Authors: Martin Archer
Tags: #Historical Fiction
“Aye, you could be right, Thomas, you could be right.”… “Well, yes you are; this could be the best place we’ve found so far - but only if we can anchor the cogs in the river here so we can get them close enough to shore so we can unload them and work on them. If we can’t get the cogs close enough, we’ll have to go back down the river a ways to that place we looked at down below the big rock where the river bends.”
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“Samuel, the sun has just come up, the wind is from the east, and you are rowing easterly into the wind loaded with refugees. You have thirty experienced Marine archers and ten sailors on your galley. Your lookout on the mast has just reported seeing two war galleys dead ahead of you that are turning towards you. What orders do you give?”
Harold is the master sergeant of our sailors and that’s the kind of question he and Thomas and I have been asking our sergeant captains for the past three days – prior to selecting sergeants to captain the six galleys we will soon be sending back to the Holy Land and other destinations to carry refugees and other coin-paying passengers and cargos from the Holy Land.
Talking with all our sergeant captains at the same time about what a sergeant captain should do when various events happen is something Thomas suggested. He said such “make believe talk” was quite helpful for him when he was at the monastery learning to be a priest.
I didn’t think much of the idea but went along with it because Thomas is so educated, what with memorizing some of the bible and reading all nine books at the monastery before he left to rescue me and take me crusading. Now I can honestly say that the “make believe talking” for our galley sergeants has been interesting and helpful, at least for me. Hopefully it has for our sergeant captains as well.
What we’ve been doing for the past three days is confronting all of our sergeant captains with different situations and asking what orders they would give and what they would expect their men and their galley to do after they give them. Their answers, of course, range from quite the right thing to do to damn foolish. Then everyone talks about them until everyone understands the best orders to give and why they should be given.
When we finish Thomas and I will select the galleys.
And begin wondering how many of them will not return, and which of our galleys and men will not.
In a couple of days six of our galleys will begin voyaging off to Cyprus and the Holy Land along the same basic route we followed to get here a couple of weeks ago.
Not all of our galleys are going east. One has already left for London and with five of the surviving original archers, a dozen or so of the English galley slaves we freed, and miscellaneous sailors and men at arms. They’re men who originally came from London or want to try to walk to their old homes from there.
After the men are dropped off the cog’s sergeant captain will try to buy some sacks of grain we can grind for flour. He’ll buy them at the big market for merchants selling grain near London’s long dock. I know because I helped carry sacks to the cog when our company of archers went out with Richard. There were one hundred and ninety two of us then; now we are only ten here and another seven in the east.
Another galley and both of our cogs will soon be following the returning archers and make many more stops at ports along the way. They’ll be going all the way to Newcastle and Blackpool with stops in the smaller ports along the way to land recruiting parties and place supply orders. But before the cogs can leave, however, we’ll have to unload their cargos - and that means finding a place where we can safely store them.
The rest of our galleys, eight in all, are in the process of being pulled out of the water. They will be laid up for the winter because we don’t have enough men to crew them – because of desertions and because almost five hundred of our best fighting men will be staying with us to guard our ships and coin chests. So will the two hundred or so likely looking recruits we picked up along the way and have begun training as apprentice archers.
It’s a long process to train archers isn’t it? They need to develop strong arms and learn how to use them. And ours need even more training than most because we’ll be using them on both land and sea.
Surprisingly enough, at least to me, most of the hundreds of galley slaves we acquired and freed when we cut the galleys out of Tunis, including more than half the Englishmen, have volunteered to stay on with us as sailors and make the return trip to Cyprus and the Holy Land.
Some probably to get closer to home before they run; but many, it seems, don’t have anywhere to go and don’t know what else to do. Poor sods.
Not all the former slaves are leaving. A couple of dozen made their marks to train as archer apprentices and most of them from Britain are still with us because they are going to head towards their homes on the galleys and cogs heading for Newcastle and Blackpool with stops along the way. And, of course, we expect some of the archers and slaves will come back. People die and things change so it’s hard to go home after being away for years
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Thomas and I are good examples of why it’s hard to go home; there’s nothing in the village for us and I’ll be damned and dead before I’ll be a serf or churl for whoever is the local lord these days.
Most of the galleys that will be heading for Cyprus and the Holy Land in a few days will be gone until about this time next year, if not longer. And that’s if they’re lucky and don’t get taken or go down in a storm along the way. While they’re gone we’ll be training up more archers and recruiting experienced pilots and sailor sergeants so we can send out the rest of our galleys next year.
And yes, damn it, we probably should have sent the galleys back to Cyprus as soon as we took them off the Moors and got them to Malta.
It is experienced sea pilots and archers we need most of all and, after them, strong young men we can train to be archers – particularly Englishmen and Welshmen we can trust. Sailors and men at arms are not such a big a problem. If necessary we can recruit them along the way as we’ve done in the past. At least that’s our current plan.
Accordingly, the galleys and cogs going to Newcastle and Blackpool will put recruiting parties ashore at various ports along the way and then pick them and their recruits up on the way back. There is a lot of shipping and sailormen on the Thames below London so all of our ships going north past the Thames will visit its various ports and docks.
In addition to ships’ pilots who’ve made multiple visits to the Holy Land and have extensive experience as the sergeants of sailors, our recruiting parties are particularly looking for experienced archers and likely young men we can apprentice to be archers if they are willing to serve aboard our galleys and cogs.
Also, at Thomas’ request, our recruiting sergeants are to keep an eye out and pass the word to the priests and merchants that we are looking for lively young boys who might be smart enough to learn how to read and write and do sums.
The captains of the cogs and the galleys being used for recruiting and supply purposes and the sergeants in charge of the recruiting parties don’t know it, of course, but they are being tested. Each will be given a fairly goodly sum of silver coins they can use to buy the tents and clothes we need and to hire fishing boats and passages for any additional recruits and supplies they find that they have no room to carry. They’ll also each be taking one of the paste chests to show around on the way out and sell on the way back.
Hopefully they will use the coins well and get results and we can promote them; if not, at least we’ll know they’re not up to bigger things.
Our biggest need of all, however, is not likely to be filled - for dependable fighting men who can also scribe and do sums, and thus are capable of captaining major outposts such as Yoram and Randolph are captaining for us in Cyprus and Alexandria.
The chance of recruiting such men is slim to none. Thomas is probably right when he says we’ll have to find likely young boys and educate and train them from scratch if we are to grow power for George to take over when we’re too old.
Anyhow that’s what Thomas wants to do and that’s why we’re looking for likely young lads who can be schooled and brought along with young George. He thinks he’s already found two such boys in Falmouth.
What we’re hoping, of course, is that in the interim before George and his lads take over we’ll be able to identify sergeants from our refugee hauling and our recruiting and supply buying voyages who can be teamed up with scribes who can read and write
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In the meantime we have decided to send some of the prize galleys with little more than skeleton crews back to Cyprus for Yoram to send on to the Holy Land ports - and keep about six hundred of our current strength in Cornwall. Well, it’s six hundred if we include the hundred and twenty or so men who will be going out in the cogs and recruiting galleys and the apprentice archers we are now training.
Every one of the galleys heading to Cyprus and on to the Holy Land is a prize galley we took out of Tunis; and every captain except one is the original captain of its prize crew. Each will sail with the smallest possible crew of sailors and rowers so it can sail between Cyprus and the Holy Land ports with as many refugees and their coins as its captain can squeeze in.
Except for the one man who was removed for gross incompetence, the captains will be the prize captains who got their galleys to England. They were all given the opportunity to keep their commands and they all chose to do so - and in virtually every case are astonished to find themselves elevated above the status in which they expected to spend their entire lives.
Thomas and I know the feeling.
The prize captains were selected before we visited Tunis from the men already serving with us.
They got their ships all the way to England so we’re giving them a chance to keep them.
Where we’ve made some changes are in the galleys’ pilots and the sergeants of their sailors and fighting men. There seem to be some good sailor men, including a number of ship owners and masters among the slaves we freed when we took the heathen galleys. Some of the best of them will soon be on their way to Cyprus and the Holy Land; others we’re keeping with us to crew the galleys which we are temporarily pulling ashore.
Each of our six sergeant heading for the Holy Land as galley captains is authorized to maintain his crew by signing up replacement archers, men at arms if they need additional rowers, and sailors in the ports they visit along the way. But they are not to recruit more men than they need for replacements - except for experienced archers, particularly longbow men, who are to be recruited whenever they are found. It was repeated over and over again in the “make believe talking” sessions that the galley captains are to keep their crews small so as to allow for largest possible numbers of coin paying refugees.
The “make believe talking” is Thomas’ idea and it absolutely amazes the men; they, like me, had never heard of such a thing. But they took to it with surprising enthusiasm and all claim to have learned a lot. I certainly did whilst I was helping Harold and Thomas learn them what to do.
A big part of our problem is keeping the sergeants honest when there are so many coins involved. That’s why all the passengers the galleys pick up in the Holy Land ports will be delivered to Cyprus and interviewed on the Cyprus docks when they arrive.
As you might imagine, the big question every passenger will be asked privately is how much he actually paid. And it better be what each of our sergeant captains turns over to Yoram – the passengers will be interviewed and checked off when they arrive and corrupt sergeant captains and any of their sergeants and crew men involved will be killed or discharged on the dock.
At least, that’s what we told the captains and their sergeants and that’s what appears in the instruction parchments the galleys are carrying to Yoram and Randolph. They better believe it – for Randolph and Yoram have indeed been ordered to kill them if they hold out on us.
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I’m wearing the gown and miter I took off the bishop I killed in Latika and I’m off to find Lord Edmund’s widow and give her the sad news. William is going to stay behind in Falmouth with Helen and George. While I’m gone he and Henry will organize our men for the winter since it looks like we’ll be staying here - and that means training them for land warfare using horse bowmen in the Saracen style and the new Swiss-style pikes our smiths made for us before we left Cyprus. William and Harold, our master sergeant in charge of our ships in British waters, are also going to begin a week or more of training and role playing for our ships’ captains and their sergeants.
About a dozen of our steadiest archers and men at arms are accompanying me with three of the four horses we bought in Falmouth carrying our tents and supplies and me riding the fourth.
The men are walking so we make slow time. It takes three days over the rough and meandering track before Edmund’s castle comes into view. There is no hurry and after all those weeks at sea it is rather relaxing to walk along the track and watch the local serfs and churls bringing in the harvest. No one bothers us though we certainly draw a number of curious looks and friendly waves from the men and women working in the fields.