Man Of War

He turned to his lieutenant as the others cut to their posts. ‘I compliment you on the work of the topmen, Mr Lambe. Admirable; quite admirable.’

‘I will tell the captains of the tops, sir,’ replied Lambe, modestly but cheered.

Peto cleared his throat, as if to be done with what had gone before. ‘Very well, Mr Lambe,’ he began, in a voice intended to carry to each side of the quarterdeck. ‘We shall exercise the batteries. Carry on if you please.’

He had conferred with Lambe the evening before. Rupert would fire two broadsides, starboard first, and then by deck, gun by gun, as they were ready. This way he would gain a better impression of her gunnery since he would otherwise not know by how much the slowest crew impeded the rest. And they would fire full-charge with the quoins out so that he could see the reach of shot.

Lambe put the speaking-trumpet to his mouth. ‘Sile-e-ence!’

The midshipmen at each of the hatches relayed the cautionary order.

‘Starboard battery, stand-by . . . Ready . . . Fire!’

Even running in a calm sea at nine knots, Rupert shuddered like a tautened rope with the explosion of three hundredweight of black powder – and four hundred tons of iron jumping like crazed roughs. Smoke billowed through the hatches in the following wind, masking the waist, but Peto knew well enough the scene below, the guns at full recoil, muzzles inboard, worms scouring out the cartridge remnants, sponges dowsing the embers before the loaders ladled in the new cartridges, driving home the wads of rope yarn on to the charge with the rammer; then the roundshot and its containing wad; and the captain of the gun plunging his corkscrew into the touch hole to prick the cartridge, pushing in the quill primer-tube with its fine-mealed powder, and the rest of the crew heaving on the breeching tackle to run out the gun, lashing it secure, heaving with the handspikes so it was properly trained – until at last the gun captain could hold up his hand to show ready to the lieutenant.

Peto observed the face of his Prior hunter with the utmost concentration. It had been the best that money could buy (short of having one encrusted with precious stones) – the best time-keeping, the most reliable, the most able to withstand the rigours of the service. He had bought it with the prize-money from Lissa, and many had been the time he had watched intently its second hand, though never perhaps quite so fretfully as now. A frigate’s gunnery was one thing – life or death when it came to action, as any man-of-war, but action was not the primary business of a frigate: in frigate work navigation preceded gunnery. In a line-of-battle ship gunnery was everything. Her raison d’être was gunnery. She was nothing but a floating fortress – arsenal and battery combined; more weight of cannon than even Bonaparte had been able to mass at Waterloo. It was why their lordships had brought Rupert out of the Ordinary. Her gunnery would overawe the Turk; or if it did not, it would overpower him.

The second hand passed twelve for the second time, and then five . . .

The lead gun of the lower-deck battery fired, and then her others in a thunderous drum roll, the upper deck’s beginning three seconds later, and the middle deck’s a fraction after them. Peto shook his head. Every gun had fired: the gun-crews were doing their job faithfully at least; but so slowly that against another three-decker – or even a well-served 74 – half the guns might be put out of action by the return broadside. Even the French, in the late war, for all their time blockaded in Toulon or Cadiz, could fire a second broadside in two minutes! If this had been the Nisus’s gunnery he would have been laying into the crews from the top of the quarterdeck companion, and his voice would have carried to the forecastle even against the wind.

‘Larboard battery, sir?’

Peto braced. ‘Very well, Mr Lambe; larboard battery.’

‘Larboard battery, stand-by . . . Ready . . . Fire!’

Rupert shook once more. Peto glanced at his hunter again and watched for the fall of shot – a good mile and a half (it might have been more; it was not easy to judge in open sea), great fountains of water, the thirty-two-pounders’ reaching just beyond the upper deck’s eighteens’, but all in a satisfyingly regular fashion. Not that he would expect to engage a ship at such a range, unless it were trying to run from him, but it was well to know just how far he might stand off a shore battery, say.

Smoke billowed as before, so that once again the waist was soon hid, and he began pacing, fretfully again, until just as the second hand touched twelve the upper-deck battery thundered back into life, and the lower decks’ seconds after. For a moment he contemplated summoning the lieutenants and midshipmen, but that he had done already, and he could scarcely add to what he had said. He could assemble all the gun captains – or get Lambe to berate them . . .