For some moments the Spaniards gave way, as though amazed, and every one of the Sophie's men and boys came aboard, amidships and over the bow: the Spaniards gave way from abaft the mainmast, backing into the waist; but there they rallied. And now there was hard fighting, now there were cruel blows given and received – a dense mass of struggling men, tripping among the spars, scarcely room to fall, beating, hacking, pistolling one another; and detached fights of two or three men together round the edges, yelling like beasts. In the looser part of the main battle Jack had forced his way some three yards in: he had a soldier in front of him, and as their swords clashed high so a pikeman drove under his right arm, ripping the flesh outside his ribs and pulling out to stab again. Immediately behind him Bonden fired his pistol, blowing off the lower part of Jack's ear and killing the pikeman where he stood. Jack feinted at the soldier, a quick double slash, and brought his sword down on his shoulder with terrible force. The fight surged back: the soldier fell. Jack heaved out his sword, tight in bone, and glanced quickly fore and aft. 'This won't do,' he said.
Forward, under the fo'c'sle, the sheer weight and number of the three hundred Spaniards, now half recovered from their surprise, was pushing the Sophies back, driving a solid wedge between his band and Dillon's in the bows. Dillon must have been held up. The tide might turn at any second now. He leapt on to a gun and with a hail that ripped his throat he roared, 'Dillon, Dillon, the starboard gangway! Thrust for the starboard gangway!' For a fleeting moment, at the edge of his field of vision, he was aware of Stephen far below, on the deck of the Sophie, holding her wheel and gazing collectedly upwards. 'Otros cincuenta!' he shouted, for good measure: and as Stephen nodded, calling out something in Spanish, he raced back into the fight, his sword high and his pistol searching.
At this moment there was a frightful shrieking on the fo'c'sle, a most bitter, furious drive for the head of the gangway, a desperate struggle; something gave, and the dense mass of Spaniards in the waist turned to see these black faces rushing at them from behind. A confused milling round the frigate's bell, cries of every kind, the blackened Sophies cheering like madmen as they joined their friends, shots, the clash of arms, a trampling huddled retreat, all the Spaniards in the waist hampered, crowded in upon, unable to strike. The few on the quarter-deck ran forward along the larboard side to try to rally the people, to bring them into some order, at least to disengage the useless marines.
Jack's opponent, a little seaman, writhed away behind the capstan, and Jack heaved back out of the press. He looked up and down the clear run of deck. 'Bonden,' he shouted, plucking his arm, 'Go and strike those colours.'
Bonden ran aft, leaping over the dead Spanish captain. Jack hallooed and pointed. Hundreds of eyes, glancing or staring or suddenly looking back, half-comprehending, saw the Cacafuego's ensign race down her colours struck.
It was over. ' 'Vast fighting,' cried Jack, and the order ran round the deck. The Sophies backed away from the packed mob in the waist and the men there threw down their weapons, suddenly dispirited, frightened, cold and betrayed. The senior surviving Spanish officer struggled out of the crowd in which he had been penned and offered Jack his sword.
'Do you speak English, sir?' asked Jack.
'I understand it, sir,' said the officer.
'The men must go down into the hold, sir, at once,' said Jack. 'The officers on deck. The men down into the hold. Down into the hold.'
The Spaniard gave the order: the frigate's crew began to file down the hatchways. As they went so the dead and wounded were discovered – a tangled mass amidships, many more forward, single bodies everywhere – and so, too, the true number of the attackers grew clear.
'Quickly, quickly,' cried Jack, and his men urged the prisoners below, herded them fast, for they understood the danger as well as their captain. 'Mr Day, Mr Watt, get a couple of their guns – those carronades – pointing down the hatchways. Load with canister – there's plenty in the garlands aft. Where's Mr Dillon? Pass the word for Mr Dillon.'
The word passed, and no answer came. He was lying there near the starboard gangway, where the most desperate fighting had been, a couple of steps from little Ellis. When Jack picked him up he thought he was only hurt; but turning him he saw the great wound in his heart.
Chapter Eleven
H.M. Sloop Sophie off Barcelona
Sir, I have the honour to acquaint you, that the sloop I have the honour to command, after a mutual chase and a warm action, has captured a Spanish xebec frigate of 32 guns, 22 long twelve-pounders, 8 nines, and 2 heavy carronades, viz, the Cacafuego, commanded by Don Martin de Langara, manned by 319 officers, seamen and marines. The disparity of force rendered it necessary to adopt some measure that might prove decisive. I resolved to board, which being accomplished almost without loss, after a violent close engagement the Spanish colours were obliged to be struck. I have, however, to lament the loss of Lieutenant Dillon, who fell at the height of the action, leading his boarding-party, and of Mr Ellis, a supernumerary; while Mr Watt the boatswain and five seamen were severely wounded. To render just praise to the gallant conduct and impetuous attack of Mr Dillon, I am perfectly unequal to.
'I saw him for a while,' Stephen had said, 'I saw him through that gap where two ports were beaten into one: they were fighting by the gun, and then when you called out at the head of those stairs into the waist; and he was in front – black faces behind him. I saw him pistol a man with a pike, pass his sword through a fellow who had beaten down the boson and come to a redcoat, an officer. After a couple of quick passes he caught this man's sword on his pistol and lunged straight into him. But his sword struck on the breastbone or a metal plate, and doubled and broke with the thrust: and with the six inches left he stabbed him faster than you could see – inconceivable force and rapidity. You would never believe the happiness on his face. The light on his face!'
I must be permitted to say, that there could not have been greater regularity, nor more cool determined conduct shown by men, than by the crew of the Sophie. The great exertions and good conduct of Mr Pullings, a passed midshipman and acting lieutenant whom I beg to recommend to their Lord-ships' attention, and of the boatswain, carpenter,gunner and petty officers, I am particularly indebted for.
I have the honour to be, etc.
Sophie's force at commencement of action: 54 officers, men, and boys. 14 4-pounders. 3 killed and 8 wounded.
Cacafuego's force at commencement of action: 274 officers, seamen and supernumeraries. 45 marines. Guns 32.
The captain, boatswain, and 13 men killed; 41 wounded.
He read it through, changed 'I have the honour' on the first page to 'I have the pleasure', signed it Jno. Aubrey and addressed it to M. Harte, Esqr. – not to Lord Keith alas, for the admiral was at the other end of the Mediterranean, and everything passed through the hands of the commandant.
It was a passable letter; not very good, for all his efforts and revisions. He was no hand with a pen. Still, it gave the facts – some of them – and apart from being dated 'off Barcelona' in the customary way, whereas it was really being written in Port Mahon the day after his arrival, it contained no falsehood: and he thought he had done everyone justice – had done all the justice he could, at least, for Stephen Maturin had insisted upon being left out. But even if it had been a model of naval eloquence it would still have been utterly inadequate, as every sea-officer reading it would know. For example, it spoke of the engagement as something isolated in time, coolly observed, reasonably fought and clearly remembered, whereas almost everything of real importance was before or after the blaze of fighting; and even in that he could scarcely tell what came first. As to the period after the victory, he was unable to recapture the sequence at all, without the log: it was all a dull blur of incessant labour and extreme anxiety and weariness. Three hundred angry men to be held down by two dozen, who also had to bring the six-hundred-ton prize to Minorca through an ugly sea and some cursed winds; almost all the sloop's standing and running rigg
ing to be set up anew, masts to be fished, yards shifted, fresh sails bent, and the bosun among the badly wounded; that hobbling voyage along the edge of disaster, with precious little help from the sea or the sky. A blur, and a sense of oppression; a feeling more of the Cacafuego's defeat than the Sophie's victory; and exhausted perpetual hurrying, as though that were what life really consisted of. A fog punctuated by a few brilliantly clear scenes.
Pullings, there on the bloody deck of the Cacafuego, shouting in his deafened ear that gunboats were coming down from Barcelona; his determination to fire the frigate's undamaged broadside at them; his incredulous relief when he saw them turn at last and dwindle against the threatening horizon – why?
The sound that woke him in the middle watch: a low cry mounting by quarter tones or less and increasing in volume to a howling shriek, then a quick series of spoken or chanted words, the mounting cry again and the shriek – the Irish men of the crew waking James Dillon, stretched there with a cross in his hands and lanterns at his head and his feet.
The burials. That child Ellis in his hammock with the flag sewed over him looked like a little pudding, and now at the recollection his eye clouded again. He had wept, wept, his face streaming with tears as the bodies went over the side and the marines fired their volley.
'Dear Lord,' he thought. 'Dear Lord.' For the re-writing of the letter and this casting back of his mind brought all the sadness flooding up again. It was a sadness that had lasted from the end of the action until the breeze had died on them some miles off Cape Mola and they had fired urgent guns for a pilot and assistance: a sadness that fought a losing battle against invading joy, however. Trying to fix the moment when the joy broke through he looked up, stroking his wounded ear with the feather of his pen; and through the cabin window he saw the tall proof of his victory at her moorings by the yard; her undamaged larboard side was towards the Sophie, and the pale water of the autumn day reflected the red and shining gold of her paintwork, as proud and trim as the first day he had seen her.
Perhaps it was when he received the first unbelieving amazed congratulations from Sennet of the Bellerophon, whose gig was the first boat to reach him: then there was
Butler of the Naiad and young Harvey, Torn Widdrington and some midshipmen, together with Marshall and Mowett, almost out of their minds with grief at not having taken part in the action, yet already shining with reflected glory. Their boats took the Sophie and her prize in tow; their men relieved the exhausted marines and idlers guarding the prisoners; he felt the accumulated weight of those days and nights come down on him in a soft compelling cloud, and he went to sleep in the midst of their questions. That marvellous sleep, and his waking in the still harbour to be given a quick unsigned note in a double cover from Molly Harte.
Perhaps it was then. The joy, the great swelling delight was certainly in him when he woke. He grieved, of course he grieved, he grieved bitterly for the loss of his shipmates – would have given his right hand to save them – and mixed in his sorrow for Dillon there was a guilt whose cause and nature eluded him; but a serving officer in an active war has an intense rather than a lasting grief. Sober objective reason told him that there had not been many successful single-ship actions between quite such unequal opponents and that unless he did something spectacularly foolish, unless he blew himself as high as the Boyne, the next thing that would reach him from the Admiralty would be the news of his being gazetted – of his being made a post-captain.
With any kind of luck he would be given a frigate: and his mind ran over those glorious high-bred ships -Emerald, Seahorse, Teipsichore, Phaлton, Sibylle, Sirius, the lucky Ethalion, Naiad, Alcmиne and Triton, the flying Thetis. Endymion, San Fiorenzo, Amelia… dozens of them: more than a hundred in commission Had he any right to a frigate? Not much: a twenty-gun post-ship was more his mark, something just in the sixth rate. Not much right to a frigate. Not much right to set about the Cacafuego, either; nor to make love to Molly Harte. Yet he had done so. In the post-chaise, in a bower, in another bower, all night long. Perhaps that was why he was so sleepy now, so apt to doze, blinking comfortably into the future as though it were a sea-coal fire. And perhaps that was why his wounds hurt so. The slash on his left shoulder had opened at the far end. How he had come by it he could not tell; but there it was after the action, and Stephen had sewn it up at the same time he dressed the pike-wound across the front of his chest (one bandage for the two) and clapped a sort of dressing on what was left of his ear.
But dozing would not do. This was the time for riding in with the tide of flood, for making a dash for a frigate, for seizing fortune while she was in reach, running her aboard. He would write to Queeney at once, and half a dozen letters more that afternoon, before the party – perhaps to his father too, or would the old boy make a cock of it again? He was the worst hand imaginable at plot, intrigue or the management of what tiny amount of interest they had with the grander members of the family – should never have reached the rank of general, by rights. However, the public letter was the first of these things, and Jack got up carefully, smiling still.
This was the first time he had been openly ashore, and early though it was he could not but be conscious of the looks, the murmurs and the pointing that accompanied his passage. He carried his letter into the commandant's office, and the compunction, the stirrings if not of conscience or principle then at least of decency, that had disturbed him on his way up through the town and even more in the anteroom, disappeared with Captain Harte's first words. 'Well, Aubrey,' he said, without getting up, 'we are to congratulate you upon your prodigious good luck again, I collect.'
'You are too kind, sir,' said Jack. 'I have brought you my official letter.'
'Oh, yes,' said Captain Harte, holding it some way off and looking at it with an affectation of carelessness. 'I will forward it, presently. Mr Brown tells me it is perfectly impossible for the yard here to supply half your wants -he seems quite astonished that you should want so much. How the devil did you contrive to get so many spars knocked away? And such a preposterous amount of rigging? Your sweeps destroyed? There are no sweeps here. Are you sure your bosun is not coming it a trifle high? Mr Brown says there is not a frigate on the station, nor even a ship of the line, that has called for half so much cordage'
'If Mr Brown can tell me how to take a thirty-two gun frigate without having a few spars knocked away I shall be obliged to him.'
'Oh, in these sudden surprise attacks, you know however, all I can say is you will have to go to Malta for most of your requirements. Northumberland and Superb have made a clean sweep here.' It was so evidently his intention to be ill-natured that his words had little effect; but his next stroke slipped under Jack's guard and stabbed right home. 'Have you written to Ellis' people yet? This sort of thing' – tapping the public letter – 'is easy enough: anyone can do this. But I do not envy you the other. What I shall say myself I. don't know… 'Biting the joint of his thumb he darted a furious look from under his eyebrows, and Jack had a moral certainty that the financial setback, misfortune, disaster, or whatever it was, affected him far more than the debauching of his wife.
Jack had, in fact, written that letter, as well as the others
– Dillon's uncle, the seamen's families – and he was thinking of them as he walked across the patio with a sombre look on his face. A figure under the dark gateway stopped, obviously peering at him. All Jack could see in the tunnel through to the street was an outline and the two epaulettes of a senior post-captain or a flag-officer, so although he was ready with his salute his mind was still blank when the other stepped through into the sunlight, hurrying forward with his hand outstretched. 'Captain Aubrey, I do believe? Keats, of the Superb. My dear sir, you must allow me to congratulate you with all my heart – a most splendid victory indeed. I have just pulled round your capture in my barge, and I am amazed, sir, amazed. Was you very much clawed? May I be of any service – my bosun, carpenter, sailmakers? Would you do me the pleasure of dining aboard, or are yo
u bespoke? I dare say you are – every woman in Mahon will wish to exhibit you. Such a victory!'
'Why, sir, I thank you most heartily,' cried Jack, flushing with undisguised open ingenuous pleasure and returning the pressure of Captain Keats' hand with such vehemence as to cause a dull crepitation, followed by a shattering dart of agony. 'I am infinitely obliged to you, for your kind opinion. There is none I value more, sir. To tell you the truth, I am engaged to dine with the Governor and to stay for the concert; but if I might beg the loan of your bosun and a small party – my people are all most uncommon weary, quite fagged out – why, I should look upon it as a most welcome, indeed, a Heaven-sent relief.'
'It shall be done. Most happy,' said Captain Keats. 'Which way do you go, sir? Up or down?'
'Down, sir. I have appointed to meet a – a person at the Crown.'
'Then our ways lie together,' said Captain Keats, taking Jack's arm; and as they crossed the Street to walk in the shade he called out to a friend, 'Tom, come and see who I have in tow. This is Captain Aubrey Of the Sophie! You know Captain Grenville, I am sure?'
'This gives me very great pleasure,' cried the grim, battle-scarred Grenville, breaking out into a one-eyed smile: he shook Jack by the hand and instantly asked him to dinner.
Jack had refused five more invitations by the time he and Keats parted at the Crown: from mouths he respected he had heard the words 'as neat an action as ever I knew', 'Nelson will rejoice in this', and 'if there is justice on earth, the frigate will be bought by Government and Captain Aubrey given command of her'. He had seen looks of unfeigned respect, good will and admiration upon the faces of seamen and junior officers passing in the crowded street; and two commanders senior to him, unlucky in prizes and known to be jealous, had hurried across to make their compliments, handsomely and with good grace.
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