by Tim Jeal
Humphrey was staring out at the forts through the darkness at the moment when a brilliant flash lit up the white stonework clearly showing the rows of embrasures; during the second it took for the roar of Vengeance’s first broadside to reach Scylla, the sky was once more plunged into darkness; it was as if, he thought, the sun had been snuffed out without warning on a bright day. Never could Humphrey remember minutes longer than the two or three which now passed. The question in his and every other mind was whether Fort Constantine would open with isolated guns, at full strength, or not at all. The flash of the next broadside came and still no answer. Then seconds later, Humphrey saw a sight far more disturbing than the fiery smoke of guns in the casemates would have been; the sky was ablaze with light balls and rockets fired from the parapets of the forts. Figures were distinctly visible moving on Vengeance’s decks, now and then obscured by the white smoke of her last broadside. The light balls were bursting at great height, hanging, as though suspended for a moment, and then, still incandescent, falling steeply into the sea.
Charles leapt down the poop steps onto the quarter-deck, and, seizing the master’s speaking trumpet, yelled to the signals quartermaster in the main-top.
‘Make to flagship: “May I commence?”’
Before the lanterns had been displayed, Vengeance fired again, and a split-second later the Russian batteries opened with a beautifully compact flight of shell from the 32-pounders, the fuses describing glowing red fiery arcs in the black sky. Without waiting for the answer to his signal, Charles was yelling:
‘Hands up anchor. Man the capstan.’
The reasons for silence now being gone, the boatswain’s pipe repeated the command, and the men on the forecastle leapt to their bars, spinning the capstan round like an enormous top, their feet pounding on the deck. The cable had already been hove in, and the chain was at once grinding and clashing in at the hawse pipe. Light balls were still going up in high lazy parabolas, climbing rapidly, hanging and then falling slowly. Tall plumes of water, tossed up by the Russian shells, could be seen spouting in line twenty yards short of Vengeance. As Charles gave the order to raise steam, the flagship signalled: ‘Leander and Scylla proceed in line abreast.’
Vengeance was moving across the face of the batteries at an agonisingly slow speed of four or five knots, the best the tug could manage when towing alongside. The spaced broadsides had been abandoned and her gunners were firing independently at their best speeds. Every second or so, a well-placed shell burst against the walls of Fort Constantine with a violet and orange flash, illuminating the whole structure. The Russians were replying with shell in co-ordinated salvos, punctuated by random discharges of hot shot from Fort Alexander and the Quarantine Battery on the other side of the harbour. On account of the very close range, the gunners on both sides were using short 1¼-inch fuses, which often detonated the explosive in mid-air, throwing out shrieking fragments of metal and showers of glowing red sparks. Sometimes after a momentary lull, a sharp explosion shook the air; then came more muted sounds, merging into each other, like a rapid roll on a gigantic drum, rising in pitch and crescendoing into simultaneous crashes like thunder directly overhead.
As Vengeance began her turn out to sea she was hit amidships by two large mortar shells, which instantly started a fire. Humphrey gasped as he saw the flames catching the ratlines and shooting up them as though following fast-burning fuses. Every man on Scylla’s quarter-deck was gazing in silent horror, expecting a magazine to go up, but after the initial blaze, the flames began to die down as the ship was shrouded in a dense pall of black smoke. No efforts were being made to launch boats, and so Humphrey assumed that the conflagration had looked worse from a distance than it had actually been.
The boatswain’s pipe proclaimed that the anchor was at the bows and a moment later an assistant engineer came running with the news that the steam was up. Within seconds the screw had engaged, and as the vibrations intensified, the master’s calm voice was heard: ‘Turn ahead easy,’ then: ‘Half ahead.’ Humphrey had always liked the master, a bald pot-bellied man with red cheeks and small twinkling eyes; unlike the other officers he was wearing a plain faded surtout without a sword belt. His phlegmatic expression and folded arms comforted Humphrey. Charles sent the midshipman nearest to him forward with orders for the 68-pounder pivot on the forecastle to open up at fifteen hundred yards. Astern of Scylla two deep folds of water fanned out, their crests creaming and foaming with phosphorescence. On a parallel course, half-a-mile to starboard, Leander was steaming in on Fort Alexander, a long ribbon of dark smoke arching from her tall ungainly stack.
Scylla’s forecastle Lancaster had fired two rounds when the Russians found the ship’s range with 42-pound round-shot. As Humphrey heard the low vibrant whoosh of these balls passing through the rigging, and then the sharper whistle of the first shells fired at them, he felt an icy tingling down his back, as if after sweating he had suddenly been subjected to a chilling breeze. His mouth felt numb and stiff and he was afraid in case if he was asked something he would not be able to answer. The softness of his hand against the hilt of his useless little sword made him shudder. He raised a hand to his neck and felt the soft downy skin which he had never needed to shave. If I were hit here, or in the stomach. Nobody lives after a stomach wound. Was it possible that other human beings less than a thousand yards away wanted to kill him? He thought of his mother and the servants at Hanley Park, and could hardly remember a word of anger being spoken to him by any of them. He saw his father dying, the blood bubbling at the corners of his mouth. Remembered the men dying ten a day during the worst of the cholera, and how on boat duty he had been sent out with a bayonet or sharpened boarding pike to puncture the bloated sewn-up hammocks, which had raised the 32-pound shot used to sink bodies buried at sea. He recalled the precise slow hiss of escaping gas and the sickening smell as he or another man stabbed at one of these inflated shrouds, sending it down at once, emitting a decreasing stream of bubbles. But few of the officers had died of cholera, and those that did had had time to know their fate; a privilege not accorded by these lumps of metal tearing the air. A soldier might fire his rifle and move his position, urging men on, working out what enemy movements meant, but for naval officers there was nothing but this endless waiting and nowhere to hide. Without moving his head or hands to betray himself, he said a silent prayer. Before he had finished, a round-shot smashed down onto the poop, ploughing up the planks as though they were paper thin, striking the mizzen mast, leaving the bitts a useless mess of matchwood and going overboard, carrying with it twenty feet of the taffrail. A second shot landed in the waist, killing two men instantly and pitching over a gun, splintering the truck and crushing a gunner’s legs. The man’s screaming rose above the firing: a shrill scarcely human sound. Humphrey stared at Charles, as though he could do something to stop this terrible sound, but Crawford gazed ahead of him apparently deaf to pain and suffering. Next to him, Wilmot said a few words and they both smiled grimly. Humphrey dug his nails into the palms of his hands.
In truth Charles was angry. The first casualties should be moved at once, especially if badly wounded; less for their own sake than for general morale. He found himself imagining why there was a delay. Mangled and shattered limbs caught under a fallen gun or spar? A deck-ladder carried away? Something fluttered down to the deck just to his left; he bent down and with a tremor of irrational rage picked up the ensign. The shot which had crashed through the taffrail had severed the stern halliards.
‘Secure this to the mizzen truck,’ he shouted to a member of the nearest carronade’s gun-crew. Without halliards, no power on earth could restore it to the mizzen peak. Round and chain shot were now slicing through the rigging almost continuously. Charles turned his telescope on Vengeance and realised with a shock that her fore-mast had been brought down. Shells were raining down around her, and although she was still moving, her withdrawal was not fast enough to prevent the gunners registering hit after hit on her upper decks. H
e had no doubt that the only reason why Scylla and Leander had not been recalled was the absolute necessity for dividing the Russians’ fire as much as possible to save Vengeance. Charles knew the terrible dilemma his father would be in; how by trying to spare Vengeance, he might well lose one of the other two ships, and if he did, Dundas and the French admirals would not be slow to point out the absurdity of attempting any further attacks on the forts. Charles was determined that come what might Vengeance should not be lost; his father would not be let down by him, so long as Scylla answered her helm. As another shell burst on the crippled frigate’s forecastle, Charles strode to the wheel.
‘Starboard two points; full ahead,’ he said quietly.
‘Starboard two points,’ replied the quartermaster as the course was adjusted, and then as the engine-room bell rang: ‘Engines full ahead.’
Charles felt the eyes of his officers on him and heard several uneasy coughs. Wilmot came up to him. He looked embarrassed and anxious.
‘I understood our orders were to …’
‘I know our orders, Mr Wilmot,’ said Charles curtly.
‘Aye aye, sir.’
Charles knew what Wilmot was thinking but could not explain to him without others overhearing and realising what a gamble he was taking. The orders had been to turn to port at a thousand yards and to engage Fort Constantine from the front. Charles was now steering straight for the harbour mouth, a course which would inevitably expose his ship to close simultaneous fire from the forts on both sides of the entrance. He calculated that only by coming close to the guns on the inner southern face of Fort Constantine could he draw the fire of the western seaward face away from Vengeance. That he would also have to risk the fire of Fort Alexander from the other side of the harbour mouth could not be helped, but Leander would soon be engaging that battery and should occupy the gunners there. Scylla had now reached her top speed of thirteen knots, making her a harder target than the slow-moving Vengeance. The high trajectories of the short-range mortar shells told Charles that he was now within five hundred yards of the mouth; several seconds later he was thankful to hear Leander going into action. On her new course, Scylla’s broadsides would be useless for a few minutes yet, but her bow Lancaster was still firing at three rounds a minute.
From the corner of his eye Charles saw that the seaman he had sent up with the ensign had performed his task and had now climbed down to the comparative safety of the mizzen-top. He was easing himself out by the futtock shrouds onto the top of the ratlines, when some chain shot hit him, hurling him from the rigging like a rag-doll, his arms thrown out and his back bent double. Charles thought he had gone overboard, but a moment later saw the body impaled on the davits below the poop, stomach ripped open and head lolling forward. Charles heard Wilmot order a mizzen-topman to: ‘Get that thing down,’ and he himself was about to send a midshipman down to the gun-decks with new orders when a shell hit the quarter-deck. The air was splitting apart in a tornado of whistling and screaming splinters and jagged metal; the deck seemed to lurch and leap upwards as he fell. He held his head as every bone in his body danced with the reverberations and shock; he was blinded with smoke, and his nostrils and throat were choked with the suffocating acrid smell of burning powder. As the smoke cleared slightly, and the white popping flashes behind his eyes diminished, he saw that half the officers and men, who moments before had been standing on that immaculate white deck, were dead or dying. The master’s massive body was lying slumped against the binnacle-housing, his head cleanly severed from his body by a bomb splinter; as neatly done as might have been achieved with a knife. Blood was bubbling and gushing from his neck. Wilmot was lying on his back, his right side an unrecognisable pulp of bleeding flesh and torn clothing, his face raw and bloody as though it had been flayed. The quartermaster’s right leg had been smashed below the knee, and he was sitting looking at the wound with a surprised and confused expression; the shock still insulating him from the pain. Charles steadied himself on the only surviving post of the rail round the main-companion hatch; his stomach was heaving and he could taste vomit in his mouth. Men were running up from the waist with stretchers and slipping in the spreading pools of blood. Charles himself picked up a sand-bucket and scattered its contents. Another shell exploded on the bulwarks just above the main entry-port, hurling large planks and timbers into the air, but Scylla held her course without any reduction in speed. A red hot shot had buried itself deep in the forecastle deck-planks between the fore-mast and the gangboard gratings over the bowsprit. A cry of ‘Fire!’ went up but, from the size of the flames, Charles did not think it would spread. Shot was now falling on every side, columns of water shooting up and cascading down in fountains onto the decks. Charles remembered that he had been about to send orders to the gun-decks; recalled too with a paralysing spasm of panic that he would have entrusted them to Humphrey to take below to get him out of the way before the ship was under the full impact of the forts’ fire. He looked around and saw him standing just aft of the port shot garlands, staring down at the deck as if dazed or in a dream. As Charles touched his shoulder, the boy started and swung round to face him. The air was loud with the whistling of shells and the groans of the wounded. A canister bouquet exploded sharply just astern.
‘Don’t be afraid, my boy,’ he murmured. Humphrey made no movement; his eyes looked glazed and there were drops of sweat standing out on his forehead and upper lip. ‘Go tell Mr Machin to let the men fire as they will after a single broadside. He may fire the moment his guns bear on either side.’
Humphrey raised his hand to his cap mechanically.
‘Aye aye, sir.’
As he moved away uncertainly, Charles called out:
‘And stay below unless I send for you.’
Seconds after Humphrey’s departure, shots tore through the starboard gangboard above the waist and another smashed a large hole in the forecastle bulwarks, carrying away dead-eyes, cleats, shrouds and fore-mast ratlines – so much gossamer on the wind. A few more shots like that and the masts would be down. For the first time Charles wondered whether his ship was going to survive. Suppose he had not risked his ship by going in; might Vengeance still not have crept to safety? If either Scylla or Vengeance were to be lost, there was no doubt which the Admiralty would have chosen to sacrifice: Vengeance, the unconverted sailing frigate. If he ever survived the loss of his ship he might well face a court-martial for failing to adhere to his orders. Another fifty yards and there would be no turning back; yet Charles never considered this option, although he had already vastly increased Vengeance’s chances of escape. Another shell exploded as it struck the planksheer rail, showering the quarter-deck with splinters and cutting Charles’s forehead above his left eye. He wiped away the blood and cursed the Russians. The hammock netting had absorbed most of the blast and saved him from certain death. He thought of the deluge of shell and shot which he felt sure would rain down on Scylla as soon as she was level with the inner face of Fort Constantine. He imagined the yards and blocks coming crashing down, and felt fury rather than fear; fury that the Russians had blocked their harbour mouth and refused to come out and fight on equal terms; fury with the British public’s belief that the Royal Navy was not as it had been of old. The ignorant blockheads thought that the men who won the Battle of the Saints, the First of June, and Trafalgar would have had no trouble in levelling a few harbour forts. None of them remembered that Nelson’s failures had all been against shore positions: the fiascos at Turk’s Bay and Teneriffe and his repulse from Boulogne. Did they ever think that the navy’s present impasse in the Black Sea was due entirely to the Russians’ fear of a general action? Not they. Well, let them read in their comfortable chairs about how a British two-decker acquitted herself against overwhelming odds. He saw Bowen and Cunningham, the only two officers of wardroom rank to have survived the shell, both looking at him strangely and he did not find it hard to guess their thoughts. Bowen caught his eye and Charles smiled blandly before turning and ordering t
he men at the quarter-deck carronades to stand to their guns. A few seconds later he gave the order to fire, and the quarter-deck guns were followed by the entire broadside; port first and starboard just after; the ship heeling in the opposite direction after each discharge, engulfed in smoke from stem to stern. By running up onto the poop and leaning out over the shattered taffrail, Charles was able to see shells and shot pitting the stonework, here and there demolishing the dividing walls between the casemates. The crash of Scylla’s guns and the continual rumbling of the truck wheels, made him shiver with excitement and elation. It was almost a minute before he realised that the enemy had not replied. At first he assumed that they could not depress their guns low enough to hit him as close in as three hundred yards. Even at five hundred most of the shot had gone through the rigging. But at this range it ought to be easy for them to hit Scylla firing mortars at their normal 45° elevation, loaded with short-fuse shells and low charges of powder. Without such weapons the forts would not be able to achieve a continuous line of fire across the channel. His confusion changed to astonishment when he realised that, although close enough to Fort Constantine to cause problems over the depression of fixed guns, the same reason could not explain the silence of Fort Alexander, seven hundred yards away. Then through gaps in the smoke Charles saw men hauling up light howitzers and field guns to the parapets. Only then did he realise with a chilling shock that he had engaged the face of an empty battery. There were no guns in the casemates commanding the channel at the harbour mouth.
