Chapter 29: One Day At Sea Is Like Another

That set the pattern for the next several days. Every morning we’d go gather up all the drunks we could find, then try to get some things done, have the previous night’s duty section get us underway for an exercise, and come back to port, giving them their drinking money and trying to get some work out of the hungover sailors before giving up for the night.

Some of them got the bright idea that it really wasn’t necessary to get drunk every night. Others thought it was required, but those sailors got to practice doing manual labor when hung over. Either way works.

For my part, after that first time when we went out without three of our men, I made a new rule: If a man wasn’t on the ship when it got underway, he wasn’t getting paid for that day. I’d pay these three men this time because we hadn’t discussed it yet, but that wasn’t happening again. “If you aren’t on the ship, you aren’t getting paid as part of the crew.”

“And if you aren’t waiting for us on the pier when we get back, you aren’t getting paid for the next day, either. I have no problem with a sailor getting drunk on his night off, that’s fine and I’ve done it myself when I was a deck sailor. I have a real problem with a sailor not being able to work the next day because he’s still too drunk or hung over.”

After the first two exercises, I had some logs delivered that were the right size for cruise missiles and we used them for live fire exercises. We had some kegs and barrels that weren’t clean enough to use for food, so we sealed them up empty. When we were well out in the bay we rolled them off both sides and used them for target practice.

Turn the ship around and come back, sometimes under sail and sometimes under oars. The barrels are about twenty feet apart. Without running over this close one, try to hit the far one. Well, that was close. Come about and try with the other launcher.

They never did hit any of them, but it gave the duty gunners practice loading and firing both launchers. I didn’t want to fire our four remaining ‘real’ missiles, as they had fire-hardened points at the front and turkey feathers at the back. If one of them decided to dive for the mud, we’d never get it back. I wasn’t about to waste one for this. For these practice shots, we just used the logs we’d gotten delivered. Chop a point on one end and it worked fine.

And we had plenty of time to go looking for the logs we’d launched. We got to know roughly where they would be, and how that changed with shooting high or low. Of course, if the shot was low enough in shallow water, we’d lose that log, stuck in the mud somewhere. We did that a couple of times.

The duty section would bring us back to port and we’d unload the empty barrels and load any supplies that had arrived. Refilled food and water barrels, food in baskets, other stuff.

More practice logs. We found a place where we could set up a cook-stove so that the on-duty sailors could have a hot meal, and after dark when not too many people were watching we’d prop a couple of our practice logs over it for the points to dry out and harden. By morning they would be ready to load onboard, and after the gunners trimmed them to be smooth and straight and added feathers to the back we’d store them with our ‘war shots’ or ‘real’ missiles.

After five days we’d hired four more sailors and we’d completely resupplied, but we stayed one more night so that Jono’s section could have a third night off. By then we’d gone more than halfway through our drinking-money chest so I had Filo and the Commander take some shieldmen and go refill it the same way as before. Most of the crew had wanted the four Pinches instead of the one Quad, so this time I told them to get three times eighty times four Pinches, and only eighty Quads. That was nine hundred and sixty Pinches and the chest was pretty full with all that.

The next morning I sent a messenger to tell the town council and the queen that we were setting out to sea to visit Small Cove, then returning to our patrol area off the south side of the island before going home at Widemouth. As soon as he had returned and we had brought onboard all the drunks we could find, we took in all lines, brought the gangplank in, brought onboard the boat we’d had out, and got underway. We were three sailors short and we only had a half-dozen passengers.

I wanted to see Small Cove and meet whoever was in charge there, but Donna was ecstatic. Small Cove was the other town on Hunter’s Island that was large enough to have a bank, and if a Hero came through she could get her reward.

We didn’t see anything of note on our way north. We stayed in sight of the coast because I was still trying to map the island. We saw several small villages with fishing boats, but nothing big enough to have a pier you could unload a cargo ship at.

Aside from Donna we weren’t in any hurry, so we had each section take turns doing evolutions: Raise all sails, toss a couple of barrels out, reverse course and shoot at both barrels, drop all sails, out oars, retrieve both barrels, retrieve both practice logs, raise all sails again, return to previous course.

The Commander also went through various exercises with his men, but I stayed out of that. Even though I was the one who showed them how to combine the shield-and-sword men, the spearmen backing them up, and the archers behind them, he knew far more about getting the most out of his men than I did.

A lot of his boarding and defensive exercises were without armor just so that anyone who fell overboard would have a chance, but when they weren’t exercising he wanted the shieldmen in particular to wear their armor. It took a while to put on, and the more used to it they were the better they would perform with it. Something else for the future. We needed to teach everyone to swim, and we needed lighter armor.

Just about every day I’d get the crew together when we were sailing steady on a course and talk about something. Maybe I’d have Filo describe what he knew about the cities on the mainland, maybe we’d have Michael or Jen show us how to safely clean a shark we’d caught. One day I introduced a new word. The English pretty much consider the Scottish to be backwards and poorer cousins, but one good thing about the English is that when they see something that works better than what they have, they adopt it as their own.

“Where I come from, there is an island somewhat like Hunter Island. It’s big enough that the different people in the different parts speak a little differently. They can all understand each other, but they all think that everyone else talks funny. The people up at the north end have another word for ‘Yes’. That word is ‘Aye’. It sounds just like the word used for myself. You, him and I. For those of you who can read and write, it is spelled differently, but it sounds just the same.”

“Now, if you try it, you’ll find that it’s a lot easier to say ‘Aye’ than ‘Yes’. You can yell ‘Aye’ a lot louder, too. That’s important in a bad storm, or in a battle with swords ringing, men shouting, and the wounded screaming.”

“Because of that, the soldiers and the sailors where I come from use ‘Aye’ instead of ‘Yes’ when they are giving or receiving orders or asking and answering questions. I want you men to try it. If I ask you, Nomo, if you’re hungry, you say ‘Aye, Captain, I missed breakfast and I’m starving.’ If I ask Big John if his cock is bigger than his foot he says ‘Aye, Captain, almost twice as long’ and so on.”

“The second half of that is when an officer gives an order. If there’s time, you should always repeat it back so everyone knows that you heard the same order as was given, and then you say yes you heard the order and yes you will do it. In a crisis, though, or if it’s a standard order that everyone is expecting, you can shorten that to a simple ‘Aye, aye’ meaning ‘yes, you heard the order’, and ‘yes, you will do it.’ So, when we’re done here I’m going to tell Cookie to serve the noon meal. He’ll reply with ‘Serve the noon meal, aye, aye, Captain’. Any questions?”

“Is there another word for ‘No’?”

“Those people say ‘Nay’, like what a horse does. Yes, it’s spelled differently, but it’s not as common. You can yell ‘No’ pretty loudly so that’s not needed as badly. All I’ll ask is that you use ‘Aye’ instead of ‘Yes’. Can you do that, men?”

I got quite a few “Yes, Captain”s as well as a few “Aye, Captain”s and a few “Aye, aye, Captain”s. That was followed by a lot of laughter.

“I know, it takes time to sink in. Let’s try it again. Can you do that, men?”

This time I got a lot more “Aye, aye, Captain” and a lot fewer “Yes, Captain” back.

“We’ll keep working on it.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

“Very good. I think we’re done here, today. Crew, dismissed! Cookie, serve the noon meal!”

“Aye, aye, Captain!”

“Very good!”

After a few days sailing north, I think it was three, we came to Small Cove. This, now, was a city. A small one, maybe, but it was a lot larger than Bridgetown or Widemouth. I don’t know how I got the idea that Bridgetown was bigger.

This was the place that King Tom should have as his capital, not Bridgetown. It was clear that Bridgetown was growing, but a lot of that was simply because it was the capital. If King Tom had selected somewhere else for his capital then Bridgetown wouldn’t be any larger than Widemouth. Okay, Bridgetown was on the coast nearest the mainland and it wasn’t two miles up a narrow fast river so it would probably always be larger, but not that much.

Small Cove had everything we might need to repair or outfit the Place just as well as Bridgetown, and better than Widemouth could. Although, we were changing that last. It wouldn’t be long before Widemouth could do anything we needed.

Here, there was the remains of a shipyard to one side. It had rigging derricks and supplies, but it looked abandoned. If we stayed here for long, maybe we could add a pair of top-masts to hold yards and sails. I was still thinking about that.

I was also thinking about more keel area. Tacking upwind would work a lot better if we didn’t make so much leeway. Should we make our keel larger, and thus deeper? Or should we rig up larger sideboards? I wanted a deeper keel for the long run, but everyone seemed agreed that that the keel couldn’t be modified after the ship was built.

We’d have to completely disassemble the ship down to the keel, replace the keel with a bigger one or attach more wood to the original, and then re-assemble the ship again on top of it. That wasn’t happening, it was just too much trouble. A bigger keel would have to wait until we built our own designed warships. As a temporary measure the sideboards were working but they weren’t big enough. Did we replace them with bigger ones, or did we just add more daggerboards?

We got the local carpenters to cobble up another pair of daggerboards for the stern. They mounted on horizontal posts just below deck level. Those posts were pinned to the underside of the deck, and since they were in the same place as the steering gear they didn’t really cost us any cargo space.

Just as important, we needed a permanent cook-house for Cookie, one with a fireplace instead of just a couple of small kegs to soak dried foods in. With metal so rare here, we couldn’t do it the way it had been done on Earth, with a metal-lined room to prevent fires. We’d need something like a layer of brick, then sand, then brick again and the fire on that.

We didn’t need a large fire. A small one could keep a couple of kettles hot enough to convert our dried foods into decent meals. Smaller was better; the smaller the fire was, the less firewood we’d need.

If we kept the sand wet, the wood floor might get warm but it wouldn’t get hot. It would probably rot a lot faster though. Maybe we could seal it well with the local hull caulking first?

The fireplace would be incredibly heavy. Brick was heavy. Two layers would be worse. And wet sand would just add to it. It would just about have to be on the centerline so that it didn’t affect the ship’s balance. Maybe we could seal the deck with tile? That might keep the water in so we only needed the sand and one layer of brick.