"Look here," he said to Wilson, and Wilson knelt beside him.
"Jesus Christ! I wonder if Pendexter means to turn before we cut them into two bloody parts." The captain clearly could not see the schooner beyond the Icarus's foresail.
If the Icarus had been a merchantman, Biddlecomb would have called down a warning, but he knew better thanto do so aboard the man-of-war. "If he turns right now, it'll still be a close thing," Biddlecomb observed.
And then they heard Pendexter's voice. "Commence with the salute, Mr Hickman!" he shouted from the quarterdeck, and instantly the forwardmost gun on the starboard side went off, expelling smoke and flame from its muzzle as it flew inboard.
"If I wasn't a gunner, I wouldn't be here," came the singsong chant as the gunner timed his shots. "Fire two!" and the next gun went off. "If I wasn't a gunner, I wouldn't be here... fire three!"
Biddlecomb listened to the rhythm and anticipated the forth gun, but it didn't come. The gunner, who had already marched past number four, turned and ran back, his cadence ruined.
"Mr Hickman, God damn your eyes! What is the problem?" shouted Pendexter. Biddlecomb could see him now, leaning over the rail at the break of the quarterdeck.
"Slow match is out!" the gunner replied, reaching out for the slow match from number-three gun.
"I don't give a goddamn, just get on with it!" Pendexter replied, and even as he spoke, Smeaton hurried to his side and grabbed his arm and pulled him to the weather rail, pointing forward around the foresail. Biddlecomb saw the captain's eyes open wide and his mouth drop as he caught sight of the schooner. He turned to the helmsman, but if he issued an order, no one aboard the Icarus heard it, for in that same instant Hickman fired number four and Pendexter's voice was lost in the report.
"Hickman! Belay the goddamned salute!" Pendexter cried.
"Turn to starboard," Biddlecomb muttered, "go downwind of the schooner."
Pendexter turned to the helmsman. "Larboard!" he shouted. "Hard a'larboard!" and the Icarus began to round up into the wind.
Biddlecomb could see the schooner now as the Icarus passed twenty feet to windward of her. Her crew was running around the deck, waiving their arms. Four men were wrestling with a giant fender, trying to get it over the side as the Icarus continued to turn into the wind.
"That was bloody close," whispered Wilson.
"He should have turned and run to leeward of her," Biddlecomb said. If Pendexter thinks he can drop the anchor now, with the schooner right down wind and current, we'll be all over her before he has enough cable out."
The fore topsail began to collapse and flog in loud confusion as the wind ran down the edge of the canvas. The brig continued its swing into the wind, and suddenly the sails were hard aback, the beating canvas was silent, and the Icarus came to a stop, the schooner now forty yards astern and directly down wind and tide.
"Let go!" Pendexter shouted, and McDuff, standing on the cathead, let fly the ring stopper. The best bower plunged into the harbor, and the anchor cable, flaked out along the deck, began to fly through the hawsepipe.
The Icarus was moving faster and faster astern with all plain sail set and fully aback. Biddlecomb watched the distance to the schooner falling rapidly away.
"Get the sails off of her! Get the damned sails off!" Pendexter shrieked, glancing over his shoulder at the schooner.
"Cast off the topgallant sheets!" Dibdin shouted, his voice loud and even. "Cast off topsail halyards! Clew down!" The men on the deck below tumbled over themselves to get to the running gear. Knots of men sweated the topsail clewlines, struggling like demons to haul the big sails down. But their efforts were hampered because the sails were aback and pressed hard against the mast, and because no one had obeyed Dibdin's first order to cast off the topgallant sheets, which were now holding the topsail yards in place.
Biddlecomb glanced up at the main topsail yards/ The spar was bending in the center, threatening to burst from the forces acting upon it.
And then with a rending sound the corners of the fore and main topgallant sails tore out. The canvas fluttered in the breeze like a tattered ensign, and the topsail yards fell ten feet down the mast.
Biddlecomb looked aft again. The Icarus was still making sternway, still moving fast, and the schooner was no more than twenty yards astern. He looked down at the deck. The anchor cable was still snaking out of the hawsepipe.
"McDuff!" Dibdin shouted from the quarterdeck. "Clap a stopper on that anchor cable or we'll be aboard that schooner!"
McDuff stared at the anchor cable, eight-inch-thick hemp lifting off the deck as it flew out the pipe, and Biddlecomb guessed that McDuff did not cherish the thought of trying to stop it. He glanced around, then seized the coil of line from the pinrail and tossed a midshipman's hitch around the anchor cable that still lay on the deck, making the stopper fast to the fife rail.
At that moment Mr Appleby, apparently considering the Icarus to be anchored, issued his orders to the men waiting anxiously at the boat falls. The longboat flew from the booms and swung out over the side. The boat was fifteen feet outboard before Pendexter could issue an order.
"Belay that, you idiot, you whore's son!" he shrieked at the confused boy. "Get that boat back on the booms!"
Before Appleby could countermand his orders, the last turns of the anchor cable spun out. The cable lifted off the deck as the stopper took the strain, and the fife rail and the line groaned together with the shock as the Icarus's sternway was checked. The brig hung there for a moment, the creaking of the fife rail and the popping of the straining cordage loud in the silence. Then the stopper parted and the anchor cable spun out again and the brig slewed to starboard as it once more gathered sternway.
The schooner was only fifteen yards away, the distance dropping fast. Her panicked crew was lining the side with anything that they could employ as a fender. The Icarus continued to slew around until she was hurtling down broadside to the schooner.
Biddlecomb knew that nothing could prevent the collision. "Grab hold of something, you men," he said as he grabbed a fistful of running rigging. The other foretopmen grabbed on to any handhold that they could find.
The Icarus's longboat, hanging outboard as it was, was the first thing to strike the schooner. It passed just abaft the foreyards and fetched up on the mainstay, tangling in the braces. And then the boat falls parted and the longboat fell to the schooner's deck, breaking its back and stoving in the main hatch.
The actual impact was softened by the fenders, but still the two vessels came together with a crunching sound like a giant beam splitting, and a cacaphony of smaller snapping and popping noises. The high-sided brig rode up on the smaller vessel, crushing twenty feet of bulwark and splintering the main channel. The lanyards on the schooner's main shrouds parted one at a time, and the shrouds swung inboard. Biddlecomb wondered if the mast would go.
The grinding sound of the two vessels, loud though it was, was merely a backdrop to the shouts and curses that flew between the ships. It was clear to Biddlecomb that the two vessels were locked together now, and the greatest danger was that the schooner would drag her anchor and both vessels would be driven ashore. He imagined that that point was being discussed, though he could not hear anything other than cursing from the deck of the schooner.