Suddenly there was an enormous crash, a thump of invisible pressure, and smoke filled the boat, followed by a distant shriek and confused shouting. The sun darkened and then lightened, and Ramage felt his lungs burning as he breathed in gun smoke. But his men were still rowing; the oars were still squeaking in the rowlocks and they came out into the sunlight again.
He glanced round to larboard, guessing what he would see. The second gun had fired and the cutter was now just a swirl in the water with splintered planking and oars floating away. Heads were bobbing about in the wreckage - several heads. Wagstaffe and the launch were still rowing fast but farther away now because, Ramage was glad to note, the second lieutenant was making for the schooner's stern, which also took him out of the arc of fire of the first gun. With Ramage's men boarding over the bow and Wagstaffe's over the transom, with luck Baker would board amidships, providing Ramage's men could silence that carronade.
Ramage twisted his cutlass belt round so that the blade hung down his back and would not trip him; he pushed the pistols more firmly into his waistband and jammed his hat firmly on his head.
Twenty yards, ten, five - and then the gig was under the privateer's bow, the oars were backing water to stop the boat, and there was a wild scramble as men began climbing, Ramage grabbed the thick, rusty lower fluke of the spare anchor and kicked upwards. The top edge of the planking, doubled for a couple of feet below the sheer line, made a narrow ledge for his feet so that he was held horizontally. He paused for a moment and saw that one swing up with his legs would enable him to catch his feet in the bottom edge of the port for the bowchase gun, the carronade that had missed the gig but which by now must have been reloaded and ready to fire.
He tensed his muscles and heaved upwards, and a moment later was standing spreadeagled across the port, off balance and leaning inboard with his belly against the wide muzzle of the gun. At the breech, four feet away, he saw a blur of movement: a man to one side cocked the flintlock; a second man, behind and beyond the recoil of the gun, began to take the strain on a lanyard - the trigger line which fired the gun. Within a moment the carronade would fire and blow him in half - the men were apparently aiming for Baker and the pinnace at the very moment that Ramage appeared at the port. He tugged for one of his pistols. It came clear of the waistband and his thumb cocked it as one of the Frenchmen screamed a warning to the others and lashed out at Ramage with a handspike, a six - foot - long steel - tipped lever used to move the other guns and which would have crushed Ramage's head if the tip had not caught the side of the face of another man in the French gun's crew. Ramage, still seeing it all as a blur, aimed along the lanyard towards the man at the end and fired; then regaining his balance he wriggled sideways round the barrel and in through the port just as the man with the lanyard - the gun captain, in fact - collapsed within a foot of the man hit by the handspike.
As he tugged his second pistol free he sensed rather than saw men rushing past him: his own men from the gig who, coming over the bow, had not found so fast a route on board. The rest of the carronade's crew had vanished - fled aft, presumably, when they saw the Calypsos coming over the bow. But as Ramage looked back out of the port to see where the other boats were, he realized that the fighting had stopped: the privateer's crew were dead or had surrendered.
Then in the sea a few yards away he saw the expanding circle of splintered wood, the remains of the cutter with men clinging to the wreckage. Wagstaffe had obeyed his orders and not stopped with the launch, but now a boat could go back and pick up survivors. Jackson was standing in front of him, grinning cheerfully. 'All surrendered, three wounded, and this chap here - ' he pointed to the man hit by the handspike - 'and one dead, the one you shot, sir.'
'And our casualties?'
'None on board here, sir, but the cutter . . .'
'Yes, get back and pick up the survivors; I can see several men holding on to wreckage.'
Then Wagstaffe was reporting and then Baker, and after making sure the prisoners were being guarded, Ramage led them in a dash to the second privateer alongside, but there was no one on board. There were still eight more privateers to be secured, and after returning to the schooner and leaving instructions for securing the prisoners, he ordered the men back into the boats. As an afterthought he ordered one of the guards to lower the French flag, and the man paused a moment and said: ''Sfunny thing, sir: she's flying French colours, but she's got a Spanish name on her transom: I noticed it as I climbed on board.'
'What name?'
'Can't rightly pronounce it, sir, but summat like Newstra lady of Antigua. I know it was "Antigua" 'cos I thought of English Harbour.'
"Was it Nuestra Senora de Antigua!' The tone of Ramage's voice and his correct pronunciation made the seaman stare at him. 'Cor, sir - then this is the privateer what murdered all them in the Tranquil!' Ramage nodded. A French privateer with a Spanish name and probably commanded by Adolphe Brune, who had described himself as 'chief of the privateers' in the letter to van Someren demanding Amsterdam's surrender. If Brune survives mis affair in Curacao, Ramage vowed, hell end up dangling on a noose from one of the gibbets on the Palisades at Port Royal.
By five o'clock that evening the gig, launch and pinnace were back alongside the Calypso, secured to the boat boom. More than sixty French prisoners from the ten privateers - more than ten times the number Ramage had expected - had been ferried on shore and locked up in the town jail. Because Amsterdam was a large port and accustomed to acting as the forcible host to crowds of drunken and rioting seamen, the jail was a large stone building, and the Governor assured Ramage that the jailers were quite capable of dealing with up to a hundred prisoners without the cells seeming crowded.
The capture of the rest of the privateers without a shot being fired had been luck: Ramage realized that none of the Frenchmen in the remaining eight had seen the shot smashing the cutter to pieces; the whole action had been hidden by the sheer bulk of Brune's schooner and the ketch. They had heard a carronade and a 6 - pounder each fire once, apparently without effect on the British, and the nearest of them had heard a single pistol shot, and then the French flag had come down at the run on board the Nuestra Senora. That had been enough to make each of them surrender immediately one of the Calypso's boats came alongside.
Now the ten privateers were still at anchor in Amsterdam, but on board each one were two Dutch soldiers who had simple orders: if any French came into sight on the quays and looked as though they might board, they were to light the slow matches leading.to the magazines and escape in the rowing boats which had been commandeered from local fishermen. The fishermen had made no protest at losing their boats temporarily; they had lost their appetite for fishing.
Bowen was still busy patching up the wounded. Three of the cutter's crew had been badly cut and bruised by splinters but were in no danger; two were missing and obviously killed and one man, with no mark on him, was just cold and trembling, unable to walk or talk. Kenton was once again his lively self but swearing he would always wear shoes, not knee - length boots, on any further boat operations. If he had to swim again, he declared, he could kick off shoes, but his boots had acted like ballast An otherwise sympathetic Aitken had agreed with the problem of boots but warned Kenton against kicking off the shoes, pointing out that: 'Ye never know but y' might have to walk a long way back to the ship.' His Scots accent made 'ship' sound like 'sheep', and Kenton had gone off muttering that he was a sailor, not a shepherd.