The Happy Return hh-7

by Cecil Scott Forester

  And throughout these considerations he continually found himself blushing again at the recollection of his abrupt dismissal by el Supremo. He felt that there were few captains in His Britannic Majesties service who would have submitted so meekly to such cavalier treatment.

  “But what the devil could I have done?” he asked himself pathetically.

  Without turning out his lantern he lay on his cot sweating in the still tropical night while his mind raced back and forth through past and future.

  And then the canvas screen flapped. A little breath of wind came stealing along the decks. His sailor’s instincts kept him informed of how the Lydia was swinging to her anchor. He felt the tiny tremor which ran through the ship as she brought up short to her anchor cable in a new direction. The land breeze had begun at last. The ship was cooler at once. Hornblower wriggled over on to his side, and slept.

  Chapter V

  Those doubts and fears which encompassed Hornblower while he was trying to go to sleep the night before vanished with the day. Hornblower felt a new strength running through his veins when he awoke. His mind was teeming with plans as he drank the coffee which Polwheal brought him at dawn, and for the first time for weeks he dispensed with his morning walk on the quarterdeck. He had decided as he stepped on the deck that at least he could fill the watercasks and restock with fuel, and his first orders sent parties of men hurriedly to the tackles to hoist out the launch and lower the quarter boats. Soon they were off for the shore, charged with the empty casks and manned by crews of excited chattering men; in the bows of each boat sat two marines in their red coats with their muskets loaded and bayonets fixed, and in their ears echoing their final orders from their sergeant, to the effect that if a single sailor succeeded in deserting while on shore every man among them would have his back well scratched with the cat.

  An hour later the launch came back under sail, deep laden with her watercasks full, and while the casks were being swayed out of her and lowered into the hold Mr. Midshipman Hooker came running up to Hornblower and touched his hat.

  “The beef cattle are coming down to the shore, sir,” he said.

  Hornblower had to struggle hard to keep his face immobile and to receive the news as if he expected it.

  “How many?” he snapped; it seemed a useful question to ask in order to waste time, but the answer was more surprising still.

  “Hundreds, sir. There’s a Dago in charge with a lot to say, but there’s no one ashore who can speak his lingo.”

  “Send him out to me when you go ashore again,” said Hornblower.

  Hornblower spent the interval granted him in making up his mind. He hailed the lookout at the main royal masthead to ensure that a careful watch was kept to seaward. On the one hand there was the chance that the Natividad might come sailing in from the Pacific, in which case the Lydia, caught with half her crew ashore, would have no time to clear from the bay and would have to fight in confined waters and with the odds necessarily against her. On the other hand there was the opportunity of filling up completely with stores and regaining entire independence of the shore. From what Hornblower had seen of conditions prevailing there he judged that to postpone regaining that independence would be dangerous in the extreme; at any moment Don Julian Alvarado’s rebellion might come to a hurried and bloody ending.

  It was Hernandez who came out to him, in the same boat with the two tiny lateen sails in which Hornblower had been ferried across last night. They exchanged salutes on the quarterdeck.

  “There are four hundred cattle awaiting your orders, Captain,” said Hernandez. “My men are driving them down to the beach.”

  “Good,” said Hornblower, his mind still not made up.

  “I am afraid it will take longer to assemble the pigs,” went on Hernandez. “My men are sweeping the country for them, but pigs are slow animals to drive.”

  “Yes,” said Hornblower.

  “With regard to the salt, it will not be easy to collect the hundred quintals you asked for. Until our lord declared his divinity salt was a royal monopoly and scarce in consequence, but I have sent a party to the salt pans at Jiquilisio and hope to find sufficient there.”

  “Yes,” said Hornblower. He remembered demanding salt, but he had no distinct recollection of the quantity he had asked for.

  “The women are out collecting the lemons, oranges, and limes which you ordered,” continued Hernandez, “but I am afraid it will be two days before we shall have them all ready.”

  “Hah’m,” said Hornblower.

  “The sugar is ready at el Supremo’s mill, however. And with regard to the tobacco, señor, there is a good deal in store. What special kind do you prefer? For some time we have only been rolling cigars for our own consumption, but I can set the women to work again after the fruit has been collected.”

  “Hah’m,” said Hornblower again, suppressing just in time the cry of delight which nearly escaped him involuntarily after the mention of cigars—it was three months since he had last smoked one. Virginia pigtail twist was what his men used, but that, of course, would be unobtainable on this coast. However, he had often seen British sailors chewing and enjoying the half-cured native leaf.

  “Send as many cigars as will be convenient to you,” he said, lightly. “For the rest, it is of no importance what you send.”

  Hernandez bowed.

  “Thank you, señor. The coffee, the vegetables, and the eggs will of course be easy to supply. But with regard to the bread—”

  “Well?”

  Hernandez was obviously nervous about what he was going to say nest.

  “Your excellency will forgive me, but in this country we have only maize. There is a little wheat grown in the tierra templeda, but it rests still in the hands of the unenlightened. Would maize flour suffice?”

  Hernandez’ face was working with anxiety as he gazed at Hornblower. It was only then that Hornblower realised than Hernandez was in terror of his life, and that el Supremo’s lighthearted endorsement of the requisitions he had made was far more potent than any stamped and sealed order addressed to a Spanish official.

  “This is very serious,” said Hornblower sternly. “My English sailors are unaccustomed to maize flour.”

  “I know that,” said Hernandez, his interlocked fingers working galvanically. “But I assure your excellency that I can only obtain wheat flour for them by fighting for it, and I know that el Supremo would not like me to fight at present. El Supremo will be angry.”

  Hornblower remembered the abject fright with which Hernandez had regarded el Supremo the night before. The man was in terror lest he should be denounced as having failed to execute his orders. And then, suddenly, Hornblower remembered something he had unaccountably forgotten to ask for—something more important, if possible, than tobacco or fruit, and certainly far more important than the difference between maize flour and wheat.

  “Very well,” he said. “I will agree to use maize flour. But in consequence of this deficiency there is something else I must ask for.”

  “Certainly, Captain. I will supply whatever you ask. You have only to name it.”

  “I want drink for my men,” said Hornblower. “Is there wine to be had here? Ardent spirits?”

  “There is a little wine, your excellency. Only a little. The people on this coast drink an ardent spirit with which you are perhaps not acquainted. It is good when of good quality. It is distilled from the waste of the sugar mills, from the treacle, your excellency.”

  “Rum, by God!” exclaimed Hornblower.

  “Yes, señor, rum. Would that be of any use to your excellency?”

  “I shall accept it in lieu of anything better,” said Hornblower sternly.

  His heart was leaping with joy. It would appear like a miracle to his officers that he should conjure rum and tobacco from this volcano-riddled coast.

  “Thank you, Captain. And shall we begin to slaughter the cattle now?”

  That was the question on which Hornblower had been postp
oning a decision ever since he had heard about the arrival of the cattle on the beach. Hornblower looked up at the lookout at the masthead. He tested the strength of the wind. He gazed out to sea before he took the plunge.

  “Very well,” he said at length. “We will start now.”

  The sea breeze was not nearly as strong as yesterday, and the weaker the breeze the less chance there was of the Natividad coming in to interrupt the Lydia’s revictualling. And as events turned out the Lydia completed the work undisturbed. For two days the boats plied back and forth between the beach and the ship. They came back piled high with bloody joints of meat; the sand of the shore ran red with the blood of the slaughtered animals, while the halftame vultures gorged themselves into a coma in the piled offal. On board the ship the purser and his crew toiled like slaves in the roasting heat, cramming the brine barrels with the meat and tugging them into position in the storerooms. The cooper and his mates worked for two days with hardly a break, making and repairing casks. Sacks of flour, ankers of rum, bales of tobacco—the hands at the tackles sweated as they swayed these up from the boats. The Lydia was gorging herself full.

  So obvious were the good intentions of those on shore that Hornblower was able to give orders that the cargo consigned to this coast should be released, and so the boats which bore the meat and flour to the ship returned laden with cases of muskets and kegs of powder and shot. Hornblower had his gig hoisted out, and was rowed periodically round his ship inspecting her trim, in the anticipation lest at any moment he would have to hoist up his anchor and beat out to sea to fight the Natividad.

  The work proceeded by night as well as by day; in fifteen years at sea—every one a year of warfare—Hornblower had seen many opportunities lost as a result of some trivial lack of energy, some omission to drive a crew into exerting the last ounce of its strength. He had lost opportunities himself like that, for that matter. He still felt a revulsion of shame at the recollection of how he had missed that privateer off the Azores, for example. For fear of standing condemned again in his own eyes he drove his men until they dropped.

  There was no time for enjoyment of the pleasures of land at the moment. The shore party did indeed cook their rations before a huge bonfire, and revel in roast fresh meat after seven months of boiled salt meat, but with the characteristic contrariness of British sailors they turned with revulsion from the delicious fruit which was offered them—bananas and pawpaws, pineapples and guavas, and considered themselves the victims of sharp practice because these were substituted for their regulation ration of boiled dried peas.

  And then, on the second evening, as Hornblower walked the quarterdeck enjoying the sea breeze at its freshest, and rebelling in the thought that he was free of the land if necessary for another six months, and looking forward with the sheerest joy to his imminent dinner of roast fowl, there came the sound of firing from the beach A scattering volley at first; a few dropping shots, and then another ragged volley. Hornblower forgot his dinner, his feeling of wellbeing, everything. Trouble on the mainland, of whatever sort, meant that the success of his mission was being imperilled. In hot haste he called for his gig, and he was pulled to the shore by a crew who made the stout oars bend as they flung their weight on the handles in response to the profane urgings of Coxswain Brown.

  The scene that greeted his eyes as he rounded the point excited his worst apprehensions. The whole landing party was clubbed together on the beach; the dozen marines were in line on one flank, reloading their muskets; the sailors were bunched beside them armed with whatever weapons had come to their hands. In a wide semicircle round them were the inhabitants, brandishing swords and muskets, and in the no man’s land between the two parties lay one or two corpses. At the water’s edge, behind the sailors, lay one of the hands with two of his mates bending over him. He was propped up on his elbow and he was vomiting floods of blood.

  Hornblower sprang into the shallows; he paid no attention to the wounded sailor, but pushed his way through the mob before him. As he emerged into the open there came a puff of smoke from the half circle up the beach and a bullet sang over his head. He paid no attention to that either.

  “Put those muskets down!” he roared at the marines, and he turned towards the gesticulating inhabitants and held up his hand palm forward, in the universal and instinctive gesture of peace. There was no room in his mind for thought of personal danger, so hot was he with anger at the thought that someone was botching his chance of success.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” he demanded.

  Galbraith was in command. He was about to speak, but he was given no opportunity. One of the sailors who had been attending to the dying man came pushing forward, discipline forgotten in the blind whirl of sentimental indignation which Hornblower instantly recognized as characteristic of the lower deck—and which he despised and distrusted.

  “They been torturing a pore devil up there, sir,” he said. “Lashed him to a spar and left him to die of thirst.”

  “Silence!” bellowed Hornblower, beside himself with rage not merely at this breach of discipline but at realising the difficulties ahead of him. “Mr. Galbraith!”

  Galbraith was slow of speech and of mind.

  “I don’t know how it started, sir,” he began; although he had been at sea since childhood there was still a trace of Scotch in his accent. “A party came running back from up there. They had Smith with them, wounded.”

  “He’s dead now,” put in a voice.

  “Silence!” roared Hornblower again.

  “I saw they were going to attack us, and so I had the marines fire, sir,” went on Galbraith.

  “I’ll speak to you later, Mr. Galbraith,” snapped Hornblower. “You, Jenkins. And you, Poole. What were you doing up there?”

  “Well, sir, it was like this, sir—” began Jenkins. He was sheepish and crestfallen now. Hornblower had pricked the bubble of his indignation and he was being publicly convicted of a breach of orders.

  “You knew the order that no one was to go beyond the creek?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Tomorrow morning I’ll show you what orders mean, and you, too, Poole. There’s the sergeant of marines?”

  “Here, sir.”

  “A fine guard you keep, sergeant, to let these men get by. What were your pickets about?”

  The sergeant could say nothing; he could only stand rigidly at attention in face of this incontrovertible proof of his being found wanting.

  “Mr. Simmonds will speak to you in the morning,” went on Hornblower. “I don’t expect you’ll keep those stripes on your arm much longer.”

  Hornblower glowered round at the landing party. His fierce rebukes had them all cowed and subservient now, and he felt his anger ebbing away as he realised that he had managed this without having to say a word in extenuation of SpanishAmerican justice. He turned to greet Hernandez, who had come riding up as fast as his little horse would gallop, reining up on his haunches in a shower of sand.

  “Did el Supreme give orders for this attack on my men?” asked Hornblower, getting in the first broadside.

  “No, Captain,” said Hernandez, and Hornblower rejoiced to see how he winced at the mention of el Supremo’s name.

  “I think he will not be too pleased with you when I tell him about this,” went on Hornblower.

  “Your men tried to release a man condemned to death,” said Hernandez, half sullenly, half apologetically. He was clearly not too sure of his ground, and was nervous about what would be Alvarado’s attitude towards this incident. Hornblower kept a rasp in his voice as he went on speaking. None of the Englishmen round him, as far as he knew, could speak Spanish, but he was anxious for his crew to believe (now that discipline was restored) that he was wholeheartedly on their side.

  “That does not permit your men to kill mine,” he said.

  “They are angry and discontented,” said Hernandez. “The whole country has been swept to find food for you. The man your men tried to save was condemned for
driving his pigs into the bush to keep them from being taken and given to you.”

  Hernandez made this last speech reproachfully and with a hint of anger; Hornblower was anxious to be conciliatory if that were possible without exasperating his own men. Hornblower had in mind the plan of leading Hernandez out of earshot of the Englishmen, and then softening his tone, but before he could act upon it his attention was caught by the sight of a horseman galloping down the beach at full speed, waving his wide straw hat. Every eye turned towards this new arrival—a peon of the ordinary Indian type. Breathlessly he announced his news.

  “A ship—a ship coming!”

  He was so excited that he lapsed into the Indian speech, and Hornblower could not understand his further explanations. Hernandez had to interpret for him.

  “This man has been keeping watch on the top of the mountain up there,” he said. “He says that from there he could see the sails of a ship coming towards the bay.”

  He addressed several more questions rapidly, one after the other, to the lookout, and was answered with nods and gesticulations and a torrent of Indian speech.

  “He says,” went on Hernandez, “that he has often seen the Natividad before, and he is sure this is the same ship, and she is undoubtedly coming in here.”

  “How far off is she?” asked Hornblower and Hernandez translated the answer.

  “A long way, seven leagues or more,” he said. “She is coming from the south eastward—from Panama.”

  Hornblower pulled at his chin, deep in thought.

  “She’ll carry the sea breeze down with her until sunset,” he muttered to himself, and glanced up at the sun. “That will be another hour. An hour after that she’ll get the land breeze. She’ll be able to hold her course, close hauled. She could be here in the bay by midnight.”

  A stream of plans and ideas was flooding into his mind. Against the possibility of the ship’s arrival in the dark must be balanced what he knew of the Spanish habit at sea of snugging down for the night, and of attempting no piece of seamanship at all complicated save under the best possible conditions. He wished he knew more about the Spanish captain.