1637: No Peace Beyond the Line

by Eric Flint

  Chapter 52

  Fort St. Patrick, Trinidad

  Tearlach Mulryan watched Tropic Surveyor brush past one of the galleoncetes which had been sent to intercept her, discharge a broadside, and then swiftly heel over as soon as her stern passed the Spaniard. The responding fire missed, falling behind the speeding frigate-built bark or splashing into the water to either side of her. Meanwhile, her two escorting jachts darted in between the other Spanish ships, tempting them into perilously close-hauled positions in order to return broadsides at the swift craft. Although the speedy northern contingent of the fleet under the Swede Tryggve Stiernsköld had been tasked primarily to pull Spanish hulls away from the main fight before the fort, it seemed quite possible that they might inflict some damage of their own. The galleoncete which had come under Tropic Surveyor’s guns had been hit by multiple balls and no small amount of chain shot. Several of her shrouds were down, and her portside ratlines were shredded.

  Mulryan sighed, made himself swing his glass westward to what he knew would be a far less cheering sight.

  He was not surprised. Peg Leg Jol’s small contingent of ships had finally come to grips with the Spaniards who had been near the fort and who had since pulled away from it. In one sense, that was good news, because the Spanish bombardment had been short and largely ineffectual. One ball had blown a forty-two-pounder in the ravelin off her carriage, apparently killing most of her Dutch crew. But otherwise, the allies’ ground defenses were virtually undiminished.

  However, so short a bombardment had not been part of the plan, nor had the early discharge at the Spanish ships. O’Donnell and Jol had wanted the Spanish settled in to shell the fort when Peg Leg came sweeping around Galba Point, and so, take them by surprise with the wind abeam and ultimately in a broad reach as they turned into their foes. But with the wind having blown against Jol, surprise had been impossible, to say nothing of swift and decisive maneuver. And so O’Bannon had probably fired his battery early with the hope of disabling ships, since he knew the Dutch were no longer moving quickly enough to pin the Spanish in against the shore, surprise notwithstanding. And the two ships that O’Bannon’s artillerists had savaged were indeed nursing their wounded rigging by continuing to move away from, not toward, engagement with the Dutch, so that at least was helpful.

  But it seemed like it could not possibly be helpful enough. The picket patache had run before the Dutch lead ship, Gijszoon’s Kater, which reluctantly gave chase. That pulled him far enough out of position to expose the flank of the Dutch van to the two Spanish galleoncetes, but still did not allow him to catch and trade shots with the Spanish packet. The Amsterdam had moved forward in an attempt to plug that hole. She was now fending off two galleons with her forty-four guns: more than the number carried by either of the Spaniards, but of smaller bore and lighter shot.

  Whether it was a trick of the wind around Galba Point or a momentary lapse of seamanship, the Dutch van had also split into two parts. Peg Leg, leading the way to the point, had continued on past it with the Thetis in his wake, apparently attempting to court the wind so that, by heading a little further upwind, he would be able to swing around and still have a slight advantage of the weather gauge when he cut southeast to engage the Spanish.

  However, Hjalmar van Holst’s Vereenigte Provintien lost the wind as she came around the point more closely and struggled to make headway. That ultimately brought her bow around to point due east before her sails bit into the wind, still quite close-hauled. Evidently taking this as a sign that the flotilla was to split into a small anvil and an even smaller hammer, the other ships followed van Holst, which slowed them even as they steered into a head-on course toward their Spanish enemies. And now those four Dutch warships found themselves trading blows with six galleons and three more closing in rapidly.

  Until, that is, the breeze began to die. In three minutes’ time, the imminent naval battle became a feckless combination of sailing and drifting as all the ships—Dutch and Spanish alike—struggled to grab any useful piece of wind. However, the Spanish old-style galleoncetes that had been in the main echelon took advantage of these baffling winds to lower their rarely used oars into the water. They began boxing in Hjalmar’s fragmentary van, becoming a screening force between him and Peg Leg’s two ships.

  The Spanish, possessing longer and heavier guns, and probably thinking themselves to have greater reserves of powder, began firing at two hundred yards range. The several balls that did hit inflicted considerable damage, particularly to the bow of Overijssel, but were not in any way crippling. As the Dutch stoically, and practically, held their fire, muskets began sputtering between the closer ships. A few men fell, but again, at such ranges, the effects were minimal.

  However, as the ships drew slowly closer together, Mulryan forced himself to send the update that he had anticipated with both fear and loathing:

  –MESSAGE BEGINS–

  BOTH FLEETS ALMOST BECALMED STOP

  SPANISH HAVE MORE SHIPS, GUNS, TROOPS, POSITIONAL ADVANTAGES STOP

  DUTCH DEFEAT LIKELY STOP

  UNCONTESTED SHELLING OF FORT COULD COMMENCE AT DAWN STOP

  GOD’S LOVE BE WITH US ALL STOP

  –MESSAGE ENDS–

  * * *

  Juan de Somovilla Tejada stared across the three hundred yards of mostly open ground from the western edge of the forest and studied the fort the usurpers had constructed. It was not large, but the stockade had been improved by berms that were set five meters out from it, and were given shape and reinforcement by a stout wooden backing. Perched beyond that, and extending past the stockade’s eastern extremity was a lower ravelin, built almost to the edge of the drop to the Gulf of Paria. All but two of the captured Spanish guns were mounted in these two positions.

  Slightly beyond the eastern end of the ravelin was a lunette, a crescent-moon-shaped free-standing redoubt, that protected the balance of the battery and was, obligingly, without any rear protection other than a low berm that trailed directly inland before tapering away, too low to offer cover. Which meant that eliminating the lunette, or at least chasing its gunners from their pieces, could be achieved by maneuvering to its rear flank, which could be achieved by approaching to approximately eighty yards.

  That position would also put Somovilla’s attackers approximately one hundred yards from the walls of the eastern wall of the stockade. The enemy’s defensive arrangement was thus far from perfect, but on the other hand, they may not have had the time or manpower to do much more than maximize their protection from naval bombardment. Either way, a direct attack on the lunette’s eastern flank seemed to be in order.

  Happily, the enemy had also used the open land between the fort and the forest as a dumping ground for driftwood beams, strakes, and other wooden debris. Just beyond the midpoint of the three-hundred-yard expanse, partial frames of derelict ships littered the ground like the ribs of so many vulture-picked carcasses. Somovilla nodded approvingly at the rubbish: it was a convenient point at which to take cover and regroup for the final assault. It also offered an excellent position from which to more closely assess any enemy preparations that might lie lower to the ground, unseen behind the heaped piles of distaff wood.

  He looked behind, saw the forward edge of his six hundred morion-wearing troops milling ten yards in from the tree line. Casañas, hovering over Somovilla’s right shoulder, glanced expectantly at him. “Sergeant,” Juan asked, “are our men ready?”

  “Yes, sir. There was a bit of confusion after running into the ambushes, but I’ve sorted that out.”

  Somovilla nodded curt approval. The usurpers had, predictably, seeded marksmen into the woods, sniping through clear spots in the foliage as the Spanish followed the game trail. Their balls had killed or incapacitated almost twenty of his men. In return, his troops had given chase and dispatched four of the attackers. The Spaniards who had cornered the first of the slain ambushers were taken aback when their quarry turned and unleashed a short but deadly barrage of pistol fire
upon his pursuers. The source of that brief shower of lead had been Somovilla’s first surprise of the day. It was a pistol such as the engineer had never seen before, having five separate primer-fired barrels bored into a rotating cylinder, each of which held a shot in readiness. Not up-time manufacture from the look of it, but unmistakably up-time influenced.

  The second surprise was the appearance of the ambusher himself, whose freckled skin was as pale as his hair was red. A cross around his neck marked him a Christian, and a pocket with crude pictures of the saints annotated in an indecipherable language marked the fellow as either an Irishman, or one of the rarer Scots Catholics. A strange fellow to be fighting against the Spanish, and stranger still to be found doing so on this mostly forsaken island.

  But Somovilla had little patience for mysteries and had less time to waste. The original landing plan had simply involved a first wave of troops to overwhelm the presumably rude defenses. Having discerned the prepared fortifications, Captain Gregorio de Castellar had revised that plan, deciding instead that the first landing group should assess the enemy’s preparations from greater proximity and also sweep the area around the fort to locate and eliminate any relief or counterattack forces in reserve. That plan did not survive the hour in which it had been formulated, but changed again when the enemy’s battery spoke in the rolling, thunderous voices of captured Spanish forty-two-pounders. Now Somovilla was charged with disabling or disrupting the batteries, starting with those in the somewhat vulnerable lunette and then pressing on along behind the ravelin, rolling up the artillerists there. And all of that meant closing with the enemy.

  “Sergeant.”

  “Sir?”

  “I want our fastest men as a skirmish line of fifty, leading the rest. They are to be carrying swords and pistols so that they are only lightly encumbered and may clear any enemy who may be behind that debris in a short, close fight.”

  “Yes, sir. And the rest of us?”

  “We follow those skirmishers at a range of fifty yards, pieces loaded. Our first objective is to reach the driftwood barrier and take cover. Once there, we will more closely observe the enemy positions and decide upon a plan of attack. Ready the men.”

  Casañas gestured sharply to the less senior sergeants, who passed the gesture quickly along the tree line. At various points, more lightly armed and armored men, most of them quite fit, moved a step beyond the main lines. They looked toward their sergeants for the order to charge.

  Casañas nodded at Somovilla. “We are ready, sir.”

  Somovilla rose to a crouch and shouted, “Then Santiago and at them!”

  * * *

  Overhead, Tearlach Mulryan heard a sound as faint as a butterfly spitting. He looked up, saw that another near miss from a group of musketeers below had popped a small hole in the envelope of the balloon. Too tiny a leak to be of any concern, not when he was equipped with Don Michael McCarthy’s wondrous and altitude-boosting Coleman hand burner, but worrisome, even so.

  Not as worrisome, however, as the naval battle unfolding beneath and before him. Several miles to the north, Tropic Surveyor and her two jacht escorts were keeping the Spanish occupied, but only by engaging them directly. At the faintest hint that the lighter allied ships might be showing their heels, the galleons demonstrated that they were more than happy to come around and head for the main fray just east of Point Galba. In consequence, the three allied ships were now continuously trading blows with vessels much larger than they, and had it not been for their superior maneuverability, would have been battered beneath the waves long before now. As it was, the Noordsterre had taken a good portion of a galleoncete’s full broadside and was trailing smoke and shattered spars.

  However, their fight was not in vain, for had those Spaniards been free to join the main combat unmolested, they might well have turned that desperate fight into a complete slaughter. Although the wind had freshened somewhat, it did so from due north, conferring the weather gauge upon neither fleet. Peg Leg Jol’s Achilles and the Thetis were finally bearing down upon the tangled melee of ships closer to the shore and would have both the wind gauge and an advantageous position when they arrived. But that would be at least twenty more minutes, and Mulryan saw quite clearly that in that time, all could be lost.

  The Dutch ships were beset from all sides now, and only their masters’ superior seamanship and gunnery kept them from falling afoul of a lethal sequence of overlapping Spanish broadsides. But as the fight went on, the superior Spanish numbers were able to further constrain the Dutch maneuver and the ranges between ships were growing ever smaller: a harbinger of the kind of close action and boarding battles that Peg Leg had desperately wanted to avoid.

  Only one of the Dutch ships, Hjalmar van Holst’s Vereenigte Provintien, was a match for the largest Spanish galleon that was still roughly at the center of her fleet. And yet, when a path in the seas between the two stood suddenly clear, and the almost black-sided Spanish forty-eight-gun beast put her prow toward the big Dutch ship, van Holst responded in kind. It was unclear whether he was heading directly toward the Spanish flagship, her somewhat smaller starboard escort, or the one-hundred-and-fifty-yard-wide span of water between the two. The latter would be the worst, naturally, since then Hjalmar would be subjected to broadsides from both port and starboard. Unfortunately, that looked to be just where he was heading.

  In a brief lull between the mounting cannonades, Tearlach heard another sound: a distant cheer that was vaguely familiar. He scanned the ground and discovered both its source and familiarity in the same moment. Three companies of Spanish troops, close kin to those he’d served alongside in the Lowlands, had come bursting out of the eastern tree line. Their battle cry was a distant echo of his first battlefields, and he felt a twinge of regret at being opposed to his old allies. But then again, Tearlach Mulryan regretted the need to lift his hand against any man.

  However, it did not make him hesitate doing so. He sent his observation of the Spanish infantry’s numbers, armaments, and direction to the ground station and breathed a sigh of relief. Well, at least one thing is going according to plan.

  * * *

  Somovilla was among the first in the main ranks to reach what looked like the shattered prow of a Dunkirk cromster. The fifty skirmishers who had preceded them were already behind cover, wondering that the defenders had not used the considerable piles and scattering of wood as cover, or at least concealment, for their own troops.

  It was Casañas who first remarked on the pungent smell that seemed to permeate the air around them. “I had heard that the Pitch Lake has a stink, but this!”

  Somovilla did not comment. He was too busy assessing an unpleasant but not disastrous surprise laid by the defenders. Evidently they had employed the ship-parts graveyard as a blind, to prevent the attackers from observing the positions they had prepared on the partly open rear-flank of the lunette: a short, shallow double trench line, each one covered by a low, outfacing berm, such as the one he had seen extending inland from its outer corner. But the personnel and equipment in those trench lines remained hidden, except for what looked like stands or tripods arrayed along the further berm. Approximately eighty yards away, the trenches were a screen against any close attack directly into the rear of the lunette. But the broader tactical wisdom was still a puzzlement to Somovilla: Why would the defenders leave such cover as the wreckage and driftwood within far musket shot? Why not groom the three hundred yards of open ground between forest and fort to ensure that any attempt to charge across it would result in it becoming a monstrous killing field?

  “Captain,” the sergeant said. “That smell, sir. It’s not just Pitch Lake.”

  Annoyed, Somovilla supported himself on a blackened fragment of gunwale and turned. “What? What do you mean?” And then he had the answer to his own question. Beneath his supporting hand, the wood was slimy, even viscous, as though it was coated in—

  Two of the skirmishers shouted something about smoke. A burst of sparks—a fuse end that
evidently snaked up out of the ground from beneath a concealing plank—ignited a small puddle of something flammable.

  What happened next was not a sequence of events so much as a collage of near-simultaneous disasters. The fire from that small puddle of burning liquid raced along the driftwood, spreading faster than the eye could follow. At two other points in the debris, similar fuse ends revealed themselves in bright, momentary flares. One failed to ignite anything but the second made up for it. With a breathy phwuuumphh the largest piece of wreckage, a sizeable section of hull, burst into sudden, fierce flames. Dozens of men who had sheltered behind or rested against the fuel-oil soaked timbers were suddenly alight, screaming, clawing to shed clothes, armor, gear.

  The invaders’ ploy was abruptly, perfectly, horribly clear. They had left the wood precisely so that the Spanish would take cover behind it—and so, anoint themselves with the flammable coating that was, as Casañas’ nose had detected, much more powerful and pungent than mere pitch.

  Somovilla flinched away from the ruined bow of the cromster before the racing flames reached it. He was checking to see if there was a clear path of retreat when the sergeant raised his sword. “Out of these flames and at the heathens!” he cried with a confirming nod toward his lieutenant as he charged beyond the quickly building inferno around them.

  “Yes, charge! Charge!” shrieked Somovilla. Who did not join them, but rather, continued to look for a safe path rearward through the mounting flames.

  * * *

  Ann Koudsi had known that this moment would come, steeled herself for it, but still lacked the impassivity she had hoped to achieve. One moment the Spanish, hundreds of them, had been huddled behind the driftwood that she and her workers had soaked with bunker oil: the most plentiful product they were distilling from Well Number One’s crude. The very next moment, the debris field was burning in two places.

  Two of the Wild Geese who had a crude proficiency with a bow looked toward Hugh O’Donnell, who eyed the burning rags secured to their nocked arrows. He shook his head. “No need. The flames from the two successful fuses are spreading quickly enough.”