Hornblower and the Hotspur h-3

by Cecil Scott Forester

“We’ll try it tonight,” said Hornblower.

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  The Little Girls lay squarely in the middle of the channel of the Goulet; on either side lay a fairway a scant quarter of a mile wide, and up and down those fairways raced the tide; it would only be during the ebb that the French would be likely to come down. No, that was not strictly true, for the French could stem the flood tide with a fair wind—with this chill easterly wind blowing. The Goulet had to be watched in all conditions of bad visibility and Hotspur had to do the watching.

  Chapter XVI

  “I beg your pardon, sir,” said Bush, lingering after delivering his afternoon report, and hesitating before taking the next step he had clearly decided upon.

  “Yes, Mr. Bush?”

  “You know, sir, you’re not looking as well as you should.”

  “Indeed?”

  “You’ve been doing too much, sir. Day and night.”

  “That’s a strange thing for a seaman to say, Mr. Bush. And a King’s officer.”

  “It’s true, all the same, sir. You haven’t had an hour’s sleep at a time for days. You’re thinner than I’ve ever known you, sir.”

  “I’m afraid I’ll have to endure it, nevertheless, Mr. Bush.”

  “I can only say I wish you didn’t have to, sir.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Bush. I’m going to turn in now, as a matter of fact.”

  “I’m glad of that, sir.”

  “See that I’m called the moment the weather shows signs of thickening.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “Can I trust you, Mr. Bush?”

  That brought a smile into what was too serious a conversation.

  “You can, sir.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Bush.”

  It was interesting after Bush’s departure to look into the speckled chipped mirror and observe his thinness, the cheeks and temples fallen in, the sharp nose and the pointed chin. But this was not the real Hornblower. The real one was inside, unaffected—as yet, at least—by privation or strain. The real Hornblower looked out at him from the hollow eyes in the mirror with a twinkle of recognition, a twinkle that brightened, not with malice, but with something akin to that—a kind of cynical amusement—at the sight of Hornblower seeking proof of the weaknesses of the flesh. But time was too precious to waste; the weary body that the real Hornblower had to drag about demanded repose. And, as regards the weaknesses of the flesh, how delightful, how comforting it was to clasp to his stomach the hot-water bottle that Doughty had put into his cot, to feel warm and relaxed despite the clamminess of the bedclothes and the searching cold that pervaded the cabin.

  “Sir,” said Doughty, coming into the cabin after what seemed to be one minute’s interval but which, his watch told him, was two hours. “Mr. Prowse sent me. It’s snowing, sir.”

  “Very well. I’ll come.”

  How often had he said those words? Every time the weather had thickened he had taken Hotspur up the Goulet, enduring the strain of advancing blind up into frightful danger, watching wind and tide, making the most elaborate calculations, alert for any change in conditions, ready to dash out again at the first hint of improvement, not only to evade the fire of the batteries, but also to prevent the French from discovering the close watch that was being maintained over them.

  “It’s only just started to snow, sir,” Doughty was saying. “But Mr. Prowse says it’s set in for the night.”

  With Doughty’s assistance Hornblower had bundled himself automatically into his deck clothing without noticing what he was doing. He went out into a changed world, where his feet trod a thin carpet of snow on the deck, and where Prowse loomed up in the darkness shimmering in the white coating of snow on his oilskins.

  “Wind’s nor’ by east, sir, moderate. An hour of flood still to go.”

  “Thank you. Turn the hands up and send them to quarters, if you please. They can sleep at the guns.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “Five minutes from now I don’t want to hear a sound.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  This was only regular routine. The less the distance one could see the readier the ship had to be to open fire should an enemy loom up close alongside. But there was no routine about his own duties; every time he took the ship up conditions were different, the wind blowing from a different compass point and the tide of a different age. This was the first time the wind had been so far round to the north. Tonight he would have to shave the shallows off Petit Minou as close as he dared, and then, close-hauled, with the last of the flood behind him, Hotspur could just ascend the northern channel, with the Little Girls to starboard.

  There was spirit left in the crew; there were jokes and cries of surprise when they emerged into the snow from the stinking warmth of the ‘tween deck, but sharp orders suppressed every sound. Hotspur was deadly quiet, like a ghost ship when the yards had been trimmed and the helm orders given and she began to make her way through the impenetrable night, night more impenetrable than ever with the air full of snowflakes silently dropping down upon them.

  A shuttered lantern at the taffrail for reading the log, although the log’s indications were of minor importance, when speed over the ground could be so different—instinct and experience were more important. Two hands in the port-side main-chains with the lead. Hornblower on the weather side of the quarter-deck could hear quite a quiet call, even though there was a hand stationed to relay it if necessary. Five fathoms. Four fathoms. If his navigation were faulty they would strike before the next cast. Aground under the guns of Petit Minou, ruined and destroyed; Hornblower could not restrain himself from clenching his gloved hands and tightening his muscles. Six and a half fathoms. That was what he had calculated upon, but it was a relief, nevertheless—Hornblower felt a small contempt for himself at feeling relieved, at his lack of faith in his own judgement.

  “Full and bye,” he ordered.

  They were as close under Petit Minou as possible, a quarter of a mile from those well-known hills, but there was nothing visible at all. There might be a solid black wall a yard from Hornblower’s eyes whichever way he turned them. Eleven fathoms; they were on the edge of the fairway now. The last of the flood, two days after the lowest neaps, and wind north by east; the current should be less than a knot and the eddy off Mengam non-existent.

  “No bottom!”

  More than twenty fathoms; that was right.

  “A good night this for the Frogs, sir,” muttered Bush beside him; he had been waiting for this moment.

  Certainly it was a good night for the French if they were determined to escape. They knew the times of ebb and flood as well as he did. They would see the snow. Comfortable time for them to up anchor and get under weigh, and make the passage of the Goulet with a fair wind and ebb tide. Impossible for them to escape by the Four with this wind; the Iroise was guarded—he hoped—by the Inshore Squadron, but on a night as black as this they might try it in preference to the difficult Raz du Sein.

  Nineteen fathoms; he was above the Little Girls, and he could be confident of weathering Mengam. Nineteen fathoms.

  “Should be slack water now, sir,” muttered Prowse, who had just looked at his watch in the light of the shaded binnacle.

  They were above Mengam now; the lead should record a fairly steady nineteen fathoms for the next few minutes, and it was time that he should plan out the next move—the next move but one, rather. He conjured up the chart before his mental eye.

  “Listen!” Bush’s elbow dug into Hornblower’s ribs with the urgency of the moment.

  “Avast there at the lead!” said Hornblower. He spoke in a normal tone to make sure he was understood; with the wind blowing that way his voice would not carry far in the direction he was peering into.

  There was the sound again; there were other noises. A long drawn monosyllable borne by the wind, and Hornblower’s straining senses picked it up. It was a Frenchman calling “Seize,” sixteen. French pilots still used the old-fashioned toise to
measure depths, and the toise was slightly greater than the English fathom.

  “Lights!” muttered Bush, his elbow at Hornblower’s ribs again. There was a gleam here and there—the Frenchman had not darkened his ship nearly as effectively as the Hotspur. There was enough light to give some sort of indication. A ghost ship sweeping by within biscuit toss. The topsails were suddenly visible—there must be a thin coating of snow on the after surfaces whose gleaming white could reflect any light there was. And then—

  “Three red lights in a row on the mizzen tops’l yard,” whispered Bush.

  Visible enough now; shaded in front, presumably, with the light directed aft to guide following ships. Hornblower felt a surge of inspiration, of instant decision, plans for the moment, plans for the next five minutes, plans for the more distant future.

  “Run!” he snapped at Bush. “Get three lights hoisted the same way. Keep ‘em shaded, ready to show.”

  Bush was off at the last word, but the thoughts had to come more rapidly like lightning. Hotspur dared not tack; she must wear.

  “Wear ship!” he snapped at Prowse—no time for the politenesses he usually employed.

  As Hotspur swung round he saw the three separated red lights join together almost into one, and at the same moment he saw a blue glare; the French ship was altering course to proceed down the Goulet and was burning a blue light as an indication to the ships following to up helm in succession. Now he could see the second French ship, a second faint ghost—the blue light helped to reveal it.

  Pellew in the old Indefatigable, when Hornblower was a prisoner in Ferrol, had once confused a French squadron escaping from Brest by imitating the French signals, but that had been in the comparatively open waters of the Iroise. It had been in Hornblower’s mind to try similar tactics, but here in the narrow Goulet there was a possibility of more decisive action.

  “Bring her to the wind on the starboard tack,” he snapped at Prowse, and Hotspur swung round further still, the invisible hands hauling at the invisible braces.

  There was the second ship in the French line just completing her turn, with Hotspur’s bows pointing almost straight at her.

  “Starboard a little.” Hotspur’s bows swung away. “Meet her.”

  He wanted to be as close alongside as he possibly could be without running foul of her.

  “I’ve sent a good hand up with the lights, sir.” This was Bush reporting. “Another two minutes and they’ll be ready.”

  “Get down to the guns,” snapped Hornblower, and then, with the need for silence at an end, he reached for the speaking-trumpet.

  “Main-deck! Man the starboard guns! Run ‘em out.”

  How would the French squadron be composed? It would have an armed escort, not to fight its way through the Channel Fleet, but to protect the transports, after the escape, from stray British cruising frigates. There would be two big frigates, one in the van and one bringing up the rear, while the intermediate ships would be defenceless transports, frigates armed en flute.

  “Starboard! Steady!”

  Yard arm to yard arm with the second ship in the line, going down the Goulet alongside her, ghost ships side by side in the falling snow. The rumble of gun-trucks had ceased.

  “Fire!”

  At ten guns, ten hands jerked at the lanyards, and Hotspur’s side burst into flame, illuminating the sails and hull of the Frenchman with a bright glare; in the instantaneous glare snowflakes were visible as if stationary in mid air.

  “Fire away, you men!”

  There were cries and shouts to be heard from the French ship, and then a French voice speaking almost in his ear—the French captain hailing him from thirty yards away with his speaking-trumpet pointed straight at him. It would be an expostulation, the French captain wondering why a French ship should be firing into him, here where no British ship could possibly be. The words were cut off abruptly by the bang and the flash of the first gun of the second broadside, the others following as the men loaded and fired as fast as they could. Each flash brought a momentary revelation of the French ship, a flickering, intermittent picture. Those nine-pounder balls were crashing into a ship crammed with men. At this very moment, as he stood there rigid on the deck, men were dying in agony by the score just over there, for no more reason than that they had been forced into the service of a continental tyrant. Surely the French would not be able to bear it. Surely they would flinch under this unexpected and unexplainable attack. Ah! She was turning away, although she had nowhere to turn to except the cliffs and shoals of the shore close overside. There were the three red lights on her mizzen topsail yard. By accident or design she had put her helm down. He must make sure of her.

  “Port a little.”

  Hotspur swung to starboard, her guns blazing. Enough.

  “Starboard a little. Steady as you go.”

  Now the speaking-trumpet. “Cease fire!”

  The silence that followed was broken by the crash as the Frenchman struck the shore, the clatter of falling spars, the yells of despair. And in this darkness, after the glare of the guns, he was blinder than ever, and yet he must act as if he could see; he must waste no moment.

  “Back the main tops’l! Stay by the braces!”

  The rest of the French line must be coming down, willy-nilly; with the wind over their quarter and the ebb under their keels and rocks on either side of them they could do nothing else. He must think quicker than they; he still had the advantage of surprise—the French captain in the following ship would not yet have had time to collect his thoughts.

  The Little Girls were under their lee; he must not delay another moment.

  “Braces, there!”

  Here she came, looming up, close, close, yells of panic from her forecastle.

  “Hard-a-starboard!”

  Hotspur had just enough way through the water to respond to her rudder; the two bows swung from each other, collision averted by a hair’s breadth.

  “Fire!”

  The Frenchman’s sails were all a-shiver; she was not under proper control, and with those nine-pounder balls sweeping her deck she would not recover quickly. Hotspur must not pass ahead of her; he still had a little time and a little room to spare.

  “Main tops’l aback!”

  This was a well-drilled crew; the ship was working like a machine. Even the powder-boys, climbing and descending the ladders in pitch darkness, were carrying out their duties with exactitude, keeping the guns supplied with powder, for the guns never ceased from firing, bellowing in deafening fashion and bathing the Frenchman with orange light while the smoke blew heavily away on the disengaged side.

  He could not spare another moment with the main topsail aback. He must fill and draw ahead even if it meant disengagement.

  “Braces, there!”

  He had not noticed until now the infernal din of the quarterdeck carronades beside him; they were firing rapidly, sweeping the transport’s deck with grape. In their flashes he saw the Frenchman’s masts drawing aft as Hotspur regained her way. Then in the next flash he saw something else, another momentary picture—a ship’s bowsprit crossing the Frenchman’s deck from the disengaged side, and he heard a crash and the screams. The next Frenchman astern had run bows on into her colleague. The first rending crash was followed by others; he strode aft to try to see, but already the darkness had closed like a wall round his blinded eyes. He could only listen, but what he heard told him the story. The ship that rammed was swinging with the wind, her bowsprit tearing through shrouds and halliards until it snapped against the main-mast. Then the fore-topmast would fall, yards would fall. The two ships were locked together and helpless, with the Little Girls under their lee. Now he saw blue lights burning as they tried to deal with the hopeless situation; with the ships swinging the blue lights and the red lights on the yards were revolving round each other like some planetary system. There was no chance of escape for them, as wind and current carried him away he thought he heard the crash as they struck upon the Little Gir
ls, but he could not be sure, and there was no time—of course there was no time—to think about it. At this stage of the ebb there was an eddy that set in upon Pollux Reef and he must allow for that. Then he would be out in the Iroise, whose waters he used to think so dangerous before he had ventured up the Goulet, and an unknown number of ships was coming down from Brest, forewarned now by all the firing and the tumult that an enemy was in their midst.

  He took a hash glance into the binnacle, gauged the force of the wind on his cheeks. The enemy—what there was left of them—would certainly, with this wind, run for the Raz du Sein, and would certainly give the Trepieds shoal a wide berth. He must post himself to intercept them; the next ship in the line must be close at hand in any case, but in a few seconds she would no longer be confined to the narrow channel of the Goulet. And what would the first frigate be doing the one he had allowed to pass without attacking her?

  “Main chains, there! Get the lead going.”

  He must keep up to windward as best he could.

  “No bottom! No bottom with this line.”

  He was clear of Pollux, then.

  “Avast, there, with the lead.”

  They stood on steadily on the starboard-tack; in the impenetrable darkness he could hear Profuse breathing heavily at his side and all else was silence round him. He would have to take another cast of the lead soon enough. What was that? Wind and water had brought a distinctive sound to his ears, a solemn noise, of a solid body falling into the water. It was the sound of a lead being cast—and then followed, at the appropriate interval, the high pitched cry of the leadsman. There was a ship just up there to windward, and now with the distance lessening and with his hearing concentrated in that direction he could hear other sounds, voices, the working of yards. He leaned over the rail and spoke quietly down into the waist.

  “Stand by your guns.”

  There she was, looming faintly on the starboard bow.

  “Starboard two points. Meet her.”

  They saw Hotspur at that same moment; from out of the darkness came the hail of a speaking-trumpet, but in the middle of a word Hornblower spoke down into the waist again.