Book 13 - The Thirteen-Gun Salute

by Patrick O'Brian

'He may give wild improper orders,' said Jack, smiling wearily, 'but no one will take any notice. One of our officers will be in command.'

  The officer in question was Elliott, who had had the watch when the Diane struck. He knew very well that if he had remembered his orders and had reefed topsails when the breeze increased the ship would have been making no more than three or four knots at the moment of impact rather than a full eight. A cruel blow in any case, but probably not a disastrous one. Jack knew it, since he had seen the full topsails laid aback; and Elliott knew that he knew it. Neither had said anything, but Jack at once agreed to his request that he should take the pinnace, led him through the charts and observations and checked his instruments, lending him a better azimuth compass.

  Elliott left the ship in what was in fact his first command a little before eleven. He was at the landing-place at the stated time; and then followed one of those intolerable delays typical of landsmen—packages forgotten, fetched, exchanged for others, confused; arguments, screeching, counter-orders; arrangements changed—and Jack, who had intended to remain on deck until the pinnace sailed by into the offing, went below and slept for twenty minutes: he had not turned in all night.

  Hauled back into the present world, he stood on the motionless quarterdeck, taking off his hat to the distant Fox, equally erect, equally bareheaded, as the pinnace, quarter of a mile away, went about and headed south-south-west.

  'Well, Mr Fielding,' he said, having gazed for a while at the decks and the distant shore, 'they have left us looking not unlike Rag Fair: decks all ahoo, and the beach like a gypsy encampment after the constables have taken them all away. Is that Mr Edwards I see over there, in the black breeches?'

  'Yes, sir. He told me he was to be left behind with a copy of the treaty, in case of accident.'

  'Oh, indeed? After dinner, then, let all hands make things look a little more shipshape here—I should like my joiner and his mates to put the cabin back as it was—and then repair on shore and put that mass of objects into some kind of an order before we lighten the ship any further. We cannot go on living indefinitely with a disused pawnshop just at hand: furthermore, we must set about finding water.'

  A real sleep before his own dinner, and above all dinner itself did wonders for Captain Aubrey. 'I once ate my mutton at an inn called The Ship Aground,' he said to his guests, 'but I never thought to do so in sober earnest: a very whimsical idea, upon my word. Mr Edwards, a glass of wine with you, sir. Captain Welby, I know I must not speak of service matters at table, but pray put me in mind of the word that has been on the tip of my tongue this last half hour—the subject I must consult with you when we go ashore—the learned word for setting up tents and so on.'

  'Castramentation, sir,' said Welby, beaming with decent triumph—it was rare that a soldier could triumph aboard a man-of-war—'And there is more to it than might be supposed.'

  Certainly there was more to it than Jack had supposed. 'To begin with, sir,' said Welby, 'it is always wise to be both on rising ground and to have a good supply of fresh water within your lines if it is at all possible; and it would be strange if this sloping stretch of grass did not kill two birds with one stone. By that, sir, I mean it might on the one hand house all our people on its upper right-hand face, and on the other, give them a well at no great depth—there has certainly been a watercourse in the middle, long ago. The position would not answer against artillery, but for an ordinary surprise you could hardly ask better. A square with a moderate breastwork and a stockade would leave a fine open space between itself and the forest on three sides, and command the landing-place on the fourth. With a carronade at each corner it would make a very neat little post, even without re-entering angles or ravelines or anything ambitious like that.'

  Jack could best survey the broad sweep, a green triangle thrust uphill into the swarming forest, from a central mound, now covered by the Diane's livestock, sheep, goats, pigs, geese, poultry, grazing on a particularly sweet grass shoulder to shoulder. 'Baker,' he called, 'drive them over to the far side.'

  'I can't, sir,' replied Baker. 'They won't follow anyone but Jemmy Ducks and young Pollard; and the hogs bite, if shoved.'

  It was the old story. Even the most recent animals, influenced by the older inhabitants, were already too tame to be driven; they could only be led by those they liked. The next step would be their conversion into holy cows that could not possibly be slaughtered, cut up and served out. 'Then pass the word for Jemmy Ducks and Pollard,' said Jack, making a mental note to tell Fielding to move Pollard to other duties; detachment was easy enough where poultry was concerned, but the four-legged stock required a frequent change of keeper.

  'Yes, I think it should do very well,' he said, when he could see the whole extent. 'I was not really thinking so much of defence as of neatness, so I believe we scarcely need a breastwork or stockade, far less covered ways or outworks; but we must have a well, and we should like a trim square for tents and stores, where purser, bosun, carpenter and gunner can lay their hands on what they need. So if you would be so good as to sink your well and then trace out the lines according to the rules of the art, I will have a word with the sailmaker and set tents in hand.'

  'Perhaps just a little ditch for drainage, sir, in case of rain, with the earth thrown up outside?'

  'As you please, Captain Welby,' said Jack, walking off. 'But nothing elaborate.'

  'The sergeant and I will pace it out and break ground as soon as we can get out picks and shovels from the ship, sir,' called Welby after him.

  At the landing-place he learnt that Stephen had last been seen making his way into the extraordinarily tangled forest with a cutlass sharpened for him by the armourer and a large pair of tendon-cutters, so he took Bonden and Seymour in the skiff to survey what he could of the island before nightfall. Richardson was engaged in sweeping for the lost anchors or Jack would have taken him too, an excellent surveyor's mate.

  It was as well that the skiff was light, for their voyage was pulling all the way; the breeze had dropped away shortly after Fox and his company dipped below the horizon, and although an unusually strong current swept them along the southern shore, from the western point right along the island's high straight north face they had to pull very hard indeed, and as Bonden observed, if the tide had been running with the current they could not have stemmed it at all. The island was more or less rectangular, like a battered book set down on the sea at an angle, the southern side awash, the northern an almost sheer rise, a couple of hundred feet high in places, with caves in it, some of them deeply recessed, with small beaches to them.

  As they rowed along they heard a shrill halooing from one of the cliffs, and looking up they saw Dr Maturin, waving a handkerchief. He called out when he saw they had seen him, but although the air was so still and the sea so calm all they could make out was the word soup.

  Between taking his angles and recording depths, Jack turned this over in his mind, but he could make nothing of it until after sunset, when they reached the ship, her great stern window glowing its full width and Stephen sitting there in the restored cabin, his cello between his knees. He smiled and nodded, carried the phrase, part of his own Saint Cecilia's Day, through to its end, and said, 'Did you see our streeted camp?'

  'Only a glimmer of white from the sea. Surely it is not finished already?'

  'Finished to Welby's satisfaction, no; but much is standing and even more is marked out to the exact inch and degree. I have rarely seen a man take more pleasure in what he was about. Though I may say I believe I took even more delight in my afternoon than Welby. I found the edible-nest swallow! Hirundo esculenta, the bird's-nest soup swallow! Colonies of them, several thousand strong, on those cliffs from which I saw you. In the depths of those caves their nests lie in rows. Little small grey birds they are, not three inches long, but true swallows and even swifter than ours; and their nests are almost white. I hope you will come and see them tomorrow.'

  'Certainly, if work permits. Was it very diffi
cult to get through the forest?'

  'Tolerably so, because of the lianas; yet there are boars in plenty, and by crouching one can follow their paths fairly well. There are some other paths too, though much overgrown; people must come here from time to time—the animals are by no means tame.'

  Jack fetched his violin and while Stephen gave him a short account of the island's flora and fauna he tuned it lovingly. 'So much for the ring-tailed ape,' said Stephen at last, and with one accord they swept into his Saint Cecilia. After that, and after a visit from Fielding to report, they ate their customary toasted cheese and played on and on, the music echoing the length of the almost empty ship with quite another resonance.

  Jack turned in late and he slept deep, although his cot moved no more than if it had been slung in the Tower of London; yet he woke uneasy. Of course any man commanding a King's ship that is poised on a reef with several days before he can hope to float her off must wake uneasy, even when expert opinion has told him that the fine weather will continue and when he knows for certain that Thursday's high-water will be as high as that during which she struck, while the full spring-tide on Sunday will be higher by far—will necessarily raise her free. But this was an uneasiness of another nature, closer to superstitious or instinctive dread.

  Washing, shaving, and then a hearty breakfast dispelled some of it; a most encouraging tour of the hold with the carpenter—Mr Hadley's repairs meant that now the pumps were in action for only half a glass in each watch—did away with more; and after a visit to Welby's encampment he was almost himself again. The encampment, with its exact earthwork (for Welby had interpreted ditch very freely), its trim lines, its store-tent in the middle, and its well with three and a half feet of water already, was a joy to behold; and so was the pleasure of the Marines, now for once the experts, aware that they had astonished the foremast jacks.

  But at low tide he took a small party to buoy the guns; the men were the ship's few swimmers and three or four were competent divers too; he went in, and down, with them, and there was something indefinably wrong about the water: not only to warm to be at all refreshing but also in some way unclean. They buoyed the guns neatly, but the uneasiness returned, and although at dinner he told Stephen how reasonable it was to expect the ship to lift off on Thursday without any cruel dragging over the remaining length of reef and how nearly certain it was on Sunday, with the sun and the new moon both pulling the spring-tide to its fullest height, at least half a fathom more, he had no appetite, and leaving both wine and pudding he went on deck to look at the sea and the sky.

  Neither pleased him. It was slack water—a very low tide indeed—and there was an odd heave and shudder on the surface, a motion not unlike twitching. The sky had been somewhat veiled before dinner. Now it was hazy and low: no breeze at all, and the exposed rocks smelt disagreeable in the oppressive heat. A large pale fish, a shark of a kind he had not seen before, passed slowly by.

  He watched the sea; and even before the turn of the tide he saw an unnatural swell set in: unnaturally sudden, unnaturally strong. His uneasiness increased, and after half an hour he turned to the master.

  'Mr Warren,' he said, 'the signal for officers and all boats, if you please; and meanwhile let the people get ready to lay out the small bower as before, but with two cables.'

  Over on a level stretch of green outside the camp he saw the ordered pattern of a game of cricket break up and the players run down to the landing-place; and already the surf was sending its long lines of white along the shore.

  'Mr Warren,' he said again, 'I did ask whether you had a barometer, did I not?'

  'Yes, sir, you did; and I had to say I gave it to Dr Graham to have adjusted in Plymouth. It is still there, in course.'

  Jack nodded and walked up and down, looking eastward at each turn, for not only was the swell coming from that direction but the horizon and the sky for ten degrees above it was taking on a dark coppery glare rarely to be seen.

  'Mr Fielding,' he said as soon as the first lieutenant was aboard, 'is the Doctor on shore?'

  'Yes, sir: he is under the impression that you may go for a walk in the forest with him, and perhaps climb down the farther cliff. He has a coil of stout, supple line and Sorley, a cragsman from one of the Scotch islands.'

  'Not today, I am afraid. Let all hands turn to and lighten ship: carronades, small arms, ammunition; whatever purser, carpenter, gunner, armourer, sailmaker and bosun think most important in their own line; then the hands' bags and chests, officers' personal property. And beg the Doctor to come aboard for his own things and the medicine-chest.'

  Doctor Maturin came by the first returning boat, and though the tide of flood was not yet a half hour old, surf was breaking high on the rocks that closed the little bay on the west, breaking at unusually long and solemn intervals. He found Jack in the cabin with his clerk, assembling the ship's documents, registers, signal-books, the enormous and sometimes most secret paper-work of a man-of-war. 'Mr Butcher,' said Jack, 'do not for Heaven's sake let us forget Mr Humboldt's readings: they are on that locker over there. Let them be packed up with my hydrographical remarks.'

  'I will take them at once, sir,' said Butcher, who had suffered from these hundreds of hours of accurate measurement and who valued them at their true worth.

  'Brother,' said Stephen, when the clerk had staggered off with the files clutched to his bosom, 'what is afoot?'

  'I am not sure,' said Jack, 'but it may be your St Cecilia:

  And when that last and dreadful hour

  This crumbling pageant shall devour,

  The trumpet shall be heard on high,

  The dead shall live, the living die,

  And Music shall untune the sky.

  Look out to the east, will you?' They gazed through the stern window, where deep purple was massing beneath the coppery glare. 'I only remember to have seen a sky like that once,' said Jack after a long considering pause, 'and that was when we were in the South Sea, standing for the Marquesas. You saw precious little of it, because a lee-lurch tossed you into the waist and you hit your head on a gun, but it came before a most stupendous blow, that same blow that wrecked the Norfolk. I do not like this sudden swell, neither. So I am clearing the ship as much as ever I can and I beg you will have everything you value taken ashore, and all your physic and saws and pills. If I am wrong, there is no great harm; they can only call me an old woman.'

  It was perfectly clear that by now none of the seamen belonging to the frigate were going to call their Captain an old woman; they were all of his opinion, and their total conviction infected the afterguard, the landmen and the first-voyage Marines, vexed at first by the loss of their game of cricket but now silent, casting anxious glances at the eastern sky.

  The boats plied to and fro at racing speed, but with the making tide the much fiercer surf ran farther up the beach, much farther every voyage, however fast they pulled; and soon it was very hard to work the boats out through it to the ship. Worse: the ship being stern-on to the swell gave no shelter and coming alongside grew more and more perilous, so that chests, stores, cases had to be lowered or often tossed from the head-rails.

  It was now that Jack called his first lieutenant below and said, 'Mr Fielding, if this develops as I fear it may, let each officer be prepared to get his division ashore when I give the word. There will be no piping abandon ship, no calling out or excitement, just a plain going ashore in due order.'

  For nearly an hour longer the swell grew without a breath of wind, and the great solemn crash came echoing back from the rocks; and towards the end of this hour the ship first began to shift on her bed. Jack had already given the word and little by little the ship had emptied until now there were only four men of the final boat-load still aboard, the Captain, his steward, the sentry guarding the spirit-room and a hand who was not quite right in the head. The purple had spread over half the sky, the coppery light over almost all the rest, reaching the far horizon here and there. From the darkness far astern there was a
low constant thunder and the reflexion of lightning all along the eastern sky. Then with a howl the wind came racing across the sea in a white squall: one moment the air was calm and the next the full blast was on them, flying shattered water cutting their breath and blurring their sight. The launch, crammed with its last cargo, was hooked on to the forechains, only just holding, and Fielding roared with all his might, 'Come on, sir. For God's sake come on.'

  Jack was at the break of the quarterdeck with the others. 'Get along forward,' he said to them and darted into the cabin to check: nobody. A last look and he raced along to the ship's head and strode into the boat as it rose to the level of the rail. The moment Bonden and the bowman let go the boat shot away, flying before the terrible wind, rising and falling enormously; and away ahead Jack saw the large cutter pooped by a breaker, turn and roll over and over in the killing surf. But before the launch was half way to the shore the wind brought rain, a great black hurtling mass of warm rain; and now they were in the very midst of the thunder, stunning, ear-splitting thunder just overhead and lightning all about them.

  'Back water all,' roared Bonden above the uproar, poising the launch on the back of a towering wave. 'Give way, oh Christ give way.'

  The heavy boat rose, rose, and sped for the beach, grounding high in a smother of foam. The whole crew was lining the shore and those who could find a hold ran her up the streaming sand and then by skids far up beyond the highest tide mark, close to the remaining cutter. The skiff was nowhere to be seen.

  Jack had often noticed, and now he noticed it again, that in time of extreme emergency men often seemed to go beyond dread, pain and fatigue; and for noise, danger and the overturning of all natural order this was as extreme as a great fleet-action fought yardarm to yardarm. As they waded up the yielding slope and through the unbelievable rain, carrying their burdens, a line of trees on the edge of the forest blazed blue-green, and the lightning leapt back from them into the sky with a hiss. He bent to shout into a quartermaster's ear, 'Look after Charlie,' for the half-wit was crying, his knuckles to his eyes, and it looked as though he might lose his senses altogether. 'Aye aye, sir,' replied the quartermaster, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, 'I'll change him directly we're under cover.'