Aub-Mat 08 - The Ionian Mission

by Patrick O'Brian

  ‘Perilous would it be, at all?’

  Jack whistled. ‘Why, as long as we do not spring a butt, we are not likely to founder,’ he said. ‘But it does make things a little damp between decks, and it does check our speed. Now you must forgive me. You would get a better general view from the poop: Mr Grimmond, Mr Savage, give the Doctor a hand to the poop. He would like to sit on the coaming where he can clap on to the fife-rail if it should get rough. Forecastle, there: is that spritsail-topsail laid along?’

  He returned to the task of driving a heavy, partially-waterlogged and possibly disintegrating ship through a savage chaotic cross-sea, the Mediterranean at its sudden worst: and all the time he tried to persuade himself that the rearmost Frenchmen were not drawing away. The English line had changed a good deal since it was first formed at crack of dawn and the Worcester had moved up two places, the Orion dropping astern for want of foretopgallantmast and then the Renown with her bowsprit gone in the gammoning: the squadron was now sailing in a bow-and-quarter line, pelting along as hard as ever they could go, all their carefully-husbanded stores, cordage, sailcloth and spars now laid out with a reckless prodigality. Jack could see the Admiral, made fast to an elbow-chair clamped to the Ocean quarterdeck, his telescope often trained forward to fix Emeriau’s flagship. Little time he had for watching the Admiral, however: this pace, close-hauled on a strong but capricious and veering wind that might lay the Worcester on her beam ends with a sudden furious gust or take her aback, called for the closest attention; and all this time the four experienced quartermasters at the wheel had to favour her to try to avoid the murderous slap, but without losing speed.

  From his lonely, windswept, comfortless viewpoint abaft the mizenmast Stephen could make out little but a confused turmoil of water, high, sharp-pointed waves apparently running in every direction - a dirty sea with a great deal of yellowish foam blown violently over the surface, eddying here and there, and all this beneath a low yellow-grey sky with lightning under the western clouds. Far more impressive seas he had known: the enormous rollers of the high southern latitudes, for example, of the hurricane waters off Mauritius. But he had not seen a more wicked and as it were spiteful sea, with its steep, close-packed waves - a sea that threatened not the instant annihilation of the great antarctic monsters but a plucking apart, a worrying to death. Looking along the line he saw that several of the English ships had already been plucked to some degree - many a topgallantmast was gone, and even to his unprofessional eye there seemed to be some strange makeshift spars, sails and rigging, while far astern one unhappy ship could be seen sending up a jury mizen and at the same time trying everything humanly possible to keep pace. Yet there was not a ship but that was hurrying, racing along, with a prodigious expenditure of nautical skill and ingenuity and persistence, as though joining battle were the only felicity: a battle that seemed more and more improbable as time went by, measured for Stephen by the regular strokes on the Worcester’s bell and for the seamen by one emergency after another - the main pump choking, a gun breaking loose on the lower deck, the foretopsail blowing clean out of its boltrope.

  At four bells Dr Maturin, changing into his old crusted black coat, crept down to make his rounds of the sick-bay: this was earlier than his usual time, but it was rare that a heavy, prolonged blow did not bring a fair number of casualties and in fact the sick-bay was busier than he had expected. His assistants had dealt with many of the sprains, contusions and broken bones, but some they had left for him, including a striking complex compound fracture, recently brought below.

  ‘This will take us until after dinner, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘but it is much better to operate while he is unconscious: the muscles are relaxed, and we are not distracted by the poor fellow’s screams.’

  ‘In any case there will be nothing hot for dinner,’ said Mr Lewis. ‘The galley fires are out.’

  ‘They say there are four feet of water in the hold,’ said Mr Dunbar.

  ‘They love to make our flesh creep,’ said Stephen. ‘Come, pledgets, ligatures, the leather-covered chain and my great double-handed retractor, if you please; and let us stand as steady as we can, bracing ourselves against these uprights.’

  The compound fracture took even longer than they had expected, but eventually he was sewn up, splinted, bandaged, and lashed into a cot, there to swing until he was cured. Stephen hung his bloody coat to drip dry upon its nail and walked off. He looked into the wardroom, saw only the purser and two of the Marine officers wedged tight about their bottle, and returned to his place on the poop, carrying a tarpaulin jacket.

  As far as he could make out little had changed. The Worcester and all the ships he could see ahead and astern were still tearing along at the same racing speed, carrying a great press of canvas and flinging the white broken water wide- a great impression of weight, power, and extreme urgency. On the decks below him there was still the same tension, with men jumping to make the innumerable slight changes that Jack called for from the place at the weather-rail that he had scarcely left for five minutes since the chase began, and where he was now eating a piece of cold meat. The pumps were still turning fast, and somewhere in the middle parts of the ship another had joined them, sending its jet in a fine curve far out to leeward. The French line still stretched half-way to the horizon, standing north-east for Toulon: they did not seem very much farther away if at all and it seemed to Stephen that this might continue indefinitely. To be sure, the Worcester was labouring cruelly, but she had been labouring cruelly for so long that there seemed no good reason why she should not go on. He watched attentively, therefore, and not without hope that some disaster among the French ships might allow the squadron to make up those few essential miles: he watched, fascinated by the spectacle of what he was tempted to call motionless - relatively motionless - hurry, with a sense of a perpetual, frozen present, unwilling to miss anything, until well on into the afternoon, when Mowett joined him.

  ‘Well, Doctor,’ said he, sitting wearily on the coaming, ‘we did our best.”

  ‘Is it over, so?’ cried Stephen. ‘I am amazed, amazed.’

  ‘I am amazed it lasted so long. I never thought to see her take such a pounding, and still swim. Look at that,’ he said, pointing to a length of caulking that had worked out of a seam in the deck. ‘God love us, what a sight. She spewed the oakum from her sides long since, as you would have expected with such labouring; but to see it coming from a midships seam . . .’

  ‘Is that why we must give up?’

  ‘Oh no: it is the breeze that fails us.’

  ‘Yet there seems to be a good deal still,’ said Stephen, looking at the strip of mixed pitch and oakum as it lashed to and fro in the wind, the end shredding off in fragments that vanished over the side.

  ‘But surely you must have seen how it has been hauling forward this last hour? We shall be dead to leeward presently. That is why the Admiral is taking his last chance. You did not notice the Doris repeating his signal, I suppose?’

  ‘I did not. What did it signify?’

  He is sending our best sailers in to attack their rear.

  If they can get there before the wind heads them, and if Emeriau turns to support his ships, he hopes we shall be able to come up in time to prevent ours being mauled.’

  ‘A desperate stroke, Mr Mowett?’

  ‘Well, sir, maybe, maybe. But maybe it will bring on a most glorious action before the sun goes down. Look: here they come. San Josef, Berwick, Sultan, Leviathan, and just the two frigates to windward - no, sir, to windward - Pomone and of course our dear old Surprise. All French or Spanish ships, you see, and all with a fine tumblehome. Some fellows have all the luck. I will fetch you a spyglass, so that you miss nothing.

  Now that they were no longer obliged to keep down to the squadron’s pace the four swift-sailing ships of the line ran up in splendid style, steadily increasing sail as they came. They passed up, forming as they went, and each ship gave them a brief informal spontaneous cheer as they went by: S
tephen saw the cheerful Rear-Admiral Mitchell in the San Josef, the surgeon of the Leviathan, and perhaps a dozen other men he knew, all looking as though they were going to a treat. And he waved to Mr Martin on the Berwick’s quarterdeck; but Mr Martin, half blinded by the spray sweeping aft from the Berwick’s eager bow, did not see the signal.

  Now they were well ahead, the San Josef leading, the others in her wake, and all heading straight for the gap between the French rear and centre divisions. Stephen watched them closely with his glass: the finer points of seamanship no doubt escaped him, yet he did see that for the first hour they not only drew clear away from their friends but they certainly gained on their enemies.

  For the first hour: then between three bells and four the situation hardly changed. All those heavily-armed, densely-populated ships raced strenuously over the sea in gratuitous motion, neither gaining nor losing. Or was there indeed a loss, a slackening of the tension, the first edge of sickening disappointment? Stephen peered over the pooprail down at the quarterdeck, where Jack Aubrey stood in his set place as though he were part of the ship; but little did he learn from that grave, closed, concentrated face.

  At that point the Worcester’s captain was in fact even more part of his ship than usual: the master’s, carpenter’s, first lieutenant’s reports had given him a fairly clear picture of what was happening below and intuition provided the rest. He felt each of her monstrous plunges as though her bowels were his own; furthermore he knew that the immense purchases by which he had so far held the Worcester’s masts to her hull depended essentially upon the mechanical strength of her clamps and hanging-knees, that these must be near their limit, and that if they went he could not carry half his present sail - could not keep up with the squadron, but would have to fall to leeward with the other lame ducks. For a long while he had prayed that they might last long enough for the fighting to begin in the French rear and for the Worcester to come up; now, keener-sighted than his friend, he saw that there was to be no fighting. Long before Stephen saw the San Josef taken squarely aback, losing her maintopgallantmast with the shock, Jack realized that Mitchell’s ships were being headed by the wind: he had seen the quivering weather-leeches, he had divined the furious bracing of the yards and the hauling of the bowlines, and he had measured the increasing gap between the English and the French, and it was clear to him that the advanced ships’ slanting approach to the enemy could not succeed - that the long chase must end in slow disappointment and anticlimax.

  But it was not over yet. ‘Look at Surprise and Pomone, sir,’ cried Pullings, and swinging his telescope from the San Josef Jack saw the two frigates draw ahead under a great press of sail and bear down under the rearmost Frenchman’s lee, the Robuste, of eighty guns. They moved faster than any ship of the line and as soon as they were within range they opened with their bow-guns and then with their broadsides, firing high in the hope of knocking away some important spar.

  ‘Luff up, luff up, for God’s sake luff up,’ said Jack aloud as he followed them in their perilous course along the Robuste’s side: very close range was everything in such a case. But neither Surprise nor Pomone luffed up. Both sides fired repeatedly at a distance; neither did any apparent damage, and after the frigate’s first unsuccessful run Admiral Thornton threw out the signal of recall, emphasizing it with two guns: an engagement at that range, a distant peppering, would accomplish nothing, whereas the Robuste’s heavy metal might disable or even sink the smaller ships. And these two guns, together with those remote and ineffectual broadsides under the clouds to the north-east, were all the firing the squadron ever heard.

  Almost immediately after the Admiral’s second gun, and as though in answer to it, a particularly violent gust laid the Worcester over in a cloud of foam: she recovered heavily, all hands clinging to their holds; but as she came up and took the weather-strain so Jack heard the deep internal rending that he had dreaded. He and Pullings exchanged a glance: he stepped over to his larboard hawsers, felt their horrible slackness, and called to the signal-midshipman, ‘Mr Savage, prepare the hoist; I am overpressed with sail.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  When Jack Aubrey brought his ship into the fleet at the rendezvous south-east of Toulon she had three turns of twelve-inch cable frapped about her and a spare sprit sail, thick with tarred oakum, drawn under her bottom. She had something of the chrysalis-look her captain had once imagined in the lightness of his heart, but at least she still possessed her masts and all her guns, though they had cost her people some cruel days of pumping, and at least she looked trim and clean as she glided cautiously in over a perfect sea, the deep, deep blue rippling under the caress of a languid southern breeze. The water still gushed in steady jets from her side, but she was no longer in danger of foundering.

  The Worcester came in at such a gentle pace that Jack had plenty of time to survey the squadron. Some ships were missing, either because they had been sent to Malta to refit or because they had not yet rejoined; but on the other hand two seventy-fours and an eighty-gun ship had arrived from Cadiz, and at least some stores must have reached the fleet, since there were now only half a dozen jury-masts to be seen. The squadron, though battered and somewhat diminished, was still a powerful blockading force. He saw that clearly enough from a distance, and when his barge pulled along the line in answer to the flagship’s signal he saw it more clearly still. On this calm, sunny day the ships all had their ports open to air the lower decks, and behind these ports he saw the guns, row after row of guns, with seamen titivating them. This sense of abiding strength and his exact falling-in with the squadron was a satisfaction to him, but the greater part of his mind was taken up with foreboding and concern. As the barge slipped along past the Ocean’s splendid gilded stern he heard the howling of the Admiral’s little dog, and when Bonden hooked on at the entry-port, blundering for the first time in his life as captain’s coxswain, Jack was obliged to compose himself for an instant before going aboard.

  The ceremony of reception was muted; on all hands he saw faces as grave as his own; and the Admiral’s secretary, leading him to the fore-cabin, said in a low voice, When I take you in, pray let the interview be as short and smooth as possible. He has had a long hard day of it: Dr Harrington is with him now.’

  They stood there for a while, looking out through the half-port, beyond the dark rectangle to the brilliance and purity of the day, even purer and more brilliant for being framed: and still the dog howled. ‘The doctor is with him,’ reflected Jack. ‘So they have put the pug into the coach: some dogs cannot bear seeing their masters touched.’ The Ocean veered a quarter of a point, and now the frame contained a ship, a great way off and apparently floating above the nacreous surface of the farther sea. As seamen will, Jack tilted his head back and sideways to consider her: she was Surprise, of course, and she was presumably coming from the inshore squadron; yet her side was painted blue and what little he could make out of her pennant showed it as low as the crosstrees: the ship was in mourning. ‘What happened to Captain Latham?’ he asked.

  ‘Can you indeed see as far as that?’ said Allen, following his gaze. ‘I am afraid he was killed. He and his first lieutenant were killed by the same ball as the Surprise was going down to attack the Robuste.’

  Dr Harrington came out of the great cabin, bowed and sombre; he opened the coach door as he went by, and the little dog, scrambling fast across the deck, darted in before Jack and the secretary and flung itself down under the Admiral’s desk.

  Jack had expected to find the Admiral deeply saddened, even more infirm, possibly savage (he could be a Tartar on occasion), certainly very gravely affected indeed; but he had not expected to find him removed from humanity, and it disconcerted him.

  Admiral Thornton was perfectly civil and collected: he congratulated Aubrey on having brought the Worcester in, listened to a brief summary of the Statement of Condition that Jack laid on his desk and said the ship must clearly go to Malta for a complete refit - she would be of no use as a man-of-war
for a great while, if at all; but her guns would be uncommonly useful at this juncture. His mind was alive - it dealt with the details of his command, rarely hesitating for a moment - but the man was not, or not wholly, and he looked at Jack from an immense distance: not coldly, still less severely, but from another plane; and Jack felt more and more embarrassed, ashamed of being alive while the other was already taking leave.

  ‘But in the mean time, Aubrey,’ said the Admiral, ‘you will not be idle. As you may have heard, poor Latham was killed in his engagement with the Robuste, so you will proceed to the Seven Islands in Surprise. The death of one of the Turkish rulers on the Ionian coast has brought about a complex situation that may possibly allow us to expel the French from Marga, even from Paxo and Corfu, and we must have at least one frigate on the spot. I will not elaborate - I am leaving this station very shortly, you know - but Mr Allen will make the position clear and the Rear-Admiral will give you your orders. You will have the advice of Dr Maturin and Mr Graham. Does that suit you?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Then goodbye to you, Aubrey,” said the Admiral, holding out his hand. Yet it was not a human farewell: it was rather a gesture of civility to a being of another kind, very small and far away, at the wrong end of a telescope as it were, a being of no importance, in circumstances of no great importance, that nevertheless had to be dealt with correctly.

  Only twice had Jack felt that the Admiral was still in contact with the ordinary world: once when he gently put his foot on the pug’s back to stop it wheezing so loud, and once when he said ‘leaving this station’. It was common knowledge that the Ocean was sailing for Mahon and Gibraltar in the morning, but the Admiral’s meaning would have been clear to a man with even less religious sense than Jack Aubrey and the tone of unaffected humility and resignation moved him deeply.