Metcalfe walked confidently to the rail, set the musket against his shoulder and raised the barrel. The bottle swung with the wind of the ball’s passage and the officers and marines watching let out a hoot of triumph, for he had missed. They were all still laughing at Metcalfe’s pride preceding his humiliation, when a second discharge followed. The bottle shattered, its jagged neck left at the boom-end.
Even as a suspicion crossed Drinkwater’s mind, the certainty of it had been realized by Moncrieff who was already striding across the deck.
‘Let me see that fire-lock,’ he cried.
‘It ain’t a Brown Bess, for sure,’ Vansittart opined stridently, moving forward with the others to discover by what malpractice Metcalfe had cheated them.
The speed and accuracy of the second shot had raised all their suspicions. Metcalfe was surrounded by the officers and Drinkwater heard the accusations rain on the first lieutenant.
‘It’s a damned rifle . . .’
‘That’s a Chaumette breech, damn it . . .’
‘Let me see . . . the devil! ’Tis a Ferguson rifle! Where the deuce d’you get this, Metcalfe?’ Metcalfe had surrendered the gleaming weapon to their scrutiny and Moncrieff now held it. The question silenced their mild and curious outrage and they stood in a circle, staring at the first lieutenant. A feeling of premonition crept over Drinkwater as he watched these antics, marking the distastefully smug expression on the face of his second-incommand.
He heard Metcalfe utter the words ‘a gift from Captain Warburton’, and the mention of his predecessor confirmed his hunch.
‘Sergeant Hudson,’ he called, suddenly bestirring himself, and the crack of his voice stilled the curious officers examining the rifle.
‘Sah!’ Hudson was ramrod stiff, his body an admonition to the levity on the quarterdeck.
‘There are a dozen or more bottles yet to be shivered. Another round for each of your men and try again.’
‘Yes, sah!’
Recalled to his duty, Moncrieff gave back the rifle and bustled to muster his men again. The officers broke up, some still admiring the Ferguson rifle in Metcalfe’s hands, others waiting and watching the marines, others wearied of the sport now the first bottle had been dispatched.
Drinkwater went below. As he reached his cabin door he growled to the marine sentry, ‘Pass the word for my servant.’ A minute later Mullender appeared.
‘Mullender, you recollect when we were in the Pacific I had a gun, a rifle . . .’
Patiently Drinkwater awaited the slow workings of Mullender’s memory.
‘Aye, sir, I do. You fetched it back one day from the Californio shore,’ Mullender said slowly, his brow furrowed with concentration.
‘Yes, exactly. What did we do with it?’
‘Well, sir,’ Mullender began, stepping forward and wiping his hands on his apron, ‘we stowed it in the settee locker, but . . .’
Drinkwater had the squabbed cushion beneath the stern windows off in a trice, long before Mullender could complete his explanation.
‘But after you left the ship, sir, in a hurry like you did, sir, and we heard you wasn’t to be coming back, sir, well, that’s what we was told at the time and then Captain Warburton and his own man came and I was sent forward, sir . . .’
The stern locker was empty, at least of the oiled cloth package Drinkwater now clearly remembered laying there for safe-keeping. He had forgotten all about the rifle, assuming it was lost along with his journals and the polar bearskin he had left in Mr Quilhampton’s safe-keeping. When Quilhampton had lost the gun-brig Tracker . . .
Above their heads the bangs of the marines’ discharges were suddenly followed by a cheer: a second bottle had been hit!
‘It was in here, wasn’t it, Mullender? You don’t recall it being removed when Mr Quilhampton took my personal effects ashore?’
‘No, sir,’ Mullender hung his head miserably. ‘I forgot it, sir, when I packed, like, ’twas in such a hurry and Mr Quilhampton was bursting to get ashore . . .’
‘It doesn’t matter, Mullender,’ Drinkwater said, leaving the puzzled steward staring after him as he took the quarterdeck ladder two at a time. Metcalfe was still on deck, the Ferguson rifle held in the crook of his arm. Drinkwater crossed the deck and confronted Metcalfe.
‘That was a capital shot, Mr Metcalfe,’ Drinkwater said, ‘may I see your gun?’
He knew instantly he had seen the rifle before. It had once belonged to a bearded American mountain-man, a man who spent his life wandering across the vast spaces of North America and who had been shot dead at Drinkwater’s feet. ‘Captain Mack’, he had been called, and the long-barrelled Ferguson rifle had been in his possession since he had captured it from a British officer at the Battle of King’s Mountain when the gun’s inventor himself suffered defeat at the hands of the American rebels. Odd how things turned out.
‘If you turn the trigger guard . . .’
‘Yes, I know.’ Drinkwater dropped the guard, exposing the breech opening that facilitated the quick loading which had so impressed them all.
‘The rifling makes the shot fly true,’ Metcalfe tried again, and again Drinkwater quietly said, ‘Yes, I know.’ In addition to the rifle, Captain Mack had left half a dozen gold nuggets and with the proceeds of their sale, Captain Drinkwater had purchased Gantley Hall.*
‘I did not know you were so good a shot, Mr Metcalfe,’ he said, handing back the rifle. ‘It’s a fine piece.’
Metcalfe grinned complacently. ‘That is why Captain Warburton kindly presented me with it,’ he explained.
‘And where did Captain Warburton obtain it?’ Drinkwater asked.
‘I believe he inherited it, sir.’
‘Did he now?’
Above their heads there was the sound of shattering glass and a thin cheer went up from the marines still at their target practice.
*See In Distant Waters.
CHAPTER 4
August 1811
The Paineite
The last of the daylight faded in the west; ahead the sky seemed pallid with foreboding, Drinkwater thought, drawing his cloak the tighter around him and shifting his attention to the upper yards. There would be a strengthening of the wind before morning.
‘Very well, Mr Gordon. You may shorten down. Clew up the main course and let us have the t’garn’s off her!’
‘Main clew garnets, there! Look lively! Stand by to raise main tacks and sheets!’
A bank of clouds gathered darkly against the vanishing day. The twilight of sunset was always the most poignant hour of the seaman’s day and, just as the small hours of the middle watch endowed trivial matters with a terrible gravity, this crepuscular hour invested thoughts with sombre shadows.
What was it, Drinkwater thought, that so troubled him? Did this daily marking of time punctuate the passage of his life? Or was it a gale he feared, rolling towards them from the vicinity of Cape Hatteras, the disaffected mood of his officers, or the poor quality of his crew? Once he would have striven with every fibre of his being to lick them into shape; this evening he felt the task beyond him. He was tired, too old for this young man’s game. He should not have come back to sea, but quietly farmed his hundred acres, visited the Woodbridge horse fair and sought a pocket borough.
Damn it, he was not old! He could ascend the rigging with the agility of the topmen now running up to douse the flogging topgallants as they thundered in their buntlines. There were men up there far older than himself!
No, he was disturbed by the vague shadow of a new war, for he sensed it as inevitable as much as it was incomprehensible. No matter the pros and contras of diplomacy adduced by Vansittart; no matter the crude claims and counter-claims advanced by his fire-brand officers, the fact of a war between the United States and Great Britain being in the interests of neither country was obvious. Only Napoleon Bonaparte could profit. Much might be laid at the door of his agents in fomenting the suspicion existing between London and Washington.
Despite
these considerations, it piqued him to think he had been placed back in command of Patrician precisely because he was ageing. The Ministry wanted no hothead frigate captain with only a score of summers to his credit hanging off the Virginia capes, landing a diplomatic messenger on the one hand and impressing American seamen from American ships on the other. He ought to be flattered, he thought, an ironic and private smile twitching the corners of his mouth. He detested the new breed of sea-officer nurtured on victory and assumptions of invincibility. They had never tasted the bitterness of bloody defeat any more than many of them had participated in a victorious action. This current presumption of superiority was a dangerous delusion, but he had heard it expressed enough while he had been ashore in Plymouth. Thank heaven his own officers seemed relatively free of it.
Shortened down, the frigate rode easier, still standing doggedly to windward. Eight bells struck as the watch changed, and in the gathering darkness Drinkwater saw Gordon hand over to Frey. He caught the simultaneous glance of both their heads and the faint blur of their faces as they looked in his direction. He remembered so well the compound of fear and respect he had felt for most of his own commanders, all of them men with feet of clay; old Hope of the Cyclops, Griffiths of the Kestrel and the Hellebore.
Christ, he was morbid! Was this an onset of the blue devils? It was time to go below. Vansittart had sensibly taken to his cot the moment the weather livened up, now he would do the same. The gale would arrive by dawn, time enough to worry then. For the nonce he could drown his megrims in sleep.
And yet he lingered on, his shoulder braced against the black hemp shrouds that rose to the mizen top, feeling the faint vibration of their tension as Patrician harnessed the power of the wind and drove her twelve hundred tons into its teeth.
What an odd thing a ship was, he thought, curious in its component parts: fifteen hundred oaks, several score of pine and spruce trees, tons of iron and copper, miles of hemp and coir, tar, flax and cotton. Full of water and stores to support its living muscles and brains which now in part huddled about the deck and in part slung their hammocks in the corporate misery of the berth deck. Men dreaming of homes, of wives, lovers, children; young men dreaming of prize money, old men dreaming of death. Men troubled by lust or infirmities, men scheming or men hating. Men confined by the power confided by Almighty God in the Sovereign Prince King George III, mad by reputation, puissant by the force of the twin batteries of cannon Patrician and a thousand ships like her bore on every ocean of the globe.
And he, Nathaniel Drinkwater, post-captain in His Britannic Majesty’s Royal Navy, directed this arm of policy, and took Henry St John Vansittart to pow-wow in the lodges of the Yankees in the vain hope of averting a war! Would His Majesty’s ministers concede the real point of American objection and lift the ordinances against American trade? Or would the greater preoccupations, the maintaining of a naval blockade of Europe and the supply of a British, a Portuguese and a Spanish army in the Iberian peninsula, blind them to the dangers inherent in failing to appease the Americans. And if they did comply with Washington’s demands, would the Americans be content to the extent of suppressing their desire for Canada?
Two bells struck; the passing of time surprised him, the watch had been changed an hour earlier. It was quite dark now, the horizon reduced to the white rearing crest of the next wave ahead as it surged out of the gloom. Drinkwater was stiff and cramped, his muscles cracked as he straightened up.
The truth was, he wanted to go home. ‘Ah, well,’ he muttered, ‘I have that in common with most of the fellows aboard.’
His left leg had gone to sleep and he almost fell as he tried to walk. ‘Damn,’ he swore under his breath, hobbling to peer into the binnacle and check the course. The pain of returning circulation made him wince.
‘Course sou’west by west . . .’ began the quartermaster.
‘Yes, yes, I can see that,’ Drinkwater said testily. Frey loomed up alongside. Drinkwater was in no mood for pleasantries. ‘Good-night, Mr Frey,’ he said, then called dutifully from the head of the companionway, ‘don’t hesitate to call me if this wind freshens further.’
‘Aye, aye, sir,’ the young officer responded confidently. All’s right with the world, Drinkwater thought, heartened by Frey’s cheerful tone. Mentally cursing the megrims, he descended to the gun deck and the stiffening marine outside his cabin door.
He had no idea afterwards why he paused there. He thought it might have been a lurch of the ship which prevented him momentarily from passing into the sanctuary of his cabin; on the other hand, the marine, a punctilious private named Todd, made a smart showing of his salute and Drinkwater threw back his cloak to free his hand to acknowledge this and open the door. Whatever the cause he was certain it was no more than some practical delay, not premonition or extra-sensory perception.
Yet in that moment of hiatus he knew something was wrong. Quite what, it took him a moment to discover, but the watchful, expectant look in Todd’s eyes rang an alarm in Captain Drinkwater’s consciousness. He passed into his cabin and stood, his back against the door, listening.
The ship was unusually quiet.
One became accustomed to its myriad creakings and groanings. One heard instead the noises of people, from the soft murmurs of men chatting in their messes, sitting and smoking at the tables suspended between the guns, or idling on the berth deck, through the louder shouts of abuse or jocularity to the bawled orders and shrilling of pipes. The denser concentrations of humanity, like the marines’ quarters or the midshipmen’s so-called gunroom, produced their own noise, and the low hum generated by a watch below during the daytime was quite different from that produced, as now, when the watches below should have been asleep, or at least turned in.
What had troubled him outside his cabin door was not a total silence, but a curious modulation somewhere that was not right, existing alongside an equally curious lack of noise to which he could not lay a cause.
Irritated and a little alarmed, still cloaked though he had tossed his hat aside, he threw open the door and stalked outside. The gun deck was quiet. The men who slept there appeared to have turned in, for the few lamps showed bulging hammocks above the faintly gleaming gun breeches.
He turned abruptly and descended to the berth deck. Immediately he knew something was wrong. He sensed rather than saw a movement, but clearly heard the hissed caveat that greeted his intrusion. He moved quickly forward, ducking under hammocks and brushing them with his head and shoulders. Many of those slung were full and he provoked the occasional grunted protest from them, but more were empty and, with a mounting sense of apprehension, he dodged forward, aware of someone moving parallel to himself, trying to beat him but, having to move in semi-concealment, not making such light work of it.
He could hear the source of that strange modulation as he drew up beside the bitts and suddenly saw below him a press of men crowded into the cable-tier. Their faces were rapt, lit by the grim light of a brace of battle-lanterns as the listened in silence to a voice which, though it spoke in a low tone, carried with it such a weight of conviction it sounded upon the ears like a shout.
So strong was the impact of this oration that it, as much as astonishment, made Drinkwater pause to listen. In the wings of the berth deck, his shadower paused too.
‘The rights of kings might be supported as an argument; nay, friends, adopted as a principle for good government were it not for the fact that it in all cases without exception reduces us to the status of subjects and, moreover, many of us to abject and necessary poverty. For to glorify one requires a court whose purpose is adulatory, if not purely idolatrous, and which, to support itself, requires the extraction of taxes from the subjected.
‘Furthermore, it promotes excessive pride amongst those close to the throne. This in turn excites envy among the middling sort who, gaining as they are power in the manufacturies, seek to adopt the manners and privileges of noblemen. Under the heels of this triple despotism are ground the poor, the weak, t
he hungry, the dispossessed, the homeless and the helpless: men, women and children – free-born Britons every one, God help them!’
Drinkwater drew back in retreat. He had not seen the speaker but knew the man’s identity: Thurston, the Paineite, the disaffected seducer of men’s minds, a suborner, a canting levelling republican subversive . . .
Drinkwater flew up the ladder and Todd snapped to attention, his face an enigmatic mask. Drinkwater had no idea whether or not the marine knew of the combination gathered in the cable-tier, but he surely must have done. Without pausing, saying nothing, but conveying much to the sentry, he sought the refuge of his cabin, his mind a whirl.
He had suspected something of the sort as he had edged forward under the hammocks. A meeting of Methodists, perhaps, even a mutinous assembly, but this, this was intolerable . . .
Why had he done nothing about it?
The thought brought him up with a round turn. The man keeping cave had known of his presence, if not his identity; Todd would soon let them know the captain had been down to the orlop and come up again looking as though he had seen a ghost! Good God, what was the matter with him?
And then the appalling thought struck him that Thurston spoke with an irrefutable logic. What little he knew of the Court of St James and the prancing, perfumed and portentious Regent, struck a note of revulsion in his puritan heart . . .
And yet his duty, his allegiance . . .
‘God’s bones!’ he raged. What was he going to do, flog the lot of them? Suppose the bosun’s mates refused? And how could he discover who was in attendance and who had turned in? Could he punish Thurston alone, and for what? Speaking a truth that some called sedition? White had been lenient; had White caught the refreshing breath of truth and let the man escape the horrors of the law’s worst excess?
The Flying Squadron Page 6