Victory

He felt a cold wetness: a grey advance of drizzle brought a soft misery that seemed to shroud the scenes of dying and ruin from mortal eyes. It fell gently, dissolving the blood so that Englishman and Frenchman mingled in fraternal embrace before trickling together through the scuppers into the sea.

Kydd pulled himself together. There was now no alternative to yielding: he must therefore face— But, no, he saw one last move . . . As the frigate completed its turn and took up for its final run he wheeled the wounded sloop off the wind and steered straight for the privateer to leeward. By feinting at it and causing it to run directly from his ship, Kydd was bringing it into the line of fire from the frigate chasing Teazer. They would not fire on their own: for the moment Teazer was safe.

But they did.

The broadside erupted without warning. The storm of shot that broke over Teazer was cataclysmic, smashing into her with an intensity that numbed the senses. A series of unconnected images flashed in front of Kydd. The fore-hatch bursting upwards a split second before a ball ended its flight with a colossal clang against an opposite gun. A ship’s boy snatched from the deck and flung like a bloody rag into the scuppers. Hallum’s face turning towards him in horror and pain, his mouth working as the splinter transfixing his lower body turned in the wound. And then came the deafening timber-cracking of the main-mast as it fell in dignified but awful finality, taking what remained of the fore-mast with it in a tangle of cordage, ruined spars and canvas.

It had finished. It was defeat. The end of everything.

As if in a dream he watched men slowly emerge from under the wreckage, go to the wretched bodies, stare in haggard disbelief at the passing frigate – and then from forward came the single crash of a gun.

Squinting past the heaped ruin of spars and canvas he saw it was his gunner’s mate, Stirk, dragging a foot behind him but going methodically from gun to gun, sighting carefully and banging off defiance at their nemesis – whatever else, Teazer would be seen to go down fighting.

Eyes pricking, Kydd had not the heart to stop him. The frigate began its final turn to take possession of them – and, extraordinarily, one of Stirk’s shots told. At the precise point of the slings of its crossjack there was a sudden jerk, tiny pieces flew off and the spar dipped awkwardly, then fell, rending the mizzen topsail above it and engulfing the driver.

The frigate – name still unknown – fell back on its course. Disabled and unable to turn back, it eventually disappeared into the grey mists of rain. The privateer stayed with it and suddenly Teazer was alone and desperately wounded in the desolate expanse of the Atlantic.

Dizzy with reaction Kydd mustered the Teazers. They seemed dazed, the petty officers half-hearted in their actions, the men shuffling in a trance. Kydd didn’t waste time on words: if they were to survive it needed every man to rally to the aid of their ship. The time of grieving would come later.

Teazer wallowed sickeningly broadside to the seas, her fore-mast a three-foot stump, her main a giant jagged splinter. It was a deeply forlorn experience to see nothing aloft but empty sky, and with the loss of steadying sails, the vessel lurched to the swell like a log.

The first urgency was for a party of men to find the wounded and carry them below. The dead were heaved over the side. Hallum was dragged with rough kindliness to the lee of the capstan where he died quietly. Another party was sent to find the few Frenchmen still aboard who had hidden in fear of their own ship’s broadside.

But the main chore was to clear the deck and try by any means to get sail on. All hands turned to, including Renzi, who stood in for Purchet and led the fo’c’sle party to set a series of purchases on the main spars and haul them clear before starting work on a species of sheer-leg. Even a rag of sail set to the streaming oceanic winds would serve.

Kydd forced his mind to coolness as he reviewed their situation. There was just one thing in their favour: these Atlantic winds were south-westerlies that blew directly for England. If they could keep sail on Teazer they would eventually make an English port, however long it took.

The carpenter brought welcome news. He had sounded the wells and made his rounds and could confidently say there was no hurt to Teazer’s stout Maltese hull that he could not deal with – in a jet of warmth, Kydd realised that it was more than possible his command would be able to lay her before long to the tender care of a dockyard, her grievous wounds to be healed.

‘Pass the word for the purser’s steward. He’s to see every man shall get his double tot.’ There would be inhuman effort required to cut through the maze of ropes and canvas and shift the heavy spars, and little enough time to do it for it was now well into the afternoon.

Other thoughts intruded. Would the frigate return? Their fallen crossjack would have torn down much of the mizzen’s ropery and would not easily be mended, not this day – and by morning Teazer would be well away from the scene of the action. Kydd thrust away the possibility that the frigate captain could calculate their uncontrolled drift and lie in wait for them.

And where were they in this immensity of sea? Their desperate slant across the Channel and out into the Atlantic had been only hazily marked, the dead-reckoning tentative at best and their last frenzied moves not noted at all. The leaden sky offered no hope of a sextant sight – they were to all intents and purposes lost and adrift.

The day wore on. At three bells in the first dog-watch the young Seaman Palmer choked on blood and died. No longer in action, Teazer saw him buried at sea in the hallowed way. An early dusk put an end to their efforts to show sail and for the long hours of night they were left with their thoughts and weariness, awaiting the dawn and what it would bring.

With the tendrils of morning light spreading, there was hope. The sheer-legs took a boom lashed to the summit and a reefed fore-topgallant spread slowly below to the cheers of Teazer’s company. Poulden hurried aft and took the wheel again, feeling for the life that was now filling her.

A fore-and-aft staysail rigged from the jagged main gave control and purpose in their creeping progress – until a dreaded call came from a sharp-eyed seaman forward. The grey cloud-bank ahead had firmed. Ushant.

If their crazily lashed-up sail could not allow them to double the wicked northern headlands they would end driven by the same wind inexorably into the iron-hard cliffs.

Kydd tried everything: sweeps on the starboard side, scraps of sail everywhere they could be set, manhandling the guns aft – but it was not enough. In the dying light of day Teazer touched once, then again, before lurching to a stop on the dark, kelp-strewn Chaussee, a series of sub-sea reefs in the shadow of the ominous craggy heights of the ?le de Keller.

Slewing sideways immediately, she lifted, then sagged, with a jarring, grinding finality, canted immovably over