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

It was just like musketry, Sharpe realized. On land the armies came together and, as often as not, it was the side that could fire its muskets fastest that would win. Men did not aim muskets, because they were so inaccurate. They pointed their muskets, then fired so that their bullet was just one among a cloud of balls that spat toward the enemy. Send enough balls and the enemy would weaken. Lay two ships close together and the one that fired fastest should win in the same way, and so Chase harried his gunners, praising the swift ones and chivying the laggards, and all morning the sea about the ship quivered to the vibration of the guns. A long track of wavering and thinning powder smoke lay behind the ship, proof that she made some progress, though it was frustratingly slow. Sharpe had brought his telescope up the mast and now trained it eastward in hope of seeing land, but all he could see was a dark shadow beneath the cloud. He shortened the barrel and trained the glass downward to see Malachi Braithwaite pacing up and down the quarterdeck, flinching every time a gun cracked.

What to do about Braithwaite? In truth Sharpe knew exactly what to do, but how to do it on a ship crammed with over seven hundred men was the problem. He collapsed the telescope and put it into a pocket, then, for the first time, climbed from the maintop up above the main topsail to the crosstrees, a much smaller platform than the maintop, where he perched beneath the main topgallant sail. Yet another sail rose above that, the royal, up somewhere in the sky, though not so high that men did not climb to it, for there was a lookout poised above the royal’s yard, contentedly chewing tobacco as he stared westward. The deck looked small from here, small and narrow, but the air was fresh for the ever-present stink of the ship and the rotten-egg stench of the powder smoke did not reach this high.

The tall mast trembled as two guns fired together. A freak breath of wind blew the smoke away and Sharpe saw the sea rippling in a frantic fan pattern away from the guns’ blasts. Grass did that in front of a field gun, except that the grass became scorched and sometimes caught fire. The sea settled and the smoke thickened.

“Sail!” the man above Sharpe bellowed to the deck, the hail so loud and sudden that Sharpe jumped in fright. “Sail on the larboard beam!”

Sharpe had to think which side of the ship was larboard and which starboard, but managed to remember and trained his telescope out toward the west, but he could see nothing except a hazy line where the sea met the sky.

“What do you see?” Haskell, the first lieutenant, called up through a speaking trumpet.

“Royals and tops,” the man shouted, “same course as us, sir!”

The gunfire ceased, for Chase now had something else to worry about. The gunports were closed and the big guns lashed tight as a half-dozen men scurried up the rigging to add their eyes to the lookout’s gaze. Sharpe could still see nothing on the western horizon, even with the help of the telescope. He was proud of his eyesight, but being at sea demanded a different kind of vision to looking for enemies on land. He swept the glass left and right, still unable to find the strange ship, then a sudden tiny blur of dirty white broke the horizon; he lost it, edged the glass back, and there she was. Just a blur, nothing but a blur, but the man above him, without any glass, had seen it and could distinguish one sail from another.

A man settled beside Sharpe on the crosstrees. “It’s a Frenchie,” he said.

Sharpe recognized him as John Hopper, the big bosun of the captain’s gig. “You can’t tell at this distance, surely?” Sharpe asked.

“Cut of the sails, sir,” Hopper said confidently. “Can’t mistake it.”

“What is it, Hopper?” Chase, bareheaded and in shirtsleeves, hauled himself onto the platform.

“It could be her, sir, it really could,” Hopper said. “She’s a Frenchie, right enough.”

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *