The Barbed Crown

Chapter 30





Perched a hundred feet above the sea, I had a strange sense of detachment as the battle began. I felt wedged into a box seat, watching an elaborate stage production. The long, greasy swells kept us sharpshooters lazily rocking as if we were nested in a tree, the ships moving with the stately sway of giraffes. The quick thud of the French and Spanish guns seemed disconnected from this nautical minuet at first, too excited to fit the panorama’s languorous mood. But the gunfire slowly rose in frequency to become a rolling thunder, its urgency reminding me why we were here. The ocean began to erupt from splashing cannonballs. The shooting also settled the crews of the Combined Fleet, putting them to work. They cheered each rippling broadside, gray-white clouds of gunsmoke hanging like fog because there was almost no breeze to disperse it. As a result our hulls were gradually shrouded, and the shooting became half-blind.

The British ships sailed directly toward us in ominous silence, firing not a shot. Many of the French and Spanish cannons initially missed, demonstrating their lack of practice, and the Nelson columns glided ahead in a corridor of geysers. As the distance narrowed to five hundred yards, however, accuracy grew. I began to see splinters fly, ropes snap, and holes open up in sails, perforated into lace. Seven different vessels blasted away at the lead ship of Nelson’s southern column, chips spinning as if she were being whittled.

“Royal Sovereign,” a French marine sergeant reported after peering through his glass. “Not Nelson, but someone just as eager. Collingwood, perhaps.”

“Where’s Nelson then?”

He pointed to the lead ship of the northerly column, every possible sail set as it drifted downwind. “The one coming for us.”

Lucas had failed me, putting us in the path of the dangerous admiral instead of on the battle’s periphery.

You can never find a coward when you need one.

Fifteen minutes after the opening shots to the south the Victory came under our own fire, our guns rippling and our ship heeling to their kick. But the English flagship sailed majestically on, utterly silent, masts scraping heaven, sails swelling like a proud chest, and its sides bulging like a bicep and studded with guns. We were frantic to stop the enemy flagship before it pierced our line, and yet it seemed impervious to anything we did. Guns roared in broadside after broadside, and the sound boomed up to us in claps of air. Sailors’ ears would bleed even when wrapped in kerchiefs, and some would go deaf for days or a lifetime.

Finally, our attempt to slow and blind the enemy by blasting away at its rigging became successful. The studding sails that extended from the main yards of Victory were shot away, fluttering down like tumbling ducks. The foresail turned to ribbons. With stays cut, the mizzen topsail of the English ship snapped and tumbled, hanging awkwardly against lower lines and poised like an arrow at the helm below. A cannonball bounced off one of the English anchors and it sagged.

I could see the blue-coated English officers standing stiffly on their quarterdeck with little to do but demonstrate courage. The flagship’s great wheel disintegrated in a cloud of splinters. They flinched and stayed standing, even as the helmsmen died. The fresh black and yellow paint was beginning to be gouged with scars of raw wood. Nonetheless, Victory swung to starboard, obviously steered from somewhere below, and calmly passed down our line. Damnation! The perfect place to pierce our line was between Bucentaure, directly ahead, and Redoutable. This was as bad luck as at the Nile.

Victory seemed almost impervious to the punishment it was taking, plowing ahead through a rain of cannonballs, but then a group of red-coated marines suddenly tumbled like pins in a bowl. A still-cradled ship’s boat erupted into pieces, its planks whirling like scythes. I heard English screams. Surely they’d turn away? The enemy flagship was taking a terrible pounding, and maybe we could really hammer it to a halt before Nelson achieved his melee. But no, for the first time the Victory’s port batteries let loose in return as she cruised down our line, the wood of French ships flinching from their punch. Stout wood quivered. Masts reeled.

Redoutable had yet to receive any fire.

My mouth was dry, and I had to remember to swallow.

Then Victory turned again, to pierce our formation, and slid into a fog of French gunsmoke to slip at no more than walking pace between Villeneuve’s flagship and our own Redoutable. The three-decker was only eight feet higher, but it seemed to tower over us. The English were so close that I could clearly hear the calls of the British helmsman below, a calm, “Steady! Steady as she goes!” The hats of the officers were visible through the smoke as they paced like toy soldiers in a toy courtyard. The French marines began to fire at them.

“Shoot, shoot, American!”

There, could that be Nelson? I aimed at his foot and squeezed, hoping to chase the idiot to safety below. The shot struck the planking, and the man jumped but didn’t retreat. Why the pointless bravado?

To combat fear, I knew.

At the bow of the British ship I could see a crew crouched around an enormous sixty-eight-pound carronade, essentially a gigantic shotgun packed with five hundred musket balls. It was aimed not at us but at the windowed stern of Bucentaure on Victory’s other side, the mullioned glass glinting in the low, hazy sunlight of late October.

I wanted to shout warning, but it was pointless. Villeneuve knew his doom.

The English carronade fired.

The stern of Bucentaure dissolved into a penumbra of flying glass and window sash. The swarm of musket balls shot down the interior of the ship as if into a bag. There was an agonized bellow. The screams signaled to the lower decks of the English ship that they’d come within range, and as Victory slid across the stern of the French flagship, every other port gun, each loaded with two or three cannonballs, fired at point-blank range as it passed. More than a hundred round shot systematically crashed into Villeneuve’s command, creating havoc I could scarcely imagine. Cannon flipped and shattered. Companionway ladders dissolved into wooden splinters. The ship’s stern became a gaping cave, its interior splashed with blood like paint. Smoke rolled out from the ruins as if from a horizontal chimney.

In a single broadside, the French flagship was half-wrecked.

There was quiet as the British reloaded, enough so that I could hear the curses of French wounded floating across the water.

Then it was our turn. Captain Lucas shouted orders, the sound faint from my aerie, and we tried desperately to swing. Our bow strained to turn east so we could get our own guns parallel to the immense British flagship that was cutting our line ahead of us. But the wind remained feeble, the rudder sluggish, and we were too late. We’d punished the British ship as it had charged, and now it would have revenge.

Our bow slid into view of the cannon on Victory’s starboard side and once again its guns barked in turn, a steady thump like the pounding on a drum. Redoutable actually seemed to stutter and slow as the balls hit our prow, huge chunks of wood spiraling upward in crazy corkscrews. I saw cannonballs bounding off stout timbers and ricocheting out to splash. One of Redoutable’s two anchors was shot from its perch and plunged into the sea. Our foremast swayed in the storm of shot, yardarms and sails tumbling like limbs in a storm and punching through the netting to hit the deck with a crash. Sharpshooters on the foretop platform yelled as they fell, hitting the deck with a sickening thud. The mainmast swayed ominously, and the mizzen where I stood shuddered, meaning some of the cannonballs passed entirely through the Redoutable’s length and struck the base of our mast. I felt like a squirrel waiting while woodsmen chopped at my tree.

Better men than me report a strange coolness in battle, a sharpening of senses and attention to the business at hand that gives them robust courage.

Not today. This wasn’t my fight. I felt hideously exposed, caught in a nightmare from which I could not awake, my mind whirling.

“Reload, American!” Muskets went off in my ears, smoke stinging.

I did so mechanically but with deliberate slowness, not wanting to kill either English or French. The men around me shot ever more frantically, swearing in frustration as they sought to slow the English onslaught. Victory had raked two French ships at once, but now it was swinging parallel to Redoutable.

It was time to try the French tactics. “Hoist the grapnels!” Lucas cried.

We were about to collide and tie ourselves to the huge English flagship. Madness, madness! Yet the French soldiers and marines packed around me cheered lustily, anxious to wreak revenge against cannon with cutlass and grenade. I pressed back against the mast, happy to have the other sharpshooters between English bullets and me. One of our little company grunted and fell. His comrades unceremoniously bent, hoisted, and threw him over. Another abruptly sat, wounded and coughing, blood frothing at his lips. He was allowed to stay. English marines were crouched behind bulwarks, shooting up at us as we shot down at them.

The Victory could have avoided our boarding challenge by standing off, but instead swung toward us so that we angled together and crashed at the front. The Redoutable shook with the impact, but crewmen began assembling to board. A charge was our only chance. Meanwhile, the shattered Bucentaure with Admiral Villeneuve was drifting slowly north from Victory, no longer able to control the Combined Fleet and hammered again and again as other British ships broke the French and Spanish line and pounded it. Masts cracked and toppled. Guns disintegrated into fragments after being struck by a ball or overheating. Marines pitched from its rigging.

I looked out at the entire battle. By now it was cloaked with smoke. Clouds from sixty furiously firing ships had piled to the mast tops, so what I saw was a sea of fog lit by the flash of thousands of cannon. Metal shrieked, hissed, and flew so copiously that it occasionally rang like bells as opposing cannonballs collided in mid-air. The English seemed able to fire at demonic speed. As they out-paced the enemy more and more Combined Fleet guns fell silent, increasing Nelson’s advantage. They were gnawing us to impotence.

The battle was devolving into the pell-mell pounding that the admiral had wished for, capitalizing on the superiority of British training. With yards, sails, and entire masts coming down like crumbling scaffolding, warships dragged ever more ponderously. A broadside would ripple out, pulverizing a helplessly drifting opponent, and then long agonizing minutes of quiet would pass as the guns were laboriously reloaded and one ship or the other was brought around to repeat the cannonade. Knots of two, three, and four ships formed, some shooting all the way through a riddled enemy hull and accidentally hitting an ally on the other side. The clogging dead were unceremoniously tossed overboard, forming lines of floating corpses in tidal eddies.

There was only one rule. The faster you could kill, the greater the chance of not being killed.

Grapnels lashed the Victory and Redoutable together. The two hulls ground in the sickening swell, tumble homes touching like two breasts, and yardarms reached for each other like crisscrossing fingers. The ship’s rails, however, were several yards apart because of the bulge of the ships’ hulls. The gap was too far to leap and this put the Redoutable in a dilemma. Lucas had assumed he’d be fighting another two-decker, but Nelson’s path had linked him to a mighty three. That meant the British rail was a full deck above our own; the English sailors could leap down onto us but the French would have to climb up to them. Nor could Lucas’s men see who might be waiting for them, unless we on the mast tops cried warning.

Meanwhile, the two ships blasted into each other’s hulls. They were so close that Nelson’s crew no longer bothered to run out their guns after recoil, and in fact hurled buckets of water on their French enemy right after shooting so the muzzle flashes wouldn’t set both ships on fire. The gun decks were absolute pandemonium, guns leaping with each discharge, smoke so thick you couldn’t see, noise so loud you couldn’t hear, and comrades crushed as they fell. Some cannons were dismounted and shattered by screaming shot, setting off secondary explosions.

The only thing that kept terror at bay was the inability of any one man to see all the havoc; no one entirely knew what was happening beyond the little world of his own gun crew. I had an eagle’s view but was masked by smoke, so I felt more than saw the howling shot smashing Redoutable’s innards. The mizzenmast kept shaking as if thrashed by bear.

“Shoot, shoot, you damned American!” The topmen were hurling grenades that exploded with a flash in the fog.

My reluctance to fire meant I had time to see things the others missed. I grabbed the sleeve of the man who’d shouted and pointed toward the bow of the British ship. “We have to warn your comrades!”

About fifty French had emerged from the chaos belowdecks with sword, pike, and pistol, and were bunching on our foredeck to scramble up to the British vessel in hopes of seizing it. What they couldn’t see was that the starboard carronade, the one that hadn’t been used, was being swiveled to point at Lucas’s prepared attack. The massed boarders made a perfect target.

“There, there, shoot the English gunners!” the marine yelled to his fellows. “Swing down, American, and warn Captain Lucas!”

I left my rifle and slipped back through the lubber’s hole to shout out the danger so the French target of men could disperse. It seemed a wonderfully neutral task between shooting my British friends and refusing to do so for the French. I did shout warning, but couldn’t hear it myself in the roar of battle. I was also clumsy as the rigging swayed, and as slow descending the ratlines as I’d climbed. I felt sluggish, a fly on a sticky web.

So I was too late. Before I was halfway down the carronade fired.

The effect on Redoutable was as dramatic as the earlier blast into the stern of the Bucentaure. Again, a scythe of five hundred musket balls blasted out, this time spraying our French top deck like a gust of hail. I could actually see the shadow of the radiating cloud of lead as it kicked up a blizzard of splinters.

The gore was instantaneous. Sailors and marines were hurled like paper. Small arms went flying. Almost the entire boarding party fell dead or wounded, turning an attack into slaughter. Lucas’s charge ended before it could begin.

No sooner had the carronade blasted than the French topmen got the range and peppered the British gun crew with grenades and gunfire. Several English fell and the rest ran into their forecastle for cover. Boarders and defenders were both down now, temporary stalemate ensuing. The decks of the two warships were littered with casualties.

Not wanting to join chaos below, I clambered back to the mizzen platform, noting uneasily that there was more room than when I’d left. British marines had shot several of my companions out of our perch. Our concealing canvas curtain was dotted with bullet holes.

“There! Is that Nelson?”

The marksmen peered through a momentary clearing in the smoke. A diminutive man stood on the British quarterdeck with bodies sprawled around him. He was wearing a bicorn hat of command and a coat with embroidered decorations. He almost begged to be a target.

The wearer was either insane or waiting for glory. Muskets aimed.

“Not him!” I shoved against the soldiers, making them lurch, and the muskets flashed, shots flying wide.

“You imbecile!”

“Don’t cut him down like a dog.” It was a plea, a gasp. “He’s blessed by greatness.”

“You made us miss, traitor!” A fist smashed into my face. Then a knee hit my groin. I fell onto the fighting top, and boots kicked me. I lashed back in return, tripping men, trying to save the mad admiral who strutted below.

“Take his ship and take him prisoner, dammit!” I urged. “That’s the higher deed.”

They ignored me. “Take Gage’s rifle! It’s still loaded!”

I grabbed. “No!” But they wrestled it from my grasp, my fingers slipping from its carved butt. I clawed for the sniper’s legs, but I was still being pummeled. Then I heard the gun’s distinctive crack.

I rose to my knees, surprised to be alive and dreading to look. Someone important had fallen and was being carried below, a concealing handkerchief draped over his face.

“We’ve shot the admiral!” a sergeant bellowed down to Lucas. “Their deck is clear. Now, now, board!”

Indeed, Victory’s top decks looked almost deserted except for a handful of marines crouching behind their gunwale. The wheel was smashed, the boats exploded, and dead and wounded lay everywhere. The carronades were abandoned. Exploded French grenades littered the planking with fragments of metal, and a steady collapse of rigging had choked the main deck with an avalanche pan of wreckage. Far below, where the hulls ground together, I could see stabs of fire as more British and French cannon went off, tearing out the guts of the ships.

It didn’t seem survival was possible for any of us.

Captain Lucas was staggering on his own quarterdeck from a wound, but now he bellowed like a bear at his men down below. “Come! They’ve fled their main deck! Leave the guns! We can seize them from above!”

For a seventy-six-gun two-decker to conquer the fabled Victory would be the proudest achievement of French arms in naval history. With Nelson down, suddenly it seemed possible. The sailors who were losing the gunnery contest below clambered up to attack across the rails. Redoutable’s guns fell silent as men bunched once again to rush the British marines.

“Lower the main yard to use as a ramp!” Lucas ordered. The spar holding the mainsail came down and was swung to lean like a log between the higher Victory and the lower Redoutable. It would serve as a bridge along which the boarders could scramble like monkeys.

“Midshipman Yon!”

“Aye, Captain!” A young French officer at the bow saluted and led four sailors in a daring leap across to the Victory’s anchor, and then up its stock to the British deck above. They disappeared a moment before his head popped up above the enemy gunwale.

“There’s no one left alive! They’re all hiding below!”

“Our grenades have worked!” Lucas called to his men. They cheered.

I could feel our ship quaking as the British continued to disembowel Redoutable with their artillery.

“Boarders ready!” The men strained like hounds on the end of their leash. If the great Nelson had been wounded or killed, the top deck swept clear, and the carronades silenced, this would be the climax of the battle. Against all odds, Lucas would sweep and conquer.

“Away boarders! Charge!”

A great shout rose up, at first warbling and then strengthening in volume. “Vive la France! Vive l’empereur!”

And then a new opponent loomed out of the miasma of smoke. The French and Spanish ships would not cooperate. The English did.

The British three-decker Téméraire, a towering monster of ninety-eight guns, bore down on our untouched starboard side like some ghastly apparition, huge and relatively unscathed. The men next to me shouted and pointed, urging their comrades below to return to the starboard cannon. But no one was paying attention; their eyes were on Victory. The French marines around me shot impotently at this new tormentor, hurling their last grenades. The bombs fell short into the sea, and they cursed in frustration.

The Téméraire sailed into point-blank range. Then it fired a thunderous broadside, every gun at once, into the other side of Redoutable.

It was if a volcano had erupted below. The entire starboard side of the ship caved in, cannons were upended like toys, and the would-be boarding party was lashed by iron and splinters. The decks below actually blistered and broke upward, planks raw, and the ladders leading from one deck to another disappeared like chaff. Even from a hundred feet above, the human havoc was horrific. Limbs spun off into the black pit that had become the core of my ship. Blood sprayed upward as if shot by a fountain. Torsos were cut in two.

Téméraire crashed against our starboard side, rocking us, and began hammering Redoutable with its guns as Victory was doing on the port, leaving us helplessly sandwiched between two bigger ships. Our own artillery had fallen silent because there was almost nobody left to man the cannon.

We were being pulverized. Three quarters of Redoutable’s men were already dead or wounded.

“Victory is getting away!”

The British had chopped away the grapnel lines, and Nelson’s battered flagship began to drift off. The widening gap of water revealed that its hull was pockmarked with shot holes and that our own hull was little more than ravaged ribbing. So much wood had been shot away that iron nails jutted like coat hooks. Dead and wounded tumbled into the growing crevasse between the two ships, vanishing in the ocean. As Victory got some sea room the rhythm of its guns actually increased, hammering with vicious determination. Shrouds, stays, and halyards snapped; lines scythed; and yardarms crashed down. The protective netting had long since collapsed, and the spars bounced as they hit the main deck with great crashes. The broken French deck was a tangle of sails, rope, and bodies.

We’d lost. My surviving topmen turned on me. “The damned American has been a coward the entire battle!”

“Not a coward, but an ambassador,” I gasped. “I tried to stop this.”

“Hang him!”

“From what, François? Our rigging is tumbling. I’m going to shoot him before we go over ourselves.”

“Lucas wants me alive,” I tried. “He’ll need a negotiator.”

There was no reasoning. They were in a rage of despair, deafened from the fighting, their friends dead. I represented bad luck. Two held my arms while a third pressed a musket muzzle against my head.

I closed my eyes.

Then Téméraire broadsided again, and the mizzen shook as if every cannonball was aimed at its base. Everyone on our platform jerked and fell, the musket’s blast going off by my cheek and giving me a painful powder burn. The world pitched and rolled. The mizzen cracked somewhere below, cut like a great tree, and we all yelled and screamed as it leaned, men plunging. With majestic momentum, it fell toward Victory.

I instinctively clung to a ratline as the French mast pivoted, watching time again slow to molasses. A few surviving British marines and sailors shouted soundlessly, looking upward at this tower falling toward them. The shattered English rigging loomed like a tangled forest canopy. The gun smoke thickened as we descended into it, as if I was falling into an alien atmosphere of poisonous clouds. A wrack of canvas and broken tackle rushed up.

Harry! came into my mind. Not just my wife, but my poor dear son.

And that was the end.