Hornblower and the Hotspur h-3

by Cecil Scott Forester

  The lesson he had learned remained with him during that summer to trouble his conscience. Otherwise during those golden months the blockade of Brest might have been for Hotspur and Hornblower a yachting holiday, a holiday with a certain macabre quality. Just as some lay theologians advanced the theory that in Hell sinners would be punished by being forced to repeat, in unutterable tedium and surfeit, the sins they had committed during life, so Hornblower spent those delightful months doing delightful things until he felt he could not do them any longer. Day after day, and night after night, through the finest summer in human memory, Hotspur cruised in the approaches to Brest. She pressed up to the Goulet with the last of the flood, and cannily withdrew in to safety with the last of the ebb. She counted the French fleet, she reported the result of her observations to Admiral Parker. She drifted, hove-to, over calm seas amid gentle breezes. With westerly winds she worked her way out to give the lee shore a wide berth; with easterly winds she beat back again to beard the impotent French in their safe harbour.

  They were months of frightful peril for England, with the Grande Armee, two hundred thousand strong, poised within thirty miles of the Kentish beaches, but they were months of tranquillity for Hotspur, even with a score of hostile battleships in sight. There were occasional flurries when the coasters tried too boldly to enter or leave; there were occasional busy moments when squalls came down and topsails had to be reefed. There were encounters after dark with fishing vessels, conversations over a glass of rum with the Breton captains, purchases of crabs and lobsters and pilchards—and of the latest decree of the Inscription Maritime, or of a week-old copy of the Moniteur.

  Hornblower’s telescope revealed ant-like hordes of workmen rebuilding the blown-up batteries, and for a couple of weeks he watched the building of scaffolding and the erection of sheers on the Petit Minou, and, for three continuous days, as a result, the slow elevation to the vertical of the new mast of the semaphore station. The subsequent days added horizontal and vertical arms; before the summer was over those arms were whirling about reporting once more the movements of the blockading squadron.

  Much good might that do the French, huddled in their anchored ships in the Roads. Inertia and a sense of inferiority would work their will on the unfortunate crews. The ships ready for sea might slowly increase in number; men might slowly be found for them, but every day the balance of fighting quality, of naval power, swung faster and faster over in favour of the British, constantly exercising at sea, and constantly reinforced by the seaborne tribute of the world.

  There was a price to be paid; the dominion of the seas was not given freely by destiny. The Channel Fleet paid in blood, in lives, as well as in the sacrifice of the freedom and leisure of every officer and man on board. There was a constant petty drain. Ordinary sickness took only small toll; among men in the prime of life isolated from the rest of the world illnesses were few, although it was noticeable that after the arrival of victualling ships from England epidemics of colds would sweep through the fleet, while rheumatism—the sailor’s disease—was always present.

  The losses were mainly due to other causes. There were men who, in a moment of carelessness or inattention, fell from the yard. There were the men who ruptured themselves, and they were many, for despite the ingenuity of blocks and tackles there were heavy weights to haul about by sheer manpower. There were crushed fingers and crushed feet when ponderous casks of salted provisions were lowered into boats from the storeships and hauled up on to the decks of the fighting ships. And frequently a lacerated limb would end—despite all the care of the surgeons—in gangrene, in amputation, and death. There were the careless men who, during target practice with the cannon, lost their arms by ramming a cartridge into an improperly sponged gun, or who did not remove themselves from the line of recoil. Three times that year there were men who died in quarrels, when boredom changed to hysteria and knives were drawn; and on each of those occasions another life was lost, a life for a life, a hanging with the other ships clustered round and the crews lining the sides to learn what happened when a man lost his temper. And once the crews manned the sides to see what happened when a wretched young seaman paid the price for a crime worse even than murder—for raising his fist to his superior officer. Incidents of that sort were inevitable as the ships beat back and forth monotonously, over the eternal grey inhospitable sea.

  It was well for the Hotspur that she was under the command of a man to whom any form of idleness or monotony was supremely distasteful. The charts of the Iroise were notoriously inaccurate; Hotspur set herself to run line after line of soundings, to take series after series of careful triangulations from the headlands and hilltops. When the fleet ran short of silver sand, so necessary to keep the decks spotless white, it was Hotspur who supplied the deficiency, finding tiny lost beaches round the coast where a park could land—trespassing upon Bonaparte’s vaunted dominion over Europe—to fill sacks with the precious commodity. There were fishing competitions, whereby the lower-deck’s rooted objection to fish as an item of diet was almost overcome; a prize of a pound of tobacco for the biggest catch by an individual mess set all the messes to work on devising more novel fish-hooks and baits. There were experiments in ship-handling, when obsolescent and novel methods were tested, when by careful and accurate measurement with the log the effect of goose-winging the topsails was ascertained; or, it being assumed that the rudder was lost, the watch keeping officers tried their hands at manoeuvring the ship by the sails alone.

  Hornblower himself found mental exercise in working out navigational problems. Conditions were ideal for taking lunar observations, and by their aid it was possible to arrive at an accurate determination of longitude—a subject of debate since the days of the Carthaginians—at the cost of endless calculations. Hornblower was determined to perfect himself in this method, and his officers and young gentlemen bewailed the decision, for they, too, had to make lunar observations and work out the resulting sums. The longitude of the Little Girls was calculated on board the Hotspur a hundred times that summer, with nearly a hundred different results.

  To Hornblower it was a satisfactory occupation, the more satisfactory as it became obvious that he was acquiring the necessary knack. He tried to acquire the same facility in another direction, without the same satisfaction, as he wrote his weekly letters to Maria. There was only a limited number of endearments, only a limited number of ways of saying that he missed her, that he hoped her pregnancy was progressing favourably. There was only the one way of excusing himself for not returning to England as he had promised to do, and Maria was inclined to be a little peevish in her letters regarding the exigencies of the service. When the water-hoys arrived periodically and the enormous labour had to be undertaken of transferring the already stale liquid into the Hotspur Hornblower always found himself thinking that getting those eighteen tons of water on board meant another month of writing letters to Maria.

  Chapter XIII

  Hotspur’s bell struck two double strokes; it was six o’clock in the evening, and the first dog watch had come to an end in the gathering darkness.

  “Sunset, sir,” said Bush.

  “Yes,” agreed Hornblower.

  “Six o’clock exactly. The equinox, sir.”

  “Yes,” agreed Hornblower again; he knew perfectly well what was coming.

  “We’ll have a westerly gale, sir, or my name’s not William Bush.”

  “Very likely,” said Hornblower, who had been sniffing the air all day long.

  Hornblower was a heretic in this matter. He did not believe that the mere changing from a day a minute longer than twelve hours to one a minute shorter made gales blow from out of the west. Gales happened to blow at this time because winter was setting in, but ninety-nine men out of a hundred firmly believed in a more direct, although more mysterious causation.

  “Wind’s freshening and sea’s getting up a bit, sir,” went on Bush, inexorably.

  “Yes.”

  Hornblower fought down
the temptation to declare that it was not because the sun happened to set at six o’clock, for he knew that if he expressed such an opinion it would be received with the tolerant and concealed disagreement accorded to the opinions of children and eccentrics and captains.

  “We’ve water for twenty-eight days, sir. Twenty-four allowing for spillage and ullage.”

  “Thirty-six, on short allowance,” corrected Hornblower.

  “Yes, sir,” said Bush, with a world of significance in those two syllables.

  “I’ll give the order within a week,” said Hornblower.

  No gale could be expected to blow for a month continuously, but a second gale might follow the first before the water-hoys could beat down from Plymouth to refill the casks. It was a tribute to the organization set up by Cornwallis that during nearly six continuous months at sea Hotspur had not yet had to go on short allowance for water. Should it become necessary, it would be one more irksome worry brought about by the passage of time.

  “Thank you, sir,” said Bush, touching his hat and going off about his business along the darkened reeling deck.

  There were worries of all sorts. Yesterday morning Doughty had pointed out to Hornblower that there were holes appearing in the elbows of his uniform coat, and he only had two coats apart from full dress. Doughty had done a neat job of patching, but a search through the ship had not revealed any material of exactly the right weather-beaten shade. Furthermore the seats of nearly all his trousers were paper-thin, and Hornblower did not fancy himself in the baggy slop-chest trousers issued to the lower-deck; yet as that store was fast running out he had had to secure a pair for himself before they should all go. He was wearing his thick winter underclothing; three sets had appeared ample last April, but now he faced the prospect, in a gale, of frequent wettings to the skin with small chance of drying anything. He cursed himself and went off to try to make sure of some sleep in anticipation of a disturbed night. At least he had a good dinner inside him; Doughty had braised an oxtail, the most despised and rejected of all the portions of the weekly ration bullock, and had made of it a dish fit for a king. It might be his last good dinner for a long time if the gale lasted—winter affected land as well as sea, so that he could expect no other vegetables than potatoes and boiled cabbage until next spring.

  His anticipation of a disturbed night proved correct. He had been awake for some time, feeling the lively motion of the Hotspur and trying to make up his mind to rise and dress or to shout for a light and try to reads when they came thundering on his door.

  “Signal from the Flag, sir!”

  “I’ll come.”

  Doughty was really the best of servants; he arrived at the same moments with a storm lantern.

  “You’ll need your pea jacket, sir, and oilskins over it. Your sou’wester, sir. Better have your scarf, sir, to keep your pea jacket dry.”

  A scarf round his neck absorbed spray that might otherwise drive in between sou’wester and oilskin coat and soak the pea jacket. Doughty tucked Hornblower into his clothes like a mother preparing her son for school, while they reeled and staggered on the leaping deck. Then Hornblower went out into the roaring darkness.

  “A white rocket and two blue lights from the Flag, sir,” reported Young. “That means ‘take offshore stations’.”

  “Thank you. What sail have we set?” Hornblower could guess the answer by the feel of the ship, but he wanted to be sure. It was too dark for his dazzled eyes to see as yet.

  “Double reefed tops’ls and main course, sir.”

  “Get that course in and lay her on the port tack.”

  “Port tack. Aye aye, sir.”

  The signal for offshore stations meant a general withdrawal of the Channel Fleet. The main body took stations seventy miles to seaward off Brest, safe from that frightful lee shore and with a clear run open to them for Tor Bay—avoiding Ushant on the one hand and the Start on the other—should the storm prove so bad as to make it impossible to keep the sea. The Inshore Squadron was to be thirty miles closer in. They were the most weatherly ships and could afford the additional risk in order to be close up to Brest should a sudden shift of wind enable the French to get out.

  But there was not merely the question of the French coming out, but of other French ships coming in. Out in the Atlantic there were more than one small French squadron—Bonaparte’s own brother was on board one of them, with his American wife—seeking urgently to regain a French port before food and water should be completely exhausted. So Naiad and Doris and Hotspur had to stay close in, to intercept and report. They could best encounter the dangers of the situation. And they could best be spared if they could not. So Hotspur had to take her station only twenty miles to the west of Ushant, where French ships running before the gale could be best expected to make their landfall.

  Bush loomed up in the darkness, shouting over the gale.

  “The equinox, just as I said, sir.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’ll be worse before it’s better, sir.”

  “No doubt.”

  Hotspur was close-hauled now, soaring, pitching and rolling over the vast invisible waves that the gale was driving in upon her port bow. Hornblower felt resentfully that Bush was experiencing pleasure at this change of scene. A brisk gale and a struggle to windward was stimulating to Bush after long days of fair weather, while Hornblower struggled to keep his footing and felt a trifle doubtful about the behaviour of his stomach as a result of this sudden change.

  The wind howled round them and the spray burst over the deck so that the black night was filled with noise. Hornblower held on to the hammock netting; the circus riders he had seen in his childhood, riding round the ring, standing upright on two horses with one foot on each, had no more difficult task than he had at present. And the circus riders were not smacked periodically in the face with bucketfuls of spray.

  There were small variations in the violence of the wind. They could hardly be called gusts; Hornblower took note that they were increases in force without any corresponding decreases. Through the soles of his feet, through the palms of his hands, he was aware of a steady increase in Hotspur’s heel and a steady stiffening in her reaction. She was showing too much canvas. With his mouth a yard from Young’s ear he yelled his order.

  “Four reefs in the tops’ls!”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  The exaggerated noises of the night were complicated now with the shrilling of the pipes of the bos’n’s mates; down in the waist the orders were bellowed at hurrying, staggering men.

  “All hands reef tops’ls!”

  The hands clawed their way to their stations; this was the moment when a thousand drills bore fruit, when men carried out in darkness and turmoil the duties that had been ingrained into them in easier conditions. Hornblower felt Hotspur’s momentary relief as Young set the topsails a-shiver to ease the tension on them. Now the men were going aloft to perform circus feats compared with which his maintenance of his foothold was a trifle. No trapeze artist ever had to do his work in utter darkness on something as unpredictable as a foot-rope in a gale, or had to exhibit the trained strength of the seaman passing the ear-ring while hanging fifty feet above an implacable sea. Even the lion tamer, keeping a wary eye on his treacherous brutes, did not have to encounter the ferocious enmity of the soulless canvas that tried to tear the topmost men from their precarious footing.

  A touch of the helm set the sails drawing again, and Hotspur lay over in her fierce struggle with the wind. Surely there was no better example of the triumph of man’s ingenuity over the blind forces of nature than this, whereby a ship could wring advantage out of the actual attempt of the gale to push her to destruction. Hornblower clawed his way to the binnacle and studied the heading of the ship, working out mental problems of drift and leeway against the background of his mental picture of the trend of the land. Prowse was there, apparently doing the same thing.

  “I should think we’ve made our offing, sir.” Prowse had to shout each sy
llable separately. Hornblower had to do the same when he replied.

  “We’ll hold on a little longer, while we can.”

  Extraordinary how rapidly time went by in these circumstances. It could not be long now until daylight. And this storm was still working up; it was nearly twenty-four hours since Hornblower had detected the premonitory symptoms, and it had not yet reached its full strength. It was likely to blow hard for a considerable time, as much as three days more, possibly even longer than that. Even when it should abate the wind might stay westerly for some considerable further time, delaying the water-hoys and the victuallers in their passage from Plymouth, and when eventually they should come, Hotspur might well be up in her station off the Goulet.

  “Mr. Bush!” Hornblower had to reach out and touch Bush’s shoulder to attract his attention in the wind. “We’ll reduce the water allowance from today. Two between three.”

  “Aye aye, sir. Just as well, I think, sir.”

  Bush gave little thought to hardship, either for the lower-deck or for himself. It was no question of giving up a luxury; to reduce the water ration meant an increase in hardship. The standard issue of a gallon a day a head was hardship, even though a usual one; a man could just manage to survive on it. Two thirds of a gallon a day was a horrible deprivation; after a few days thirst began to colour every thought. As if in mockery the pumps were going at this moment. The elasticity and springiness that kept Hotspur from breaking up under these strains meant also that the sea had greater opportunities of penetrating her fabric, working its way in through the straining seams both above and below the water line. It would accumulate in the bilge, one—two—three feet deep. While the storm blew most of the crew would have six hours’ hard physical work a day—an hour each watch—pumping the water out.