1805

by Richard Woodman

  ‘Orders, sir?’ Mr Mount the lieutenant of marines saluted him.

  ‘Mornin’, Mr Mount. Divide your men up ’twixt quarter-boats and launch. Mr Rogers is in command. I want those invasion craft destroyed!’

  ‘Very well, sir.’ Mount saluted and spun round: ‘Sergeant, your platoon in the starboard quarter-boat. Corporal Williams, your men the larboard. Corporal Allen, with me in the launch!’

  The neat files broke up and the white-breeched, black-gaitered marines scrambled over the rails and descended into the now waiting boats. Drinkwater looked at the enemy. The invasion craft had already vanished but the brig still showed, ghostly against the insubstantial mass of the closing fog.

  ‘Mr Hill! A bearing of the brig, upon the instant!’

  ‘Sou’-east-a-half-south, sir!’

  ‘Mr Rogers!’ Drinkwater leaned over the rail and bawled down at the first lieutenant in the launch. ‘Steer sou’-east-a-half-south. We’ll fire guns for you but give you fifteen minutes to make your approach.’

  He saw Rogers shove a seaman to one side so that he could see the boat compass and then the tossed oars were being lowered, levelled and swung back.

  ‘Give way together!’

  The looms bent with sudden strain and the heavy launch began to move, followed by the two quarter-boats. In the stern of each boat sat the officers in their blue coats with a splash of red from the marines over which the dull gleam of steel hung until engulfed by the fog.

  ‘Now we shall have to wait, Mr Hill, since all the lieutenants have left us behind.’

  ‘Indeed, sir, we will.’

  Drinkwater turned inboard. There was little he could do. Already the decks were darkening from condensing water vapour. Soon it would be dripping from every rope on the ship.

  ‘I had hoped the sun would rise and burn up this mist,’ he said.

  ‘Aye, sir. But ’tis always an unpredictable business. The wind dropped very suddenly.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The two men stood in silence for a few minutes, frustrated by being unable to see the progress of the boats. After a little Hill pulled out his watch.

  ‘Start firing in five minutes, sir?’

  ‘Mmmm? Oh, yes. If you please, Mr Hill.’ They must give Rogers every chance of surprise but not allow him to get lost. Drinkwater would not put it past a clever commander to launch a counter-attack by boat, anticipating the very action he had just taken in sending a large number of his crew off.

  ‘Send the men to quarters, Mr Hill, all guns to load canister on ball, midshipmen to report the batteries they are commanding when ready.’ He raised his voice. ‘Fo’c’s’le there! Keep a sharp look-out!’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir!’

  ‘Report anything you see!’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir!’

  He turned aft to where the two marine sentries stood, one on either quarter, the traditional protection for the officer of the watch. It was also their duty to throw overboard the lifebuoy for any man unfortunate enough to fall over the side. ‘You men, too. Do you keep a sharp look-out for any approaching boats!’

  He fell to a restless pacing, aware that the fog had caught him napping, a fact which led him into a furious self-castigation so that the report of the bow chaser took him by complete surprise.

  The boom of the bow chaser every five minutes was the only sound to be heard apart from the creaks and groans from Antigone’s fabric that constituted silence on board ship. Even that part of the ship’s company left on board seemed to share some of their captain’s anxiety. They too had friends out there in the damp grey fog. The haste with with the boats had been hoisted out had allowed certain madcap elements among the frigate’s young gentlemen to take advantage of circumstances. In manning the guns, Drinkwater had learned, most of the midshipmen had clambered into boats, and those who had not done so were now regretting their constraint.

  Lord Walmsley had gone, followed by the Honourable Alexander Glencross, both under Rogers in the launch. Being well acquainted with his temperament, Drinkwater knew that Rogers would have – what was the new expression? – turned a blind eye, that was it, to such a lack of discipline. Wickham had also gone in the boats, carting off little Gillespy. Dutfield had not been on deck and Frey had too keen a sense of obligation to his post as signal midshipman to desert it without the captain’s permission, even though the lack of visibility rendered it totally superfluous. As a consequence Drinkwater had posted Hill’s two mates, Caldecott and Tyrrell, in the waist and in charge of the batteries.

  ‘Gunfire to starboard, sir!’

  The hail came from the fo’c’s’le where someone had his arm stretched out. Drinkwater went to the ship’s side and cocked his head outboard, attempting to pick up the sound over the water and clear of the muffled ship-noises on the deck. There was the bang of cannon and the crackle of small-arms fire followed by the sound of men shouting and cursing. It did nothing to lessen Drinkwater’s anxiety but it provoked a burst of chatter amidships.

  ‘Silence there, God damn you!’ The noise subsided. Side by side with Hill, Drinkwater strained to hear the distant fight and to interpret the sounds. The cannon fire had been brief. Had Rogers attacked the brig successfully? Or had the brig driven Antigone’s boats off? If so was Rogers pressing his attack against the invasion craft? And what had happened to little Gillespy and Mr Q? Anxiety overflowed into anger.

  ‘God damn this bloody fog!’

  As though moved by this invective there was a sudden lightening in the atmosphere. The sun ceased to be a pale disc, began to glow, to burn off the fog, and abruptly the wraiths of vapour were torn aside revealing Antigone becalmed upon a blue sea as smooth as a millpond. Half a mile away the brig lay similarly inert and without the aid of a glass Drinkwater could see her tricolour lay over her taffrail.

  A cheer broke out amidships and beside him Hill exclaimed, ‘She’s ours, by God!’ But uncertainty turned to anger as Drinkwater realised what Rogers had allowed to happen. He swept the clearing horizon with his Dolland glass.

  ‘God’s bones! What the hell does Rogers think he’s about . . . Mr Hill!’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Hoist out my barge . . . and hurry man, hurry!’

  Drinkwater swept the glass right round the horizon. There were no other ships in sight. But beyond the brig the convoy of chaloupes and péniches was escaping, quite unscathed as far as he could tell. In a lather of impatience Drinkwater sent Frey below for his sword and pistols.

  ‘You will remain here, Mr Frey, to assist Mr Hill . . . Hill, you are to take command until Mr Rogers returns. I will take Tyrrell with me.’ Frey opened his mouth to protest, then shut it again as he caught sight of the baleful look in his captain’s eyes.

  As he hurried into the waist, Drinkwater heard Hill acknowledge his instructions and then he was down in the barge and Tregembo was ordering the oars out and they were away, the oar looms bending under Tregembo’s urging. He looked back once. Antigone sat upon the water, her sails slack and only adding to the impression of confusion that the morning seemed composed of. He forced himself to be calm. Perhaps Rogers had had no alternative but to attack the brig. Drinkwater knew enough of Roger’s character to guess that the fog would have given him a fair excuse to ignore the invasion craft.

  They were approaching the brig now. They pulled past three or four floating corpses. Someone saw their approach and then Rogers was leaning over the rail waving triumphantly.

  ‘Pass under the stern,’ Drinkwater said curtly to Tregembo, and the coxswain moved the tiller. Drinkwater stood up in the stern of the boat.

  ‘Mr Rogers,’ he hailed, ‘I directed you to attack the invasion craft!’

  Rogers waved airily behind him. ‘Mr Q’s gone in pursuit, sir.’ The first lieutenant’s unconcern was infuriating.

  ‘You may take possession, Mr Rogers, and retain the quarter-boat. Direct Gorton and Mount to follow me in the launch!’

  Roger’s crestfallen look brought a measure of satisfa
ction to Drinkwater, then they were past the brig and Drinkwater realised he had not even read her name as they had swept under her stern windows. Tregembo swung the boat to larboard as the invasion craft came into view.

  Smaller than the brig and clearly following some standing order of the brig’s commander, they had made off under oars as soon as Roger’s attack materialised. They were about a mile and a half distant and were no longer headed away from the brig. Seeing they were pursued by only a single boat they had turned, their oars working them round to confront their solitary pursuer. Mr Quilhampton’s quarter-boat still pressed on, about half a mile from the French and a mile ahead of Drinkwater.

  ‘Pull you men,’ he croaked, his mouth suddenly dry; then, remembering an old obscenity heard years ago, he added, ‘pull like you’d pull a Frenchman off your mother.’

  There was an outbreak of grins and the men leaned back against their oars so that the looms fairly bent under the strain and the blades flashed in the sunshine and sparkled off the drops of water that ran along them, linking the rippled circles of successive oar-dips in a long chain across the oily surface of the sea. Drinkwater looked astern. The white painted carvel hull of the big launch was following them, but it was much slower. Drinkwater could see the black maw of the carronade muzzle and wished the launch was ahead of them to clear the way. The thought led him to turn his attention to the enemy. Did they have cannon? They would surely be designed to carry them in the event of invasion but were they fitted at the building stage or at the rendezvous? He was not long in doubt. A puff of smoke followed by a slow, rolling report and a white fountain close ahead of Quilhampton’s boat gave him his answer. And while he watched Quilhampton adjust his course, a second fountain rose close to his own boat. For a second the men wavered in their stroke, then Tregembo steadied them. An instant later half a dozen white columns rose from the water ahead.

  Beside him Tyrrell muttered, ‘My God!’ and Drinkwater realised the hopelessness of the task. What could three boats do against ten, no twelve, well-armed and, Drinkwater could now see, well-manned boats armed with cannon. One carronade was going to be damn-all use.

  ‘Stand up and wave, Mr Tyrrell.’

  ‘I beg pardon, sir?’

  ‘I said stand up and wave, God damn you! Recall Quilhampton’s boat before we are shot to bits!‘

  ‘Aye, aye, sir.’ Tyrrell stood and waved half-heartedly.

  ‘I said wave, sir, like this!’ Drinkwater jumped up and waved his hat above his head furiously. Someone at the oars in Quilhampton’s boat saw him.

  ‘Swing the boat round, Tregembo, I’m breaking off the attack.’

  ‘Aye, ayr, zur,’ Tregembo acknowleged impassively and the barge swung round.

  He waved again, an exaggerated beckoning, until Quilhampton’s boat foreshortened in its turn. ‘Pull back towards the launch.’ He sat down, relieved. Ten minutes later the three boats bobbed together in a conferring huddle while, nearly a mile away, the French invasion craft had formed two columns and were pulling steadily eastwards.

  ‘Well they’ve lost a brig, sir,’ said Mount cheerfully. A ripple of acknowledgement went round the boat crews, a palliative to their being driven off by the French.

  ‘Very true, Mr Mount, and doubtless we’ll all be enriched thereby, but the smallest of those péniches can carry fifty infanty onto an English beach and you have just seen how well they can hold off the boats of a man-of-war. If the French have a few days of calm in the Channel it will not matter how many of their damn brigs are waiting to be condemned by the Prize Court, if the Prize Court ain’t able to sit because a French army’s hammering on the doors.’ He paused to let the laboured sarcasm sink in. ‘In carrying out an attack with a single boat you acted foolishly, Mr Q.’ Quilhampton’s face fell. Drinkwater rightly assumed Rogers had ordered him forward, but that did not alter the fact that Drinkwater had nearly lost a boat-load of men, not to mention a friend. It was clear that Quilhampton felt his public admonition acutely and Drinkwater relented. After all, there was no actual harm done and they had taken a brig, as Mount had pointed out.

  ‘We have all been foolish, Mr Q, unprepared like the foolish virgins.’

  This mitigation of his earlier rebuke brought smiles to the men in the boats as they leaned, panting on their oar looms.

  ‘But I still have not given up those invasion craft. By the way, where’s Mr Gorton?’

  ‘Er . . . he was wounded when we boarded the brig, sir.’ Quilhampton’s eyes did not meet Drinkwater’s.

  ‘God’s bones!’ Drinkwater felt renewed rage rising in him and suppressed it with difficulty. ‘Pull back to the ship and look lively about it.’

  He slumped back in the stern of the barge, working his hand across his jaw as he mastered anger and anxiety. He was angry that the attack had failed to carry out its objective, angry that Gorton was wounded, and angry with himself for his failure as he wondered how the devil he was going to pursue the escaped invasion craft. And the parable he had cited to Quilhampton struck him as having been most applicable to himself.

  Chapter 5

  April 1804

  Ruse de Guerre

  Captain Drinkwater’s mood was one of deep anger, melancholy and self-condemnation. He stood on the quarterdeck of the 16-gun brig Bonaparte, a French national corvette whose capture should have delighted him. Alas, it had been dearly bought. Although surprised by the speed of Rogers’s attack, the French had been alerted to its possibility. Two marines and one seaman had been killed, and three seamen and one officer severely wounded. In the officer’s case the stab wound was feared mortal and Drinkwater was greatly distressed by the probability of Lieutenant Gorton’s untimely death. Unlike many of his colleagues, Drinkwater mourned the loss of any of his men, feeling acutely the responsibility of ordering an attack in the certain knowledge that some casualities were bound to occur. He was aware that the morning’s boat expedition had been hurriedly launched and that insufficient preparation had gone into it. The loss of three men was bad enough, the lingering agony of young Gorton particularly affected him, for he had entertained high hopes for the man since he had demonstrated such excellent qualities in the Arctic the previous summer. It was not in Drinkwater’s nature to blame the sudden onset of fog, but his own inadequate planning which had resulted not only in deaths and woundings but in the escape of the invasion craft whose capture or destruction might have justified his losses in his own exacting mind.

  But he had been no less hard on Rogers and Mount. He had addressed the former in the cabin, swept aside all protestations and excuses in his anger, and reduced Rogers to a sullen resentment. It simply did not seem to occur to Rogers that the destruction of the invasion craft was of more significance than the seizure of a French naval brig.

  ‘God damn it, man,’ he had said angrily to Rogers, ‘don’t you see that you could have directed the quarter-boats to attack the brig, even as a diversion! Even if they were driven off! You and Mount in the launch could have wrought havoc among those bateaux in the fog, coming up on them piecemeal. The others would not have opened fire lest they hit their own people!’ He had paused in his fury and then exploded. ‘Christ, Sam, ’twas not the brig that was important!’

  Well it was too late now, he concluded as he glared round the tiny quarterdeck. Rogers was left behind aboard Antigone with a sheet of written orders while Drinkwater took over the prize and went in pursuit of the invasion craft.

  ‘Tregembo!’

  ‘Zur?’

  ‘I want those prisoners to work, Tregembo, work. You understand my meaning, eh? Get those damned sweeps going and keep them going.’

  ‘Aye, aye, zur.’ Tregembo set half a dozen men with ropes’ ends over the prisoners at the huge oars.

  It was already noon and still there was not a breath of wind. The fog had held off, but left a haze that blurred the horizon and kept the circle of their visibility under four miles. Somewhere in the haze ahead lay the chaloupes and the péniches that Drinkwater was
more than ever determined to destroy. He had taken the precaution of removing the brig’s officers as prisoners on board Antigone and issuing small arms to most of his own volunteers. In addition he had a party of marines under a contrite Lieutenant Mount (who was eager to make amends for his former lack of obedience). Drinkwater had little fear that the brig’s men would rise, particularly if he worked them to exhaustion at the heavy sweeps.

  He crossed the deck to where Tyrrell stood at the wheel.

  ‘Course south-east by east, sir,’ offered the master’s mate.

  Drinkwater nodded. ‘Very well. Let me know the instant the wind begins to get up.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir.’

  He turned below, wondering if he would find anything of interest among the brig’s papers and certain that Rogers had not thought of looking.

  The wind came an hour after sunset. It was light for about half an hour and finally settled in the north and blew steadily. Drinkwater ordered the sweeps in and the prisoners below.

  ‘Mr Frey.’

  ‘Sir?’ The midshipman came forward eagerly, pleased to have been specially detailed for this mission and aware that something of disgrace hung over the events of the morning.

  ‘I want you to station yourself in the foretop and keep a close watch ahead for those invasion craft. From that elevation you may see the light from a binnacle, d’you understand?’

  ‘Perfectly sir.’

  ‘Very well. And pass word for Mr Q.’

  Quilhampton approached and touched his hat. ‘Sir?’

  ‘I intend snatching an hour or two’s sleep, Mr Q. You have the deck. I want absolute silence and no lights to be shown. Moonrise ain’t until two in the mornin’. You may tell Mount’s sentries that one squeak out of those prisoners and I’ll hold ’em personally responsible. We may be lucky and catch those invasion bateaux before they get into Havre.’