‘God damn them!’ he snarled, finding himself at the decanter stowed in its fiddle. His hand was already on the stopper when he realized he had no time for such indulgence. He had to do something, something which was both everything and nothing, something that would not rouse them to spontaneous and hot-headed mutiny, for what Thurston was undoubtedly ignorant of was the fact that he might ignite something of which he was not master. Yet Drinkwater had to signify his displeasure, his disapproval and his power, in order to dissuade them from ever attempting any mass action. He realized what he faced was not mutiny, not something he could quell by summoning the marines and arming his officers. That would be desperate enough, for God’s sake!
What he faced was something infinitely worse: its results would be mass desertion in the United States.
Patrician slammed into a wave and Drinkwater felt her bow thrust into the air as she climbed over it and fell into the trough beyond.
‘God damn!’ he swore again, with a mindless and futile anger. Then he snatched up his hat. Out on the gun deck he knew his visit had disturbed them. There was a low murmur of voices as men hurriedly turned in; he knew he had rattled them. Even if they did not know yet it was the captain who had discovered their meeting, they would guess it had been an officer.
He emerged on to the quarterdeck. All was still well there, he consoled himself. They would do nothing until they arrived in American waters. Unless, of course, they decided to seize the ship . . .
‘Sir . . .’ Frey began, seeing the captain unexpectedly on deck.
‘Call all hands,’ Drinkwater snapped, ‘upon the instant, d’you hear?’
‘Aye, sir . . .’ An astonished Frey relayed the order and the bosun’s mate of the watch piped and shouted at the hatchways.
Drinkwater drew his cloak around him, stood at the windward hance and watched them turn up.
‘Sir . . . ?’
‘Double reef the tops’ls, Mr Frey, and look lively, a watch to each mast.’ Drinkwater cut poor Frey off short and watched for Thurston. The men emerged, many of them stumbling uncertainly, torn unceremoniously from their hammocks by the shrilling of the pipes. Drinkwater was not an inhumane commander and worked his crew in three watches. To be turned up like this suggested some disaster in the offing, perhaps an enemy, and to the uncertainty of those aware their political meeting had been discovered was now to be added this element of panic.
Frey and his bosun’s mate were already translating Drinkwater’s order: ‘Way aloft, topmen! Double reef the tops’ls! Hands by the lee braces, halliards and bowlines . . . !’
Drinkwater had no difficulty in singling out Thurston. The man made no effort to merge inconspicuously with the mass of the people, but stood stock still for a moment, at the far end of the starboard gangway. There was no one between them, until a petty officer shoved him roughly into his station with a cut of his starter across Thurston’s buttocks.
With a sudden feeling of guilt, Drinkwater turned away. Was he one of Thurston’s ‘middling sort’, apeing the manners and seeking the privileges of a discredited nobility? Was the acquisition of Gantley Hall such an act?
‘Is something the matter?’
‘Eh, what?’
Vansittart stood beside him, the silk dressing-gown flamboyant even in the darkness of a rising gale.
‘Matter, Mr Vansittart?’ said Drinkwater, aware of the irony of his situation, ‘Why no, we are shortening sail, there’s a blow coming on.’
‘Oh dear. Then we are to be further delayed.’
‘I’m afraid so, but this is one thing we cannot change – the weather, I mean,’ he added. Vansittart shuffled away. ‘My dear fellow,’ Drinkwater said after him in a low, inaudible voice, ‘if only you knew by what a slender silken thread the world holds together.’
Far above him men laid out to secure the reef points. Thus far he had the measure of them, and Deo gratias, the wind was freshening rapidly!
‘Call all hands!’
Drinkwater clapped a hand to his hat as Patrician lurched into another wave and the resulting explosion of spray hissed over the weather bow, a fine grey cloud in the first glimmer of dawn. Jamming himself in his familiar station at the mizen rigging he waited for the men to turn up. The bosun’s pipes pierced his tired brain and rang in his ears, for he had not slept a wink.
‘Another reef, sir?’ Lieutenant Gordon struggled up the deck towards him, his cloak flapping wildly in the down-draught from the double reefed main topsail. In the lee of the mizen rigging what passed for shelter enabled the two sea-officers to speak without actually shouting. Gordon’s expectant face was visible now as the light grew.
‘No, Mr Gordon. All hands to lay aft. And I want the officers and marines drawn up properly. Please make my wishes known.’ Drinkwater saw the look of uncertainty at the unusual nature of the instruction cross Gordon’s face. ‘Do you pass the word, if you please,’ Drinkwater prompted. He rasped a fist across his stubbled chin. His eyes were hot and gritty with sleeplessness and he felt a petulant temper hovering. He had spent the night wondering what best to do to stave off the trouble he knew was brewing, trouble far worse than a little bad blood between his officers. He tried to imagine what the wholesale desertion of a British frigate’s crew would mean in terms of repercussions. In the United States it would be hailed as a moral victory, evidence of the rottenness and tyranny of monarchy, a sign of the rightness of the emerging cause, perhaps even fuel for the fire of rebellion certain prominent Americans wished to ignite in Canada.
For the Royal Navy itself it would be a dishonour. Already the trickle of deserters from British men-of-war had prompted the stop-and-search policy of cruiser captains, a prime cause of the deterioration in Anglo-American relations. The Americans were justifiably touchy about interference with their ships. The practice of British officers boarding them on the high seas and taking men out of them on the flimsy pretext that they had been British seamen, was a high-handed action, a deliberate dishonour to their flag and a provocation designed to humiliate them. The extent to which this arrogant practice prevailed was uncertain, as was the counter-rumour that trained British seamen made up the gun-crews aboard Yankee frigates; men who would give good account of themselves if it came to a fight, desperate men who resented having been pressed from their homes but who were, nevertheless, traitors.
In this atmosphere of half-truths and exaggeration the defection of Patrician’s people would be a death-blow for British hopes of avoiding war. The Ministry in London might be able to overlook the case of ‘mistaken identity’ which had allegedly occurred the night the USS President fired into the inferior Little Belt; it would be quite unable to extend this tolerance to the desertion of an entire ship’s company. His Majesty’s frigate Patrician would become notorious, synonymous with the Hermione, whose crew had mutinied and carried their frigate into a Spanish-American port, or the Danae’s people who had surrendered to the French. Such considerations made Drinkwater’s blood run cold, not merely for himself and the helpless, humiliated and shameful state to which he would be reduced, but also for the awful disruption to the mission which would otherwise avert a stupid rupture with the United States.
He had been tortured for hours by this spectre, his mind unable to find any solution, as though he faced an inevitable situation, not something of which luck, or providence, had given him forewarning. His lurking bad temper was as much directed at himself and his lack of an imaginative response, as against the men now emerging into the dawn. In all conscience he could not blame them, and therein lay the roots of his moral paralysis. He devoutly wished he did not see their side of the coin, that he felt able to haul Thurston out of their grumbling ranks and flog the man senseless as an example to them all. It would tone down the upsurge of their rebelliousness.
Christ, that was no answer!
How could he blame them? Some had been at sea continuously for years. There were faces there, he remembered, who had stayed at sea when the Peace of Amiens had been si
gned, loyal volunteers to the sea-service, men who had made up the crew of the corvette Melusine when war had broken out again. They, poor devils, had had their loyalty well and truly acknowledged when turned over without leave of absence into the newly commissioning frigate Antigone, from which, following their captain, they had passed into this very ship in the fall of 1807. Ten years would be the minimum they would have served.
And to them must be added the droves of unwilling pressed men, come aboard in dribs and drabs from the guardships and the press tenders, but who now made up the largest proportion of Patrician’s company. Among these came petty criminals, men on the run from creditors or cuckolds, betrayed husbands, men cut loose from the bonds of family, seeking obscurity in the wooden walls of dear old England, fathers of bastards, poxed and spavined wretches and, worst of all, those men of education and expectations whom fate had found wanting in some way or another.
What had they to expect from the Royal Navy? The volunteers had been denied leave, the pressed ripped from their homes, the fugitives and the intelligent found no refuge but the inevitable end of them all, to be worn down by labour, if death by disease or action did not carry them off first.
Nathaniel Drinkwater had faced mutiny before and beaten it, but none of this gave him much confidence, for he had been aware on each of these occasions that he had obtained but a temporary advantage, a battle or a skirmish in a war in which victory was unobtainable. And now, in addition to the catalogue of mismanagement and oppression, the Paineite Thurston had introduced the explosive constituent of something more potent than gunpowder: political logic. Clear, concise and incontrovertible, it had set France afire twenty-two years earlier; it had turned the world on its ears and unleashed a conflict men were already calling the Great War.
Drinkwater found himself again searching for Thurston; the man whom White had sent down in a rare mood of leniency, to stir up the lower deck of the Patrician instead of digging turnips on the shores of Botany Bay; Thurston, the man who had smiled and whom Drinkwater conceived might, in vastly different circumstances, have been a friend . . .
And yet the idea still did not seem absurd. He had known one such man before. Perhaps, he thought wildly, they were growing in number, increasing to torture liberally inclined fools like himself until, inexorably, they achieved their aim: the overthrow of monarchy and aristocracy, the reform of Parliament and the introduction of republicanism. That too had happened in England once before, and in English America within his own lifetime.
He recalled the Quaker Derrick, whose fate had been uncertain, lost when the gun-brig Tracker had been overwhelmed by Danish gunboats off Tönning and poor James Quilhampton had been compelled to surrender his first command. Derrick had not succeeded because he did not proselytize. Thurston was dangerously different.
God, what a train of gloomy thoughts chased each other through his weary mind! Would Moncrieff never have his infernal marines fallen in? And where the deuce was Metcalfe? Christ Almighty, what a burden he was turning out to be!
Why the hell had their Lordships saddled the ship with such a nonentity? He had asked for Fraser, but Fraser, his old first luff, had been ill, and Metcalfe had survived from the last commission when he had served as second lieutenant. It was true he was a good shot, but that did not make him a good officer.
‘May I ask . . . ?’
‘No, you may not!’ Drinkwater snapped as the first lieutenant materialized in the disturbingly insinuating way he had. Metcalfe fell back a pace and Drinkwater, meanly gratified at the small humiliation thus inflicted, roused himself and stepped forward. In doing so he appeared to drive the first lieutenant downhill, a sight at once mildly comic, but also threatening. The ship’s company, whatever the seductions of Thurston’s republican polemic, were more certain of Captain Drinkwater’s mettle than he was himself.
‘Off hats, Mr Metcalfe,’ he said quietly, and Metcalfe’s voice cracked with sudden nervous anticipation as he shouted the command.
Drinkwater stared at the ship’s company and the ship’s company stared back. Some of them were shivering in the cold; some eyed him darkly, well knowing why they had been summoned; others wore the look of blank incomprehension and this was chiefly true of the officers, though one or two made a gallant attempt at pretending they knew why the lower deck had been cleared at so ungodly an hour.
Despite the rising howl of the wind, the hiss of the sea and the creaks and groans of the ship, the waist of the Patrician was silent. Drinkwater withdrew the small book from beneath his cloak, cleared his throat and began to read in a loud voice.
‘If any person in or belonging to the Fleet shall make or endeavour to make any mutinous assembly upon any pretence whatsoever, every person offending herein, and being convicted thereof, shall suffer death: And if any person shall utter any words of sedition or mutiny he shall suffer death . . .’
The words were familiar to them all, for on the fourth Sunday of every month, in place of the liturgy of the Anglican Church, the Articles of War were read to every ship’s company in commission by their commanding officer. But this morning was not the fourth Sunday in the month, not did Drinkwater read them all. He excised some of the legal provisos of Articles Nineteen and Twenty, and cut them to their essential bone; he laid heavy emphasis on certain words and punctuated his sentences with pauses and glares at his disaffected flock. He read with peculiar and deliberate slowness, eschewing the normal mumbling run-through to which even the most punctilious captain had succumbed by the end of the routinely morbid catechism.
‘If any person shall conceal any traitorous or mutinous practice or design, he shall suffer death . . . or shall conceal any traitorous or mutinous words spoken by any to the prejudice of His Majesty or Government, or any words, practice or design, tending to the hindrance of the service, and shall not forthwith reveal the same to the commanding officer, or being present at any mutiny or sedition, shall not use his utmost endeavours to suppress the same, he shall be punished . . .’
Drinkwater closed the book with a snap. ‘That is all, Mr Metcalfe. You may carry on and dismiss the hands.’ As Drinkwater stepped towards the companionway Moncrieff called his men to attention and, with some difficulty on the plunging deck, had them present arms.
Drinkwater must remember to thank Moncrieff for that salute; it was quick-witted of him to invest the departure of Captain Drinkwater from the quarterdeck with the full panoply of ceremony. Drinkwater devoutly hoped its effect would not be lost on the men, aware of the theatricality of his own performance. All those who had listened to Thurston’s able and seductive sermon would, he believed, now be pricked by individual guilt and, as he found himself in the shadows of the gun deck, he wondered how many would report the seditious proceedings.
Not many, he found himself privately hoping. He did not yet wish for the dissolution of his crew. Only an honourable peace could permit that.
‘Sir, has something occurred?’
Drinkwater laid down his pen and looked up at Metcalfe. For once the man was flustered, unsure of himself. This was a side of his first lieutenant Drinkwater had not yet observed.
‘A very great deal, Mr Metcalfe.’
‘But when, sir?’
‘When you were asleep, or perhaps taking wine in the wardroom, I imagine.’ A slight mockery in the captain’s voice alarmed Metcalfe.
‘But what, sir?’ asked Metcalfe desperately and Drinkwater admitted to a certain malicious amusement at his expense.
‘Tut-tut, Mr Metcalfe, can you not guess? Surely the Articles I read out were explicit enough. What does the scuttlebutt in the wardroom suggest?’
The question further confused Metcalfe, for the opinion in the wardroom, expressed fully by every officer, was that the captain, perceptive though he was, had got wind of the gaming combination, mistaken it for some sort of mutinous meeting and misconstrued the whole affair. In this conclusion, the debating officers were chiefly concerned to unhorse their overbearing mess-president, and they had
succeeded, for a covert conference had been observed between Metcalfe and Midshipman Porter, after which torn pages of a note-book had been seen floating astern. Thoroughly alarmed, Metcalfe had sought this unsuccessful interview with the captain.
‘Sir, I must request, as first lieutenant, you take me into your confidence.’
‘That I am not prepared to do, Mr Metcalfe,’ Drinkwater said carefully, aware that he felt no confidence in the man and could not bare his soul. To admit to his second-in-command that he had discovered a seditious meeting would be an admission to Metcalfe of something he wished to remain between himself and those at whom he had aimed this morning’s exercise in intimidation. Besides, strictly speaking, he should report the matter to their Lordships, and to inform Metcalfe of the circumstances and subsequently do nothing would be to lay himself open to charges of dereliction of duty. He would have to tell Metcalfe something, of course.
But his refusal to confide in Metcalfe had struck his subordinate’s conscience and, unbeknown to Drinkwater, no further explanation was necessary. Metcalfe assumed the worst as far as he, a self-interested man, was concerned. In his guilty retreat he gave up both his chance of a clue that it was not his malpractice of betting on the crew’s wrestling which had caused the morning’s drama, as well as Captain Drinkwater’s rather ingenious explanation of why he had acted so extraordinarily.
It was to Gordon that he spoke about Thurston. The memory of the Quaker Derrick had brought its own solution; what had been done once might be done again. ‘The man is in your division and seems a likely character, a man of some education and no seaman.’
‘I’m afraid I know little about him, sir,’ Gordon admitted.
‘You should,’ Drinkwater said curtly. ‘Anyway, to the point. I have no clerk, and want a writer. You may send him aft at eight bells.’
As for an explanation of the morning’s events digestible enough for the officers, it was Frey to whom he revealed his fabricated motive.
The Flying Squadron Page 7