STO'B 34

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Chasseur fired her signal guns again, and through his telescope Philip could see the green and tan brig’s crew standing about in confusion. One man was pointing at their flogging sails, and then at the English brigs, while another vehemently gestured to the fort, which fired again, and again with a second gun. Aboard the snow someone, presumably the master, was climbing into the mainmast’s weather shrouds with a speaking trumpet. “Mr Wilkins, lower the cutter,” Philip called to his midshipman.

A fountain of water erupted between the Badger and the Chassuer, followed some moments later by a second fountain only ten yards from the Badger’s side, a fountain that collapsed onto and soaked the quarterdeck. And now that the French guns had found the range, the rest of the battery opened up, five guns at once, followed by a sixth. Philip watched one of the shells, watching it fly high, high, almost out of sight before passing the top of its arc and plummeting down toward him, and finally exploding some yards off to starboard, perhaps a foot above the water. Iron shell fragments slammed into Badger’s hull, and the starboard fore shrouds collapsed, but nothing carried away yet. The cutter was in the water now, with its crew (most of them marines wearing seamen’s slops, on this occasion) in place around some poorly folded canvas, but before Philip climbed down into it he turned to Wilkins, “the moment we hook on to the snow, strike the French colors - not a moment before or after.”

Into the cutter he went, and the boat’s crew pulling hard across the lane of water separating them from the snow, ducking as the shells exploded around them, for now the fort had shifted from the brigs to the cutter, hoping to cut them off before they reached the merchantman. Philip glanced back at the Badger. Wilkins stood at the rail, watching them intently through a glass, waiting to order one of the Badgers to strike the colors. A hail from the snow, asking what in hell was going on, what were they about; but Philip ignored it, said nothing, folding his telescope and nodding at the bowman, who picked up his boat hook.

The snow was still uncertain, not sure if Philip and his men were friend or foe, and although she had not dropped any manropes or ladders for them, neither had she rigged boarding netting. “Lower a rope,” Philip called in French, but either he wasn’t heard or he was ignored, or perhaps he had mis-spoken - in any event no rope appeared.

The bow man hooked on. Philip swiveled in his seat and saw the French colors flutter down from the Badger’s top. Over on the Chasseur the English colors raced aloft to appear over the French naval flag. “Grapnels,” Philip ordered, and the marines stripped the folded canvas aside to reveal three grapnels with ropes bent to them, along with several muskets, cutlasses, and collection of boarding axes as a back-up for the grapnels.

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