The Bomb Vessel Read Online Free PDF Page B

clerk’s mind and thus obtain whatever the ship required.
    Drinkwater made daily rounds of the ship. Forward of the officers’ accommodation under the low poop stretched one huge space. It was at once hold and berthing place for the hammocks of her crew. Gratings decked over the lower section into which the casks of pork, peas, flour, oatmeal, fish and water were stowed. Here too, like huge black snakes, lay the vessel’s four cables. Extending down from deck to keelson in the spaces between the two masts were two massive mortar beds. These vast structures were of heavy crossed timbers, bolted and squeezed together with shock-absorbant hemp poked between each beam. Drinkwater suspected he was supposed to dismantle them, but no one had given him a specific order to do so and he knew that the empty shells, or carcases, stowed in the gaps between the timbers. He would retain those shell rooms, and therefore the mortar beds, for without them, opportunity or not,
Virago
would be useless as anything but a cargo vessel. Store rooms, a carpenter’s workshop and cabin each for Matchett and Willerton were fitted under the fo’c’s’le whilst beneath the officers’ accommodation aft were the shot rooms, spirit room, fuse room and bread room. Beneath Drinkwater’s own cabin lay the magazine space, reached through a hatchway for which he had the only key.
    It was not long before Drinkwater had made arrangements to warp
Virago
alongside the Gun Wharf, but he was desperate for want of men to undertake the labour of hoisting and mounting the eight 24-pounder carronades and two 6-pounder long guns that would be
Virago’s
armament. They received a small draft from the Guardship at the Nore and another from the Impress service but still remained thirty men short of their complement. By dint of great effort, by the second week in December, the carronades were all on their slides, the light swivels in their mountings and the two long guns at their stern ports in Drink-water’s cabin. The appearance of the two cold black barrels upon which condensation never ceased to form, brought reality to both Mrs Jex and to Drinkwater himself. To Mrs Jex they disturbed the domestic symmetry of the place, to Drinkwater they reminded him that a bomb vessel was likely to be chased, not do the chasing.
    Virago
had been built as one of a number of bomb shipsconstructed at the beginning of the Seven Years War. She was immensely strong, with futtocks the size of a battleship. Though only 110 feet long she displaced 380 tons. She would sit deep in the water when loaded and, Drinkwater realised, would be a marked contrast to the nimble cutter
Kestrel
or the handy brig
Hellebore
. Only one bomb vessel had been purpose-built since 1759, in 1790, though a number of colliers had been converted. Normally employed on the routine duties of sloops, the bomb vessels only carried their two mortars when intended for a bombardment. For this purpose they loaded the mortars, powder, carcases and shells from the Royal Artillery Arsenal at Woolwich, together with a subaltern and a detachment of artillerymen. The mortars threw their shells, or bombs (from which the ships took their colloquial name) from the massive wooden beds Drinkwater had left in place on
Virago
. The beds were capable of traversing, a development which had revolutionised the rig of bomb vessels. As of 1759 the ketch rig had been dispensed with. It was no longer necessary not to have a foremast, nor to throw the shells over the bow, training their aim with a spring to the anchor cable. Now greater accuracy could be obtained from the traversing bed and greater sailing qualities from the three-masted ship-rig.
    Even so, Drinkwater thought as he made one of his daily inspections, he knew them to be unpopular commands.
Virago
had fired her last mortar at Le Havre in the year of her building. And convoy protection in a heavily built and sluggish craft designed to protect