Asimov's SF, February 2010 (18 page)

The whole world now knows the biographies of two of the heroes of the
Tom Paine
—Miss Caroline Herschel, and my own father Rear Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood—but the third member of that famous crew, Ben Hobbes, has received less attention. His own account shows how he had to overcome, not merely lethal peril, but the flaws of his own
heart. And in this mortal realm none of us faces a greater challenge.

I herewith present Ben Hobbes—his journal. The first entry is dated Thursday, December 12th, 1805.

—ANNE COLLINGWOOD, Morpeth, June 22nd, 1809.

I

The drummers sounded battle stations, and it was a noise fit to chill the blood.

It was a bleak sky that hung over the
Indomitable
, and the other square-riggers and gun-boats of the French and Spanish navies that crowded to defend Napoleon's National Flotilla as it toiled across the Channel, on its way to give England her worst night since the comet-fall of 1720. It was already late afternoon, so long had it taken the Flotilla to form up out of Boulogne, and I mused that the elements were showing little sympathy for the hundred and seventy thousand troops throwing up their guts in the invasion barges.

And, peering out from the foredeck, I saw the British ships bearing down. There are few things in the world so elegant as a fighting three-master seen head on as she leans into the wind, her canvas full set. But some of those ships were already showing the sparking of guns, and you could hear a distant pop, pop. The Royal Navy had taken a licking at Trafalgar, and one-arm Nelson was swimming with the fishes, but the English weren't defeated yet.

All around me the
Indomitable
prepared for war. You must not believe glamorous accounts of a tar's life. That French warship, already battered and patched from previous scraps, was crowded with men, you went shoulder to shoulder with your fellows on the working decks, and now all of them were running around and hauling on ropes and clambering high in the rigging. The shot racks were opened, the powder hatches made fast, the cutlasses and pistols handed out, and huge canvases soaked in seawater were draped in the deck spaces as firebreaks. The most ominous preparation was the swabbing of the decks and the scattering of sand, so that men would not slip on their mates’ blood. The cabin lads penned the ducks and geese in their coops, and dragged the goats and pigs to the side and dropped them in the surging water between the ships, the first casualties of the day. And the wives and whores cowered in the corners.

As for me, Ben Hobbes, I had signed the papers and taken Bonaparte's gold to sail my
Nautilus
against the English. That slim copper hull was already hung from its hawser by the starboard rail. But I had no intention of adding my name to the butcher's bill that day. I looked for Lieutenant Gourdon, the brute Frenchman who had been assigned by the Captain to supervise me and who, damn his eyes, had been as efficient at his task as he had been reluctant to take it on. In those frantic minutes he was distracted by his other duties, and so I took my chance and darted away below deck, seeking a place to be out of sight.

Below, the atmosphere was no less fraught. I hurried past the surgeon's cabin where the tables were being scrubbed down, and the doctor himself in his leather apron lined up the blades and saws and scalpels and tourniquets. I found myself in the first gun deck—the uppermost of three on this first rate, as the British would have called the ship. Here in this wide, low space, you had teams of a dozen men gathering around each of the weapons on the starboard side—for you only fired from one side at a time—and they rushed through the complicated choreography of preparing a big gun: raising the port, ramming a powder cartridge down the barrel and then the ball, before you heave your muzzle out of the port and make the tackles for the recoil, and the gun captain takes his quill filled with powder and drops it into the touch-hole. The powder boys scuttled with their lethal supplies, and the lieutenants stalked about yelling orders, and I hurried through the space, meeting the eye of no man or boy.

But then Gourdon showed up, damn him, and I knew he had watched me more closely than I thought, and followed me down. “There you are, you Yankee worm!” Gourdon roared this in my face, showing teeth gapped after a boyhood of brawling in the Marseilles docks, and his long pigtail was greasy and clumped with bits of stale food, for he used it to wipe his mouth when he ate. You can speak for or against the Revolution in France and what “Emperor” Napoleon has done with it, but you'd not have found a man like Pierre Gourdon in any position of responsibility in the navy of King Louis. “You took good French money to sail yon undersea ship against the British—serving the nation that has invaded your own—and now at the crux you skulk like a rat among these guns. You are a coward and a thief !"

I was stung by one insult, but not the other. “Coward you may call me; but what man wants to die for a cause that isn't his own? But thief—never! I took your government's money, for I had little choice, once my master Robert Fulton had absconded to the English—and your officers were done press-ganging me! Look, Gourdon—why not just let me be? The
Nautilus
's pinprick attack will make no difference to the outcome of this mighty conflict. Your own Emperor said so, at first, when Fulton presented a prototype of his invention. When the action's done we'll see to a reckoning.” I winked at him. “I have gold, lodged in a bank in Paris."

A persuasive argument you might think, but he grabbed my collar and began to lug me off that deck. “For you the reckoning is now, Yankee—"

You can hear a cannonball before it arrives, a kind of hot descending whistle.

A whole section of the starboard side exploded inwards, sending one gun swiveling from its mount and skittling its crew, and there was a hail of stout French oak smashed to splinters, lethal in themselves. I saw the projectile itself—they don't always move so fast, but the mass they pack does the damage—and it passed out of the port side hull, making an even bigger mess of the woodwork. My ears rang from the concussion, and I stepped back. I trod on a power boy, lying on the floor, his head stove in and his right leg detached and lying neatly beside him.

And through the gaping wound in that starboard bulkhead I saw another ship's hull slide close, a “Nelson chequer” of paintwork and gaping gun nozzles, surely only a few dozen yards away. Beyond I saw more ships closing with stately grace—and, under that grey Channel sky, I saw something vaster than any ship, breaking the water and rising, a sleek dome from which the water poured. I thought perhaps it was a whale, but it lacked flukes and a spout and a gimlet eye. Strangest of all, I thought I saw a man riding the back of the thing as it rose, attached by a sort of harness and a metal wand. Then smoke from the cannonades drifted across my field of view, and I saw no more. Just moments after the shot, my senses were fuddled. I think if I had known that that brief impression was my first glimpse of a Phoebean—an invader far worse than any Frenchman who ever lived—I would have subsided into a greater fear yet!

The gun crews were responding now. Men hauled away their fallen mates, or the bits of them, the officers yelled and the crew leaders roared their orders, and the mighty cannons leapt back under the recoil, and the space was filled with heat and smoke and a stink of gunpowder. Still Gourdon wasn't about to let me go. His meaty hand clamped to my shoulder, he dragged me away.

II

My
Nautilus
still hung from its crane, like a trophy fish on display.

I clambered up a short ladder to the port in its upper hull. Soon I was sitting in my solitary couch and strapping the leather harness in place pulling a blanket over my legs. Glancing around the hull, I saw that it had been loaded with bombs—copper canisters of air—and with carcasses, Fulton's dragged mines.
Nautilus
was sturdy enough around me, with her copper sheets riveted over iron ribs—and she was mine, the design as much my own as Fulton's no matter what the popular accounts may tell you, and she had been tested and not found wanting. But whether she could withstand a cannon shot was a matter I didn't want to explore.

Gourdon loomed over me, blocking out the grey sky. “The English lie to the north,” he grunted. “The square-riggers will not be able to lower their guns to fire on you, though the gun-boats might—"

"I know what to do. Shut up the dome, Gourdon, and let me be on the way."

He leaned forward, so his brutal face filled my world. “Be sure that if you flee today, no matter where you hide, I will find you."

But I grinned at him; whatever followed, at least I would be out of reach of his fists and the odor of his breath.

He and a seaman hauled up the glass blister and set it over my head and shoulders. Soon they were tightening the screws with a will, and the noise of battle was shut out. Then Gourdon waved and yelled, and seamen hauled on ropes, and I was lifted up in the air, and the hawser swiveled to dangle me over the sea.

Just for a minute, looking out of my blister, I was granted a view of the battle vouchsafed to none other, aside from those wretches climbed high in their ships’ rigging. In a fight between sailing ships, the great square-riggers close as slow and subtle as dreams. If there are formations and grand designs of admirals, it's not visible to your basic seaman. But when the ships close on one another their walls of guns fire their iron spite at each other, and there's a kind of friction of explosions that erupts all along the facing hulls. That day the destiny of England herself was in play and the fight was fierce, and I could see that some ships of both flags had already been reduced to drifting hulks with splintered stumps of masts and shattered hulls, and the crews were pitching the dead and dying over the side, and yet they fought on.

So much you might have seen in any naval action around the world for a century, as England and France, and Spain and Holland too, had slugged it out in search of empire and wealth. But today you had the added element of the National Flotilla: the huge, unlikely fleet Napoleon the Ogre had gathered in Boulogne, where the harbors had been crammed with boats gunwale to gunwale. The rumors had been that Napoleon had assembled seven army corps, with no fewer than nine thousand horses, and blacksmiths, surgeons, carpenters, grooms, harness makers, and chefs, and all the weapons, ammunition, and supplies they would need to make their foothold in England, all packed into three thousand boats. The Royal Navy had been England's best hope of defense, and for years it had kept the French and Spanish fleets bottled up in their ports. But in October the navy had been dished by Nelson's huge failure at Trafalgar—and Napoleon had sailed as soon as he could, despite the challenge of the December weather.

Now, in the gaps between the square-riggers, I saw the Flotilla boats like a dismal carpet on the water, barges and bilge keelers and other flat-bottomed types, ideal for landing on southern England's shallow beaches yet wallowing in the choppy waters of the Channel. In amongst them were the prames, specialist gunships, three-masted and a hundred feet long, but with a shallow draught and a shallow triple keel, and smaller fighting ships like chaloupes and cannoniers and peniches. And I saw how the English gun-boats, heftily rowed by seventy men apiece, prowled among the wretched lumbering barges, smashing them to pieces. Many blue-coats would die before they ever got off this sea—and yet more would come through this trial of water and fire to land, and thus do tyrants pay for their ambitions with the lives of others.

All this I saw in an instant, suspended by the hawser. But then the French sailors paid out their ropes, and there was a sickening moment of falling—and I was in the water with the rest!

III

The first order of business was to get under the sea, rather than bob about on it. I pulled a lever to open my keel, a hollow iron tube into which water bubbled steadily, and I imagined the stares of the men in the barges as I sank into the briny.

I was immediately enclosed in the sea's own peculiar noise, which is something like the rushing of blood you may hear if you cup your hands over your ears. Balm for the soul compared to the popping of cannons, screaming of shells, and shrieking of men! I could still see traces of the battle, however—the invasion barges littering the water above like pages torn from a book, and here and there a stray shot plowing into the sea like a diving bird—and, more gruesomely, I saw bodies adrift in their own clouds of blood. I decided I would descend to two or three fathoms’ depth—Fulton had taken the
Nautilus
to four fathoms once, and stayed there an hour, with three crewmen on board—for I judged that such a depth should shield me from the worst of the firestorm above. I would be too deep for my leather snorkel, but I had air contained in my bombs and would not suffer.

As I descended I ran a hasty check of my craft; the copper hull banged and creaked, but those iron ribs were sturdy, and there were no big leaks. I tested my rudder and my fins, the latter being two horizontal flaps fixed to the vertical rudder and intended to control the angle of dive, all adjusted with levers from the cabin. I tried out my propulsion, a screw affixed to the stern of the craft that I turned with a hand crank. All worked as I and Fulton [
Here the author had scratched out “Fulton and I"—A.C.
] had designed and built it, and I would be able to swim about the sea as graceful as a porpoise. Snug under my blanket, my
Nautilus
stout about me, my mood began to improve. I wondered now at my reluctance to climb aboard in the first place.

The scheme was that I should assail British warships. The vessel carried mines we called carcasses. I would rise up beneath an enemy, and a spike mounted on my dome would be driven into the ship's wooden hull. I would speed away, cranking the screw furiously, paying out a line. When I got far enough away the carcass would strike the hull; each carcass was a copper cylinder containing hundreds of pounds of gunpowder, to be detonated by a gunlock mechanism that fired on contact with the hull. All of this we had extensively tested in the course of dives in the Seine and elsewhere.