Read Online 1805 by Richard Woodman - Free Book Online Page B

brute of a Frenchman with a great black beard
while all along the deck similar struggles were in progress. Drinkwater
recognised the struggling seaman as Franklin from the dark, distinctive
strawberry birthmark. Catching up his sword he took three paces across
the deck and drove the point into the flank of the giant.
    The man turned in surprise and rose slowly. Drinkwater
recovered his blade as the giant staggered towards him, ignoring
Franklin who lay gasping on the deck. The giant was unarmed and
grappled forward, a forbidding and terrifying sight. There was
something so utterly overpowering about the appearance of the man that
Drinkwater felt fear for the first time since they had gone into
action. It was the same fear a small boy feels when menaced by a
physical superior. Drinkwater's sword seemed inadequate to the task and
he had no pistols. He felt ignominious defeat and death were
inevitable. His legs were sagging under him and then his hearing came
back to him. The man's mouth was open but it was himself that was
shouting, a loud, courage-provoking bellow that stiffened his own
resolve and sent him lunging forward, slashing at the man's face with
his sword blade. The giant fell on his knees and Drinkwater hacked
again, unaware that the man was bleeding to death through the first
wound he had inflicted. The giant crashed forward and Drinkwater heard
a cheer. What was left of his crew of volunteers encircled the fallen
man, like the Israelites round Goliath.
    The deck of the
Bonaparte
remained in
British hands.
     
    Antigone
leaned
over to the wind and creaked as her lee scuppers drove under water.
Along her gun-deck tiny squirts of water found their way inboard
through the cracks round the gun-ports. In his cabin Drinkwater
swallowed his third glass of wine and finally addressed himself to his
journal.
    It is not
, he wrote at last,
the
business of a sea-officer to enjoy his duty, but I have often derived a
satisfaction from achievement, quite lacking in the events of today.
We have this day taken a French National brig-corvette of
sixteen 8-pounder long guns named the
Bonaparte.
We
have also destroyed twelve invasion bateaux, two of the large class
mounting a broadside of light guns, taken upwards of sixty prisoners
and thereby satisfied those objectives set in launching the attack at
dawn. Yet the cost has been fearful. Lieutenant Gorton's wound is
mortal and nineteen other men have died, or are likely to die, as a
result of the various actions that are, in the eyes of the public,
virtually un-noteworthy. Had we let the enemy slip away, the newspapers
would not have understood why a frigate
of
Antigone's
force
could not have destroyed a handful of boats and a little brig. It was
clear the enemy had prepared for the possibility of attack, that the
brig was to bear its brunt while the bateaux escaped, and, that, at the
end, we were nearly overwhelmed by a ruse de guerre that might have
made prisoners of the best elements aboard this ship, to say nothing of
extinguishing forever the career of
myself. Even now I shudder at the possible consequences of their
counter-attack succeeding.
    He laid his pen down and stared at the page where the wet
gleam of the ink slowly faded. But all he could see was the apparition
of the French giant and remember again how hollow his legs had felt.

----
Chapter
Six
April-May 1804
The Secret Agent
    As April turned into a glorious May,
Lieutenant Rogers
continued to smart from Drinkwater's rebuke. It galled him that even
the news that the
Bonaparte
had been condemned as
a prize and purchased into the Royal Navy—thus making him
several
hundred pounds richer failed to raise his spirits. There were few areas
in which Rogers evinced any sensitivity, but one was in his good
opinion of himself, and it struck him that he had come to rely upon his
commander's reinforcement of this. Such hitherto uncharacteristic
reliance upon another further annoyed him, and to it he began to add
other causes for