Due east the Centurion flew. In the morning she was flying still, her bowsprit right in the eye of the rising sun: and the wind held fair.
‘We must not be too sanguine,’ said Peter, trying to master his hands as he straightened the chart.
‘No. We had high hopes before, and they was dashed cruel hard,’ said Ransome. ‘We must not raise ’em too high.’
But even as they spoke they knew it was no good. The ship was alive with excitement: all the disappointed longings, swallowed down with a sailor’s hard-learnt philosophy, had sprung into brilliant life, as strong and stronger than ever: the ship was blazing with expectation—and they were part of the ship. They might talk as much as they pleased, but in their hearts there was a bubbling ferment that would not be kept down.
Never had the Commodore spoken with such certainty. Always, before Acapulco, there had been caution, reserve: this time he had said, ‘I will bring you to the station where she must pass: if you have spirit enough, we shall take her.’ He had certainly acquired some secret intelligence in Canton or Macao: he knew that she would sail: and he had given nothing away—the whole crew had been convinced that they were bound for Batavia; everybody on shore had been so unquestioningly certain of it that at this very moment, in the clerk’s cabin, there lay bags of mail for Batavia.
Eastward, eastward, and south about Formosa. ‘May 5th. 21° 57’ N., Bashee Islands bearing SSE 20 leagues. Botel Tobago Xima 7 leagues N. So the Bashees were 25 leagues too much to the W. on the chart: corrected it.’ These observations were of the first importance in navigation, and the Commodore was not, for one minute, going to allow such opportunities to pass: and as the observations were also of the greatest assistance in bringing them to their station in time, every man aboard capable of making them wielded the instruments with passionate zeal.
Glory and a million pieces of eight depended on their efficiency: for this was the galleon bound for Manilla, and her cargo was solid silver and gold.
Efficiency was their ambition and their watchword. Even in the highest days before Acapulco, Peter had never seen men race up the rigging or fling themselves to the braces with such instant, intelligent speed. It was as if their hopes had come to life five times reinforced by long rest. And at the guns the crews practised with indefatigable care: if a shot went wild there was no need for any officer’s reproof; the gun’s crew would be as down as if each man had lost five guineas, and the captain would look wretchedly ashamed. With so small a ship’s company there could not be men enough to fight all the guns: they were divided into gangs of ten on the main-deck, twelve on the gun-deck—two loaders to each gun, and the rest to run from one port to another. They practised continually, so that no words were needed, and the heavy guns ran in and out with silent, astonishing speed.
The sharpshooters, the men with small-arms in the tops, brought themselves to a degree of perfection that would have made a musketry instructor gasp. They were a band of thirty, carefully picked by a long series of competitions, followed with breathless interest by the entire crew: within this band rank and rating went by the board, for a steady hand and eye might be found in any man, irrespective of his degree; and some of the most skilled specialists—warrant officers and their mates—found themselves under the iron rule of Gyppo Soames. For two years past the pipe of All hands to witness punishment had primarily meant that Gyppo was going to cop it again; and the rolling drum’s chief duty had been to drown the poacher’s anguish. But now what a change was here: Soames neat, clean, a conscientious, exemplary tyrant—a most respectable man indeed. And for that matter, the Centurion’s defaulters’ list showed an unnatural blankness from the day of the Commodore’s address: it was marred only once, in May, by the record of a furious battle between Hairy Amos and Henry Burrell, able seamen of the starboard watch, for the possession of a musket named Old Noll, allegedly superior to all but Gyppo Soames’ Dead-Reckoner.
‘May 15th. No latitude at noon. Logged 71 leagues, course SW 17 hours, SW½W 7 hours. A glorious run after yesterday’s and the day before’s head-wind and dying airs. Topmen fired upon a pewter plate (old) veered out on a 20 fathom line: 30 holes in it at first volley: praised by Commodore. Mem. Cape Espiritu Santo shows as one knob, three little knobs, one knob, then a headland bearing NNE 1 mile to the sea.’
‘May 17th. Terrible day of calm. Boats away to tow—how much lighter she is—but still am quite fagged out. It is the anxiety, not the exercise. 4 miles logged. Slight current setting E½N however, a great comfort.’
‘May 18th. Half-gale at N and NNW. Crew rejoiced. Carried away larboard main-topgallant studdingsail boom: rigged out another and made good in 7 minutes 45 seconds. Sean begged I would explain plain rule of thumb navigation. Spent all watches below at mast-head watching for Cape. Mem. one knob, three clustered knobs, one knob, headland: must be on starboard bow. Later: wind dying in gusts—much anxiety.’
‘May 19th. 11° 53’ N. 3° 46’ E. of Botel Tobago Xima. A prodigious run. We may do it yet.’
‘May 20th. Beautiful gale throughout middle watch and forenoon. Raised Cape at noon. I saw it at the same moment as Wilson, whatever he may say, SSW 11 leagues—knob, 3 knobs, knob, on starboard bow. Instantly tacked and struck topgallants, because of the sentinels they post there for the galleon, with beacons. Cape Espiritu Santo is in 12° 40’ N. precisely and 4° E. of Botel Tobago Xima: all our reckonings agree. This is May 31st, their style, and 3 days before the Acapulco ship has ever made the Cape. We are to cruise between 12° 50’ N. and 13° 5’. Crew in most amazing high spirits. Must get some sleep, not having turned in these four watches together.’
‘May 31st. Gunnery practice. Some elegant shots. Number 7 and 10 lower tier still a little slow, being mostly ship’s boys. Longboat lashed alongside, in readiness. Mem. shot-garland no. 4 is a little worn.’
‘June 3rd. Keeping station. This is June 14th N.S. We grow somewhat uneasy. Sorcery beginning again. Lascars very sly about their sacrifice to Pulay Wooloo—a god of their parts, I find. Gave them a Canton hen. Wish them luck. I had a horrible dream that we were blown off station: I wish it may not be an omen.’
‘June 5th. Keeping station. Guns firing all day as usual. The black men’s guns won the prize. How they gleam, when heated. Mulberry lost his little finger running up no. 36: said “Damn um,” and laughed heartily. Tomorrow is the height of their time—the most usual day—16th, their style.’
‘June 11th. Cruising still. An anxious week, but anxiety allayed because of fresh breezes at W. and WSW., which must keep her back. Men have little time for anxiety, being as busy as bats. Scene between Commodore and Sean. Mr Anson wanted mutton: Sean said No, only two China sheep left, and begged pardon, but one must be kept for Commodore to celebrate victory and one to sustain Spanish captain in defeat. Commodore still wanted mutton, however: Sean grew dogged—was told obstinate, pigheaded; asked if he wished to be flogged? Unmoved. Commodore went aft, muttering.’
‘June 12th. Accident with no. 41. Overheated—kicked at the charge—turned, damaging trunnion. Beautiful repair by Aston, goldsmith by trade. Ransome sleep-walked with a cutlass. We pray earnestly for head-winds, which will be fair for the galleon. Weed beginning to grow.’
‘June 13th. Prayers answered. Fresh breezes and ½ gale E. and NE. Mulberry says it is his god—nonsense. Lascars look uncommon knowing, but say nothing. Gunnery, small-arms; very strict lookout.’
‘June 16th. A shocking thing has occurred. We were confident that we were on station 15 leagues off the cape, but at dawn we found it looming at a bare 7 leagues, the tide having set prodigious strong. Clawed off with all haste: but have our topsails been seen? Gloucester’s were, off Acapulco. If their sentinels were awake they could already have sent one of those amazing swift outrigger canoes beyond us already, in the dark, as an aviso to the galleon.’
‘June 18th. Backing and filling in one patch of weed all day. Anxiety very painful. Could she have passed us in the night, days ago? Ship filled with rumours.’
/> ‘June 19th—30 their style and the last day of the month. Can hardly bear it any more. Commodore keeps the deck. Unable to sleep or eat. If she don’t come within 48 hours it is all up.’
Worn and irritable from lack of rest, Peter came off duty at the end of the middle watch. It was four in the morning. He could not face small beer and biscuit, nor the unending guess and conjecture of the berth. He moved slowly up to the foretop in the grey light of the declining moon: the dew was wet under his hands, and the rigging fiddle-string tight. The Centurion lay head-on to the Pacific surge, and remotely before her the stars shone low. It was now the morning watch, and somewhere beyond the rim of the sea the sun would have risen. Peter made a quick calculation: yes, the first rays would be coming green through the woods in Tinian now. They would be lighting the blackened keel of the bark they had burnt: and the dawn would be racing westward at an inconceivable speed. Soon—in an hour and a half or thereabouts—it would have covered the whole tract of sea that had taken them so long to pass, and it would put out the stars.
They were growing a little paler already. Yes, he thought, shifting a leg cramped with sitting and moving up to the topmast-head to loosen it out, yes, they are much paler already, and the small three in a line have almost gone.
That star, he thought: I cannot place it. He called the astronomical atlas into his mind: but no, he said again, I do not make it out.
‘Oh, strike me,’ he whispered aloud, with something like horror (yet not horror, either) in the sound of his throat. ‘It can’t be …’
The star had not paled. Nor had it risen at all, like those few that could yet be seen: and there was no star in that quarter, nor any planet at all.
With a long swooping rush he slid down the back-stay. ‘I beg pardon, sir,’ he said in a low voice to Mr Dennis, the officer of the morning watch. ‘But I believe there may be a ship’s light one point on the larboard bow. I am not sure, sir.’
The third lieutenant’s face froze in attention. Without a word he vanished aloft: he was back; he gripped Peter’s hand, shook it briefly, made a dash towards the Commodore’s cabin, checked himself and said, ‘No. You may go—compliments, of course—say I confirm.’
‘Mr Dennis’s compliments, sir,’ said Peter, addressing the wide-awake eyes that gleamed from the cot, ‘and there is a top-light at south-east.’
‘Very good, Mr Bailey—no, Mr Palafox, I see. I will be on deck directly.’
It was impossible to say how the news had spread: but even before the Commodore had stepped from his cabin the men were appearing in the dimness from every part of the ship. The entire watch below was on deck, waiting and waiting: silently waiting and staring aloft towards the mast-head.
And when at last, with the sun, there came the wonderful cry from aloft it was not a surprise, but a confirmation—a profoundly satisfying confirmation, received with a deep, sighing growl.
She had long been stripped for action. There was little to do, and that little was done in seven minutes: now they were to wait. Yet before the galley fires were doused Mr Anson ordered a hot dinner: all hands would eat it, he said, or be sent below during the whole of the action.
With polished mess kits they watched him anxiously. Satisfied, he ordered the fires to be doused, and five minutes later the drumroll, tan tarara tan, filled all the ship. Clear for action: and action stations.
Peter, moved by some strange impulse—which was shared by all the rest, he noted, although not a word had been said—darted below for his best uniform. With the drum still thundering in his ears he took his place on the quarter-deck. Colours came with the rising sun, and gold and blue the Commodore stood at the windward rail: gold and blue, Mr Saumarez stood at the lee with the second and fifth lieutenants beside him: plain blue the master, conning the ship behind the wheel: red the officers of the Marines. Peter, Keppel and Preston were on the quarter-deck. The other officers were in their stations about the ship: the surgeon in the cockpit, ready: Ransome and Bailey with Mr Norris and Mr Stapleton in the gun-deck, ready; Mr Smith of the Gloucester and Hill on the fo’c’sle (he had replaced Peter at the guns by seniority); Balthasar and Mr Hughes in the waist, ready; Mr Wood of the Tryal at the quarter-guns.
Far, far over the sea she came, the familiar shape that Peter had seen so often in that distant Mexican bay by night. He knew every line but one, a dark cross like a royal, and yet not a royal, high above the white sails. ‘It is the crucifix,’ he realised, with a strange thrill in his heart. ‘The cross that the Spaniards sail under in enemy seas.’
‘She is clewing up her topgallants,’ he said to himself. ‘She holds to her course, bearing down. She means to engage.’ And he found that the noise that he heard was his heart. He glanced quickly at the impassive faces to see if anyone else had noticed it too.
‘Quite the size of a first-rate,’ he said, continuing his interior monologue. ‘We shall have the weather-gage in ten minutes, if she holds on her course. Then she cannot escape.’
‘Mr Saumarez,’ said the Commodore, ‘we will hale on the wind half a point.’
‘One league,’ said Peter, as the swift patter of feet died away. Everything had been long foreseen: there was nothing to do but to wait. His duty was to wait through the increasing tension: he was there, like the others on the quarter-deck, to second the Commodore at an instant’s notice—to be there for any emergency.
‘She is bringing-to,’ said Peter as the galleon began the movement. She lay there, a beautiful ship, brought-to under topsails, with her head to the north: and as her fore-topsail spilled the wind the royal standard of Spain broke out at the main-topgallant mast-head, a puff of smoke appeared in her side, and a little later the deep cry of the challenging gun reached the Centurion.
Between them a squall of rain drifted and turned. Peter saw the Spanish sails shiver, and then she was lost. A few warm drops fell on his cheek. The squall passed: and there she lay still, waiting for them; and her gun-ports were open.
‘I think we may show them our colours,’ observed the Commodore, looking at his watch. Keppel and the signal-yeoman sprang into motion. The ensign, the broad pennant, the Union flag appeared on the instant.
‘They have not cleared yet,’ continued Peter. Something was going over the side of the galleon. Might he look with his glass? Would it be proper? No. He could see now, anyway. It was a cow or a bullock. Another. They were throwing their stores overboard to clear the guns.
‘Pass the word for the gunner,’ said the Commodore. ‘Mr Randall, can you fetch her with the chasers?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Make it so, Mr Gunner. The chasers alone. You will lay them yourself, Mr Gunner: no other gun will fire until the order is given. You will disturb her people at their work, Mr Gunner.’
‘Aye-aye, sir.’
Boom, went the larboard chaser, and Peter strained for the pitch of the shot. Splash, splash again, and the third bounce must have struck her abaft the mizzen shrouds. A hoarse murmur ran through the ship, drowned by the crash of the starboard gun. That wetted them, thought Peter: and at the same minute he saw smoke from the galleon’s stern. Three plumes of water appeared ahead of the ship on either bow, and a spent Spanish ball made a hollow thud somewhere forward.
‘In topgallantsails,’ said the Commodore, just raising his voice above the sighing of the wind in the rigging. The upper-yard men raced silently aloft, and at the halliards and clewlines the hands worked in perfect co-operation, without a word: for the first time in his sea-career Peter heard the weather-clew and its block slap up against the lowered yard, a hundred and fifty feet above his head.
‘Fore and maincourse,’ said the Commodore, after a pause in which the starboard bow-chaser fired again—the fall of the shot unseen. He meant to close under topsails and mizzen alone, with the Centurion’s decks clear fore and aft. She still had a great deal of way upon her, and the gun-crews below could hear the gurgling run of the water racing along her side just under the sills of their open port
s.
The Centurion was ranging up alongside the galleon, approaching her larboard quarter to run up under her lee, so that she might not fall off before the wind and escape. The Spaniard’s immense poop and her broad, gilded stern-gallery could now be seen plainly, and the faces of men. The range was closing fast.
‘The sprits’l yard fore and aft, if you please, Mr Saumarez. Tops, there. You may fire with the first gun. Mr Brett, the guns may fire as they bear,’ said the Commodore, looking at his watch again and noting time and position on a slate. A hole appeared in the foretop-sail and the Spanish stern-chasers barked out again.
Spaniards were busy on their spritsail yard. ‘And they are doing the same,’ said Peter, ‘as if they meant to board us. Damn their impertinence. Spirited, though.’
Now the broad sea between them was a lane, a lane that narrowed with each heart-beat. Nearer and nearer the Spaniard was just keeping steerage-way, keeping the wind on her starboard quarter, waiting for the Centurion. The two ships were almost on parallel courses now: the Centurion had already crossed the galleon’s wake diagonally, and she was racing up with the white water tearing at her stem.
Closer still, and closer fast. ‘Hands to the braces,’ cried Mr Saumarez a second before the Centurion’s bowsprit ran under the galleon’s lee. The rest of his order was lost: as the Centurion’s bows passed the galleon’s stern-ports the Spanish broadside thundered out. But already the topsails were backed, and the way came off the ship.
They were side by side within close pistol-range, moving, but without any appearance of movement, for they moved together. Between them lay a dense night of smoke, pierced with innumerable scarlet-orange jets and shaken by the hellish roaring, the metallic bellowing of guns. The Centurion fired continuously: the galleon in broadsides, slow, measured, all-embracing thunderbursts of sound and smoke and fire.
One, that had swept the bowsprit and head. Two, on the roll and too high. ‘This is it,’ said Peter in a whisper. Three. The whole smoke-bank lit up with a roar like the falling sky, and an enormous jarring blow struck the Centurion full.