"Aah… that's part of a hand," Lt. Langlie said in a shuddery voice as he recognised the object.
"Get it overside, and let's sink the other one," Lewrie snapped, nauseated by the sight. The smoke of the broadside, and the blast, was clearing very slowly, and the second one still lived… somewhere out there.
"There, sir!" Marine Lt. Devereux shouted, pointing at a vague outline. It was the one-masted sloop, rounding up within a cable off Proteus's starboard quarter… chasing her!
"Six pounders and swivels, aim aft!" Lewrie shouted, gathering up his rifle. "Marines, put 'em down!"
"Eh! Eh! Heu! Heu! Canga, bafio tй!"
"Marines, cock your locks! Level… by volley… fire!"
"Canga, moune de le! Canga, do ki la!"
Lewrie took aim, the action at full cock, and squeezed the trigger of his Ferguson. The butt slammed back into his shoulder with an emphatic reassuring thump. His target, an "officer" in a blue coat over ebony skin and ragged field workers' trousers, clapped both hands to his face as the bullet took him in the left cheek, knocking his ornate cocked hat off as he left his feet and flew backwards into the tillerman and some sheet-tenders. The stutter of a volley of Brown Bess muskets followed a second later, and half a dozen Blacks were cut down, their cheering and shouting stopped. Swivel guns mounted in the metal forks atop the taff-rail and after starboard bulwarks barked and yapped, spewing handfuls of grape-shot or.75 caliber musket balls in a deadly hail that chopped down even more. Then the 6-pounders, loaded with roundshot and stands of grape-shot, began to fire, slamming so hard that chunks of hull and bodies were flung skyward, almost burying the sloop's bow in its own wave as it was bludgeoned to a stop.
"Canga, li!"
A torch was lowered to an open powder keg, the bearer bleeding from a dozen wounds, but still chanting and screaming at them. Before more musketry could bring him down, he smiled and shoved the fire into the keg- "Canga, li!" his dying comrades gleefully urged him!
"Duck!" Lewrie shouted, along with twenty others.
Not one hundred yards astern in Proteus % wake, the sloop went up in a boil of flame-shot smoke, smashing in every transom window and taff-rail lanthorn glass pane. A huge, feathery pillar of water arose, bearing up planks and oars, bits of mast, seared ropes, and gobbets of flesh… to patter down amid a foetid shower of seawater!
The people on the quarterdeck got back to their feet, mumbling and working their jaws, tugging at their ears from the assault on eardrums and sinuses. A few even bled from their ears and noses.
Astern, there were now two roiled circles of white spume, with only a few identifiable bits of wreckage to be seen
"Don't s'pose there's much point in looking for survivors, is there, sir," Lieutenant Langlie said; it wasn't a question. He looked stunned.
"No… I doubt there is, Mister Langlie," Lewrie replied, his own ears ringing like Bow Bells. With an outward calm he did not feel, he cranked the breech of the Ferguson open, bit off a cartridge, then shoved it ball-first into the breech and cranked it shut. He primed the pan and closed the frizzen. "Now, let's come about and see to the other two boats, sir. Place us up to windward of them, and we'll use the larboard battery. No closer than two cables to 'em."
"Quite, sir," Langlie enthusiastically agreed.
"Carpenter to sound the well, and inspect the transom from the bilges up. Water carries the power of explosives better than air, I'm told," Lewrie prosed on, slinging the rifle, and turning to Andrews to take his double-barreled pistols to load and prime them, too. "We may have a plank stove in below the waterline from… that."
"Aye aye, sir."
"Anyone hurt?" Lewrie called out. "Yer bowels still work?"
His still shaken crew began to chuckle; even if more than a few were shifting their slop-trousers and clawing at their fundaments, as if their bowels had worked just hellish-fine, thankee.
"Ah, still living, Mister Winwood?" Lewrie chirped.
"Aye, sir. Never seen the like, sir," Winwood marvelled, about as much as Winwood could sound surprised by anything. "Why, they must be mad as a hatter to immolate themselves like that! Drunk as swine!"
"Anything t'kill oppressors, more-like, Mister Winwood," Lewrie speculated, still working his jaw, popping his mouth open like a fish to fully restore his hearing. "They tried t'sink us. Or die tryin'."
"They came out here deliberately then, do you think, sir?"
"Runnin' arms and powder along the coast," Lewrie said, shrugging in perplexity. "The roads must be horrid, with all those mountain ranges ashore, as bad as Italy. We were told that this L'Ouverture was out to invade Spanish Santo Domingo. We might have put a spoke in his wheel for a few weeks by intercepting these… madmen. Perhaps the other two boats'll tell us more. Do we take a prisoner or two?"
Wouldn't put it past 'em, Lewrie imagined, though; sent 'em out to sink a blockading ship? Lured us in? Was it deliberate? Jesus!
Proteus wore off the wind again to due West, well clear of her previous encounter, reduced sail, and ghosted down on the two crippled boats. In the short space of time since they had maimed them, one of them, the smaller sloop, had sunk, and only her bow bobbed upright in the sea, with a few wailing survivors clinging to it. The lugger was low in the water, and people were bailing with hats, pails, and their hands, others trying to rig a jury-mast from a pair of oars atop her planked-over forepeak, attempting to spread the leach and foot of her after lugsail to the wind by extending the oars out like cat's whiskers, with the tack of the sail shinnied up the foremast. As the frigate neared the lugger, wailing could be heard, and her crew, augmented by survivors from the sunken sloop, took up arms and stood trembling but game, some levelling their muskets at an impossible range.
"Pass the word for Surgeon's Mate Mister Durant," Lewrie said. "He speaks good French. Those slaves once got their work orders in it."
The larboard 12-pounders were run out and ready, the carronades and 6-pounders manned, as were the swivels. Devereux's Marines stood along the larboard gangway with their muskets, and a boarding party in Wyman's charge had cutlasses slung in baldrics over their shoulders, more muskets and pistols in their hands, and boarding pikes ready to deter any more suicidal charges.
"A point more alee, Mister Langlie," Lewrie ordered. And their frigate veered even closer to the lugger.
"Less than a cable, sir," Winwood warned.
"Mister Sevier… a shot from the bow-chaser! No shot across the bows… hull her if you can!"
The 6-pounder on the forecastle yapped, and its ball hit short but in line with the lugger, to carom off the sea and bound across her deck at head-height, scattering the close-packed Blacks, and killing a couple of the taller or slower ones.
"Ah, Mister Durant," Lewrie said, turning to the Surgeon's Mate. "Since my French is so execrable, perhaps you might try to make them see reason, and surrender. No one'll be harmed, tell 'em. I'll even let them go, once we've inspected their boat, and had a chance to interrogate them. They don't stand a mouse's chance, else. I'll set 'em ashore, unarmed, and I'll sink the boat, but they'll live. We're not grands blancs … we're British."
"I will try, Capitaine," Durant vowed, stepping to the bulkwark. "Bonjour, mes amis!" he began, and slanged a long palaver in Frog.