A Ship of the Line h-8

by Cecil Scott Forester

  “Good morning, Bush,” he said. “Have you seen the new draft?”

  “No, sir. I was rowing guard for the middle watch and I’ve only just turned out. Where do they hail from, sir?”

  Hornblower told him, and Bush rubbed his hands with pleasure.

  “Thirty!” he said. “That’s rare. I never hoped for more than a dozen from Exeter Assizes. And Bodmin Assizes open today. Please God we get another thirty there.”

  “We won’t get topmen from Bodmin Assizes,” said Hornblower, comforted beyond measure at the equanimity with which Bush regarded the introduction of gaolbirds into the Sutherland’s crew.

  “No, sir. But the West India convoy’s due this week. The guards ought to nab two hundred there. We’ll get twenty if we get our rights.”

  “M’m,” said Hornblower, and turned away uneasily. He was not the sort of captain—neither the distinguished kind nor the wheedling kind—who could be sure of favours from the Port Admiral. “I must look round below.”

  That changed the subject effectively enough.

  “The women are restless,” said Bush. “I’d better come, too, sir, if you don’t object.”

  The lower gun deck offered a strange spectacle, lit vaguely by the light which came through half a dozen open gun ports. There were fifty women there. Three or four were still in their hammocks, lying on their sides looking out on the others. Some were sitting in groups on the deck, chattering loud-voiced. One or two were chaffering for food through the gun ports with the occupants of shore boats floating just outside; the netting which impeded desertion had a broad enough mesh to allow a hand to pass through. Two more, each backed by a supporting group, were quarrelling violently. They were in odd contrast—one was tall and dark, so tall as to have to crouch round-shouldered under the five foot deck beams, while the other, short, broad, and fair, was standing up boldly before her menacing advance.

  “That’s what I said,” she maintained stoutly. “And I’ll say it again. I ain’t afeared o’ you, Mrs Dawson, as you call yourself.”

  “A-ah,” screamed the dark one at this crowning insult. She swooped forward, and with greedy hands she seized the other by the hair, shaking her head from side to side as if she would soon shake it off. In return her face was scratched and her shins were kicked by her stout-hearted opponent. They whirled round in a flurry of petticoats, when one of the women in the hammocks screamed a warning to them.

  “Stop it, you mad bitches! ‘Ere’s the cap’n.”

  They fell apart, panting and tousled. Every eye was turned towards Hornblower as he walked forward in the patchy light, his head bowed under the deck above.

  “The next woman fighting will be put ashore instantly,” growled Hornblower. The dark woman swept her hair from her eyes and sniffed with disdain.

  “You needn’t put me ashore, Cap’n,” she said. “I’m goin’. There ain’t a farden to be had out o’ this starvation ship.”

  She was apparently expressing a sentiment which was shared by a good many of the women, for the speech was followed by a little buzz of approval.

  “Ain’t the men never goin’ to get their pay notes?” piped up the woman in the hammock.

  “Enough o’ that,” roared Bush, suddenly. He pushed forward anxious to save his captain from the insults to which he was exposed, thanks to a government which left its men still unpaid after a month in port. “You there, what are you doing in your hammock after eight bells?”

  But this attempt to assume a counter offensive met with disaster.

  “I’ll come out if you like, Mr. Lieutenant,” she said, flicking off her blanket and sliding to the deck. “I parted with my gown to buy my Tom a sausage, and my petticoat’s bought him a soop o’ West Country ale. Would you have me on deck in my shift, Mr. Lieutenant?”

  A titter went round the deck.

  “Get back and be decent,” spluttered Bush, on fire with embarrassment.

  Hornblower was laughing, too—perhaps it was because he was married that the sight of a half-naked woman alarmed him not nearly as much as it did his first lieutenant.

  “Never will I be decent now,” said the woman, swinging her legs up into the hammock and composedly draping the blanket over her, “until my Tom gets his pay warrant.”

  “An’ when he gets it,” sneered the fair woman. “What can he do with it without shore leave? Sell it to a bumboat shark for a quarter!”

  “Fi’ pound for twenty-three months’ pay!” added another. “An me a month gone a’ready.”

  “Avast there,” said Bush.

  Hornblower beat a retreat, abandoning—forgetting, rather—the object of his visit of inspection below. He could not face those women when the question of pay came up again. The men had been scandalously badly treated, imprisoned in the ship within sight of land, and their wives (some of them certainly were wives, although by Admiralty regulations a simple verbal declaration of the existence of a marriage was sufficient to allow them on board) had just cause of complaint. No one, not even Bush, knew that the few guineas which had been doled out among the crew represented a large part of Hornblower’s accumulated pay—all he could spare, in fact, except for the necessary money to pay his officers’ expenses when they should start on their recruiting journeys.

  His vivid imagination and absurd sensitiveness between them perhaps exaggerated part of the men’s hardships. The thought of the promiscuity of life below decks, where a man was allotted eighteen inches’ width in which to swing his hammock, while his wife was allowed eighteen inches next to him, all in a long row, husbands, wives, and single men, appalled him. So did the thought of women having to live on the revolting lower deck food. Possibly he made insufficient allowance for the hardening effect of long habit.

  He emerged through the fore hatchway on to the maindeck a little unexpectedly. Thompson, one of the captains of the forecastle, was dealing with the new hands.

  “P’raps we’ll make sailors of you,” he was saying, “and p’raps we won’t. Overside with a shot at your feet, more likely, before we sight Ushant And a waste o’ good shot, too. Come on wi’ that pump, there. Let’s see the colour o’ your hides, gaol-birds. When the cat gets at you we’ll see the colour o’ your backbones, too, you—”

  “Enough of that, Thompson,” roared Hornblower, furious.

  In accordance with his standing orders the new hands were being treated to rid them of vermin. Naked and shivering, they were grouped about the deck. Two of them were having their heads shorn down to the bare skin; a dozen of them, who had already submitted to this treatment (and looking strangely sickly and out of place with the prison pallor still on them) were being herded by Thompson towards the wash-deck pump which a couple of grinning hands were working. Fright was making them shiver as much as cold—not one of them, probably, had ever had a bath before, and what with the prospect, and Thompson’s bloodcurdling remarks and the strange surroundings, they were pitiful to see.

  It enraged Hornblower, who somehow or other had never forgotten the misery of his early days at sea. Bullying was abhorrent to him like any other sort of wanton cruelty, and he had no sympathy whatever with the aim of so many of his brother officers, to break the spirit of the men under him. One of these days his professional reputation and his future might depend on these very men risking their lives cheerfully and willingly—sacrificing them, if need be—and he could not imagine cowed and broken-spirited men doing that. The shearing and the bath were necessary, if the ship was to be kept clear of the fleas and bugs and lice which could make life a misery on board, but he was not going to have his precious men cowed more than was unavoidable. It was curious that Hornblower, who never could believe himself to be a leader of men, would always lead rather than drive.

  “Under the pump with you, men,” he said kindly, and when they still hesitated—“When we get to sea you’ll see me under that pump, every morning at seven bells. Isn’t that so, there?”

  “Aye aye, sir,” chorused the hands at the pump—their
captain’s strange habit of having cold seawater pumped over him every morning had been a source of much discussion on board the Lydia.

  “So under with you, and perhaps you’ll all be captains one of these days. You, there, Waites, show these others you’re not afraid.” It was blessed good fortune that Hornblower was able not only to remember the name, but to recognise in his new guise Waites, the sheepstealer with the moleskin breeches. They blinked at this resplendent captain in his gold lace, whose tone was cheerful and whose dignity still admitted taking a daily bath. Waites steeled himself to dive under the spouting hose, and, gasping, rotated heroically under the cold water. Someone threw him a lump of holystone with which to scrub himself, while the others jostled for their turn—the poor fools were like sheep; it was only necessary to set one moving to make all the rest eager to follow.

  Hornblower caught sight of a red angry welt across one white shoulder. He beckoned Thompson out of earshot. “You’ve been free with that starter of yours, Thompson,” he said. Thompson grinned uneasily, fingering the two-foot length of rope knotted at the end, with which petty officers were universally accustomed to stimulate the activity of the men under them.

  “I won’t have a petty officer in my ship,” said Hornblower, “who doesn’t know when to use a starter and when not to. These men haven’t got their wits about ‘em yet, and hitting ‘em won’t remedy it. Make another mistake like that, Thompson, and I’ll disrate you. And then you’ll clean out the heads of this ship every day of this commission. That’ll do.”

  Thompson shrank away, abashed by the genuine anger which Hornblower displayed.

  “Keep your eye on him, Mr. Bush, if you please,” added Hornblower. “Sometimes a reprimand makes a petty officer take it out of the men more than ever to pay himself back. And I won’t have it.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” said Bush, philosophically.

  Hornblower was the only captain he had ever heard of who bothered his head about the use of starters. Starters were as much part of Navy life as bad food and eighteen inches per hammock and peril at sea. Bush could never understand Hornblower’s disciplinary methods. He had been positively horrified when he had heard his captain’s public admission that he, too, had baths under the washdeck pump—it seemed madness for a captain to allow his men to guess that they were of the same flesh as his. But two years under Hornblower’s command had taught him that Hornblower’s strange ways sometimes attained surprising results. He was ready to obey him, loyally though blindly, resigned and yet admiring.

  Chapter II

  “The boy from the Angel has brought a note, sir,” said the landlady, when Hornblower called her in in reply to her knock at the sitting-room door. “He waits an answer.”

  Hornblower felt a shock as he read the address—the clear feminine handwriting which he recognised although it was months since he saw it last meant so much to him. He tried to disguise his feelings as he spoke to his wife.

  “It is addressed to both of us, my dear,” he said. “Shall I open it?”

  “As you please,” said Maria.

  Hornblower broke the wafer and unfolded the note.

  The Angel Inn, Plymouth.

  Fourth May, 1810.

  Rear Admiral Sir Percy and Lady Barbara Leighton would esteem it an Honour if Captain and Mrs Horatio Hornblower would dine with them at this address Tomorrow, the Fifth, at four o’clock.

  “The Admiral is at the Angel. He wants us to dine with him tomorrow,” said Hornblower, as casually as his beating heart would allow. “Lady Barbara is with him. I think we must accept, my dear.”

  He passed the note over to his wife.

  “I have only my blue sack gown,” said Maria, looking up from reading it.

  The first thing a woman ever thought about on receiving an invitation was what she should wear. Hornblower tried to bend his mind to the consideration of the blue sack gown, when all the time his heart was singing songs at the knowledge that Lady Barbara was only two hundred yards away.

  “It looks perfect on you, my dear,” he said. “You know how much I have always liked it.”

  It would call for a far better gown to look well on Maria’s dumpy figure. But Hornblower knew that they must—they must–accept the invitation, and it would be a kindness to reassure Maria. It did not matter what clothes Maria wore as long as she thought she looked well in them. Maria smiled happily at the compliment, giving Hornblower a prick of conscience. He felt like Judas. Maria would look coarse and badly dressed and stupid beside Lady Barbara, and yet he knew that as long as he pretended to be in love with her she would be happy and unconscious.

  He wrote a careful acceptance, and rang the bell for it to be given to the messenger. Then he buttoned his uniform coat.

  “I must go down to the ship,” he said.

  Maria’s reproachful look hurt him. He knew that she had been looking forward to spending the afternoon with him, and indeed he had not intended to visit the ship that day. It was only an excuse to gain privacy for himself. He could not bear the thought of being mewed up in that sitting-room with Maria and her platitudes. He wanted to be alone to hug to himself the thought that Lady Barbara was in the same town, that he was going to see her tomorrow. He could not sit still with those thoughts bubbling within him. He could have sung for joy as he walked briskly down to the ferry, thrusting aside all remembrance of Maria’s dutiful acquiescence in his departure—well she knew how great were the demands made upon a captain by the commissioning of a ship of the line.

  In his yearning for solitude he urged the rowers of his boat until they sweated. On deck he gave the briefest of salutes to the quarterdeck and to the officer of the watch, before plunging below to the security and peace for which he had been yearning. There were a hundred matters to which he could have devoted his attention but he would not stay for one of them. He strode across his cabin—littered with the preparations made for when he should come on board—and out through the stern window into the great stern gallery. There, sheltered from all interruption, he could lean against the rail, and stare across the water.

  The ebb was running, and with the wind light from the north-east the Sutherland’s stern gallery looked southward down the length of the Hamoaze. To his left lay the dockyard, as busy as a beehive. Before him the glittering water was studded with shipping, with shore boats rowing hither and thither. In the distance beyond the roofs of the victualling yard he could see Mount Edgcumbe—Plymouth was out of his sight, round the corner from the Devil’s Point; he would not have the satisfaction of gazing upon the roof that sheltered Lady Barbara.

  Still, she was there, and he would see her tomorrow. He gripped the rail in his ecstasy until his fingers hurt him. He turned away and began to walk up and down the gallery, his hands behind his back to counterbalance the stoop necessitated by the cove above. The pain he had felt at first, three weeks back, when he had heard of Lady Barbara’s marriage to Admiral Leighton was gone by now. There was only the joy in the thought that she still remembered him. Hornblower dallied with the idea that she might have travelled down to Plymouth with her husband in the expectation of seeing him. It was possible—Hornblower would not stop to think that she might have been influenced by the desire to spend a few more days with her new husband. She must have cajoled Sir Percy into sending this invitation on the moment of his arrival; Hornblower would not make allowance for the fact that any admiral must be anxious for an early opportunity to study an unknown captain placed under his command. She must have made Sir Percy ask at the Admiralty for his services—that would explain why they had found for him a new ship and a new command without a single month’s interval of half pay. It was to Lady Barbara that he owed the very comforting addition of ten shillings a day to his pay which went with the command of a ship of the line.

  He was a quarter of the way up the captains’ list now. In less than twenty years’ time—long before he was sixty—if he continued to obtain commands in this fashion he would hoist his flag as an Admiral. Then th
ey might yellow him if they wanted to; he would be satisfied with Admiral’s rank. On Admiral’s half pay he could live in London, find a patron who would nominate him to a seat in Parliament. He would know power, and dignity, and security. All this was possible—and Lady Barbara still remembered him, cherished a kindly thought of him, was anxious to see him again despite the ludicrous way in which he had behaved towards her. High spirits bubbled within him again.

  A seagull, wheeling motionless up wind, suddenly flapped its wings until it hovered stationary, and screamed raucously in his face. It flapped and screamed aimlessly along the gallery, and then, equally aimlessly, wheeled away again. Hornblower followed it with his eyes, and when he resumed his walk the thread of his thoughts was broken. Instantly there loomed up again into his consciousness the knowledge of the frightful need of men under which he laboured. Tomorrow he would have to confess miserably to his Admiral that the Sutherland was still a hundred and fifty men short of complement; he would be found wanting in the very first of a captain’s duties. An officer might be the finest possible seaman, the most fearless fighter (and Hornblower did not think himself either) and yet his talents were useless if he could not man his ship.

  Probably Leighton had never asked for his services at all, and he had been allotted to Leighton’s squadron by some trick of fate. Leighton would suspect him of having been his wife’s lover, would be consumed with jealousy, and would watch for every opportunity to achieve his ruin. He would make his life a misery to him, would plague him to madness, and would finally have him broken and dismissed the service—any admiral could break any captain if he set his mind to it. Perhaps Lady Barbara had planned to put him thus in Leighton’s power, and was working his ruin in revenge for his treatment of her. That seemed much more likely than his earlier wild imaginings, thought Hornblower, the cold fit working on him.