Chapter 2: Worrisome Times

It was indeed December 16 when Thomas saw the first part of his work in the Surrey Herald, and only a day later, a complimentary copy of The Gentleman’s Magazine with the same chapter arrived by mail from London. Mr. Symes and Mr. Nichols had shared the labour and cost of editing and typesetting, and Mr. Nichols provided stereotype casts of the chapters for the Herald’s use.

A few days later, letters from readers began to trickle in, both at the Greys’ manor and at the two publishers’ offices. Thomas read them all and categorised them into three groups: scholarly comments, flattery, and angry partisan writings. The latter group comprised roughly one tenth of the incoming letters, the scholarly writings a little more, with the vast majority of the responses being more or less meaningless compliments. He sorted the letters accordingly and resolved to answer only the comments of the first group.

Nevertheless, the Greys and their houseguest Daisy Leeds had a peaceful Christmas. Following family tradition, they exchanged gifts on Christmas morning and attended church in their chapel where the curate, Mr. Berwick, conducted an upbeat service. In Thomas’s estimate, Berwick stood head and shoulders over the old fool Caplan whom he had replaced. He was well respected by the tenants and their families and did not meddle in their private lives.

The day after Christmas, the Greys followed the tradition of Boxing Day and handed out gifts to their household members and to the estate staff. Andrew Polk, the estate carpenter, made it a memorable day when he announced his engagement with Lisette Dutour, their cook, and his willingness to raise her little son as his own. Thomas was surprised by the announcement, but Mirabel’s smug smile told him the she had known about it beforehand.

Polk had turned in his masterpiece, an ornate writing desk, to the Worshipful Company of Joiners, the principal guild of cabinet makers. Thomas and he had reached agreement on Polk renting the workshop from the estate against the promise of regular maintenance work in the manor house. Since Polk had renewed a large part of the wood work already, there was not that much for him to do anymore, and it was in both sides’ interest for the man to become an independent craftsman.

After Christmas, the print proofs for Thomas’s book arrived from Mr. Thurgood, and for the next two days, Thomas was very busy going over each page and adding corrections where needed. In all, Mr. Thurgood had performed a very thorough edit, simplifying sentences in some instances, and replacing ambiguous wordings. It was educating for Thomas to see those corrections, and he sent the proofs back with his thanks.

By now, the third chapter had been published in the two periodicals, and after a lull during the Christmas days, more letters arrived to be read, categorised and sorted. Again, Thomas responded to a number of them which argued certain points he had made.

Two letters stood out. One was from the prominent abolitionist William Wilberforce, a well known member of Parliament and a driving force behind the 1807 Slave Trade Act. Mr. Wilberforce congratulated him on the subject of his writing and on his insights and issued an invitation for the Greys’ next visit to London. Thomas sent an answering letter, expressing his delight over the invitation and promising to accept it at the earliest opportunity.

The second letter came from the 2nd Earl Grey, a prominent Whig politician. From what he had read, Thomas did not see eye-to-eye with the Earl regarding Napoleon’s reign of the Hundred Days — Earl Grey had argued it to be a French internal affair — but the man’s stance on slavery was, as everybody knew, that it should be abolished in its entirety. The latter standpoint certainly agreed with Thomas’s views.

The Earl was also complimenting Thomas’s treatise and given the shared family name, inquired about the roots of the Surrey Greys. Thomas answered carefully, thanking the Earl for his kind letter, and detailing what he knew about his forebears, starting with his great-grandfather, Captain Roger Grey, who as far as Thomas knew, had risen to his rank from before the mast.

On the whole, the book project kept him busy over the otherwise uneventful winter months. There was an interesting news in March that Lord Exmouth, sent to the Barbary Coast to negotiate an end to piracy and enslavement by the corsairs, had seemingly convinced the Deys of Tunis and Tripoli to end piracy originating from their beyliks, but the new Dey of Algiers, Omar Agha, had agreed to such provisions only with a great show of reluctance. This was interesting, and Thomas made certain to include that information and its ramifications into the concluding chapter of his treatise, in time for Mr. Thurgood to amend the print typecasts.

Otherwise the year started with uncommonly cold weather all through the spring, and even on sunny days, the sky appeared gloomy and yellowish. Even to a man such as Thomas who had spent most of his adult life reading the skies for weather signs, this was unusual.

Of the first lambs born in March, almost half did not survive in the cold weather, and the tenants took to housing them in their barns for protection. The sowing, too, was delayed and even when the tenants could not wait any longer, the crops grew only poorly. Even grazing was poor for horses, cows and sheep, and many tenants were forced to sell their calves early for lack of forage.

In late April, the landowners and caretakers had a meeting in Guildford to discuss the looming poor harvests and the impact on the livestocks. Temperatures at night were still freezing, and there was widespread worry. Thomas mentioned the strange, gloomy sky, and Mr. Thomson, ever the scientific farmer, offered that a very great fire must have released ashes into the sky, causing the strange colour but also blocking the warming sun rays. It was certainly true that the yellowish colour of the sky was eerily reminiscent of what people remembered from great conflagrations, but nobody had heard of any such massive fires.

Nothing was resolved at the meeting, but several landowners proposed to reduce the rents for the year to help their tenants. This was certainly a way to alleviate the hardships, and Thomas resolved to follow that course, too.

There was also an article in the Morning Chronicle referring to a different problem faced by the Navy Board. With over four fifths of the Royal Navy ships and sloops placed in ordinary, there were problems storing the unused provisions, such as salted pork, hardtack, dried peas and other goods. This gave Thomas an idea, and he travelled to Portsmouth by post chaise. There, he found the superintendent of the victualling yard and offered to buy a large consignment of provisions from his overfilled storehouses. For a rather low price, Thomas was able to purchase fifty pork barrels, 400 sacks of flour, 200 sacks of dried peas, 50 barrels of lemon juice, and eight-hundred pounds of cheese.

Next he found a wagon master to transport those goods 40 miles over land to Godalming, from where barges could convey the foods to Guildford using the River Wey Navigation. Only a week later, the goods were safely stored at the Grey estate, in an old stone cottage where they would be dry and safe from rodents.

He also told his neighbours about the opportunity, and Mr. Thomson proposed a buying mission to get enough food to Guildford to prevent starvation over the coming months. He saw to it himself, planning to hire a merchantman for the transport of the goods to London, from whence they could be delivered to Guilford by river barges. It was a sound plan, and Thomas, too, invested in another delivery.

He also ordered large shipments of foods and drink for their own household. For that, he made use of the recent introduction of canned foods by Messrs. Donkin, Hall and Gamble, of Bermondsey, London, which kept for a year and more and needed no salting. Poor Lisette decried the prospect of cooking with such preserved foods, but a look at the contents of a salted pork barrel quickly convinced her of the advantages of tins. Still, Thomas incurred large costs whilst his rent income would be diminished.

Weather continued to be unseasonably cold through May and even June, but at this time, there came a shocking news from the Mediterranean Sea. A group of Corsican, Sardinian and Sicilian fishermen, operating under British colours off Bona, on the eastern coast of Algiers, were attacked and massacred by the Dey of Algiers’s soldiers, with a loss of over 200 lives. This was a clear violation of the agreement between the Dey and Lord Exmouth from earlier in the year, and the newspapers gave gruelling accounts of the event.

It was pure coincidence that Mr. Thurgood had distributed the first print run of Thomas’s treatise on the Barbary Coast slave trade just two weeks before, but as soon as the news broke, Mr. Thurgood had another thousand copies printed and delivered to booksellers. All of a sudden, Captain Sir Thomas Grey was a household name amongst the literate, and Mr. Thurgood urgently pleaded for Thomas to visit London for a series of readings in the anti-slavery circles. The dismal situation on his lands due to the failing crops made him refuse, as he claimed that his presence on the lands was needed.

However, on June 28, one of the well-known Admiralty envelopes arrived. It held orders for him to report at Portsmouth and to Lord Exmouth, to join a punitive expedition against the Dey of Algiers as a supernumerary captain, with pay equivalent to that of a captain of a third-rate ship, a 74, in Lord Exmouth’s flagship, HMS Queen Charlotte. Mirabel watched him as he read.

“Orders, darling? “ she asked bravely.

Thomas nodded heavily. “I am to join Exmouth’s squadron to raise hell with the Dey of Algiers. I’ll be a super in the flagship; no command for me.”

“Oh, dear, the book?”

“Likely. Somehow, they seem to think now that I am the expert on the Barbary Coast corsairs.”

“Will it be dangerous?”

Thomas shrugged. “I don’t know Exmouth’s plans, but he just visited the place, remember? He’ll know what to do. Darling, how will you cope?”

“Never mind that! We are well provisioned, thanks to your foresight, and I have Mr. Conway to deal with the estate. I shall look after the rest, don’t worry. You only have to make certain that you’ll return healthy and hale.”

Thomas shook his head. “I shall never write a book again.”

Portsmouth was even colder than Guildford, and the overcast skies looked ominous. Lord Exmouth was in London, conferring with the cabinet, but his Chief of Staff, or Captain of the Fleet, was there. It was not Captain Dancer with whom Thomas had had many dealings in the past, but Lord Exmouth’s brother, Rear Admiral Sir Israel Pellew. He had been inducted into the Order of the Bath in the same ceremony as Thomas and he greeted him politely.

“Welcome aboard, Sir Thomas!”

“Thank you, Sir Israel.”

“Why don’t you settle in your cabin, and then we can discuss your role during the fitting-out? I have to admit that I did not expect you to arrive this soon.”

Thomas shrugged. “If I may quote, Sir Israel, ‘I owe all of my successes to having been always a quarter hour before my time’.”

“A quote from Nelson, huh? Be that as it may, it is good to have you with us, Sir Thomas. I haven’t been to the Barbary coast since ‘97, although I had some dealings with the Turks in ‘06. Well, there’ll be time to talk later. Let me enlist Mr. Bellamy. Sentry! Pass the word for Mr. Bellamy!”

Two minutes later, a grizzled lieutenant of nearly twice Thomas’s age appeared.

“Sir Thomas, this is the 1st lieutenant, Mr. Alexander Bellamy. Mr. Bellamy, please meet Captain Sir Thomas Grey, late of the Clyde frigate. He will serve on his Lordship’s staff.”

“Welcome aboard, Sir Thomas,” Bellamy announced, showing only the slightest trace of annoyance over that whippersnapper of a captain. Thomas was unfazed, having met with that attitude often enough.

“I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Bellamy.”

Pellew continued. “Please show Sir Thomas to his cabin and have somebody attend to his needs. I trust, you brought servants, Sir Thomas?”

“My body servant Broderick, Sir Israel. He will look after my needs. I have also alerted two men who might be useful for our enterprise, Master’s Mate Rourke and Midshipman Leeds. If they receive my letters in time, they are likely to volunteer. Mr. Rourke was a slave in Algiers. He knows the harbour like his own pocket and speaks the language. Mr. Leeds is also knowledgeable of the Barbary Coast.”

“That was thoughtful of you, Sir Thomas. We have an interpreter, but he has never set foot in Algiers. He’s no sailor, either. I ask for your leave now until dinner time. My brother wishes to have his dinners with his staff, so you won’t need a personal steward. I opted to contribute to the cabin stores, but...”

“Of course, I shall do the same, Sir Israel,” Thomas said quickly. “Please, do not let me keep you.”

Pellew left them, and Bellamy showed Thomas to a cabin on the starboard side of the upper gun deck, forward of the admiral’s cabin. He would have access to Exmouth’s day cabin. It was amazing how much space was available in a first-rate.

Thomas summoned Broderick who had been waiting at the port with their dunnage and who set out to make the cabin habitable. The furniture was spartan, and Thomas tasked Broderick with finding better beddings, a mattress, and an upholstered chair in town. The admiral’s staff had their own steward, a fellow named Staines, who promised to accompany and help Broderick with the purchases.

With those necessities ordered, Thomas set out to walk the decks. The largest ship he had ever sailed had been HMS Sultan, 74, and even that large two-decker would have looked puny compared with Queen Charlotte. He even descended into the lower decks, trying to get a feel of the ship. His last excursion was into the main masthead, almost 200 feet above the deck. He was out of breath arriving there, and looking down on the deck, he felt slightly queasy. It was easily the highest mast he had ever climbed, but he might be ordered up there as Exmouth’s eyes. Very carefully, he climbed down again and went aft to the quarterdeck where he met Captain Barnstowe, the flag captain. He was at least ten years senior to Thomas, in rank but even more so in age, but he greeted him friendly.

“Glad to have you on board, Sir Thomas.”

“Thank you, Sir,” Thomas said formally, acutely aware of being one of the youngest commissioned officers on board. Even most of the lieutenants were older, a common thing aboard a first-rate.