“He seemed to be on Bautista’s side.”
“Blair’s a greedy bastard,” Cochrane observed gloomily. “If we ever get off this ship alive you should look him up and give him a damned good thrashing.” His Lordship’s gloom seemed justified for, despite the fothering and the pumping, the condition of the damaged frigate seemed to be suddenly worsening. The wind was rising and the seas were steeper, conditions that made the damaged hull pound ever harder into the waves. “The fother’s shifting,” Cochrane guessed. He had turned the Espiritu Santo northward and the captured frigate was running before the wind and current, yet even so her progress was painfully slow because of the damaged hull and the amount of wreckage that still trailed overboard.
Cochrane’s sailing master, an elderly and lugubrious Scot named Fraser, threw a trailing log overboard. The log was attached to a long piece of twine which was knotted at regular intervals. Fraser let the twine run through his hands and counted the knots as they whipped past his fingers, timing them all the while on a big pocket watch. He finally snapped the watch shut and began hauling the log back. “Three knots, my Lord, that’s all.”
“Christ help us,” Cochrane said. He frowned at the sea, then at the rigging. “But we’ll speed up as we get the damage cleared. Eight days, say?”
“Ten,” the sailing master said doubtfully, “maybe twelve, but more probably never, my Lord, because she’s taking water like a colander.”
“Five guineas says we’ll make it in eight days,” Cochrane said cheerfully.
“Eight days to what?” Sharpe asked.
“To Valdivia, of course,” Cochrane exclaimed.
“Valdivia?” Sharpe was astonished that Cochrane was trying to reach an enemy haven. “You mean there isn’t a harbor closer than that?”
“There are hundreds of closer harbors,” Cochrane said blithely, “thousands of harbors. Millions! There are some of the best natural harbors in the world on this coast, Sharpe, and they’re all closer than Valdivia. The damned coast is thick with harbors. There are more harbors here than a man could wish for in a thousand storms! Isn’t that so, Fraser?”
“Aye, it is, my Lord.”
“Then why go to an enemy harbor?” Sharpe asked.
“To capture it, of course, why else?” Cochrane looked at Sharpe as though the Rifleman was mad. “We’ve got a ship, we’ve got men, we’ve got weapons, so what the hell else should we be doing?”
“But the ship’s sinking!”
“Then the bloody ship might as well do something useful before it vanishes.” Cochrane, delighted with having surprised Sharpe, whooped with laughter. “Enjoy yourself, Sharpe. If we take Valdivia, all Chile is ours! We’re launched for death or victory, we’re sailing for glory, and may the Devil take the hindmost!” He rattled off the old cliches of the French wars in a mocking tone, but there was a genuine enthusiasm on his face as he spoke. Here was a man, Sharpe thought, who had never tired of battle, but reveled in it, and perhaps only felt truly alive when the powder was stinking and the swords were clashing. “We’re sailing for glory!” Cochrane whooped again, and Sharpe knew he was under the command of a genial maniac who planned to capture a whole country with nothing but a broken ship and a wounded crew.
Sharpe had met Spain’s devil, and his name was Cochrane.
The wind rose the next day. It shrieked in the broken rigging so that the torn shrouds and halyards streamed horizontally ahead of the laboring frigate as she thumped in slow agony through the big green seas. Both rebel and royalist seamen manned the pumps continually, and even the officers took their turns at the blistering handles. Sharpe and Harper, restored to grace as passengers, nevertheless worked the sodden handles for three muscle-torturing hours during the night. Besides the women and children, only Cochrane and Captain Ardiles were spared the agony of the endless pumps. Ardiles, suffering the pangs of defeat, had closeted himself in his old cabin which Cochrane, with a generosity that seemed typical of the man, had surrendered to his beaten opponent.
In the gray morning, when the wind was whistling to blow the wavetops ragged, Lord Cochrane edged the broken frigate nearer to land so that, at times, a dark sliver on the eastern horizon betrayed high ground. He had not wanted to close the coast, for fear that the captured Espiritu Santo might be seen by a Spanish pinnace or fishing boat that could warn Valdivia of his approach, but now he sacrificed that caution for the security of land. “If worse comes to worst,” he explained, “then perhaps we might be able to beach this wreck in the channels. Though God knows if we’d survive them.”