H. M. S. Cockerel (26 page)

B O O K V

Ne tibi tunc horrenda rapax ad litora puppem ventus
agat, ludo volitans cum turma superbo pulvereis
exultat equis ululataque tellus intremit et pugnas mota
pater incitat hasta.

Let not then the driving blast carry your ship
to those dreadful shores, what time the troop
in arrogant sport fly here and there exultant on
dusty steeds, and the ground trembles to their
halloing, and their sire incites them to battle
with the brandished spear.

Argonautica
Book IV, 606–609
Valerius Flaccus

C H A P T E R 1

A
ll
secure!” Midshipman Anthony Braxton read off the bunting hoisted on
Victory.
“Fleet . . . Will enter Harbour! . . . In Columns of Divisions!”

“They're just
giving
us the place, then?” Lieutenant Scott marveled.

“So it would appear, sir,” Captain Braxton grunted, lowering his telescope, lips snug with aspersion—perhaps at French timidity. “Captain Elphinstone's landing at the fort yonder has cowed 'em, at last. They're streaming out of their forts, inland . . . nor'west for those farther hills.”

“Well, it beats fighting our way in all hollow, sir,” the Marine captain, O'Neal, opined darkly as he beheld the towering heights, rough headlands, and the many forts and batteries of Toulon.

“Granted, sir,” Braxton grumbled, sounding disappointed, though.

“We've what, barely 1,000 Marines with the entire fleet?” O'Neal said in a softer voice to Lewrie, standing nearer the wheel. “Had this fleet tried to force a landing against opposition, we'd have lost half on the first fortifications alone.”

“With the city for us, though, sir?” Lewrie scoffed gently. “I doubt they'd have put up much resistance, even if it had come to that. The Republican diehards were in the minority, thank God. And they were not to know how much we had at our disposal. Twenty-one sail with us, and God knows what over the horizon.”

After rejoining Hood's fleet, it had looked to be the very worst sort of naval service—blockade duty; slowly plodding in neat ordered lines of battle from Marseilles, round Cape Cicie to Toulon and back, parading the might of the Royal Navy, jogging off-and-on that forbidding coast, in hopes that the French might sally forth for battle. Rumours, and a “spying out,” under cover of a truce mission by Lt. Edward Cooke of
Victory,
had determined that the French had at least twenty-one sail of the line in port, seventeen of them more or less ready for sea, and frigates and sloops of war, two-a-penny. But for a few fast frigates, ordered to trail their coats into the Bay of Toulon between Cape Sepet and Cape de la Garonne to tempt a response, Hood hadn't tried to enter in force, and the French had remained strangely somnolent.

Those Royalists in Toulon, though, the ones Sir William Hamilton had spoken of . . . they'd sent a two-man committee to
Victory
under a flag of truce on 23 August. Lt. Edward Cooke had gone ashore on the 24th, then one more time, to carry Hood's reply. Cooke had been shot at by a frigate with Republican sentiments, hailed as a hero and damn near chaired in triumph to a meeting of a Royalist committee intent on surrender, arrested by Republicans on the way back, then freed by a Royalist mob.

Again, on the 26th, he went ashore, returning with a French Navy officer, Captain d'Imbert of the seventy-four-gun
Apollon,
and the agreement was ratified. Toulon was theirs!

So now
Cockerel
was inside the Bay of Toulon, slowly heaving her way under a tops'l breeze from the south, beam-reaching toward the inner roads, just north of the peninsula which formed Cape Sepet, the southern guard of the great port, where before they would not have dared.

It helped that the revolutionary government in Paris had just proscribed Var and Provence, warning that troops and guillotines were coming if they did not immediately submit to the Republic.

The situation was what some might call interesting, to say the least. While a fair majority of Toulon was Royalist, declared for some prince now called Louis XVII, there was a moderately sized minority of Republicans, mostly the poor or the bitter, dead set against the aristocracy, the large landowners, and the merchant class. With opportunists on either hand, it went without saying. Yet the French Mediterranean Fleet held only a minority of Royalists, and a majority of Republicans. Rear Admiral St. Julien, second-in-command, had seized forts facing the inner, Little Road of Toulon, with the crews of seven line-of-battle ships, about 5,000 men, disobeying orders of the staunchly Royalist Rear Admiral, Comte de Trogoff, who actually commanded the port.

Early on the 27th, a force of 1,500 men, the greatest portion of two regiments embarked with Hood's fleet, reinforced by about 200 Marines and seamen, under the overall command of Capt. George Keith Elphinstone of H.M.S.
Robust,
had landed at Fort La Malgue, on the right side of the spit of land that divided the Little and the Great roads, high enough to overlook and dominate St. Julien's much lower-set forts.

Elphinstone had sent a demand for St. Julien to surrender, and had warned that any vessel which did not enter Toulon's inner basin, land its powder and send its crew ashore, would be taken under fire.

That was enough for St. Julien. His honor had been satisfied by token resistance, so he had decamped. And now, Admiral Hood could sail in. Without a shot being fired, without a single casualty, they were in total possession of a French city, an entire French fleet, and a naval base with all its arsenals, powder mills and stocks, foundries for cannon and anchors, and immense quantities of naval stores.

“Hard to think of us taking all this, even were we fifty sail,” Mister Dimmock spoke up, nodding to the Marine captain. “First, weather Cape Sepet, as we've done. And it's simply stiff with guns. There, young sirs—” he pointed out to the midshipmen with a ferrule in his hand, as they gathered about for a lesson—“near the end of the peninsula, on the highest hill of Cape Sepet, that's . . . what, Mr. Spendlove?”

“C . . . Croix des Signeaux, sir.”

“Aye, the signals cross. That's fairly new. Semaphore tower.” Dimmock beamed his approval. “The old one, the Great Tower, is further inside the harbour, near Fort La Malgue. Now, below Croix des Signeaux, there's Batterie la Croix, north shore of the peninsula. Then west of that, there's Batterie des Frères . . . ‘ The Brothers' . . . go farther west and you come in range of Fort Mandrier, which commands the south side of the Great Road, next to the Infirmarie . . . sort o' like our Greenwich Naval Hospital back home, 'cross an inlet from Fort Mandrier, just at the thinnest shank of the peninsula, facin' the Golfe de la Veche. Mr. Dulwer, would you anchor in the Bay of Toulon, sir?”

“Uhm . . . perhaps not, sir? Not all the time?”

“Don't sound
too
definite, will ye now, Mr. Dulwer?” the sailing master sighed. “No, ye'd not. Too deep for the proper scope on cables, e'en do you weight 'em with gun barrels, and a rocky bottom. Levanter comes up, it throws a heavy sea from the east'rd, crost all that open water from Plage de la Garonne.
Plage
means beach, right, lads? Right. Now, between Batteries Croix and Frères, it's no more'n one sea mile to Cape Brun, on the north shore of the mainland. Batteries there, too . . . with forty-two-pounders. North tip o' Cape Sepet and Cape Brun squeeze in to mark the entrance to the Great Road. You have a little more shelter in the Great Road. It's still foul holding ground, but shallower'n the bay. West of Cape Brun, there're batteries on a high cliff, on this spit of land . . . here,” he said, indicating the chart. “Can't rightly see it from the quarterdeck . . . all our fleet in the way, ha ha!”

The midshipmen made sure to sound appreciative of Dimmock's jape.

“Then to the west of those batteries is Fort La Malgue, which we took this morning, on another steep headland. Little water-fort guards the foot of it, Fort Saint Louis. West o' La Malgue, there's this peninsula . . . long, narrow, and steep, almost vertical cliffs. Great Tower on its tip, where it juts southerly, and pinches off the Great Road from the Little Road. Guns a'plenty there, too, mind. This narrow pass, not
half
a sea mile, from the Great Road to the Little. Le Goulet, Frogs call it . . . that's the Gullet, in real language. Across the Gullet is where the Frogs tried to make a stand this morning, northern side of the Golfe de la Veche, on Hauteur de Grasse. Big, round hilly thing, just on our bows if ye care to look. Two little spurs on its tip. Southern has Fort de Balaguer . . . the northern Fort L'Eguillette. Lower than La Malgue, so we could've shot howitzers or mortars into them. So that's why the Frogs took French leave, ha ha!”

Another wave of laughter swept the quarterdeck, more sincere this time over Mr. Dimmock's pun, including the officers and seamen.

“The Little Road. Would you anchor
there,
Mister Dulwer?”

“Aye, sir,” Dulwer shot back quickly.

“Aye, ye would,” Dimmock agreed. “Very sheltered, fairly shallow. On the small side, though. Get out of the shallows along the shore and you don't have much room to swing. Maybe three or four ships may lie in the Little Road. Sou'west end, that's La Seyne . . . civilian harbour, so they take most of the available space. More batteries, unfortunately. Coverin' La Seyne is Fort Cruyon. A very low shore battery in an inlet north of there is Dubrun. Then another, on the north side of the Little Road, that's Le Millaud. Powder mills there, too, I recall. Atop them all, west of town, above these marshes, is Fort Malbousquet, then Fort Missicy, at the foot of this other hill, below Malbousquet.”

“So . . . where do they
really
keep their ships, Mister Dimmock?” Spendlove asked, squirming with either boredom or confusion.

“Do you get past all this, into the Little Road, sir, you come about, hard t'starb'd and sail north. Through the pass in the channel booms . . . log and chain, stout as anything . . . and there's the Basin of Toulon. They can cram up to thirty sail of the line in there t'gether, bows or stern-to the quays, as most do in the Mediterranean. Fenders betwixt, so they won't chafe their gunn'ls off. Walk all day in shade along the quay, below their bowsprits . . . Not a stone's throw from warehouses and such. But . . .” Dimmock warned with a theatrical pause. “ . . . to get into the basin, there's one damn-all tough nut still to crack, young sirs. There's the jet-ties, the breakwaters that make the basin. They're built so low to the water, it'd be like hitting a piece of driftwood. Laid out in a
fleur d'eau
. . . the very worst sort of coastal fort. They're hollow and bombproof, and stiff with guns. Entrance channel isn't a musket-shot wide, with forty-two-pounders to either beam. And the town's like an old king's castle. City walls are like a fort, with moats and drawbridges and gates . . . part of it they call Fort de France. And above it all . . . look up yonder, behind the town, sirs? Eighteen-hundred feet high, that chain of hills are. A ravine on the nor'-west . . . Gorge St. Antoine, and another narrow valley north. Steep, crumbly stuff. There's forts all over up yonder . . . with ovens for heating shot, high 'nough for accurate plungin' fire.”

“What an effort they put into this place,” Lt. Clement Braxton commented, with a whispery whistle of awe. “Marshes . . . seepy springs, I've read, everywhere one looks. And no low tides to give them time to dig or lay foundations. It's an engineering masterpiece.”

“Aye, Mister Braxton, yer correct, sir,” Dimmock agreed heartily. “Can't wait to get ashore an' look it over, myself. East side of the basin, they keep the lesser ships o' war, frigates and such. Shipyard and launch-ways, graving docks. And there's a drydock that'd rock you back on your heels, too. Brute of a thing. Think of how they managed to build
that,
sir! Seal it, and pump out with convict labour, I think. Aye, sir . . . Toulon mayn't be the world's best harbour t'lie in, but . . . it's the world's most fortified, and most impressive built! Well, end of yer geography lesson, lads. Back to your stations. We're sure to come to anchor before the hour's out.”

“From the sea
and
the land,” Lewrie commented, coming to join them as the midshipman scattered. “Hellish fortified.”

“Better for us, when it comes to holding it, sir,” Captain O'Neal agreed.

“
Nine
fath'm!
Nine
fath'm t'this line!” a leadsman called from the larboard foremast chains.
Cockerel
drew three fathoms, when deepladen.

“Steady as she goes, Quartermaster.”

“Aye aye, sir, steady'z she goes.”

A weak sun shone that day, for a wonder, as if in celebration of their bloodless victory. Quite unlike the weather of their short blockade, which had shipped green seas, and gale-force winds at times, scattering the squadrons and straining their masts nigh to snapping. Watery, wan sunlight reflected from the charcoal-blue sea of the Great Road, wave-motes of light dancing on the sides of the massive warships, and dun sails and dull colours were stage-lit to an artist's whiteness or sheening brilliance, as if posed for a commemorative oil.

During those rare moments of clear weather, Southern France had appeared rather attractive, Lewrie'd thought; much like Naples, though, in rockiness and semisere harshness. Whenever they'd gone close inshore, he'd espied hamlets and fishing villages that seemed cheerful enough. And, on the slopes of Southern France, there was a softer and lusher palette of greens than Naples could ever boast, more verdantly bright, less dusty and muted. From high summer, thatchy tan to spring-shoot green, the grasslands, vineyards and forests, olive groves and pastures seemed to roll and tumble as they were brushed by some bright scudding clouds' shadows.