Sharpe 3-Book Collection 3. Bernard Cornwell
a hundred yards from the ship. Chase, as the lieutenant had said, was not training his men to be marksmen, but to be fast. There were gunners aboard who boasted they could lay a ball onto a floating target tub at half a mile, but the secret of battle, Chase insisted, was getting close and releasing a storm of shot. ‘It doesn’t have to be aimed,’ he had told Sharpe. ‘I use the ship to aim the guns. I lay the guns alongside the enemy and let them massacre the bastard. Speed, speed, speed, Sharpe. Speed wins battles.’
It was just like musketry, Sharpe realized. On land the armies came together and, as often as not, it was the side that could fire its muskets fastest that would win. Men did not aim muskets, because they were so inaccurate. They pointed their muskets, then fired so that their bullet was just one amongst a cloud of balls that spat towards the enemy. Send enough balls and the enemy would weaken. Lay two ships close together and the one that fired fastest should win in the same way, and so Chase harried his gunners, praising the swift ones and chivvying the laggards, and all morning the sea about the ship quivered to the vibration of the guns. A long track of wavering and thinning powder smoke lay behind the ship, proof that she made some progress, though it was frustratingly slow. Sharpe had brought his telescope up the mast and now trained it eastwards in hope of seeing land, but all he could see was a dark shadow beneath the cloud. He shortened the barrel and trained the glass downwards to see Malachi Braithwaite pacing up and down the quarterdeck, flinching every time a gun cracked.
What to do about Braithwaite? In truth Sharpe knew exactly what to do, but how to do it on a ship crammed with over seven hundred men was the problem. He collapsed the telescope and put it into a pocket, then, for the first time, climbed from the maintop up above the main topsail to the crosstrees, a much smaller platform than the maintop, where he perched beneath the main topgallant sail. Yet another sail rose above that, the royal, up somewhere in the sky, though not so high that men did not climb to it, for there was a lookout poised above the royal’s yard, contentedly chewing tobacco as he stared westwards. The deck looked small from here, small and narrow, but the air was fresh for the ever-present stink of the ship and the rotten-egg stench of the powder smoke did not reach this high.
The tall mast trembled as two guns fired together. A freak breath of wind blew the smoke away and Sharpe saw the sea rippling in a frantic fan pattern away from the guns’ blasts. Grass did that in front of a field gun, except that the grass became scorched and sometimes caught fire. The sea settled and the smoke thickened.
‘Sail!’ the man above Sharpe bellowed to the deck, the hail so loud and sudden that Sharpe jumped in fright. ‘Sail on the larboard beam!’
Sharpe had to think which side of the ship was larboard and which starboard, but managed to remember and trained his telescope out towards the west, but he could see nothing except a hazy line where the sea met the sky.
‘What do you see?’ Haskell, the first lieutenant, called up through a speaking trumpet.
‘Royals and tops,’ the man shouted, ‘same course as us, sir!’
The gunfire ceased, for Chase now had something else to worry about. The gunports were closed and the big guns lashed tight as a half-dozen men scurried up the rigging to add their eyes to the lookout’s gaze. Sharpe could still see nothing on the western horizon, even with the help of the telescope. He was proud of his eyesight, but being at sea demanded a different kind of vision to looking for enemies on land. He swept the glass left and right, still unable to find the strange ship, then a sudden tiny blur of dirty white broke the horizon; he lost it, edged the glass back, and there she was. Just a blur, nothing but a blur, but the man above him, without any glass, had seen it and could distinguish one sail from another.
A man settled beside Sharpe on the crosstrees. ‘It’s a Frenchie,’ he said.
Sharpe recognized him as John Hopper, the big bosun of the captain’s gig. ‘You can’t tell at this distance, surely?’ Sharpe asked.
‘Cut of the sails, sir,’ Hopper said confidently. ‘Can’t mistake it.’
‘What is it, Hopper?’ Chase, bareheaded and in shirt-sleeves, hauled himself onto the platform.
‘It could be her, sir, it really could,’ Hopper said. ‘She’s a Frenchie, right enough.’
‘Damn wind,’ Chase said. ‘May I, Sharpe?’ He held out his hand for the telescope, then trained it west. ‘Damn it, Hopper, you’re right. Who spotted her?’
‘Pearson, sir.’
‘Triple his rum ration,’ Chase said, then closed the glass, returned it to Sharpe, and slithered back to the deck in a manner that scared Sharpe witless. ‘Boats!’ Chase shouted, running towards the quarterdeck. ‘Boats!’
Hopper followed his captain and Sharpe watched as the ship’s boats were lowered over the side and filled with oarsmen. They were going to tow the ship, not west towards the strange sail, but north in an attempt to get ahead of her.
The men rowed all through the afternoon. They sweated and tugged until their arms were agony. Very slight ripples at the Pucelle’s flank showed that they were making some progress, but not enough, it seemed to Sharpe, to gain any headway on the far sail. The small breaths of wind that had relieved the heat earlier in the day seemed to have died away completely so that the sails hung lifeless and the ship was enveloped in an odd silence. The loudest noises were the footfalls of the officers on the quarterdeck, the shouts of the men urging on the tired oarsmen and the creak of the wheel as it spun backwards and forwards in the lolling swell.
Lady Grace, attended by her maid and carrying a parasol against the hot sun, appeared on the quarter-deck and stared westwards. Captain Chase claimed the strange sail was now visible from the deck, but she could not see it, even with a telescope. ‘They probably haven’t seen us,’ Chase suggested.
‘Why not?’ she asked.
‘Our sails have clouds behind them’ – he gestured to the great cloud range that piled above Africa – ‘and with any luck our canvas just blends into the sky.’
‘You think it’s the Revenant?’
‘I don’t know, milady. She could be a neutral merchantman.’ Chase tried to sound neutral himself, but his suppressed excitement made it plain he believed the far ship was indeed the Revenant.
Braithwaite was standing under the break of the poop, watching to see if Sharpe joined her ladyship, but Sharpe did not move. He looked east and saw cat’s-paws of ripples on the water, the first signs of a freshening wind. The ripples chased and skittered across the long swells, obstinately refusing to come near the Pucelle, but then they seemed to gather together and slide over the sea and suddenly the sails filled, the rigging creaked and the towing lines dipped towards the water.
‘The land wind,’ Chase said, ‘and about time!’ He went to the quartermaster at the wheel who at last had some purchase on the rudder. ‘Can you feel it?’
‘Aye aye, sir.’ The helmsman paused to spit a stream of tobacco juice into a big brass spittoon. ‘Ain’t much though,’ he added, ‘no more than if a little old lady was breathing on the sails, sir.’
The wind faltered, shivering the sails, then lazily caught again and Chase turned to watch the sea. ‘Get the boats in, Mister Haskell!’
‘Aye aye, sir!’
‘Tot of rum for the oarsmen!’
‘Aye aye, sir.’ Haskell, who believed Chase spoiled his men, sounded disapproving.
‘Double tot of rum for the oarsmen,’ Chase said to annoy Haskell, ‘and wind for us and death to the French!’ His spirits had risen in the belief that he had found his quarry. Now he must stalk her. ‘We’ll close the angle on her during the night,’ he told Haskell. ‘Every inch of canvas! And no lights on board. And we’ll wet the sails.’ A canvas hose was rigged to a pump and used to douse the sails with sea water. Chase explained to Sharpe that wet sails caught more of a light wind than dry, and it did seem as if the soaked canvas worked better. The ship moved perceptibly,