C H A P T E R 7

Falconer’s Marine Dictionary had quite a lot to say on Mortars and Range, and the precautions the prudent officer might undertake to keep from being blown to flinders. So, too, did de Crillart’s tattered copy of Le Blond’s Elements of War, and Lewrie’s copy of the standard Muller’s Treatise on the Artillery .

Zélé should have had munitions-tenders astern, where the shells were filled with powder, and rowing boats to fetch shot as needed, and where, during transit, the fuses were inserted, the fused shells being termed “fixed”; then hoisted aboard and stored in a hide or haircloth covered rack on the safest space of the deck—called “kiting.” Well, they didn’t have tenders, and too few men to spare to row shells about, so they extemporised.

The rudimentary captain’s cabin aft under the thick remains of the upper gun deck was to be the filling room, its doors and windows covered with tanned hides, equipped with water tubs, and the passages to it constantly watered with a wash-deck pump. The filled shells to be carried most carefully to the waist, where two senior bombardiers would “fix” them with fuses, as needed for each shot, and no shell was to be “fixed” and “kited,” then left untended, no matter how secure a storage area they had.

There were more tubs of water round the depression in the waist where the mortars sat, two more bombardiers or gunner’s mates on duty to oversee port fires and slow matches the mortarmen would apply to the fuse and the mortars’ touch holes. Propellant gunpowder charges were loaded below, in the old orlop hanging-magazine, also well watered and guarded, with the door shut except to pass out premeasured cartridges through a secondary felt screen inside the actual door, slitted to let the charges be passed out in fireproof leather cylinders.

The fuses would come from a “laboratory chest” in the captain’s cabin, too. These were conical tubes made of beech or willow wood and filled with a composition of sulphur, saltpetre and mealed powder. A mixture of tallow, pitch and beeswax sealed both ends. The tapering end of the cone would go inside the shell, stripped of its protective coating, but the great end must keep its tallow until just before firing. And they all agreed that, whilst the mortars were in service, it would be impossible to employ the thirty-two-pounder great-guns simultaneously, for they would require other lit port fires and slow matches, and that was a risk too great to contemplate.

It helped immensely, Lewrie learned from observation, that their mortars were mounted on central pintles which passed completely through the bed of the mortar carriages, through the supporting timbers and deck beams of the mortar wells, through the overhead beams on the orlop, and terminated in large baulks of timber which held the whole affair up; so the mortars could be “laid” or “pointed” left and right. All they had to do was anchor with the best-bower and a single kedge (with springs, of course, on their cables), roughly abeam of the target or the coast, and the bombardiers could heave their massive charges about for aiming.

Thirteen-inch mortar; weight, eighty-one hundredweight, two quarters, one pound, according to Falconer. Powder charge when the chamber at its base was full, thirty pounds. Weight of a “fixed” shell, one hundred ninety-eight pounds; and filled with seven pounds of the very best powder. The shells were cast-iron balls, hollow, with their greatest thickness on the bottom, the better to resist the awful force of discharge from the bore, and to keep that heaviest part away from the fuse, flying first through the air, and landing on that thick portion, with the thinner, and lighter, filling and fusing end uppermost. There were two carrying handles cast or hammer-welded to either side of the fuse hole. Perhaps to avoid confusion for slower minds.

Beyond that, Lewrie’s theory got a little vague; he’d never had the greatest head for numbers. Falconer’s, under Range, listed a table of practice for sea mortars, giving the specific weights of propelling charges, and the proper fuses to use. For instance, he could discover that at forty-five degrees of elevation, a thirteen-inch mortar took an eighteen-pound charge to hurl the shot, which resulted in a flight of twenty-six seconds, and range of roughly 2,873 yards. And for the fuse to explode at the right moment, burning at the rate of four seconds and forty-eight parts to the inch, would require a premade fuse of the exact length of five inches, seventy-two parts, to be selected from the “laboratory chest.” Then, of course, there was the niggling matter of the gunners who would light the fuse, and the mortar’s touch hole with slow match, doing both at the same instant. But Alan assumed that the Spanish bombardiers, and the insufferably laconic Don Luis, might know what they were doing, and if they made a hash of it, then it was their own damned fault.

Lavishly re-equipped from those mountains of French supplies in the basin’s arsenals and warehouses, they sailed Zélé, her new sails almost virgin-white, from the docks, through the opening between the bombproof jetties, and out to join St. George and Aurore, just after first light on the 24th.

“Springs on the cables, sir,” Lieutenant Scott informed him.

“Wash-deck pumps going? Filling room and magazine passageway?”

“Aye, sir.”

“Let’s be at it, then,” Lewrie grimaced, his stomach chilly with trepidation at the unknown nature of their work. And over the danger, which was very known, of any clumsiness or inattentiveness.

“Might as well be, sir,” Scott dared to assay a tiny, wry grin. “It appears the Frogs already are.”

They walked amidships, to peer down into the mortar wells, then tip their hats to Crillart and Esquevarre, who stood close together by the rearward lip, evidently engaged in some heated discussion.

“Non non, Comandant, Le Blond . . . ” Charles de Crillart objected gently. “Alain . . . mon capitaine, I attemp’ to tell zis . . . monsieur Le Blond say ze s’irty pound charge eez beaucoup, mais zis . . . ze comandant insist . . .”

Don Luis de Esquevarre rattled off an expostulation in rapid Spanish, out of which Lewrie caught perhaps the odd word in ten, most of those mildly insulting.

“Señor,” he said, whipping out his copy of Falconer. “Allow me to quote, and do you translate, Lieutenant Crillart . . . aha, here it is.

Mr. Muller in his Treatise of Artillery, very justly observes, that the breech of our 13-inch sea-mortars is loaded with an unnecessary weight of metal. The chamber thereof contains 32 Lbs. of powder, and at the same time they are never charged with more than 12 or 15 pounds by the most expert officers, because the bomb-vessel is unable to bear the violent shock of their full charge.”

“’E say eez Inglese bull-sheet, mon capitaine, ” Crillart translated back. “Zat eez on’y pour ze cylinder chambre, et we ’ave een zis bombard, ze conical. ’E also say ’e eez très esperience viz artillery, an’ ’e ’ave no need to be tol’ . . . ’ow to soock eggs? Comment? ” Crillart shrugged in bewilderment.

To Crillart’s even further confusion, Lewrie laughed out loud, prompting a tiny upturn of one corner of Don Luis’s mouth in return.

“Señor Comandante, I have implicit trust in your experience,” Lewrie cajoled, phrase by phrase as Crillart transposed for him, “but this is a ship, not a firm battlement or well-prepared battery . . . do you see here, under Range . . . practice table? Weights of charge?”

“Ah, sí, capitán!” Don Luis brightened, pulling from a voluminous pocket of his ornate uniform coat a much-tattered, oft-rolled and thumbed table of practice, expostulating eagerly.

Fumm-fumm! Umumm. Scrreee-BLAM! BLAM! All this time, Republican shot had been falling into the Little Road, St. George belching displeasure, and Aurore ’s six- and twelve-pounders, breeches resting flat on their carriages for greatest “range at random-shot,” had been barking away. And once in a while, other floating batteries had erupted in fog banks of powder smoke.

“Ze très peu malheureusement. . . ze leetle mis-un’erstan’ment?” Charles said with relief, at last. “’E eez ’ave een min’ ze less of ze powder. ’E ees s’inking ze, uhm . . . nine poun’, at firs’?”

“Whew!” Scott breathed out.

“I defer to his greater knowledge, tell him, Charles,” Alan said, doffing his hat, making sure he was grinning when he said it.

Up from the orlop came a powder charge, sacked by the called-for weight. Spanish bombardiers used paper cartridges. From the filling room came a shell, two burly Spaniards grunting with effort to carry it by its small, slippery handles. Don Luis and his aspirante, or ensign-in-training, and a hirsute, cursing bear of a man, a sergeant-gunner, Diego Huelva, directed the work of heaving the after mortar, the left hand of the pair as they faced the coast, into line. Then began to elevate it to forty-five degrees. They fussed and hopped, peered and tinkered at screws, until satisfied, then waved for the shell to be brought forward.

Down it went into the well, as the powder charge was rammed deep into the chamber, and the priming iron was thrust into the touch hole to both clear the vent and puncture the bag. Slowly the fixed shell was lowered into the stubby bore, handles and fuse hole up.

Don Luis took a deep breath, almost made to cross himself, as he waved the excess hands away and ordered the tallow seal on the fuse to be opened. “Fósforo, preparado . . . !” he cried. “Fuego!”

The smouldering port fires touched both fuse and touch hole, and there was a split second of sizzle, then a tremendous blast! Down went the deck, as if shoved by the hand of God, and Zélé ’s timbers groaned.

Not so much a sudden detonation as it was a physical force, Alan felt his lungs rattle, his groin shrink, and his heart flutter when the mortar touched off, felt an invisible wave of pressure shove him back, rattle his coattails and hat, and fill his ears with a sound beyond a sound, almost too loud to register, except to set them ringing. Spent powder smoke spurted aloft in a sickly yellow-white column, reeking with sulphur and rotten eggs, smelling singed as lit kindling.

“Bloody Hell, that was . . .” he coughed, fanning the air for some fresh as the gush of gunsmoke dissipated. “That was magnificent! ”

He’d loved the great-guns best of all the things he’d learned in the Navy; the power, the stink of them, their recoil and shudderings. From little two-pounder boat guns and swivels to long-twelves, from far-firing twenty-four-pounders to the stubby, ship-breaking “smashers,” the carronades, Lewrie delighted in things that went Boom! —and exulted in seeing the damage they caused aboard a foe. It was irrational, brutish and savage, this joy he found in gunnery, so viscerally beneath a reasonable man’s ken, so insensible a passion, yet . . .

“Damme!” Lewrie called, feeling a boyish glee rise in him. “Don Luis! Volver a hacer? Let’s do that again! ”

That afternoon, St. George retired from the artillery duel, due to depart for Genoa, and her place was taken in the Little Road by the Princess Royal, another 98, Rear Admiral Goodall’s flagship. In lieu of his presence, her captain, John Childs Purvis, commanded. A Spanish 74 joined the bombardment.

French bursting-shell drummed around Zélé all day, fortunately never discovering the right solution in propellant charge and length of fuse, though it did get interesting at times when a shell would splash somewhat nearby, raise a feather of spray by its impact, then explode underwater a second or so later to produce an even more prodigious spout of brine which would fall like a cascade on the decks and gangways.

Don Luis Esquevarre concentrated their fire upon the lesser battery to the sou’west, the one with two guns. Patiently, firing perhaps a round every two minutes, he probed the hills, first with the left mortar, then with the right hand. A dram less powder in the charge cartridge, three drams more the next shot; a tiny tinkering with elevation, half a turn on the great screw by the bracing block; heaving to turn about a single degree on the pintle.

“Fósforo . . . preparado . . . ” he called, coatless and hatless by then, his voice hoarse from inhaling spent gunpowder and shouting for half a day. “Fuego!”

Another monumental clashing roar, and the floating battery shuddering to her very bones, timbers crying in torment. Lewrie stood aft away from the noise, on what passed for a quarterdeck, a telescope to his eye, rested steady on the larboard mizzen-stay ratlines.

“Nineteen . . . twenty . . . twenty-one . . .” Midshipman Spend-love tolled off, counting on his fingers, for his watch only had a minute hand.

Brum! Umumm. Came from the hills.

“Struck, sir. Twenty-two seconds,” he announced, and looked up to see a darker gout of smoke rise, almost mingling with the forest-fire pall that hovered continually over the Republican mortar battery. “Oh, well. Closer, I think, though, sir,” he sighed disappointedly.

Suddenly, there was a massive eruption of smoke yonder, rising as silent as a squall cloud might on the sea’s horizon, as if the French had reinforced the masked battery, and had just let fly half a dozen shells.

Brummmbrummmm-Bummm! spoke the masking hill, later than the gunpowder pall. And the pall swelled upward, outward, turned darker, shot through with dark flecks, with black writhing licorice sticks of smoke—tinged at the bottom, just atop the hill, with dying embers, with a ruddy orange loomlike flickering, like a lighthouse’s loom just over the horizon’s knife edge.

“Hola!” Don Luis shouted, raspily enthused, and his bombardiers began to cheer and dance, to caper round the deck and in the wells in triumph.

“We did it!” Lewrie cried, ready to dance himself. “We hit ’em! Blew ’em to hell, by Jesus!”

Bumm - bumm - brubrumbumm , more secondary explosions thundered, and the hills quaked to the destruction, and they could feel it in their bones and on their faces, a tremendous distant blast that rattled the earth, the shoals, and transmitted itself through the waters. They’d holed out, not on the mortars themselves, but in their magazine, where fixed and kited shells had been stored. Too many of them, fixed ready to fire, kited too close together, and even being sunk into the earth, protected by wet hides and haircloth, hadn’t saved them.

Lewrie dashed down to the gun deck where Spanish, French and English sailors cavorted and clapped, tossing their caps or hats into the air and huzzah-ing.

“Marvelous!” Lewrie told Esquevarre when he reached him. “ Magnífico! Marveloso! Genius!”

Esquevarre was thumping Crillart on the back, Crillart was bestowing Gallic kisses on those lean aristocratic cheeks, and Don Luis tweaked Charles’s nose playfully as he stepped back to clasp Lewrie to him and dance him around the deck in a stumbling bear hug.

Must be something in the water, Lewrie thought, not exactly that pleased to be bussed and hugged by a man; bloody foreigners!

“Charles, tell him we’ll celebrate,” Lewrie called over Comandante Esquevarre’s shoulder as they tripped past him in a shuffling circle. “ Vino! Plus vin? My treat! We’ll splice the main-brace . . . uh, splice-o las main-brace-o? Sí, amigo, sí, Don Luis? Bueno! ”

By sundown, they heaved to short stays on the kedge and broke it free of the rocky bottom, heaved then to short stays forrud on the bower and sailed back to the fortified jetties. The larger three-gun masked-battery’s fire had sputtered out by then, daunted perhaps by the sudden destruction of its fellow, and the Little Road became peaceful. Sweeps had to be used as the wind faded to puzzling little zephyrs across the lake-smooth waters. Once tied up, instead of boiling salt rations in steep tubs, appropriated charcoal braziers were lit atop the jetty and fresh meat was roasted. Wine and beer were doled out, the rum ration was issued, and fresh bread and butter appeared from the town for all hands.

Crillart, Scott, Esquevarre and Lewrie left the ship, repaired to a restaurant and celebrated—rather heavily, in point of fact, in all respects—wine, cuisine, music—and ended up being run out after they called for dancing girls. Esquevarre couldn’t quite understand a restaurant that didn’t have people who could play the guitar or do the flamenco—nor “do” the appreciative patrons who flung coins to them.

“France,” Crillart translated haltingly on their way back aboard. “’E say, mon ami. . . ve are la nation du. . . ‘tight-arses’? Comment? ”

The next morning, with a monumental head, Lewrie arose to the soft fumphing of thunder. He flung off his blanket and staggered to a water butt, his mouth as sour and dry as dessicated ordure. There was a knock on the door to his tiny cabin.

“What?” he croaked.

“Sir? Midshipman Spendlove, sir.”

“Enter.”

Spendlove came inside, dry as a bone; Lewrie expected rain, with that far-off thunder. He was too bleary to puzzle it out.

“Excuse me, sir, but . . . the Frogs are at it again. There’s a midshipman aboard from Admiral Goodall, sir. He says we’re to stand out into the Little Road, with all dispatch.”

“Uhuh,” Lewrie nodded heavily. “Very well, Mister Spendlove. Do you wake the others, and I’ll be on deck directly. Warn Porter to have the hands roused and at stations for shoving off.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Already at it again, he wondered as Spendlove departed; don’t the Frogs ever learn their lessons? Wondering, too, if, after the celebrations of the past evening, they could hit a bull in the arse with a bass viol this day.