SHARPE’S DEVIL. Bernard Cornwell

Albatrosses ghosted alongside the Espiritu Santa’s, rigging. The frigate, Cape Horn left far behind her, was sailing before a friendly wind on a swirling current of icy water. Dolphins followed her, while whales surfaced and rolled on either flank.

“Christ, but there’s some meat on those bloody fish!” Harper said in admiration as a great whale plunged past the Espiritu Santo. The ship was sailing north along the Chilean coast, out of sight of land, though the proximity of the shore was marked by the towering white clouds that heaped above the Andes. Inshore, the sailors said, were yet stranger creatures—penguins and sea lions, mermaids and turtles—but the frigate was staving well clear of the uncharted Chilean coastline so that Harper, to his regret, was denied a chance of glimpsing such monsters. Ardiles, still hoping to capture his own monster, Lord Cochrane, continued to exercise his guns even though his men were already as well trained as any gunners Sharpe had ever seen.

Yet it seemed there was to be no victory over the devil Cochrane on this voyage, for the Espiritu Santos lookouts saw no other ships till the frigate at last closed on the land. Then the lookouts glimpsed a harmless fleet of small fishing vessels that dragged their nets through the cold offshore rollers. The men aboard the fishing boats claimed not to have seen any rebel warships. “Though God only knows if they’re telling the truth,” Lieutenant Otero told Sharpe. Land was still out of sight, but everyone on board knew that the voyage was ending. Seamen were repairing their clothes, sewing up huge rents in breeches and darning their shirts in readiness to meet the girls of Valdivia. “One day more, just one day more,” Lieutenant Otero told Sharpe after the noon sight, and sure enough, next dawn, Sharpe woke to see the dark streak of land filling the eastern horizon.

That afternoon, under a faltering wind, a friendly tide helped the Espiritu Santo into Valdivia’s harbor. Sharpe and Harper stood on deck and stared at the massive fortifications that guarded this last Spanish stronghold on the Chilean coast. The headland that protected the harbor was crowned by Fort Ingles, which in turn could lock its cannonfire with the guns of Fort San Carlos. Both forts lay under the protection of the artillery in the Choroco-mayo fort which had been built on the headland’s highest point. Beyond San Carlos, and still on the headland that formed the harbor’s western side, lay Fort Amargos and Corral Castle. The Espiritu Santos First Lieutenant proudly pointed out each succeeding stronghold as the frigate edged her way around the headland. “In Chile,” Otero explained yet again, “armies move by sea because the roads are so bad, but no army could ever take Valdivia unless they first capture this harbor, and I just wish Cochrane would try to capture it! We’d destroy him!”

Sharpe believed him, for there were yet more defenses to add their guns to the five forts of the western shore. Across the harbor mouth, where the huge Pacific swells shattered white on dark rocks, was the biggest fort of all, Fort Niebla, while in the harbor’s center, head on to any attacking ships, lay the guns and ramparts of Manzanera Island. The harbor would be a trap, sucking an attacker inside to where he would be ringed with high guns hammering heated shot down onto his wooden decks.

Only two of the forts, Corral Castle and Fort Niebla, were modern stone-walled forts. The other forts were little more than glorified gun emplacements protected by ditches and timber walls, yet their cannons could make the harbor into a killing ground of overlapping gunnery zones. “If we were an enemy ship,” Otero boasted of the ring of artillery, “we would be in hell by now.”

“Where’s the town?” Sharpe asked. Valdivia was supposed to be the major remaining Spanish garrison in Chile, yet to Sharpe’s surprise, the great array efforts seemed to be protecting nothing but a stone quay, some tarred sheds and a row of fishermen’s hovels.

“The town’s upstream.” Otero pointed to what Sharpe had taken for a bay just beside Fort Niebla. “That’s the river mouth and the town’s fifteen miles inland. You’ll be dropped at the north quay where you find a boatman to take you upstream. They’re dishonest people, and they’ll try to charge you five dollars. You shouldn’t pay more than one.”

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