How easy it seemed, the quiet departure of the two vessels a little after the evening gun: scarcely an order was needed, and scarcely any were uttered: long-practised hands coiled down the familiar ropes, hauled the bowlines as the ship left the mole and made all fast with scarcely a conscious reflection. But Jack did check the customary hoisting of the toplight; and he called for only one single stern-lantern. The Surprises winked at one another and jerked their heads in a very knowing fashion: they were perfectly aware that something was up, and presently they knew just what that something was.
Jack called William Reade to join him and his officers on the quarterdeck. 'Gentlemen,' he said, 'you are all perfectly aware that this voyage was undertaken in order to discourage Bonaparte at sea: but it also had another side. From the landward point of view Napoleon's supporters in Bosnia, Serbia and those parts believed that if they could prevent the Russian and Austrian armies from joining the British and Prussians, he would be able to defeat each of the Allies separately, piecemeal. For this intervention they had to hire a large number of Balkan Muslim mercenaries: we stopped the Dey of Algiers letting the money pass through his country, but now it is on its way by sea from Morocco in a large galley that means to run through the Straits tonight. According to our intelligence the galley intends to lie under Tarifa until the turn of the tide, and then, the wind being favourable, to run through the Straits. And if the breeze fails him, then to row: they can make seven or even eight knots for a burst. And then again there is the advantage of the eastward current. The captain of the galley, a well-known, active corsair, has hired two others to act as decoys, one on the African side and one in mid-channel. We shall take no notice of them, but make steadily for Tarifa, Ringle to larboard and Mr Daniel in the blue cutter to starboard, each three cable's lengths abeam of Surprise. The first to sight the galley will send up a blue light if the enemy is to starboard, red if to port, and a star-burst if the galley is right ahead.'
'Blue to starboard, red to larboard, white if right ahead,' they murmured, and Reade went back to his command, while the blue cutter was lowered down.
No moon, but a most splendid wealth of stars—Orion in his glory, great Vega blazing on the larboard quarter and Deneb beyond; a little forward of the beam, both bears and the Pole Star; Arcturus and Spica on the starboard bow: and had the foresail not been in the way, Stephen would have seen Sirius, but he was shown Procyon. Then on the larboard bow Capella, low down but still brilliant, and both Castor and Pollux—'Castor is a glorious double,' said Jack, pointing them out to Stephen. 'I must show him to you in my telescope when we are at home.' Then raising his voice a little, 'Mr Harding, I believe we may shorten sail a little,' for the faint wafts of vapour—they could scarcely be called cloud—beneath the stars were now some five or even six degrees more southerly than they had been when first he had started pointing them out to Stephen. The breeze was certainly backing, and if it went on at this rate the Surprise would certainly be well to windward of the galley by the time they reached Tarifa. Furthermore, if Jack waited for the turn of the Atlantic tide there was a strong likelihood that the galley would begin her run; and although she could sail half a point nearer the wind than a square-rigged ship, once the corsair was a little way into the Strait, Surprise would even more certainly have the weather-gage and an encounter could not be avoided.
No moon, of course; but the suffused starlight gave a practised eye a fair view of the Spanish skyline—Punta Carnero, Punta Secreta, Punta del Fraile, and Punta Acebuche were all astern: Tarifa was not far off.
'Topsails alone,' said Jack quite low; and some of the way came off the ship.
'Four knots and two fathoms, sir, if you please,' said the midshipman in charge of the log, murmuring low.
There was a steadily mounting sense of crisis aboard, and for some time now the quartermaster had sounded the bells only with his knuckles. Almost no talk or even whispering along the deck, where the guns were already run out and the slow-match smouldered in the tubs.
It was Daniel in the blue cutter who first saw the galley, inshore of him and already under sail, two fine lateens sheeted well in and rounded with the breeze. He sent up a blue light and its lasting effulgence showed the enemy clear, the sea, and its own smoke, still more distinctly drifting from the south.
The galley was not quite as deeply engaged in the Strait as Jack could have wished, but she lay pretty well: pretty well, indeed. He signalled Ringle to pick up the cutter and follow him, then spread all the canvas the Surprise could carry in this moderate breeze, increasing as it backed, and he hauled her as close as ever she would lie.
The galley, seeing that she had been detected by perhaps as many as three men-of-war—possibly with others towards the eastern end warned of her approach—abandoned all hope of racing through the channel, struck her sails and took to her oars, steering into the eye of the wind.
The frigate's great spread of white sail showed clearly enough in the starlight for Murad Reis to chance a long shot with his larboard chaser when the galley was head-and-stern in line with Surprise: the heavy guns could not be traversed: they had to be aimed by means of the vessel that carried them, and he moved the rudder with an expert hand.
A long shot: but the combination of good aiming, excellent bore and powder, and the toss of the sea caused the twenty-four pound ball to strike the second gun of the Surprise's starboard broadside, killing Bonden, its captain, and young Hallam, the midshipman of the division. Once the gun had been secured Jack ran the length of the battery, checking the captains' pointing—though indeed the low-lying galley was but the faintest blur—urging highest elevation and then, on the rise, he cried, 'Fire!'
Even with his night-glass in the maintop he could not make out for sure whether the guns had had any effect: but after a few more distant exchanges in which the Surprise received only a harmless, spent ricochet, it seemed probable. At all events, after twenty minutes the galley's pace seemed to slacken, either because of damaged oars (terribly vulnerable to broadside fire) or because that first dash had exhausted the rowers.
While his glass focused on what was almost certainly the galley (for their courses were convergent) Jack ordered a forward gun to fire, and in the flash he distinctly saw her making sail.
She was fast, and her lateen rig gave her the advantage on a wind; but in their present positions and with the breeze still backing steadily, any attempt on her part to cross the frigate's bows or stern before the changing wind made it quite impossible would expose her to at least three or four unanswerable broadsides: a galley, however heavy, well-handled and however dangerous her bow- and stern-chasers, could not stand broadside-to-broadside combat with a man-of-war mounting fourteen twelve-pounders a side, apart from chasers, swivel-guns in the tops, and musketry, to say nothing of much stouter timbers.
There was no possibility of boarding, either, without the certainty of being raked fore and aft several times before coming alongside; and although Murad Reis had boarded and taken merchantmen heavier than Surprise, the truly naval speed and efficiency of her broadside convinced him that the attempt would not answer and he turned to the only other alternative—that of outsailing her (a galley could be very fast in a reasonably smooth sea with a following wind) and so of casting an eastward loop at the end of a very long run, thus, perhaps, regaining the weather-gage and freedom.
The morning sun, rising over Africa, showed the galley almost exactly where Jack had expected her, about two miles away westward: her two lateens out on either side making the most of the topgallant south-west-by-south wind: and so they ran all that pure cloudless day, and even the next, when sea, wind and current were almost exactly the same. But the extreme tension of that first day, when every man, woman and boy tried to urge the frigate on with clenched stomach muscles and extraordinary zeal in racing aloft or doing anything that might possibly increase the vessel's speed, diminished to the extent that the people went about their ordinary duties—cleaning decks, stowing hammocks, directi
ng the fire-hoses high into the sails to help them draw a little better, eating their breakfast and the like—without perpetually breaking off to look at the chase. One boy even went to tell Stephen of a curious bird, a brown-faced booby; and Stephen and Jacob were much less often disturbed in their favourite observation-point right forward, by the starboard cathead. They had little or nothing to do in the sick-berth that could not safely be left to Poll and Maggie. Jack was as active as any of his officers in drawing the last ounce of thrust from the breeze; and in any case Jack was disinclined for any other occupation whatsoever. He was, of course, very thoroughly acquainted with sudden death, but this time he felt the loss of Bonden, an admirable sailor, and of young Hallam, the son of an old shipmate, very deeply indeed.
This day was most uncommoply hot, and the next, a Monday, hotter still: Jacob, in the most natural way in the world, put on a turban, and Stephen, without much urging, a knotted white handkerchief. 'This might go on for ever,' he observed before dinner, settling down on his coil of rope.
'To be sure, these two long wakes and the infinite quantity of sea have something of the look of eternity,' said Jacob. 'Or of dream. But for my part I do not think it can last much longer. I have been aboard an Algerine corsair and a Sallee rover, and since their chief aim is to take by boarding, they are usually very full of men. Furthermore, unless they intend the raiding of a distant coast—which is not the case here—a mere dash down the Straits and so to Durazzo—they rarely carry much in the way of provisions. Then again, when the galley was using its oars at such a pace I observed the quite exceptional number of rowers: all these mouths have to be fed.'
Eight bells: the hands were piped to dinner, and they were still chewing or smelling of rum or both when they came hurrying back forward to see how the chase lay now. 'What is your opinion, Tobias Belcher?' asked Stephen, speaking to a grey-haired seaman from Shelmerston, a shipmate on former voyages and a member of the Sethian community, renowned for truthfulness. Belcher looked and considered, and in time he replied that 'there was something not wholly Christian about this here weather.'
At this point the gun-room steward came to warn the doctors that dinner would be on table directly, so they hurried off with nothing more precise than a vague apprehension. The Surprise, on reverting to a private ship, had lost her Royal Marine officer, but still with the three lieutenants, the master, the purser and her two surgeons, it was a fine full table, with a great volume of talk about the probable outcome of the day—a volume cut dead just as the pudding came in, by a magistral crash right forward, the impact of yet another ricochet from one of the galley's stern-chasers.
Now, under the blazing sun, there began a curious form of sea-warfare: a slight strengthening of the breeze reached the frigate first and brought her within range of the galley's chasers; but since the vessels were not directly in line, the galley, in order to aim these guns, had to shift her helm, exposing some of her quarter. This danger increased with the wind, which brought Surprise's foremost guns, trained right forward, into play; with the further peril that she might put her helm hard over, showing the galley the whole of her flank and sending a hundred and sixty-eight pounds of round-shot into the galley's relatively fragile timbers.
Both captains, the one right forward, the other right aft, watched one another most intently, trying to detect the slightest change and to counteract it. Jack had all his forward guns manned, of course, to give nothing away by movement; and when a favourable gust had brought the frigate perhaps fifty yards nearer he said to Daniel, in charge of the forward guns to larboard, 'Mr Daniel, I am going to put the helm a-lee and fire the bow-chaser: the moment she goes off, fire as they bear.' He stepped to the port bow-chaser, a beautiful brass gun of his own, a nine-pounder: it was already at what he judged the right elevation, and kneeling to the sight he cried, 'Helm a-lee: handsomely, now!' And as the galley's stern came just into view he fired. The ball skipped from the enemy's wake and through her after-lateen, while at the same time the three foremost broadside guns sent splinters flying from the galley's stern; but they too struck only on the rebound. Very shortly after, the gust that had brought the frigate nearer, reached and favoured the corsair, carrying her out of range.
'By God, it's hot,' said Jack: he turned and drank from the scuttle-butt, imitated by all hands.
And so it went, burning day after burning day; and now even the moonlit night sky seemed to radiate heat. Day after day, with each doing all that human skill, ingenuity, craft and malevolence could do to destroy the enemy, neither gaining any decisive advantage though each wounded his enemy—wounded him, but far from mortally.
If Jack and Adams his clerk had not kept the ship's log-book—the exact record of positions, distances made good, variations in the wind, observations on the weather, natural phenomena—he would scarcely have known that it was a Wednesday—the first Wednesday in June—when at last the wind failed them entirely, and standing in what trifling shade the limp sails could offer they watched the galley ship her oars and pull, still westwards, towards what might have been a cloud on the horizon, if this pitiless sky would have suffered even a single cloud.
This day Stephen had three cases of sunstroke, and Jack, by way of prevention and diversion, had a sail lowered over the side—all the edges well clear of this shark-infested water—a truly shocking number of sharks—leaping in himself to encourage the crew, but finding, alas, precious little refreshment in the more than luke-warm tide.
Neither surgeon saw fit to join the splashing throng, and seeing that they were quite unwatched, Stephen undertook to guide Jacob up into the maintop, from which—the ship having swung with the current—they could see the galley with a telescope borrowed from the gun-room. It was not a very perilous ascent, but Daniel and three midshipmen, stark naked, ran up the side and into the rigging to give them not only advice but active, expert muscular heaves at moments of crisis.
From the top, Matunin sent them back to their water with many thanks and the assurance that they should be able to make their own way down with no more help than the force of gravity: and after breathing for a while he went on, 'Amos, I believe you have never been up here before.'
'Never,' said Amos Jacob, 'but I am very glad to be up here now—Lord, what an expanse: and Lord, how near the galley seems. She is in active motion. May I have the telescope? Oh God . . .' he added in a tone of utter disgust. 'But I had foreseen it.'
He passed the telescope. The breeze had filled the galley's sails, and the corsairs were throwing many of their manacled rowers overboard.
They watched in a wholly disgusted silence: and then Stephen leant over and called, 'Captain Aubrey, the galley has the wind. She is sailing towards the island we can see from up here.'
For the cloud had become island, a conical island hollowed out on the near, the eastern side.
Jack was with them in a moment, dripping wet. 'I have heard of their doing that, to save food and water,' he said. And after a silence, 'I do not know that island. But then we are right off any known tract of the sea.'
'I believe I have seen it on an old Catalan map in Barcelona,' said Stephen. 'And as I recall its name is Cranc, a crab.'
'The breeze is joining us,' said Jack, and he gave orders for all hands to come aboard: within minutes the frigate was alive again, her sails full, her bow-wave mounting. And well before the hellish sun dipped down at last, they were in with the Island Crab. There was not a hand aboard who had not seen one of the rowers—slave or unransomable captive—thrown screaming into the sea, the bloody sea, and there was not one who did not hate and loathe those that did it.
The island was presumably of volcanic origin, an eruptive peak that had then blown out its east side, leaving a shallow lagoon with a high wall broken only by a narrow channel through which the sea flowed in and out. From the tops they could see the galley moored under the rock wall near the entrance, close to a battered mole and some derelict buildings. She was entirely sheltered from anything but mortars: and
the frigate possessed no mortars; nor could she enter such shallow water to use her guns.
The gentle topgallant breeze carried her round the island, surveying and sounding as she went, clean round with only a single tack: deep water, no apparent reefs, almost no vegetation on the land, no sign, no sign at all of water: nor, to Stephen's astonishment, of sea-birds. On the west side, under quite steep cliffs, there was a little grey-green strand.
Jack had himself rowed to it, with Stephen: and as they walked on what sand there was, Jack observed that this was high tide; that the surf must be very severe indeed on this side, after a strong westerly blow; and that he hoped Stephen had found some interesting creatures in that cave.
'I found something more interesting still,' said Stephen. 'A total absence of life. Well into June and not a nestling petrel even. No birds, no bird-lice, no feather mites. And I tell you what it is, brother: there is an uneasy smell in that rock, those fissures—pray thrust your nose into this one. I am no chemist, God forbid, but I very much suspect the presence of a poisonous emanation. That would account for the near-absence of vegetation, even in June.' He mused, and while he was musing Daniel came and said to Jack, 'Sir, we have a hand in the boat, McLeod, who was in Centaur in the year four: he says the position here is very like what it was when Captain Hood took the Diamond Rock. He was a Saint Kilda cragsman in his youth, and he helped to get the guns up the cliff.'
'It had not struck me,' said Jack, 'but the situation is indeed very like. Yet could he really carry a line up that cliff? McLeod,' he called, and the tall, middle-aged seaman, a recent draught from Erebus in Gibraltar, came up, awkward and embarrassed. 'Do you think you could take a line up that cliff? Right up that cliff?'
'I think so, sir,' said McLeod in his halting English, 'with a little well-tempered hand-pick, and a stout peg with a block to send me up another twenty-five fathom. This is no so steep as Diamond Rock, but it is softer, and may be false at top.'
Book 19 - The Hundred Days Page 27