The French Prize

by James L. Nelson

  Jack looked up into the maintop. The smoke was still wafting from the end of Wentworth’s barrel as he slowly lowered the weapon to reload. Another of the British sailors fired, but with his smoothbore musket it would be as much luck as skill if he managed to hit one of the fleeing Frenchmen.

  Abigail was slowly drifting onto a starboard tack and the Frenchman was drifting to larboard and the result was an enormous pressure on L’Armançon’s jibboom and bowsprit, like a man wrenching a chicken leg apart. Jack could hear the popping and the cracking, the blessed cracking, of the Frenchman’s head rig as it began to give way. He could see more boarders massing on the bow, ready to try once more to come up the bridge made by the bowsprit, but even as the officer leading this new rush stepped onto the bowsprit’s heel the whole thing gave way. The jibboom snapped off like a twig. It fell onto Abigail’s deck, now so entangled there was no telling what was Abigail’s gear and what was L’Armançon’s.

  With that release Abigail began to turn faster, dragging L’Armançon around. Jack could see the bowsprit pulled out of alignment by the force exerted by Abigail’s deadweight. He heard a louder cracking sound and saw the end of the bowsprit shivered, shards of wood sticking out like an ugly broken bone.

  The first three guns in Abigail’s battery were run out, almost together, and they fired as one and the concussion dislodged Abigail from the Frenchman’s head rig. L’Armançon was crippled now, her bowsprit shattered, and Abigail had only to pass her to windward and race away. The Frenchman could never follow because she could not hope to sail in any direction but right downwind, and even that would be chancy. Forward, someone gave a cheer and the cheer was taken up along Abigail’s deck, a wild, exuberant cheer, a release of all the fear and horror of the past hour.

  But L’Armançon was turning, her stern swinging off the wind, and Jack could see they had hauled her spanker out to windward. They were turning her on purpose, and there was only one rational reason why they might do so with their bowsprit shot to bits.

  The Frenchman’s broadside went off, not all together but one gun at a time, slowly, and Jack thought they must have their best man moving from gun to gun, aiming each, no doubt because they knew that they had one last chance, and this was it.

  The cheer died on the Abigails’ lips as the first shot clanged off the muzzle of the third gun on the starboard battery. The gun reared like a mad horse and men scattered and the ton and a half of iron crashed down to the deck. The next shot struck the caboose and went right on through, taking the upper half of the little building with it, leaving the oven and a smattering of pots exposed to the afternoon sun. The third shot was high, no one saw it strike, but the fourth passed right over the waist, the wind of its passing knocking men to the deck, but, incredibly, it hit no one in its flight.

  Then they heard the cracking sound, the rending of wood and a frantic shouting from aloft. Eyes looked up as the next of the Frenchman’s guns went off, parting the forestay, but what the Abigails were watching was the main topmast, shot through at the cap, leaning, leaning over, the sail flogging, the deadeyes exploding with the pressure, lanyards shredding, the shrouds swinging free.

  The topmast fell so slowly it was almost dreamlike. The terrible thunder of the cannons did not stop, the Abigails having regained their senses and turned to loading and firing the five remaining guns on the starboard side.

  Then the topmast started gaining momentum in its fall. It paused, just for a second, as the strain came on the main topmast and topgallant forestays, and then those parted, too, or most of them, and the ones that did not dragged the fore topgallant mast down as the entire thing fell in a thundering, wrenching crash, spewing cordage and shattered spars and torn sailcloth over the Abigail’s waist and quarterdeck.

  Frost came huffing aft. He had a cut on his cheek and his face was streaked with blood and his shirt and coat had a rent that showed white flesh below. “Captain! Captain! We’re done for now! Dear God, you must strike! You’ve done all a man could do!”

  It was all so unreal Jack was having a hard time thinking, but the thought did occur to him that this was the second time Frost had insisted he surrender, which seemed an odd thing for someone who played the fire-eater as he did. He looked over the hundred yards of water between him and L’Armançon. The French ship was still turning. They had brailed the spanker up to try and keep the ship from spinning like a weathervane up into the wind but that was not working. What they needed to do was sheet the jibs flat, but there were no jibs left because there was no bowsprit to speak of. They might back the foresails, but Jack could see how the master might not care to do that, with so much rigging torn up.

  L’Armançon slowly turned to weather and in the odd quiet Jack could hear the Frenchmen shouting fore and aft and he could see men scrambling to do something, what, he could not imagine. The Frenchman’s stern turned past them and two of Abigail’s guns fired into it. Then the French ship came up into the wind, pointing right into the wind, turning out of control. The steady trades caught the foresails and laid them aback, normally not a problem, but now there was no head rigging to keep them from falling backward.

  The Abigails were silent, fore and aft, watching with disbelief as L’Armançon’s fore topmast and fore topgallant mast, and all the rigging and gear, tilted aft, tilted as slowly as Abigail’s had, then picked up momentum in its fall because it did not have the intact rigging to slow it down. It looked like a felled tree as it came down and the mainsail jerked and the main topgallant was ripped from its place high aloft and the whole thing collapsed, half on the deck and half over the side. L’Armançon came to a stop, now two hundred yards away, spinning slowly on that patch of ocean. Two ships, crippled, drifting apart, a battle tabled until one or the other could get under way.

  Jack was the first of the Abigails to return to his senses. “Clear this wreckage away! That topsail yard is kindling, get it overboard. Someone cut those lanyards free!”

  The men leaped on the wreckage, because the tactical situation was clear; whoever could make sail first was the winner, and the other, helpless, could do nothing but strike or be beaten to death. So they swarmed over the wreckage, axes rising and falling, sheath knives working at spun yarn.

  They were at it for twenty minutes before Jack remembered his great cabin. “Mr. Tucker,” he called to the mate, “carry on here. I am going below and see what’s left of my cabin.”

  “Aye, sir,” Tucker said. He had a bandage on his hand and blood on his face that had been imperfectly wiped away.

  Jack climbed down into the ’tween decks. It was better lit than usual, with the gaping holes larboard and starboard where the ball had passed clean through the hull. He made his way past Wentworth’s and Frost’s cabins, which he could see had taken a number of hits, and forced the door to his own cabin open.

  The stern windows, just replaced at Antigua, were gone again. His hanging bunk, which he used at sea, was shot clean through, both ends still hanging from their hooks, the midsection on the floor. His sea chest and its contents, or what remained of them, were scattered about.

  He saw his barometer, his beautiful barometer, lying facedown on the deck. He picked it up with a knot of sadness at its loss, but when he turned it over he saw to his surprise that it was intact. Indeed, it looked as if it had not suffered a scratch. Jack smiled in delight, one little bit of happy news in all of this destruction. And then he looked at the mercury, and then looked again. He had checked it only a few hours ago. He was not sure he had ever seen it fall so fast.

  28

  Jack carefully wrapped the barometer in layers of bedding he pulled from his shattered hanging cot and wedged the instrument into the corner of his fixed bunk. He took one last look around and then climbed back on deck. The work had not slowed in his absence; if anything, the momentum had built as wreckage was cleared away, torn sail cut free and pulled clear, allowing more hands to get at the job.

  John Burgess, with the frugality of boatswains the world
over, was overseeing a gang of men flaking down the much torn main topsail, the topgallant waiting its turn in a heap on the larboard side. The sails represented a considerable quantity of canvas, as did the piles of broken cordage waiting to be coiled. Jack was not terribly concerned with saving Robert Oxnard’s property just then, but he did not wish to offend Burgess’s sensibilities, so he said nothing.

  The starboard end of the shattered topsail yard was free of its gear and a dozen men grabbed it up, walked it to the leeward side, and heaved it into the sea. It struck with a great splash, bobbed, and settled.

  The deck was swarming with men. If Jack was ever grateful for the extra hands Frost had brought aboard, it was now. He had no notion of how many men had been killed or wounded in that exchange, but guessed ten at least were out of action. Some of the men-of-war’s men had pulled the casualties toward the bow, the most out-of-the-way spot on deck.

  Even with his expanded company, he suspected his crew was a third the size of L’Armançon’s. But at least he now had a chance of getting his ship under way before the Frenchman. Without the British jacks, there would be no chance at all.

  He saw Wentworth straddling the main topgallant yard, lying half across the bulwark, half across the main hatch, which it had stove in when it fell. He was wielding a knife, a sailor’s knife, cutting away the robands to free the topgallant sail from the yard. Jack guessed that Tucker or someone had told him what to do, what to cut. Wentworth certainly could not name any one of the lines he was so aggressively attacking with his blade.

  Jack looked out to windward. In the short time he had been below, the trade winds had blown away the lingering cloud of powder smoke and Jack was suddenly aware of just how obscured his vision had been. It was like fog. You often did not realize how little you could see until the visibility was back to what it should be. Now he could clearly see L’Armançon, every detail visible over the half mile separating them. Like Abigail, she was lying ahull, her remaining sails clewed up. The wind and current had slowly turned her, and now Jack was looking at her bow and he could see the swarms of men there and on the bowsprit as well, could see the glint of axes rising and falling as the rigging and shattered wood was cut away.

  The bowsprit would be their focus, their alpha and omega. Without it they might be able to sail, but they would never be able to maneuver in any meaningful way. Without that heavy spar forward, the support it would give to the foremast and the leverage exerted by the jibs that flew there, they would never have control enough to outsail Abigail, or to avoid having her hang on their quarter and pound them to death when the duel resumed.

  Jack’s eyes tracked farther off to the east, and there he saw what he had missed in the smoke of the battle and the distraction of having a French man-of-war trying to batter his ship to shivers. An ugly dark line was building on the horizon, and above it great billowing anvil head clouds. This was not the usual late afternoon rain squall of the Caribbean Sea, this was something more profound and menacing. This was the sort of weather that made the mercury in the barometer fall at an alarming rate, bad in any instance, but much worse with Abigail’s hull and rig so frighteningly compromised.

  Tucker hurried over to him. He was stripped down to shirtsleeves and sweating heavily. “Two of them guns were upended, sir, carriages smashed. I had thought I might—”

  Jack cut him off. “Use the boat falls to drop them overboard, just be rid of them. The carriages as well.”

  “Aye, sir,” Tucker said and turned to go but Jack called him back.

  “See here, Oliver,” he said, low, so no one else would hear. “There’s some very nasty weather coming in from the east…”

  Tucker turned and looked, running his eyes along the horizon, let out a low whistle, then turned back to Jack. “I should say nasty, sir.”

  “No need to bring it to the men’s attention, they’re working as hard as they can right now,” Jack said, “and they’ll notice it soon enough. But once this wreckage is cleared away I want the fore topgallant mast and yard sent down, and the mizzen as well. If we have time we might strike the fore topmast. The French were kind enough to take care of the main for us.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Get the boat aboard and double-griped. Lifelines fore and aft. And for all love let’s see the guns double-lashed, inspect the eyebolts, and set some of the more godly hands to praying that none of them come adrift this time.”

  “Aye, sir,” Tucker said, paused a second to see if more was coming, and when he realized Jack was done he turned and hurried forward, calling out orders.

  Jack looked to the west, a direction he had not looked in a while as there had not been much there to command his attention, but now there was. They had run to the southeast during their fight, and the wind and current had been drifting them around some distance since the engagement ended. Jack had not been paying much attention to where on the watery globe they were, but he knew now, and he did not have to use a sextant, a chip log, or any other navigational tool to figure it out.

  They were right to windward of Guadeloupe. Jack could see the high, dull green mountains at the center of the island looming above the horizon. They were a hundred nautical miles or more from actually running up on the island’s sandy beaches, but that was not that far as measured at sea, particularly not with the wind and current setting them down on shore and them with no way to sail clear, not at least before the considerably damaged rig was set to rights.

  And that was no simple job. It was not just a matter of clearing the wreckage away. When the main topmast and the topgallant came down they tore out great quantities of running rigging in their plunge to the deck; braces, bowlines, lifts, clewlines; not to mention the shrouds, backstays, and forestays that had been pulled out or shot through, without which the masts would not bear the pressure of the sails. It all had to be knotted, spliced, or replaced before Abigail could sail, fight, or beat clear of a lee shore. Incredibly, L’Armançon had suddenly dropped to number three on Jack’s list of most immediate threats to his life and the lives of his men.

  * * *

  Barère was dead. That at least was a good thing. Renaudin had had the supreme satisfaction of seeing it, close up. But he had been wounded in the process, and Barère did not die by his hand, and that tempered his pleasure.

  It had happened near the end of the fight, a fight that had been going just as Renaudin hoped, though to be sure the Americans were better prepared for battle than he had expected them to be. If ever one needed evidence of the perfidious nature of the Americans and the British, here it was. The Americans had sailed to Antiqua, which meant they had turned to the British navy for help. The British navy. The same navy that France had fought in those very waters to defend the United States, the navy that had made Renaudin a prisoner while he fought for American freedom, and the British had not only repaired their ship but also doubled the armament and crew. Incredible.

  Renaudin did not like to think that Barère and the Directoire could be right about anything, but he could not argue with this clear example of American treachery.

  In the end, however, it did not matter, because Renaudin did not see this as an issue of international relations, or republicanism versus monarchy, or the world’s attitude toward the new French Republic or the Ancien Régime. For him, this was personal. For nearly a decade his professional pride had been smothered under a blizzard of orders, propaganda, and useless revolutionary officers sent out from Paris. His honor had been slumbering, and this impudent American had woken it up, and now he was focused entirely on crushing him, to the exclusion of all else.

  He and Dauville had driven the bastards on the lower deck hard, watch on watch, pushing them through gun drills and sail-handling drills. They had met protests and grumbling with fists and belaying pins. And the drills paid off. The first broadside, fired point-blank range into the American, who once again thought himself so clever in his quick ship handling, had been devastating. One gun upended, the thin strakes of th
e merchantman punched clean through. They had come under the American’s stern and fired again, right through the transom, the most satisfying volley of roundshot Renaudin had ever fired, his guns twice as powerful as those the American mounted.

  The American had flown up into irons, rocked by the onslaught, and Renaudin had worn around to come back and end it, the coup de grâce, as the American flatted in his headsails and cast onto a starboard tack. That was when it happened. Barère was shouting something, Renaudin managing to ignore him, until Barère took a grip on his forearm and turned him so they were face-to-face, Renaudin with his back to the American ship.

  “See here, Citoyen Renaudin!” Barère said, his finger raised as if admonishing a child, but Renaudin was still too stunned by the fact that the man had had the audacity to actually grab him by the arm and spin him around that he could not speak.

  “You have your orders, straight from the Directoire, by way of me, who speaks for the Directoire,” Barère spluttered. “You are not to destroy this ship, you are to capture it.” It was apparently clear even to Barère what Renaudin had in mind. “You will call for them to strike before you fire another shot, is that understood?”

  Renaudin’s shock dissipated but he still did not speak. Instead he reached for the pistol in his coat pocket, thinking that the weapon could express his feelings better than any words. But just as his hand found the walnut grip of the gun, he felt a burning on the top of his ear, heard a loud buzz like a swarm of bees, and a round hole appeared in Barère’s forehead. His mouth flew open and the back of his head exploded in a spray of blood. It was just as Renaudin had always envisioned it.