Chapter 30: Small Cove

Small Cove was a city and a commerce center. It had yards for caravans to gather. It had good roads going both ways along the coast as well as inland towards the hunter people. Its piers were fairly busy, with a ship arriving or leaving every other day or so. There were always fishing boats unloading their catch.

And there were men hanging around town looking for jobs. A lot of them wanted the steady pay part and could do without the steady work part, but we could deal with lazy people. I remembered the cartoon I’d seen long before about men standing in front of a stone column reading a recruiting poster for the old Roman navy: “Much work, much food. Little work, little food. No work, burial at sea.”

On our second day there we hired about a dozen men. Some were farm workers, big, strong, not necessarily agile. They would make fine rowers and deck seamen, if they could handle life at sea. Others were smaller and hopefully could be taught to be topmen, up in the masts dealing with the sails and lines up there. Some claimed to have never been on a ship before but were willing to learn. Some claimed to be the best seamen I’d ever meet.

This was really the first time we’d brought on trainees. I wanted to say that they could fit in, but at the same time I wanted to tell the crew that the trainees were nowhere near as good as them.

I told them that I’d give each one a Pinch to go to sea with us for a couple of hours. If they thought that they could do the work, I’d take their oath. If not, I’d send them off with their Pinch. As crew trainees they’d get one Pinch per day until their officer told me they were trained and reliable for at least one job.

At that time, they would get promoted to “Seaman” and a raise to two Pinches per day, but that wasn’t when THEY said they could do the job, it was when their OFFICER said they could do the job. Meanwhile, unless they already knew this ship’s particular rig I wanted them to stand in the waist up against the aft cabin walls and watch everything going on.

(I could hear them talking among themselves. “What’s the waist?” “It’s the lower middle section. Where we’re standing right now. That’s the forward end, and it has a raised deck above us. Back there is the aft end with another raised deck. The waist is the middle section between them, with no raised deck. We’re supposed to stand against that wall and watch what everyone does.” “Oh, okay. When do we get paid?” Yeah, we got some real winners here.)

Matto brought Michael back last night before he got too drunk, so I had Michael take charge of Jono’s section and get us underway again. This time he did much better, being more sure of himself and having learned a lot yesterday. There were still some issues, but he’d learn.

We had established that Michael wasn’t quite ready to tack a brig, a ship with two square-rigged masts and a couple jibs. We’d work on that. We’d have him practice every time we tacked for the next week, and he’d never screw it up again. It was the same way everyone else had learned.

Right now we had two sails, the foresail and the mainsail, and two jibs, the fore jib and the main jib. The jibs were no problem, we simply dropped them when we tacked, then raised them again once we’d crossed the wind. That was a simple matter of several men pulling or releasing a line, while someone else gathered together the fabric as it came down, or spread it out as it went up.

The sails, though, needed manpower. It was the reason that square sails weren’t used much in modern Earth. We needed eighteen men to shift a sail when we tacked. Six of them were up on the yard, while twelve of them were down on deck handling lines. It could be done with less, but that was the minimum to do it quickly, the way we needed in combat. More would definitely be better if they were available. Bigger sails would just add to the manpower needed.

That was at least thirty-six men needed to tack just for the two sails if we wanted to furl and show them both at once. Add six for the two jibs, they could be done in sequence if we had to. Throw in a lookout, a helmsman, and an officer in charge, and we needed forty-three men to quickly tack the ship as it was set up now.

I was still thinking about adding topmasts, which would give us a foretopsail and a maintopsail. Those would be smaller, but we’d have worse leverage swinging the yards so we’d probably need the same crew for each one. Add thirty-six more, we’d need eighty men to swing all four sails at once. That probably wasn’t going to happen very often.

It would be better to furl the mainsail, drop the main jib, then furl the foresail, then drop the fore jib. Put the helm over, then raise the fore jib on the other side to help steer. While that was going up, swing the fore yard to the right angle, then show the foresail while the yard was being secured.

By the time that was done, the fore jib should be tied off and drawing properly and that crew could move to the main jib if we wanted, or help haul lines for the sails if not. The team that had swung the fore yard should move to swinging the main yard, and once the foresail is secured and drawing wind, that crew could also move back to the mainsail. Just one four-man team for the jibs, one eight-man team for the yards, and another eight-man team for the sheets.

We’d still need six men on each yard, as there was no quick way to move between them. If we tried to make them run up one mast, do their job, come back down to the deck, run up the other mast, and do their job they’d be too tired out to work. Still, we could tack reasonably quickly with only thirty-two men. Thirty-five including the helm, the lookout, and the officer managing the evolution.

If they all knew what they were doing. And the wind wasn’t too strong. More men on the lines would be better, both safer and faster. More men up on the yards would mean faster furling, although it wouldn’t make showing the sails any faster.

We had enough men to do the job. We even had that many men in each of our two duty sections. Granted, when we exercised only half a crew, a good many of the line-handlers had different jobs in combat, but that was the Captain’s burden, to avoid circumstances where we needed men to both repel boarders and pull lines to tack at the same time. During a normal cruise we’d have everyone involved and we’d have a lot more topmen and linesmen for each sail.

What I wanted was at least three ‘half-crews’ that could each run the ship. We could get away with having archers pulling lines as long as there was an officer who knew what needed done and when, and each team was led by a sailor who knew which lines did what. Only the topmen, the men climbing up to the yards to furl or show the sails, really had to be skilled seamen who could hang on with one hand and work with the other, and not fall overboard when the ship pitched and rolled.

We needed more men for that, but they all needed to be paid. I could do it, I’d be a long time going through all the money I had gotten for our three prizes. Still, any reasonable man would agree that navies were expensive and manning was going to be a major cost. In peacetime, most ships would be pulled out of the water with only a couple of caretakers assigned, the rest of the crew dismissed.

That was what England used to do after every war. There had to be a way to keep those men employed. A socially-conscious king would care about those men and their families. Even if he didn’t care about the people themselves, King Tom was English and would surely be familiar from his history lessons with how hard it was to get those ships back to sea when a new war loomed.

Still, one pirate ship taken would pay for a lot of men for a long time. And increased commerce due to safe and secure seas could be taxed. That, at least, would be someone else’s problem, thank God.

All the new hands got to see Michael take the ship out using only Jono’s section. My lieutenants agreed when we had moored again that Michael was good enough to serve as lieutenant on a prize ship, and with more practice he’d be good enough to captain one. Meanwhile, he’d take his turn standing watch on deck with the helmsman and the lookout and a few sailors in case something needed to be adjusted. If he needed more men, they were available.

Good. We knew we could turn landsmen into seamen, and we’d established that we could turn seamen into officers. And all my officers knew how to do both. The only problems left were getting more men, getting more ships, and getting more experience. None of those problems were insurmountable.

All those fishermen weren’t fishing because there was a fish shortage. I expected that many of them, maybe even most of them, were fishing because they were hungry and didn’t know how to do anything else. I needed to send someone to talk with them. Half of my crew could do that; most of them had been fishermen before the pirates came to Widemouth.

Ships, well, we’d find some more pirates and if we liked their ships we’d keep them. Adn, the experience was going to come whether we wanted it or not.

Our time at Small Cove turned out to be a recruiting visit. Every day we picked up a few new men. Some would sign on, some would run down the gangplank when we moored again in the afternoon. And quite a few of them expected to be given four Pinches every night to go drinking with.

I talked to the shipyard people. They didn’t do enough business to keep their workers. If I asked them to build a ship for me, they would have to gather men and materials first, and I’d have to pay for it all first so that they could hire workers and buy materials. Sure, I could do that, but I decided to check out Bridgetown’s yard again first.

Another possibility would be to just build my ships at Widemouth. We certainly had the wood. Some of the workers would be willing to relocate to Widemouth for a guaranteed job. I’d have to think about that. Again, I had the money but I wasn’t sure that my own shipyard was the best use of it.

One thing I did was take a tour of their ropewalk. Looking at it made sense to me, but I’d have been a long time building one myself. It was easier to tell the men who had worked there that if any of them would hire on as a sailor for the trip back to Widemouth, once we arrived I’d pay to have them build our own rope-walk and I’d make sure that it stayed busy enough to make a living running it. I also remembered that I’d sent people here to buy line; maybe remembering that when I was at Bridgetown would have made dealing with those people a little easier.

While talking about shipyard skills, it came out that the hemp plant used to make twine and rope was the same plant used to make paper. I was pretty sure that it was also the same plant as marijuana came from, but it might be a different variant. It sure looked the same to me, though.

I talked to some of those people about relocating, too. Two or three acres of hemp would make far more paper than we needed. Maybe it was better to just buy our lines and paper from here, as long as we had the money. We could add those industries to the west coast later, when our usage increased. Besides, if King Tom was serious about a navy and about uniting the island, there would be enough work for all three shipyards.

One thing I saw was appalling. All of the boards used around here were made by splitting logs with wedges and mauls, and then adzes to rough-shape the logs. Sand, rocks, chisels, and saws were all used to make the final size and shape and surface. They didn’t seem to have any idea that a sawmill might save all that work. So, most of the wood from each log was wasted, turning a huge log into two or three planks. And the manpower used for each plank was outrageous. It was clear that steam power was out until steel became a lot more common, but a wind or water wheel could power a mill.

Could we make a saw blade? A straight up-and-down saw would be easy for the blacksmiths to make, but I couldn’t see it working. The gearing to turn a water wheel’s rotary motion into up and down motion for the saw wouldn’t be very reliable. A rotary saw blade would be a lot harder to make, but it would be a lot easier to power from a water wheel.

I had a lot of ideas to kick-start the industrial revolution here, but man, there were a lot of parts missing. Did Hunter Island have coal? Was there iron ore around? How similar to England was this place?

I did get the shipyard to put together a bilge pump made out of a small keg. The bottom of the keg had several holes bored in it, and they were covered by leather flaps that were glued on one side. The top had a plunger with a leather gasket that allowed the plunger to go all the way from the top to the bottom, and then a lid with a hole in the middle for the stem. That kept the plunger upright. The stem was attached to a see-saw handle so that it could be forced up and down. The bottom of the keg had another flapper valve and a leather hose that led out a hatch.