Midshipman Quinn

— 3 —

Beamish had seen the gush of smoke. He darted to the forehatch and disappeared, to appear again almost immediately and race aft to his commander.

"Gunnery store's afire, sir!" he panted. "It's blazing down there — no getting at it!"

"Better abandon ship, sir," ventured Frith, behind him at the helm.

Septimus's thoughts raced through his mind. It was a matter of minutes before the fire, fanned by the strong breeze, would spread and reach the magazine. To rig and man the pumps was impossible in the time. This, then, was to be the end of his heroics — to abandon his prize, to take to the boat and pull away, to watch the Chasseur blown sky-high when the fire had its will.

The smoke and thunder of the sea-fight was a bare four hundred yards ahead when he made the daring decision.

"Mr. Beamish!" he cried. "Two hands to the mainbrace, two to lower the boat! Larboard your helm, Frith — bring the wind abeam!"

As the sloop swung away from her course, heeling over until the wavetops lopped over her lee rail, he sprang to the flag halyards. Down came the Tricolour, and up soared the English flag. The captured Chasseur was to serve Britain after all.

Red flame was shooting from the foredeck now, licking upward at the foot of the sail. Beamish and his men had the larboard boat lowered and its painter made fast to the rail.

"Now the grapnels, Mr. Beamish — lash the ends and stand by to launch them at the Frenchman's bows!"

The sloop was almost dead to windward of the locked ships. He could see Althea's stern, and the flash of steel as men fought there. Vengeur's bows were towards him.

"Helm over!" he told Frith. "Put her before the wind and sheer her alongside!"

Round came the Chasseur, her bowsprit pointing straight at the French warship like a fencer's foil. With the wind right astern, she foamed down upon the big ship. Someone aboard Vengeur had seen the little craft's charge. A few figures gesticulated from the foredeck, a scattered fire from half-a-dozen muskets crackled ineffectually as, with smoke pouring from her and her foresail ablaze, she rushed to the attack.

"Down mainsail!"

With the red hull of the Frenchman only a pistol-shot away, the mainyard came down with a rush. The blazing sloop ran in under the huge bowsprit and Frith's strong hands pushed the tiller over until her own bowsprit rasped along the enemy's side.

Midshipman Quinn's sketch of the Sea Fight. From his private Log

"Away grapnels!" came Beamish's bull roar, and three grapnels hurtled through the air on their lines.

Every grapnel caught in the bowsprit rigging of the Vengeur and held fast. Although the lowering of the mainsail had taken much of the way off her, the jerk as the sloop was brought up short threw Septimus off his balance. When he recovered himself he saw that the Chasseur was held close against the fore part of the bigger vessel's hull, the two wooden sides grinding and splintering as the waves set them heaving against each other. The sloop's foresail was a sheet of flame, and flames stabbed upwards with orange-red tongues from half-a-dozen places on the deckplanking. It might be five minutes or more, or only five seconds, before the fire reached the magazine and it blew up. That explosion must undoubtedly damage the Vengeur severely — but they could not wait for that moment.

"All hands — abandon ship!" shouted the midshipman above the tumult of sound that came from overhead.

Musket-balls sang through the air about him as he started for the bulwarks. A loud groan made him turn. The faithful Frith was sinking to shoulder.

"Overside wi' ye, sir!" he growled almost angrily as Septimus bent over him. "Ye've not a second to spare — and I'm done!"

"Maybe — but I'm not!" retorted Septimus, and with a great effort he got his shoulder under the man's body and staggered to his feet.

Again the muskets banged and he heard the balls thud into the deck behind him as he tottered towards the rail. Beamish sprang to meet him. Frith was quickly transferred to the giant seaman's shoulders and carried down into the waiting boat. Septimus, the last to leave the vessel he had commanded for less than a day, was not slow to follow. The moment he landed in the boat she was shoved off, and Dobbs and Wallace at the oars sent her flying through the water away from the doomed sloop.

No musket-shots followed them. Midshipman Quinn, twisting round in the sternsheets to look back, saw the reason. The few men available on Vengeur's deck — all the rest were needed to deal with the frigate — were frantically trying to cut away the bowsprit rigging to which the grapnels were attached. They were not having much success. The sloop was wrapped in flame and at any moment she would blow up.

"How is he?" he inquired, turning to Beamish, who was binding a pad of cloth soaked in seawater on Frith's wounded chest.

"He won't die, sir, but he's out of the fight just now." Beamish stopped his rough bandage-work to stare up at the midshipman. "What about us, sir?" he added. "Are we out of the fight too?"

The question brought Septimus back to the realities of their situation. The rapid succession of events, the thrill and tension of the sloop's rush down wind upon the Vengeur, followed by their present release from danger, had brought an odd lethargy upon him. He summoned all his wits. There was something yet to be done, and he must take command.

What the situation on the Althea's deck was, he could only guess. The continuous din of the fighting gave no hint of its progress, and the big hull of the French warship hid the frigate. Judging by the few men on her decks, Vengeur had used the greater part of her crew in boarding the frigate, and that meant that the British seamen would be hard-pressed by forces at least twice as numerous as their own. That they were still fighting was shown by the fact that their colours still fluttered from the yardarm. The red-white-and-blue flag could just be seen, tattered but defiant, above the smoke and through the tangle of rigging.

"When will Chasseur's magazine blow up?" he muttered impatiently.

Beamish heard him. "May be a few minutes even now, sir," he declared. "Double-skin magazine, that was — iron skin between the timbers. "

A few minutes yet. When the sloop did blow up, she would send up part of the Vengeur's bows too, and probably set her on fire at once. That would disconcert the French boarding-party. Some of them might panic, or the French captain might withdraw a party to deal with the fire. That would be the moment to strike.

He leaned forward suddenly, grasping the boat's tiller and swing ing it round.

"Pull, men! Send her along! We've work to do!"

"Praise be — and didn't I know it!" chuckled O'Neill, fingering his cutlass.

The wind had already carried the boat to leeward along the Chasseur's flank. Septimus steered close in under her stern. If any Frenchman was at the rail, he either did not see them or ignored them. A small boat with seven men was not likely to distract attention from the main fight. As they rounded the big red ship, the long bowsprit of the Althea came into view, for the two ships were locked bows to stern.

Midshipman Quinn was not acting without his customary forethought. Although he could see nothing of the fierce fighting which was going on aboard the frigate, he knew that the boarders must have made good their footing there. It was therefore very likely that the Althea's men, forced back from the bulwarks, would be defending the quarterdeck end of their ship, where the colours flew. It was Mr. Quinn's intention to gain the foredeck and counter-attack from there, taking the French in the rear as he had at first planned to do before Charles Brunel provided him with the weapon of a fire-ship.

"Lay to your oars!" he shouted impatiently. "Easy all! Stand by!"

The boat glided swiftly beneath the stern windows of the Frenchman, and the familiar figurehead of their own ship appeared overhead beneath the long bowsprit. He steered beneath the bowsprit, and Beamish, standing up in the boat, got a hand over the sprit-stay as the oarsmen held water. In a second he was followed by the others. Frith called faintly after them to wish them luck as one by one they heaved themselves on to the stay.

Such work was child's play to seamen who could climb a rope by using their hands alone, but Septimus found it the hardest bit of that crowded day's work. Had it not been for the steel muscles of Tod Beamish, ever at hand to help him, he would not have managed the climb to the bowsprit. In his ears, as he panted and clung in undignified fashion with the giant seaman's hand gripping his collar, was the ever-growing roar of the fight — an indescribable medley of shouting, screaming, pistol-shots and the grind and clash of steel. When, at last, he crouched on the massive round of the bowsprit just beyond the bows, he could see the frigate's deck and what was happening there.

He had hardly time to realise that the Althea's men were hemmed in on the quarterdeck, and that the mass of striving men with their backs to him were French sailors, before there was a rending explosion from somewhere in front of him. The bowsprit leaped beneath him like a live thing and the whole ship shuddered with the shock. The sloop had blown up.

Through the acrid smoke that made a thick vapour on the frigate's deck he saw the rank of Frenchmen falter. Some few of them ran back, shouting excitedly and pointing to the column of smoke rising from the foredeck of their ship. This was the moment.

"Come on!" he yelled, and scrambled to his feet. Regardless now of the drop into the water far below, he leapt across the few feet that separated him from the bulwarks and landed with a flying jump on the deck. After him rushed the five seamen, led by Beamish.

In the wild charge that followed, Septimus scarcely noticed that the deck was littered with dead and dying men and slippery with blood. He certainly did not realise that he was still wearing his spectacles. He was cheering madly, and so were his men. They raced for the packed mass of Frenchmen together, and together they flung themselves into the fight.

Midshipman Quinn could never recall, afterwards, the details of that surprise attack. There was a savage face in front of him, a raised pistol. He cut fiercely at it and his blade met flesh and bone. The face disappeared. A man with blood running down his cheek thrust at him with a sword, catching the point in his coat-sleeve. From beside him Beamish's mighty arm swept down and the man fell with a scream. Carried on by the impetus of his rush, slashing and thrusting, he was conscious only of a fierce desire to win through to the Althea's men, to join forces with Barry and Cocker and the rest of his shipmates.

Suddenly he found himself with no opponent in front of him. The after deck was the scene of a dozen man-to-man fights. He caught a glimpse of Captain Sainsbury, some yards on his left, coolly parrying the thrust of a French sword. And then he saw his old enemy Lieutenant Pyke.

Pyke was down on one knee close to the rail, his right arm dangling helpless and his sword in his left hand, desperately parrying the savage cuts of a French officer who stood over him. Septimus sprang forward with his reddened cutlass raised.

"Althea!" he yelled at the full pitch of his lungs — it was the only battle-cry that occurred to him.

The French officer spun on his heel and made a sweeping cut at this new adversary. Septimus ducked beneath it, straightened himself like lightning, and lunged. The point of his cutlass took the Frenchman in the throat, and the man flung up his arms and fell backwards.

At that moment there rose on the air a noise like the growling of a gigantic dog. It was the hoarse cheer of the Althea's men as they surged to the attack. Step by step the Frenchmen gave back along the slippery deck, the heart gone out of them. Most of them had by now realised that their ship was in danger. Uncertainty as to whether they should regain her deck or not, coupled with this unexpected rear attack by a force of extraordinary fighters in strange costumes, had unnerved them. The tide of battle had turned.

The uproar swelled suddenly, French oaths and yells rising above the din. For the Vengeur, her decks alive with flickering flames, was drifting slowly away from the frigate. Beamish and his men had severed the grappling-ropes.

After that it was easy to deal with the Frenchmen who had been left on board the Althea. Many of them lost their lives in trying to leap across the widening space between the two ships, others flung down their arms. Among those remaining on the deck of the British vessel was the French captain, the sallow-faced Gruvel, who fought on like a madman until a pair of grinning seamen tripped him up and sat on him, refusing to let him get up until he promised to surrender his sword to Captain Sainsbury like a good Monseer.

As for the doomed Vengeur, nothing could be done to save her. The frigate, severely damaged in the battle and holed below the waterline, was powerless to help. Slowly the great ship drifted away, the flames licking higher and higher about her masts and lower rigging. The victors watched her turn as some gallant soul on board strove to get her under control. Slowly the blazing ship heeled before the wind and began to move through the water. Then, with blinding suddenness, she seemed to dissolve in an immense fountain of fire. The flames had reached her powder-magazine.