She came racing up out of the blinding rain, a dark squall a little way abaft the beam on the landward side, making for the sound of battle with all the canvas she could bear. They saw one another at the same moment:
the Felipe fired, showed her colours, received the Sophie’s broadside in reply, grasped her mistake, put up her helm and headed straight back to Barcelona with the strong wind on her larboard quarter and her big lateens bellying out and swaying wildly on the roll.
The Sophie’s helm was over within a second of the privateer’s: the tompions of the starboard guns were out:
cupping hands sheltered the sputtering slow-match and the priming.
‘All at her stern,’ cried Jack, and the crows and handspikes heaved the guns through five degrees. ‘On the roll. Fire as they bear.’ He brought the wheel up two spokes and the guns went off three and four. Instantly the privateer yawed as though she meant to board; but then her flapping mizen came down on deck, she filled again and went off before the wind. A shot had struck the head of her rudder, and without it she could bear no sail aft.
They were putting out a sweep to steer with and working furiously at the mizen-yard. Her two larboard guns fired, one hitting the Sophie with the strangest sound. But the sloop’s next broadside, a careful, collected fire within pistol-range, together with a volley of musketry, put a stop to all resistance. Just twelve minutes after the first gun fired her colours came down and a fierce, delighted cheer broke out – men clapping one another on the back, shaking hands, laughing.
The rain had stopped and it was drifting westwards in a dense grey swathe, blotting out the port, very much nearer now. ‘Take possession of her, Mr Dillon, if you please,’ said Jack, looking up at the dog-vane. The wind was veering, as it so often did in these waters after rain, and presently it would be coming from well south of east.
‘Any damage, Mr Lamb?’ he asked, as the carpenter came up to report.
‘Wish you joy of the capture, sir,’ said the carpenter. ‘No damage, rightly speaking; no struc-tur-al damage; but that one ball made a sad mess in the galley upset all the coppers and unshipped the smoke-funnel.’
‘We will take a look at it presently,’ said Jack. ‘Mr Pullings, those for’ard guns are not properly secured. What the devil?’ he cried. The gun-crews were strangely, even shockingly pied, and horrible imaginations flashed through his mind until he realized that they were covered with wet black paint and with the galley’s soot: and now, in the exuberance of their hearts, those farthest forward were daubing their fellows. ‘Avast that God-damned – foolery, God rot your – eyes,’ he called out in an enormous line-of-battle voice. He rarely swore, apart from an habitual damn or an unmeaning blasphemy, and the men, who in any case had expected him to be far more pleased with the taking of a neat privateer, fell perfectly mute, with nothing more than
the rolling of an eye or a wink to convey secret understanding and delight.
‘Deck,’ hailed Lucock from the top. ‘There are gunboats coming out from Barcelona. Six.
Eight – nine – eleven behind ’em. Maybe more.’
‘Out launch and jolly-boat,’ cried Jack. ‘Mr Lamb, go across, if you please, and see what can be done to her
steering.’
Getting the boats to the yardarms and launching them in this swell was no child’s play, but the men were in tearing spirits and they heaved like maniacs – it was as though they had been filled with rum and yet had lost none of their ability. Muffled laughter kept bursting out: it was damped by the cry of a sail to windward – a sail that might place them between two fires then revived by the news that it was only their own prize, the tartan.
The boats plied to and fro; the glum or surly prisoners made their way down into the forehold, their bosoms swollen with personal possessions; the carpenter and his crew could be heard working away with their adzes to make a new tiller; Stephen caught Ellis as he darted by. ‘Just when did you stop being sick, sir?’ ‘Almost the moment the guns began to go, sir,’ said Ellis. Stephen nodded. ‘I thought as much,’ said he. ‘I was watching you.’
The first shot sent up a white plume of water topmast high, right between the two vessels.
Infernally good practice for a ranging shot, thought Jack, and a damned great heavy ball.
The gunboats were still over a mile away, but they were coming up surprisingly fast, straight into the eye of the wind. Each of the three foremost carried a long thirty-six-pounder and rowed thirty oars. Even at a mile a chance hit from one of these would pierce the Sophie through and through. He had to restrain a violent urge to tell the carpenter to hurry. ‘If a thirty-six-pound ball does not hasten him, nothing I can say will do so,’ he observed, pacing up and down, cocking an eye at the dog-vane and at the gunboats at each turn. All seven of the foremost had tried the range, and now there was a spasmodic firing, most falling short, but some howling right overhead.
‘Mr Dillon,’ he called over the water, after half a dozen turns, and the splash from a ball plunging into the swell just astern wetted the back of his neck. ‘Mr Dillon, we will transfer the rest of the prisoners later, and make sail as soon as you can conveniently do so. Or should you like us to pass you a tow?’
‘No, thank you, sir. The tiller will be shipped in two minutes.’
‘In the meantime we might as well pepper them, for what it is worth,’ reflected Jack, for the now silent Sophies were looking somewhat tense. ‘At least the smoke will hide us a little.
Mr Pullings, the larboard guns may fire at discretion.’
This was much more agreeable, with the banging, the rumble, the smoke, the immense intent activity; and he smiled to see the earnestness of every man at the brass gun nearest him as they glared out for the fall of their shot. The Sophie’s fire stung the gunboats to a great burst of activity, and the dull grey western sea sparkled with their flashes over a front of a quarter of a mile.
Babbingion was in front of him, pointing: wheeling
about, Jack saw Dillon hailing through the din the new tiller had been fitted.
‘Make sail,’ he said: the Sophie’s backed foretopsail came round and filled. Speed was called for, and setting all her headsails he took her down with the wind well abaft her beam before hauling up into the north-north-west. This
took the sloop nearer to the gunboats and across their front: the larboard guns were firing continuously, the enemies’ shots were kicking up the water or passing overhead, and for a moment his spirits rose to a wild pitch of delight at the idea of dashing down among them – they were unwieldy brutes at close quarters. But then he reflected that he had the prizes with him and that Dillon still had a dangerous number of prisoners aboard; and he gave the order to brace the yards up sharp.
The prizes hauled their wind at the same time, and at a smooth five or six knots they ran out to sea. The gunboats followed for half an hour, but as the light faded and the range lengthened to impossibility, one by one they turned and went back to Barcelona.
‘I played that very badly,’ said Jack, putting down his bow.
‘Your heart was not in it,’ said Stephen. ‘It has been an active day – a fatiguing day. A satisfactory day, however.’
‘Why, yes,’ said Jack, his face brightening somewhat. ‘Yes, certainly. I am most uncommonly delighted.’ A pause. ‘Do you remember a fellow named Pitt we dined with one day at Mahon?’
‘The soldier?’
‘Yes. Now, would you call him good-looking – handsome?’
‘No. Oh, no.’
‘I am happy to hear you say so. I have a great regard for your opinion. Tell me,’ he added, after a long pause, ‘have you noticed how things return to your mind when you are hipped? It is like old wounds breaking out when
you come down with scurvy. Not, indeed, that I have ever for a moment forgotten what Dillon said to me that day: but it has been rankling in my heart, and I have been turning it over this last day or so. I find that I must ask him for an explanation – I should certainly have done so before. I shall do so as soon as we go into port: unless, indeed, the next few days make it unnecessary.’
‘Porn, porn, porn, porn,’ went Stephen in unison with his ‘cello, glancing at Jack: there was an exceedingly serious look on that darkened, heavy face, a kind of red light in his clouded eyes. ‘I am coming to believe that laws are the prime cause of unhappiness. It is not merely a case of born under one law, required another to obey – you know the lines: I have no memory for verse. No, sir: it is born under half a dozen, required another fifty to obey. There are parallel sets of laws in different keys that have nothing to do with one another and that are even downright contradictory. You, now – you wish to do something that the Articles of War and (as you explained to me) the rules of generosity forbid, but that your present notion of the moral law and your present notion of the point of honour require. This is but one instance of what is as common as breathing. Buridan’s ass died of misery between equidistant mangers, drawn first by one then by the other. Then again, with a slight difference, there are these double loyalties – another great source of torment.’