A Journal of The Experiment at Jamaica (The Neville Burton 'Worlds Apart' Series Book 2) Read online

  A Journal of

  The

  Experiment

  at Jamaica

  by

  ­

  Georges Carrack

  The Neville Burton ‘Worlds Apart’ Series

  Volume 2

  All rights reserved.

  © Copyright Carrack Books 2013

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

  Story by Georges Carrack

  Cover design by Joshua Courtright

  Cover illustration sourced from public domain: “The Younger Views of the South Seas”, a painting by John Clevely

  E-Book ISBN: 978-0-9906492-2-9

  Carrack, Georges, 1947-

  The Experiment at Jamaica: fiction/ Georges Carrack.

  Visit our website at www.CarrackBooks.com

  This is a work of fiction. While some character names, ship names and locations that appear in this work may be found in historical documents, the specific incidents and events depicted in the story and the names of all characters, historical or otherwise, are used fictionally. Any resemblance to businesses or companies is also fictional and entirely coincidental.

  v1.0 KDP

  This second volume of

  The Neville Burton ‘Worlds Apart’ Series

  is dedicated to

  Carolyn

  * * * * * * * *

  For her continuous patience, ideas

  and undying support in all things

  The author wishes to recognize the efforts of and thank people who were extremely helpful in accomplishing this publication.

  Joshua Courtright for cover design

  The group of willing “Beta Readers” who provided guidance on the story line and finding my parade of punctuation errors.

  All those authors of this genre who have gone before, providing the inspiration and a basic understanding of life on a British warship in the Napoleonic era, and

  The internet and its contributors, without whom the original research necessary to complete such a tale would have been enough to sink my effort.

  The Neville Burton ‘Worlds Apart’ Series

  Volume 1: The Glorious First of June

  Volume 2: The Experiment at Jamaica

  Volume 3: Mutiny at Port Maria

  Volume 4: The Stillwater Conspiracy

  Note to Readers: A glossary is included at the back of the book that may be of help to your understanding of this story.

  A Journal of

  The Experiment at Jamaica

  Volume 2 of the Neville Burton ‘Worlds Apart’ Series

  1 - “Storms of Olde”

  The blackness was receding, and Neville could hear sounds and see with a strange sort of tunnel vision. He was mostly conscious of the fact that he had the worst headache of his life, and it was not going away quickly. His thinking was still muddled – just pieces of mental pictures. There was noise, he remembered, but it’s quiet now. Yes, he was sure there had been a naval battle – against the Dutch, yes. The noise was that of men and cannon above that of wind and water. Where was Mary? No, she wouldn’t be here. She’s ashore back in Bury. Two ships came together. A yard block fell. The captain will be hit! Was I injured in the rush to board? I am aboard a ship; there is no question of that; I must be in sickbay? Can I move?

  He attempted to lift his left arm, but was rewarded with only the wriggling of his fingers.

  I’ll try again in a minute. Maybe the headache will go away, he thought, sinking back asleep again.

  When he regained consciousness the headache was slightly less, his vision a bit improved, and he could remember that he had been trying to move. He tried again. This time his left arm moved, so he tried the other, and then his legs. All fine. Turning his head worked as well, but it certainly hurt.

  Perhaps I have a head wound, he mused, and lifted his hand to feel for bruises or cuts.

  Something there; possibly a cut. Yes, dried blood.

  “He’s awake, doctor,” someone called nearby. Neville heard footsteps approaching.

  I must indeed be in sickbay.

  An unfamiliar disembodied face peered down at him from behind a bright candle.

  “You’ll be all right then, I see,” said the face in a booming voice, “Up in a day or so...

  “Rundell, get a slime draught in him. We’ll not lose another today after all.”

  A day later he was sitting upright, chewing on something they had given him, and surveying his surroundings with almost-clear eyes. His head still hurt, but it was more of a general headache than a sore wound. He had no bandage, but vaguely remembered being hit with something during the battle. On self-inspection, he could determine no other injuries. He had spoken with nobody other than Rundell, who wasn’t much on words. Rundell’s response to “Where am I,” was simply the obvious, “Sickbay, Sir.” A few men had passed by him, but he saw no one he recognized.

  “On what ship?” he had asked in an irritated tone, since this sickbay was not familiar – was certainly not the spacious sickbay of Duncan’s flagship, HMS Venerable, and it didn’t even look English.

  Oh, yes, now I remember falling over the side, he thought, with a sudden quickening of his heart. This ship could be French, Dutch or English. I could be a prisoner…. but Rundell spoke English.

  “The Swan, Sir,” he replied with an almost offended arrogance.

  “Swan, you say… British?”

  Rundell paused before answering. “Aye, Sir. British, indeed.”

  “In port, as well, I gather. There is no sea-motion.”

  “Aye, Sir, in Plymouth.” Rundell gave him a queer look.

  A boatswain’s pipe began whistling, and men were running. “What’s being called on deck, Mr. Rundell?”

  “We’re casting off, Sir, for the Indies.”

  A week later Neville, mostly recovered, stood on the quarterdeck cupping his ear in an attempt to better hear Swan’s First Lieutenant Gaston. The wind whipped the man’s words from his mouth as quickly as it had shredded the main topsail an hour ago. The rain, falling almost horizontally, stung Neville’s face whenever he looked to wind’rd. It streamed in small rivulets off his tarpaulin hat and down into his uniform beneath the awkward tarpaulin jacket like tiny fingers of icy death, he thought. The thought itself surprised him, as he was not a superstitious sailor; not normally given to black thoughts.

  Dark, flat-bottomed clouds scudded past the ship hour upon hour, sometimes letting go torrents of rain and sometimes only threatening with blinding lightning and rolling peals of thunder. Never was there a break in the overcast or the wind, however, and the waves here in the great Atlantic Ocean south of England grew steadily larger. Seawater washed the deck at irregular intervals, begging for a human sacrifice to King Neptune – which could be anyone not clasping to a man-rope as they crept forward or aft or clapped on to the shrouds for dear life as they climbed the masts that swung in great circles above the decks.

  Neville tried to ignore the cold and moved another two steps closer to the orders being shouted only ten feet away. This was the worst storm he had ever seen, and even at his young age, he had spent two years in the North Sea and crossed the Atlantic to Newfoundland and back. Something very strange has happened, he thought to himself. I haven’t got to the bottom of what I’ve seen the last fortnight, but I doubt it has anything to do with Sir William. He
couldn’t get these disquieting thoughts out of his head even when immersed in a great storm.

  “-orecourse only... ‘eeft…” is what he understood after the repetition. Gaston was short and more square than round, and he carried himself with a self-important air. He otherwise knew no more about this man or Captain Neville, either personally or by reputation, than he had learned in his short time aboard. He could therefore only determine what they wanted by using his past experience together with exactly what he heard to form his best judgment of what was needed. As a 32-gun frigate, Swan’s sails and rigging were fully understandable to any experienced sailor, even though she was Dutch-built. Neville had served almost two years aboard HMS Castor, an English-built frigate of similar size. She was not identical, though, carrying a complement of only 135 as opposed to the 212 souls in Castor.

  Is there some connection between this Dutch ship Swan and the battle off Holland that I recently survived? he wondered. Much about the ship was unfamiliar. The great guns and the marines’ muskets were similar, but they looked somehow cruder. Could it simply be that they were Dutch? He thought that the galley stove looked antique, as well. Dutch, again? He knew little of Dutch ship construction or armament.

  Neville’s thoughts were swimming; they had been swimming for a week. He had not arrived aboard in the usual fashion. How on earth did he get there? He remembered no orders to go aboard Swan. He didn’t remember leaving HMS Venerable or travelling to Plymouth, but obviously he had. He was told he’d been carried aboard sick and not moved for something over a day. When he first awoke, his head felt as if someone had taken an axe-handle to it; he remembered that. There was a bruise on his head, but he remembered getting that in the battle aboard Venerable, though he didn’t remember exactly how. The bruise didn’t seem enough to account for a headache that bad, at any rate. It would normally take at least a day to get back to England from the Dutch coast, and at least two more to sail to Plymouth, so he must have been out for longer than Rundell told him.

  There certainly had not been much formality for the three days before they raised anchor in the Sound off Plymouth. He’d had no proper introduction to this ship’s officers, but they acted as though he belonged there. As he understood it, Captain Neville and First Lieutenant Gaston were so busy with arrangements for the ship’s cargo and insufferably demanding guests that they left much of the supervision of loading to Third Lieutenant Wylle while Lt. Burton lay almost comatose below.

  He’d learned little about their purpose, either, unless it was simply what it appeared on the surface – that they were transport for those two important guests – new governors for British colonies in the West Indies. These names Colonel Kendall for Barbados and Lord Inchiquin for Jamaica didn’t mean anything to him, but he was no student of politics. He hadn’t met them yet, either, owing to the strange circumstances of his arrival, but perhaps he’d seen some news sheet in London?

  For two days the storm had blown, and it wasn’t diminishing this morning. The captain had ordered them to reduce sail to only a topsail on the foremast and naught else. It was now his duty to take the foremast division aloft to reef it. He worked his way down the five steps to the waist and forward to where a dozen men were sheltering themselves – some clinging behind a scrap of sailcloth tied to the foremast bitts and a few under the boats – all dreading orders to do anything at all. He was glad of the shelter; here he could make himself heard.

  “Up we go, lads. Now we reef it,” he ordered. “Smartly, now, if you want your tot. You lot, to the sheets.”

  They seemed a good group to Neville, and experienced enough, but it was not easy talking with them. Most spoke with heavy accents of Scotland or Ireland, or with the backwardness of landsmen from some part of England he had not visited; certainly not his native Suffolk. Up they crept, the wind shrieking about their ears and shaking the very shrouds they climbed, their fingers becoming numb and stiffer with each stiff rung they touched. Neville waited at the mast while the men inched out the yard. Most lieutenants wouldn’t even go up with their men, but he needed to get to know them as fast as he could and to understand his new ship. It wouldn’t hurt to have them see he was willing to share their hardship, either. They were but eight days out of Plymouth, and the weather had worsened every day, keeping all the officers busy. The great number of new men made it harder. The weather had been nice enough on ninth March when the anchor was catted aboard, but that was the last of it. They must be well south of Ushant now, so their voyage should not be ended by that bit of rock. In not many more days, however, they would need to be wary of Cape Finisterre at the western tip of Europe.

  Scudding before the wind under this scrap of foretopsail there was seldom a wave bashing the bows, but when a gust of wind met the unusual crossing sea the ship would roll heavily, taking a scoop of water across the waist. Swan did not seem to him the best sailer. Looking out the yard to starboard, he could see two of his men having difficulty getting sail in. Those to larboard were almost finished. He decided to go help. He had done enough of this not long ago as a midshipman to know his business, even though he was never very comfortable aloft. Thankful that the temperature was not so low as to cause the rain to freeze on the yards, Neville inched outward. At least the wind was from behind him, pressing his hips onto the yard and carrying the rain to pelt his back. He motioned for the first man to move outward a bit, allowing four of them to work in the space for three. Facing forward and leaning together over the great wooden beam, using their knees to punch enough sailcloth into their stiff fingers to grab hold, they did not see the towering wave approaching from aft. A sickening feeling in Neville’s stomach rose in concert with the ship’s stern, but he dared not take his attention away from his work. At the wave’s crest, with the ship’s bow poked high into the wind, a sudden gust ripped the unsecured sail from their hands, ballooning it forward only on the starboard end. The thundering noise of the sail slapping full was not loud enough to hide the sound of cracking wood as the foremast was wrenched. Nor was the sound long enough to disguise the noise of the great wave crashing into the ship’s stern and roaring forward across the decks. A small spout of water squirted outward from a cabin hatch, indicating that the governors’ cabins had somehow been inundated from aft.

  Near panic engulfed Neville, his boyhood vision of a foundering ship passing across his mind like a ghost, but he controlled his fear. The only reasonable course of action was to secure the sail. Together his topmen instinctively seized the instant to claw in the canvas when the sail went momentarily limp. The ship dropped into a trough in front of the next massive wave which briefly blocked the wind. He took the opportunity to scream out his order to furl the sail completely, recognizing that the mast might not be able to take the strain of it after the wrenching. Waving to the men on the larboard end of the spar to do the same, he noticed that a break in the rain was providing a moment of clarity. Three sail of the almost seventy that had departed Plymouth with them were visible to larboard. His man at the larboard eye was gone. The unfortunate seaman was apparently unable to hang on to the yard when it abruptly stopped its aftward movement during the event, and he was flicked off like an ant.

  Despite his unfamiliarity with Swan and his growing belief that she was not a good sailer to begin with, it felt to Neville that she was swimming sluggishly. Part of his mind expected the ship to founder, but reason was replacing the feeling of panic from the minute before. Human sounds were audible below, as all hands were called to deal with the situation. Looking down he could see the body of his missing foretopman lying near the larboard main belaying rail. There might have been more blood, but that had washed away already, and the body would soon go overboard with it. There had been four men at the wheel, but only one still clung to it now. A second man was struggling to return to his station, but the other two had simply vanished.

  He motioned his men to go down, and they began creeping like spiders inward on the yard and down the shrouds. Two took their chances at sl
iding down a backstay.

  Lt. Gaston snarled at him when he had worked his way back to the foot of the mainmast, “Why have you bowsed the topsail entirely, Lieutenant Burton?”

  Neville’s senior officer had thus far seemed an unfriendly man, and he now seemed more angry than curious. Neville was pleased to see no panic. He expected that the man would listen.

  “You didn’t hear it, Sir?” he shouted. “Foremast is sprung. Cracked through, she is. She might hold a jib, but I’d not trust a sail on her in this.”

  “That’s captain’s to say, not ours,” Gaston retorted, “but I’ll say it for him. Hoist the jib before we founder. Captain’s busy below. The after gallery is broken and the cabin’s awash. Our esteemed guests are swimming down there – verily. We have water above the ballast. After that jib is set, get your division down to help Lt. Wylle with the pumps.”

  “Aye, aye.”

  Again, Neville crept his way forward, beckoning to each of the foremast men as he saw them. He had been thoroughly soaked by a wave that rushed about him as he crossed the waist and was beginning to worry that the cold would creep over him before he could accomplish his new mission. As he reached the foremast, he saw that Midshipman Conners and four of his division were waiting for him with the jib, having anticipated the order. He merely nodded and wiggled his finger in an ‘up it goes’ motion, and they all set to it. As the jib was hanked on and raised, it whipped the sheets as a dog does a rat. The noise of the rough canvas ended with an abrupt clap as the sail was sheeted home and belayed. His stomach turned on one wave as the ship came near broaching, but the yawing of the ship as each wave passed beneath the keel was decreasing markedly. Swan was responding better to her rudder once she was being pulled again by the wind rather than pushed by the waves. Pumping out the water must be having some effect as well; she felt slightly lighter.