Richard Testrake - (Sea Command 2) (10 page)

Valkyrie accompanied the prize into Palermo on the island of Sicily. Sir William Hamilton was the British minister there and Mullins took the time to call on him. Sir William was an educated man who could discuss most subjects intelligently, but his main interests seemed to be in art and volcanology.

With little understanding of either, Mullins, during a break in conversation, wondered if he could obtain the services of a Sicilian prize court, to dispose of his prizes. Hamilton foresaw little difficulty with this since King Ferdinand was fervent in his dislike of the French intrusion into Naples, the other part of his kingdom.

HMS Valkyrie remained at anchor for a week while stores were purchased and taken aboard. When the formalities had been completed, the prizes were taken under supervision of the Palermo prize court and the hands aboard them came back to the ship.

With the newly loaded fresh provisions, Mullins felt prepared to go on his cruise. He had a nearly complete crew, but prior to sailing, small craft began coming alongside, with Italian crewmen offering to sign on. It was not unusual for hands to sign on in a foreign port and Mullins was glad to take on the dozen seamen he felt he could berth.

These hands well knew they would be conscripted into the French army should they be taken at sea by the enemy. Many decided it was preferable to serve on a British warship rather than the French army.

Before sailing, Sir William presented a small keg of a red wine, to which he was partial, to the wardroom, with another for the captain.

The rum brought out from home was nearly finished, so the purser too, purchased a quantity of red wine himself, to issue to the crew in lieu of grog. This was not a popular substitute and there were some sour faces that evening among the crew. Mullins ordered his servant to decant some of the Hamilton wine for the evening meal for himself and his guests in the cabin. This idiosyncrasy would be repeated to the hands who would be able to marvel at their captain drinking Italian red wine by choice.

The wine was exquisite and the guests had nothing to complain about.

The ship, by herself now, set out to round the Italian peninsula to make her way around into the Ionian Sea, looking for legitimate prey. South of Sicily, they sighted a small island. Mullins decided it would be fine to visit the island to gain intelligence and possibly obtain a few sheep for the cabin and wardroom.

As Valkyrie closed the island, a quantity of smoke was seen blanketing the southern portion of the island. The masthead soon reported an entire village to be smoldering. There was a small cove there where fishing boats had formerly moored. Now, any such craft visible were burnt out wrecks.

With the lead in use, Valkyrie approached as close as the sailing master dared, then boats were launched loaded with Marines, supplemented by armed seamen and carrying the first officer. When Mister Danton returned, he brought a pair of young children and a badly injured young woman. She had been slashed with a sword and apparently been left for dead. The surgeon took her into the cockpit to do his magic and Mullins detailed a pair of the new Sicilian hands to look after the children. One of those men had served before on British shipping and was conversant with the English language.

Danton reported bodies were scattered throughout the town. Apparently, an enemy had landed, surrounded the village and began killing and looting. There were few dead women present, implying these had been carried away by their attackers.

This man, Giuseppe, came to him that evening and explained what the children had told him. The raiders had come at dawn the previous morning. It was a quick action, their mission accomplished before noon. Parties of raiders blocked off exits from town and began seizing all the young people they could get their hands on. Those resisting, as well as most of the older citizens, were put to the sword. The ship was gone a few hours after landing.

Only a few survivors were found alive. The wounded were treated by the surgeon and either taken on board or released to their own devices, as they wished.

One village elder had hidden under a shed and survived unscathed. This person had, earlier in his life, been enslaved by Moorish corsairs and understood their language. Free now, he had listened to their conversation as well as to his fellow villager’s screams. Signor Bernadelli had an idea of where the raiders might be based.

Bernadelli was old and frail, and Mullins did not wish to take him to sea where he might be injured in a scuffle with the Moorish raiders. However, after being closeted with a pair of his Sicilian hands, a fair idea of the possible location of the pirates was gained, and Signo Bernadelli insisted on accompanying them.

The consensus was the raiders and their captives might well be located on an empty island about a hundred sea miles to the east. Apparently, at one time this had been home to a large population, but over the years, this island had been raided so often that it was now empty, and the new generation of raiders was using it to warehouse their prisoners until it was time to carry them off to Africa.

More survivors had gradually trickled back to the outraged village, and Mullins decided there were enough people to care for the elderly and injured. Leaving provisions and money behind to support the more helpless, he went back to the ship to make her ready to sail.

Aboard Valkyrie, the sailing master had gone over his charts and had them ready to display to his captain. There were three islands near the suspected location of the raider’s nest and Valkyrie was put on course to the nearest. It took them two days to find the island, which proved to be empty. There was plenty of evidence of human habitation, but no person appeared to be still located there.

The homes of the former inhabitants were all in ruins, and the little cultivated plots were now thick with weeds, at least of varieties the sheep would not eat. The numerous feral sheep had eaten much of the palatable vegetation.

Since Mullins was still in mind of a roast of mutton, Mister Daniels offered to take a few of his Marines ashore to harvest some fresh meat, returning with a dozen carcasses. Joints went to the cabin, the wardroom and the gunroom, with the remainder issued to the cook to prepare for the hands. The cook prepared the meat for the crew on a Wednesday, normally a banyan day, when meat would not otherwise be furnished.

With everyone replete with fresh meat and no one found on the island, it was time to move on. The next island was just within sight. As they approached, at first there seemed to be two islands. The island had two major mountains, connected to each other by a low-lying plain, formed like a horseshoe.

This might very well be their objective. Smoke was rising from a cluster of hovels, along the beach of the little bay. As they approached, a large, European made ship lay at anchor in the bay, while several galley-type craft were drawn up on the beach.

At first, Valkyrie seemed to have been unobserved, but then a drum was heard beating across the water. Numbers of men began rushing to the galleys, but only one was shoved off the beach. There seemed to be much confusion as the single galley manned her oars and set out toward Valkyrie. Other people on shore began running to the second galley, but there seemed to be no success in getting her afloat yet.

With a drum aboard the first galley beating cadence for her oarsmen, it pointed directly at Valkyrie, and her oars drove her directly at the warship. Mullins turned over the ship to his master so he could concentrate on the enemy. Mister Ralston veered to port so the starboard guns were directed at the oncoming galley. While waiting for the raider to approach a bit closer, a party on the beach was seen to congregate around a previously un-noticed gun.

Mister Weems was still on deck, studying the likely targets his guns must soon engage. When he realized the ship would soon be likely under fire, he pointed out the target to several of the gun captains then dashed below to his lair in the magazine.

Mister Danton had the sense of the expected engagement and the gun crews were all at their stations. Glancing at his captain over his shoulder, he got the nod and ordered ‘Fire’.

Eleven guns erupted and the single gun on shore was dismounted and the crew decimated. Now, it was the turn of the galley approaching them, and its end was hardly less spectacular.

This galley had a pair of twelve-pounder guns up forward, and its crew was frantically attempting to get one of them ready to fire. Many of the galley’s crew had been stranded onshore and there were not enough people present to ready both guns. It really made no difference.

The single gun, when fired, did no harm to Valkyrie, the ball splashing close to the ship’s cutwater. Her own broadside, delivered in a hurry, bow raked the oncoming galley, almost dismantling the lightly built craft. A second broadside, opened the bow up like an orange. One of her guns spilled out, and the weight of the other took the flooding craft below the waves.

The surviving raiders ashore were seen rushing into the hills behind the village, and Mullins sent Mister Daniels with a party of Marines as well as a strong party of armed seamen ashore.

While giving the village a cursory inspection, the missing Italian villagers were found there, much abused and rather bedraggled, but alive. There were a few younger men, captured in their sleep on their native islands, but most of them were women and children. A cadre of mature women seemed to be now in control. A delegation of these ladies came to Mullins on the beach, loudly demanding their due. Since he spoke no Italian himself, he was not quite certain what these ladies wished, but he had known assertive women himself in the past and well knew it was not a good idea to deny such women their wishes.

It took some time to bring his Sicilian crewmen up to discuss matters with the surviving women captives.

Their main demand was arms so they could hunt down their Moorish abusers. This presented a problem for Captain Mullins. If he were to furnish British arms to these women, he knew he would hear of this from the Navy, very loudly possibly.

Of course, if the women armed themselves, possibly from captured enemy weapons, he could hardly be blamed for the carelessness of the pirates.

While he was listening with one ear to the outraged expostulations of one of the women, Lieutenant Daniels pointed to the pile of arms his men had gathered. Mullins nodded and wandered over to the stack. Muskets, bayonets, pistols and cutlasses were all present.

Giuseppe approached then, with a complaint the women were driving him to distraction, with their demands for arms. Mullins asking the Italian if he thought the women could learn how to use the captured weapons, caused the elder to think. He turned to the most imperative female and said a few words to her.

She nodded, grabbing a few others and ran to the pile of arms. For a few minutes there was a scramble as the women sorted out the arms they thought might be appropriate to their mission. The women organized themselves into groups and set out to the woodland behind the beach.

Mullins, presented with a ‘
fait accompli’
was now terrified that he had unleashed a firestorm. How could these untrained women overcome the bloody pirates that had captured them originally. He could well see the long arm of the Royal Navy come down on his neck, holding him responsible for their fate.

As the day progressed, shots were heard in the island’s interior, then not a few distant masculine cries of outrage and pain. Toward dusk, a commotion was heard approaching the beach and here were the ladies, with a large group of prisoners. Many of the pirates, caught unawares, had fled to the interior without their weapons. The women, more familiar with this terrain than the pirates were, had little difficulty capturing most of the missing pirates, and these men were very unhappy.

A shocked Giuseppe reported to Mullins what he had learned of the women’s actions. The early captives had been castrated where they were captured. The women were not experienced with such surgery and their first victims had all perished from shock and severe blood loss. Now, they wished the ship’s surgeon to demonstrate the proper way to administer the surgery so the victims would live a few days before expiring.

When Mullins expressed his own dismay, Giuseppe explained every one of these women had lost a close family member to the ravages of these pirates. Even little children had been savagely violated. Not being able to argue with these facts, Mullins pondered his options. Finally, he asked Giuseppe to have the women gather at the fire while legal matters were explained to them.

The women were proud of their accomplishments and were suspicious that these Englishmen might wish to free their captives.

Speaking slowly, so Giuseppe could translate his words, Mullins began.

“Ladies, as an officer of the Royal Navy, I am bound by British law. I am not permitted to summarily execute prisoners or permit them to be mistreated.”

A murmur of outrage echoed from the gathering. He continued. “It is required that pirates such as we have here be punished under the rules of British law. The normal way criminals like you have here are punished back home is by hanging until dead.”

“Now, of course, we are not in England. I cannot myself execute any of these people until they have stood trial back in England and have been found guilty. The only way I can see for them to be legally punished is by decree of a local court.”