The Captain had never called me by my first name before, and at first I was comforted by this unexpected show of affection. Then I realised he had spoken to me like that because he felt in his bones that we were minutes away from death.

  We went at once to the ship’s armoury. Two loaded pistols were placed in my hands, weapons which I had fired perhaps twice before in my life, and certainly never in anger. I was also presented with a cutlass, a weapon which I had never even held before. Then, with our sails between me and the Frenchman, I hurried to the top of the mast, doing my best to keep from view. Peeping out from between the sails I could see that the Isabelle was nearly upon us. On her deck I counted thirty men at least, crouching under cover from our occasional musket shots, and with their grappling hooks at the ready. We were outnumbered at least two to one.

  On our deck I could see Clay and his gun crew hiding by their gun, ready to unleash a lethal shot. This at least might even the odds a little. I was surprised that I did not feel more frightened – after all, our enemy had made it plain she would take no prisoners. But when fear rose in my chest I glanced over to the shore at St Alban’s Head and told myself that we were only five miles away from land. If the ship were overrun I could leap down from the mast and into the sea, and swim to safety. When other, more doubtful, thoughts entered my head, I shooed them away. I had to believe I was going to survive this battle...

  The Isabelle drew closer, and lead shot began to thud into the side of our ship with some regularity. As she placed herself alongside she fired a single shot at our own gun, which was poking out at an angle from the stern. The ball hit home with an ugly splintering. In an instant it knocked the heavy gun over, then bounced up to take Mr Clay’s head clean off his shoulders. As his lifeless body fell on its knees, I shut my eyes tight with horror, and swallowed hard to rid my mouth of the bile that had risen to the back of my throat.

  The direct hit brought a cheer from the French ship, and then a further volley of musket and pistol shots. When I looked again I could see the two other men in our gun crew shrieking and writhing in agony, one crushed by the weight of the gun, the other peppered with splinters.

  Just at that moment the sun came out. Almost immediately I heard a shot tear through the rigging of the mainmast behind me. I looked round and saw sunlight falling directly on the sails, silhouetting a shipmate named William Elliot, who was hidden behind the main topsail. Another shot rang out from the Isabelle. William screamed and fell. He hit the deck with a dull crump, dead twice over. Then a bullet punched a small hole in the sail next to my head, and I realised with skin-prickling horror that I must be just as conspicuous. Should I jump into the sea while I still had a chance? Or should I wait for the bullet that would surely knock me off my perch and have me fall to my death?

  As stifling panic began to grip, I became aware of a voice shouting up to me. It was Captain Rushford.

  ‘Sam! Sam! Come down quickly before you are shot!’

  I didn’t need telling twice and leaped at once for the rigging that would take me down to the deck. As I climbed down, shots whistled through the canvas but were all wide of their mark. When I reached the deck I realised I would have to stand and fight here. The Isabelle was now so close, any of us who raised a head above the rail risked a bullet in the brain. I crouched down on the deck behind the ship’s cutter, next to the Captain, waiting to rush out at the oncoming boarders. I fumbled clumsily for my cutlass, but in my haste I brushed the sharp blade across the back of my hand, drawing blood.

  The shadow of the French ship moved over us like a huge bird of prey. Shots were landing almost vertically on the planks close to our feet, as men high in the Isabelle’s masts fired straight down on to the deck. ‘To the last, lad,’ Rushford said to me, gripping my shoulder. Perhaps I should have been terrified, but now I was so fired up I felt like a coiled spring ready to tangle with anyone who came at me. There we waited, for the grinding jolt of ship crashing against ship, and the clang of grappling hooks curling over to embed themselves on our deck.

  Instead we heard a desperate cry. ‘Ennemi vaisseau, tribord!’ I looked at Rushford, who understood immediately what was being said.

  ‘It’s a Navy ship!’ he cackled, his face lighting up with relief. ‘It’s the Royal Navy come to rescue us. Keep down, Sam. We’re not done yet,’ he said quickly. He filled his lungs and shouted out, ‘Hold fast, men. Stay under cover.’ The shadow of the Isabelle moved away from us. Only after a couple of minutes did we feel safe enough to peer out from our sheltered positions. Sure enough, the Isabelle was now stern on to us. Sailing towards us from the coast was a handsome Navy warship, its white ensign fluttering fiercely in the breeze.

  The Captain’s eyes sparkled with delight. ‘Ship of the Line. Must be a 74. She’ll be able to chase off the Frenchman.’

  Elated, I rushed below deck to tell George we were safe. But he turned away, his eyes refusing to meet mine. I suppose he felt he’d lost face in front of me when he had been wounded, and I was saddened because I had come to think of him as a friend.

  The joy I felt on surviving the attack drained away like air from a balloon. Wearily I returned to the deck, to join the crew in the melancholy task of gathering together the dead. I had seen dead people before – the tiny, pockmarked corpses of my younger brothers, grandparents as shrunken husks in their coffins, and a pale drowned boy dragged from the river – but never men killed violently in battle.

  We lost four men in the attack – Clay the most prominent among them. Also dead was Langan McKenzie, who had been one of Clay’s gun crew. William Elliot, who fell from the mast, was an east countryman like me. He had been at sea for nearly twenty years. In truth, he was a stranger – I’d expected us to have something in common because we both came from the same county, but he always kept himself to himself. I looked at him now, and thought how easily it could have been me, lying cold and still, flecks of blood around my mouth, dead eyes staring up at the blustery sky. All of a sudden I felt very cold, and I ran below to fetch my jacket.

  Chapter 2

  Pressed

  The Captain decided to bury the dead men as soon as possible. It was six o’clock, and we still had at least another two and a half hours of daylight. He ordered me to go below with Filip Anders to fetch four blankets from the dead men’s bunks. Pulling a blanket away from the mattress I could not help but think that a man now to be consigned to the chilly depths of the sea had lain there that morning, safe and warm in the same grimy cloth.

  We sewed the bodies inside the blankets, with a cannonball at their feet to make sure they sank. The Captain read the service so beautifully I thought he would have made a good parson. For the reading, he chose Psalm 103.

  As for man, his days are as grass;

  as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.

  For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone;

  and the place thereof shall know it no more.

  Rushford spoke movingly of Jeremiah Clay. ‘He was a fine British seaman down to his boots and bones. I have to acknowledge that without Mr Clay’s brave actions today, we would now almost certainly be heading for a grim and possibly fatal stay in a French prison.’

  The Captain omitted to mention that thanks to him we could all have been killed, but it is easy to forgive the dead. Then, the ceremony over, all four men in turn were slipped into the sea, on a platform set up on the side of the ship. I did not relish the thought of a sea burial. The bottom of the sea must be a bleak and lonely resting place.

  As the sun began to set we noticed that the Navy ship was still shadowing us, keeping a half mile or so to our stern. ‘Perhaps she means to board us,’ said Filip Anders, ‘and press some of us into service.’

  ‘Surely not,’ I said, ‘after what we’ve just had to suffer!’

  Filip looked at me sharply and said, ‘You’ve a lot to learn of this world, Master Witchall.’

  As the remaining crew sat around the mess table that night, talk turned at once to the Navy ship. My shipmates sometimes talked of the Royal Navy and most of them had a deep loathing for it. In their past, some of the crew had volunteered for the service, and others had been forced to join – ‘pressed’, they called it.

  ‘Be warned, lads, especially when you’re a few years older,’ said one old salt to George and me. ‘The Navy can board a merchantman and press who they like. It’s the law, and there’s nothing we or the Captain can do about it.

  ‘Life on a fighting ship’s a hair-raising business,’ he went on. ‘The bosuns beat their men with a rope to make them work faster. Y’ wouldn’t get that on the old Franklyn. Rushford knows he’d never be able to hire a crew if word got round that he was acting like that. But in the Royal Navy, if you complain you’re looking at a flogging or hanging.’

  George wasn’t having this. ‘No,’ he jeered. ‘Come on, that’s traitor’s talk. The British are a free-born race. The officers wouldn’t permit such tyrannous behaviour.’

  Even I looked sceptical at that last observation. By then our conversation had sparked the attention of Silas Warandel, a tall, wiry Londoner with a weather-beaten complexion, who wore his straw-coloured hair in a ponytail. Silas was something of a character on the Franklyn and I was curious to know what he had to say.

  He strolled purposely over, placed his tattooed hands firmly down on the table, and leaned over to look George straight in the face.

  ‘You, sunshine, obviously don’t know your arse from your elbow. I joined the Navy as a ship’s boy, like you. It was the worst decision I ever made in my life. Men on a fighting ship stay at sea for years on end. Their captains won’t let them go on shore because they know that half the crew would desert. The food is ten times worse than the muck we get on this old bucket... meat and biscuits full of maggots.’ He paused. ‘You get used to the cold, bitter taste of ’em.’

  Then he took off his shirt, revealing a back that was badly scarred. ‘That, young man, is what happens to boys who join the Navy.’ Silas was still aggrieved about his injury. ‘I was flogged twenty times for having cross words with an officer. I cannot begin to tell you how horrible it is to be flogged, and if you join the Navy, my boy, you will be flogged as sure as day follows night. Each blow felt like a knife straight through my body. The pain shot like lightning to the tips of my toes and fingernails. As the flogging went on, I was sure that my lungs and organs would burst. When I passed out, they waited until I recovered my senses, and then they carried on. By the time they’d finished, my back looked like a piece of raw meat.’

  We listened in a stunned silence, no one daring to speak. Silas carried on with his bleak warning. ‘There is no justice or injustice in the Royal Navy,’ he said, ‘only duty and mutiny. All that you are asked to do is duty. All that you refuse to do is mutiny. And mutiny is punished by the whip or the noose. And there’s many a man that’s been flogged will tell you the noose is more merciful.’

  With that, he turned his back on us and returned to his corner.

  I was annoyed with George for provoking this response from Silas. He was quite a formidable character, and not a good man to cross. But although I was frightened of him, I was also intrigued. As I got to know the crew I discovered that he was a gifted seaman, but he could barely read or write. He also liked to drink, and when he drank his behaviour was the stuff of many a scandalous story.

  Seven days after I first went to sea with the Franklyn, Silas had refused to get out of his bunk to take the Sunday morning watch, after a Saturday night nursing a bottle of rum. Captain Rushford, who had taken the previous watch despite having a high fever, reacted with uncharacteristic anger. When told of Silas’s refusal to get out of bed, the Captain stormed over to his bunk in a rage. On the way down he had picked up a small bucket of sea water which one of the crew was using to clean the deck, and flung it over Silas. I heard him shout, ‘Damn your bones, Mr Warandel. Get out of bed now, before I have you tied to the mainmast and flogged.’

  Silas roused himself like an angry ferret from his bolt hole, and staggered to his feet. He took a swing at the Captain, missed pathetically, and ran out on deck.

  ‘I’ll see you drowned before you flog me,’ he snarled, then ran to the rigging and scurried up to the very top of the mast.

  Rushford, his anger spent, stared up at Silas, a dark blot against the dawn sky. ‘Mr Warandel,’ he cried in a voice which was attempting to sound conciliatory, ‘come down at once, and let us put an end to this unseemly debate.’ Silas, obviously unsettled by his exertions, leaned over the mast and retched noisily. The Captain stepped aside just in time, as a pool of vomit splattered down on the spot where he had been standing.

  Silas stayed at the top of the mast for the rest of the morning. Whenever the Captain came out of his cabin, Silas would hurl abuse of the most hair-raising variety. Rushford simply pretended not to hear. When we were nearby the Captain, George and I tried not to catch each other’s eye – we would have had a fit of uncontrollable giggling.

  Silas came down just before noon and went at once to Rushford’s cabin. What was said no one knew, but no more was heard about the incident. While the two men talked, Filip Anders told me they had sailed together for many years.

  ‘Silas has the homing instinct of a seabird,’ he said. ‘He’ll sniff the air, and know which way the ship should be heading. His feel for currents and tides comes from a lifetime at sea, not a year or two at a school of navigation.’

  Filip had a high regard for Silas. ‘Last year, when we were making slow progress close to the coast, I saw him pluck a feather from a chicken the cook was preparing for dinner, then toss it into the sea. He watched it float off, then warned the captain of dangerous currents to the lee of the boat. He saved us from certain disaster.’

  Silas was more than a sailor, Anders told me; he was a carpenter, sail-maker, gunner, and helmsman too. On one Atlantic crossing, Anders said, the bow sprung a nasty leak in rough weather. Silas patched it up with a large piece of salt pork, a few nails and three small joists. It lasted the ship out until they returned home.

  I slept badly that night, not least because of the dire warning Silas had given us about life in the Royal Navy. When I tried to rest, I saw in my mind’s eye the dreadful sights I’d witnessed during the day – the hull disintegrating before my eyes, William Elliot’s fall from the mast, the violent death of Mr Clay and his gun crew – and I relived the moment the shadow of the Isabelle fell over our ship. While it was happening, I was too excited to think about it. But now, in the still, small hours of the night, I realised that I had probably been seconds away from death. A horrible, agonising death too – run through with a cutlass or a dagger, then pitched over the side still half alive, with not even a Christian burial to see me off. When I did fall asleep I would wake with a start, tormented by dreams. I fell into a deeper slumber only shortly before I was roused to take the early watch.

  Out on the chilly deck, the sun was still two hours away from rising. Captain Rushford stood by the wheel. He was in remarkably good humour, but then he had much to be happy about. By a single twist of fate he had escaped with his ship and his life.

  When I had set the sails as instructed, the Captain called me over to the wheel. He was joined by Filip Anders.

  ‘Witchall,’ said Rushford, ‘Mr Anders is concerned that our friend over there,’ he pointed to the distant lights of the Navy ship, ‘is going to board us and press some of the crew. Now I’m sure they’ll not press a boy as young as you, but I don’t want to take any chances. If they come on board, go and hide yourself in the hold.’

  I thanked the Captain, but began to feel a deep unease.

  The Navy warship was still behind us when the day broke just after six o’clock, but she was edging closer. A little later I brought George some breakfast. He had been told to rest for a day, and so I sat down with him to eat. He seemed a little more friendly towards me, but was unconcerned by the news that we were being shadowed.

  ‘It’s of no consequence to me,’ he said rather smugly. ‘As I’m apprenticed, I’m exempt from the attentions of the Navy.’

  ‘But what about me?’ I said, feeling rather hurt.

  ‘Well, Sam. The Navy needs men, and you’ll be a fine one, I’m sure.’

  I wish I’d had the wit to make some cutting reply, but in truth I was stunned by his callousness, and could think of nothing to say. I knew at once our friendship was over.

  That morning I set about my usual tasks, cleaning the deck and trimming the sails. But my mind was not on my job. I kept thinking of the Navy ship to our stern, and wondered when they would choose their moment to come on board. But the trouble I feared actually came from another quarter. Just before ten o’clock that morning, when I was at the end of my watch and desperate to sleep, we were approached by another, smaller vessel on our larboard side, flying a large Navy ensign.

  ‘She looks like a pressing tender to me,’ said the Captain. ‘She’s probably already full of men seized by the press gangs. Must be heading for Portsmouth.’

  ‘I’m sure she means to board us,’ said Mr Anders.

  ‘No matter,’ said Rushford. ‘We shall carry on and see what happens.’

  The Franklyn sailed on. I flinched when I heard a gun shot. A plume of water erupted in the water ahead of our bows. They were telling us to heave to.

  All hands were called on deck to bring the ship to a halt. As I ran up the masts to do this, I felt as though I was being told to dig my own grave. I knew the Navy ship would be watching, and they would spot me among the crew. There was nothing I could do. When the ship’s sails had been taken in, I noticed a boat being launched from the tender, set to board us. I immediately ran to the Captain and asked if I could hide. ‘Yes, lad, off you go,’ he said. But he sounded so downhearted, I supposed that he already suspected they would take me.