Sharpe's Trafalgar
CORNWELL, BERNARD
ichard Sharpe's place was on the forecastle of the H.M.S. Pucelle. Captain Llewellyn and his young lieutenant commanded forty of the ship's marines stationed on the poop and quarterdeck, while...
...The Frenchman kicked Sharpe hard in the thigh, wrenched the axe free and raised it a third time, but before he could deliver the killing stroke he uttered a scream as a pike slid into his belly...
...The crash Sharpe had heard when he was on the lower deck had been the Revenant's mainmast collapsing across both ships and, when he reached the weather deck, he saw Frenchmen running across the mast that, together with the Revenant's fallen main yard, served as a bridge between the two ships' decks...
...The sea was covered in patches of smoke like breaking fog...
...Chase patted the midshipman's shoulder, then walked back into the musket fire that pitted the quarterdeck...
...A musket ball thumped the deck by his feet and he turned and paced back...
...The Pucelle was three ship lengths away from the enemy line and Chase was choosing the place where he would sail her through...
...The fiercest battle now was to the north of her where a few of the enemy vanguard had risked coming back to help their comrades and now opened fire on the battle-weary British ships that loaded and fired and rammed and fired again...
...Another hole appeared in Sthe Pucelle's foresail, a studdingsail 'boom was shot away, a crash sounded close to the larboard water line, and another enemy shot bounced across the swells to leave a trail of foam close on the starboard side...
...He would then have to run, balancing himself on the broken pine spar, before jumping down onto the Revenant's deck, and because the two ships were moving unequally in the long high swells, the mast would be pitching and rolling...
...Tirez...
...He could hear men singing from a gundeck below...
...Sharpe was shouting...
...More sail-handlers were up the mainmast trying to secure the wreckage of the topgallant mast...
...Everything happened so slowly...
...In Chase's father's day the ships of the line edged together, broadside to broadside, taking exquisite care never to expose their vulnerable bows and sterns to a raking, but this British fleet went bull-headed at the enemy...
...His feet flailed for a heartbeat, then found the inwardsloping futtock shrouds and he went back down to the Pucelle's deck and, when he looked back up, all he could see at the Redoutable's maintop was a body hanging off the edge...
...Sergeant Armstrong fired his musket, swore as a bullet drilled his left foot, limped to the rail, picked up another musket and fired again...
...Repel boarders...
...Chase slashed through a last shroud with a boarding axe, left a petty officer to clear the mess on the poop deck and went back to his quarterdeck as the Revenant crept closer and closer...
...The Pucelle slowly came to life...
...Sharpe slashed a pike aside, cut his blade across a Frenchman's eyes, then found no one to oppose him, but a musket ball plucked at the hem of his jacket as he turned to look for his marines...
...The enemy's cannons still raked the Pucelle, shot after shot demolishing the high windows, throwing down cannon and spraying blood on the deck beams overhead...
...Once he was in the front rank he cleared the larboard side of the Revenant's weather deck while Sharpe led the charge along the starboard side...
...His father, behind their barrels...
...He was shrieking like a fiend...
...Her starboard gunports had been closed, but now a few opened as the surviving gunners crossed from larboard...
...She must have sailed clean around the western edge of the mleee while the Pucelle passed to its east, and now the Frenchman was heading landward as though trying to escape the battle...
...Clouter was using an axe, swinging it one-handed, ignoring the men who tried to surrender, but just cutting them down in an orgy of killing...
...Simmons stared at him, wideeyed...
...Muskets cracked from the quarterdeck and more fired from the forecastle and at least one defender was killed by his own side in that wild fire.The Revenant's men far outnumbered the boarders, but the British numbers increased every second and the Pucelle's crewmen wanted revenge for the raking the Revenant had 88 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR N Summer Reading Issue 2001 given them...
...I'll trouble you to find rammers and swabs for this deck...
...The lower deck's thirty gunports were all raised, letting the daylight stream in to reveal the ship's masts like three gigantic pillars about which was a seething mass of half-naked men...
...he shouted, pointing up at the forecastle deck where some of Montmorin's crew still fought back...
...If I can take some to the maintop, sir...
...Mister Cowper...
...Chase seemed to be aiming across the smaller Spaniard's bows, taking the Pucelle through the shrinking gap between her and the Frenchman ahead, while the Spaniard was trying to cut the Pucelle off, trying to lay his smaller ship right across her bows and he was so close to the Frenchman that his jib boom, the outer part of his bowsprit, almost touched the French mizzen...
...She had been stunned by her raking, but Chase led a score of seamen up to the poop to cut away the mizzen's wreckage, and below decks the surviving gunners from the larboard cannon went to make up the crews of the starboard broadside...
...Sharpe asked...
...And keep an eye on me...
...Sharpe rammed the musket and, between his feet, there appeared a trickle of blood, spilling from the flood released by the shot that had killed the three marines...
...Then go down to the orlop deck, Mister Collier, and don't disturb the surgeon, but in his dispensary there is a net of oranges, a gift from Admiral Nelson...
...Engage the enemy more closely...
...The noise of that battle was a continuous thunder, while the sound from the ships ahead of the Pucelle was of gun after gun, close together, unending, as the French and Spanish crews took this chance of firing at an enemy who could not fire back...
...The glass panes and their frames disappeared as the heavy missiles whipped down the lengths of the Neptune's two gundecks...
...Make the shots tell...
...Musket balls pattered on the sails...
...Chase called...
...The crews of the two larboard carronades, which had no targets, were levering the fallen starboard carronade out of the way so that they could drag one of their two guns to replace it...
...The enemy cheered...
...He was a small man with a very loud voice...
...Amen...
...The shots screamed through the Pucelle's rigging, shivering the sails and severing lines...
...Have you got musket balls loaded...
...The ships ahead of the Pucelle were taking a more serious pounding, but the Pucelle was drawing closer and closer, heaved by the big swells and wafted by the ghosting wind, and every second took her nearer to the guns, and soon, Chase knew, he would be under a much heavier cannonade, and just as he thought that so a heavy round shot struck the starboard cathead and whirled a wicked splinter of oak across the forecastle...
...A fountain spewed up on the starboard side, spattering one of the carronade crews...
...Neither ship could escape now, they could only kill each other...
...0Two seamen dragged the Pucelle's soaking white ensign onto the quarterdeck, smearing Haskell's blood with the sopping folds of the heavy flag...
...Three of the studdingsails were now hanging from the yards and Chase's seamen were trying to haul them inboard...
...A bullet smacked into the deck beside his feet, another ricocheted off the ship's bell...
...He led his ten men down the companionway, stepped over the body of a powder monkey who lay dead though there was not a mark on his young body that Sharpe could see, then down to the hellish dark and thick gloom of the lower deck...
...She was scarcely even a ship, for all her masts were gone and her hull was mangled by cannon fire...
...Now kill them...
...Another gunner was crawling on the deck, vomiting blood...
...Then the carronades recoiled on their slides and spat casks of musket balls which cut down the axemen still trying to free the two ships from their mutual embrace...
...Chase shouted at his ship...
...Yes, sir...
...My duty, sir...
...He grinned at Sharpe...
...These thirty-two would have to suffice...
...The Spartiate was painfully slow, but that only gave her gunners more time to aim properly, and the broadside drove deep wounds into the Revenant...
...Holderby ordered...
...Holderby, elegant in silk stockings and gilded coat, ducked under the deck beams...
...Now the Frenchman's shots broke open the hull, screamed across the deck and crashed out to leave patches of newly created daylight where they holed the larboard side...
...Chase looked at Sharpe, paused as the Revenant's guns opened fire again...
...Fifty yards to go...
...There was a tearing, grating, grinding sound as the two hulls juddered together, then the Spanish captain, fearing he would be boarded, backed his topsails and the smaller ship fell away astern...
...A topsail shivered as a high shot slashed through...
...He threw the volley gun down, picked up a musket and walked to the larboard rail...
...Simmons...
...Three of the Pucelle's heavy guns fired together, their sound almost stunning Sharpe, who was going from gunport to gunport and stabbing at the French with his cutlass...
...The British ships, now that their gunports were opened, were studded with red squares that broke the black and yellow stripes...
...He was below the water line now, and it was here that the ship's magazines were guarded by marines armed with muskets, bayonets, and orders to stop any unauthorized person from going through the double leather curtains that were dripping with sea water...
...The sergeant was evidently confused about Nelson's true rank and exempted the admiral from all dislike, regarding him as an honorary Northumbrian who was now taking the Victory, his flagship, into the enemy's line, and Sharpe heard the sound of her broadsides and saw the flames flickering down her starboard flank as she crashed three decks of double-shotted guns into the bows of one of the French ships that had been tormenting her for so long...
...Make your own way to the surgeon," Armstrong told him, "and don't make a fuss...
...The vast Santisima Trinidad was silent, her ensign struck...
...A Scotsman invented it...
...Chase shouted, and the gunners who had helped repel the boarders now ran to the squat weapons and levered them around to fire at the men trying to free the Revenant, which now had more troubles, for her foresail had caught fire...
...You can take your eyes off that, sir," he had told Sharpe when he saw the officer's interest in the weapon, "'cos I'm saving it for when we board one of the bastards...
...Are they kicking...
...Lower deck...
...Like going through the breach of an enemy fortress, he reckoned...
...More muskets flickered from the enemy's mast and Sharpe threw down his musket and picked up Sergeant Armstrong's volley gun...
...Haskell had overheard him...
...He dimly heard an explosion, saw flames illuminate the black smoke filling the enemy's gundeck, then he left Simmons to throw the other grenades while he went back down the deck, stepping past bodies, avoiding the gunners, checking each gunport to make sure no more Frenchmen were trying to reach through with cutlass or pike...
...Chase had fallen between two of the Frenchman's starboard guns, and they protected him, but Sharpe was exposed and he screamed at the enemy, flicked a pike aside with the cutlass, lunged at a man's eyes, missed, then a marine jumped onto the Frenchman's back, throwing him forward, and Sharpe stamped on the man's head as the marine was piked in the back...
...Three bodies floated beside the Pucelle, heaved overboard from the Temeraire or Conqueror...
...Make them tell...
...Water's cold, eh, lads...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR M Summer Reading Issue 2001 85 Clouter looked astonished...
...Push on through...
...Plenty left to kill," Chase said, then cupped his hands...
...Fetch marines...
...Sharpe fired his musket through a gunport, glimpsed a Frenchman's face dissolve into blood, ran to the next and used the butt of the empty musket to hammer an enemy's arm...
...The Pucelle was shaking from the impact...
...He rammed another cask of musket balls into the short barrel, then waited for another target to come within the short gun's range...
...I told you to watch the clock in the poop, didn't I?" "There ain't no clock, sir...
...Men were surrendering now, throwing down axes or swords, holding up their hands or just throwing themselves to the deck where they pretended to be dead...
...It was always going to be a fight to the finish, right from the moment the Pucelle had first seen the Revenant off the African coast...
...Between the guns...
...But bind it up, bind it up...
...The gun crews will stand up, Mister Haskell...
...The fourth shot shattered the Pucelle's wheel and impaled the quartermaster on its splintered spokes...
...There was no blood in the spittle...
...A slap overhead made Sharpe look up to see that a hole had been punched through the Pucelle's foresail...
...The Spanish ship that had been straight ahead had gone into smoke and there was a Frenchman there instead, and close behind her was another ship, though whether she was French or Spanish Sharpe could not tell, for her ensign was hidden by the mass of her undamaged sails...
...For what we are about to receive," another man intoned, but before he could finish the prayer Lieutenant Holderby's voice interrupted him...
...British seamen pounded past him, forcing the French another two or three paces back down their deck, and Sharpe climbed the cannon and jumped down its other side...
...Larboard a point, John," Chase said to the quartermaster, "larboard...
...He pulled the trigger, adding to the smoke that writhed under the beams, then he drew the cutlass...
...Still, Sharpe supposed, they were paid more so they must risk more...
...Get yourself below...
...The French Neptune was slowed by her trailing mizzenmast...
...Up on the quarterdeck Chase shuddered and when Haskell, his first lieutenant, raised an eyebrow, the captain smiled...
...Chase recognized her, saw Capitaine Louis Montmorin standing coolly on his quarterdeck, saw the smoke of the Frenchman's guns sweeping up into her undamaged rigging and heard the terrible sounds of his ship being battered beneath his feet, but at last the Pucelle responded to the drag of the mizzen and the tug of the tiller and Chase's starboard broadside could begin to respond, though some of his guns had been dismounted and others had dead crews and so his first broadside was feeble...
...The wind had risen a little, so that the smoke patches streamed eastward, flowing around disabled ships that trailed masts and fallen rigging...
...Chase asked...
...The Revenant's powder smoke belched into the Pucelle, choking men who struggled to return the favor...
...The first lieutenant was bleeding from a bullet wound in his left arm, though he refused to have it treated...
...It was a slender bridge, but it was sufficient for the French...
...Clouter spat a wad of chewed tobacco over the gunwale, then cut himself another plug...
...Nearly a dozen ships fought there...
...He swung down the companionway into the lower deck's gloom...
...He slid down on his backside, landed with a thump and just pointed the volley gun down the lower deck...
...Then get rid of him...
...From there a man could step onto the mast...
...Run them out...
...The Royal Sovereign was lost in cloud, surrounded by the enemy, fighting desperately as the limp wind brought help so slowly...
...Stop firing...
...Sharpe jumped down, threw the volley gun aside and drew his cutlass...
...Chase shouted at the quartermaster who had already begun the turn which would bring the Pucelle's larboard broadside to face the Neptune, but then the new enemy fired and the very first shot ripped away the tiller ropes so that the wheel spun uselessly in the quartermaster's hands...
...Didn't we just kill some...
...Because when that black heathen starts to fight, sir, there ain't a man born who dares stand in his way...
...What are you doing here, Mister Collier...
...The shot hit nothing, threading the Pucelle's rigging to splash far aft...
...Pikes...
...I want those carronades busy...
...Plenty to go around, sir...
...Like hell you are...
...He had his sword drawn...
...A gunner halfheartedly rammed a cannon swab at Sharpe, who thumped the volley gun's butt onto the man's head, then shouted at the bastards to get out of his way...
...louter did not pull the carronade's flintlock lanyard when Chase ordered him to fire...
...The next ship in Admiral Collingwood's colwho had fought the French thirty years umn, the two-decked Belleisle, was still before, would have been appalled by these tactics...
...Beneath their silverbuckled feet the great guns gouged and hammered...
...He turned and bowed to Chase...
...You saved my life," Sharpe insisted...
...A marine cursed and staggered on the forecastle as a musket bullet drove down through his shoulder into his belly...
...Now...
...86 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR N Summer Reading Issue 2001 Guns were thrown off carriages, men were mangled by round shot and grapeshot, and still Montmorin stood unmoving, even when the wheel was shot away behind him...
...Sharpe was deaf now, his ears buffeted by the big guns and his world shrunken to this small patch of bloody deck and the smokewreathed enemy rigging soaring above him...
...We are winning, aren't we...
...Only half of the starboard cannons were firing now, and they were being impeded by the French who slashed through the gunports with cutlasses and pikes...
...Clouter was using an axe, swinging it one-handed, ignoring the men who tried to surrender, but just cutting them down in an orgy of killing...
...Is it loaded...
...By God, sir, so they do...
...Chase wanted to laugh and Montmorin was smiling, both men struck by the oddity of such courtesies even as they did their best to kill each other...
...A big crucifix was fastened to the Spanish ship's mizzenmast, but when Chase's stern carronades blasted down the smaller ship's length the hanging Christ's left arm was torn away and then his legs were broken...
...T- he Pucelle had sailed past the Victory and the Redoutable, leaving a thick cloud of smoke that drifted after her, and out of that cloud there appeared the bows of an undamaged ship...
...Make sure your muskets are loaded...
...She's going to be knocked to pieces, ain't she...
...Sharpe registered that the French did not use flintlocks, was surprised to have noticed such a thing in battle, then the gun fired and the rammer, left in the barrel, disintegrated as it was driven across the Pucelle's deck...
...Mackay's dead, Sergeant...
...They're coming through the gunports, sir...
...Armstrong gave a monosyllabic opinion of that advice and pulled a cartridge from his pouch.A bullet had grazed Clouter's back leaving a bloody welt like the stroke of a lash, but the big man was paying it no heed...
...Armstrong sounded disapproving, but then, Clouter was palpably not a Northumbrian...
...Her name was written in golden letters placed on a black band between two sets of the stern's lavishly gilded windows...
...So far as Armstrong was concerned only men from Northumberland itself, raised to remember the cattle-raiders from north of the border, were true warriors while the rest of mankind was composed of thieving bastards, cowardly foreigners and officers...
...The ship's biggest guns squatted here like tethered beasts behind their closed ports...
...There were French marines on the opposing gangway, and a horde of armed defenders waiting in the Revenant's blooddrenched waist...
...A dozen Frenchmen were on that gangway and trying to reach the Pucelle's stern...
...Sharpe asked Armstrong as they walked away from the carronade...
...The Scots were content to serve under Sergeant Armstrong, for, if he distrusted them, he hated anyone from south of the River Tyne...
...He ran up the quarterdeck steps, turned down the gangway and tried not to think of what was about to happen...
...Flames were rising to his left, then a gunner threw sand across the remnants of the grenade and another tossed a cask of water to douse the fire...
...A few red-coated marines crouched under the cover of the carronades and put up a feeble fire to counter the lashing musketry that still ripped down from the French masts, while on the Victory's farther side another enemy ship fired into her hull...
...Take their weapons...
...You'll live," Sharpe told him...
...Three hammering blows in quick succession shuddered the ship's timber as balls plowed through the twin layers of oak that formed her hull...
...We must all endure the same risks," he had told Haskell when the first lieutenant had suggested the netting, though it seemed to Sharpe that the officers on the quarterdeck ran more risk than most for they were made distinctive to the enemy by their unprotected position and by the brightness of their gold-encrusted uniforms...
...Chase had his sword drawn and was running across the makeshift bridge...
...The Pucelle's starboard guns were firing properly now, their crews reinforced at last, and the shots were splintering holes in the Revenant's side, but then the first of the Frenchman's guns were reloaded and Chase watched their blackened muzzles appear in the gunports...
...Chase found a speaking trumpet amidst the wreckage on the deck...
...Men were lifted from the enemy deck, snatched upward by the round shot...
...The swells heaved the Pucelle eastward...
...Stop it, I said...
...Dreadful gunnery, wouldn't you say...
...By God I want a prize today...
...The Pucelle's marines did their best, but they were outnumbered...
...The Frenchman's foremast, all of it, right down to the deck, swayed left and right, then toppled slowly...
...Marines...
...A few French guns answered, and one ball smashed through the gathering boarders, driving a path of blood across the Pucelle's deck...
...Sharpe went back to stand beside the foremast and suddenly remembered he had forgotten to load either of his weapons, and was grateful for the lapse, for it gave him something to do...
...Sharpe rammed his bullet, primed the gun, lifted it to his shoulder and aimed at the knot of men on the Frenchman's maintop...
...A grenade landed on the forecastle and exploded in a sheet of flame...
...Haskell recognized the danger and turned on Chase with a raised eyebrow...
...Stop firing, you bastards...
...The French shots were heavier, for they carried larger guns, but larger guns took longer to reload and the British fire was noticeably quicker...
...No time to think, just time to fight...
...Armstrong knew what had to be done, the marines had been superbly trained by Llewellyn, and Sharpe had no mind to pace the forecastle showing a gentlemanly disdain for enemy fire...
...Sharpe could hear the big guns firing below, filling the ship with their thunderous pounding, though whether it was the Revenant's guns that fired or the Pucelle's, he could not tell...
...One of them was a huge man, thick-bearded, carrying an axe, and he chopped the blade at Sharpe who stepped back, surprised by the bearded man's long reach, and his right foot slid in a pool of blood and he fell back and twisted aside as the axe split the deck next to his head...
...Chase stared aft at the Spanish ship...
...The cannons were usually stored with their barrels fully elevated and then drawn tight to the ship's sides, but now the barrels had been lowered to the fighting position and the carriages were standing well back from the ports...
...He would clear the Pucelle's decks and Chase desperately wanted to retreat into the shelter of the damaged poop, but his place was here, in full view, and so he put his hands behind his back and tried to look calm as he paced up and down the deck...
...Montmorin had fifty or sixty men in his upperworks and they would now try to do what the Redoutable had done to the Victory...
...A tall French officer, hatless and with a powder-stained face, led a charge toward the Pucelle's bows...
...A broken line whipped and flew wide...
...There's nothing like a volley gun for clearing an enemy deck...
...The Santisima Trinidad, towering over both fleets like a behemoth, was being raked and pounded by smaller ships that looked like terriers yapping at a bull...
...He was going to be raked and so he shouted at his men to lie down between the guns, though that would not save them from the Pucelle's gunfire, then he stood in the center of his quarterdeck and waited...
...Stop firing...
...They hit the cathead earlier...
...A midshipman fired a pistol into an enemy gunport...
...The fires in the vast iron oven had all been doused and two of the ship's cats were rubbing themselves against the blackened metal as if curious as to why their source of warmth was gone...
...The point stuck in the gun's timber carriage and Sharpe wasted a second wrenching it free...
...Armstrong shouted...
...The insides of the gunports were painted red and one of them was hanging from a single hinge until a man tore it away and let it drop...
...The flames spread with extraordinary swiftness, engulfing the great spread of shot-punctured canvas, but Montmorin's men were just as swift, cutting the halliards that held the sail's spar and so dropping it to the deck where they risked the fire to hurl the burning sail over the side...
...The powder smoke now spread across two miles of ocean, a man-made fog...
...The sky was darkening to the north and west...
...The Revenant was the Pucelle's sister ship, indeed it felt to Sharpe that he was fighting on the Pucelle, so alike were the two vessels...
...He wished he knew French...
...The French had no carronades, relying on the men in their fighting tops to clear an enemy's deck with musket fire...
...Stop firing...
...Hear us and save us," he said under his breath, "that we perish not...
...Wood splintered from the French deck and side as the shots punched out...
...A ball clanged off Clouter's empty carronade and struck a man in the thigh...
...The Victory was close to the smoke cloud now, but she seemed to Sharpe to be sailing straight into a wall of smoke, flame and noise...
...The sprittopsail yard under the reaching bowsprit twitched, one end flying into the air, then fell, broken, to hang close to the sea...
...He saw an officer in a red coat...
...A shot screamed down the weather deck, killing eight sailors and wounding a dozen more...
...Sharpe bellowed...
...He saw a Frenchman ramming a cannon, half leaning out of the opposing gunport, and he skewered the man's arm with the cutlass...
...The sea was littered with floating wreckage...
...One of the marines was kneeling in prayer, "Mary, Mother of God," he said over and over again, crossing himself...
...Push on through...
...I didn't even see you, sir...
...He wished he knew French...
...Pull hard, lads...
...To the death, then...
...A mastless hulk, its guns silent, drifted away from the melee...
...And you, sir...
...One was burned and sunk, the rest were fleeing...
...French-built, sir, well built...
...We are being raked, Mister Collier...
...You should go below, Sergeant...
...The towering Santisima Trinidad had lost her foremast and most of her mizzen and still she was being hammered by smaller British ships...
...Sharpe trapped a Frenchman against the ship's side, beneath the gangway...
...There was honor to be gained in defeating a flagship and the Victory, like the Royal Sovereign, was drawing enemy ships like flies...
...The rails of the two ships were thirty feet apart because their lower hulls bulged out so greatly, but Chase was close enough to see Montmorin's expression and the Frenchman, seeing Chase, took off his hat and bowed...
...The sergeant sniffed as he looked at the vast pot on its carriage...
...He climbed...
...He turned as he heard the sound of a sword scraping from a scabbard and saw Midshipman Collier, bright-eyed and still drenched in Lieutenant Haskell's blood, standing under the fallen French mainmast that would be the boarding bridge...
...The sergeant came from Seahouses in Northumberland where he had been imbued with a deep distrust of the Scots...
...Men heaved and rammed, their naked torsos gleaming with sweat that trickled through the powder residue...
...Spit, boy...
...Gone below...
...Thick dust and thicker smoke drifted in the shafts of light...
...He paced up and down the quarterdeck, one hand on Collier's shoulder...
...The forecastle was manned by the marines and by two of the ship's six thirty-two-pounder carronades.The one to larboard was under the command of Clouter, the escaped slave who was in Captain Chase's barge crew.The huge black man, like his gunners, was naked to the waist and had a scarf tied around his ears...
...A l'abordage...
...They all looked black now, except where they were spotted or streaked or sheeted with blood...
...Glad you sailed with me...
...The ball had then pierced all the lower sails, one after the other, before vanishing astern...
...Spit...
...The Neptune's mizzenmast went overboard...
...She had destroyed the Redoutable just as that ship had been on the point of boarding the Victory, and Chase felt an exultation as he looked back to see the terrible damage his guns had done...
...The Victory's cannon fire was ripping upward through her decks now as Hardy's gunners elevated their barrels as high as they could...
...The Pucelle shuddered as the Revenant slammed into her side...
...It seemed to Sharpe, and to everyone else who 78 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR M Summer Reading Issue 2001 watched, that Clouter was waiting too long and that the French would reach the Victory's weather deck, but the Pucelle had heaved up on a swell and Clouter was waiting for the ship to roll to larboard on the back of the wave...
...Her figurehead showed a ghostly skeleton, scythe in one hand and a French tricolor in the other, and she was crossing behind the Pucelle, not a pistol's length away, and the whole of her larboard broadside was facing the Pucelle's decorated stern...
...I'm going below," he told Armstrong, "to draw a musket from stores...
...A seaman flailed with one of the handspikes used to shift the cannon, a vast club of wood that crushed a Frenchman's skull...
...They want to board Victory...
...Take him below...
...He stared up at the Frenchman's mizzenmast where a knot of men were firing muskets down onto the Pucelle...
...Sharpe 74 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR N Summer Reading Issue 2001 looked right and saw that the first ships behind Collingwood's Royal Sovereign had at last reached the enemy...
...The flames leaped twice as high as the masts and the other ships, fearing the firebrands that must be spewed when her magazines exploded, set sail to move away from her, though some British ships, knowing what horrors the crew of the burning ship endured, sent small boats to pluck them to safety...
...Then, having taken the punishment for so long, she could rake two ships at once, ripping blood and bone and timber with her own fire-driven metal...
...Hard to starboard...
...A gunner halfheartedly rammed a cannon swab at Sharpe, who thumped the volley gun's butt onto the man's head, then shouted at the bastards to get out of his way...
...He was stuffing another cask of musket balls into the carronade, though by now the Pucelle had gone beyond the Redoutable and the Frenchman was out of Clouter's range...
...French guns poured round shot into the Pucelle's hull...
...Fourteen enemy ships had struck so far...
...Marines were following him...
...Collier tried to sound confident, but his voice was shaking...
...Hurry...
...France, he seemed to believe, was a populous county somewhere so far south of London as to be execrable, while Spain was probably hell itself...
...He looked at the two men who lay like rag dolls in the sheet of blood that covered a quarter of the deck...
...Chase shouted through the speaking trumpet...
...He swung down the companionway into the lower deck's gloom...
...At this moment, Chase reckoned, that man was more valuable to the ship than its captain...
...Sharpe went on down to the lower deck which was as dim as a cellar, though some light seeped from the wide windows of the stripped wardroom that lay at the stern...
...Lieutenant Swallow...
...A dozen marines were left...
...The big capstan in the middle of the deck, used to haul the ship's anchor cables, had an enemy round shot buried in its wooden heart...
...One, two, three more strikes on the hull, each making the Pucelle tremble, and Sharpe wondered how the enemy could even see to aim their guns for the powder smoke lay so thickly along their hulls...
...He went to the starboard rail, slung the big gun on his shoulder and pulled himself up the foremast shrouds...
...The shot left a spattering trail of blood the whole length of the deck, and the next shot 80 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR N Summer Reading Issue 2001 cut Haskell in half, leaving his torso on the starboard rail and his legs hanging from the quarter-deck's forward rail...
...he shouted, pointing up at the forecastle deck where some of Montmorin's crew still fought back...
...Aye, they do make good ships...
...The men were still crouched between the guns...
...Blood was trickling from the scuppers of the Redoutable's weather deck, trickling under the shattered rail and dribbling red across her closed gunports...
...At least get the arm bandaged," Chase suggested, staring at the Neptune, which was making surprising speed despite the loss of her mizzenmast...
...She's ours...
...The guns still punctured the air, but fewer now, for more enemy ships were yielding...
...His men cheered as they swarmed up the yard.The Pucelle lifted on a wave...
...Stand on...
...Her crew slashed at the fallen rigging with axes, trying to lose the broken mast overboard...
...He would make his name, be an admiral by nightfall and carry Nelson as a prisoner back to Cadiz...
...It'll be ten or fifteen minutes before we're in range, sir," Clouter said, answering Sharpe's unspoken question...
...Sharpe could see the holes appear like magic, making the ship's whole spread of canvas quiver...
...You ain't got nothing to do for the next few minutes, so bind it up...
...He primed the musket as a round shot went close enough to his head to punch his scalp with the wind of its passing...
...A portion of her quarterdeck had collapsed and a British flag now hung over her counter...
...U A dozen enemy were firing at Nelson's Sships now...
...To the west, where the long swells came so high, the sea was all battle...
...Gunners heaved on the tackles and the thick deck quivered as the huge guns were hauled forward so that their barrels protruded beyond the ship's sides...
...The trickle looked very red against the white of the scrubbed timber...
...The weather-deck gunners, bare-chested, blood-streaked and powder-blackened, were assembling with pikes and cutlasses...
...There was blood on the weather deck where a ricocheting round shot had struck a crew and the air was filled with a shrieking, whistling, tearing noise that was chain shot and bar shot whipping through the masts to slice lines and rip sails...
...A ball gouged through the wet blood on the forecastle, bounced up to tear a gap in the forecastle's after rail and punched through the lower edge of the mainsail...
...Sharpe shouted, and a marine sergeant held up one of the stubby weapons...
...A musket ball struck the deck between them, then a round shot splintered the edge of the poop deck just above Chase before scattering the flag lockers built against the taffrail so that the Pucelle THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR N Summer Reading Issue 2001 75 suddenly trailed a bright stream of gaudy flags...
...Shot after shot spat from the Pucelle in a fire that was deliberate, slow and lethal...
...He reached the futtock shrouds and, without thinking, hurled himself upward and outward, the quickest way to the maintop...
...Smoke filled the low deck, curling under beams splashed with blood from the Revenant's first raking broadside...
...he shouted, bellowing to be heard above the sound of the enemy's guns that still hammered into the Pucelle...
...Take their weapons...
...Heavy wooden blocks thumped on the deck...
...The Frenchman sprang back and Sharpe skipped aside for he could see the gunner holding the linstock to the touch-hole...
...She was a two-decker, smaller than the Pucelle, and her figurehead showed a monk with an uplifted hand holding a cross...
...Captain Joel Chase had ordered his crew to lie down because the enemy's shot, coming from directly forward, could scream down these decks and each one could easily knock down a score of men, but if the gun crews were in the intervals between the heavy cannons then they would be mostly protected...
...Take me by his quarter...
...Sharpe was counting, watching the stern of the Spaniard where the first guns had fired...
...Why close to you...
...The man looked vacantly at Sharpe, frowned, then obediently spat...
...More round shot from the Victory was breaking out of the enemy's side and some struck the Pucelle...
...Armstrong was instinctively suspicious of Sharpe for the ensign was not a marine, not from Northumberland and not born into the officer class...
...Death to the Redoutable, he thought, and just then the French seamen released the Redoutable's main-yard halliards and the great spar dropped to crash onto the Victory's shattered hammock netting...
...Splashes whipped up from the sea all about the leading ships...
...Some French and Spanish ships had struck their flags, but then, in the vagaries of battle, their opponents had moved on and those ships rehoisted their colors, hung what sail they could on their fractured masts and headed eastward...
...Stop it, I said...
...The midshipman stayed still for a second, disoriented...
...Another crash, close to his feet, made him spin around...
...We won't be swimming in it, sir...
...If he misjudged, and if the Spaniard succeeded in laying his hull athwart the Pucelle's bows then the Dons would seize his bowsprit, lash it to their own ship and hold him there while they raked, pounded and turned his ship into bloody splinters...
...He stumbled on the corpses and the Frenchmen saw him, his gold braid bright in the smoke, and they shouted as they charged, but then Sharpe fired the volley gun from the spar and the bullets twitched the French back in a cloud of smoke...
...A Frenchman tried to surrender to him there, but Sharpe dared not leave a man in his rear so he slashed at the Frenchman's wrist so he could not use the axe he had dropped, then kicked him in the groin before climbing the next cannon...
...The worst of that fight was below decks where the two ships, matched gun to gun, mangled each other...
...Haskell rapped a knuckle on the quarterdeck rail...
...This way...
...He kept thinking of his wife, his house, the children...
...Ain't but a scratch, Sergeant...
...Sharpe dropped down one more companionway to the orlop deck which was lit by shielded lanterns...
...He could not see the admiral, or Captain Hardy...
...When the ship tilted slightly to larboard the trickle veered to the left, when the stern was raised by a following sea the trickle dashed ahead, and when the bows raised to the swell it hesitated, then the red rivulet slid to the right as the ship leaned to starboard, and Sharpe scrubbed the trickle into oblivion with his foot, then pushed the ramrod back into its hoops...
...Armstrong screamed at his marines who appeared paralyzed by their comrade's sudden death...
...Kill them...
...It came from above, from the weather deck that was slick with so much blood that the sand no longer gave men a secure footing...
...He willed himself to stand still...
...The gunners below decks could not yet see the enemy, but they knew they were close for the smoke of the enemy guns lay across the sea like mist, then thickened as the enemy fired again, though now the Pucelle was so close that they were firing at the ships behind her...
...Bring them up for the gun crews...
...The Spartiate gave Montmorin's ship a full broadside...
...Then another scream pierced Sharpe's ringing ears...
...He had leaped into the smoking madness of battle, not the deliberate calm of disciplined fighting when battalions fired volleys or when stately ships exchanged cannon fire, but the visceral horror of the gutter fight...
...If we boards an enemy, Clouter," he said sternly, "you stay close to me...
...Ten marines were left on the Pucelle's forecastle...
...He could hear steel striking steel...
...She survived," he said admiringly, "and she's been under fire for twenty-three minutes...
...The Pucelle's fore topgallant sail collapsed, the chains holding the yard shot through...
...Good luck, Clouter...
...A marine reeled back from the rail, his mouth opening and closing...
...Going to be lively, sir," he greeted Sharpe, nodding toward the enemy line that was now barely a mile away...
...Chase had ordered the gunners to raise their barrels so that the shots cracked through the Frenchman's side and tore their way upward through the deck which was thronged with men...
...Another gouging, tearing noise erupted from the starboard side and Sharpe leaned over to see a bright splinter of timber jutting from a band of black-painted hull...
...The cano nons' flintlocks were cocked and the gunners crouched to the side, lanyards held ready...
...The recoil of the gun hurled him back against the topmast shrouds...
...Musket bullets cracked on her poop...
...A gun exploded on the Revenant, the sound echoing horribly as scraps of the shattered breech cut down Montmorin's lower-deck gunners...
...Just fight...
...Slow, he thought, slow, but a slow gunner could still kill...
...Back to the guns...
...A huge crash, dreadful in its loudness and so prolonged that it seemed to go on forever, broke through Sharpe's deafened ears and he reckoned a mast had gone overboard, though whether it was another of the Pucelle's or one of the Revenant's he could not tell...
...Montmorin knew what was about to happen and he could do nothing to stop it...
...Away to the east, beyond the Revenant, a handful of enemy ships shamefully sailed away, while to the north the enemy vanguard had at last turned and was lumbering southward 82 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 0 Summer Reading Issue 2001 to help their beleaguered comrades...
...Clouter...
...The Frenchmen had been snatching boarding pikes from their racks about the mainmast, while others held axes or cutlasses, but one carronade forward and one aft provided a tangling crossfire that destroyed the boarding party...
...I don't want them below," Chase said, "they could make mischief...
...Chase said...
...The flames would stab, momentarily lighting the interior of the smoke bank, then vanish, and the fog flowed over the enemy decks, and the shots whipped out to thump into the Victory and the Temeraire and the Neptune and the Leviathan and the Conqueror and the Pucelle, and after those ships there was a gap before the lumbering three-decked Britannia which was still not under fire...
...The seamen chanted as they raised the staysail again...
...The enemy ship was a hundred yards away...
...The sergeant's unbloodied eye was glassy, he was scarce conscious, but he was still trying to reload his musket...
...The fallen mast jutted across the weather deck, but was too high to be reached unless a man stood on a hot gun barrel and hauled himself up...
...Look there," Chase shouted, pointing beyond his own stern, and Montmorin climbed up his mizzen ratlines to see over the Pucelle's poop and there, ghosting across the swells, untouched, was the Spartiate, a British seventy-four, the French-built ship that was rumored to be bewitched because she sailed faster by night than by day and now, coming late to the battle, she opened her larboard gunports...
...The arm hung useless, but Haskell claimed it did not hurt and, besides, he said, he was right-handed...
...For now was the glorious moment of revenge...
...Sharpe snapped...
...He sheathed the cutlass, forcing the blood-clotted blade into the scabbard's throat, then ran through the defeated Frenchmen to where the forward companionway led down to the lower deck...
...the French captain shouted...
...Sharpe shouted at his few men, though none heard him in the noise, but he reckoned some might follow if they saw him climb the companionway...
...He resisted the temptation to extend each length of the deck until he was under the poop, but forced himself to turn a few paces short, though he did stop once to stare in fascination at the mangled remains of the binnacle and its compass...
...Sharpe slashed a pike aside, cut his blade across a Frenchman's eyes, then found no one to oppose him, but a musket ball plucked at the hem of his jacket as he turned to look for his marines...
...Musket balls began striking the deck...
...The melee about the Victory had grown, but he could distinctly see a British ensign flying above a French tricolor, showing that at least one enemy ship had struck...
...Heathen gun, sir...
...He ate some, grateful for the juice in his parched mouth, then scooped some more which he put into Armstrong's mouth...
...Now was the moment when, if the Pucelle could force her passage, she would carry her broadsides within feet of an unprotected enemy stern and an unprotected enemy bow...
...The spaces between the cannon served as refuges for the French and Sharpe wanted to break them out and drive them onto the pikes and blades of the boarders...
...Smoke obscured the smaller ship...
...This was worse than the engagement at Assaye, Sharpe reckoned, for at least on land a soldier had the illusion that he could step left or right and so try to avoid the enemy's shot, but here a man could only stand as the ship crawled toward the enemy line which was a row of massive batteries, each ship carrying more artillery than had marched with Sir Arthur Wellesley's army...
...the fifth lieutenant shouted, and petty officers repeated the order to the forward part of the deck...
...It is a pity...
...Starboard, John," he said, gesturing, "starboard...
...Chase leaned on the broken quarterdeck rail...
...A long line of French and Spanish battleships was coming from the south, but none was in close range and so Chase continued toward the churning smoke, lit by gunflashes, that marked where Nelson's beleaguered flagship lay...
...Fire at those bastards...
...t seemed to Sharpe that the very passage of time slowed, so that he could see clearly what every enemy intended...
...He kicked the dying Frenchman off the steel, then swung the bloody blade to drive two more boarders back...
...He would tear the bowsprit clean out of the Spaniard's hull before he gave way...
...More Frenchmen were in the waist of the ship, screaming their war cry and hacking with cutlasses.Their attack, as sudden as it was unexpected, had succeeded in clearing the center section of the weather deck where the invaders now stabbed at fallen gunners, as a bespectacled French officer hurled overboard the cannons' rammers and swabs...
...Her mizzen shrouds parted with a sound like Satan's harp strings snapping, then the whole mast toppled, splintering like a monstrous tree to carry yards, sails and tricolor overboard...
...Chase shouted, relief flooding through him because at last he could fight back...
...A seagull perched on one, sometimes pecking at the man's face which had been torn open by gunfire and washed white by the sea...
...Some of the enemy ships, not daring to come close to the fighting and looking to escape, bombarded the brawling fleets from a distance, but their shots were as much a danger to their own side as to the British...
...Let them be...
...You saved my life," he told the tall man...
...Holderby was at his station by the aft companionway...
...Sharpe twisted the steel in the man's belly, wrenched it free...
...It seemed to him that the enemy ships were gathering around Nelson and the sound of their guns was quivering the sea, rattling Sharpe's teeth, deafening him...
...The Pucelle's guns returned the fire, roaring back on their breeching ropes to fill the deck with thunder...
...Stand up...
...The French captain shouted at his men to drop the mainyard, for that would serve as their bridge to glory...
...Didn't your bloody mothers teach you to waste not and want not...
...Marines, sir, needed below...
...The British had a Neptune in the fight, a three-decked ship with ninety-eight guns, while this Neptune was a twodecker, though Sharpe had the impression she was bigger than the Pucelle...
...The man obediently wriggled his fingers...
...I feel like taking the air, Llewellyn," Chase said with a smile...
...It was no pretty thing, nor was it accurate, but bring it within yards of an enemy ship and it could belch a flail of metal that could have torn the guts out of a battalion...
...He patted his carronade, his "smasher," which was as ugly a weapon as any Sharpe had seen...
...One man, left untouched on the mast, jumped down to the Pucelle's deck and Clouter, almost underneath him, brought the axe up between the man's legs...
...One after another the guns crashed back and their balls smashed the high gallery windows of the Revenant's stern and screamed down her decks, just as the Revenant had raked the Pucelle earlier...
...A shot plowed into the forecastle, another struck high on the foremast and a third smacked into the water line on the larboard side...
...Back to the guns...
...It was not like a land battle where the cavalry could pound across the field to leave a plume of dust and horse artillery slewed about in a spray of earth...
...Sharpe could have insisted on commanding the marines, but he suspected they would fight better if Armstrong gave them their orders...
...Marines...
...Captain Llewellyn's marines had recaptured the gangway and now guarded the fallen mast, shooting down any Frenchman who tried to cross, while the remaining invaders were caught between the attack from the stern and the assault from the bows...
...he called to the boy...
...Amen...
...That was why he was paid four hundred and eighteen pounds and twelve shillings a year, and so he paced up and down, up and down, made conspicuous by his cocked hat and gilded epaulettes, and he tried to divide four hundred and eighteen pounds and twelve shillings by three hundred and sixty-five days and the Frenchmen aimed their muskets at him so that Chase walked a strip of deck that became ever more lumpy and ragged from bullet strikes...
...Sharpe shouted over the bellow of the guns...
...Sharpe stood and followed, leaving the bearded Frenchman twisting and shaking on the deck, the pike still buried in his guts...
...Sergeant Armstrong had appeared beside Sharpe...
...Use a musket, lad...
...A mast toppled into smoke...
...Buggers can stand on the poop instead and be shot at...
...Two bodies drifted past...
...The stern of the French ship was so close that Sharpe felt he could have reached out and touched it...
...Haskell shouted down to the weather deck...
...They had filleted her, by God...
...He tested both flints, found them secure...
...Chase wondered whether his father's memorial stone had been delivered from the masons, and whether it had been placed in the church choir, and then he touched the prayer book in his pocket...
...She was a Spaniard and her red and white ensign was so huge that it almost trailed in the water...
...He slid down on his backside, landed with a thump and just pointed the volley gun down the lower deck...
...A gunner, deaf to Sharpe's shouts, and half-blinded by the smoke, pushed a powder-filled reed into a cannon's touch-hole and Sharpe slashed him with the cutlass...
...Which meant Sharpe had little to do on the forecastle other than set an example, which was what most junior officers were doing when they were killed in battle...
...Sharpe looked for Clouter and hailed him...
...Blood dripped from the forecastie scuppers while the figurehead of the monk with a cross had been turned into matchwood...
...Close the larboard ports," Chase called down the weather deck...
...Captain Chase was fighting on the weather deck, leading a group of men who assailed the French from the stern...
...Some shots passed through the Redoutable to strike the Victory's weather-deck rail...
...The Pucelle had ripped away a part of the Frenchman's ensign, while the rest was in the water with the fallen mizzenmast...
...Chase shouted to the forecastle...
...Follow me up to the quarterdeck...
...The mainsail had at least a dozen holes in it now...
...All crews to starboard...
...Come on...
...The sound of the enemy guns was loud now, punching over the water, sometimes in thunderous groups, more often single gun by single gun...
...Chase wished he had an orange to throw to Montmorin who, he was sure, would appreciate the gesture, but he could not see Collier...
...Thank you...
...Some of the men had lost the scarves they had tied about their heads and their ears dribbled blood...
...A body appeared in a gunport and was pushed overboard...
...Another thump from below, a second, a third, then screams made a shrill descant to the battering noise of the enemy guns...
...The force of the collision, broadside to broadside, two thousand tons meeting two thousand tons, drove the two ships apart again, but Chase shouted at the few remaining men on his top decks to throw the grapnels and make the Revenant fast...
...That ship, by far the closest to the French and Spanish line, looked bedraggled, for her studdingsail yards had been shot away and the sails hung like broken wings beside her rigging...
...Jesus, Sharpe thought, sweet Jesus, but this was a terrible place to be...
...A Spaniard, then...
...Gigs, barges and longboats, some grievously damaged by shot, rowed between the combatants carrying British officers who went to accept an enemy's surrender...
...The sound of the muskets crackled like thorn burning...
...But we killed some, didn't we...
...Repel boarders...
...Chase did not know it, but his presence on the deck was directly useful, for the French marksmen in the fighting tops were obsessed by his death and so ignored the carronade crews which, seeing French seamen gather in the Revenant's waist, fired down into the mass...
...A rending crash sounded as a heavy shot tore up the poop deck and Sharpe could see Captain Llewellyn dragging a body toward the stern rail...
...Farther south there was a second m8le where Collingwood's squadron had cut off the rear of the French and Spanish fleet...
...The mainsail had six great holes in it now, and shook as a seventh appeared...
...The boy, in mute proof, held up the twisted enamel of the clock's face...
...He must have feared that she would put up her helm and lay alongside his starboard flank, but the Spartiate sailed grandly on, seeking a victim all her own...
...Her studdingsails trailed in the water, though Captain Pellew's men were working to drag them inboard...
...Another bullet whipped close by, a second struck the mast and, bereft of force, thumped against the volley gun's stock...
...The man's arm, its torn tendons, flesh and muscle trailing like wet offal from the red sleeve, lay forgotten under the small structure that held the ship's bell and Sharpe picked it up, carried it to the larboard rail and hurled it into the sea...
...Nelson died...
...Throw him overboard...
...Sergeant Armstrong, bleeding to death, still sat by the foremast and clumsily fired his musket up into the enemy rigging...
...Clouter was back in the front rank, chopping the axe in short hard strokes that felled a man each time...
...A shot landed close by the Pucelle's bows and spattered water back over the beak and forecastle...
...Another struck the ship's beakhead, whistling a shred of wood high into the air, then a tearing, ripping, rustling sound made Sharpe look up to see that the Pucelle's main topgallant mast, the slenderest and highest portion of the mainmast, was falling to bring down a tangle of rigging and the main topgalTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 0 Summer Reading Issue 2001 lant sail with it...
...I'm sure Pickering [ed.: the ship's surgeon] is quite busy enough without having to be detained by scratched lieutenants," Haskell answered testily...
...Smoke billowed...
...Now, Clouter, now...
...The very last of the British ships, the slowest of the fleet, were only just entering the fray and opening fresh gunports to add their metal to the carnage...
...The sails looked dirty...
...Shelter them.Your time will come soon enough...
...The sergeant possessed one of Captain Llewellyn's precious seven-barrel guns that he had propped against the foremast...
...Tiller ropes...
...Chase stared at the shrinking gap and felt the temptation to head across the Spaniard's stern, but he would be damned if he let the Spanish captain dictate his battle...
...It went slowly, the shrouds parting with sounds like pistol shots, and the mainmast swayed as the stay connecting it to the mizzen tightened, then that cable parted and the mizzen creaked, splintered and finally fell...
...Midshipmen and lieutenants 0 repeated the order to the lower deck...
...Have a rest, gentlemen, before proceedings commence...
...That was all there was to do now.Just fight, and Chase's life or death would make small difference to the outcome, whereas the lieutenants, commanding the guns, were doing something useful...
...Then just go and watch something else...
...The scream seemed to be the loudest noise Sharpe had heard in all that furious day...
...Sharpe shouted...
...Chase shouted and saw Lieutenant Peel, hatless and sweating, add his weight to the tiller rope...
...Neptune...
...Two minutes, and still the guns had not fired again...
...It resembled an army mortar, though it was slightly longer in the barrel, and it squatted in its short carriage like a deformed cooking pot...
...In this kind of battle, a wild ml~e with ships THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 0 Summer Reading Issue 2001 81 milling about in smoke, it would be a miracle if any captain was not raked, and he was proud that his men had turned the ship before the Revenant could empty her whole broadside into the Pucelle's stern...
...More shots broke through the stern...
...A gunner was swinging a handspike, swatted aside a sword, crushed a Frenchman's skull, then he was pushed on by the men behind...
...Marines were following him...
...The French Neptune had vanished, and the Pucelle was threatened by the Revenant alone, but the Revenant had somehow escaped the worst of the fighting and Montmorin, as fine a captain as any in the French navy, was determined to pluck some honor from the day...
...Because that's where I can keep an eye on the thieving bastards, sir...
...Coming with you, sir...
...70 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 0 Summer Reading Issue 2001 The long guns were all in their recoil position, hard back against their breeching ropes...
...Chase leaned over the broken quarterdeck rail to see a dozen men hauling on one of the spare tiller lines that had been rove before the battle...
...The ship began to turn, but it was the mizzenmast, with its sail and rigging that lay in the water off the Pucelle's starboard quarter, that did most to drag the ship around...
...Move your fingers, boy...
...Two of them took hold of the decapitated body and carried it to the rail beside the carronade, but before they could heave it overboard Armstrong told them to take the man's ammunition...
...In her last letter Florence had said that one of the ponies had a sickness, but which one...
...The British fired faster...
...They slashed and lunged and screamed and hit and battered men down...
...Time to teach those bastards some manners," he growled...
...Ain't a white man alive that can kill me, sir...
...Then give it here...
...The Spaniard's red and black hull was hidden by smoke that thickened as more guns fired...
...The Pucelle's bowsprit, ragged with its broken yard, pushed into the gap between the two ships...
...And see what's in his pockets, lads...
...The Revenant was the Pucelle's sister ship, indeed it felt to Sharpe that he was fighting on the Pucelle, so alike were the two vessels...
...The flagship's hull could not be seen amidst that stinking fog, but, judging from the masts, Chase reckoned there was a Frenchman on either side of her...
...He stabbed up, trying and failing to rake the Frenchman's arm with the cutlass point, then rolled to his left as the axe slammed down again...
...It was the first of the Pucelle's guns to fire, and it shrieked back on its carriage in a cloud of black smoke...
...Men gathered i around their guns, peered through the Sopen ports, eyed the ragged holes that Shad already been punched in the hull's Sdouble-planked oak timbers...
...He slashed at one, parried another, then lunged at the first to spit the man on his cutlass blade...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR E Summer Reading Issue 2001 87 "Marines...
...The big black man came across the fallen mainmast, leaped to the deck and headed aft, howling to be let through the crowded seamen...
...The enemy ships ahead were still in clumps, and where they were close together they looked like islands of guns...
...And now Sharpe would finish it...
...He won't live," Armstrong said, stooping over the man, who was blinking through a mask of blood and breathing in juddering gasps...
...One moment there was a boarding party, the next there was a butcher's yard...
...Fetch the grenades...
...Still more Frenchmen ran along the fallen mainmast and yard to reinforce their comrades...
...Marines...
...The Temeraire, second in Nelson's column, forced her ponderous way through a gap in the enemy line and opened fire, pouring her broadside into the stern of a Frenchman...
...A cloud of smoke, black as night, boiled where the burning ship had floated while scraps of fire seared to the clouds, fell to the sea, hissed in the ocean, died...
...Now...
...He screamed as the seas drove the two hulls together...
...Captain Llewellyn and his young lieutenant commanded forty of the ship's marines stationed on the poop and quarterdeck, while Sharpe had twenty, though in truth the score of forecastle men were led by Sergeant Armstrong, a man as squat as a hogshead and stubborn as a mule...
...The man lunged his cutlass at Sharpe, had it effortlessly parried, saw death in the redcoat's face and so, in desperation, squirmed through a gunport and threw himself down between the ships...
...The ship swooped up on a long swell, making him stagger slightly, then subsided into the trough, and suddenly a terrible crash echoed through the timbers, making the deck beneath Sharpe's feet quiver, and he realized that a round shot must have hit the upperworks...
...I was going to offer you the same chance, Captain Chase...
...Walk with me, Mister Collier," Chase said, seeing that the boy seemed close to tears, "just walk with me...
...The lower deck was dark now, for the Revenant blotted out the daylight on the starboard side and the larboard gunports were closed...
...He looked down to see the sea churning white between the two hulls and he felt dizzy and imagined falling to be crushed to death as the two hulls banged together, then a bullet spat past him and he saw Chase had jumped from the shattered stump of the mast and Sharpe followed, screaming as he leaped through the smoke...
...instead he scrambled up the ratlines as nimbly as any sailor and then rolled onto the grating to find that he was now level with the Frenchmen in their maintop...
...Their bullets banged on the deck or buried themselves in the hammock nettings.Just beneath the enemy's gun smoke a shield was carved into the taffrail...
...The air quivered with the sound of guns, whistled with the passage of shots, and the long Atlantic swell lifted and drove the slow ships straight into the enemy fire...
...A marine fell backward, struck through the lungs by one of the splinters...
...Go to the forward magazine," Sharpe shouted...
...Captain Montmorin?You should yield before we kill more of your men...
...The Redoutable had no cannons manned...
...Stand on...
...It's over...
...The Neptune was threatening to cross the Pucelle's bows and Chase needed to avoid that, but he reckoned he had speed enough to catch the Frenchman, lay her alongside and fight her muzzle to muzzle, and, because she carried eighty-four guns and he only had seventy-four, his victory would be all the more remarkable...
...Her fore topmast was bent at an unnatural angle and there were scars on her painted flank...
...That would have been the first crash Sharpe had heard and he saw that the starboard cathead, a stout timber that jutted from the bows and from which the anchor was lowered and raised, was gouged almost halfway through...
...The deck about his feet was being pockmarked with bullet strikes...
...Powder monkeys, some in felt slippers, but most barefooted, waited by the outer curtain with their long tin canisters and Sharpe asked one of the boys to fetch him a pouch of musket ammunition and another of pistol shot while he went forrard to the small arms store and took a musket and pistol from the racks...
...The battle, Chase reckoned, could only get worse, for a dozen ships on either side had yet to engage, but his fight was with Montmorin now...
...One of the starboard carronades on the quarterdeck had been punched off its carriage...
...A gunner, deaf to Sharpe's shouts, and half-blinded by the smoke, pushed a powder-filled reed into a cannon's touch-hole and Sharpe slashed him with the cutlass...
...A round shot killed the lieutenant, spewing his intestines across the gratings where the thirty-two-pound round shots were stored...
...They were better trained...
...The carronade's thirty-two-pound balls, each as large as a man's head, were stored on a grating...
...He had gathered thirty-two marines and supposed the rest were dead, wounded or else guarding either the magazines or the French prisoners on the poop...
...A staysail halliard parted and the sail drifted down to drag in the sea until a rush of seamen went forrard along the bowsprit to pull it in and attach a new halliard...
...The Pucelle's foremost guns, reloaded, fired into the Frenchman's bows and there was a crack like the gates of hell being shut as the vast anchor was struck by a round shot...
...Screams sounded from the lower deck as an enemy shot punched through the oak and ricocheted from the mainmast to strike a crouching gun crew...
...The Pucelle's gunners had abandoned their cannon to fight the invaders with cutlasses, handspikes, rammers and pikes...
...The Pucelle's waist was filled with hacking, stabbing, shouting seamen who ignored the desperate shouts for quarter from the French whose impetuous attempt to capture the Pucelle had been foiled by the carronade...
...Lie down...
...Simmons...
...And Clouter hesitated...
...The French rigging was spotted with powder smoke, her hull was sheathed in it...
...Only a score of Frenchmen were still standing and, disarmed, they were shepherded toward the stern...
...The rudder, no longer tensioned by the ropes, centered itself and the Pucelle swung back to larboard, leaving her stern naked to the enemy guns...
...They're thieves to a man, sir," he confidently assured Sharpe, but still contrived that every Scotsman among Llewellyn's marines serve in his squad...
...Some gunners cheered the catch and Chase held the orange aloft like a trophy, then tossed it to Hopper, the ship's bosun...
...The big black man came across the fallen mainmast, leaped to the deck and headed aft, howling to be let through the crowded seamen...
...Her crew had hauled the fallen studdingsails inboard and her guns were at last firing as the vast ship pierced the enemy's formation...
...You should come with us, sir...
...Badly wounded, anyway...
...Collier looked alarmed at the order, as though he feared to throw something at his captain, but he tossed the orange underhand as if he was bowling a cricket ball and Chase had to lunge to one side to catch it singlehanded...
...Chain shot, sir," Sergeant Armstrong said...
...Starboard a point," he said to the helmsman, then took a speaking trumpet from the shattered rail...
...Heave him over...
...Cannon barrels were hurled from their carriages, men were eviscerated, and still the shots came, gun after gun, as the Pucelle slowly, so slowly, traveling at an old man's walking pace, inched past the stern to bring the successive larboard gunports to bear...
...The ships ahead of the Pucelle were similarly wounded...
...He waited...
...It lay like a canvas-wrapped log across the Redoutable's waist, but its larboard end jutted out over the Victory's weather deck...
...To Sharpe it seemed as though the Victory and Temeraire were sailing directly toward the Santisima Trinidad with its four smoke-wreathed decks of death...
...Chase had half considered laying alongside the Redoutable and boarding her, but she was already lashed to the Victory and doubtless the flagship's crew would take her surrender, then he saw the French Neptune ahead and he shouted at the helmsman to steer for her...
...Sharpe slung the empty gun on his shoulder and lowered himself off the grating...
...Lieutenant Holderby shouted at a midshipman, then had to go right up to the boy and cup his hands over the midshipman's ear...
...One of the Royal Sovereign's topmasts had fallen, but she had broken the enemy line and now she would be swallowed into their fleet...
...Chase applauded his opponent's crew as they tipped the last burning wreckage overboard...
...Make the bastards sorry they had ever been born and damn them to a fiery hell for the damage they had already done to his ship...
...What...
...Clouter, his black torso streaked and spattered by other men's blood, had taken command of the starboard carronade after half its crew was killed by a grenade thrown from the Revenant's foremast...
...Lively now...
...A flintlock sparked and the sound of the heavy gun pounded Sharpe's ears...
...The French marines vanished, shredded to a bloody mist by the cask of musket balls that had been loaded on top of the massive round shot that shattered the painted shield and then struck the Neptune's mizzenmast with a crack that was drowned by the first guns firing from the Pucelle's lower decks...
...Steady" Chase said, "steady" A buzz whipped past Sharpe's ear and he thought it was an insect, then he saw a small splinter fly out of the deck and knew that it was musket fire coming from the rigging of the ships ahead...
...Sergeant Armstrong was standing by the foremast, scowling at the enemy line which suddenly seemed much nearer...
...Sharpe fired up into the dazzling light, then hurriedly reloaded...
...Aye aye, sir...
...he shrieked...
...Armstrong asked suspiciously...
...The Victory's guns were pounding the Frenchman's hull, while the French ship had scores of men in the rigging, and those men were pouring a lethal musket fire down onto the flagship's exposed decks...
...Chase stood on tiptoes to see across the barrier of the hammock netting to where the Royal Sovereign was almost up to the enemy line...
...Or islands of smoke speared by gun-flames...
...A round shot scattered the hammock netting, turned the quarterdeck rail to splinters and punched out through the stern without doing any injury to the crew...
...It would be easier, Sharpe reckoned, to go to the quarterdeck, then return along the Pucelle's starboard gangway...
...He would rather fight...
...Simmons reappeared with the grenades and Sharpe took a linstock from one of the remaining water barrels, lit its fuse, then waited until the vagaries of the ocean swells brought a French gunport into view.The fuse sputtered...
...Stand up...
...I should have laid alongside her," he told Haskell ruefully...
...These guns were double-shotted and each had a bundle of grape rammed on top of the twin cannon balls, and they were being fired straight into the Frenchman's stern windows...
...One, struck by a musket ball, collapsed over the mainyard, then fell to leave a long trail of blood down the mainsail...
...It took more than a minute for the Pucelle to pass the doomed French ship, and for all of that minute the guns ripped into her, and then it was the turn of the quarterdeck carronades that could look down on the bloody mess left on the enemy deck and the two smashers finished the work, emptying their squat barrels into the squirming mass...
...Armstrong was, in short, ugly, ignorant, prejudiced and as fine a soldier as Sharpe had met...
...Sharpe shouted...
...Stop firing, you bastards...
...Two Frenchmen cowered in their galley where the big iron stove had been torn apart by gunfire...
...The tip of the British right horn was about to tear into the enemy, but the Pucelle was in the left horn and that was still well short of the line, and the enemy could still fire without fear of any reply...
...Blood dripped from the deck above...
...Assemble a boarding party, Mister Sharpe," Chase said formally...
...His seamen had grappled the bigger Victory and dragged her close, his gunners had closed their ports and seized their cutlasses and now the French sought a way across to Nelson's deck.The Victory was higher than the Frenchman, and the two ships' tumblehomes meant that even when their hulls were touching, the rails were still thirty or more feet apart...
...Heathen gunner, too," he added, looking at Clouter...
...He pulled the trigger...
...The marine lieutenant was wounded in the belly and had been taken below to die.A dozen gunners were dead and two marines had been thrown overboard, but Chase reckoned the Pucelle had still been lucky...
...The sound of the enemy gunfire was muted so that it was little more than a dull grumble...
...A gun, crammed with 84 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 0 Summer Reading Issue 2001 grapeshot, recoiled across his path and Frenchmen screamed...
...No, no, I gave my word to Nelson...
...The guns on the starboard side were firing into the Spaniard's bow, breaking the heavy timber apart to send their murderous shots down her gundecks.The Pucelle was dishing out slaughter and the smoke billowed from her sides, starting at the bows and working down to her stern...
...Connors, the signal lieutenant, had lost his right forearm to a cannon ball and was down in the cockpit, while Pearson, a midshipman who had twice failed his lieutenant's examination, had been killed by the musketry...
...Full of them, sir...
...The Victory's guns would have recoiled inboard and men would be swabbing and reloading, ramming and heaving, breathing smoke and dust, and slipping on fresh blood as they hauled the guns out...
...The Victory had almost disappeared in smoke...
...There were more British guns firing now, for the Revenant had lost a dozen when she was raked, and the Pucelle was hurting the Frenchman relentlessly...
...Don't want you dripping blood on a nice clean deck...
...Captain Llewellyn's marines were firing up into the Spanish rigging...
...An orange rolled across the deck at his feet, its skin dimpling the blood on the planks...
...Collier, still holding the silk stock, was smothered in Haskell's blood...
...Montmorin's crew was probably the best trained in all the enemy's fleet, yet still Chase's men were THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 0 Summer Reading Issue 2001 83 faster, but now the enemy tossed grenades through the open gunports and fired muskets to slow the British guns...
...he shouted...
...A twenty-fourpounder cannon lay on its side, trapping a screaming man...
...Some ships had rigged a net across the quarterdeck to save heads from being stove in by such accidental missiles, but Chase did not like such "sauve-tOtes," for, he claimed, they protected the officers on the quarterdeck while leaving the men forrard unprotected...
...None of the Pucelle's guns could answer, nor could they until the ship turned...
...he shouted...
...Men were surrendering now, throwing down axes or swords, holding up their hands or just throwing themselves to the deck where they pretended to be dead...
...He wanted to cower, but his job was to stay on his quarterdeck...
...Stand to your guns...
...The Royal Sovereign had vanished, her position marked only by a vast cloud of smoke out of which the rigging and sails of a half-dozen ships stood against the cloudy sky...
...A shot howled overhead and vanished astern...
...What the hell are you doing here, Harry...
...Sharpe asked...
...Stand up...
...Use a musket, lad...
...Chase exclaimed, pointing...
...Powder smoke thickened between the ships, rising to hide and protect the Pucelle's bullet-lashed deck...
...A shot gouged a furrow through the Pucelle's forecastle deck, another struck the mizzenmast, shaking it, a third hammered the length of the weather deck, piercing bows and stern and miraculously touching nothing in the flight between...
...Chase was shouting at men to follow him aft toward the quarterdeck while Sharpe was leading a swarm of crazed men forward...
...Her stern was a foot or more higher than the Pucelle's forecastle and it was lined with French marines armed with muskets...
...The sea there seemed to seethe with steam...
...There was a ripping, splintering sound as the Pucelle's bowsprit tangled with the Spanish bowsprit, but then the Spaniard's jib boom broke off altogether and the Pucelle's shot-battered bows were in the gap, her broken sprit topsail yard was ripping the French ensign, and the first of her guns could bear...
...The lowerdeck guns still fired, shaking both ships with every shot...
...And a word of advice, Mister Collier...
...A fiend, he is...
...Chase did not blame himself for being raked...
...Hard to starboard...
...When you command a ship of your own, take great care never to be raked...
...The others were dead or wounded...
...Stop firing...
...He should have summoned a lieutenant from below decks to replace Haskell, but he decided against it...
...The Pucelle's crew began to counterattack...
...Others seized pikes and speared at the French...
...The ocean was thick with wreckage...
...Chase dropped down the rigging...
...The wind seemed to have died completely so that the sails and flags hung limp...
...Make the bastards bleed, he thought vengefully...
...Chase winced as a round shot smacked through his sails to open a succession of holes...
...he told Haskell...
...He saw the purser peering nervously from the forward companionway...
...the Welshman suggested...
...There goes His Majesty...
...He had a musket at his shoulder and, though his right eye was closed by blood, he did his best to aim the musket, then fired...
...Her forecastle was crowded with men armed with cutlasses and boarding pikes, but the remaining starboard carronade on Chase's quarterdeck ripped them away.John Hopper, the bosun of Chase's barge crew, commanded that gun...
...The shield was surmounted by an eagle and on either side of the crest were sheaves of wooden flags, all of them, like the shield itself, painted with the French tricolor, but the paint had 76 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 0 Summer Reading Issue 2001 weathered and Sharpe could see faded gold traces of the old royalist fleur-delys beneath the red, white and blue...
...The Victory's guns made deep booms...
...Sharpe swung the cutlass again, then cheered as a rush of British marines and seamen dropped to the deck...
...Four other British ships were in action close to the Victory, but the enemy had seven or eight, and no more help would arrive for a time because the Britannia was such a slow sailor...
...He used both hands to swing the cutlass back to his left, driving away a French officer who stumbled over the dying British marine and fell back out of range...
...The Pucelle was off her quarter now and Chase's larboard gunners had reloaded and poured shot after shot into the Frenchman, firing through the lingering smoke of their first broadside...
...He brought the musket's brass-bound stock hard down on the orange, squashing and bursting the fruit, then stooped and scooped up some of the pulped flesh...
...Blood dripped from his fingers...
...In truth he was terrified...
...The guns fired into the Pucelle...
...Chase remarked to the bare-chested gunners...
...The midshipman scrambled up the companionway to the weather deck that shook from the recoil of its twenty-four-pounder guns.Wreckage of the rigging lay across the central part of the deck which was so thick with smoke that the midshipman climbed to the forecastle instead of to the quarterdeck...
...Tirez...
...One minute passed and the smoke there was thinning...
...To the south another score blazed at each other...
...And you will stay here, Harold Collier, and note the signals.Watch the clock...
...Lively now...
...The remains of the mizzenmast were cut through below the decks and Chase watched appalled as the whole mast slowly toppled, tearing itself out of the poop deck as it collapsed to starboard...
...k THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR N Summer Reading Issue 2001 89...
...Was it better...
...The great white ensign trailed in the water...
...It's over...
...The bespectacled enemy officer still tried to render the Pucelle's guns useless by jettisoning their rammers, but Clouter threw the axe and its blade thumped into the man's skull like a tomahawk and his death seemed to still the frenzy, or perhaps it was Captain Chase's insistent voice shouting that the Pucelle should stop fighting because the remaining Frenchmen were trying to surrender...
...A shot hit the foremast, making the rigging shake...
...We're murdering the bastards, Sergeant...
...The sergeant paced across the deck, picked up the severed head by its bloody hair and dropped it over the side...
...He could see the Revenant's yellow planking, then the opposing ship ground against the Pucelle's hull and a gunport came into sight and he hurled the glass ball into the Revenant...
...A woman was hauling on a gun tackle, spitting curses at the French gunners who were only a cutlass length away...
...Shelter your men as best you can, Llewellyn," Chase ordered...
...You're to lie down between the guns...
...She would be raked...
...She came slowly, still being punished by the French ship that had sailed out of the me6le's smoke...
...The Revenant turned to larboard, plainly intending to run alongside the Pucelle...
...Tiller ropes...
...Sounds like the devil's wings beating, it does...
...Like two bare-knuckled boxers, deep in their thirtieth or fortieth round, both bleeding and dazed, yet neither willing to give up, the two ships pounded each other...
...Kill them...
...He paced on, knowing he would be hit soon, hoping it would not hurt too badly, regretting his death so keenly and wishing he could see his children one more time...
...Low on the bows, sir," Armstrong said...
...Broken leg, sir...
...Captain Montmorin, knowing that Chase intended to board him, had sent men with axes to cut away the fallen mainmast...
...Montmorin cupped his hands...
...A ripple of filthy smoke was traveling from her bows to her stern as she emptied her larboard broadside into the stern of a Spanish ship and her starboard guns into the bows of a Frenchman...
...Hodgkinson...
...He sheathed the cutlass, forcing the blood-clotted blade into the scabbard's throat, then ran through the defeated Frenchmen to where the forward companionway led down to the lower deck...
...T-,he swells were getting bigger, the sky darker...
...Armstrong, wounded by shards of glass, smothered the flames with a bucket of sand, then began to reload...
...The third marine had lost an arm and the shot had also opened his chest so that his ribs showed in a jelly-like mass of torn muscle and blood...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 0 Summer Reading Issue 2001 69 The enemy shots were still falling well short of the Pucelle as Sharpe went down the companionway and forward into the covered bow portion of the weather deck where he found the galley-usually a place where men gathered-empty, cold, and deserted...
...A dozen more still fought...
...Grenades were hurled, exploding in gouts of smoke and whistling shards of glass and iron...
...he asked a marine...
...To the south, where Collingwood's Royal Sovereign had opened the battle, a ship burned...
...The carriage had no wheels, but instead allowed the barrel to slide back, wood on greased wood.The gun's wide muzzle gaped and its belly was crammed with one thirty-two-pound round shot and a wooden cask of musket balls...
...Starboard a point," he called, and the wheel creaked as the quartermaster hauled the spokes...
...She could still not return the enemy's fire, but in a few minutes she would be among them and her three decks of guns could begin to repay the beating she endured...
...She could still fight...
...Two shots struck the Pucelle close to the water line, another ricocheted from her larboard flank, gouging a splinter as long as a boarding pike, a fourth struck the mainmast and broke apart one of the newly painted hoops, a fifth screamed past the forward starboard carronade, decapitated a marine, threw two others back in a spray of blood, then whipped overboard to leave a trail of red droplets glistening in the suddenly warm air...
...Clouter had reloaded the larboard carronade, a slow job, but there was no target close and he would not waste the giant shot on the Neptune which had at last released the wreckage of its mast and was drawing away...
...He pushed his way through the enemy, going into the shadow of the forecastle...
...The cannon barrel that had been thrown off its carriage was lashed tight so that it would not shift with the ship's rolling and crush a man...
...Now, boys...
...He could not see Chase, but then a bullet struck the shroud above him, making the tarred rope tremble like a harp string and he climbed desperately, his ears buffeted by the sound of the big guns...
...We're boarding her...
...A man to his right was drawing back a pike, so that threat could be ignored because it would take at least a heartbeat for the pike to come forward, and meanwhile a bearded man in front was already swinging down a cutlass and Sharpe twisted the point of his own blade into that man's throat, then whipped the cutlass to his right, parrying the pike thrust, though Sharpe himself was looking to his left...
...And hard to starboard...
...Masts were shattered, yards broken, sails hung in folds, but enough canvas remained to drive them slowly onward...
...Once in a while a man would lift a gunport, letting in a bright wash of light, and lean out to peer toward the enemy...
...The sail-handlers, short numbered because so many were manning the guns, sheeted home the sails as the Pucelle swung around...
...The French Neptune looked to be going to join that mle6e, and so Chase followed...
...A l'abordage...
...There was no time to be frightened...
...He loaded the pistol...
...The ships touched here, their gunports almost coinciding so that when a British gunner tried to swab his cannon a French cutlass half severed his arm, then the lambswool swab on its staff was seized and carried aboard the French ship...
...The smoke at the French ship's stern thinned and Chase saw the name of the two-decker which threatened to board the Victory...
...If he fell then his men knew what to do...
...Sergeant Armstrong, his face bleeding from three cuts and his trousers a deep red from a bullet wound, was sitting with his back against the foremast...
...harpe watched one ship dead ahead...
...Well done...
...Sharpe was firing up into the maintop, hoping his bullets would gouge through its timbers to kill the French marksmen perched on the platform...
...Chase could see the smoke of the Victory's guns spewing out from the narrow space between the two ships and he imagined the horror in the Frenchman's lower decks as the three tiers of British guns mangled men and timber, but he also saw that the French upper decks were crowded.The French captain appeared to have abandoned his gundecks altogether and assembled his whole crew on the forecastle, open weather deck and quarterdeck where they were armed with muskets, pikes, axes and cutlasses...
...he shouted...
...Sharpe shouted...
...Chase was standing at the shattered quarterdeck rail, appearing as calm as though he were sailing the Pucelle into an empty inland sea...
...You're wanted below, sir...
...Another marine was being carried to the rails...
...It went...
...The Victory's mizzen was gone, her fore- and mainmasts were mere stumps, but her guns were still manned and still dangerous...
...Mister Peel...
...The starboard carronade, loaded like Clouter's with musket balls and a vast round shot, had swept the Spaniard's forecastle clean of men...
...A gust of wind freed her of smoke and when she rolled to a long sea Sharpe could see daylight clean through her gunports, but then she rolled back and a half-dozen of those gunports stabbed flame...
...He could haul the ship around and take on the French ship broadside to broadside, but his orders were to pass through the line, though the gap was narrowing dangerously...
...She had pierced the line, but the Neptune had gone north while the Spaniard had disappeared in smoke astern and there were no ships in front except for an enemy frigate that was a quarter-mile off and ships of the line did not stoop to fight frigates when there were battleships to engage...
...Well done...
...The volley gun's smoke filled the sky, but no shots came from the Frenchman's maintop...
...Now kill them...
...His shoulder was bruised by the musket so that he flinched every time he fired...
...He tried clamping his jaws shut to still the muscle, but it kept quivering...
...If I fall you are to find Mister Peel and tell him the ship is his...
...The wind was foully light...
...Sharpe looked to his right and saw the Royal Sovereign had reached the enemy line...
...There isn't a clock...
...A portion of the forward rail of the forecastle suddenly vanished into splinters, sawdust and whirling slivers of wood...
...Others had bleeding noses caused by nothing more than the sound of the guns...
...Tie that around Lieutenant Haskell's arm," he ordered the midshipman, then turned to the quartermaster...
...Sir...
...The nearest enemy ship now was a two-decker that was laid alongside the bigger Victory...
...The guns were loud enough to hurt Sharpe's eardrums...
...A midshipman, commanding the Pucelle's lowerdeck guns, saw that the two hulls were so close together that the muzzle flames of his thirty-two-pounders were setting fire to the splintered wood of the Revenant's lower hull, so he ordered a half-dozen men to throw buckets of water at the small fires in case the flames caught and spread to the Pucelle...
...It's over...
...Froggies have our range," a man said in the gloom...
...A bullet hit a mast hoop, scraping away fresh yellow paint...
...He saw no imminent danger, looked back to the right, flicked the blade up into the pikeman's face, looked front again, then shoulder-charged the pikeman, driving him back so that he fell against a cannon and Sharpe could raise the cutlass and, with both hands, drive it down into the man's belly...
...Only when the last of the Spartiate's guns had sounded did he turn and look at the ship that had raked him...
...He saw the Revenant's sails quiver to the shock of her guns, felt his own ship tremble as the balls struck home, saw young Collier standing at the starboard rail staring at the approaching enemy...
...A half-dozen ships were firing at the Victory, just as another half-dozen were hammering the Royal Sovereign a little more than a mile to the south...
...He tried to think of such domestic things, wondering if the apple harvest was good and whether the stable yard had been repaved and why the parlor chimney smoked so bad when the wind was in the east, but in truth he just wanted to dash into the poop's shadow and so be protected from the musketry by the deck planks above...
...Clouter gave a strange, highpitched laugh...
...Sharpe shouted at him...
...Five or six pairs of ships, like the Pucelle and the Revenant, were clasped together, exchanging fire in private battles that took place beyond the bigger melee...
...Sharpe drew the long cutlass and met the invaders under the break of the forecastle...
...Montmorin was trying to cut himself free, hoping he could limp away to Cadiz and live to fight another day...
...It was like traversing a tightrope...
...Chase skipped out of their way, then saw Midshipman Collier on the weather deck where he was handing out oranges from his huge net...
...The hooks flew into the enemy's rigging, but the enemy had the same idea and her crew was also hurling grappling hooks, while seamen in the Frenchman's rigging were tying the Pucelle's lower yards to their own...
...His heart was thumping, his mouth was dry, and a muscle twitched THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR E Summer Reading Issue 2001 71 in his left cheek...
...Fetch marines...
...Where's Captain Llewellyn...
...His ears were ringing with the sound of the guns and his throat was as dry as ash...
...Captain Llewellyn's marines were firing at the French in their fighting tops, but the French were more numerous and their lashing fire was thinning Llewellyn's ranks...
...He fired his musket, obliterating the view with smoke, then Clouter, who had deliberately waited until his carronade could fire directly down the center line of the French Neptune, pulled the lanyard...
...Lieutenants redistributed gunners among the crews, making up the numbers where too many had died or been injured...
...Go and watch the bloody clock...
...The Pucelle's ordeal had begun, and all he could do now was sail slowly on into an everincreasing storm of gunnery...
...The French captain had gambled everything on boarding the Victory, and his boarders were now dead, wounded or dazed, but the ship's rigging was still filled with the marksmen who had emptied the upper decks of Nelson's flagship and those men had turned their muskets onto the Pucelle...
...Chase was suddenly aware that his fingers were drumming nervously against his right thigh and so he forced his hand to be still...
...Sharpe climbed back to the forecastle where he found the marines crouching by the hammock netting and the carronade crews squatting a long way behind which meant the Royal Sovereign must fight the enemy single-handed until help arrived...
...Chase took off his white silk stock and beckoned to Midshipman Collier...
...Yes, Sergeant...
...Captain Llewellyn was bringing marines from the poop, but taking them along the starboard gangway which ran above the weather deck beside the ship's gunwale...
...Then disaster struck...
...Chase bellowed at those of his men who were aiming muskets at the struggling French sailors...
...An odd whistling sound, almost a moan, but with a curious sharp rhythm, came from near the ship, then went silent...
...he shouted at a marine...
...Sharpe found that hard to bear...
...Sharpe could see the cannon balls looking like short pencil lines that flickered in the sky, and each pencil line meant a ball was coming U more or less straight toward the Pucelle...
...Stop firing...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 0 Summer Reading Issue 2001 77 The Pucelle's wounded were carried below and the dead jettisoned...
...Do you understand...
...Throw one here, lad...
...Open ports...
...The enemy ships ahead were shrouded in smoke, but because the small wind was blowing from the west, that smoke was shredding through their 72 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR E Summer Reading Issue 2001 rigging and sails like a bank of fog drifting before a sea breeze, yet the fog was fed continually and Sharpe could see the pulses of fresh gray, white and black smoke, and he could also see the dark brightness of the cannon flames appear like evanescent spearheads in the fog...
...She was through the enemy line now and the gun smoke seemed to boil around her, though Sharpe could just see the flagship's high gilded stern reflecting a weak daylight through the man-made fog...
...The Temeraire, which had failed to overtake the Victory and was now sailing off her starboard quarter, was taking shots through her sails...
...Aye aye, sir...
...He unslung the volley gun, cocked and aimed it...
...Chase could not see the French ship's name, for the powder smoke curled around her stern, but her captain was plainly a bold man, for he was willing to lose his own ship if, thereby, he could capture Nelson's flagship...
...It would look odd there, but by God he would fly it to show that the Pucelle was undefeated...
...The boy's voice was hoarse...
...Sharpe leaped the dead, carrying the fight toward the Revenant's bows.The French defenders were numerous, but the way aft was blocked by just as many men...
...A huge gap was opening in the enemy's line north of where Collingwood had attacked, which showed that the British ships were snaring and pounding the enemy south of the Royal Sovereign, but the French and Spanish ships to the north of Collingwood's flagship just sailed on toward the place where Nelson's Victory was setting up a second snare...
...He pushed his way through the enemy, going into the shadow of the forecastle...
...Run it up to the main topsail yard, larboard side," Chase ordered...
...She was a pistol shot away and the big guns of Chase's larboard broadside began to work on the devastated enemy...
...he asked Sharpe earnestly...
...A second body followed...
...Armstrong commanded two of his men, gesturing at the third marine who had died...
...He was frightened, but it was unthinkable to do anything else but show a cool disdain for danger...
...Seamen scrambled up the ratlines to reeve broken lines...
...Will you board with us...
...The guns pounded below, grinding and mangling the two ships...
...Sharpe said, and clambered up onto the mast, but a hand held him back and he turned, cursing, to see that it was Chase...
...But the Pucelle was suddenly in a patch of open sea with no enemy near...
...Captain Chase's barge crew had followed him aft, fighting their own battle toward the quarterdeck steps, but Clouter had come late to the fight, for he had been the man who fired the Pucelle's forward starboard carronade down into the mass of defenders just as Chase had led the charge across the mast...
...Two Frenchmen cowered in their galley where the big iron stove had been torn apart by gunfire...
...The sea ahead of the Pucelle was being pockmarked by shot, flicked by white spray or whipped by round shots skimming the waves, though so far none of those shots had come close to the Pucelle herself...
...Montmorin gave his answer by cupping his hands and shouting down to his weather deck...
...The marine still prayed, calling on Christ's mother to protect him, making the sign of the cross again and again...
...A signal flew from her rigging and Chase did not need a signal lieutenant to translate the flags...
...This battle was taking place at a lethargic speed and there was a strange contrast between the stately slow beauty of the full-rigged ships and the noise of their guns...
...He swung the cutlass to the right, inadvertently foiling another pike thrust, then reached and seized the French seaman's shirt and pulled him forward, straight onto the cutlass blade...
...There was a roar above Sharpe as Clouter, letting go of the pike, seized the axe from the Frenchman's hand and charged on in a frenzy...
...The Redoutable, still lashed to the Victory, was French no longer...
...Chase wanted to turn his ship to larboard and lay her alongside the Neptune and batter her hull into bloody ruin, but the smaller Spanish ship rammed the Pucelle and inadvertently turned her to starboard...
...She did, and on that down roll Clouter fired and the shot was perfectly timed so that its barrelful of musket balls and round shot slashed into the Frenchmen clambering up the spar that would have carried them onto the Victory's unprotected deck...
...The Britannia's bluff bows, bright with the figurehead of Britannia holding her shield and trident, were suddenly pushing through a curtain of spray where an enemy round shot had fallen short...
...A dozen more muskets fired from the enemy's maintop and Sergeant Armstrong was on his knees, cursing, but still reloading...
...The Pucelle now glided past the Redoutable's quarter...
...No more than seven guns fired...
...The Frenchman's guns were firing still, and Sharpe could see more boarders gathering on the Revenant's weather deck...
...Chase thought about putting his helm hard down and closing on her, but he was already past and so he shouted at the quartermaster to turn the ship north toward the caldron of fire and smoke that surrounded the Victory...
...He coughed hoarsely, mingling bloody spittle with the orange juice that trickled down his chin...
...Sharpe heard the French musketeers screaming as they fell with the mast...
...The sails, which projected either side of the ship, were only useful in a following wind and now the Pucelle would turn to place the small wind on her larboard flank...
...Sharpe could see men with muskets in the enemy rigging...
...Once he was in the front rank he cleared the larboard side of the Revenant's weather deck while Sharpe led the charge along the starboard side...
...He took the boy under the break of the poop, close to the mangled remains of the wheel and the quartermaster...
...He pulled the trigger, adding to the smoke that writhed under the beams, then he drew the cutlass...
...He took the two pouches, thanked the boy, and climbed back to the lower deck where he paused to hang the cartridge pouches from his belt...
...Under the break of the poop, Llewellyn.You can fire from there...
...He bit open the cartridge and saw a body being thrown off the Conqueror's quarterdeck...
...He turned and stared westward...
...Well, he was about to do that, and he was engaging a virtually undamaged enemy ship while his own had been grievously hurt, but by God, Chase thought, he would make Nelson proud...
...Sharpe could hear the big guns firing below, filling the ship with their thunderous pounding, though whether it was the Revenant's guns that fired or the Pucelle's, he could not tell...
...The noise of the guns filled the sky, made the sea quiver, shook the ship...
...The dead were making a barricade to protect Sharpe and Chase, but a French marine was climbing over one of the guns...
...Who's got a volley gun...
...Sharpe climbed to the quarterdeck with Chase...
...Chase said...
...Back to the guns...
...Chase did the same...
...The dead lay where they fell now, for there were not enough men to throw them overboard, or rather the men who remained were too busy fighting...
...They went to their deaths so gracefully, in the full beauty of tensioned masts and spread sails above painted hulls.They crept toward death.The Leviathan and Neptune were in the battle now, piercing the enemy line a little to the south of the Victory...
...The French captain planned to pour hundreds of men onto the Victory...
...He could see musket flashes up there...
...Sharpe heard the screams of the marksmen in her rigging, watched them fall, then rammed a new ball down his musket...
...Fire at those bastards...
...It's over...
...Stop firing...
...Pull hard...
...Think he's dead, sir...
...Bastards," he said, and pulled the trigger...
...Muskets...
...The burning ship was French, the Achille, and the sound of her explosion was a dull thump that rolled across the wreckage-littered sea like the crack of doom...
...Run them out...
...A gun recoiled, filling the deck with noise and breaking its breeching rope so that it slewed around and crushed two men whose shrieks were lost in the din...
...No, sir, they done all they can to me, and now it's me and my smasher's turn...
...Chase had climbed a few feet up the mizzen shrouds to see what was happening, and what he saw appalled him...
...Holes were being punched high in the French two-decker's starboard side as round shot, fired into the ship's larboard flank, hammered clean through her.Yet the British gunners were firing blind and the boarders were gathering on the side nearest the Victory where the British guns could not reach...
...Sharpe shouted...
...There'll be others, sir...
...he said to the quartermaster...
...Chase looked about the quarterdeck...
...Yield, Capitaine...
...The gunners sat by their guns...
...Stand up...
...A round shot banged into one of the lower-deck guns, throwing the three-ton barrel clean off its carriage, crushing two gunners and filling the ship with a sound like a vast hammer striking a giant anvil...
...What the sergeant really wanted to know was whether Sharpe planned to usurp his authority...
...He saw the ship's barber, a one-eyed Irishman, hauling on a weather-deck gun...
...One of the marines aimed a sevenbarreled gun, but Sharpe snatched it from him...
...He could see a marine lying on the Pucelle's quarterdeck with a rivulet of blood seeping from his body along the planks...
...Hot work, sir...
...You can pull a trigger," Armstrong allowed...
...His rigging was tangled with the Victory's rigging, but his was filled with men and the Victory's was empty...
...Another marine had an arm torn open by a splinter, but though his sleeve was soaked with blood and more blood dripped from his wrist, he refused to go...
...The Redoutable...
...You want pikes, axes, cutlasses...
...Thirty or forty Frenchmen were in the ship's waist now, and more were streaming along the mast, but just then a carronade blasted from the quarterdeck and emptied the makeshift bridge...
...Stop firing...
...Chase scrambled to his feet, lunged his slender sword at his attacker, then fired a pistol across the other cannon...
...Chase gauged the gap...
...Lie down...
...He ran behind Chase, the heavy sevenbarreled gun in his hands...
...A shot whipped out the timberhead which held the fore staysail sheets...
...There were a dozen men there, most reloading, but one fired and THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 0 Summer Reading Issue 2001 79 Sharpe felt the wind of the ball whipping past his cheek...
...Clouter knocked the man's sword aside then punched him in the face so hard that the officer recoiled into his own men, then a swarm of British gunners, screaming and stabbing, swept past the black man to hack at the invaders...
...He looked up at the enemy maintop and reckoned it was too far away and that the seven bullets would spread too wide before they reached the platform that was built where the Frenchman's lower mast was jointed to the upper...
...Simmons ran, grateful for a chance to be beneath the water line even if only for an instant...
...Stop firing...
...The tall man grinned...
...Beyond the Victory, beyond the smoke that lay about her, beyond the embattled ships, some dismasted, he could see the undamaged rigging of the British vessels that formed the rearmost part of each squadron and those ships, not yet committed, were only just entering the battle...
...Sharpe protested...
...Pull in the studdingsails," he ordered...
...Yes, sir...
...Chase had gone left, jumping into a space cleared by the carronade, though it was still cluttered with twitching bodies and the deck was slick with new blood...
...Me first, Sharpe," Chase chided him...
...Montmorin knew what was coming, but just then the forward carronade sent a shattering cask of musket balls into the Revenant's belly and belched a pall of smoke above the ship...
...k THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR N Summer Reading Issue 2001 89 barge crew had followed him aft, fighting their own battle toward the quarterdeck steps, but Clouter had come late to the fight, for he had been the man who fired the Pucelle's forward starboard carronade down into the mass of defenders just as Chase had led the charge across the mast...
...Chase was standing by the mizzenmast, hands clasped behind his back...
...The cob...
...Chase bellowed...
...She was the Revenant...
...The Conqueror was suffering as well...
...Other men chopped through the grapnel lines that tied the Revenant to the Pucelle...
...Chase looked back and saw the Victory...
...Swallow was the young marine lieutenant...
...A bar shot, two lumps of iron joined by a short iron rod, banged into the foremast close to the deck and stuck there, driven deep into the wood by the force of the impact...
...Armstrong called...
...Captain Chase still lived...
...He took the gun, exchanging it for his musket, then made sure his cutlass was not bloodcrusted to its scabbard...
...The sailhandlers streamed out along the yards...
...Another broke a topsail yard just as two shots banged through the weather deck to leave the ship's waist strewn with timber scraps...
...Capitaine Montmorin looked across at Chase and shrugged, as if to suggest that the failure of his boarders was regrettable but not serious...
...One of the marines aimed a sevenbarreled gun, but Sharpe snatched it from him...
...A musket bullet buried itself in the wheel, another broke the binnacle lantern...
...Another, pierced through the throat, knelt by the foremast and gazed wide-eyed at Sharpe...
...He knew the fire could spread to the Pucelle and both ships would then burn together and explode in horror...
...Sharpe leaped the gun, looking for an enemy...
...The fallen yard and sail were drenched with blood, but the Frenchmen had disappeared, snatched into oblivion by the storm of metal...
...Far more stayed as captured prizes, their decks a shambles, their hulls riddled and their crews stunned by the ferocity of the British gunfire...
...The balls rained down, smacking on the quarterdeck like metal hail...
...They had almost cleared those decks, so that now the British fought from their lower decks while the French sought a way to cross to the flagship's virtually unguarded upper decks...
Vol. 34 • July 2001 • No. 6
