Sharpe's Trafalgar

by Bernard Cornwell

  Chase timed the gun crews, promising an extra tot of rum to the fastest men. The sound of the guns was astonishing. It pounded the eardrums and shivered the ship before fading slowly into the immensity of sea and sky. The gunners tied scarves about their ears to diminish the shock of the noise, but many of them were still prematurely deaf. Sharpe, curious, went down to the lower deck where the big thirty-two-pounders lurked and he stood in wonder as the guns were fired. He had his fingers in his ears, yet, even so, the whole dark space, punctuated with bright shafts of smoky sunlight which pierced through the open gunports, reverberated with each gun’s firing. The sound seemed to punch him in the abdomen, it rang in his head, it filled the world. One after the other, the guns hammered back. Each barrel was close to ten feet long and each gun weighed nearly three tons, and each shot strained the gun’s breeching rope taut as an iron bar. The breeching rope was a great cable, fixed with eyebolts to the ship’s ribs, that looped through a ring at the gun’s breech. Half-naked gunners, sweat glistening on their skins, leaped to sponge out the vast barrels while the gun’s chief stopped the vent-hole with a leather-encased thumb. Men put in powder bags and shot, rammed them home, then hauled the weapon’s muzzle out through the gunport with the rope-and-pulley tackles fixed on either side of the carriage.

  “You’re not aiming at anything!” Sharpe had to shout to the fifth lieutenant who commanded one group of guns.

  “We ain’t marksmen,” the lieutenant, who was called Holderby, shouted back. “If it comes to battle we’ll be so close to the bastards that we can’t miss! Twenty paces at most, and usually less.” Holderby paced down the gundeck, ducking under beams, touching men’s shoulders at random. “You’re dead!” he shouted. “You’re dead!” The chosen men grinned and sat gratefully on the shot gratings. Holderby was thinning the crews, as they would be thinned by battle, and watching how well the “survivors” manned their big guns.

  The guns, like those on the Calliope, were all fired by flintlocks. The army’s field artillery, none of it so big as these guns, was fired with a linstock, a slow match that glowed red as it burned, but no naval captain would dare have a glowing red-hot linstock lying loose on a gundeck where so much powder lay waiting to explode. Instead the guns had flintlocks, though, if the flintlock failed, a linstock was suspended in a nearby tub half-filled with water. The flintlock’s trigger was a lanyard which the gunner would twitch, the flint would fall, the spark flash and then the powder-packed reed in the touch hole hissed and a four- or five-inch flame leaped upward before the world was consumed by noise as another flame, twice as long as the gun’s barrel, seared into the instant cloud of smoke as the gun crashed back.

  Sharpe climbed to the deck, and from the deck to the maintop, for only from there could he see beyond the massive bank of smoke to where the shots fell. They fell ragged, some seemingly going as much as a mile before they splashed into the sullen sea, others ripping the surface into spray only a hundred yards from the ship. Chase, as the lieutenant had said, was not training his men to be marksmen, but to be fast. There were gunners aboard who boasted they could lay a ball onto a floating target tub at half a mile, but the secret of battle, Chase insisted, was getting close and releasing a storm of shot. “It doesn’t have to be aimed,” he had told Sharpe. “I use the ship to aim the guns. I lay the guns alongside the enemy and let them massacre the bastard. Speed, speed, speed, Sharpe. Speed wins battles.”

  It was just like musketry, Sharpe realized. On land the armies came together and, as often as not, it was the side that could fire its muskets fastest that would win. Men did not aim muskets, because they were so inaccurate. They pointed their muskets, then fired so that their bullet was just one among a cloud of balls that spat toward the enemy. Send enough balls and the enemy would weaken. Lay two ships close together and the one that fired fastest should win in the same way, and so Chase harried his gunners, praising the swift ones and chivying the laggards, and all morning the sea about the ship quivered to the vibration of the guns. A long track of wavering and thinning powder smoke lay behind the ship, proof that she made some progress, though it was frustratingly slow. Sharpe had brought his telescope up the mast and now trained it eastward in hope of seeing land, but all he could see was a dark shadow beneath the cloud. He shortened the barrel and trained the glass downward to see Malachi Braithwaite pacing up and down the quarterdeck, flinching every time a gun cracked.

  What to do about Braithwaite? In truth Sharpe knew exactly what to do, but how to do it on a ship crammed with over seven hundred men was the problem. He collapsed the telescope and put it into a pocket, then, for the first time, climbed from the maintop up above the main topsail to the crosstrees, a much smaller platform than the maintop, where he perched beneath the main topgallant sail. Yet another sail rose above that, the royal, up somewhere in the sky, though not so high that men did not climb to it, for there was a lookout poised above the royal’s yard, contentedly chewing tobacco as he stared westward. The deck looked small from here, small and narrow, but the air was fresh for the ever-present stink of the ship and the rotten-egg stench of the powder smoke did not reach this high.

  The tall mast trembled as two guns fired together. A freak breath of wind blew the smoke away and Sharpe saw the sea rippling in a frantic fan pattern away from the guns’ blasts. Grass did that in front of a field gun, except that the grass became scorched and sometimes caught fire. The sea settled and the smoke thickened.

  “Sail!” the man above Sharpe bellowed to the deck, the hail so loud and sudden that Sharpe jumped in fright. “Sail on the larboard beam!”

  Sharpe had to think which side of the ship was larboard and which starboard, but managed to remember and trained his telescope out toward the west, but he could see nothing except a hazy line where the sea met the sky.

  “What do you see?” Haskell, the first lieutenant, called up through a speaking trumpet.

  “Royals and tops,” the man shouted, “same course as us, sir!”

  The gunfire ceased, for Chase now had something else to worry about. The gunports were closed and the big guns lashed tight as a half-dozen men scurried up the rigging to add their eyes to the lookout’s gaze. Sharpe could still see nothing on the western horizon, even with the help of the telescope. He was proud of his eyesight, but being at sea demanded a different kind of vision to looking for enemies on land. He swept the glass left and right, still unable to find the strange ship, then a sudden tiny blur of dirty white broke the horizon; he lost it, edged the glass back, and there she was. Just a blur, nothing but a blur, but the man above him, without any glass, had seen it and could distinguish one sail from another.

  A man settled beside Sharpe on the crosstrees. “It’s a Frenchie,” he said.

  Sharpe recognized him as John Hopper, the big bosun of the captain’s gig. “You can’t tell at this distance, surely?” Sharpe asked.

  “Cut of the sails, sir,” Hopper said confidently. “Can’t mistake it.”

  “What is it, Hopper?” Chase, bareheaded and in shirtsleeves, hauled himself onto the platform.

  “It could be her, sir, it really could,” Hopper said. “She’s a Frenchie, right enough.”

  “Damn wind,” Chase said. “May I, Sharpe?” He held out his hand for the telescope, then trained it west. “Damn it, Hopper, you’re right. Who spotted her?”

  “Pearson, sir.”

  “Triple his rum ration,” Chase said, then closed the glass, returned it to Sharpe, and slithered back to the deck in a manner that scared Sharpe witless. “Boats!” Chase shouted, running toward the quarterdeck. “Boats!”

  Hopper followed his captain and Sharpe watched as the ship’s boats were lowered over the side and filled with oarsmen. They were going to tow the ship, not west toward the strange sail, but north in an attempt to get ahead of her.

  The men rowed all through the afternoon. They sweated and tugged until their arms were agony. Very slight ripples at the Pucelle’s flank showed that they were maki
ng some progress, but not enough, it seemed to Sharpe, to gain any headway on the far sail. The small breaths of wind that had relieved the heat earlier in the day seemed to have died away completely so that the sails hung lifeless and the ship was enveloped in an odd silence. The loudest noises were the footfalls of the officers on the quarterdeck, the shouts of the men urging on the tired oarsmen and the creak of the wheel as it spun backward and forward in the lolling swell.

  Lady Grace, attended by her maid and carrying a parasol against the hot sun, appeared on the quarterdeck and stared westward. Captain Chase claimed the strange sail was now visible from the deck, but she could not see it, even with a telescope. “They probably haven’t seen us,” Chase suggested.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “Our sails have clouds behind them”—he gestured to the great cloud range that piled above Africa—”and with any luck our canvas just blends into the sky.”

  “You think it’s the Revenant?”

  “I don’t know, milady. She could be a neutral merchantman.” Chase tried to sound neutral himself, but his suppressed excitement made it plain he believed the far ship was indeed the Revenant.

  Braithwaite was standing under the break of the poop, watching to see if Sharpe joined her ladyship, but Sharpe did not move. He looked east and saw cat’s-paws of ripples on the water, the first signs of a freshening wind. The ripples chased and skittered across the long swells, obstinately refusing to come near the Pucelle, but then they seemed to gather together and slide over the sea and suddenly the sails filled, the rigging creaked and the towing lines dipped toward the water.

  “The land wind,” Chase said, “and about time!” He went to the quartermaster at the wheel who at last had some purchase on the rudder. “Can you feel it?”

  “Aye aye, sir.” The helmsman paused to spit a stream of tobacco juice into a big brass spittoon. “Ain’t much though,” he added, “no more than if a little old lady was breathing on the sails, sir.”

  The wind faltered, shivering the sails, then lazily caught again and Chase turned to watch the sea. “Get the boats in, Mister Haskell!”

  “Aye aye, sir!”

  “Yot of rum for the oarsmen!”

  “Aye aye, sir.” Haskell, who believed Chase spoiled his men, sounded disapproving.

  “Double tot of rum for the oarsmen,” Chase said to annoy Haskell, “and wind for us and death to the French!” His spirits had risen in the belief that he had found his quarry. Now he must stalk her. “We’ll close the angle on her during the night,” he told Haskell. “Every inch of canvas! And no lights on board. And we’ll wet the sails.” A canvas hose was rigged to a pump and used to douse the sails with sea water. Chase explained to Sharpe that wet sails caught more of a light wind than dry, and it did seem as if the soaked canvas worked better. The ship moved perceptibly, though below decks, where the gunsmoke lingered, no wind cleared the air.

  The wind freshened at dusk and the Pucelle once again heeled to its pressure. Night fell and officers went around the ship to make certain that not a single lantern was alight anywhere on board except for one feeble, red-shielded binnacle lamp that gave the helmsman a glimpse of the compass. The course was changed a few points westward in hope of closing on the far ship. The wind rose still more so that the sea could be heard coursing down the ship’s black and yellow flanks.

  Sharpe slept, woke, slept again. No one disturbed his night. He was up before dawn and found that the rest of the ship’s officers, even those who should have been sleeping, were on the quarterdeck. “She’ll see us before we see her,” Chase said, meaning that the rising sun would silhouette the Pucelle’s topsails against the horizon, and for a few minutes he considered rousting the off-duty watch to help the topmen bring in everything above the mains, but he reckoned the loss of speed would be a worse result and so he kept his canvas aloft. The men with the best eyesight were all high in the rigging. “If we’re lucky,” Chase confided in Sharpe, “we may catch her by nightfall.”

  “That soon?”

  “If we’re lucky,” the captain said again, then reached out and touched the wooden rail.

  The eastern sky was gray now, streaked with cloud, but soon a leak of pink, like the dye from a redcoat’s jacket seeping in the rain onto uniform trousers, suffused the gray. The ship quivered to the seas, left a white wake, raced. The pink turned red, and deeper red, glowing like a furnace over Africa. “They’ll have seen us by now,” Chase said, and took a speaking trumpet from the rail. “Keep your eyes sharp!” he called to the lookouts, then flinched. “That was unnecessary,” he chided himself, then corrected the damage by raising the trumpet again and promising a week’s worth of rum ration to the man who first sighted the enemy. “He deserves to be dead drunk,” Chase said.

  The east flared to brilliance and became too bright to look at as the sun at last inched above the horizon. Night had gone, the sea was spread naked under the burning sky and the Pucelle was alone.

  For the distant sail had vanished.

  Captain Llewellyn was angry. Everyone on board was irritated. The loss of the other ship had caused morale to plummet on the Pucelle so that small mistakes were constantly being made. The bosun’s mates were lashing out with their rope ends, officers were snarling, the crew was sullen, but Captain Llewellyn Llewellyn was genuinely angry and apprehensive.

  Before the ship sailed from England he had taken aboard a crate of grenades. “They’re French ones,” he told Sharpe, “so I’ve no idea what’s in them. Powder, of course, and some kind of fulminate. They’re made of glass. You light it, you throw it and you pray that it kills someone. Devilish things, they are, quite devilish.”

  But the grenades were lost. They were supposed to be in the forward magazine deep on the orlop deck, but a search by Llewellyn’s lieutenant and two sergeants had failed to find the devices. To Sharpe the loss of the grenades was just another blow of ill fortune on a day that seemed ill-starred for the Pucelle, but Llewellyn reckoned it was far more serious than that. “Some fool might have put them in the hold,” he said. “We bought them from the Viper when she was being refitted. They took them in an action off Antigua and their captain didn’t want them. Reckoned they were too dangerous. If Chase finds them in the hold he’ll crucify me, and I don’t blame him. Their proper place is in a magazine.”

  A dozen marines were organized into a search party and Sharpe joined them in the deep hold where the rats ruled and the ship’s stink was foully concentrated. Sharpe had no need to be there, Llewellyn had not even asked him to help, but he preferred to be doing something useful rather than endure the bad-tempered disappointment that had soured the deck ever since daybreak.

  It took three hours, but eventually a sergeant found the grenades in a box that had the word “biscuit” stenciled on its lid. “God knows what’s in the magazines, then,” Llewellyn said sarcastically. “They’re probably full of salt beef. That bloody man Cowper!” Cowper was the ship’s purser, in charge of the Pucelle’s supplies. The purser was not quite an officer, but was generally treated as one, and he was thoroughly disliked. “It’s the fate of pursers,” Llewellyn had told Sharpe, “to be hated. It is why God put them on earth. They are supposed to supply things, but rarely can, and if they do then the things are usually the wrong size or the wrong color or the wrong shape.” Pursers, like the army’s sutlers, could trade on their own account, and their venality was famous. “Cowper probably hid them,” Llewellyn said, “thinking he could sell them to some benighted savage. Bloody man!” Now, having cursed the purser, the Welshman took one of the grenades from the box and handed it to Sharpe. “Packed with scrap metal, see? That thing could go off like case shot!”

  Sharpe had never handled a grenade before. The old British ones, long discarded for being ineffective, had resembled a miniature shell that had been launched from a bowl-like attachment at the front of a musket, but this French weapon was made of a dark-green glass. The light was poor in the hold, but he held the grenade close t
o one of the marine’s lanterns and saw that the interior of the glass globe, which was about the size of a decent suet pudding, was packed with scraps of metal. A fuse protruded from one side, sealed with a ring of melted wax. “You light the fuse,” Llewellyn said, “throw the damn thing, and I suppose the glass container shatters when it falls. The lit fuse communicates to the powder and that’s the end of a Frenchman.” He paused, frowning at the glass ball. “I hope.” He took the grenade back and fondled it like a baby. “I wonder if Captain Chase would let us try one. If we had men standing by with buckets of water?”

  “Make a dirty mark on his nice clean deck?” Sharpe asked.

  “I suppose he won’t,” Llewellyn said sadly. “Still, if it comes to a battle I’ll give some to the boys up the masts and they can hurl them onto the enemy decks. They have to be good for something.”

  “Chuck ‘em overboard,” Sharpe advised.

  “Dear me, no! I don’t want to hurt the fish, Sharpe!”

  Llewellyn, hugely relieved by the discovery, had the precious grenades taken to the forward magazine and Sharpe followed the marines up the ladder to the orlop deck which, being beneath the water line, was almost as dark as the hold. The marines went forrard, while Sharpe went toward the stern, intending to climb to Chase’s dining cabin for midday dinner, but he could not use the companionway up to the lower deck for a man in a faded black coat was clambering unsteadily down the ladder. Sharpe instinctively waited, then saw that it was Malachi Braithwaite who so cautiously descended the rungs. Sharpe stepped swiftly back into the surgeon’s cabin where the red-painted walls and table waited for battle’s casualties and from there he watched Braithwaite take a lantern from a hook beside the companionway. The secretary fumbled with a tinderbox, blew on the charred linen to make a flame and lit the oil lamp. He put the lamp on the deck, then grunted as he heaved up the aft hatch of the hold to release a stench of bilge water and rot. Braithwaite shuddered, nerved himself, then took the lantern and clambered down into the ship’s depths.