It was the first of the Pucelle’s guns to fire, and it shrieked back on its carriage in a cloud of black smoke. The French marines vanished, shredded to a bloody mist by the cask of musket balls that had been loaded on top of the massive round shot that shattered the painted shield and then struck the Neptune’s mizzenmast with a crack that was drowned by the first guns firing from the Pucelle’s lower decks.
These guns were double-shotted and each had a bundle of grape rammed on top of the twin cannon balls, and they were being fired straight into the Frenchman’s stern windows. The glass panes and their frames disappeared as the heavy missiles whipped down the lengths of the Neptune’s two gundecks. Cannon barrels were hurled from their carriages, men were eviscerated, and still the shots came, gun after gun, as the Pucelle slowly, so slowly, traveling at an old man’s walking pace, inched past the stern to bring the successive larboard gunports to bear.
The guns on the starboard side were firing into the Spaniard’s bow, breaking the heavy timber apart to send their murderous shots down her gun-decks. The Pucelle was dishing out slaughter and the smoke billowed from her sides, starting at the bows and working down to her stern.
The Neptune’s mizzenmast went overboard. Sharpe heard the screams of the marksmen in her rigging, watched them fall, then rammed a new ball down his musket. The starboard carronade, loaded like Clouter’s with musket balls and a vast round shot, had swept the Spaniard’s forecastle clean of men. Blood dripped from the forecastle scuppers while the figurehead of the monk with a cross had been turned into matchwood. A big crucifix was fastened to the Spanish ship’s mizzenmast, but when Chase’s stern carronades blasted down the smaller ship’s length the hanging Christ’s left arm was torn away and then his legs were broken.
The Pucelle had ripped away a part of the Frenchman’s ensign, while the rest was in the water with the fallen mizzenmast. Chase wanted to turn his ship to larboard and lay her alongside the Neptune and batter her hull into bloody ruin, but the smaller Spanish ship rammed the Pucelle and inadvertently turned her to starboard. There was a tearing, grating, grinding sound as the two hulls juddered together, then the Spanish captain, fearing he would be boarded, backed his topsails and the smaller ship fell away astern. Her starboard gunports had been closed, but now a few opened as the surviving gunners crossed from larboard. The guns fired into the Pucelle. Captain Llewellyn’s marines were firing up into the Spanish rigging. Smoke obscured the smaller ship. Chase thought about putting his helm hard down and closing on her, but he was already past and so he shouted at the quartermaster to turn the ship north toward the caldron of fire and smoke that surrounded the Victory. The flagship’s hull could not be seen amidst that stinking fog, but, judging from the masts, Chase reckoned there was a Frenchman on either side of her. “Pull in the studdingsails,” he ordered. The sails, which projected either side of the ship, were only useful in a following wind and now the Pucelle would turn to place the small wind on her larboard flank. The sail-handlers streamed out along the yards. One, struck by a musket ball, collapsed over the mainyard, then fell to leave a long trail of blood down the mainsail.
The French Neptune was slowed by her trailing mizzenmast. Her crew slashed at the fallen rigging with axes, trying to lose the broken mast overboard. The Pucelle was off her quarter now and Chase’s larboard gunners had reloaded and poured shot after shot into the Frenchman, firing through the lingering smoke of their first broadside. The noise of the guns filled the sky, made the sea quiver, shook the ship. Clouter had reloaded the larboard carronade, a slow job, but there was no target close and he would not waste the giant shot on the Neptune which had at last released the wreckage of its mast and was drawing away. He rammed another cask of musket balls into the short barrel, then waited for another target to come within the short gun’s range.