“Whatever they are, Mister Langlie, they ain’t French,” Lewrie said, after he had gotten a closer look at their foe. “They’re Black! Ev‘ry man jack of ’em, from what I can see.”
The surviving sloop and lugger were within four cables as they completed crossing the wind’s eye and began to gather speed for their run to safety, and Lewrie could pick out details. The men aboard them were armed, and wore a semblance of uniforms; cocked hats, military or civilian, but all decorated with the red-white-blue cockade of revolutionary French Jacobins … white breeches and colourful sashes, into which pistols, swords, or cutlasses were jammed. Some wore shirts and dark blue French uniform coats, or coats with no shirts; some had to make do in waistcoats and no shirts, but with crossbelts and brass breastplates in the middle of their chests. There were a few in full uniforms and plumed hats, wearing officer’s swords, and dragoon boots, or breeches without stockings or any footwear. But all bore muskets with their bayonets already affixed.
Closer still, and Lewrie could see kegs of what could only be taken for gunpowder, kegs at which some rebel slave soldiers chopped with hand axes and tomahawks, while others worked at flints and lint to kindle sparks and flames, whilst others held oiled-rag torches to be … !
“Damn my eyes, Mister Langlie, I do believe those bastards mean to blow themselves to Kingdom Come, and us with ’em!” he shouted as the two small craft fell off the wind even more and, gathering speed, began to turn toward Proteus’s stern quarters … attacking the frigate!
“Marines to the quarterdeck, Mister Devereux! Man the swivels and the carronades, smartly now!” Lewrie urged, feeling a bit of panic. “Mister Winwood, a bit more speed t‘get clear of ’em. Mister Wyman? A broadside would do right nicely, ’bout now!”
“Coming, sir, directly!”
“So’s bloody Christmas!” Lewrie muttered under his breath, too fearful of the suicidal slaveys to care about “captainly” behaviour.
“Dem fools got de ‘nutmegs,’ sah,” Cox’n Andrews breathed in awe as he appeared unbidden but welcome at Lewrie’s side, with a brace of pistols and Lewrie’s trusty Ferguson rifle and its accoutrements. “Dey Law’, dey’s laughin’!”
About two cables’ distance now, the small boats surging up to carronade range, and Lewrie could hear a chant that nigh-shriveled his “stones” above the rumble of gun-trucks and the drum of running feet.
“Eh Eh! Heu! Canga, bafio té!
Canga, moune de le! Canga, do ki la!
Canga, li!”
“What the Devil’s all that?” Lewrie demanded to know.
“Don’ know, sah … Obeah stuff, maybe,” Andrews replied, crossing himself for luck and blanching a touch pale. “Some sorta witchie workin’. Voodoo … voudoun. Deir Creole tongue.”
“On the up-roll … fire!” Wyman screeched, at long last.
Not a full second after the guns erupted, before the spent gunpowder could even begin to wing alee, there came a huge tongue of yellow flame off the starboard side amid a titanic gust of wind that flung a pea-soup fog of reeking, blue-white smoke at them, stinging hot, and shot through with splinters, chunks, and burning embers! In that stentorian blasting roar, shrieks and screams could be heard. Things went wetly Plop! against the deck where they stood!
“Aah … that’s part of a hand,” Lt. Langlie said in a shuddery voice as he recognised the object.
“Get it overside, and let’s sink the other one,” Lewrie snapped, nauseated by the sight. The smoke of the broadside, and the blast, was clearing very slowly, and the second one still lived … somewhere out there.
“There, sir!” Marine Lt. Devereux shouted, pointing at a vague outline. It was the one-masted sloop, rounding up within a cable off Proteus’s starboard quarter … chasing her!
“Six pounders and swivels, aim aft!” Lewrie shouted, gathering up his rifle. “Marines, put ’em down!”
“Eh! Eh! Heu! Heu! Canga, bafio té!”
“Marines, cock your locks! Level … by volley … fire!”
“Canga, moune de le! Canga, do ki la!”
Lewrie took aim, the action at full cock, and squeezed the trigger of his Ferguson. The butt slammed back into his shoulder with an emphatic reassuring thump. His target, an “officer” in a blue coat over ebony skin and ragged field workers’ trousers, clapped both hands to his face as the bullet took him in the left cheek, knocking his ornate cocked hat off as he left his feet and flew backwards into the tillerman and some sheettenders. The stutter of a volley of Brown Bess muskets followed a second later, and half a dozen Blacks were cut down, their cheering and shouting stopped. Swivel guns mounted in the metal forks atop the taff-rail and after starboard bulwarks barked and yapped, spewing handfuls of grapeshot or .75 caliber musket balls in a deadly hail that chopped down even more. Then the 6-pounders, loaded with roundshot and stands of grapeshot, began to fire, slamming so hard that chunks of hull and bodies were flung skyward, almost burying the sloop’s bow in its own wave as it was bludgeoned to a stop.
“Canga, li!”
A torch was lowered to an open powder keg, the bearer bleeding from a dozen wounds, but still chanting and screaming at them. Before more musketry could bring him down, he smiled and shoved the fire into the keg—“Canga, li!” his dying comrades gleefully urged him!
“Duck!” Lewrie shouted, along with twenty others.
Not one hundred yards astern in Proteus’s wake, the sloop went up in a boil of flame-shot smoke, smashing in every transom window and taff-rail lanthorn glass pane. A huge, feathery pillar of water arose, bearing up planks and oars, bits of mast, seared ropes, and gobbets of flesh … to patter down amid a foetid shower of seawater!
The people on the quarterdeck got back to their feet, mumbling and working their jaws, tugging at their ears from the assault on eardrums and sinuses. A few even bled from their ears and noses.
Astern, there were now two roiled circles of white spume, with only a few identifiable bits of wreckage to be seen
“Don’t s’pose there’s much point in looking for survivors, is there, sir,” Lieutenant Langlie said; it wasn’t a question. He looked stunned.
“No … I doubt there is, Mister Langlie,” Lewrie replied, his own ears ringing like Bow Bells. With an outward calm he did not feel, he cranked the breech of the Ferguson open, bit off a cartridge, then shoved it ball-first into the breech and cranked it shut. He primed the pan and closed the frizzen. “Now, let’s come about and see to the other two boats, sir. Place us up to windward of them, and we’ll use the larboard battery. No closer than two cables to ’em.”
“Quite, sir,” Langlie enthusiastically agreed.
“Carpenter to sound the well, and inspect the transom from the bilges up. Water carries the power of explosives better than air, I’m told,” Lewrie prosed on, slinging the rifle, and turning to Andrews to take his double-barreled pistols to load and prime them, too. “We may have a plank stove in below the waterline from … that.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Anyone hurt?” Lewrie called out. “Yer bowels still work?”
His still shaken crew began to chuckle; even if more than a few were shifting their slop-trousers and clawing at their fundaments, as if their bowels had worked just hellish-fine, thankee.
“Ah, still living, Mister Winwood?” Lewrie chirped.
“Aye, sir. Never seen the like, sir,” Winwood marvelled, about as much as Winwood could sound surprised by anything. “Why, they must be mad as a hatter to immolate themselves like that! Drunk as swine!”
“Anything t‘kill oppressors, more-like, Mister Winwood,” Lewrie speculated, still working his jaw, popping his mouth open like a fish to fully restore his hearing. “They tried t’sink us. Or die tryin’.”
“They came out here deliberately then, do you think, sir?”
“Runnin’ arms and powder along the coast,” Lewrie said, shrugging in perplexity. “The roads must be horrid, with all those mountain ranges ashore, as bad as Italy. We were t
old that this L’Ouverture was out to invade Spanish Santo Domingo. We might have put a spoke in his wheel for a few weeks by intercepting these … madmen. Perhaps the other two boats’ll tell us more. Do we take a prisoner or two?”
Wouldn’t put it past ‘em, Lewrie imagined, though; sent ’em out to sink a blockading ship? Lured us in? Was it deliberate? Jesus!
Proteus wore off the wind again to due West, well clear of her previous encounter, reduced sail, and ghosted down on the two crippled boats. In the short space of time since they had maimed them, one of them, the smaller sloop, had sunk, and only her bow bobbed upright in the sea, with a few wailing survivors clinging to it. The lugger was low in the water, and people were bailing with hats, pails, and their hands, others trying to rig a jury-mast from a pair of oars atop her planked-over forepeak, attempting to spread the leach and foot of her after lugsail to the wind by extending the oars out like cat’s whiskers, with the tack of the sail shinnied up the foremast. As the frigate neared the lugger, wailing could be heard, and her crew, augmented by survivors from the sunken sloop, took up arms and stood trembling but game, some levelling their muskets at an impossible range.
“Pass the word for Surgeon’s Mate Mister Durant,” Lewrie said. “He speaks good French. Those slaves once got their work orders in it.”
The larboard 12-pounders were run out and ready, the carronades and 6-pounders manned, as were the swivels. Devereux’s Marines stood along the larboard gangway with their muskets, and a boarding party in Wyman’s charge had cutlasses slung in baldrics over their shoulders, more muskets and pistols in their hands, and boarding pikes ready to deter any more suicidal charges.
“A point more alee, Mister Langlie,” Lewrie ordered. And their frigate veered even closer to the lugger.
“Less than a cable, sir,” Winwood warned.
“Mister Sevier … a shot from the bow-chaser! No shot across the bows … hull her if you can!”
The 6-pounder on the forecastle yapped, and its ball hit short but in line with the lugger, to carom off the sea and bound across her deck at head-height, scattering the close-packed Blacks, and killing a couple of the taller or slower ones.
“Ah, Mister Durant,” Lewrie said, turning to the Surgeon’s Mate. “Since my French is so execrable, perhaps you might try to make them see reason, and surrender. No one’ll be harmed, tell ’em. I’ll even let them go, once we’ve inspected their boat, and had a chance to interrogate them. They don’t stand a mouse’s chance, else. I’ll set ’em ashore, unarmed, and I’ll sink the boat, but they’ll live. We’re not grands blancs … we’re British.”
“I will try, Capitaine,” Durant vowed, stepping to the bulkwark. “Bonjour, mes amis!” he began, and slanged a long palaver in Frog.
“Reddition?” came a defiant shout at the end of that. “jamais!”
“Zey do not believe us, Capitaine. He say, we are all blancs, French or British, it is no matter. Zey die before zey surrender.”
“Do they have powder aboard, like the others, sir …” Langlie cautioned.
“Mister Wyman? You may open upon the lugger,” Lewrie ordered. “One broadside only … from the main battery guns. Damn the fools!”
“As you bear … on the up-roll … fire!”
Proteus roared and shook, flinging defiance for defiance, and a new chorus of screams erupted as the lugger was shredded at such short range. As the smoke of the broadside drifted down alee and past that lugger, she was revealed as a total wreck. Her mast was gone, and the jury-rig up forrud was wiped away, along with the men who had tended it. The lugger’s starboard side was shot through like a colander and she heeled with her rails awash to the sea. Of her crew …
There might have been fifty or sixty men crammed aboard, before that broadside. Now her decks were piled with offal, with the dying and dead wallowing in their own life’s blood, in a coiling mass of entrails and body parts! There were some in the water, splashing about and trying to swim or grab some flotsam on which to gasp and keen.
“Now we’ll close-her,” Lewrie snapped,”before she goes under. Mister Wyman, a boarding party to search her for papers, anything. Mister Langlie, lower a boat for Mister Wyman’s party.”
“Aye, sir,” Langlie parroted, though not sounding happy.
“Fetch to, sir. Stand down the larboard battery, but keep the swivels and six-pounders manned. About a cable’s distance, hmmm?”
Lieutenant Wyman’s boat had barely reached the stricken lugger, he’d barely had time for a very quick snatch-and-grab from her decks, before she slipped under in a welter of bubbles and foam, and sank, forcing those few members of the boarding party who’d gained her rivened deck to scramble for their lives. As she rolled over and sank stern-first, Lewrie could see that the lugger had been big enough for a coach-top and some accommodations below her main deck, with a canvas spread over a cargo hatch between the stumps of her masts. Lieutenant Wyman waved, then smiled, showing that everyone in his boat was uninjured and returning safely. Wyman steered well clear of the Blacks swimming near his boat, though, with some of his hands levelling their muskets or pistols at the bobbing heads.
“Ho, here’s one, sir!” Able Seaman Inman cried from the entry-port, pointing down over the starboard side, which was now alee of the winds. Lewrie peered over to see the muscular, mahoghany-skinned man in the water below the boarding-battens and man-ropes, treading water and bleeding from the mouth, and a scalp wound upon his shaven pate. In the water, his skin was as shiny as a seal pelt.
“Don’t got a fuse and powder keg wif ‘im, does ’e?” Yeoman of the Powder Foster cracked.
“Mister Devereux, have your Marines fetch him here. He might talk to us,” Lewrie decided. “I’ll have more need of your services, Mister Durant. Now we’ve gotten this’un into a more amenable mood.” From Lewrie’s vantage point high above, the man did seem shattered, a pathetic, pleading half-grin on his features. He even raised his hands upwards in supplication.
Inman waved him up, leaning out the entry-port. “Come on, you son of a whore. Up ye get. Come on, we won’t eat ye! Safe, see?”
The man nodded, querying, as if he could not believe his luck, pointing to his chest as if to say “Who, me?” before thrusting upward from the water and grabbing the lowermost wooden batten in one hand, then a man-rope in the other, slithering and scraping along the barnacles at the waterline, wincing with the pain, but scaling the side as Proteus rolled and wallowed, the boarding-battens first vertical, then easier to climb.
“That’s th’ way, mate, up ye get. There’ll be a cup o’ grog in yer gullet in no time, laddy,” Inman encouraged, reaching down as the man got near the lip of the entry-port.
“’Ware! ’Ware!” Lt. Wyman shouted from the boat as it neared, a pistol in his hand, awkwardly dragged from his waist belt. “Knife!”
“Canga! Heu!” the survivor screamed, whipping out a long cane knife secreted in the back of his ragged trousers, and slicing Inman’s throat almost to the spine with a single backward slash!
Wyman’s pistol barked and the Black stiffened, back arched and blood spouting from his mouth as he was lung-shot, before letting go and falling back into the sea with a large splash … followed not a moment later by Inman’s body, that fell into the same target of roiled water! Fresh-killed, their lungs still full of air, after a deep, dead plunge they both wafted to the surface, almost arm-in-arm.
“God Almighty damn!” Lewrie breathed, shuddery and faint from surprise and shock. “Get him aboard, get Inman back aboard, now!”
“No use, Capitaine,” Mr. Durant sadly said. “What ze noir did to him …” Durant sucked his teeth and shook his head.
“I don’t give a damn, I won’t have him in the water with that treacherous, murderin’ bastard!” Lewrie raved.
Sheets and halliards and braces were flung overside, safely belayed about the pin-rails, and a dozen hands sprang down to the chain platforms with quickly fashioned loops of line to snag Inman and bring him alongside, t
hen coil them about his body and haul him back up to where others could take hold of his arms and lay him out on the gangway.
Lewrie went forward, his head like to burst with rage, but his feet as benumbed as if he were walking on pillows, until he stood over the body, removing his hat in reverence, as the people parted and made way. My fault, my fault, my bloody goddamned fault! he thought, full of hate for himself. Inman leaked a great puddle of water from soggy slop-clothing, leaked from that huge, ghastly rent in his throat … .
“My fault,” he croaked, having to swallow hard and cough before he could talk further. “Wanted prisoners … information! Damn ’em! Should’ve known … my fault.”
“Nossir, couldn’t a known!” Bosun Pendarves countered, raising an agreeing chorus from the hands nearby.
“Savages!” someone else spat. “Ya can’t show mercy, ’coz they don’t know what it is!”
“Ain’t Christians, like us’uns,” another growled.
“They sunk us wif’at powder, they‘da slit our throats, quick enough,” Mr. Neale, the Master-At-Arms supposed aloud. “Let’s kill ’em all, all that still tread water!”
“No!” Lewrie shouted. “We’ll leave ‘em. Let ’em sink, swim, or be taken by sharks, as God wills. ’Twas my fault that Inman died, our only casualty. We’ll give him a proper shipmate’s burial tonight, at sunset. And I’ll not have his welcome to Heaven ruined by more murder.”
“Amen, sor,” Landsman Furfy said, teary-eyed and sniffling, hat in hand and leaning on his mate, the leaner and shorter Liam Desmond.
“We know the rules, now,” Lewrie announced, close to tears himself, irritably dashing at his eyes with a coat sleeve. “We know how they mean to fight … and how much they hate us. We … I’ll not be mistaken the next time. Next time, we’ll stand off and shoot ’em to kindling. Survivors, bedamned!”
Sea of Grey Page 25
