‘Not with this wind come round three points, and those old shoals off of the headland. No, sir.’
Another group of gulls passed low over the w2ter. ‘The flame is attracting every living thing for miles,’ said Stephen.
‘Never mind, sir,’ said the bosun. ‘It will be daylight in an hour or two, and they will pay no heed then, no heed at all.’
‘It lights up the whole sky,’ said Stephen.
It also lit up the deck of the Formidable, Captain Lalonde, a beautifully built French eighty-gun ship of the line wearing the flag of Rear-Admiral Linois at the mizen: she was seven or eight miles off shore, on her way from Toulon to Cadiz, and with her in line ahead sailed the rest of the squadron,. the Indomptable, eighty, Captain
Moncousu, the Desaix, seventy-four, Captain Christy-Pallière (a splendid sailer), and the Muiron, a thirty-eight gun frigate that had until recently belonged to the Venetian Republic.
‘Let us put in and see what is afoot,’ said the admiral, a small, dark, round-headed, lively gentleman in red
breeches, very much the seaman; and a few moments later the hoists of coloured lanterns ran up. The ships tacked in
succession with a quiet efficiency that would have done credit to any navy afloat, for they were largely manned from the Rochefort squadron, and as well as being commanded by efficient professional officers they were filled with prime
sailormen.
They ran inshore on the starboard tack with the wind one point free, bringing up the daylight, and when they were
first seen from the Sophie’s deck they were greeted with joy. The boats had just reached the sloop after a long wearisome
pull, and the French men-of-war were not sighted as early as they might have been: but sighted they were, in time, and at once every man forgot his hunger, fatigue, aching arms, and the cold and the wet, for the rumour instantly filled the sloop – ‘Our galleons are coming up, hand over fist!’ The wealth of the Indies, New Spain and Peru: gold ingots by way of their ballast. Ever since the crew had come to know of Jack’s private intelligence about Spanish shipping there had been this persistent rumour of a galleon, and now it was fulfilled.
The splendid flame was still leaping up against the hills, though more palely as dawn broke all along the eastern sky; but in the cheerful animation of putting all to rights, of making everything ready for the chase, no one took notice of it any more – whenever a man could look up from his business his eyes darted eager, delighted glances over the three or four miles of sea at the Desaix, and at the Formidable, now some considerable way astern of her.
It was difficult to say just when all the delight vanished:
certainly the captain’s steward was still reckoning up the cost of opening a pub on the Hunstanton road when he brought Jack a cup of coffee on the quarter-deck, heard him say ‘A horrid bad position, Mr Dalziel,’ and noticed that the Sophie was no longer standing towards the supposed galleons but sailing from them as fast as she could possibly go, close-hauled, with everything she could set, including bonnets and even drabblers.
By this time the Desaix was hull-up – had been for some time – and so was the Formidable: behind the flagship there showed the topgallants and topsails of the Indomptable, and out to sea, a couple of miles to windward of her, the frigate’s sails nicked the line of the sky. It was a horrid bad position; but the Sophie had the weather-gage, the breeze was uncertain and she might be taken for a merchant brig of no importance – something a busy squadron would not trouble with for more than an hour or so: they were not in very grave earnest, concluded Jack, lowering his glass. The behaviour of the press of men on the Desaix’s fo’c’sle, the by no means extraordinary spread of canvas, and countless indefinable trifles, persuaded him that she had not the air of a ship chasing in deadly earnest. But even so, how she slipped along! Her light, high, roomy, elegant round French bows and her beautifully cut, taut, flat sails brought her smoothly over the water, sailing as sweetly as the Victory. And she was well handled: she might have been running along a path ruled out upon the sea. He hoped to cross her
bows before she had satisfied her curiosity about the fire on shore and so lead her such a dance of it that she would give it up – that the admiral would eventually make her signal of recall.
‘Upon deck,’ called Mowett from the masthead. ‘The frigate has taken the packet.’
Jack nodded, sweeping his glass out to the miserable Ventura and back beyond the seventy-four to the flagship.
He waited: perhaps five minutes. This was the crucial stage. And now signals did indeed break out aboard the Formidable, signals with a gun to emphasize them. But they were not signals of recall, alas. The Desaix instantly hauled her wind, no longer interested in the shore: her royals appeared, sheeted home and hoisted with a brisk celerity that made Jack round his mouth in a silent whistle. More canvas was appearing aboard the Formidable too; and now the Indomptable. was coming up fast, all sails abroad, sweeping along with a freshening of the breeze.
It was clear that the packet had told what the Sophie was. But it was clear, too, that the rising sun was going to make the breeze still more uncertain, and perhaps swallow it up altogether. Jack glanced up at the Sophie’s spread:
everything was there, of course; and at present everything was drawing in spite of the chancy wind. The master was at the con, Pram, the quartermaster, was at the wheel, getting everything out of her that she was capable of giving, poor fat old sloop. And every man was at his post, ready, silent and attentive: there was nothing for him to say or do; but his eye took in the threadbare, sagging Admiralty canvas, and his heart smote him cruelly for having wasted time -for not having bent his own new topsails, made of decent sailcloth, though unauthorized.
‘Mr Watt,’ he said, a quarter of an hour later, looking at the glassy patches of calm in the offing, ‘stand by to out sweeps.’
A few minutes after this the Desaix hoisted her colours and opened with her bow-chasers; and as though the rumbling double crash had stunned the air, so the opulent curves of her sails collapsed, fluttered, swelled momentarily and slackened again. The Sophie kept the breeze another ten minutes, but then it died for her too. Before the way was off her – long before – all the sweeps that Malta had allowed her (four short, alas) were out and she was creeping steadily along, five men to each loom, and the long oars bending perilously under the urgent, concentrated heave
and thrust, right into what would have been the wind’s eye if there had still been any blowing. It was heavy, heavy work:
and suddenly Stephen noticed that there was an officer to almost every sweep. He stepped forward to one of the few vacant places, and in forty minutes all the skin was gone from his palms.
‘Mr Daiziel, let the starboard watch go to breakfast. Ah, there you are, Mr Ricketts: I believe we may serve out a double allowance of cheese – there will be nothing hot for a while.’
‘If I may say so, sir,’ said the purser with a pale leer, ‘I fancy there will be something uncommon hot, presently.’
The starboard watch, summarily fed, took over the labouring sweeps while their shipmates set to their biscuit, cheese and grog, with a couple of hams from the gun-room
– a brief, uneasy meal, for out there the wind was ruffling the sea, and it had chopped round two points. The French ships picked it up first, and it was striking to see how their tall, high-reaching sails sent them running on little more than an air. The Sophie’s hard-won advance was wiped out in twenty minutes; and before her sails were drawing the Desaix already had a bow-wave, whiskers that could be seen from the quarter-deck.
Sophie’s sails were drawing now, but this creeping pace would never do.
‘In sweeps,’ said Jack. ‘Mr Day, throw the guns overboard.’
‘Aye aye, sir,’ said the gunner briskly, but his movements were strangely slow, unnatural and constrained as he sprung the capsquares, like those of a man walking along the edge of a cliff, by will-power alone.
Stephen came on deck again, his hands neatly mittened. He saw the team of the starboard brass quarter-deck fourpounder with crows and handspike in their hands and a common look of anxious, almost frightened concern, waiting for the roll: it came, and they gently urged their gleaming, highly-polished gun overboard – their pretty number fourteen over the side. Its splash coincided exactly with the