Nice idea, Lewrie thought; But no one can fire one o’ those things without shatterin’ his bones.
Sapphire rumbled as the truck carriages of the great-guns were hauled back up to the port sills, the wooden wheels squealing like a frightened herd of swine. Lewrie peered hard at the French frigate, now nearly one hundred yards off, still closing, and saw only empty gun-ports, a sight which gave him much cheer. All the drills he had ordered, all the live firing once a week, and the almost-daily “dry” exercises, were paying off; Sapphire’s gunners were loading, firing, and re-loading much faster than the French, and in this sort of fight, quite unlike his previous battles of manoeuvre, speed was what mattered … speed, and proper aim when the time came, when the enemy hull and his were almost touching. And that time would be soon.
His squadron’s line stood on bearing West by North whilst the French sailed Due West; his would be un-yielding, forcing the enemy to sidle up to point-blank range, slam hulls together, and duel it out within cursing distance.
Lewrie leaned out to look overboard, noting how feeble was the ship’s wake down Sapphire’s side, aghast for a moment at the sight of the many shot holes, and a roundshot or two jammed into her timbers like the black bubos on a victim of the Black Death. His guns were jerking, inch by inch, back into battery. At least that was pleasing to see. Despite the risk, he went up the starboard ladderway for a better view aft to see how the other ships of his squadron were doing, but there was almost nothing to see. There were some vague, slate-grey shapes aft, almost lost in a thick, rolling yellowish-grey fog, a hint of Undaunted astern of his ship, a hint of her opponent, and some fresh gusts of smoke and fog-dimmed red and amber flames from guns as they fired. Sterling and her opponent, and the brig-sloops, were quite invisible. The best that Lewrie could tell, they were still fighting. The cacophonous roar of guns stuttered, crashed, and rattled the sea and air like an host of kettle drums pounded by so many insane musicians.
Something hummed past his left ear, then by his right, and a small chunk of the poop deck’s railing flew up in a wee cloud of old paint and wood. Lewrie looked over at the French frigate and saw a party of men in her mizen top, reloading muskets. He doffed his hat to them and returned to the dubious safety of the quarterdeck.
“Mizen top men!” he roared. “Kill those bastards!” and jutted an arm at the enemy top, hoping that his crew’s musketry was equal to their skill and rapidity with the great-guns.
* * *
Commander Teague had held his brig-sloop close astern of Commander Blamey’s Peregrine as the trailing French frigate came within gun range, obeying Blamey’s last shouted order to make the French imagine that he could deal with the brig-sloops one at a time as they came abeam of his guns. Enemy 12-pounders roared and British 9-pounders answered as they closed, and if Blamey had stood on un-yielding to the original squadron course, Peregrine would eventually take the worst of such a duel. Teague impatiently waited, pacing frenetically, fingers flexing and drumming on the hilt of his sword for the right moment. There! Peregrine was hauling her wind a point or more, as if shying away from the Frenchman’s pummeling.
“Sheet home the main course!” Teague shouted, “Helmsmen, put your helm up and steer Nor’west. Ready, the larboard battery! Got you, you snail-eater, we got you!”
Blaze surged ahead as the French frigate took the bait, too intent on Peregrine, perhaps even losing sight of Blaze as they all slowly crept into the pall of spent powder smoke from the ships ahead of them. Ports flew up, 9-pounders were run out, and Teague roared cautions to his gunners to aim small and true, the way they’d trained with their new-fangled notched sights.
“As you bear … right up her arse … fire!” Teague yelled.
The French frigate had been lured far enough off the scant wind to bare her stern to a rake, and Commander Teague rejoiced as his gunners savaged the enemy. Raking fire directed right up the stern of a vulnerable ship would smash through the much thinner transom wood, and there was nothing to prevent the roundshot from bowling the whole length of an enemy ship. With all internal partitions, flimsy to begin with, struck down, roundshot would scour the foe from the helm to the forecastle, contained by the strength of the outer hull, and overturning guns, smashing deck support posts, flinging whole gun crews into bloody gobbets, and creating chaotic mayhem.
“Re-load, and stand ready!” Teague shouted, exultant with the results. “Helmsmen, steer us round to her starboard side. Brail up the main course!”
HMS Blaze met the enemy frigate as she writhed about to get back on the wind, to man her bowsed-down starboard guns in the face of a sudden new threat, even as Peregrine came back on the wind to match her turn, her starboard guns blasting a fresh broadside.
“Ready, sir!” Teague’s First Officer screeched.
“Right into her ports, lads!” Teague shouted. “As they come level with you … fire!”
The enemy frigate’s starboard gun-ports were jerking upward, the un-used guns being hauled to the sills. After the raking she had taken, it was asking too much of a ship’s crew to stumble over dead and wounded mates, the chaos of over-turned guns and smashed carriages, trying to ignore the screams of the savagely wounded, and try to fight both batteries at once. No warship carried enough men to do that.
“Oh, lovely!” Commander Teague shouted, pumping a fist at the sky as his re-loaded guns poured roundshot and grape into those ports at less than one hundred yards’ range, and he urged his helmsmen to edge his ship down onto the foe even closer. A moment later, and a roar of a controlled broadside from Peregrine smashed into the enemy as they doubled on her, sandwiching the Frenchman between them with no chance of escape, nor any room to turn. So close now that even Commander Blamey, dubious of all talk about “aimed fire”, could urge his own gunners to point at the enemy’s larboard gun-ports. The foe was taking a horrid beating, with barely a shot fired in reply.
“She’s striking her colours, she’s striking!” Teague could hear Blamey shouting from the other side of the French frigate, and he and his crew huzzahed and jeered as the Tricolour which had flown high above her stern came fluttering down to drape over her taffrails and shattered stern windows.
“Cannily done, I must say, sir,” Blaze’s First Officer said, “and, I don’t believe we’ve anyone killed, nor any hurt!”
“Astounding!” Commander Teague marvelled. “We’ll yield honours to Peregrine. Blamey’s senior to me. We, however, will stand on and see if we can double on another. Go give Captain Sterling our assistance. If we can even find him in all this smoke.”
* * *
“Good Lord, who can live through that?” Midshipman Hugh Lewrie whispered to himself as he beheld the furious exchange of cannonfire between his father’s ship and that big brute of a French frigate. He had a fine view from his post on Undaunted’s forecastle, in charge of the carronades and chase guns, the chasers now swung to beam gun-ports.
Great, fire-lit gushes of gun smoke dashed from both battling ships, and the sea between them was flattened by the concussions and rippled by the blasts, as bits and pieces of wood were flung aloft from both. He could hear the Rawrks and thudding crashes!
Hugh looked over at their own foe, flexing the fingers of his left hand on the dirk at his side, his father’s dirk when he’d been a Midshipman, given to him just before going aboard his first ship. That, and the pair of pistols in his waistband that his grandfather had sent him, had seen him through Trafalgar, and several actions, since. They would see him through this one.
I am my father’s son, he told himself; and I will bring credit to my family name. For God, King, and England!
“Ready, lads?” he said to his gun crews. “It’s a bit too far for the ‘Smashers’, yet, but let’s try your eyes, anyway. You game?”
“Hell, yes, Mister Lewrie!” they hungrily agreed, unable to stand by idle when the other guns were roaring.
“Maximum elevation on your screws, then,” Hugh ordered, and squatted behind them to
see to proper traverse. Undaunted’s people liked Midshipman Lewrie; he knew what he was about, fought like some tiger, and looked after their welfare, though they could get nothing past him, and he could be a strict disciplinarian at times, a proper sort of “firm but fair” officer that sailors appreciated.
“All guns!” Lt. Crosley was shouting. “By broadside … fire!”
“Give ’em Hell!” Hugh cried as the guns went off, smothering them all in smoke. “Swab out and serve ’em another!” he urged. One quick look showed him that the sheet-handlers for the jibs were out of the way, not needed for the moment. “Is that a carronade I see on on their forecastle? Damme, it is! Chase guns and six-pounders, aim small for that carronade and kill their crew. Grapeshot! Load grape atop your roundshot, smartly now!
“By broadside … fire!”
His carronades fired again, but the long guns took seconds more to be readied and run out.
“To Hell with it, blaze away, lads!” Hugh ordered.
The long guns fired, spewing roundshot and a cloud of deadly grapeshot at the French ship’s forecastle, savaging Frenchmen, gunners, powder monkeys, and petty officers, silencing that big carronade.
God, but I love the guns! he thought; Wonder if it runs in the blood?
He took a quick moment to look forward at his father’s ship, but she and her foe were lost in a rising, dense cloud of gunpowder smoke into which Undaunted sailed. Only the stabs of flame showed that they still fought, viciously and rapidly.
“Prime … run out!” Hugh cried, seeing that all guns under his charge were re-loaded and ready. “Stand ready, on the up-roll.
“By broadside … fire!”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
“Mister Westcott, pass word below,” Lewrie rasped, his throat raw from shouting commands, and inhaling a constant stream of fouled air reeking of rotten eggs and sulfur. “Load with roundshot and grape and be ready to fire into the enemy ports as they come level with us!”
“Aye, sir!” Westcott replied, coughing a bit as well, as he summoned Midshipmen Holbrooke and Chenery to carry the message.
Up forward, the forecastle 6-pounders and carronades fired at will separate from the great-guns, a fairly concentrated mini-broadside, their shot hammering and peppering, raising screams of terror from the opposing French gunners, and a great shout from his ship’s gunners as they finally silenced that French carronade, for which Lewrie was thankful, for that gun had done untold damage to his ship.
Amazingly, neither ship had suffered any damage aloft; none of the spars, top-masts, or sails had been shot away or torn to shreds, so both ships were still fully under reduced sail, creeping now as the winds faded.
There was no time to call for a cast of the log, but Lewrie could almost judge to the knot how slowly his ship was moving, and a look at the French frigate showed him that she was slowly inching up on his, not a pistol-shot off, now, with her surviving guns jerking back into her ports.
“Ready below, sir!” Midshipman Holbrooke shrilled as he came back to the quarterdeck, looking like an imp from Hell with his coat and breeches, his face and hands turned grey from the powder smoke.
“As they come level!” Lewrie shouted. “They are to fire as they bear! And sweep that damned quarterdeck clean, d’ye hear there!” he added, noting that officers and petty officers still occupied the enemy quarterdeck.
The Frenchman was just a bit ahead of Sapphire, her first two gun-ports beyond Sapphire’s bows, and there was nothing that Lewrie could do about them. He heard Lt. Elmes’s voice rise up from the lower gun deck, crying, “As you bear … fire!” And then the foremost 24-pounder went off, stabbing smoke and flame, roundshot and a full canister of grape, right into the Frenchman’s third gun-port. As each succeeding port came level with the next-aft British gun, pure bloody murder was blown into it. There were loud metal-on-metal bongs! when roundshot struck iron gun barrels or muzzles, the rattle of lead grape shot on iron and wood, and screams from enemy gunners clustered round their pieces as they were scythed away.
Quarterdeck 6-pounders and the “Smashers” ravaged the enemy’s quarterdeck a moment later, flinging men about like boneless bundles of cloth, taking down all the helmsmen and shattering the drum of the double wheel. Without steering, what wind there still was drifted the enemy ship down on Sapphire, and their bows met with a loud thud of wood-on-wood, then, rudderless, the Frenchman rebounded a moment, then came aboard the two-decker, Sapphire’s starboard cat-head timber and second bower anchor snagging on the enemy frigate’s foremast stays, with the hulls below the gunwales grinding upon each other.
“They’re cutting their boarding nets free, sir!” Lt. Westcott shouted. Sure enough, the nets which prevented boarders from gaining easy access were falling like a stage curtain. The French guns fell silent, at last, and everyone on deck could see French sailors come boiling up to her bulwarks with muskets, cutlasses, pikes, and pistols.
“Musketry!” Lewrie shouted. “Get the lower deck gunners up and prepare to repel boarders!”
Game bastards, I’ll give ’em that, Lewrie thought as he drew one of his double-barrelled Manton pistols and cocked the right-hand firelock; Who knew the Frogs’d have this much fight in ’em! Must be desperate.
Sapphire’s anti-boarding nets were still up, hanging in loose, ungainly drapes. Even if French seamen tried, they would sway and struggle to scale the nets, hanging and clawing, arse-over-tit, to get up and over, or cut their way through. And all the while vulnerable to gunfire, cutlass or pike thrusts, as helpless as flies in a spider’s web.
“Let ’em come!” Lewrie yelled. “Up, Sapphires! Up, my bully boys! Repel boarders!”
“Now, we’ll give them Hell, sir!” Mr. Yelland cried, showing off a pair of four-barrelled duckfoot pistols he’d bought at Portsmouth. One pull of the trigger and all four barrels would go off as one, the barrels angled out from each other to spew death in a fan pattern, murderous in a face-to-face fight.
Sapphire’s sailors and Marines came up from below, the men on the 6-pounders and carronades firing their last rounds of grapeshot at the French ship’s railings, then taking up small arms. The men on the 12-pounders gave the French a last broadside, then did the same as the French crew surged over their railings, leaping into Sapphire’s nets, scrambling down to their chain platforms to cross over to the British chain platforms to make their way up.
“Fire at will, fire at will!” Lt. Keane of the Marines was urging his men. “Fix bayonets and be ready to receive!”
Musket and pistol fire rattled like twigs crackling in a fire, and men in the tops fired down over the edges of the upper platforms while men on Sapphire’s weather decks and gangways blazed away.
Lewrie took aim at a man scrambling in the nets, sawing a way through. He fired, and the man fell away to land with a loud crump! on his own ship’s hard deck. He cocked the left-hand barrel, then turned to say something to the Sailing Master, just in time to see Mr. Yelland’s forehead cave in from a musket ball, collapsing him like a sawn tree, as more bumble bees hummed round him, snatching the hat off Lewrie’s head and he felt a thump on his left shoulder as a ball lightly clipped his gilt epaulet.
“Kill me, ye bastards? I’ll give ye killed!” he roared, and fired at another Frenchman hung up in the nets, and hit him, making him dangle head-down and lifeless.
Pikes were thrust over the bulwarks, cutlasses thrust or swung at enemy boarders who had gained Sapphire’s side with meaty thunks as steel cleaved skulls, slashed arms, and necks. The Marines were firing point-blank at one target, then thrusting with their bayonets at one beside. The French attack surged like a wave rushing onto a rocky beach, then ebbed, its courage and fury spent. Sensing the moment, feeling that the heart had gone out of them, Lewrie shoved his spent pistol into his waistband and drew his hanger.
“Mister Westcott, lower our nets! Cut ’em down! Boarders! Away, boarders!” he howled. “Get at them and murder the bastards!”
Sapphire’s nets ra
pidly vanished to drape the starboard side as sailors and Marines clambered over the rails, some leaping from one ship to the other, some going down to the chain platforms to get back up the French shrouds. Loaded weapons on both sides barked and men fell. A Marine was shot and fell between the hulls to be ground to death, screaming his last. Then, as the first Sapphires gained the enemy’s rails and decks, their hoarse cheers could not smother the clash of steel on steel.
Not as spry as he once had been, Lewrie swung over the side and lowered himself to his ship’s mizen channel, not daring to leap and leave himself vulnerable to a defender’s blade; not daring to miss his hold and fall into the sea, either, for the very good reason that he, like many British sailors, could not swim!
There were no ratlines on the French ship’s lower-most stays, but the thick rope shrouds were sticky with tar, making his ascent easier, even as his boot soles scrabbled on the frigate’s planking. A handy shot-hole gave him a last foothold, and he was up and over, on the enemy quarterdeck, sailors swarming round him and dashing into combat with loud shouts. A young Frenchman in a neat uniform faced off with him in a fencing pose, but Lewrie had no time for the niceeties. He bulled forward, howling, shouldering inside the fellow’s guard, shoving him off balance with his blade wide, then slashed at him back-handed, the keenly honed hanger hacking at his neck.
“Hooalooaloo!” his Cox’n, Liam Desmond, was howling some Irish battle keen, further forward, “Come an’ get it, ye Devils! Come on, Pat!” Desmond urged his long-time mate, Patrick Furfy, who was madly swinging at two Frenchmen, with a cutlass in one hand and a boarding hatchet in the other like an ancient Viking Berserker.
Lewrie drew his second Manton, cocked both firelocks with his wrist, and stepped forward. He gunned down two French sailors then deflected a pike thrust from a third that caught his coat lapel and brushed it back from his chest. A downward slash with the hanger and he laid the man’s shoulder open down to the collar bone. Wrenching his sword free, he looked for another foe, but the French were tossing aside their weapons, raising their hands in surrender, some falling to their knees as if in supplication. Someone left in authority was calling something like “amener les coleurs” and “reddition”. For a harsh moment, gunfire still popped and swords clashed, raising screams ’til Lewrie heard Westcott roaring “Quarter! Give them quarter, they’ve struck!”
A Hard, Cruel Shore Page 38