When the first light broke in the east, hard and sudden, there it lay-- the coast of India, the landfall, the sight they had waited for the long seven months. Amid the cheers he had ordered their colors hoisted-- the red cross, bordered in white, on a field of blue--the first English flag ever to fly off India's coast.
But as the flag snapped its way along the poop staff, and the men struck up a hornpipe on deck, their triumph suddenly was severed by a cry from the maintop.
In the sudden hush that rolled across the ship like a shroud, freezing the tumult of voice and foot, Hawksworth had charged up the companionway to the quarterdeck. And there, while the masts tuned a melancholy dirge, he had studied the ships in disbelief with his glass.
Four galleons anchored at the river mouth. Portuguese men-of-war. Each easily a thousand ton, twice the size of the _Discovery_.
He had sorted quickly through his options. Strike sail and heave to, on the odds they may leave? It was too late. Run up Portuguese colors, the old privateers' ruse, and possibly catch them by surprise? Unlikely. Come about and run for open sea? Never. That's never an English seadog's way. No, keep to windward and engage. Here in the bay.
"Mackintosh!" Hawksworth turned to see the quartermaster already poised expectantly on the main deck. "Order Malloyre to draw up the gunports. Have the sails wet down and see the cookroom fire is out."
"What counts is who bleeds most. Get every able man
As Hawksworth turned to check the whipstaff, the long wooden lever that guided the ship's rudder, he passingly noted that curious conflict of body sensation he remembered from two encounters in years past: once, when on the Amsterdam run he had seen privateers suddenly loom off the coast of Scotland, and then on his last voyage through the Mediterranean, when his convoy first spotted the Turkish pirate galleys. While his mind calculated the elements of a strategy, coolly refining each individual detail, his stomach belied his rational facade and knotted in instinctive, primal fear. And he had asked himself whether this day his mind or his body would prevail. The odds were very bad, even if they could keep the wind. And if the Portuguese had trained gun crews . . .