Book 13 - The Thirteen-Gun Salute

by Patrick O'Brian

  'Do you think they have finished on deck?' asked Fox. 'There seems to be less trampling.'

  'I doubt it,' said Stephen. 'Captain Aubrey would surely have sent a midshipman to tell us.'

  Less trampling, no outcry, no sound but the furious working on the launch, the only voice that of the white-faced sweating carpenter with his 'I always said this coppering of boats was fucking nonsense. In course their fucking bottoms rot beneath it, never seen.' The whole being of all the others was fixed upon the boats, the ten-oared pinnace, the ten-oared cutter, the four-oared jolly-boat and even the Doctor's personal skiff as they towed the ship, the rowers rising from the thwarts as they pulled, straining their oars to the breaking-point: the eyes of all but those who were labouring with such passionate zeal shifted now from the boats to the stark cliff of Inaccessible and now from the cliff to the ship's side to compare her forward progress with the sideways heave. The towing had begun quite well, but now that the ship had entered the binding weed, and now that the indraught of the current was stronger still it was clear that the boats were not pulling her ahead as fast as the swell was urging her inshore. There was only a quarter of a mile to go before the end of the cliff and the open sea beyond the island, but at this rate it was not possible that she should run that far before she touched. The anchors had been cleared away and they were hanging a-cockbill; but the lead gave no hope of a holding-ground—of any ground at all. And hands were stationed along the side with spars to boom off when the sheer rock was near enough; but that could not prolong the run more than a minute or so. Nearer; nearer with every enormous heave.

  Jack gazed up at the top of the precipice. 'Mind your helm, there,' he called to the quartermaster with very great force, though the poor dazed man was within a few feet of him; and the nascent breeze he had seen stirring the grass up on that distant edge came breathing along the cliff-face. It moved the main topgallant and faded; it came again, nearly filling all three topgallants and the topsails; again, and they and even the courses bellied out. The ship distinctly gathered way, and cheering began.

  'Silence fore and aft,' roared Jack. 'Man the braces.' And to the man at the wheel, 'Down with the helm.'

  The carpenter came running from the waist. 'She'll swim, sir,' he said.

  'Thank you, Mr Hadley,' said Jack. 'Mr Elliott, get her over the side. Launch's crew away: jump to it, there, jump to it.'

  They jumped to it indeed; but even pulling to crack their spines they could not make fast at the head of the tow before the ship, slanting away from that dreadful shore, had such motion on her that the hawser was slack.

  'Mr Elliott,' said Jack, when the island was clear astern and the decks were filled with grinning men, laughing and congratulating one another as they worked in a general diffused sound of the most uncommon happiness, 'the course is north-east a half east. The hands may be piped to dinner as soon as the boats are in. Mr Bennett'—to a midshipman—'pray tell Dr Maturin with my compliments that if he is at leisure I should like to show him the north side of Inaccessible.'

  Jack Aubrey sat in what remained to him of the great cabin, contemplating not only the frigate's wake stretching away and away to the north-west, but also a variety of other things: the room, though now divided by a bulkhead running fore and aft for the accommodation of the envoy, was still a fine capacious place for one brought up to the sea, with enough space to contemplate a large number of subjects, and not only space but quietness and privacy in which to do so. Relative silence, that is to say, for the stays, shrouds and backstays were being set up again after the frightful stretching they had suffered off Tristan; and no one, least of all Jack Aubrey, could expect rigging to be set up without roaring and bawling: and Crown, the bosun, had a voice fit for a line of battle ship, a first-rate line of battle ship. Furthermore Fox and Stephen were still banging away at bottles, tossed overboard and allowed to go a great way astern; while at the same time Fielding, who had been allowed on deck in this easy quartering sea, stumped about on his crutches and plastered leg, making an odd resonant sound and calling out from time to time to any of the many hands aloft who might possibly spoil the blacking of his yards. But if things of this kind had worried Jack he would have run mad long since: he let them pass by his ears as the South Atlantic was now passing by the Diane's gunports, in a smooth unnoticed flow, and he reflected upon the curiously hard fate of being unable to tell Sophie of their escape without at the same time letting her know of their danger. He had come upon this difficulty often enough in his correspondence with her, a correspondence that took the form of a serial letter that continued day by day until it could be sent, a fat bundle, by some homeward-bound chance encounter, or that was never sent at all but read aloud at home, with comments. Yet he had never come upon it so forcibly. The horror of that last cable's-length, with the ship moving with a nightmare inevitability to destruction, was still strong upon him, and he would so have liked her to share his immeasurable relief and present joy in living. He had written a watered version of the events, which he now looked over with no approval until he came to the words 'I was very pleased with the people; they behaved uncommon well' and to his praise of the ship. 'Of course, she is not the Surprise, but she is a fine responsive little ship, and I shall always love her for the way she took that breath of air off Inaccessible.'

  She was not the Surprise: he had often taken the wheel and he had tried her with every conceivable combination of sails, and although she certainly proved a sound, dry, weatherly ship, carrying an easy helm, wearing and staying quick and lying to remarkably well under reefed maincourse and mizzen staysail, she lacked that thoroughbred quality, that extraordinary manoeuvrability and turn of speed close-hauled. It was true that she also lacked Surprise's vices, a tendency to gripe unless her holds were stowed just as she liked them, and to steer wild in any but the most skilful hands; the Diane was an honest, well-designed, well-built frigate (though he could not yet tell how she would behave in really very strong winds); but there was no doubt which ship he wholly loved.

  That brought him to the second part of his contemplation. He had longed with all his being to be part of the Royal Navy again: now his name was on the list, and at this moment the familiar coat with its crown-and-anchored epaulettes was over the back of the chair by the scuttle, ready for his dinner with the envoy; and yet again and again he found himself regretting the Surprise. Not so much HMS Surprise but Surprise as a letter of marque, sailing where she pleased and when she pleased, carrying on her private and effective war against the enemy as she saw fit, with a ship's company of picked hands, some of them very old friends indeed, all of them thorough-paced seamen With such men, with such a status, and with such a second in command as Tom Pullings, there had been an easiness that could never be found in a King's ship nothing approaching a democracy, God forbid, but an atmosphere that made the regular Navy seem formal, starched, severe, and in the article of pressing downright cruel. The foremast hands were much too far removed from those in command they were often very roughly treated by inferior officers; and one of the chief functions of the Marines was to prevent mutiny or on occasion to put it down by force.

  The Diane's crew were not very ill used in this respect, for upon the whole Jack was fortunate in his officers. By this time he knew them well being perfectly able to afford it, he had reverted to the old and now declining naval custom of inviting the officer and midshipman of the morning watch to breakfast and those of the forenoon watch to dinner, often with the first lieutenant as well; while he usually accepted the gun-room's invitation to dine on Sundays. It is true that he did not invariably follow the custom, and that when he did his guests or hosts were unnaturally well-behaved, yet even so this contact, together with seeing them on duty, brought him acquainted with their more obvious qualities. Their defects, too; and tyranny was not one of them. Fielding and Dick Richardson were excellent seamen and they were both capable of driving a sluggish watch hard on occasion, but neither was in the least brutal; nor was Elliott, wh
atever other faults he might possess. Warren, the master, was a remarkable disciplinarian, a man of great natural authority, and he never had to raise his voice to be obeyed; while Crown, the bosun, was much more apt to bark than bite.

  And in comparison with most captains he was reasonably fortunate in his men. At least half of them had been turned over from other ships before he came, and Admiral Martin had found him several quite good draughts; yet he had been in too great a hurry to sail for the news of his appointment to bring in many volunteers, and a quarter of the men had come by way of the press or some other form of compulsion, some having been bred to the sea, others never having set their eyes upon it at all. Still, this did give the Diane a better proportion of able seamen than most ships in her circumstances, and there were few really hopeless cases among the first-voyagers.

  To begin with, naturally enough, the pressed men longed for their freedom, and during the enforced stay in Plymouth it had been difficult and in two cases impossible to keep the more enterprising or desperate from deserting; and even after the ship was well out in the ocean and there was no help for it many of them remained sullen and resentful. The landsmen and indeed some of the hands who had served under captains less taut than Aubrey particularly disliked his and the first lieutenant's insistence that hammocks should be exactly rolled, lashed up and stowed in the netting within five minutes of the bosun's pipe—an insistence implemented by the bosun's mates with sharp knives in their hands ready to cut the hammock-nettles and crying 'Out or down, out or down. Rise and shine, my beauties.' But by the Tropic of Cancer almost all of them, brought to it by degrees, could manage well enough; and by the Tropic of Capricorn they looked upon it as perfectly natural that a man should spring out of bed, whip on his clothes, roll his hammock and bedding into a tight cylinder lashed with seven turns, evenly spaced, and race up one or two crowded ladders to his appointed place. And by this time too each of the frigate's guns and carronades had a tolerably efficient crew, so that she could fire three quite well-directed broadsides in five and a half minutes. This was nothing like the Surprise's deadly speed and accuracy, of course, but it was more than respectable in a newly-commissioned ship; furthermore, the thunder and lightning, the shattering din, the flashes and the smoke of real gunfire almost every evening at quarters which made this result possible were, in Jack's opinion, one of the main reasons that the ship's company had shaken down so well. The powder and shot over and above the Admiralty's absurdly meagre allowance had cost him a great deal of money, but he thought it very well spent; not only could the Diane now give a fair account of herself in any well-matched action but the costly, exciting and dangerous exercise brought first the gun-crews and then the whole body of the people very much together. The men delighted in the enormous noise, the power, the sense of occasion and of wild extravagance (it was said that two broadsides cost the Captain an ordinary seaman's pay for a year); they revelled in the destruction of targets and they cossetted their eighteen-pounders, squat iron brutes of close on two tons very apt to maim their tenders, with loving care, polishing everything that could be polished and painting their names above the port. One was called Swan of Avon, but Belcher, Tom Cribb and Game Chicken were more in the usual line. The ship's unvarying routine and the perils of the sea would have welded the Dianes into a right ship's company in time, no doubt, but the violent gunnery had certainly hastened the process, which was just as well in waters where a far-ranging enemy might be encountered any day. A decent set of men: they had behaved very well off Tristan. Yet even so there were still a good many who would run if they possibly could, and that was still another reason that he was glad to be going far south of the Cape.

  The Surprise that he regretted had no pressed men, of course. Desertion never entered into consideration at all; in fact the only severe punishment he had ever had to inflict was turning men ashore for misconduct. And what was rather more to the point at this moment, she had no midshipmen either. The Diane had six young gentlemen in her midshipmen's berth, two of them, Seymour and Bennett, being master's mates. There were no really small boys, no squeakers under the gunner's care, but even so Jack's responsibilities—and he was a conscientious captain where his midshipmen were concerned, leaving little to Mr Warren the master—were quite varied. Since the ship did not carry a chaplain or a schoolmaster, Harper and Reade, the youngest, needed his help with spelling hard words and with fairly simple arithmetic, let alone the elements of spherical trigonometry and navigation; while Seymour and Bennett, near the end of their servitude, would pass, or try to pass, for lieutenants at the end of this year or the beginning of next and they were already growing anxious; they were very willing, even eager, to have the finer points of their profession explained.

  It was they who were due at four bells, and as the second bell struck he heard them tap at the door, clean, brushed, exactly dressed, carrying the log-books and draughts of the journals they would have to produce, together with their captain's certificates of service and good conduct, at their examination.

  'Sit down, both of you,' he said, 'and let me see your journals.'

  'Journals, sir?' they cried: hitherto Captain Aubrey had been concerned only with their logs, which, among other things, contained their noon observations for latitude, their lunars for longitude, and a variety of astronomical remarks. Neither he nor any other of their captains had shown the least interest in their journals.

  'Yes, of course. They have to be shown up at the Navy Board, you know.'

  They were shown up now, and Jack looked at what Bennett had to say about Tristan:

  Tristan da Cunha lies in 57°6'S and 12°17'W; it is the largest of a group of rocky islands; the mountain in the middle is above 7000 feet high and has very much the appearance of a volcano. In clear weather, which is rare, the snowy peak can be seen from 30 leagues away. The islands were discovered in 1506 by Tristan da Cunha, and the seas in their vicinity are frequented by whales, albatrosses, pintados, boobies, and the sprightly penguin, whose manner of swimming or as it were flying under water irresistibly brings Virgil's remigium alarum to mind. But, however, the navigator approaching from the west should take great care not to do so in a dead calm, because of the strong current setting east and the heave of the swell . . .

  Seymour's journal, which had a drawing of Inaccessible with a ship scraping her yardarms against the face of the cliff, began:

  Tristan da Cunha lies in 57°6'S and 12°17'W; it is the largest of a group of rocky islands; the mountain in the middle is above 7000 feet high and has very much the appearance of a volcano.

  The sprightly penguin irresistibly reminded Seymour too of Virgil, and on reaching the remigium alarum Jack cried, 'Hey, hey, this won't do. You have been cribbing from Bennett.'

  No, no, sir, they said with the utmost candour, for in spite of his stern expression they were perfectly convinced that he did not intend to mangle them. It was a joint production, with the facts taken from the Mariner's Companion and the style put in by—by a friend. But they themselves had worked out the position, and for the longitude they had had a particularly fine lunar according to the method he had shown them. There were several others, almost as good, in their logs, if he chose to look at them.

  'Where is the style?' asked Jack, not to be diverted.

  'Well, sir,' said Seymour, 'there is the sprightly penguin, for example, and the remigium piece, and later on there is the rosy-fingered dawn.'

  'Well, no doubt it is very fine: but how in Heaven's name do you expect the examining captains to swallow two sprightly penguins, one after another? It is against nature. They will come down on you like a thousand of bricks and turn you away directly, for making game of them.'

  'Why, sir,' said Bennett, the more ingenuous of the two, 'our names are so far apart in the alphabet that we cannot be called the same day; and everyone says the captains never have time to read the journals anyway, certainly not to remember them.'

  'I see,' said Jack. The argument was perfectly sound. What
really mattered in these cases was the severe viva voce about seamanship and navigation and then the young man's family, its status, influence and naval connexions. 'But still, the captains are not to be treated with disrespect, and in decency you must strike out the style when you copy your journals fair, make some changes in each, and keep to plain official prose.'

  They turned to the moons of Jupiter, which might with profit be observed on St Paul's or Amsterdam islands, should they touch there, to fix their longitude with greater certainty; and when they had finished with the moons Jack looked at his watch, saying, 'I shall just have time to speak to Clerke. Pray send him aft.'

  Clerke came within the minute, looking alarmed, as well he might, for Captain Aubrey's face now wore a look of strong and perfectly genuine disapprobation. He did not invite Clerke, a leggy youth with a still uncertain voice, to sit down but instantly said to him, 'Clerke, I have sent for you to tell you that I will not have the hands blackguarded. Any low scrub can pour out foul language, but it is particularly disagreeable to hear a young fellow like you using it to a seaman old enough to be his father, a man who cannot reply. No, do not attempt to justify yourself by blaming the man you abused. Go away and close the door behind you.'

  The door opened again almost immediately and Stephen, equally clean, brushed and properly dressed, was led in by Killick, who had little notion of his punctuality or sense of fitness.

  'Killick tells me that your dinner for the envoy is today,' he said. 'And Fielding is of the same opinion.'

  'You astonish me,' said Jack, putting on his coat. 'I had the impression it was yesterday. Killick, is everything in hand?' He spoke with some anxiety, for he had had to leave his admirable cook Adi in the Surprise, and his replacement, Wilson, was apt to grow flustered when called upon for fine work.