Alan Lewrie #06 - H.M.S. Cockerel by Dewey Lambdin

Author:Dewey Lambdin [Lambdin, Dewey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dewey Lambdin
Published: 2010-04-16T09:32:53+00:00

Chapter 2

Perhaps it was just as well that Captain Horatio Nelson's sixty-four-gunned Agamemnon bore the word to Naples, Lewrie thought. With the French Mediterranean fleet captured in one fell swoop, all her proud, large line-of-battle ships in the bag, the more impressive British liners were freed to make the diplomatic calls about the region—those ships captained by men of greater stature and diplomatic experience.

Cockerel idled about in the Golfe du Lion for a few days to keep an eye on Marseilles, round Cape Cicie to the west, before that pointless task was undertaken by a small squadron of British 74's, and she returned to Toulon. There was nothing much to guard against, since only a scattered handful of French frigates and corvettes were still free to operate, and those few were alone, uncoordinated and fearful.

"You really can walk in their shade," Lieutenant Barnaby Scott commented as they toured the basin a few days later.

Everywhere there was bustle. Proud French ships were being stripped of their guns and powder, rowing boats worked like a plague of water-beetles to carry captured supplies out to the Spanish and British ships. And a horde of curiosity seekers such as Lewrie and Scott had come ashore to gawp over all they'd won so easily, and crow with elation.

And from the moment their cutter had touched a quay, they'd been gawped at in turn, cheered by Royalist Toulonese, gushed over by women and men with white Bourbon cockades on their coats or their hats. Any restaurant would kick Frogs out to seat them and fete them, any desire they had was fulfilled (mostly), and they couldn't seem to buy a drink in the town— it was given with bubbly expressions of gratitude. "Damn' friendly lot," Barnaby Scott opined. "For Frogs." There was martial music, clattering hooves on cobblestones and the heavy drumming of field-artillery carriages and caissons as a Spanish half-regiment paraded by above the basin, on the main water street.

"S'pose we should be about our shopping," Lewrie shrugged, still uneasy with the concept of friendly Frenchmen. Besides, ambling about by themselves, surrounded by convict labourers in their filthy slops and irons, surrounded by milling packs of truculent and beetle-browed French sailors who were most pointedly not wearing Royalist cockades, and who hawked and spat behind their backs, or muttered sneering words behind their hands as they passed... well, they might be disarmed and supposedly harmless, but Lewrie didn't want to take the chance of risking the drunkest or the surliest of them. No matter how near help, in the form of Royal Navy working parties or Marine sentries, might be.

On the northern shore of the basin's quays, it all spread out before them as they stopped and stood, gazing down upon the pool of water between the jetties and the warehouses, dry dock and arsenals: A host of docked warships, frigates, corvettes, gunboats, floating batteries (that looked more like ancient oared war galleys), 74's and 80's of the line, and two monstrous 120-gun ships of the 1st Rate, so huge they dwarfed all others, even British 1st Rates.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.