Chapter 9: Patrolling the Sea-Lanes

After everyone had eaten their fill we finally ended up talking with a local who the others addressed as “Elder Simmon”, along with a selection of other people who wanted to listen to whatever we said. These people we could negotiate with. I told them that we wanted many things, but we understood that they may not be able to provide them all. I gave the stew as an example. We wanted to eat well, but we could not cook on our ship.

“Why not?”

“Have you ever taken that boat out to sea, to fish?”

“Yes, many times.”

“How did you cook your dinner, when you were out at sea?”

“You can’t have a fire on a boat, you’ll burn it up. We take something with us to eat during the day, and come back before night for dinner.”

I just looked at him.

“You can’t cook on your ship, either. I understand.”

“Right. We have all this food that has been preserved and lasts for months, but we cannot cook it. We have to eat it the way it is in the barrel. We wanted to come buy fresh food from you, but you have none to spare. So, we give you the food in those barrels in return for your people cooking it for us. We have the food, you have the fireplace and the cooking pot and the firewood. You feed us, and we feed you.”

“That is fair. What else do you want that we cannot give you?”

“My crew is almost a hundred men. We know you don’t have it, but we want a tavern with ale that my men can drink, and women that my men can spend time with. Where is the nearest tavern?”

It was well over a hundred men, actually, there were 94 actual working men and 11 of us “idlers” who did no work, the officers and ship’s boys and Cookie and Gina. Still, we were trying to allay their fears and ‘almost a hundred’ doesn’t sound as scary as ‘more than a hundred’.

“I don’t know of one closer than Widemouth, where you say you came from. Cowford is only a day’s walk away, but it doesn’t have a tavern.”

“So, another thing we want that you cannot provide. You must hide your women away when we are here, because some of our men will assume that your women want them and they will cause trouble.”

“We will do so. How often will you come here?”

“Meaning how often will we bring you food? We are here to catch the pirates who have caused so much trouble. It is our intention to be out at sea near here every day until we have caught them all. We will continue to give you food if you will continue to cook it for us. I don’t think there is anything else you can do for us.”

“You may be right. We have little here.”

“You will have more when we leave. We can give you supplies. And, if we catch a pirate ship we will give you much of what we find on it.”

What they really needed was better tools and more food. I’d seen a wooden hoe or adze somewhere. They were probably using it as a gardening tool. If they had better tools they could grow more food. They would eat better, be healthier, and have more children live to adulthood. We really had no tools to spare, but we could give them some food.

That was about it for that conference. We agreed to come back one more time for another pot of stew, either the next day or the day after, and after that the rest of the food in those three barrels was theirs. The three barrels were still almost full of dried foods and they would feed their people for some time.

All they had to do was set out what they wanted for the next day and put it in a pot of hot water overnight to soften up again. Unless they had a lot more people than we’d seen, the food we’d given them would last for the rest of the summer and get them through until harvest time.

As soon as the sun came up the next morning we collected all our people, told the locals that we would be back the following evening for more stew, took in our lines, and backed down the creek to the sea. That creek was nowhere near wide enough to allow us to turn around.

I should have Erna’s Construction Company come down here and build a better dock while they dug a turning basin for us. Hell, we hadn’t even dug the turning basin at our shipyard! We kept starting higher-priority projects.

When we came back to the creek the next afternoon, we had a captured pirate ship with us. Maybe having a woman onboard isn’t unlucky, it’s only bad luck to have a woman onboard ship when she’s kept unfucked for too long. I’d have to run some experiments on that sometime.

We had done our usual patrol down to the south until noon and seeing no one, and then tacking north-west again until we sighted the Island. We steered to the west until we were clear of the Point and crept up the coast all night on a reefed foresail. In the morning we had come about, shown all our sails, and raced down to the headland.

When we reached the headland we steered a little east of south, and within an hour our lookouts saw a sail on the horizon to the east. It was a standard one-sail cog and it was sailing eastward as fast as it could go, but we raised both jibs and were almost twice as fast. We caught up with it before noon.

It wasn’t just having more sails up, it was also reducing the hull drag as much as possible. Wrong Place was only a couple of weeks out of a maintenance period at Widemouth. One of the tasks we did while loading stores was have men down in the water with smooth rocks, rubbing as much of the hull as they could reach to scrub off anything trying to grow on the wood.

When we got close we could see the rails lined with men, all armed, so there wasn’t much question who they were. I’d been passing the telescope around so that everyone on the quarterdeck could see and we were all agreed. No one bent on honest trading would have that many armed men onboard. And why would they be here along the south coast of Hunter Island, if not traveling between the Pirate Isles and the mainland?

We dropped both jibs as we neared, but that didn’t slow us enough. We came up on their port quarter, with them on our starboard side. As we pulled up beside them, about a hundred feet apart, we also reefed our mainsail. That was almost enough, we were still gaining on them slowly but we could talk.

The ship did look like it was in good shape, so I decided to try to capture it without any damage if we could. We cocked and loaded both launchers, but their crews understood that we would be trying to avoid using them

One of the men on their quarterdeck had a speaking trumpet and asked us “What ship?”

We had had plenty of time during the chase to discuss tactics. If they do this, then we will do that, and so on. I nodded to Jono, who had one of our trumpets, and he replied “This is the Wrong Place, out of Widemouth. What ship?”

The pirate -maybe he wasn’t their captain, Jono wasn’t ours, right?- replied “Vengeance, out of New Isle. Will you surrender? We will spare your lives if you surrender.”

I nodded to Jono again. “We are here to destroy all of the pirates. Will you surrender? We will spare your lives if you surrender.” I liked that he parroted back what the pirate spokesman had said.

One of the other men gave some orders, and their ship turned sharply towards us. Or, it tried to. Nothing that ship did was going to be fast. Especially with their sail still out.

“Helm, hard to starboard. Let loose all sails!”

We had no way to rapidly take in our sails. The pirate ships simply lowered their yard and the sail went with it, but then it took a lot of work to raise the yard again with the sail attached. We kept our yards up on the masts and pulled the sails up to them when we didn’t want them showing.

The jibs could be dropped quickly, they just fell onto the deck where our sailors folded them up, but the sails had to be gathered up to the yards and that wasn’t a fast process. In an emergency, it was faster and simpler to simply let go of the sheets holding the bottom corners of the sails. They were still held securely on top at the yards, and with the sheets loose all they did was flap in the wind.

We were moving fast enough for our rudder to bite, and we turned sharp enough to miss them. As we passed by behind their stern I nodded at the Marine detachment’s Commander, and he ordered the archers to fire. They got off three volleys before we were too far away, and that was almost a hundred arrows. All were concentrated on their quarterdeck, and most of the men there fell. One of their steersmen was still standing but the other was not.

They also had a few archers, and they tried to clear our quarterdeck, too, but we had a line of shieldmen in front of us and none of us were hit.

Once it was clear that no boarding-hooks would hit us, I told Jono to get the sails drawn tight again and get us clear. I continued to watch Vengeance while we drew away. Not quite a kicked-over anthill, but it was close.

We sailed clear, then tacked to the south-west to get upwind again. It was probably an hour or so later when we came back to them on a north reach. This time they had stowed their yard and sail and were rowing east.

We stayed upwind again, and when we were close enough I had Jono repeat his last message. “We are here to destroy all the pirates. Will you surrender? We will spare your lives if you surrender.” This time I was going to turn away from them, as under oars they would be much more nimble, but they didn’t try to close with us. I had the mainsail taken in and had the helmsman ease us closer until we were in range for our archers. They were all shouting and shaking their weapons at us, so when they turned towards us again I shrugged and told the Commander to just fill them all with arrows until they surrendered.

They got the idea almost immediately when they started getting hit with arrows. They couldn’t row or steer without being out in the open, and anyone visible was soon shot. Maybe the first two or three arrows would miss them, both ships were rolling in the waves, but our archers had a lot of arrows and if an arrow didn’t hit one rower or axe-man it might hit another one.