by Jason Vail
Wasp plunged into Kellet Gut, ignoring the danger, the wind on our stern, all available sail out but for the studding sails which were no use in such rough wind and water, while those aboard held their breath, since all but many had seen last summer the disaster that happened when a ship running under full sail struck a reef. The Gut was only a hundred yards or so wide and completely unmarked, except for the raging water on either side where the surf curled and danced over the sands, leaving a pathway of sorts between the northern shoal and the southern one. There was no telling how much water Wasp had under her keel even if she kept to this dubious channel, for like the Mississippi, Goodwin Sands changed shape from year to year so that no chart maker could keep up.
It was a struggle to decide where to look: forward so as to guide Wasp through this menace, or aft at our pursuit. Each was of critical importance, but Crockett helped make up my mind by going forward without orders and taking a place on the bowsprit, where he shouted orders to Hammond at the wheel.
“I hate this,” I heard Hammond grumble to his mate at the wheel.
“Shut up, old man!” the mate hissed, catching my eye. “He can hear you.”
“I don’t give a fuck,” Hammond said.
“Did you say something, Mister Hammond?” I called to him.
“Stubbed my toe!” he called back.
I unlimbered my glass again for a look at the warship. She had just reached the spot where Vasquez had to make his own decision. I held my breath, tapping my foot with anxiety, praying that he would do what I wanted.
But he had more sense than I.
The Spanish vessel continued northward, passing across the gray stubs of Deal castle.
He would take the north channel, the safer channel.
And then, I realized my mistake: On that course, he would cut off our approach to the Thames.
We had no choice now but to try to outrun that bigger, faster ship upon the North Sea.
Chapter 17
The North Sea
November 1820
“I hate an enemy who does not cooperate,” Willie said as he watched the Spanish warship sail northward at a tangent away from us. It was as close as he came to a reproach, but I felt it like a blow. “Now what?”
“Let’s get through the Gut first,” I snapped.
There was always the chance that our Spanish friend would hit a bar, and as I watched his progress northward, I saw that he must have worried about that prospect as well, for he shortened sail to make a more cautious passage. This forced on me a similar choice. Running full tilt through the Gut might give me an advantage in the race to the Thames, but the Gut was far shallower and more temperamental than the northern passage, her depth varying constantly, so that no chart could give an accurate account of what lay under the keel. In the end, I gave way to doubt and ordered our sail shortened and leadsmen sent forward to the bow.
The roiling seas closed around Wasp as she slipped up the Gut, with the dancing waters so close at times that if a man had fallen overboard it seemed he might have been able to stand upright on the bar. In the distance, no more than a few hundred yards away, bare sand already showed itself, a rough corrugated surface of little hillocks and puddles. Despite the blustery wind and the chop, there were small boats here and there, most of them either making for the exposed sand or already upon it. At first, I wondered what drew them there, but as we passed close by one of the biggest patches, I saw above the breaking waves dark blots upon the sand, and a look through my glass revealed them to be seals taking in the sun. As I watched, men ran toward some of the seals, which frantically tried to regain the surf, but they were ungainly on land and many failed to reach the safety of the water, dying under the clubs of the men. In better times, I might have sent a boat out to fetch a seal, for they are good eating, but we had urgent business that did not allow Wasp to dally.
We were almost through now. My chart showed a finger of shoal curving northward at the outlet, directly in our path. The chop gave no indication what lay beneath, but I took no chances and called to Hammond to come northeast by north. The stretch of low water slid by our starboard, and then we were free of the Gut. I felt the welcome swells of deeper water through my heels and called to Halevy to loosen the sail.
Another decision fell to me now. Should I make north and attempt to reach the Thames ahead of our slightly more cautious pursuer? No more than three miles away, the Spanish frigate passed between us and Ramsgate, nestled by the cliffs of the Foreland. It would not be long before he cleared the passage. He had also reached the end of his danger, yet as I examined him trying to make up my mind, he loosened sail as well. North was out of the question, then, for he would surely intercept Wasp on such a course. To our starboard in the distance, the second Spanish frigate rode the swell and further behind I could make out the tannish patches that marked the schooner and the ship-sloop, tagging along as best they could, like little terriers after the bigger dogs.
East it would have to be into the North Sea.
“Come northeast by east, Mister Hammond!” I ordered. Wasp leaned into the turn like a race horse, and with deep water beneath her, with the wind at our backs, no jib, main course or headsails but fore main and all tops and topgallants filled to bursting, the masts swaying in the swells, the wash brushing our starboard rail so that seawater sloshed onto the quarterdeck, she sped toward the horizon with as much as I could hope to get out of her. But we had been months since she had had her bottom scraped and was not as fast as she had been during the summer, when nothing on the water could keep up.
I checked my watch: 10:47.
The wind backed toward the north, now blowing out of the northwest, and picked up, and along with the increasing blow, the seas grew more tumultuous, the swells deepening, the crests frothing and breaking as if on a beach. Even with all mains out and the wind on our quarter, it made for slower going, but if the sea held us back, it held back the Spaniards as well.
My hope now was to run east until dark and lose the hounds in the night. Yet, the flagship grew larger in my glass with each hour. He may have only a single knot on Wasp, but it would be enough to intercept us before dark.
The chase over such a rough sea brought us some advantage, for the remaining vessels of the Spanish flotilla were far behind us, their hulls barely visible when we balanced on a wave crest, and I was reminded of a story in Livy in which a Roman soldier fights four men in single combat. He won by running away from his enemies so that they were strung out in the chase such that, when he turned, he only had to fight one at a time, and defeated them all in turn.
I checked my watch again. It was 2:54. The Spaniard was no more than two miles away. That may seem like a great distance, but he had crept up on us all day and if we were to do anything to wriggle out of the trap it would have to be now. Waiting any longer would not leave the time for the maneuvers I had played with in my mind as I had watched him gain on us. I put the watch back in my pocket and fingered the toy horse that lay beside it. “Bring us luck,” I whispered.
“Get the boys up, Mister Halevy,” I called to the man-child who was our first lieutenant, glancing down into the waist where the men were clustered about their guns, huddled in their coats against the cold wind. “It’s time to go to work.”
“We’re going to fight that?” he asked incredulously.
Halevy had every right to his incredulity. The Spanish frigate on our tail was a big, muscular brute of a ship, easily one-hundred-sixty feet long and as broad as a New York thoroughfare, twice our weight in tonnage with at least forty guns, if my quick count of her ports was any guide, and she might carry as many as five-hundred men to our hundred-sixty. Where Wasp rode that rough sea nimbly almost like a piece of drift wood, this fellow, her red-yellow pennant snapping like a whip in the heavy wind, plowed through the great crests with a heave and splash that drove fountains of spray as high as his main yards, and I had a moment of pity for the fellows in the forecastle crews who must be drenched and dreadfully
cold. He would have eighteen pounders on his gun deck. They were capable of throwing far more weight of shot than our carronades and at a longer range, so we were outmanned and outgunned.
“Mister Hammond!” I shouted over my shoulder so that he could hear me through the wind. “Come to northeast by north! Mister Halevy, starboard watch to trim sail! Lively now! Mister Crockett, rifles and muskets to the tops!”
While Wasp’s head swung to larboard — smoothly and not too sharp, just as she should have done — the starboard watch raced to the lines and the Rangers clambered up the rigging to the tops, I stalked back to the wheel. “Where is that damned boy!” I said to the wind.
The boy on duty on the quarterdeck was crouched out of the wind by an after carronade. “Here, sir!”
“Get me that Argentine rag! Hurry!”
As the boy rummaged through the flag locker, Austin, who had remained on the quarterdeck throughout our run as if he was afraid that he would miss something important, registered a protest. “Why that flag?”
He had fashioned a Texas flag for us, you see. We had used it in battle last summer, and he expected that we would hoist it again.
I noticed that he had acquired a pistol and cutlass from the stack of small arms around the main mast. “The Argentine government still shivers in Patagonia, Mister Austin,” I replied. “We shall not give away Mister Jackson’s secret yet. And you can put those back,” I added, indicating the small arms. “With luck you shall not need them.”
He returned my look a bit sheepishly, weighing the weapons in his hands, but he did not put them down. I suppose they made him feel safer, although I had no intention of letting that monster grapple with us for a hand-to-hand.
As Wasp came to her new course, the frigate turned to match us. She had little windward advantage, and I had crossed his bow once before, with results that had been ultimately humiliating to our enemy, so Vasquez, if he truly was the captain, was taking no chances that he would be tricked again.
When I judged the time was right, I called to Halevy and Hammond, “Prepare to tack! Come to west by south!”
“Tack! This close to an enemy?” I heard Hammond mutter to the two men with him at the wheel. “Have you lost your mind?”
“Tack, Mister Hammond!” I said. “Make her dance like a race horse!”
“Oh, I’ll make her dance, I will. Little Wasp can turn on a penny under my hands!” he said.
“Then less talk and more turning.”
Wasp came around through the wind, yards swinging so that the sails would not be caught aback. There is always a risk when tacking that the ship will hang in irons, but Wasp could indeed turn on a penny and she showed her stuff here, slipping as smoothly through the wind as a girl waltzing in the arms of her lover, and in what seemed like an instant our course had changed so that we would pass the Spaniard to his larboard on an opposite heading.
Yet as smartly as she could dance, the turn had consumed so much time that now only a few hundred yards separated Wasp from her pursuer.
As we neared each other, the Spaniard pulled up his main courses, a clear indication he meant to fight. I had our top yard crews clew up our mains as well to make him think I had the same intention, mad as that might be.
Now was the time of the last waiting, the very worst part, when you are ready at the guns but the ships are not near enough to harm each other. Those last minutes always seem to drag with agonizing slowness while you breathe deeply to calm your pounding heart and strive to conceal how terrified you are.
“Mister Crockett!” I called. “Make sure your boys aim only for the enemy quartermaster and his mates!” It was rather a foul trick, but we had used it once last summer to good effect, and I hoped it would give us some advantage here.
“Aye, Captain!” he shouted from his post at the foot of the main mast, sounding all nautical, even with that thick backwoods accent.
Sea battles in those days were intimate things. Nowadays I read in the newspaper supplements that the guns fire at long range and the men behind them cannot see the faces of those they are trying to kill and who are trying to kill them, but in those days you had to sail so close the ships were almost touching to do them any harm, and that meant you had to expose yourself to his shot with nothing to protect you but a flimsy wooden hull, the fabric of your shirt and Providence. Battle was a personal thing, man against man, not a thing of numbers and calculations, but blood and strength and the willingness to risk and to fight no matter how dreadful the odds and the possibility of death. It takes a terrible toll on a man to step into the fires of hell, yet somehow men do it time and again even when they know the horror that awaits them, yet only men with that kind of grit have any chance of victory.
I had a moment to take in an impression of the men around me: old Hammond, his mouth a grimace of maniacal laughter; Halevy, his pasty boy’s face, trying to look resolute so as not to shame himself before the others; Willie, his eyes closed and lips moving in prayer; the ship’s boy crouching behind the mizzen with his hands over his eyes; the men by the larboard carronades on the quarterdeck, faces intent, one of them spitting on the deck, a cardinal sin that went unrebuked because of the importance of the moment; another man rubbing a cross in his palms; yet another man who attempted to calm the quivering of his hands by pressing them together with his thighs; the chatter in the tops as the marksmen divvied up the targets on the enemy deck; and last, Crockett, who had lost his hat to the wind and who gazed at the approaching apocalypse with a faint smile on his face as if regarding something that was deeply pleasing.
As our bowsprits crossed, the enemy on the frigate’s spar deck began shouting insults across the gap and waving their small arms in the air. Her ports opened and the guns run out, and I could see movement through those windows: the enemy crews gathered about their guns, and here and there the faces of the gun captains as they sighted along their pieces. And back by the wheel stood my old adversary, Captain Vasquez. I could pick him out of a crowd now, a lean wolfish man with cheeks hollower than I remembered, hard dark eyes and a neatly trimmed beard that came to a point at his chin.
He opened his mouth to speak, and I knew he was about to give the order to fire, for we had now passed under the muzzles of his guns. Before either of us had a chance to speak, the rifles in our tops began to crack, and I shouted, “Down, boys!”
The boys on Wasp flattened themselves on the deck just as the Spaniard’s guns bellowed their hatred for us, filling the void with gunsmoke and a hail of shot that shrieked all around us.
The next thing I knew, I was on my back staring at the mizzen mast which was swaying like a tree in a gale, her rigging shot away and nothing holding it up, the riflemen in the mizzen top clinging for dear life. I had no idea how I had got here, for I had not flung myself down like the others. I suppose passing shot must have knocked me down. A rifle had fallen to the deck and lay beside me. The circular mark on the deck where it had driven its muzzle only inches from my head was clearly visible.
Using the rifle as a crutch, I hauled myself to my feet. There wasn’t time to assess the damage to Wasp other than to gain a brief impression: shrouds cut everywhere with lines flapping free, a chunk taken out of the main mast like a bite out of a cake, here and there men lying in puddles of blood, Austin on his hands and knees nearby, a stricken expression on his face. The Spaniard had fired, aiming at our rigging, just as the frigate dipped down off a wave crest, not the best time, which had thrown most of his shot off so that we had avoided the awful harm that twenty-four pounders could do at short range.
As the wind whipped away the gun smoke, I saw the Spaniard turn, Vasquez himself at the warship’s wheel for there seemed to be no one else about to do that work, and I realized then he meant to grapple with us, for there was also a mass of men clustered at the Spaniard’s bow, some with grapples in their hands. If they could get us in their grasp and draw Wasp close, it would be a death embrace, for then a flood of the enemy would tumble onto our deck and bear
us down by sheer weight of numbers.
Hammond and his mates were at the wheel, holding us steady on our course.
“Hard to larboard!” I shrieked at Hammond and he and his mates spun the wheel.
Halevy was not in sight, wounded or dead perhaps, so I barked, “Mister Harper! See to the trim!” For it was important to keep our speed, and we could only do so if we continued to work the ship.
The two ships circled each other like partners in a deadly waltz, but Wasp was the more nimble and began to draw across the Spaniard’s stern.
Stumbling to the after carronades on the quarterdeck, amazed to see that none of the crews had been hit, I fairly screamed, “Ready the larboard guns!”
I had no idea whether my voice would carry to the gun deck, so far away, then voices along the way, Crockett’s among them, called the same words, an echo in the chamber of hell, punctuated by the crack and thump of rifles and muskets.
I aimed one of the carronades as Wasp stumbled over the heaving sea slowly, so damned slowly, at an oblique angle across the Spaniard’s stern. Men at his taffrail looked down upon our deck, and at least one man leveled a pistol at us and fired, the sound lost so that I only recall the jet of smoke from the barrel, odd that I should remember that detail and that of the face staring at us in astonishment from the stern gallery windows, for I was so intent on laying the gun that you’d think I had no room in my mind for anything else.
“The rudder!” I cried so forcefully that my throat seemed to tear. “Remember! Aim for the rudder!”
And then our moment came, the only chance we would have if ever we had any. It was not the best of moments for we had not reached the crest of the swell but were rising up toward it. But there would be no other chance, for in a heartbeat we would have passed beyond our enemy.
“Fire!”
The seaman at my side yanked the lanyard on the flintlock, adding the voice of our gun to the salvo as it roared over the gray sea. Wasp shuddered so violently that her planks seemed to separate and, with a snap, return to their positions. A cloud of gunsmoke thicker than a London fog enveloped us to the lower yards and I could not even see the man next to me. Then in a whiff, it was gone, racing across the water.