The Letter of Marque

by Patrick O'Brian

  'Bless you, William,' said Jack inwardly. 'I never knew you were so quick.' And aloud, in answer to the unspoken question that hung there in the cabin, 'Captain Pullings, who accompanies me as a volunteer and who is the most senior King's officer in these waters, will be taking command of the Surprise in my absence. Mr Strype, have you a remark?'

  'Yes,' said Strype, and for the first time it became apparent that he was drunk, pale drunk with solitary gin, 'how do we stand for prize-money?'

  This was said with a particularly knowing, cynical leer, and the others reddened with shame. Jack looked at him coldly and said 'That is surely selling the bear . . . that is surely counting your bears . . .' he hesitated. 'In any case the question is premature and likely to bring misfortune,' he went on. 'It will of course be dealt with according to the custom of the sea. Those that tow share equally with those that take.'

  'Fair enough,' said Leigh. 'It was like that in the last war, and in the American war before that.'

  'And now that we have returned to the subject of boats,' Jack continued, 'I will be more exact. Captain Babbington and I are agreed that the largest belonging to each ship, launch, longboat or pinnace, would be best. They should be fully manned, with spare rowers for a long pull, and the men should be well armed for boarding, though I hope they will not be called upon to do so. They should be equipped with hook-ropes and all the necessary tackle and they would be best commanded by the bosun or a senior master's mate. Yet even more important, they must be made to understand that silence is absolutely essential—matting on the thole-pins or rowlocks, naturally, but above all no talking: not a word. The boats lie on their oars when I cast them off and neither move nor speak till they are called in by name, either to tow or help in overcoming resistance. Since they may have to board they should have white armbands, to be put on at the last moment, like the Surprises: the password is Merry Christmas and the answer Happy New Year. I think that is all, gentlemen.' He stood up: he had seen far too many meetings of this kind rendered vague and obscure by an interminable discussion of points that had little or nothing to do with the main issue, and it seemed to him better to leave his plan in its simplest form. Yet when the captains were gone he sat down with Babbington and the master of the Tartarus, checking soundings and bearings and the order of the French ships along the quay: a worthless brig, two gunboats mounting thirty-two pounders, the Diane, and two fair-sized merchantmen that had recently moved from the bottom of the basin, presumably with the intention of slipping out in her wake. These, together with the shoals to be avoided on leaving the port, they traced in three copies, together with a statement of the successive stages of the operation in the simplest, most unambiguous language they could work out; and when the three were finished Jack Aubrey said 'There. I believe we have done all we can. If you will issue these as part of an order, William, and let your captains mull over them all tomorrow, getting them by rote themselves and teaching the boat-crews until they are word-perfect, you will do me a great service. I shall leave you now and take the ship some way out into the offing. I shall pick up the boats tomorrow on my way in, and if all goes well I hope to see you about midnight or a little after. But if it don't, William, if I make a cock of it, you must not—I repeat must not—follow me in or let any of your ships do so. If this business drags out long enough for the French to recover their wits and find that the isthmus is not being invaded after all, they will keep up such a fire on the narrow pass that no ship will get out alive. I have told Tom Pullings the same, and he has agreed.'

  'Well, sir,' said Babbington unwillingly, 'I shall do what you say; but I wish to God I were going with you.'

  During the short pull back to his ship Jack studied the sky with the closest attention: its veils of mist were still just to be made out, but they were dissipating fast and the high sky was almost clear, with a few streaks of lofty cirrus moving gently across the stars from the west-south-west.

  'I wish it may not turn dirty before morning,' he said to Bonden, by way of averting ill-fortune.

  'Not on your life, sir,' said Bonden. 'I never seen a prettier night.'

  Having given the orders that would take the Surprise northwest for a couple of hours, there to stand off and on for the rest of the night, Jack went below. The cabin was lit but empty; Stephen had already gone to bed, leaving some medical notes, three books with their places marked, a half-written score, and, lying next to a magnifying glass, three Naples biscuits, already attacked by rats. Jack tossed the biscuits out of the scuttle, took the glass and studied his hanging barometer: it had risen a tenth of an inch and the quicksilver showed a marked convexity, confirming his already set opinion. He opened his desk, where his serial letter to Sophie was still spread out from the day before, and sitting down he wrote 'My dear, I am just returned from Tartarus—William is made post!—He is so happy about it, and so am I—it is as pretty a night as ever I have seen, with the wind at WSW or a trifle S of it, and a gently rising glass. God bless you, my dear: I am just about to turn in—It was quite a busy day today and I hope it will be far busier tomorrow.' With this he lit his hand-lantern and went to bed. The lantern hooked into a slot within hand's reach of his cot and with its slide almost entirely closed it sent out no more than a very soft narrow beam that lit two feet of deckhead. He contemplated this beam for perhaps two minutes with an easy mind: it appeared to him that he had done everything that he ought to have done and that if the weather was kind he had a fair chance of success tomorrow—the enterprise was perfectly justifiable even if very much less depended on it; he would have undertaken it in any circumstances. He knew that his colleagues were fallible, that the simplest order could be misunderstood or disobeyed, and that grotesque ill-luck could always intervene; but now the dice were thrown, and he must abide by the result. Gazing at the beam he was dimly aware of the ship's living sound as she moved north-east with a slight following sea, the contented hum of the well-set-up rigging (taut, but not too taut), the occasional creak of the wheel, and of the complex aroma, made up of scrubbed plank, fresh sea-breeze, stale bilge-water, tarred cordage, paint and damp sailcloth.

  By the later part of the forenoon on the twelfth, a grey peaceful day with the small breeze steady in the west-south-west, the only comfortable place in the Surprise was the mizzentop. The decks were entirely filled with parties engaged in hoisting up the remaining carronades from the hold and striking down the long guns and with making all fast in preparation for the night's bombardment; for not only could carronades be fired much faster than long guns, thus making an even greater noise in the aggregate, but only a couple of hands were required to work them as opposed to the great gun's team of six or eight. The cabin was taken up by the captain, his officers and the boats' coxswains, settling a host of details. The medical men had therefore gone aloft quite early, with books, telescopes and chessmen. There was a draught-board neatly carved in the floor of the top and on this they had played a not very aggressive game, ending in a draw, and now they were reclining on the folded studdingsails.

  From a scattered bddy of gulls, working slowly against the wind with angled wings, Stephen had picked out what was almost certainly Larus canus, usual enough in the Irish parts of his youth, some of which had been spent in the west, where they nested in quantities on the cliffs and the more lonely strands, but quite rare in these waters, and he was just about to say 'I believe I see a common gull' when Martin asked 'How would you render peripateia?'

  'Why surely a reverse. But no doubt you mean it in the dramatical sense: can you not say peripety in English? The French certainly have péripétie; though to be sure they use it loosely, in the sense of ordinary vicissitudes.'

  'I believe I have seen peripety. But it is scarcely current English, and I do not think it would leave Mowett much the wiser.' He passed Stephen a little slim book, Aristotle's Poetica, and said 'I promised to translate this for him.'

  'That was benevolent in you.'

  'It would have been more truly benevolent if I had re
alized the difficulty; but I did not. I had read it at the university with my tutor, an excellent man, bless him, a scholar with a great gift for making duller minds understand and even love a text. With his help I did grasp the essence and I have retained it; but now turning it into an English that is both accurate and tolerably fluent, an English that might be spoken by a Christian, is I am afraid a task beyond my powers.'

  'From what I remember of the book's strange flitting nature and its many technicalities it would be beyond mine too.'

  'Pride and precipitancy were my undoing. When Mowett told me he meant to write a very ambitious piece called The Sea-Officer's Tragedy, based on Captain Aubrey's career, his victories and his misfortunes, I told him I hoped he would make it end happy. "I cannot possibly do that," says he. "Since it is a tragedy, it must end in disaster." I begged his pardon for disagreeing, but I had the support of the greatest authority in the learned world, Aristotle himself, in saying that although tragedy necessarily dealt with the doings of great-minded men or women, in a high and serious manner, it by no means necessarily ended unhappy: and I quoted the lines I have ventured to render thus: The nature of the tragedy's action has always required that the scope should be as full as can be without obscuring the plot, and that the number of events making a probable or necessary sequence that will change a man's state from unhappiness to happiness or from happiness to unhappiness should be the smallest possible, and desired him to observe that not only was the change from evil to good eminently possible in tragedy, but that Aristotle put it first.'

  Two bells. The Surprise had softened many of the rigours of naval life: no officers or bosun's mates started the hands into brisker motion with plaited canes or blows from a rope's end; the stowing of hammocks in the nettings each fine morning was not a breakneck race; no one was flogged for being last off the yard; and people walked about in a free and easy fashion, talking or chewing tobacco as they saw fit. But brahminical cleanliness remained; the watches and their exact relief-were still holy; and so was the ceremony of meals. During the later part of the game of chess, quite destroying their concentration, the pandemonium of all hands being piped to dinner had broken out below them, with the banging of mess-kids and plates as the salt beef came aft from the galley and the muffled thunder of blackjacks as the beer came forward from the hatchway butt—for the ship was not yet in grog waters and the people had to be content with their traditional gallon a day at twice, which the tradition-loving Surprise still served out in leather jugs. And now the drummer at the capstan—no longer a Marine, but a moderately gifted foremast jack—gave a preliminary thump and then launched upon his version of Roast Beef of Old England, the equivalent of the officers' dinner-bell, the warning that dinner would very soon be on the table.

  They leapt to their feet, and as they gathered books, papers, chessmen, Stephen said, 'I am so glad to hear what you tell me, about Aristotle. I had forgotten those words or had skipped them—the whole book I read with a cross, superficial mind, having taken against him in those far-off days because of his weak remarks about birds and for his having brought up that showy brute-beast Alexander, as great a public nuisance as our Buonaparte—but of course he was the great learned man of the world.' He lowered himself through the lubber's hole, and as he hung there by his elbows with his feet searching for the shrouds below he said to himself, 'Tonight is perhaps Jack's true peripety. Dear Lord, how I pray that his tragedy may end happy and that . . .' Here kindly hands seized his ankles, guiding them to a firm foothold.

  In the cabin he was shocked to find Jack Aubrey standing waiting for him, unusually tall, grave and stern, dressed in a fine bottle-green coat and a gleaming newly-tied neckcloth. 'Really, Stephen, what a fellow you are,' he said. 'We are invited to dine in the gun-room and here you are like something sent aboard from the receiving-ship. Padeen, there. Pass the word for Padeen.' And to Padeen, 'Shave and brush your master directly: put out his best coat, black satin breeches, silk stockings, silver-buckled shoes. He will be here in five minutes.'

  In five minutes he was there, bleeding from three small cuts and looking somewhat confused. Jack dabbed at the blood with his handkerchief, twitched Stephen's wig and waistcoat straight and walked him quickly to the gun-room, where they were welcomed by their hosts as three bells struck in the afternoon watch.

  It so happened that this was the first time the captain of the Surprise had dined as a guest in the gun-room since she became a private man-of-war. Before the taking of the Spartan and her prizes the officers had been too poor to invite him and during the strenuous days in Polcombe cove there had been no entertainment possible. It was therefore an unusually splendid meal, all the more so since the gun-room cook was determined to outdo Adi; yet though the table was loaded with such things as lobsters, crayfish, crabs, soles, and mussels in three separate ways—all corruptly obtained from the Tartarus—there were desperately wide spaces between the diners. Jack had known this table for a great many years, always pretty full and sometimes packed with guests elbow to elbow; but now there were no Marine officers, no master, no purser, no chaplain, no guests from the midshipmen's berth or from other ships, and he occupied one whole side to himself, on Pullings' right. On the opposite side sat Stephen and Davidge, while Martin had the foot of the table; and heavy work they made of it, at least to begin with. Jack Aubrey, though acquainted with West and Davidge and aware of their professional competence, had never known them outside the service and he was not on easy terms with them—nor with any other stranger for that matter, since his trial. For their part they found him intimidating; and they too had been strangely damaged by losing their commissions and with them their livelihood, their future and much of their identity. Then again those who were not going on the cutting-out expedition were strongly aware that in a few hours time the others would be setting off—even more strongly aware than those directly concerned—and they felt that gaiety was out of place. There was tension among those who were going, too, and in Jack Aubrey's case it was a tension he had never known before, although he had seen more action than most sailors of his age. He observed, to his astonishment, that the piece of lobster that he held poised on his fork while he waited for Davidge to finish his period was trembling. He ate it rapidly and continued listening, with inclined head and civil smile, to the wandering tale that was very slowly drawing to its disastrous want of an end: Davidge had travelled in France during the peace; he had wished to dine at a famous eating-house between Lyons and Avignon, but the place was full and he had been told of another just as good, by the cathedral. There he was the only guest, and he entered into conversation with the master of the house; they spoke of this cathedral and other cathedrals and Davidge observed that at Bourges he had been much struck by the extraordinary beauty of one of the choirboys. The inn-keeper, a paederast, had misunderstood him and had made a scarcely veiled proposal; Davidge however had managed to decline without offence and the man had taken it so well that they parted on the best of terms, all payment for the splendid meal being resolutely declined. But Davidge, having at last reached the Rhône by way of innumerable parentheses, suddenly felt that sodomy, as a thing amusing in itself and the justification for any anecdote however long, would not do for his grave, attentive captain, and he tried to give his tale some other turn that would not sound too foolish—a vain attempt from which he was only rescued by the next course, which consisted of soused pig's face (one of Jack's favourite dishes) and a saddle of mutton, the joint being put down for Martin to carve. Martin, a chop-house bachelor until his recent marriage, had never carved a saddle of mutton. He did not carve one now, but with a powerful thrust of his fork flung it straight into Davidge's lap. It saved Davidge from his predicament at the cost of his breeches—cheap at the price, he thought—and it was silently passed on to Stephen, who cut it up in the approved surgical manner.

  It was good mutton, well hung and roasted to a turn, and with it came a truly beautiful claret, a Fombrauges which so pleased Jack Aubrey that after th
e first glass he produced one of the very few remnants of his brief education on dry land. 'Nunc est bibendum,' he said with a rather triumphant look at Stephen and Martin, 'and upon my honour, you could not ask a pleasanter vino to bib.'

  After this the dinner-party grew easier, though the tension could not be entirely set aside, since two grindstones had been brought up on deck and their high-pitched scream as the armourer and his mate put a fine edge upon cutlasses and boarding-axes necessarily kept the immediate future in mind. Yet even so, the party was not exactly convivial, since it split into two groups: Aubrey and Pullings talking quietly of former shipmates and former voyages, while Stephen and Davidge spoke of the difficulties of remaining alive as an undergraduate at Trinity College in Dublin: Davidge had a cousin there who had been pierced three times, twice by a sword, once by a pistol-bullet.

  'I am not a quarrelsome man nor inclined to take offence,' said Stephen, 'yet I must have been out a score of times in my first year. It is better now, I believe, but it was a desperate place in those days.'

  'So my cousin said. And when he came to see us in England my father and I gave him some lessons: it was riposte, counter-riposte, parry or tierce all through that summer; but at least he survived.'

  'You are an eminent swordsman, I find.'

  'Not I. But my father was, and he did make me at least competent. It was useful to me later on, when I was in a sad way, having left the service, because Angelo employed me for a while in his salle d'armes.'

  'Indeed? It would oblige me extremely if you would exchange a few passes with me after dinner. I am somewhat out of practice, and it would grieve me to be cut down like a simpleton tonight.'

  Stephen was not the only man in the Surprise with the same notion, and as the dinner-party came up to take the air on the quarterdeck they heard the steady pop-popping of hands right forward shooting bottles at close range with their pistols, for by now the carronades were all in position, the boats were towing two-abreast astern, and arms had been served out. The sea, the breeze and the sky were much as they had been, gentle, grey and steady: a timeless kind of day.