Book 13 - The Thirteen-Gun Salute

by Patrick O'Brian

  As soon as it was over Bushel called out 'My barge'. It was in fact already hooked on to the starboard main-chains, with white-gloved side-boys waiting by the gangway stanchions, and in a moment the farewell ceremony was in train. With a rhythmic stamp and clash the Marines presented arms, all the officers attended him to the side, and the bosun and his mates sprung their calls. In some ships the crew cheered their departing captain: in this case the Dianes only stared heavily, some chewing on their quids, others open-mouthed, all completely indifferent.

  When the barge was at a proper distance Jack drew his order from his inner pocket and handing it to the first lieutenant said, 'Mr Fielding, be so good as to have all hands called aft, and read them this.'

  Again the calls howled and twittered: the ship's company came flocking aft along the gangways and in the waist and stood there, silent, waiting.

  Jack withdrew almost to the taffrail, looking down at this strangely familiar quarterdeck, which he had last seen flowing with blood, some of it his own. In a strong voice Fielding cried, 'Off hats', and to the bareheaded crew he read, 'By the Commissioners for executing the office of Lord High Admiral of Great Britain and Ireland et cetera and of all His Majesty's plantations et cetera. To John Aubrey, esquire, hereby appointed captain of His Majesty's ship the Diane. By virtue of the power and authority to us given we do hereby constitute and appoint you captain of His Majesty's ship the Diane willing and requiring you forthwith to go on board and take upon you the charge and command of captain in her accordingly, strictly charging and commanding the officers and company belonging to the said ship subordinate to you to behave themselves jointly and severally in their respective employments with all due respect and obedience to you their said captain, and you likewise to observe and execute as well the general printed instructions as what orders and directions you shall from time to time receive from us or any other your superior officers for His Majesty's service. Hereof nor you nor any of you may fail as you will answer the contrary at your peril. And for so doing this shall be your warrant. Given under our hands and the seal of the office of Admiralty on this fifteenth day of May in the fifty-third year of His Majesty's reign.'

  Chapter Five

  'Amen,' said Captain Aubrey in a strong voice, echoed by two hundred and nine other voices, equally strong. He rose from the elbow-chair draped with a union flag, laid his prayer-book on the small arms-chest—decently covered with bunting like the carronades on either side—and stood for a moment with his head bowed, swaying automatically to the enormous roll.

  On his right hand stood the envoy and his secretary: beyond them the forty-odd Royal Marines, exactly-lined rows of scarlet coats, white trousers and white cross-belts. On his left the sea-officers, blue and gold in their full-dress uniforms, then the white-patched midshipmen, six of them, four quite tall; and beyond, right along the quarter-deck and the gangways, the foremast hands, all shaved, in clean shirts, their best bright-blue brass-buttoned jackets or white frocks, the seams often adorned with ribbon. The Marines had been sitting on benches, the officers on chairs brought from the gun-room or on the carronade slides, the seamen on stools, mess-kids or upturned buckets. Now they stood in silence, and there was silence all around them. No sound came from the sky, none from the great western swell; only the flap of the sails as they sagged on the roll, the straining creak and groan of shrouds and dead-eyes and the double breeching of the guns, the working of the ship, the strangely deep and solemn call of penguins, and the voices, far forward, of the pagans, Mahometans, Jews and Catholics who had not attended the Anglican service.

  Jack looked up, returning from whatever ill-defined region of piety he had inhabited to the anxiety that had been with him since he first saw Inaccessible Island that morning, far nearer than it should have been, in the wrong place, and directly to leeward. Three days and nights of heavy weather with low driving cloud had deprived them of exact observation; both he and the master were out in their reckoning, and this comparatively fine Sunday found them twenty-five miles south-east of Tristan da Cunha, which Jack had intended to approach from the north, touching for fresh provisions, perhaps some water, perhaps snapping up one or even two of the Americans who used the island as a base when they were cruising upon Allied shipping in the South Atlantic. A very slight anxiety at first, for although he had lain in his cot much later than usual—a long session of whist with Fox, and then half the graveyard watch on deck—and although Elliott, disregarding orders, had not sent to tell him until long after it had been sighted, the gentle air from the west was then quite enough to carry the ship clear of Inaccessible and up to the north-west corner of Tristan, where boats could land; and according to his reading of the sky the breeze would certainly strengthen before the afternoon. Yet even so, after hurrying through divisions he ordered church to be rigged on the quarterdeck rather than on the comparatively clement upper deck, so that he might keep an eye on the situation.

  It was while they were singing the Old Hundredth that the breeze died wholly away, and all hands noticed that in the subsequent prayers the Captain's voice took on a harder, sterner tone than was usual on these occasions, more the tone for reading the Articles of War. For not only had the breeze failed, but the great swell, combined with the westerly current, was heaving the ship in towards that dark wall of cliffs somewhat faster than he liked.

  He looked up from his meditations, therefore, said to his second lieutenant (the first being tied to his cot with a broken leg), 'Very well, Mr Elliott: carry on, if you please,' glanced at the drooping sails, and walked to the starboard rail. At once the pattern broke to pieces. The Marines clumped forward and below to ease their stocks and their pipe-clayed belts; the seamen of the larboard watch repaired, in a general way, to their stations, while the younger, more vapid starbowlines, particularly the landsmen, went below to relax before dinner; but the older hands, the able seamen, stayed on deck, looking at Inaccessible as intently as their captain.

  'Well, sir,' said Mr Fox at his elbow, 'we have done almost everything that should be done in a sea-voyage: we have caught our shark—indeed a multiplicity of sharks—we have eaten our flying fishes, we have seen the dolphin die in glory, we have sweltered in the doldrums, we have crossed the Line, and now as I understand it we behold a desert island. And wet, grey and forbidding though it looks, I am glad to see solid land again; I had begun to doubt its existence.' He spoke in this easy way, standing by the Captain's side on a particularly sacred part of the quarterdeck, because church was now being unrigged: the bosun's mates were folding the perfectly unnecessary awning, and for the moment the quarterdeck, poised between two functions, no longer called for formality, secular or divine.

  'Desert it is, sir,' said Jack, 'and likely to remain so. Its name is Inaccessible, and as far as I am aware nobody has ever succeeded in landing upon it.'

  'Is it like that all round?' asked Fox, looking out over the grey sea. 'Those cliffs must be a thousand foot sheer.'

  'It is worse on the other three sides,' said Jack. 'Never a landing-place: only a few rock-shelves and islets where the seals haul out and the penguins nest.'

  'There are plenty of them, in all conscience,' said Fox, and as he spoke three penguins leapt clear of the water just by the mainchains and instantly dived again. 'So clearly we are not actually to set foot on our desert island. By definition, Inaccessible could not be our goal,' he went on.

  'No,' said Jack. 'You may recall that yesterday evening I spoke of Tristan itself. If you look forward, just to the west—to the left—of the cliff, you can make out its snowy peak among the clouds, rather more than twenty miles away. It is quite clear on the top of the rise. And there is Nightingale away to the south.'

  'I see them both,' said Fox, having peered awhile. 'But do you know, I believe I shall go and put on a greatcoat. I find the air a little raw. If there were any wind it would be mortal.'

  'This is mid-winter, after all,' said Jack with a civil smile. He watched Fox walk off to the companion-ladder
with scarcely a lurch in spite of the most uncommon roll—clear proof not only that he had an athletic frame and an excellent sense of balance but that he had been at sea without a break for some ninety degrees of latitude: never a sight of land since they cleared the Channel, Finisterre, Teneriffe and Cape San Roque all having passed in dirty weather or in darkness. Fox disappeared and Jack returned to his anxiety.

  This had been an anxious voyage even before it began, with great difficulty in manning the ship in spite of Admiral Martin's good will, and the Diane had had to sail twenty-six hands short of her complement. Then there had come the heart-breaking weeks of lying windbound in Plymouth, eventually putting to sea in search of a wind the moment the weather allowed him to scrape past Wembury Point, but leaving so fast that he had had to abandon his surgeon and four valuable hands, they not having responded to the blue peter within the prescribed twenty minutes.

  It was when they sank the Lizard at last, with a charming steady topgallant gale on the starboard quarter but with the plan of their voyage hopelessly disrupted, that Jack decided to go far south, keeping well over on the Brazil side for the current and the south-east trades to carry them down as quickly as possible to the forties, with their strong and constant westerly winds, leaving out the Cape of Good Hope altogether. He had long had the possibility in mind, and he had conned over Muffitt's logs, observations and charts. Now the shortage of hands seemed less disastrous, for given a moderately favourable run the Diane's provisions should certainly last; and to deal with the problem of water he, the sailmaker, the bosun and the carpenter had contrived a system of really clean sailcloth, hoses and channels, easily shipped and designed to collect the rain that often fell in such prodigious quantities in the doldrums. The doldrums had behaved perfectly; the Diane had passed through the calms in little more than a week, picking up the trades well north of the line and running down for the forties touching neither brace nor sheet, hundreds and hundreds of miles of sweet sailing.

  She had not reached them yet, though in thirty-seven degrees south she was on their edge. But, thought Jack, looking at the cliff that now stretched wide on either hand, unless he took measures fairly soon she would never reach them at all. There was no anchoring here: the bottom plunged to a thousand fathoms just off shore. And the swell was heaving the ship in, broadside on, at a knot and a half or even more.

  He was extremely unwilling to wreck the people's Sunday, and they in their best clothes, particularly as no one had slept for a full watch these many nights past, all hands having been called again and again; but unless his prayers were answered by seven bells he would have to order out the boats to tow her clear—very severe work indeed, with this enormous swell.

  'I beg your pardon, sir,' said Elliott, crossing the deck and taking off his hat, 'but Thomas Adam, sheet-anchor man, starboard watch, was here during the peace with another whaler: in a dead calm and in just such a swell their consort was heaved ashore and destroyed. He says the current sets east much stronger close inshore.'

  'Pass the word for Adam,' said Jack, and Adam came aft at the double, a reliable middle-aged seaman, now exceedingly grave. He repeated his account, adding that the other whaler rolled her mainmast by the board as they were getting out a boat, and the ship was already in the kelp before they began trying to tow: he and his friends had watched from off the southern point, unable to help in any way. No one had been saved.

  'Well, Adam,' said Jack Aubrey, shaking his head, 'if we do not have a breeze before seven bells we too shall lower down the boats; and I trust we may have better luck.' He looked at the sky, still full of promise, and scratched a backstay.

  'Sir,' said Elliott in a low, strangely altered voice, 'I am very sorry—I should have reported it before—the carpenter found the garstrake and two bottom planks of the launch rotten under the copper, and he has taken them out.'

  Jack instantly glanced at the boats on the booms. The jolly-boat was stowed inside the launch and the work was not at all apparent, but an informed eye saw it at once. 'In that case, Mr Elliott,' he said, 'let us get what boats we have over the side at once. And I should like a word with the carpenter.'

  During all this time, that is to say from the end of divisions which as acting-surgeon he attended, Stephen had been sitting on a paunch-mat, wedged between the foremast and the foretopsail-sheet bitts, gazing at the extraordinary wealth of life in, upon and over these waters: Port Egmont hens, Cape pigeons and four other kinds of petrel so far, the inevitable boobies, some prions, many terns and far, far greater numbers of penguins, some of which he could not identify at all. No great calm albatross hitherto, alas, but on the other hand the most wonderfully gratifying view of seals and fishes. The water was exceptionally clear, and as each unbreaking, untroubled wave of this prodigious swell rose and rose, towering above the ship as she lay in the trough, the inhabitants of the deep could be seen within it, seen with the utmost clarity, and seen sideways, going about their business, seen as though the observer shared their element. He sat there entranced, facing away from the island because the sun was now over the Tropic of Cancer and the light came from the north. Once Ahmed crept forward with a biscuit and said he would bring a covered mug of coffee if the tuan would like it; but otherwise there was no interruption at all.

  He faintly heard the psalm; he was aware of the Sunday smells, pork and plum-duff, coming from the galley; and he had some notion that there were bosun's calls, vehement orders, the running of many feet. But piping, vehemence and running were commonplace in naval life and in any case his entire conscious attention was now wholly taken up with the most striking, moving and unexpected sight he had ever seen: as his eyes followed a penguin swimming rapidly westwards in the glassy wall rearing before him they met a vast shape swimming east. He instantly knew what it was but for a moment his mind was too astonished, amazed to cry out Whale! A whale, a young plump sperm whale, a female, slightly speckled with barnacles; and she had a calf close by her side. They swam steadily, their tails going up and down, the calf's faster than its mother's; and at a given moment they were on a level and even higher than his gaze. Then the ship in its turn rose, heeling on the crest, and they were gone, quite gone. Farther off he saw other whales spouting, but they were too far away; they belonged to the rest of the school.

  Suffused with joy, he made his way aft through all the busy hands, their cries, their tight-stretched ropes, staggering on the roll and twice very nearly pitching into the waist. His expression changed when he saw Jack's face and heard him say privately, 'Stephen, you can do me an essential service: keep the civilians below, out of the way.'

  He nodded and made straight for the companion-ladder. Fox and Edwards, his secretary, were just about to mount, but they stood aside to let him come down.

  'I beg your pardon,' said Stephen. 'I have been banished. Apparently there is some manoeuvre toward for which the mariners require the deck quite clear.'

  'Then we had better stay below,' said Fox. 'Would you like a game of chess?'

  Stephen said he would be very happy. He was an indifferent player and he disliked losing; Fox played well and he liked winning; but this would keep the envoy quiet and in his cabin.

  'It is curious that there should be little or no surf on that island with such a swell,' observed Fox, looking out of the scuttle as he fetched the board and men. 'We should surely see it from here. The island has come very much closer, in spite of the calm. Has the manoeuvre any connexion with it? Are we to confess our sins and make our wills?'

  'I think not. I presume the activity has to do with our landing on Tristan. Captain Aubrey has promised a wind in the middle of the day, which is to waft us to the northern island. I look forward to it extremely; for among other things I hope to astonish and gratify Sir Joseph with some beetles unknown to the learned world. As to the surf, or rather its absence, the explanation, I am told, lies in a broad zone of that gigantic southern sea-wrack which some call kelp. Cook speaks of stems exceeding three hundred and fifty feet in le
ngth off Kerguelen. I have never been more fortunate than two hundred and forty.'

  The game began, Stephen, who had the black men, following his usual plan of building up a solid defensive position in the middle of the board. Edwards, an obviously capable and intelligent young man, but unusually reserved, muttered something about 'a glass of negus in the gun-room' and sidled unnoticed out of the door.

  Stephen's hope was that Fox, in attacking his entrenchments, would leave a gap through which some perfidious knight might leap, threatening destruction, and indeed after some fifteen moves it appeared to him that such an opening would come into existence if he were to protect his king's bishop's fourth. He advanced a pawn one square.

  'Quite a good move,' said Fox, and Stephen saw, with real vexation, that it was fatal. He knew that if Fox were now to castle on his queen's side and attack with both rooks, black had no defence. He also knew that Fox would take some time before he made these moves, partly to check all the possible responses twice over and partly to relish the position.

  Yet Fox delayed them three rolls too long. The board survived two unusually violent lurches as the ship entered the great kelp-bed, but at the third it slid off the table, scattering the pieces all over the cabin. As he helped to pick them up Stephen remarked, 'You are cleaning your Manton again, I see.'

  'Yes,' said Fox, 'the lock is such a delicate affair that I do not like to leave it to anyone else. As soon as the sea grows more reasonable, we must go back to our competition.'

  Fox had two rifles, as well as fowling-pieces and some pistols, and he was a remarkably good shot: better than Stephen. But although Stephen had little hope of improvement at chess he could outdo Fox with a pistol and he thought that with practice he might perform quite well with a rifle; hitherto he had used nothing but sporting guns and the usual smooth-bore musket.