Drinkwater struggled uphill to the high starboard side and peered over in the vain hope of catching sight of the work that was causing all the trouble. The marine sentries on either quarter muttered an exchange and, as Drinkwater turned to cross the quarterdeck to the low side, a man wearing the plain blue coat of Royal George's master came up from below and looked briefly about him. His face wore an expression of extreme apprehension and he too was muttering. He caught sight of the officer of the watch.
'Mr Hollingbury! Damn it, Mr Hollingbury...'
Lieutenant Hollingbury turned. 'What the devil do you want?'
'I must insist that you right the ship as I asked some moments ago. Right the ship upon the instant, sir! I insist upon it.'
'Insist? What the deuce d'you mean by insisting, Mister? I insist that you finish work on the damned cock. Have you finished work on the cock?'
'No, but...'
'Then attend to the matter. It is not pleasant standing here with such a heel...'
'Get the ship upright, you damned fool, there's water coming in over the lower-deck sills ...'
'What did you say?' Hollingbury's face was suffused with anger and he advanced on the warrant officer. 'We haven't got her over this far to jack in before the task's done. I've ordered the pumps to be manned. Just attend to that damned cock, or I'll have the warrant off you, you impudent old bugger!'
The master turned away, his face white. He hesitated at the top of the companionway and his eyes met Drinkwater's. At that instant they both felt a slight trembling from below. 'She'll go over,' the master said, looking away from Drinkwater and down the companionway as though terrified of descending.
A sudden cold apprehension took possession of Drinkwater's guts. The master's prophecy was not an idle one. Instinctively he felt there was something very wrong with the great ship, though he could not rationalize the conviction of his sudden fear. For a moment he thought he might be succumbing to the panic that held the master rooted to the top of the companionway. Then he knew. The list was no greater than if the Royal George had been heeled to a squall of wind, but there was something unambiguously dead about the feel of her beneath his feet.
Then from below there came an ominous rumbling, followed by a series of thunderous crashes accompanied by cries of alarm, screams of pain and the high-pitched arsis of human terror.
Drinkwater ran across the deck and leaned out over the rail to catch sight of Cyclops's boat.
'Gig, hoy!' he roared. 'Cyclops, hoy!' He saw the face of Midshipman Catchpole in the stern look up at him. Drinkwater waved his arm. 'Stand clear of us astern! Stand clear!' He saw the boy wave in acknowledgement and then thought of Hope down below in the admiral's cabin. He made a dash for the companionway. The master had gone, but now an indiscriminate horde of men and women, seamen, marines, petty officers and officers, poured up from below, all shouting and screaming in abject panic. Then Hollingbury, his face distorted by fury at the rank disorder, barred his way. It occurred to Drinkwater that Hollingbury was one of those men who, even in the face of enormity, either deceive themselves as to their part in it or are too stupid to acknowledge that a crisis is occurring
'The ship is capsizing, sir!' Drinkwater hurled the words into the lieutenant's face. 'Capsizing! D'you understand?'
Hollingbury's expression changed as the import of Drinkwater's statement dawned upon him, though it seemed the concept still eluded him, as though it was beyond belief that the almost routine careening of a mighty man-of-war could so abruptly change to something beyond control. But the pandemonium emerging from below finally confirmed that the warning shouted in his very face by this insolent stranger might be true. Comprehension struck Hollingbury like a blow. The colour drained from the lieutenant's face and he spun round. 'My God!' His eyes fell upon the hogsheads of rum hauled out of Lark and lying on the deck. In a wild moment of misguided inspiration, he sought to extricate the ship. The only weights he could move rapidly on the low side of the Royal George were those rum barrels. 'Get those casks over the side! Heave 'em overboard! Look lively there, damn your eyes!'
A boatswain's mate saw the logic of the order and, driven by habit, wielded his starter. The men on deck and those who were pouring up from below, themselves habituated to obedience, did as they were bidden and rushed across the deck in a mass. But it was too late; their very movement contributed to disaster. The ship's lower deck ports were now pressed well down below the level of the sea. Water cascaded into the ship, settling her lower in the water, deadening her as Drinkwater had divined, drowning those still caught on the orlop and in the hold spaces, and adding the torrential roar of its flooding to the chaos below.
Drinkwater failed to reach the companionway. His momentary confrontation with Hollingbury had delayed him, but even had he succeeded, he would have been quite unable to defy the press of terrified people trying to reach the upper deck. Instead he lost his footing and fell as a gust of wind fluttered across Spithead to strike the high, exposed bilge and the top-hamper of her lofty rig. The gust laid the Royal George on her beam ends.
No longer able to support the weight of the remaining starboard guns, the rest of the breechings parted. On the lower gun-deck the huge thirty-two-pounders broke free and hurled their combined tonnage across the lower deck, joined on the decks above by the twenty-four- and twelve-pounders. Lying full length, Drinkwater felt the death throes of the great ship as she shook to a mounting succession of shudderings. He cast about for his journals as they slid down the deck, his heart beating with the onset of panic, abandoned them and clutched at a handhold.
Throughout the Royal George's entire fabric a vast disintegration was taking place. It had started as the first guns broke adrift, careered across the decks and carried all before them, weakening stanchions, colliding with their twins on the opposite side of the gun-decks and knocking out the sills and lintels of the gun-ports piercing the larboard side. The increasing influx of water only settled the Royal George deeper. Had her capsizing moment been arrested, she might yet have righted herself sufficiently to be saved, but the rush of men to the larboard waist was just enough to further increase the flow of water and, augmented by that fatal gust of wind, took her past the point of no return.
Finally, the parting breechings of the majority of the guns loosed an avalanche of cast iron in a precipitous descent. Gun after gun crashed into the ship's side, embedding themselves in softening timber, dislodging futtocks and transmitting tremulous shocks throughout the fabric of the hull. Such dislocations sprung more leaks far below, where the upward pressure of the water bore unnaturally upon her heavily listing hull and found the weaknesses of rot. The roundness of her underwater body caved inwards in a slow, unseen implosion that those far above, in terror of their lives, felt only as a great cataclysmic juddering.
Drinkwater, clinging to a train tackle ring-bolt, felt the tremor. Almost, it seemed, directly above his head, one of the half-dozen six-pounder guns that had lined the starboard rail of the quarterdeck strained at its breeching. He watched the strands of the heavy rope unravel ominously. The sight of it galvanized him with the reactive urgency of self-preservation. He began to scrabble upwards, fascinated by the fraying rope-yarns, as though they counted out the remaining seconds of his existence. He did not dare catch hold of the gun-carriage lest his weight accelerate the rope's parting, and stretched instead for the gun-tackle on the left-hand side of the carriage, the hauling part of which now dangled untidily downwards. Somewhere in the back of his mind was the image of the ship's starboard side at which he had glanced out of idle curiosity only a few moments earlier. If he could make the rail and get over it, he might yet escape!