The Waxman Murders

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‘From the horrors of the sea and its devouring monsters, Domine libera nos — Lord deliver us’ was a common prayer of those who used the sea lanes from the tip of Cornwall through the Narrow Seas and up to where the waves crashed like demons against the fang-tooth rocks off Farnborough Head. However, no sea monster was more feared than the great soaring, fat-bellied three-masted war cog The Waxman, with its jutting prow and high stern castle, fighting platforms and other instruments of war. The terrors of a night squall, the fury of devil-ridden winds, the horrors of the blackest storm and the monstrous soaring waves paled against the speed, savagery and ruthlessness of The Waxman, under its master Adam Blackstock, late citizen and burgess of the King’s city of Canterbury.

The Waxman was well named; she would suddenly appear, then melt away, as if shrouded in some malevolent protective mist, only to reappear off the Humber, the mouth of the Thames, or prowling off Pevensey or one of the Cinque Ports. Her crew were regarded as fiends incarnate and their evil-looking cog a ship of the damned. Only recently The Waxman had taken a wine ship off Bordeaux, seized its precious cargo and valuables, then sunk the craft after hanging its captain and drowning the survivors of his crew. She had even attacked the warlike galleys of powerful Venice and, more importantly, the round-bellied cogs of the German merchants, the mighty Hanseatic league who had their own dock and quayside at the Steelyard in London.

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