The Thirteen Gun Salute

by Patrick O'Brian

  'Huzzay! Hear him, hear him!' cried the suite, a confusion of voices in which the sailors joined with a decent zeal.

  'What I drink to,' cried Loder, standing up and leering at Fox, 'is to the Bath. The Most Honourable Order of the Bath.'

  'Huzzay, huzzay! Hear him! Bottoms up!' cried the others, and while Fox looked down in smiling modesty they drank the sentiment.

  They huzzayed their way on to knighthood with three times three; and after that they drank 'Baronetcy, a governorship and five thousand a year on the Civil List.'

  Jack looked at Elliott, saw that he was pallid-drunk, caught Richardson's eye instead, rose and said, 'You will excuse us now, Excellency. We must go and prepare your way. Mr Richardson will accompany you to the barge in forty-five minutes. Mr Welby, the new pinnace will come for you and your men in half an hour.'

  He took the bewildered Elliott by the arm and guided him out. Seymour, at the landing-place, reported the departure of the big proa and some smaller boats full of servants. Jack told him what to expect, suggested that Bonden should spread sailcloth over the sternsheet cushions, and walked Elliott off round the crater-rim, hailing the ship from his usual point.

  'Mr Fielding,' he said, looking into the crowded waist, 'are all the mission's servants aboard?'

  'All aboard, sir; and the last baggage-boat will shove off in a minute or so.'

  'I am delighted to hear it. The new pinnace for the Marines right away, if you please; then I believe we may unmoor and ride at single anchor - indeed, creep to a kedge, with such quiet water and so little breeze. The envoy and his people should leave the hard in half an hour. Salute, of course, and everything man-of-war fashion. Pray let me know when they put off. I hope to sail with the first of the ebb. I trust to God the Doctor has not wandered off looking for centipedes,' he added in a lower voice, going below.

  He took off his coat and lay on his cot. Killick peered at him through a crack in the door and shook his head sympathetically. The Diane was unmooring, and her captain listened to the familiar sequence, the click of the capstan-pawls, the cries of 'Light along the messenger, there', 'Heave and in sight' and the rest, but his mind was elsewhere. In most men, in perhaps all he had ever known, victory made them benign, expansive, affable, generous. Fox had been arrogant and hostile. He had also betrayed a meanness that must always have been subjacent, since its appearance caused no surprise: there had been and there would be no feast for the young gentlemen, the warrant officers, the foremast hands, no drinks, no address, telling the good news and acknowledging their part in the successful voyage. To be sure, it was not a very pretty victory: it scarcely called for the ringing of church bells and bonfires in the street. He regretted his ale; he regretted his port still more; yet even so he dropped off for some minutes and when Reade came with 'Mr Fielding's compliments and duty, sir, and the barge has put off: he says the breeze and high water are all you could wish,' he felt surprisingly fresh.

  'Thank you, Mr Reade,' he said. 'I shall be on deck in ten minutes or so.'

  He let himself lie in that delicious state of complete relaxation for a while, rose up, plunged his face into water, squared his neckcloth and hair, and put on his coat. Killick instantly appeared, brushed him, arranged his clubbed pigtail and its bow, spread his best epaulettes wide and even.

  On deck he saw that the breeze was indeed all he had wished: it was blowing right across the anchorage, and he had but to back his mizen topsail, make a sternboard with plenty of helm, fill, pluck up the kedge - Fielding had it almost atrip - and let the breeze and the turning tide carry the ship out while it was being run up.

  He also saw that everything was exactly as it should be: yards squared by the lifts and braces, side-boys in white gloves, man-ropes just so, Marines all present, pipe-clayed and correct, officers and young gentlemen square-rigged, Mr Crown and his mates with their silver calls already poised, Mr White with his poker, the glow visible in the long evening shadow of the starboard bulwark.

  He gauged the distance from the advancing barge still as rowdy as a boatful of Cockneys going down to Greenwich: nearer, nearer. 'Very well, Mr White,' he said, and the first gun spoke out, followed by the remaining twelve. The barge hooked on; the envoy came aboard followed by his suite looking squalid, frowsty, crapulous, old, and unclean, their coats buttoned to the wrong buttonholes, their hair astray and at least one flap or codpiece blowing in the wind. They were received with rigid, exact formality; and abruptly sobered, they fingered their clothes; Fox looked extremely displeased; the suite glanced uneasily at one another, and they all hurried below.

  'Where is the Doctor?' asked Jack.

  'He came aboard with the Marines,' said Fielding, 'carrying hairy thing. He is in the gunroom, I am afraid.'

  'Lord, what a relief,' murmured Jack, and in a strong official voice 'Let us proceed to sea.

  As he spoke the Prabang fortress began to boom out a farewell salute; the Diane answered it, and they were still firing, gun for gun, with the smoke drifting away to leeward, as she passed through the channel into the open sea.

  'Mr Warren,' said Jack, 'the course will be north-east by east a half east; and that, I trust, will bring us to our rendezvous with the Surprise.'

  Chapter 9

  The Diane had not run off two degrees of longitude before the old pattern of sea-going life was as firmly settled as if it had never been interrupted. It is true that she ran them off slowly, rarely exceeding five knots and never logging more than a hundred miles from noon to noon. This was not because she did not try, not because she was too early for her rendezvous: far from it: at present, with the balmy air coming in one point abaft the beam, she had a magnificent display of canvas spread, with studdingsails aloft and alow, royals and even skyscrapers, and a variety of rarely-set objects on the stays; yet the balmy air was so languid that she only just had steerage-way.

  Jack Aubrey, having done all that could be done, paced fore and aft on the windward side of the quarterdeck according to his habit before dinner with his mind perfectly at ease on that point if not on all others; the greater part of a lifetime afloat had convinced him that railing at the weather only spoilt one's appetite, which was always a pity and which would be even more of a pity today, when he and Stephen, alone for once, were to eat some particularly fine fish, bought from a proa that morning.

  'What is it that you wish me to see?' asked Stephen, coming up the companion-ladder with his usual precautions, although there was scarcely any movement at all under his feet.

  'You cannot see it from here, because of the awning,' said Jack. 'But come with me along the weather gangway, and I will show you something that perhaps you have never seen before.' They went forward, and some of the hands in the waist nodded and smiled significantly. The Doctor was going to be stunned, amazed, taken aback all standing. 'There,' said Jack, pointing upwards. 'Abaft the topsailyard, right up against the trestletrees. Have you ever seen that before?'

  'The thing like a tablecloth pulled out at one corner?' asked Stephen, who could be sadly disappointing on occasion.

  'Well, it is a mizen topgallant staysail,' said Jack, who had expected little more. 'You can tell your grandchildren you saw one.' They walked back to the quarterdeck and resumed the pacing; Jack accommodating his long-legged stride to keep in step.

  'As I understand it,' said Stephen, 'we keep our appointment with Tom Pullings off the False Natunas and then drop Fox in Java to take an Indiaman home; but is it not a strangely roundabout way, as if one should go from Dublin to Cork by way of Athlone?'

  'Yes. His Excellency was good enough to point that out to me yesterday - perhaps he showed you the same map- - and I will make the same reply to you as I did to him: as the prevailing winds lie at this season, it is quicker to go back to Batavia by the False Natunas than by the Banka Strait. And then' (lowering his voice) 'which is more to my purpose though not perhaps to his, there is our rendezvous.'

  'Well, I am content. There is, I presume, a convenient harbour in the
False Natunas? And, by the way, why False? Are the inhabitants unusually treacherous?'

  'Oh no. There is no harbour. That is only a sea-going expression, a hyperbole, as I believe you would say: they are only a parcel of uninhabited rocks, like the Dry Salvages. It is understood that we cruise for a week in their latitude or in fact a trifle south of it. Their longitude has not yet been fixed with any certainty, but as you know we can be reasonably sure of our latitude; and so we cruise along it, a glass at every masthead, and at night we may lie to, with a lantern in each top. As for their being false...

  The ship's bell stopped him in mid-stride, mid-sentence, and together they hurried below, their mouths watering steadily.

  '.... as for their being false,' said Jack, after a long and busy pause, 'that arose when the Dutch were- first making their conquests in these parts. The master of some ship bound for the real Natunas but who was sadly out in his dead-reckoning, raised them one foggy morning and cried, "I have made the perfect landfall! Ain't I the cheese!" The Dutch cheese of course, ha, ha, ha! But, however, when the mist lifted they proved to be these mere God-damned barren rocks, looming large in the thick weather; so he put them down in his chart as the False Natunas. The South China Sea is full of places like that, imperfectly fixed, mistaken for one another; and vast areas outside the Indiamen's track are not charted at all - just hearsay of islands, reefs and shoals picked up from proas or junks that can only give the vaguest of bearings for the places they are talking about.'

  'I am sure you are right. Yet it does seem strange to a landsman. These are populated waters: at this very moment I can see....' He was looking out of the stern-window, his eyes narrowed against the brilliance of the day.'.... six, no, seven vessels: two junks, one large proa, four small things with outriggers paddling fast, whether fishermen or pirates on a modest scale I cannot tell.'

  'It is just as occasion offers, I believe. In the South China Sea, by all accounts, the rule is to take anything you can overcome, and avoid or trade with anything you cannot.'

  'I am afraid it was much the same with us until very recently. I have read strange accounts of Maelsechlinn the Wise, son of Eric and he the kindest of men by land. But these are populated waters, as I was saying, and the Chinese who sail them belong to a very highly civilized, literate community, while the Malays are by no means ignorant of letters, as we know very well. Why, then, do we swim in this cloud of uncertainty?'

  'Because junks never draw more than a few feet of water - they are flat bottomed - and proas even less. Whereas a ship the line, a seventy-four, draws 22 or 23; even our light raught aft is close on fourteen foot, and with stores and all very much more: I am never happy unless we have at least four fathoms under our keel even in smooth weather. A shoal that a junk would scarcely notice, much less mark down, might rip our bottom out as easy as kiss my hand. These are the very words I shall use when I explain sailing in uncharted waters elsewhere, after dinner,' he said with the significant look that often passed between them in this sounding-box of a divided cabin.

  Stephen nodded, put his perfectly clean skeleton on to the dish in the middle, took another Java sea-perch, looked at Jack's unseemly heap of bones, and observed, 'You have to be a Papist to eat fish, I find. Pray tell me how you arrange private meetings at sea, half the world apart.'

  'They cannot be at all precise, at such a distance, but it is remarkable how often they answer. The usual thing is to give three or four cruising-grounds, always if possible near some island where a message can be left after the agreed cruising-time is over; and then if circumstances call for it we set a final rendezvous where one or the other can lie at anchor until a stated time. Ours is Sydney Cove.'

  'So if we should not meet this time, we have another chance?'

  'I will not deceive you, Stephen: we do have another chance. In fact we have three other chances - a week each side of the next two full moons, and then of course in New South Wales.'

  'What joy. I long to see the Surprise and all our friends again- I long to tell Martin of my dear ape, my tarsier, that rarest of primates, my enormous beetle, whole unknown genera of orchids. What is amiss, brother? Have you a flogging to deal with?'

  'No. Just a disagreeable little matter to clear up.

  'Killick and Ahmed came in, the one bearing a roly-poly pudding and the other a sauce-boat of custard. 'Killick,' said Jack, 'just jump round to the other side, will you: my compliments, and will His Excellency be at leisure for a few minutes in half an hour.'

  Fox had never been liked in the Diane, but until Batavia he had given little active offence, while his secretary, Edwards, was positively esteemed, in a quiet way, by both officers and foremast hands. But since the envoy's behaviour at Prabang, his ignoring of the people belonging to the ship that had taken him there, his total indifference to their pleasure at the signing of the treaty, his treatment of the Marine guard - 'airs and graces and all turn out to present arms every time the bugger puts his nose out of doors and not so much as a half bottle to drink the King's health even at the end when him and his friends was as pissed as Davy's sow' - and of the seamen who rowed him to and fro, this absence of liking had grown into strong reprobation. His suite, of course, and their servants, had been unpopular from the beginning; but they were only passengers, and of passengers, landsmen at that, nothing could be expected. The present dislike of Fox was on another plane altogether; it was personal, not directed against a class, and it was so marked that a man far more insensitive than Fox must be conscious of it.

  'You may say what you please,' said Jack, 'but I have eaten roly-poly within the Arctic Circle, damned nearly within the Antarctic, and now under the equator, and I am of opinion that it has not its equal.'

  'Except, perhaps, for spotted dog.'

  'Ah, you have a point there, Stephen.'

  They drank their coffee and presently Jack said, 'I hope to be back in five minutes.'

  He was not back in five minutes, and Stephen sat there by the pot - how the coffee retained its heat in this climate! - reflecting. He knew that last night some one of the mission had mounted to the dark quarterdeck, had approached Warren, the officer of the watch, just as the ship was wearing on to the larboard tack, had been intercepted by Reade, had cuffed the boy aside and had told Warren that he should make more sail, that the Captain would certainly wish it for the King's service, that this miserable pace was dawdling away precious time. But he hoped that Jack would not take the matter up before Fox had to some extent recovered from his present state of over-excitement: a foolish hope, perhaps, since a thing of this kind had to be taken up at once to prevent any recurrence (the offence in naval eyes was very grave) and since there were no signs of Fox's restless enthusiasm declining at all.

  As he listened to the indistinct but certainly angry voices on the other side of the thin bulkhead he reflected upon a whole variety of things, his mind relapsing into a contemplative after-dinner state in which it swam between dreaming and waking; and at one point he found himself recalling an eating house by the Four Courts - an extraordinarily clear detailed visual image of the place. He was sitting at the far end and he saw a man open the door, look at the long, crowded room (it was term-time), and, after a moment's hesitation, walk in with exaggerated nonchalance, his hands in his pockets and his hat on his head, taking one of the few vacant places not far from Stephen. There was nothing in any way remarkable about him except that he was ill at ease; he felt conspicuous, regretted it, and made himself more conspicuous still by sprawling in his chair with his legs stretched out. But soon it became apparent that he was an ill-conditioned fellow as well. On being shown the bill of fare he questioned the waiter about every other item: 'Was the mutton well hung? Had the parsnips no wood in their middle? Was it bullock's beef or cow's?' and eventually he called for colcannon, a cut off the sirloin and half a pint of sherry. By this time he was aware that he was an object of dislike and he ate his meal with deliberate coarseness, hunched there with his elbows on the table, fairly exud
ing hostility and defiance.

  'If this is my inner man providing me with an analogy,' he said, his mind moving into the present, 'I cannot congratulate him at all. He has left out the essential factor of triumph and intense excitement. The only valid aspect is the man's suspecting that he is unpopular and then going to great pains to make certain he is loathed.'

  Stephen had never liked or wholly trusted Fox, but until the actual signature of the treaty they had got along smoothly enough. During the negotiations, in which Stephen had enabled the envoy to outflank Duplessis again and again and in which, as Fox knew very well, he had acquired the support of a majority in the council, without which the execution of Abdul would have had no diplomatic effect, they had worked well together; and he had been touchingly grateful for Stephen's help in the matter of Ledward and Wray. But a kind of lasting drunkenness or exaltation had come upon him at the ceremony of signature, the consummation of their voyage; and since that moment he had treated Stephen very shabbily indeed.

  It was not only his inattention to his guest at that discreditable meal: it was a quantity of minor slights and an insistence upon his sole unaided personal success. And although even in the most unreserved flow of indiscretion during that interminable dinner Fox had not betrayed Stephen's real function, it was no very ungenerous reflection to suppose that this was because he meant to arrogate all the merit to himself. What would Raffles make of that? What would Raffles make of the present Fox? What would Blaine have to say to him?

  It was altogether a very strange state of affairs. Here was a man of real abilities, one who had despised the Old Buggers - had apologized for them - but who was now revelling in their company and their by no means delicate flattery. It was known that the governorship of Bencoolen would soon be vacant, and they all asserted that Fox must be the obvious choice. This pleased him, but it was a knighthood that Fox really longed for; he was convinced, or very nearly convinced, that his treaty would earn him one, and nothing could exceed his desire to get back to England for it as soon as conceivably possible. He even contemplated the extremely arduous overland journey.