Chapter 22: North Isle

As part of the signal system I had to assign pennant numbers to all the ships. It was either that or spell out “Pirate’s Gift” every time I wanted that ship to do something. Pennant numbers were easier. Shark would be number one. I probably wouldn’t be sending any messages about my own ship, but what if I moved to another ship? What if King Tom wanted Shark somewhere and sent a signal? Shark needed a pennant number, too.

I gave Wrong Place, Thunder, and Sword numbers two, three, and four, then Widemouth’s Vengeance, Cleaver, and Kraken got five, six, and seven. Bridgetown’s Flying Arrow, Lance, and Sea Fortune got eight through ten. Small Cove’s Intimidator and Charger got eleven and twelve. Sword, Kraken, Sea Fortune, and Charger were all back at home guarding the Island, but I’d be sailing with them soon enough. They needed to be on the list.

Our six ‘escort’ brigs, Lion and the rest, all got numbers thirteen through eighteen. Those first eighteen were the only ships I intended to keep their numbers on a permanent basis.

After them I skipped to thirty and started on all the transports, adding the nine prizes at the end. I’d originally thought of skipping to fifty, but we already had more than forty transports and I didn’t want to have to go to three digits. Better to start at thirty. Surely we’d be back at home long before we had thirty warships. Seventy transports might happen, though.

Anyone who came to copy the signal book would copy the pennant list, too, and everyone would know when I hoisted “2VPNW” that I wanted Filo to take Wrong Place and his whole squadron to go patrol to the northwest. Those ships that were in that squadron would know what to do without Filo having to go by every ship and tell them. Or, he could hoist “VPNW” on Wrong Place and tell them the same thing. His group was to patrol to the northwest. If I followed that with “TD4” they would know that they were to remain on station for four days before returning.

Along with the signal book and pennant list I also sent out my letter with examples. It really belonged with the signal book, as part of it. For instance, I was using ‘V’ for ‘Group’. Since King Tom was on Flying Arrow, the ship assigned pennant number 8, and he was commanding the transport group, ‘8V’ would mean Flying Arrow, all transports, and all escorts assigned to shepherd them. ‘15V’ meant just Sir Tony’s group of transports, and ‘17V’ meant just the Commander’s group of transports. Or, ‘30V34LI’ would mean the group from 30 to 34 should land their troops immediately. If I just wanted ships 30 and 34, I would hoist the same signal but with a space instead of ‘V’ between the numbers.

Shark got a whole gaggle of men onboard for the day to write out their ships’ copies of the signal book and other documents. I put Aldo in charge of that, too, but I had them do it on waxboard first, both for practice and to prove they could do it before wasting paper and ink. Some of them had very good handwriting, far better than mine, while others were worse than Aldo’s.

Well, we had them all day, or even longer if we needed, right? The fleet got underway while Aldo was getting them organized. They were with us until we gathered the fleet again, unless I wanted to send them out with Thunder.

Of course they all wanted to see the actual flags, so that they knew what they were writing about, and almost immediately we ran into a problem. We’d gotten about twenty men from all the warships and escorts, plus a couple of the transports. Out of those twenty men, we found three that were color-blind. Oh, they could tell some colors, but not enough to read all of the flags. And, what would happen if one of those men were chosen to pull the flags out and put together a hoist?

Those three could write out the documents, but they couldn’t fill in the drawings in the signal book. Well, no one could at the moment, we’d have to find some paints first, but when we did have paints and gathered all the signal books together to paint the drawings, we needed to have those three men out hauling on lines, not painting the drawings.

And, what was the chance that of twenty random men, three of them would be colorblind? I was pretty sure that this was a genetic problem. Was colorblindness so prevalent that fifteen percent of all men on Chaos were colorblind? Or was it just a local problem, and we’d find that it was only people from a particular town and others whose families had recently moved from there?

I was interested enough to question them on their families. One was from Small Cove, one was from one of the small mainland fishing villages, and the third one was raised in a large mainland city but was an orphan. He had no idea where his family was from. I didn’t say anything, but I noticed that all three were blonde. It wasn’t much of a clue since I was, too, but it was something.

I made a sort of mental note to ask the Heros to research it when they got home, and get back to me on their next visit. And I’d have to come up with some sort of color test, like those numbers the Navy used. If you’re color-blind, you can’t be a signalman or a pilot!

I’d been thinking of having each writer make two copies of everything, so we’d have some extras to hand out, but with some of the men unable to write and others unable to tell colors that idea got shot down. We ended up having the two color-blind men who could write clearly just make twenty copies of the pennant list and the example letter, while the ten best writers among the ones who could tell colors made two copies each of the signal book.

I had the remainder -the men who’d been sent over to write but who failed my writing test- help our crew rig a couple of signal halliards on the mainmast. We already had the one that we were using to hoist the blue ensign, but I didn’t want to have to pull it down just to send a signal. Besides, it was fairly lightweight. The ensign didn’t get messed with very often. It got hoisted when we went to sea, and lowered when we came back into port. Aside from that, it got left up there. The signal halliards had to be a lot sturdier, as we may well be using them all the time.

We had enough copies by early afternoon to send Thunder down to the south to deliver people and documents to each warship and escort. Since we were staying a lot closer this time, Thunder should be able to get to the end of the line before dark, then come back during the night. They’d be the only ship that was having any fun today.

Everything was fine on Shark until nightfall. About an hour before sunset, we dropped our sails and hoisted “BK” like we’d said, and we could see the other ships north and south of us dropping their sails too as they saw us. I really didn’t want to lose any ships this time. Then, when the light started failing, we lit a lantern and had it hoisted up to the crow’s nest where it was tied to the masthead like usual.

Since Aldo had people with him, I couldn’t very well insist that he sleep in the hammock across the doorway like usual. We ended up converting my table into a bed for them and strung a couple of blankets across the cabin like we had for Donna Herbalist, the Cassandran Damsel I had accidentally rescued. This time, Aldo got to have fun all night while I lay in my bed all alone and tried to ignore the noise.

He was fifteen, alright. He must have taken care of both of those women two or three times. It seemed like every time the noise died down and I got to sleep, I’d get woken up again by all the noise when they started again. I wasn’t very happy about getting payback for all the times he’d had to sleep through me taking care of Ceecee or Gina.

I grumbled about it in the morning. Aldo was apologetic, and offered to share one of the women with me but I vetoed that. Aldo and I weren’t social equals, he was a kid and an orphan and a sailor while I was older and rich and a Captain or Admiral, and a Lord, Baron, and Duke to boot. I was even his employer, his boss.

On this subject, though, we were equals. I had more than one wife, he had more than one wife, and we could talk about our problems like equals. There was no way I would ever share any of my wives with anyone else, so it would be dishonest for me to accept that offer from anyone else. Another man might accept that offer, but I couldn’t. I would just be cranky for a while.

We came across North Isle the next morning. If we hadn’t stopped for the night, we might had passed it in the dark. Probably not, since the island would have lights in quite a few places, but maybe. More likely, the ships that saw it would have stopped and the rest of the fleet would have kept on going until they realized there was something wrong.

This time we knew what we were doing. We just charged in, the warships first to clear out any ships that came to argue with us, and then all the transports as needed to land whatever was required to destroy whatever we found. Again, once the two guard ships were dealt with -they were both sunk after the requisite ‘short discussion’- the warships split up to go around the island and deal with any other ships that came out.

One of the escorts hung around to rescue any sailors who wanted to surrender, but they had to swim to the ship and ask permission to board. The crew would ask if the pirate surrendered, and if he said yes he’d be allowed onboard. If anyone bitched about the treatment they could be told that it was better than what the East Isle pirates got, we didn’t stop for those assholes at all.

The rest of the fleet moved on in to do the same thing. It was different in that North Isle was different from East Isle, but we were doing the same thing. The warships went first to deal with any ship that was moving, and the transports followed us to deal with anything that wasn’t moving. This time we were willing to take a bit more care and loot before burning, as we wanted to make sure we kept our supplies up. We needed water more than anything else, but more food was welcome too.

North Isle was more spread-out than East Isle had been. North Isle didn’t have cities so much as a lot of estates and towns and villages. There were more ships and boats and yards, but they weren’t defended as well.

We worked over North Isle for several days, much longer than we had worked over East Isle. Part of it was a desire to make sure that our backs were safe when we left, part of it was avarice and hunger, and part of it was that someone had remembered that this was the island that the attack on Widemouth had come from. We talked to enough prisoners to know that Lord Howard had been killed in a duel not long after his return. He’d left with four ships and about eight hundred men, and returned with two ships -one damaged- only about two hundred and fifty men, and no loot at all. Enough people had been unhappy about all the sons and brothers and fathers who hadn’t come back to keep him fighting until he died.

That made us happy, but it didn’t unburn all those buildings or bring all those people and farm animals back to life. For these people, we could look them in the eye and tell them that this was a pirate raid in payment for their attack on Widemouth. If they didn’t like it, they could do something about it. They could kill the next guy to suggest raiding Hunter Island.

One of the things we did to North Isle was demand tribute. I was worried about supplies. With all of our captured ships we were up to about forty-five that we could use for transports, and we spread our men out until none of them had more than two hundred soldiers.

The smaller ships were still pretty full, but Tony and Eric and the Commander didn’t want to break up the companies. Most of them were shy of a hundred men by now. Some of them had never actually had a hundred when they were formed, and with casualties they were all down to ninety or eighty or seventy. It was easy enough to say “When you’re done here, your company is going to embark on Dawn Flower. It’s smaller and we need Sea Foam for one of the larger companies.”

We ended up keeping the four best ships we’d captured at North Island, but we stripped and scuttled two of our ships that weren’t in as good shape, so we only got two more ships for our fleet. Everything else got burned or sunk.

We also got a lot of loot. We allowed the soldiers to take anything they found that was worth the effort of carrying onboard ship. Once we had destroyed or taken anything along the shore that might be used to build, repair, or outfit a ship we were willing to talk to the islanders about everything they still had left. By then they were willing to agree that they couldn’t stop us from rolling over anything they had, and they gave us all the food and ale we could store on our ships.

We took care of our own water. Asking them to do that would just be asking to be poisoned or something. We already had the barrels, so all we had to do was rinse them out, fill and seal them, and put them back on the ships. By the time we were done at North Island every ship was fully stocked and ready for another long voyage.

Shark continued to get bolts of cloth in various colors delivered as part of the loot and re-supply. The seamstresses had little else to do during the day, so by the time we were done with North Isle Shark had three complete sets, or rather one set of signal flags with three of each flag. Each of the warships had at least one complete set. We were working on the escorts, since they could be used as messenger ships. And every ship, even the captured transports, had the ‘A’, ‘J’, ‘Q’, ‘Y’, and ‘N’ flags so that they could acknowledge orders, ask for help, question their orders, or say yes or no.

During the night all the seamstresses spent their time with the man of their choice. I really stayed out of that. They were not slaves or whores, they were women in my employ and I was not going to say yea or nay to their choices. Aside from my bed. No.

We didn’t take many prisoners this time, as we caught very few of their ships out on the sea. Any prisoners we took were almost immediately stripped and released, as soon as the fighting was over. Mostly, our soldiers just collected slaves who asked to go home with us. We got some children who the slaves claimed, and the soldiers also returned with quite a few women who may not have been slaves but I wasn’t going to look too closely at that. This was a pirate raid, and women were valid loot.