Quarterdeck (22 page)

“Gotta loose gun!”

Bryant dropped his food and raced for the hatchway, shouting to Kydd, “A dozen micks—now!”

Because of the weather the hammocks had all been stowed below in the lowest deck. Kydd stood in the hatchway, snatching a dozen men to a halt. “Down t’ the orlop—we’ll go under.” He

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plunged recklessly down the hatchway, praying they would follow. As he passed the level of the gun-deck he had a brief glimpse of a squat black creature crouching for the kill. He hurried on.

Finally in the orlop he paused to allow his eyes to adjust; then he set the men to work. In the wildly heaving gloom hammocks were passed up while Kydd cautiously entered the deserted gun-deck. The gun stood out brazenly from the ship’s side. The muzzle lashing had pulled its ringbolt from rotten wood and some weighty motion of the ship had subsequently caused the iron forging of the breeching tackle on one side to give way. The big cannon had swung out and, held by a few stranded ropes, was all but free.

Bryant stood to one side with a crew of seamen armed with handspikes. Kydd signalled to the fi rst men to come up.

“Stand your ground!” the fi rst lieutenant roared, at the men hesitating at his back. The whites of their eyes showed as they fearfully hefted their handspikes and waited for the order. When Kydd’s men had temporarily stopped the beast with hammocks thrown in its path, Bryant’s would hurl themselves on it with the handspikes in an attempt to overturn it.

Tenacious
rose to a wave and fell to starboard. It was all that was needed; the remaining ropes parted with a dull
twang
and the twenty-four-pounder trundled across the deck, accelerating as it went. The men threw themselves back at the sight of the unrestrained rampage while the cannon hurtled at the opposite side. Then the deck heaved the other way. The gun slowed and stopped, trickling back and forth in a grotesque parody of a bull-fi ght as the ship hesitated at the top of a roll. The next headlong charge might be the last.

“Er, can we help?” Lieutenant Best, accompanied by half a dozen marines, stood uncomprehending and hesitating at the hatchway.

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“No! Get ’em away.” Kydd appreciated his courage but a crowd was not needed—only a handful of daring, active seamen.

He glanced behind him: Chamberlain, the midshipman, with the agility of youth, Lamb, a spry topman, Thorn, steady and quick—

he had enough.

“Each a mick, an’ follow me—rest, wait until we has it cornered, then move in fast.” He seized a trussed hammock for himself and moved forward, feeling the eyes of Bryant’s crew on him.

Tenacious
’s bows rose to a comber. The deck canted up and the cannon suddenly rolled—towards him. Kydd threw the hammock before it and fl ung himself to one side. It thrust by, skidding on the hammock and fetched up against the mainmast with a splintering crash.

“Chamberlain—here! Lamb ’n’ Thorn, get in behind it!” He spotted Best, still hovering. “Get out of it,” he snarled, and pushed the crestfallen offi cer away.

They must close in at whatever risk: Bryant’s crew could do nothing until the beast was stopped and then they had seconds only. The next few minutes would see heroes—or death. Warily he approached the cannon, trying to gauge the seas outside.

The bows began to rise again and he tensed, but the downward motion of the cannon abruptly changed course as the wave angled under her keel, and it rumbled headlong towards the ship’s side and where Best stood, paralysed with horror.

It happened very quickly: a fatal wavering and the two-ton monster caught him, snatched him along, and slammed against another—a choking squeal and a brief image of spurting blood, limbs and white bone. Best’s body was fl ung to the deck.

Yet his sacrifi ce was the saving of the ship. Caught in the gun’s small wheels his body caused the cannon to slew and stop. Kydd hurled his hammock in its path. Others threw themselves at it, Bryant’s crew with handspikes levering furiously, frantically.

They had won.

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• • •

Shaken, Kydd needed the open decks.
Lord Woolmer
lay to a mile or so away, taking seas on her bows in explosions of white, pitching and rolling under her scraps of sail.

Hambly was standing by the main shrouds, looking up at the racing dark clouds and the torn seascape. On seeing Kydd, he shouted, “We’re takin’ it more from the west, I fear.” The rest of his words were snatched away by the wind’s blast.

“And this means?” Kydd had not heard Houghton approach behind them. Hambly wheeled round, then respectfully accompanied them to the shelter of the half-deck.

“Sir, it means the centre o’ the storm is placin’ itself right in our path. We’ll be down t’ bare poles at this rate—we should really bear away an’ scud instead of lyin’ to. There’s no hope this storm is goin’ to blow itself out, sir.”

Kydd wondered whether the real reason
Woolmer
was hanging on was the reluctance of her captain to deny his passengers hope of a harbour and surcease. To scud was to abandon all attempts even to hold a position and simply fl y before the violence, but this was to turn about and be blown back over the miles they had won at such cost.

“I understand, Mr Hambly, but we stay with them.”

Conditions were deteriorating and it was hard to keep them in sight: the air was fi lled with stinging spray, the motion of the ship becoming a shuddering heave as the seas grew more confused.

The hours wore on. Kydd imagined what it must be like for the people of
Woolmer:
an indescribable nightmare, endlessly protracted.

After midday
Woolmer
fi nally submitted to fate and made the decision to scud. It would be touch and go: the swells issuing from the storm centre were now more than forty feet high, higher even than the lower yards, and clawed into white streaks by the pitiless wind. They had left it perilously late. To fall off
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the wind, then run before it they must fi rst pass through the most dangerous time of all—broadside to the powerful seas.

Tenacious
stood by while
Woolmer
began to turn, all aboard holding their breath. Her captain had clearly planned his turn away from the wind, for the small sail left on main and mizzen vanished at exactly the same time as her headsails mounted. The leverage told, and the ship, plunging and rocking like a fractious horse, began putting her bow downwind, faster and faster. A rampaging comber burst on her side, checking her movement, but with the appearance of square sail on her fore—loosed by some heroic topmen aloft—
Woolmer
completed her turn. Rolling drunkenly at fi rst she settled to her new track.

“A princely piece of seamanship as ever I’ve seen, and with an injured mast!” exclaimed Houghton. Kydd quietly agreed: it had been well done indeed.

“At least they has no worry o’ being pooped,” said Hambly, eyeing the stately East Indiaman’s high stern. With a following sea there was always the danger of a giant wave overtaking and crowding on to her deck to sweep everything before it.

“That’s not m’ worry,” Kydd said—seared on his memory was fi ghting the helm of a similar-sized vessel in the Great Southern Ocean, the frigate
Artemis
on her way round Cape Horn.

Hambly looked at him, troubled. “What’s that, sir?”

“No matter.” Kydd could not voice the fears that had been triggered by the memory.

Houghton broke in decisively: “I’m going to scud under foretopmast stays’l and a close-reefed fore tops’l. Mr Hambly?”

“Aye, sir.” Hands went to their stations, Kydd on the poop at the mizzen. The reefed driver was brought in and all sail aft disappeared, released seamen sent to the main deck.
Tenacious
began her turn, experiencing the same vertiginous rolls before she, too, was round with the hard wind at her stern.

Barely set on her course,
Tenacious
’s fore topsail split and was

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instantly transformed to streaming ribbons. “I’ll have a quick-saver on that,” Houghton shouted at the hurrying boatswain, ordering the replacement topsail and a pair of ropes to be crossed over the sail to prevent it ballooning forward.

Then, there were cries of horror. No more than half a mile away, Kydd saw
Woolmer,
her silhouette dark against the white of the spindrift, strangely misshapen. Her weakened mainmast had given way under the wind pressure: it had splintered and fallen in ruin over the side.

While
Tenacious
watched, agonised, the inevitable happened.

The crew were unable to cut away the substantial wreckage in time and it acted as a drag to one side.
Woolmer
yawed. Pulled to one side she was at the mercy of the onrushing water, which pushed her further broadside. Kydd’s fears had come to pass: with no ability to come back on course she was forced right over on her beam ends, and the giant seas fell on the helpless vessel.
Lord
Woolmer
capsized in a smother of wreckage, her long hull a glistening whale-like rock for a time before she disappeared altogether; lords, ladies and common seamen gone for ever.

“Mr Hambly,” said Houghton, in an unnatural voice, “the best course for us?”

Hambly tore his eyes away from the scene and pulled himself together. “Er, to the suth’ard would keep us fr’m the centre . . .

We scuds afore the westerly, that’s undoubted, until we can show canvas and come about—there’s nothing more we c’n do, sir.”

Alone,
Tenacious
fought the sea, men moving silently in a pall of disbelief, senses battered by the hammering wind. For all of twenty hours the ship ran before the tempest until, in the early hours of the next day, the master judged it possible to set square sail on the main and thereby edge closer to the wind. By evening the winds had moderated to the extent that at last
Tenacious
could ease round more westward, towards the now distant Halifax.

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But the storm had one last trial for the old ship. By degrees the wind shifted north and the temperature fell. The fi rst whirling snowfl akes came, then snow squalls that marched across the seas with dark, brassy interiors bringing intense cold.

It got worse. Ice covered shrouds, sails, decks, freezing exposed faces. It stiffened wet ropes to bars that seamen, with frozen fi ngers in wet gloves and feet in agony with the cold, had to wrestle with to coil.

Even breathing was painful: Kydd bound a cloth round his face but it soon clogged with ice as moisture froze. Below, the wardroom stank of damp wool, bear-grease and the hides used in foul-weather gear. No one spoke: it was too much effort. Renzi sat with his head in his hands.

On Kydd’s watch the wind moan increased, the pitiless blast buffeting him with its fearsome chill. He hugged himself, grateful for his moose-hide jacket, and thought of the hapless men in the fo’c’sle. In the scrappiest clothing against the numbing chill they had to muster on watch day and night, working, enduring.

Hambly came over. “Shall have t’ take in the main tops’l,” he said, looking signifi cantly at Kydd. They had been fortunate until now that they carried the same square sail, close reefed fore and main topsails, but the wind had increased again.

Kydd stared up at the straining sail. There was no question, the ship was over-pressed in these conditions and must be relieved—he could feel it in her laboured response to the helm. He was offi cer-of-the-watch and the responsibility was his, not the master’s.

But there was the deadly glitter of ice on the shrouds, in the tops and along the yards: how could he send men aloft in the almost certain knowledge that for some there would be a cry, a fall and death?

His eyes met Hambly’s: there was understanding but no compassion. Without a word Kydd turned and made his way down to

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the main deck where the watch on deck shivered, hunkered down in the lee of the weather bulwarks.

They looked up as he descended, their faces dull, fatigued, and pinched with cold. He paused. How could he order them to go aloft into a howling icy hell? Perhaps some rousing speech to the effect that the ship, they themselves even, depended on them taking their lives into their hands and going aloft? No. Kydd had been in their place and knew what was needed.

His face hardened. “Off y’r rumps, y’ lazy swabs. I want th’

main tops’l handed, now.” They pulled themselves slowly to their feet. Their weary, stooped fi gures and bloodshot eyes wrung his heart.

“Lay aloft!” he roared. Every man obeyed. Kydd allowed a grim smile to surface. “An’ there’ll be a stiff tot f’r every man jack waiting for ye when you get back. Get moving!”

For two hours, ninety feet above Kydd’s head, the men fi sted the stiff sail in a violently moving, lethal world. Fingernails split and canvas was stained with blood, tired muscles slipped on icy wood and scrabbled for a hold, minds retreating into a state of numbed endurance.

And for two hours, Kydd stood beneath, his fi sts balled in his pockets, willing them on, feeling for them, agonising. That day he discovered that there was only one thing of more heroism than going aloft in such a hell: the moral courage to order others to do it.

For two more days
Tenacious
fought her way clear of the storm, which eventually headed north, increasing in malevolence as it went. On the third day the Sambro light was raised—and, after a night of standing off and on, HMS
Tenacious
entered harbour.

Chapter 7

“Damn! That cursed tailor will hound me to my grave,”