Darkness came and the long night brought no relief from the hammering northerly. Only when dawn’s cold light imperceptibly displaced the blackness was there a moderation in the welter of torn seas. Alexander, Orion and Tenacious came together once more.
‘She’s signalling!’ Kydd’s eyes were sore with salt spray as he tried to read Vanguard’s hoist. ‘To Alexander – “prepare to take me in tow.”’
‘Now we’ll see what they’re made of, I think,’ said Bryant, wedging himself against the outside corner of the master’s cabin and calmly contemplating, across the chaotic, tumbling seas, the heroic feat of seamanship now demanded.
‘Boats won’t swim,’ said Kydd, similarly exercised.
‘Can float off a keg wi’ a messenger line,’ mused the master, ‘if Alexander dare take a wind’d position.’ This was where the main difficulty lay: to allow the keg to float downwind, or any like manoeuvre, implied placing Alexander upwind. The huge windage of the 74s at slow speeds would ensure they drifted inexorably to leeward but it would be at differing rates for different ships and weather conditions. The consequences of the ship to weather drifting faster and colliding with the one to leeward, with all the inertia of one and a half thousand tons, was too horrific to think about.
Alexander lay off, preparing her move. Any close manoeuvring was deadly dangerous in the wild seas and it would take extreme care to pass over the line safely. She wore round in a big circle and approached Vanguard from astern and to windward. Sail was shortened down to goosewinged fore-topsail and storm staysails, and she approached with the buffeting wind on her quarter. Closer, she eased the sheets of two of the three staysails and lined up for her run – she was clearly trying for a close glancing approach to Vanguard’s poop with one fleeting moment to get the line across.
The voluted beakhead of Alexander slowly approached the carved stern of Vanguard. As she did so, the scale of the independent plunging and rearing of the two ships was evident. Alexander’s bowsprit and its complex tracery of rigging speared closer. Then, in seconds, the situation changed. A chance convergence of wave crests into a larger one rose up on Alexander’s outer bow at the same time as its trough allowed Vanguard’s stern to slide towards her.
It looked as if the two ships would merge in splintering ruin but then the fo’c’slemen on the foredeck of Alexander boomed out the fore-topmast staysail to weather by main force and by small yards she yawed giddily and slid past.
Kydd strained to see any tiny thread of black rope against the white water indicating a line had been passed. There was none. The 74 plunged past Tenacious on her way round once more and Kydd could see activity on both ships. But when the light line had been finally passed across from Alexander it would in turn bring aboard a heavier hawser, then probably one of the anchor cables roused up from the tiers in the orlop. At more than a hundred and twenty pounds for every fathom streamed it would be a fearsome task to manhandle.
This time Alexander came up to leeward of the stricken flagship, necessarily head to head to bring their fo’c’sles adjacent. Kydd used his signal telescope to watch: he could make out a lone seaman in the forechains with his coiled, heaving line tensed, waiting.
The two ships closed, Alexander deliberately keeping well to leeward as she edged ahead. They began to overlap – the seaman started to swing his smaller coil in readiness – but even as he did so it became obvious that the windward vessel was catching more of the wind’s blast and drifting down fast on the more sheltered leeward. Alexander’s bowsprit sheered off rapidly.
Once more the big man-o’-war went round ponderously. Once more the seaman in the chains began his swing, and once more it proved impossible. Time wore on. In Tenacious hands were piped to dinner, and the heaving line was cast twice more. The afternoon watch was set – and on the next pass a line at last was caught on Vanguard’s foredeck.
Those watching in other ships dared not breathe as the dots of men on her fo’c’sle scrambled to bring in the line, but Alexander was falling away fast. Kydd knew what they had to do: a dark cavity in Alexander’s stern windows was where her cable would be led out, but first Vanguard must hold fast the precious light line while a stouter rope was heaved in from Alexander and manhandled through the hawse-hole, where it would be led to the main capstan.
Below in the sweating gloom this hawser would be heaved in, its distant other end seized to the main cable issuing out of Alexander’s stern windows as it was led from the giant riding bitts further forward.