But there were two more men on the big double-wheel, and as a solid curtain of spray burst over them and the quartermasters, they looked like survivors clinging to a capsizing wreck.
Adam Bolitho watched a party of seamen securing the hammock nettings. It was not vital. Seamen had slept in sodden hammocks before, and they would again. But it gave them a sense of purpose, kept them occupied when, even now, fear might be striding amongst them.
Unrivalled was leaning hard over, her lee bulwark almost awash, water spurting past the forward carronades and knocking men off their feet like skittles.
He held his breath, counting seconds as the bows dipped yet again, the hull quivering as it smashed into solid water, as if she had driven ashore.
He cupped his hands. “Fore t’gan’s’l’s carried away!” He saw Galbraith staring at him. “Leave it! Not worth risking lives!”
He watched the sail destroy itself, being ripped apart as if by giant, invisible hands until there were only shreds.
Men were clambering across the boat-tier now, urged on by the boatswain’s powerful bellow. If a boat came adrift it would run amok on the deck, maiming and killing if not secured.
He heard Partridge shout, “Make a bloody seaman of ye yet, damned if I don’t!”
Old Stranace would be down there too. Dragging himself from gun to gun, checking each breeching rope, making sure that his equipment was not being lost or damaged.
Adam shivered, and felt the icy water exploring his spine and buttocks. But it was not that. It was a wildness, an elation he had not felt since he had lost Anemone.
The ship’s backbone, the professionals. They never broke.
Midshipman Fielding was knocked sideways by a block swinging from a severed halliard. A seaman caught his arm and pulled him to his feet. Adam recognised the man as one of those due to be flogged. Today… He even saw the man grin. Like Jago. Amused. Contemptuous.
He seemed to hear John Allday’s voice, when they had served together. His summing up of a ship’s ability or otherwise.
Aft the most honour, mebbe, but forrard the better men!
He could see the horizon now, blurred with spray, writhing in the fierce light. Men’s faces, bodies soaked and bruised, some with nails torn out by the tormented canvas they had fisted and kicked into submission, their world confined to a dizzily swaying yard, their strength that of the men up there with them.
But was it worth it? To risk so much, everything, on a frail belief?
A boatswain’s mate ran past him, one arm out-thrust, his mouth a soundless hole as the wind’s fury increased to an insane scream. Adam thought he had seen something fall, probably from the maintopsail yard, hardly making a splash as it hit the sea and was swamped by the water surging back from the stem.
Not even a cry. The fall had probably killed him. But suppose he lived long enough to break surface and see his ship already fading into the storm?
It happened often enough, something which landsmen never considered when they saw a King’s ship passing proudly at a safe distance.
Midshipman Bellairs wiped his face with his sleeve and gasped, “It can’t go on!”
Cristie heard him, and exclaimed harshly, “Later on you’ll remember this, my lad! When you’re striding your own deck and making poor Jack’s life a bloody misery! Leastways I hope you’ll remember, for all our sakes!”
He watched the captain, his body angled to the quarterdeck, his voice carrying above the wild chorus of wind and sea.
“It’s what you want to be, right?” He liked Bellairs; he would make a good officer, given the chance. He glanced at the captain again. And the example. Cristie had seen the best and the worst of them in his day. His own family had grown up in Tynemouth, in the next street to Collingwood, Nelson’s friend and second-in-command at Trafalgar.
He heard Lieutenant Massie say, “I’ll not answer for the jib if we try to come about!”
Cristie nudged the midshipman and repeated, “Remember it, see!”
He moved away as the captain strode towards him.
“What say you, Mr Cristie? Do you think me mad to drive her so?”
Cristie did not know if Bellairs was listening, nor did he care. It was nothing he could mark on his chart, or record in the log. And nobody else would understand. The captain, the one who drove himself and everybody else, who had not hesitated to lead his own men on a cutting-out raid which had seemed an almost certain disaster, had asked him. Not told him, as was every captain’s right.
He heard himself say, “There’s your answer, sir!” He watched his face as he looked at the widening bank of blue sky as it spread from horizon to horizon. The wind had lessened, so that the rattle of broken rigging and the flapping tails of torn canvas intruded for the first time. Soon the sun would show above the retreating cloud, and steam would rise from these wet, treacherous decks.
Men were pausing to draw breath, to peer around for messmates or for a special friend, as they might after action. Two of the younger midshipmen were actually grinning at one another and shaking hands with a kind of jubilant triumph.
Adam saw all and none of it. He was staring up, at the first lookout to risk the perilous climb aloft.
“Deck there! Sail on th’ weather bow!”
He turned to Cristie and said quietly, “And there, my friend, lies the enemy.”
7. A Bad Ship
LIEUTENANT Galbraith pivoted round on his heels and stared up to the quarterdeck rail, eyes slitted against the first hard sunshine.
“Ship cleared for action, sir!”
Adam did not take out his watch; he had no need to. From the moment the small marine drummer boys had begun the staccato rattle of beating to quarters, he had watched the ship come alive again, the savage wind almost forgotten. Only fragments of canvas and snapped cordage, flapping “Irish pennants,” as the old hands called them, gave any hint of the storm which had passed as quickly as it had found them.
Seven o’clock in the morning: six bells had just chimed from the forecastle. It was all routine, normal, and yet so different.
Adam had stood by the rail, feeling the ship preparing for whatever challenge she might meet within the next few hours. Screens torn down, hutch-like cabins folded away and stowed in the holds with furniture and all unnecessary personal belongings. A bad moment, when some might pause to reflect that their owners might not need them after this day was past.
It had taken ten minutes to clear the ship from bow to stern. Even his cabin, the largest he had ever occupied and a place which still lacked personality, was open, so that gun crews and powder monkeys could move unhindered if the shot began to fly.
The galley fire had been doused at the beginning of the storm, and there had been no time to relight it. Men fought better on a full belly, especially when they had already been contesting wind and sea for most of the night.
He stared along the main deck, at the gun crews standing by their charges, the long eighteen-pounders which made up the bulk of Unrivalled’s artillery. Most of them were stripped to the waist, new hands and landsmen following the example of the seasoned men who had seen and done it all before. Any clothing was precious to a working sailor, and costly to replace out of his meagre pay. Fabric also attracted gangrene, and hampered treatment should a man be wounded.
Adam thought he could smell the rum even from the quarterdeck. The purser had been quietly outraged by the extra issue he had ordered, a double tot for every man, as if the cost would be extracted from his own pocket.
But it had bridged the gap, and would do no harm at all.
Six seamen to each gun, including its captain, but hauling the heavy cannon up a tilting deck if the ship was to leeward of an enemy would require many more. An experienced crew should be able to fire a shot every ninety seconds, at the outset of battle in any case, although Adam had known some gun captains prepared and ready to fire three shots every two minutes. It had been so in Hyperion, an exceptional ship: a legend, like her captain.