Chapter one
I, Dray Prescot, First Lieutenant of His Britannic Majesty’s seventy-four gun shipRoscommon, leaped for the struggling form of Mr Midshipman Simpkins entangled in rigging as the main topmast collapsed upon him.
The ship writhed in the gale and the deck went up and down like the swinging hips of those beautiful girl dancers of Tahiti. Simpkins screamed on and on, a thin kitten mewling snatched away in the maelstrom of noises. The physical force of the wind battered our senses, ripped the breath from our mouths, clenched with the pressure of a torturer’s tongs upon our brains.
There was no time for all that. Skidding on the water-running deck I nearly missed him. He was a fresh pimply-faced youngster scared out of his wits. Savagely I wrenched myself about, grabbed for him. His arm felt sparrow-leg thin in my grip.
“Come here, lad!”
A monstrous sea washed inboard spinning us about helplessly. With that water-buffeting momentum and my desperate wrench he slid free as the main topmast hammered down.
The gong note of mast against deck rang clear through the boiling confusion of the gale.
The mast slewed viciously, dragged by the trailing rigging, and gyrated across the deck. The main top-gallant smashed down and across the lee bulwark, snapped and in a smother of parting lines vanished over the side. There was no hope in my mind that the top-gallant had really gone, oh, no! The damn thing would be held up and penduluming and in the moment the thought occurred the first jarring thump shocked through the hull.
“Get that raffle cleared away!” I used the old foretop hailing voice to pierce through the racket. Another vibration through our feet made the men jump — perhaps not as much as the savage quality of command in my intemperate bellow, I dare say — and they moved in warily on the wreckage. The top-gallant would puncture our hull if we were not sharp about it.
Everything was going up and down and around and around.
The hands were right to be cautious. Lines snaked everywhere across the deck ready to snatch up an incautious man like those damned great pythons of the jungles. Axes lifted and descended and keen edges bit.
The light was going, a ghastly blood-red glow through the turmoil, and a man’s life was cheap, far cheaper than the value of one of His Britannic Majesty’s ships of the line. First Lieutenant or not, was I not Dray Prescot? Was I an officer to send my fellow human beings into peril and hang back? Well, of course, in the right circumstances certainly I was. But not now. Seizing an axe as Simpkins collapsed, I jumped at the raffle of wreckage.
The whole mass shifted threateningly and it was a business of nip and tuck. One by one the tangling lines parted. The manic banging of the top-gallant overside acted like some imperative drum, driving us on.
We’d been badly hit in the fight with the French eighty and some blood had still not been washed from the decks. There’d be shot-holes below the waterline, into the bargain, although the Froggy had played the usual French trick of shoot
