Chapter 3: Commissioning Thunder

Filo was a self-starter, a man who would decide on his own what should be done, and then either go do it himself or get someone else to do it. Jono wasn’t. Jono was a fine officer if someone else was in charge, but he wasn’t executive material. Not that I should talk, I wasn’t either when I was back on Earth. It took coming here and realizing that no one else COULD take charge to get me to step up to the plate.

Still, with me backing him up as owner and Captain, Jono got a crew together within a few days and started loading supplies. I paid the two carpenters a small amount for their missile launcher and told them that they had used supplies from my shipyard to build it, as well as shipyard labor that I was already paying for so claiming that it was ‘theirs’ wasn’t going to be well received by any honest man.

In fact, it could be argued that they hadn’t really built it. All they had done was stand around and supervise while my men built it. By this time, we had a lot of men who knew how to build any sort of siege engine.

Once most of the stores were onboard we used the dockside sheerlegs to hoist the launcher up and onto where it belonged, on the open deck between the two masts. We set it to fire to port simply because the two stairways going from the waist up to the quarterdeck and the forecastle were on the starboard side. There was more room for it to port, and crew could move from deck to deck behind it without getting injured when it fired.

My first ship, the ‘Wrong Place’, now out looking for trouble under Filo’s command, had a large enough waist that it carried two launchers, one to port and one to starboard. They were somewhat nested, as there wasn’t enough room for two of them firing to the same side.

What I called a ‘cruise missile launcher’ was a simple large crossbow, built large enough to take a bolt that was ten to twelve feet long and eight or so inches across. With a set of turkey feathers in the back and a fire-hardened point in front, it didn’t have much range but it would pierce the hull-planks of any ship I’d seen yet. One shot had even broken a pirate ship’s mast. With water coming in the hull, their mast broken, and many of their crew injured or killed, they had surrendered almost immediately.

It also took a while to reload. It was basically a one-shot weapon. Our tactics were to pass by a pirate ship close enough for the launcher to hit it, and either fire high to cripple the crew, or fire low to punch a hole in the side and sink it. We had done both, and unless it missed it almost always gave the pirate crew enough trouble to forget about us for a while.

It was a slightly larger version of this one that had sunk the pirate ship ‘Mary’s Ransom’ during the attack. The launcher’s first shot had gone through both sides and it sank so fast that most of the crew drowned. We had found a good many bodies all around the ship, sinking into the mud and covered in armor. Well, they shouldn’t have gone into a naval battle wearing heavy metal armor.

Of course, they hadn’t known that they were sailing into a naval battle. They thought that they were simply sailing up to our pier and unloading all their fighters to ransack the town while all of our defenders were on the wall. Still, that was a vivid lesson for all of us.

For Wrong Place’s first voyage I’d borrowed some of the town’s Guard, and they had fought in their usual metal armor. Some had scale and others had chain, but a sword that hit their torso hit steel armor with padding under it. The armor kept them from injury or death, but it was far too heavy to swim in. None of us had liked it, but it was what we had available.

After that first voyage we had started working on armor for them that might be lighter and might be less protective, but certainly could be taken off in seconds if someone fell overboard. That was yet another reason why Millie’s shop was so busy. Millie and Henry and Jim were the only ones in town who knew how to work with leather armor.

The Marines that we took with us would have their standard mail armor with them and they could put it on if we thought it appropriate, but they would normally wear hardened leather armor for ship-to-ship combat.

Thunder wasn’t that much smaller than Wrong Place was. With only one launcher there was plenty of room for men. This time, I wanted to take two squads of the Guard’s shield-and-sword men and three of the militia’s archers who could also act as spearmen when needed.

The two groups were trained to work together. During the pirates’ attack on the town, a shield wall backed by spearmen, then backed in turn by archers, had completely routed a much larger force of pirates. It wasn’t the swords that the shieldmen were carrying that killed all the pirates, it was the archers. All the shields and swords and spears had done was to keep the archers clean while they did their jobs. The only pirate survivors had been those few who ran and got out of range before the archers got around to shooting them.

The only difference onboard ship was that we didn’t have separate forces of spearmen and archers. We didn’t usually need both at once. If we were boarding a pirate, we needed spearmen to back up the shield wall. We might also need a couple of archers but not many.

Until then, though, the shieldmen were protecting everyone else from enemy archers: our own archers, the crew, the helmsmen, the officers. We needed as many archers as we could get to eliminate the enemy archers, cut down on their numbers, kill their officers and helmsmen and rowers, and just generally convince the pirates that they weren’t going to win.

We didn’t need spearmen at all until there were pirates within range of their spears. So, we took trained archers and taught them how to use a spear, and as the range closed the archers started putting their bows on their backs and picking up their spears to support the shieldmen.

Of course, for our first time down the river in Thunder, we weren’t going looking for pirates. It was just sea-trials, a quick test to prove that the hull and masts were sound, the rigging worked well, and everyone in the crew knew their jobs. I didn’t take a full load of Marines.

There was some grumbling from all the new people when I announced the pay rate. Thunder was a warship. Its purpose was to go out to sea and sink or capture any pirates we could find. Because of this, I valued training, experience, and known trustworthiness.

Any sailor or Marine who had not sailed with me before would be fed two or three times a day and given a place to sleep. When we were at sea, he would be paid one Pinch per day. Anyone who had sailed with me before, well, I knew I could count on them. Their skill, their honor, and their courage had already been proven. Veterans got double what the new people would get, two Pinches per day for a sailor or Marine. Crew leaders and Marine corporals got double that, and officers would be paid more yet. As usual, if we got in a fight everyone’s pay rate doubled for the whole time we were at sea.

So, sailors I’d never met would get one Pinch per day no matter how much experience they had. Corporals who I’d never sailed with would get two. Corporals I knew I could trust were going to get four, and if we got into a fight the pay rates would all double until we returned home. Note that this first trip was supposed to just be a couple of hours to test everything and we weren’t looking for trouble, but if we set out to sea and ran across a pirate who just had to attack us, well, there wasn’t much we could do about other people making mistakes.

The crew-chief on the launcher was a man I at least knew. He had helped build and use one of the siege engines we’d used during the pirate attack. I didn’t remember which one or what he did, but I remembered the face. I’d pay him 2 Pinches per day because he was a leader, and then after his first fight he would get four as a veteran leader.

Believe me, sea-trials on Thunder went a lot better than they had on Wrong Place. We didn’t have to prove a new concept. All we had to do was prove that Thunder had been overhauled and modified correctly and that all the parts were good. We never even left sight of the Island.

Anything else was simply training the new guys. I knew what I was doing, Jono and some of the men knew what they were doing. All the men knew that I and my officers knew what we was doing and they trusted us.

We started by exercising the rowers. Everyone rows, the ship moves forward. It’s not as simple as it sounds. Everyone on one side has to row at the same speed, or the oars interfere with each other. Yes it’s funny when someone gets knocked in the head, but it also focuses their attention on what the other rowers are doing.

Have one side row forward while the other side backs, and the ship turns. Spins, even, since this was a smaller ship than Wrong Place and it had the same number of oars. It should be more maneuverable, although it may not be as fast. We’d see.

We couldn’t raise any sails until we got into the ocean, but the two-mile trip down the river gave us plenty of time to get the rowers straightened out and working together. They would never be as good at rowing as the pirates were, but they could do their jobs. And they’d get more practice as conditions allowed.

Still, we were out there to test everything so, after exercising the rowers some more out in the open ocean, we turned south and dropped all four of our side-boards into the water. Then we raised the fore jib about halfway, keeping the foot on the forecastle. Thunder had, as best as we could arrange it, the exact same rig as Wrong Place. We’d proven that that rig worked well, and some of our crew knew how it worked. If anyone came up with an improvement, we’d do it on all our ships so they all had the best rig possible and any of our officers and crew could run any of our ships. After we’d tested it and proved that it really was better, that is.

The sideboards were because none of these ships had a keel worth beans. They were as close to flat-bottomed as the builders could make them, because they needed to be pulled up on the beach whenever there was no pier to tie up to. They didn’t need a keel, since all they did was sail downwind and row everywhere else.

Further, there was no way to add a keel without completely disassembling the whole ship down to the frame. However, we needed a keel to sail in any direction other than downwind. After some experiments on Wrong Place we’d settled on a set of four narrow ‘daggerboards’ that could be dropped in the water to sail, or pulled up to row or beach the ship.

When I first started out to build a navy to protect Widemouth and Hunter Island, I had really just intended to use captured (and sunk-and-raised) ships as a temporary expedient to learn what I was doing before building ‘real warships’ for our fleet. That ‘building real warships’ thing kept getting pushed back into the future, though, since we seemed to be doing fine with our converted pirate raiding ships. As long as we were fast enough and maneuverable enough to control any engagement, we were fine. We could board if we wanted to, we could stand off and use our archers to kill the pirates, or we could use our missile launchers to just sink the pirate ships. Our speed and maneuverability gave us the choice.

Sooner or later, though, everyone else would catch on and our converted ships would no longer be top dog. At that time we’d have to start building our own ships and we’d finally get ships with real keels and we wouldn’t have to deal with all the sideboards. Until then, though, we were stuck with the sideboards if we wanted to be able to tack.

All the jib really did was keep us headed southward, we weren’t really moving. The rudder could easily balance the fore jib, and the sideboards kept us from sliding sideways -making leeway- too much. While the helm held us southward we showed our mainsail. The mainsail did have an improvement that Wrong Place didn’t have yet. All of our ‘sails’ were made from sewing strips of cloth together, and for this set the vertical seams had reinforced holes in them every foot or so.

We planned to used them in two ways. To start with, the furling lines didn’t just go from the yard to the foot like they did on Wrong Place. Here, the lines went through the holes. From the yard down the front of the sail, in the top hole, down the back of the sail, in the next hole, down the front again, and so on back and forth all the way to the foot of the sail. That allowed the topmen to haul the sail up by the furling lines.

If there was no wind, the lines straight down the front of the sail on Wrong Place worked fine. If there was any wind, though, we’d learned pretty quickly that the sail tended to push the lines around it and bow through the middle between them. Furling the mainsail had been a lot of trouble more than once. This way, the lines couldn’t be pushed away from the seams because they went through them, and furling should be a lot less trouble. The sail would simply fold back and forth like an accordion and not flop everywhere like Wrong Place’s did.

Heading southward, we were on a ‘reach’, or going across the wind. The big mainsail was aft of the ship’s pivot point, and as soon as we had the yard at the right angle and the sail showing fully and tied down, the ship wanted to point into the wind which would lose the wind in the sail. And, until we were moving faster, the rudder couldn’t counter that. That was our cue to raise the fore-jib the rest of the way so it could counterbalance the mainsail.