1. No place to be.

The western portion of the English channel is no place to be, in a winter gale, with the wind blowing hard from the west – just where you want to go and where neither the wind or the strong tides will allow you to get to – unless of course you are a very good seaman which he wasn’t. Shivering heavily now and deeply tired inside several layers of soaked wool and with the rain and spray coursing down his old and leaky oilskin to pool in his lap or run down his legs into his sodden sea boots. Hans Eric Vesterman, the skipper, braced both feet against the lip of the steersman’s foot well to leeward and pulled hard against the heavy wooden tiller as gust after gust tried to force the smack to round up into the wind. He strained to look forward while trying to shelter his eyes from the blinding spray thrown aft every time the old smack kicked hard into a wave.

Cold, tired and very sick now he wanted to be anywhere that wasn’t here : his problem though was he didn’t even know exactly where he was and with the compass glass broken he could only guess at the direction they were sailing in and then only when they could catch a rare glimpse of the sun : they hadn’t seen a clear sun for three days now as they came around England’s north Foreland and worked their way out into an increasingly grey and boisterous English channel. Now, nearly three days since they last saw land they were all exhausted and the hull of the smack was flexing and twisting so much that it was leaking heavily and one crewman out of the four on board had to work at the pump almost continuously to keep the boat from flooding and foundering.

Last time he had felt able to go below, ostensibly to take a turn at the pump and to check on the boy, but actually to get out of the cold wind for a while, he had been violently sick again and again such that he could feel his stomach heaving painfully even when there was nothing left to bring up. He was almost tempted to give up the entire enterprise and put into an English port for shelter but then there would be discovery and difficult questions to answer : now, the best he could hope for was to put into shelter somewhere on the French coast, anchor and rest in some river or creek for a while even if it meant being quarantined. Most of the time now he was so far beyond normal tiredness and so cold and sick that he couldn’t even think clearly.

Had he been one of the smack’s original crew, an Essex smacksman. then he would have known how to make the over pressed vessel jog along slowly under storm trysail and backed staysail ; like that he could even have hove to for a few hours and gone below with the crew to light the galley stove and get warmed up and dried out a little. He wasn’t though, in fact he wasn’t much of a seaman at all especially in these waters and these conditions : if asked he wouldn’t be able to explain why he had taken on the job in the first place.

When he threw back the hatch to get away from the fetid interior, which now stank of wine and spirits from the broken bottles sloshing around the bilge with their own piss and vomit, he felt that the smack was moving through the waves better than it had been doing. On deck the paid hand had thrown a short length of stout line over the tiller and was using that to ease the weight in the tiller caused by the unbalanced sail plan.

Extreme tiredness and cold do strange things to a man’s mind : once back on deck in the wind and rain he’d pushed the hired hand away from the tiller although he now used the relieving line as though he knew how to do that all along. Often now his nodded and drooped as his mind tried to drop into an uneasy sleep but he would be jerked instantly awake by the dash of an icy wave against his face. For his part it was a snatch of bar room music playing the same notes over and over and yet interspersed with part of a sermon he once had to listen to : something about Saint Peter and the keys to heaven repeating again and again.

Now though he was vaguely aware of the paid hand shaking him by the shoulder and shouting in his ear something about land while he pointed forward. When he could make his eyes and mind focus in the gloom of a late winter’s afternoon he just make out ahead the grey rocks of a shoreline with the white of surf breaking over them and behind that a hint of higher land with perhaps the suggestion of a square building behind.

What saved them was a huge gust that forced the smack to broach into the wind while at the same moment causing the heavy wooden yard to snap clean through and was now waving around uselessly but dangerously over their heads. What they would have hit unknowingly was a small reef of mostly submerged rocks and the strong tide now pushing them towards the west : the problem with the tide though was that it was running directly against the wind so the whole area in front of them was now a confused mess of tidal race and surf from the rocks to windward.

The next few minutes were confused, to say the least : young Tristan, the paid hand, ran forward to the mast to let go the two halyards that were used to hoist and then support the big yard except one of them caught around a cleat so only the outer end, the peak of the yard, came down and was thrashing around at deck level threatening to knock anyone overboard that got too close. What Tristan did in error was to also throw off the outer jib halyard so most of that sail went overboard and was now dragging through the waves. From being very nearly in the shelter of high ground the smack was instead swept into the rocky channel by the strong west going ebb and with what little control remained was veering from side to side of the narrow channel. Finally, having got too close to the southern side of the channel so as to avoid the beacon on yet another rock the bow of the smack ground up against the sand and mud at the edge of the bay known locally as Kernoc and with the tide ebbing strongly now, started to settle there.

If the skipper thought that they were somewhere near the Island of Guernsey and that they had somehow sailed into the channel leading up to Saint Peters port then he was wrong by about fifty miles : they and the big smack having passed that island without seeing it or it’s outlying rocks and reefs during the previous night.

2. Enez Vaz

Enez Vaz, or to give it it’s regular French name : l’ile de Batz, is a small and rocky Island off the coast of northern Brittany, just opposite the coastal town and port of Roscoff. Between the island and the mainland is the fiercely tidal and rock strewn Batz channel. Home to a few dozen Breton fishermen and their hardy families. Most of the tiny homes there are low lying cottages built from local granite : many of them fitted out with boxed in beds in little alcoves like the foc’sle of a seagoing ship and, as with many seagoing ships an iron stove is the only source of heat for warmth and meals.

The island forms one of the important barrier or quarantine stations administered by the Marine National of the French navy and the quarantine board of that region of France : the main administration point of the island – little used nowadays – centers around the small chapel dedicated to one of the local saints and is run largely by an order house of poor friars. The other barrier islands on the Brittany coast : Ile d oessant (Ushant) and the smaller Ile de Seine being also lot less active now that the highly contagious and once lethal plague has mostly been eradicated in this north western corner of France.

For most of the day the island is completely cut off from the mainland by the strong tides of that coast except for the boatmen and fishermen that live on either shore and who run the local ferry twice daily. The small port of Roscoff and the Morlaix estuary are used as anchorages for the smaller steam powered patrol boats that operate on this coast and vessels that are stopped, boarded and arrested are detained in the deep tidal pool near the harbourmasters office : nowadays the deep water port : the port de Bloscon.

The Franciscans, or more properly, the order of friars minor, choose to live and work communally from a plain and simple formation house. The brothers rise early and pray together before taking a frugal breakfast and then go about their work for the day, gathering again for their main evening meal and more reading and prayers before retiring for the night. One of the brothers, brother Henri, had family locally – his older brother having recently returned from a life at sea had married a local widow who had lost her first husband at sea and the pair of them had made a simple life living in the old family cottage. Brother Henri always made time, when he could, to visit his older brother who would often tell him tall tales about his time aboard a square rigged tea clipper racing across the great southern ocean.

This night, brother Henri was restless : with the weather being cold and stormy from the west it hadn’t been possible to row across to the mainland for most of the day and that was where he worked with the local apothecery and herbalist. After dinner he excused himself and with his superior’s permission walked the short distance to his older brother’s cottage where he sat with his brother and his wife, obviously pregnant now, to talk while heavy squalls blew through overhead.

Later on, after a particularly heavy squall rattled the tiles, he bid his extended family blessings and wished them a peaceful night and then got up to leave. As he went back into the dark night he glanced briefly to seaward where he caught a brief glimpse of a sailing vessel of some kind out to sea and making for the eastern end of the island and that end of the Batz channel although with some apparent difficulty in the large inshore waves. Instead of leaving he knocked on the door of the cottage again to rouse his older brother whom he know owned a fine telescope with which to view whatever vessel it was : brother Henri assumed it to be local and possibly in some distress as it heaved and plunged through the steeper inshore waves.

His brother, Michel, joined him outside in the lee of his cottage and got his younger brother to stand in such a way and in a position that allowed him to rest the fore end of the heavy instrument on his younger brother’s shoulder. Not one of ours, he said, after studying the sailing vessel for a few minutes. How do you know ? asked Henri. It’s not one of the island vessels – I know them all and they’re all pulled up onto the sand here for work and repairs – I don’t think it’s from Ros, over the water, in fact I don’t think it’s a French boat at all. Here ! swap over and take a look : i’m going to fetch captain Gaspard.

With that, Michel jogged off to the cottage where one of the older seamen lived which left brother Henri to study the stranger with his telescope resting on the nearby wall. Just a few minutes later his brother reappeared with the older seaman in tow struggling into a stiff old oilskin against the foul weather. Henri balanced the heavy telescope on his shoulder again while his brother, Michel, pointed towards where the vessel was appearing and disappearing again just as quickly again in the confused seas of the inshore tidal race.

I have him muttered the older man, his mainsail is down – ripped I think – and it looks as though his yard is down and his boom broken : it looks as though they are trying to rig a trys’l (small triangular sail used in heavy weather).

What do you make of him ? asked Michel…..one of ours or a Brest boat ?

Definitely not a local boat – it’s difficult to make out in this sea what it is but for a moment I could make out it’s ensign which I thought to be the Dutchie tricolor but it’s odd because it don’t look like no Dutch boat…..looks more like one of those English fishing smacks I seed that time I went up the big Thames river that time with old man Cretien (his late father and a former sea captain)

What must we do ? asked brother Henri.

Well, you know how it stands with our quarantine law : if he anchors behind the headland – in front of the harbor master’s place – and hoists his yeller flag then he can leave when he likes. Last thing I saw before he went out of view behind our headland he seemed to be making that way. What you should do is go back and tell your superior to use the station semaphore to send a signal to the harbor master, what me and him – indicating Michel – is take a walk down to the bay and shelter in the lee of my boat and we will see what we will see !

With reports of plague re emerging in the British colonies relations between France and the British isles haven’t been amicable since France declared it’s waters closed to maritime traffic except via it’s ports of entry : the nearest being the port and city of Brest off to the west and, St Malo to the east. It is for this very reason that the quarantine laws were being applied more vigorously and it must be said with good effect so far.

Plague, or to be more precise, the Black Plague burnt itself out several hundred years before but then re emerged in the south and east of the country on the trade route from southern Europe and it was in France that not only was the connection made between the then more common black rat (Rattus Rattus) and the plague but also the means of preventing it using strict quarantine at it’s ports. It was also in France that it was discovered that it is only the black rat that carries the plague flea and not the larger brown or Norway rat which is now used to control the disease because a population of resident brown rats will out compete the smaller black rats which is why brown rats are now actively bred and encouraged to thrive being regarded as quite clean animals.

That very fact is now said to be one of the main reasons why the British in the form of it’s government and jingoistic press actively and vociferously hate the French. In the English press cartoons a Frenchman is often depicted as rat in a beret. It is also why England has an active black rat population and the deadly plague once again with the main culprits most likely coming straight into the heart of the country at the Isle of Grain via grain carrying steamers from eastern Europe.

Readers whom are familiar with the British government and it’s play-along press wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear that the Catholic church in France is hated and villified because it was and is mostly their work in the natural sciences that made the scientific connection. More politically it is the French Catholics that support the Free Eire or Free Irish Republican movement rather than the Engish Royalist loving and more powerful Ulstermen in the north. At the time of this story there is a new Bill being put before through the English parliament, vociferously by the same Ulster contingent that seeks to further restrict the freedom of all Catholics on the mainland as they are often portrayed as rebels and religious fanatic traitors that support the roman Papacy.