Just at darkness, the brig, closing up on the Princess, had fired a shot across her bows, and in response the Princess hove‑to in apparent surrender. The gun that fired that shot would almost certainly be ready for action still. Baddlestone rushed over to one battery, Hornblower to the other.
“There’s a charge here!” yelled Baddlestone “Here, Jenkins, Sansome! Bear a hand!”
Hornblower searched along the shot garlands and found eventually what he sought.
“It’s canister that’ll do the trick,” he said, bringing it over to the labouring group.
Baddlestone and the others were working like madmen with handspikes to swing the gun round to point at the hatchway. It called for vast effort; the trucks of the carriage groaned and shrieked as they scraped sideways on the deck. Baddlestone took the powder charge in its serge bag from out of the carrying bucket which had stood by the gun ready for use. They rammed it home, and then against the charge they rammed in the canister — a cylindrical box of thin metal containing a hundred and fifty bullets. Gurney the gunner pierced the serge through the touch hole with the pricker, and primed with the fine powder from the horn. Then he began to force in the quoin; the breech of the gun rose and the muzzle began to point with infinite menace down the hatchway. Baddlestone glowered round, turning his black face this way and that.
“Get down in the boats, all of you,” he said.
“I’d better stay with you,” said Hornblower.
“Get down into your boat with your party,” countered Baddlestone.
It was the sensible thing to do; this was a rearguard action, and the covering force should be reduced to the absolute minimum. Hornblower herded his party down into the Princess’s boat, and most of Baddlestone’s went down into the brig’s. Hornblower stood for a moment on tiptoe, with the sea surging round, holding on to the forechains with one hand while the other still retained its grip on the blanket‑bundle of books. He could just see from here; there was the swaying deck, with the dead men tumbled over it and the incredible confusion of the dismantling. Yet two lanterns still burned in the shrouds, and the light from the cabin still waxed and waned with the swinging of the door. Gurney had apparently forced a second quoin under the breech of the gun, so that it pointed down at a steep angle into the hatchway. He and Baddlestone stood clear, and then he jerked at the lanyard. A bellowing roar, a blinding flash, a billow of smoke; yells and screams from down below, distinctly heard where Hornblower was standing. Then the Englishmen came running across the deck, Baddlestone and Gurney, the guards at the scuttle and the hatchway, the guards over the prisoners. Hornblower watched them scrambling down into the boat, Baddlestone last, turning to yell defiance before he disappeared down into his boat. Hornblower released his hold on the chains and sat down in the sternsheets.
“Shove off!” he said.
Over there that tiny pinpoint of dancing light showed where Princess still lay‑to. In five minutes they would be under way again, free from pursuit, with the wind fair for Plymouth.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Hornblower wrote the final lines of his letter, rapidly checked it through, from ‘My dear Wife’ to ‘Your loving husband, Horatio Hornblower’, and folded the sheet and put it in his pocket before going up on deck. The last turn was being taken round the last bollard, and Princess was safely alongside the quay in the victualling yard in Plymouth.
As always, there was something unreal, a sort of nightmare clarity in this first contact with England. The people, the sheds, the houses, seemed to stand out with unnatural sharpness; voices sounded different with the land to echo them; the wind was vastly changed from the wind he knew at sea. The passengers were already stepping ashore, and a crowd of curious onlookers had assembled; the arrival of a waterhoy from the Channel fleet was of interest enough became she might have news, but a waterhoy which had actually captured, and for a few minutes had held possession of, a French brig of war was something very new.