Choundas shoved the girl away from him and scrambled for his breeches and stockings. "From the east? And just how did they land, eh, Gabord? Get back to the ship and prepare to up-anchor. We'll have the 'biftecs' sailing into harbor with the sun behind them. I join you as soon as I stiffen our miserably blind allies. Go!"
He stood and donned his shirt, and gave the crawling girl a kick of frustration. "Goddamned useless, all of them! Putain!"
"Reg'ment!"
" 'Tal'ion!" came the chorus.
"Halt!"
Rather a lot of 'em, Sir Hugo thought, surveying his enemies. The village had come to a boil, and what seemed a brigade of pirates had emerged, swords, spears and antique muskets waving, each done up in gold, silk and batik-printed cotton as sleek and shiny as an army of poisonously colorful sea-snakes.
"Reg'ment will load!" he shouted, stepping back toward his color party. "Skirmishers, engage!"
The light companies broke off into skirmishing pairs, one man standing, and one kneeling. With a howl of rage, the Lanun Rovers lurched forward, thousands of them in an avenging mob. The flat crack of muskets sounded from the light companies as they opened fire. Once a man had discharged his piece, he would retreat a few paces behind his rear-rank man, who would cover him while he reloaded, and take a shot of his own. Back they came, giving ground slowly and raking the leading pirate ranks with ball, dropping a man here, a man there. The pirates checked, shying away from being the first man to die, while their leaders urged them on.
"Light companies, retire!" Sir Hugo howled. "Reg'ment! First rank, kneel!"
Emboldened by the seeming retreat of the skirmishers, the pirates found their courage again, and started walking forward. At first uneasily, then with greater boldness. Some began to trot, to save their lungs and strength for hand-to-hand combat later. Some braver souls broke into a run.
Sir Hugo stepped forward again, to ascertain that both light companies were safely out of the line of fire on the flanks.
Brown Bess was a hideously inaccurate weapon. Massed gunfire shoulder to shoulder settled the day, delivered at a man-killing sixty yards. To strike a man in the middle, one aimed high for the neck at that range, even so. With his regiments deployed in only two ranks Sir Hugo had to wait to let them come even closer.
"Cock your locks!" Sixty yards, and mechanical crickets sang.
"Present!" Fifty yards, and barrels were leveled with sighs.
Forty yards. "Fire!"
The long line of musketmen erupted in a wall of gunpowder and the crackling reports of priming pans and rammed charges sounding like burning twigs. Pirates screamed in surprise, and went down like wheat.
"Second rank… cock your locks! Present… fire!"
He could hear the rattle of ramrods just before the second rank pulled their triggers and the snapping and crackling rang up and down the line. More pirates howled, with pain this time, and he saw men driven backward, thrown off their feet and back into their mates by the sledgehammer blows of.75 caliber lead ball.
"Guns!" he yelled, turning to glare at Captain Addams. And the artillery went off, rippling from the center half-battery of six-pounders out to the flanks where the converted boat-guns barked and reared on their trails.
"Well, Goddamn!" Sir Hugo spat. He'd never seen the like, not in the last war certainly, not at Gibraltar for sure. The air was so moist with humidity that when the artillery discharged, those brutal barrels not only flung out a huge cloud of spent powder and sparks, they split the air with their loads, leaving a misty trail behind.
The best one could expect from any field gun loaded with canister and grape was about five hundred yards, and one usually saw the end result, but not the passage of shot. But this time, it was as if each barrel had flung out a giant's phantas-magorical fist of roiled air that went milky as the shock wave passed through it. Like a row of shotguns, the artillery cleaved great swathes from the enemy ranks. Densely packed as they were, they went down by platoons. Before each piece, there was a mown lane of dead and dying twenty yards across and three times that deep!
"Platoon fire!" Sir Hugo roared. Now for the grim business to continue in normal fashion, to create a continuous rolling volley of fire up and down the line. No one could fire faster and with more effect than an English-trained regiment.
The pipes had been skirling out something Sir Hugo had never heard before. Now, with no need to set a marching pace, they broke into civilian strathspeys and reels. "The Wind That Shook the Barley," "The Devil among the Tailors" and "The High Road to Linton." Hard-driving, frightening in their hurried pace, for all their gaiety, dance tunes turned to the Devil's business amid the rattling of musketry and the deeper-bellied slamming of the guns.
"They're breaking!" Major Gaunt shouted. "They're retiring!"
"Cease fire! Load! Fix bayonets!"
"Fix… bayonets!" the officers repeated eerily, and the sudden silence was broken by the slither of steel, steel that winked and glittered in the dawn.
"The 19th will advance!"
The pipers cut off their latest reel, extemporizing themselves back into a march as the coehorn mortars began to fire. Explosively fused round-shot lofted overhead to burst in mid-air above the wavering hordes of pirates, who had just begun to screw their courage back to the sticking post, and were ready to charge once more.
It was the guns that decided the matter. Slow to roll between the company ranks, the regiment had to stay to a half-step pace even with the pipes urging them on, so that they looked as if they minced forward, but with both ranks bearing musket-stocks held close to the hip, barrels and wicked bayonets inclined forward. And for bayonet work, the sepoys had to be closer together, shoulder to shoulder, reducing their front to a bare two hundred yards.
With an unintelligible shout, the native pirates came forward to meet them once more, sure they could sweep around both flanks and encircle them this time, and chop them to bits at last.
"Reg'ment… halt!" Sir Hugo screamed. "First rank, kneel! Cock your locks! We'll serve 'em another portion of the hottest curry they've ever tasted, by God!"
Chiswick pulled back the fire-locks of his two pistols, stuck his smallsword into the turf in front of him, and stood ready, with his nerves singing a gibbering song as that manic horde came on.
"By volley… first rank… fire!"
Twenty muskets discharged at sixty yards. Perhaps nine foe-men went down, trampled by their fellows in their rage to get at Sir Hugo's men.
'Too damned soon!" he cursed himself. "Second rank, present! Fire!" Another eight or nine pirates were hammered backward.
Too few once more! The artillery subadar looked at him, and he waved his arm vigorously. Both boat-guns bucked and reared, slashing the front of that implacable mob with grape and canister, and finally they checked their headlong rush, shying away for a second.
"Goddamnit!" Chiswick moaned. He had shot all his bolts, and there was nothing left. Although his immediate front was cleared, there were at least a hundred foe sweeping his right flank. He fired both his pistols, and took down one man, then cast them aside and drew his sword from the earth. "Bayonets! Charge!"
His troops went in at a rush, weapons fully extended, to be met with shields, spears and sword blades. At first, they carried all in front of them with bayonet and musket-butt. Chiswick carved a spearman's face open, reversed and ripped the belly from another to his left. Nandu gave a great scream as he was shouldered backward and stumbled under the point of a third. Chiswick hammered the edge of his blade across the foe's back; the man screamed like a rabbit with his spine cut in half, then twitched uncontrollably.
"Dahnyavahd, sahib, dahnyavahd!" Nandu shivered as Chiswick helped him to his feet. "Achcha!"*
*"Thanks, sahib, thanks! Good!"
"Bloody young fool!" Sir Hugo grumbled. "Captain Yorke, face right, double time and reinforce the right flank! Support the guns! Nineteenth! Charge!"
Once again, two slim ranks of musketeers had shattered pirate ambitions, and the guns had strewn the ground with howling, broken wounded. It was time to go in with cold steel, or be driven back.
"One more charge!" Choundas insisted.
"No tuan, boats!" his interpreter shouted back as the pirate chieftain raved and slobbered with wrath. "He want go now! No good this place no more! No good fight on land!"
"He'll sail off and leave all his treasure?" Choundas sneered coldly. "Sail off and abandon all my gifts? All the muskets and shot?"
"He say, you want, you stay and keep, tuan" the interpreter finally replied. "He go Illana. Steal more nex' year."
"Filthy cowards," Choundas whispered. "Filthy pagan brutes!" He turned on his heel and stalked off for the waiting launch, his face burning with anger at this final failure of his ally, this final proof of their utter uselessness. And with his own failure as well. He had no hope now of a raiding season. He'd seen the two regimental colors and the massed bands, all the artillery that only two one-battalion units could array. Where had the heretical English gotten so many ships to carry that many troops, and then land them on the eastern shore, where he had not expected them? Only an overt operation with the full strength of the Royal Navy could put such an expedition at sea and support it this far from India. Something had happened to force the English to take the lid of secrecy off. Had another war broken out back home of which he was unaware?
"To the ship," he snapped at his waiting boat crew as he sat down in the stern. "And quickly!"
"He', merde alors!" his new coxswain groaned, pointing out to sea. "Les Anglais!"
Chapter 13
Have we the depth to stand in closer?" Hogue asked.
"And a quarter less four!" the leadsman shouted from up forward as if in answer.
"Captain's Ayscough's recollections say we do, sir," Lewrie replied with a happy but fierce grin on his features. "Helm down to larboard, quartermaster. Ease her up as close as she'll lie to the wind, full and by."
"Full an' by, sir!"
"How we got this far, I don't know, sir," Hogue enthused as they swept into the harbor in Telesto's wake. "I was sure that was a battery on the point, but nary a peep from them did we hear."
"Most thoroughly in the barrel, drunk as lords, I expect," Lewrie said, clapping his hands with anticipation as he strode to the quarterdeck nettings to look down upon his gun deck. "Mister Owen, I give you leave to open fire as you bear!"
"Thankee, sir!" Owen shouted back. "Wait for it, lads, wait for it!"
Culverin could work her way much closer to the beach than any of the other vessels, where her short-ranged but heavy car-ronades had the advantage. There was a mushrooming pillar of smoke coming from beyond the native settlement. He could see a coehorn mortar shell burst in mid-air, most excellently fused, against the rim of sunrise on the horizon over the trees. And on that wide beach was a gunner's fondest dreams- stationary targets drawn up with their prows resting on the sand, their guns pointing inland and useless! At least twenty blood-red praos abandoned by their crews engaged against the troops on the far side of the little town.
Telesto opened fire first, followed by Lady Charlotte. Sand flew into the air as eighteen- and twelve-pounder balls struck the shore. Boats twitched and thrashed as they were hit, their sterns leaping out of the water to fall back downward and flail the shallow waters like a beaver's slap. Masts and paddles went spinning in confusion, and hulls split open as they were flayed with iron.
"Two cables, sir!" Owen shouted. " 'Ere we go, then! Number one gun… fire!"
Lewrie stood amazed as the flower of smoke and flame gushing from the muzzle expanded into an opening blossom larger than any he had ever witnessed, the air torn apart with weapons' song, and the twenty-four-pounder ball's progress marked by a misty trail of shock and turbulence as if they were firing combustible carcasses. The ball hit a prao on the beach, square on the stern-posts, ripped right through the light wood and flung a shower of broken timbers and laced-together planking into the air. There was a sudden, screeching rrawwrrkk! as the ball rivened her from stern to stem, to topple her in ruin.
"Huzzah, lads, do us another!" Lewrie cheered his gunners as they took aim with the rest of the starboard battery. "Quartermaster, luff us up a mite. Slow our progress to give the gunner more time to aim."
Smoky, belching crashes as the carronades spewed out their loads, thin dirty trails of roiled air emerging from the sudden mists of burned powder and then the slamming screech of ravaged wood ashore as another prao, then a third, leaped like frightened birds at being touched with iron, screaming their rrawwrrkk, rrawwrrkk! as if in their death-agonies.
"Carry on, Mister Owen," Lewrie said, picking up a telescope for a better view. In the distance, he could see villagers running one direction, pirates in their gaudier clothing falling back into the village and down to the beach to save what they could of their ships, to fall in irregular clots of terror as iron shattered and keened in clouds of sharp shards and splintered wood.
He directed his glass forward to see Telesto take Poisson D'Or under fire. The French ship had cut or slipped her cables, abandoning her anchors, and was getting underway, even as several ship's boats thrashed oars in her wake to catch her up.
"By God, I do believe that's our bastard Choundas in one of those boats!" Lewrie crowed aloud. "Can't even fight from your ship this time, can you, you pervert? Have to let some more of your people do your dying for you, you poxy whoreson Frog?"
Poisson D'Or had gotten her jibs and stays'ls set, her spanker over the stern hoisted, and had let fall her tops'Is, but they were a-cock-bill and not yet fully braced round to draw the wind. She was not yet under full control, but her larboard gunports flew open in unison, and muzzles emerged. She would fight it out.
And right in Telesto's wake sailed Lady Charlotte, paying off the wind a little as if in trepidation of getting too close, but her guns crashed out a solid broadside, and the sea around Poisson D'Or erupted in feathers of spray, and several balls hit her low, "twixt wind and water."
A hefty explosion drew Lewrie's attention back to the task at hand. A ball had hit one of the praos on her foredeck where her guns were seated, igniting a powder store, which had blown up in a great dark bulb of smoke and flame. The prao had disintegrated and was cascading down in smoldering chunks onto two other boats to either side, setting them alight and scattering the pirates around them.
"A guinea for that gunner, Mister Owen, my word on it!" Alan vowed.
"And a quarter less five!" the leadsman called out over the roar of the battle.
"Damme, sir, we could get inshore even closer!" Hogue shouted. "We're dead astern of Poisson D'Or's anchorage. Deep water, sir!"
"Luff up again, quartermaster. Pinch us closer inshore!" Alan commanded. "Mister Owen, load your next broadside with canister and grape-shot! Put an iron hail on the beach and skin the bastards!"
Culverin rounded up into the wind, ghosting almost to a stop with her sails shivering and thrashing, until the leadsman found only three fathoms of water. The quartermaster put his tiller over to the windward side to fill the sails with wind, and she heeled hard for a moment before riding back upright. They were now only a single cable off the beach, two hundred yards, just as the central part of the village came abeam. Pirates were falling back in disorder through the town, massing on the beach and heaving to launch their boats for an escape.
Alan could almost hear the sudden fatalistic sighs, the groans of alarm, as they saw the trim little ketch with her guns run out and the muzzles staring them between the eyes.
"As you bear… fire!" Lewrie called.
Five carronades lurched inboard on their recoil slides. Five crashing bellows of noise, stink and shudders. Five great blooms of smoke towered over her sides and drifted away to leeward through her sails. Five fists of God struck the beach, hewing away everything they touched, taking down the bamboo log palisade behind the beach, scything the palms above the high-tide line, lashing the thatched rooves. But most particularly, flailing the sand into a bloody cloud and scattering Lanun Rovers, bowling them over like nine-pins. And when the smoke cleared, the beach had been abandoned by the living, with only the broken dead and whimpering wounded remaining.
"Merciful God in Heaven!" Murray whispered in awe at what they had wrought. "Bloody…"
"And again, Mister Owen!" Lewrie bade. "Grape and canister!"
The next broadside only thrashed at the heels of the pirates, who fled that threat of death, back into the palisaded village for shelter, bold sea-rovers too afraid to save their ships.
"They're afire up yonder, sir," Murray pointed.
Lewrie raised his glass and looked toward the eastern end of the harbor. Praos were burning there, smudging the dawn with greasy coils of smoke and ruddy flame. "I see soldiers on the beach there!" he rejoiced. "Mister Owen, direct your fire upon the village walls and clear the way for the troops!"
"Aye, sir!"
"And a half, two!" the leadsman warned.
"I believe we may haul our wind a point or two for now, men," Lewrie told his helmsman. The long sweep of the tiller was put over to starboard, and the bows swung off the wind. Deck crew flung themselves onto the belaying pins to free the sheets and ease the set of the sails to draw more wind.
And Culverin slid to a stop.
"One fathom and a quarter!" the leadsman called out, much too late.
"Well, shit!" Lewrie fumed, turning red with embarrassment at running solidly aground, right in the midst of a battle. Of all the places to choose from, he'd staggered right onto an uncharted sandbar!
"Uhm, she struck mighty easy-like, sir." Murray frowned, his mouth working hard. "Prob'ly didn't do no damage t' her quickwork. Her gripe an' her cut-water is solid enough, and she's a tough old lady, she is, sir. Rat-run bottom, too. Ahh… er, that is, fer when the tide goes out, sir."
"Ah," Lewrie sighed, wishing it was possible to die of mortification. "Hmm. Yes. The tide. Bloody hell!"
"Aye, sir," Murray commiserated, taking a pace away.
"Well, damn my eyes!" Lewrie sighed heavily, one hand on his hip and gazing up at the masthead for clues. "Look, have 'Chips' go below and sound the forepeak to see if there's any leakage. A hand that's a good swimmer over the bows to see how hard she's… stuck! And boat crews into the launch and cutter to see if we may tow out the stream or kedge anchor and work her off. Before we're left high and bloody dry 'til supper-time."
"Aye, sir!" Murray replied, knuckling his brow.
"Damn all hard luck, sir," Hogue told him.
"I feel like such a goose-brained… twit!" Lewrie confessed.
"Happens to the best, I'm told, sir," Hogue added, though he had to work at keeping a straight face.
There was a shattering explosion just at that moment, which spun them about in their tracks. Something had set fire to Cuddalore, anchored farther to the east-perhaps a few die-hards from the prize crew Choundas had put aboard to safeguard her from being plundered by his allies. She had just gone up in a titanic blast as her magazines burst, ripping her into a plume of fragments.
Farther east, and out in deeper waters, Poisson D'Or was still fighting, with Telesto close aboard on her left beam as they fell off the wind to the north for the chain of tiny islets that guarded this harbor from the opposite Monsoons. Lady Charlotte had continued on easterly as she could, to cross the French ship's stern and rake her before turning north as well on the far side, to lay Poisson D'Or in a savage cross-fire.
'To think that but for a moment of stupidity, we could be a part of that!" Lewrie said with a bitter growl. "God, what a glorious fight they're having. And we've missed it!"
"Grand seats, though, sir," Hogue replied cheerfully. "Right in the stalls, as it were, to witness it."
Owen came up the starboard ladder to the quarterdeck and gave a cough to let them know he was there. " 'Scuse me, sir, but I've flat run outa targets, sir. No more o' those pirates t' be seen, an' half the village knocked down s' far, sir. Want me t' keep on?"
"No, Mister Owen. Continue to fire with one gun only, and I wish to have your other gunners for boat crews. We have to kedge off before the tide runs out too much."
"Aye, sir."
"Sir!" Murray called. "Those boats yonder! From Poison Door, sir! Tryin' t' land on the beach!"
Lewrie seized his glass and climbed up on the shore-side bulwark to peer at the two longboats being rowed ashore.
"Choundas!" Lewrie howled with frustration. "Can we lay a gun on him? He'll get away into the jungle, else!"
"Er, nossir," Owen almost moaned, wringing his grimy hands in frustration. "He's outa our gun-arcs, 'less we had a fo'c'sle chase-gun. An' it don't look like he'll put it anywhere close t' our poor range!"
"He'll get away at last!" Lewrie snorted in disbelief. All of their labors and suffering for nothing… again! "Mister Hogue!"
"Sir?"
"Take charge of the ship, sir," Lewrie exclaimed. "Keep Mister Murray and Mister Owen with you, and defend her should the pirates try to get off the beach and take her now she's aground. Use your artillery over our heads should we run into trouble on the beach. Are the boat crews assembled? Good. Arm them. Muskets, a pistol each and a cutlass. Cony, fetch my case of pistols!"
The cutter had eight oarsmen, a bow-man and Cony as coxswain. The launch had a total of eight men aboard. Instead of a kedge anchor lowered into the stern-sheets, or one of the stern cables, the men were surprised to receive arms.
"Row for the beach!" Lewrie snapped, "Row like the Devil was at your heels. I want yon bastard!"
They cast off and put their backs to it, digging in deep with their oar-blades and grunting with the exertion, Lewrie's cutter in the lead. He stood in the bows, loading his pistols.
"Not straight for the beach, Cony. Take us east up the coast for a ways before cutting in. Closer to them before we ground."
"Aye, sir," Cony replied, angling the tiller-bar under his arm to steer them more slant-wise across the lapping wavelets.
* * *
Choundas looked up from gazing at the bottom-boards of his boat with a bleak expression. The eastern palisade of the village was yet being defended, but he could see most of the pirates streaming off for safety, south through the longest wall and over the rice-paddies into the jungle. The remaining praos on the strand were on fire, damaged or under the guns of the ketch-rigged gun-boat. There would have been no safety aboard Cuddalore, minus her topmasts and rigging, so after picking up his tiny watch party from her, he had set her on fire, so the "biftecs" would not have the satisfaction of recapturing her.
"She's aground, I think," he said to no one, turning to look at the saucy little ketch. "And a dropping tide."
No means of escape there, either, even if his small party could take her.
Coehorn mortar shells were bursting farther inland, over those rice-paddies, and he could hear the muffled popping and crackling of musketry in a steady, rolling platoon-fire. They would have to run that deadly gauntlet across the paddy dykes to escape. And from the continual, thin screaming they could barely hear, that way was being turned into a killing-ground.
Choundas swiveled aft to look at his beautiful ship. Poisson D'Or, one of the finest thirty-two-gunned frigates that had ever swum, was almost hull-down up the fringe of islets, wreathed in a mushroom cloud of gunpowder, with two of her masts gone. As thinly manned as she was, after losing La Malouine and his best hands, she was putting up a marvelous fight, but she was going to lose. It was fated.
And he wasn't aboard to lead the fight in her, when she was battling for her life, as a captain, as an officer of the French Navy should be! No, he had waited too long, trying to put some spine into that churlish native chieftain. Who could have expected the damned English to land their troops on the east side of the island and march overland through all that trackless jungle, and then attack him from the west with their ships? Only the insane would beat against the wind and attack from leeward, when the best approach would have been to ghost into harbor with a following wind, with the rising sun at their backs to ruin his gunners' aim. Everything had gone wrong!
"What shall we do now, sir?" one of his surviving garde de la marines asked him in a soft whisper close to his ear. Choundas lifted his face to gaze at him. Nineteen years old, the equivalent of an English midshipman, an officer-in-training.
Choundas wondered just what sort of lesson Valmette was learning today.
"Steer for the beach, timonier" Choundas instructed his new cox'n. "Land us west of the land fighting, but out of range of those guns on the ketch. This side of the eastern palisade. We shall take a path through the village, go out its western side, and get into the jungle away from the 'biftecs' artillery. Then strike down the western coast and find a decent seagoing boat. A prao, perhaps."
"Two boats setting out from the ketch, sir," Valmette warned. "To kedge her off? Could we take her?"
'Too few of us," Choundas snapped, having already counted heads and discounted their chances. "And their boats are no better than ours for deep ocean."
Choundas took a second look. Small as his party was, he had more men, well-armed men, than what appeared in the English boats.
"Hostages, perhaps, mes amis!" Choundas brightened. "For safe passage out of here. Timonier, steer to meet them in the shallows. Men, ready your muskets! I want prisoners. An officer if we can."
"They're turning to meet us shy of the beach," Lewrie told his boat crew. "We're going to have a fight on our hands, lad. A devil of a fight! Load muskets and pistols, and lay your swords to hand."
Lewrie looked back at Culverin. There was not one gun barrel that could be cranked around in its port to lay on the French. Even if they could have pointed, the range was too great. He looked back to the shore, to the eastern end of the beach where the boats were on fire; it would appear that his father's regiment had been held up in their advance. There would be no aid from that quarter, either.
I could meet 'em gunnel to gunnel, he thought, but one peek over the side canceled that thought. The water may have been clear as gin but there was the niggling little matter of his not being able to swim, and boats were sure to be capsized if they meleed like miniature frigates! The water was so clear it was impossible to judge its depth but for the faint sunrise shadow of his hull on the bottom-sand, and he judged that to be over his head, perhaps a full fathom still.
"Cony, put your tiller over hard a'larboard," he ordered.
"We beach and meet them with the boats for cover and steadier aim."
"Aye, sir," Cony parroted, and shoved the tiller bar over. The second boat in his wake followed suit a moment later.
"We'll be the stone fortress, he'll be the enemy squadron, men," Lewrie told both boat crews to cover his queasy fear of being drowned. "Once ashore, get down below the gunnels and we'll skin 'em. And if they want to come to us, then be-damned to 'em, I say! Save your pistols for when they get close."
The French boats changed course once more, and the oarsmen laid almost flat on their thwarts to drive faster, once they saw their plan for a miniature naval engagement was for nought.
"Row! Row! Get us ashore, quickly now!" Lewrie urged his hands. The French were aimed right for him, trying to be upon them even before they could jump over the gunwales or get the oars shipped! Musketeers lay in the bows of the French boats, and one or two tried shots at long range. A stroke oar aft by Cony shrieked and fell back among his mates, upsetting the furious stroke, his neck shattered by a ball.
"Toss yer oars!" Cony yelped as the surf heaved them forward on a limp wave. The cutter lurched and slithered with a wet hiss as her keel ran onto the sand.
"Damn the oars!" Lewrie shouted. "Over the side and make ready!" The bow man leaped shin-deep into water and started to drag the bows farther up the beach, while the oarsmen let go of their oars and took up their weapons. The bow man was hit,-flung backward with a grunt of ruptured lungs, which encouraged them to make haste and slither over the off-side gunwale instead of standing and leaping out with a care to staying erect and dry.
Muskets were popping, and bits of the cutter were flying into the air as ball splintered the wood. Lewrie had gone sprawling once over the side, and when he raised his head, there was the lead boat not ten yards off, ready to ground almost alongside!
"Cock your locks… take aim… fire!" he shouted as he drew his first pistol. Six muskets spat out a thin volley. The seventh had soaked priming and only squibbed with a dull phutt! But three French oarsmen had been hit as they stowed their oars and took up weapons from the bottom boards. The second French boat, the one with Choundas aboard, was landing ten yards farther up the beach. Lewrie drew back the lock of his pistol and took aim at a French musketman. He pulled the trigger and his weapon squibbed.
"Well, damme!" he spat, tossing the useless pistol aside and drawing its mate. By then, his target was kneeling out of side on the far side, his arm appearing as he rammed down a fresh load. He popped back up and Lewrie fired. This time, the weapon gave out a sharp bark and the Frenchman fell back with a shrill scream as the top of his head was blown off. "Fire at will!"