The first lieutenant was bleeding from a bullet wound in his left arm, though he refused to have it treated. The arm hung useless, but Haskell claimed it did not hurt and, besides, he said, he was right-handed. Blood dripped from his fingers. “At least get the arm bandaged,” Chase suggested, staring at the Neptune, which was making surprising speed despite the loss of her mizzenmast. She must have sailed clean around the western edge of the melee while the Pucelle passed to its east, and now the Frenchman was heading landward as though trying to escape the battle.
“I’m sure Pickering is quite busy enough without having to be detained bv scratched lieutenants,” Haskell answered testily.
Chase took off his white silk stock and beckoned to Midshipman Collier. “Tie that around Lieutenant Haskell’s arm,” he ordered the midshipman, then turned to the quartermaster. “Starboard, John,” he said, gesturing, “starboard.” The Neptune was threatening to cross the Pucelle’s bows and Chase needed to avoid that, but he reckoned he had speed enough to catch the Frenchman, lay her alongside and fight her muzzle to muzzle, and, because she carried eighty-four guns and he only had seventy-four, his victory would be all the more remarkable.
Then disaster struck.
The Pucelle had sailed past the Victory and the Redoutable, leaving a thick cloud of smoke that drifted after her, and out of that cloud there appeared the bows of an undamaged ship. Her figurehead showed a ghostly skeleton, scythe in one hand and a French tricolor in the other, and she was crossing behind the Pucelle, not a pistol’s length away, and the whole of her larboard broadside was facing the Pucelle’s decorated stern.
“Hard to starboard!” Chase shouted at the quartermaster who had already begun the turn which would bring the Pucelle’s larboard broadside to face the Neptune, but then the new enemy fired and the very first shot ripped away the tiller ropes so that the wheel spun uselessly in the quartermaster’s hands. The rudder, no longer tensioned by the ropes, centered itself and the Pucelle swung back to larboard, leaving her stern naked to the enemy guns. She would be raked.
A shot screamed down the weather deck, killing eight sailors and wounding a dozen more. The shot left a spattering trail of blood the whole length of the deck, and the next shot cut Haskell in half, leaving his torso on the starboard rail and his legs hanging from the quarterdeck’s forward rail. Collier, still holding the silk stock, was smothered in Haskell’s blood. The fourth shot shattered the Pucelle’s wheel and impaled the quartermaster on its splintered spokes. Chase leaned on the broken quarterdeck rail. “Tiller ropes!” he shouted. “Mister Peel! Tiller ropes! And hard to starboard!”
“Aye aye, sir! Hard to starboard!”
More shots broke through the stern. The Pucelle was shaking from the impact. Musket bullets cracked on her poop. “Walk with me, Mister Collier,” Chase said, seeing that the boy seemed close to tears, “just walk with me.” He paced up and down the quarterdeck, one hand on Collier’s shoulder. “We are being raked, Mister Collier. It is a pity.” He took the boy under the break of the poop, close to the mangled remains of the wheel and the quartermaster. “And you will stay here, Harold Collier, and note the signals. Watch the clock! And keep an eye on me. If I fall you are to find Mister Peel and tell him the ship is his. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.” Collier tried to sound confident, but his voice was shaking.
“And a word of advice, Mister Collier. When you command a ship of your own, take great care never to be raked.” Chase patted the midshipman’s shoulder, then walked back into the musket fire that pitted the quarterdeck. The enemy’s cannons still raked the Pucelle, shot after shot demolishing the high windows, throwing down cannon and spraying blood on the deck beams overhead. The remains of the mizzenmast were cut through below the decks and Chase watched appalled as the whole mast slowly toppled, tearing itself out of the poop deck as it collapsed to starboard. It went slowly, the shrouds parting with sounds like pistol shots, and the mainmast swayed as the stay connecting it to the mizzen tightened, then that cable parted and the mizzen creaked, splintered and finally fell. The enemy cheered. Chase leaned over the broken quarterdeck rail to see a dozen men hauling on one of the spare tiller lines that had been rove before the battle. “Pull hard, lads!” he shouted, bellowing to be heard above the sound of the enemy’s guns that still hammered into the Pucelle. A twenty-four-pounder cannon lay on its side, trapping a screaming man. One of the starboard carronades on the quarterdeck had been punched off its carriage. The great white ensign trailed in the water. None of the Pucelle’s guns could answer, nor could they until the ship turned. “Pull hard!” Chase shouted and saw Lieutenant Peel, hatless and sweating, add his weight to the tiller rope. The ship began to turn, but it was the mizzenmast, with its sail and rigging that lay in the water off the Pucelle’s starboard quarter, that did most to drag the ship around. She came slowly, still being punished by the FYench ship that had sailed out of the melee’s smoke.
She was the Revenant. Chase recognized her, saw Montmorin standing coolly on his quarterdeck, saw the smoke of the Frenchman’s guns sweeping up into her undamaged rigging and heard the terrible sounds of his ship being battered beneath his feet, but at last the Pucelle responded to the drag of the mizzen and the tug of the tiller and Chase’s starboard broadside could begin to respond, though some of his guns had been dismounted and others had dead crews and so his first broadside was feeble. No more than seven guns fired. “Close the larboard ports,” Chase called down the weather deck. “All crews to starboard! Lively now!”
The Pucelle slowly came to life. She had been stunned by her raking, but Chase led a score of seamen up to the poop to cut away the mizzen’s wreckage, and below decks the surviving gunners from the larboard cannon went to make up the crews of the starboard broadside. The Revenant turned to larboard, plainly intending to run alongside the Pucelle. Her forecastle was crowded with men armed with cutlasses and boarding pikes, but the remaining starboard carronade on Chase’s quarterdeck ripped them away. John Hopper, the bosun of Chase’s barge crew, commanded that gun. Chase slashed through a last shroud with a boarding axe, left a petty officer to clear the mess on the poop deck and went back to his quarterdeck as the Revenant crept closer and closer. The Pucelle’s starboard guns were firing properly now, their crews reinforced at last, and the shots were splintering holes in the Revenant’s side, but then the first of the Frenchman’s guns were reloaded and Chase watched their blackened muzzles appear in the gunports. Smoke billowed. He saw the Revenant’s sails quiver to the shock of her guns, felt his own ship tremble as the balls struck home, saw young Collier standing at the starboard rail staring at the approaching enemy. “What are you doing here, Mister Collier?” Chase asked.
“My duty, sir.”
“I told you to watch the clock in the poop, didn’t I?”
“There ain’t no clock, sir. It went.” The boy, in mute proof, held up the twisted enamel of the clock’s face.
“Then go down to the orlop deck, Mister Collier, and don’t disturb the surgeon, but in his dispensary there is a net of oranges, a gift from Admiral Nelson. Bring them up for the gun crews.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Chase looked back and saw the Victory. A signal flew from her rigging and Chase did not need a signal lieutenant to translate the flags. “Engage the enemy more closely.” Well, he was about to do that, and he was engaging a virtually undamaged enemy ship while his own had been grievously hurt, but by God, Chase thought, he would make Nelson proud. Chase did not blame himself for being raked. In this kind of battle, a wild melee with ships milling about in smoke, it would be a miracle if any captain was not raked, and he was proud that his men had turned the ship before the Revenant could empty her whole broadside into the Pucelle’s stern. She could still fight. Beyond the Victory, beyond the smoke that lay about her, beyond the embattled ships, some dismasted, he could see the undamaged rigging of the British vessels that formed the rearmost part of each squadron and those ships, not yet committed, were only just entering the battle. The Santisima Trinidad, towering over both fleets like a behemoth, was being raked and pounded by smaller ships that looked like terriers yapping at a bull. The French Neptune had vanished, and the Pucelle was threatened by the Revenant alone, but the Revenant had somehow escaped the worst of the fighting and Mont-morin, as fine a captain as any in the French navy, was determined to pluck some honor from the day.