The galleon's grave hg-3 Read online

  'And what will that judgement be?' asked Gresham, fascinated.

  'Ask me when I know if I met my death fighting. We cannot control how we are born. We have some control over how we die.'

  Gresham spoke softly,

  '" Go you gently unto death? Is what you are so little worth? We enter screaming into life, And death hurts more than birth.'"

  'What is that?' asked the Duke.

  'Childish verse,' said Gresham. He made a massive effort to pull himself together. ‘My Lord,' he said, 'I hope you don't die. I hope justice prevails.'

  'I am not such a fool as to hope to die,' responded the Duke, an ironic smile on the edge of his lips. 'It is merely that I fear I have little control over it, and even less control over justice. You may leave. It would not be good to have an Englishman here for the conference 1 must hold now.'

  'That's it, then,' said Mannion once back outside. 'Fine mess you've got us into. Tonight there's a spring tide right near its top, and the wind's been freshening all day. If our lads can get enough fireships together, they'll come down on this anchorage like shit off a shovel.'

  'The Spanish fireships did nothing at Cadiz,' said Gresham. 'That's 'cos there was no wind to speak of, and hardly any tide. And there was three times as much space as there is 'ere.' 'So what should the Duke do?' asked Gresham. 'Piss off and go 'ome,' said Mannion. 'Like us.' 'But he'll fight,'said Gresham

  'Then 'e's a stupid bastard,' said Mannion, 'who ought to know better. If he wants to do it for his honour, let him. I've given serious thought as to whether I want to do it for mine, and I don't. But I bet you he won't let us piss off and go home. So it's the same old place, isn't it? The one people like me 'ave been in for centuries. I have to pop me clogs so fie can keep his honour.'

  They stood watching the small boats scuttle between the ships of the Armada, the deliveries of food from shore to ship which the essentially friendly, one-legged Governor of Calais had allowed.

  He had lost the leg in retaking Calais from the English fifty years earlier and felt no love for Queen Elizabeth. The tension was tangible. Every sailor on board could sense the tide and wind, and even now, well before sunset, they were looking out to sea and towards the English. That tension had spread to the soldiers, dispirited now, convinced that they had no role in this campaign except to die. For the first time that morning Gresham had seen spots of rust on three or four breastplates, spots that the soldiers concerned had not ferociously rubbed away at the first sign. Somehow everyone on board San Martin was moving more slowly, as if there was a deep ache in their bones and a heavy pack on their back. Gresham had caught one of the gentleman adventurers, a young, fresh-faced lad no more than seventeen years old, standing by the bow, crying. He had turned, horrified, determined to hide his face. Gresham had put out a hand, then dropped it helplessly to his side.

  'It's a cruel thing, facing your death, when you're that age,' said Mannion drily. Over these past few weeks his master had taken on an extraordinary strength and inner resilience. Only a few years in age separated the young Englishman and the young Spaniard before them, yet there was a decade between them in experience.

  Devil ships. That was the fear of every sailor on board the Armada. Three years earlier the Dutch had sent specially-constructed fireships down the Scheldt to try and lift the Spanish siege of Antwerp. Three tons of explosive had been crammed into brick chambers on board. One had fetched up against a fortified bridge, killed eight hundred men in the explosion and inflicted horrific injuries on thousands of others. Of the bridge nothing remained. Federigo Gambelli was the name of the designer. He was known to be in London, working for the English.

  'Your job's done, now, you know that, don't you?' Mannion prompted. 'This 'as gone beyond advice. If our lads… sorry, if the English do their jobs, this lot's going to be burned to buggery, whether you want it to 'appen or not. You ain't going to influence anything any more. That girl's waiting for you in Calais, more as like, and half the girls in England are waiting for me in London…'

  'So why not swim ashore?' Gresham finished Mannion's words. 'You go,' he said suddenly. He reached out, grasped Mannion's arm, looked into his eyes. 'This has never been your fight, only mine. You've done enough, lost enough. Go on. Leave me. It's only right.'

  'Why ain't you coming?'

  'Because… because I can't.' Gresham knew how feeble it sounded. 'I respect this man, respect him more than any other I've ever met. They'll damn him for what happened here, yet I've seen him, talked to him. I think he knew where it would all end, knew he would die all along, yet he still did what he was asked to do, still carried on fighting for his cause against all the odds, knowing it was hopeless. It's not just courage, it's true dignity.'

  'So?' said Mannion. 'Write him a letter, get all that off your chest. And then jump overboard.'

  'I just can't do it,' said Greshanv 'I have to be here at the end. I want to stay with him.'

  'Sleep now,' said Mannion. 'I'll get us up when it's dark. Then we'll slip back and get as close to the stem as we can.'

  'What?' said Gresham, startled.

  'Not going to get much bloody sleep tonight, are we? And odds on a fireship hits the bow first. Though if it's one of those bloody Devil ships it won't make a blind bit of difference.'

  'Then you're staying,' said Gresham. This tears-in-his-eyes business had just got to stop, he said to himself, not realising just how deep down into his reserves of mental energy the past months had forced him to dig and how exhausted he was.

  "Course I'm bloody staying, aren't 1?' said Mannion. 'There's got to be somebody with brains looking after you.'

  For all that the lead-up to Calais was largely a confused blur in his memory, Gresham remembered that night and day for the rest of his life, could recreate its every moment with total vividness. As he remembered another day. A bald, decapitated head rolling across a hastily erected scaffold, the comic expression of startlement on the executioner's face as he held not a head but a red wig in his hand. And now, thousands of men gripped by a superb discipline fighting a lost cause to the bitter end, fighting a cause that no man should have asked them to sail on, a cause so profligate of human life as to make a mockery of a kind creation. Fighting with simple courage. Why in the depths of his and this life's idiocy did mankind reveal itself as so brave and wonderful?

  The flickering of distant fire came at midnight. The sudden, violent ringing of bells, first from one ship then another, until the whole of Calais roads seemed like a vast Cathedral tower. The pinnaces and longboats the Duke had stationed to guard his fleet leaped forward, grapnels ready. Two of the outermost fireships, yards already outlined in a dull red flame, were caught and hauled aside, but the combination of wind and tide was too much, sending the ships at ferocious speed down on to the Spanish ships. One pinnace was engulfed in flames itself, a longboat smashed to pieces as the flaming monster bore down and through it. Then from the lead ship a roar of cannons shattered the anchorage, a series of massive explosions. Devil ships!

  The English would say that the Armada panicked. Yet Gresham saw no panic. A hundred and thirty ships cut their cable, left their anchors rotting in the Calais roadstead, and all evaded the fireships, made it out of harbour. The discipline was superb. Hardly a man spoke on the San Martin as the men clambering oh the yards dropped the great sails, saw them fill with wind. The soldiers were lining the sides in five minutes of the alarm bell sounding. There was no collision, no crashing of great timbers hurled into each other.

  'God help us!' said Mannion at dawn the next morning, in the last period of sanity either men would have for twenty-four hours. It was not an expletive, but rather a genuine plea for help. The San Martin had cut her cable, dodged two fireships with relative ease and come round, dropping her spare anchor less than a mile from where she had started. And she was virtually alone in the anchorage.

  The San Juan, San Marcos, San Felipe and San Mateo were within hailing range. The San Lorenzo, flagship of the galleasses, wa
s crawling inshore, her rudder destroyed by fouling on a discarded cable, her mainmast broken. And that was all. The remainder of the Armada was scattered out at sea, heading north before the driving wind.

  'Anchors,' said Mannion. 'I'll bet most of 'em ain't carrying spare anchors. Most used-two, even three to keep themselves steady here.' There was shifting sand on the bottom, and fierce currents. 'Only one spare anchor left, you 'as to stand out to sea. No point comin' back in here and trying to hold fast in a strong wind with only one anchor.'

  A squadron of English ships broke off from the main body, heading inshore after the wounded galleass.

  'Ain't nothing 'e can do for 'er,' said Mannion, 'don't care how brave he is.'

  Orders were shouted, and the San Martin started to pull out of the roadstead.

  'He's going to put himself and these few ships between the rest of the Armada and the English,' said Gresham. 'Hope the other ships can get back and reform in the time he buys them. It's madness. We're outnumbered ten, twenty to one. We'll be blown to pieces.'

  'Yep,' said Mannion. 'Want to watch it from the deck, or get below and try to hide?'

  The leading English ships, twenty of them led by a fine galleon, were on a converging course with the San Martin and her four companions. The leading English ship made a minor alteration of course, heading straight towards the San Martin.

  The artillery captains, one for each side of the gun deck, yelled their orders. The San Martin was perilously short of shot and powder. No shot could be wasted. 'Fire only at point blank range! Hold your fire.' The musketeers on the deck and the arquebusiers aloft braced themselves against deck and yard, many surreptitiously crossing themselves as the enemy ship boiled towards them, crashing the waves aside from her bow in her headlong rush to destroy.

  'This is new,' said Mannion, sucking on the inevitable tooth.

  The lead English ship was holding her fire, coming within cannon then musket range, coming on even further, until within pistol range, fifty or a hundred yards. Then her bow guns flared out, and she luffed up to present her broadside to the San Martin. The two ships were so close that Gresham felt he could reach out and touch the men on the opposite deck, smell the ship and the fear and tension of its men. And there, on the quarterdeck, strutted the familiar figure, Gresham's nemesis, Sir Francis Drake. Yelling, red-faced at his gunners, forcing them to hold fire until the very last minute by sheer force of will alone. Drake looked round, and for a single brief second their eyes came together.

  At this range the explosion of the cannon was felt as a pressure and a hot breath, as well as a gout of black smoke, red and yellow flame. Drake's broadside shattered into the side of the San Martin, its impact at such close range unlike any other assault the brave vessel had received. The ship actually shuddered in her tracks. There were howls and screams from below. The shot had cut through the thick timbers of the main hull, sending a savage spray of splinters through the gun decks, upending a great gun before it could be fired, half its men crushed and screaming under the great wooden carriage. A ship's boy was crawling along the deck, leaving a trail of blood behind him on the grimy deck, hand clutched disbelieving to his stomach where the grey sausages of his intestine had been exposed. It would be minutes before the shock wore off and the pain came in its place. As quickly as she had come, Drake swung out of line, revealing another English ship behind her, already swinging at monstrously close range to punch the San Martin with all her power.

  The San Martin's return fire was sporadic, almost measured. At fifteen minutes to reload a gun, and twenty English ships taking it in turns to draw up and empty their broadsides into her hull, the Duke had ordered several guns to hold their fire, so that there was at least something awaiting the next English vessel as it hauled round and poured iron into the long-suffering hull of the San Martin.

  Without speaking and with no conscious communication

  Gresham and Mannion started to haul such wounded as could be moved to the companionways, where other willing hands took them down to the sweated and agonised hell of the surgeon's deck. There seemed no end to the line of English ships, the crash and roar of the guns, the replies from the San Martin, the continual crack and pop of the small arms. There were problems loading the guns. Gresham could see. The soldiers whose job it was to return from their station to reload were unwilling to do so. Feeble, hope-less battle though it was, for the first time they had targets on board the English ships, someone to aim and fire their weapon at. Loading a heavy gun would have done more damage to them, and done more to save their lives, but men in battle are not subject to logic. Soon Gresham and Mannion found themselves serving a gun, obeying the screaming orders amid the stench of blood and warm bronze, the bitter biting tang of powder in the nose and throat.

  The tone of the battle changed. The San Martin seemed almost dead in the water now, a shadow blotting out the light from the open gun ports on the starboard side. Blood was running out from the scuppers and gun ports. A great English galleon had drawn up almost alongside the flagship, struck his tops'ls and started to try to pound her to pieces from pistol shot range. Other vessels were ' engaging her port side now, though the whine and crack of shot suggested the English too were reduced to firing lighter broadsides than they might have wished.

  Three, four, five hours the monstrous cannonade went on. For a moment, Gresham felt his world go dark, came round to see himself looking up at the grating on the San Martin's deck. He felt his head gingerly. A flying piece of timber had cracked his head open, the wound soaking his hair with blood. Mannion dragged him upright. 'On deck!' he said firmly. 'Get yourself taken to the surgeon and 'e's as likely to amputate your head as put a dressing on it.' They stumbled up the ladder. A bucket miraculously still full of sea water lay on the deck, part of the precautions against fire. Unceremoniously Mannion dumped it over Gresham's head. The sting of the salt water on the open wound cut through the mists in his head.

  Strangely, as in a dream, he saw the half-naked figure of a man with a rope round his waist, a waist already rubbed red raw. Men were firing, reloading, dropping all around him, yet the half-naked man seemed oblivious. He and an assistant were tying something round the rope on a loop, what looked like a lead plate and some hemp. The diver tugged at them both, nodded to his assistant, and stood on the rail. Strangely graceful, he poised for a moment, and dived into the cold sea, which was whitening around the San Martin's hull. A diver. One of three on board, seeking to plug the holes in the side and hull of the San Martin even as they were made. How had he survived the marksmen on the English deck? By accident? Or by some strange form of chivalry to one of few men at sea that day who would take no lives, but might save some?

  Extraordinarily, with superb seamanship and magnificent heroism, the great ships of the Armada started to appear round their flagship, drawing the English fire and shepherding her back into what was at first a mere mocking copy of the half-moon formation that had served the ships so well, but which as each hour went by became tighter, stronger.

  The San Martin's sails were in tatters, her rigging half cut away. Four hundred round shot they counted taken into her hull, yet still she sailed, still she fought, the blood running from the scuppers, men with mangled limbs continuing to serve the guns, to hurl abuse at the enemy. Ten, fifteen English ships gathering like wolves around a single Spanish galleon, as they had gathered round the San Martin. Twice the San Martin herself dragged herself out to relieve besieged vessels. Her crew looked on horrified as they pulled up alongside the San Mateo. How could any man have survived the series of smashing blows she had received? Half her men were dead, her shot lockers empty, her decks a bloody shambles. Standing' proudly in the wreck of his ship was her Captain, Diego de Pimental. They offered to evacuate the San Mateo. Pimental sent the boats back, asking instead for divers to mend his leaks.

  It could not last. Perhaps God had some mercy left in Him. At four o' dock a sudden, sharp savage squall blew itself down on the battlefield, and figh
ting men looked up to see billowing sails thrashing against the masts, hulls rising and failing in the increasing sea. Was their reward to founder in a storm after all?

  For fifteen minutes, perhaps half an hour, the opposing fleets fought the sea and not their own kind. The English ships, seemingly undamaged from their encounters, had either turned head to wind or skidded along the edge of the storm under close sail. The Armada vessels, their sails in tatters and losing more wind than they held, simply plunged on off to the north east, the wind full in their tattered and leaking canvas.

  When the storm settled, there was clear water between the Armada, huddled now back together, and the English fleet. Gresham lay beyond exhaustion, his back up against the carriage of the gun he had helped to serve, when the tap on his shoulder came.

  'Why have they left us?' the Duke asked. 'Why are they not attacking?' He had spoken without the translator, who had one arm bound to his side with a rough dressing. Gresham looked at Mannion. He shrugged, spoke to the Duke directly. All were too tired to care about the breach of protocol.

  'Out of powder, most likely. And the wind's driving you north, away from Parma. Why risk more lives when the wind's doing their job for them?'

  The Duke nodded, and turned back to stare out over the stern at the far distant white blobs of English sail. It was a dismissal. He was in a tunic, his frame seeming thin in the cold light. He had given his two boat cloaks to a wounded officer, and a ship's boy with a smashed leg who he had put in his cabin.

  They lost three ships over the night, the San Mateo and the San Felipe hardly able to keep afloat, beached on the Flemish shore, their crews tossed overboard to drown. The final act came with the morning. The wind had strengthened overnight, half the ships nearly unmanageable because of the state of their sails and spars.

  They were being driven inexorably north west. Ahead of the Armada lay a patch of clear sea, then a layer of choppy water. Beyond that lay the white foam of waves breaking on a beach. The Flanders sand banks.