Master & Commander a-1

by Patrick O'Brian

  'Oh, it is factual enough,' said Jack.

  'But he has done nothing amiss, surely? No one can pretend he ran away or did not fight as hard as ever he could.'

  'But he lost his ship. Every captain of a King's ship that is lost must stand his trial at court-martial.'

  'I see. A mere formality in his case, no doubt.'

  'In his case, yes,' said Jack. 'His anxiety is unfounded – a sort of waking nightmare, I take it.'

  But the next day, when he went down with Mr Daiziel to see the Sophie's crew in their disaffected church and to tell them of the flag of truce from the Rock, it seemed to him a little more reasonable – less of a sick fantasy. He told the Sophies that both they and the Hannibals were to be exchanged – that they should be in Gibraltar for dinner – dried peas and salt horse for dinner, no more of these foreign messes – and although he smiled and waved his hat at the roaring cheers that greeted his news, there was a black shadow in the back of his mind.

  The shadow deepened as be crossed the bay in the Caesar's barge; it deepened as he waited in the antechamber to report himself to the Admiral. Sometimes he sat and sometimes he walked up and down the room, talking to other officers as people with urgent business were admitted by the secretary. He was surprised to receive so many congratulations on the Cacafuego action – it seemed so long ago now as almost to belong to another life. But the congratulations (though both generous and kind) were a little on the cursory side, for the atmosphere in Gibraltar was one of severe and general condemnation, dark depression, strict attention to arduous work, and a sterile wrangling about what ought to have been done.

  When at last he was received he found Sir James almost as old and changed as Captain Ferris; the Admiral's strange, heavy-lidded eyes looked at him virtually without expression as he made his report; there was not a word of interruption, not a hint of praise or blame, and this made Jack so uneasy that if it had not been for a list of heads he had written on a card that he kept in the palm of his hand, like a schoolboy, he would have deviated into rambling explanations and excuses. The Admiral was obviously very tired, but his quick mind extracted the necessary facts and he noted them down on a slip of paper. 'What do you make of the state of the French ships, Captain Aubrey?' he asked.

  'The Desaix is now afloat, sir, and pretty sound; so is the Indomptable. I do not know about the Formidable and Hannibal, but there is no question of their being bilged; and in Algeciras the rumour is that Admiral Linois sent three officers to Cadiz yesterday and another early this morning to beg the Spaniards and Frenchmen there to come round and fetch him out.'

  Admiral Saumarez put his hand to his forehead. He had honestly believed they would never float again, and he had said as much in his report. 'Well, thank you, Captain Aubrey,' he said, after a moment, and Jack stood up. 'I see you are wearing your sword,' observed the Admiral.

  'Yes, sir. The French captain was good enough to give it back to me.'

  'Very handsome in him, though I am sure the compliment was quite deserved; and I have little doubt the court-martial will do the same. But, you know, it is not quite etiquette to ship it until then: we will arrange your business as soon as possible – poor Ferris will have to go home, of course, but we can see to you here. You are only on parole, I believe?'

  'Yes, sir: waiting for an exchange.'

  'What a sad bore. I could have done with your help -the squadron is in such a state… Well, good day to you, Captain Aubrey,' he said, with a hint of a smile, or at least a lightening in his expression. 'As you know, of course, you are under nominal arrest, so pray be discreet.'

  He had known it perfectly well, of course, in theory; but the actual words were a blow to his heart, and he walked through the crowded, busy streets of Gibraltar in a state of quite remarkable unhappiness. When he reached the house where he was staying, he unbuckled his sword, made an ungainly parcel of it and sent it down to the Admiral's secretary with a note. Then he went for a walk, feeling strangely naked and unwilling to be seen.

  The officers of the Hannibal and the Sophie were on parole: that is to say, until they were exchanged for French prisoners of equal rank they were bound in honour to do nothing against France or Spain – they were merely prisoners in more agreeable surroundings.

  The days that followed were singularly miserable and lonely – lonely, although he sometimes walked with Captain Ferris, sometimes with his own midshipmen and sometimes with Mr Daiziel and his dog. It was strange and unnatural to be cut off from the life of the port and the squadron at such a moment as this, when every able-bodied man and a good many who should never have got out of their beds at all, were working furiously to repair their ships – an active hive, an ant-hill down below, and up here on these heights, on the thin grass and the bare rock between the Moorish wall and the tower above Monkey's Cove, solitary self-communing, doubt, reproach and anxiety. He had looked through all the Gazettes, of course, and there was nothing about either the Sophie's triumph or her disaster: one or two garbled accounts in the newspapers and a paragraph in the Gentleman's Magazine that made it seem like a surprise attack, that was all. As many as a dozen promotions in the Gazettes, but none for him or Pullings and it was a fair bet that the news of the Sophie's capture had reached London at about the same time as that of the Cacafuego. If not before: for the good news (supposing it to have been lost – supposing it to have been in the bag he himself sank in ninety fathoms off Cape Roig) could only have come in a dispatch from Lord Keith, far up the Mediterranean, among the Turks. So there could not be any promotion now until after the court-martial – no such thing as the promotion of prisoners, ever. And what if the trial went wrong? His conscience was very far from being perfectly easy. If Harte had meant this, he had been devilish successful; and he, Jack, had been a famous greenhorn, an egregious flat. Was such malignity possible? Such cleverness in a mere horned scrub? He would have liked to put this to Stephen, for Stephen had a headpiece; and Jack, almost for the first time in his life, was by no means sure of his perfect comprehension, natural intelligence and penetration. The Admiral had not congratulated him: could that conceivably mean that the official view was…? But Stephen had no notion of any parole that would keep him out of the naval hospital: the squadron had had more than two hundred men wounded, and he spent almost all his time there. 'You go a-walking,' he said. 'Do for all love go walking up very steep heights – traverse the Rock from end to end -traverse it again and again on an empty stomach. You are an obese subject; your hams quiver as you go. You must weight sixteen or even seventeen stone.'

  'And to be sure I do sweat like a mare in foal,' he reflected, sitting under the shade of a boulder, loosening his waist-band and mopping himself. In an attempt at diverting his mind he privately sang a ballad about the Battle of the Nile:

  We anchored alongside of them like lions bold and free. When their masts and shrouds came tumbling down, what a glorious sight to see!

  Then came the bold Leander, that noble fifty-four, And on the bows of the Franklin she caused her guns to roar;

  Gave her a dreadful drubbing, boys, and did severely maul;

  Which caused them loud for quarter cry and down French colours haul.

  The tune was charming, but the inaccuracy vexed him: the poor old Leander had fifty-two guns, as he knew very well, having directed the fire of eight of them. He turned to another favourite naval song:

  There happened of late a terrible fray, amp;gun upon our St James's day, With a thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, Thump, thump a thump, thump.

  An ape on a rock no great way off threw a turd at him, quite unprovoked; and when he half rose in protest it shook its wizened fist and gibbered so furiously that he sank down again, so low were his spirits.

  'Sir, sir!' cried Babbington, tearing up the slope, scarlet with hailing and climbing. 'Look at the brig! Sir, look over the point!'

  The brig was the Pasley: they knew her at once. The hired brig Pasley, a fine sailer, and she was crowding sail on the brisk north-west
breeze fit to carry everything away.

  'Have a look, sir,' said Babbington, collapsing on the grass in a singularly undisciplined manner and handing up a little brass spyglass. The tube only magnified weakly, but at once the signal flying from the Pasley's masthead leapt out clear and plain – enemy in sight.

  'And there they are, sir,' said Babbington, pointing to a glimmer of topsails over the dark curve of the land beyond the end of the Gut.

  'Come on,' cried Jack, and began labouring up the hill, gasping and moaning, running as fast as he could for the tower, the highest point on the Rock. There were some masons up there, working on the building, an officer of the garrison artillery with a splendid great telescope, and some other soldiers. The gunner very civilly offered Jack his glass: Jack leant it on Babbington's shoulder, focused carefully, gazed, and said, 'There's the Superb. And the Thames. Then two Spanish three-deckers one's the Real Carlos, I am almost sure: vice-admiral's flagship, in any event. Two seventy-fours. No, a seventy-four and probably an eighty-gun ship.'

  'Argonauta,' said one of the masons.

  'Another three-decker. And three frigates, two French.'

  They sat there silently watching the steady, calm pro. cession, the Superb and the Thames keeping their stations just a mile ahead of the combined squadron as they came up the Gut, and the huge, beautiful Spanish first-rates moving along with the inevitability of the sun. The masons went off to their dinner: the wind backed westerly. The shadow of the tower swept through twenty-five degrees.

  When they had rounded Cabrita Point the Superb and the frigate carried straight on for Gibraltar, while the Spaniards hauled their wind for Algeciras; and now Jack could see that their flagship was indeed the Real Carlos, of a hundred and twelve guns, one of the most powerful ships afloat; that one of the other three-deckers was of the same force; and the third of ninety-six. It was a most formidable squadron – four hundred and seventy-four great guns, without counting the hundred odd of the frigates – and the ships were surprisingly well handled. They anchored over there under the guns of the Spanish batteries as trimly as though they were to be reviewed by the King.

  'Hallo, sir,' said Mowett. 'I thought you would be up here. I have brought you a cake.'

  'Why, thankee, thankee,' cried Jack. 'I am devilish hungry, I find.' He at once cut a slice and ate it up. How extraordinarily the Navy had changed, he thought, cutting another: when he was a midshipman it would never in a thousand years have occurred to him to speak to his captain, far less bring him cakes; and if it had occurred to him he would never have done so, for fear of his life.

  'May I share your rock, sir?' asked Mowett, sitting down. 'They have come to fetch the Frenchmen out, I do suppose. Do you think we shall go for 'em, sir?'

  'Pompйe will never be fit for sea these three weeks,' said Jack dubiously. 'Caesar is cruelly knocked about and must get all her new masts in: but even if they can get her ready before the enemy sail, that only gives us five of the line against ten, or nine if you leave the Hannibal out – three hundred and seventy-six guns to their seven hundred odd, both their squadrons combined. We are short-handed, too.'

  'You would go for them, would not you, sir?' said Babbington; and both the midshipmen laughed very cheerfully.

  Jack gave a meditative jerk of his head, and Mowett said, 'As when enclosing harpooners assail, In hyperborean seas the slumbering whale. What huge things these Spaniards are. The Caesars have petitioned to be allowed to work all day and night, sir. Captain Brenton says they may work all day, but only watch and watch at night. They are piling up juniper-wood fires on the mole to have light.'

  It was by the light of these juniper fires that Jack ran into Captain Keats of the Superb, with two of his lieutenants and a civilian. After the first surprise, greetings, introductions, Captain Keats asked him to take supper aboard – they were going back now – only a scrap-meal, of course, but some genuine Hampshire cabbage brought straight from Captain Keats' own garden by the Astraea.

  'It is very kind of you indeed, sir; most grateful, but I believe I must beg to be excused. I had the misfortune to lose the Sophie, and I dare say you will be sitting on me presently, together with most of the other post-captains.'

  'Oh,' said Captain Keats, suddenly embarrassed.

  'Captain Aubrey is quite right,' said the civilian in a sententious voice; and at that moment an urgent messenger called Captain Keats to the Admiral.

  'Who was that ill-looking son of a bitch in the black coat?' asked Jack, as another friend, Heneage Dundas of the Calpe, came down the steps.

  'Coke? Why, he's the new judge-advocate,' said Dundas, with a queer look. Or was it a queer look? The trick of the flames could give anyone a queer look. The words of the tenth Article of War came quite unbidden into his mind: If any person in the fleet shall cowardly yield or cry for quarter, being convicted thereof by the sentence of a court-martial, shall suffer death.

  'Come and split a bottle of port with me at the Blue Posts, Heneage,' said Jack, drawing his hand across his face.

  'Jack,' said Dundas, 'there is nothing I should like better, upon my oath; but I have promised Brenton to give him a hand. I am on my way this minute – there is the rest of my party staying for me.' He hurried off into the brighter light along the mole, and Jack drifted away: dark steep alleys, low brothels, smells, squalid drinking-shops.

  The next day, under the lee of the Charles V wall, with his telescope resting on a stone, and with a certain sense of spying or eavesdropping, he watched the Caesar (no longer the flagship) being eased alongside the sheer-hulk to receive her new lower mainmast, a hundred feet long and more than a yard across. She got it in so quickly that the top was over before noon, and neither it nor the deck could be seen for the number of men working on the rigging.

  The day after that, still from his melancholy height, full of guilt at his idleness and the intense, ordered busyness below, particularly about the Caesar, he saw the San Antonio, a French seventy-four that had been delayed, come in from Cadiz and anchor among her friends at Algeciras.

  The next day there was great activity on the far side of the bay – boats plying to and fro among the twelve ships of the combined fleet, new sails bending, supplies coming aboard, hoist after hoist of signals aboard the flagships; and all this activity was reproduced in Gibraltar, with even greater zeal. There was no hope for the Pompйe, but the Audacious was almost entirely ready, while the Venerable, the Spencer and, of course, the Superb, were in fighting trim, and the Caesar was so near the final stages of her refitting that it was just possible she might be fit for sea in twenty-four hours.

  During the night a hint of a Levanter began to breathe from the east: this was the wind the Spaniards were praying for, the wind that would carry them straight out of the Gut, once they had weathered Cabrita Point, and waft them up to Cadiz. At noon the first of their three-deckers loosed her foretopsail and began to move out of the crowded road; then the others followed her. They were weighing and coming out at intervals of ten minutes or a quarter of an hour to their rendezvous off Cabrita Point. The Caesar was still tied up alongside the mole, taking in her powder and shot, with officers, men, civilians and garrison soldiers working with silent concentrated earnestness.

  At length the whole of the combined fleet was under way: even their jury-rigged capture, the Hannibal, towed by the French frigate Indienne, was creeping out to the point. And now the shrill squealing fife and fiddle broke out aboard the Caesar as her people manned the capstan bars and began to warp her out of the mole, taut, trim and ready for war. A thundering cheer ran all along the crowded shore, from the batteries, walls and hillside black with spectators; and when it died away there was the garrison band playing Come cheer up my lads, 'tis to glory we steer as loud as ever they could go, while the Caesar's marines answered with Britons strike home. Through the cacophony the fife could still be heard: it was most poignantly moving.

  As the Caesar passed under the stern of the Audacious she hoisted Sir James's flag
once more and immediately afterwards heaved out the signal weigh and prepare for battle. The execution of this was perhaps the most beautiful naval manoeuvre Jack had ever seen: they had all been waiting for the signal, they were all waiting and ready with their cables up and down; and in an unbelievably short space of time the anchors were catted and the masts and yards broke out in tall white pyramids of sail as the squadron, five ships of the line, two frigates, a sloop and a brig, moved out of the lee of the Rock and formed in line ahead on the larboard tack.

  Jack pushed his way out of the tight-packed crowd on the mile-head, and he was half-way to the hospital, meaning to persuade Stephen to mount the Rock with him, when he saw his friend running swiftly through the deserted streets.

  'Has she got out of the mole?' cried Stephen, at a considerable distance. 'Has the battle begun?' Reassured, he said, 'I would not have missed it for a hundred pounds: that damned fellow in ,Ward B and his untimely fancies -a fine time to cut one's throat, good lack a-day.'

  'There's no hurry – no one will touch a gun for hours,' said Jack. 'But 1 am sorry you did not see the Caecar warping out: it was a glorious sight. Come up the hill with me, and you will have a perfect view of both squadrons. Do come. I will call in at the house and pick up a couple of telescopes; and a cloak – it grows cold at night.'

  'Very well,' said Stephen, after a moment's thought. 'I can leave a note. And we will fill our pockets with ham: then we shall have none of your wry looks and short answers.'

  'There they lay,' said Jack, pausing for breath again. 'Still on the larboard tack.'

  'I see them perfectly well,' said Stephen, a hundred yards ahead and climbing fast. 'Pray do not stop so often. Come on.'

  'Oh Lord, oh Lord,' said Jack at last, sinking under his familiar rock. 'How quick you go. Well, there they are.'