Ship of Fire by Michael Cadnum Page B

“a ship’s boat took us off and we were preserved, except for those who died.”
    â€œAre many children taken to sea?”
    â€œSir, the Admiralty pays our parents and we learn the trade of seamen.”
    I was shaken by the sudden death that awaited every mortal on a warship, and wondered that children should be so exposed to danger.
    â€œBesides,” Hercules was saying, “being small we fit the crowded ship life, if it please you.”
    I asked how old he was. Hercules confided that he had seen eleven winters—I had reckoned him very much younger.
    â€œAnd now that I am a surgeon’s boy,” he continued, “some day I’ll grow to be surgeon’s mate, and, if it please the Admiralty, some day I may set splints and drink my wine spiced, just like a gentleman surgeon.” He caught himself, and put a hand out to a chafing dish that was dancing its way across our tabletop.
    â€œUnless I’m wrong, sir,” he added questioningly, “to dream of such things?”
    Our ship crashed into seas over the coming days, the admiral commanding the captain to crowd on canvas, and the mariner who was manning the whipstaff—the device that worked the vessel’s rudder—was often thrown off his feet by the force of the waves.
    Even as I mourned my master, a succession of drenched and shivering seamen limped into the surgeon’s cabin presenting dislocated shoulders, hobbling sprains, and black eyes where tackle had broken loose and smashed into the men trying to secure it. The cook himself, a stout man with tufted eyebrows, presented a broken thumb. The stubborn stock pot had once again leaped from the sputtering fire—“cold soup all over my knave of a galley-mate.” I set a splint, and was entirely sincere in wishing him the speediest recovery.
    Our first shipboard patient, Davy, his hand bandaged, often accompanied the injured with praise and reassurance, recounting how his finger had dropped into the waiting bowl with “a merry note, like a little chiming bell.” He showed the mangled digit to his friends, suspended in a green-glass jug of spirits of wine—my master had long emphasized the keeping of specimens.
    Days passed, wet and cold, with no sign of our fleet.
    Jack Flagg confided to me that under any other officers the crew might have been apprehensive, but under Admiral Drake, “We would sail singing ‘hey-ho’ into the teeth of Hell.”
    Later I would wonder if my friend had some gift as a prophet.

Chapter 25
    Late on the afternoon of our tenth day out, a cry came down from our top castle, the viewing platform high on the mainmast.
    â€œA sail, dead ahead!”
    I made my way to the main deck and joined soldiers and seamen in gazing out over an ocean alive with white caps and wind-foam, clouds parting and showing feeble blue for the first time in several days. As before, there was no sign of our fleet to our stern. The ships had been scattered by days of hard weather; although Jack had confided that the Golden Lion had been seen “hull up on the horizon, when the rain parted and the wind took a breath.”
    Now a sail tossed on the gray seas ahead of us as men tried to guess her nationality and cargo. She was a good-sized ship, Jack murmured, and the admiral paced the quarterdeck, rubbing his hands together.
    All the rest of that day our ship gave chase to this mysterious set of sails. The weather was heavy, and while it filled our canvas and drew us ever nearer to this unknown ship, the stranger made every show of not wanting to be caught.
    Intercepting a privateer—a ship licensed to intercept merchant shipping—would win us her stolen cargo. Even better, the chance capture of a Spanish galleon, blown off course by this bad weather, would earn us all a share in gold from the New World.
    A chase at sea, however, is nothing like a foot race, all over in the space of a few heartbeats. Hours would