The enemy got the smack,
after all, and the bear, which, being a Norwegian, proved so
untractable on Swedish soil that, sad to relate, in the end they cut
him up and ate him.
King Charles, himself a knightly soul and an admirer of a gallant
enemy, gave orders to have all Tordenskjold's belongings sent back
to him, but he did not live to see the order carried out. He was
found dead in the rifle-pits before Frederiksteen on December 11,
1718, shot through the head. It was Tordenskjold himself who brought
the all-important news to King Frederik in the night of December
28,--they were not the days of telegraphs and fast steamers,--and
when the King, who had been roused out of bed to receive him, could
not trust his ears, he said with characteristic audacity, "I wish it
were as true that your Majesty had made me a schoutbynacht,"--the
rank next below admiral. And so he took the step next to the last on
the ladder of his ambition.
Within seven months he took Marstrand. It is part of the record of
that astonishing performance that when the unhappy Commandant
hesitated as the hour of evacuation came, not sure that he had done
right in capitulating, Tordenskjold walked up to the fort with a
hundred men, half his force, banged on the gate, went in alone and
up to the Commandant's window, thundering out:
"What are you waiting for? Don't you know time is up?"
In terror and haste, Colonel Dankwardt moved his Hessians out, and
Tordenskjold marched his handful of men in.
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