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Updated: April 30, 2025
He and his first lieutenant were immediately escorted on board the Bon Homme Richard. He found her condition to be even worse than his own; her quarters and counter were entirely driven in; the whole of her lower-deck guns dismounted, and she was also on fire in two places, with six or seven feet of water in the hold.
The British crew, unable to open the eight lower-deck starboard ports from the third abaft, blew them off. The Vengeur's musketry, meantime, and her poop carronades, soon played havoc on the Brunswick's quarterdeck, killing several officers and men, and wounding others, among whom was Captain Harvey, three of his fingers being torn away by a musket-shot, though he refused to leave the deck.
And now it was remarked that those who escaped were the lower-deck workers, those whose duties kept them off the upper deck and away from gunports and deadlights. It was also suggested that the cause was some deadly attribute of the night air in these tropical regions, to which the Americans succumbed; for, so far, the coast division had escaped.
He also presided over certain of the lower-deck amusements, and, at the bi-weekly cinema shows, studied their tastes in the matter of Charlie Chaplin and the Wild West with the discrimination of a lover choosing flowers for his mistress. His own personal amusements were few.
One gun, however, found its target, and that was one aimed and fired by the hand of Lord Desborough himself: a heavy shot, a thirty-two, from one of the massive lower-deck guns of the Yarmouth, which the pleasant weather permitted them to use effectively, came through one of the after gun-ports of the Randolph, and swept away the line of men on the port side of the gun.
Here Nosey found himself an insignificant unit among nearly a thousand barefooted, free-fisted, cursing, clean-shaven men, who smelt perpetually of soap and damp serge, and comprised the lower-deck complement of a British battle-cruiser. He worked in an electric-lit, steel tunnel, with red-hot furnaces on one side, and the gaping mouths of coal caverns on the other.
The starboard guns were also run in amidships and secured by tackles, the moving over of this great weight of metal bringing the larboard lower-deck port-cills just level with the water. The men were then able to get at the mouth of the pipe. For an hour the ship remained in this position, while the carpenters were at work.
And this magistrate, as he was more intelligent than any other person of his nation that came to our knowledge, so likewise was he more curious and inquisitive, viewing each part of the ship with particular attention, and appearing greatly surprised at the largeness of the lower-deck guns, and at the weight and size of the shot.
She carried one hundred and four guns, all of brass forty-two pounders on the lower-deck; thirty-two on the middle deck; and twenty-four pounders on the quarter-deck, forecastle, poop, and main-deck.
The Berwick was a good ship, and, in addition to her metal, had two sixty-eight-pounder carronades on the poop; but next to her was the Dolphin, forty-four, with only twenty twelve-pounders on the lower-deck, which could not be expected to make any impression on a sixty-four.
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