Chapter 105: The Royal Navy’s Decision
Chapter 105 – The Royal Navy’s Determination
Above the English Channel, the Beagle was in an upwind favorable position.
From the lens of the monocular, Colonel Fitzroy was observing every move of the ships on the opposite side.
He saw that the diving boards that had been placed between the two ships had been withdrawn, and immediately afterward, both ships had hoisted the signal flag ‘Willing to be stopped for inspection’.
“This ……”
Colonel Fitzroy looked at the similar size of the two ships, and for a moment it was difficult to tell which one was the ‘Blackthorn’ they were looking for.
He thought for a moment and decided that it would be better to follow the conventions of naval warfare and keep a distance until he was sure of the identity of the other ship.
He opened his mouth and ordered, ”Release the sampan skiffs into the sea, and split up into eight marines to board over and conduct an inspection. If you find something wrong midway, wave the white ship’s flag and we’ll go over to rescue you as soon as possible.”
With Colonel Fitzroy’s order, several Marines, led by two sergeants, jumped into each of the two skiffs tied to the side.
With the push of the winch wheel, the two skiffs descended a little with the twine, and finally landed foursquare on the surface of the sea.
Arthur stood at the bow of the ship, sniffing the cool sea breeze, but always felt a lingering smell of blood lingering in his nose.
Agares was standing beside him, only to see him raise his right arm, and an illusory red-eyed dodo immediately flew from the sea and landed on his small arm.
Agareth put his ear to the raven’s beak as he listened to the dodo’s report while nodding his head repeatedly.
“Well …… well …… well done my little one.”
The Red Devil fished a small colored ball out of his coat pocket and fed it into the dodo’s mouth, smiling as he stroked its head, “This is your reward.”
Arthur saw this and calmly said with his pipe in his mouth, “Quite the reward!”
The red devil grinned, “That’s for sure, do you think I’m you? Arthur. I’ve always been generous to people who are serious about their work, whereas you don’t give a dime to conscientious devils. How about a deal, ten souls for a message from me.”
“One soul for one piece of information, turn around and reap a tenfold windfall. Agares, you really are a better businessman than a Jew.”
Agares sniffed and hummed out a breath from his nose, “Arthur, you are belittling me! Back then Judas sold Jesus for thirty silver coins, I can’t negotiate such a low price! For the devil, the life of a prophet is much more than thirty silver coins!”
“Is it?” Arthur asked, “What about my life?”
“Wow, my dear Arthur.”
The Red Devil rubbed his hands together and hemmed and hawed, “That question of yours goes to my trade secrets. But while I can’t answer that question for you, I can tell you that that message with a price tag of ten souls will allow you to save more than ten lives.”
“Really?”
Arthur thought back on Agares’ words for a moment until he confirmed that the guy had used a declarative sentence, then he spoke, “Looks like a devil is going to make a fortune today.”
The red devil smiled, “Arthur, look at what you’re saying. It’s all a fair deal between us, and Professor Agares is a boy and a girl.”
Arthur didn’t say anything either, but just stretched out his hand and pressed a handprint on the indenture that Agares had conjured up.
Almost in an instant, his stretched brows instantly furrowed, the scene of Fred’s conversation with the others just now instantly surfaced in his mind.
He hastily took off his pipe and let out a low curse under his breath, ”Damn, Fred is doing really big business! Not only trafficking indentured servants to North America, but also getting involved with the Barbary pirates who specialize in sending white slaves to the Ottoman Turkish Empire!”
The Red Devil drifted to his side and hid a laugh, “But how are you going to convince Colonel Fitzroy to trust you? You can’t tell him that you know about the Barbary Pirates because you made a deal with the devil, can you?”
“Convince? Why would I convince him?”
“Then what are you going to do? Wait for the opposite side to initiate an attack?”
Arthur didn’t say anything, he just went to the guns mounted on the bow of the ship, smiled at the gunner and asked, “Are the shells loaded?”
The gunner was stunned by his question, “Of course.”
Arthur nodded expressionlessly, then pointed at the sky and shouted, “My God! Look, is that God?”
The gunner looked up as he was fooled, and Arthur took advantage of this and snapped his burning pipe onto the cannon’s fuse.
The gunner looked back, scratched the back of his head in bewilderment, and asked, “Where is God, sir?”
Arthur doesn’t answer either, he just counts down.
“Three, two, one ……”
Only a bang could be heard, the cannon fire rose up to the sky, the cannonball flew out sharply along the barrel, only due to the distance being too far to be followed up, it ended up only smashing into the sea not far away from the Blackthorn.
White smoke filled the bow of the ship, the gunner was stunned by the movement, after a long time, he reacted to what had happened.
He couldn’t help but say angrily, ”Are you crazy? The captain hasn’t even given the order yet, why would you do such a thing?”
Arthur put one hand in his pocket and shook his head, “I’ve told you, I didn’t do it, it was God.”
Immediately after that, he walked towards Colonel Fitzroy.
And Colonel Fitzroy was also shocked by this sudden shot, he walked towards the bow of the ship while cursing angrily, “Which son of a bitch fired that shot? I’ll fucking skin him!”
Arthur walked forward, stretched the folded monocular and placed it in front of Colonel Fitzroy’s eyes, “Mr. Colonel, don’t get angry yet, what do you think this is?”
In the view of the binoculars, two flags were slowly raised on both ships.
One was a skull and crossbones pirate flag equipped with a silver and white arm symbol painted in a blood red background.
And on the other, the triangular, blood-colored St. George’s flag.
As a sailor who had lived on the ship for more than twenty years, Colonel Fitzroy certainly understood what these two flags meant.
The former side, symbolized that the Barbary pirates would kill the place off.
The latter side, on the other hand, represented that the British pirates would fight to the end in blood.
“Son of a bitch!”
Colonel Fitzroy threw his boater hat down to the ground, his cheeks reddening, and he didn’t know if it was from excitement or anger. “Fuck, and I really did catch two big fish! All hands on deck, sidestep the ship, guns calibrated and aligned!”
And on the opposite side of the Blackthorn, Fred was also holding binoculars to observe the movements of the Beagle.
He threw the binoculars downward in anger and cursed, “How did they know we had a problem? Close the distance for me, I’m going to go up and kill those idiots!”
However, in the future of his words, he heard the sound of cannons roaring on the surface of the sea.
“Take cover!!!”
The first mate’s voice ran through the entire Blackthorn, however, without waiting for him to finish shouting these words, four cannonballs had already whistled and struck the Blackthorn’s hull.
One shot pierced the ramming horns, one snapped the mast, and two more directly took away the lives of three unlucky people.
“Fuck!” Fred spat, “If the Army artillery had this kind of accuracy back then, Waterloo wouldn’t have to fight so hard!”
He yelled, “What are you waiting for? Fire back at me!”
But while Fred ranted and raved, the first mate wasn’t going to follow his advice.
Although the Blackthorn was an armed merchant ship, it was only equipped with two eight-pounders, which were far out of range at this point.
As for the dozens of muskets on board, the usefulness of firing at this distance was limited to boosting morale.
He wanted to order the ship to close the distance, but after sailing for a while, he realized that Blackthorn was in a downwind position, and approaching the Beagle with a speed of twelve knots against the wind was like a fool’s errand.
The initiative of whether to advance or retreat at this time was almost entirely in the hands of the Beagle.
The Blackthorn was at a loss, but the experienced Barbary pirates already had an idea.
They quickly sailed away from the Blackthorn, intending to go around to the front of the Beagle’s weak firepower to return fire.
But the battle-hardened Royal Navy could not let him have his way, and almost at the same moment that the Barbary Pirates left the Beagle, Colonel Fitzroy ordered a rapid approach to the Blackthorn.
Fred couldn’t help but be overjoyed at the sight, and he ordered, “Quickly turn around for me, I’m going to have a hard time with them!”
The first mate sniffed with a bitter look on his face, but he couldn’t refute it.
They were in the downwind position, even if they were to play collision, it would be the Beagle hitting the Blackthorn, there was no such thing as a hard collision.
But he still ordered the Beagle to fire back when it entered range.
“Fire!”
With a bang, the shell landed where the Beagle’s waterline was, yet it only left a dent in the Beagle’s hull, which had been reinforced with copper skin.
However, even if no damage was done, the Beagle’s gunners were not about to spoil Fred’s temper.
“FIRE!!!”
BANG BANG BANG BANG!!!
It was the second round of shelling in three and a half minutes.
In order not to sink the Blackthorn, the gunners chose the point of impact with extreme care, either the mast or the canvas.
Their focus was not on killing people, but on trying to disable the Blackthorn’s ability to escape.
As Admiral Nelson famously said, the purpose of the Royal Navy was ‘If there is a chance of capturing twelve ships, and in the end only eleven are captured, I will not call it a victory’.
Just when Fred thought the shelling was over and he could finally stop for a while, a strong odor of saltpeter suddenly came to the tip of his nose.
Before he could figure out what was going on, he realized that the deck of the Beagle was lit up with countless white spots of light, and immediately after that, he heard a mournful shrill sound resonating on the surface of the sea.
Fred’s pupils shrunk, he recognized this thing because the Army had also used it to attack Napoleon at Waterloo.
He remembered when the infantry had used only a few hundred rounds of the thing to carry off several onslaughts from Napoleon’s own French Old Close Guard.
The Congreve rocket!
Fred didn’t know its scientific name; the uneducated cavalryman in him usually preferred to call it ‘Death’s Whisper’.
Almost instantly, the entire ship of the Blackthorn was on fire, with burned sailors lying and rolling around on the deck, explosions ringing in their ears every now and then, and the air smelling a lot of sizzling, ripened meat, in addition to the smell of urine left over from panic and fear.
The flames writhing like snakes, the screams, the blood enough to cover the feet and the charred corpses smoldering with white smoke.
Fred looked at the scene in front of him, wondering if he had inhaled too much smoke, and in a trance, he felt as if he had returned to that day fifteen years ago.
The June 18th that cost him two fingers and a toe.
Suddenly, the hull of the Blackthorn shuddered violently, and in the middle of the first mate’s terrified shouts.
Fred saw three diving boards set up in front of him.
Above the diving boards, a dozen marines with swords in their mouths were rushing towards the deck of the Blackthorn.
And on the diving board directly across from him stood a young dark-haired man with an officer’s sword in his mouth.
He jumped off the diving board and stabbed the Blackthorn sailor who lunged at him through the jaw.
Moving his feet again, he avoided a chop to his left, then stepped on the shin of the enemy beside him, and in a fluid motion plunged his longsword down his throat, penetrating the back of his opponent’s head with a slight thrust.
Just after taking a man’s life, he twisted his body again and caught the scimitar slashing at him with his leather-gloved left palm, then swooped forward and sent the blade into his enemy’s heart.
Fred saw this and suddenly felt his long-dormant blood boil a little.
Although he would still occasionally kill a few people over the years, they were nothing more than one-sided sadistic killings that did not excite him at all.
Aside from Willox who was a bit more resistant to fighting, it had been a long time since he had run into an expert of this level.
“There are actually such capable people in the Royal Navy?” His eyes widened and he grinned, “Mediterranean fighting style, Apennine Swordsmanship, Fiore Flow?”
(End of chapter)