The Flying Squadron: A Nathaniel Drinkwater Novel

By Richard Woodman

It is 1811 and Napoleon’s French Empire dominates Europe. Desperate to stem the encroaching French tide and avert war with the emerging power of the United States, the Royal Navy orders Captain Nathaniel Drinkwater to the Chesapeake Bay to heal the rift between London and Washington. On the banks of the Potomac, Drinkwater discovers the first clue to a plan by which the U.S. could defeat the Royal Navy, collapse the British government, and utterly destroy the British cause. Drinkwater takes command of a squadron sent against the Americans in the South Atlantic, audaciously risking his reputation and, in a climactic confrontation, coming face-to-face with the horror of an interminable war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: RowmanLittlefield
• Release date: Jul 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781493071401

Richard Woodman

Richard Woodman has previously worked for The Trinity House Service. He is also the author of the Nathanial Drinkwater stories and other maritime works.

Book preview

PART ONE

Hawks and Doves

‘You will have to fight the English again . . .’

NAPOLEON

Cawsand Bay August 1811

The knock at the door woke Lieutenant Frey with a start. His neglected book slid to the deck with a thud. The air in the wardroom was stiflingly soporific and he had dozed off, only to be woken moments later with a headache and a foul taste in his mouth.

‘Yes?’ Frey’s tone was querulous; he was irritated by the indifference of his messmates, especially that of Mr Metcalfe.

‘Beg pardon, sir.’ Midshipman Belchambers peered into the candle-lit gloom and fixed his eyes on the copy of The Times behind which Mr Metcalfe, the first lieutenant, was presumed to be. He coughed to gain Mr Metcalfe’s attention, but no flicker of life came from the newspaper, despite the two hands clearly holding it up before the senior officer’s face.

Frey rubbed his eyes and sought vainly for a drop of wine in his glass to rinse his mouth.

‘Sir . . .’, Belchambers persisted urgently, continuing to address the impassive presence of Mr Metcalfe.

‘What the devil is it?’ snapped Frey, running a finger round the inside of his stock.

Relieved, Belchambers shifted his attention to the third lieutenant. ‘Cap’n’s gig’s approaching, sir.’

Glaring at the newspaper, Frey rose, his fingers settling his neck linen. He kicked back his chair so that it scraped the deck with an intrusive noise, though it failed to stir the indifference of his colleagues. Piqued, he reached for coat and hat.

‘Very well,’ he said, dismissing Belchambers, ‘I’ll be up directly.’

From the doorway, as he drew on his coat, Frey regarded his colleagues in their post-prandial disorder.

Despite the bull’s eyes, the skylight shaft and the yellow glow of the table candelabra, the wardroom was as ill-lit as it was stuffy. At the head of the long table, leaning back against the rudder trunking, Mr Metcalfe remained inscrutable behind his newspaper. Mr Moncrieff, the marine officer, was slumped in his chair, his pomaded head thrown back, his mouth open and his eyes shut in an uncharacteristically inelegant posture.

Ignoring the midshipman’s intrusion, the master, his clay pipe adding to the foul air, continued playing cards with the surgeon. He laid a card with a snap and scooped the trick.

‘Trumps, by God,’ grumbled Mr Pym, staring down at his own meagre hand.

Wyatt, the master, grinned diabolically through wreaths of puffed smoke.

Frey looked in vain for Mr Gordon, but the second lieutenant had retired to his cabin and only Wagstaff, the mess-servant, reacted to Frey’s exasperated surveillance, pausing expectantly in his slovenly shuffling as though awaiting rebuke or instruction. Frey noticed that there was little to choose between his filthy apron and the stained drapery which adorned the table. With an expression of mild disgust Mr Frey abandoned this scene of genteel squalor with something like relief, and retreated to the deck, acknowledging the perfunctory salutes of the marine sentries en route.

Emerging into the fresh air he cast a quick look about him. His Britannic Majesty’s frigate Patrician lay at anchor in Cawsand Bay. The high blue arch of the sky was gradually darkening in the east behind the jagged, listing outline of the Mewstone. The last rays of the setting sun fanned out over the high land behind Cawsand village. Already the stone houses and the fish-drying sheds were indistinct as the shadow of the land crept out across the water. The depths of the bay turned a mysterious green, disturbed only by the occasional plop of a jumping mullet and a low swell which rolled round Penlee Point, forming an eddy about the Draystone.

In contrast to the stifling air below, the deck was already touched with the chill of the coming night and Frey paused a moment, drinking in the pure tranquillity of the evening.

‘Boat ’hoy!’

The bellow of the quarterdeck sentry recalled him to his duty. He settled his hat on his head and walked to the ship’s side.

‘Patrician!’

The answering hail brought some measure of satisfaction to Mr Frey. The stark, shouted syllables of the ship’s name meant the captain was aboard the gig and, in Frey’s opinion, the captain’s presence could not occur soon enough.

More marines, the side-boys and duty bosun’s mates were :running aft to take their stations. Tweaking the sennit-covered man-ropes so they hung handily down the frigate’s ample tumble-home on either side of the steps, Belchambers raised two fingers to his hat-brim.

‘Ship’s side manned, sir; Cap’n coming aboard.’

‘Very well, Mr Belchambers.’

Frey watched the distinctive blue and white paintwork of the gig; the oars rose and fell in perfect unison. As the oarsmen leaned back, the bow of the boat lifted a trifle and Frey caught sight of Captain Drinkwater alongside the coxswain. There was another figure too, a civilian by the look of his garb. Was this the mysterious passenger for whom, it had been intimated, they were waiting?

A second boat crabbed out in the gig’s wake. She was larger, with an untidy clutter of gear in her waist and a consequently less synchronous movement of her oars. Midshipman Porter had a less sure hand upon the tiller of the overloaded launch as it visibly struggled towards them. Frey rightly concluded it had left Dock Town hard well in advance of the gig and had been overtaken.

He stood in his place as the gig ran alongside and a moment later, as the shrilling of the pipes pierced the peaceful stillness, Frey touched the fore-cock of his hat and Captain Drinkwater hove himself to the deck.

For a moment, as the pipes completed their ritual shrieking, Drinkwater stood at the salute, his eyes swiftly taking in the details of the deck. At last the tremulous echoes waned and faded.

‘Evenin’, Mr Frey.’

‘Evening, sir.’

Drinkwater stood aside and put out a hand.

‘Come, sir,’ he called back to the civilian in the boat who stared apprehensively upwards. ‘Clasp the ropes and walk up the ship’s side. ‘Tis quite simple.’

Frey suppressed a smile as Drinkwater raised his left eyebrow a trifle. The side party waited patiently while the man-ropes jerked and a young man, elegantly dressed in grey, finally hauled himself breathlessly on to the deck. Frey regarded the stranger with interest and a little wonder. The cut of the coat was so obviously fashionable that it was difficult not to assume the newcomer was a fop. Aware of the curiosity aroused by the contrast between the somewhat grubby informality of Frey’s undress uniform coat and the attire of his companion, Drinkwater gave his guest a moment to recover his wind and gape about. Turning to the third lieutenant, Drinkwater asked, ‘First Lieutenant aboard, Mr Frey?’

‘Here, sir.’

Metcalfe materialized by magic, as if he had been there all along but chose that precise moment to forsake invisibility.

‘We’ll get under weigh the moment the wind serves.’

Metcalfe cast his eyes aloft and turned nonchalantly on his heels, his whole demeanour indicating the fact that it was a flat calm. ‘Aye, aye, sir . . . when the wind serves.’

Frey, already irritated by the first lieutenant’s idiosyncratic detachment, watched Captain Drinkwater’s reaction to this piece of studied insolence with interest and anxiety.

‘You take my meaning, Mr Metcalfe?’ There was the hint of an edge to Drinkwater’s voice.

Metcalfe completed his slow gyration and met the cool appraisal of his new commander with an inclination of his head.

’Perfectly, sir. May I remind you the ship still wants thirty-seven men to complete her establishment. The watch-bill . . .’

‘Then, sir,’ snapped Drinkwater with a false formality, ‘you may take a party ashore when the launch is discharged and see what the stews of Dock Town will yield up.’

Frey noted the irritation in Drinkwater’s tone as he turned back to the young man in grey.

‘Mr Vansittart, please allow me to conduct you below, your dunnage and servants will come aboard from the launch directly . . .’

Frey nodded dismissal to the side party and exchanged glances with Midshipman Belchambers. They were, with Mr Comley the boatswain and Mr Maggs the gunner, the only officers remaining from Patrician’s last commission. Despite the drafts from the guardships at Plymouth and Portsmouth, the pickings of the Impress Service sent them by the Regulating Officers in the West Country and the sweepings of their own hot-press, they remained short of men.

Patrician had been swinging at a buoy in the Hamoaze when Captain Drinkwater had first come aboard and read his commission to the assembled ship’s company. Her officers had regarded with distaste the mixture of hedge-sleeping vagrants, pallid gaolbirds, lumpish yokels and under-nourished quota-men who formed too large a proportion of the people. Afterwards Lieutenant Gordon had spoken for them all: ‘’Tis hands of ability we want, seamen, for God’s sake,’ Gordon had continued despairingly, ‘not mere numbers to fill slots in a watch-bill.’

‘That’s all you’re going to get,’ said Pym the surgeon, having inspected them for lice, the lues, ruptures and lesser horrors, adding with some relish, ‘a first lieutenant who slept in the ship would be an advantage . . .’

It was not, Frey thought, as Drinkwater and the grey-coated gentleman disappeared below, a very propitious start to the new commission. An absentee first luff, a crew of farm hands and footpads, with what looked like a diplomatic mission, did not augur well for the future. Mr Metcalfe had appeared eventually, in time to throw his weight about while they had completed rigging, warped alongside the hulk and taken in powder and shot. He had a talent, Frey had observed as they dropped down to the anchorage at Cawsand, for a dangerous inconsistency which threatened to set the ship on its ears and kept its unsettled, ignorant and inexpert company in a constant state of nerves.

Mr Metcalfe was of the opinion efficiency manifested itself in proportion to the number of officers disposed about the deck and the orders given. He believed any transgression or failure should be corrected, not by instruction, but by abuse and punishment. Tactful attempts by the mild and sensitive David Gordon to point out the folly of this procedure brought down the wrath of Mr Metcalfe on the unfortunate head of the second lieutenant.

Out of Metcalfe’s hearing Moncrieff had shrewdly observed it a matter of prudence to ‘keep the weather gauge of Mr Metcalfe. He wants at least one of you Johnnies betwixt himself and trouble.’ And failing to see the light of any comprehension in his messmates’ eyes in the aftermath of Metcalfe’s humiliation of Gordon, he had added, ‘to keep his own yard-arm clear, d’you see, and the smell of himself sweet in his own nostrils.’

The quaintness of Moncrieff’s assertion had imprinted itself on the minds of his listeners and Mr Wyatt had affirmed the opinion as sound by a loud and conspicuous hawking into the cuspidor.

Sadly, the first lieutenant had had his way, for the mysteries of ‘official business’ had kept Captain Drinkwater ashore almost continuously until this evening and Frey had not enjoyed his commander’s absence.

‘Frey?’ The peremptory and haughty tone of Metcalfe’s voice cut aptly into Frey’s train of thought.

‘Sir?’ He looked round.

‘You heard the Captain, Frey. You and Belchambers are to take the launch and scour the town for seamen. Try the village there,’ Metcalfe said, in his arch tone, nodding at Cawsand where the first faint lights were beginning to show in the cottage windows.

‘Aye, aye, sir.’ Frey’s acknowledgement was flat, formal and expressionless. There were no seamen to be had in Cawsand, nor within a night’s march into Cornwall. They might pick a few drink-sodden wretches in the dens of Dock Town, but he was not optimistic and was disappointed in Drinkwater’s suggestion that anything practical might be achieved. He was about to walk away when Metcalfe spoke again.

‘And Frey . . .’

‘Sir?’

‘Let me know’, Metcalfe said with a pained and put-upon look, ‘when the Captain is coming aboard next time.’

‘The midshipman reported the boat’s approach to you in the wardroom.’

‘Don’t be insolent, Frey, you don’t have the charm for it and it ill befits you.’

Frey bit off a hot retort and held his tongue, though he was quite unable to stop the colour mounting to his cheeks. Beyond Metcalfe’s shoulder he could see Captain Drinkwater had returned to the quarterdeck.

‘I know you served in the ship’s last commission,’ Metcalfe went on, oblivious of the captain’s approach, ‘but it don’t signify with me, d’you see?’

‘Mr Frey.’ Drinkwater’s curt voice came as a relief to Frey.

‘Sir?’

Metcalfe swung round and saw Drinkwater. ‘Ah, sir, I was just directing Mr Frey to take command of the press . . .’

‘I told you to deal with that, Mr Metcalfe. Mr Frey has another duty to perform.’

‘Indeed, sir, may I ask what?’

Drinkwater ignored Metcalfe, addressing Frey directly, over the head of his first lieutenant. ‘The launch has, in addition to Mr Vansittart’s personal effects and two servants, a large quantity of cabbages, Mr Frey. See they are got aboard and stowed carefully in nets. I want them exposed to air.’

‘Cabbages, sir?’ said the first lieutenant, his face registering exaggerated astonishment, ‘Are they your personal stores?’

‘No, Mister,’ Drinkwater said, a note of asperity creeping into his voice, ‘they are for the ship’s company.’

The captain swung on his heel; Metcalfe stared after him until he was out of earshot.

‘Rum old devil, ain’t he, Mr Frey?’ and the remark shocked Frey for its shift of ground, betraying the inconsistency he had already noted in Metcalfe, but striking him now as deeper than mere pig-headedness.

Frey did his best to keep his voice non-committal. ‘Excuse me, sir, I’ve my duty to attend to.’

‘Ah, yes, the cabbages,’ Metcalfe said, as though the earlier invitation to complicity had never passed his lips. Lapsing into an almost absent tone he muttered, ’Two servants, damme,’ then, raising his voice he bellowed, ‘Mr Belchambers! Lay aft here at the double!’

CHAPTER 1 August 1811

The King’s Messenger

Captain Nathaniel Drinkwater hauled himself up the companionway against the heel of the ship and stepped on to the quarterdeck. Clapping one hand to his hat he took a quick reef in his billowing cloak with the other and made his way into the partial shelter of the mizen rigging.

‘Morning, sir.’ The third lieutenant approached, touched the fore-cock of his hat and added, quite unnecessarily, ‘A stiff breeze, sir.’

‘Indeed, Mr Frey.’ Drinkwater stared aloft, at the whip of the topgallant masts and the flexing of the yards. The wind had veered a touch during the night and had hauled round into the north-west quarter. He knew from the tell-tale compass in his cabin that they were making a good course, but he knew also that the shift of wind would bring bright, squally weather. The first rays of the sun breaking above the cloud banks astern of them promised just such a day.

‘Let’s hope we’ve seen the last of that damned rain and sea fret,’ Drinkwater said, turning his attention forward again, where the bow swooped, curtseying to the oncoming grey seas.

Two days west of the Scillies, clear of soundings and with a fine easterly wind giving them the prospect of a quick passage, the weather had turned sour on them, closed in and assailed them with a head wind and sleeting rain.

‘Treacherous month, August,’ Mr Wyatt the master had said obscurely. In the breaks between the rain, a thick mist permeated the ship, filling the gun and berth decks with the unmistakable stink of damp timber, bilge, fungus and human misery. The landsmen, yokels and town labourers, petty felons and vagrants swept up by either the press or the corruption of the quota system which allowed substitutes to be bought and sold like slaves, spewed up their guts and were bullied and beaten into the stations where even their puny weight was necessary to work the heavy frigate to windward.

In his desperation to man the ship, Drinkwater had written to his old friend, Vice-Admiral Sir Richard White, bemoaning his situation. You have no idea the Extremities to which we are driven in Manning the Fleet Nowadays. It matches the worst Excesses of the American War. We have every Class of Person, with hardly a Seaman amongst them and a large proportion of Men straight from Gaol . . .

Sir Richard, quietly farming his Norfolk acres and making the occasional appearance in the House of Commons on behalf of a pocket borough, had written in reply, My Dear Nathaniel, I send you Two Men whom you may find useful. Though both should be in Gaol, the one for Poaching, the other for Something Worse. I received your Letter the Morning they came before the Bench. Knowing you to be a confirmed Democrat you can attempt their Reformation. I thus console my Guilt and Dereliction of Duty in not having them Punished Properly according to the due forms, & c, &c, in sending them to Serve their King and Country . . .

Drinkwater grinned at the recollection. One of the men, Thurston, a former cobbler and of whom White had insinuated guilt of a great crime, was just then helping to hang a heavy coil of rope on a fife-rail pin at the base of the main mast. About thirty, the man had a lively and intelligent face. He must have felt Drinkwater’s scrutiny, for he looked up, regarding Drinkwater unobsequiously but without a trace of boldness. He smiled, and Drinkwater felt a compulsion to smile back. Thurston touched his forelock respectfully and moved away. Drinkwater was left with the clear conviction that, in other circumstances, they might have been friends.

As to the crime for which Thurston had been condemned, it was said to be sedition. Drinkwater’s enquiries had elicited no more information beyond the fact that Thurston had been taken in a tavern in Fakenham, reading aloud from a Paineite broadsheet.

Sir Richard, not otherwise noted for his leniency, had not regarded the offence as meriting a prison sentence, though conditions in the berth deck were, Drinkwater knew, currently little better than those in a gaol house. Thurston’s natural charm and the charge imputed to him would earn the man a certain esteem from his messmates. Prudence dictated Drinkwater keep a weather eye on him.

Drinkwater watched the bow of his ship rise and shrug aside a breaking wave. The impact made Patrician shudder and throw spray high into the air where the wind caught it and drove it across the deck to form a dark patch, drenching Thurston and the party of men with whom he went forward.

Frey crossed the deck to check the course at the binnacle then returned to Drinkwater’s side.

‘She’s holding sou’west three-quarters west, sir, and I think another haul on the fore and main tacks ;will give us a further quarter point to the westward.’

‘Very well, Mr Frey, see to it.’

Drinkwater left to Frey the mustering of the watch to hitch another fathom in the lee braces and haul down the leading tacks of the huge fore and mainsails. He looked over the ship and saw, despite eight months in dockyard hands, the ravages of time and long service. His Britannic Majesty’s frigate Patrician was a cut-down sixty-four-gun ship, a class considered too weak to stand in the line of battle. Instead, she had been razéed, deprived of a deck, and turned into a heavy frigate.

A powerful cruiser when first modified, she had since completed an arduous circumnavigation under Drinkwater’s command. During this voyage she had doubled Cape Horn to the westward, fought a Russian seventy-four to a standstill and survived a typhoon in the China Seas. A winter spent in home waters under another post-captain had further tested her when she had grounded in the Baie de Seine. Refloated with some difficulty she had subsequently languished in dock at Plymouth until recommissioned for special service. Her prime qualification for this selection was her newly coppered bottom which, it was thought, would give her the fast passages Government desired.

‘Well, we shall see,’ Drinkwater thought, watching the sunlight break through the cloud bank astern and suddenly transform the scene with its radiance, for nothing could mar the beauty of the morning.

The grey waves sparkled, a rainbow danced in the shower of spray streaming away from the lee bow, the wave-crests shone with white and fleeting brilliance, and the details of the deck, the breeched guns, the racks of round shot, the halliards and dewlines coiled on the fife-rails, the standing rigging, all stood out with peculiar clarity, throwing their shadows across the planking.

The sails arched above them, patched and dulled from service, adding their own shadows to the play of light and shade swinging back and forth across the wet deck, which itself already steamed under the sun’s influence.

Drinkwater felt the warmth of the sunshine reach him through the thickness of his cloak, and with it the sharp aroma of coffee floated up from below. A feeling of contentment filled him, a feeling he had thought he would not, could not, experience again after the months of family life. He wished Elizabeth could be with him at that moment, to experience something of its magic. All she knew was the potency of its lure, manifested in the frequent abstraction of her husband. He sighed at the mild sensation of guilt, and at the fact that it came to him now to mar the perfection of the day, then dismissed it. A great deal had happened, he reflected reasonably, since he had last paced this deck and been summoned so peremptorily to London, what, a year ago?

Then he had been in the spiritual doldrums, worn out with long service, seeing himself as the scapegoat of government secrecy and hag-ridden with guilt over the death of his old servant Tregembo in the mangrove swamps of Borneo. He had thought at the time that he could never surmount the guilt he had felt, and had accepted the mission to Helgoland in the autumn of 1809 with a grim, fatalistic resignation.

But fate, in all things capricious, had brought him through the ordeal and, quite providentially, made him if not wealthy, then at least a man of comfortable means. True, he had been ill for some months afterwards, so reduced in spirits that the doctors of Petersfield feared for him; but the care of his wife, Elizabeth, and the kindness of old Tregembo’s widow Susan, their housekeeper, finally won their fight with the combination of the blue devils, exposure and old wounds.

With the onset of summer Drinkwater and Elizabeth left the children in the care of Susan Tregembo and travelled, spending Christmas at Sir Richard and Lady White’s home in Norfolk where their children, Charlotte-Amelia and their own Richard, had joined them. It had been a memorable few months at the end of which Drinkwater’s convalescence was complete. It was from the Whites’ house that Drinkwater wrote to the Admiralty soliciting further employment. Nothing came of his application, however, and he was not much concerned. The short, cold winter days of walking or riding, of wildfowling along the frozen salt-marsh, were pleasant enough, but the luxury of the long, pleasurable evenings with Elizabeth and the Whites was not lightly to be forsaken for the dubious honour of a quarterdeck in winter.

‘You’ll only get some damned seventy-four blockading Brest with the Black Rocks under your lee, and some damn fool sending

Reviews for The Flying Squadron

[joeldinda_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

After a series of really dark novels, Woodman rewards us with a romp that takes place largely in or near Chesapeake Bay. Most of the characters who've not been serving with Drinkwater for years are pretty much cardboard pastiches, but it's all good fun. The exceptions are Mr. Vansittart ("Fancy-tart," according to the Master), who's delightfully witty, and Thurston, who's aboard ship as a sentence for seditionist (read: democratic) tendencies.A stylistic oddity: Twice in this novel we get flashbacks which pick up the story just where it was a page or two before. In the first instance, the object was clearly to transition to what amounted to a new story, but the other was just a trick, as the telling moved from the book's narrative to part of the dialogue. Nicely executed, but still a trick.I've left out a lot of Nat's self-doubt ("megrims"), and some developments on the Dungarth front. And we get a portrait of the Drinkwaters' home life, for once.Good fun.