“I’m having a better time than I ever dared expect when I embarked on the Calliope.”
“Good,” Chase said, going to the door, “good. And time to turn north.”
Sharpe was busy enough. In the morning he paraded with the marines, and then there was practice, endless practice, for Captain Llewellyn feared his men would become stale if they were not busy. They fired their muskets in all weathers, learning how to shield their locks from the rain. They fired from the decks and from the upperworks, and Sharpe fired with them, using one of the Sea Service muskets which was similar to the weapon he had fired when he was a private, but with a slightly shorter barrel and an old-fashioned flat lock which looked crude, but, as Llewellyn explained, was easier to repair at sea. The weapons were susceptible to salt air and the marines spent hours cleaning and oiling the guns, and more hours practicing with bayonets and cutlasses. Llewellyn also insisted that Sharpe try his new toys, the seven-barrel guns, and so Sharpe fired one into the sea from the forecastle and thought his shoulder must be broken, so violent was the kick of the seven half-inch barrels. It took over two minutes to reload, but the marine captain would not see that as a disadvantage. “Fire one of those down onto a Frog deck, Sharpe, and we’re making some proper misery!” Most of all, Llewellyn wanted to board the Revenant and could not wait to launch his red-coated men onto the enemy’s deck. “Which is why the men have to stay spry, Sharpe,” he would say, then he would order groups to race from the forecastle to the quarterdeck, back to the forecastle, then up the forward mast by the larboard ratlines and down by the starboard ones. “If the Frogs board us,” he said, “we have to be able to get around the ship quickly. Don’t dawdle, Hawkins! Hurry, man, hurry! You’re a marine, not a slug!”
Sharpe equipped himself with a cutlass that suited him far better than the cavalry saber he had worn ever since the battle of Assaye. The cutlass was straight-bladed, heavy and crude, but it felt like a weapon that could do serious damage. “You don’t fence with them,” Llewellyn advised him, “because it ain’t a weapon for the wrist. It’s a full arm blade. Hack the buggers down! Keep your arms strong, Sharpe, eh? Climb the masts every day, do the cutlass drill, keep strong!”
Sharpe did climb the masts. He found it terrifying, for every small motion on deck was magnified as he went higher. At first he did not try to reach the topmost parts of the rigging, but he became adept at clambering up to the maintop, which was a wide platform built where the lower mast was joined to the upper. The sailors reached the maintop by using the futtock shrouds which led to the platform’s outer edge, but Sharpe always wriggled through the small hatchway beside the mast rather than risk the frightening climb up the futtock shrouds where a man must hang upside down from the tarred ropes. Then, a week after they had turned north, on a day when the sea was frustratingly calm and the wind fitful, Sharpe decided to attempt the futtock shrouds and so show that a soldier could do what any midshipman made look simple. He climbed the lower ratlines which were easy for they leaned like a ladder against the mast, but then he came to the place where the futtock shrouds went out and backward above his head. He would have to climb upside down, but he was determined to do it and so he reached back with his hands and hauled himself upward. Then, halfway to the maintop’s platform, his feet slipped off the ratlines and he hung there, suspended fifty feet above the deck, and he felt his fingers, hooked like claws, slipping on the wet ropes and he dared not swing his legs for fear of falling and so he stayed, paralyzed by fear, until a topman, swinging down through the web of rigging with the agility of a monkey, grabbed his waistband and hauled him into the maintop. “Lord, sir, you don’t want to be going that a way. That be for matelots, not lobsters. Use the lubber’s hole, sir, that’s what it be for, lubbers.”