know squat about trees, but I assumed that they behaved the same way here as they did on Earth. On Earth, using ‘green’ or freshly-felled trees on a ship was deprecated, as the wood tended to rot very quickly in seawater. If you allowed the wood to ‘season’ or dry for a few seasons first, then it would last for years or decades in the water.

I had the lighter of the two strongboxes taken to the blacksmith to cut the lock off. As I expected, it was about half full of the bank’s standard ‘coins’. The Pinches, Quads, Shells, and Conchs were all clear plastic or glass disks with a little gold inside.

Well, the Pinches had a very little, maybe just a pinch, right? And the Quads looked like they had about four times as much as the Pinches, sure. The Shells had maybe four times as much as the Quads, yeah. The Conchs were fairly heavy. They had a lot of gold in them.

As near as I could tell, these coins were used all over the world. And none of them had been manufactured by any process available on Chaos. The whole banking system here was more of the Crossroads people working in the background. Anyway, I deposited another fourteen or so Conchs in the bank and had the empty strongbox put back on the ship. I was already showing a profit on this ship!

I left the heavy one on the ship until it had been pulled out of the water. It clearly had something else besides money in it. I didn’t want to take a chance on something going wrong and it getting lost, buried in the mud somewhere in the middle of the river. Besides, no one was going to sneak off in the middle of the night with THAT one.

When the day came to tow the Wrong Place to the yard for repairs and conversion to a warship, Millie and Gina insisted upon joining me on the ship. Millie’s reasoning was that there was no telling how long this would take, and she wasn’t going to let me sleep alone.

Gina was there because her aunt Millie was there. On the other hand, sometimes Gina flirted with me just a little, and Millie never called her on it. At least, in my hearing. I had no idea what they talked about when I was away, of course.

It was a boring trip. The ship was dead, just a thing to be towed around. The pull-out ways weren’t ready yet, so we got towed to my unfinished pier and tied up to some of the pilings. I had bought two small boats plus a larger one from the fishermen who helped raise the ship, so we weren’t stranded. We didn’t even have to go down to the road and wait for the ferry.

Okay, the next step was to get Erna to set several pilings on either side of the pull-out ways so that the ship could be moored between them, in line with the ways. If one of the patches failed and the ship sank again, it would be lined up correctly and all we would have to do is attach an anchor cable to it and drag it ashore. Meanwhile, I left an overnight crew of four men to take turns sleeping and watching the water level in the bilges. If the water starts rising, bail it out. If it rises too fast to bail, get on deck and bang on the drum. Don’t drown trying to save the ship.

Erna could get a few of the guide pilings I wanted driven the next day, since he was taking them out of the cofferdam and delivering them to the yard anyway for the pier and for seasoning. While he was doing that I had as much of the ballast as possible removed. Once the ship was moored beside the pier, we could use the net to get rid of the rest of the ballast and cargo, then dismantle the cargo net and yard again. With that done there was very little weight aloft and the ship was fairly stable. At least on the river, where there were no big waves.

As soon as Erna had two guide pilings installed on each side, one pair just offshore and the other about 50 feet out, I had the Place shifted to moor between them. Now, all I needed was to pull it ashore and that took either massive manpower, some draft horses, or a winch. Maybe all three.

For a temporary makeshift expedient winch, I hired the town’s carpenters to build a drum with beam slots around a tree that was roughly in the right place, in line with the ways and not too far away. I had some men cut the tree down about six feet up and then bark it, exposing the smooth wood underneath. Then we slathered the trunk with tallow to cut down on friction, and when we added the drum we could wind a long cable around it and turn it with beams that we stuck in the slots.