“Eighteen-pounders,” said Jacques. “The same as we have. Good! The odds grow more and more equal! Come on down, Lieutenant,” he said to his first mate. “You will be of more help to me down here than up there.” Ironhead slid down the mast and stepped to his captain’s side.
The frigate continued her advance but did not fire again. The experiment of a moment before had taught her that she was still too far away from the brigantine to fire with accuracy.
“Now, Master Tête-de-Fer,” said Jacques, “to the battery. As long as we are in retreat, use only the cannons—but as soon as the frigate pulls alongside, switch to the howitzers, and only the howitzers. Understood?”
“Aye, sir.” The lieutenant disappeared down the aft stairway.
Another thirty minutes passed without any further signs of hostility between the two vessels. Jacques, with his eye for distance, refused to waste good powder and shells on the sea and did not respond to the other ship’s earlier provocations. But it was obvious, from the excited faces of the two crews and the attention with which the captain measured the space that separated the combatants, that the battle was close at hand; that, as they say, the monologue would become a dialogue very soon indeed.
Scarcely ten more minutes had gone by—ten minutes that seemed like a century to everyone involved—when the bow of the frigate flared with smoke once more, followed by the whistle of cannonballs passing through the Calypso’s rigging, punching holes through the foremost topsail and severing a few sheets.
Jacques sized up the damage with a practiced eye. Judging it to be slight, he ordered his men to return fire. “Come on, men!” he cried. “One good turn deserves another, eh? Fire!” A double blast echoed throughout the brigantine, and Jacques leaned over the rail to watch the cannonballs’ progress. One of them tore away a portion of the frigate’s bulwark, while the other buried itself in her bow.
“Voilà!” Jacques cried. “What will you do now? Give her a broadside! Aim at the rigging—let us clip this bird’s wings and break her legs! Wood is more precious than flesh at the moment, is it not? Ha!” No sooner had he uttered these words, however, than two more enemy cannon shells tore through the rigging and sails of the Calypso. One merely grazed the mainyard, but the other carried the foremost mast clean away.
“Fire, by God, fire!” Jacques shouted. “Teach those rascals a lesson! Twenty-five louis to the first man who brings down a mast!”
The booming of the cannon nearly drowned out his final words, and the balls hurtled through the air toward the enemy ship’s rigging. The action was answered immediately, and for nearly a quarter of an hour there was an uninterrupted volley of cannon fire. The breeze had disappeared, and the two vessels were running at barely four or five knots apiece. The space between them was full of black smoke, and the gunners fired blindly. The frigate continued to creep closer and closer to the side of the brigantine—which had the advantage of a rear wind and was sailing in clear air, only her topmasts visible through the smoke.
This was the moment Jacques had been waiting for. He had done everything he could to avoid a shipboard skirmish; now he had no choice but to turn on his pursuer like a wounded boar. The frigate was to starboard of the Calypso, firing with her forward guns. Jacques, seeing the advantage in his position, was determined to profit by it. “Bring the watch on deck!” he shouted.
The boatswain’s whistle acknowledged his order, and it was carried out in an instant. The firing continued. Jacques’s voice rang out again above the fracas. “Tighten the mainsail! Man the rear braces! Haul up the main sheet! Keep alongside her, now! Steady, men!”
These orders had hardly been carried out when the Calypso, obeying both her rudder and her rear sails, swung rapidly around to starboard, cutting off the frigate and coming to a stop, thanks to her captain’s foresight in supporting the starboard foresails. The Leicester, damaged in sails and rigging and unable to halt her forward progress, surged helplessly through the clouds of smoke and the crashing waves, and ran directly into the Calypso. With a terrible noise, the frigate’s forward mast crashed and tangled in the brigantine’s mainsail.
Jacques’s voice rose above the din again. “Fire!” he cried. “Fore and aft, men! Raze her like a pontoon! Don’t leave a spar standing!”
Fourteen cannons, six loaded with grapeshot and eight with howitzer shells, roared to life. Balls hailed down on the frigate, cutting down thirty or forty men where they stood, and the foremast snapped at its base. At the same moment, a shower of grenades exploded on the frigate’s forward deck. The Leicester’s only feeble reply was to fire from atop the mizzenmast, which was half enveloped by the ruined topsail.
Now using the Leicester’s ruined riggings, ropes, sheets, and spars as bridges, the pirates of the Calypso surged aboard the crippled frigate. The British marines tried to hold them off with their muskets, but they could not stem the tide. For every man who fell, another took his place; even those men who were wounded continued to crawl forward, tossing grenades and brandishing their cutlasses. Georges and Jacques were prepared to declare victory when, at the cry of “All hands on deck,” the British sailors who had been stationed belowdecks came rushing up through the fore and aft hatchways. This reassured their comrades, who had begun to fold.
The Leicester’s captain now emerged at the head of his troops. Jacques had been right. It was Lord William Murray, who had resumed his old command so that he might take his revenge. He and Georges faced each other once again, but this time awash in blood and carnage, their swords in their hands—no longer friends, but mortal enemies.
They recognized each other immediately, and moved to begin hand-to-hand combat—but the commotion around them was so great that they could not reach each other.
The Munier brothers cut great swaths through the British ranks, fighting side by side with calm bravery. Once two sailors raised their axes over Georges’s head; then they fell simultaneously, cut down by an unseen marksman. Several times the brothers were threatened with bayonets, and on every occasion their invisible savior shot the assailants dead. It was Pierre Munier, wielding his trusty carbine and protecting his sons like a guardian angel.
All of a sudden a terrible cry rang out over the booming of the grenades, the clash of the bayonets, and the screams of the wounded. The words struck terror into every heart:
“Fire! We’re on fire!”
Dense smoke billowed from the aft hatchway and out of the portholes. A howitzer shell had exploded in the captain’s cabin, and the frigate was ablaze. For a moment every man stood frozen. Then Jacques’s clear and commanding voice made itself heard once more above the din: “Back to the Calypso, men!”
With the same speed they had shown in boarding the Leicester, the privateers abandoned her to scramble back aboard their own ship. Jacques and Georges, with a few trusty hands assisting them, covered the retreat.
Now Lord Murray appeared again, charging to the forefront of the assault in pursuit of the pirates, brandishing his sword and obviously hoping to reach the deck of the Calypso. Jacques’s men darted up the masts to toss down a fresh hail of grenades, holding back the enemy while throwing down ropes and mooring lines to aid their comrades’ return to the brigantine. By this time Jacques had regained his own deck.
Georges was still aboard the Leicester. The governor faced him; the young mulatto readied himself for the fight. Then all at once a hand seized Georges in an iron grip and pulled him to safety. It was Pierre Munier—who would not leave his son, and who had now saved him from certain death for the third time in this extraordinary day.
Jacques’s voice rang out again. “Bring us ’round, men! Hoist the jib and haul down the main tack. Helm, hard to starboard!” His orders were obeyed with such swiftness that the English, fast as they were, were not able to lash the two ships together. The Calypso, with a great heave, pulled away from her enemy as if she understood the danger she was in.
The Leicester, now lacking her forward mast, moved slowly under the power o
f the sails remaining on the mainmast and the mizzenmast.
A terrible spectacle could now be seen on her bloody decks, witnessed with horror by those safely aboard the Calypso.
The fire, which had been allowed to spread unnoticed in the heat of combat, had spread too far to be controlled.
The famed British discipline was never more admirable than at this moment. In the midst of the choking smoke, Lord Murray mounted the quarterdeck and raised the speaking horn he still clutched in his left fist.
“Steady, men! Stay calm! I am in control!” The English sailors stopped in their tracks.
“To the boats!” the captain cried. The launch was swiftly lowered; then the jolly boat, and finally the two quarter boats. “The jolly boat and launch for the marines,” ordered Lord Murray. “The two quarter boats for the crew!”
The Calypso widened the gap between herself and the frigate, and the rest of Lord Murray’s commands were inaudible. From the brigantine’s deck, the privateers could see the four boats filling with the remnants of the frigate’s crew, while the wounded crawled on their knees, begging to be taken along.
Jacques, watching closely, realized that the Leicester’s escape boats could not possibly contain all the survivors. “Launch two lifeboats!” he shouted at once. Two empty launches were unlashed from the Calypso’s side and dropped to float lightly on the waves. Immediately the English sailors who had not been able to find a place in the other craft began swimming toward them.
Lord Murray had remained on board the Leicester.
His men had tried to persuade him to join them on the lifeboats, but he had refused. There were wounded men aboard his ship, and he was responsible for them. He would go down with them.
The churning sea was fearsome.
The four lifeboats pulled clear of the burning vessel, their occupants rowing desperately. The remaining sailors were still pulling themselves aboard the boats Jacques had ordered dropped.
The Leicester sat motionless in the smoke, burning, with her dying crewmen scattered on the decks and her commander standing erect among them.
It was a terrible spectacle. Aboard the Calypso, Georges felt Sara’s trembling hand come to rest on his shoulder. He did not turn; he did not take his gaze from the flaming wreckage of the Leicester. Even the lifeboats, once they were at a safe distance, halted upon the waves. Every eye was fixed on the crippled frigate.
This, my friends, is what happened next:
The smoke from the Leicester grew thicker and thicker. Tongues of fire flickered out of her portholes; climbed her masts; devoured her sails. The loaded guns burst, one by one. Then, all at once, there was a deafening explosion. The body of the ship split, and a geyser of flame shot skyward. The observers watched fragments of masts and riggings hurtle through the air and plunge into the sea.
Of the Leicester, nothing remained but debris.
Sara’s voice was quiet. “What of Lord Murray?”
“If it were not my fate to live on with you, Sara,” Georges said, turning to face her, “on my honor, I would choose to die exactly as he has.”
NOTES
CHAPTER I. L’ÎLE DE FRANCE
chapter title. L’île de France: Better known as Mauritius, it is part of the Mascarene Islands in the southwest Indian Ocean. Known to Arab and Malay traders in the Middle Ages as Dina Mozare, it came under Dutch control from 1598 to 1710 and was named Mauritius in honor of the governor Prince Maurice of Nassau. Renamed île de France, the island was colonized by the French until 1810, and the sea battle represented at the beginning of Georges marked its end as a French colony. It then came under the rule of Great Britain, which renamed it Mauritius and abolished slavery in 1835. Mauritius remained a British colony until independent sovereignty in 1968.
L. 16. Walter Scott: The Scottish novelist and poet (1771–1832) whose Waverley (1814)—followed by many other novels, from The Antiquary (1816), Rob Roy (1818), and The Heart of Midlothian (1818) to Ivanhoe (1819), The Pirate (1820), and Redgauntlet (1824)—initiated the vogue of historical fiction in European and American literature. Scott produced a massive œuvre at a very fast writing pace, and in his novels he let imaginary central figures (“Scott heroes”) encounter documented historical characters and events, presenting memorably detailed settings as well as dramatic battle and travel scenes. In these aspects, Dumas’s Georges follows the Scott tradition.
L. 11. modern Prometheus…St. Helena…martyr is gone: Dumas is referring to Napoleon Bonaparte, who, after a series of military losses, abdicated as French emperor in April 1814. His English opponents insisted on his exile and sent him to the Mediterranean island of Elba. Nine months later Napoleon escaped and orchestrated his reinstallation, resulting in the famous battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815, that signaled Napoleon’s final defeat. (It also finalized the British rule over the former île de France.) In order to prevent another escape, the English had him exiled much farther away, to the barren South Atlantic Ocean island of St. Helena, where he died in 1821. Dumas was sympathetic to Napoleon, his father having distinguished himself in the French army and been allowed the opportunity to succeed despite his status as a mulatto.
L. 13. Joan of Arc: (1412–31) a national heroine of France and a saint of the Roman Catholic Church. She claimed to have been directed by God to recover her homeland from the English occupiers in the latter part of the Hundred Years’ War. Joan of Arc led troops to military victories against the English under the instructions of the uncrowned king Charles VII. She fell prisoner in battle and was convicted of heresy. Subsequently, the English regent John of Lancaster, first Duke of Bedford, had her burned at the stake.
L. 13. Mary Stuart: (1542–87) Better known as Mary, Queen of Scots, she was the monarch of the Kingdom of Scotland (1542–67) and the queen consort of France (1559–60). Mary Stuart was forced by her Protestant lords to abdicate the Scottish throne to her infant son. She fled imprisonment and sought shelter in England, where instead she was held captive for nineteen years. In the wake of a series of Roman Catholic plots against Elizabeth, the queen’s ministers demanded and put into action Mary Stuart’s execution.
L. 14. Golgotha: the hill on which Jesus was crucified.
L. 20. The Lusiads: Portuguese epic, Os Lusíadas (1571) in the original, by the poet Luíz Vaz de Camões (1524–80), often called Camoens in English. A continuation of the tradition of Homer and Virgil, The Lusiads tells the story of the hero Lusus’s coming to the part of the Iberian peninsula that was named Lusitania and is now Portugal. In the fifth canto of the poem, the giant Adamastor, descended from the gigantes of Greek myth, rules the Indian Ocean (where île de France lies) and represents the dangers Vasco da Gama has to overcome braving the Cape of Storms, turning it into the Cape of Good Hope.
L. 20. Cléofas: Hero of the Spanish satire El diablo cojuelo (The Limping Devil, 1641) by Luis Vélez de Guevara and adapted by Alain-René Le Sage as Le Diable boiteux (1707). When the student Don Cléofas Leandro Pérez Zambullo frees the devil Asmodée from the bottle in which he is imprisoned, the devil takes Don Cléofas on his coattail to the steeple of San Salvador, above the city of Madrid, and lets him magically see through the roofs and walls, revealing a satiric panorama of many comically intimate scenes of human folly. By casting the reader as a new Cléofas, Dumas’s narrator takes the part of the devil and invites the reader to the “Asmodeus ride” of a bird’s-eye view of the island.
L. 10. Creoles: a word of Spanish origin (“Criollo”) referring to people born in European colonies, especially in the Americas. Whether it should be applied to people of both European and non-European descent is disputed. Dumas uses the term in the narrower sense of people of French origin born in the colonies, who were often believed to be particularly prejudiced.
L. 31. Paul and Virginie: Paul et Virginie is a sentimental island romance published in 1787 by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. Set on île de France, it tells the story of two young people who fall in love completely according to nature’s l
aws due to the isolation of their homeland from civilization. Their sad deaths at the end of the tale made the book one of the most popular novels of the eighteenth century.
CHAPTER II. LIONS AND LEOPARDS
L. 1. It began: As Douglas Munro suggested in Alexander Dumas, Père, “Dumas’ account of the battle was for a long time considered to be false in that it differed from the official account published in Le Moniteur; it has, however, since been proved that his description was the correct one, the official version having been distorted for political reasons” (pp. 60–61).
CHAPTER III. THREE CHILDREN
L. 6. caissons: carriers of artillery ammunition. A large case rests on an axle, with a road wheel at each end, while poles connect the center of the axle to the harnessed horses. Commonly used to tow guns.
L. 18. cuirassier: a member of the cavalry who wears a cuirass, a type of protective armor.
L. 28. Malgache dog: a dog of the Coton de Tulear breed. The breed appeared at the pirate and slave-trading port of Tulear, Madagascar, during the seventeenth century. It was adopted by Madagascar’s nobles as a companion dog and subsequently became known as The Royal Dog of Madagascar. A symbol of wealth, it was adopted by the conquering French colonists.
L. 32. the Dumas battery: one of the two principal fortification batteries of Port Louis, capital of Mauritius, at the time.
CHAPTER IV. FOURTEEN YEARS LATER
L. 33. Sixtus Quintus: Pope Sixtus V (1520–90), one of the founders of the Counter-Reformation.
CHAPTER V. THE PRODIGAL SON
L. 7. one of these ribbons: the ribbons of Charles III and the Legion of Honor; see ch. 4, p. 34, l. 21.
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