“You don’t flog?”
“I must,” Chase said, “but rarely, rarely. Maybe twice since I took command? That’s twice in three years. The first was for theft and the other was for striking a petty officer who probably deserved to be struck, but discipline is discipline. Lieutenant Haskell would like me to flog more, he thinks it would make us more efficient, but I don’t think it needful.” He stared morosely at the sails. “No damn wind, no damn wind! What the hell does God think he’s doing?”
If God would not send a wind, Chase would practice the guns. Like many naval captains he carried extra powder and shot, bought at his own expense, so that his crew could practice. All morning he had the guns going, every port open, even the ones in his great cabin, so that the ship was constantly surrounded by a pungent white-gray smoke through which it moved with a painful slowness.
“This could mean bad luck,” Peel, the second lieutenant, told Sharpe. He was a friendly man, round-faced, round-waisted and invariably cheerful. He was also untidy, a fact that irritated the first lieutenant, and the bad blood between Peel and Haskell made the wardroom a tense and unhappy place. Sharpe sensed the unhappiness, knew that it upset Chase and was aware of the ship’s preference for Peel, who was far more easygoing than the tall, unsmiling Haskell.
“Why bad luck?”
“Guns lull the wind,” Peel explained seriously. He was wearing a blue uniform coat far more threadbare than Sharpe’s red jacket, though the second lieutenant was rumored to be wealthy. “It is an unexplained phenomenon,” Peel said, “that gunfire depletes wind.” He pointed at the vast red ensign at the gaff as proof and, sure enough, it hung limp. The flag was not hoisted every day, but at times like this, when the wind was lazily tired, Chase reckoned that an ensign served to show small variations in the breeze.
“Why is it red?” Sharpe asked. “That sloop we saw had a blue one.”
“It depends which admiral you serve,” Peel explained. “We take orders from a rear admiral of the red, but if he was blue we’d fly blue and if he was white, white, and if he was yellow he wouldn’t command any ships anyway. Simple, really.” He grinned. The red flag, which had the union flag in its upper corner, stirred sluggishly as a rare gust of warm air disturbed its folds. Off to the east, where the gust came from, there were heaps of clouds which Peel said were over Africa. “And you’ll note the water’s discolored,” he added, pointing over the side to a muddy brown sea, “which means we’re off a river mouth.”
Chase timed the gun crews, promising an extra tot of rum to the fastest men. The sound of the guns was astonishing. It pounded the eardrums and shivered the ship before fading slowly into the immensity of sea and sky. The gunners tied scarves about their ears to diminish the shock of the noise, but many of them were still prematurely deaf. Sharpe, curious, went down to the lower deck where the big thirty-two-pounders lurked and he stood in wonder as the guns were fired. He had his fingers in his ears, yet, even so, the whole dark space, punctuated with bright shafts of smoky sunlight which pierced through the open gunports, reverberated with each gun’s firing. The sound seemed to punch him in the abdomen, it rang in his head, it filled the world. One after the other, the guns hammered back. Each barrel was close to ten feet long and each gun weighed nearly three tons, and each shot strained the gun’s breeching rope taut as an iron bar. The breeching rope was a great cable, fixed with eyebolts to the ship’s ribs, that looped through a ring at the gun’s breech. Half-naked gunners, sweat glistening on their skins, leaped to sponge out the vast barrels while the gun’s chief stopped the vent-hole with a leather-encased thumb. Men put in powder bags and shot, rammed them home, then hauled the weapon’s muzzle out through the gunport with the rope-and-pulley tackles fixed on either side of the carriage.
“You’re not aiming at anything!” Sharpe had to shout to the fifth lieutenant who commanded one group of guns.
“We ain’t marksmen,” the lieutenant, who was called Holderby, shouted back. “If it comes to battle we’ll be so close to the bastards that we can’t miss! Twenty paces at most, and usually less.” Holderby paced down the gundeck, ducking under beams, touching men’s shoulders at random. “You’re dead!” he shouted. “You’re dead!” The chosen men grinned and sat gratefully on the shot gratings. Holderby was thinning the crews, as they would be thinned by battle, and watching how well the “survivors” manned their big guns.
The guns, like those on the Calliope, were all fired by flintlocks. The army’s field artillery, none of it so big as these guns, was fired with a linstock, a slow match that glowed red as it burned, but no naval captain would dare have a glowing red-hot linstock lying loose on a gundeck where so much powder lay waiting to explode. Instead the guns had flintlocks, though, if the flintlock failed, a linstock was suspended in a nearby tub half-filled with water. The flintlock’s trigger was a lanyard which the gunner would twitch, the flint would fall, the spark flash and then the powder-packed reed in the touch hole hissed and a four- or five-inch flame leaped upward before the world was consumed by noise as another flame, twice as long as the gun’s barrel, seared into the instant cloud of smoke as the gun crashed back.
Sharpe climbed to the deck, and from the deck to the maintop, for only from there could he see beyond the massive bank of smoke to where the shots fell. They fell ragged, some seemingly going as much as a mile before they splashed into the sullen sea, others ripping the surface into spray only a hundred yards from the ship. Chase, as the lieutenant had said, was not training his men to be marksmen, but to be fast. There were gunners aboard who boasted they could lay a ball onto a floating target tub at half a mile, but the secret of battle, Chase insisted, was getting close and releasing a storm of shot. “It doesn’t have to be aimed,” he had told Sharpe. “I use the ship to aim the guns. I lay the guns alongside the enemy and let them massacre the bastard. Speed, speed, speed, Sharpe. Speed wins battles.”
It was just like musketry, Sharpe realized. On land the armies came together and, as often as not, it was the side that could fire its muskets fastest that would win. Men did not aim muskets, because they were so inaccurate. They pointed their muskets, then fired so that their bullet was just one among a cloud of balls that spat toward the enemy. Send enough balls and the enemy would weaken. Lay two ships close together and the one that fired fastest should win in the same way, and so Chase harried his gunners, praising the swift ones and chivying the laggards, and all morning the sea about the ship quivered to the vibration of the guns. A long track of wavering and thinning powder smoke lay behind the ship, proof that she made some progress, though it was frustratingly slow. Sharpe had brought his telescope up the mast and now trained it eastward in hope of seeing land, but all he could see was a dark shadow beneath the cloud. He shortened the barrel and trained the glass downward to see Malachi Braithwaite pacing up and down the quarterdeck, flinching every time a gun cracked.
What to do about Braithwaite? In truth Sharpe knew exactly what to do, but how to do it on a ship crammed with over seven hundred men was the problem. He collapsed the telescope and put it into a pocket, then, for the first time, climbed from the maintop up above the main topsail to the crosstrees, a much smaller platform than the maintop, where he perched beneath the main topgallant sail. Yet another sail rose above that, the royal, up somewhere in the sky, though not so high that men did not climb to it, for there was a lookout poised above the royal’s yard, contentedly chewing tobacco as he stared westward. The deck looked small from here, small and narrow, but the air was fresh for the ever-present stink of the ship and the rotten-egg stench of the powder smoke did not reach this high.