In Distant Waters

by Richard Woodman

  ‘It’s not your fault, Mr Fraser, not entirely. We must worry about Mount. I hope to God he does not run foul of those men. Have they arms?’

  ‘Two or three were marines, sir . . . aye, they’ve a gun or two between them.’

  ‘Get a signal of recall up to Mount and then let us haul her into deeper water.’

  Suddenly the danger from surprise attack by Russian battle-ships seemed a foolishly mythological preoccupation. Patrician herself appeared to carry her own ill-luck.

  Drinkwater stared down at the rag tied round the hawser. It had definitely crawled aft an inch or two. By a stroke of misfortune the ship had grounded close to high water, and now she was reluctant, twelve hours later, to come off. Above them a full moon hung in the velvet sky and from time to time the ship lifted and then bumped on the bottom as a low swell rolled in from a distant gale somewhere in the vast Pacific.

  ‘Again, my lads.’ He could hear the creak of the capstan, the grunts of the straining men and the slither of their bare and sweaty feet on the planking. The rag moved aft another inch. A feeling of hope leapt in Drinkwater’s breast. ‘Again, lads, again!’

  They caught his tone and the grunts came again. He heard Lieutenant Quilhampton’s exhortations. Thank heavens they had shoed the anchors, augmented the palms of the flukes with facing pieces of hard-wood, so that they held better and allowed the anchors to bite and not drag home to the ship before they had hauled her into deep water.

  The rag jerked again and then began to move steadily. The ship lifted to a swell, the rag surged aft, there was a dipping in the rope and the men cheered, they could feel the tension on the messenger and the nippers ease, someone had fallen over and a ribald laugh came to him. The swell crashed onto the beach and the ship shook with great violence as the entire length of her keel struck the bottom.

  ‘Heave again . . . heave away!’

  She was off now, he could feel it through the deck. The next swell passed under her and, though he waited for it, she did not strike in the low trough that followed. Half-an-hour later they had her safe in deeper water.

  ‘Stand the men down, now, Mr Fraser. Six hours below, then turn ’em out again. I want this ship in fighting trim by this time tomorrow.’

  They had not finished by the following night, for the long presaged gale burst upon them in the late afternoon. The lurid sunset of the previous evening, green as verdigris, had held its ill-promise by a deceptively mild morning; but gradually cloud had obscured the sun and a damp, misty wind had rolled in from the Pacific. Urgently they had hoisted in the boats and had recovered all but the damaged barge abandoned by the deserters on the distant beach. Even the masts and spars were ready to go aloft again.

  As the wind freshened they watched Grant get his ship underway. There was a flamboyant style to the American commander. He loosened his sail and threw his foreyards aback, making a stern-board, until he brought the wind broad onto his starboard bow. Drinkwater watched in admiration, aware that Grant was cocking-a-snook at the British Navy, demonstrating the supreme ability of both himself and his men, men that Drinkwater would fain have had aboard Patrician at that moment despite his promises to the American. Grant hauled his foreyards with a nicety that would have delighted even that old punctilio, Earl St Vincent, and stood out to sea, heading southeastwards for the better shelter of San Francisco Bay. As Drinkwater watched in his glass the last thing he saw was the American vessel’s name, Abigail Starbuck, gold letters fading in the grey mist, above which, conspicuous at the taffrail, stood a single figure. Drinkwater could almost imagine Grant winking that pale and sinister ice-blue eye.

  ‘Do you trust him to hold his tongue, sir?’ asked Hill, who had also been watching the departure of the American ship. ‘Or will he gossip our predicament through every bagnio in San Francisco?’

  ‘I mind someone telling me the word “Yankee” is Cherokee Indian for one who is untrustworthy. In Captain Jackson Grant’s case I would certainly judge him to be opportunistic.’ Drinkwater wondered if Grant might make use of what he knew to gain access to Don José and, through him, to Doña Ana Maria. ‘But that, Mr Hill, is just the opinion of a bigoted Englishman with a deal of things on his mind.’

  ‘Aye . . . the men . . .’

  ‘Or lack of ’em. God’s bones, Hill, I wish to God I’d not gone gamming with that damned Yankee!’ Drinkwater’s tone was suddenly ferocious.

  ‘You’ll not go chasing after them, sir?’

  Drinkwater turned to the old sailing master. He shook his head.

  ‘Damn it, no. We’ll lose the whole festering lot of them once they get ashore. Grant spent yesterday selling rot-gut spirits to the Indians, and I daresay our fellows will soon hear about that. These men will go to the devil if they have half a chance. No, I’ll not go chasing after them . . . but damn it, Hill, we’ve hardly men left to fight. Grant said there was at least a frigate at Sitka . . .’

  ‘But no two-decker . . .’ Hill’s tone was tolerantly reasonable, like a parent leading a wilful child to a desired conclusion.

  ‘You still don’t think that ship we saw off the Horn was a Russian, do you?’

  Hill shrugged, almost non-committally. ‘No, sir, I’m more inclined to think it was a Don and is presently sitting off Panama. And even if it was a Russian, what in the world makes you think it’s hovering over the horizon, like Nemesis?’

  ‘You think I am obsessive, eh?’

  ‘You’ve had a deal of doings with Russia, sir,’ Hill said circumspectly, ‘I know that . . .’ Drinkwater looked at Hill. They shared past clandestine ‘doings’ on behalf of Lord Dungarth’s Secret Department, and Drinkwater saw concern in the older man’s eyes. ‘. . . But here, in the Pacific, surely it’s unlikely . . .’

  ‘Unlikely? What’s unlikely? That the Russians are anxious to dominate the Pacific? Or that I’m off my head about a ship I saw off the Horn? Damn it, Hill, what the deuce d’you think we’re out here for but to lick the blasted Russians before they take advantage of the decaying power of Spain? What better time for ’em with Spain a nominal ally, but the whole damned world knowing that the Dons are under the Corsican’s tyranny and rotten at the core. D’you think if the Russians land there, that whoremonger Godoy in Madrid is going to lift a finger? Why, he’s too busy lifting the skirts of the Queen of Spain!’

  Drinkwater’s diatribe descended to crudity for lack of better argument. Though he saw Hill could not dismantle it and was reluctantly conceding his viewpoint. He could not explain to the master that he was haunted by fears of a less logical kind.

  Hill had not had that prescient dream off Cape Horn, Hill had not been touched by the strangeness of the incident on Más-a-Fuera, nor by the undercurrents of something sinister between the Arguello brothers, nor the beauty of Doña Ana Maria, nor the jealous lusts she excited, nor the ghost of Nicolai Rezanov. Some intuition, born perhaps of the blue-devils, of the isolation of command, of too introspective a nature, or too vivid an imagination, but some powerful instinct told him with a certainty he could not explain, that they were in danger.

  Its source was, as yet, conjectural, but its reality was as obvious to him as the smell of distant blood to a famished shark.

  The gale lasted two days. Patrician escaped the worst of it behind the low shelter of Punta de los Reyes, though she snubbed at her cable and rolled in the swells that cart-wheeled into Drake’s Bay. They got her topmasts hoisted despite it, and set up her rigging to the upper hounds. A lighter mood settled on the ship as they prepared to face the second night of dismal and howling blackness.

  ‘We’re better off without them . . .’ said Mylchrist as the wardroom officers relaxed after the day’s labours and discussed the matter of the deserters.

  ‘Good God, Johnnie, you ain’t going to give us a speech about “we happy few” and “summoning up the blood” are you? For God’s sake we’re in the Pacific, not on the stage.’ Quilhampton slumped in his chair and toyed dejectedly with a biscuit.

  ‘J
ames is right, you know, we’re in a damned parlous condition,’ observed Mount seriously. He too sat downcast at the table, his fingers fiddling with the stem of a wine glass, rolling it and fitting it over the numerous wine-rings that marked the table-cloth. He had taken the defection of his two marines badly and was angry that his detachment to the observation post had occurred at all. In Mount’s opinion, the desertions would not have taken place had he been directly in control of the sentries.

  ‘And now there’s a gale . . .’

  ‘And a delay . . .’

  Hill came into the wardroom, peeling off his tarpaulin and shaking his head. Water flew from his soaked hair as though from a dog. ‘A delay that’ll ensure the Dagoes know of our whereabouts . . . give me some shrub, for God’s sake, that rain makes a man chilly . . .’

  ‘Have a biscuit . . .’ Quilhampton pushed the barrel towards the master who occupied a vacant chair. ‘Where’s the first luff?’

  ‘Wandering about worried sick . . .’

  ‘Och, an’ away,’ mocked Mylchrist, but no one paid this puerility any attention.

  ‘And what does the Captain think, Hill? You had his ear all morning?’

  Hill looked at Mount, aware that the marine officer held Drinkwater to blame for his absence from the ship at a crucial time.

  ‘You know damned well what the Captain thinks; he’s as concerned as the rest of us.’

  ‘And this Russian nonsense? He’d do better thinking the Americans have their greedy eyes on this coast . . .’

  ‘We ain’t at war with the Americans,’ drawled Mylchrist, eager to re-establish his credibility after his rebuff.

  ‘Doubtless we soon will be,’ said Quilhampton, ‘Britannia contra mundum.’

  ‘Now who’s bleating about “we happy few”?’ Mylchrist crowed.

  ‘I think, gentlemen, it’s time for sleep . . .’ Hill tossed off his pot and rose. ‘God grant we’re out of this pestilential spot tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Amen to that . . .’

  Below his pacing figure the ship slept, exhausted with the seemingly endless exertions of the day. Only the anchor-watch were about, huddled in corners and beneath the boats to avoid the drizzle that hardened from time to time, into heavy showers of torrential rain.

  The night was black, the wind tugging at the ship and moaning in the lower rigging, rising periodically to a higher cadence as it shifted a point and freshened. But it always fell away again, never sustaining a promise of abandoned violence, though every time it rose, Drinkwater’s heart beat faster in anticipation of fresh disaster. In such a state of mind, sleep was impossible.

  So he walked his quarterdeck in the time-honoured tradition, between the main mast and the carved taffrail, for no better reason than it seemed the only way to pass the time of anxiety and to be on hand if the worst of his fears came to pass. He was half-dead with his fatigue, his brain had lost the power of coherent thought, yet was too active to permit sleep. In an unending kaleidoscope it reviewed a tumbling series of images, of monstrous black ships in the mighty combers of the Horn, of yawning caverns of water that threatened to suck him down into the bowels of hell, of the laughing mockery of the white-lady of his nightmare who, inexplicably and with a paralysing abruptness, changed into the dark and lovely vision of Doña Ana Maria. And even as he sank fantastically upon her white and ample breasts he found the scimitar smile of Rubalcava and the triumphant eyes of the Arguello brothers. Above these images the imperious shadow of Hortense Santhonax manipulated the wires of a marionette.

  In all this waking, walking nightmare he paced the deck, his senses all but dead to anything beyond the fury of his hallucinating brain, his cloak wrapped round him, his eyes stark staring into the windy blackness of the night, until at last he slept, slumped against a quarterdeck carronade.

  Lieutenant Quilhampton jumped into the shallows and splashed ashore followed by Sergeant Blixoe, four marines and the bowman of the cutter. As the boat was dragged onto the beach and Blixoe wandered off, following the scuff marks of the deserters’ foot-prints in the sand, Quilhampton strode along the beach to the stove barge. He was joined by Marsden, the carpenter. Both of them stood for a moment looking at the split and holed planks in the side of the boat, the results of a few moments’ work with a boarding axe.

  ‘Tomahawk,’ opined Marsden, laying the finger of a horny hand upon the splintered wood. ‘I can patch it to get her back on board.’ He patted the gunwhale of the boat.

  ‘Very well . . .’

  ‘I’ll need a hand . . .’

  Quilhampton called the cutter’s crew over to assist and they lifted her gunwhale and braced her at a practical angle with foot-stretchers and bottom boards so that Marsden could plug the hole with a greased canvas patch covered with a lead tingle. While the work progressed, Quilhampton followed Blixoe up the beach.

  The marine sergeant had orders not to proceed out of sight of the ship and Quilhampton followed him to the highest sanddune in their vicinity.

  ‘Bugger-all, sir,’ said Blixoe, turning as Quilhampton came up with him.

  ‘Did you really expect ’em to be in sight, Blixoe?’ Quilhampton grinned despite himself, for the marine was itching to fire his musket and dispel the obloquy the returned Mount had heaped upon him. ‘No scalps for you, Sergeant, I’m afraid.’

  ‘One ’opes, sir, one ’opes,’ Blixoe replied grimly, still searching the desolate locality like a hound sniffing the wind. ‘What about there?’ He pointed. Beyond the dunes stretched the fingers of an inlet, spreading northwards, cut off from the ocean by a long isthmus which culminated behind them in Punta de los Reyes. An Indian village, a miserable collection of adobe dwellings overhung by the wispy smoke of cooking fires, lay some miles to the northwards.

  Quilhampton shook his head. ‘No . . . do you ensure none of the fellows that came ashore with us run.’

  Blixoe turned and they looked down at the huddle of men round the barge. The rest of Blixoe’s men stood about, their stocks loosed in the sunshine that burned warm after the passing of the rain and wind, their loaded muskets at the port, the bayonets gleaming wickedly.

  ‘No bloody fear of that, sir.’

  They looked at the ship, silhouetted black against the sun’s lambent reflection which danced upon the surface of the sea and was diffused by the watery mist that still lay a league offshore. Already the topgallant masts were aloft and they could see the foretopgallant yard being hoisted, its length slowly squaring against the line of the mast as the lifts were adjusted and its parrel was re-secured.

  ‘Not long now,’ Quilhampton remarked, a sense of relief pervading him. Their luck had held so far. A few more hours . . . nightfall perhaps, tomorrow morning at the latest, they would feel the deeps of the ocean beneath their keel.

  ‘No sir. We’ve been lucky.’

  ‘Yes, damned lucky.’

  ‘They say that leak, sir,’ ventured Blixoe, taking advantage of Lieutenant Quilhampton’s mellow mood, ‘well, that it were caused deliberate, like . . .’

  Quilhampton looked sharply at the sergeant, but the man was in profile, his bucket hat pulled down over his eyes as he stared at the Patrician anchored in her pool of sunshine.

  ‘And what do you say, Mr Blixoe?’

  Unperturbed, the marine shrugged his white woollen epaulettes. ‘How should I know, sir?’

  ‘I’ll lay a guinea you’ve a theory of your own, though.’

  Blixoe pulled the corners of his mouth down. ‘I reckon we’ve all got theories, sir. Trouble is, the truth ain’t much to do with theories, is it?’ Blixoe turned and faced Quilhampton. ‘Truth is, sir, that the men are at the end of their tethers. We lost a good prize and we know there’s rich pickin’s off the bloody Dagoes; there’s men as knows the papist’s ways, stuffin’ their churches with gold and word has it that there is a church somewhere about this coast where they’ve the bones of some saint all laid out in a casket of jewelled gold . . . and what they’re wondering is why, begging your pardon
, sir, the Captain ain’t batterin’ down these bloody Spanish churches, sir . . . by way of an act of war, like? That’s the truth of it, sir.’ Blixoe paused, then added, ‘If you’ll pardon me for speaking freely . . .’

  ‘Yes, of course, come, they seem to have finished down there . . .’

  They could see the barge being dragged into the water. Men were scrambling into her, ready to pass her painter to the cutter. Quilhampton looked again at the ship. The foretopgallant yard was across.

  And then he froze. The heat went out of the sun and his heart suddenly thudded in his chest. ‘Look!’

  Pointing with one hand he restrained Blixoe with the other. The marine paused and shaded his eyes against the glare. They were insubstantial at first, mere phantoms in the haze, but then their outlines hardened, the sharp, squared edges of topsails, the low hulls of men-of-war standing into the bay. There could be no doubt as to the purpose of their approach.

  ‘Come on!’ Slithering in the sand, Quilhampton began an awkward descent.

  ‘Fire those bloody muskets, lads,’ Blixoe called to his platoon and a ragged volley of alarm sounded flatly across Drake’s Bay.

  CHAPTER 13

  Apirl–May 1808

  Rubalcava’s Revenge

  ‘God’s bones!’

  Drinkwater swung round and stared at the beach as the sound of the volley echoed across the bay. He expected to see men running but on the contrary, they stood stock-still around the boats, every attitude suggesting they were as surprised as himself at the shots. Then he saw the tiny white figure of Quilhampton in his shirt-sleeves, running ungainly through the soft sand, his arms waving wildly and with the four marines stumbling after him.

  ‘What the devil . . . ?’

  ‘Deck there!’

  They swung to the hail from the foremast where topmen sat astride the newly sent up top-gallant yard.

  ‘To seaward, sir!’

  Drinkwater and the officers idle on the quarterdeck spun round, following the man’s urgently outstretched arm.