Bernard Cornwell - Sharpe’s Devil - Napoleon and South America, 1820–1821

The weather became as wild as the stories. It was supposed to be summer in these southern latitudes, yet more than one dawn brought hissing sleet showers and a thick frost which clung like icy mildew in the sheltered nooks of the Espiritu Santo ’s upper decks. Huge seas, taller than the lanterns on the poop, thundered from astern. The tops of such waves were maelstroms of churning white water which seethed madly as they crashed and foamed under the frigate’s stern.

Most of the Spanish artillery officers succumbed to seasickness. Few of the sick men had the energy to climb on deck and, in front of the scornful sailors, lower their breeches to perch on the beakhead, so instead the passengers voided their bellies and bowels into buckets that slopped and spilt until the passenger accommodations stank like a cesspit. The food did not help the ship’s well-being. At St Helena the Espiritu Santo had stocked up with yams which had liquefied into rancid bags, while most of the ship’s meat, inadequately salted in Spain, was wriggling with maggots. The drinking water was fouled. There were weevils in the bread. Even the wine was sour.

Sharpe and Harper, crammed together in a tiny cabin scarce big enough for a dog, were luckier than most passengers, for neither man was seasick, and both were so accustomed to soldiers’ food that a return to half-rotted seamen’s rations gave no offence. They ate what they could, which was not much, and Harper even lost weight so that, by the time the Espiritu Santo hammered into a sleety wind near Cape Horn, the Irishman could almost walk through the cabin door without touching the frame on either side. ‘I’m shrivelling away, so I am,’ he complained as the frigate quivered from the blow of a great sea. ‘I’ll be glad when we reach land, devils or no devils, and there’ll be some proper food to eat. Christ, but it’s cold up there!’

‘No mermaids in sight?’

‘Only a three-horned sea serpent.’ The grotesque stories of the fearful Spanish army officers had become a joke between the two men. ‘It’s bad up there,’ Harper warned more seriously. ‘Filthy bad.’

Sharpe went on deck a few moments later to find that conditions were indeed bad. The ocean was a white shambles, blown ragged by a freezing wind that came slicing off the icesheets which lay to the south. The Espiritu Santo , its sails furled down to mere dark scraps, laboured and thumped and staggered against the weather’s malevolence. Sharpe, tired of being cooped up in the stinking ’tweendecks, and wanting some fresh air, steadied himself against the quarterdeck’s starboard carronade. There were few other people on deck, merely a handful of sailors who crouched in the lee scuppers, two men who were draped in tarpaulin capes by the wheel, and a solitary cloaked figure who clung to a shroud on the weather side of the poop.

The cloaked man, seeing Sharpe, carefully negotiated a passage across the wet and heaving deck, and Sharpe, to his astonishment, saw that it was the reclusive Captain Ardiles who had not been seen by any of the passengers since the Espiritu Santo had left St Helena.

‘Cape Horn!’ Ardiles shouted, pointing off to starboard.

Sharpe stared. For a long time he could see nothing, then an explosion of shredded water betrayed where a black scrap of rock resisted the pounding waves.

‘That’s the last scrap of good earth that many a sailorman saw before he drowned!’ Ardiles spoke with a gloomy relish, then clutched at the tarred rigging as the Espiritu Santo fell sideways into the green heart of a wave’s trough. He waited till the frigate had recovered and was labouring up a great slope of savaged white sea. ‘So what did you think of Napoleon?’ Ardiles asked Sharpe.

Sharpe hesitated, wanting his answer to be precise. ‘He put me in mind of a man who has played a hugely successful joke on people he despises.’

Ardiles, who had flat, watchful eyes in a hungry, cadaverous face, thought about Sharpe’s answer, then shrugged. ‘Maybe. But I think he should have been executed for his joke.’

Sharpe said nothing. He could see the waves breaking on Cape Horn more clearly now, and could just make out the loom of a black cliff beyond the battered water. God, he thought, but this is a fearful place.

‘They made me sick!’ Ardiles said suddenly.

‘Sick?’ Sharpe had only half heard Ardiles’s scathing words and had assumed that the frigate’s Captain was talking about the seasickness which afflicted most of the army officers.

‘Ruiz and the others! Fawning over that man! Jesus! But Bonaparte was our enemy. He did enough damage to Spain! If it were not for Bonaparte you think there’d be any rebellion in South America? He encouraged it! And how many more Spaniards will die for that man’s evil? Yet these bastards bowed and scraped to him. Given half a chance they’d have licked his bum cleaner than a nun’s finger!’

Sharpe staggered as the ship rolled. A rattle of sleet and foam shot down the deck and slammed into the poop. ‘I can’t say I wasn’t impressed by meeting Bonaparte!’ he shouted in defence of the Spanish army officers. ‘He’s been my enemy long enough, but I felt privileged to be there. I even liked him!’

‘That’s because you’re English! Your women weren’t raped by those French bastards, and your children weren’t killed by them!’ Ardiles stared balefully into the trough of a scummy wave that roared under the Espiritu Santo ’s counter. ‘So what did you talk about when you were alone with him?’

‘Waterloo.’

‘Just Waterloo?’ Ardiles seemed remarkably suspicious.

‘Just that,’ Sharpe said, with an air of irritation, for it was none of Ardiles’s business what he and a stricken Emperor had discussed.

Ardiles, sensing he had offended Sharpe, changed the subject by waving a hand towards the cabins where Ruiz’s artillery officers sheltered from the storm in their vomitrinsed misery. ‘What do you think of officers who don’t share their men’s discomforts?’

Sharpe believed that officers who abandoned their men were officers on their way to defeat, but tact kept him from saying as much to the sardonic Ardiles, so instead he made some harmless comment about being no expert on Spanish shipping arrangements.

‘I think such officers are bastards!’ Ardiles had to shout to be heard over the numbing sound of the huge seas. ‘The only reason they sailed on this ship is because the voyage will be six or eight weeks shorter! Which means they can reach the whorehouses of Valdivia ahead of their sergeants.’ Ardiles spat into the scuppers. ‘They’re good whorehouses, too. Too good for these bastards.’

‘You know Chile well?’ Sharpe asked.

‘Well enough! I’ve visited twice a year for three years. They use my ship as a passenger barge! Instead of letting me look for Cochrane and beating the shit out of him, they insist that I sail back and forth between Spain and Valdivia! Back and forth! Back and forth! It’s a waste of a good ship! This is the largest and best frigate in the Spanish navy and they waste it on ferrying shit like Ruiz!’ Ardiles scowled down into the frigate’s waist where the green water surged and broke ragged about the lashed guns, then he turned his saturnine gaze back to Sharpe. ‘You’re looking for Captain-General Vivar, yes?’

‘I am, yes.’ Sharpe was not surprised that Ardiles knew his business, for he had made no secret of his quest, yet he was taken aback by the abrupt and jeering manner of the Colonel’s asking and Sharpe’s reply had consequently been guarded, almost hostile.

Ardiles leaned closer to Sharpe. ‘I knew Vivar! I even liked him! But he was not a tactful man. Most of the army officers in Chile thought he was too clever. They had their own ideas on how the war should be lost, but Vivar was proving them wrong, and they didn’t like him for that.’