Book 4 - The Mauritius Command

by Patrick O'Brian

  'That flat rock is what we call Noah's Ark, and far over there is Seal Island—the Doctor will like that. And beyond the Ark where you see the white water is the Roman Rock: we shall pass between the two. Indeed, we shall open Simon's Bay at any minute now. Mr Richardson, pray see if the Doctor has finished—whether he can come on deck—he would be sorry to miss all this. Yes, there we are,' he went on, with his telescope to his eye as the inner harbour came into full view. 'Raisonable, do you see? The two-decker. Then Sirius: Néréide laying inside her, a very pretty berth: then a brig I cannot make out at all. Mr Seymour, what do you make of the brig with her topmasts on deck?' At this point Stephen appeared, blinking in the strong light, wiping his bloody hands on a woollen nightcap and looking squalid. 'Ah, there you are, Doctor,' cried Jack. 'Have you finished sawing up poor young Francis? How is he coming along? Prime, I dare say?' Francis, until today the most popular topman in the ship, endeavouring to gild the Boadicea's main topgallant truck, had lost his hold, making a most spectacular fall from that giddy eminence, missing the deck (and certain death) by the grace of the frigate's roll, but grazing her number twelve portlid with such force as to play havoc with his thoracic cage and above all to smear the bleeding paintwork, the grass-combing bugger.

  'He may do,' said Stephen. 'These young fellows are made of steel and a particularly resilient leather. So that is Africa.' He looked greedily at the shore, the known haunt of the aardvark, the pangolin, the camelopard; of birds without number, roaming at large amidst a flora of extraordinary wealth, headed by the ostrich. 'And that,' pointing towards a remote headland, 'is the all-dreaded Cape of Storms itself, I make no doubt?'

  'Not exactly,' said Jack. 'The Cape is far astern: I am sorry you did not see it. We came round precious close while you was busy. But before that you did see the Table Mountain, did you not? I sent a messenger.'

  'Yes, yes. I felt most obliged to you, in spite of the unchristian hour. It might also be compared with Ben Bulben.'

  'Curious, ain't it? And now here on the larboard bow—no, the larboard—you have Simon's Bay, a sweet anchorage. And there's Raisonable, wearing the flag.'

  'Would that be a line-of-battle ship?' asked Farquhar. 'A most imposing vessel.'

  'I doubt any sixty-four would ever lie in the line nowadays,'said Jack. 'In any case, the Raisonable was built fifty years ago, and if she fired a full broadside she might fall to pieces; but I am glad she looks imposing. Then comes Sirius, a much more powerful ship in fact, although she has but one tier of guns; thirty-six eighteen-pounders, much the same broadside weight of metal as ours. Then another frigate, do you see? Néréide thirty-six; but only twelve-pounders. Then that odd little brig-of-war.'

  'Pray, sir, why are they not at sea?' asked Farquhar. 'As I understand it, those and a smaller vessel called the Otter are almost all we have to guard the Indian trade. I ask out of mere curiosity.'

  'Oh,' said Jack, 'this is the tail-end of the hurricane season up there. They could hardly be blockading the Mauritius in the hurricane season. They are probably in to refit and to take in stores—nothing for them up there, two thousand miles to the north . . . Mr Johnson, I believe you may begin to reduce sail.'

  His eyes were fixed to his glass: the Boadicea had made her number and he was watching for the master-attendant's boat to put off. There it was, just leaving the pier. Although the frigate was now under fore and main topsails alone, still she glided in, heaved on by the moderate south-east swell and the making tide, and the shore came fast towards him. The moment he had the Admiralty House square on he would begin his salute; and while he waited for that moment to come he had the strangest feeling that at the first gun England and his whole voyage south would vanish into the past.

  'Carry on, Mr Webber,' he said, and as he spoke the nine-pounder bawled out its respects with a tongue of fire in a cloud of smoke.

  'Fire one,' said the gunner; and the echoes came hurrying back from the mountains. 'Fire two. Fire three . . . ' By the seventeenth gun the great bay was alive with crossing reverberations, and before they had died away a puff of smoke appeared on the Raisonable's side, followed a second later by the deep report. Nine guns she fired, the reply due to a captain, and after the ninth the Boadicea's signal-midshipman, young Weatherall, piped, 'Flag signalling, sir.' Then his voice broke to a harsh bass as he went on, 'Captain repair aboard flag.'

  'Acknowledge,' said Jack. 'Lower away the gig. Where's my coxswain? Pass the word for my coxswain.'

  'I am sorry, sir,' said Johnson, blushing. 'Moon is drunk.'

  'Damn him,' said Jack. 'Crompton, jump into the gig. Mr Hill, are these all my papers? Every last one?' Clasping the packet of sealed, canvas-covered documents to his bosom he ran down the side, caught the heaving gig on the height of its rise, and said, 'Shove off.'

  It was many, many years since he had last been here, a midshipman, an oldster, in the Resolution, yet how exactly he remembered it all; there were a few more civilian houses in the village at the bottom of the bay, but everything else was just the same—the steady beat of the surf, the mountains, the men of-war's boats crossing to and fro, the hospital, the barracks, the arsenal: he might himself have been a lanky boy, returning to the Resolution after catching Roman-fish off the rocks. He was filled with a pleasurable excitement, with countless memories, yet at the same time with an apprehension that he could not define.

  'Boat ahoy?' asked the Raisonable.

  'Boadicea,' replied the acting coxswain in a voice of brass; and then more quietly he said, 'Rowed of all.' The gig kissed against the tall flank of the flagship, the sideboys ran down with their scarlet man-ropes, the bosun started his call, and Jack was piped aboard. As he took off his cocked hat he realized with a shock that the tall bowed white-haired figure who answered his salute was the Admiral Bertie he had last seen in Port of Spain as the lithe, lively, wenching captain of the Renown; and some part of his busy mind said to him, beneath all the rest, 'Perhaps you are not so very young yourself, either, Jack Aubrey.'

  'Here you are at last, Aubrey,' said the Admiral, shaking his hand. 'I am very happy to see you. You know Captain Eliot?'

  'Yes, sir; we were shipmates in the Leander in ninety-eight. How do you do, sir?'

  Before Eliot could reply with anything more than an extension of the friendly smile that he had worn ever since Jack's face appeared, the Admiral went on, 'I dare say those papers are for me? Come along; let's have a look at them in the cabin.' Splendour; opulence; carpets; a portrait of Mrs Bertie, looking plump and comfortable. 'Well,' he said, wrestling with the outer covers, 'so you had a tedious passage of it: but did you have any luck on your way down? They used to call you Lucky Jack Aubrey in the Mediterranean, I remember. God damn these seals.'

  'We saw barely a sail, sir; but we did have a little brush off the Dry Salvages, and retook the old Hyaena.'

  'Did you? Did you, indeed? Well, I am heartily glad of it . . .' The papers were free now, and as he glanced through them he said, 'Yes. I have been expecting these. We must take them along to the Governor at once. But you have a politico aboard, I see? A Mr Farquhar? He must come too: I shall send my barge, by way of compliment; you cannot be too careful with these political gents. You had better order some cool clothes, too; it is a twenty mile ride to Cape Town. The Governor will not object to nankeen trousers and a round jacket.' He gave his orders and called for a bottle of wine. 'This is the right Diamant of the year one, Aubrey,' he said, sitting down again. 'Too good for you young fellows but you did retake the old Hyaena . . . I was a midshipman in her. Yes.' His washed-out blue eyes looked back over forty-five years, and he observed, 'That was in the days before carronades.' Returning to the present he drank his wine, saying, 'I trust your luck will hold, Aubrey: you need it, on this station. Well, and so we shall have to fag over that damned mountain, a wearying ride in this infernal dust—dust everywhere, rain or shine; a whole nation of swabbers would never come to an end of it. I wish we did not have to go. If it were not for the political
side, I should get you to sea the minute you had your water aboard. The situation is far worse than ever it was before you left England—far worse than when these orders were written. The French have snapped up two more Indiamen, this side of the Ten Degree channel, the Europe and the Streatham: homeward-bound Indiamen, worth a mint of money.'

  'Lord, sir, that is very bad,' cried Jack.

  'Yes, it is,' said the Admiral, 'and it is going to get even worse unless we bring it up with a round turn, and smartly at that. That is what we must do: it is feasible, and it must be done. Oh, yes, it is feasible, with a certain amount of initiative . . . and maybe I should add good fortune too, though luck don't bear talking about.' He touched wood, considered for a while, and then said, 'Listen, Aubrey, before your Mr Farquhar comes aboard—before we start getting entangled in political considerations—I shall lay the position before you as clearly as I can. There are four French frigates based on Mauritius and Réunion, in addition to the force they had there last year: they can use Port Louis or Port South-East in Mauritius and Saint-Paul in Réunion, and separately or in pairs they can range out as far as the Nicobars and beyond—the whole Indian Ocean. You can't catch them out there; we can't convoy all the Eastern trade—we do not possess the ships; and you can't blockade them for ever. So you must either destroy them in detail in their home waters or eventually you must take their bases away from them. Now with this in mind, we have seized and garrisoned Rodriguez with part of the 56th and some Bombay sepoys, for your water in the first place, and in the second as a base for the reinforcements that are supposed to come from India in time. There are only about four hundred men on the island at present, but we hope for more next year—it is a question of transports. You know Rodriguez?'

  'Yes, sir. I have not touched there, however.' Rodriguez: a remote and tolerably barren speck of land alone in the ocean, three hundred and fifty miles eastward of Mauritius: he had viewed it from the masthead of his dear Surprise.

  'So at least you have your water. As for ships, you have Boadicea, of course; Sirius, with a good steady captain in Pym, as regular as a clock; Néréide—she is only a twelve-pounder, and getting on in years, but Corbett keeps her in very good order though he is rather undermanned; Otter, a fast, useful eighteen-gun sloop, in very good order too. Lord Clonfert has her: she should be in any moment now. And I can let you have Raisonable except in the hurricane months, for she cannot bear a hard blow. She is not all she was when I was a boy, but we careened her a few weeks ago, and she is quite fast. At least she is a match for the Canonnière, who is older still; and she makes a show. I might conceivably be able to add the Magicienne from Sumatra, in time, and the Victor, another sloop. But even without them, I conceive that, Raisonable cancelling out Canonnière, three well worked-up frigates and a powerful sloop would not be reckoned out of the way for dealing with four Frenchmen.'

  'Certainly not, sir,' said Jack. The Admiral was speaking as though Jack's pennant were a certainty.

  'No one will pretend it is an easy task, however. The Frenchmen are Vénus, Manche, Caroline—it was she who took the last two Indiamen—and Bellone, all new forty-gun frigates. As for the rest, they have the Canonnière, as I have said, still mounting her fifty guns, our brig the Grappler, several avisos and a few smaller things. And I warn you, Aubrey, if you hoist your pennant, I cannot let you have a captain under you. If you shift into the Raisonable for the time being, Eliot can replace you in Boadicea; but I cannot let you have a captain under you.' Jack bowed. He had scarcely relied upon it: on the remoter stations there were few post-captains to spare; and then again if a commodore did have a captain under him, that commodore was entitled to a third of the Admiral's share of prize-money.

  'May I ask whether we have any intelligence of their landforces, sir?' he said.

  'Yes, but I wish it were more exact. On Mauritius General Decaen has the best part of two regiments of the line, and his militia may amount to ten thousand or so. Our information from Réunion is more scanty, but is seems that General Desbrusleys has much the same. Oh, it is a tough nut to crack, I grant you; but cracked it must be, and at the earliest possible moment. You have to strike hard and fast with your forces concentrated while theirs are dispersed: in a word, you have to go in and win. Government will be in a rare old taking when the news of the Europe and the Streatham reaches England, and this is the kind of situation where you must produce results at once. I do not mention the country's interests, of course; but I do say that from a purely personal point of view there is probably a knighthood or even a baronetcy if you succeed; and if you don't, why it is the beach and half-pay for the rest of your life.'

  A midshipman darted in. 'The captain's duty, sir,' said he, 'and should you wish a compliment to the gentleman in the barge?'

  'Certainly,' said the Admiral. 'As to a flag.' In the pause that followed he gazed abstractedly at his wife's portrait. 'Should you not like a baronetcy, Aubrey? I am sure I would. Mrs Bertie fairly longs to wipe her sister's eye.'

  The unofficial part of Simon's Town, though little more than a hamlet, had drinking-booths, wine-shops and places of entertainment enough for a town of moderate size; and into one of those, at dusk, walked Stephen Maturin, bearing a bunch of orchids. He was tired, thirsty, and covered from head to foot with African dust; but he was happy, having spent his first half-day ashore walking up a mountain clothed with a vegetation largely unknown to him and inhabited by remarkable birds, some of which he recognized from their published descriptions: he had also seen three quarters of a female spotted hyaena, and he found the remaining piece, including its wistful face, removed to some distance, in the act of being devoured by his old friend the bearded vulture—a pleasant combination of the present and the past, of two far-distant worlds.

  He called for wine and water, mingled them in proportion to his thirst, placed his orchids in the water-jug, and drank until at last he began to sweat again. Apart from the landlord and three pretty Malay girls at the bar, there were only two other people in the twilit room, a very large officer in a uniform he could not make out, a vast gloomy man with a great deal of dark whisker, not unlike a melancholy bear, and his smaller, inconspicuous companion, who sat at his ease in shirtsleeves, with his breeches unbuttoned at the knee. The sad officer spoke a fluent though curious English devoid of articles: the smaller man's harsh and grating accent was clearly that of Ulster. They were discussing the Real Presence, but he had not made out the thread of their discourse before they both burst out 'No Pope, no Pope, no Pope,' the sad officer in the deepest bass that Stephen had ever heard. At the bar the Malay girls politely echoed 'No Pope' and as though it were a signal they brought candles and set them about the room. The light fell on Stephen's orchids and upon the contents of his handkerchief, fourteen curious beetles, collected for his friend Sir Joseph Blaine, formerly the chief of naval intelligence; he was considering one, a bupestrid, when he became aware of a darkness by his side, the melancholy bear, gently swaying. 'Golovnin, fleet lieutenant, captain of Imperial Majesty's sloop Diana,' said he, clicking his heels.

  Stephen rose, bowed, and said, 'Maturin, surgeon of Britannic Majesty's ship Boadicea. Please to take chair.'

  'You have soul,' observed Golovnin, nodding at the orchids. 'I too have soul. Where did you find them, flowers?'

  'In mountain,' said Stephen.

  Golovnin sighed; and taking a small cucumber from his pocket he began to eat it. He made no reply to Stephen's proffer of wine, but after a while he said, 'What is their name, flowers?'

  'Disa grandiflora,' said Stephen, and a long silence fell. It was broken by the Ulsterman, who, tired of drinking alone, brought his bottle over and set it on Stephen's table without the least ceremony. 'I am McAdam, of the Otter,' he remarked, sitting down. 'I saw you at the hospital this morning.' Now, by the light of the candle, Stephen recognized him, not from that morning but from many years ago: William McAdam, a mad doctor with a considerable reputation in Belfast, who had left Ireland after the failure of hi
s private asylum. Stephen had heard him lecture, and had read his book on hysteria with great applause. 'He will not last long,' observed McAdam, referring to Golovnin, now weeping on to the orchids.

  'Nor will you, colleague,' thought Stephen, looking at McAdam's pallid face and bloodshot eye.

  'Will you take a wee drink?'

  'Thank you, sir,' said Stephen, 'I believe I shall stay with my negus. What is it that you have in your bottle, pray?'

  'Och, it's a brandy they distil hereabouts. Raw, rot-gut stuff; I drink it experimentally, not from indulgence. He'—pointing an unsteady finger at Golovnin—'drinks it from nostalgia, as the nearest to his native vodka; I encourage him.'

  'You alluded to an experiment?' said Stephen.

  'Yes. Strobenius and others allege that a man dead drunk on grain-spirits falls backwards: on brandy he falls forwards. And if that is true, it tells us something about the motor centres, if you understand the expression. This gentleman here is my corpus vile. Yet it is wonderful how he holds out. This is our third bottle, and he has drunk glass for glass with me.'

  'I honour your devotion to science, sir.'

  'I do not give a fart in hell for science,' said McAdam. 'Art is all. Medicine is an art or it is nothing. Medicine of the mind, I mean; for what is your physical medicine, apart from purges and mercury and bark, what your murderous chirurgical tricks? They may, with luck, suppress symptoms: no more. On the other hand, where is the true fons et origo of nine tenths of your vicious constitutions of body? The mind, that's where it is,' he said, tapping his forehead. 'And what heals the mind? Art: nothing else. Art is all. That is my realm.'