Book 5 - Desolation Island
Page 33
'Oh, must you be away? Shall you not go with Mr Herapath to the whaler?'
'I shall not see him again today. He did propose our meeting after dinner, but to tell you the truth I am very weary at present. It will have to wait till tomorrow. I mean to spend the rest of the day by myself.'
Suddenly, and à propos of nothing, Mrs Wogan said, 'I know you are a friend of America—Mr Herapath tells me that the whalers sing your praises, and I am sure they should—and when you are next in London I wish you would go to see a friend of mine, a most interesting, intelligent man: Charles Pole. He has a place under government, in the Foreign Office, but he is not the ordinary dull kind of official; and his mother came from Baltimore.' She was looking at him very hard now, not only with affection but with a particular significance.
'I should be happy to know Mr Pole,' said Stephen, rising. 'Good day to you, now, my dear.'
She held out her hand; he took it, returned the pressure, and walked off.
Hc called on Jack, told him that he had desired Herapath to go to the whaler tonight rather than himself, and asked for the loan of his very best glass. He was on the point of going farther, of saying that Herapath should not be stopped whatever the circumstances—even farther, perhaps, if persuasion were needed—when Jack spontaneously observed, 'He will have to go by himself, then. There will not be a soul ashore tonight, apart from the women. We are going to hoist up the rudder, and I need close on every hand that can tally on to a rope. Stephen, you will take great care of this telescope, will you not? It is the very best achromatic, with extraordinary light-gathering powers, and a truly virgin objective.'
'I will, too. But Jack, I hope you will be able to let me have Bonden, in spite of the rudder? I very much wish to be on my island.'
'Oh, one more or less don't signify. But surely, Stephen, you don't mean to miss the hoisting up of the rudder? To miss such a glorious sight?'
'Is this the definitive, final, triumphant move?'
'Oh, of course not. This is for the pintles, Stephen. The pintles, not the gudgeons. But it is pretty triumphant for a sailor, upon my sacred honour, it is.'
'My sacred honour,' said Stephen, closing the door. 'Tantum religio potuit saudere malorum.' And to Bonden, 'Barret Bonden, pray be so good as to accompany me to my island in the canvas boat. I must make observations in the afternoon, and later I wish to see my chicks by the light of the moon.'
'She rises a little after dark tonight, sir,' said Bonden. 'Maybe I had best bring a bite and some furs. There will be a rare old frost, once the sun has dipped. Mr Herapath was asking for you just now, sir. He's gone off with the raft, to see if you're in the sickbay.'
'Aye. Well, buckle to, Bonden; we must be off. Leave word that I am not at leisure today, but will see him tomorrow.'
Bonden had accompanied the Doctor on many a curious expedition. He made no comment when Stephen concealed himself on the island and trained the powerful glass on the shore, where all hands were assembled to be ferried aboard on the raft. After an hour Herapath appeared in the objective, alone on the beach. He looked thin, worn, sad and tormented. He had a large bundle wrapped up in a cloak, and he carried it across the strand, deserted but for Mrs Boswell and her baby, past the still-smoking forge, to one of the whale-boats that were waiting to carry the whole smithy away. The boat-keeper was lying with Peggy under the lee of a rock, out of his sight but within the telescope's view. Herapath hesitated, heard a hail from the cliff where Reuben and his men were gathering their last cabbages, nodded, put the bundle into the bows, and paced up and down for a while before disappearing into Mrs Wogan's hut. A sweep of the glass showed the Leopard, every man aboard staring intently at the massive great rudder as it mounted into the air.
From then on the glass remained fixed on the hut, as though by staring at the door and the oiled-paper window Stephen could learn something of the doubtful battle raging within. 'Surely she must overcome him,' he reflected. 'She has this baby to wield, and the war, and tears, as well as all common sense. But when it comes to honour, dear Lord . . . I could not love thee, dear, so well, loved I not honour more: and so on to the foot of the stake. And there is the infinitesimal fact that he owes me seven guineas for his uniforms: it might prove the ludicrous sticking-point. Who can tell just where another man will jib? All shame, all ignominies, but not this one. Which one, though? Hardest of all to tell in men that are weak; or weak in places, like Herapath. if she overcomes him, perhaps he will never forgive her: if she does not, she will certainly never forgive him. She will certainly win the day. Maturin, friend, you are protesting too much: you do not know.'
'Sun's dipping, sir,' said Bonden at last. 'You'd best put on your cape.'
Dipping already. The time had passed with extraordinary speed. Twice Herapath was seen in the twilight: but still Stephen could not tell what was in his mind, apart from conflict.
'They are having a high old time with the rudder,' observed Bonden, putting the sealskin over Stephen's shoulders. 'The Marines have hauled it into the larboard shrouds, the lubbers.'
There were lights all over the Leopard now: Jack did not intend to lose a minute. The stars were beginning to show, dimmed in the south by the aurora australis, waving down there towards the pole, a great are of increasing splendour: and the frost had begun to fall.
Darkness now, and the barking of seals: the vague forms of petrels in the starlight. 'What is that you are smoking?' asked Stephen.
'The best Virginny,' said Bonden, with a contented laugh. 'There was an old shipmate of mine on shore from the whaler this morning. A bit leary at first, when Joe Plaice and me tipped him the wink, because there is an R against his name. Run, sir. But then we got talking, and he gave us a keg. It don't matter my telling now, because they're winning their anchor, and he's as safe as the Tower. Do you see how the brig's crept across? Now she's signalling. Lantern to the peak: up and down, up and down. Has she left someone on shore? Yet I never seen no boat. Now she's at single anchor, and they're shifting the messenger for t'other. Stamp and go, stamp and go: you hear 'em, sir?' In a deep rumbling undertone Bonden echoed the shanty: Stamp and go, stamp and go, the lady comes from Mexico. 'Now the cable's up and down: she's right over her anchor—hear the skipper call for nippers thick and dry.'
The moon rose, huge and very little past the full, flooding the sea with her pale fire. Clear of the horizon now: higher still, and somewhere on the left a battle broke out among the sea-elephants.
'Maybe they've fouled a fluke, hanging about so long,' said Bonden at last. 'No. She's loosed her foretopsail. She'll weigh any minute now. Soon be gone, with the ebbing tide; and she'll cast pretty on this breeze. Soon be gone, and so shalt we, thank God. Gudgeons in and rudder shipped tomorrow, and homeward bound maybe, once the hold is stowed. The lantern again. They'll lose their tide if they keep hanging about like this: what a rum way of carrying on! Do you hear that, sir? No, not the old seal. A boat, a-pulling for the brig. There, I see 'un, coming from behind the pointed rock. Why, our jolly-boat. I dare say it is Mr Herapath to say good-bye, he pulls so awkward. Yes, so it is. But who's his mate, the black-haired boy? I don't know that phiz. Sir, sir, it's Mrs Wogan! She's skipped her bail! Shall I shove off and bring 'em back?'
'No,' said Stephen. 'Sit still and keep quiet.'
The boat came nearer still, passed within whispering distance, and the moon shone on their faces, delighted, ingenuous, and absurdly young. It passed on; swung into the black shadow of the whaler's side. Some low cries from the La Fayette—'Get a good hold on the lines, ma'am, and mind your petticoats—easy, all, as she rises'—and then, as the brig swung to the breeze and gathered way, Mrs Wogan's laugh, floating clear across the water, very cheerful and amused, more amused than ever, so amused that both Stephen and Bonden chuckled aloud; and now, for the first time, it had a fine triumphant ring.
The Naval World
of Jack Aubrey
N. A. M. RODGER
THE PERIOD which Patrick O'Brian has made
his own, the Great Wars against France, is at once the least and the best known part of all British naval history. It is often referred to as the 'classical' age of navel history, and it is almost always the period to which both academic historians and common readers refer when they think of the history of the Royal Navy under sail. The reasons for this have to do both with scholarship and literature. Among serious historians of the Navy, this was almost the first period to be thoroughly treated. The scholars of what might be called the first great age of British naval history (say from 1890 to 1914), looked back on the Great Wars as the last, and also the longest and fiercest, real naval war, the culmination of centuries of experience, the reference point by which the Navy's development both before and after might be judged.
To their labours we are indebted for a mass of detailed analysis of how and why the wars were fought at sea which is still unequalled for any other period with the possible exception of Queen Elizabeth's reign. Of the forty-eight volumes published by the Navy Records Society between its foundation in 1893 and the outbreak of the First World War, twenty-two dealt wholly or partly with the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. At the same time this was the first period of British history when the Navy and its activities attracted detailed interest from the public at large, and when the Service itself generated a substantial professional literature. This is the era of the first naval periodicals and annuals, of Steel's Navy List, of the Naval Chronicle, of the biographical dictionaries of Charnock and Marshall. (John Charnock, Biographia Navalis). It is the era in which newspaper coverage of naval affairs increased enormously, and about which many officers and not a few ratings subsequently wrote memoirs. Moreover this was the period depicted in fiction by the naval historical novelists, of which Patrick O'Brian is the latest, and the first was probably John Davis, the anonymous author of The Post-Captain, or The Wooden Walls Well-Manned of 1805. The first great age of the naval historical novel was in the 1820s and 1830s, when the three Captains, William Glascock of The Naval Sketch Book, Frederick Marryat of Peter Simple and Midshipman Easy, and Frederick Charmier of The Life of a Sailor and Ben Brace were writing lightly fictionalised accounts of their own services, for the entertainment, in many cases, of men of their own generation. (This subject is studied generally in C. N. Robinson, The British Tar in Fact and Fiction) Marryat had served as a midshipman under Lord Cochrane, and incidents from the spectacular career of that most theatrical and flamboyant of officers appears both in Marryat's novels and in Patrick O'Brian's. (For Marryat see: Christopher Lloyd, Captain Marryat and the Old Navy. Much of Master and Commander is drawn from Cochrane's command of the ill-named sloop Speedy, which in 1801 he captured the Spanish frigate El Gamo.)
From fiction, contemporary journalism and subsequent scholarship, therefore, a mass of material is available for the novelist seeking to reconstruct a vanished world. The historian's problem is that in spite, even in some cases because of this wealth of evidence, we still know far too little about the daily life of the officers and men of Jack Aubrey's day. In default of documentary research, scholars must draw on the same materials as the novelist, and there are few who can do so with the imaginative power of Patrick O'Brian. Moreover there are particular dangers in drawing on much of this material to describe relations between officers and men, for many of the memoir-writers and novelists (including Marryat) were explicitly or implicitly participating in a debate on the reform of naval discipline which was taking place in and after the 1830s. Part of their object was to demonstrate how bad things had been, (For Marryat see: Lloyd, Captain Marryat, The later stages of the naval reform movement are dealt with by Eugene L. Rasor, Reform in the Royal Navy: A Social History of the Lower Deck 1850 to 1880). which makes them unreliable witnesses to what things had really been like—but no more unreliable than extrapolation from research on the Navy of fifty years before, which is the best the historian can offer at present.
It needs to be emphasised that we are dealing with an era of social change, especially in the 1790s. In any other area of British history it would seem absurd to stress something so obvious, but naval history is still technically rather back ward, and many standard works still submerge the developments of periods as long as two centuries under some bland generalisations about the age of sail. The half century from 1750 to 1800 may seem a short time, well within the careers of individual officers and men, and yet it is clear, even in our present state of ignorance, that the social life of the Navy changed greatly during that time. These changes may be divided into the material and the psychological.
It has been calculated that the total number of seafarers employed in British ships was nearly 130,000 at the height of the Seven Years' War, and over 150,000 during the American War. (David J. Starkey, 'War and the Market for Seafarers in Britain, 1736-1792', in Shipping and Trade, 1750-1950: essays in International Maritime Economic History) At the height of the Seven Years' War the Navy mustered nearly 85,000 officers and men, and during the American War the figure rose to nearly 110,000; by 1800 the Navy required about 125,000; and in 1810 the figure attained 145,000. (Christopher Lloyd, The British Seaman, 1200-1860: A Social Survey) In principle the navy needed most if not all the seafarers who were in peacetime employed in the merchant service—but merchant shipping contracted little if at all in wartime, and the inevitable result was an acute shortage over all. The gap between peacetime supply and the wartime demand of the Navy and merchant service combined was made up by dilution of skills, with a large recruitment of landmen into the Navy, and by widespread employment of foreigners in merchantmen, among other expedients. (Rodger, The Wooden World) The manpower situation had undoubtedly worsened over fifty years. An analysis of the musters of ships commissioning at Plymouth between 1770 and 1779 shows that 62% of the ratings were petty officers, able seamen or idlers against 38% ordinary seamen, landmen or servants. Only 6% had been pressed, 94% had volunteered, not many had been recruited by the Impress Service and virtually none were turned over from other ships. The majority (63%) were Englishmen, with 20% born in Ireland, and only 2% outside the British dominions. (N. A. M. Rodger, 'Devon Men and the Navy, 1688-1815', in The New Maritime History of Devon) A similar analysis of Plymouth ships commissioning in 1805 reveals a very different picture. So large a number of the crews had been turned over from other ships that it is not possible to make a direct comparison of the proportion of volunteers and pressed men, but it is clear that it had changed very much for the worse. Almost all the new recruits came from the Impress Service via the guard-ship, rather than entering for a particular ship. The ratio of skilled to unskilled had virtually reversed; only 35% were rated petty officers, able seamen or idlers, but 65% were ordinary seamen or landmen. Only 47% were English, and only 58% British, while the Irish (four fifths of them unskilled) had risen to 29%, and foreigners to 6%. (Ibid., Table 10. To preserve the comparison, Americans have not been included as foreigners in 1805, but in that year a furthur 5% had been born in the Americas (including Canada and the West Indies). These figures are strong evidence that the Navy's manpower situation was much worse during the 'Great War' against France than it had been in the American War twenty-five years before. Another sample, of man serving on the Leeward Islands station between 1784 and 1812 (but mostly during the Great War) shows 55% English and 30% Irish. (John D. Byrn, Crime and Punishment in the Royal Navy: Discipline on the Leeward Islands Station 1784-1812) Since Ireland was, from the point of view of naval manning, largely a reservoir of unskilled men, this also points to an increasing shortage of seamen. The result was that nightmare of manning with which Jack Aubrey and all officers were familiar, a situation in which the Sophies might be described as 'a very fair crew. A score or two of prime seamen, and a good half of the people real man-of-war's men, which is more than you can say for most line of battle ships nowadays'. (Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander)
One category of recruit which the Navy had always been reluctant to accept was criminals. An act of 1744 had allowed magistrates to sen
d the Service 'rogues and vagabonds', together with 'idle and disorderly persons', but in practice at that date the Navy was extremely reluctant to take any class of prisoner except smugglers and debtors. To some extent this reluctance was overcome by the pressure of necessity during the American War, and another act of 1795 widened the scope of those who might lawfully be sentenced to naval service to smugglers, embezzlers of naval stores and men with no lawful trade. (N. A. M. Rodger, The Insatiable Earl: A Life of John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich) Magistrates in some, though not all, counties made a practice of sending thieves and petty criminals to the Navy, but it is not clear how many of them were actually accepted, and in the present state of our knowledge we should be cautious in accepting at face value con temporary officers' rhetoric about the 'dregs of the jails'. (Rodger, The Wooden World) The same comment applies to the imprisonment of landmen, which was illegal and virtually unknown in the 1750s, but is often said to have been widespread by the end of the century. (Lloyd, The British Seaman) The evidence certainly exists to prove or disprove the statement, but until it has been investigated there is not much we can usefully say.