Hunt for White Gold

Chapter Twenty-Five





Having had the temerity to unbatten the aft hatch and go below, Hugh Harris brought up his fiddle. He plucked and stamped to the rhythm of the sea, moving along the line of the gunners and winking at them all on every downstroke of his bow-arm.

Devlin watched the Mumvil creeping away northwards. Was she fleeing? No matter. His starboard guns were primed and they would be on her stern in four more risings of the bow. The deck of the Talefan became a jolly place and the gun-crew waited for their guns to float across the three windows of the stern cabin. But the wind seemed to chill Devlin’s neck as he thought on the brown coat and the burgundy hat of the man with the spyglass that commanded the sloop running from his range.

He stepped away from the bulwark and stopped Hugh in his music. ‘Are your pistols readied, Hugh?’

Hugh lowered his bow and looked left and right at the pair of duelling pistols stuck in his belt, tied to a linen sling around his neck. ‘Aye, Cap’n. Always.’ And he went back to his fiddle. Dandon was at Devlin’s side, drawn by the hard look on his captain’s face. He had seen the look a year ago, in the stockade on The Island, before Coxon had appeared and the Shadow had not arrived and all seemed lost. Then, Devlin had slashed into a table with a sword in rising frustration, the frustration of an intelligent man thwarted. Before he could question his captain’s mood Devlin turned to him.

‘Take down the time, Dandon.’ Devlin’s eyes had a guilty look about them and he paused, glancing away and then back again as the sun caught the Mumvil’s sails like a glinting shield. He watched her as she began to heel around to larboard, turning over, showing fresh strakes shining as the sea ran off and her keel leant with bracing yards.

Needlessly some voice yelled out, ‘She’s coming about!’ and all of them watched the Mumvil turn.

Watson was ready but now the prize’s stern spun away from him, and his guns had yet to bear. ‘She’s coming back in!’ He checked his hawser coils. There were rounds enough. ‘Warm her bow, lads if we can’t have her stern!’

‘Aim them high!’ Devlin yelled at Watson. ‘Her bow’s no use to me. Take her wind.’

Watson and his gunners tugged out the quoins and the muzzles rose. Eight hundred yards between the wooden worlds. The Mumvil wheeled around; the sea boiled white and angry beneath her as she struggled against the waves, her bowsprit pointing towards them now, her powder-scorched sails facing and full. Whoever the captain was he was racing his ship to face a broadside that would surely take at least his jibs and forecourse and with luck the mast as well. It was foolish, desperate even, and Devlin stood back to let Watson to his work and wondered what he would have planned if he were standing on the sloop flying towards him.

Five hundred yards and Toombs’s bowsprit began to cross the path of Devlin’s starboard guns. The Mumvil turned fully. Surely not to ram? Coming like a bull, but towards loaded guns? Pride perhaps? A final glory of a dead ship?

The bosun yelled to his mate and they heaved the fore-course up to slow the Talefan just enough to let Watson’s guns have a measured passage across the Mumvil’s draft and eat her bow like chopping wood.

Hugh Harris stopped his tune and the tiny sound of Watson dribbling his powder trail across the touch-holes of his guns and the hiss of the slow-match drew every man’s eye.

Dandon sidled up to Devlin again, his own confidence wavering amid the sight of the ship ploughing towards their guns. ‘Surely this is suicide for them, Patrick? Does he intend to ram us?’

Devlin did not turn from watching the bowsprit ducking and stabbing ever forward. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘It’s a bad angle to board anyways.’

Watson danced across all four of the guns with his linstock and the powder flared into life.

Dandon weaved away from Devlin’s imminent fury as he spoke. ‘Surely he knows we’re about to empty our guns at him?’

And that was it. To empty the guns. Surely he knows we’re about to empty our guns at him?

‘He’s going to club-haul at us!’ he hollared to all as it came to him. ‘He’s to drop anchor at us! He’ll swing round to bear!’ Devlin sprang forward to a swab bucket on the deck plucking the rope handle as he yelled.

‘Dowse them, John! He wants us to fire!’ He tossed the water at the breech of number one just as she roared and hurtled back, shattering the bucket in Devlin’s hands.

Watson and the rest covered their ears as the guns rolled one by one in four drumbeats that tore through the Mumvil’s forecourse and the whole ship vanished in the white smoke, the sound of whipping cleatlines and stays whistling through the air.

‘Cap’n?’ Watson shouted back as his senses returned.

Devlin bellowed for all hands to reload. The cloud began to drift fore just as they heard the unmistakable splash of an anchor from the Mumvil.

The veil of the cannon’s breath lifted away to reveal Toombs’s broadside swinging towards them. The reloading froze on the Talefan as they stared over at all ten of Toombs’s minion guns aiming above the gunwale only a pistol shot away. The hiss of their touch-holes wafted like mocking laughter.

‘Down!’ Devlin bellowed and threw himself to the deck.


With two men lighting the touch-holes it took ten seconds to fire ten guns and Seth Toombs was the only man not clamping his hands to his ears but idly checking again the lock and leather-clasped flint of his pistol. He stood and watched the eighty pounds of double-shotted iron and chain explode away from his deck.

He winked at Howell, cowering behind the foremast, as the last gun echoed in the sails. If Devlin had been a better captain, thought Toombs, he would have noticed the fast heeling of the Mumvil as a sign of all the guns being shifted over to larboard, weighing her over. He would have noticed her leaning to her lee as she went at the Talefan under full forecourse.

His gunners had removed the quoins and the trucks of the five guns at the ports and dragged them back to angle over the gunwale. The starboard guns had been freed from their tackles and wheeled round to stand between and behind their brothers. Jury-rigged tackles reeved through the deck’s fairleads amidships. It was risky, a gamble. A pirate’s chance. All ten guns peered over the gunwale. One round – an avalanche of iron that would turn a weak sloop into a man-of-war for one murderous broadside.

Seth had bellowed for the starboard quarter anchor to be dropped just as the shot from the Talefan hazed his bow, jibs and forestays. As the anchor bit it would club-haul the ship round to bear.

The fluke had dug into the coral, the sudden reining of the hawser bucking the ship and heaving her round, just as the timoneer did the same. The effect was like braking a carriage at full pelt in a harness race, to make the corner or kill the driver, except that ships did not risk toppling over. Instead they turn, and turn fast. The scream of the ship as her seams resist is the only similarity.

When the smoke cleared from the Talefan’s broadside they were beam to beam, the caps of their spars fencing playfully. Seth’s guns stared ready at the powerless Talefan, an axe about to fall.

‘Fire!’ cried Seth, and snapped his own pistol at one of the grey shapes moving through the fog at the same instant his ten guns detonated at Devlin’s masts.

The Mumvil writhed with the recoil, the deck quaking in her seams. It was ten seconds of nothing but pounding guns and smoking wood. Had they been anything larger than four-pounders they may have snapped away, killing or maiming as they flew from their breeches. As it happened, each man eagerly picked up a loaded musket with a cheer, for not even an eyebrow was singed.

Seth climbed up the larboard shrouds to fire down onto Devlin’s deck, his smoke-filled eyes searching through the haze for the head of the Irish traitor. The ship opposite rolled in pain at each fresh fiery stab into her side.

It had been ten murderous seconds for Devlin and his men. After each new pounding from the guns beyond, Devlin had inched along the scuppers towards the cabin, aiming himself away from the splinters flying at his eyes and limbs.

A ton of yards and sail crashed to the deck all about. By the fourth shattering of wood his path was blocked by a cobweb of sheets and ratlines taller than a man and he looked over to the mainyards and maincourse shrouding the bodies of his men amidships.

The seconds dragged on and the rage continued. Three more and the topmasts came down like stone columns to the deck, crushing legs and skulls. Cries were cut short as men who had worked with wood and rope all their lives were suddenly spliced and hammered themselves.

The canvas and cordage had been a living thing only an hour before, its duty a world of tension and stays; now the iron had cleaved it free and four miles of rope and wood plummeted howling to the backs of the tiny men below.

Three more seconds passed and a storm of sawdust and choking smoke that tasted of paint and tar swirled around the deck. Devlin crawled away from the sight of bare bloody feet poking out of fallen sails and his hand lighted on a broken fiddle, its neck snapped, its strings splayed out like whiskers. He shoved it away for fear of what it might represent, then dived beneath the larboard bulwark to protect himself from the final storm of topsails and stays falling in defeat.

Slowly silence began to ripple through the air and the whisper of the sea and the creaking of the deck resumed as the world rolled on. Devlin’s ears then began to absorb the other sounds: the roars from the other ship and the coughing and groans of the dying.

Devlin knew what would come well enough and he crept from his cover of the cannons and the bulwark and pulled his pistol, shouting for hands, as bold as if an army were waiting below for his call.

He stood and looked about for those who could still stand. A face riven with gore stepped to his side, the stark whites of its eyes gleaming from the mask of blood running from the black wound across his scalp.

Devlin did not recognise the ghoul until the matched pair of duelling pistols clicked into life with a snap of his wrists. Then he warmed to the power of Hugh Harris by his shoulder.

‘I thought you lost, Hugh. I saw your fiddle broke.’

The red face spat a mouthful of blood. ‘They broke my fiddle?’ He kissed his pistols in turn. ‘I’ll eat the bastards when I’m done!’

More heads struggled from their stupor, blowing dust from the locks of their musketoons and pistols, before ducking from a volley of whistling musket balls splintering the deck. Then the risen men found the nerve to mock their opponents’ lamentable aim, vowing as one to show them how it should be done, before joining their captain’s side.

Only stumps of mast remained so there would be no climbing to the tops to hurl grenadoes or crow’s feet caltrops. It would be a fire-fight now, cutlass and shot. Lead and steel, and blood.

Devlin saw Watson, linstock still in hand, lying dead by his guns as he counted the men still with him. Lawson, the bosun, locked his musketoon and crouched ready. Others checked their pistols and wound lighted fuses around their wrists for the grenadoes stuffed within their shirts.

Six, Devlin counted. Six, and him, still fighting, and he called all their names as he strode to the starboard gunwale to await the grappling hooks, plucking a boarding axe from the remains of the mainmast and passing it to one of his brethren to hack at the ropes as they landed.

He stepped into something wet amongst a mess of cloth and rope and looked down to his boot in the writhing guts of Sam Fletcher. Fletcher belched a torrent of watery blood and looked up at Devlin with a gasp.

Devlin lifted his foot, foolishly apologising, and lowered his pistol to Fletcher’s head.

Fletcher whispered to his captain, his hands trying to tuck his insides back into place, his voice too rasping to hear.

Devlin clicked his lock. ‘What you say, Sam?’

‘My mother, Pat. Don’t tell me mother about me.’

‘You didn’t hang, Sam,’ and he winked at the boy for the last time.

‘Nor you, mate,’ Fletcher coughed a hot dribble of blood. His eyes closed to the sight of Devlin emptying his pistol into his forehead.

Devlin moved on, reloading as he went, using the clicks and snaps of his weapon to shake the memory before it formed. Then he heard his name, like a curse, bellowed in a Bristol accent from the ship opposite and he raised his pistol to the man astride the gunwale, hanging off the shrouds, aiming at him with a snarling grin.