The Neptune’s mizzenmast went overboard. Sharpe heard the screams of the marksmen in her rigging, watched them fall, then rammed a new ball down his musket. The starboard carronade, loaded like Clouter’s with musket balls and a vast round shot, had swept the Spaniard’s forecastle clean of men. Blood dripped from the forecastle scuppers while the figurehead of the monk with a cross had been turned into matchwood. A big crucifix was fastened to the Spanish ship’s mizzenmast, but when Chase’s stern carronades blasted down the smaller ship’s length the hanging Christ’s left arm was torn away and then his legs were broken.
The Pucelle had ripped away a part of the Frenchman’s ensign, while the rest was in the water with the fallen mizzenmast. Chase wanted to turn his ship to larboard and lay her alongside the Neptune and batter her hull into bloody ruin, but the smaller Spanish ship rammed the Pucelle and inadvertently turned her to starboard. There was a tearing, grating, grinding sound as the two hulls juddered together, then the Spanish captain, fearing he would be boarded, backed his topsails and the smaller ship fell away astern. Her starboard gunports had been closed, but now a few opened as the surviving gunners crossed from larboard. The guns fired into the Pucelle. Captain Llewellyn’s marines were firing up into the Spanish rigging. Smoke obscured the smaller ship. Chase thought about putting his helm hard down and closing on her, but he was already past and so he shouted at the quartermaster to turn the ship north toward the caldron of fire and smoke that surrounded the Victory. The flagship’s hull could not be seen amidst that stinking fog, but, judging from the masts, Chase reckoned there was a Frenchman on either side of her. “Pull in the studdingsails,” he ordered. The sails, which projected either side of the ship, were only useful in a following wind and now the Pucelle would turn to place the small wind on her larboard flank. The sail-handlers streamed out along the yards. One, struck by a musket ball, collapsed over the mainyard, then fell to leave a long trail of blood down the mainsail.
The French Neptune was slowed by her trailing mizzenmast. Her crew slashed at the fallen rigging with axes, trying to lose the broken mast overboard. The Pucelle was off her quarter now and Chase’s larboard gunners had reloaded and poured shot after shot into the Frenchman, firing through the lingering smoke of their first broadside. The noise of the guns filled the sky, made the sea quiver, shook the ship. Clouter had reloaded the larboard carronade, a slow job, but there was no target close and he would not waste the giant shot on the Neptune which had at last released the wreckage of its mast and was drawing away. He rammed another cask of musket balls into the short barrel, then waited for another target to come within the short gun’s range.
But the Pucelle was suddenly in a patch of open sea with no enemy near. She had pierced the line, but the Neptune had gone north while the Spaniard had disappeared in smoke astern and there were no ships in front except for an enemy frigate that was a quarter-mile off and ships of the line did not stoop to fight frigates when there were battleships to engage. A long line of French and Spanish battleships was coming from the south, but none was in close range and so Chase continued toward the churning smoke, lit by gunflashes, that marked where Nelson’s beleaguered flagship lay. There was honor to be gained in defeating a flagship and the Victory, like the Royal Sovereign, was drawing enemy ships like flies. Four other British ships were in action close to the Victory, but the enemy had seven or eight, and no more help would arrive for a time because the Britannia was such a slow sailor. The French Neptune looked to be going to join that melee, and so Chase followed. The sail-handlers, short numbered because so many were manning the guns, sheeted home the sails as the Pucelle swung around. The sea was littered with floating wreckage. Two bodies drifted past. A seagull perched on one, sometimes pecking at the man’s face which had been torn open by gunfire and washed white by the sea.
The Pucelle’s wounded were carried below and the dead jettisoned. The cannon barrel that had been thrown off its carriage was lashed tight so that it would not shift with the ship’s rolling and crush a man. Lieutenants redistributed gunners among the crews, making up the numbers where too many had died or been injured. Chase stared aft at the Spanish ship. “I should have laid alongside her,” he told Haskeli ruefully.
“There’ll be others, sir.”
“By God I want a prize today!” Chase said.
“Plenty to go around, sir.”
The nearest enemy ship now was a two-decker that was laid alongside the bigger Victory. Chase could see the smoke of the Victory’s guns spewing out from the narrow space between the two ships and he imagined the horror in the Frenchman’s lower decks as the three tiers of British guns mangled men and timber, but he also saw that the French upper decks were crowded. The French captain appeared to have abandoned his gundecks altogether and assembled his whole crew on the forecastle, open weather deck and quarterdeck where they were armed with muskets, pikes, axes and cutlasses. “They want to board Victory]” Chase exclaimed, pointing.
“By God, sir, so they do.”
Chase could not see the French ship’s name, for the powder smoke curled around her stern, but her captain was plainly a bold man, for he was willing to lose his own ship if, thereby, he could capture Nelson’s flagship. His seamen had grappled the bigger Victory and dragged her close, his gunners had closed their ports and seized their cutlasses and now the French sought a way across to Nelson’s deck. The Victory was higher than the Frenchman, and the two ships’ tumblehomes meant that even when their hulls were touching, the rails were still thirty or more feet apart. The Victory’s guns were pounding the Frenchman’s hull, while the French ship had scores of men in the rigging, and those men were pouring a lethal musket fire down onto the flagship’s exposed decks. They had almost cleared those decks, so that now the British fought from their lower decks while the French sought a way to cross to the flagship’s virtually unguarded upper decks. The French captain planned to pour hundreds of men onto the Victory. He would make his name, be an admiral by nightfall and carry Nelson as a prisoner back to Cadiz.
Chase had climbed a few feet up the mizzen shrouds to see what was happening, and what he saw appalled him. He could not see the admiral, or Captain Hardy. A few red-coated marines crouched under the cover of the carronades and put up a feeble fire to counter the lashing musketry that still ripped down from the French masts, while on the Victory’s farther side another enemy ship fired into her hull.
Chase dropped down the rigging. “Starboard a point,” he said to the helmsman, then took a speaking trumpet from the shattered rail. “Clouter! Have you got musket balls loaded?”
“Full of them, sir!”
The enemy ship was a hundred yards away. The Victory’s cannon fire was ripping upward through her decks now as Hardy’s gunners elevated their barrels as high as they could. Holes were being punched high in the French two-decker’s starboard side as round shot, fired into the ship’s larboard flank, hammered clean through her. Yet the British gunners were firing blind and the boarders were gathering on the side nearest the Victory where the British guns could not reach. The French captain shouted at his men to drop the mainyard, for that would serve as their bridge to glory. His rigging was tangled with the Victory’s rigging, but his was filled with men and the Victory’s was empty. The sound of the muskets crackled like thorn burning. The Victory’s guns made deep booms. Wood splintered from the French deck and side as the shots punched out.