Book 13 - The Thirteen-Gun Salute

by Patrick O'Brian

  'Will you take your stand by the cooper, sir, you being quite tall?' said Pullings to Standish; and seeing his questioning look he added, 'There is an old saying in the service, when very hard work is to be done, "the gentlemen hale and draw with the mariners". Presently you will see the Captain and the Doctor take their spell.'

  'Oh, certainly,' cried Standish. 'I should be very happy—I should like to have an oar in my hand again.'

  The gentlemen haled and drew with the mariners, and although for the first quarter of a mile there was some confusion, with one monstrous crab sending half a dozen men tumbling into their shipmates' laps, they soon found their rhythm; and once she had gained her impetus the long cumbrous sweeps moved the ship along so that the water ran whispering along her side. There was no lack of zeal, advice—'Stretch out, sir, and keep your eyes in the boat'—and merriment: it was a pretty example of a good ship's company at work, and when the log was heaved it showed that the Surprise was making two knots and a half.

  Unhappily the snow made three or even more. She was much lighter; her people were far more accustomed to sweeping; and being so much nearer the surface they could use their oars with greater effect. At the end of his first spell of rowing Jack fixed her with his come-up glass, which showed him that the chase was gaining; and in an hour this was evident to every man aboard—even in that light-filled immensity of sea and sky a mile could still be made out. The laughter died away, but not the determination, and with grave, set faces the rowers lunged forward, dipped and pulled hour after hour, their reliefs stepping in at the first sound of the bell so neatly that barely a stroke was lost.

  The sun was well past the zenith, the snow had merged with the horizon, almost hull-down, far, far ahead, and there was silence aboard, apart from the rowers' grunting heave, before the longed-for air began to breathe from the south-south-west. It rounded the upper sails first and rippled the sea quite far ahead; already the ship had a fresh life, and when the topgallants were drawing Jack cried, 'Lay on your oars.' With anxious delight he and all the ship's company listened to the breeze in the rigging and the bow-wave shearing on either side.

  Topsails filled and then courses, and with the yards exactly trimmed Jack had the sweeps brought inboard; many a man stood bending and cherishing his arms and legs or rubbing the small of his back, but a moment later they ran eagerly and fairly nimbly aloft to spread the cloud of sail the frigate was used to. The strengthening breeze had settled half a point west of its origin; she had it well abaft the beam and she was able to set a most imposing array of royals and skysails, as well as weather studding-sails from top to bottom, spritsail, spritsail-topsail and a host of staysails, an array so beautiful that Standish, coming up for fresh air from tepid mutton soup and his first encounter with the larger kind of weevil called bargemen and seeing all this with the sun shining through and across all its curves, convexities and infinite variety of brilliantly lit or delicately shadowed white, cried out in admiration.

  'Lord, sir,' he said to Pullings, 'what more than Gothic glory!'

  'I dare say you are right, sir,' said Pullings. 'But we shan't keep it long, I doubt. See how she has started to pitch and roll.' So she had, and with something less than her usual well-bred air and long easy buoyant motion: rarely had she been so deep in the water. 'It is a swell coming up from the south-west, and it is sure to bring us half a gale.'

  'Are we overtaking the snow?' asked Standish, peering forward at impenetrable canvas. 'We must be going at an amazing speed.'

  'Close on nine knots,' said Pullings. 'And since it was us brought by the wind, we have gained maybe a mile or so. Yet so deep-laden—twelve months' stores and more—the barky cannot do her best, nor nothing like it. With a breeze like this I have seen her run twelve knots off the reel; and at that rate we should have been alongside the snow half an hour ago. But now, in course, she has the wind too, and she may be drawing away a trifle. Most remarkable rapid for a snow: such yards I have rarely seen. Was you to go into the bows with this glass, you could see her plain; and was you to look hard you would see she has set save-alls, too.'

  'Thank you,' said Standish absently: his eyes were fixed on the rail as it rose, rose, rose still, hung for an instant and then began its inevitable, deliberate, vertiginous fall.

  'Mark you,' continued Pullings, 'if it comes on to blow like the Captain says and I am sure he is right, then we shall have the advantage; for we are the taller ship, and a heavy sea will not wrong us as it will wrong the snow. Hold up, there: over the rail, sir, if you please.'

  When Standish had finished this first bout Pullings told him there was nothing like a good vomit—better than bleeding or rhubarb or blue pill—he would soon get used to the motion—and called two amused hands to lead him below. He could barely stand, and his face had turned a yellowish green—his lips were curiously pale.

  Standish did not reappear that day, nor would any man at all subject to queasiness have done so, for the half-gale reached them even sooner than they had hoped, and Stephen, deep in his papers though he was, noticed that the Surprise had grown unusually skittish and that the whole sound of the ship had changed: a far greater volume, a far greater urgency. Closing a file and tying its original black French tape around it—poor thin stuff, compared with Dublin tape: a man could hang himself with Dublin tape—he leant back in his chair; and as he did so he saw Jack Aubrey look cautiously through the door.

  'Should you like to see the chase?' asked Jack. 'She is a pretty sight.'

  'I should like it of all things,' said Stephen, getting up. 'Jesus, Mary and Joseph, how my back hurts.'

  'The sight of the prize will cure it, I am sure.'

  The deck—the world in general—now had a very different appearance. The great spread of canvas had shrunk to courses, reefed topsails and spritsail; the deck itself was canted some twenty degrees and the bow-wave flung high white and wide to leeward. A few sparse clouds were racing over the bright blue sky and dark banks had gathered far in the south, but the air was still flashing clear and filled with light—a slightly pinkish light already, the glorious sun so low.

  'Clap on to the line,' said Jack, leading him forward; and as Stephen edged along the weather gangway many a hand took his elbow, passing him to a sure hold and telling him to watch out, to take great care; and behind their kindness to him there was a certain grim ferocity.

  Pullings was waiting for them in the bows. He said, 'She has not altered course, no not by half a point since first we seen her; she must surely be running for the Cove of Cork, or a little south.'

  Jack nodded, and over his shoulder he called, 'Duck up.'

  The spritsail puckered and turned, and to his astonishment Stephen saw the chase right ahead, almost within gunshot, very, very much closer than he had expected. She was a black, low ship, all the blacker for her great foaming wake, brilliant white in the sun; and she seemed all the lower for the great breadth of her yards, the dun sails drum-tight upon them as she raced along. Jack had given him his telescope and as Stephen listened with half his mind to the sailors' remarks about double and even triple preventer-stays—extraordinary speed for a snow, even one so well handled—Surprise shockingly handicapped—trim not at all that could be wished, by any means: distinctly by the head—he gazed at the men gathered at the snow's taffrail, and they steadily watching the Surprise, never moving, though the spray often swept across their faces. The glass was exceptionally good and the air so perfectly clear that he distinguished a kittiwake as it moved along the side of the snow, the bird too faintly tinged with pink. He had directed the telescope at the two guns, probably nine-pounders, pointing through the snow's chase-ports when his mind as it were leapt to attention and he instantly returned to the man, to the third man from the left: he focussed with even greater sharpness and there was not the least possible doubt. He was looking at Robert Gough.

  Gough too had been a member of the United Irishmen: he and Maturin had agreed that Irishmen should govern Ireland and that Catholi
cs should be emancipated: on everything else they were opposed and had been from the beginning. Gough was one of the leaders of that part of the movement which was in favour of French intervention whereas Maturin was wholly against it—he was against violence and he was even more against importing or in any way helping the new kind of tyranny that had arisen in France, the horribly disappointing sequel of that Revolution which Maturin and most of his friends had welcomed with such joy. When the rising of 1798 was put down with revolting cruelty and with the help of swarms of informers, native, foreign and half-bred, their lives were equally in danger, but since then all similarity had vanished. Gough, with the survivors of his school of thought, had become even more committed to France, whereas Maturin, once he had recovered from the stunning shock, which had coincided with the loss of his sweetheart, had observed the development of an exceedingly dangerous dictatorship, entirely replacing the generous ideas of 1789 but at the same time profiting from them. He had seen the treatment of the Catholic church in France, of the Italian sympathizers in those unfortunate regions overrun by the French, and of the Catalans in his own Catalonia; and well before the end of the Revolutionary War he had seen that this whole system of pillage and oppression, this whole series of police-states must, before everything else, be brought to an end. And everything he had seen since, the subversion of countless states by brute force, the imprisonment of the Pope, the universal bad faith, had confirmed his diagnosis, strengthening him in his conviction that this tyranny, far more intelligent and invasive than anything that had been known, must be destroyed. The freedom of Ireland and of Catalonia were dependent upon its destruction—the defeat of French imperialism was a necessary condition for all the rest.

  Yet there was Gough, just over the water, eager for another French landing; and Stephen had the absolute certainty that he was on a mission to Ireland. If the snow were taken Gough would be hanged: the tyranny would be by so much the weaker. But at this all Stephen's old loathing for informers rose up with overwhelming force, his utter revulsion from anything and everything to do with them and the result of their betrayals, the torture, the floggings, the melted pitch on men's heads; and of course the hangings. He could not bear the slightest hint of a connexion between himself and such people; he could not bear being connected in any way whatsoever with the taking of Gough.

  He heard Pullings say, 'I have had the bow-guns cleared away, sir, in case you would like to try a random shot before it gets dark.'

  'Well, Tom,' said Aubrey, considering the range with narrowed eyes and stroking the larboard chaser, a beautiful brass long nine, 'I have been thinking of it, naturally: and with luck we might knock away a spar or two and kill some of her people, though the distance is so great and the ship is behaving more like a rocking-horse than a Christian. But I do hate battering a prize, particularly a small one. Apart from anything else it takes so much time, what with repairing and towing and perhaps having to send her in with a prize-crew we have to wait for. No. What I should like best would be to range up alongside and offer her a full broadside if she don't strike: nobody but a mad lunatic would refuse—we carry five times her weight of metal. Then without any slaughter or repairing or fuss we carry her into the nearest port and so proceed to Lisbon, where we are likely to be uncommon late in any case, after such a run.'

  'To be sure,' said Pullings, 'there is not much likelihood of our losing her tonight, with the moon so near the full; and to be sure, we have the weather-gage—could not have it more. But I was only thinking that if we do not check her in some way, at this pace it will be a great while before we can show her our broadside clear and close; and by then we may have run almost the whole length of the Irish Sea; and beating into a south-wester off Galloway is tedious work.'

  They discussed a variety of possibilities; and then, breaking off, Jack said, 'Where is the Doctor?'

  'I believe he went aft some minutes ago,' said Pullings. 'How dark it has grown.'

  Maturin had indeed gone aft, aft and below to the orlop, where he sat on a three-legged stool by the medicine-chest, staring at the candle in the lantern he had brought with him: he was more likely to be alone here than anywhere in the ship, alone and in silence, for although there was the ship's own voice and the tumultuous roar of the sea echoing down here in a general confusion of sound, it was an unceasing noise and could be set aside in time, forgotten, quite unlike the spasmodic cries and orders, the footsteps and clashing that would break in upon his thoughts if he were to sit in the coach.

  He had long since accepted that Gough was now of no real importance and that in view of the disastrous outcome of all the attempted French landings hitherto it was extremely unlikely that they would in fact ever launch another, whatever promises Gough might be carrying. His loss would not weaken Bonaparte's machine to any perceptible degree. Yet although Maturin could and did look upon this as axiomatic, it in no way affected his determination not to be associated with Gough's arrest and his mind had now been turning for some considerable time on possible ways of dealing with the situation.

  Yet so far his mind had produced little; it turned and turned, but the turning, though arduous, was sterile. Some great man had said, 'A thought is like a flash between two dark nights': at present Stephen's nights were running into one uninterrupted darkness, lit by no gleams at all. The coca-leaves he chewed had the property of doing away with hunger and fatigue, giving some degree of euphoria, and making one feel clever and even witty; he certainly had no appetite and he did not feel physically tired, but as for the rest he might have been eating hay.

  There was of course Pratt's magnet. A ship's compass would deviate from the north in the presence of a magnet and the helmsman would be misled: the ship would wander from her true course. But how much would the compass deviate, and how near was the required presence? He knew nothing whatsoever about either point. Nor did he know the ship's position, except that she was in the Irish Sea; and in such a state of general ignorance he could not form any useful opinion about the danger of casting her and his friends away on some rocky shore.

  He put the instrument into his pocket and made his way to the quarterdeck, stopping to put the lantern on its hook in the coach. Although the bight coming through the companion should have warned him, he was still astonished by the brilliance of the moonlit night. Though the colours were subtly different it might almost have been day; there was not the least question of his failing to recognize the four men at the wheel, Davis and Simms, old Surprises, and Fisher and Harvey, from Shelmerston, or the quartermaster at the con, old Neave. Nor was there the least question of his approaching the binnacle and observing the variation of the compass as he moved the magnet, for not only did West, who had the watch, at once come over and ask him whether he had not turned in, but it was perfectly obvious that the ship was not steering by compass at all. The wind had now increased to a stiff gale, and at the last change of watch the Surprise had taken another reef in her topsails and forecourse and had furled the spritsail, so there, right ahead, lay the chase; and it was by the chase that the frigate was steering, her bowsprit pointing directly at the long moonlit wake, both ships tearing through the sea with extreme urgency.

  'The distance seems about the same,' observed Stephen.

  'I wish I could think so,' said West. 'We had gained a cable's length by two bells, but now she has won it back and even more. Still, the tide will change against the wind in an hour or so, and that should chop up a nasty head-sea for her.'

  'Has the Captain gone to bed?' asked Stephen, cupping his hands to make his voice, curiously hoarse and weak at present, carry over the roar of sea and wind.

  'No. He is in the cabin, pricking the chart. We had a very fine fix with Vega and Arcturus just now.'

  That, of course, would be the simplest way of dealing with at least one side of his ignorance. If he were to walk into the cabin there he would see the ship's position marked on the chart with all the accuracy of an expert navigator. Doing so would not be elegant howeve
r; and as well as being inelegant it would be in direct contravention to his particular morality, the private set of laws which for him separated the odious practice of spying from the legitimate gathering of intelligence.

  'I beg your pardon,' he said, having missed everything of West's last remark but for the fact that he had spoken or rather bellowed something about fire.

  'I was only saying they must be burning heather or furze over there in Anglesey,' said West, pointing to a distant orange serpent on the starboard beam.

  Stephen nodded, reflected for a moment and then crept backwards down the companion-ladder meaning to walk forward along the waist. Most of the starboard watch were sheltering under the break of the quarterdeck, and Barret Bonden left the group to shepherd him along past the double-breeched guns and under the double-griped boats on the skid-beams, past the galley and so by the hooked steps in the Surprise's broad top-tackle scuttle to a place as nearly comfortable, safe and dry as so bleak a station could afford.

  It was quieter here in the bows, in the lee of the foremast and the topsail-sheet bitts, and they talked for a while about the progress of the chase, the snow there before them clear and sharp, a mile ahead, tearing along and throwing the water wide. Bonden knew the Doctor was upset, and in case it should be something to do with this prize, with the frigate's relatively poor performance, or with what a landsman might consider the Captain's want of enterprise, he very delicately offered a few points for consideration: at the beginning of a very long voyage, no captain would risk masts, spars and cordage unless he were up against an enemy man-of-war, a national ship, or at least a very important privateer; at the beginning of a very long voyage the ship, low and sluggish with all her stores, could not be driven really hard, as she could be driven when she was riding light and homeward-bound, with supplies only a few days ahead—the Doctor would remember how the barky wore topgallants in a close-reef topsail breeze, and not only topgallants but foretopmast and lower studdingsails too, when they were chasing the Spartan on their way home from Barbados. If they were to do that now, the barky would fall to pieces, and they would have to swim home, those that were not provided with wings.