The Invasion Year: An Alan Lewrie Naval Adventure (Alan Lewrie Naval Adventures)

305 Pages·2011·1.56 MB·English

by  Dewey Lambdin

This one is dedicated to Forrest
“Nathan Bedford,” my “little general,” and his “bubba” Mosby’s groomer, fellow
prankster, and “hot water bottle” on cool nights. Forrest was white-furred, with a grey
tail, ears and nose, and the brightest, widest jade green eyes. He was an ambusher, a
talker who’d hold long conversations with me, or any message left on the phone, and
could purr louder than any other cat I can remember. He was only 9½ when he left this
life on July 2nd, 2010, and Mosby and I miss him very much, and wish he could have
stayed with us many years more—if only to help Mosby open every under-counter
cabinet door in the house, or lay side by side to “paddle” all the sliding closet doors
open so they could get inside and prowl.
Forrest was my shadow, and my foot-warmer under the desk whenever I wrote even a
short letter, much less a chapter of the books, and I miss that very much, too.
Forrest, I give you the Sunday wardroom toast,
“Absent Friends.”

Pateant montes silvacque lacusque
cunctaque claustra maris; spes et metus omnibus esto
arbiter. Ipse locos terrenaque summa movendo
experiar, quaenum populis longissima cunctis
regna valim linquamque datas ubi certus habenas.
Let mountains, forests, lakes
and all the barriers of ocean open out before them;
hope and fear shall decide the day for all alike.
I myself by shifting the seat of empire upon earth
shall make trial which kingdom I shall elect to let
rule longest over all peoples, and in whose hands I
can without fear leave the reins of power once bestowed.
~ARGONAUTICA, BOOK I 556–560
GAIUS VALERIUS FLACCUS
PROLOGUE
Vae victis.
Woe to the vanquished.
~HISTORY, BOOK X
TITUS LIVIUS (LIVY)
59 B.C.–17 A.D.
CHAPTER ONE
“Damme, but I do despise the bloody French!”
“Understandably, sir,” the First Lieutenant softly agreed.
“Their bloody general, Rochambeau,” Captain Alan Lewrie, RN, further gravelled, “he’d
surrender t’that murderous General Dessalines and his Black rebel army, but he’s too
damned proud t’strike to us?”
“Well, Dessalines did give them ten days’ truce to make an orderly exit, sir,” Lt.
Westcott pointed out. “Else, it would have been a massacre. Another, really.”
“If they don’t come out and surrender to us, soon, it’ll be all ‘Frogs Legs Flambé,’ and
Dessalines’ truce be-damned,” Captain Lewrie said with a mirthless laugh as he
extended his telescope to its full length for another peek into the harbour of Cap
François … and at the ships anchored inside, on which the French now huddled, driven
from the last fingernail grasp of their West Indies colony.
Evidently, the Black victors of the long, savage insurrection were getting anxious over
when the French would depart, too, for those solid stone forts which had guarded the
port from sea assault showed thin skeins of smoke, rising not from cook-fires but from
forges where iron shot could be heated red-hot, amber-hot, to set afire those ships and
all the beaten French survivors aboard them—soldiers, civilians, sailors, women, and
children. Root and branch, damn their eyes, Lewrie thought; burn ’em all, root and
branch!
He lowered his glass and grimaced as he turned to face his First Officer, Lt. Geoffrey
Westcott. “Is it askin’ too much, d’ye imagine, sir, that the Frogs could face facts?
Which is the greater failure or shame … admittin’ the rebel slaves beat ’em like a rug,
and surrenderin’ t’them … or strikin’ to a civilised foe, like us? They’ve done the first,
so … what matters the second?”
“Perhaps it’s the matter of Commodore Loring’s terms, sir,” Lt. Westcott supplied,
inclining his head towards their senior officer’s flagship, idling under reduced sail further
out to seaward. “He will not let them dis-arm and sail for France on their parole.”
“Be a fool if he did,” Lewrie said with a dismissive snort, “and Admiralty’d never forgive
him for it if he did. We’d, escort them to Jamaica, intern their civilians … make the
women and kiddies comfortable … Rochambeau and all his officers’d be offered parole,
quarters, and funds ’til they’re exchanged.…”
“Of course, we’d sling all their sailors and soldiers into the prisoner hulks,” Lt. Westcott
added with a touch of whimsy, then, in a tongue-in-cheek manner, said, “And surely
some of those French jeunes filles, or fetching young widows … surely some of them
are, sir … might find themselves in need of a British officer’s ‘protection’?”
“Hmm, well…,” Capt. Lewrie allowed, rocking on the balls of his feet, making his
Hessian boots creak; they were new from a cobbler at Kingston, still in need of breaking
in. “I expect you’d be one to make such an offer, Mister Westcott? I warrant you’re a
generous soul,” he said with a leer. Since their first acquaintance fitting-out their new
frigate at the renewal of the war with France a little after Easter, Lewrie had discovered
that Geoffrey Westcott was a Buck-of-The-First-Head when it came to putting the leg
over biddable young ladies … almost himself to the Tee, in his younger, frivolous days.
“Well … I hope to be, sir,” Lt. Westcott replied, shrugging in false modesty, or piety (it
was hard to tell which), and flashing a brief, teeth-baring grin before turning sober and
“salty” once more.
“Wish ye joy of it,” Lewrie said, turning to probe the harbour with his telescope once
more.
Cap François, casually known as “Le Cap” in better days, had at one time been the
richest entrepôt on the French colony of Saint Domingue, rivalling Jacmel, Mole St.
Nicholas, or Port-Au-Prince itself. Nigh a thousand ships had put in there each year with
all the luxuries of Europe and the Orient, and had cleared laden deep with sugar, rice,
molasses, and rum, making Saint Domingue the richest prize of all the Sugar Islands,
richer than all the British possessions put together.
Cap François and Mole St. Nicholas further west out towards the extreme Nor’western
cape of Saint Domingue were well placed for trade—on the North side of the colony,
accessible to the passages out into the broad Atlantic, which made for shorter voyages
to American or European markets.
Give the Frogs a little credit, Lewrie thought; at least they made something of their half
of Hispaniola.
The eastern half of Hispaniola was held by the Spanish, but San Domingo had never
produced a pittance of wealth compared to the French half; cattle herding, sheep and
pigs, subsistence farming … along with the boucaniers who dressed in hides, and had
become the dreaded buccaneers of pirate lore.
Now, though … it was all lost, to both France and any other nation which might try to
possess it; as Great Britain had in those early days of the French Revolution, when
they’d landed an army ashore, and had been fought back to the beaches and piers by
the rebel slaves … when they weren’t fighting their former grands blancs masters, or
the petits blancs and half-bloods, or each other, for dominance.
That brute General Dessalines had once been an aide to the former house slave
Toussaint L’Ouverture, who’d turned out to be a much more brilliant general than any
that the French had sent to fight and die here. Over thirty generals, Lewrie had heard
tell, and over fourty thousand French soldiers had perished, including Napoleon’s
brother-in-law, General LeClerc. Oh, LeClerc had managed to lure L’Ouverture to a
parley and had enchained him, then shipped him to die in an alpine prison in France—
dead of cold, hunger, and heart-break that Napoleon Bonaparte would betray him, the
“Napoleon of The West,” and break all the promises of the French Revolution, of
Liberté, Fraternité, and Egalité, of the heady vows of abolishing slavery anywhere in
every French colony, in hopes that without L’Ouverture, the rebellion would end.
It wasn’t even Saint Domingue anymore, either. Now, the rebel slaves had begun to call
it Haiti, or Hayti, which—so far as Lewrie could tell from the many battles-to-the-death,
the ambushes of whole battalions at a whack, the massacres of masters, mistresses,
and overseers, and pretty-much anyone else of the former ruling castes, and the
betrayals that had taken place here—translated from Creole patois as “Hell On Earth.”
The last desperate refuges for the surviving French of Saint Domingue were the ships in
harbour, anchored as far out as they could from the shore guns, but still be in the port
proper; to venture out further would put them at risk of being raided and boarded at
night by the blockading British squadron.
“One’d hope that Rochambeau had wits enough t’spike his coast artillery, before he
abandoned the forts, Mister Westcott,” Captain Lewrie said to his waiting First
Lieutenant.
“Well … he is French, sir, so there’s no telling.”
Their frigate, HMS Reliant, along with the rest of the squadron that had sailed from
Portsmouth in May on an independent mission, lay three miles to seaward of the coast,
right at the edge of what had come to be accepted as the limits of a nation’s, or
island’s, sovereignty, the Three Mile Limit. Three miles because that was the Range-To-
Random Shot of the largest fortress gun then in use, the 42-pounder. Had the French
ever had 42-pounders emplaced on Saint Domingue? Lewrie didn’t know, but, just to
err on the side of caution, that was how far out Commodore Loring had decided they
would come to anchor.
“He couldn’t be that huge a fool as t’leave ’em in place, then anchor right under ’em,”
Lewrie commented.
“As I said, sir … he is French, after all,” Westcott said.
“Most-like, the rebels have only field guns … regimental guns of six-, eight-, or twelve-
pound shot,” Lewrie speculated.
“Twelve-pounders firing heated shot would more than suffice, at that range from the
shore to the anchored French, sir,” Lt. Westcott opined as he briefly doffed his hat to
swab his forehead with a faded handkerchief; almost the last day of November in the
Year of Our Lord 1803 or not, it was a bright, sunny, and almost windless day.
“Mmm-hmm,” Lewrie agreed, intent again on the ships yonder.