To Rooke Bolitho added sharply, 'We will sail back on the same course and engage his other side!' He felt a grin spreading on his face and sensed that same madness he had forcibly controlled at Cozar.
Rooke nodded and raised his speaking trumpet. He looked pale beneath his tan, but somehow he got the words out. `Stand by to go about! Ready ho!V
'Helm alee!' Gossett threw his own weight to help the straining helmsmen.
For a few seconds the ship seemed to go mad, and as the men in the bows let go the headsail sheets and the hull began to answer the savage demands of the rudder, even the distant gunfire was drowned by the thunder of canvas and the agonised whine of stays and rigging.
'Off tacks and sheets!' Rooke was dancing with impatience and despair. 'Mainsail haul!'
What the Hyperion's desperate manoeuvre looked like to the Frenchman Bolitho could not imagine, but as he stared fixedly at the other two-decker he felt the sweat like ice across his forehead. Perhaps he had after all left it too late. The other ship seemed to tower across the Hyperion's quarter like a great cliff, so that as the old hull staggered round it seemed as if nothing would prevent the Frenchman from smashing headlong into her larboard side.
'Let go and haul, you bastards!' Rooke was hoarse and al
most screaming. But the men at the braces were almost horizontal with the deck as they dug in their toes and tugged like madmen, their ears and minds blank to everything and their eyes filled with the tall, onrushing sails which loomed high above them blotting out all else.
But she was answering, as with a mighty roar of canvas the Yards went round, the sails ballooning and cracking with effort while the deck tilted further and still further towards the Frenchman's onrushing bowsprit.
Bolitho gripped the rail and shouted, 'Stand to! Guncaptains fire as you bearl Pass the word to the lower battery!'
He was almost blinded with sweat and was shaking with wild excitement. Somehow the Hyperion had answered his impossible demands and had turned into the wind right across the other ship's course. Now as she heeled on an opposite tack she was already charging down the Frenchman's side, a side lined with sealed ports and as yet undefended. He could see the surging chaos on the ship's maindeck as men from the opposite battery ran across to open the ports, probably stunned by the sudden change of roles.
The Hyperion's heeling bows passed the Frenchman's forecastle, her shadow across the struggling seamen like a cloud of doom.
Inch was running along the guns, and as he dropped his arm the first pair of guns roared out together. Both ships were passing one another so rapidly that the attack was almost a full broadside, rippling down the Hyperion's hull in a double line of darting red flashes.
Bolitho almost fell as the quarterdeck nine-pounders joined in the battle, while around and above him he could hear Ashby's marines yelling and cursing with excitement as they fired their muskets into the mounting wall of smoke which billowed up and across the Frenchman's side hiding the carnage and damage as they passed within twenty yards of those sealed ports.
Bolitho yelled, `Stop that cheering! Reload and run out!' He had his sword in his hand although he did not recall drawing it. `Larboard cat ronade stand by!' He saw the gunners on the forecastle staring back at him from beside the snub-nosed carronade. They were hemmed in by smoke and seemed to be suspended in space. He turned to Gossett. 'Stand by to go about again! We will cross his stem now that we have taken the weather-gage!'
`Look, sir! Her foretopmast's falling!'
Bolitho rubbed his streaming eyes and turned to watch as with something like tired dignity the Frenchman's topmast staggered and then began to topple. He could see small figures clinging to the severed yards, and then being shaken off like dead fruit as with a splintering crash the whole spar, complete with rigging and lacerated sails, pitched forward and down into the smoke alongside.
But the Hyperion was already reeling round, the men at the braces and sheets coughing and choking as the guns fired yet again, their minds dulled by the din of noise and the blinding fog of battle.
Bolitho hurried across the deck, his eyes on the smokeshrouded topsails, pockmarked and ragged from his ship's attack, as once more the Hyperion went about to cross the enemy's stem. A gust of wind cleared a patch of water, so that he saw the other ship's counter within fifty feet of the bows. He could see the tall windows, the familiar horseshoeshaped stem so beloved by French designers, and the small figures clustered above her name, Saphir. They were firing muskets, and as he watched he saw some of the forecastle hands falling and kicking in the smoke, their cries lost in the bombardment.
But then, as the Hyperion's bowsprit cast a black shadow across the open patch of water the carronade fired. For a brief instant before the smoke eddied across the water once more he saw the whole section of stern windows fly open as if in some maniac wind, and in his mind's eye he pictured the carnage in the Saphir's crowded lower gundeck as the packed charge smashed through the ship from end to end. On Cozar's pier it had been terrible enough. In a confined space filled with dazed seamen who were already unnerved by the Hyperion's swift vengeance it would br like a scene from hell.
He forcibly thrust the picture from his mind and concentrated instead on the Hyperion's upper deck. As the ship tacked heavily around the Frenchman's stern the larboard battery were only getting off half the shots which they had achieved in the first assault. All the grating apprehension which had gripped the men earlier while the French ships had approached with such confidence had been replaced by a kind of delirious excitement, and as he peered down through the billowing smoke Bolitho saw more than one gunner capering with wild delight. intent on watching the havoc across the narrow strip of water rather than attending to his own duties.
Bolitho cupped his hands and shouted, `Mr. Inch! Double up the gun crews from the starboard side, and pass the word.too the lower deck to do the same!!' He saw Inch nodding violently, his hat awry, his long face blackened by the powder smoke.
The Saphir had stewed slightly to larboard, the fallen topmast acting as a great sea anchor, so that it took more precious minutes to sail around bet counter. Although Hyperion was now technically downwind of her adversary once more the earlier advantage had been rendered useless by the damage to the Saphir's spars and sails. As the bowsprit edged purposefully past the Frenchman's high poop and the forward guns belched out with renewed anger, Bolitho saw great fragments of splintered timber flying up from the bulwarks and the flare of sparks as one of the enemy's guns was hurled bodily sideways on to its crew, the screams only urging the British gunners to greater efforts.
Then as both ships ploughed abeam through the smoke the French upper battery fired back for the first time. It was a ragged salvo, the tongues of flame lancing through the drifting fog, the crashing detonations mingling with the Hyperion's broadside as the distance slowly lessened until both ships were less than thirty feet apart.
The Saphir's gunners had fired on the downroll, and Bolitho felt the deck shake under him as ball after ball smashed into his ship's stout hull or shrieked towards the unseen world beyond the smoke. Men were shooting down from the French tops, and he caught a brief glimpse of an officer waving his sword and then pointing at him as if to will the marksmen to bring him down. Musket-balls slapped into the hammock nettings at his side, and he saw a seaman staring aghast at his hand where a ricocheting ball had clipped away a finger with the neatness of an axe.
Ashby's marines were yelling insults as they returned the fire, and more than one man hung lifeless on the French tops as silent witness to their accuracy.
Again a ragged salvo ripped along the Saphir's upper ports, but still the Hyperion's masts were unscathed. Her sails were well pitted with holes, but only a few severed blocks and halyards bounced unheeled on the nets which he had ordered to be strung across the upper deck to protect the sweating gunners.