Kydd cupped his hand: ‘Le navire de sa majesté Teazer.’
‘À bas le pavillon!’ demanded the voice, in hectoring tones – Strike your colours!
Feeling flooded Kydd. This was not how it was going to end with his beloved ship. He would not let the French seize and despoil her. It would be like the violation of a loved one. Fierce anger clamped in.
‘Never!’ he roared back, and braced himself.
The shock of the expected broadside did not come. Instead there was a brief hesitation and the frigate’s side slid smoothly towards Teazer’s.
‘Stand by to repel boarders!’ Kydd bawled urgently, drawing his sword.
It was crazy: a frigate carried several times their number and their own guns were charged with round-shot, not the merciless canister that would sweep their decks clear. It would all be over in minutes – one way or the other.
They closed. Now only yards separated them, the milling, shouting mass on the enemy deck jostling with naked steel amain in anticipation. Kydd heard a hoarse order in French and shrieked, ‘Get down!’
He flung himself to the deck just as the murderous blast of grape and canister lashed Teazer’s bulwarks. Choking on the swirling powder-smoke he heaved himself up. A swelling cheer rose about him as Teazer’s carronades smashed back, adding to the thick smoke-pall and screaming chaos. Then, through the clearing reek, Kydd saw the high side of the frigate bearing down.
‘Stand t’ your weapons!’ he roared. Around him Teazers hefted cutlasses, pistols and boarding pikes. There was an almighty shudder as the two vessels touched and groaned in unison, the movement sending several to their knees.
The seas were high, producing a corkscrew effect on the two vessels that made them roll out of step with each other. The yells of triumph from the Frenchman’s deck tailed off quickly at the sight of a dark chasm between the two ships and the boarders hesitated. Some stood on the bulwarks poised to leap and were hit by pistol shot and musket fire from Teazer’s marines. They dropped with shrieks between the grinding hulls; others held back at the sight of the lethal points of boarding pikes held by unflinching British seamen.
A swivel banged from Teazer’s rail, another from forward. The French boarders’ hesitation was fatal for at that moment the frigate caught a wind flurry and surged ahead and away, snapping the grapnels that held the ships together and spilling three men into the sea.
A storm of cheers went up from the Teazers at the sight of the frigate sheering off, but Kydd didn’t join in. As the frigate readied for another attempt the privateer was manoeuvring to close and it was obvious to him that this time there was the awful prospect of a boarding from both sides simultaneously.
He hastily summoned every man aboard to join the lines of defenders, sending some into the tops with grenadoes to hurl at the massing boarders, with swivels to mount that could bring fire down on them, but it was so little against such odds.
The frigate had backed its mizzen topsail and was slipping back in a stern-board to lay itself alongside Teazer – the privateer was cannily matching its movements on the other side, a crude gangway hoisted in readiness to lower over the void between them.
Kydd stood in the centre of the deck with drawn sword and turned to face the massing privateers. In seconds the screeching horde on the vessel would be flooding on to their deck – but dogged courage like a man-o’-war’s man’s would not be their style. If they met with too much resistance they would falter and break, the effort not worth any gain. If by naked courage the Teazers could sustain the fight until . . .
‘I shall attend on the frigate side, brother.’ It was Renzi, with a plain but serviceable sword that, since he had taken up his scholarly quest, he had sworn to draw only in the last extremity. Their eyes met, then the frigate bumped and ground into the hull as the privateer’s gangway crashed down on Teazer’s bulwarks.
A roar of triumph went up and Kydd sprang forward to meet the rush across the improvised bridge. The first corsair had a scimitar and a pistol that he fired left-handed as he jumped – it brought down Seaman Timmins in a choking huddle but before Kydd could face him the man took a pike thrust to the chest and he had to kick the squealing body away to confront another with a tomahawk and cutlass.
There was no science in it: Kydd lunged viciously for the eyes and, when the man recoiled, turned the stroke to slash down at the wrist. The cutlass clattered to the deck, but before he could recover, a flailing body from behind catapulted him on to Kydd’s blade, which did its work without mercy.
Beside him, Kydd was subliminally aware that Poulden was being overborne by a brutish black man and, without thought, swung his blade horizontally in a savage backhand slash that ended in a meaty crunch in the man’s neck. With a wounded howl he turned on Kydd, but Poulden saw the opening and thrust pitilessly deep into the armpit.
Kydd turned back to fend off a frenzied stab from a wild-eyed man – the crude flailing had no chance against Kydd’s skill and experience and, with one or two expert strokes, he had forced him to a terrified defensive. The man slipped and tried to ward off Kydd’s straight-arm thrust to his throat, but in vain – he went down gurgling and writhing.
Suddenly there were no more opponents: he saw that the makeshift gangway had clattered down between the ships and many were left impotently on the wrong side. He whirled round. Renzi, in a practised fencer’s crouch, lunged up at a frigate officer in a blur of motion. The man stood no chance.
Defenders from the privateer’s side righted the gangway, then sprang across the deck. The smoke-wreathed chaotic mêlée, wreckage, stench of blood, groaning bodies and frayed cordage whipping about was a scene from hell.
The frigate was in heaving movement with the high seas, the vertical motion making it a trial for those dropping down on to Teazer’s deck from its higher bulwarks. The attackers had to time their move, unavoidably signalling this to the defenders, and when they landed, stumbling and off-balance, they were easy meat for the pikemen.
A trumpet bayed from within the frigate above the clash of battle – and then again. The retreat? With swelling exultation, Kydd saw the attackers left on Teazer’s deck fling down their weapons in despair, knowing the penalty for turning their backs to return to their ship.
It was incredible, glorious, and Kydd’s blood sang. They had repelled the enemy and Teazer was made whole again. Inside, a cooler voice chided that in large part they owed their success to the restless seas.
The frigate pulled away and cheers were redoubled again and again from the smoke-grimed and bloodied Teazers. But in a cold wash of reality Kydd knew what was coming next.
‘For y’ lives! Hands to wear ship!’ he bellowed, stumping up and down to get the men from their guns and to the ropes. Teazer began her swing – but was it too late? The frigate was wearing about as well, but Kydd was gambling that their own turning circle was less.
It was – but it was not enough to escape. The frigate now no longer saw Teazer as a prize but an enemy who must be crushed. And against the unrestrained broadsides of a frigate the little sloop had no chance.
When it came the punishment was hideous. Quartering across Teazer’s stern the bigger ship’s cannon blows brought a cascade of ruin and devastation, a tempest of iron that smashed, splintered and gouged, brought down spars, turned boats to matchwood.
In the blink of an eye Purchet, who had been with the ship from the first, was disembowelled and flung across the deck, his entrails strung out into a bloody heap against the waterway. The inoffensive sailmaker, Clegg, huddled by the main-hatch, was frantically trying to stitch repairs when he simply dropped, his head dissolved into a spray of brain.
From all sides came shrieks of pain from cruel, skewering splinters.
Shaken by the destruction, Kydd shouted hoarsely for sail of any kind on the fore. If they could just . . .
The frigate completed her veering, but she had another broadside waiting on her opposite side and she took time to tack about, a manoeuvre that w
ould end in her coming up alongside the wreck that would be Teazer.
He felt a cold wetness: a grey advance of drizzle brought a soft misery that seemed to shroud the scenes of dying and ruin from mortal eyes. It fell gently, dissolving the blood so that Englishman and Frenchman mingled in fraternal embrace before trickling together through the scuppers into the sea.
Kydd pulled himself together. There was now no alternative to yielding: he must therefore face— But, no, he saw one last move . . . As the frigate completed its turn and took up for its final run he wheeled the wounded sloop off the wind and steered straight for the privateer to leeward. By feinting at it and causing it to run directly from his ship, Kydd was bringing it into the line of fire from the frigate chasing Teazer. They would not fire on their own: for the moment Teazer was safe.
But they did.
The broadside erupted without warning. The storm of shot that broke over Teazer was cataclysmic, smashing into her with an intensity that numbed the senses. A series of unconnected images flashed in front of Kydd. The fore-hatch bursting upwards a split second before a ball ended its flight with a colossal clang against an opposite gun. A ship’s boy snatched from the deck and flung like a bloody rag into the scuppers. Hallum’s face turning towards him in horror and pain, his mouth working as the splinter transfixing his lower body turned in the wound. And then came the deafening timber-cracking of the main-mast as it fell in dignified but awful finality, taking what remained of the fore-mast with it in a tangle of cordage, ruined spars and canvas.
It had finished. It was defeat. The end of everything.
As if in a dream he watched men slowly emerge from under the wreckage, go to the wretched bodies, stare in haggard disbelief at the passing frigate – and then from forward came the single crash of a gun.
Squinting past the heaped ruin of spars and canvas he saw it was his gunner’s mate, Stirk, dragging a foot behind him but going methodically from gun to gun, sighting carefully and banging off defiance at their nemesis – whatever else, Teazer would be seen to go down fighting.
Eyes pricking, Kydd had not the heart to stop him. The frigate began its final turn to take possession of them – and, extraordinarily, one of Stirk’s shots told. At the precise point of the slings of its crossjack there was a sudden jerk, tiny pieces flew off and the spar dipped awkwardly, then fell, rending the mizzen topsail above it and engulfing the driver.
The frigate – name still unknown – fell back on its course. Disabled and unable to turn back, it eventually disappeared into the grey mists of rain. The privateer stayed with it and suddenly Teazer was alone and desperately wounded in the desolate expanse of the Atlantic.
Dizzy with reaction Kydd mustered the Teazers. They seemed dazed, the petty officers half-hearted in their actions, the men shuffling in a trance. Kydd didn’t waste time on words: if they were to survive it needed every man to rally to the aid of their ship. The time of grieving would come later.
Teazer wallowed sickeningly broadside to the seas, her fore-mast a three-foot stump, her main a giant jagged splinter. It was a deeply forlorn experience to see nothing aloft but empty sky, and with the loss of steadying sails, the vessel lurched to the swell like a log.
The first urgency was for a party of men to find the wounded and carry them below. The dead were heaved over the side. Hallum was dragged with rough kindliness to the lee of the capstan where he died quietly. Another party was sent to find the few Frenchmen still aboard who had hidden in fear of their own ship’s broadside.
But the main chore was to clear the deck and try by any means to get sail on. All hands turned to, including Renzi, who stood in for Purchet and led the fo’c’sle party to set a series of purchases on the main spars and haul them clear before starting work on a species of sheer-leg. Even a rag of sail set to the streaming oceanic winds would serve.
Kydd forced his mind to coolness as he reviewed their situation. There was just one thing in their favour: these Atlantic winds were south-westerlies that blew directly for England. If they could keep sail on Teazer they would eventually make an English port, however long it took.
The carpenter brought welcome news. He had sounded the wells and made his rounds and could confidently say there was no hurt to Teazer’s stout Maltese hull that he could not deal with – in a jet of warmth, Kydd realised that it was more than possible his command would be able to lay her before long to the tender care of a dockyard, her grievous wounds to be healed.
‘Pass the word for the purser’s steward. He’s to see every man shall get his double tot.’ There would be inhuman effort required to cut through the maze of ropes and canvas and shift the heavy spars, and little enough time to do it for it was now well into the afternoon.
Other thoughts intruded. Would the frigate return? Their fallen crossjack would have torn down much of the mizzen’s ropery and would not easily be mended, not this day – and by morning Teazer would be well away from the scene of the action. Kydd thrust away the possibility that the frigate captain could calculate their uncontrolled drift and lie in wait for them.
And where were they in this immensity of sea? Their desperate slant across the Channel and out into the Atlantic had been only hazily marked, the dead-reckoning tentative at best and their last frenzied moves not noted at all. The leaden sky offered no hope of a sextant sight – they were to all intents and purposes lost and adrift.
The day wore on. At three bells in the first dog-watch the young Seaman Palmer choked on blood and died. No longer in action, Teazer saw him buried at sea in the hallowed way. An early dusk put an end to their efforts to show sail and for the long hours of night they were left with their thoughts and weariness, awaiting the dawn and what it would bring.
With the tendrils of morning light spreading, there was hope. The sheer-legs took a boom lashed to the summit and a reefed fore-topgallant spread slowly below to the cheers of Teazer’s company. Poulden hurried aft and took the wheel again, feeling for the life that was now filling her.
A fore-and-aft staysail rigged from the jagged main gave control and purpose in their creeping progress – until a dreaded call came from a sharp-eyed seaman forward. The grey cloud-bank ahead had firmed. Ushant.
If their crazily lashed-up sail could not allow them to double the wicked northern headlands they would end driven by the same wind inexorably into the iron-hard cliffs.
Kydd tried everything: sweeps on the starboard side, scraps of sail everywhere they could be set, manhandling the guns aft – but it was not enough. In the dying light of day Teazer touched once, then again, before lurching to a stop on the dark, kelp-strewn Chaussée, a series of sub-sea reefs in the shadow of the ominous craggy heights of the Ȋle de Keller.
Slewing sideways immediately, she lifted, then sagged, with a jarring, grinding finality, canted immovably over to larboard, the surf passing to end in hissing white rage on the further crags. It was so unfair! Nearly choked with emotion, Kydd fought against hopelessness and rage.
‘Get forrard, y’ chicken-hearted rabble,’ he snarled, at a terrified crowd of seamen who were scrambling for the higher reaches of the after part of the crazily angled ship. But for a space his heart went out to them: this was how so many voyages ended for sailors, in terror and drowning on a hostile shore.
And Ushant was the worst: an appalling mass of rock flung out into the Atlantic with surging ocean breakers and wild currents of ten knots or more, a place of nightmares for any mariner. The Bretons here had a saying, ‘Qui voit Ouessant voit son sang!’ – He who sees Ushant, sees his blood!
Kydd crushed his desolation. ‘Find the carpenter and send him below,’ he snapped at the nearest seaman, who stared back at him in fear. ‘Damn you, I’ll do it m’self.’ He pushed through the mass of men now on deck. The loss of the boatswain and his only lieutenant was a crippling blow: with just a single master’s mate and the petty officers he had to take control of the fearful, milling men before they took it into their heads to break discipline and run wild.
He found the carpenter, broken at hearing of the loss of his friend Clegg. ‘On y’r feet,’ Kydd said brutally. ‘Take a look around below, sound the wells an’ report to me instantly. Now!’ Without waiting for a response he stormed back to the wheel, collecting all the petty officers he could find.
‘We’ve a chance,’ he said urgently, shouting down the nervous cries from the back. ‘Do your part, an’ we’ll swim again – don’t and we’ll be shakin’ hands with Davy Jones afore nightfall.’
As if to add point to his words, a seething surf broke and thrust rudely past them, surging the hull further up with a deep, rumbling scrape that brought cries of terror from some.
But if they could get off the Chaussée and if they were not badly holed – there was hope.
‘A strake near th’ garboard forrard weepin’ an’ all, but nothin’ the pumps can’t clear,’ the carpenter said woodenly, breathing heavily.
Kydd rounded on the haggard faces watching them: ‘Hear that, y’ lubbers? Next tide’ll have us off! So clear this lumber and stand by!’
There was one thing he refused to think about: this was French territory. To his knowledge they had a form of military outpost, a signalling telegraph, on the western arm of Ushant, half a dozen miles to the south, probably tasked to report naval movements. If so, their situation would be known and . . .
‘Get moving, y’ shabs!’ he roared, shoving men to their posts. The tide would return some time in the afternoon and they had to be ready. All wreckage overside, lighten the ship by any means – but not the guns. Not so much that they could defend their poor ship but to deny the enemy the opportunity of later grappling them to the surface.
A boat was lowered and fought to seaward, a small stream anchor slung under, the vessel rearing and plunging as it struggled out past the combers. When it was at a distance, the lashings were cut and the killick dropped away into the depths.
The tide receded hour by hour, leaving them still and silent on the wet rocks. ‘They’s come!’ shrilled a voice, suddenly, and all eyes turned to the skyline above the black cliffs. Two figures stood looking down, and as they watched, others joined them.
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