Book 18 - The Yellow Admiral

by Patrick O'Brian

  Reade in the tender had almost equal knowledge of the bay, since he had accompanied his captain on most of his movements and surveys, and since the Ringle could lie so much closer to the wind he was soon out of sight even when the murk parted; but the unhappy Grampus was perfectly new to Brest, and she kept so perilously close to the Bellona's stern that Jack stationed a hand with a speaking-trumpet to warn her where he was about to tack, a fairly frequent exercise in these waters, though somewhat less so as the wind continued to veer westerly.

  From time to time, Stephen, resuming the tarpaulin jacket, stood in out-of-the-way places on the leeward side of the quarterdeck: the ship might have been sailing, perhaps at a very great speed (with everything—sea, foam, squalls, fog—in furious, apparently random motion it was impossible to judge) through a nightmare lit only by battle-lanterns and through one of the noisier, unrecorded, circles of the Inferno: and it was both wonderful and comforting to see the wet, cheerful, unconcerned faces around him, perfectly willing to tally aft and belay or leap into the rigging and vanish upwards at a pipe or the word of command—competent, at home, eagerly expectant.

  Space might scarcely exist, having lost all boundaries, but time was still with them, measured by bells; and at six bells in the middle watch Stephen made his way cautiously down and down (the size of this ship still surprised him) to the sick-berth, which, in comparison, was a gently lamplit haven of peace: so much so that his cystotomy and all the other patients and their attendants were fast asleep. He sat listening to the cystotomy's even breathing for a while, and then, noticing a change in the Bellona's motion, he returned to the quarterdeck, feeling that in this wild rush through the obscurity his presence (though useless) was called for, by decency, if by nothing else.

  'There you are, Stephen,' said Jack. 'We have just reached the western end of the Black Rocks and we are starting our run in for the Goulet. Do you hear them banging away? They are well to the east of St Matthews: right in the Goulet. Dear Lord, what a prodigious great deal of weather! Not a fit night out for man or beast, as the Centaur observed, ha, ha, ha!'

  With this western tendency in the turning wind the Bellona now received it where she liked it best, and at four bells in the morning watch the midshipman in charge of the log reported, 'Nine knots and one fathom, sir, if you please.'

  Killick came out, shielding a jug of coffee, and as Jack came aft to share it with Stephen he nodded towards a wicked swirl of white water a quarter of a mile on the starboard beam and said, 'That is the Basse Royale, a death-trap for a ship of our draught in a hollow sea, near the bottom of the ebb: and over there,' nodding to larboard, 'you would see the Basse Large, was you on the poop, which is worse by far but more obvious. Mr Whewell'—raising his voice—'I believe we may shake out the reef in the foretopsail.'

  The mingled cloud and fog lifted a little about this time, just before the first hint of day in the east, and its grey lower surface showed crimson with the stabbing gunfire ahead. 'Yes, they are right in the Goulet, by the Basse Beuzec,' said Jack. 'Happily the St Matthews battery cannot see a thing, perched up there: we shall have to pass right under their guns.'

  'Sail on the starboard bow,' bawled a lookout, adding confidentially, 'Tender, I do believe.'

  'The ship, ahoy,' called a voice from that direction. 'What ship is that?'

  'Bellona, Mr Reade,' said Jack. 'Come aboard.' And directing his voice forward, 'Pass a line there.'

  'Stand by to fend off,' cried Harding, careful for his paintwork.

  'What is the position?' asked Jack as Reade came over the side.

  'They are two French seventy-fours, sir,' said Reade, 'and they have battered Aboukir and Ramillies pretty badly. Aboukir is stuck on the near Basse Beuzec and the Frenchmen would have boarded her, but Naiad came up and kept peppering them, while Ramillies hit one of them very hard—there was an explosion amidships.'

  'Very good. Just how does Aboukir lie?' Reade explained. 'Then cut back and do what you can to lay out a kedge east-north-east. With any luck the tide should lift her in—' He looked at his watch by the light of the binnacle—'twenty minutes. Master gunner,' he called, and after a short, largely formal exchange with Mr Meares he said to his first lieutenant, 'Mr Harding, let us beat to quarters. Stephen,' he added in an aside, smiling as he spoke, 'away below with you, out of the falling damps.'

  The Bellona's surgeon and his assistants sat there in the cockpit, listening intently: the midshipmen's sea-chests, lashed together under the lantern, covered with tarpaulins, then sailcloth and then a fine white sheet made fast all round, stood in the middle: the instruments, shining clean and, where an edge was called for, shaving-sharp, stood in their accustomed order, saws to the larboard.

  They listened, and even down here the rumbling grumble of the French seventy-fours, the Ramillies and the Naiad made the bottles tremble; while a little later the poor hard-hit Aboukir, lifting to the tide, brought her broadside to bear and returned the enemy fire with all the pent-up fury of a ship that has been punished without being able to reply.

  But their own battle, the Bellona's rippling broadsides they had heard so often during the great-gun exercise, did not begin, and tense expectation was drooping even to the point of discontent when, with a wholly different and immediate sharpness, her bow-chasers fired, followed by the foremost guns of her starboard broadside, deep-voiced guns, loud and clear, firing well-spaced, carefully-aimed deliberate long shots.

  'It has started,' cried Smith, who had seen no action; and as if in reply a spent, harmless round-shot hit the Bellona's side. Smith gazed at his colleagues with a wild enthusiasm.

  'What is it, Mr Wetherby?' asked Stephen, seeing the boy come in.

  'Captain's compliments, sir, if you please, and Aboukir's surgeon would be most grateful for a hand with his casualties. There is a cutter alongside, if you please to come with me.'

  'We are to expect no more action, I collect?' asked Stephen: he began filling a basket with instruments, bandages, pledgets, tourniquets, splints, laudanum.

  'Not at present, sir, I am afraid. The Frenchmen are running for home.'

  It would have been temerity carried to a criminal pitch if the Frenchmen had not done so, when they were confronted with a resuscitated Aboukir, a largely intact Ramillies, a thirty-eight-gun frigate, and now two perfectly fresh and untouched two-deckers, particularly as one of the French ships of the line had had seven ports beaten into one and several guns dismounted by the explosion. Yet it was disappointing. 'Call that an action?' asked Mr Meares, addressing his mates. 'I call it a fart in a blind alley. A genteel fart in a blind alley, is what I call it. And after all our hurry and preparation—all hands day and night, then cartridges filled without so much as a hot dinner, screens shipped, decks sanded and wetted and who for God's sake needed any more water on a God-damned day like this?'

  'It was disappointing,' said Jack, as Stephen joined him for what had to pass for breakfast. 'But there was no help . . .'

  'Come, sir, if you please,' said Killick, with a bucket of hot water, soap, towel, dressing-gown. He guided Stephen into the quarter-gallery, leaving him with the words, 'You know the Captain can't bear the sight of blood, and there you are soaked, fair soaked, from head to foot and what poor Grimble and I shall do to the floorcloth with all them nasty footprints, I don't know. Now take off everything, sir, shirt, drawers, stockings and all and throw them into that there bucket. I will keep your coffee hot: his honour will not mind waiting.'

  Neither Captain Aubrey nor Dr Maturin was an outstandingly meek or patient man, yet such was Killick's total conviction, his moral superiority, that the one waited for his longed-for coffee without complaint and the other not only washed obediently but would have shown both hands, front and back, if required.

  'Yes, it was disappointing,' said Jack. 'But there was no help for it. The Frenchmen were hopelessly outnumbered, so of course as soon as they made out our full force and as soon as Aboukir had lifted they spread all the sail they could—un
happily they lost no more than a mizzen topmast between them in the action; and that don't signify, since now they have a leading wind.'

  'They could not be pursued, with this same leading wind, I presume?'

  'Certainly they could be pursued, and by steady fire, yawing now and then for a broadside, we might well knock away a few spars and even conceivably take them, right up in the Goulet, before they reach their friends in the inner bay. But how do you propose to bring them out with the wind in the west, the powerful tide against us too, and the fog lifting with the sun so that we are exposed to the batteries?'

  They heard a boat alongside reply 'Ramillies' to the sentinel's hail and Jack hurried on deck to receive Captain Fanshawe. 'Come and have a cup of coffee,' he said, and brought him into the cabin. 'You know Dr Maturin, I believe?'

  'Of course, of course: long since. How do you do, sir? And so you have real coffee? We have been down to grains of barley, roasted and ground, these many weeks. How I should love a single draught of right Arabian mocha. Heavens, Jack, you were a welcome sight, you and poor old Grampus, heaving up out of the murk. I had a horrible feeling it was more Frenchmen coming to join their friends—a rendezvous—and we were in a wretched posture to receive them, with Aboukir hard and fast . . . but, however, now the tables are turned, ha, ha ha—What glorious coffee—Turned as pretty as you could wish.'

  'Turned indeed: and the Doctor wants us to bring them out in triumph'

  'If we had some of those vessels that are said to sail against wind and tide, we might do so,' said Fanshawe, looking affectionately at Stephen. 'But as we are only simple ships of the line I believe we must return to our dreary blockade, sending word to the Admiral that Aboukir will probably have to go into Cawsand Bay.'

  This they did, patching up the Aboukir as well as the assembled carpenters and sailmakers could manage, although eastwards they heard remote but quite unmistakable and heavy gunfire, borne on the still westerly breeze.

  'No,' said Fanshawe, 'our orders are to patrol the bay, which implies preventing the enemy from coming out or getting in and above all from joining forces. If you like I will send Naiad and your tender to see if either of them can find the flag and ask for orders, but that is as far as I can go. Our clear duty, as I see it, is to go up and down this vile bay until we are told to stop.'

  'You always was a pig-headed brute, Billy,' said Jack; but this was a totally unofficial aside (they were alone in the cabin) and it was taken as such: in point of fact Captain Aubrey and all the rest continued to go up and down that vile bay, blockading the port of Brest and growing steadily hungrier—up and down until a little before two bells in the afternoon watch of Friday, a brisk topsail breeze at south-west, the weather clear, a moderate southern swell, when the Bellona's masthead and every other masthead belonging to the inshore squadron reported a sail four points on the larboard bow. As they were then heading for St Matthews, the sail was clearly from Ushant: and since she was travelling fast, with a favourable breeze, further details came down at quite short intervals. 'On deck, there: a three-decker, sir.' 'On deck, there: a brig and a ship in her wake—store-ship, I believe.' 'On deck there: the Charlotte, sir.'

  Well before that awe-inspiring (but scarcely unexpected) name, the captains' servants began titivating their masters' best uniform against the almost inevitable signal Captains repair aboard the flag and the first lieutenants hurried about anxiously looking for imperfections that might bring discredit on the ship. Unhappily there was no time for blacking the yards, but at least everything that should be taut was tautened with tackles, Spanish buttons or just plain heaving staves, while the dirtier midshipmen were sent below to wash, while all were desired to brush their hair, change their shirts and put on gloves.

  Aboard the Bellona every urgent measure had been taken and they were beginning the fine-work, such as whitening lanyards, when with real concern they saw the flagship round to and at once begin to lower down her barge. Captain Fanshawe was the senior captain present and his ship, the Admiral's natural victim, was seized with a renewed frenzy of zeal, her people hurrying about like ants in an overturned ant-hill: but they were mistaken. Very soon it became apparent that the barge was heading for Bellona, whose Royal Marine officers now conducted the most rapid and thorough-paced review of their 120-odd men in the history of the corps, finishing only when the barge, in answer to the wholly superfluous hail, replied 'Flag', and hooked on.

  Lord Stranraer came nimbly up the side, followed by his flag-lieutenant and a much duller figure in a blue coat with no gold lace, the Queen Charlotte's surgeon, Mr Sherman. The Admiral saluted the quarterdeck, and acknowledged the Marines' flashing presentation of arms and Jack's salute by touching his hat, and saying 'Captain Aubrey, I hope you and all the other captains of the inshore squadron, will dine with me this afternoon: but for the moment Mr Sherman and I should like to see Dr Maturin.'

  'Certainly, my lord,' said Jack. 'If you choose to walk into the cabin, I will desire him to join you. In the meantime, may I offer you a glass of madeira?'

  Jack, Harding and all those who had any pride in the ship's beauty and her seamanlike appearance had done virtually everything in human power to make it impossible for any candid eye, however severe, to find fault with her: they knew that the Admiral could not honestly say that her yards were not exactly squared, nor could he complain that the hens had flung their litter about the deck (a not unusual grievance when there was nothing else to blame) because no poultry whatsoever had survived the dearth. But they had never thought of Stephen. No one had washed, brushed or dusted Dr Maturin, and he came up in more than his usual squalor, unshaved, fresh—if such a word can be used—from his greasy, malodorous task of dissecting the inedible parts of yet another porpoise.

  None of this disturbed the Admiral, stickler though he was for precision in uniform. 'My dear Dr Maturin,' he cried, leaping, leaping from his chair and coming forward with outstretched hand. 'I could not miss this opportunity of coming across to express my sense of your—of your great goodness in prescribing for me. I knew it would answer, your physic, but I had no idea it would answer so prodigious well—I was in the maintop this morning, sir: I ran up to the top! I had hoped to be allowed to consult you, but Mr Sherman here assured me it would never do—would be quite impossible—that he had a lien upon me—and that no physical gentleman of your eminence would consent to examine one of his patients without he was there.'

  'Sure, Mr Sherman was in the right of it entirely,' said Stephen. 'In the medical world we too have our conventions, perhaps as rigid as those of the service. Some of them are puzzling to patients who in the wild licentiousness of their imaginations supposed that they can wander from physician to surgeon to quacksalver and back again just as the whim bites; and some are, on occasion, thought offensive, such as our rule of using Latin when we discuss the sufferer's case in his presence. This has its advantages, such as extreme accuracy of definition and from the nature of the language an admirable concision. But if my colleague agrees, I should be perfectly happy if we were both to examine you.'

  Bows all round, and Captain Aubrey withdrew. The examination was thorough and although Killick, on the other side of the door, was of a contrary opinion ('Once they start talking foreign, mate, it is all up: you can send for the sexton as soon as you like—here lieth Arthur Grimble, died of the marthambles, Brest bearing west by north ten leagues 1814') profoundly satisfactory. Stephen's only advice was extreme caution with the digitalis—dose to be steadily diminished—patient not to be told the name of the drug, still less allowed access to it. 'More men, particularly sailors, have died from self-administered doses than ever the enemy killed in action,' he observed; and turning to the Admiral, 'My lord, you are the most gratifying of patients. The anomalies that we noticed before have virtually disappeared, and if you will run up to the maintop every morning, half an hour after a light breakfast, and observe Mr Sherman's precepts, I see no reason why you should not rival Methusalem, and succeed officers as ye
t unborn as Admiral of the Fleet.'

  'Ha, ha, ha! How well you speak, dear Doctor,' said the Admiral. 'I am infinitely obliged to you—to you both (a bow to Sherman)—for your advice and care.' He put on his clothes, and with a certain embarrassment asked Stephen to dine aboard the Charlotte with Aubrey and the other captains.

  Lord Stranraer's dinner was as splendid, as far as the food was concerned, as anyone would expect from a flagship; but for the captains of the inshore squadron, deprived of almost everything for so long, it was far, far beyond even the most fervent expectations and they ate with a steady intensity of greed from the first course to the last. There was almost no conversation apart from 'Just another leg, if you please,' or 'Well, perhaps another couple of slices,' or 'May I trouble you for the bread-barge?'

  The Captain of the Fleet, however, who sat next to Stephen at the foot of the table, entertained him in a low confidential voice to a very highly-detailed account of his digestive processes—his very complicated and prolonged digestive processes—and a catalogue of the substances he could not eat: on the subject his usually pale, phlegmatic face grew pink and assumed a look almost of enthusiasm. He was dealing with the effect of cardamon in all its varieties when he became aware of a silence all along the table and of the Admiral at its head, clearly poised to make an announcement.

  'Gentlemen,' he said, 'before we drink the loyal toast, I think I should give you some news that may perhaps incline you to drink it with even greater fervour. But first, since contrary winds and foul weather have cut most of you off from the world for so long—not for nothing do we call certain parts of this station Siberia—I may be allowed to give you a short account of recent events on the Continent. It may well be imperfect: there are many land-borne officials who do not always understand the seaman's hunger for news. But in the main I think it accurate enough. I dare say you are all aware that Napoleon suffered a severe defeat before Leipzig some months ago, but that even so he beat the Germans and Austrians again and again—he was doing so even a week or two ago. But that was his undoing. His forces are all away in the north-east, his left flank is open and the Allies are marching upon an almost undefended Paris. Wellington, as you know, has taken Toulouse. He has now crossed the Adour and he is moving north at a great pace. At present there is some kind of a congress meeting at Châtillon; but since Napoleon was offered reasonable terms three times even after Leipzig and refused them all, he will gain nothing from this congress, now that he has no organized army at all. The ships that sailed from Brest and those we met with west of Ushant had intended to join by way of a final fling; but they never met; the gallant Captain Fanshawe here, and Beveridge offshore put an end to their capers.' Many hands beat discreetly on the table, many officers raised their glasses, bowing to Fanshawe and Beveridge; and the Admiral went on, 'It is usually considered unlucky to predict a fortunate outcome of anything whatsoever: but on this occasion I shall be so bold as to foretell a sensible end to this congress at Châtillon, the downfall of Napoleon, the end of this war, and our return to England, home and beauty. Gentleman, the King.'