Book 12 - The Letter of Marque

by Patrick O'Brian

  Chapter Two

  Dawn found the Surprise far out in the grey, lonely waste that was her natural home; a fine topgallant breeze was blowing from the south-west, with low cloud and occasional wafts of rain but promise of a better day to come; and she had topgallantsails abroad although it was so early, for Jack wished to be out of the ordinary path of ships on their way to or from the various naval stations. He had no wish to see any of his men pressed—and no King's officer could resist the temptation of such a numerous, hand-picked crew of able seamen—nor had he any wish to be called aboard a King's ship to show his papers, give an account of himself, and perhaps be treated in an off-hand manner, even with familiarity or disrespect. The service was not made up solely of men with a great deal of natural or acquired delicacy and he had already had to put up with some slights; he would get used to them in time, no doubt, but for the present he was as it were flayed.

  'Get under way, Joe,' said the quartermaster, turning the watch-glass, and a muffled form padded forward to strike three bells in the morning watch. The master's mate heaved the log and reported six knots, two fathoms, a rate few ships could equal in these conditions and perhaps none surpass.

  'Mr West,' said Jack to the officer of the watch, 'I am going below for a while. I doubt the breeze will hold, but it looks as though we may have a pleasant day of it.'

  'It does indeed, sir,' replied West, ducking his head against a sudden shower of spray, for the Surprise was sailing close-hauled south-south-east with choppy seas smacking against her starboard bow and streaming aft, mixed with the rain. 'How delightful it is to be at sea once more.'

  At this early stage Jack Aubrey was three persons in one. He was the ship's captain, of course; and since no candidate he could approve had appeared among the many who came forward, he was also her master, responsible for the navigation among other things; and he was her purser as well. Officers commanding vessels sent on exploration were usually their pursers too, but this role had never fallen to Jack, and although as captain he had always been supposed to supervise his pursers and required to sign their books, he was astonished at the volume and complexity of the necessary accounts now that he came to deal with them in detail.

  There was already light enough to work at the stern window of the great cabin—a curving series of panes the whole width of the ship that gave him a certain pleasure even at the worst of his unhappiness, as indeed did the cabin itself, a singularly beautiful room with scarcely a right-angle in it—curved deck, curved deck-head, inclined sides—and with its twenty-four feet of breadth and fourteen of length it provided him with more space than all the other officers together; and this was not everything, since out of the great cabin there opened two smaller ones, one for dining, the other for sleeping. The dining cabin, however, had now been made over to Stephen Maturin, and when breakfast arrived, Jack, having dealt with almost a third of the invoices, advice-notes and bills of lading, nodded towards its door and asked 'Is the Doctor stirring?'

  'Never a sound, sir,' said Killick. 'Which he was mortal tired last night, like a foundered horse. But maybe the smell will wake him; it often does.'

  The smell, a combination of coffee, bacon, sausages and toasted soft-tack, had woken him in many latitudes, for like most sailors Jack Aubrey was intensely conservative in the matter of food and even on very long voyages he generally contrived, by carrying hens, pigs, a hardy goat and sacks of green coffee, to have much the same breakfast (apart from the toast) on the equator or beyond the polar circles. It was a meal that Maturin looked upon as England's chief claim to civilization; yet this time even the coffee did not rouse him. Nor did the cleaning of the quarterdeck immediately over his head, nor the piping-up of hammocks at seven bells nor that of all hands to breakfast at eight, with the roaring, rushing and bellowing that this always entailed. He slept on and on, through the gradual dropping of the wind and through the wearing of the ship to the larboard tack, with all the hauling, bracing round and coiling down that accompanied the manoeuvre; and it was not until well on in the forenoon watch that he emerged, gaping and stretching, with his breeches undone at the knee and his wig in his hand.

  'God and Mary with you, gentleman,' said Padeen, who had been waiting for him.

  'God and Mary and Patrick with you, Padeen,' said Stephen.

  'Will I bring a clean shirt and hot water for shaving, now?'

  Stephen considered, rasping his chin. 'You might bring the water,' he said. 'The weather is calm, I find, the motion slight, the danger inconsiderable. As for the shirt,' he went on, raising his voice to overcome the cheerful conversation of a working-party eleven inches above him, 'as for the shirt, I have one on already, and do not mean to take it off. But you may desire Preserved Killick to favour me with a pot of coffee.' The last was said still louder, and in English, since there was a strong likelihood that Killick, always intensely curious, would hear it.

  Some time later, shaved and refreshed, Dr Maturin came on deck: that is to say he walked out of his cabin by the forward door, along the passage to the waist of the ship and so up the ladder to the quarterdeck, upon which the captain, the first mate, the bosun and the gunner were in consultation. Stephen made his way to the taffrail and leaned there in the sun, looking forward the whole length of the ship, some forty yards, to the point where the rising bowsprit carried it farther still; the day had indeed turned out to be pleasant, but the breeze was on the wane and in spite of a noble spread of canvas the Surprise was making no more than two or three knots, with barely a tilt on her deck.

  Everything looked superficially the same—the familiar sun-filled white curve's above, the taut rigging and its severe shadows—and he had to search for some while before he could tell where the essential difference lay. It was not in the lack of naval uniforms, for except in flagships and some others, commanded by very 'quarterdeck' captains, it was now quite usual for officers to wear nondescript working clothes unless they were invited to dine in the cabin or were engaged upon some official duty; and as for the hands, they had always dressed as they pleased. Nor was it the absence of a man-of-war's pennant streaming from her masthead, which he would never have noticed. No: part of it lay in the absence of the Marines' scarlet coats, always a striking patch of colour against the pale deck and the unemphatic variations of the sea, and in that of boys of any kind, ship's boys or young gentlemen on the quarterdeck. They were not much use; they took up valuable room; it was difficult to make them quietly attentive to their duty; but they did add a certain shrill cheerfulness. Cheerfulness was still present; in fact it was considerably more audible—hands laughing in the tops, along the gangway and on the forecastle—than it would have been in the Royal Navy under an equally taut captain; but it was of a different nature. Stephen was pondering upon this further difference when Bonden came aft to attend to the ensign, a red one, which had become entangled, and they had a word. 'The hands are most uncommon pleased about Lord Nelson's letter, sir,' said Bonden, after they had discussed the breeze and the possibility of taking codlings with hook and line. 'They look upon it as what you might call a sign.' At this point the bosun's pipe called Bonden and all hands to get the blue cutter over the side and Jack walked aft. 'Good morning to you, sir,' said Stephen, 'I am sorry not to have seen you at breakfast, but I slept as the person in Plutarch that ran from Marathon to Athens without a pause would have slept if he had not fallen dead, the creature. Poor Martin is sleeping yet, blisters and all. Lord, how we skipped along, so pitifully anxious not to miss the boat. Sometimes, on very steep hills, he led me by the hand.'

  'Good morning to you, Doctor; and a pretty one it is,' said Jack. 'Mr Martin is aboard, then? I had imagined he was gone home to make his arrangements and that he would rejoin when we put in to Shelmerston again.'

  'Sure, I had no time to speak to you about him or anything else yesterday afternoon, and at night I was asleep before ever you came below. And even now, although this is not the Admiral's supper-table,' he said quietly, looking at the wheel, whi
ch in the Surprise was just forward of the mizzenmast, ten feet away, with its helmsman and the quartermaster at the con, to say nothing of the officer of the watch by the capstan and a party of seamen running up the shrouds to arm the mizzen-top, 'it is scarcely a place that I should choose for confidential talk.'

  'Let us go below,' said Jack.

  'And even here,' said Stephen in the cabin, 'even in what seems the true penetralia of the frigate, little is said that does not become known, in a more or less distorted form, throughout the ship by nightfall. I do not allege any malignance, any wicked evil intent in any soul aboard, yet it is a fact that the people are already aware of Lord Nelson's letter. They know—that is to say they believe they know—that the Surprise was bought by a syndicate of which I was the mouthpiece, while its members almost certainly include my former patient Prince William. And they know that Martin has put off his clerical character for that of a surgeon, he having been unfrocked for rogering—do you know the expression rogering, Jack?'

  'I believe I have heard it.'

  'His bishop's wife; unfrocked and therefore incapable of bringing us bad luck. As for his presence, I did suggest that he should go home with an advance on his pay, as you were so very kind as to give me long, long ago, and come aboard with his sea-chest when we next put in; but he preferred to send his wife the advance and to stay aboard. His affairs are in a desperate way, I am afraid: no hope of a living, none of a naval chaplaincy since his unfortunate pamphlet, and an inimical father-in-law; and he is in danger of an arrest for debt if he returns. Besides, although we are to be out only a fortnight, he is happy to put up with the inconvenience of no spare shirt and shoes worn through on the off-chance of our taking a prize. I explained our system of shares, which he had not understood; and fourpence would make him happy. There are other things, however, that I have been most impatient to tell you. Suppose we climb into the top, when those men have finished what they are at?'

  'They will be some time yet,' said Jack, who had climbed into the top with Stephen before this. 'Perhaps a better plan would be to pull round the ship in your skiff after the great-gun practice. In any case I wish to look at her trim.'

  'Would you be intending to exercise the great guns directly?'

  'Why, yes. Did not you see the blue cutter going over the side with the targets? Now that we are in an out-of-the-way corner of the sea I should like to find how the new hands shape with live ammunition. We mean to fire half a dozen rounds, starbowlins against larbowlins, before dinner. We shall have to look precious sharp.'

  'Targets away, sir,' said Pullings at the cabin door; and he did in fact look sharp, as keen as a terrier shown a rat, in striking contrast to Jack Aubrey.

  Stephen had the impression that his friend would not greatly care if the targets quietly sank of their own accord, and this impression was strengthened during the first part of the exercise. The stimulus of Nelson's letter and the Admiral's kindness had long since died away; sombreness had returned. This sombreness was not accompanied by any lack of conduct; Aubrey had far too strong a sense of duty to his ship to be anything but exact and punctilious. Yet Stephen observed that even the smell of the slow-match, the splitting crash of a gun, the screech and twang of its recoil, and the powder-smoke eddying along the deck did not really move him now. He also observed that Pullings, who loved Jack Aubrey, was watching him with anxiety.

  What Stephen did not observe was that the great-gun and musketry exercise was exceedingly poor, for these activities had usually taken place in the evening, when all hands were piped to quarters, to their action-stations, and as surgeon his was far below, where the casualties were to be received. He had little experience and almost no appreciation of the frigate's outstanding gunnery in former times. Jack Aubrey, from his earliest dawn of naval reason, and even more certainly from his very first command, had been convinced that accurate, rapid gunfire had more to do with victory than polished brass: he had worked on this principle in all his successive ships and he had brought the Surprise, which he had commanded longest, to a high pitch of excellence. In good conditions HMS Surprise had fired three accurate broadsides in three minutes eight seconds, which in his opinion no other ship in the Navy could equal, far less surpass.

  The present Surprise, though shorn of her HMS, nevertheless carried all her old guns, Wilful Murder, Jumping Billy, Belcher, Sudden Death, Tom Cribb and the rest, together with many of her old gun-crews; but in order to produce a united ship's company, or rather to prevent more animosity and division than was inevitable, Jack and Pullings had mixed old men and new; the result was pitifully slow, blundering, and inaccurate. Most of the privateersmen were much more accustomed to boarding their opponents than to battering them from a distance (apart from anything else, battering was sure to spoil the victim's merchandise), and few were qualified to point a gun with anything like precision. Many a nervous look did the old Surprises throw at the captain, for in general he was a most unsparing critic; but they saw no reaction of any kind, nothing but an unmoved gravity. Only once did he call out, and that was to a new hand who was too close to his gun. 'The boarder at number six: James. Stand free or you will lose your foot on the recoil.'

  The last shot was fired, the gun sponged, reloaded, wadded, rammed and run out. 'Well, sir . . .' said Davidge, uneasily.

  'Let us see what they can do with the larboard guns, Mr Davidge,' said Jack.

  'House your guns,' called Davidge; and then, 'All hands about ship.'

  The newcomers might be weak on gunnery, but they were thorough-going seamen, and they ran as fast as the Surprises to their appointed sheets, tacks, bowlines, braces and backstays, and the familiar cries followed: 'The helm's a-lee', 'Off tacks and sheets', but the full-voiced 'Mainsail haul' was immediately followed by a shrieking hail from the masthead: 'On deck, there. Sail one point on the larboard bow.'

  The sail could be seen even from the deck, bringing up the breeze at a fine pace. The look-out had obviously been watching the exercise rather than the horizon. The Surprise paid off; Jack laid her foretopsail aback, and slinging his telescope he made his way to the top. From there she was hull-up and even without the glass he could tell what she was: a big cutter, one of those fast, nimble, weatherly two or three hundred ton vessels used by smugglers or those who pursued smugglers. She was very trim for a smuggler; too trim; and presently the telescope showed him the man-of-war's pennant clear against the mainsail. She had the weather-gage, but the Surprise could almost certainly outsail her going large; yet this would mean running right out into the regular track of shipping, and the likelihood of being brought-to by some rated man-of-war that would rob him of many more men than a cutter. And escape by beating to windward was out of the question; no square-rigged ship could lie as close as a cutter.

  He returned to the deck and said to the officer of the watch, 'Mr Davidge, we shall lie to until she comes up, and continue the exercise afterwards. Stand by to dip topsails and ensign.' There was a murmur, more than a murmur, of strong disapproval from the new hands at the quarterdeck carronades, most unwilling to be pressed, and one said 'She's only the Viper, sir, nothing like as swift as us before the wind.'

  'Silence, there,' cried Davidge, striking at the man's head with his speaking-trumpet.

  Jack went below and after a moment he sent for Davidge. 'Oh, Mr Davidge,' he said, 'I have told West and Mr Bulkeley, but I do not think I have mentioned it to you: there will be no starting in this ship, no damning of eyes or souls. There is no room for hard-horse officers in a private man-of-war.'

  Davidge would have replied, but a look at Jack's face checked his words: if ever there was a hard-horse officer, ready with a frightful blow regardless of persons it was Jack Aubrey at this moment.

  Killick silently brought in a respectable coat, blue, but with no naval marks or lace or buttons; Jack put it on and began to gather the papers that he should have to present if he were called aboard. He looked up as Stephen came in and said with a forced smile, 'You have a paper t
oo, I see.'

  'Listen, brother,' said Stephen, drawing him to the stern window, 'it is not without some inward wrestling that I produce this, because there was a tacit assumption that it was designed to cover our South American voyage alone. Yet the carpenter tells me that this Viper is commanded by a peculiarly busy coxcomb, a newly-appointed lieutenant who is habitually rude and tyrannical, and it appears to me that if the puppy were to be as provoking as I fear he may be, you might commit yourself and there would be no voyage to South America, no voyage at all.'

  'By God, Stephen,' said Jack, reading the document, which was the Admiralty's letter of exemption from impressment for the entire ship's company, 'I admire your judgment. I have looked at the Navy List, and Viper is commanded by the son of that scrub in Port Mahon, Dixon. It might have been hard to avoid kicking him, if he gave himself airs. By God, I shall be easy in my mind now.'

  Even so, Jack Aubrey required all his self-command—more indeed than he thought he possessed—to avoid kicking the young man; for the loss of almost all pleasurable emotion left susceptibility, irritation, anger and rage intact or in fact strengthened, except during his long periods of apathy; and this was not one of them. When the Viper was within bailing-distance she ordered the Surprise to come under her lee, to send her master aboard with his papers, and to look hellfire quick about it, the order being emphasized with a gun across her bows.

  Jack was pulled across in the target-towing boat and on going aboard the Viper—a mere two steps up the side, these vessels being so low in the water—he saluted the quarterdeck: the youth who had the watch, a master's mate, made a sketchy motion towards his hat and told him that the captain was busy: he would see Mr Aubrey later. With this he returned to his conversation with the captain's clerk, walking up and down and talking with an affectation of easiness. Cutters' midshipmen were notorious in the service for ill-breeding and the Viper's ran true to form, leaning against the rail with their hands in their pockets, staring, whispering, sniggering, and staring again. Farther forward the cutter's warrant-officers had gathered in a body, watching with silent disapproval; and a middle-aged seaman who had sailed with Jack many years before stood motionless at the bitts with a coil of rope in his hands and a look of positive horror on his face.