Read Online By the Mast Divided by David Donachie - Free Book Online Page A

with parties sent out by dozens of other captains in the fleet. Every party seeking hands saw it as their duty to tear down each other’s posters; to disrupt each other’s gatherings and in extreme cases to pinch each other’s recruits. Thus the lanes bordering England’s coast this last month had resounded more from blows traded between competing crews than any other noise. His parties, after several bruising encounters with cudgels and cosh had gathered some volunteers, but nowhere near enough for him to both sail and fight his ship.
    Hood had been just as unsympathetic to that explanation. ‘You must, like all other officers, apply to the Impress Service without any excessive leverage from my office.’
    Ralph Barclay had made pleas in abundance to the Impress Service, the official body responsible for naval recruitment, and they had fallen on deaf ears. As the agents of the Navy Board they were supposed to take in the men who volunteered, then parcel them out to the waiting ships by a process that was as mysterious as it was inefficient. They also sent out the official press gangs, made up of professional ruffians who would take up wandering sailors in the easiest place to find them, off the coast from incoming merchant vessels or in the ports that ringed the British shore. A bounty per head meant they were dead set against competition. Being both numerous and brutal enough to enforce their claim, it was a brave captain that tried to compete on their turf; he could well find himself losing hands rather than gaining any.
    Whatever men were gathered – by fair means or foul – were sent aboard ships captained by those who knew how to return a favour, usually in coin. So the working officers of the Impress Service, often men of low calibre, got a bribe to go with the cash bounty paid by the government.This was not an option for a man who had lived the five years since 1788 on half pay and had only recently got a ship, a man forced to pay usurious rates to a moneylender just to fund his first voyage. And all of that took no account of a selfish and ambitious admiral like the one before him who could keep the Press Tenders, hulks that should be full of sailors to man the fleet, empty. Indeed, keep hundreds of trained volunteers, prime seamen in the main, unoccupied at a place of his choosing, just so that he could man his own command.
    Ralph Barclay had realised then that no amount of pleading would do him any good. Looking his superior right in the eye he had said, ‘I have brought my boats upriver with me, sir, and if you could write an instruction to the officer in charge at the Tower to release the men I need…’
    Hood had cut right across him, quite unfazed by Barclay’s attempt to embarrass him. ‘I never knew you to be hard of hearing, Captain Barclay. I have already told you I have no knowledge of this. If you take leave to doubt that I would be interested to hear you say so, and having said it I would then ask you to put it in writing.’
    Which would be suicide, you over-braided bastard, Barclay had thought, as he reached into his coat pocket for a document which he hoped would protect from what he intended to do. ‘All I wish to put in writing is in this letter, sir, which brings to the attention of the Admiralty my concerns, given the situation in which I find both myself and my ship.’ Which was as good a way of saying to Hood, as he handed it to him, ‘Court martial me if you dare when I get into difficulties, of whatever nature, and a fair copy of this letter will be introduced as evidence to justify my actions’.
    Hood had proved a wily old fox, too well versed in naval politics actually to take the letter, knowing it for what it was, an attempt to blackmail him into releasing some hands. He also knew as well as Barclay that HMS Brilliant needed a complement of at least one hundred and forty men to both sail and fight; she was, if he was being told the truth, at present, forty short of that