is it red?’ Sharpe asked. ‘That sloop we saw had a blue one.’
‘It depends which admiral you serve,’ Peel explained. ‘We take orders from a rear admiral of the red, but if he was blue we’d fly blue and if he was white, white, and if he was yellow he wouldn’t command any ships anyway. Simple, really.’ He grinned. The red flag, which had the union flag in its upper corner, stirred sluggishly as a rare gust of warm air disturbed its folds. Off to the east, where the gust came from, there were heaps of clouds which Peel said were over Africa. ‘And you’ll note the water’s discoloured,’ he added, pointing over the side to a muddy brown sea, ‘which means we’re off a river mouth.’
Chase timed the gun crews, promising an extra tot of rum to the fastest men. The sound of the guns was astonishing. It pounded the eardrums and shivered the ship before fading slowly into the immensity of sea and sky. The gunners tied scarves about their ears to diminish the shock of the noise, but many of them were still prematurely deaf. Sharpe, curious, went down to the lower deck where the big thirty-two-pounders lurked and he stood in wonder as the guns were fired. He had his fingers in his ears, yet, even so, the whole dark space, punctuated with bright shafts of smoky sunlight which pierced through the open gunports, reverberated with each gun’s firing. The sound seemed to punch him in the abdomen, it rang in his head, it filled the world. One after the other, the guns hammered back. Each barrel was close to ten feet long and each gun weighed nearly three tons, and each shot strained the gun’s breeching rope taut as an iron bar. The breeching rope was a great cable, fixed with eyebolts to the ship’s ribs, that looped through a ring at the gun’s breech. Half-naked gunners, sweat glistening on their skins, leaped to sponge out the vast barrels while the gun’s chief stopped the venthole with a leather-encased thumb. Men put in powder bags and shot, rammed them home, then hauled the weapon’s muzzle out through the gunport with the rope-and-pulley tackles fixed on either sideof the carriage.
‘You’re not aiming at anything!’ Sharpe had to shout to the fifth lieutenant who commanded one group of guns.
‘We ain’t marksmen,’ the lieutenant, who was called Holderby, shouted back. ‘If it comes to battle we’ll be so close to the bastards that we can’t miss! Twenty paces at most, and usually less.’ Holderby paced down the gundeck, ducking under beams, touching men’s shoulders at random. ‘You’re dead!’ he shouted. ‘You’re dead!’ The chosen men grinned and sat gratefully on the shot gratings. Holderby was thinning the crews, as they would be thinned by battle, and watching how well the ‘survivors’ manned their big guns.
The guns, like those on the Calliope, were all fired by flintlocks. The army’s field artillery, none of it so big as these guns, was fired with a linstock, a slow match that glowed red as it burned, but no naval captain would dare have a glowing red-hot linstock lying loose on a gundeck where so much powder lay waiting to explode. Instead the guns had flintlocks, though, if the flintlock failed, a linstock was suspended in a nearby tub half-filled with water. The flintlock’s trigger was a lanyard which the gunner would twitch, the flint would fall, the spark flash and then the powder-packed reed in the touch-hole hissed and a four- or five-inch flame leaped upwards before the world was consumed by noise as another flame, twice as long as the gun’s barrel, seared into the instant cloud of smoke as the gun crashed back.
Sharpe climbed to the deck, and from the deck to the maintop, for only from there could he see beyond the massive bank of smoke to where the shots fell. They fell ragged, some seemingly going as much as a mile before they splashed into the sullen sea, others ripping the surface into spray only a hundred yards from the ship. Chase, as the lieutenant had said, was not training his men to be marksmen, but to be fast. There were gunners aboard who boasted they could lay a ball onto a floating target tub at half a mile, but the secret of battle, Chase insisted, was getting close and releasing a storm of shot. ‘It doesn’t have to be aimed,’ he had told Sharpe. ‘I use the ship to aim the guns. I lay the guns alongside the enemy and let them massacre the bastard. Speed, speed, speed, Sharpe. Speed wins battles.’
It was just like musketry, Sharpe realized. On land the armies came together and, as often as not, it was the side that could fire its muskets fastest that would win. Men did not aim muskets, because they were so inaccurate. They pointed their muskets, then fired so that their bullet was just one amongst a cloud of balls that spat towards the enemy. Send enough balls and the enemy would weaken. Lay two ships close together and the one that fired fastest should win in the same way, and so Chase harried his gunners, praising the swift ones and chivvying the laggards, and all morning the sea about the ship quivered to the vibration of the guns. A long track of wavering and thinning powder smoke lay behind the ship, proof that she made some progress, though it was frustratingly slow. Sharpe had brought his telescope up the mast and now trained it eastwards in hope of seeing land, but all he could see was a dark shadow beneath the cloud. He shortened the barrel and trained the glass downwards to see Malachi Braithwaite pacing up and down the quarterdeck, flinching every time a gun cracked.
What to do about Braithwaite? In truth Sharpe knew exactly what to do, but how to do it on a ship crammed with over seven hundred men was the problem. He collapsed the telescope and put it into a pocket, then, for the first time, climbed from the maintop up above the main topsail to the crosstrees, a much smaller platform than the maintop, where he perched beneath the main topgallant sail. Yet another sail rose above that, the royal, up somewhere in the sky, though not so high that men did not climb to it, for there was a lookout poised above the royal’s yard, contentedly chewing tobacco as he stared westwards. The deck looked small from here, small and narrow, but the air was fresh for the ever-present stink of the ship and the rotten-egg stench of the powder smoke did not reach this high.
The tall mast trembled as two guns fired together. A freak breath of wind blew the smoke away and Sharpe saw the sea rippling in a frantic fan pattern away from the guns’ blasts. Grass did that in front of a field gun, except that the grass became scorched and sometimes caught fire. The sea settled and the smoke thickened.
‘Sail!’ the man above Sharpe bellowed to the deck, the hail so loud and sudden that Sharpe jumped in fright. ‘Sail on the larboard beam!’
Sharpe had to think which side of the ship was larboard and which starboard, but managed to remember and trained his telescope out towards the west, but he could see nothing except a hazy line where the sea met the sky.
‘What do you see?’ Haskell, the first lieutenant, called up through a speaking trumpet.
‘Royals and tops,’ the man shouted, ‘same course as us, sir!’
The gunfire ceased, for Chase now had something else to worry about. The gunports were closed and the big guns lashed tight as a half-dozen men scurried up the rigging to add their eyes to the lookout’s gaze. Sharpe could still see nothing on the western horizon, even with the help of the telescope. He was proud of his eyesight, but being at sea demanded a different kind of vision to looking for enemies on land. He swept the glass left and right, still unable to find the strange ship, then a sudden tiny blur of dirty white broke the horizon; he lost it, edged the glass back, and there she was. Just a blur, nothing but a blur, but the man above him, without any glass, had seen it and could distinguish one sail from another.
A man settled beside Sharpe on the crosstrees. ‘It’s a Frenchie,’ he said.
Sharpe recognized him as John Hopper, the big bosun of the captain’s gig. ‘You can’t tell at this distance, surely?’ Sharpe asked.
‘Cut of the sails, sir,’ Hopper said confidently. ‘Can’t mistake it.’
‘What is it, Hopper?’ Chase, bareheaded and in shirt-sleeves, hauled himself onto the platform.
‘It could be her, sir, it really could,’ Hopper said. ‘She’s a Frenchie,
