Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [555]
“He means to gobble up all.”
Mighty Austria joined Pitt’s alliance and the stage was set for a massive conflict.
1805: SEPTEMBER 15
The mission of the little frigate Euryalus is seldom recorded in works of general history. Yet no ship in the British navy played a more important role in saving England during the fateful autumn of 1805.
“We were Nelson’s watchdog,” the crew would recall proudly. “We were his extra eye and arm.”
And if he had to serve in the King’s Navy instead of smuggle safely at home in Christchurch, Peter Wilson counted himself lucky that it was this ship, of all the others, that the press gang had taken him to.
For the press gang system was a wholesale business. The press tenders were everywhere in the Channel waters around the Solent. One of their favourite places to lie in wait was near the western tip of the Isle of Wight, ten miles from Christchurch, where they would send gangs aboard every ship entering the port of Southampton to take some of their men. But they raided frequently along the coastal towns as well.
On the night he was pressed, Peter found himself aboard a receiving ship lying out in the bay. He had been stripped, and the ship’s doctor, after a cursory inspection, pronounced him sea worthy. Then they took him down into the hold.
He knew what to expect. Over the top of the hold was a grate. Above he could see the shadowy outlines of four marines with loaded muskets standing guard. Around him in the cramped space were, he estimated, thirty other men, some of them taken the day before. The hold was now so full that all the men were pressed together. The stench was terrible. In his pocket he still had the ring he had been carrying. It would not be long before someone tried to get that. He took it out and, in the darkness, slipped it over his little finger. It stuck at the joint, but, though it made him wince, he pushed it over. “Now,” he thought, “they’ll have to cut my finger off to get that.” What would follow next? They would probably be taken, he guessed, to rendezvous with the other tenders. There would be all manner of recruits: experienced sailors taken from merchant vessels, sometimes quasi-legally, raw recruits like himself, and ‘Lord Mayor’s men’ – those who had joined the navy to escape from the law or other misdeeds. Then they could be distributed anywhere in the fleet. If they were lucky the pressed men might join a ship with a kindly commander. If not . . . a cruel captain could exact terrible punishments for all kinds of offences: he had heard of men being given seven hundred lashes, or worse, being keel-hauled: dragged under the ship on a rope so that, if you did not drown, the barnacles on the hull ripped the flesh off your body.
It was while he contemplated these horrors, and the fact that he had lost his home and his bride, that he heard a voice above remark.
“These are all to be put ashore at Buckler’s Hard. There’s a new ship there.”
He knew Buckler’s Hard. It was a small inlet a few miles along the coast from Christchurch, where the heathland at the southern end of the New Forest ran down to the sea. There was a dockyard there where they built ships.
And it was there, praise be to God, that he joined the Euryalus.
The Euryalus was a small vessel: a thirty-six gun frigate with three masts: a trim, speedy little vessel, designed by Sir William Ruse, surveyor of the King’s Navy, commissioned in 1803: her captain, the Hon Henry Blackwood. From the moment that Peter Wilson walked on board, he knew he was in luck.
Being only a frigate, the Euryalus had none of the impersonality of the huge hulks with seventy-four or ninety-eight guns. Being newly commissioned, she had no bad tradition of cruelty, which some of the older ships had. And her captain was a kind and dashing figure.
“You’re in luck with this one,” one of the seamen told him. “Lucky as if you’d got Nelson himself.”
He learned his seamanship fast. It came to him naturally; and apart from the occasional blow from the bo’sun’s rattan – which was more a genial reminder of his authority than