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Dennis Seddon was born
Ormskirk, Lancashire, Deciding to give up the
quiet village life, they immigrated to After semi retiring in 1997,
they settled in Rockingham, W.A. Dennis developed an interest
in writing four years ago and has written two short stories. Twelve months ago
he tried his hand at fantasy fiction and wrote his first full novel,
Daughters of the Sea. At present he is
writing the sequel to this novel, which he intends to call,
Secrets of the Mariana Trench.
PROLOGUE Somewhere in the
Captain José De Brueys stood at the portside gunwale
staring across the water at the two distant ships. He snapped the telescope shut
with enough force to make his second-in-command, Jacques Linois, think he may
have broken it. Jacques said nothing but waited calmly for his captain’s
decision.
‘They could be heading for the new colony?’ Jacques finally said, breaking the
silence. ‘You
may be right, my friend, but don’t you find it just a little strange that two
British frigates that have been dogging us for two days have never tried to
catch up?’ José replied. ‘If it will ease your mind, tell the helmsman to hold
this course. If they are heading for the new colony, they should swing onto a
westerly course within the hour. If not, I guess their intentions are quite
clear.’ ‘And
may I ask what your intentions will be?’ ‘My
orders still stand. We are going home. However, if the British have other plans,
we shall be ready for them. In the meantime, clear the decks for action and beat
to quarters,’ De Brueys said irritably, disappointed that his friend should see
need to question him.
Reluctantly, Jacques shouted the order that brought all the men up on deck.
Anything that had a use or could be used again later was taken below decks and
stored away. If it was no longer wanted, it was tossed over the side so as not
to hamper the crew during battle. The galley embers were extinguished as a
precautionary measure against fire and the risk of an explosion due to gunpowder
that may have accidentally been spilled on the decks. Bulkheads and partitions
were dismantled to allow the crew to move about freely and to lessen the chance
of being struck by flying splinters. It was no different below decks as gun
crews ran to their stations and quickly set about loading and running the huge
cannons out in readiness while other crew members ran up and down the narrow
corridor issuing gunpowder to each gun station from cylindrical cartridge boxes.
A job normally carried out by boys as young as ten, known as powder monkeys, De
Brueys had seen fit to replace the youngsters with older crew members, finding
the boys more of a hindrance during the heat of battle. Also it had saddened him
to look upon their dead young faces as they lay in a row waiting their turn to
be sewn inside a jute bag for burial. In
the bowels of the ship just below the water line, the carpenters and a few men
were armed with conical wooden plugs, sheets of lead and balls of oakum and
nails. Their job was to plug up any holes that might appear in the hull caused
by the enemy. The entire ship was mayhem, but it was controlled mayhem, and
twenty minutes after beating to quarters, the captain, his first lieutenant, the
master and a few appointed midshipmen were gathered on the quarterdeck. The ship
was now a formidable, fortified battery. José
turned to his first lieutenant. ‘Lower the mizzen foretopgallant and foretopsail
for rigging. Whatever the British decide to do, I will not be caught napping.’ The
topgallant sails were quickly furled and the very moment they were tied, below
decks at the main mast’s foundation, four members of the crew began removing
three metal pins that went through a solid iron sleeve that was attached to the
main mast. The bottom of the iron sleeve was six feet above the hull and encased
the mast as far as the mainsail yardarm. Before the final pin was removed, a
crew member signalled to another crewman until an officer on deck received the
message that they were ready. The officer, in turn, relayed the message to six
crew members on the main deck who were holding onto a rope as though waiting for
a signal to participate in a tug of war. The thick rope ran through a
complicated system of pulleys that was secured to the top of the main mast by an
iron ring.
Nodding to his first lieutenant, the captain gave the order to begin letting the
rope out the moment they felt the strain. Soon a dull thud echoed throughout the
ship as the iron sleeve suddenly dropped the six feet until it came to rest on a
coil of rope purposely placed at the bottom of the mast to cushion the sleeves
descent. De Brueys watched with a keen eye as the men slowly let the rope out
and the mast began to bend sternwards. Inch by inch the mast was lowered until
it finally came to rest at a forty-degree angle in a carefully hidden cradle
fitted on the mizzen yardarm. A crew member quickly lashed it into place while
other men, who had been patiently waiting on the yardarms, began casting out
ropes to hang loosely over the stern of the ship and when caught by the breeze,
wildly flapped around making it look as though her stays had broken and were
fouling the rigging. Only
one more thing had to be done to make the ship appear completely helpless. Three
crew members, upon a signal, gathered ropes from a locker on the poop deck and
set about lowering them over the stern’s taffrail after first securing one end.
The other end was weighted with a thirty-two-pound cannonball which was enclosed
in a thick net. Each rope was left hanging three feet below the water line and
viewed from a distance, looked liked some of the ship’s stays had come loose and
were fouling the rudder, leaving the ship without steerage. When
word reached the captain that everything was in order, he said calmly, ‘Now we
wait. I want three men only to each gun, every other man must be on deck and
clearly seen. If all goes well, there may be no need to run the guns again.’
The British Frigate HAWK 1827 The Hawk, a
thirty-two-gun British frigate captained by James Hall, had been ordered by the
British Admiralty to seek out and destroy the infamous ship
Vengeance with the help of the
thirty-two-gun ship,
Because of his thick, jet-black, curly hair, coal-black, beady eyes and hooked
nose, Hall had been nicknamed The Crow by certain members of the Admiralty. In
fact, unbeknown to him, he had been given two nicknames, the other being King
Henry the Ninth, because the same certain members of the Admiralty knew of no
other captain that had sunk his ship before it had left the As
he stood on the bridge looking through his telescope, he was interrupted by his
first officer, Lieutenant Grimes. ‘Captain, she is signalling her intentions to
surrender. The French do not wish to engage.’
‘Thank you, Lieutenant,’ Hall replied sourly, then, ‘Stand the gun crews down
and have them muster on deck in readiness for boarding. Signal Hornsby to do the
same and to come alongside on her starboard.’ He gazed through his telescope at
the stricken ship again. His lieutenant had spoken the truth. Hall’s thin lips
moved to form the closest thing to a smile they were capable of as he saw that
the French captain had little choice but to surrender. The distance between the
ships was closing rapidly and he could clearly see the French crew frenetically
working at the stern of the stricken ship in a futile attempt to free the rudder
of a web of ropes.
Lowering the telescope, he turned to his first officer. ‘Inform the helmsman to
pass on her port side and have the men ready to lower the main topgallant, fore
topgallant and mizzen topgallant. Inform the helmsman also to match her speed
and have the men ready to drop anchor the moment the warship heaves to.’
Lieutenant Grimes at any other time would have relayed his captain’s orders
without question, but he had a gut feeling that something was not right. ‘I must
protest, Captain. You will be putting both our ships at risk if you continue on
this course of action. Our orders were very specific: find and destroy the
ship.’ ‘Do
you question my orders, sir?’ Hall roared. ‘The ship is helpless and all its
crew on deck. What possible danger are we in?’
Grimes took an involuntary step backwards at the ferocity of his captain’s
response. Knowing that Hall’s mind was set on taking the ship as his prize and
that further talk would be useless, he reluctantly relayed the orders to the
crew. As
the prow of the Hawk slowly slid past the Vengeance’s
stern, Hall could not help but admire the size of the French man-o-war. It was
by far the biggest three-decker he had ever seen and when the three warships
sailed in unison on a placid ocean with no more than thirty yards of water
separating them, Hall mentally began his appraisal of the ship. The
Vengeance was at least thirty feet longer than any other
front-of-the-line ship he had ever seen being at the least two hundred and
twenty feet in length on the lower gun deck. He estimated her breadth close to
sixty feet and her draught twenty to thirty. When rigged, armed and stored, her
displacement, including the weight of the crew, must exceed over three thousand
five hundred tons. As
these facts and figures raced through his mind, out of the corner of his eye, he
suddenly noticed a movement on the ship’s quarter deck. Gazing up, he noticed
two men standing at the rail. Guessing one to be the captain and the other his
second-in-command, he casually gave them a salute. There was an unusual delay
before he was acknowledged and when the return salute came, Hall was puzzled by
the Frenchman’s reactions. The one whom he guessed to be the second-in-command
began shouting and though he took no particular notice of what he was saying,
Hall could not help but notice a look of sadness on his face. At the same time
as the officer began shouting, Hall suddenly saw a flicker of movement behind
the cannons. That was the precise moment he knew he had been tricked and was
going to die. Even so, when the explosion came and the deck of the British
frigate erupted beneath his feet hurtling him twenty feet into the air, he
smiled grimly at the huge piece of iron grating that came spinning towards him.
He neither felt or realised that it had taken both his legs off two inches above
the knees as easily as a knife slices through melted butter. Hitting the water and plunging three metres below its surface, he desperately kicked out in a weak effort to propel himself upwards. As the first waves of panic began to take control of his senses, he could not understand why the surface appeared to be getting further away from him. For what seemed a lifetime but in reality was only seconds, he finally broke the surface sucking in huge amounts of air until his lungs could hold no more. He felt no pain; in fact, he felt at peace as he bobbed up and down staring at the sea of flotsam that was once his ship. Seeing his lieutenant floating face down, he wondered why his legs didn’t respond when he tried to go to his aid. His last thought was that somebody had come to his aid and taking hold of him around his waist, forcibly pushed him through the water towards his prized possession. As the sixteen-foot shark pulled him under the stern of the Vengeance and the warm waters of the Indian Ocean slipped over his open eyes, the last thing Captain James Hall saw was the immaculately dressed man standing on the poop deck staring down at him with that same sad expression. Click on the cart below to purchase this book:
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