“Bayonets!” Sharpe shouted at the men crouched on the bottom boards. “Fix bayonets!” He said it again in Spanish and watched as a dozen men, those who had bayonets, twisted their blades onto their muskets. “When we land,” he called to the crouching men, “we don’t wait to give the bastards a volley, we just charge!”
Off to the left were a dozen other longboats. Some had come from the O’Higgins and were carrying marines. The attacking boats were scattered across the sea. Sharpe flinched as he saw a great gout of exploding water betray where a cannonball had slapped home beside one of the laboring longboats, and he was certain that the roundshot’s strike had been close enough to swamp the fragile-looking boat, but when the spray fell away he saw the boat was still afloat and its oarsmen still rowing.
The Spanish infantrymen fired again, but just like the fort’s gunners, their own powder smoke was now obscuring their aim. Nor were they being intelligently led, for their officer was just telling the men to fire at the boats. If they had concentrated their fire on one boat at a time they could have reduced each longboat into a screaming horror of blood and splinters, but instead their musketry was flying wild and wide. Yet the Spaniards held the advantage, for the longboats still had to negotiate the murderous tumbling of the breaking surf. If a boat broached in the breaking waves and spilled its cargo, the waiting infantrymen would be presented with a bout of twilight bayonet practice.
The sun was gone, but there was still light in the sky. Sharpe crouched in the stern sheets and made sure his borrowed sword was loose in its scabbard. A broadside from the O’Higgins crashed overhead, twitching a skein of powder smoke as it slammed above the Spanish infantry to shatter the further slope into gouts of soil and grass. A gull screeched in protest. Another signal rocket whooshed into the sky to splinter into a fountain of light. It was too dark to use the semaphore arms, so Fort Ingles’s defenders were rousing Valdivia Harbor’s garrisons with the bright rockets.
“Row!” Cabral shouted, and the oarsmen grunted as they laid their full weight into the oars, but another great mat of floating weed impeded the boat, slewing it round. A man in the bows leaned overboard and hacked at the weed with a cutlass. “Back your oars!” Cabral screamed, “Back!” A bullet smacked into the gunwale, while another shattered an oar blade. Cochrane was shouting off to Sharpe’s left, screaming at his men to be the first ashore. Cabral beat at the side of the boat in his frustration. One of the oarsmen shouted that it was too dangerous, that they would all drown in the surf, and Cabral drew his sword and threatened to skewer the man’s guts if he did not row, and row hard! Then the longboat was free of the clinging weed and the oars could pull again. One or two of the rowers looked nervous, but any thoughts of mutiny were quelled by the sight of Cabral’s drawn sword. “Row!” he shouted and the crest of a wave lifted the boat, driving it fast, and one of the rowers jerked forward and collapsed, blood slopping out of his mouth.
“Overboard!” Cabral shouted. “Heave him over! Juan, take his place! Row!” They rowed. Another wave took them, hissing them forward, driving them up to its white crest, then the wave was past and they slid down into a scummy, weedy trough, and the oarsmen pulled again, and the sky echoed with the thunder of guns and the crackle of musketry and the beach was close now, close enough for Sharpe to hear the sucking roar as the waves slid back toward the foam, then another breaker plucked them, bubbled them about with surf and hurled them fast toward the beach, and suddenly Sharpe could see the whole expanse of sand and the dark, smoke-fogged shapes of the waiting Spaniards at the top of the beach, then those dark shapes blossomed with pink flames as the muskets flared, but the strike of the musket balls was drowned in the sound and fury of the shattering surf’s maelstrom that was now all around the shivering boat. Cabral was screaming orders, and somehow the coxswain was holding the bow straight on to the beach as the oarsmen gave a last desperate pull and then the bow dropped, bounced on the sand and drove on up. Cabral shouted at the men to jump out and kill the bastard sons of poxed whores, yet still the longboat was sliding up the beach, driven by the wave, while ten yards to the left another boat had turned sideways and rolled so that the welter of white water was littered with men, weapons and oars. Cabral’s boat jarred to a halt. Sharpe leaped off the gunwale and found himself up to his knees in freezing water and churning sand.