Sharpe's Trafalgar

by Bernard Cornwell

  Some of the men were writing letters, using their guns as desks. Others wrote wills. Few could write, but those who could took the dictation of others and the letters were taken down to the safety of the orlop deck. The wind stayed feeble; indeed it seemed to Sharpe that the great swells coming from the west heaved the ships on with more effect than the wind. Those seas were monstrously long, looking like great smooth hills that ran silent and green toward the enemy. “I fear,” Chase said, coming to Sharpe’s side, “that we are in for a storm.”

  “You can tell?”

  “I hate those glassy swells,” Chase said, “and the sky has an ominous cast.” He looked behind the ship where the sky was darkening, while overhead the blue was crossed by bands of feathered white streaks. “Still,” he continued, “it should hold off long enough for this day’s business.”

  The band on the forecastle came to the end of one of its more ragged efforts and Chase went to the quarterdeck rail and held up a hand to keep them silent. The captain had still not ordered the drummer to beat to quarters, so most of the lower-deck men were on the weather deck and that great throng now looked up at Chase expectantly, then stood respectfully when he doffed his hat. The officers copied him. “We shall be handing out a drubbing to the Frenchies and Dons today, men,” Chase said, “and I know you will make me proud!” A murmur of agreement sounded from the men crowded about the guns. “But before we go about our business,” Chase went on, “I would like to commend all our souls to Almighty God.” He took a prayer book from his pocket and leafed through its pages, seeking the Prayer to Be Said Before a Fight at Sea Against Any Enemy. He was not an outwardly religious man, but the captain had a blithe faith in God that was almost as strong as his trust in Nelson. He read the prayer in a strong voice, his fair hair lifting to the small wind. “Stir up thy strength, O Lord, and come and help us. Let not our sins cry against us for vengeance, but hear us, thy poor servants, begging mercy and imploring thy help, that thou would’st be a defense unto us against the enemy. O Lord of Hosts, fight for us. Suffer us not to sink under the weight of our sins or the violence of the enemy. O Lord, arise, help us, and deliver us for thy name’s sake.” The men called out amen and some of them crossed themselves. Chase put his hat on. “We shall have a glorious victory! Listen to your officers, don’t waste shot! I warrant you I shall lay us alongside an enemy and then it is up to you and I know the wretches will regret the day they met the Pucellel” He smiled, then nodded at the band. “I think we could suffer ‘Hearts of Oak’ once more?”

  The men cheered him and the band struck up again. Some of the gunners were dancing the hornpipe. A woman appeared on the weather deck, carrying a can of water to one of the gun crews. She was a stocky young woman, pale after being concealed below decks for so long and raggedly dressed in a long skirt and a threadbare shawl. She had red hair that hung lank and filthy and the men, pleased to see her, teased her as she threaded her way across the crowded deck. The officers pretended not to notice her.

  “How many women are aboard?” Lady Grace had come to stand beside Sharpe. She was wearing a blue dress, a wide-brimmed hat, and a long black boat cloak.

  Sharpe glanced guiltily toward Lord William, but his lordship was deep in conversation with Lieutenant Haskell. “Chase tells me there are at least a half-dozen,” Sharpe said. “They hide themselves.”

  “And they will shelter in the battle?”

  “Not with you.”

  “It doesn’t seem fair.”

  “Life isn’t fair,” Sharpe said. “How do you feel?”

  “Healthy,” she said, and indeed she looked glowing. Her eyes were bright and her cheeks, that had been so pale when Sharpe first saw her in Bombay, were full of color. She touched his arm briefly. “You will take care, Richard?”

  “I shall take care,” he promised, though he doubted that his life or death were in his own keeping this day.

  “If the ship is taken ... “ Lady Grace said hesitantly.

  “It won’t be,” Sharpe interrupted her.

  “If it is,” she said earnestly, “I do not want to meet another man like that lieutenant on the Calliope. I can use a pistol.”

  “But you have none?” Sharpe asked. She shook her head and Sharpe drew out his own pistol and held it toward her. They were standing close together at the quarterdeck rail and no one behind could see the gift which Lady Grace took, then pushed into a pocket of the heavy cloak. “It’s loaded,” Sharpe warned her.

  “I shall take care,” she promised him, “and I doubt I will need it, but it gives me a comfort. It’s something of yours, Richard.”

  “You already have something of mine,” he said.

  “Which I will protect,” she said. “God bless you, Richard.”

  “And you, my lady.”

  She walked away from him, watched by her husband. Sharpe stared doggedly forward. He would borrow another pistol from Captain Llewellyn whose marines were lining the forecastle rails and sometimes leaning outboard to see the distant enemy.

  Chase had gathered his officers and Sharpe, curious, went to listen as the captain outlined what Nelson had told him on board the Victory. The British fleet, Chase said, was not going to form a line parallel to the enemy, which was the accepted method of fighting a sea battle, but intended to sail its two columns directly into the enemy’s line. “We shall chop their line into three pieces,” Chase said, “and destroy them piecemeal. If I fall, gentlemen, then your only duty is to stand on, pass through their line, then lay the ship alongside an enemy.”

  Captain Llewellyn shuddered, then drew Sharpe to one side. “I don’t like it,” the Welshman said. “It’s none of my business, of course, I am merely a marine, but you will have noticed, Sharpe, surely, that we have no guns to speak of in the bow of the ship?”

  “I had noticed,” Sharpe said.

  “The foremost guns can fire somewhat forward, but not directly forward, and what the admiral is proposing, Sharpe, is that we sail straight toward the enemy who will have their broadsides pointing at us!” Llewellyn shook his head sadly. “I don’t have to spell that out to you, do I?”

  “Of course not.”

  Llewellyn spelled it out nonetheless. “They can fire at us and we cannot return the fire! They will rake us, Sharpe. You know what raking is? You rake an enemy when your broadside faces his defenseless stern or bow, and it is the quickest way to reduce a ship to kindling. And for how long will we be defenseless under their guns? At this speed, Sharpe, for at least twenty minutes. Twenty minutes! They can pour round shot into us, they can tear our rigging to pieces with chain and bar, they can dismast us, and what can we do in return?”

  “Nothing, sir.”

  “You have grasped the point,” Llewellyn said, “but as I said it is none of my business. But the fighting tops, Sharpe, they are my business. Do you know what the captain has ordered?”

  “No men in the tops,” Sharpe said.

  “How could he order such a thing?” Llewellyn demanded indignantly. “The Frogs, now, they’ll have men in the rigging like spiders in a web, and they’ll be pouring nastiness on us, and we must just cower on the deck? It isn’t right, Sharpe, it isn’t right. And if I cannot put men up the masts then I cannot use my grenades!” He sounded aggrieved. “They are too dangerous to keep on deck, so I’ve left them in the forward magazine.” He stared at the enemy fleet which was now less than two miles away. “Still,” Llewellyn went on, “we shall beat them.”

  The Britannia, which followed the Pucelle, was a slow ship and so a long gap had opened between the two. There were similar gaps in both columns, but none so wide as the gap between Collingwood’s Royal Sovereign and the rest of his squadron. “He’ll be fighting alone for a time,” Llewellyn said, then turned because Connors, the signal lieutenant, had called that the flagship was signaling.

  It was an immensely long signal, so long that when the Euryalus repeated the message the flags needed to be flown from all three of the frigate’s masts where the pe
nnants made bright splashes of color against the white sails. “Well?” Chase demanded of Connors.

  The signal lieutenant waited for the feeble wind to spread some of the flags, then paused as he tried to remember the flag code. It was a recent code, and simple enough, for each flag corresponded to a letter, but some combinations of flags were used to transmit whole words or sometimes phrases, and there were over three thousand such combinations to be memorized and it was evident that this long signal, which required no less than thirty-two flags, was using some of the more obscure words of the system. Connors frowned, then suddenly made sense of it. “From the admiral, sir. England expects that every man will do his duty.”

  “I should damn well think so,” Chase said indignantly.

  “What about the Welsh?” Llewellyn asked with an equal indignation, then smiled. “Ah, but the Welsh need no encouragement to do their duty. It’s you bloody English who have to be chivvied.”

  “Pass the message on to the men,” Chase ordered his officers and, in contrast to the resentful reception the message had received on the quarterdeck, it provoked cheers from the crew.

  “He must be bored,” Chase said, “sending messages like that. Is it in your notebook, Mister Collier?”

  The midshipman nodded eagerly. “It’s written down, sir.”

  “You noted the time?”

  Collier reddened. “I will, sir, I will.”

  “Thirty-six minutes past eleven, Mister Collier,” Chase said, inspecting his pocket watch, “and if you are uncertain of the time of any message you will find the wardroom’s clock has been conveniently placed under the poop on the larboard side. And by consulting that clock, Mister Collier, you will be hidden from the enemy and so might stop them from removing your head with a well-aimed round shot.”

  “It’s not a very big head, sir,” Collier said bravely, “and my place is near you, sir.”

  “Your place, Mister Collier, is where you can see both the signals and the clock, and I suggest you stand under the break of the poop.”

  “Yes, sir,” Collier said, wondering how he was expected to see any signals while standing in the shelter of the poop deck.

  Chase was staring at the enemy, drumming his fingers on the rail. He was nervous, but no more so than any other man on the Pucelle. “Look at the Saucy” Chase said, pointing ahead to where the Temeraire was trying to overtake the Victory, but the Victory had unfurled her topgallant stud-dingsails and so held onto her lead. “He really shouldn’t go first through their line,” Chase said, frowning, then turned. “Captain Llewellyn!”

  “Sir?”

  “Your drummer can beat to quarters, I think.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” Llewellyn replied, then nodded to his drummer boy who hitched his instrument up, raised his sticks, then beat out the rhythm of the song “Hearts of Oak.”

  “And God preserve us all,” Chase said as the men crowding the weather deck began to disappear down the hatchways to man the lower-deck euns. The drummer kept on beating as he went down the quarterdeck steps. The boy would beat the call to arms all about the ship, though not one sailor aboard needed the summons. They had long been ready.

  “Open gunports, sir?” Haskell asked.

  “No, we’ll wait, we’ll wait,” Chase said, “but tell the gunners to load another shot on top of the first, then put in a charge of grape.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  The Pucelle’s guns would now be double-shotted, with a cluster of nine smaller balls ahead of the bigger round shot. Such a charge, Chase explained to Sharpe, was deadly at close range. “And we can’t fire till we’re in the thick of them, so we might as well hurt them badly with our opening broadside.” The captain turned to Lord William. “My lord, I think you should go below.”

  “Not yet, surely?” It was Lady Grace who answered. “No one has fired.”

  “Soon,” Chase said, “soon.”

  Lord William scowled, as if disapproving of his wife questioning the captain’s orders, but Lady Grace just stared ahead at the enemy as if she was memorizing the extraordinary sight of an horizon filled by ships of the line. Lieutenant Peel was surreptitiously sketching her in his notebook, trying to capture the tilt of her profiled face and its expression of intent fascination. “Which is the enemy admiral’s ship?” she asked Chase.

  “We can’t tell, my lady. They haven’t put out their flags.”

  “Who is the enemy admiral?” Lord William asked.

  “Villeneuve, my lord,” Chase answered, “or so Lord Nelson believes.”

  “Is he a capable man?” Lord William asked.

  “Compared to Nelson, my lord, no one is capable, but I am told Villeneuve is no fool.”

  The band had gone to their stations so the ship was oddly quiet as she heaved forward on the big swells. The wind just filled the sails, though in every lull, or when the waves drove the ship faster, the canvas sagged before lazily stretching again. Chase stared southward at the Royal Sovereign which was now far ahead of Collingwood’s other ships as, under every possible sail, she headed toward a lonely battle in the thick of the enemy fleet. “How far is she from the enemy?” he asked.

  “A thousand yards?” Haskell guessed.

  “I’d say so,” Chase said. “The enemy will open on her soon.”

  “Bounce won’t like that,” Lieutenant Peel said with a smile.

  “Bounce?” Chase asked. “Oh! Collingwood’s dog.” He smiled. “It hates gunfire, doesn’t it? Poor dog.” He turned to stare beyond his own bows. It was possible to estimate now where the Pucelle would meet the enemy line and Chase was working out how many ships would be able to batter him while he sailed his defenseless bows toward them. “When we come under fire, Mister Haskell, we shall order the crew to lie down.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “It won’t be for three quarters of an hour yet,” Chase said, then frowned. “I hate waiting. Send me wind! Send me wind! What’s the time, Mister Collier?”

  “Ten minutes of twelve, sir,” Collier called from under the poop.

  “So we should meet their fire at half past midday,” Chase said, “and by one o’clock we’ll be among them.”

  “They’ve opened!” It was Connors who shouted the words, pointing toward the southern part of the enemy line where one ship was wreathed in gray and white smoke which blossomed to hide her hull entirely.

  “Make a note in the log!” Chase ordered, and just then the sound of the broadside came like a ripple of thunder across the sea. White splashes punctured the swells ahead of the Royal Sovereign’s bows, showing that the enemy’s opening salvo had fallen short, but a moment later another half-dozen ships opened fire.

  “It sounds precisely like thunder,” Lady Grace said in amazement.

  The Victory was still too far from the northern part of the enemy’s fleet to be worth firing at, and so the vast majority of the French and Spanish ships stayed silent. Just the six ships kept firing, their shots whipping the sea to foam ahead of Collingwood’s flagship. Perhaps it was the sound of those guns that prompted the enemy to reveal their colors at last for, one by one, their ensigns appeared so that the approaching British could distinguish between their enemies. The French tricolor appeared brighter than the Spanish royal flag which was dark red and white. “There, my lady,” Chase said, pointing forward, “you can see the French admiral’s flag? At the masthead of the ship just behind the Santisima Trinidad.”

  The Royal Sovereign must have been taking shots, for she suddenly fired two of her forward guns so that their smoke would hide her hull as it drifted with the feeble wind. Sharpe took out his telescope, trained it on Collingwood’s flagship, and saw a sail twitch as a round shot whipped through the canvas, and now he could see other holes in the sails and he knew the enemy must be firing at her rigging in an attempt to stop her brave advance. Yet she stood on, studdingsails set, widening the gap between her and the Belleisle, the Mars and the Tonnant which were the next three ships astern. The splashes of the enemy
gunfire began to land about those ships now. None could fire back, and none could expect to open fire for at least twenty minutes. They must simply endure and hope to repay the bartering when they reached the line. Chase turned. “Mister Collier?”

  “Sir?”

  “You will escort Lord William and Lady Grace to the lady hole. Use the aft hatchway in the gunroom. Your maid will accompany you, my lady.”

  “We are not under fire, Captain,” Lady Grace objected.

  “You will oblige me, my lady,” Chase insisted.

  “Come, Grace,” Lord William said. He still wore his sword and pistol, but made no attempt to stay on deck. “May I wish you well, Captain.”

  “Your sentiments are much appreciated, my lord. I thank you.”

  Lady Grace gave Sharpe a last look, and he dared not answer it with a smile for Lord William would see it, but he met her gaze and held it till she turned away. Then she was gone down the quarterdeck steps and Sharpe felt a horrid pang of loss.

  The Pucelle was catching up with the Conqueror now and Chase took her toward that ship’s starboard side. He stared at the enemy through his glass and suddenly called Sharpe. “Our old friend, Sharpe.”

  “Sir?”

  “There, look.” He pointed. “You see the Santisima Trinidad? The big ship?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Six ships back. It’s the Revenant.”

  Sharpe trained his telescope and counted the ships astern of the vast four-decked Spanish battleship, and there, suddenly, was the familiar black and yellow hull and as he gazed he saw the ports open and the guns appear. Then the Revenant vanished in smoke.

  And the Victory was under fire, and the enemy could not hope to escape to Cadiz because, despite the fickle wind, there would be a battle. Thirty-four enemy ships would take on twenty-eight British. Two thousand five hundred and sixty-eight enemy guns, manned by thirty thousand French and Spanish seamen would face two thousand one hundred and forty-eight guns crewed by seventeen thousand British tars.