Chapter 17: Planning for War

Once we were alone with the door closed, Tony pulled out a piece of paper and slapped it down on the table. “Here, read this.”

Huh? Fine, I’ll read it.

“Let all who read this know that on this day I, King Tom of Hunter Island, do hereby install Lord Jason of Topeka as Baron Jayport, responsible for and with full authority over all lands, waters, forests, farms, towns, and all other resources within fifty miles of Jayport. This title shall be his and his descendants unto eternity, as long as his issue shall serve the people with honor and integrity.”

Huh? It was signed by “Tom of London, King of Hunter Island”, “Eleanor of Dampford, Queen of Hunter Island”, and “Eve of Sandoss City, Caretaker of Crossroads”, and below that there was a list of various copies. This was supposedly the original going to me.

What the fuck, Chuck? I looked back up at Tony.

He was ready with another piece of paper. “Here, read this.”

“Let all who read this know that on this day I, King Tom of Hunter Island, do hereby appoint Lord Jason, Baron Jayport, as Lord High Admiral of the Hunter Island Royal Navy, responsible for and with full authority over all ships, boats, coastal forts, coasts, bays, ports, seas, and open ocean within fifty miles of Hunter Island.

Let all who read this know that his authority extends to wherever I may send him and our ships to protect our land and people.”

Again it was signed by the same three people, with various copies to various places. I was getting the original.

WTF, over?

When I was done absorbing that, Tony slapped down a third sheet of paper. “Now for the good one. Read this.”

“Let all who read this know that on this day I, King Tom of Hunter Island, do with full trust hereby install Lord Jason, Baron Jayport, as Duke of the Western Marches and Protector of the Southern Coast, responsible for and with full authority over all lands, waters, forests, farms, towns, and all other resources within fifty miles of the western and southern coasts of Hunter Island as well as all lands drained by the Wide River and the Long Lake.”

Again the three signatures and list of copies. Like the others, I was getting the original. Widemouth was getting a copy.

“That’s like a third of the Island, Tony! Maybe more!”

“Yes, but he trusts you. You have the same values that he does. And, you live here. You’re here all the time. He probably trusts Queen Eleanor more than you, and maybe me too, but you can’t name a third person.”

“Philipmina?”

“Certainly not the good Lady Philipmina. She would happily kill anyone who looked at the King crossly. Hell, I get mad at Tom all the time. He doesn’t want me killed for it, he wants to know what he did wrong. No, Philipmina will never have his trust the way you and I and Eleanor do. We have all proven that we’ll risk our own lives to help others. Paul, too, but he’s more of a doer than an executive.”

“What is this all about, really?”

“Do you remember that mission that Eric had, to rescue the three Damsels held on the Pirate Isles?”

“Sure. We didn’t have the forces to do it. I felt bad about turning him down, but even with surprise we couldn’t do it.”

“Right. However, it needs to be done. And the pirates need to be taken down. King Tom is throwing his weight behind that mission. As Baron Jayport, you have every right to raise a force to defend your barony. That appointment as Admiral gives you the right to requisition every ship we can lay our hands on. The appointment as Duke gives you the authority to organize a ground force from Widemouth and the Long Lake and send it wherever you see fit. We were thinking five hundred men from here and another thousand or so from Widemouth. I’m going to organize another force from Bridgetown and all the eastern coast towns. Probably about three or four thousand men, if we can transport them all.”

Tony continued “Eric is going to be in command of our scouting and skirmishing forces, while I command the main ground combat force. You will command the fleet and keep our soldiers alive until we land. This isn’t going to be a raid. King Tom has declared war on the Pirate Isles for the safety of our people, and we will have orders to destroy every ship and reduce every fortification we find. We can visit as many or as few islands as we choose, as long as we rescue those Damsels before we return.”

All those soldiers ... When added to the sailors and Marines, we’d have seven or eight thousand men on that expedition. Maybe more. “Fuck me.”

“That’s about right, yes. Tom assures me that we have enough food for the men, no matter how many we take. It will all depend upon shipping. And we will all depend upon you to get us there safely. So, what’s going on here? Your people look rather busy, and I see a lot more soldiers than you used to have.”

I had to explain how I was trying to organize a force that could go rescue those Damsels without alerting the pirates to what we were doing, and what the ‘training exercise’ was all about.

When I was done Tony sighed and said “I don’t think I can participate. I’m not supposed to be starting fights if it’s not directly related to rescuing a Damsel. I could stay and defend the fort after you take it, but if you are just planning to destroy it there’s little point in that. I don’t think I can help you at all except maybe helping train your people.”

“I think that everyone would enjoy that, if you don’t mind getting a little sweaty showing my men everything they don’t know yet.” Even Eric had admitted that Sir Tony was the best swordsman on the planet.

So Tony spent the next day giving demonstrations, usually in the form of a sparring session with each company or crew’s champion. By the end of the day he was exhausted, but he was still undefeated. Everyone had to admit that he was still the best, and if he helped teach them everyone would benefit.

He had also brought me the lenses from three more telescopes, a hand-drawn document that showed a cross-staff, a back-staff, and a quadrant as well as how they were used, and a list of the Royal Navy’s old signal flags.

A simple cross-staff would be easy. The others would take a bit more time to build. I’d looked at sextants when I was in the Navy, but I didn’t have the support I’d need to build one here. I hadn’t even thought about the earlier instruments. They should be an immense help navigating. I could build them, and I could use them.

Longitude was out until we had chronometers, but latitude we could do. Either the sun at noon, or a star in the north at sunset, or a different star in the north at dawn. Any of them would change their height in the sky by one degree for every degree we sailed northward.

How many miles was that? Let’s see ... the kilometer had originally been defined as one-ten-thousandth of the distance between equator and north pole, so there were ten thousand kilometers for ninety degrees, or ... a hundred and eleven kilometers per degree. Not that anyone here knew what a kilometer was.

Okay, a nautical mile was originally defined as one minute of a degree at the equator. Obviously, a degree of latitude was sixty nautical miles. Okay, the charts showed that the Pirate Isles were about five degrees north of us. If I could build an instrument that would let me tell latitude that closely, we could find them.

Or, I could have someone else build them for me. I showed the drawing to one of our wood-workers and I had a simple cross-staff in my hands before the day was out. A nicer one, as well as a back-staff and a quadrant, would take a couple more days.

As soon as it got dark I was out looking at stars. Unfortunately, with the sun having set it was hard to see the horizon. That wasn’t going to do me any good at all. During the day I could see the horizon, but I’d get blinded trying to sight the sun. At night, I could sight a star but I couldn’t tell the horizon.

Maybe I could use a back-staff to check the sun’s height at noon. If I could measure the sun’s height here and also at the north end of the Island and see a difference, that would be good enough to measure latitude with. Then, we could simply follow that latitude.

With the cross-staff and the back-staff, you had to hold it steady on the horizon while taking your reading, and I could already see how miserable that would be on a ship. A quadrant was better, though, since it ignored the horizon and dealt with the angle between the sun or star and ‘down’. A quadrant used a weight on a string against an arc. All the user had to do was sight along the star he was interested in, and hold it steady enough for the weight to stop swinging.

On land, that was easy. At sea, not so much. It could be done, though. Then, either clamp the string in place until it had been read or have an assistant read it directly while you held the sights on the target star.

We had been messing around with signal flags, but we hadn’t gotten anywhere near as far as I’d have liked. Tony’s list from the British Royal Navy made it clear that the problem was a lot more complicated than I’d expected. There were ten flags for numerals, plus twenty-six flags for letters, plus another dozen or so special purpose flags, plus another thirty or so pendants which were considered different from flags.

We were supposed to come up with our own code book that applied to our local conditions. His documents gave examples from the British system, and apparently they had a lot of standard phrases because the codes were three-digit numbers. Sure, that gave them a lot of things to say, but it used a lot of flags. If you wanted to send message ‘9’ and ‘99’ you had to somehow make it clear that this wasn’t message ‘999’.

One way would be to send ‘009’ and ‘099’. Another way would be to add spaces between messages, or use separate hoists. According to the examples, Nelson’s old “England expects” message took up flag halliards on all three masts, all six main yards, and a couple other places to hoist it all at once.

We were a long way from needing that. We’d have to make the flags, then distribute copies of the code book. And even then if I wanted to say anything like that I was going to hoist the ‘G’ flag, meaning ‘Gather around the flagship’, and I’d tell them in person. Surely most words can be said with their initial? ‘N’, ‘E’, ‘W’, ‘S’ would have to be reserved for directions, so we couldn’t use ‘E’ for ‘enemy’ and ‘N’ for ‘neutral’ and ‘U’ would mean ‘unknown’ so it can’t be ‘us’. ‘F’ would be ‘Follow me’, right?

Or maybe directions should be double letters ‘NN’, ‘NE’, ‘EE’, ‘SE’, and so on. That would free up ‘N’, ‘E’, ‘W’, and ‘S’ for ‘neutral’, ‘enemy’, ‘where’, and ‘speed’. That would work a lot better. Use ‘Q’ for question, and ‘QWE’ would be ‘Tell me where the enemy is’. Getting back ‘6EM4NW’ would mean ‘There are six enemy ships four miles to the north-west’, which is what I would have wanted Lion to tell me when we ran across Daffid’s fleet.

Once we had everyone loaded up and headed east I had lots of time to noodle with this while we sailed over to the mainland, and paper had become cheap enough that once I’d worked this all out on a couple of waxboards I could make a more permanent list of our common codes. Of course just simply trying to manage our fleet during this raid gave me all kinds of ideas for messages I should be able to send. A lot of my initial choices for one-flag messages had to change as more useful meanings showed up.

Each ship would have to have a hull number. That’s what the pennants were, to identify the ship without accidentally sending a message “All ships return home immediately for royal funeral”. With each ship numbered, we could send ‘9PWWC’ meaning ‘Ship number 9 is to patrol due west of the convoy’. As soon as we saw ‘A’ on that ship’s mast meaning ‘acknowledged’, we could drop that hoist and then raise ‘7PNWC’ and then ‘12PSWC’ telling those two ships to patrol north-west and south-west, and everyone would understand that those three ships were to form a screen to the westward of the cargo ships.

We kept the fleet together to protect the transports. Right now our morale was pretty high. Our men all believed that we could win any sort of fair fight. Morale would sink, though, if we allowed a pirate or anyone to capture one of our transport ships. I couldn’t see it happening, myself. Who would board and try to capture a ship carrying two hundred soldiers, most of them in armor? It was a possibility, though, so we kept the fleet together.