"We'll be silouetted against the dawn, I suppose," Lt. Westcott said on, rocking on the balls of his booted feet.
"Good odds," Lewrie agreed, grunting. "No helpin' it. Pray the Frog lookouts are blind, or late in bein' posted aloft, 'stead of the decks. Gives us five minutes more t'close em?"
"They go about, we'll just chase them," Westcott said, sighing as he lifted his telescope again to peer ahead off the starboard bows.
Lewrie looked up, but could not quite see the long, lazy whipping of the commissioning pendant. The wind was scant that morning, a touch cool on the skin from the starboard quarter; they were angled enough off the winds to be able to feel the wind, for once. He turned and peered aft at Modeste. She was a large, dark shadow, as wide and bluff as a baleful barn, her grey, weathered sails eerily rustling to the wind's vagaries, equally dark against the pre-dawn gloom. She was only a little over a cable's distance astern, yet Lewrie had to recall what she looked like bows-on, with little more than the faint mustachio of foam under her forefoot, that creamed to either side of her bows, to positively mark her place.
Damme, is she… fuzzy? Lewrie thought, pinching the bridge of his nose and rubbing his eyes as false dawn only slightly began to grey the horizon astern, revealing charcoal-sketch impressions of the ships aft of Reliant. Are my eyes goin'? he wondered; No, its mist! Mine arse on a bandbox, of all the shitten luck!
The false dawn sketched his own decks as he looked forward, gave slightly more detail of artillery, sailors, sails, rigging, and masts-all misted with a thin pre-dawn fog!
"Land Ho!" a lookout shouted down. "Island on th' starb'd side! Two point off th' starb'd bows! Five mile off!"
"The Sou'west tip of the last Chandeleur," Lewrie growled as he went to the Sailing Master's chart. "Be-fogged, though, we're closer than five miles, if he can see it. Three miles, more-like, sir?"
"It appears to be a thin fog, sir," Mr. Caldwell, the Sailing Master, cautiously pointed out, using dividers to measure possible distances, then lean closer and peer at the depth notations. "Still in deep water, sir, do we hold to this course."
"Mist or fog, however thin, though," Lt. Westcott fretted near them, fingers flexing on the hilt of his scabbarded sword. "We could miss them in it, even so, sir."
"Should've remembered," Lewrie muttered, turning away to pace to the forward edge of the quarterdeck. He chid himself for forgetting that the coasts hereabouts were so low-lying and marshy, the summers as humid as Canton, Calcutta, or the Ivory Coast of Africa, and a cooler sea air just naturally bred fogs and mists.
"Deck, there!" the lookout shouted once more, just as the first hints of true dawn and the first colours could be ascertained. "Ships! Four ships, hull-up… fine on th' starb'd bows!"
"Mister Grainger!" Lewrie bellowed over his shoulder as he lifted his telescope to peer out-board, a sense of relief, of success, beginning to fill him. "Hoist to Modeste… 'Enemy In Sight'!"
"Aye aye, sir!" the fifteen-year-old piped back.
Four Bells chimed from the foc's'le belfry; 6 a.m. and it was true dawn at last; close enough to the exact time for sunrise noted in the ephemeris. Grey murk retreated Westward as brightness surged up from the East. Coastal waters went from black to steely grey, then to dark blue with flecks of white. There were thin clouds and the first pale smears of blue skies. There was the mist, of course, a pearlescence to the West, closer to the shore, where it would be thicker.
"Next hoist to Modeste, Mister Grainger," Lewrie ordered as he returned to the helm. "Make it 'Four Ships, Fine On Starboard Bows.'"
"Aye, sir."
"Tip of the last o' the Chandeleurs here," Lewrie eagerly said, jabbing at the chart. "We're about here, and the French are… there! Do we bear off a point or two to larboard, and we'll have them on our starboard beams, bows-on to us, and open to rakin' fire. Or we hold t'this course, and we barge into them, bows-on to their larboard batteries."
"Up to Modeste, that," Lt. Westcott commented, shrugging.
"Aye, but I'd prefer to haul off… place ourselves 'twixt them and the East Pass into the river," Lewrie schemed aloud. "They'd have to fight through us or go about and run back the way they came, with Breton Island t'larboard, and the waters shoalin' fast, the closer to Biloxi or Lake Borgne they go. They fight us or they go aground, up yonder, and strike their colours."
"They're hull-up already?" Lt. Westcott said, looking dubious. "Surely they've spotted us, round the time we spotted them, sir."
"Aloft, there!" Lewrie shouted, cupping his hands about his mouth. "Have they turned away? And what is the order of their sailing?"
"Sailin' as before, sir!" the lookout replied. "Same course! A two-decker leadin'… then a frigate, another two-decker, and another frigate, the hind-most! Makin' sail, sir!"
"They've seen us, right enough," Lewrie told his officers. "On a tear t'get into the Delta, to the Head of Passes, before we can close 'em! And in the same order as they were last night, with their troop ship to leeward so they could protect her."
"She'll turn away," the Sailing Master speculated.
"She'll press on, even if the others engage us," Lewrie countered. "She's too close to the end of her passage t'do else. Mister Westcott, shake the reefs from the main course and drive her, hard. Helmsmen… helm up, and steer West, Nor'west."
Just pray Jesus that Blanding sees what I intend, and dont interfere! Lewrie thought, peeking astern in dread of anxious bunting.
"One can see them from the deck, sir!" Midshipman Grainger cried from the starboard mizen shrouds and a perch most of the way up them. Lewrie raised his telescope, focussed, then… By God, there they are! he exulted in silence. They were real, not Will-O'-The-Wisps, and not more than six or seven miles off.
I was right! Lewrie felt like shouting; this Frog did hide his arse behind the Chandeleurs, or gave himself the option of landing his troops up North. Damme… I was right? What's the world comin' to?
Inside that pearly mist, there were four complete sets of sails, rustling like spooks on the scant winds; there were darker smudges of hulls below them, and the mast-heads! They were above the mist and clear as day… now only five miles off, he reckoned!
"Deck, there!" a new voice called. Midshipman Rossyngton had gone aloft to join the lookouts, and it was his thin piping that they heard. "Lead two-decker stands on! The trailing ships haul their wind! One point off the starboard bows! Avast! Moving to two points off!"
Lewrie could see the hair-thin mast-heads pivotting, aligning themselves atop each other, as the three French warships came about to point roughly bows-on to their own line of battle.
They're lasting! Lewrie realised; sailin a bow-and-quarter line… oblique to us! Clever devil, yonder.
The French would close them, with a frigate nearest to them and their two-decker 74 perhaps a cable further away, off the frigate's larboard quarters, and the trailing frigate even further away, off the 74's larboard quarter, like the last three fingers of Lewrie's left hand.
"Worn to larboard tack, sir?" Mr. Caldwell said, scratching his scalp with a pencil stub, up under his hat. "They'll have to come off the wind 'fore they can cross our bows and rake us."