How Would a Lone, 14th-Century Saboteur Scuttle a Ship?

[The Crawling Chaos]

Hi all,

I'm a little stuck on my current WIP - not so much because I don't have any ideas but because I find my best option so far convoluted and inelegant. I wonder if anyone here has some feedback or better ideas I could explore instead.

Important note: This is a medieval fantasy type story set in a fictional world, so it does not have to be historically accurate. No magic, or rather the human characters are unaware at that point that a handful of magical beings live among them.

The premise: I have a group of people who are prisoners at a working camp and are trying to escape. The camp is a few days (by horse) away from the nearest town. It is framed by high mountains on one side and the ocean on the other, with no other land in sight. There is a mountain pass which is heavily guarded since it's the only access point via land, and the chances a group of underequipped and starved prisoners could survive a climb or a long trek in the mountains themselves with a search party on their heels are close to nil.

The male prisoners dig for ore or tend to the buildings. The female prisoners either dive for seashells, pearls and the occasional precious jetsam brought there by the currents, or produce clothes from fabric that gets there via boats.

So far escaping via these boats seems to be their best option: Three merchant ships leave the camp at dawn every other week to sell what the prisoners found/produced and they come back with food and fabric for the camp. If they could board one, they would not only have a safe way out but would also elope with its precious cargo, whose sale would cover their needs when they reached the land.

My MC is one of the female prisoners there and she is an incredible diver, capable of swimming great distances while submerged or hold her breath underwater for minutes. But the rest of the group is all-male which makes them unable to leave their position and rally a ship unnoticed in normal circumstances, so the MC will have to act alone, swimming all the way to the ships from the area where the females dive, to create the diversion they need. The plan is to scuttle two of the three ships as they depart to cause panic, and have the guards and some of the third ship's crew run/swim to their rescue, leaving an opportunity for the whole group to board the third ship, overpower the rest of the crew and sail away. No other significant ships would be available there to pursue them so it should be smooth sailing from that point. A note: I feel like the scuttled ships and their cargo need to be in immediate danger of sinking rapidly to justify such large-scale panic among the guards, so damaging their rudders or other sailing devices to immobilize them would not do. Both ships need to be sinking.

Now how will a lone, late-medieval diver scuttle two cog-type merchant ships? I have not found a satisfying option. In fact the only one I have at the moment came courtesy of one of the male prisoners from the group, who is an alchemist by trade and suggests using a sodium-type material - which they will have to steal from his personal supply under the nose of the camp's guards - that blows up when immerged in water to damage the hulls of the ships. Of course that comes with all sorts of problems, like how my MC is supposed to plant the material on the hull safely and swim away in time to avoid injury or death. So the material would probably need to be packaged or wrapped in some water-resistant outer shell to create what is essentially a time bomb. This would definitely add tension to the scene, as her long swim in dark waters with two ticking timebombs about her would be fraught with danger. But the main problem is that I find this solution rather inelegant and lacking in simplicity.

Additionally, you might need to know that our alchemist is - unbeknownst to anyone else - a god with vast powers, so technically he could snap his fingers and sink both ships by himself, but he is very secretive about his true nature and a trickster at heart: He sold himself off as a slave to join the prisoners camp only because he wanted to meet my MC - he needs her help for something - and now he wants to see her and her group of puny human beings struggle to find their way out themselves while simply aiding and abetting from the sidelines.

So my questions to you are: What are your thoughts on this? Have I overlooked anything major? Have you heard of real cases of medieval "combat divers" who had managed to sink a ship single-handedly (I could not find any example and combat diving is generally understood to have been experimented with and created at the start of the 20th century anyway)? What other tools would be available to a prisoner that could cause catastrophic damage to the hull of a cog? Should my characters scrape the whole plan and try their luck in the mountains?

Many thanks for reading.

CC

 

[G.T.]

If your reader is aware of the alchemists powers then he could simply give your MC something she has to plant to scuttle the ship. It doesn't really matter if it works or not because he can snap his fingers and make it work. It really depends on what his goals are, does he want her to get hurt or just for her to think she is saving the day? When really it is him who is doing all the work, he is just getting her to run around so he can watch.

Also does he want them to escape slavery? If he does then it is reason enough for him to provide this item to her and then just make it work via his magic.

 

[The Crawling Chaos]

The reader, like the characters, is unaware of this character's true nature and abilities at this stage. Whatever he does can be magic, but it cannot look like magic.

 

[Kerrybuchanan]

A few thoughts.

The MC could drill a series of large holes through the hulls of the ships, several in each one, just above the water line of the side that would be downwind when the ships raise their sails to leave (assuming they're sailing vessels). As soon as the ship begins to sail, she will heel slightly to that side and the holes will then be below the water line, causing rapid flooding, tipping the boat even further to that side, and possibly eventual capsizing it, with luck.

Another thought would be for her to hole the boats below the water line but plug immediately with a soluble substance that would dissolve as the ships move off, thus sinking them. I think that one would be technically harder to pull off in many ways and probably less believable to readers.

Thinking of rudders, if she sawed through the rudder stock where it passed through the bottom of the ship, that might allow water ingress as soon as the crew attempted to steer.

As a sailor, I spend many sleepless nights dreaming up ways in which our boat might come to grief through accident or neglect. I've actually been onboard a sinking boat as we dashed for "land, any land", and (in a separate incident) been rescued by a lifeboat when a steering cable snapped in a Force 6 onshore wind close to a rocky and inhospitable shore.

 

[G.T.]

I think it could still work even if everyone is unaware of the alchemist's powers. He can just hand her something and say it will work, unless she is an alchemist how would she know? Explaining every little detail of everything is not necessarily the best option.

Also something else, if the ships come every two weeks then there must a large number of slaves producing a lot of product to fill three ships every two weeks. Are only a few slaves going to escape?

Putting a hole in a ship is risky, the chances of it being discovered before they set sail would be quite high I'd have thought or the hole not being big enough to cause a problem close enough to shore for them to get to the third ship. That would have to be very precise.

A potion stuck to the side of the ship that just works when needed sounds good enough to me. Maybe its covered in something that protects it until it is in place then the water acts on it and it dissolves the hull making a large hole quickly. The alchemist could just tell her this, no magic involved. Later, if necessary, he can just tell her the potion wasn't real and he did it all or not.

 

[The Judge]

I think G.T.'s suggestion is a good one -- the alchemist can give the MC something that he tells her will explode after a certain time underwater, and he then ignites it when she's clear. If your readers don't then know he has this power, they might think it's a bit convenient but you can have him dress it up in alchemical nonsense so as to confuddle the MC and I don't image many readers will be upset, and then later when his powers are revealed you can make it clear exactly how it happened.

Alternately, if the cogs are full of things made by the prisoners, why don't they smuggle something explosive -- or the alchemist says is explosive -- into the holds? That doesn't use your MC in the same way, but might be more easy to arrange.

Kerry's idea of boring holes is interesting, but will surely require the MC to be alongside the ships for some time -- I've no idea how thick the planking of a cog is likely to be, but even an inch-thick plank is likely to take a while to drill through with a medieval augur or brace and bit. (I'm not sure when the latter was developed and though there was one on board the Mary Rose when she sank, that was 1545 so a good 200 years later than you're aiming for.) She'd have to drill more than one hole in both boats, so all of that is adding up to a lot of time when she's in danger of being seen or her absence being noted, and while that adds a frisson of danger in itself, it's perhaps going to seem less plausible to the reader. Plus if the ships themselves have to heel around before the water begins to flood in, it will still take some minutes -- the Mary Rose sank quickly but it had all its gunports open, which meant huge "holes" in the ship's side -- and the undamaged ship will have sailed on unhampered. Even if it manages to turn back to help, it's still not going to be moored alongside the dock, so how will the slaves get on board to overcome the remaining sailors?

EDIT: G.T. just got in ahead of me!

EDIT2: by the way, is this in a Mediterranean-type sea? It's just you talk of the ships always leaving at dawn, but if there are tides involved, and the cogs depending on wind and weather, isn't the actual time going to vary? That in itself will create problems for planning the escape I'd have thought, even if you have sailors among all the prisoners.

 

[Toby Frost]

Funnily enough I ran into something very similar last year, when writing a fantasy novel (I'm still looking for a publisher for it). However, the setting was a fantasy Renaissance, which made it much easier, since characters had access to gunpowder and clockwork as well as magic. I did use a sodium/magnesium/made up substance throughout the book: just spit on it and it'll flare into (unrealistically reliable) life.

I do wonder how long it's going to take to bore a sufficiently large hole in two ships, and whether they'll be noticed before they take effect. I do think something magical will be required, even if it's a "magic bomb".

 

[The Crawling Chaos]

First of all, thank you all for taking the time to reply and offer suggestions.

The MC could drill a series of large holes through the hulls of the ships

This was my first thought. When it comes to sinking a boat, you can't really get more efficient than puncturing the hull. But I had several concerns, mainly practical (how hard would it be for the character to drill through overlapping 2-inch-thick planks of oak while remaining unnoticed?) and temporal (time-consuming process, especially if several holes have to be drilled). I ended up scraping the idea for something more expedient: An explosive attached to the hull. If you can get past the fact that sodium has to be manufactured through a chemical process, it could be a good candidate as a fistful of it will be enough to trigger a decent explosion when thrown in water.

I think it could still work even if everyone is unaware of the alchemist's powers. He can just hand her something and say it will work, unless she is an alchemist how would she know? Explaining every little detail of everything is not necessarily the best option.

It's not so much the MC I worry about, it's the reader. Maybe it's just me but I no longer have any tolerance for deus ex-machinae, especially when the stakes are high. In this case they very much are, since the MC is stuck forever in this place unless she escapes. So I don't want to use sleight of hand to get her out, she needs to earn her escape.

Also something else, if the ships come every two weeks then there must a large number of slaves producing a lot of product to fill three ships every two weeks. Are only a few slaves going to escape?

The reason three ships are used is not because they are overflowing with produce but because they are sent to three different markets, in three different nations. They will not be full. Only the MC's group will escape, the fate of the hundreds of slaves left behind is of no concern to them.

If your readers don't then know he has this power, they might think it's a bit convenient but you can have him dress it up in alchemical nonsense so as to confuddle the MC and I don't image many readers will be upset, and then later when his powers are revealed you can make it clear exactly how it happened.

This will never happen. The characters will learn that there are three magical beings and the entire plot revolves around hunting them down and killing them. One single and rather flimsy clue around the halfway mark will suggest a fourth magical being may also exist or have existed, and by the end of the story the attentive reader may deduce that the alchemist was that fourth being, who used the MC to destroy his three competitors and become the only such creature in existence. But it's possible that a high number of readers will always see him as a human alchemist who was just part of the gang.

 

[The Crawling Chaos]

Alternately, if the cogs are full of things made by the prisoners, why don't they smuggle something explosive -- or the alchemist says is explosive -- into the holds? That doesn't use your MC in the same way, but might be more easy to arrange.

This is interesting. So simple yet it never occurred to me that the explosive, or parts of the explosive compound, could already be on the ships... Thank you.

by the way, is this in a Mediterranean-type sea? It's just you talk of the ships always leaving at dawn, but if there are tides involved, and the cogs depending on wind and weather, isn't the actual time going to vary? That in itself will create problems for planning the escape I'd have thought, even if you have sailors among all the prisoners.

Yes, good point. It's a pretty vast expanse of sea so the tide is not non-existent, but it's still of a very low amplitude (maybe a dozen centimeters?) which I assume is negligible to sailors. I wasn't planning to offer this kind of information to the reader but since you brought it up it will certainly be a concern to others as well, so I'll squeeze in a reference to it. Thanks a lot.

 

[goldhawk]

I do believe he would open the scuttle cocks and prevent anyone from closing them.

 

[Wayne Mack]

If it was me, I'd plot it slightly differently. I would make the escape attempt on the last night in port -- the ships would be fully loaded and the crew would be mostly in town for their last night of liberty. Having a group of miners hanging out in a bar after their shift would give a plausible explanation for them being near the docks.

There would likely be few guards for the ships and the guards would be mostly on the pier. A single swimmer could visit the ships and perhaps climb the anchor chain to board. She could then start fires on two of the ships; this would draw attention and draw crowds to the wharf. It would also provide distraction for the guards of the third ship -- some could run to aid in the fire fighting effort, one or perhaps two could be taken down by the swimmer from behind, the remainder might be overrun by the miner group. Perhaps one or two of the miners might even be killed in the melee. This would provide the swimmer and miners a chance to set sail while everyone else is focused on the two burning ships.

 

[Margaret Note Spelling]

I actually faced a similar problem in a plot of mine once. Same concept--a character (actually, two of them in my case) was meant to swim out and sabotage a ship, although I honestly forget why or what they were trying to accomplish now. I don't think I actually meant it to work out, for plot reasons. In any case, the method I used was sneaking aboard the ship and lighting a fire someplace where it could grow large before anyone noticed it. At the time, I'd heard that fire tends to be extremely dangerous aboard ships, especially sailing ships with old ropes, canvas, dried wood, and crates and cargo and stuff. I'm not sure where I heard that though--it may well have just been in an episode of Hornblower, in which case it's obviously suspect, but that could be an interesting place to start. It would require your MC sneaking aboard the ship instead of staying in the water, which is an entirely different difficulty, of course. Still, I second @Wayne Mack--fire could be another option.

 

[paranoid marvin]

A couple of things that you may wish to consider.

Are these ships moored at a dockside or floating offshore? If they are taking and delivering shipments, then they would almost certainly be docked in a port. This being the case, there would be no need for those on the other ships to leave them defenceless, as there would be dock workers/guards/watchtowers in the vicinity. A port in a place that has both valuable mineral deposits and prisoners is likely to be very heavily guarded, particularly if this is the only avenue of escape.

But a ship that is in a port would be attacked in a very different way to one afloat in a bay; no need to swim out to it, but hard to damage without being spotted.

If they are in a penal colony with a harbour, there is likely to be a fort with cannon defending the approaches. Not only for those wanting to escape, but to defend against an enemy attempting to steal the valuable ore deposits. Without capturing the fort first, any ship attempting to escape would likely be sunk.

The one thing that really would draw attention is fire. In such a case, not only the ship but the whole dockyard is in danger. And with smoke during the day or firelight at night, the direction of the danger could easily be pinpointed and would draw considerable attention. But those guarding the other ships would likely be put at higher alert of possible danger to themselves and their own ship.

It may be worth considering having the would-be escapees attacking the fort to take control of the cannon, and sink two of the ships? Inexperienced at firing cannon, the 'lucky shots' fired by your MC could be guided by the alchemist to make sure they hit their targets, therefore making her think that she has won the day.

Also worth considering is whether your MC chooses to escape with other colonists, or just with her own gang. Unless the rest of the prisoners are truly bad people and don't deserve rescue, what does it say of her if she escapes with a cargoful of goods when she could have escaped with a cargohold full of fellow prisoners just after the cargo has been offloaded.

Ps good luck with your story.

 

[The Crawling Chaos]

Thanks all, lots of good info and even the stuff I cannot use allows me to reconsider and refine what I do have in mind for the scene so you have all been really useful.

 

[msstice]

A wooden shoe in the bilge pump. I apologize in advance.

 

[Deke]

I don’t have any good advice for you, sadly. But I did just want to pop in and say the details your relayed make your story sound extremely interesting. Great story plotting!

 

[WSDuffy]

I wonder if the ships need to be disabled, or merely the "important" people on them. If the saboteur successfully poisoned the food or water of the ship's crew, particularly with something that suddenly disabled a bunch of them at once, it would render the ship either still or (if it had caught wind) potentially out of control. Given the expense, this might send people to the ship at least as fast as burning (and therefore maybe less worth risking one's life for) ship.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Yes, good point. It's a pretty vast expanse of sea so the tide is not non-existent, but it's still of a very low amplitude (maybe a dozen centimeters?) which I assume is negligible to sailors. I wasn't planning to offer this kind of information to the reader but since you brought it up it will certainly be a concern to others as well, so I'll squeeze in a reference to it. Thanks a lot.

Then, if you mention elsewhere in the book that there is a (sizeable) moon orbiting this planet, or you have scenes that need moonlight to work (which would imply that there was a sizeable moon), you'll have nit-pickers like me who will wonder why there are very small tides.

 

[The Crawling Chaos]

Then, if you mention elsewhere in the book that there is a (sizeable) moon orbiting this planet, or you have scenes that need moonlight to work (which would imply that there was a sizeable moon), you'll have nit-pickers like me who will wonder why there are very small tides.

I don't understand. The Mediterranean is a vast expanse of sea on a planet orbited by a sizeable moon and the amplitude of its tide is virtually non existent, unless you live in Venice.

 

[The Judge]

But that's surely because there's only a tiny passage into the ocean at the straits of Gibraltar, so it's pretty much an enclosed body of water.

If a Med-type situation is what you're envisaging for your plot, then there's no problem with a lack of tides. If, though, your sea is open to the ocean, it's likely to be more of an issue.