The Baltic Gambit
Page 36
“Ah,” Lt. Eades replied with a wry bark. “Resurrection!”
“Just so,” Lt. Fox said with a nod. “But here’s the wind, and here we are, so I suppose we’ll be going in.”
“Get it over with,” Lt. Eades said, chin up and determined; even if his mittened fingers continually flexed on the hilt of his sword in nervousness. “Waiting’s the rum part. Though our captain seems to be coping.”
They both looked aft to see Capt. Alan Lewrie, turned out in his best-dress uniform with both his medals, swaddling furs traded for his grogram boat-cloak, at last; Capt. Lewrie was sipping a last hot mug of tea, and chewing on a thick, fatty-bacon sandwich. Between bites, he was chatting with the Second Officer, Lt. Dick Farley, and looking as unperturbed as the Royal Navy wished of its officers.
“Mmm,” Lt. Ballard, the First Officer, wryly commented, having caught part of Fox’s and Eades’s conversation, “perhaps the captain’s seals will look after us, sirs,” he seemed to scoff. It was such an odd departure from Ballard’s usual taciturn nature that both officers gawped in surprise, unsure whether Ballard was making a subtle jape, or being slyly insubordinate.
“Boat ahoy!” Midshipman Tillyard called to the approaching gig, though all could see that it was their Sailing Master, Mr. Lyle, along with their civilian adviser, Capt. Hardcastle, returning. Midshipman Sealey, their eldest, and the Captain’s Cox’n, Liam Desmond, could be seen in the stern-sheets as they conned the gig smartly alongside the ship’s side.
Desmond and the boat crew had had a busy night, and an equally busy morning; at 7 A.M., the flagship had signalled “Captains of the Fleet are to come to the Admiral,” requiring Lewrie to be rowed out to Elephant for final instructions. Barely had Lewrie returned when the flagship had hoisted a signal to summon all masters and pilots.
“All’s in order, Mister Lyle?” Capt. Lewrie asked once the man was back on the quarterdeck.
“All’s not, sir!” Lyle spat, “the spineless, puling lotta. . . . !”
“The merchant masters and pilots have refused to conn our ships in, Captain Lewrie,” Capt. Hardcastle supplied. “Demurred, I think the kindest word would be.”
“Should be flung in irons, flogged . . . keel-hauled!” Mr. Lyle fumed. “Were they Navy masters, they would be!”
“I don’t know where Admiralty dredged up the fools, sir,” Capt. Hardcastle stuck in. “They insist the deep channel’s alongside of the Middle Ground, and the shore side of the King’s Deep is too shoal, but we can all see that’s wrong. Equidistant of the shoal, and the foe, and we’ll have five, six fathom, sure, sir.”
“Hoist from the flag, sir!” Midshipman Furlow shouted. “It’s a special . . . Number Fourteen!” He looked quickly through his slim ledger book for the sheet of addendums of Nelson’s own devising. “ ‘Prepare for battle, with springs on the anchors, and the end of the sheet cables taken in by a stern port,’ sir!” he translated.
“Very well, Mister Furlow,” Lewrie replied. “Mister Ballard . . . bring the ship to Quarters, if ye please.”
Furniture, sea-chests and personal belongings, deal partitions, and temporary bulkheads had been struck to the orlop hours before, as had the Franklin stoves, once their fires had been staunched and their embers and ashes cast overside. Chain slings and anti-boarding nets had been rigged while Lewrie had been aboard the flag soon after the hands had stowed their hammocks and breakfasted. The galley fires had been extinguished half an hour before (with Lewrie’s last mug of tea warmed in hot sand in the brick fire-boxes below the cauldrons), and the spring and kedge anchor cable had been laid out just after the hands had finished sweeping, sanding, and scrubbing the decks, so HMS Thermopylae had just been waiting for Vice Admiral Nelson’s order.
Bosuns’ calls piped “All Hands,” and Dimmock and Pulley roared orders. The Marine drummer began the Long Roll, with the aid of the fifer, and Thermopylae shuddered as hundreds of men spilled up companionway ladders from the faint warmth of their berth-deck to the guns.
Bowsings were cast off cold barrels and truck-carriages; tackle was laid out for free running, and the guns run in to the extent of the breeching ropes. Rams, spongers, and worms appeared from stowage over the mess tables, which themselves were now hinged up and lashed out of the way. Crow-levers were laid out to help shift the carriages, and gun-captains were issued the removable flintlock strikers, the trigger lines, and priming wires used to puncture powder cartridges, once seated in the breeches, along with powder quills should the strikers fail.
Decks were sanded and wetted for traction, and the water tubs between the guns were topped up for sponging between shots, and slow-match was issued, to be coiled about the tubs with the lit end trapped in a notch, hanging over the water, to ignite the quills the old way.
Barefoot powder monkeys went below to queue up before the felt and leather screens at the door of the magazine, the screens properly wetted and weighted at the bottoms, to keep out sparks, which could send the tons of gunpowder stored within off in a titanic blast. Inside the magazine, the Master Gunner, Mr. Tunstall, his Mate, Shallcross, and the Yeoman of the Powder, Bohanon, in list slippers and leather aprons, passed out the first sewn cartridge bags, which the powder monkeys put into their leather or wooden cylinders.
Tompions were removed from the muzzles, and gun-captains chose the roundest, truest shot from the rope garlands or hatchway racks for the first broadsides, turning them over and over in their hands until satisfied.
“Load!” and the powder monkeys darted forward from the centreline of the deck and handed cartridges to the loaders, then once more dashed below for another, while loaders shoved cartridge down the iron throats of the guns, and the rammer men thumped them home. Round-shot came next, to be thumped in place, too, followed by damp waddings.
“Up ports!” and the gun-port lids were lowered, their blood red inner faces making a chequerboard against the wide, pale yellow horizontal hull stripe.
“Run out!” and gun crews threw themselves on the tackles, heaving ’til the truck-carriages thudded against the bulwarks, the wooden wheels and their ungreased axles rumbling and sqealing. The run-out tackles, blocked to the ring bolts set into the deck, were overhauled, as were the recoil tackles, and gun-captains and senior quarter gunners stuck one hand in the air to show that they were ready, and which was first. The powder monkeys returned with their second cartridges and knelt amidships, where they would bide ’til the artillery fired, and a further supply of propellant charge was needed.
“Marines at Quarters, sir,” Lt. Eades reported with a doff of his hat. Sharpshooters were in the fighting tops of each mast, a file of Marines were posted down both sail-tending gangways, and sea-soldiers with bayonetted muskets stood guard at each companionway hatch to make sure that, from that moment, only officers, powder monkeys, Midshipmen, or the Surgeon’s loblolly boys, with their stretchers to fetch wounded to the orlop surgery, could go below, or come up. “Arms chests opened, and weapons ready to hand, as well.”
“Very good, sir,” Lewrie replied.
“The ship as at Quarters, sir,” Lt. Ballard reported a moment later.
“Capital, Mister Ballard. Now, heave us in to short stays, and ready to up-anchor,” Lewrie bade him, wiping his fingers of fatty-bacon and mustard smears, then his mouth, on his pocket handkerchief.
“Hoist from the flag, sir!” Midshipman Furlow piped up. “The ‘Preparative,’ sir!”
By God, we’re really goin’ t’do it! Lewrie marvelled, wondering why he was so calm, for a rare once; Total lack o’ sleep last night, I s’pose. His cabin steward, Pettus, took away his tin plate and pewter mug, and headed below. “Take good care of the catlings, Pettus!”
“Aye, I will, sir!”
“Two reefs in the tops’ls, t’begin with, Mister Ballard,” Lewrie said, off-handedly, scowling at the sky, the pendant, and the state of the waters of the King’s Deep.
“New signal, sir!” Midshipman Furlow cried. “Number Sixty-Eight!”
“Hmm,” came from Lt. Ballard, almost a snort of disbelief.
“Mister Ballard’s your model, Mister Furlow,” Lewrie chuckled, “quite unlike me. But I’m a Post-Captain, and allowed my . . . eccentricities. Shout and cheer, do I feel like it. Do I not, Lieutenant Ballard?” he asked, sidling up to the First Officer.
“Oh, of old, sir,” Ballard gruffly replied, staring forward.
“Always have been enthusiastic,” Lewrie prosed on, pacing ’til he was before Ballard’s vision, and peering at him. “Pretty-much like Lord Nelson, over yonder. It works for him. Right, sir?”
“With no experience serving under that worthy, sir, I cannot in good conscience say, one way or the other,” Lt. Ballard intoned.
“The Preparative is down, sir!” Midshipman Furlow announced, in calmer takings; though he was up on his tip-toes with excitement. “ ‘Weigh, the outer or leeward ships, first,’ sir.”
“Weigh, Mister Ballard,” Lewrie snapped. And in the din of the capstan clacking round, the stamp of sailors breasting to the bars, and the groan of the cable of the best bower coming in through the hawse-holes, Lewrie stepped even closer to Ballard’s right ear. “I swear I don’t know what your problem seems to be with me, Mister Ballard, but you come over mutely insubordinate, you sneer at me one more time, and I will see you below in irons, . . . sir!” he harshly whispered.
Lt. Arthur Ballard half-turned his head towards Lewrie, swallowing what bile had sprung to the base of his throat, what reply he would have made, then grimly nodded, his sun-darkened, sea-weathered face going red as he stamped to the hammock nettings to be about his duties.
Sails sprang aloft, even as the best bower was rung up, catted, and fished, and Thermopylae paid off the breeze from her anchorage, a faint wake beginning to form as she gained a bit of steerageway among the many warships preparing for battle, slowly threading her way to join up with Capt. Riou’s HMS Amazon.
“A tune, there!” Lewrie yelled. “Desmond, gather the lads, and carry us in!”
A moment later, and the Marine drummer lad, the fifer, Desmond and his uilleann pipes, and the ship’s fiddler began One Misty, Moisty Morning, a gay, uplifting tune. Sailors began to stamp their feet in time, and several bellowed out the brief repeating chorus, of “And How D’ye Do, and how d’ye do, and how d’ye do, again!” whenever it came round.
Flags flying from every mast-head, reefed tops’ls, forecourses, and jibs standing, the squadron of twelve line-of-battle ships stood on towards the King’s Deep channel, and the waiting Danish guns, sorting themselves out into line-ahead formation, with bomb vessels falling in trail, their sea-mortars prepared to throw shells into the Quintus and Sixtus bastions either side of the entrance to Copenhagen’s main naval harbour, and the Arsenal, with six frigates and several armed cutters accompanying them, with barges full of Army troops idling out of gun-range awaiting the call to land and assault Copenhagen itself.
“Uhm, Vice-Admiral Sir Hyde Parker’s squadron, sir,” Hardcastle said with a worried look on his face. “Last I heard from the civilian masters when we convened aboard the flagship, his part of the fleet was anchored above the Middle Ground . . . far above the Trekroner Fort.”
“Aye, Captain Hardcastle?” Lewrie asked.
“Well, sir, it strikes me that a favourable wind for us will be a ‘dead muzzler’ for him, and the other eight ships of the line, so . . .”
“He was to sail, the same time as us, aye,” Lewrie said with a faint grin, “though it’ll take his ships hours to cover the distance before they can be brought to action. The Danes won’t even pay him the slightest bit of attention. Somehow, I’d wager that Admiral Nelson had that in mind, sir. The greater the glory, the fewer to share it.”
“God help us!” Capt. Hardcastle said with a shudder. He could have left the ship, his duty done, and been safely a witness aboard Sir Hyde’s flagship, HMS London, as safe as houses, but he’d decided to stay and see a naval battle once in his life. Hardcastle had a pair of pistols in his overcoat pockets, and a borrowed cutlass slung on a baldric over his shoulder, but they felt, of a sudden, the frailest pretension, and he found himself suppressing an nigh-uncontrollable shudder in his lower limbs and stomach. “Ye really think . . . ?”
“Captain Riou told me that Parker and Nelson despise each other, by now,” Lewrie told him with a wink. “And that Nelson is sure that Sir Hyde should’ve stayed in bed with his ‘sheet-anchor,’ his wee ‘batter-pudding,’ than be trusted with a battle fleet. Don’t know, really . . . but I’ve seen Nelson in action before, and if anyone can pull this off, then he’s your boy. Mad as a hatter, he is. As a March hare.”
“God help us,” Capt. Hardcastle muttered again.
As Thermopylae came level with HMS Cruizer, anchored off of the very end of the Middle Ground to act as a marker which all other ships would leave well to starboard, the frigate’s impromptu band struck up an even livelier tune, Staines Morris, a village dancing song that most knew from the Spring maypole performances; incongruous, yet uplifting.
Aboard HMS Glatton, 56 guns, Capt. William Bligh, of the mutiny fame, scowled and snapped. “Who is in command over there?”
“Lewrie, sir,” his First Officer replied. “The ‘Ram-Cat.’ ”
“Fie on such false enthusiasms!” Bligh grumbled. “That’s no way to take a ship into battle . . . or anywhere else!”
“Of course, sir,” his First Lieutenant pretended to agree.
“And why the Devil are they barking?” Capt. Bligh fumed.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
This could quickly go t’shit, Lewrie told himself. Agamemnon had gone aground on the Middle Ground shoal early on, requiring hasty signals from Elephant to re-order the line of battle. A moment after that, the nearest Danish ships, hulks, and floating batteries opened fire. Great belching clouds of powder smoke erupted to leeward from heavy pieces, upwards of 36-pounder guns, and the roar of the broadsides crashed as loud as a summer’s lightning and thunder storm. Shot moaned past, and overhead, as deep-voiced as a chorus of bassos and baritones, and the shallow waters of the King’s Deep were speckled with geysers and feather plumes as iron shot dapped across the surface in First and Second Graze.
Then, to make things even worse, both HMS Bellona and the HMS Russell, Third Rate 74s down for the task of hammering the Trekroner forts, took the ground on an uncharted spur of sand and mud shoal about halfway to their anchorages, and could not be got off, either!
“Signal from Amazon, sir!” Midshipman Furlow said with a gulp. “Our number, and ‘Conform On Me,’ sir.”
“Half a point to starboard, Mister Ballard, and fall in trail of Amazon,” Lewrie snapped. At the early-morning conference aboard Elephant, Nelson had given Capt. Riou the liberty of acting as he saw fit with his small squadron of frigates, but . . .
What the Devil’s he aimin’ at? Lewrie wondered as Thermopylae closed on Amazon’s larboard quarter, about two cables astern of her.
“Our number again, sir, and the signal is ‘Make More Sail.’ ”
“Shake one reef from the tops’ls, Mister Ballard,” Lewrie ordered. As topmen scrambled aloft and out on the tops’l yards, he took a look to the West, where hundreds of guns, perhaps a thousand guns, were hammering away with a speed he’d never seen from the French or the Spanish. Thermopylae had sailed past eight Danish ships by then, coming level with the ninth, a corvette-sized 6th Rate blasting away with some impossibly heavy guns for such a small warship, and another even larger North of her, a hulked two-decker with only a stump mast amidships, yet flying an admiral’s flag, hurriedly firing what looked to be 24-pounders and 18-pounders. It felt as if every shot was aimed at Thermopylae, for the continuous rumbles and h
owls of shot passing overhead, of splashes in the water between their frigate and the Danes. There was a crash aloft as the main t’gallant yard was smashed in two like a pencil, to come screeching and snarling down in pieces, and a shower of ropes, blocks, and ravelled sail.
“Not so bad, so far,” Lewrie said with a grin he did not feel. “See to it, Mister Ballard.”
He looked astern and found support in the form of two-deckers in rough line-ahead behind them; not all of them, for the sternmost were lost in a thick pall of spent gunsmoke, but he could make out the Edgar and Ardent just coming to anchor by the stern, as ordered, with Bligh’s Glatton right-astern. Off the starboard quarter, Bellona and Russell, though still hard aground on the shoal’s unseen spur, were firing deliberate broadsides at long range.
Back Westward, they were just coming level with Elephant and Capt. Hardy’s Ganges, with Riou in Amazon leading the frigates round Monarch’s starboard quarters to pass them and go on further North.
“Shall we fire, sir?” Lt. Ballard asked.
“None of ’em are our ‘pigeons,’ sir,” Lewrie told him, though he was impatient to let loose, not swan on by without responding. “Do we fire, I want the first broadside t’be a smasher, at a target that’ll matter. A few minutes more . . . let the damned Danes guess which of ’em will feel our sting.”
Lewrie wished he could fancy that Thermopylae’s aloof silence might un-nerve whichever Danish ship she took under fire, but . . . from the sound of it, the Danes were too busy to be un-nerved.
As in all sea-battles where over an hundred guns bellowed and roared, the shock of gunfire seemed to smash the very wind to nothing, and Thermopylae slowed as Amazon led them to the starboard side of the Defiance, now anchored and duelling it out with one of those floating gun-rafts, a two-decker, still ship-rigged with three masts, and yet another of those older two-decker hulks with a single stump mast.