Yet in a sense that command was precarious. If the eighteen ships of the line in Brest Roads could escape, could round Ushant and come up-Channel with Cornwallis distracted in some fashion, Keith might be driven away, might be destroyed. Three days would be sufficient to put Bonaparte’s army into the boats and across the Channel, and Bonaparte would be issuing decrees from Windsor Castle as he had already done from Milan and Brussels. Cornwallis and his squadron, Hotspur and her mightier colleagues, were what made this impossible; a moment of carelessness, a misjudged movement, and the tricolour might fly over the Tower of London.
Hornblower counted the ships in Brest Roads, and as he did so he was very conscious that this morning routine was the ultimate, most insolent expression of the power of England at sea. England had a heart, a brain, an arm, and he and Hotspur were the final sensitive fingertip of that long arm. Eighteen ships of the line at anchor, two of them three-deckers. Seven frigates. They were the ones he had observed yesterday. Nothing had contrived to slip out unnoticed during the night, by the passage of the Four or the Raz.
‘Mr Foreman! Signal to the Flag, if you please. “Enemy at anchor. Situation unchanged.” ’
Foreman had made that signal several times before, but, while Hornblower watched him unobtrusively, he checked the numbers in the signal book. It was Foreman’s business to know all the thousand arbitrary signals off by heart, but it was best, when time allowed, that he should corroborate what his memory told him. An error of a digit might send the warning that the enemy was coming out.
‘Flag acknowledges, sir,’ reported Foreman.
‘Very well.’
Poole, as officer of the watch, made note of the incident in the rough log. The hands were washing down the deck, the sun was lifting over the horizon. It was a beautiful day, with every promise of being a day like any other.
‘Seven bells, sir,’ reported Prowse.
Only half an hour more of the ebb; time to withdraw from this lee shore before the flood set in.
‘Mr Poole! Wear the ship, if you please. Course west by north.’
‘Good morning, sir.’
‘Good morning, Mr Bush.’
Bush knew better than to indulge in further conversation, besides, he could devote his attention to watching how smartly the hands braced the main-topsail round, and to how Poole handled the ship when the topsails filled. Hornblower swept the northern shore, seeking as ever for any signs of change. His attention was concentrated on the ridge beyond which Captain Jones had met his death, when Poole reported again.
‘Wind’s come westerly, sir. Can’t make west by north.’
‘Make it west nor’west,’ replied Hornblower, his eye still to the telescope.
‘Aye aye, sir. West nor’west, full and bye.’ There was a hint of relief in Poole’s voice; an officer is likely to be apprehensive when he has to tell his captain that the last order was impossible to execute.
Hornblower was aware that Bush had taken his stand beside him with his telescope trained in the same direction.
‘A column of troops, sir,’ said Bush.
‘Yes.’
Hornblower had detected the head of the column crossing the ridge. He was watching now to see to what length the column would stretch. It continued interminably over the ridge, appearing through his glass like some caterpillar hurrying over the even rougher hillside. Ah! There was the explanation. Beside the caterpillar appeared a string of ants, hurrying even faster along the path. Field artillery – six guns and limbers with a wagon bringing up the rear. The head of the caterpillar was already over the farther ridge before the tail appeared over the nearer one. That was a column of infantry more than a mile long, five thousand men or more – a division of infantry with its attendant battery. It might be merely a portion of the garrison of Brest turning out for exercises and manoeuvres on the hillside, but its movements were somewhat more hurried and purposeful than would be expected in that case.
He swept his glass farther round the coast, and then checked it with a start and a gulp of excitement. There were the unmistakable lugsails of a French coaster coming round the bold headland of Point Matthew. There was another pair – a whole cluster. Could it possibly be that a group of coasters was trying to run the blockade into Brest in broad daylight in the teeth of Hotspur? Hardly likely. Now there was a bang – bang – bang of guns, presumably from the field battery, invisible over the farther ridge. Behind the coasters appeared a British frigate, and then another, showing up at the moment when the coasters began to go about; as the coasters tacked they revealed that they had no colours flying.
‘Prizes, sir. And that’s Naiad an’ Doris,’ said Bush.
The two British frigates must have swooped down during the night by the passage of the Four inshore of Ushant and cut out these coasters from the creeks of Le Conquet where they had been huddled for shelter. A neat piece of work, undoubtedly, but bringing them out had only been made possible by the destruction of the battery on the Petit Minou. The frigates tacked in the wake of the coasters, like shepherd dogs following a flock of sheep. They were escorting their prizes in triumph back to the Inshore Squadron, whence, presumably they would be dispatched to England for sale. Bush had taken his telescope from his eye and had turned his gaze full on Hornblower, while Prowse came up to join them.
‘Six prizes, sir,’ said Bush.
‘A thousand pound each, those coasters run, sir,’ said Prowse. ‘More, if it’s naval stores, and I expect it is. Six thousand pound. Seven thousand. An’ no trouble selling ’em, sir.’
By the terms of the royal proclamation issued on the declaration of war, prizes taken by the Royal Navy became – as was traditional by now – the absolute property of the captors.
‘And we weren’t in sight, sir,’ said Bush.
The proclamation also laid down the proviso that the value of the prizes, after a deduction for flag officers, should be shared among those ships in sight at the moment the colours came down or possession was secured.
‘We couldn’t expect to be,’ said Hornblower. He was honestly implying that Hotspur was too preoccupied with her duty of watching the Goulet, but the others misinterpreted the speech.
‘No, sir, not with—’ Bush broke off what he was saying before he became guilty of mutiny. He had been about to continue ‘not with Admiral Parker in command’ but he had more sense than to say it, after Hornblower’s meaning had become clear to him.
‘One eighth’d be nigh on a thousand pounds,’ said Prowse.
An eighth of the prizes was, by the proclamation, to be divided among the lieutenants and masters taking part in the capture of the ships. Hornblower was making a different calculation. The share of the captains was two-eighths; if Hotspur had been associated in the venture with Naiad and Doris he would have been richer by five hundred pounds.
‘And it was us that opened the way for ’em, sir,’ went on Prowse.
‘It was you, sir, who—’ Bush broke off his speech for the second time.
‘That’s the fortune of war,’ said Hornblower, lightly. ‘Or the misfortune of war.’
Hornblower was quite convinced that the whole system of prize money was vicious, and tended towards making the navy less effective in war. He told himself that this was sour grapes, that he would think differently if he had won great amounts of prize money, but that did not soften his present conviction.
‘For’ard, there!’ yelled Poole from beside the binnacle. ‘Get the lead going in the main chains.’
The three senior officers beside the hammock nettings came back to the present world with a general start. Hornblower felt a chill wave of horror over his ribs as he realised his inexcusable carelessness. He had forgotten all about the course he had set. Hotspur was sailing tranquilly into peril, was in danger of running aground, and it was his fault, the result of his own inattention. He had no time for self-reproach at the present moment, all the same. He lifted his voice, trying to pitch it steadily.
‘Thank you,
Mr Poole,’ he called. ‘Belay that order. Put the ship on the other tack, if you please.’
Bush and Prowse were wearing guilty, hangdog looks. It had been their duty, it had been Prowse’s particular duty, to warn him when Hotspur was running into navigational dangers. They would not meet his eye; they tried to assume a pose of exaggerated interest in Poole’s handling of the ship as she went about. The yards creaked as she came round, the sails flapped and then drew again, the wind blew on their faces from a different angle.
‘Hard-a-lee!’ ordered Poole, completing the manoeuvre. ‘Fore-tack! Haul the bowlines!’
Hotspur settled down on her new course, away from the dangerous shore to which she had approached too close, and all danger was averted.
‘You see, gentlemen,’ said Hornblower coldly, and he waited until he had the full attention of Bush and Prowse. ‘You see, there are many disadvantages about the system of prize money. I am aware now of a new one, and I hope you are too. Thank you, that will do.’
He remained by the hammock netting as they slunk away; he was taking himself to task. It was his first moment of carelessness in a professional career of ten years. He had made mistakes through ignorance, through recklessness, but never carelessness before. If there had been a fool as officer of the watch just now utter ruin would have been possible. If Hotspur had gone aground, in clear weather and a gentle breeze, it would have been the end of everything for him. Court martial and dismissal from the service, and then …? In his bitter self-contempt he told himself that he would not be capable even of begging his bread, to say nothing of Maria’s. He might perhaps ship before the mast, and with his clumsiness and abstraction he would be the victim of the cat, of the boatswain’s rattan. Death would be better. He shuddered with cold.
Now he turned his attention to Poole, standing impassive by the binnacle. What had been the motives that had impelled him to order the lead into use? Had it been mere precaution, or had it been a tactful way of calling his captain’s attention to the situation of the ship? His present manner and bearing gave no hint of the answer. Hornblower had studied his officers carefully since Hotspur was commissioned; he was not aware of any depths of ingenuity or tact in Poole, but he freely admitted to himself that they might exist, unobserved. In any case, he must allow for them. He sauntered down the quarter-deck.
‘Thank you, Mr Poole,’ he said, slowly and very distinctly.
Poole touched his hat in reply, but his homely face did not change its expression. Hornblower walked on, nettled – amused – that his questions remained unanswered. It was a momentary relief from the torments of conscience which still plagued him.
The lesson he had learned remained with him during that summer to trouble his conscience. Otherwise during those golden months the blockade of Brest might have been for Hotspur and Hornblower a yachting holiday with a certain macabre quality. Just as some lay theologians advanced the theory that in Hell sinners would be punished by being forced to repeat, in unutterable tedium and surfeit, the sins they had committed during life, so Hornblower spent those delightful months doing delightful things until he felt he could not do them any longer. Day after day, and night after night, through the finest summer in human memory, Hotspur cruised in the approaches to Brest. She pressed up to the Goulet with the last of the flood, and cannily withdrew in to safety with the last of the ebb. She counted the French fleet, she reported the result of her observations to Admiral Parker. She drifted, hove-to, over calm seas amid gentle breezes. With westerly winds she worked her way out to give the lee shore a wide berth; with easterly winds she beat back again to beard the impotent French in their safe harbour.
They were months of frightful peril for England, with the Grande Armee, two hundred thousand strong, poised within thirty miles of the Kentish beaches, but they were months of tranquillity for Hotspur, even with a score of hostile battleships in sight. There were occasional flurries when the coasters tried too boldly to enter or leave; there were occasional busy moments when squalls came down and topsails had to be reefed. There were encounters after dark with fishing vessels, conversations over a glass of rum with the Breton captains, purchases of crabs and lobsters and pilchards – and of the latest decree of the Inscription Maritime, or of a week-old copy of the Moniteur.
Hornblower’s telescope revealed ant-like hordes of workmen rebuilding the blown-up batteries, and for a couple of weeks he watched the building of scaffolding and the erection of sheers on the Petit Minou, and, for three continuous days, as a result, the slow elevation to the vertical of the new mast of the semaphore station. The subsequent days added horizontal and vertical arms; before the summer was over those arms were whirling about reporting once more the movements of the blockading squadron.
Much good might that do the French, huddled in their anchored ships in the Roads. Inertia and a sense of inferiority would work their will on the unfortunate crews. The ships ready for sea might slowly increase in number; men might slowly be found for them, but every day the balance of fighting quality, of naval power, swung faster and faster over in favour of the British, constantly exercising at sea, and constantly reinforced by the seaborne tribute of the world.
There was a price to be paid; the dominion of the seas was not given free by destiny. The Channel Fleet paid in blood, in lives, as well as in the sacrifice of the freedom and leisure of every officer and man on board. There was a constant petty drain. Ordinary sickness took only small toll; among men in the prime of life isolated from the rest of the world illnesses were few, although it was noticeable that after the arrival of victualling ships from England epidemics of colds would sweep through the fleet, while rheumatism – the sailor’s disease – was always present.
The losses were mainly due to other causes. There were men who, in a moment of carelessness or inattention, fell from the yards. There were the men who ruptured themselves, and they were many, for despite the ingenuity of blocks and tackles there were heavy weights to haul about by sheer manpower. There were crushed fingers and crushed feet when ponderous casks of salted provisions were lowered into boats from the storeships and hauled up on to the decks of the fighting ships. And frequently a lacerated limb would end – despite all the care of the surgeons – in gangrene, in amputation, and death. There were the careless men who, during target practice with the cannon, lost their arms by ramming a cartridge into an improperly sponged gun, or who did not remove themselves from the line of the recoil. Three times that year there were men who died in quarrels, when boredom changed to hysteria and knives were drawn; and on each of those occasions another life was lost, a life for a life, a hanging with the other ships clustered round and the crews lining the sides to learn what happened when a man lost his temper. And once the crews manned the sides to see what happened when a wretched young seaman paid the price for a crime worse even than murder – for raising his fist to his superior officer. Incidents of that sort were inevitable as the ships beat back and forth monotonously, over the eternal grey inhospitable sea.
It was as well for the Hotspur that she was under the command of a man to whom any form of idleness or monotony was supremely distasteful. The charts of the Iroise were notoriously inaccurate; Hotspur set herself to run line after line of soundings, to take series after series of careful triangulations from the headlands and hilltops. When the fleet ran short of silver sand, so necessary to keep the decks spotless white, it was Hotspur who supplied the deficiency, finding tiny lost beaches round the coast where a party could land – trespassing upon Bonaparte’s vaunted dominion over Europe – to fill sacks with the precious commodity. There were fishing competitions, whereby the lower-deck’s rooted objection to fish as an item of diet was almost overcome; a prize of a pound of tobacco for the biggest catch by an individual mess set all the messes to work on devising more novel fish-hooks and baits. There were experiments in ship-handling, when obsolescent and novel methods were tested, when by careful and accurate measurement with the log the effect of goose-winging the t
opsails was ascertained; or, it being assumed that the rudder was lost, the watch-keeping officers tried their hands at manoeuvring the ship by the sails alone.
Hornblower himself found mental exercise in working out observations, and by their aid it was possible to arrive at an accurate determination of longitude – a subject of debate since the days of the Carthaginians – at the cost of endless calculations. Hornblower was determined to perfect himself in this method, and his officers and young gentlemen bewailed the decision, for they, too, had to make lunar observations and work out the resulting sums. The longitude of the Little Girls was calculated on board the Hotspur a hundred times that summer, with nearly a hundred different results.
To Hornblower it was a satisfactory occupation, the more satisfactory as it became obvious that he was acquiring the necessary knack. He tried to acquire the same facility in another direction, without the same satisfaction, as he wrote his weekly letters to Maria. There was only a limited number of endearments, only a limited number of ways of saying that he missed her, that he hoped her pregnancy was progressing favourably. There was only the one way of excusing himself for not returning to England as he had promised to do, and Maria was inclined to be a little peevish in her letters regarding the exigencies of the service. When the water-hoys arrived periodically and the enormous labour had to be undertaken of transferring the already stale liquid into the Hotspur Hornblower always found himself thinking that getting those eighteen tons of water on board meant another month of writing letters to Maria.
XIII
Hotspur’s bell struck two double strokes; it was six o’clock in the evening, and the first dog watch had come to an end in the gathering darkness.
The Young Hornblower Omnibus Page 73