Winds of Folly Read Online Free

was a little over six feet, clapping his hands behind his back and casting an eagle eye over his domain.
    Not that anyone took a blind bit of notice, of course, much less quaked in their boots, but this, too, might be taken as cause for satisfaction, in that every man aboard knew his place and function, no one had been flogged for as long as he could remember, and the smooth running of the ship was something her Captain could more or less take for granted.
    It had not always been the case. Nathan had taken command of the
Unicorn
in the aftermath of mutiny and murder, when a score or so of her people had risen up against their officers and made off in the ship’s cutter, taking their previous Captain as hostage. His body had later been washed up on the shores of Louisiana with its throat cut, and the mutineers had taken to a life of piracy on the Spanish Main while the
Unicorn
had endured hurricane and near-shipwreck in a futile pursuit.
    Nathan had come aboard in the Havana to find both ship and crew in a sorry state. The first lieutenant was a martinet and a moron, the junior officers morose and uneasy, the people whipped into a dogged and surly subservience. But after a shaky start, he had presided over a dramatic improvement. The
Unicorn
had fought and won two encounters with larger frigates, and though both her opponents had run upon the rocks and foundered, depriving him of a considerable fortune in the way of prize money, the victories had done much to bond officers and crew into a fighting unit. By a strange series of events, Nathan had secured the freedom of a number of African slaves in Louisiana and many of them had volunteered for service on the
Unicorn
where they had proved ideal recruits, particularly in the working of the guns. The fact that they could not under any circumstance be described as loyal subjects of King George was of no account. Not that many of the crew were.
    Once, going through the ship’s books with the purser, Nathan had been startled to discover that ninety-six of thehands, almost half the total, were listed as foreign-born, including twelve Frenchmen. He hoped the latter were Royalists, but he did not count on it. The hands comprised Scandinavians, Latvians and Lithuanians, Italians, Americans, the Africans – and a pair of Lascars who had been found drifting in an open boat off the west coast of Ireland and had yet to satisfactorily explain their presence there. And then there were the Irish, of course – the Catholic Irish – who made up almost a third of the remainder and were at best reluctant subjects of King George, at worst out-and-out rebels, at least in their Papist hearts.
    As for the native English, most of them were the scourings of the jailhouse or the waterfront, forcibly brought in by the press, or fleeing from a worse fate than the King’s Navy.
    Nathan had decided he was more pleased than not by this multiplicity of nationalities and races, as if their very variety gave them some common cause, like Crusaders. Though God only knew what it was. The restoration of the Bourbons to the throne of France hardly counted as a crusade. The prize money probably helped.
    The officers, of course, were a different matter, and here Nathan had more cause for satisfaction. Death had removed the main impediments to his contentment, the first lieutenant having been struck by a musket ball in the Caribbean, and the sailing master, a notorious Jeremiah, having lived up to his own expectations and succumbed to a perforated ulcer on the voyage home. Their replacements, Mr Duncan and Mr Perry, were their superiors in every way. They could be relied upon to manage the crew and to sail the ship in whatever direction was required without troubling their Captain for an opinion on either subject. And should he feel compelled to offer one, or even to issue an order, he could always turn for advice to his particular friend, Lieutenant Tully, presently commanding the
Bonne Aventure
.