‘Port your helm,’ he said quietly to Compton, the older of the two men at the wheel, a hand who knew him well, and the tone of his voice. Compton and his mate eased the great plunging ship a trifle to starboard, opening Jack a view as he stood there swaying to the sea, the telescope to his good eye.
A long pause, an electric tension on the quarterdeck and right along the waist of the ship, filled with men who knew or knew of him; then the first of a series of blinding squalls of mixed rain, sleet and snow; and when it had passed Callow said hesitantly, ‘Sir, I believe I saw Monmouth repeat Tack all together just before she vanished.’
Jack and his officers stared briefly eastward. ‘I see nothing,’ he said. ‘Did you make out any signal, Mr Harding?’
‘None, sir.’
‘Mr Callow: make enemy in sight two leagues south-west by south heading north-west. Mr Miller, shake out the reefs in the foretopsail: set fore topmast staysail half in.’ He stepped over to the wheel and with his eye on those remote flecks in the infinity of other greys and whiteness, all shifting incessantly, he set a course to intercept the vessel, the enemy, the very probable enemy.
The ship’s company, including those who had escaped from the sick-berth along with their attendants, lined the side. If there were any so morose as to disbelieve the Captain’s implied declaration, they did not mention it. From his early days as an astonishingly successful frigate-captain, coming home with a tail of captured ships and a fortune in prize-money, Jack had acquired the status of a mythical being or something very like it, a being whose judgment in these matters could not be wrong; and any scepticism would have been most furiously resented.
The event confirmed the believers in their creed. Within half an hour the chase, raised high on a towering wave, was seen to be a frigate wearing French colours, herself pursuing a merchantman. She was not a national ship, however, but one of those powerful, fast-sailing privateers from Vannes or Lorient that were more deadly as commerce-raiders than the regular men-of-war and that were now making the most of what war was left to them, often running very extreme risks within miles of the Channel fleet.
She was called Les Deux Frères and so intent was she on her prey – already within long shot, but they far preferred boarding, in case a ball, causing a leak, should spoil the cargo
– that she did not make out the Bellona, partly veiled in a squall for some minutes. On doing so she instantly bore up, bringing the wind not right aft but on her quarter, her best point of sailing; at the same time, out of mere spite, she fired at the merchantman and almost immediately set her flying jib. Little good did either do. The shot missed and the sail blew out of its boltrope.
Still, she fled along, throwing a splendid bow-wave, her heavy crew tending the sail with the utmost attention and risking long shots at the seventy-four in the hope of wounding her sails and cutting up her rigging, conceivably knocking away a yard or a topmast: after all,
the Deux Frères carried a by no means contemptible armament, including some carronades. But even more than that every man and boy aboard knew that their last three captures in the chops of the Channel had made them the richest privateer afloat.
She fled with the utmost zeal therefore, almost as fast as the Ringle steadily there on her starboard bow, just out of shot. She fled with all the earnest desire to preserve wealth and freedom that can be imagined and with almost superhuman skill; but short of the Bellona being struck by lightning – a good deal was flashing above the low cloud-cover she had no chance. For the sea was rising: minute by minute the crests were higher, the spume tearing away from their tops, and the hollows between them were deeper and wider; and in seas of this magnitude no frigate could outsail a well-handled ship of the line to windward of her, since in these deep valleys the frigate was becalmed, while the seventy-four (which in any case could spread more sail) was not, or not entirely, and she retained the momentum of her sixteen hundred tons. ‘It is going to be a dirty night,’ said Jack to the officer of the watch. ‘Pray pass the word for the gunner.
Master Gunner,’ he went on, ‘we will not touch the lower-deck port-lids, but it would be as well to ready the forward larboard eighteen-pounders. You drew them all yesterday, I believe?’
‘So I did, sir.’
‘And you are quite happy about your tompions, with all this wet about?’
‘If any misses fire, sir,’ said the gunner, his rain-soaked old face grinning with delighted anticipation, ‘you may call me Jack Pudding.’ Then the full horror of this remark striking home, he looked perfectly blank, his lips framing unspoken words. All conversation, all possible explanations, were cut off by a freakish sea flooding green over the quarterdeck rail and surging aft; and before it had cleared an even more freakish carronade ball from the Deux Frères struck and shattered the Bellona’s wheel, flinging the helmsmen right and left, unhurt. She put straight before the wind and offered to come up the other side, taken all aback; but she had right seamen aboard and they, brailing up the mizen-topsail and starting the main sheet, quickly brought her under control until the usual purchases to the tiller had been shipped, allowed the ship to be steered by orders called down to the hands on either side of the sweep.
In the few minutes that all this took the Deux Frères forged ahead; but when they saw the Bellona fill and square away with her upper-deck ports open and the guns run out, their hearts died within them. They abandoned the notion of crossing the Bellona’s bows and raking her with all they could throw: abandoned it entirely, came up into the wind, struck her colours and lay to.
Jack edged the Bellona over to make something of a lee,
sent the Ringle and the blue cutter with a well-armed prize-crew aboard under Miller, telling him to make for Falmouth and send the frigate’s master back with his officers and papers. ‘And be uncommon brisk, Mr Miller. It will be nip and tuck getting the boat aboard.’
Nip and tuck it was, with the wind increasing to such a shocking degree, and it took the whole of the afternoon to heave the cutter in. But at last it was done and the boat made triply fast. Well before that however the Frenchmen had been taken disconsolate below –
Harding was tolerably fluent in French – and Jack, still on deck, said to the master, ‘Mr Woodbine, it is time to steer for Keller’s Island.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You do not seem happy, Mr Woodbine.’
‘I am happy about the prize, and I give you joy, sir: but was I in command I should follow her into Falmouth. The
bosun is just going to report that the mainyard is probably
sprung in the slings: the mizen doubtful in the woulding: the beakhead bulkhead is stove. We have not had an observation these last three watches; and I do not believe the blow has reached its full strength, no sir, not by a very long chalk. It will be a great while before Chips and his mates can give us a right wheel and although steering with sheet and purchase is very well for a pleasant Saturday afternoon it is bloody awkward pardon me the expression all night long in a howling tempest bearing dead on Ushant and its cruel reefs –
imagine trying to avoid a wreck with such a wind and with such a helm! And wrecks there will be by wholesale before
daylight.’
Woodbine had obviously been drinking. ‘We must do our best,’ said Jack, not unkindly.
Their best they did, but it was not enough. Very late that night the blow turned out to be one of those notorious turning winds. It headed them when they were no great way from Ushant, and there was no beating into it even if the Bellona had had a full suit of storm canvas, intact masts, spars and rigging, and a fresh, full-fed crew. She had none of these things. The galley had been flooded in the graveyard watch. It had been All Hands right round the clock and not a man had eaten anything but wet ship’s bread since yesterday’s dinner: the people were utterly exhausted and the ship was making more water than the pumps could expel.
A certain lightening in the east, and it was first day at last. And they had their bearings, Vega some time before, through the tearing clouds, and old Saturn. The sea however was no less; the wind even more contrary. Jack bore up at last and sailed for Cawsand Bay.