“Are they gunboats, I need you here, sir,” Lewrie said. “If we end up seizing a couple of fishing smacks, there’s not enough glory in ’em. Why, Mister Westcott?” Lewrie posed with a grin. “Are ye in need of favourable notice with Admiralty? One of your amours isn’t some admiral’s daughter, is she?”
“Frankly, sir, but for the chance to be blown sky-high by one of our bloody torpedo contraptions, it’s been a dull Summer,” Lt. Westcott replied. “Looking for a bit of honest excitement was my desire.”
“Captain Speaks will be returning with a fresh lot of catamaran torpedoes,” Lewrie pointed out. “Perhaps we’ll actually employ ’em on the French… under return fire and at close range. Be careful what you ask for, Mister Westcott. There’s some honest excitement for you!”
“Just so long as we are in action, sir,” Westcott told him with a hungry grin and a flash of his teeth.
Lewrie paced back to the binnacle cabinet, with his First Lieutenant dutifully following him.
“We’re making two and a half knots, sir, barely,” Mr. Caldwell, the Sailing Master, reported, his coat damp from supervising the cast of the log. “I was wondering about what you said, sir… that the local French fishermen would stay closer to shore, and no stiff wind could’ve blown them this far out where they might run into some of our ships on close blockade?”
“Aye, Mister Caldwell?” Lewrie prompted, feeling a shiver that he might be wrong in thinking that they had blundered into only small boats. He was used to being wrong!
“Might the French have tried to sneak a convoy of invasion boats up the coast, and got caught the same as us in this odd turn of the weather?” Mr. Caldwell posed. “There’s a good, sheltered inlet South of us by Avranches and Saint Hilaire,” he said, referring to the chart for a moment. “Were they building caiques and such in there, they might have thought to sneak them as far as Cherbourg in one night.”
“And if they are a convoy of invasion craft, they might have an escort or two, is what you’re thinking?” Lewrie asked him, feeling yet another shiver of dread.
“Do we blunder up close to one, sir, perhaps they’ll take us for one of their big, three-masted prames,” Lt. Westcott said, shrugging.
Moo-wa! lowed from larboard once again, sounding much closer to them than before, followed by a thin voice!
“Quelq’un la-bas?… Allo?”
“Houghton’s boat must be upon it, whatever it is!” Lt. Westcott snapped, going to the larboard side in more haste than officers of the Royal Navy usually displayed. “French, for certain, by God!”
“Qui va la?” that distant voice came again, caution or alarm in its tone. “Qui vive?” more sharply and urgent.
That demand was answered by a volley of musket shots, soft pops, and cracks muffled by the fog, from Midshipman Houghton’s men or the French they could not tell, but there came a human wail of surprise or pain, and thin cheers!
“Whatever it is, it sounds as if Mister Houghton thinks he can board it and take it, sir!” Westcott called over his shoulder. Even as he turned back to look out-board, there came a few more muffled cracks too soft for muskets; it sounded as if Houghton, his sailors, and the Marines might actually be aboard and close enough for pistol-shots!
“Dear Lord, if they’ve troops aboard!” Mr. Caldwell cautioned.
“Doesn’t sound like it,” Lewrie said after listening intently for more clues. There were no more shots, and only one more chorus of cheers, triumphant sounds, before the day went still once more, and he could not tell if it was British cheers, or from the French, who might have out-manned, swarmed, and over-awed Midshipman Houghton’s party to take them all prisoner. All Lewrie could hear was the groans from the barely swaying masts, the tilting yards, and Reliant’s hull timbers.
“More shooting, sir, from starboard!” the Sailing Master yelled. “Lieutenant Merriman’s at it!”
“Somethin’ orf th’ starb’d bows!” a lookout shouted from the forecastle. With the fog so thick, they had kept night-time deck lookouts posted as well as the day lookouts placed high aloft in the top-masts. “Strange boat t’starb’d… close aboard!”
It took a few more seconds for that strange boat to appear to the people on the quarterdeck. First there was nothing but whiteness and fog, then a faint and darker shadowy bulk that magically materialised, only slowly taking solid form.
“What the Devil is that?” the Sailing Master barked as the oddity fully emerged.
Salvation from that threatened court-martial? Lewrie thought in sudden glee.
The French boat looked to be no further off than a long musket-shot, a two-masted thing with its lug-sails and jibs hanging limp and the booms sweeping uselessly to either beam. It resembled an inverted serving platter or shallow soup tureen, with a long rectangular box on its back that ran down the centreline, from the small cockpit to the rhino-like proboscis in the bow.
“A beetle?” Lt. Westcott deemed it, sounding awed. That was a fair-enough first guess, for near its forward third there were wide-bladed oars jutting to either side, at least half a dozen on the larboard side that faced them, and they were being worked like scoops to crawl it forward, just like a water-beetle that had lost most of its legs!
“Qui vive? Heu, mort de ma vie!” the lone Frenchman aft at the thing’s helm wailed. Just aft of him at its taffrail stood a staff, from which a small French Tricolour windlessly dangled.
“Mister Spendlove!” Lewrie yelled to the gun-deck. “Take that… thing under fire!”
One of the big’uns, I think, Lewrie adjudged after a dash for the starboard bulwarks for a better look; fourty-five or fifty feet in length… the type Peel said could carry an hundred French troops!
“As you bear… fire!” Lt. Spendlove cried in sing-song.
Even with the wood quoins fully inserted under the breeches of the guns, the odd French invasion barge lay so low to the water that half the shots only scythed away the two masts and lug-sails, crashed clean through that long centreline box that should protect French soldiers and let them re-load in shelter, carrying most of it away in a whirl of shattered lumber! It was the carronades on the quarterdeck with their screw adjusters under their breeches that could be depressed low enough to score solid hits, and they were awesome! They were 32-pounders firing solid shot, and they punched huge holes right through the carapace of the “beetle’s” back and, from the parroty Rrawk-screech sounds which followed the initial timber-screams on entry, carried on at a shallow angle out the boat’s starboard side!
The French boat’s helmsman, before being cut in two by roundshot, had put its helm hard-over, and though the rest of its crew that had been manning the paddles had abandoned them and come rushing on deck, the strange craft swung its bows shoreward, coasting along on a scant momentum. What little wind there was that moved the banks of fog blew the gunsmoke back into the faces of the gun crews as they swabbed out and began the ritual of re-loading, blinding everyone for long moments with thick yellow-white clouds of sulfur-reeking smoke.
By the time the guns were run out in-battery once more and the gun-captains could take aim, the range was just long enough for surer aim.
“As you bear… fire!” Lt. Spendlove screeched again.
“That’s better!” Lewrie cheered. “That’s the way, lads!”