‘Gallant? I tell you I would have none of it were I Admiralty. A frigate is an instrument of war as much as is a first-rate. Fighting chivalrously is always at someone’s expense — and usually those who are least able to afford it! All this tirez les premiers is so much cant. Fontenoy it began at, did it not? “We do not fire first, gentlemen: we are the English Guards!” ’ Peto made a loud huffing sound.
Hervey thought there had been something pragmatic in the Guards’ invitation but could not recall the particulars, and, in any case, it was Trafalgar he wished to discuss, not Fontenoy. It was not every day a man might hear of it from so close an observer. And so they sat well into the night, Hervey pressing him to every detail of the battle, with more burgundy and Madeira than he had ever drunk at one sitting. When at last he rose, unsteadily, to retire to his quarters, he put a final question to his host. ‘How came it about that Lord Nelson was able to recommend you to Captain Blackwood in the first instance? Are you from a naval family, sir?’
‘No, I am not,’ replied Peto with a smile. ‘Not, that is, in the literal sense. Lord Nelson’s father had the living at Burnham Thorpe, and my father was once his curate. At the time of my going to sea he had the neighbouring parish.’
‘Then,’ smiled Hervey, ‘we have something in common.’
They began comparing their relative ecclesiastical fortunes, but since the tithes were either impropriate to the patron or modest, the comparison was brief.
‘So we each must seek for our prosperity in uniform,’ concluded Peto, dabbing with a napkin at the Madeira which had found its way to his waistcoat.
‘Just so,’ smiled Hervey, ‘and at a time when there is peace on earth!’
‘Ah,’ said Peto, shaking his head optimistically, ‘but there is little goodwill towards men!’
Next day
The wind had backed, and a moderate westerly was making the air chill. Hervey had on the thinnest cheesecloth shirt, yet he was sweating. Half an hour’s brushing followed by another’s strapping would maintain his own hale condition as surely as it would Jessye’s. And he had just been struggling to remove her shoes too, for they served no purpose standing on deep straw. He looked up to see Peto eyeing his labours intently. Feeling the need to say something, for he knew the business must gravely offend the captain’s sensibilities, he thought he might express his gratitude once more. ‘I do very much appreciate what a trial this is, sir,’ he began.
Peto surprised him by his reply, however. ‘Captain Hervey, I should not have risked the regularity of my ship had I thought your horse posed any danger,’ he smiled. ‘On the contrary, a horse has a most civilizing effect. The hands feel better for seeing her. I would be chary of that, perhaps, were there not peace on earth, but I see no cause now for keeping the crew quite as tight as the bowstring they have been hitherto.’
He seemed in excessively good spirits this morning. Hervey smiled with some relief.
‘We see eye to eye, I think, on many matters. When you are quite finished with your day’s exertions join me, if you please, on the quarterdeck. I wish to apprise you of something.’
Hervey put on his cloak before leaving the shelter of the waist. Sail was stretching fuller in the freshening westerly, and spray was now visiting the deck. No land was visible, even by telescope, and seabirds were fewer by the hour. Peto was wrapped likewise in a cloak and stood alone at the stern rail, legs braced a little apart, a hand fastened on one of the shrouds. Hervey walked as close to the rail as he could without actually placing a hand on it, the ship’s motion sufficiently pronounced now to make him a shade insecure. Peto smiled as he reached the stern. ‘Worry not: in six months you’ll be rushing to the tops like an old hand!’
Hervey looked unconvinced, and then not a little anxious as it occurred to him that Peto might have summoned him to begin this very practice.
The captain’s preoccupations were otherwise, however. ‘Since you are evidently an officer of singular attachment to your profession, I judge that you might be an availing interlocutor in the art of war.’
Hervey had no idea of what he alluded to. ‘You flatter me greatly, sir—’
‘Yes, yes, yes — but do I suppose correctly that you have an eye for more than a horse?’
He smiled. It seemed that the duke, at least, believed so. ‘Try me, sir,’ he replied.
‘Certain notions of warfare, acquired these past six years, I am minded to commit to the page.’
Hervey wiped the stinging salt spray from his eyes and pulled his shako lower. ‘Notions particular to war at sea?’
Peto thought a moment before replying. ‘At first I should have considered them so, but I am no longer sure, for it seems to me that the general precepts ought equally to apply on land. What do you know of the affair at Lissa?’
Hervey now had his legs braced twice as wide as Peto’s, and a tighter grip on a shroud line. ‘I know that an English squadron defeated a French one twice its strength.’
‘Just so, Hervey, just so.’ Peto’s voice was beginning to rise against the wind. ‘Four of the French’s were forty-gun frigates, too — though to say French is not entirely true, for one was Venetian, and another couple of thirty-twos as well. A damned fine fight they put up, though!’
Hervey made respectful noises.
Peto now revealed he was writing a memento. ‘I gave a public lecture on Lissa — at Gresham’s College in the City. A publisher approached me thereafter.’
His evident pride in both was endearing. Hervey nodded in appreciation.
‘I intend, in a supplementary chapter, to draw lessons from the action, developing a more general theory,’ he added.
Hervey asked if he would be challenging any Admiralty document thereby.
‘There are the Standing Instructions, yes. And these are added to by fleet instructions. Lord Howe’s are still the basis for our fighting.’
‘And these are deficient?’
Peto looked rather irritated. ‘They don’t want for quality! I wish merely to develop a general design for captains of frigates — and it’s only of frigates I speak, for the future is with them.’
‘And the import of Lissa?’
Peto looked happier again. ‘In the Royal Navy it is a precept, by which an officer is taught, that navigation precedes gunnery.’
Spray was now beginning to reach high, yet Peto was not inclined to move. Hervey pulled up his collar and further inclined his ear towards him.
‘Captain Hoste prevailed at Lissa because he handled Amphion superbly, not because her gunnery was superior — though it was. He placed his ship where her fire might be to greatest advantage, and he drove the French onto the shore. That is working a frigate, Hervey!’
Despite the distraction of having to keep his balance, Hervey saw how it must be so (indeed, he wished they were a little closer to the shore themselves). In any case, there could be no doubting the captain’s aptness for such a treatise, for Peto had walked the quarterdeck with Hoste, who had himself walked the deck with Nelson.
‘And I tell you this,’ he continued, now so fired by his subject that his voice had risen well above the wind, ‘there is wonderful pleasure to be had cruising, but it’s nothing to manoeuvring to advantage in shallow waters. The Nile was, to my mind, the most famous of victories!’
Hervey would not have gainsaid that.
‘Do you recall Bonaparte’s lament? “Wherever you find a fathom of water, there you will find the British!” Oh yes, Hervey, believe me: it’s shallow waters that truly test a captain.’
‘I shall remember it,’ he replied, smiling. ‘A fathom only, you say?’
‘It is all that I should need,’ Peto asserted. ‘Come below and I’ll read you my account of it.’
Even in the cold and the spray — and the effort to stay on his feet — Hervey could see the vigour in Peto’s thinking. And if he could pass just a little of his time at sea in discourse such as this he might well increase his own fitness for command, for it was evident
that in the handling of a frigate and a troop of cavalry there was more than a little similitude. As to this being any more than a theoretical fitness, however, he could only confide, for everywhere, they agreed — even in India — there was peace on earth.
IV. A PROSPEROUS VOYAGE
Approaching the coast of Coromandel, 6 February 1816
Hervey had written so many letters during his otherwise idle hours that they filled one of his hatboxes. But to one man he had yet to commit his thoughts, for Daniel Coates was neither family, nor regiment, nor superior. Daniel Coates was a man who would wish to hear of his thoughts as they touched upon his military condition, so that he might compare them with his own experience, which, in the space of the ten years he had been Hervey’s self-appointed tutor in practical soldiering, he had shared unsparingly. Daniel Coates, formerly General Tarleton’s trumpeter in the first American war, had lived peaceably on Salisbury Plain for twenty years, first as shepherd, then as agister, with sheep so numerous they had made him rich even by the wool standard of that county. Hervey would hold that he owed his life on a dozen occasions to that veteran’s generosity and tireless instruction — and never more so than at Waterloo, when Coates’s clever new carbine had been all that stood between him and a French lancer’s bullet. He had left the letter until this time so that he might reflect properly on the half-year he had passed in the wooden world.
My Dear Daniel,
I write this as the end of my passage to Hindoostan will soon be come. You will know, I trust, since my father will have told you, of my great good fortune. Of my affiancing I can say nothing but that it is more than I ever thought possible, and I pray daily that its consummation will not be too long delayed. Of my attachment to the Horse Guards, you may be sceptical, but I believe I may assure you that on that account you need have no anxiety, for I come here to do the bidding of the Duke of Wellington, about which more I am unable to say in this present but that the duties seem fitted to me. I do confess, though, to some unease, for, having pondered on my orders these past months, I feel the need of more intelligence than that to which I have been made privy. However, I can have nothing but the utmost faith in those who have despatched me hither (as they must have reposed their faith in me), and I am confident that when I attend on the offices of the Honourable East India Company in Calcutta I shall be given every facility and courtesy, and that all shall be well.
Six months at sea has seemed a great many more than six months in the saddle. No day has been the same as another, although the ship’s routine is so regular. Wind and weather may change with such rapidity — sometimes, it seems, almost perversely within but a few minutes — and hands must race aloft to set more sail or to shorten it. As a soldier, changes in the weather have rarely meant more to me than variations of discomfort. You, of all men, will remember talk of the campaigning season, but you, as I, have fought in the depths of winter often enough. But, on the whole, weather might mean putting on capes and oilskins, or taking them off, and the difference between a hot meal and a brew, or biscuit and a nip. But beyond that the weather troubled us nothing much. Once or twice in Spain we had posted extra sentries during storms at night, when hearing was made difficult and it was feared the enemy might pass through our vidette line undetected, but these occasions were exceptional. To a soldier, changes in the weather bring no habitual extra duties. But the captain of this ship, the Nisus, owns that that is the first purpose of a frigate’s crew, to trim the ship to the weather, and declares that fighting her is secondary. And I do so very much see what he has of mind, for without apt sailing, her gunnery is to no avail. Indeed, Dan, I have learned so much from this captain that might with profit be taken up on land by light dragoons. Captain Peto says that, in the navy, navigation precedes gunnery, and I can see how likewise it should be with light cavalry, for if one could but manoeuvre one’s force to advantage, and with surprise, there might scarce be need of a single shot. These past months have been the first time that I have had any leisurely opportunity to address affairs of strategy, and in Captain Peto I have found a most unexpected teacher.
Likewise have I greatly enjoyed the companionship of the wardroom, cramped though it is. To a man, I declare, the officers are fine fellows, and, would you believe, the lieutenant of Marines was my senior at Shrewsbury. I like him very much, though he is at times melancholy, though that is in large part accounted for by a most unhappy history. But I shall be most sad to part from him and all the Nisus’s crew.
I do not know, Dan, if you were ever tempted to go to sea, or, for that matter, were ever close to the press gang, but I must say that, this companionship apart, I have not seen anything that might recommend the Service to a free man in place of going for a soldier. There are the evident advantages, of course, a bed and a roof over the head for at least part of the day, regular if indifferent food, and, perhaps, a little prize-money, but beyond that it seems the meanest existence. Drink keeps order here, where in the Peninsula it was the cause of so much disorder. Here the officers control it with strict regulation and precise application, for no liquor could mean mutiny and too much could mean dissent. Nisus’s officers are what others call, charitably, enlightened. Captain Peto would not have it otherwise. He promotes selfrespect in the way that the Sixth does. The purser has told me that the ship’s victuals are better and more varied than on any other he knew of, and that it is the captain’s own pocket which causes it to be so. And so, too, with the crew’s uniform, for it is not provided at Admiralty’s expense, as ours is by the Horse Guards. Every man has a smart, round japanned hat with a gold-lace band with ‘Nisus’ painted on it in capital letters, a red silk neckerchief, white flannel waistcoat bound with blue piping, white canvas trousers and a blue jacket with three rows of gold buttons. The crew parades on Sunday mornings in their best dress, and after divine service come pickles and beer, and there is music from two black fiddlers whom the captain engaged in London at a not inconsiderable premium. Sometimes, too, there is much skylarking, as they call it. In the middle of November, when we crossed the Equator for the first time, King Neptune paid us his apparently customary visit. In truth, this king is always the longest-serving rating, and I and the other first-timers (one of the lieutenants and all the midshipmen) had to do homage to the briny deep, as they say, and with as much good humour as we could manage. This we did in a great bathing tub of seawater on the deck, and there was much skylarking which followed, until I was grateful that a sudden squall doused us all and sent the larboard watch aloft to shorten sail. And then there was Christmas, a day which I confess I found uncommonly difficult to bear, for my thoughts kept returning to Horningsham, where I have not seen Christmas in nine years. But the southern seas were heavy all that night and throughout the morning, and Captain Peto had his work cut out keeping the rig balanced while allowing the crew what they considered their rightful merrymaking. I do not envy him this command, Dan, as once I might, and I confess that he exceeds even Major Edmonds and Sir Edward Lankester in my estimation, for he sits on a powder keg in more than just the actual sense. Can you imagine, Dan, that a sentry should ever be posted by the headquarters of your old regiment or mine to guard the colonel from assault by his own dragoons?
I have dined with the captain on so many occasions during this voyage, for he has been kindness itself to me. Our table has become less rich of late, and preserves of all kinds are now our staple, as well as fish, of course, and, for one week in January, turtle. But the captain’s cellar has good wine still. I long for a plate of your best mutton, though!
I should tell you that Jessye has borne the voyage very tolerably well. Only once has she given me true anxiety, and that was lately in what they call, aptly, the ‘horse latitudes’, but it proved no more than a common chill. I cannot tell you (though perhaps you will know) how much I ache to have her feet on dry land again so that she might enjoy a run. She is the best of horses. I could not imagine what it might be like to take a blood on board, but I should not want to put her t
hrough the confines of a journey such as this for a long time to come. For the moment, though, I am only too relieved that she is well.
I have been able to learn a little of one of the native languages from the captain’s clerk, who has spent some time in Calcutta, and I have had much opportunity for reading and contemplation. Milton I have read copiously; and Wordsworth and Coleridge, for Henrietta gave me a little collection of the latter’s work as yet unpublished — you will not know, I think, that she meets and corresponds with some who are called the ‘romantic poets’ (how strange to think that Coleridge once shared our calling, albeit briefly!). I confess they give me intense pleasure. Milton is as ever improving, though. Do you recall how you used to say that ‘Paradise Lost’ was the best of gazetteers? Too much of its allegory eludes me still, but it is apt to conclude with it, for the passage describes our position and condition almost perfectly:
‘As when to them who sail
Beyond the Cape of Hope, and now are past
Mozambic, off at sea north-east winds blow
Sabean odours from the spicey shore
Of Araby the blest, with such delay
Well pleased they slack their course, and many a league
Cheered with the grateful smell old Ocean smiles.’ Well, Dan, I trust that so it shall be until our proper landfall, and ask, when at last you receive this, to pray for a safe passage for Henrietta by these same waters, or for my return by them in due course — whichever it is to be.
Your ever most loyal friend,
Matthew Hervey.
As evening came on, he took a turn on the quarterdeck. There was the lightest breeze, and in consequence a full set of sails, but it was quiet enough to hear the contented purling of the hens in their coop as they settled for the night. It was warm, though without the sultriness of the latitudes through which they had lately sailed, and there was a scent of land on the breeze, part dust, part spice. In any event, it seemed to bear a scent of mystery. Yet he could see no lights, and therefore no shore. It must be just beyond the horizon, and he wondered whether it were desert or rainforest. He knew nothing at first hand of the former, nor indeed of the latter. But he had read, and he had listened to others, and he knew which would be his choice if pressed to make one, for even the thought of what things would be in such a forest repelled him — what creatures crept, stalked or slithered unseen. He shuddered at the schoolroom visions. Nothing short of absolute necessity would ever compel him to enter the jungle. That he swore.
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