The result of our procedure amply demonstrated the wisdom of the skipper’s arrangements; for when we reached the battery—which we did rather sooner than I had expected—we found it absolutely unguarded at the rear, the sentinels, three in number, being so posted as to watch the harbour entrance only. Where the rest of the garrison were we could not at the moment discover, but, feeling certain that they were somewhere close at hand, it became necessary to proceed with the utmost caution; I therefore formed up my little band under the shelter and in the deep shadow of a projecting angle, and, enjoining upon them the most absolute silence, entered the battery alone for the purpose of reconnoitring.
I gained the inside without difficulty—the gate having been carelessly left unfastened—and at once found myself in a semicircular court-yard formed by the gun platform of the battery and the sod revetment which surrounded it. The platform was about eight feet high, and was apparently case-mated, for immediately in front of me, as I entered, was a door and two windows, through the latter of which streamed into the blackness of the night the feeble rays of a barrack lantern. Pyramidal piles of round shot were stacked here and there about the gravelled court-yard; and upon approaching one of these and passing my hand over the shot, I came to the conclusion that the five guns which I dimly made out as shapeless masses of blackness upon the platform were thirty-two pounders. The three sentries, wrapped in their greatcoats, stood motionless, one in the centre and one at each extremity of the platform, facing to seaward, but I judged from their listless attitudes that they were anything but on the alert. Access to the platform was obtained by two broad flights of stone steps, one at either extremity.
It was the work of but two or three minutes for me to ascertain these particulars, having done which I returned to my men, gave them most careful instructions how to proceed, and then led them into the battery, where, while the main body silently divided and stole round, in the shadow of the platform, to the guard-room door, about which they ranged themselves, I and two others, whom I had especially picked for the purpose, drew off our boots, and, in our stockinged feet, crept, silently as shadows, up on to the gun platform, where each of us crouched behind a gun waiting for a signal which I had arranged to give. I selected as my victim the sentinel who mounted guard in the middle of the platform, because he was the most difficult man to approach, the other two being posted close to the head of the two flights of stone steps, and I knew that by the time that I had reached him my men would be quite ready.
The fellow stood close to the middle gun, on its lee side, and appeared to be sheltering himself as well as he could from the wind and the rain by crouching close to its carriage. His back was toward me. I therefore had no difficulty whatever in approaching him, which I did in a crouching attitude until I was near enough to touch the flapping skirts of his coat. Then, drawing myself up to my full height and taking a deep breath, I coughed loudly as a signal to my two men, at the same instant clapping one hand over the sentinel’s mouth and seizing his musket in the other as I drove my knee into the small of his back and bore him irresistibly to the ground.
“Utter no sound if you value your life!” I hissed in his ear, in French; and whether it was that my caution was effective, or that the poor fellow was too utterly surprised and astounded to speak, certain it is that he lay perfectly quiet, with my knee on his breast and my hand clutching his throat, while I carefully laid down the musket and drew a gag and some line from my pocket wherewith to secure him. A subdued scuffling to my right and left, scarcely audible above the rush of the wind and the roar of the breakers on the outside beach, told me that the other two sentinels were being similarly dealt with; but there was no outcry whatever, and in less than five minutes we had all three of them securely gagged, and bound hand and foot.
The next thing was to secure the remainder of the garrison, and this we did without any difficulty, simply flinging open the guard-room door and dashing in, cutlass and pistol in hand, upon the sleeping soldiers, and seizing the muskets that stood neatly ranged in a rack along one of the walls. There was a terrific outcry and jabber among the astonished Frenchmen for a minute or two, with some show of a disposition to resist; but I pointed out to them that there were only thirty of them to twenty-six of us, that we were armed while they were not, and that we were not in the humour to put up with any nonsense whatever; which, with the resolute attitude of our men, had the effect of very speedily reducing them to subjection.
I had brought a hammer and a handful of nails with me, and my next business was to spike the guns. This occupied but a very few minutes, and when it was done I returned to the guard-room with the intention of withdrawing my men. As I glanced round the room, however, I caught sight of a small bunch of keys hanging against the wall, and, thinking that these might possibly belong to the magazine, the spirit of mischief suggested to me the propriety of destroying the battery altogether, instead of merely temporarily disabling it; so I took down the keys, and, lighting another lantern, of which there were several, I proceeded to investigate.
It was as I had anticipated. The keys were those of the magazine and the store-room, and, entering the former, I soon found that there was an ample stock of powder, in kegs and made up into cartridges, to wreck the entire structure. There was also a coil of slow match, a piece of which I cut off, and, taking it outside, lighted it for the purpose of ascertaining the rate at which it burnt. This was soon done, whereupon I cut off enough to burn for about twenty minutes, opened the kegs of powder, and emptying one of them in a heap in the middle of the floor, buried one end of the slow match in the pile, taking the other end outside. I then returned to the guard-room and marched the prisoners, surrounded by my own men, outside the battery, when, having assured myself that all hands were safe, I informed the Frenchmen that I was about to blow up the battery, and recommended them to run for their lives, at the same time directing my own men to let them go. The Frenchmen needed no second bidding. Away they went down the slope like startled deer, tumbling over each other in their anxiety to escape from the effects of the anticipated explosion, to the great delight and amusement of our people, and in less than a minute they had vanished in the darkness. The Frenchmen thus disposed of, I ordered my own men to make the best of their way down to the boats, there to wait for me, and then re-entered the battery. It had been arranged between the skipper and myself that each of us should, after taking our respective batteries, display a lantern or light of some sort, on the parapet, as a signal to the other. And my first act, therefore, upon returning to the battery, was to light a lantern and place it where it could be seen from the other battery, and at the same time be shielded from the wind and the rain. While doing this I noted with satisfaction that the captain’s signal was already displayed; so, comforted with the assurance that both batteries were now rendered harmless, I descended to the court-yard, and, with some difficulty, succeeded in igniting the slow match. I waited only long enough to make quite sure that it was burning all right, and then made a bolt of it for my life, overtaking my men just as they reached the beach. We found the boats all right, and perfectly safe, but the men in charge growing very uneasy, as the tide was rising fast over the reef of rocks that sheltered the little cove in which they were lying, and a very nasty, awkward sea was beginning to roll in, occasioning the boat-keepers a great deal of trouble and anxiety in their endeavours to prevent the boats being stove. “All is well that ends well”, however, the boats had thus far escaped, and we lost no time in tumbling into them and shoving off. Just as we did so a terrific glare lit up the sky for an instant, accompanied by a violent concussion of the rocks upon which some of us were standing, and followed by a deep, thunderous boom. Our battery had blown up, and presently, above the seething roar of the sea and the moaning of the wind, we caught the crashing sound of the falling fragments of masonry and earth, and the thud of the heavy guns dislodged from their resting-places upon the demolished platform.
Meanwhile the wind and the sea had both been steadily increasing until it had grown to be what sailors expressively term “a regularly dirty night”, and we were no sooner clear of our sheltering reef of rocks than we were struck by a comber that pretty nearly half-filled the boat that I happened to be in, the other boat, which was astern of us, faring little or no better. The men, however, bent to their oars with a will, and in about ten minutes, by keeping the boats stem-on to the sea, we forced our way out through the broken water and were enabled to head for the harbour, toward which, wet to the skin, and half-dead with the cold of the piercing bitter wind, we made the best of our way. Just inside the harbour entrance, and about mid-channel, we fell in with the skipper’s two boats, which had arrived a few minutes earlier, and were lying upon their oars, waiting for us. Thus reunited, the skipper and I briefly exchanged details of the result of our respective efforts, after which we gave way in line abreast for the spot where we expected to find the barque. We pulled for a quarter of an hour but failed to discover her, although the skipper and I were equally confident that we must be close to the spot where we had seen her at anchor. Then, after a brief consultation, it was agreed that the boats should separate and search for her, a pistol-shot from the lucky boat being the signal arranged to notify that the search had been successful. This plan, or rather the first part of it, was at once put into execution, each boat pulling away in a different direction from the others; but although we diligently searched in every likely direction, frequently encountering one or another of the other boats, the barque was nowhere to be found, and, not to needlessly spin out this adventure, it may suffice to say that we fruitlessly hunted all over the harbour until daylight, when it became evident that in some mysterious manner the vessel had contrived to give us the slip and make good her escape. It had probably occurred during the time that the skipper and I had been busy with the batteries; but the most curious part of it all was that Comben, our second mate, left in charge of the schooner, declared that, although he had never relaxed his vigilance for an instant, from the time of our leaving until our return on board, neither he nor any of the men who shared his watch with him had seen anything whatever of the craft. We thus had an arduous, dangerous, and most trying night’s work for nothing; for with the escape of the barque our work upon the batteries became absolutely useless to us. So, in no very good-humour, we all shifted into dry clothing, weighed our anchor, shaping a course to the northward and westward, and then went to breakfast.