Flint himself leapt into Walrus's main shrouds and called out to his crew: Long John, Billy Bones, Mad Pew, Black Dog, George Merry, Israel Hands, and all the others. The wretched Crane heard every word.
"Look at them, the sons of bitches!" he cried, pointing to John Donald. "They never dared fire a gun, and now they've run below, shitting their shirt-tails as they burrow in the ballast to hide!" A roar of laughter came from his crew, and they nudged one another and thought their captain no end of a wit.
But Flint had made a nasty mistake. John Donald's decks looked empty only because her people were laid between their guns, behind musket-proof screens of junk and anchor cable that had been raised above her bulwarks. Flint should have spotted that, for it was man-o'-war fashion to build barricadoes. It took time and effort and interfered with the smooth running of a ship. It was not a thing to do without a purpose.
In that instant, down came Captain Crane's arm, and five gun captains jumped up and applied glowing matches to a battery of six-pounders. There followed some long seconds as priming powder smoked and fizzed into life and hot flame darted busily into the thickness of the iron breeches.
There was surprise and anger among Flint's men. The stupid, like Tom Morgan and George Merry, pointed out what was happening and roared in outrage as if at some piece of broken faith. The clever, like Flint and Long John, dropped smartly on to Walrus's canted deck and grovelled into the planking, trying to squeeze themselves into the seams alongside the caulking.
With a thunderclap bellow, a gout of flame and a vast jet of white smoke, the first gun went off. Three of its fellows joined in, pizzicato, and the fifth fired three seconds later. The guns were expertly laid: chocked up high at the breech, to play downwards upon the open decks of a ship closing upon her weather beam. Crane had served King George in his youth. He'd fought Frog, Dago and Dutchman, and he knew his business well.
In all five guns the load was "langridge": shards of iron, old bolts, bent nails, lengths of chain, musket balls — whatever came to hand — and every last scrap of it that could be crammed down the barrels without bursting the guns. Such a broadside was useless at any but the closest range, for it was entirely without accuracy and would scatter and lose its capacity to kill. But Crane was well aware of that, which was why he'd waited until his paint was all but rubbing up against Flint's.
Consequently, well over half a hundredweight of jagged fragments tore into Flint's boarding party, and cut like a thousand lancets. They took off fingers, thumbs, buttocks, faces, knees, elbows and limbs. They threw men down, they opened them up, they blinded, castrated and disembowelled. They ripped out livers and kidneys, lights and pipes, and spewed them hot and slimy on the deck. Thirty men were struck dead on the spot and fifty wounded. The remaining sixty-five whole and untouched men stood wavering in the smoke-reeking slaughterhouse of Walrus's waist, up to their ankles in the wet meat that had recently been their shipmates.
A cheer came from John Donald Smith as the smoke cleared and her crew saw the dreadful work done by their fire.
"Muskets, boys!" roared Crane, and showed the way by sheathing his cutlass and seizing a sea-service Brown Bess.
At a range of ten feet, Crane let fly and saw a bloodied figure throw up his arms. Dropping the long gun, Crane hauled out his pistols to empty them at the enemy. Mad with excitement, the John Donalds took up their small arms and set to. There were three dozen muskets ready and waiting, plus half a dozen of blunderbusses, and a brace of pistols for every man aboard.
This crackling, battering fire, hard on the heels of the dreadful broadside, knocked the heart out of Flint's men, and all those still able ran below; some beshitting themselves and digging into the pebbles of the ballast, just as their captain had said only a few moments ago.
With the helmsman hauling in his own entrails hand over hand, howling like a broken-backed dog, Walrus's tiller pleased itself where it lay, and the twelve-foot bar slammed and banged to either beam. Finally, with her aftermost sails drawing harder than her foresails, Walrus herself decided that she would bring herself round, bow into the wind, and wallow dead in the eye of it, sails flapping, blocks rattling, and offal, excrement and wounded men slithering across her decks with every roll.
Meanwhile, John Donald Smith held her course and ploughed onward at a steady seven knots, a very creditable speed for her, which goes to show that Eustace Crane was as good a seaman as he was a gunner — and a desperately poor tradesman. For if Crane hadn't made so many bad guesses, and so many times been deceived, then he'd never have found himself in the position whereby his all and everything was risked in this one voyage. And in that case, he'd never have laid in extra guns and powder, and spent time drilling his crew and making ready for a fight. And in that case he'd have given up the ship to Flint, as so many sensible men had done before him, in order to keep a whole skin and live another day.
Instead, Eustace Crane and the ship of which he was part owner sailed onward and eastward, and in due course dropped anchor in Bristol, and turned a most excellent profit on her voyage.
Afterwards, for the rest of his life, it was Crane's pleasure, whenever he was in congenial company with his back to a good fire and the rum-punch going round, to tell the tale of how he'd driven off that bugger Flint and ruined half his villainous crew. It was the strict truth, and Crane had every right to be proud of it. But even his best friends never really believed him.
Chapter 21
Smoke and flame filled the waist as Walrus received John Donald's fire. Laid flat on his face, Long John Silver was kicked sideways by a terrific blow as men and wreckage fell all around him. He couldn't see the length of his own arm for the smoke, and for the moment he was deaf from the massive concussion of five cannon less than a dozen yards from his head. But he could still smelclass="underline" and a hot stench of burned meat and hair filled his nostrils.
He tried to sit up, shoving at the weight pressing him down. The weight — and the smell — was Mad Pew the Welshman, who lay across Long John, mouthing in his mother tongue, and scorched from brow to breast by muzzle-flash. The face was black, the hair was gone, the eyes were white and blank. Mad Pew was now blind Pew.
Long John heaved Pew clear and tried to leap to his feet. He couldn't. Something was wrong. Then the smoke cleared and Long John gaped in dismay. His left leg was hideously mangled between hip and knee. The great bone of the thigh gleamed in the depths of the wound, blood sprayed outward, and the remnant of the leg hung by ragged straps of skin and meat.
Flint's face appeared, peering and prying.
"Why, John," he said, "they've limbed you!" He grinned wickedly. "So who's the better man, now, I wonder?" Long John still couldn't hear properly, but he read Flint's lips and he saw that Flint was smooth and unharmed. Not a hair nor fingernail disturbed.
"Bastard!" said Long John, and reached for the long pistol in his belt. But the ship rolled, the mainsail boom swung viciously across the waist, wreckage groaned, and Blind Pew shrieked and fell over Long John's arm.
"Later, John," promised Flint, as Billy Bones came up and hauled Flint to his feet.