The Young Hornblower Omnibus

by C. S. Forester

  ‘Sunset, sir,’ said Bush.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Hornblower.

  ‘Six o’clock exactly. The equinox, sir.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Hornblower again; he knew perfectly well what was coming.

  ‘We’ll have a westerly gale, sir, or my name’s not William Bush.’

  ‘Very likely,’ said Hornblower, who had been sniffing the air all day long.

  Hornblower was a heretic in this matter. He did not believe that the mere changing from a day a minute longer than twelve hours to one a minute shorter made gales blow from out of the west. Gales happened to blow at this time because winter was setting in, but ninety-nine men out of a hundred firmly believed in a more direct, although more mysterious causation.

  ‘Wind’s freshening and sea’s getting up a bit, sir,’ went on Bush, inexorably.

  ‘Yes.’

  Hornblower fought down the temptation to declare that it was not because the sun happened to set at six o’clock, for he knew that if he expressed such an opinion it would be received with the tolerant and concealed disagreement accorded to the opinions of children and eccentrics and captains.

  ‘We’ve water for twenty-eight days, sir. Twenty-four allowing for spillage and ullage.’

  ‘Thirty-six, on short allowance,’ corrected Hornblower.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Bush, with a world of significance in those two syllables.

  ‘I’ll give the order within the week,’ said Hornblower.

  No gale could be expected to blow for a month continuously, but a second gale might follow the first before the water-hoys could beat down from Plymouth to refill the casks. It was a tribute to the organisation set up by Cornwallis that during nearly six continuous months at sea Hotspur had not yet had to go on short allowance for water. Should it become necessary, it would be one more irksome worry brought about by the passage of time.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Bush, touching his hat and going off about his business along the darkened reeling deck.

  There were worries of all sorts. Yesterday morning Doughty had pointed out to Hornblower that there were holes appearing in the elbows of his uniform coat, and he only had two coats apart from full dress. Doughty had done a neat job of patching, but a search through the ship had not revealed any material of exactly the right weather-beaten shade. Furthermore the seats of nearly all his trousers were paper-thin, and Hornblower did not fancy himself in the baggy slop-chest trousers issued to the lower-deck; yet as that store was fast running out he had had to secure a pair for himself before they should all go. He was wearing his thick winter underclothing; three sets had appeared ample last April, but now he faced the prospect, in a gale, of frequent wettings to the skin with small chance of drying anything. He cursed himself and went off to try to make sure of some sleep in anticipation of a disturbed night. At least he had a good dinner inside him; Doughty had braised an oxtail, the most despised and rejected of all the portions of the weekly ration bullock, and had made of it a dish fit for a king. It might be his last good dinner for a long time if the gale lasted – winter affected land as well as sea, so that he could expect no other vegetables than potatoes and boiled cabbage until next spring.

  His anticipation of a disturbed night proved correct. He had been awake for some time, feeling the lively motion of the Hotspur and trying to make up his mind to rise and dress or to shout for a light and try to read, when they came thundering on his door.

  ‘Signal from the Flag, sir!’

  ‘I’ll come.’

  Doughty was really the best of servants; he arrived at the same moment, with a storm lantern.

  ‘You’ll need your pea jacket, sir, and oilskins over it. Your sou’wester, sir. Better have your scarf, sir, to keep your pea jacket dry.’

  A scarf round the neck absorbed spray that might otherwise drive in between sou’wester and oilskin coat and soak the pea jacket. Doughty tucked Hornblower into his clothes like a mother preparing her son for school, while they reeled and staggered on the leaping deck. Then Hornblower went out into the roaring darkness.

  ‘A white rocket and two blue lights from the Flag, sir,’ reported Young. ‘That means “take offshore stations.” ’

  ‘Thank you. What sail have we set?’ Hornblower could guess the answer by the feel of the ship, but he wanted to be sure. It was too dark for his dazzled eyes to see as yet.

  ‘Double reefed tops’ls and main course, sir.’

  ‘Get that course in and lay her on the port tack.’

  ‘Port tack. Aye aye, sir.’

  The signal for offshore stations meant a general withdrawal of the Channel Fleet. The main body took stations seventy miles to seaward off Brest, safe from that frightful lee shore and with a clear run open to them for Tor Bay – avoiding Ushant on the one hand and the Start on the other – should the storm prove so bad as to make it impossible to keep the sea. The Inshore Squadron was to be thirty miles closer in. They were the most weatherly ships and could afford the additional risk in order to be close up to Brest should a sudden shift of wind enable the French to get out.

  But there was not merely the question of the French coming out, but of other French ships coming in. Out in the Atlantic there were more than one small French squadron – Bonaparte’s own brother was on board one of them, with his American wife – seeking urgently to regain a French port before food and water should be completely exhausted. So Naiad and Doris and Hotspur had to stay close in, to intercept and report. They could best encounter the dangers of the situation. And they could best be spared if they could not. So Hotspur had to take her station only twenty miles to the west of Ushant, where French ships running before the gale could be best expected to make their landfall.

  Bush loomed up in the darkness, shouting over the gale.

  ‘The equinox, just as I said, sir.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’ll be worse before it’s better, sir.’

  ‘No doubt.’

  Hotspur was close-hauled now, soaring, pitching, and rolling over the vast invisible waves that the gale was driving in upon her port bow. Hornblower felt resentfully that Bush was experiencing pleasure at this change of scene. A brisk gale and a struggle to windward was stimulating to Bush after long days of fair weather, while Hornblower struggled to keep his footing and felt a trifle doubtful about the behaviour of his stomach as a result of this sudden change.

  The wind howled round them and the spray burst over the deck so that the black night was filled with noise. Hornblower held on to the hammock netting; the circus riders he had seen in his childhood, riding round the ring, standing upright on two horses with one foot on each, had no more difficult task than he had at present. And the circus riders were not smacked periodically in the face with bucketfuls of spray.

  There were small variations in the violence of the wind. They could hardly be called gusts; Hornblower took note that they were increases in force without any corresponding decreases. Through the soles of his feet, through the palms of his hands, he was aware of a steady increase in Hotspur’s heel and a steady stiffening in her reaction. She was showing too much canvas. With his mouth a yard from Young’s ear he yelled his order.

  ‘Four reefs in the tops’ls!’

  ‘Aye aye, sir.’

  The exaggerated noises of the night were complicated now with the shrilling of the pipes of the bos’n’s mates; down in the waist the orders were bellowed at hurrying, staggering men.

  ‘All hands reef tops’ls!’

  The hands clawed their way to their stations; this was the moment when a thousand drills bore fruit, when men carried out in darkness and turmoil the duties that had been ingrained into them in easier conditions. Hornblower felt Hotspur’s momentary relief as Young set the topsails a-shiver to ease the tension on them. Now the men were going aloft to perform circus feats compared with which his maintenance of his foothold was a trifle. No trapeze artist ever had to do his work in utter darkness on something as unpredictable as a foot-rope in
a gale, or had to exhibit the trained strength of the seaman passing the ear-ring while hanging fifty feet above an implacable sea. Even the lion tamer, keeping a wary eye on his treacherous brutes, did not have to encounter the ferocious enmity of the soulless canvas that tried to tear the topmast men from their precarious footing.

  A touch of the helm set the sails drawing again, and Hotspur lay over in her fierce struggle with the wind. Surely there was no better example of the triumph of man’s ingenuity over the blind forces of nature than this, whereby a ship could wring advantage out of the actual attempt of the gale to push her to destruction. Hornblower clawed his way to the binnacle and studied the heading of the ship, working out mental problems of drift and leeway against the background of his mental picture of the trend of the land. Prowse was there, apparently doing the same thing.

  ‘I should think we’ve made our offing, sir.’ Prowse had to shout each syllable separately. Hornblower had to do the same when he replied.

  ‘We’ll hold on a little longer, while we can.’

  Extraordinary how rapidly time went by in these circumstances. It could not be long now until daylight. And this storm was still working up; it was nearly twenty-four hours since Hornblower had detected the premonitory symptoms, and it had not yet reached its full strength. It was likely to blow hard for a considerable time, as much as three days more, possibly even longer than that. Even when it should abate the wind might stay westerly for some considerable further time, delaying the water-hoys and the victuallers in their passage from Plymouth, and when eventually they should come, Hotspur might well be up in her station off the Goulet.

  ‘Mr Bush!’ Hornblower had to reach out and touch Bush’s shoulder to attract his attention in the wind. ‘We’ll reduce the water allowance from today. Two between three.’

  ‘Aye aye, sir. Just as well, I think, sir.’

  Bush gave little thought to hardship, either for the lower-deck or for himself. It was no question of giving up a luxury; to reduce the water ration meant an increase in hardship. The standard issue of a gallon a day a head was hardship, even though a usual one; a man could just manage to survive on it. Two thirds of a gallon a day was a horrible deprivation; after a few days thirst began to colour every thought. As if in mockery the pumps were going at this moment. The elasticity and springiness that kept Hotspur from breaking up under these strains meant also that the sea had greater opportunities of penetrating her fabric, working its way in through the straining seams both above and below the water line. It would accumulate in the bilge, one – two – three feet deep. While the storm blew most of the crew would have six hours’ hard physical work a day – an hour each watch – pumping the water out.

  Here was the grey dawn coming, and the wind was still increasing, and Hotspur could not battle against it any longer.

  ‘Mr Cargill!’ Cargill was now officer of the watch. ‘We’ll heave to. Put her under main-topmast stays’l.’

  Hornblower had to shout the order at the top of his lungs before Cargill nodded that he understood.

  ‘All hands! All hands!’

  Some minutes of hard work effected a transformation. Without the immense leverage of the topsails Hotspur ceased to lie over quite so steeply; the more gentle influence of the main-topmast stay-sail kept her reasonably steady, and now the rudder desisted from its hitherto constant effort to force the little ship to battle into the wind. Now she rose and swooped more freely, more extravagantly yet with less strain. She was leaping wildly enough, and still shipping water over her weather bow, but her behaviour was quite different as she yielded to the wind instead of defying it at the risk of being torn apart.

  Bush was offering him a telescope, and pointing to windward, where there was now a grey horizon dimly to be seen – a serrated horizon, jagged with the waves hurrying towards them. Hornblower braced himself to put two hands to the telescope. Sea and then sky raced past the object glass as Hotspur tossed over successive waves. It was hard to sweep the area indicated by Bush; that had to be done in fits and starts, but after a moment something flashed across the field, was recaptured – many hours of using a telescope had developed Hornblower’s reflex skills – and soon could be submitted to intermittent yet close observation.

  ‘Naiad, sir,’ shouted Bush into his ear.

  The frigate was several miles to windward, hove-to like Hotspur. She had one of those new storm-topsails spread, very shallow and without reefs. It might be of considerable advantage when lying-to, for even the reduction in height alone would be considerable, but when Hornblower turned his attention back to the Hotspur and observed her behaviour under her main-topmast stay-sail he felt no dissatisfaction. Politeness would have led him to comment on it when he handed back the glass, but politeness stood no chance against the labour of making conversation in the wind, and contented himself with a nod. But the sight of Naiad out there to windward was confirmation that Hotspur was on her station, and beyond her Hornblower had glimpses of the Doris reeling and tossing on the horizon. He had done all there was to be done at present. A sensible man would get his breakfast while he might, and a sensible man would resolutely ignore the slight question of stomach occasioned by this new and different motion of the ship. All he had to do now was to endure it.

  There was a pleasant moment when he reached his cabin and Huffnell the purser came in to make his morning report, for then it appeared that at the first indication of trouble Bush and Huffnell between them had routed out Simmonds the cook and had set him to work cooking food.

  ‘That’s excellent, Mr Huffnell.’

  ‘It was laid down in your standing orders, sir.’

  So it was, Hornblower remembered. He had added that paragraph after reading Cornwallis’s orders regarding stations to be assumed in westerly gales. Simmonds had boiled three hundred pounds of salt pork in Hotspur’s cauldrons, as well as three hundred pounds of dried peas, before the weather had compelled the galley fires to be extinguished.

  ‘Pretty nigh on cooked, anyway, sir,’ said Huffnell.

  So that for the next three days – four at a pinch – the hands would have something more to eat than dry biscuit. They would have cold parboiled pork and cold pease porridge; the latter was what the Man in the Moon burned his mouth on according to the nursery rhyme.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Huffnell. It’s unlikely that this gale will last more than four days.’

  That was actually the length of time that gale lasted, the gale that ushered in the worst winter in human memory, following the best summer. For those four days Hotspur lay hove-to, pounded by the sea, flogged by the wind, while Hornblower made anxious calculations regarding leeway and drift; as the wind backed northerly his attention was diverted from Ushant to the north to the Isle de Sein to the south of the approaches to Brest. It was not until the fifth day that Hotspur was able to set three-reefed topsails and thrash her way back to station while Simmonds managed to start his galley fires again and to provide the crew – and Hornblower – with hot boiled beef as a change from cold boiled pork.

  Even then that three-reefed gale maintained the long Atlantic rollers in all their original vastness, so that Hotspur soared over them and slithered unhappily down the far side, adding her own corkscrew motion as her weather-bow met the swells, her own special stagger when a rogue wave crashed into her, and the worse lurch when – infrequently – a higher wave than usual blanketed her sails so that she reeled into the sea instead of yielding, with a bursting of green water over her decks. But an hour’s work at the pumps every watch kept the bilges clear, and by tacking every two hours Hotspur was able to beat painfully out to sea again – not more than half a mile’s gain to windward on each tack – and recover the comparative safety of her original station before the next storm.

  It was as if in payment for that fair weather summer that these gales blew, and perhaps that was not an altogether fanciful thought; to Hornblower’s mind there might be some substance to the theory that prolonged local high pressure during the su
mmer now meant that the pent-up dirty weather to the westward could exert more than its usual force. However that might be, the mere fresh gale that endured for four days after the first storm then worked up again into a tempest, blowing eternally from the westward with almost hurricane force; grey dreary days of lowering cloud, and wild black nights, with the wind howling unceasingly in the rigging until the ear was sated with the noise, until no price seemed too great to pay for five minutes of peace – and yet no price however great could buy even a second of peace. The creaking and the groaning of Hotspur’s fabric blended with the noise of the wind, and the actual woodwork of the ship vibrated with the vibration of the rigging until it seemed as if body and mind, exhausted with the din and with the fatigues of mere movement, could not endure for another minute, and yet went on to endure for days.

  The tempest died down to a fresh gale, to a point when the topsails needed only a single reef, and then, unbelievably, worked up into a tempest again, the third in a month, during which all on board renewed the bruises that covered them as a result of being flung about by the motion of the ship. And it was during that tempest that Hornblower went through a spiritual crisis. It was not a mere question of calculation, it went far deeper than that, even though he did his best to appear quite imperturbable as Bush and Huffnell and Wallis the surgeon made their daily reports. He might have called them into a formal council of war; he might have covered himself by asking for their opinions in writing, to be produced in evidence should there be a court of inquiry, but that was not in his nature. Responsibility was the air he breathed; he could no more bring himself to evade it than he could hold his breath indefinitely.

  It was the first day that reefed topsails could be set that he reached his decision.

  ‘Mr Prowse, I’d be obliged if you would set a course to close Naiad so that she can read our signals.’

  ‘Aye aye, sir.’

  Hornblower, standing on the quarter-deck in the eternal, infernal wind, hated Prowse for darting that inquiring glance at him. Of course the ward-room had discussed his problem. Of course they knew of the shortage of drinking water; of course they knew that Wallis had discovered three cases of sore gums – the earliest symptoms of scurvy in a navy that had overcome scurvy except in special conditions. Of course they had wondered about when their captain would yield to circumstances. Perhaps they had made bets on the date. The problem, the decision, had been his and not theirs.