by John Drake
Both French ships had seen the opportunity to trap Queen Charlotte and for once they were co-operating well. Montagne shortened sail to fall alongside of us and her gun-ports opened as her crews ran across from the larboard guns, which previously had been in action, to run out the starboard guns which now bore upon us. Simultaneously Jacobin put down her helm and bore down upon us to nip Queen Charlotte between herself and her consort. But she overdid the thing, and there came a deep, groaning rumble as our bowsprit tore into her mainmast shrouds and our bows ground against her hull. Queen Charlotte was the bigger ship and we struck Jacobin amidships, throwing her over so the seas came aboard in the waist. Men were cast over the side and gun tackles parted under the shock.
But Montagne opened a heavy fire into our larboard side, and as she righted, Jacobin’s gunners joined it too. Our larboard guns gave as good as they got and more into Montagne, but Jacobin had us caught in a jam of rigging and was placed to rake us by the bows. Worse still, a yelling horde of boarders was pouring on to our fo’c’sle and cutting down every man that stood before them.
“Hands to repel boarders!” bellowed a voice beside me, God knows who it was, and there was a rush towards the bow, led by a Marine Officer in his scarlet coat. I hadn’t the wit not to join in, so I drew my cutlass, took a pistol in my left hand and charged like a fool with the rest.**When, as here, Fletcher makes play of his claimed unwillingness to fight, he is striking a pose. By all accounts he was a formidable adversary and the fury of his temper was a tangible fact to all who knew him. S.P.
There were fifty Frogs on the fo’c’sle, armed to the teeth and screaming for blood. But there was nothing for it but to let fly, and wade in hacking left and right.
25
It is further reported that shortly before the engagement, his Lordship had taken into his flagship Mr Jacob Fletcher, a private gentleman recently become heir to the estate of a noted Staffordshire manufacturer, the said Mr Fletcher having been of invaluable assistance to his Lordship in revealing the whereabouts of the French Fleet.
(Extract from a despatch by Captain William Parker, of Audacious, 74, published in a special edition of the London Gazette on 5th June 1794.)
*
Just after ten o’clock on the evening of 28th May 1794, His Majesty’s Ship Audacious, 74, with shattered rigging, powder-stained timbers and guns still hot from her fight with Revolutionnaire, was in imminent danger of falling upon the French line-of-battle, which lay no more than half a mile downwind, an endless succession of crossed yards, bulging canvas and chequered stripes of menacing gun-ports.
Captain William Parker had just seen his surgeon’s report which listed only three dead and nineteen wounded (three seriously and expected not to live). That was good, for he’d stake his commission he’d inflicted ten times that on the cowardly three-decker that had hauled out of the fight. But it was all of a piece. The French had fired high from the start. All they’d wanted to do was smash his spars and rip his sails so they could get away, and that’s why the butcher’s bill had been so light.
“Wear ship, mister!” he said to his First Lieutenant, stuffing the piece of paper into his pocket. “We must bring her clear of that herd.” He pointed at the French Fleet, and lifted his voice for the men to hear, “One first-rate is nothing to this ship, but there’s another three hiding from us in there!”
They cheered him for that, as well they might, but it was some time before Audacious could effect the manoeuvre, for her damage aloft was even worse than it had first seemed.
By nightfall, Audacious had weathered the French line and her people worked on through the night to put their ship in a condition to rejoin the fleet. But daylight brought two disappointments. First, it seemed that nothing short of a dockyard refit would put her right. And second, although they’d escaped the Brest Fleet, by an evil chance an entirely different French formation was no more than three miles off to windward. There were two 74’s, two frigates and a vast shoal of merchantmen. It was the Grain Convoy itself. Alone of the entire Channel Fleet, Audacious had found this incalculably important prize, and the tragedy of it was that hopelessly outnumbered and unable to manoeuvre, there was nothing Audacious could do other than exert herself to escape.
And even that was dangerously close. As daylight came, Audacious was halfway through bending fresh sails to replace those shredded in the action. Her foresail and three topsails were unbent — the main topsail was actually on its way up, with the hands hauling away, as the French were sighted. With no more than main-and fore-topmast staysails set, Parker put his ship before the wind and limped away, and it was only the luck of a haze of fog descending on the ocean that enabled the crippled 74 to make good her escape.
Given the respite of invisibility, Captain Parker and his men set to with redoubled energy. If only they could get their ship properly under sail, they might still enable Lord Howe to intercept the Grain Convoy. But there was little they could do. Masts were gouged and weakened by shot, the standing rigging was barely secured by their efforts, and any attempt to bear up into the wind would put such a strain on her as to tear her wounded, weakened rigging into pieces.
That left only one course of action, and it was bitter hard for Parker to accept it. For one thing, he knew there were those who would now accuse him of cowardice.
“Portsmouth, mister!” he said, to his First Lieutenant. “Wind’s steady south by west. We must take her in. We can do no more.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” said the First Lieutenant, as miserable as if he’d been ordered to murder his mother.
Five days later, on the morning of 3rd June 1794, Audacious dropped anchor in Plymouth Sound. She was growing steadily more unseaworthy and Parker deemed it best to make landfall as soon as possible.
By the afternoon of 3rd June, Parker was on his way to London with the Mail, via Ashburton, Exeter, Collumpton, Wellington, Taunton, Bridgwater, Wells, Bath, Devizes, Marlborough, Hungerford, Newbury, Reading, Maidenhead, Hounslow and so to the main terminus at the Swan Inn, Lad Lane, in the heart of the Metropolis. He brought with him his own account of the actions of 28th May, plus letters from the Senior Naval Officer, Plymouth, plus certificates from the dockyard officials particularising the damage sustained by Audacious.
Already spent by his exertions aboard ship, Parker was numbed by the twenty-hour overland journey. When he climbed out of the coach in the courtyard of the Swan, with his hat and his papers under his arm, he was like a man in an opium-trance: he actually didn’t know whether he were tired or not tired, hungry or not hungry. He made his way through the press of travellers, servants, porters touting for business, and got roundly cursed by the drivers of the gleaming outbound Mails for not getting out of their way quick enough.
Fortunately, a sharp-eyed hackney coachman, hovering like a hawk after pigeons, caught sight of his uniform and took him up, just as he emerged into the street.
“Whitehall, Captain?” said the coachman, for here was a Naval officer fresh off the West Country Mail, unshaven, with no luggage, but guarding a bundle of despatches.
Half an hour later, and having been charged approximately twice the legal fare, Parker staggered through the Admiralty Arch, up the stairs into the building and entered into the very heart, liver and brains of the service to which he’d given most of his life.
He was lucky. They were so delighted that Howe was in contact with the Brest Fleet, and so sure that a great victory must follow, that they believed his (true) story of the fight with
Revolutionnaire and the unquestionable propriety of his subsequent actions. He was congratulated, employed constantly thereafter, and received a medal for gallantry, at Lord Howe’s command.
On 5th June, a special “Gazette” was issued, containing Parker’s report verbatim. It caused great excitement and was avidly read and discussed. However, some people who read the despatch noted one little point of detail that Parker had included. And those who did note it, did so with a savage and ecstatic delight. This
was the fact that a Mr Jacob Fletcher, gentleman, was aboard Lord Howe’s flagship.
With this information, any persons wishing to contact Mr Fletcher, for whatever reasons, needed only await the fleet’s return in order to be sure of finding him.
26
It was bloody murder on Queen Charlotte’s fo’c’sle with dead tars sprawled underfoot and the decks wet and slippery. The Frogs had themselves well organised. Boarding is something they always put special effort into, in their methodical logical style of thinking.
There were two teams of them at work. One was up on our bowsprit and in their rigging, busily making fast the one to the other, so we couldn’t get clear. That would give their gunners down below their best chance to go on pounding us through the bow and down the length of our decks. The other team, which was growing all the time, came aboard by the bowsprit, using it as a gangplank. They had clumps of pikemen out in front, trained to act together, like a hedgehog of spikes with each man protecting his mates. And behind the pikes came grenade men with slow matches and a bag full of black iron balls, the size of a man’s fist, filled with powder and musket balls and set off by a fuse that gave a few seconds’ grace after it was lit.
A grenade is a frightful weapon, for it scorches and mutilates. And it’s bloody dangerous aboard ship for its capacity to start fires. In short, a typical Frenchman’s idea of a weapon. The only good thing about them is they’re so bloody dangerous to the grenadier. He’s only got to make one mistake and he’s up in smoke.
So that’s what I blundered into with about twenty or thirty others, officers and men from Queen Charlotte’s own boarders. And it was pistol and cutlass against pike and grenade.
There’s no time to think in such a melee, and I galloped forward in the crowd, bellowing madly and trying to keep my arms free of the men on either side of me. Bang! I let fly with one of Black Dick’s pistols into the mass of French faces behind their glittering pike-heads. One man screeched, dropped his pike and clutched at his face. Blood sprayed between his fingers and he was down. I hurled the empty pistol at the head of another man, then, boom! A grenade went off with a deafening roar, somewhere just behind me. My ears rang, the hot blast sizzled the hair on the back of my head and two men collapsed around me, clutching at my coat tails trying to keep their feet as the shrapnel thudded into them. Boom! Another grenade, not so close but well into the thick of the British charge. The scarlet Marine Officer turned and bawled at his men, as still more grenades went off and our bold rush wavered and lost heart.
The Frogs immediately to my front cheered and pushed forward with their pikes, a dozen of them working as a team, stamping their feet in time as they advanced and jabbing the fearsome points forward in short, controlled lunges. They’d learned it as a drill, it was plain to see. I fell back, fumbling for the second pistol, which was stuck somehow in my belt and wouldn’t be drawn.
They skewered the Marine before my eyes, even as he was waving his sword in the air, calling his men onward. He groaned and died as two steel-tipped ash staves squelched into his lungs. He must have been a popular officer, for a couple of our tars hurled themselves forward in a screaming rage. One got caught on the pikes, but I didn’t see what happened to the other because I was leaping in beside him.
I wrenched out the second pistol at last (snapping my belt, though I never noticed) and blazed away into the belly of the nearest pikeman, while beating my way through the pike hedge with my cutlass.
Once inside the reach of the pikes, it was faces, hands and elbows on every side, and I staggered as the Frenchmen swayed to and fro. One man dropped his pike and had at me with a dirk, but I caught him with a swing of my heavy cutlass, just above the ear. Queen Charlotte’s armourer must have done a good job with his grindstone, ‘cos the three-foot blade was wickedly sharp and took the top right off the bugger’s head. I distinctly saw the sliced brains inside and the dome of scalp and bone fly away with the hair fluttering.
That cleared some ground around me and I laid on furiously, left and right at anything that looked French. Our men came up all around in support and we began to shove them back. But another dozen pikemen fell upon us with a Frog officer in command.
Then I saw a grenade man among them, actually holding one of the sodding things, fizzing in his hand as he looked for a target. The Frog officer screeched at him to throw it and it went sailing up in the air, over my head to burst uselessly in the air. Bullets spattered down, doing as much harm to the French as to us, and another beastly, vicious struggle took place.
My cutlass broke on something, God knows what, and I was left with the steel guard and a couple of inches of blade, so I swung it like an iron glove and clouted the first Frog I could get hold of. But three or four of them got me on my own, with some behind the some in front, and I really thought I was going to die in that moment. The officer was one of them and he drew a pistol from his belt, while the others had the foot-long dirks that seemed to be their secondary weapon. I was shrivelled with terror and I fought like a madman in that dire extreme with my life not worth a bent farthing.
I flung the useless cutlass hilt into the officer’s face, grabbed him by his belt and collar, and swung him off his feet like a doll. In a frantic burst of strength, I hoist him quickly over my head and hurled him at those in front of me with all my might.
(The secret of it is sheer strength and should you ever be placed as I was, then you should not attempt to do the like but should scream loudly, fall down, and play dead.)
That left two of them, with expressions of gawping disbelief on their faces. But they went for me with their dirks and one of ‘em got his blade into my side just as I caught the pair of their heads and cracked them smartly together and knocked them senseless. Strength again, d’you see? And speed too. It was all a matter of seconds and then our men were swarming forward to finish the thing, even as I dropped my two Frogs on the deck.
And that was the end of the French attempt to board Queen Charlotte’s fo’c’sle. Of course, mine wasn’t the only fight that took place in those few dreadful minutes. Nearly a hundred men fought that battle and there were a dozen struggles like mine going on simultaneously and tumbling all over one another. But, as you’ll imagine, I hadn’t time to pay attention to them. Unfortunately that wasn’t the end of my part in the greater battle between Jacobin, Montagne and Queen Charlotte. Our bowsprit was still jammed into Jacobin’s rigging, Jacobin’s 36-pounders were hammering us end to end, and we must soon either break free or be battered to pieces. Then up comes Queen Charlotte’s First Lieutenant with a couple of dozen men, fresh from the guns below.
“Away boarders!” he cried. “Axe men with me!” and he instantly led a charge up the bowsprit to cut away the French lashings so we could pull clear. At least he tried to, and I took a discarded cutlass and went with them, but it was no use. Queen Charlotte’s bowsprit, the big jutting spar that rose diagonally up and forward from her bow, was a monster of near four feet in diameter, but even so there was room for only one man at a time, and we had to scramble up in single file. What’s more, with the two ships heaving and grinding against each other, and trembling with gunfire, the bowsprit was shifting alarmingly and you couldn’t go at a rush for fear of falling off.
Jacobin had the advantage of us, you see, for with their ship broadside on to ours, all three of their fighting tops could fire down on our fo’c’sle while only our foretopmen could fire back. The fighting tops in a three-decker are big platforms fixed to the masts, just above the lower yards, about eighty feet from the deck. In action these are filled with sharpshooters whose job it is to fire down upon the enemy: quarterdeck officers being a particularly favoured target. That’s how Nelson was killed, as you know (and if you didn’t know that then I don’t see how you can call yourself British).
Well, Jacobin had made regular little forts of her tops with timber barricades to give cover, and they were bristling with musketeers.
First they’d killed or wounded everyone in
our foretop, then they’d cleared our fo’c’sle for their boarders, and when the First Lieutenant’s men tried to go up the bowsprit, they had the easy target of a line of men all coming up the same path and they fairly showered us with bullets. I saw three men at least struck down and go into the sea between the two ships. I felt shot go through my coat and we were all of us crouching low with our arms raised over our heads in a futile, instinctive gesture to ward off the musket balls as if they were rain. It was a death-trap and we had to fall back.
But the First Lieutenant knew his business and with the bullets splintering the planks all around him he bawled at us to bring one of the fo’c’sle 12-pounders into action.
“Canister!” he cried and shook his fist at the Frog maintop. “We must clear out the nest of ‘em!” says he. So we fell upon the gun and hauled it round, nine or ten of us, by brute strength to point forward towards Jacobin’s mainmast. Stumbling over each other in the rush, someone found a cartridge, and another a round of canister from a nearby shot-locker. We got the gun loaded, primed and ready. But French bullets were pouring among us, and grouped round the gun we made another fine target. Soon there were only five of us left besides the Lieutenant and the rest were laid out around us, stone dead or writhing with plain.
“The coign! The coign!” cried the Lieutenant. I understood fastest and found a handspike to lever up the breech so the elevating wedge could be drawn out from beneath it. But the gun was laid for point blank, with the coign lashed in place, so one of the tars had to out with his knife and slash it free. Thump! I let fall the breech and up rose the muzzle. But it was useless. We got no more than five or six degrees of elevation. The old wooden carriages on their squat wheels just weren’t meant to point at the sky.
“Up with ...” cries the Lieutenant, and choked off in surprise as something hit him. He sta ered back and sat down heavily on the deck. There was blood all over his face and he couldn’t see. The other men gawped at this and stared at one another. There’s only so much even brave men can do and they were on the point of running.