James Dillon broke through the glass wall. ‘Hands at quarters, sir, if you please,’ he said, raising his three-corner hat.
‘Very well, Mr Dillon,’ said Jack. ‘We will exercise the great guns.
A four-pounder may not throw a very great weight of
metal, and it not be able to pierce two feet of oak half a mile away, as a thirty-two-pounder can; but it does throw a solid three-inch cast-iron ball at a thousand feet a second, which is an ugly thing to receive; and the gun itself is a formidable machine. Its barrel is six feet long; it weighs twelve hundredweight; it stands on a ponderous oak carriage; and when it is fired it leaps back as though it were violently alive.
The Sophie possessed fourteen of these, seven a side; and the two aftermost guns on the quarter-deck were gleaming brass. Each gun had a crew of four and a man or boy to bring up powder from the magazine. Each group of guns was in charge of a midshipman or a
master’s mate – Pullings had the six forward guns, Ricketts the four in the waist and Babbington the four farthest aft.
‘Mr Babbington, where is this gun’s powder horn?’ asked Jack coldly.
‘I don’t know, sir,’ stammered Babbington, very red. ‘It seems to have gone astray.’
‘Quarter-gunner,’ said Jack, ‘go to Mr Day – no, to his mate, for he is sick – and get another.’ His inspection showed no other obvious shortcomings: but when he had had both broadsides run in and out half a dozen times – that is to say when the men had been through all the motions
short of actually firing the guns – his face grew long and grave. They were quite extraordinarily slow. They had obviously been trained to fire nothing but whole broadsides at
once – very little independent firing. They seemed quite happy with easing their guns gently up to the port at the rate
of the slowest of them all: and the whole exercise had an artificial, wooden air. It was true that ordinary convoy-duty in a sloop did not give the men any very passionate conviction of the guns’ vital reality, but even so. . . ‘How I wish I could afford a few barrels of powder,’
he thought, with a clear image of the gunner’s accounts in his mind: forty-nine half barrels in all, seven under the Sophie’s full allowance; forty-one of the red, large grain, seven of them white,
large grain – restored powder of doubtful strength – and one barrel of fine grain for priming.
The barrels held forty-five pounds, so the Sophie would nearly empty one with each double broadside. ‘But even so,’ he went on, ‘I think we can have a couple of rounds: God knows how long these charges have been lying in the guns. Besides,’ he added in a voice within his inner voice – a voice from a far deeper level, ‘think of the lovely smell.’
‘Very well,’ he said aloud. ‘Mr Mowett, be so good as to go into my cabin. Sit down by the table-watch and take exact note of the time that elapses between the first and second discharge of each gun. Mr Pullings, we’ll start with your division. Number one. Silence, fore and aft.’
Dead silence fell over the Sophie. The wind sang evenly in her taut weather-rigging, steady at two points abaft the beam. Number one’s crew licked their lips nervously. Their gun was in its ordinary position of rest, bowsed up tight against its port and lashed there –
put away, as it were.
‘Cast loose your gun.’
They cast loose the tackles that held the gun hard against the side and cut the spun-yarn frapping that clenched the breeching to hold it firmer still. With a gentle squeal of trucks the gun showed that it was free: a man held each side-tackle, or the Sophie’s heel (which made the rear-tackle unnecessary) would have brought the gun inboard before the next word of command.
‘Level your gun.’
The sponger pushed his handspike under the thick breech of the gun and with a quick heave levered it up, while number one’s captain thrust the wooden wedge more than half-way under, bringing the barrel to the horizontal pointblank position.
‘Out tompion.’
They let the gun run in fast: the breeching checked its inward course when the muzzle was a foot or so inboard: the sail-trimmer whipped out the carved and painted tompion that plugged it.
‘Run out your gun.’
Clapping on to the side-tackles they heaved her up hand over hand, running the carriage hard against the side and coiling the falls, coiling them down in wonderfully neat little fakes.
‘Prime.’
The captain took his priming-iron, thrust it down the touch-hole and pierced the flannel cartridge lying within the gun, poured fine powder from his horn into the open vent and on to the pan, bruising it industriously with the nozzle. The sponger put the flat of his hand over the powder to prevent its blowing away, and the fireman slung the horn behind his back.
‘Point your gun.’ And to this order Jack added, ‘As she lies,’ since he wished to add no complications of traversing or elevating for range at this stage. Two of the gun’s crew were now holding the side tackles: the sponger knelt on one side with his head away from the gun, blowing gently on the smouldering slow-match he had taken from its little tub (for the Sophie did not run to flintlocks): the powder-boy stood with the next cartridge in its leather box over on the starboard side directly behind the gun: the captain, holding his vent-bit and sheltering the priming, bent over the gun, staring along its barrel.
‘Fire.’
The slow-match whipped across. The captain stubbed it hard down on to the priming. For an infinitesimal spark of time there was a hissing, a flash, and then the gun went off with the round, satisfying bang of a pound and more of hard-rammed powder exploding in a confined space. A stab of crimson flame in the smoke, flying morsels of wad, the gun shooting eight feet backwards under the arched body of its captain and between the members of its crew, the deep twang of the breeching as it brought up the recoil -all these were virtually inseparable in time; and before they were over the next order came.
‘Stop your vent,’ cried Jack, watching for the flight of the
ball as the white smoke raced streaming down to leeward. The captain stabbed his vent-piece into the touch-hole; and the ball sent up a fleeting plume in the choppy sea four hundred yards to windward, then another and another, ducks and drakes for fifty yards before it sank. The crew clapped on to the rear-tackle to hold the gun firmly inboard against the roll.
‘Sponge your gun.’
The sponger darted his sheepskin swab into the fireman’s bucket, and pushing his face into the narrow space between the muzzle and the side he shot the handle out of the port and thrust the swab down the bore of the gun: he twirled it conscientiously and brought it out, blackened, with a little smoking rag on it.
‘Load with cartridge.’
The powder-boy had the tight cloth bag there ready:
the sponger entered it and rammed it hard down. The captain, with his priming-iron in the vent to feel for its arrival, cried, ‘Home!’
‘Shot your gun.’
The ball was there to hand in its garland, and the wad in its cheese; but an unlucky slip sent the ball trundling across the deck towards the fore-hatch, with the anxious captain, sponger and powder-boy following its erratic course. Eventually it joined the. cartridge, with the wad rammed down over it, and Jack cried, ‘Run out your gun. – Prime. – Point your gun. – Fire. Mr Mowett,’ he called, through the cabin skylight, ‘what was the interval?’
‘Three minutes and three-quarters, sir.’
‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ said Jack, almost to himself. There were no words in the vocabulary at his command to express his distress. Pullings’ division looked apprehensive and ashamed: number three gun-crew had stripped to the waist and had tied their handkerchiefs round their heads against the flash and the thunder: they were spitting on their hands, and Mr Pullings himself was fussing anxiously about with the crows, handspikes and swabs.
‘Silence. Cast loose your gun. Level your gun. Out tompion. Run out your gun…’
This time it was rather better – just over three minutes. But then they had not dropped their shot and Mr Pullings had helped run up the gun and haul on the rear-tackle, gazing absently into the sky as he did so, to prove that he was not in fact there at all.
As the firing came aft gun by gun, so Jack’s melancholy increased. One and three had not been unlucky bands of boobies: this was the Sophie’s true average rate of fire. Archaic.