“Have the gunner clear equipment for shooting a line. Get cross-bearings from points ashore, so we can make sure of charted depths. Put a man forward with heave lead.”
He gave the engineer one bell.
While the cutter slowed to half speed the captain informed the executive officer, “We mustn’t take too many chances, Mr. Todd, but we’ve got to tackle shoal water to put a line aboard her.”
Both of them were trained by similar feats, and they did not need to canvass in speech an especial hazard from a sea running as heavily as that one.
This danger was not long in revealing itself. When the cutter quartered in, flanking the schooner to starboard in order to get as much broadside target as possible in shooting a line across her, the shoaling water was heaved more tumultuously by the friction of bottom. The Arrowsic swooped so deeply into troughs that the shore station was repeatedly eclipsed by wave crests. The water in those troughs resembled boiling porridge; the rollers were scooping sand from the depths. In a calm sea the cutter would have beneath her a safe surplusage of fathoms. But these deeply gouged troughs invited the risk of bumping.
Captain Bent held on as long as prudence permitted. Doubling his body over the bridge’s weather-cloth he had made sure that the starboard gun and the line tubs were ready. Gunner Martin, lanyard in hand, glanced up at the captain and saluted.
“Let her go, gunner!”
Martin had adjusted elevation to measure with the cutter’s poise at wave crest. At an instant of brief steadiness, he shot. A skyrocketing line snaked away behind the missile which shrieked its course over the disabled packet and plopped into the sea beyond, laying the line across the schooner’s waist.
“Very handsomely done, gunner!” shouted Captain Bent, glass at eye.
A moment later he cursed with all the power of his lungs, now damning something which was not being done.