by Hunter, Seth
He fixed his glass on her again. They had closed noticeably since the last time he looked. He could see the guns bowsed up against the gun ports: 6-pounders, the same as Nereus, and a pair in the bows that he could not see properly but looked as if they might be of a greater calibre. He focused on the small cluster of figures at the stern. Unlike Nathan in his reefer jacket and Breton fisherman’s knit, they looked like men who held the King’s commission. He could see their bicorn hats and their blue coats, entirely in keeping with what you might expect of officers in His Britannic Majesty’s Navy except . . .
And then he knew. And was sliding down the weather backstay to the deck before his mind had put the thought into words. No King’s ship of that size would be without her contingent of marines—Nereus had seventeen—yet he could not see a single red coat on deck.
Tully was waiting for him at the helm with an inquiring eye.
“If she is a King’s ship,” said Nathan, “then I am the Bishop of Rome.”
The captain’s pretensions to the papacy had been exposed too often for Tully to speak in support of them now. Nathan glanced up at the sails and the barque’s blue pennant streaming out to the southwest. If they were to run that must be the course they took for they had no hope of slipping past her, not without exposing themselves to her broadside.
“Bring her round to sou’-sou’-west,” he instructed the helmsman, adding for Tully’s benefit, “We’ll run for Ushant and see how far he will chase us.”
Tully let out his first great bellow of “Hands to the braces” and Nathan left him to it while he crossed to the weather side with his glass. If she was French and the Speedwell ran for France it was possible she would let them go and wait for the next ship bound for England. But as soon as Nathan steadied the glass that little hope was dashed. Her deck and shrouds were swarming with men and within a minute they were bringing her round. Nathan took his eye from the glass and watched his own crew anxiously as they manned the braces. Tully had them well drilled but they were so few compared to the crew of a ship of war. His only hope was to keep the wind on his quarter and keep manoeuvres down to the minimum. The yards finally came round and he felt her instant response. If the wind held they might have the legs of her.
His head was full of calculations . . . The tide on the ebb, four hours before it began to turn . . . He looked back across the stern rail towards their pursuer. By God, she was close; there was hardly a mile in it. He could see details with his naked eye he had barely seen through the glass before—among them the two black ports for her bow chasers. She would hardly run them out at this range, though, unless they were bigger guns than he thought.
Tully was at his side. Was that the hint of a smile?
“Cook says dinner is ready,” he said.
Dinner? He only just stopped himself from repeating it in his incredulity. He glanced up at the sun which was where it should be at noon on a summer’s day and then once more at the brig which was closer than he would have liked but no longer gaining. Dinner. Why not? It would reassure the crew. They might even think he knew what he was about.
They sent the starboard watch off first. Nathan could not bear to leave the deck even for an instant and if he would not go, nor would Tully. He regretted this and not only for Tully’s sake. He was quite hungry though he was accustomed to dine an hour later than the men on Nereus.
And right on cue here was his steward, Gabriel, with a tray followed by a small boy carrying a stand to put it on—and a chair. And a dish under a cover.
“What have we here?” Nathan inquired, as Gabriel set the dish on the tray and lifted the cover.
What he had was a large chop from the pig they had killed yesterday, rather overdone by the look of it, with a mush of peas on a tin plate and a jug of ale to wash it down, which it looked like it needed. The cook was a man called Small—possibly a nickname—and he did not aspire to greatness. Nathan suggested to Gabriel that he might be good enough to bring Mr. Tully his dinner, too, and though the mate demurred it was done. He saw smiles from the watch still on deck which was better than scowls and murmurings.
Inevitably the crew called his steward the Angel Gabriel though had they known what Nathan knew about him they might have considered it blasphemous—or ironic. He had been among the jail sweepings taken aboard his father’s old Ajax in the American War and had been trained up as a steward from God knows what whim: perhaps because he had the aspirations of a gentleman—he claimed to have been a highwayman—but more likely because he was useless at anything else aboard ship. He was certainly a novelty to the crew of the Speedwell. They were clearly not used to captains with their own personal servants. But as far as they were concerned, Nathan was their new owner, an American by the name of Turner, born and raised in New York but based in London, the better to make a fortune from the war. He had told them when they were well out into the Bristol Channel that they were bound for Le Havre and would draw a year’s pay upon arrival—but any who wished would be put ashore at St. Ives. Thankfully, there had been no takers, for they would have been difficult to replace. They were blockade runners when they left Boston—possibly smugglers too in the West Indies trade, Tully said—so it was business as usual for them.
“Your health, Mr. Tully,” said Nathan, raising his jug. He was beginning to enjoy himself though he had to keep a tight hold on the tray and he could not prevent sneaking a glance every minute or so back at the brig. He saw the boy was doing it too, perhaps more often. Francis Coyle, cabin boy. Twelve years old, though he looked younger, taken on in Boston for his first voyage. Why, in God’s name—at a time of war when they must have known the risks they were taking? But Tully said he was a by-blow of the mate, who had since absconded or been pressed into the Navy. The crew all had stories of why they were here and where they had come from and most of them would be lies; it was best not to ask, said Tully.
“Have you eaten yourself?” Nathan asked the boy.
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
Nathan doubted it but did not pursue the inquiry. He had been much the same age when he first went to sea and always hungry but he had not seen action then. Nor since, unless you counted the incident off the Somme.
He half turned to look back towards the brig—and by God she had run out her bow chasers . . . He leapt up and took another look through his glass. They were 6-pounders—a long shot at this range, an impossible shot, he told himself. He swept her decks with the glass and saw that they had hauled in her false colours and broken out the tricolour at her stern, not that he needed the glass to see that. It billowed out to leeward as big as a sail: the new flag of republican France, America’s friend and protector, though the French ports were filled with American merchantmen taken as prizes. He was still looking at her when she fired—the two guns in the same second, two spumes of flame through the smoke and an instant later the double report carried across the water. Nathan observed the twin spouts falling close together, a cable’s length astern. He put down his chop, wiped his fingers fastidiously on his napkin, and pulled out his watch to consult the time. He saw the boy looking up at him, he rather hoped in admiration but it was no pose. He wanted to know how long it took them to load.
The hands were tumbling up from below, either having finished their dinner or having no appetite for it.
“Send down the larboard watch for their dinner.” Nathan saw the look in Tully’s eye and shared his doubts but now he had issued the order he did not care to rescind it. He crossed to the stern rail to observe the brig. Was she gaining? Perhaps a little. He measured the angle of the braces. Perhaps if they clewed up the mainsail on the weather side and veered a point or so off the wind . . .
“I am going to see what I can do with the stern chaser,” he told Tully.
The Speedwell carried a broadside of six 4-pounders—pop-guns that any ship of war would have despised—but she had a sting in her tail:
a long 6-pounder that Nathan had bought himself and had fitted in Bristol, moving the ship’s wheel forward a few feet to allow for the recoil. It was one of the new Blomefield pattern made by Samuel Walker and Company, with a loop at the top of the button for the breech rope which made it much easier to fire at an angle. Nathan had indulged in several hours’ target practice during the long haul down the Bristol Channel and picked five men for a gun crew. Though they would never compete with the crew of the Nereus when it came to speed he was satisfied they were competent to load and fire her. Now they came aft to his summons, tying their handkerchiefs round their ears and grinning at their shipmates whose encouragement sounded to Nathan disturbingly close to jeers.
He already had his hand on the breech, gazing out across the stern towards their pursuer and estimating the distance. One 6-pounder against two was much shorter odds than their respective broadsides and they might not fancy the duel. Not with the seas full of British warships that might snap them up if they suffered even a minor wound to their rigging.
He caught the eye of Solomon Pratt, the man he had designated gunner. Nathan strongly suspected he was a deserter from the British Navy and long practised at his trade. Even in the short time they had sailed together a certain rivalry had emerged between them as far as the gun was concerned and to Nathan’s secret regret, it had become known to the crew as Pratt’s Prick.
“Cast loose your gun,” he ordered, ignoring the insolent way the gunner was shaking his head and pursing his lips at the range.
A squealing of iron trucks as they rolled the gun back from the port and held it on the side tackles.
“Open the port.”
The powder boy, a man of at least forty called Joseph Gurney, brought up the cartridge, and the rammer took the tompion from the muzzle and rammed the cloth bag hard down into the bore.
The gunner fished for it with his priming wire through the vent.
“Home,” he cried.
“Shot your gun,” ordered Nathan.
The rammer rammed down a 6-pound ball and the wad on top of it.
“Run out your gun.”
They heaved on the side tackles and ran the carriage hard up against the rail.
“Maximum elevation,” Nathan instructed Pratt, moving aside as the rammer heaved up the breech with his handspike and the gunner hammered in the wedge to bring the muzzle up ten or eleven degrees, which was all the port would allow.
“Prime.”
The gunner thrust the priming iron down the touch hole to pierce the cloth bag and then poured fine powder from his powder horn into the quill. He did this with a certain air of disdain, for Nathan had recently acquired flintlocks for the guns and Pratt, a conservative to his soul, was firmly attached to the slow match and the tub, which he considered more reliable, even if it frequently blew out.
You can always light her again, he had informed Nathan, whereas if your flint don’t work . . .
You replace it with another, Nathan had instructed him firmly. He was glad enough to have a Navy man for a gunner but he would take no instruction from a deserter.
“Point your gun,” he said now.
They heaved and grunted until the gunner was happy or as close to it as he ever would be at this range. He nodded to Nathan and stood to one side of the carriage, crouching down to stare fixedly out of the port with his hand on the lanyard.
Nathan felt the deck under his feet. He felt the bows rise and then begin to fall; he felt the sea rising towards the stern and the stern with it . . .
“Fire!”
The gunner jerked the lanyard and the flint came down with a flash and on the instant the charge exploded.
A thin jet of fire leapt from the touch hole and a much greater blast of flame and smoke from the muzzle; the carriage leapt back eight feet and Nathan and the gunner almost cracked heads as they leapt in to watch the fall of the shot through the port.
A brief white plume about a cable’s length short of the bows. A pause. And then a smaller splash, and another as the ball skipped across the choppy sea and sank, almost in line with the bowsprit and a few yards to windward.
A moment later the bow chasers replied—with a few seconds now between each—both balls still falling well short of the Speedwell’s stern and far to starboard. Nathan dragged out his watch. Almost four minutes since the first shot. Not good. Encouragingly bad, in fact. But then they might have been waiting for the range to close.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw young Coyle standing over by the rail, watching eagerly. What was he to do with him? He could order him below, of course, but he would be hurt and humiliated. A demon voice proposed that hurt and humiliation were the lot of small boys and reminded him of his own sufferings in that regard but demons, like gunners, should know their place.
“You, boy, up to the top with you,” he said, “and watch the fall of the shot. Sharp now, for we are counting on your report.”
He turned back to the gun, ready swabbed and loaded, and ran her out for the next shot.
“Prime . . .”
And so it went on, the slow running battle in the chops of the Channel to the fiendish music of the wind and the gun—the squealing of the iron truck wheels and the whining of the breeching, the creaking complaints of the ropes and every few minutes a loud bang . . . And the crew toiling in silence save for Nathan and the gunner and the boy in the maintop marking the fall of the shot.
“A half cable short . . . A few feet to leeward.”
And then, dancing with delight, “A hit! A hit!” Capering like a lunatic so that Nathan feared he would jump straight down the lubber’s hole and come crashing onto the deck and all for a small ragged gap in the brig’s fore course that would not slow her in the least.
Then a shot from the brig skipped up from the waves and struck a great splinter off the rail a few feet from where Nathan was standing and it shook him for a moment, the force of it and the thought of what it would do to flesh and bone, and he had to force himself to put it out of his mind and concentrate on the slow, methodical firing of the gun.
They hit her again: another small hole in her canvas and still she came on, closer now, as if they were joined by a long line and it was slowly being hauled in. Twenty minutes Nathan reckoned, a half hour at most, and she would veer into the wind and give them her broadside. He looked to the sun but it seemed suspended in the sky, a lingering, indifferent spectator to their deadly sport.
Barely a thousand yards between them now and the next shot came in with a howling and a shrieking that had Nathan looking to the boy in the top for they were firing chain to cut up the rigging. A prayer half formed in his head but what fair-minded god would heed a prayer for the boy and not for the Frenchmen they were trying to kill.
“I will lay the next shot myself,” he told the gunner, stepping up to the breech. The last two shots had gone high and wide and he had them draw out the quoin an inch or so to bring down the muzzle by two degrees. He checked the flint in the lock—for it would have given Solomon great pleasure to see it misfire—and sprinkled the fine priming powder from the horn, took hold of the lanyard, waited for the bows to rise and fall, felt for the sea rushing under the hull, sensed the exact moment when it would lift the stern and then . . .
It was wonderful how the jerking of a thin cord should make such a riot of sound and fury, such a rumpus of iron and fire and smoke, and three hundredweight of gun carriage hurtling past within an inch of his foot to be brought up with a great screeching of tackle . . .
“A hit, a hit!” The boy was dancing again. “Oh, sir, you hit the gun, you hit the gun!”
Nathan leapt to the ratlines and clapped the telescope to his eye. As the smoke cleared and the hair blew from his face he saw the mayhem in her bows. The shot had struck the muzzle of the starboard bow chaser and thrown it back off its carriage, smashing throu
gh the port and doubtless making a terrible slaughter of her crew.
“She’s coming round,” the boy cried, but Nathan had already seen the flash of white along her side and the guns run out and he gave a great shout of, “Down! Get down!” an instant before she raked them. A banshee howling and screaming of chain, a splintering tearing of wood and canvas like a high wind in a forest and he knew it was all over for the boy but when he looked up he was still there, gazing about him with a shocked and indignant air and the rigging in ruins all about him.
Nathan yelled a stream of orders that had half the crew swarming aloft to save what was left of the mainsail which was flapping wildly to leeward and the maintop yard, hanging by a thread. He looked back at the brig, expecting her to resume the chase but astonishingly she was completing the turn, showing him her stern as she came up into the wind. Running, for God’s sake. The broadside had been her parting shot, a vengeful kick of the heels before she bolted—from one lucky shot that had unshipped a single gun. He could not believe her captain could be so shy.
And nor was he.
“Sail ho! Two points off the starboard bow,” came the frantic cry from the foretop. And Nathan jerked his head round and felt his heart leap to his throat as he saw the massive ship bearing down on them with her great spread of canvas and the long double row of guns thrust out from the ports along her black and yellow hull.
Chapter 8
the Billy Ruffian
The Bellerophon, 74, was one of the fastest ships in the British fleet, named after the hero of Greek mythology who tamed the winged horse Pegasus and attempted to ride him to Heaven only to be thwarted by the great god Zeus who sent a gadfly to sting the beast and unseat the rider. But it was a different story that sprang to Nathan’s mind as he presented himself in the captain’s cabin with the sealed envelope prepared for him at the Admiralty for just such an occasion.
