One cannot help feeling pity for the unhappy fellow; but it was no time for pity. Commander Faulknor could do only one thing, and he did it. Without for an instant losing his presence of mind, he replied to the man in a still lower tone:
'The fate of this expedition depends on the helm in your hand. Give it to me, and go and hide your head in whatever you fancy the safest part of the ship. But mind—fears are catching. If I hear you tell yours to one of your messmates, your life shall answer for it to-morrow!'
CAPTAIN FAULKNOR STORMING FORT LOUIS
'The poor fellow,' in the words of the Naval Chronicle, 'panic-struck, went away, and overcome with shame sat down upon the arm chest, whilst Captain Faulknor seized the helm and with his own hand laid the Zebra close to the walls of the Fort, but before he had got upon them at the head of his gallant followers, a cannon-ball struck the arm chest and blew the pilot to atoms.' He was the only man killed of all the Zebra's crew that day.
Would the pilot have escaped had he pulled himself together and stuck to the helm? This is what Commander Faulknor wrote home to his mother after the fight.[63] 'I had a ship's cartouch box, which is made of thick wood, buckled round my body with pistol cartridges in it, for the pistol I carried by my side. As the Zebra came close to the fort, a grape-shot struck, or rather grazed my right-hand knuckle, and shattered the cartouch in the centre of my body: had it not miraculously been there I must have been killed on the spot.'
Faulknor ran the Zebra in and laid her as close under the French guns as the depth of water at that state of the tide would allow, within fifteen feet of the walls of Fort Louis. The next instant 'the scaling-ladders flew from the rigging, the boats in tow astern became the bridge, and Captain Faulknor headed his boarders over the parapet into the fort.'
The boats of the squadron, led by Captains Nugent and Riou—'the gallant, good Riou,' killed before Copenhagen seven years later, as all the world knows—were coming up astern, flying through the water after the Zebra, as fast as the men, bending their hardest to their oars, could send them forward; but they were still some way off.