Throughout the
Finally, the parting breechings of the majority of the guns loosed an avalanche of cast iron in a precipitous descent. Gun after gun crashed into the ship's side, embedding themselves in softening timber, dislodging futtocks and transmitting tremulous shocks throughout the fabric of the hull. Such dislocations sprung more leaks far below, where the upward pressure of the water bore unnaturally upon her heavily listing hull and found the weaknesses of rot. The roundness of her underwater body caved inwards in a slow, unseen implosion that those far above, in terror of their lives, felt only as a great cataclysmic juddering.
Drinkwater, clinging to a train tackle ring-bolt, felt the tremor. Almost, it seemed, directly above his head, one of the half-dozen six-pounder guns that had lined the starboard rail of the quarterdeck strained at its breeching. He watched the strands of the heavy rope unravel ominously. The sight of it galvanized him with the reactive urgency of self-preservation. He began to scrabble upwards, fascinated by the fraying rope-yarns, as though they counted out the remaining seconds of his existence. He did not dare catch hold of the gun-carriage lest his weight accelerate the rope's parting, and stretched instead for the gun-tackle on the left-hand side of the carriage, the hauling part of which now dangled untidily downwards. Somewhere in the back of his mind was the image of the ship's starboard side at which he had glanced out of idle curiosity only a few moments earlier. If he could make the rail and get over it, he might yet escape!
His fingers closed on the gun-tackle, worked at it as his right foot, lodged on the eyebolt, raised him an inch, his fingers scrabbling for a better grip. Then he caught and grasped it and was about to grab it with his other hand when the gun breeching failed. The six-pounder ran away and he found himself pulled the last few feet up the violently canted deck as the descending gun unrove the gun-tackle. The truck hit his foot and he kicked at it just as his eyes caught sight of the proximity of the standing block to his fingers. He let go of the rope, kicked again, found a momentary foothold on the slewing and falling gun-carriage, and grabbed another rope which had dropped from a pin on the mizen rail. He slid back as it ran slack, then drew tight; he began to climb, frantic in his movements, gasping for breath, his objective in sight. With a final effort dredged from the inner resource of pure terror, he hauled himself up to the pinrail. Here there was no lack of handholds and, almost exhausted with the effort, his heart beating in his breast and his breath rasping painfully in his throat, he threw himself over it. Panting and shaking, he glanced back, almost vertically downwards. The mainyard, its extremity already in the water, had stabbed down across the deck of the
He turned away, shuddering too much from exertion and visceral fear to be able to stand. Instead he crawled past the open ports of the starboard side whence came the loud sibilance of compressed air roaring upwards with columns of debris. He understood now why he could not hear anyone shouting or screaming. Every unsecured port on the starboard side stood open, venting a furious mist in which unidentifiable items flew upwards, to flutter down beside the ship. What had once been a woman's shawl or a baby's diaper, a book, a shoe or a man's hat, fell into the surrounding sea as flotsam. Drinkwater pulled himself together as he realized that, shallow though the water was, it was deep enough to swallow whole the vast bulk of the
Perhaps ten other men and a solitary woman who screamed and rent her hair in despair were visible on the starboard side. Another man, a marine by his tunic, was hauling himself out of an open port on the middle gun-deck, the water running off him. Drinkwater scrambled towards the woman, but she turned on him in a fury, her eyes wild with dementia, a torrent of abuse pouring from her. He turned aft, thinking again of Hope below in the admiral's state-cabin. Perhaps he could free the stern windows before it was too late, but the wreck beneath his feet trembled again and suddenly the venting roar died away and the circle of water about him approached.
He was on his feet now, running aft in search of
He had survived the immersion, being dragged painfully over the gig's transom and surrendered to the solicitous Appleby who had chafed his naked and bruised body with brandy. He had been touched by the anxious concern of White and Devaux, and later mourned the loss of his journals.
He was never to know, though he might afterwards have guessed, that a few days later a sabre-winged fulmar, sweeping low over the wave crests somewhere to the westward, in the overfalls that run off St Alban's Head, had its roving eye caught by a patch of white. It banked steeply and rolled almost vertically as it made its curving turn, keeping the white patch in view as it swooped back on its interminably hungry reconnaissance. But the white paper was of no nutritional value to the fulmar and it levelled off and skimmed on westwards towards Portland Bill, its wings motionless as they had been all the time it had surveyed the sheet of paper.
The secretary's ink had run by then and no one could have read Kempenfelt's last signature, nor that the paper was a commission made out in the King's name for a certain insignificant Nathaniel Drinkwater.
CHAPTER 3
The Flogging
The North Sea was a heaving mass of grey crests which broke in profusion, the pallid spume of their dissolution driving downwind. Under close-reefed topsails and the clew of the foretopmast staysail,
Everything below decks was its usual compound of stink and damp. Sea water squirted through the interstices of closed gun-ports as the lee side buried itself, and the crew were employed at the pumps for an hour and a half every watch. Men barely spoke to each other; nothing beyond the barest detail of duty was discussed and every man, irrespective of his station, sought only the meagre comfort of his hammock or cot as he came below from the greater misery of the deck.
Relieved by White, Midshipman Drinkwater made his bruised and buffeted way below and clambered wearily into his hammock. The dark of the orlop deck was punctured by the swaying lanterns which imparted their weird and monstrous shadows as they oscillated at different rates to the laden hammocks. From below came the swirl and effluvia of the bilge, counterpoint to the creaks and groans of the frigate's hull and the faint thrum of the gale roaring above through the mast and rigging.
Despite his exhaustion, Drinkwater was unable to sleep. His active brain rebelled against the fatigue of his body. Dulled by the monotony of the gale and the necessity of ignoring his protesting and empty stomach, it now refused to let him drift into the seaman's one palliative for misery, the balm of exhausted sleep.
It hardly seemed possible that
