Patrick O'Brian - The Nutmeg of Consolation

'I shall go and peer at them from the lavatory, eating a sandwich as I do so.'

'Stephen,' said Jack in a low tone, 'look for Pierrot, Christy Palli�'s boy, will you? I hope you do not see him, because that would confirm my idea he is ashore. I fairly dread killing him.'

'You mean the young French officer you met in Pulo Prabang, our friend's nephew? But you forget I never saw him, either as a boy or as a man.'

'Very true,' said Jack. 'Forgive me.'

The Nutmeg stood on, with her captain alone on his quarterdeck, apart from a single man at the wheel and Hooper by the lee rail, looking like a ship's boy. Richardson stood high on the yard, looking down into the clear water ahead, dark blue for the deep water of the channel, light for the shoals on either side. A score of seamen stood about on the forecastle, their hands in their pockets, or lounged on the gangway, even leaning on the rail. All the rest of the ship's company were out of sight under the forecastle, under the gangways, on the half-deck and in the cabin. All the gun-crews were at their stations, and those who could make out anything through the cracks of their portlids or through holes in the canvas strips, told their friends what they saw in a low voice, with striking accuracy. The boarders had their weapons at hand, cutlasses, pistols, boarding-axes, pikes; slow-match smoked in tubs beside the carronades - Jack would never trust to the flint-lock alone; and now the atmosphere was grave.

Behind its sliding door the quarter-gallery was quite cut off from the close-packed attentive crowd and its rumble of voices: it was the Captain's washing, shaving and powdering closet, and together with its companion on the other side (his privy) it was one of the few upper parts of the ship left undisturbed when she was cleared for action. With its wash-basin removed it made a pleasant little place from which to view proceedings; and Stephen was luckier with his sash-light than any of the hundred-odd below decks, except for those who could command a scuttle.

Like them he saw the Corn�e come closer as the Nutmeg glided diagonally across the bay, disappear from his field of vision as she took the first dog-leg in the channel and reappear ten minutes later on the second, remarkably closer, still firmly moored; and as the Nutmeg continued her turn the motionless Corn�e and the sea around her moved steadily forward almost as far as his eyes could follow. It was now that he saw a signal break out at her masthead, just two imperative flags reinforced by a quarterdeck gun: the jet of smoke and then the crack, loud in this waiting silence. A strong voice from the deck above him: 'Stand by. Stand by, there. Man the lee-braces,' and the ship vanished beyond the edge of the sash light.

For Jack she was still very dearly in sight, and he did not need his glass to see her open ports fill with eighteen-pounders run out.

The Nutmeg was tracing the long curve that was to carry her alongside the frigate, now almost right ahead and broadside on. The French colours ran up to the Corn�e's mizen-peak: Jack waited for the warning shot.

There was no warning shot. Instead the three aftermost eighteen-pounders fired to kill almost simultaneously.

'All hands,' called Jack as the balls raced overhead at topsail height a few yards to starboard. It was clear that his disguise had been pierced, but although he might be raked fore and aft he still hoped to sail the Nutmeg close enough to engage with real effect. Below him in the waist the bosun sprung his call: the officers came running up to the quarterdeck. 'Courses and staysails,' said Jack. 'Bear a hand, bear a hand, bear a hand, there. Mr Crown, cast off the painted strips. Mr Fielding, ensign and pennant.'

Stephen heard the crash of a ball somewhere forward, and then in a turmoil more apparent than real his door slid open and Seymour called in his ear 'They have smoked us, sir. Captain desires you will go below.'

The Corn�e's remaining eighteen-pounders fired in a long rippling sequence, her side vanishing behind the smoke. Holes appeared in the topsails and courses; the tack of the mainsail, just belayed, sprang free; the balls sent water splashing from the forecastle aft; several shot up white fountains close at hand; the last shattered the larboard cathead.

'Good practice for such a distance,' observed Jack.

'Very creditable, sir,' said Fielding. 'I wish it may not improve, however.'

A pause during which the Nutmeg, in spite of her wild maincourse, advanced two hundred yards, and then in a deliberate fashion all the Corn�e's larboard guns fired, one after another. Six balls hit the hull, masts or yards; one carried away half the larboard quarter-gallery; and the sixteenth came the length of the ship at chest height, killing two men on the forecastle and three on the quarterdeck: Miller, just next to Jack Aubrey, a hand at the wheel, and the master.

'Man the lee braces,' called Jack, wiping Miller's blood from his face: and to the men who had instantly taken over the wheel, 'Port your helm.'

The Nutmeg turned fast to starboard, and in a voice that reached the orlop he gave the infinitely welcome order 'Fire as they bear.'

Now the sick-berth echoed not only with the sledge-hammer blows of the enemy's shot but the much louder cracking roar of the Nutmeg's thirty-two-pounder carronades and the shriek of their slides as they recoiled. Stephen, Macmillan and Suleiman the loblolly-boy were already busy - splinter-wounds, contusions, a forearm broken by a falling block - but as they stitched and bandaged and splinted they nodded to one another with satisfaction. Bonden, carrying young Harper down in his arms, said 'We are slogging it out, sir; a pleasure to see.'

So they were, and the sky echoed and re-echoed with their thunder, a continuous roar beneath the separate explosions.

The Nutmeg, like most Dutch twenty-gun ships, carried all her armament on a single deck: she was firing into the wind, so that her smoke was instantly swept away: it was therefore easy for the quarterdeck to see the pitch of her thirty-two-pound balls. She was firing remarkably fast, at least twice the speed of the Corn�e, and her teams were working perfectly together, ammunition coming up from the magazines with clockwork regularity: but at high elevation their shot was wild, and at low, though their line was true, the balls fell short. The Corn�e was slow by any standard, partly because she was firing to leeward and the eddying smoke obscured her view; but even at three quarters of a mile she was shockingly accurate. Furthermore, although she was clearly husbanding her powder, never wasting a shot, she quite certainly was not limited to four barrels nor anything like it.

'Stand by the chasers,' called Jack. 'Mr Fielding, we will wear ship.'

The Nutmeg turned, bringing the wind right aft, came up again on the starboard tack and sailed off as she had come. As she turned the stern-chasers managed to get in three shots each, two of which certainly went home; but the Corn�e fired two broadsides, the first of which might have dismasted the Nutmeg if she had not put her helm hard over at the right moment. The second fell short.

'If they had fired as quick as they fired straight,' reflected Jack, 'we should have been hard up in a clinch, and no knife to cut the seizing.' He did not confide this thought to his first lieutenant however but said 'She is finding it hard to win her anchor.' Even without his telescope he could make out that the shorthanded Corn�e was having a wretched time at the capstan; and with it he could see the straining red-faced men, sometimes only three to a bar, trying to force the drum to turn: then shifting over to the other cable, heaving on that, veering the first and so trying again, rather than leave anchor and cables so many thousand miles from any replacement.