Chapter 20: The Pirate Isles

The first thing I did when we got back to Jayport was to order all of the cargo ships careened and scraped. Every one of them would have to row west from Jayport to Rocky Point, the headland that marked the south-west corner of Hunter Island. They may be fat, and they may be pigs, but they could be a lot faster pigs. It may only be fifty or sixty miles, but there was no reason for them to wallow the whole way.

After that, they may be able to sail on a reach northward, using the easterly winds, but at least that first leg of the voyage would have to be rowed. And scraping their hulls would make them faster when they sailed, too.

The ones that we owned accepted their orders and went out to do it. The independent traders, though, objected. They were fine. It was a lot of work. Who cared if their ship was faster or slower? It was a cargo ship.

We cared. I cared. The Brotherhood was only a few days’ sail from Jayport for our ships, but it would take their ships twice as long as our ships. If we left them behind, the pirates would come in behind us all and capture them and I would lose all my soldiers. I didn’t want the whole expedition to have to crawl, waiting for them. I wanted them to be able to go fast enough to keep up with everyone else.

We weren’t getting anywhere. After some more arguing I put my foot down and told them that I was buying the whole lot, all five of them, whether they wanted to sell or not. I’d give each captain an even hundred conchs for their ship. Once we were done with our invasion, I’d sell the ships back to them, but the price would be higher by the value of all the work we had done to make them better ships. High-handed, I know, but we needed the ships and we needed them able to keep up with the fleet.

Without any more argument I had some of our soldiers come and empty out each ship. While they were doing that, I had some of our sailors lower their yards and start working on rigging that would allow them to tack. Between being careened and the improved rig, they should be a lot faster.

Really, it only took a few days for each ship. Drop the yard, empty the stores and ballast, careen the ship out in the bay, put all the ballast and supplies back in, re-rig the yard to allow tacking. We had to sink some pilings along the beach to anchor our capstans so we could pull the ships over on their sides, but cleaning the hull didn’t take that long with several hundred men available to do it. Since they were all being done at the same time as we had the men and materials, they were all done well before the first scout for the King’s fleet showed up. We even added jibs to the ones we had the sailcloth for.

All five of the independent ships needed repairs of one sort or another. We did what we could, but a lot of work had to be deferred until after the campaign. We even held sea-trials for them all when we were done, demonstrating that cleaning the hull made them faster and easier to row, while the improved rig allowed them to use the wind a lot better than they used to be able to.

Three of the captains remained with their ships, hoping to get them back when we were done. The other two scampered off with their payment, leaving me as the owner. Fine, I’ll be able to sell them for much more than a hundred conchs when we get back. As soon as they were seaworthy again we sent them all up to Widemouth for repairs and to load, along with one of our ‘escorts’ to keep the flies off. I had enough space on my own ships to carry all six of the Jayport companies. Widemouth was training far more soldiers than they had ships to carry them, and at two companies per ship the five I had just bought would be able to carry a thousand of them.

When Thunder had returned from its trip to see the King, I kept it at home with me. We still hadn’t come up with any ship faster than it. I had thought that a smaller ship with the same sails would be faster, but when we tried that the smaller ship just pounded in the waves once it got into the open ocean. It probably would be faster in protected water with no swells like just off the eastern side of Hunter Island, but that didn’t do us any good. Thunder and other ships her size were probably about as small as we could go and still be steady in the open ocean.

I was probably having a scale problem. Thunder was about a hundred feet long, and to us right here and now it seemed pretty big. In times to come, though, ships would keep getting larger and larger, and there would come a time when Thunder was considered a very small ship. The US Navy’s modern nuclear carriers were all well over a thousand feet long.

Even the Navy’s ‘Fast Frigates’ or FFGs -that was pronounced ‘figs’- that we had built so many of for the Cold War were considered dangerously small to be out in the open ocean, and they were like four hundred feet long. The FFGs had eventually all been decommissioned as not up to modern warfare, and the US Navy had not replaced them with newer versions. The Navy that I had served in had instead used the larger -and more expensive- destroyers and cruisers to perform the same tasks.

We would continue to try to make our ships faster, and we would continue to operate smaller ships like our ‘escorts’, but I didn’t really expect any ship to be faster than Thunder without a lot of work. Like three or four masts, skysails, moonrakers, and all that stuff. Not worth the trouble until we started having real wars with other nations that also had fast ships and anti-ship missiles.

Anyway, the waves around Hunter Island followed the wind, which I guessed was a good indication that the wind was a constant. Unless there was a storm nearby, our ‘happy hunting ground’ around the southern side and south-west corner of the Island generally had swells about three or four feet high. The waves were anywhere from fifty to a hundred feet apart, as near as I could tell, bunching up in shallow water. More careful measurement and analysis would probably show a constant relationship, but without a good reason I couldn’t see going to that much trouble.

Larger ships like Shark were almost always supported by more two or more waves. Ships shorter than Thunder were often only supported by one wave and they could easily slide up and down, but if they got moving too fast they had a bad tendency to rise on one wave and then drop, crashing into the next one. Anything smaller than Thunder couldn’t really be used to chase pirates.

So, when our lookout tower reported a friendly ship approaching from the east, Thunder was the only real warship I had handy so I took it out to meet the fleet. Shark and Wrong Place were out on patrol, ensuring that no one interfered with us. Excuse me, I asked Thunder’s captain Matto if he could give me a ride out to meet them.

There was no way I was taking Lion or any of our escorts. They were slower, they weren’t as maneuverable, they had no anti-ship weapons. What if it wasn’t our fleet?

The initial report was for the fleet’s scout, and by the time we had reached it we could see the rest of the fleet. That was a gaggle of geese. There were ships everywhere. I couldn’t even count them all.

Believe me, Thunder sailing downwind was far faster than a bunch of cargo ships rowing upwind. Thunder rowing upwind probably would have been faster than some of those ships sailing downwind. With the current working against them too, they weren’t moving very fast at all.

All of the eastern towns’ warships were still basic brigs with a square sail on two masts and one or two jibs, the rig that we’d showed them originally. They were fast enough and maneuverable enough to do what they needed to do, in the sea between the mainland and the Island. They didn’t need the topsails that we had added to our ships later, and they certainly didn’t need all the added deckhands and topmen it took to get any use from them.

All the cargo ships, though, the ones they were using as troop transports, they were going to be a problem. They were all normal cargo tubs. One of them had two masts, but I could tell just by looking at them that they were rigged as simple cogs. If the wind wasn’t behind them, they had to row.

They were all like that. To go upwind or even just cross-wind, they had to drop the sails and row. I’d be willing to bet that nine out of ten of them hadn’t had their hulls cleaned in years. They weren’t quite as slow as dogshit in a Texas heat wave, but they were close. Certainly they were slower than molasses in January.

It was reasonable to question if they were capable of making it to the Pirate Isles before the men all collapsed in exhaustion. Even if they did make it, the men onboard wouldn’t be in any shape to fight. Sometimes speed mattered, and those ‘transports’ weren’t fast enough to do the job. It was time to be pushy again.

All of the escorting warships were flying a blue ensign at the top of their mainmast. One of them also had a yellow flag just below it, to identify the one carrying the king. Gold is yellow, right? We came about and rafted with King Tom’s flagship, the Flying Arrow. That was his first ship, one of the ones we had sold to Queen Eleanor when we first started this.

Actually, this was probably the first time he’d ever been on one of these ships. He wasn’t a sailor. He worked for the London Transit Authority, or whatever it was called, and spent his day driving workers and pensioners and tourists around.

I guessed that meant that we needed to protect Flying Arrow. I mean, the ship had a good captain and crew and it was a fine warship, but getting King Tom killed would probably spoil whatever we were doing. Something to talk about later.

Right now we needed to get those ships upgraded. King Tom and Sir Tony didn’t push back at all on that problem statement, those ships would never make it. They pushed back on my proposed solution, but what else were we going to do? Those ships were used to going from port to port along the mainland, and maybe one or two islands like ours. They had no schedule and no minimum speed on track requirements, and if the rowers got tired they could rest. If they had to row all the way to the Pirate Isles they’d be dead of exhaustion first.

Was it time to admit what we were doing? No, we agreed. If we were going to stay here for several days for repairs, that was long enough for the Brotherhood to get word and cause trouble. Until we really left, we had to keep our real plans secret.

Tom and Tony had brought four warships and almost thirty transports, cargo ships carrying men and food instead of cargo. We could cram them all into the little bay at the mouth of the Jay River, but there wouldn’t be much room for a rowboat. Just to get them out of the way, we decided to send my contingent on ahead, as far as we could send them.

We pulled out the maps and found a place on the northwest coast of the Island that looked like maybe it would have a safe anchorage somewhere. At least, it was behind a peninsula and protected from the wind, the waves, and the current. Tom said it looked about where Campbeltown was, on the peninsula that protected the Firth of Clyde, in Scotland. I had all seven of my transports load their men as fast as they could, and go there to wait. We’d be there in about fifteen days.

I also sent two of my ‘escort’ ships, ships that we normally manned as warships but weren’t big enough to carry a launcher, with them to keep them under control. Really, there wasn’t much difference between the transports and the escorts aside from their rig. The escorts were brigs and the crews all had leather armor for fighting at sea. The transports were cogs with one main sail, and all the soldiers had chain or scale armor. Some of my crews did too, but they didn’t wear it at sea.

King Tom sent two of his transports with them, as he and Tony felt that they could keep up with mine. All the rest needed work before we moved any further. Those two should do what they could up at the anchorage while they were waiting. My men would give them any guidance and help they needed.

We ended up with something like twenty-five ships all getting worked on at once in a continuous process. Disembark the troops, unload the supplies, careen the hull, reload the supplies, do what we could to improve the rig, add some kind of sideboards, and then embark the troops again. The four warships just needed their hulls cleaned and they weren’t that bad so they were pretty quick.

The transports took a lot longer. Since we didn’t have a warm fuzzy feeling about what condition they were in, we had to be careful rolling them on their sides. Two of the transports needed too much work for the time we wanted to spend. We did what we could and sent them both, empty, to Widemouth to be overhauled at the shipyard. Their troops would get split among the other ships.

One of the ships, ‘Sunrise’, collapsed when we rolled it on its side to clean the hull. I mean, the hull and frames underneath just gave way. We had a couple of men on the ship to look things over, and they got injured, but no one got killed. Surprised the hell out of everyone watching, that’s for sure!

I’d have thought that maybe it got caught on a rock, but it was something like the third ship to get rolled over at that location and there was a fairly smooth depression in the sand where they’d all been. Didn’t much matter, it was for sure that no one else was going to use that spot again, not until the wreckage was cleared away.