Gradually the white blur resolved itself into a brig; and the brig was clearly giving chase.
The hours passed:
Captain Azéma was thoughtful and preoccupied during dinner – pecked at his food, and from time to time going up on deck. The Lord Nelson was under topgallants, with upper and lower studdingsails, which urged her towards Corunna at five or even six knots as the breeze freshened. He set his royals a little after four, anxiously watching to see how the wounded masts would stand the strain; and for a while it seemed that the brig was falling behind.
‘Sir,’ said Pullings secretly, coming from those airy heights after a long examination of the brig, ‘I am almost sure she is the Seagull. My uncle was master of her in ninety-nine, and many’s the time I have been aboard.’
‘Seagull?’ said Jack, frowning. ‘Did she not change to carronades?’
‘That’s right, sir. Sixteen twenty-four-pounders, very tight in the bridle-ports: and two long sixes. She can hit hard, if only she gets near enough, but she is amazing slow.’
‘Slower than this?’
‘Much of a muchness, sir. She’s just set her skysails. It may make a difference.’
The difference was small, very small – perhaps a tablecloth or two – but in five hours of steady unchanging weather it was enough to bring the Seagull within reach of the Lord Nelson’s aftermost starboard eighteen-pounder and of a long eight that Captain Azéma had shifted to fire
through the stateroom gallery.
For ten sea miles the brig – and now they were sure she was the Seagull – could reply only with her bow six-pounder, which did nothing but make a smoke and encourage her crew; but slowly the Lord Nelson neared and then crossed a dark band in the sea, where the wind, backed up by the Spanish Cordillera, combined with the ebbing tide to produce a distinct frontier, a sullen, choppy zone haunted by gulls and other inshore birds.
Within five minutes the Lord Nelson’s way fell off perceptibly; the song of her rigging dropped tone by tone; and the Seagull ranged up to her starboard quarter. Before the brig crossed the dark water in her turn, she fired the first full broadside of her close-range carronades: it fell short, and so did the next, but a ricocheting twenty-four-pound ball tore through the hammocks and dropped weakly against the mainmast. Captain Azéma looked thoughtfully from the heavy shot to the brig: she still had a quarter of a mile to run before she would lose the full fair breeze. A gain of fifty yards would bring these twenty-four-pounders rattling about his ears, piercing the Indiaman’s costly sides and endangering her already damaged masts. His chief feeling was irritation rather than any dread for the outcome: the Seagull’s rate of fire and accuracy left much to be desired, whereas he had eight master-gunners aboard; the brig’s power of manoeuvring was no greater than his,
and he only had to knock away a spar or two to leave her behind and gain the coast.
Nevertheless, he was going to need all his concentration.
‘She is scarcely commodious, your brig,’ he said to Jack. ‘We may have serious difficulty with her. I must ask you to go below. Messiers les prisonniers into the hold, if you please –
I invite the prisoners to go into the hold.’
There was no denying his authoritative tone. They went below with many a reluctant glance at the evening sea, down hatchway after hatchway to the final grating, which closed over them with a thump and the rattle of a chain. And it was in the crammed bowels of the Indiaman, shut firmly down in the smell of tea, cinnamon and bilgewater that Jack, Pullings, the Company’s Europeans and all the passengers witnessed the action.
Aural witnesses, of course, no more, since they were below the water-line, with nothing but a swinging lantern and the vague shape of bales to see, but what they heard they heard well. The Lord Nelson resonated like a sounding-box to the crash of her eighteen-pounders, transposing the roar an octave lower; and the sea transmitted the Seagull’s broadsides
– a curious dead thump, like a padded hammer a great way off, a sound devoid of overtones and so distinct that it was sometimes possible to distinguish each of the eight carronades, whose fire would have seemed simultaneous in the open air.
They listened, tried to calculate the direction, worked out the weight of metal – four hundred and thirty-two pounds for the Lord Nelson, three hundred and ninety-two for the brig – and the possibility of bringing it into play. ‘Azéma is using his big guns alone,’
observed Jack. ‘Concentrating on her masts, I make no doubt.’ Sometimes the Seagull hit them, and they cheered, full of speculation as to the place of the strike; once a sudden rush in the well and a renewed activity of the pump made it clear that the Lord Nelson had been holed between wind and water, probably in the forepeak; and once a great metallic clang made them think that a gun had been struck; perhaps dismounted.
Towards three o’clock in the morning the candle went out, and they lay in darkness, listening, listening, sometimes regretting their coats, rugs, and pillows and food, and sometimes dozing. The firing went on and on: the Seagull had given up her broadsides and was firing gun by gun; the Lord Nelson had never done anything else throughout the engagement – a steady, deliberate rhythm hour after hour.
Miss Lamb woke with a scream: ‘It was a rat! A monstrous great wet rat! 0 how I regret my trousers!’
Extreme attention slackened as the long night wore on. Once or twice Jack spoke to Major Hill and to Pullings and had no reply. He found that his counting of the shots was mingling with a calculation of the number of sick and wounded under Stephen’s hands – with observations made to Sophia – with thoughts of food, of coffee, and the playing of the D
minor trio – Diana’s rough glissando and the deep sustaining note of the ‘cello, as they played three-handed.
A flood of light, the grinding of the chain and grating, and he was conscious that he had been three parts asleep.
Not wholly, since he knew that the firing had stopped this last/hour and more, but enough to feel shifty and ashamed.
On deck it was raining, a thin drizzle from a high sky
– very little wind, and that a land-breeze; Captain Azéma and his people looked deathly pale, tired, but undisturbed
– too worn for outward pleasure, but undisturbed. Under her fore and main topsails the Lord Nelson was slipping along through the water close-hauled, away from the motionless Seagull, far away on her starboard quarter:
even at this distance Jack could see that she had suffered badly. Her foreyard was gone, her maintopmast seemed to be tottering, there was a great deal of wreckage on her deck and dangling over her side: four gun-ports beat in:
strangely low in the water: pumps hard at work. She had hauled off to refit, to stop her leaks, and the likelihood of her renewing the action – of being able to renew the action
– was.
Captain Azéma had been bent over a gun, laying it with the very greatest care: he gaged the roll, fired, sending a ball plumb amidships into the repairing party. He waited for the flight of the shot, said ‘Carry on, Partre,’ and stepped back to his mug of coffee, steaming on the
binnacle. –
It was perfectly allowable; Jack might have done the
same; but there was something so cold-blooded about it that Jack refused a draught from the mug and turned to look at the Lord Nelson’s damage and at the coast, barring the whole eastern horizon now. The damage was heavy but not crippling; Azéma had not made quite the landfall he had expected – that was Cape Prior right ahead – but he would be in Corunna road by noon. Jack ignored the second gun: he tried to make out why it should wound him so, for he had no particular friend aboard the Seagull. He could not clarify his mind, but he knew he felt the most furious enmity for Azéma, and it was with more than the ordinary leap of delight, of hope revived when all seemed lost, that he saw the first ship round that Spanish headland, heading north. A homeward-bound line-of-battle ship, HMS Colossus, followed by the Tonnant, eighty.
The mast-head hailed ‘Two ships of the line’. But two more followed: a very powerful squadron, all sails abroad, and holding the weather-gage. There was not the slightest chance of escape. Mute, weary consternation; and in the silence Jack stepped to the pointed eighteen-pounder, laid his hand on the lock and said coldly, ‘You must not fire that gun, sir. You must strike your colours to the brig.’