Chapter 18: Sea Trials

Bridgetown was said to have a shipyard, which told me that they had all the skills and materials needed to build and outfit a ship. I was pretty sure that, between the fishermen and sailors, and the town’s blacksmiths and carpenters, we could make almost everything we needed, but we had no way to make lines. I knew what a rope-walk was, but I didn’t understand it well enough to build my own. In this case, it might be better to buy from the experts.

As soon as we had proven that we could lower the water level in the cofferdam, I had hired one of the fishing boats to go to Bridgetown and Small Cove to buy all the rope and line they could, in several sizes and in as long of individual lengths as they could. Those guys knew what it should cost far better than I did. And, they probably knew how much we’d need better than I could, too.

They estimated a total cost of three or four Conchs for what we needed. I’d given them five Conchs in cash to spend on as much as they could buy, and taken them to the bank to introduce the boat’s skipper and his assistant so that they could withdraw as much as ten more from the banks there if they needed it.

They had come back while the ship was still out of the water bringing, frankly, far more rope than we needed, but that was better than not enough. We had washed, inspected, and tested all of the ship’s original lines while we were doing everything else. Some were fine, while others were not.

We used it all. The good stuff was put back to work rigging the ship. The not-so-good stuff was used around the shipyard as needed. The stuff that my experts condemned was taken apart, and the fibers mixed in with pine sap and other things to make the goop they sealed the hull with. These guys knew what they were doing. My job was to come up with ideas, then step back and let them do it.

Speaking of letting people work, the two carpenters had pretty much moved into the shipyard while they built things. They had drawn things in the dirt, argued, tromped all over the ship, argued, gone back to their drawings, argued, and finally come to me with a suggestion. A crossbow that was big enough to use against ships would be too big and heavy to turn around from one side to the other while the ship was heaving in the waves. Maybe here against the pier where we could use the derrick to pick it up, but not out at sea.

We needed two missile launchers, one for each side of the ship. But, there was nowhere else we could put one except between the masts. Both the bow and stern had cabins, so they wanted to take over the entire space between the masts and build two missile launchers for there. They could be built heavy enough to sink ships. They wouldn’t have that much range, but with one pointing to each side we wouldn’t be trying to shift one in the middle of a battle. We could even anchor them in place, which would make them a lot safer to be around when they were fired. And in heavy weather when the deck was heaving.

I had approved that idea, and while the two launchers were built we rearranged the way we had thought we would do things. Once the launchers were installed, the mid-ships deck would not be available for the ship’s equipment. Or even people, for that matter. They didn’t really take up ALL the room between the masts, but being in the wrong place when they fired would get you killed. What we did was cut the railing down to the deck on both sides so that the missile would clear the railing, and then erect a sort of rope bridge over the opening along each side going from forecastle to quarterdeck.

Those rope bridges weren’t very steady, but they allowed people to move forward and aft without interfering with the launchers. You could also go down into the hold using the small hatch in the forecastle, walk down the walkway in the middle between all the stores, and come out at the midships cargo hatch or the smaller hatch in the main cabin, but the hatches may be closed at any time, and they were heavy. They also latched from on top and may have people or gear on top of them, so if you were under them you’d have a lot of trouble getting them open.

We had a lot of people living at the shipyard while we worked on the ship. Not me, I went home to Millie every night, but we had all kinds of workers there. I could have set up a chuck-wagon and bought food and paid a cook, but it was easier for me to just pay Pertic at the Northside Tavern to feed them all twice a day. Some of the men would have happily worked without pay, just for those two meals!

I didn’t really want to run a shipyard, but it seemed like every day I had to authorize, and pay for, some kind of improvement. A latrine for the men to use so they weren’t doing their business in the river or behind a tree we were going to cut down tomorrow. A corral to keep the horses and cattle from wandering off. A barn to keep food for the horses and cattle.

We used some old sails to make a set of open-air tents or pavilions, for people to sleep under if it rained. Of course, they could sleep in the ship, but the ground was softer. Or, they could go home every night to their wives and beds like I was, but I wasn’t going to pay for those ferry rides unless they were with me when I went.

Was all this going to be just abandoned, when I finally took the Wrong Place out to sea? I couldn’t keep paying all the workers unless they were doing something that brought money back in. I could probably get Erna or someone else to manage it for me, but only if we had paid work for them to do. Otherwise, I’d have to shut it down, let all the workers go, and just keep on a couple of guards to keep everything there from wandering off.

I had my team of advisors thinking about ways for the shipyard to earn money. If any of the fishing boats needed an overhaul, well, we had the place and the tools now. For that matter, if the town wanted any work done on the Pirate’s Gift we could do it. We’d have to find out how much Bridgetown charged for work and see if we could undercut them, just so we’d have the work. The Gift came and went a couple of times while we were working on our own ship.

Eventually, I figured, I’d have to bite the bullet and build my own warships, but I really needed more experience in how things were done here before I even thought of trying that. What did I know about building wooden ships?

Eventually we thought we had all the rigging done the way I wanted it, and we were ready for sea trials. We still had to load stores, but I’d pretty much already collected my crew. All the work on both ships and setting up the shipyard and everything else we’d done had taught me who worked hard and who shirked, who thought about what he was doing and who didn’t, who had courage and initiative and who didn’t. Not everyone I wanted was willing to ship with me, but there were enough good people that I could pick and choose from among the best.

We didn’t have the missile launchers aboard for trials, but I wanted the crew to be armed in case we ran into trouble. I asked the Commander and the Captain of the guard to lend us ten good shield men, and I asked the militia commander for twenty good archers. Just the same as in front of the town walls, the archers would win any fight for us as long as no one was among them chopping them up. The archers were supposed to double as spearmen and back up the shield men if the fight got up close and personal.

The guardsmen and the militia were supposed to be training the crew in how to fight. I would pay each of them, sailors and soldiers alike, two Pinches a day, doubling it to a Quad a day if they had to fight. Of course, whenever they weren’t fighting they had to help crew the ship, and that would start with an hour or two on the oars as we went down the river to the sea.

I wanted to fly an identifying flag, but that wasn’t a thing here and I didn’t have a clue what I’d want as a personal banner. I had no idea what the official Seal of the great City of Topeka looked like, and I wasn’t about to fly an American flag here. However, most of Earth’s navies flew a Naval Ensign, which was basically a blue flag with some design on it. The United States Navy used the upper left corner of the normal American flag, the 50-star arrangement on a blue field.

So, when we cast off from the still-unfinished pier and headed downriver for trials we had a plain blue flag flying from a flagstaff atop the mainmast. To me, that should tell everyone that this wasn’t a trading ship. It was a warship. Until the island had a government, though, it would be a private venture to protect the island and make some money doing it.

We had 69 bodies onboard when we cast off. I was in charge as owner-commanding. For actual sailing matters until I knew what I was doing, we had Filo -one of Widemouth’s fishing boat captains- as our sailing master and my second in command, plus a couple other fishermen we trusted as his lieutenants.

The Commander had volunteered the Captain of the Guard for this short trip out to sea, and the Captain commanded the defensive force of ten shield men and twenty archers. He would also command our ‘main battery’ of two launchers when we installed them.

We went out with 34 sailors, men who would man lines, raise and lower sails, tend the tiller, and row as needed. That was actually forced by the oars, since we had 8 oars on each side. We needed a rower and a spare to swap with him for each oar. Add a man on the tiller and someone to swap with him, and that’s 34 sailors.

One of the sailors was Michael, the man who had been elected the seamen’s leader back on the Pirate’s Gift when they were trying to get paid. He doubled as as the voice of the common seamen. Besides him, we had a couple more work-crew leaders as supervisors and maybe officer trainees.

We didn’t raise any sails for our trip downriver. We just followed the current and used the oars as needed to stay clear of all the mud banks. The channel was not at all clear to me. Even when I was ready to run the ship, I’d want Filo or Erna or one of the locals to act as river-pilot. The long trip through the river delta between town and sea was one of the town’s best defenses. We got good training and practice in using the oars, enough that the guardsmen started bitching about rowing boats not being what they signed up for.

I’d gone with a basic ‘brig’ setup, which was a two-masted ship with a square rig on both masts. I couldn’t remember the difference between a schooner and a yawl and a ketch and a bark and a barkentine and a brigantine or any of the other options, but two square-rigged masts was a brig. It took more crew than some of the other rigs, but with the yards on pivots so that they could be jacked around, for the same sail area a brig was more maneuverable than any of the others. If you added jibs or triangular sails between the bowsprit, the masts, and the stern, it was a lot faster too.

The river took us well off the shore, but the sea breeze wanted to push us back. Once we had gone out as far as the river could take us, we turned the ship to port and started raising sails. Well, we raised the forward jib, the triangular sail between the bowsprit and the foremast. Once that started catching the air it wanted to push the bow around towards the land again, but we could counter that with the rudder.

Well, as long as we were moving forward we could. We had to let the ship turn downwind, then when it was moving ahead the rudder could bite and we could turn back away from the shore again. With the port turn pushed by the sail countered by starboard rudder, the only net effect was the thrust from the sail. Okay, the rudder apparently was way oversized. The tiller didn’t need to be very far to port to balance the jib.

Next was the foresail. We jacked the yard around as far as we could before releasing the foresail. Once that sail was all the way down, tied off, and drawing the wind we did the same with the mainsail. After that, we were moving. And the fishermen in the crew all agreed that we were moving faster than any other ship or boat they’d seen.

What was more, we were moving upwind, away from the shore. Yeah, we were moving mostly to the side, but we were gaining on the wind. This ship could tack, or flip back and forth, and sail against the wind. We could make better progress if we reduced the leeway. That would take a larger keel. Or maybe sideboards, if that made more sense.

Leeway was the ship moving sideways because the wind pushed it. We wanted the hull as clean as possible to make it easy to row or sail, but at the same time the cleaner the hull was the more a side-wind would push the ship to the side. This could be countered by making the hull stick to the water more, but that was another way of saying ‘more drag’.

The only way to reduce leeway without increasing drag was to add fore and aft beams that stuck down into the water. The beam would slip through the water lengthwise, but it would resist sliding sideways. If the beam was built-in and it was on the centerline, it was called a keel. If you had pairs of them and they were offset from the centerline, they were called bilge keels.

Obviously, the bigger the keel the better the ship would sail, but there were drawbacks. The keel added weight to the ship, making it sit lower in the water and have more drag. Both the keel itself and the added weight made the bottom of the ship deeper, meaning that you needed deeper water just to avoid running aground.

Last, anything like a keel made it harder to pull the ship out of the water. Beaching it at night was harder, and pulling it out for repairs was harder. You needed a purpose-built set of ‘ways’ to slide the ship on when you pulled it out, with support for the hull but slots for the keel(s) to go in so the weight of the entire ship didn’t rest on the keel.

When we’d pulled Wrong Place out for its overhaul, I had frankly ignored that problem because the keel wasn’t that deep, and we were pulling it out onto wet grass and mud. The keel had sunk into the mud and the ship’s hull had rested on the grass. If we made the keel deeper, that wouldn’t work. We’d need real ways.

Very small boats bypassed all these issues by using removable keels or keel-boards. If you had a solid hull like Earth’s fiberglass boats, you could put a slot in the middle of the boat and drop a ‘centerboard’ whenever you needed one. That allowed you to pull it up again, when you didn’t need it. Like when you were beaching it or carrying it to your car.

If your local materials didn’t support a huge crack in the middle of your hull, you mounted a pair of them, one on either side of the hull. They were usually mounted on a common shaft, and you simply mounted the shaft across the boat. If they were small enough, they could be controlled by the shaft. Turn the shaft and lower the sideboards, turn them the other way to raise them. If the sideboards were too large for that, you tie a line to the boards and hoist them up or let them down.

We tacked a couple of times, slowly and after we’d all talked it over and everyone knew what was going to happen. We wanted to pull the sails in -the jib came down to the deck while the foresail and the mainsail got pulled up to their yards- then while the ship was still moving turn the rudder hard to get it to cross over so that the wind was on the other side, then we’d jack the yards around the other way, raise the jib, and lower the sails.

I won’t say that the first time was a clusterfuck, but both sails got away from us and it took some time to get control of them again. This was going to take some practice. We did it several times, with everyone available holding onto the sheets, until we were all exhausted.

When we turned to run back to port, we’d established that the sail plan worked, the hull still leaked, the rudder was too damn big, we needed to have the sweeps manned and out to help us turn when we tacked, we needed a deeper keel, and we probably needed more ballast as the ship heeled more than we liked. What if we had a stronger wind? We needed more ballast. I also had all kinds of ideas for more sail area, but the ship was clearly already usable as-is.

We had a lookout platform on top of the mainmast. We could take it off, add topmasts to both masts, and hang yards for topsails. Of course, we’d want to put a crow’s nest on top of it all. The two topsails would be smaller than the mainsails, but the wind was generally stronger the higher you went, so the total force provided by the topsails would be almost equal to the mainsails.

Another change I needed to make was where I’d had the waist railing cut away to make a place for the launchers to fire. Every time we turned into the wind, we got the tops of the waves through those openings. We were going to have to make some sort of doors for them, like gunports on the old wooden warships on Earth. Wood, canvas, whatever worked as long as it kept most of the water out and we could easily remove them to fire the launchers.