The lights of Anson were still ahead. The decision had been made: it was to stay on their course. Kydd could only guess Lydiard had reasoned that, all other things being equal, the French had chosen to keep on the track their mission required, quite in keeping with the overriding need to fly at utmost speed from one place to another.
He slept fitfully in the jerking cot and woke in the crepuscular pre-dawn light, dressing hurriedly. The motion of the ship was the same but more exaggerated – could they fight a blazing action in this? He crushed the worries as they rose, for when day broke the French might well have gone, Lydiard’s decision the wrong one.
Anson’s bulk materialised ahead as the dawn asserted itself, grey and sombre. She was plunging on regardless, a comforting sight, but all eyes were on the steadily widening circle of visibility – and then suddenly, gloriously, there were the French.
Some way to starboard but still ahead, and appreciably closer.
But that made for difficulties. Normally the chase would continue until either the quarry got away or were overhauled. Then it would be battle – but the conditions overnight had worsened, the winds veering even further aft. Waves were leaving long streaks as they were tumbled on before the relentless pummelling, which now had real force behind its steady streaming from the north-east, and the low cloud was starting to drive before it.
Everything now pointed to the near certainty that a hurricane was out there and all prudent mariners would be taking steps to get out of its way. But in the fast deteriorating conditions all four still plunged on before the storm.
‘Mr Kendall,’ Kydd called across to the grave-faced master, ‘shall we talk?’
‘Aye, sir.’
They stood together, each with a firm grip on a rope, eyeing the white-streaked seascape with concern.
‘Glass is at twenty-eight an’ three-fourths last time I looked, sir.’
Kydd glanced up to the fast-moving clouds overhead. ‘Yes, it looks like a hurricane right enough,’ he said. ‘And we’re driving before it.’
There was a rule of thumb that said to face into the wind and the whirling chaos of the centre was somewhere off nine points on the right hand.
Kendall sniffed the wind. ‘And it veers,’ he muttered. ‘That means …’
He didn’t have to explain it to Kydd. The winds feeding the massive gyre did so at an angle, coming in the same all around the rotating mass. Generations of mariners had learned, however, that all was not equal, finding out the hard way that while there were two directions to step out of the way of the onrushing storm only one was to be trusted.
Turning off to the north side would find the ship up against headwinds, which by their angle would try their malignant best to suck the vessel into the centre. Not only that, as the hurricane track nearly always curved to the north, it would continue to bear down on the fleeing ship.
A turn to the south, though, would have the same winds impelling the ship under and behind the deadly system, much to be preferred. This side was called the navigable, the other the dangerous semicircle.
It was easy enough to find out their situation. By the same rule of thumb, it could be seen that if the direction of the wind as the storm approached continued to veer against the compass, to change clockwise, they could be sure they were in the north; if it backed, they were in the south.
‘… and so we’re plumb within the dangerous semicircle,’ finished Kydd.
‘Sir.’
After his two experiences of a hurricane, years in the past, every instinct tore at him to put over the helm and flee before it was too late – but he could not. While the chase went on he was duty-bound to stay with it. And while the Frenchmen had their turn-aside threatened they were staying on course, and while they did so, Anson was never going to let up the chase and Kydd must stay with her as long as he could.
It was now a test of nerves: sooner or later they had to break and run. Who would be first?
Meanwhile, heavy-weather precautions had to be taken before conditions worsened further.
Royals and topgallants had long since been handed and, in conformity with Anson, a reef put in the topsails. Weather cloths were spread to give some relief to the helmsmen, and life-lines rigged fore and aft. Below decks it was vital to see to the securing of the guns, their breeching and tackles doubled and seized, while the spare tiller was laid along, and relieving tackles for its lines rigged. All that a prudent seaman should do aloft or alow was put in hand.
As the morning wore on, a gale developed, a hard, streaming pressure that had men staggering and all canvas hard as a board, a rising doleful drone among the lines from aloft shredding nerves. Spindrift was driven from seething crests to sting and blind, and L’Aurore began to stagger, an uncomfortable surge and jerking as the underlying swell grew.