It was deafening, howling chaos, loud enough to make sailors and Marines bleed from their ears and noses. Between the titanic blasts from heavy guns, the barks of swivels, the crack of muskets and pistols, and the dull bangs from flung grenadoes created a continual drumming. Ball spanged and caromed from gun barrels, thonked into timbers and tore out gouts of dust, splinters, and lead splatters. Proteus's quarterdeck was quickly quilled with torn-up slivers of holystoned wood, making it hard to walk. The surgeon's mates, Mr. Hodson and the laconic French йmigrй
Mr. Maurice Durant, made continual trips up from below with the narrow, rope-strapped carrying boards borne by their loblollymen to haul shaken and wounded men below. The dead were piled about the bases of the masts!
'Yah pistols, sah,' his Coxswain, Andrews, said, fetching him a brace of double-barreled Mantons. 'I thought ya might like havin' yer Ferguson rifle, too.'
Lewrie stuck the pistols in his waist-belt, slung the cartouche box over his shoulder, and accepted a horn of priming powder, quickly loading the deadly-accurate breechloader rifled musket. Shooting back, he decided, beat pacing about like a fart in a trance, all hollow! He took aim at an officer in a bicorne hat, swung slowly to follow him as he paced about, bellowing and waving a sword, and…
'Got you!' he exulted after the muzzle-smoke cleared, seeing his foeman fall into the arms of a pair of Dutch mates, then drop below the bulwarks and disappear. One turn of the screw-breech lever, below the trigger and lock assembly; lower the barrel, rip a cartouche open with his teeth, shove it ball-end forward into the barrel, then screw in the opposite direction to close the breech. Frizzen at half-cock, the pan open for a touch of priming powder; snap the frizzen shut; draw the lock to full cock, and search for another target… a thickset gunner's mate or something like that, up on the gangway and urging his crews to load… a careful aim, a pent breath…
'Got you!' he crowed again.
'Sir, their fire's slacking!' Langlie pointed out, coming over to his side. 'We're shooting her to pieces, they don't have Smashers, and we're turnin' her into a sieve! They're gatherin' amidships, with pikes and pistols. I think they're about to board us!'
By then, Lewrie was half-deaf and it took concentration to heed Langlie's words, mostly by lip-reading. But the only cannon fire he could hear was now under his own feet. He lowered his gaze to see the damage done to the Dutch frigate's hull, and it did, indeed, resemble a sieve or colander-one could not find a stretch of her scantling more than ten feet long without a ragged, star-shaped hole punched in it! He saw sailors and Marines gathering, cutlasses waving, surviving officers, mates or midshipmen shoving them into order…
'Mister Wyman! Last rounds, then take up arms!' Lewrie called down to the gun-deck. 'Boarders! Mister Devereux, your Marines, down from the tops, and ready to re-'
Something went Bang-splang-fwee! off a quarterdeck 6-pounder, a blink before Lewrie felt as if someone had just hit his left arm with a waggon-tongue! He was spun about in a half-circle leftward, to trip over his own feet and tumble to the deck!
'Goddammit!' he meant to shout, but it came out rather weakly, even to his ears. 'Cause I'm gun-deaf? he had to wonder. Suddenly, he was shivering cold, with only the cattle-brand heat in his arm to warm him. He looked up at Langlie and Devereux, as if from the bottom of a well, with the sides blotting out most of the sky, and…
'B-boarders!' he insisted, the ringing in his ears smothering his own words.
'Surgeon's Mate!' someone was keening.
'Never fear, sir… we'll take her for you,' someone very like Langlie whispered, leaning down over his face as he was jostled by many hands, soaring aloft like a freed soul, with something hard and narrow under him as he was quickly bound with ropes like some damned soul for spitting and roasting on the Devil's rфtisserie.
'Proteuses… away boarders! Away boarders!'
'No, repel boarders, not…!'
He was sure he'd said it, but no one paid him any mind but for Mr. Durant, who was making clucking noises and shaking his head sadly.
Daylight was gone; he was plunged into reeking, foetid darkness, feet-first into the 'fug' of unwashed bodies, bilges, and stinks; below into glim-lit Hades. To the cockpit on the orlop, where the wailing and shrieking of the eternally damned soared and chorused in an atonal agony. Those saved, above, shouted Hosannas of blissful and eternal joy- though they were making a rather noisy, tinkery, metallic and feu de joie music along with their paeans!
'It must come off, at once,' Mr. Thomas Shirley, the twentyish surgeon, lowed like a cow, spouting some dry, esoteric dog-Latin.
'Non, non… ze humerus is broken, not shattered, m'sieur,' Durant (or somebody Froggish, anyway!) insisted. 'See, ze axillary responds when I stick 'is palm, and…'
'Ow! Bloody…!'
'Ze blood loss suggest ze axillary artery is
A large pewter cup of rum was shoved under Lewrie's nose and he drank it down, just before a leather gag was put between his teeth to bite on when the pain got severe… which it did!
They probed, retracting wool coat and silk shirt shards, taking out slivers of bone and tiny splashes of lead, Durant insisting that a watered tincture of brandy be splashed around inside the wound, over the instruments, before they squeezed, twisted, and pried at his arm to see how it lined up before getting shot… and re-set it!
'A simple fracture, after all, sir.'
'Sonofagoddamnbitchl'llbloodykillyourmiserableFrogass!'
'You are welcome, M'sieur Capitaine. Next?'
He was bound in linen, with lots of batting, also soaked in the French йmigrй's watered brandy, that stung like Blazes; over the bandages, two wooden belaying pins were bound taut with twine; some spare Number Eight sailcloth, the lightest aboard, was fashioned into a neat sling; and he was stowed forrud on a straw-filled mattress, armed with another hefty measure of rum, then ignored.
'We took her, sir! We took her!' Langlie was crowing about a quarter-hour later, coming to his side with flecks of blood (hopefully someone else's!) on his coat facings, his cheek, and shirt. 'Oh, 'twas a hard fight, but we took her! You were right to call for boarders, Captain Lewrie. Had they formed and attempted to board us, well…! But we beat them to it, and broke their spirit into the bargain.'
Lewrie could but gawp at him (a trifle drunkenly by then) and wonder what the Blazes this idiot was babbling about!
'Very good, sir. Just get me out of this cess-pit and back to my roomin' house, 'fore the wife finds me, hey?'
'Sir?' Lt. Langlie gawped in puzzlement.
'Oh, never mind, I'm too sleepy t'care.'
'And that, sirs, is how I conquered a Dutch frigate,' Captain Alan Lewrie, RN, concluded with a blithe laugh. 'Stood up shirtless, strapped to a carryin' board by the windward mizen shrouds, with a cup of rum in my hands, towin' out our prize! Speaking of… allow me to propose another toast. To Lieutenant Anthony Langlie, my able First Officer, and the true hero of the piece. He placed the Batavian Navy Orangespruit, a thirty-six gun Fifth Rate frigate, on a platter for me, and served her up… well done!'
His fellow diners gave out a loud, prolonged cheer, along with the curious onlookers who had gathered to peer over their shoulders as the tale was told, and they clapped and laughed, as well. Handsome women in the height of Fashion that season fanned and flushed, or made as if they'd swoon. They raised a rousing 'For He's A Jolly Good Fellow,' to which Lewrie nodded and smiled, raising his port glass in answering salute and acknowledgement.
Of course, it made a good tale, a 32-gun taking a 36-gun; what the public expected their Navy to accomplish. Of course, he did not tell them of his mistakes, of stumbling about in the smoke, damn near lost, of his sin of over- confidence, of yielding the wind-gauge to the Dutch so stupidly, being drawn like a lamb to the slaughter into the mouths of the guns of a doughty, wily, and desperate enemy captain, who had taken much the same precautions as he, to be the biter and not the bit, that day!
No, this crowd wouldn't appreciate unvarnished truth, nor would they tolerate another toast, this to the dead,
