Master and Commander

by Patrick O'Brian

  There was nothing to say, nothing to do: the gun-captains had their orders and they were obeying them with splendid fury, firing for the hull, firing as quickly as they could; the midshipmen in charge of the divisions ran un and down the line, bearing a hand, dealing with any beginning of confusion; the powder and shot travelled up from the magazine with perfect regularity; the bosun and his mates roamed gazing up for damage to the rigging; in the tops the sharpshooters' muskets crackled briskly. He stood there reflecting: a little way to his left, scarcely flinching as the balls came whipping in or hulled the sloop (a great rending thump), stood the clerk and Ricketts, the quarter-deck midshipman. A ball burst through the packed hammock-netting, crossed a few feet in front of him, struck an iron netting-crane and lost its force on the hammocks the other side—an eight-pounder, he noticed, as it rolled towards him.

  The Frenchman was firing high, as usual, and pretty wild: in the blue, smokeless, peaceful world to windward he saw splashes as much as fifty yards ahead and astern of them—particularly ahead. Ahead: from the flashes that lit the far side of the cloud and from the change of sound it was clear that the Gloire was forging ahead. That would not do. 'Mr Marshall,' he said, picking up his speaking-trumpet, 'we will cross under her stern.' As he raised the trumpet there was a tumult and shouting forward—a gun was over on its side: perhaps two. 'Avast firing there,' he called with great force. 'Stand by, the larboard guns.'

  The smoke cleared. The Sophie began to turn to starboard, moving to cross the enemy's wake and to bring her port broadside to bear on the Gloire's stern, raking her whole length. But the Gloire was having none of it: as though warned by an inner voice, her captain had put up his helm within five seconds of the Sophie's doing so, and now, with the smoke clearing again, Jack, standing by the larboard hammocks, saw him at his taffrail, a small trim grizzled man a hundred and fifty yards away, looking fixedly back. The Frenchman reached behind him for a musket, and resting his elbows on the taffrail he very deliberately aimed it at Jack. The thing was extraordinarily personal: Jack felt an involuntary stiffening of the muscles of his face and chest—a tendency to hold his breath.

  'The royals, Mr Marshall,' he said. 'She is drawing away from us.' The gunfire had died away as the guns ceased to bear, and in the lull he heard the musket-shot part almost as if it had been in his ear. In the same second of time Christian Pram, the helmsman, gave a shrill roar and half fell, dragging the wheel over with him, his forearm ploughed open from wrist to elbow. The Sophie's head flew up into the wind, and although Jack and Marshall had the wheel directly, the advantage was gone. The port broadside could only be brought to bear by a further turn that lost still more way; and there was no way to be lost. The Sophie was a good two hundred yards behind the Gloire now, on her starboard quarter, and the only hope was to gain speed, to range up and renew the battle. He and the master glanced up simultaneously: everything was set that could be set—the wind was too far forward for the studdingsails.

  He stared ahead, watching for the stir aboard the chase, the slight change in her wake, that would mean a coming movement to starboard—the Gloire in her turn crossing the Sophie's stem, raking her fore and aft and bearing up to protect the scattered convoy. But he stared in vain. The Gloire held on to her course. She had drawn ahead of the Sophie even without her royals, but now these were setting: and the breeze was kinder to her, too. As he watched, the tears brimming over his eyelids from the concentration of his gaze against the rays of the sun, a slant of wind laid her over and the water ran creaming under her lee, her wake lengthening away and away. The grey-haired captain fired on pertinaciously, a man beside him passing loaded muskets, and one ball severed a ratline two feet from Jack's head; but they were almost beyond musket-range now, and in any case the indefinable frontier between personal animosity and anonymous warfare had been passed—it did not affect him.

  'Mr Marshall,' he said, 'pray edge away until we can salute her. Mr Pullings—Mr Pullings, fire as they bear.'

  The Sophie turned two, three, four points from her course.The bow gun cracked out, followed in even sequence by the rest of the port broadside. Too eager, alas: they were well pitched up, but the splashes showed twenty and even thirty yards astern. The Gloire, more attentive to her safety than her honour, and quite forgetful of her duty to Señor Mateu, the unvindictive Gloire did not yaw to reply, but hauled her wind. Being a ship, she could point up closer than the Sophie, and she did not scruple to do so, profiting to the utmost by the favour of the breeze. She was plainly running away. Of the next broadside two balls seemed to bit her, and one certainly passed through her mizzen topsail. But the target was diminishing every minute as their courses diverged, and hope diminished with it.

  Eight broadsides later Jack stopped the firing. They had knocked her about shrewdly and they had ruined her looks, but they had not cut up her rigging to make her unmanageable, nor carried away any vital mast or yard. And they had certainly failed to persuade her to come back and fight it out yard-arm to yard-arm. He gazed at the flying Gloire, made up his mind and said, 'We will bear away for the cape again, Mr Marshall. Southsouth-west.'

  The Sophie was remarkably little wounded. 'Are there any repairs that will not wait half an hour, Mr Watt?' he asked, absently hitching a stray slab-line round a pin.

  'No, sir. The sailmaker will be busy for a while; but she sent us no chain nor bar, and she never clawed our rigging, not to say clawed. Poor practice, sir; very poor practice. Not like that wicked little old Turk, and the sharp raps he give us.'

  'Then we will pipe the hands to breakfast and knot and splice afterwards. Mr Lamb, what damage do you find?'

  'Nothing below the water-line, sir. Four right ugly holes amidships and two and four gun-ports well-nigh beat into one: that's the worst. Nothing to what we give her (the sodomite),' he added, under his breath.

  Jack went forward to the dismounted gun. A ball from the Gloire had shattered the bulwark where the aft ring-bolts were fastened, just as number four was on the recoil. The gun, partly checked on the other side, had slewed round, jamming its run-out neighbour and oversetting. By wonderful good luck the two men who should have been crushed between them were not there—one washing the blood from a graze off his face in the fire-bucket, the other hurrying for more slow-match—and by wonderful good luck the gun had gone over, rather than running murderously about the deck.

  'Well, Mr Day,' he said, 'we were in luck one way, if not the other. The gun may go into the bows until Mr Lamb gives us fresh ring-bolts.'

  As he walked aft, taking off his coat as he went—the heat was suddenly unbearable—he ran his eye along the south-western horizon. No sign of Cape Nao in the rising haze: not a sail to be seen. He had never noticed the rising of the sun, but there it was, well up into the sky; they must have run a surprising long way. 'By God, I could do with my coffee,' he said, coming abruptly back into a present in which ordinary time flowed steadily once more and appetite mattered. 'But, however,' he reflected, 'I must go below.' This was the ugly side: this was where you saw what happened when a man's face and an iron ball met.

  'Captain Aubrey,' said Stephen, clapping his book to the moment he saw Jack in the cockpit. 'I have a grave complaint to make.'

  'I am concerned to hear it,' said Jack, peering about in the gloom for what he dreaded to see.

  'They have been at my asp. I tell you, sir, they have been at my asp. I stepped into my cabin for a book not three minutes ago, and what did I see? My asp drained—drained, I say.'

  'Tell me the butcher's bill; then I will attend to your asp.'

  'Bah—a few scratches, a man with his forearm moderately scored, a couple of splinters to draw—nothing of consequence—mere bandaging. All you will find in the sick-bay is an obstinate gleet with low fever and a reduced inguinal hernia: and that forearm. Now my asp—'

  'No dead? No wounded?' cried Jack, his heart leaping up.

  'No, no, no. Now my asp—' He had brought it aboard in its spirits of wine; and at some po
int in very recent time a criminal hand had taken the jar, drunk up all the alcohol and left the asp dry, stranded, parched.

  'I am truly sorry for it,' said Jack. 'But will not the fellow die? Must he not have an emetic?'

  'He will not: that is what is so vexing. The bloody man, the more than Hun, the sottish rapparee, he will not die. It was the best double-refined spirits of wine.'

  'Pray come and breakfast with me in the cabin; a pint of coffee and a well-broiled chop between you and the asp will take away the sting—will appease . . .' In his gaiety of heart, Jack was very near a witticism; he felt it floating there, almost within reach; but somehow it escaped and he confined himself to laughing as cheerfully as Stephen's vexation would with decency allow and observing, 'The damned Villain ran clean away from us; and I am afraid we shall have but a tedious time making our way back. I wonder, I wonder whether Dillon managed to pick up the settee, or whether she ran for it, too.'

  It was a natural curiosity, a curiosity shared by every man aboard the Sophie, apart from Stephen; but it was not to be satisfied that forenoon, nor yet for a great while after the sun had crossed the meridian. Towards noon the wind fell to something very near a calm; the newly-bent sails flapped, hanging in flaccid bulges from their yards, and the men working on the tattered set had to be protected by an awning. It was one of those intensely humid days when the air has no nourishment in it, and it was so hot that even with all his restless eagerness to recover his boarders, secure his prize and move on up the coast, Jack could not find it in his heart to order out the sweeps. The men had fought the ship tolerably well (though the guns were still too slow by far) and they had been very active repairing what damage the Gloire had inflicted. 'I will let them be at least until the dog-watch,' he reflected.

  The heat pressed down upon the sea; the smoke from the galley funnel hung along the deck, together with the smell of grog and the hundredweight or so of salt beef the Sophies had devoured at dinner-time: the regular tang-tang of the bell came at such long intervals that long before the snow was seen it appeared to Jack that this morning's sharp encounter must belong to another age, another life or, indeed (had it not been for a lingering smell of powder in the cushion under his head), to another kind of experience—to a tale he had read. Stretched out on the locker under his stern window, Jack revolved this in his mind, revolved it again more slowly, and again, and so sank far down and away.

  He woke suddenly, refreshed, cool and perfectly aware that the Sophie had been running easily for a considerable time, with a breeze that leant her over a couple of strakes, bringing her heels higher than his head.

  'I am afraid those damned youngsters woke you, sir,' said Mr Marshall with solicitous vexation. 'I sent 'em aloft, but I fear it was too late. Calling out and hallooing like a pack of baboons. Damn their capars.'

  Although he was singularly open and truthful, upon the whole, Jack at once replied, 'Oh, I was not asleep.' On deck he glanced up at the two mastheads, where the midshipmen were peering anxiously down to see whether their offence was reported. Meeting his eye, they at once stared away, with a great demonstration of earnest duty, in the direction of the snow and her accompanying settee, rapidly closing with the Sophie on the easterly breeze.

  'There she is,' said Jack inwardly, with intense satisfaction. 'And he picked up the settee. Good, active fellow capital seaman.' His heart warmed to Dillon—it would have been so easy to let that second prize slip away while be was making sure of the crew of the snow. Indeed, it must have called for extraordinary exertions on his part to pin the two of them, for the settee would never have respected her surrender for a moment.

  'Well done, Mr Dillon,' he cried, as James came aboard, guiding a figure in a tattered, unknown uniform over the side. 'Did she try to run?'

  'She tried, sir,' said James. 'Allow me to present Captain La Hire, of the French royal artillery.' They took off their hats, bowed and shook hands. La Hire said, 'Appy,' in a low, pénétré tone: and Jack said, 'Domestique, monsieur.'

  'The snow was a Neapolitan prize, sir: Captain La Hire was good enough to take command of the French royalist passengers and the Italian seamen, keeping the prize-crew under control while we pulled across to take possession of the settee. I am sorry to say the tartan and the other settee were too far to windward by the time we had secured her, and they have run down the coast—they are lying under the guns of the battery at Almoraira.'

  'Ah? We will look into the bay when we have the prisoners across. Many prisoners, Mr Dillon?'

  'Only about twenty, sir, since the snow's people are allies. They were on their way to Gibraltar.'

  'When were they taken?'

  'Oh, she's a fair prize, sir—a good eight days since.'

  'So much the better. Tell me, was there any trouble?'

  'No, sir. Or very little. We knocked two of the prize-crew on the head, and there was a foolish scuffle aboard the settee—a man pistolled. I hope all was well with you, sir?'

  'Yes, yes—no one killed, no serious wounds. She ran away from us too fast to do much damage: sailed four miles to our three, even without her royals. A most prodigious fine sailer.'

  Jack had a notion that some fleeting reserve passed across James Dillon's face, or perhaps showed in his voice; but in the hurry of things to be done, prizes to survey, prisoners to be dealt with, he could not tell why it affected him so unpleasantly until some two or three hours later, when the impression was reinforced and at least half defined.

  He was in his cabin: spread out on the table was the chart of Cape Nao, with Cape Almoraira and Cape Ifach jutting out from its massive under-side, and the little village of Almoraira at the bottom of the bay between them: on his right sat James, on his left Stephen, and opposite him Mr Marshall.

  '. . . what is more,' he was saying, 'the Doctor tells me the Spaniard says that the other settee has a cargo of quicksilver hidden in sacks of flour, so we must handle her with great care.'

  'Oh, of course,' said James Dillon. Jack looked at him sharply, then down at the chart and at Stephen's drawing: it showed a little bay with a village and a square tower at the bottom of it: a low mole ran twenty or thirty yards out into the sea, turned left-handed for another fifty and ended in a rocky knob, thus enclosing a harbour sheltered from all but the south-west wind. Steep-to cliffs ran from the village right round to the north-east point of the bay. On the other side there was a sandy beach all the way from the tower to the south-west point, where the cliffs reared up again. 'Could the fellow possibly think I am shy?' he thought. 'That I left off chasing because I did not choose to get hurt and hurried back for a prize?' The tower commanded the entrance to the harbour; it stood some twenty yards to the south of the village and the gravel beach, where the fishing-boats were hauled out. 'Now this knob at the end of the jetty,' he said aloud, 'would you say it was ten foot high?'

  'Probably more. It is eight or nine years since I was there,' said Stephen, 'so I will not be absolute; but the chapel on it withstands the tall waves in the winter storms.'

  'Then it will certainly protect our hull. Now, with the sloop anchored with a spring on her cable so'—running his finger in a line from the battery to the rock and so to the spot—'she should be tolerably safe. She opens as heavy a fire as she can, playing on the mole and over the tower. The boats from the snow and the settee land at the Doctor's cove'—pointing to a little indentation just round the south-west point—'and we run as fast as ever we can along the shore and so take the tower from behind. Twenty yards short of it we fire the rocket and you turn your guns well away from the battery, but blaze away without stopping.'

  'Me, sir?' cried James.

  'Yes, you, sir; I am going ashore.' There was no answering the decision of this statement, and after a pause he went on to the detailed arrangements. 'Let us say ten minutes to run from the cove to the tower, and . . .'

  'Allow twenty, if you please,' said Stephen. 'You portly men of a sanguine complexion often die suddenly, from unconsidered exertion in t
he heat. Apoplexy—congestion.'

  'I wish, I wish you would not say things like that, Doctor,' said Jack, in a low tone: they all looked at Stephen with some reproach and Jack added, 'Besides, I am not portly.'

  'The captain has an uncommon genteel figgar,' said Mr Marshall.

  The conditions were perfect for the attack. The remains of the easterly wind would carry the Sophie in, and the breeze that would spring up off the land at about moon-rise would carry her into the offing, together with anything they managed to cut out. In his long survey from the masthead, Jack had made out the settee and a number of other vessels moored to the inner wall of the mole, as well as a row of fishing-boats hauled up along the shore: the settee was at the chapel end of the mole, directly opposite the guns of the tower, a hundred yards on the other side of the harbour.

  'I may not be perfect,' he reflected, 'but by God I am not shy; and if we cannot bring her out, then by God I shall burn her where she lies.' But these reflexions did not last long. From the deck of the Neapolitan snow he watched the Sophie round Cape Almoraira in the three-quarter darkness and stand into the bay, while the two prizes, with the boats in tow, bore away for the point on the other side. With the settee already in the port there was no possibility of surprise for the Sophie, and before she anchored she would have to undergo the fire of the battery. If there was to be a surprise it would lie with the boats: the night was almost certainly too dark now for the prizes to be seen crossing outside the bay to land the boats in Stephen's cove beyond the point—'one of the few I know where the white-bellied swift builds her nest'. Jack watched her going with a tender and extreme anxiety, torn with longing to be in both places at once: the possibilities of hideous failure flooded into his mind—the shore guns (how big were they? Stephen had been unable to tell) hulling the Sophie again and again, the heavy shot passing through both sides—the wind falling, or getting up to blow dead on shore—not enough hands left aboard to sweep her out of range—the boats all astray. It was a foolhardy attempt, absurdly rash. 'Silence fore and aft,' he cried harshly. 'Do you want to wake the whole coast?'