"We're right here, Mister Furlow," Lewrie chid him with a laugh. "We're not gun-deaf yet, so there's no need t'shout. Save your lungs for later, when it's really noisy. Watch for the 'Preparative' to be struck down. Calmly does it. Else, you set a bad example for the men."
"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 B7;tcab, 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 howls 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.
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"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.
"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 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 o
f 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 powder 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.
The Baltic Gambit l-15 Page 35
