Victory (16 page)

My other favorite moment came when the ship was
indeed under full sail, cutting through the ocean, rising and falling in the swells, with a bone in her teeth, as the men said—meaning the white spray she threw off on either side of the bow. I saw neither of these favorite moments in my first year on the ship, being trapped below decks by my duties. But now that I was older and no longer owned completely by the cook, I was on deck far more often, happy in the smells of the sea and the spray, that were so much more agreeable than the multifarious below-decks stinks of the ship and her men.

And I knew that someday, when I was bigger, I would work and beg and pray to become one of the topmen running up those masts. This was where I lived my life, now; this was where I belonged.

When I said this to my uncle Charlie, he smiled rather sadly and shook his head. “More power to thy young heart, Sam. As for me, I shall be back on land to my Joan the minute I am able.”

I could understand his feelings; after all, he was nearly forty years old. But none of us was close to being able to go home again, not yet.

Five weeks after setting sail from the West Indies we were back once more at Gibraltar, and then we sailed north, to meet Admiral Cornwallis's Channel Fleet one evening in August, off Ushant. It was early evening when we reached them; we fired our salute across the sea and it echoed round the fleet like thunder. All the ships of our squadron stayed there with the fleet except
Superb,
who sailed on with us to
England, and three days later we put Admiral Nelson ashore at Portsmouth Point after two and a quarter years at sea.

Even then, only the officers were allowed to leave the ship—and only some of the officers, at that. None of us men and boys was allowed to leave at all. Britain was at war, and the Navy would not risk giving any of its seamen—specially those who had been unwillingly pressed—the chance of deserting. So although women were allowed to visit the ship, and my aunt Joan came and brought presents for Uncle Charlie and me, I had no hope of going home to see my family. And I knew that even if my mother had been able to visit Portsmouth, three days by coach from our home, my father would never have let her go.

But it was good to hear the seagulls wheeling and crying overhead, off the Hampshire coast. Nowhere else in the world, it seems to me, do the gulls call with the same voice as they do over the waters around England.

Less than a month after we came home, we set sail again. On the 15th of September 1805, very early in the morning, the Admiral's barge was lowered over the side from its place on the main deck, and its crew of seamen dressed very neat in white trousers and striped shirts pulled away toward Southsea, which is a part of Portsmouth. There they picked up Admiral Nelson from the beach, which the men said was thronged with hundreds of people cheering and wishing him well; and with Captain Hardy he came back to us, looking very splendid in a blue coat shining with the stars and ribbons of all the awards he had won.

I had just a glimpse of him as he came over the side, with the bosun's pipe shrilling and the marines all lined up in their red and white uniforms, and I felt proud and frightened at the same time. My uncle and all the other men in our mess had said that we were off to fight the biggest of all the battles against Bonaparte; that the Admiral knew the whole French and Spanish fleets were gathered in the Spanish harbor of Cadiz, and he was taking us down there to blow them out of the water.

“And mark you,” Mr. Hartnell had said in a sad deep voice, looking I thought straight at me, “a lot of the men on this ship will be blowed out of the water at the same time.”

So we sailed south, and by September 27th we were off Cadiz, joining the British fleet that had been waiting there under Admiral Collingwood—though we fired no welcoming salute this time, nor got one, because our Admiral had forbidden it. The sea was filled with great ships of the line; it was a grand sight. For three days running we had their captains arriving at HMS
Victory
for dinners, one of them celebrating our Admiral's forty-seventh birthday, and there was an endless piping and saluting as they came aboard.

Captain Hardy had the ship's paint touched up, though whether that was for a birthday celebration I do not know, and because I was strong but light I was one of those lowered over the side with paint and brush, to hang over the waves trying to dodge the spray. The sides of the ship were broad stripes of yellow and black, and within the three yellow stripes were all our gunports, which had
to be painted black with no black smears or dribbles. It was no easy job, hanging there sitting on a board with ropes strung through it and lashed round your waist. The worst danger was not of falling into the sea, but of catching the rage of Lieutenant Quilliam if you splashed yellow paint on a black stripe, or left a black toeprint on a yellow one as the sea swung you against the side.

The boat crews bringing the captains from the rest of the fleet told us that the other ships were being painted to match
Victory
's pattern. Every ship had to paint its masts buff-colored as well, to make sure they looked different from the hooped masts of the French and Spanish fleets.

I said to Jonathan, next to me when we heard this, “Surely everyone can tell their ships from ours?”

He looked at me as you might look at a baby who calls a chicken a duck.

“This is for the thick of battle, Sam,” he said. “A ship is just a ship if its colors are shot away.”

But of course I had not seen battle, yet. I cannot tell you the difference that makes, in a mind, in a heart.

We sailed to and fro, out at sea off Cadiz, fifty miles out, watching the captains of our fleet come and go as the Admiral summoned them to HMS
Victory
to tell them his battle plans. I knew we were waiting for the enemy ships to come out of Cadiz harbor, but we were so far offshore that we couldn't see them over the horizon. All we could see were the distant sails of Lord Collingwood's smaller British fleet, between us and the coast.

“That's Nelson for you,” said the captain of our gun crew, as we paused in one more mock drill. “He knows just where to sit so that the Frenchies can't see him. They can see Old Coll's fleet, but they have no idea how many ships we have all told.”

“But we can't see them either,” I said, and then wished I had not spoken, because I was only the powder boy.

He answered just as if I was a man, though; we were a team, he was treating us all alike. “He's got fast little frigates like Euryalus watching Cadiz,” he said. “If the frigates see the enemy come out, they clap on sail and signal Coll, and he signals us. And we chase!”

And that, in the end, was what happened, on October 19th in the morning. I was below decks, off duty, stealing a visit to Hugh to help him feed the chickens. Even though I no longer worked for the cook at all, I liked to be reminded of the farm and home. But suddenly the bosun's pipes shrilled out above our heads, calling all hands, and heavy feet came clattering down the stairs. And I knew, with a sudden hollow feeling in my stomach, that this was the first step on the way to battle.

The poor chickens and their coops were snatched away in a squawking flurry, and a great banging and hammering began. Partitions and hatchways and even ladders were lashed up high or cut completely away, to leave as much space as possible for us to run out and fire the guns. I was sent to help roll hammocks and carry them up to the deck, to be stuffed into the netting along the sides of the ship—
something we did every day, but extra important now as a protection against splinters and shot. Other men were loading furniture from the officers' quarters down into the hold.

On we sailed, all this while; all through that day and the next, with the sea choppy and the wind sometimes fierce. We took our hammocks down to sleep in them, and then put them back again. At night, blue lights tossed on the horizon, and flares lit up the clouds; they were signals from the frigates, telling our Admiral that they still had the enemy ships in sight. And by the morning of October 21st, a warm hazy morning with the sun trying to shine, we saw them too. They had put out from Cadiz, on the west coast of Spain, not knowing that we were sailing up from the Strait of Gibraltar to catch them—twenty miles off the rocks of a cape called Trafalgar.

Now we were really sailing toward battle. Some of us were sailing toward death. I was not thinking about this when we were eating our breakfast, because for once we had neither the nasty burgoo nor our imitation coffee, but an issue of fresh bread, cheese, butter and beer. But Jonathan sat beside me, alternately sharpening his knife on a leather strop and using the knife to shred his hard lump of cheese.

“Young Sam,” he said, “if I go overboard, you are to take my kit for your own. Our messmates are my witness. The bag is strung up by that beam there.”

“Go overboard?” I said.

“There's no nice ceremony in battle,” Jonathan said. “A dead man has to be flipped over the side, out of the way.” He
looked at me with the nearest thing to a smile I had ever seen on his face. “But you will have to learn to play my pipe,” he said, “for I'll not have it wasted.”

“And another thing,” said my uncle Charlie, on his other side. He pulled a ring off his finger, leaned past Jonathan and took hold of my hand. The only place the ring would fit was over my left thumb. “Take that to thine aunt, Sam, if need be,” he said. “With my love.”

I was getting really frightened, for the first time. Up on deck, drums were beating, and the bosun's mates' pipes rising in command. “I'm just as likely to get killed as you are,” I said.

“True,” Jonathan said. “But I have a feeling about that. I think you will come through. Here, sharpen your knife.” He tossed me the leather strop.

I heard myself say something that until now had been part of my private nightmares. “I'd rather be killed than have my arm or my leg cut off.”

“No you wouldn't,” said Jonathan. “If Horatio Nelson can lead us all with one arm and one eye, anyone can do anything.” He tapped his mug of beer on the table and held it up to the other men, raising his voice, “To the Admiral, God bless him!”

“Bless him!” they rumbled—and then the pipes changed pitch to call us all up on deck. There was a rush to stow our things and hang up the table, and up we ran, to find the crew cheering. Out on the horizon was the long line of great ships of the French and Spanish fleet, and up in our rigging was a line of signal flags.

I could see Admiral Nelson on the quarterdeck, in his blue coat with all the bright stars and medals on it. He was looking up at the signal, and I think he was smiling.

I looked at the string of flags and said urgently to anyone who would listen, “What does it say?”

A big grizzled seaman beside me said, “He has signaled the fleet:
England expects that every man will do his duty
.”

And across the waves from the British ships sailing behind us came more cheers, clear and defiant, carried on the wind, carried into the teeth of the destruction that was waiting for us ahead.

Like a vast room the gundeck stretches before them,
dimly lit by lanterns. There is more sense of space than Molly had expected. Great black cannons line the side of the ship, the nearest one higher than her head, and she can just make out the shapes of another row on the other side. There is wooden planking under her feet, and over her head. She sees wooden buckets, racks of cannonballs, coils of rope.

“Each of those balls weighs thirty-two pounds,” Grandad says. “These were the biggest guns, down here. When they were fired, the recoil sent them rushing backward to where we're standing, hundreds of pounds of iron like a missile, and you had to keep clear or you'd be squashed. See those huge thick ropes threaded round each
gun? They caught it when it recoiled, so that it wouldn't go crashing backward right across the deck.”

Molly's ears ring; for an instant she hears faraway thunder and feels a quivering under her feet. Then it is gone.

She says to Grandad, almost accusingly, “You've been here before.”

“I certainly have,” Grandad says. “I'm a devoted member of The Nelson Society—we know a lot about this old ship. So I'm your personal guide, Miss Molly, at least until we find my friend Joe. This is what they call a ‘freeflow' day on Victory, when you can wander about alone instead of being part of a guided tour.”

Molly says, “That's good. Tours are for tourists.”

“We're not tourists?”

“Of course not. We belong.” And as she says it, she feels somehow that the ship agrees.

Grandad leads her up some ladderlike steps to the next deck. Again it is lined with cannons, poking their deadly noses out of the side of the ship through holes in square Plexiglas windows. Rain beats against the Plexiglas.