The Blast That Tears the Skies (2012) (27 page)

I do not know if I hit another of the enemy. In that moment I heard Lieutenant Giffard’s shout from further forward. I turned and looked at him, but before he could speak to me a fountain of blood spat from the top of his head and he fell dead to the deck. Almost in the same moment, I felt a sudden sharp pain in my foot, looked down and saw blood seeping over my shoe from a round wound in my instep. I do not know if I cried out or not. Master Yardley dragged me down behind one of the larboard demi-culverins, tore off my shoe, pulled Cornelia’s kerchief from my scabbard and wrapped it around the bleeding foot. Poor Cornelia: what torment of mind she would be in if she knew how earnestly her brother and her husband were endeavouring to kill each other, and what far greater torment would overwhelm her if one of us succeeded.

‘Lucky, Captain,’ he said soothingly. ‘A hit from one of the marksmen in their tops. A few inches’ difference in his aim and the ball would have gone through the top of your skull.’

Round shot from the
Oranje
’s middle deck smashed through the starboard rail, taking away several feet of the deck where I had just been standing and sending a huge splinter of oak straight through Yardley’s stomach. The master looked at me with what seemed to be mild disappointment, his hands gripping the great wooden shard that protruded bloodily through his jerkin.

Scobey and Barcock ran to attend me. My two young servants were still visibly pale from witnessing the death of their companion Castle and the indiscriminate slaughter all around them; now they saw their captain bathed in the blood of Yardley, and momentarily must have thought that I, too, had perished.

‘I need reports,’ I hissed at them through my pain. ‘Reports from all quarters. Order to Lieutenant Farrell. Unman the larboard guns on the middle and lower gundecks and send the spare men up here to replace our losses. Above all, maintain fire on the downroll!’

It took another two or three broadsides for the reports to be brought to me, and it was only Scobey who bore them; Barcock had fallen on the middle gundeck, taken away by a vast splinter that impaled him against a bulkhead. I thought of his father and mother, so well known to me from Ravensden, but now just another set of parents who did not yet know that they ought to don their mourning weeds. Such is war: a time of black drapery.

Our position was evidently desperate. A hundred men, over a quarter of the ship’s company, lay dead or dying. Giffard, Yardley and most of the standing officers were gone. That good, honest soul Roger, Comte d’Andelys, straddled the border between life and death. The sails and rigging were in shreds; God alone knew how our masts still stood, but Thurston, our ancient carpenter, seemed to have made it a matter of personal pride that the enemy would not fell our mainmast. He stood by it, oblivious to the carnage all around him, ordering his rapidly diminishing crew to shore up here and hammer some treenails into place there. Through my pain, I tried desperately to conceive of a way in which the captain of the
Merhonour
could extricate the ship and his remaining men from this bloody horror. There was one only that I could envisage: surrender. If
Merhonour
yielded, this would end, and good men would live. My foot screamed at me to haul down the flag; my head, swimming in pain and appalled by the carnage around me, joined it in alliance; but at the last, my heart held out. In a voice all its own, not that of my grandfather or any other of my ancestors, it said simply, ‘A Quinton does not surrender.’

But still the guns of the
Oranje
thundered.

It was obvious what Cornelis was about. It was the classic Dutch tactic: weaken the enemy, clear his decks, then close for the boarding. And if it came to that, my good-brother had far more men available to him. Men who would have calculated exactly how much coin the States-General would pay them for taking such a great prize as the
Merhonour
.

We had to do something,
anything
, to hurt the Dutchman. If we were to avoid destruction or surrender, then I had to do something that Cornelis would not expect. Yet unlike me, Cornelis was the consummate seaman, master of the modern arts of war –

The modern arts. But perhaps not of the old ones. ‘Scobey,’ I said, struggling to my feet and tentatively putting weight onto the wounded limb, ‘go down to the orlop and bring up the surgeon’s mate, the Welshman. Thence to Oakes, the armourer, with this command…’

Ieuan Goch of Myddfai appeared on deck as another broadside roared out from the
Oranje
, the acrid gunsmoke sweeping across the
Merhonour
like a shroud. Once again Cornelis’s chain- and bar-shot tore through our standing and running rigging, felling one of the men on the main top but still failing in its main purpose, to bring down masts or yards and thus disable us. The Welshman looked about him with apparent unconcern, as though such slaughter was part of his daily staple.

‘Tell me, druid,’ I said, ‘the Welsh always had a name as great archers – they fought with my ancestor at Agincourt, and did for the French hordes that day. But do your people still train with the bow?’

The Welshman’s expression was at once curious and eager. ‘Aye, My Lord, we do. Muskets are expensive and clumsy, and though the world cries them up as the only way for modern men to fight, we Welsh still prefer the bow. A good bowman can get off three arrows in the time it takes one of your much vaunted musketeers to fire but one shot.’

‘Very well, then.’ I grimaced at another jolt of pain from my foot. ‘Go through the ship, Ieuan Goch, and find me as many Welshmen as are able to wield a longbow. Then assemble them upon the forecastle, yonder. All speed, man!’

‘All speed’ to the Welsh seemed to have a different meaning to that taken by the English. Ieuan Goch looked down at my foot and said, ‘I will examine that later, My Lord, if you are willing.’

‘If you don’t get the Welsh to the forecastle, druid, there may be no “later”!’

He nodded, which might or might not have been taken for a salute, but before he moved away he said, ‘You should have a crutch, My Lord. Send this infant to fetch you one.’

‘Impudent sheep-buggerer,’ cried Scobey as the Welshman departed. ‘As though I’d do his bidding –’

The hull shuddered as another broadside from the
Oranje
struck home. The unexpected motion sent another bolt of pain through my entire frame. ‘I think,’ I gasped, ‘I think he may have the rights of it, Scobey. Pray fetch me a crutch.’

Amid another hail of musket-fire from the
Oranje
, the fresh men from below arrived on deck, taking cover at once behind the guns or beneath the remnants of the fights. I made my way through them, swinging my newly-acquired crutch and limping to favour my good foot, nodding grimly to each man in turn. The deck was red and sticky from the blood already shed upon it. Once again the
Oranje
’s broadside belched out, to be greeted at last by something like the full broadside of the
Merhonour
. If the Dutch had thought we were weakening, perhaps they were now disabused.

Grimacing through every step, I finally reached the forecastle, where the band of Welshmen was assembled. Their weapons had only just arrived from the orlop and were in canvas bags upon the deck, so they must have seemed a sorry spectacle indeed to those aboard the
Oranje
. The relative positions of our two ships had shifted slightly now. Although both had come to almost a complete stop, wind and tide had moved us a little way, and now, upon the forecastle, I was much closer to my enemy’s quarterdeck. As the smoke from another broadside cleared, and the inevitable screams of anguish rose from both ships, I looked up and saw the captain of the
Oranje
at his quarterdeck rail. In that moment, Cornelis van der Eide turned and saw me. His normally imperturbable face fell.

The Welshmen took up the strange weapons that had lain in the armourer’s store of the
Merhonour
for decades. Fire-arrows were a common enough weapon aboard ships of that time, but they were large and clumsy affairs, designed for firing from some of the smaller cannon such as sakers or minions. As with all shot fired from cannon, they could be aimed only approximately.

Merhonour
carried none of these. But the larger artillery weapon had been based on a much simpler, much older and much more accurate model; and of these, the ancient ship had an abundance.

I looked across to the
Oranje
, to the bewildered face of my
good-brother
Cornelis. I smiled through the pain from my foot and raised a hand in salute. Then, once I was certain that every Welshman had a bow and a true fire-arrow in his hand, I raised my sword and let it fall.

At such close range, the Welshmen could not fail to hit. The arrows stuck into Cornelis’s quarterdeck, his mizzen mast and its sail. The fiery substance immediately behind the arrowheads scattered on impact. Frantically Cornelis turned away, no doubt to order water brought up and for guns to be brought to bear on the extraordinary spectacle on the
Merhonour
’s forecastle. But in that time, my Welsh archers, heirs to those who had decimated the flower of French chivalry at Agincourt, had let loose another volley. In truth, the fire-arrows were merely pin-pricks, igniting small fires and sowing panic on the quarterdeck but not causing much real damage. However to the crew of the
Oranje
, no doubt exhausted from having been at the heart of the fight all day and still being hammered by the battery of the
Merhonour
, they must have been very nearly the last straw.

Very nearly: but not quite the last of all.

Beyond the
Oranje
I caught a glimpse of the masts and sails of another great ship, seemingly floating eerily above the swirling gunsmoke. A torn but still proud plain red flag at the fore identified her. It was the
Royal Oak
. The wounded Lawson and his successor, Jordan, were come to the rescue of the ship that had abandoned her place in line at the beginning of the battle. The suspected traitors had come to the assistance of the man who had been tasked with destroying them. The Commonwealths-men were fighting to save the cavalier.

As the
Oak
’s broadside hammered into her larboard beam, the fire into us from the
Oranje
’s starboard battery weakened correspondingly. I could see Cornelis, still waving his sword, ordering men to put out the remaining fires started by our arrows and gesticulating furiously toward his new opponent. Or rather, opponents: for now the masts and sails of a ship identical to the
Oak
hove into view off her starboard quarter, manoeuvring to take her place alongside the
Oranje
. The blue flag at the mizzen identified her beyond doubt as the
Royal Katherine
, the equally new and mighty sister ship of the
Royal Oak
, flagship of Thomas Teddiman, Rear-Admiral of the Blue.

The appearance of such powerful seconds gave fresh heart to the gun crews of the
Merhonour
. Our rate of fire increased, joined by the fresh battery of the
Katherine
on the opposite side of the
Oranje
. Now, at last, Cornelis’s fire began to fall off. At bottom, his great ship was a merchantman, and there was a limit to the punishment she could take; a limit that Cornelis had probably already exceeded, several times over.

The end, when it came, was sudden. The colours of the
Oranje
came down. I saw Cornelis van der Eide, my good-brother, standing at his starboard rail, holding his sword hilt-first toward me. I nodded grimly.

Francis Gale appeared at my side, fresh from his efforts below. No one would have taken him for a man of God: with his torn, open shirt and grimy flesh, caked in the blood of those he had helped, he resembled the roughest tarpaulin.

He surveyed the scene. ‘Well, Matthew,’ he said with some satisfaction, ‘I think I may truthfully report to the Lord Archbishop that the curse of the
Merhonour
has finally been laid to rest.’

 

 

 

The
Merhonour
now had a respite from the battle, but the occasional thunder of a distant broadside betrayed the fact that our headmost ships were still engaged against the rearmost of the Dutch, who were in headlong flight and apparently entire disarray.

Thus I had an interval in which to entertain Captain Cornelis van der Eide in the remnants of my great cabin; much of the starboard side had been shattered by the guns of the
Oranje
, and our carpenter’s crew was busy with running repairs as we spoke. Through the gaping holes that now served me for windows, we watched as his brave ship burned. The
Oranje
had been too badly damaged to save, but we and the other ships around us had taken off as many of her crew as we could and transferred them to some of the attendant hoys and ketches. Some two hundred men survived from Cornelis’s ship: barely half the crew. How many of those would survive months of incarceration in a disease-ridden castle was a moot point. That would not be the fate of Cornelis himself, of course: as a captain, he would give his parole and would thus be given a large measure of liberty in an appropriate lodging. It was with some alarm that I suddenly realised where that lodging was likely to be. After all, where could be more appropriate than the home of his dear twin sister, where no doubt they would instantly resume the internecine warfare that seemed to have prevailed between the van der Eide siblings since the day of their birth?

Unsurprisingly, my stocky good-brother, a dour man even when in his happiest condition, was sullen and contemplative. This might have been a consequence of his surrender, or of his wounds – he had a great gash in his head, which had been bandaged beneath his hat, and he had also taken some of our canister-shot in his thigh.

‘Bows and arrows,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘A weapon from another time, Matthias. I had not thought such things still existed, nor men able to use them.’

‘Old weapons fired by an old race, good-brother. You had bested almost our entire fleet single-handed, so we were hardly going to stop you with the common weapons of our age.’

‘I did my best,’ said Cornelis, gloomily. ‘I had sworn to take the
Royal Charles
, and my crew gave their all. But none supported us – too many of our captains were cravens and backsliders. And worst of all, good-brother, I think too many would prefer to fight each other than you English. All the hatred between Zeeland and Holland, all the disputes over the command… If we can but resolve that, and find an admiral that all respect, then we will give you English a day to remember, I think.’

‘Perhaps, good-brother. If you still have a fleet and a country on the morrow, that is.’

Something of the defiance and undoubted valour of Cornelis van der Eide returned. ‘Be not so confident, Matthias. Remember that mighty Spain, with all its bullion and its invincible armies, could not defeat my land in an eighty-year war. Do you really think that you English can do so in a day?’

Just then, Scobey came and informed me that my presence was requested in the cockpit on the orlop deck. I went slowly, leaning heavily upon my crutch and wincing with every step. I also went down with a heavy heart. The summons could surely mean only that Roger, Comte d’Andelys, was on the point of death, and wished to say his farewells…

‘Ah,
mon ami
, I give you joy of your victory, Captain Quinton!’

Francis Gale, who was attending the patient, glanced at me and raised his eyes to the heavens. Roger was full of colour, waving his right arm frantically as though to compensate for the immobility of the left, which was splinted and now ended in a tar-cauterised stump.

‘My Lord!’ I cried joyfully. ‘And I give you joy of your recovery, sir!’

‘Indeed, indeed. And my recovery is due entirely to your personal sorcerer, here, who provided potions that made the operation bearable.’ Ieuan Goch nodded sagely. ‘The loss of a hand is inconvenient, of course,’ Roger continued, ‘but now I think on it, I cannot quite remember what I ever used the left one for. I think I will cope admirably with just the one, Matthew. In truth, perhaps it will make me something of a curiosity at court, for warriors with battle-scars always seem to have a powerful effect on Milady This and the Duchesse de That. Better still, I now resemble a pirate, and I know some very grand ladies indeed whose most secret dream is to be ravished by one such. Who knows, perhaps I shall even invest in a hook?’

‘My Lord,’ said Ieuan Goch to me, ‘it would be best if you took the pallet next to the Gallic count, here. It is time for us to deal with your foot. The longer it is unattended, the greater the risk of the gangrene.’

Craigen, the surgeon, merely nodded in assent; it was clear that authority within the
Merhonour
’s cramped apology for a hospital had passed wordlessly to that elemental force, our own Physician of Myddfai. I would have dissented, as I wished to inspect all parts of the ship and to survey the state of the action from my quarterdeck, but Francis Gale shot me a glance that suggested he would personally strap me down if I rejected the Welshman’s advice.

It was Ieuan Goch who sewed up my wound by the light of a solitary lantern, swinging from the bulkhead above. I permitted him to rub the wound with his balms, and I consented to take some mouthfuls from the bottle of excellent French brandy that Roger had evidently produced from one of his dozen or so sea-chests. Perhaps these alleviated some of what I then endured, but it hardly seemed so. Every stitch was agony: the needle pushing through my flesh on the one side, then the briefest of respites before it pushed back up through the other. I desired nothing more than to scream with all my strength, for this exceeded all the pain I had known in my life. But my honour would not permit me to cry out; it was not fit that a king’s captain should do such a pathetic thing. Nor, at first, did I permit myself to faint away. Yet at one point I must have been in a kind of delirium, for I seemed to see my grandfather at the foot of the pallet. He was not as I knew him, an ancient man soon destined for the grave, but a young, vigorous figure in the garb of the old queen’s time. He seemed to smile at me and said, ‘Call that a wound, boy? Wait until you get a Spanish pike in your side.’ With that, and another searing pull of Ieuan Goch’s needle, shapes and lights swam before my eyes. Still I fought against the faintness, and at last I heard the Welshman’s voice: ‘All done.’ He proclaimed the wound to be clean, the stitching to be good, the prospects for a full recovery and a clean scar both excellent.

With the operation complete and the pain beginning to recede a little, I looked about me. The cockpit was ever a low, dark place, cramped beyond measure, reeking of the bilges beneath. Now it also stank of corruption, of rotting flesh and the discharges from the newly dead. Apart from the usual sounds of timber moving through seawater and the distant rumble of cannon-fire, only groans and an occasional scream interrupted the silence of that awful place. I spied perhaps another two dozen men on pallets or upon the deck, about half of them given up for dead, the others with good prospects of living. I was inordinately pleased to see that one of the latter was Tremar, whose slight frame seemed able to shrug off the most terrible of wounds. He was remarkably merry, given his condition; but then, all of the wounded men seemed remarkably merry. Roger had evidently been typically generous with his private libation.

An hour or so passed before I returned to the quarterdeck, sporting a heavily bandaged foot and a second crutch. The Welshman was furious that I refused to rest for any longer and berated me by relating the dire consequences that had allegedly befallen patients of his whose wounds had reopened. But with the first lieutenant, master and several of the mates dead we had a desperate shortage of watch-keeping officers, and even a wounded and comparatively ignorant gentleman captain was capable of playing that part.

I hauled myself up the quarterdeck stairs and saw Kit Farrell, Francis Gale and my good-brother standing at the starboard rail, looking off toward a group of three desperately shattered Dutch ships with their colours hauled down in surrender.

‘Damnable,’ said Francis. ‘Unchristian. Unspeakable. Un-English!’

‘It is against all the laws of war,’ said Cornelis. ‘Truly monstrous.’

Kit was the first to espy my approach, and turned to salute. ‘Mister Farrell, gentlemen,’ I said through clenched teeth, fighting back the desperate pain in my foot. ‘How stands the battle?’

‘The Dutchmen that we catch are surrendering, sir. Like the three yonder –’

‘The big Indiaman, that is the
Maerseveen
,’ said Cornelis. ‘Behind her,
Swanenburg
. To starboard,
Tergoes
, of Zeeland – my friend Kruyningen commands her. They fell foul of each other during their attempted flight. And now see how their surrender is acknowledged, brother!’

At last, I understood the full horror of what was transpiring before me. A small English man-of-war, flying the white flag of Prince Rupert’s squadron, was close under the larboard quarter of the
Tergoes
. At first glance I had taken her for one of the sixth rates, presumably closing the Dutchmen to secure them following their surrender. But now, as I saw the longboat pulling away from the stern of our ship and the first flames suddenly spring from her hold, I realised what I was witnessing. She was a fireship. Ignoring the stricken colours, she had fastened herself to the three hopelessly entangled Dutchmen.

‘May God grant that the barbarous murderer meets his right end,’ said Francis Gale. ‘And if the Duke’s short of a hangman, I’ll gladly play the part.’ He gripped the ship’s rail tightly, rocking backward and forward in anger.

‘Gregory,’ said Kit. ‘The fireship is the
Dolphin
, so her captain is William Gregory.’

The first flames broke out in the standing rigging of the
Tergoes
. Men ran upon her decks like ants fleeing a disturbed nest. Some attempted vainly to put out the flames. Others leapt into the sea. Yet others attempted to cross onto one of the other ships, the
Maerseveen
and
Swanenburg
, but the flames pursued them mercilessly. Like many of the ships in the Dutch fleets, the three burning men-of-war had cut loose the boats that would normally be towed behind them; and by doing so, they had inadvertently condemned hundreds of men aboard them to a fiery death.

Now the first faint aroma came to us upon the breeze: the stench of burning human flesh. I thought upon poor Roberts and the
Bachelor’s Delight
: of all the many ways in which men could perish in battle, this was perhaps the most hideous, and I felt nothing but shame that this atrocity could be committed by an Englishman.

‘We should pray for them, Francis,’ I said numbly, just as the conflagration took hold of the sails of the
Swanenburg
.

The man who had kept his faith through the notorious slaughter at Drogheda shook his head, and continued to stare at the terror across the water. ‘There are no prayers for this, Matthew,’ he said, his voice trembling. ‘God has no words for such as this.’

The
Merhonour
soon left the dreadful scene astern, but Captain Cornelis van der Eide stayed at the rail, silently watching the blaze recede into the distance. I approached him once, intending some words of comfort, but one look at his face dissuaded me. For in the years I had known him, I had never seen my dour, unemotional good-brother in tears.

* * *

During the remaining hours of daylight, we continued our pursuit of the Dutch. Nine of their ships, unable to flee or otherwise cut off, surrendered to our fleet; nine, that is, in addition to the three destroyed by the foul iniquity of the captain of the
Dolphin
fireship. Four more, that had become impossibly entangled with each other during their headlong flight, were given the chance to surrender by the Duke of York, but valiantly refused the offer and were thus legitimately burned by another of our fireships. We could see the flames in the distance, and heard the blast when one of them blew up. I was later told that this very explosion blew free one of the four, which made its escape to Holland, but that on the remaining ships barely a hundred survived. Such is the fortune of war.

Meanwhile our fleet slowly rearranged itself into a very rough sailing order, returning to our original squadrons. Inevitably, this was a difficult process. Most of our ships were much shattered in their masts and rigging, and we were no exception. Indeed, we were perhaps in a worse state than most, for the antiquity of the ship was all too apparent. Despite the Dutch propensity to fire on the uproll, aiming for masts and rigging, we had taken at least two dozen shot in the hull, and the consequences threatened to be dire. The water in our hold, never less than two feet deep, was now coming dangerously close to four, and we had crews constantly at the pumps. Much of the beakhead was gone, shattered by the ferocious fire of the
Oranje
. Up above, our sails had been torn to shreds by two hundred or more great shot; barely a rope of either the standing or running rigging survived unscathed. The single most prevalent sound on the
Merhonour
, and across the water upon many of our companions, was that of hammering, as damage was made good, cannonball holes patched and jury masts rigged. My great cabin was slowly rebuilt around me as I rested, my wounded foot elevated to ease the pain. But as we all steered clumsily into something approximating our allocated positions, our ships often came near enough to each other for messages to be bawled through voice-trumpets. Thus by dusk those of us aboard the
Merhonour
were fairly certain of the final butcher’s bill upon our side in the great battle that had just concluded. It was said that we had lost over a thousand men; and to them, perhaps, should be added Gregory, captain of the
Dolphin
, who had been placed under arrest pending a court-martial, the verdict thereof being in little doubt.