“I’m sure Pickering is quite busy enough without having to be detained bv scratched lieutenants,” Haskell answered testily.
Chase took off his white silk stock and beckoned to Midshipman Collier. “Tie that around Lieutenant Haskell’s arm,” he ordered the midshipman, then turned to the quartermaster. “Starboard, John,” he said, gesturing, “starboard.” The Neptune was threatening to cross the Pucelle’s bows and Chase needed to avoid that, but he reckoned he had speed enough to catch the Frenchman, lay her alongside and fight her muzzle to muzzle, and, because she carried eighty-four guns and he only had seventy-four, his victory would be all the more remarkable.
Then disaster struck.
The Pucelle had sailed past the Victory and the Redoutable, leaving a thick cloud of smoke that drifted after her, and out of that cloud there appeared the bows of an undamaged ship. Her figurehead showed a ghostly skeleton, scythe in one hand and a French tricolor in the other, and she was crossing behind the Pucelle, not a pistol’s length away, and the whole of her larboard broadside was facing the Pucelle’s decorated stern.
“Hard to starboard!” Chase shouted at the quartermaster who had already begun the turn which would bring the Pucelle’s larboard broadside to face the Neptune, but then the new enemy fired and the very first shot ripped away the tiller ropes so that the wheel spun uselessly in the quartermaster’s hands. The rudder, no longer tensioned by the ropes, centered itself and the Pucelle swung back to larboard, leaving her stern naked to the enemy guns. She would be raked.
A shot screamed down the weather deck, killing eight sailors and wounding a dozen more. The shot left a spattering trail of blood the whole length of the deck, and the next shot cut Haskell in half, leaving his torso on the starboard rail and his legs hanging from the quarterdeck’s forward rail. Collier, still holding the silk stock, was smothered in Haskell’s blood. The fourth shot shattered the Pucelle’s wheel and impaled the quartermaster on its splintered spokes. Chase leaned on the broken quarterdeck rail. “Tiller ropes!” he shouted. “Mister Peel! Tiller ropes! And hard to starboard!”
“Aye aye, sir! Hard to starboard!”
More shots broke through the stern. The Pucelle was shaking from the impact. Musket bullets cracked on her poop. “Walk with me, Mister Collier,” Chase said, seeing that the boy seemed close to tears, “just walk with me.” He paced up and down the quarterdeck, one hand on Collier’s shoulder. “We are being raked, Mister Collier. It is a pity.” He took the boy under the break of the poop, close to the mangled remains of the wheel and the quartermaster. “And you will stay here, Harold Collier, and note the signals. Watch the clock! And keep an eye on me. If I fall you are to find Mister Peel and tell him the ship is his. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.” Collier tried to sound confident, but his voice was shaking.
“And a word of advice, Mister Collier. When you command a ship of your own, take great care never to be raked.” Chase patted the midshipman’s shoulder, then walked back into the musket fire that pitted the quarterdeck. The enemy’s cannons still raked the Pucelle, shot after shot demolishing the high windows, throwing down cannon and spraying blood on the deck beams overhead. The remains of the mizzenmast were cut through below the decks and Chase watched appalled as the whole mast slowly toppled, tearing itself out of the poop deck as it collapsed to starboard. It went slowly, the shrouds parting with sounds like pistol shots, and the mainmast swayed as the stay connecting it to the mizzen tightened, then that cable parted and the mizzen creaked, splintered and finally fell. The enemy cheered. Chase leaned over the broken quarterdeck rail to see a dozen men hauling on one of the spare tiller lines that had been rove before the battle. “Pull hard, lads!” he shouted, bellowing to be heard above the sound of the enemy’s guns that still hammered into the Pucelle. A twenty-four-pounder cannon lay on its side, trapping a screaming man. One of the starboard carronades on the quarterdeck had been punched off its carriage. The great white ensign trailed in the water. None of the Pucelle’s guns could answer, nor could they until the ship turned. “Pull hard!” Chase shouted and saw Lieutenant Peel, hatless and sweating, add his weight to the tiller rope. The ship began to turn, but it was the mizzenmast, with its sail and rigging that lay in the water off the Pucelle’s starboard quarter, that did most to drag the ship around. She came slowly, still being punished by the FYench ship that had sailed out of the melee’s smoke.