Dewey Lambdin - The Baltic Gambit

"Half a point to starboard, Mister Ballard, and fall in trail of Amazon," Lewrie snapped. At the early-morning conference aboard Elephant, Nelson had given Capt. Riou the liberty of acting as he saw fit with his small squadron of frigates, but…

What the Devil's he aimin' at? Lewrie wondered as Thermopylae closed on Amazon's larboard quarter, about two cables astern of her.

"Our number again, sir, and the signal is 'Make More Sail.' "

"Shake one reef from the tops'ls, Mister Ballard," Lewrie ordered. As topmen scrambled aloft and out on the tops'l yards, he took a look to the West, where hundreds of guns, perhaps a thousand guns, were hammering away with a speed he'd never seen from the French or the Spanish. Thermopylae had sailed past eight Danish ships by then, coming level with the ninth, a corvette-sized 6th Rate blasting away with some impossibly heavy guns for such a small warship, and another even larger North of her, a hulked two-decker with only a stump mast amidships, yet flying an admiral's flag, hurriedly firing what looked to be 24-pounders and 18-pounders. It felt as if every shot was aimed at Thermopylae, for the continuous rumbles and howls of shot passing overhead, of splashes in the water between their frigate and the Danes. There was a crash aloft as the main t'gallant yard was smashed in two like a pencil, to come screeching and snarling down in pieces, and a shower of ropes, blocks, and ravelled sail.

"Not so bad, so far," Lewrie said with a grin he did not feel. "See to it, Mister Ballard."

He looked astern and found support in the form of two-deckers in rough line-ahead behind them; not all of them, for the sternmost were lost in a thick pall of spent gunsmoke, but he could make out the Edgar and Ardent just coming to anchor by the stern, as ordered, with Bligh's Glatton right-astern. Off the starboard quarter, Bellona and Russell, though still hard aground on the shoal's unseen spur, were firing deliberate broadsides at long range.

Back Westward, they were just coming level with Elephant and Capt. Hardy's Ganges, with Riou in Amazon leading the frigates round Monarch's starboard quarters to pass them and go on further North.

"Shall we fire, sir?" Lt. Ballard asked.

"None of 'em are our 'pigeons,' sir," Lewrie told him, though he was impatient to let loose, not swan on by without responding. "Do we fire, I want the first broadside t'be a smasher, at a target that'll matter. A few minutes more… let the damned Danes guess which of 'em will feel our sting."

Lewrie wished he could fancy that Thermopylae's aloof silence might un-nerve whichever Danish ship she took under fire, but… from the sound of it, the Danes were too busy to be un-nerved.

As in all sea-battles where over an hundred guns bellowed and roared, the shock of gunfire seemed to smash the very wind to nothing, and Thermopylae slowed as Amazon led them to the starboard side of the Defiance, now anchored and duelling it out with one of those floating gun-rafts, a two-decker, still ship-rigged with three masts, and yet another of those older two-decker hulks with a single stump mast.

"Almost all the others have come to anchor, sir," Mr. Lyle said. "All our two-deckers are now in action."

"Leaving us… Christ!" Lewrie spat as the Trekroner Fort, the "Three Crowns" behemoth, loomed up off their larboard bows.

Riou can't be serious, surely! he thought, appalled at the very idea of frigates engaging a stone fort belching fire and smoke from an hundred or more cannon, upon which their 18-pounder shot would merely bounce, or harmlessly shatter!

" 'Come to anchor by the stern,' sir!" Midshipman Furlow cried.

"We'll anchor three cables astern of Amazon, Mister Ballard," Lewrie said. "Ready to let go the kedge when I call."

"Aye-aye, sir," Ballard said, his voice steady, stolid, and as stoic as ever.

The Jolly Thresher and Hey, Johnny Cope strained to rise above the ear-shattering din of gunfire as HMS Thermopylae eased to a stop at last, spare hands aloft to take in sail and bind it to the yards.

"Desmond! Thankee lads, but we're in business!" Lewrie called. "Take your posts! Range to the fort, Mister Ballard?"

"I would estimate it to be eight hundred yards, sir," Ballard decided, sounding emotionless, though his full lips were taut-pursed, and his left hand quivered on the scabbard of his sword.

"That stump-masted two-decker's much closer," Lewrie said with a grunt of how useless it would be to waste their fire on the fortress and its stonework. "We'll engage her. Hands to the springs, sir, and place her square abeam."

A long minute or so, and the Danish warship was on a line with Thermopylae that put her directly amidships.

"Mister Farley!" Lewrie shouted down to the waist, leaning over the hammock nettings at the break of the quarterdeck. "Broadsides on that big bastard, yonder!"

"Aye-aye, sir!" Lt. Farley eagerly replied, ordering "Prime your pieces!" to quarter-gunners and gun-captains. Wire prickers were stuck down the touch-holes to pierce the cartridge bags; quills filled with fine priming powder were jammed down next; flintlock strikers were set at full cock, and the gun-captains raised their free fists in the air to show their readiness, the trigger lines of the strikers as taut as bowstrings in their other hands.

"By broadside… Fire!" Farley cried.

The larboard 12-pounder bow chaser and fourteen 18-pounders of the larboard battery lit off together, spewing quick yellow and amber sparks through sudden surges of powder smoke, wreathing the frigate in a spectral, reeking fog. Though the range was a bit too great for the 32-pounder carronades on the quarterdeck, they erupted, too, at their maximum safe elevation, if only to add great, threatening shot splashes somewhere close to the Danish hulk, and make them wonder. Fired with their muzzles lifted, the carronades' heavy shot behaved more like sea-mortars, arcing slightly up, then down, in shallow ballistic paths to crash into the waters of Copenhagen Roads to throw up great, towering plumes of silty water and foam that only slowly collapsed on themselves but about three hundred yards short of the Danish warship.

God help me but I do love the guns! Lewrie told himself, taking a deep whiff of powder smoke, his ears already ringing despite the wee wads of candle wax he'd stuffed in them after giving the order to open fire. Lt. Farley nigh amidships, and Lt. Fox nearer the bows, already had the gun crews at the tackles to run out their swabbed and re-loaded cannon for a second broadside. As the smoke cleared just enough to see their target, the Danish warship responded, her lower-deck 24-pounders lighting off first, and her upper-deck 18s scant seconds later.

"For what we're about to receive," Mr. Lyle muttered, "may the Good Lord make us grateful."

Heavy shot moaned overhead, close enough to the upper masts to set them thrumming, their shrouds quiver. Splashes between both ships showed where round-shot fired a bit too low skipped in First Graze, but dead in line with Thermopylae, to thud into her hull, travelling about 800 or 900 feet per second after the Grazes, with enough force to make the frigate stagger, and smash stout scantling planks. One fired but a bit higher crashed through the sail-tending gangway bulwarks with a loud parrot Rwark!, creating a cloud of broken oak splinters as big as a man's forearm, cutting a Marine on the gangway in half at the waist, and spraying a cloud of his blood over the gunners on the deck below. Two sailors on the gangway spun away shrieking as they were quilled by wood splinters. Surgeon Mr. Harward's team of loblolly boys carrying a mess-table for a stretcher mounted the gangway, bearing one man away to the midships companionway hatch, but shoving the ruin of the second over the side through the blown-open gap in the bulwarks. The dead… those horribly dismembered and splattered, or the ones who seemed to be sleeping and whole… were to be gotten out of sight quickly. Was a hand too grievously wounded for the surgeon and his mates to waste time dealing with him, it was considered a mercy to deliver a skull-smashing blow with a maul, and pass the unconscious sufferer out a gun-port to drown and sink out of sight, before the pain of his wounds set in… and his screams un-nerved his mates. Mourning was for later.