The Baltic Gambit

by Dewey Lambdin

  “Almost all the others have come to anchor, sir,” Mr. Lyle said. “All our two-deckers are now in action.”

  “Leaving us . . . Christ!” Lewrie spat as the Trekroner Fort, the “Three Crowns” behemoth, loomed up off their larboard bows.

  Riou can’t be serious, surely! he thought, appalled at the very idea of frigates engaging a stone fort belching fire and smoke from an hundred or more cannon, upon which their 18-pounder shot would merely bounce, or harmlessly shatter!

  “ ‘Come to anchor by the stern,’ sir!” Midshipman Furlow cried.

  “We’ll anchor three cables astern of Amazon, Mister Ballard,” Lewrie said. “Ready to let go the kedge when I call.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” Ballard said, his voice steady, stolid, and as stoic as ever.

  The Jolly Thresher and Hey, Johnny Cope strained to rise above the ear-shattering din of gunfire as HMS Thermopylae eased to a stop at last, spare hands aloft to take in sail and bind it to the yards.

  “Desmond! Thankee lads, but we’re in business!” Lewrie called. “Take your posts! Range to the fort, Mister Ballard?”

  “I would estimate it to be eight hundred yards, sir,” Ballard decided, sounding emotionless, though his full lips were taut-pursed, and his left hand quivered on the scabbard of his sword.

  “That stump-masted two-decker’s much closer,” Lewrie said with a grunt of how useless it would be to waste their fire on the fortress and its stonework. “We’ll engage her. Hands to the springs, sir, and place her square abeam.”

  A long minute or so, and the Danish warship was on a line with Thermopylae that put her directly amidships.

  “Mister Farley!” Lewrie shouted down to the waist, leaning over the hammock nettings at the break of the quarterdeck. “Broadsides on that big bastard, yonder!”

  “Aye aye, sir!” Lt. Farley eagerly replied, ordering “Prime your pieces!” to quarter-gunners and gun-captains. Wire prickers were stuck down the touch-holes to pierce the cartridge bags; quills filled with fine priming powder were jammed down next; flintlock strikers were set at full cock, and the gun-captains raised their free fists in the air to show their readiness, the trigger lines of the strikers as taut as bowstrings in their other hands.

  “By broadside . . . Fire!” Farley cried.

  The larboard 12-pounder bow chaser and fourteen 18-pounders of the larboard battery lit off together, spewing quick yellow and amber sparks through sudden surges of powder smoke, wreathing the frigate in a spectral, reeking fog. Though the range was a bit too great for the 32-pounder carronades on the quarterdeck, they erupted, too, at their maximum safe elevation, if only to add great, threatening shot splashes somewhere close to the Danish hulk, and make them wonder. Fired with their muzzles lifted, the carronades’ heavy shot behaved more like sea-mortars, arcing slightly up, then down, in shallow ballistic paths to crash into the waters of Copenhagen Roads to throw up great, towering plumes of silty water and foam that only slowly collapsed on themselves but about three hundred yards short of the Danish warship.

  God help me but I do love the guns! Lewrie told himself, taking a deep whiff of powder smoke, his ears already ringing despite the wee wads of candle wax he’d stuffed in them after giving the order to open fire. Lt. Farley nigh amidships, and Lt. Fox nearer the bows, already had the gun crews at the tackles to run out their swabbed and re-loaded cannon for a second broadside. As the smoke cleared just enough to see their target, the Danish warship responded, her lower-deck 24-pounders lighting off first, and her upper-deck 18s scant seconds later.

  “For what we’re about to receive,” Mr. Lyle muttered, “may the Good Lord make us grateful.”

  Heavy shot moaned overhead, close enough to the upper masts to set them thrumming, their shrouds quiver. Splashes between both ships showed where round-shot fired a bit too low skipped in First Graze, but dead in line with Thermopylae, to thud into her hull, travelling about 800 or 900 feet per second after the Grazes, with enough force to make the frigate stagger, and smash stout scantling planks. One fired but a bit higher crashed through the sail-tending gangway bulwarks with a loud parrot Rwark!, creating a cloud of broken oak splinters as big as a man’s forearm, cutting a Marine on the gangway in half at the waist, and spraying a cloud of his blood over the gunners on the deck below. Two sailors on the gangway spun away shrieking as they were quilled by wood splinters. Surgeon Mr. Harward’s team of loblolly boys carrying a mess-table for a stretcher mounted the gangway, bearing one man away to the midships companionway hatch, but shoving the ruin of the second over the side through the blown-open gap in the bulwarks. The dead . . . those horribly dismembered and splattered, or the ones who seemed to be sleeping and whole . . . were to be gotten out of sight quickly. Was a hand too grievously wounded for the surgeon and his mates to waste time dealing with him, it was considered a mercy to deliver a skull-smashing blow with a maul, and pass the unconscious sufferer out a gun-port to drown and sink out of sight, before the pain of his wounds set in . . . and his screams un-nerved his mates. Mourning was for later.

  “This’ll be hot work, today,” Lewrie said, watching the wounded man disappear down the companionway ladders, then returned his attention to their foe, straining to see what damage, if any, their fire had caused. He raised a telescope to peer at the Danish ship.

  “Soaks it up like a bloody sponge,” Lewrie griped, finding but little damage to cheer him, so far.

  “That frigate of theirs,” Mr. Lyle pointed out, jutting an arm over the larboard bows to the last Northerly ship in the Danish line, “is getting a drubbing, sir. As is our target. Amazon, Blanche, and the rest of the frigates share their fire ’twixt her and this one.”

  Before Thermopylae could fire another broadside, shot from the other frigates did splash round the stump-masted two-decker off their beam, and flay her scantlings and upper works with iron.

  “By broadside . . . Fire!” Lt. Farley howled, and HMS Thermopylae belched out another great gush of smoke and thunder.

  As the smoke from that fresh broadside slowly thinned, Mr. Lyle lifted an arm to point at the fortress beyond the embattled ships. “I do believe the Trekroner . . . the Three Crowns . . . has opened upon us, sir.”

  Indeed, the middle and southern faces of the great stone works were alive with gushes of powder, reddish flashes as heavy guns upwards of 36-pounder weight fired.

  “Know why the Danes call it the Three Crowns?” Mr. Lyle asked, as phlegmatically as if they were on a day-tour in search of “quaint” sights.

  “Recall the Bard of Avon,” Capt. Hardcastle piped up, sounding squeakier. “At the end of Hamlet, the last of the tragedy is the seizure of Denmark by the Prince of Norway . . . wasn’t it Norway? Way back then, Denmark, Sweden, and—”

  He stopped his gob briefly, ducking as a heavy round-shot hummed close over the quarterdeck.

  “Sweden, Denmark, and Norway were allies, with three kings, so they named it the Three Crowns,” Mr. Lyle completed for him, unwilling to let the civilian get the last word on anything.

  “And it’s a bugger,” Capt. Hardcastle said, straightening up.

  “We’re well within her greatest range,” Lewrie noted, lifting his telescope once more. “Same as the guns of Kronborg Castle, up the Narrows. Their ramparts are, what . . .’bout a thousand yards or so to loo’rd? They’ve at least five hundred yards range over us.”

  “The fortress’s gunners don’t seem that well drilled, though, sirs,” Lt. Ballard contributed to the conversation, his demeanour the required cool and unruffled sang-froid that British Sea Officers were to display. “And no more accurate than the gunners of the Kronborg were, when the fleet passed them without a single hit.”

  “ ‘Sound and fury, signifying nothing,’ hey, Mister Ballrd?” Mr. Lyle japed. “To quote Shakespeare.”

  “Wrong play,” Capt. Hardcastle quipped. “The First Lieutenant is correct, Captain Lewrie. The fortresses are manned by the Danish army, and I cannot recall seeing them practice with live pow
der and shot in all my years passing through the Narrows.”

  “Well, they’re getting some practice today,” Lewrie said with a smirk. “Hello! Well shot, Mister Farley! Hammer the bitch again!” he cheered as iron shot pummeled the Danish two-decker, smashing scantling planks and stoving in her bulwarks in showers of splinters. For good measure, there was an explosion aboard her, fire stabbing upward, and powder smoke jutting skyward . . . a sure sign of a burst gun!

  A second later, though, the Danish gunners responded, their side erupting in a staggering, stuttering series of explosions as her guns went off, no longer in controlled broadsides, but as quickly as gunners could swab out, re-load, and run out.

  Balls shrieked overhead, passing close-aboard their frigate’s bow and stern. The roundhouse atop the forecastle was blown open with a round-shot that went clean through it; the larboard anchor cat-head was shattered with another parroty screech, and the best bower anchor, its cat and fish lines shot away, dropped free to splash into the harbour, lost forever, most likely. Yet a third ball, perhaps an 18-pounder, buried itself in the trunk of the foremast below the fighting top and made the mast, and the ship, sway to starboard, so that sailors and Marines in the tops had to hold on for dear life.

  “Well, the Danish army may be half-blind dodderers, but it seems their navy knows their business,” Lewrie said. “See to it, Mister Ballard.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “By broadside . . . Fire!” Lt. Farley in the waist was yelling, his voice gone hoarse and raspy on smoke and excitement, and Thermopylae rocked to starboard a few degrees, settling an inch or two in the water to the massive recoil as the guns slammed backwards from the ports, the truck-carriages squealing and the breeching ropes and recoil tackle and ring bolts groaning. The guns were hot now, and 18-pounders weighing nearly two tons altogether were leaping from the deck as they lit off, thundering back down at the full extent of the breeching ropes at odd angles. Sure enough, there came a howl from a tackle man struck in the shins by an erratically recoiling carriage, and a scream as the heavy wood carriage and sizzling-hot gun rolled over one of his ankles.

  “Loblolly boys, here!” Lt. Fox yelled. “Spare man from starboard, take his place. Quick now, lad! Overhaul tackle! Swab out!”

  “Oh, poor fellow,” Lt. Ballard calmly said, returning from up forward.

  “The foremast sound, Mister Ballard?” Lewrie asked him.

  “I would not trust it with more than forecourse and the fore tops’l, sir,” Lt. Ballard gloomily replied. “The ball is half-buried in the trunk, fourty feet above the deck. It will need fishing, and banding, do we get the chance.”

  “Cold shot, I take it?” Lewrie asked with a wry grin. “Not sizzlin’?”

  “Cold shot, aye, sir, not heated shot,” Lt. Ballard replied with almost an impatient expression, as though he found Lewrie’s attempt at humour disagreeable. “We’ve no fear of bursting aflame, sir.”

  “By broadside . . . Fire!” Lt. Farley yelled, and the guns roared and thundered yet again, re-wreathing the frigate in a dense cloud of spent powder smoke, adding to the acrid, rotten-egg cumulus that stood above and to leeward from their first broadsides, muffling Thermopylae in a white-yellow mist that made it hard to see the forecastle from the quarterdeck.

  Lewrie paced aft to the taffrails, past the larboard carronades to the taffrail lanthorn, to see how the rest of the battle was going. But even his telescope could not pierce the palls of smoke towering over the British and Danish lines. He could make out the Lynetten, a smaller version of the Trekroner to the West–Sou’west, and only the nearest warships in the opposing lines of battle. Now and again, as the guns fired or the smoke pall cleared, he could espy a few Danish gunboats anchored with their bows pointing East behind the larger Danish vessels, great bow-mounted pairs of guns erupting, and sea-mortars huffing upwards with even more massive shot.

  Dead astern lay HMS Defiance, Rear-Admiral Graves’s flagship, belching broadsides at the furious rate of three rounds per gun every two minutes, the desired standard of the Royal Navy, with Graves’s Red Ensign flying, along with Signal Number 16—“Engage the Enemy More Closely.”

  There came yet another broadside from the Danish two-decker as Lewrie turned to pace back forward. This one was even more irregular than the last, not quite as ordered and regimented, and . . . was it his imagination, or was it not quite as powerful as the ones that had come before? “Fool!” Lewrie spat, grinning as he realised that the Danish captain had split his fire, his upper-deck guns directed at his ship, his lower-deck 24-pounders angled in the ports to engage Amazon and Blanche, which were pummelling her hard.

  “Over-haul tackle!” Lt. Farley cried, almost wheezing on smoke. “Swa-ab out!” From Lt. Fox came “We’re latherin’ ’em, lads!”

  Lewrie paused to dig into his waist-coat pocket for his watch, and flipped open the lid. Amazingly, the action had been going on for an hour and a half; they’d weighed a little after 10 A.M., and here it was nigh 11:45!

  Crash! came a ball right through the larboard bulwarks of the quarterdeck, just forrud of the first carronade, and a chorus of yells of alarm. Splinters the size of pigeons, the size of bed-slats, flew in a whirling, vicious cloud! The ball continued cross the deck, then exited by clanging off an idle starboard-side carronade barrel, darting skyward as a jagged blur of dark metal!

  “Good Christ!” the civilian Capt. Hardcastle cried aloud, struck dumb by the sudden carnage that had, like the plague of Egypt that had taken the first-born and spared the Israelites, sprung up all about him. “Oh, my Good God!” he yelped, just before staggering away to heave his stomach’s contents.

  The captain of the Afterguard and two men of the mizen mast crew were down, gobbling fear and pain over their hurts, or lying dazed in sudden shock. Midshipman Privette was sprawled on the deck, his head and face completely covered in blood.

  And the First Officer, Lt. Ballard, was down, his head and his chest propped up on the Sailing Master’s lap.

  “What are his—?” Lewrie began to ask, then clamped his mouth shut as he saw that Arthur Ballard no longer had a left leg; the heavy 24-pounder ball had taken it off at mid-thigh!

  “Loblolly boys to the quarterdeck, now, damn yer eyes!” Lewrie bellowed. “Mister Tillyard . . . do you go below and warn the Surgeon the First Officer is comin’ down to him.”

  “Aye, sir,” Tillyard said with a gulp, his face as pale as new laundry. He staggered to his feet, recovered his hat, and headed for the larboard gangway ladder; rapidly, at first, then more slowly as he recalled that his actions could cause panic and despair.

  Christ, why him? Lewrie asked the aether.

  “Pass word for Lieutenant Farley,” Lewrie snapped, forced by grim duty to continue as before. “My compliments to him, and he is to assume the duties of First Officer. Pass word to Midshipman Sealey, and inform him he is to replace Lieutenant Fox up forrud, and consider himself an Acting-Lieutenant, for the time being.”

  “Aye, sir!” Marine Corporal Frye replied, heading off quickly.

  “Help’s coming, Arthur,” Lewrie said more gently as he took time to kneel beside Ballard, who was rolling his head back and forth, his agony already clawing at him, his weathered face gone whitish-grey as he bit his lips to keep from howling and jibbering. Lewrie took his hand as Mr. Lyle whipped out a length of small-stuff rope to bind about Ballard’s leg near his groin to staunch the heavy bleeding. “Help’s on the way. Stay with us, Arthur.” Lewrie repeated, feeling helpless and holding out but the slimmest hope that his old friend would survive his horrid wound.

  “Damn you!” Lt. Ballard hissed, “You lucky bastard, you always were . . . ah-ah!” he had to pause as a wave of pain hit him. “Dumb blind luck, always get what you want, not . . . ! Aahh! Walk through shit with nought stickin’ to . . . Christ!” Ballard loudly howled as the loblolly boys arrived with a mess-table stretcher to fetch him to the surgery on the orlop.

  And what’s all that about? Lewrie helplessl
y wondered as he let go Ballard’s hand, the hand snatched from his grasp, more-like by Ballard himself, not from a need to writhe in pain, or . . .

  Lewrie got back to his feet, dusting the knees of his breeches, and his fingers came away bloody with Ballard’s gore, which had spread in a wide pool.

  “Very well, then, gentlemen . . . carry on,” he ordered, reaching out to help the Sailing Master to his feet.

  “Here, sir,” Lt. Farley reported himself, dashing two finger to the brim of his hat in a casual salute. “Mister Fox has taken over my place, and Midshipman Sealey now commands the foredeck.”

  “The Dane, yonder, is mistakenly dividing his fire ’tween us and Amazon and Blanche, Mister Farley,” Lewrie icily told him, his eyes gone Arctic grey. “ ’Twixt the three of us, we should give her a hellish- good pounding. Keep up the rate of fire, sir.”

  “I shall, sir,” Farley firmly declared, though his eyes rolled in horror of the bodies being borne off, and all the blood soaking in the snow-white plankings and the tarred oakum between.

  Lewrie forced himself to pace to the larboard bulwarks by the head of the larboard gangway ladder, quite near the place the Danish 24-pounder shot had entered, and took out his pocket-watch, again. It was almost Noon of Maundy Thursday, and the day showed no sign of ending.

  “Run-out your guns!” Lt. Fox was bellowing in Farley’s stead. “Prime! Take aim! By broadside . . . Fire!”

  And the chief of the loblolly gang paused, snapped his fingers as if remembering something, then bent over to lift Lt. Ballard’s leg, shoe, and what was left of his silk stocking and breeches, and tossed them over the starboard side.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Pace . . . fret . . . set a brave example, Lewrie chid himself as the hours crawled by, for there was little for a captain to do once his ship was engaged at such long range; it was all up to the skill and the speed of his gunners, the steadiness of his crew. Look at your watch, he reminded himself, finding that it was now half past one in the afternoon, which made him shake his head in wonder. Not too strongly, for the continual roar of the guns had given him a headache and rendered him half-deaf despite the candle wax in his ears.