H. M. S. Cockerel (31 page)

C H A P T E R 6

L
ewrie
had
kept them out of those forbidding hills, though he wasn't exactly sure he'd done them any favours. Rear Admiral Goodall had only the briefest sketch of Lewrie's career, and had been intent upon a large map of the area, in the middle of a conference with his opposite number, Rear Admiral Gravina of the Spanish Navy, and a host of subordinates, all of whom had a loud opinion of what should be done, and at that very instant before . . .

“Commanded two bomb ketches, I see, sir,” Goodall had commented.

“Yes, sir, but—”

“Batt'ry at Yorktown, by God. Land service.”

“Yes, sir, although—”

“That folderol in the Far East, shellin' pirates an' such?”

“Well, in fact . . .”

They'd been
converted
bombs, reduced to tiny but stoutly built ketch-rigged gunships; his two-gun batteries at Yorktown hadn't fired a single shot, much less had a target; the folderol in the Far East was not
exactly
mortar work now, was it, but . . .

“Cheesy-lookin' raft,” Lewrie muttered. “Ain't it.”

They'd given him a floating battery. They'd also given him an “all-nations” to sort out. Lieutenant de Crillart showed up, full of ginger and good cheer, eager to be doing something at last, out of the water once more. He brought with him about forty men— all Royalists, thank God—former members of the Royal Corps of Marine Gunners, once a body of 10,000, the most expert and perfectly trained naval artillery known. With cunning, the latest scientific artifice, lavish support from the greatest minds and mathematicians, the most modern gun foundries, they had developed a complete
“la jeune école,”
a New School for gunnery.

The Revolutionaries, though, had broken them up, parcelled them out in tiny leavenings to land units, unable to abide
any
elite superior to the Common Man, nor any organisation left over from royal days.

There was a further complication, an equal draft of artillerists more experienced with mortars, for which Lewrie might have backhandedly thanked God. Unfortunately, they were
Spanish
bombardiers under a lean, haughty coach whip of an officer; one Comandante (Major) Don Luis Emiliano de Esquevarre y Saltado y Perez. To make matters even worse, he was not a naval officer but a
military
artillerist, and had about as much English as Lewrie had Spanish. Which wasn't saying much, beyond
“dos vinos”
and
“sucar tus putas.”
El Comandante would be in charge of the pair of massive thirteen-inch brass mortars sunk in the middle of the waist, where the mainmast used to be, whilst Lieutenant de Crillart and his grizzled veterans would service the six heavy thirty-two-pounders, three to either beam.

Zélé,
the battery had been named once, a proud two-decker 74 of about 160 feet on the range of her gun deck and over 40 feet in beam. Now, she was a
“rasé,”
a ship shaved down. Gone were her tall foc's'le and poop deck. Gone, indeed, was her quarterdeck as well, along with an upper gun deck and the original sail-tending gangways.

She'd been reduced to a hulking, squat water beetle, wide and low to the water, with the only shelter for her crew the foremost wedge of the bows on the remaining gun deck, and what went unused on that deck aft, under what was left of the upper gun deck. Her mainmast had been drawn out like a rotten tooth, and her fore and mizzen had been reduced to the fighting-tops—“to a gantline,” they would say in the Royal Navy. There was still a forecourse yard on which a sail was set, an inner and an outer jib forward set on stays which ran to a shortened jib boom without a sprit yard doubled atop it. Aft, the mizzen could set a course on the usually bare cro'jack yard, and an ancient lateen spanker awaited.

Lewrie didn't think he'd be winning any regattas with her, though. Her sails were tattered and mildewed, mere afterthoughts. Had she half-a-gale abeam, he reckoned, she
might
log a quim-hair above two knots. No, to get this beamish, overbuilt and deep-draughted beast about the bay, it would be necessary to use the long, thick sweep oars which lay piled atop the centerline of the gun deck, and extend them out the many ports where artillery no longer nested. Sure enough, he could see tholepins the size of pier bollards at several empty gun ports.

“Christ, what a bloody . . .” he began to carp. “Ow! Goddamn an' blast it . . .” He'd stubbed his toe on a knot. The ship was so old, so pared down by holystoning during her half century of service, that hard pine knots had arisen from the softer planking material, and now stood as high as flattopped islands all over the gun deck, making an archipelago of dark burls against the pale gray of her weathered decking.

“So what do
we
do, sir?” Scott asked, looking about as dubious as Lewrie did about their prospects.

“We're the coachees, Mister Scott,” Lewrie told him, rubbing his foot through his shoe. “The Frogs and the Dons shall make the loudish banging noises whilst we steer them round, wherever they wish to go.”

“Hack-work,” Scott opined. “We'll need more men, a power more, just to row her, or . . .” He pointed at the size of the capstans fore and aft. They'd
have
to row her, then anchor with both bowers, the stream
and
the kedge, put springs on the cables, and use the secondary capstans, which were about as massive as
Cockerel
's, to nudge her bearing, so the guns and mortars could aim.

“About forty more hands, I should think,” Lewrie scowled. “Landsmen, mostly. Be wonderful, were we to get 'em. But . . . we're not. This is it. All the Fleet or the garrison may spare right now. Charles?”

“Oui, mon capitaine?”

“We'll need your men to share the sweepwork, when it's needful.
La
. . . oars?
Les
capstans?” Alan flustered, trying for the life of him to recall what the French called things. “Until we're in position and ready to open fire, of course.”

“Ah, ze
rames et
ze
cabestan, je comprend.
D'accord.
I . . . un'erstan'.
Oui,
I agree, Alain,” Crillart beamed most agreeably.

“Still, there're the Spanish. We could use their help, too,” Alan said. “If we really have quick need of 'em. Uhm, perhaps
you
should be the one to broach the subject with Don ‘whatsit,' Charles. You have so much more Spanish than I.”

“Moi?”
de Crillart sighed, taking a long look at the nose-high, and immensely bored, expression of their bombardier.
“Merde.”

C H A P T E R 7

F
alconer's
Marine
Dictionary
had quite a lot to say on Mortars and Range, and the precautions the prudent officer might undertake to keep from being blown to flinders. So, too, did de Crillart's tattered copy of Le Blond's
Elements of War,
and Lewrie's copy of the standard Muller's
Treatise
on
the
Artillery
.

Zélé
should have had munitions-tenders astern, where the shells were filled with powder, and rowing boats to fetch shot as needed, and where, during transit, the fuses were inserted, the fused shells being termed “fixed”; then hoisted aboard and stored in a hide or haircloth covered rack on the safest space of the deck—called “kiting.” Well, they didn't have tenders, and too few men to spare to row shells about, so they extemporised.

The rudimentary captain's cabin aft under the thick remains of the upper gun deck was to be the filling room, its doors and windows covered with tanned hides, equipped with water tubs, and the passages to it constantly watered with a wash-deck pump. The filled shells to be carried most carefully to the waist, where two senior bombardiers would “fix” them with fuses, as needed for each shot, and no shell was to be “fixed” and “kited,” then left untended, no matter how secure a storage area they had.

There were more tubs of water round the depression in the waist where the mortars sat, two more bombardiers or gunner's mates on duty to oversee port fires and slow matches the mortarmen would apply to the fuse and the mortars' touch holes. Propellant gunpowder charges were loaded below, in the old orlop hanging-magazine, also well watered and guarded, with the door shut except to pass out premeasured cartridges through a secondary felt screen inside the actual door, slitted to let the charges be passed out in fireproof leather cylinders.

The fuses would come from a “laboratory chest” in the captain's cabin, too. These were conical tubes made of beech or willow wood and filled with a composition of sulphur, saltpetre and mealed powder. A mixture of tallow, pitch and beeswax sealed both ends. The tapering end of the cone would go inside the shell, stripped of its protective coating, but the great end must keep its tallow until just before firing. And they all agreed that, whilst the mortars were in service, it would be impossible to employ the thirty-two-pounder great-guns simultaneously, for they would require other lit port fires and slow matches, and that was a risk too great to contemplate.

It helped immensely, Lewrie learned from observation, that their mortars were mounted on central pintles which passed completely through the bed of the mortar carriages, through the supporting timbers and deck beams of the mortar wells, through the overhead beams on the orlop, and terminated in large baulks of timber which held the whole affair up; so the mortars could be “laid” or “pointed” left and right. All they had to do was anchor with the best-bower and a single kedge (with springs, of course, on their cables), roughly abeam of the target or the coast, and the bombardiers could heave their massive charges about for aiming.

Thirteen-inch mortar; weight, eighty-one hundredweight, two quarters, one pound, according to Falconer. Powder charge when the chamber at its base was full, thirty pounds. Weight of a “fixed” shell, one hundred ninety-eight pounds; and filled with seven pounds of the very best powder. The shells were cast-iron balls, hollow, with their greatest thickness on the bottom, the better to resist the awful force of discharge from the bore, and to keep that heaviest part away from the fuse, flying first through the air, and landing on that thick portion, with the thinner, and lighter, filling and fusing end uppermost. There were two carrying handles cast or hammer-welded to either side of the fuse hole. Perhaps to avoid confusion for slower minds.

Beyond that, Lewrie's theory got a little vague; he'd never had the greatest head for numbers. Falconer's, under Range, listed a table of practice for sea mortars, giving the specific weights of propelling charges, and the proper fuses to use. For instance, he could discover that at forty-five degrees of elevation, a thirteen-inch mortar took an eighteen-pound charge to hurl the shot, which resulted in a flight of twenty-six seconds, and range of roughly 2,873 yards. And for the fuse to explode at the right moment, burning at the rate of four seconds and forty-eight parts to the inch, would require a premade fuse of the exact length of five inches, seventy-two parts, to be selected from the “laboratory chest.” Then, of course, there was the niggling matter of the gunners who would light the fuse, and the mortar's touch hole with slow match, doing both at the same instant. But Alan assumed that the Spanish bombardiers, and the insufferably laconic Don Luis, might know what they were doing, and if they made a hash of it, then it was their own damned fault.

Lavishly re-equipped from those mountains of French supplies in the basin's arsenals and warehouses, they sailed
Zélé,
her new sails almost virgin-white, from the docks, through the opening between the bombproof jetties, and out to join
St. George
and
Aurore,
just after first light on the 24th.

“Springs on the cables, sir,” Lieutenant Scott informed him.

“Wash-deck pumps going? Filling room
and
magazine passageway?”

“Aye, sir.”

“Let's be at it, then,” Lewrie grimaced, his stomach chilly with trepidation at the unknown nature of their work. And over the danger, which was
very
known, of any clumsiness or inattentiveness.

“Might as well be, sir,” Scott dared to assay a tiny, wry grin. “It appears the Frogs already are.”

They walked amidships, to peer down into the mortar wells, then tip their hats to Crillart and Esquevarre, who stood close together by the rearward lip, evidently engaged in some heated discussion.

“Non non, Comandant,
Le Blond . . .
”
Charles de Crillart objected gently. “Alain . . .
mon capitaine,
I attemp' to tell zis . . .
monsieur
Le Blond say ze s'irty pound charge eez
beaucoup, mais
zis . . . ze
comandant
insist . . .”

Don Luis de Esquevarre rattled off an expostulation in rapid Spanish, out of which Lewrie caught perhaps the odd word in ten, most of those mildly insulting.

“Señor,”
he said, whipping out his copy of Falconer. “Allow me to quote, and do you translate, Lieutenant Crillart . . . aha, here it is.

Mr. Muller in his Treatise of Artillery, very justly observes, that the breech of our 13-inch sea-mortars is loaded with an unnecessary weight of metal. The chamber thereof contains 32 Lbs. of powder, and at the same time they are never charged with more than 12 or 15 pounds by the most expert officers, because the bomb-vessel is unable to bear the violent shock of their full charge.”

“'E say eez Inglese bull-sheet,
mon capitaine,
” Crillart translated back. “Zat eez on'y pour ze cylinder chambre,
et
we 'ave een zis bombard, ze conical. 'E also say 'e eez
très esperience
viz artillery, an' 'e 'ave no need to be tol' . . . 'ow to soock eggs?
Comment?
” Crillart shrugged in bewilderment.

To Crillart's even further confusion, Lewrie laughed out loud, prompting a tiny upturn of one corner of Don Luis's mouth in return.

“Señor Comandante, I have implicit trust in your experience,” Lewrie cajoled, phrase by phrase as Crillart transposed for him, “but this is a ship, not a firm battlement or well-prepared battery . . . do you see here, under Range . . . practice table? Weights of charge?”

“Ah, sí, capitán!”
Don Luis brightened, pulling from a voluminous pocket of his ornate uniform coat a much-tattered, oft-rolled and thumbed table of practice, expostulating eagerly.

Fumm-fumm! Umumm. Scrreee-BLAM! BLAM!
All this time, Republican shot had been falling into the Little Road,
St.
George
belching displeasure, and
Aurore
's six- and twelve-pounders, breeches resting flat on their carriages for greatest “range at random-shot,” had been barking away. And once in a while, other floating batteries had erupted in fog banks of powder smoke.

“Ze
très peu malheureusement
. . . ze leetle mis-un'erstan'ment?” Charles said with relief, at last. “'E eez 'ave een min' ze less of ze powder. 'E ees s'inking ze, uhm . . . nine poun', at firs'?”

“Whew!” Scott breathed out.

“I defer to his greater knowledge, tell him, Charles,” Alan said, doffing his hat, making sure he was grinning when he said it.

Up from the orlop came a powder charge, sacked by the called-for weight. Spanish bombardiers used paper cartridges. From the filling room came a shell, two burly Spaniards grunting with effort to carry it by its small, slippery handles. Don Luis and his
aspirante,
or ensign-in-training, and a hirsute, cursing bear of a man, a sergeant-gunner, Diego Huelva, directed the work of heaving the after mortar, the left hand of the pair as they faced the coast, into line. Then began to elevate it to forty-five degrees. They fussed and hopped, peered and tinkered at screws, until satisfied, then waved for the shell to be brought forward.

Down it went into the well, as the powder charge was rammed deep into the chamber, and the priming iron was thrust into the touch hole to both clear the vent and puncture the bag. Slowly the fixed shell was lowered into the stubby bore, handles and fuse hole up.

Don Luis took a deep breath, almost made to cross himself, as he waved the excess hands away and ordered the tallow seal on the fuse to be opened.
“Fósforo, preparado . . . !”
he cried.
“Fuego!”

The smouldering port fires touched both fuse and touch hole, and there was a split second of sizzle, then a tremendous blast! Down went the deck, as if shoved by the hand of God, and
Zélé
's timbers groaned.

Not so much a sudden detonation as it was a physical force, Alan felt his lungs rattle, his groin shrink, and his heart flutter when the mortar touched off, felt an invisible wave of pressure shove him back, rattle his coattails and hat, and fill his ears with a sound beyond a sound, almost too loud to register, except to set them ringing. Spent powder smoke spurted aloft in a sickly yellow-white column, reeking with sulphur and rotten eggs, smelling singed as lit kindling.

“Bloody Hell, that was . . .” he coughed, fanning the air for some fresh as the gush of gunsmoke dissipated. “That was
magnificent!
”

He'd loved the great-guns best of all the things he'd learned in the Navy; the power, the stink of them, their recoil and shudderings. From little two-pounder boat guns and swivels to long-twelves, from far-firing twenty-four-pounders to the stubby, ship-breaking “smashers,” the carronades, Lewrie delighted in things that went
Boom!
—and exulted in seeing the damage they caused aboard a foe. It was irrational, brutish and savage, this joy he found in gunnery, so viscerally
beneath
a reasonable man's ken, so insensible a passion, yet . . .

“Damme!” Lewrie called, feeling a boyish glee rise in him. “Don Luis!
Volver a hacer?
Let's do that
again!
”

That afternoon,
St. George
retired from the artillery duel, due to depart for Genoa, and her place was taken in the Little Road by the
Princess
Royal,
another 98, Rear Admiral Goodall's flagship. In lieu of his presence, her captain, John Childs Purvis, commanded. A Spanish 74 joined the bombardment.

French bursting-shell drummed around
Zélé
all day, fortunately never discovering the right solution in propellant charge and length of fuse, though it did get interesting at times when a shell would splash somewhat nearby, raise a feather of spray by its impact, then explode underwater a second or so later to produce an even more prodigious spout of brine which would fall like a cascade on the decks and gangways.

Don Luis Esquevarre concentrated their fire upon the lesser battery to the sou'west, the one with two guns. Patiently, firing perhaps a round every two minutes, he probed the hills, first with the left mortar, then with the right hand. A dram less powder in the charge cartridge, three drams more the next shot; a tiny tinkering with elevation, half a turn on the great screw by the bracing block; heaving to turn about a single degree on the pintle.

“Fósforo . . . preparado . . . ”
he called, coatless and hatless by then, his voice hoarse from inhaling spent gunpowder and shouting for half a day.
“Fuego!”

Another monumental clashing roar, and the floating battery shuddering to her very bones, timbers crying in torment. Lewrie stood aft away from the noise, on what passed for a quarterdeck, a telescope to his eye, rested steady on the larboard mizzen-stay ratlines.