SHARPE’S TRAFALGAR. Bernard Cornwell. Sharpe’s Trafalgar: Richard Sharpe and the Battle of Trafalgar, October 21, 1805

A buzz whipped past Sharpe’s ear and he thought it was an insect, then he saw a small splinter fly out of the deck and knew that it was musket fire coming from the rigging of the ships ahead. He willed himself to stand still. The Spanish ship that had been straight ahead had gone into smoke and there was a Frenchman there instead, and close behind her was another ship, though whether she was French or Spanish Sharpe could not tell, for her ensign was hidden by the mass of her undamaged sails. The sails looked dirty. She was a two-decker, smaller than the Pucelle, and her figurehead showed a monk with an uplifted hand holding a cross. A Spaniard, then. Sharpe looked for the Revenant, but could not see her. Chase seemed to be aiming across the smaller Spaniard’s bows, taking the Pucelle through the shrinking gap between her and the Frenchman ahead, while the Spaniard was trying to cut the Pucelle off, trying to lay his smaller ship right across her bows and he was so close to the Frenchman that his jib boom, the outer part of his bowsprit, almost touched the French mizzen. French guns poured round shot into the Pucelle’s hull. Musket balls pattered on the sails. The French rigging was spotted with powder smoke, her hull was sheathed in it.

Chase gauged the gap. He could haul the ship around and take on the French ship broadside to broadside, but his orders were to pass through the line, though the gap was narrowing dangerously. If he misjudged, and if the Spaniard succeeded in laying his hull athwart the Pucelle’s bows then the Dons would seize his bowsprit, lash it to their own shin and hold him there while thev raked, nounded and turned his shin into bloody splinters. Haskell recognized the danger and turned on Chase with a raised eyebrow. A musket ball struck the deck between them, then a round shot splintered the edge of the poop deck just above Chase before scattering the flag lockers built against the taffrail so that the Pucelle suddenly trailed a bright stream of gaudy flags. A musket bullet buried itself in the wheel, another broke the binnacle lantern. Chase stared at the shrinking gap and felt the temptation to head across the Spaniard’s stern, but he would be damned if he let the Spanish captain dictate his battle. “Stand on!” he said to the quartermaster. “Stand on!” He would tear the bowsprit clean out of the Spaniard’s hull before he gave way. “The gun crews will stand up, Mister Haskell!” Chase said.

Haskell shouted down to the weather deck. “Stand up! Stand up! Stand to your guns!”

Midshipmen and lieutenants repeated the order to the lower deck. “Stand up! Stand up!” Men gathered around their guns, peered through the open ports, eyed the ragged holes that had already been punched in the hull’s double-planked oak timbers. The cannons’ flintlocks were cocked and the gunners crouched to the side, lanyards held ready.

A marine cursed and staggered on the forecastle as a musket bullet drove down through his shoulder into his belly. “Make your own way to the surgeon,” Armstrong told him, “and don’t make a fuss.” He stared up at the Frenchman’s mizzenmast where a knot of men were firing muskets down onto the Pucelle. “Time to teach those bastards some manners,” he growled. The Pucelle’s bowsprit, ragged with its broken yard, pushed into the gap between the two ships. The gunners below decks could not yet see the enemy, but they knew they were close for the smoke of the enemy guns lay across the sea like mist, then thickened as the enemy fired again, though now the Pucelle was so close that they were firing at the ships behind her.

“Push on through!” Chase shouted at his ship. “Push on through!”

For now was the glorious moment of revenge. Now was the moment when, if the Pucelle could force her passage, she would carry her broadsides within feet of an unprotected enemy stern and an unprotected enemy bow. Then, having taken the punishment for so long, she could rake two ships at once, ripping blood and bone and timber with her own fire-driven metal. “Make the shots tell!” Chase called. “Make them tell!”

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