The Mauritius Command

by Patrick O'Brian

  An early dinner, cold, and the grog cut by half; yet there was no grumbling. The Commodore's look of contained pleasure, his certainty, the indefinable change that had come over him, had spread a feeling of total confidence throughout the ship. The hands ate their good biscuit and their execrable cheese, wetted with more watered lime-juice than rum, and they looked at him, they looked at the Frenchmen in their uneasy heap to leeward, they looked at the two ships coming closer every minute, and they talked in low cheerful voices: there was a good deal of quiet laughter in the waist and on the forecastle.

  With a piece of chalk the Commodore drew his plan of attack on the deck: the captains of the sloop and the brig watched attentively. The three were to run down in line abreast, the Boadicea in the middle, and they were to endeavour to separate the two French frigates; there were many possibilities, depending on the movements of the Astrée, and Jack explained them clearly. 'But at all events, gentlemen,' he said, 'in case of the unforeseen, you will not go far wrong by closing with the Iphigenia, ahead and astern, and leaving the Astrée to me.'

  With the wind three points abaft the beam, and under topsails alone for freedom of manoeuvre, they bore down, the brig looking pitifully small on the Boadicea's starboard beam and the sloop a mere wisp to port. Jack had given them plenty of time to feed and rest their hands; he knew that they were thoroughly prepared and well manned, and that their commanders understood his intentions beyond any sort of doubt.

  He had foreseen a great many possibilities, and he stood on with a confidence that he had rarely felt so strongly before, a steady rising of his heart; but he had not foreseen what in fact took place. They were still a mile and a half away when the Astrée passed the Iphigenia a towline and both frigates made sail. Abandoning the Africaine, they gathered away, packed on more sail and still more, hauled their wind and stretched to the eastwards as fast as they could go, the fine-sailing Astrée keeping the Iphigenia's head right up to the wind, closer than ever the Boadicea could lie.

  By coming to instantly it was conceivable that since she was somewhat to windward the Boadicea might bring them to action at the end of a very long converging chase, in spite of the Astrée's superiority on a bowline; but neither the Otter nor the Staunch could possibly keep up, and in the meanwhile it was probable that Hamelin's reinforcement, brought by the French brig, would be down for the Africaine. No: this, alas, was a time for discretion, and the Boadicea stood quietly on for the sad dismantled hulk, which lay wallowing on the swell with no more than her ensign-staff to show the French colours.

  The Boadicea came alongside: the Africaine fired two guns to leeward and the French colours came down, to the sound of immense cheering from the prisoners still aboard her. 'Mr Seymour,' said Jack, with a feeling of anticlimax, yet with a deep glowing satisfaction beneath it, 'be so good as to take possession. What the devil is this?'

  This was the sight of a score of Africalnes plunging into the sea, swimming across, and swarming up the side of the Boadicea. They were in a state of wild enthusiasm, joy and rage strangely mingled: nearly all sense of discipline was gone and they crowded dripping on the quarterdeck, begging the Commodore to renew the action—they would fight his guns for him—they would be happy to serve under Captain Aubrey—not like under some brass bound buggers—they knew him—and they knew he could serve those French farts out for what they done—take on two of them at any time like kiss your hand—'I know you can do it, sir,' cried one with a bloody dressing round his upper arm, 'I was shipmates along of you in Sophie, when we fucked the big Spaniard. Don't say no, sir.'

  'I am glad to see you, Herold,' said Jack, 'and I wish I could say yes, with all my heart. But you are a seaman—look how they lay. Three hours stern chase, and five French frigates to northwards ready to come down for the Africaine. I understand your feelings, lads, but it's no go. Bear a hand with a towline, and we shall take your barky into St Paul's and refit her: then you shall serve the Frenchmen out yourselves.' They looked longingly at the Astrée and the Iphigenia, and they sighed; but as seamen they had nothing to say. 'How is Captain Corbett?' asked Jack. 'Did the French take him aboard?'

  Silence. Then, 'Don't know, sir.' He looked at them in surprise. In front of him was a row of closed faces: the rare, immediate, man-to-man contact was entirely gone: he had run straight into the brick wall of lower-deck dumbness, the covering-up solidarity he knew so well, often stupid, generally transparent, but always unbreakable. 'Don't know, sir,' was the only answer he would ever get.

  Chapter Nine

  Slowly the Boadicea dragged the Africaine southwards through the rising swell: she behaved like a sodden treetrunk of enormous size, now lagging sullenly so that the Boadicea's masts complained and Seymour's hoarse whisper—all that was left of his voice—desired the hands 'to start that—sheet before everything carried away', now darting unpredictably at the Boadicea's stern and then slewing so that the towline jerked from the sea, a rigid bar of rope on the verge of rupture, squirting water from every strand; and above all she rolled, a dead lurching drunken gunwale-roll that made the surgeons' work even more hazardous and delicate than usual.

  Stephen was there, helping poor Mr Cotton, an elderly cripple who had scarcely recovered from a bout of dysentery and who had been overcome with work from the first few minutes of the action. Even now, after a shocking number of deaths below, sixty or seventy cases remained, lying all along the berthdeck: there was plenty of room, at least, since the French had killed forty-nine men outright and had taken fifty prisoners away. The Africaines who remained, helped by a party from the Boadicea, were busily lashing what spars they possessed to the stumps of the masts, and towards nightfall they were able to set three staysails, which at once gave the frigate back her life, so that she moved like a sentient being once more, with no more of a roll than a reasonable ship.

  'What a relief,' said Mr Cotton, plying his saw. 'At one time I feared I was about to be seasick again seasick after all these years afloat! A ligature, if you please. Are you subject to the seasickness, Dr Maturin?'

  'I have known it in the Bay.'

  'Ah, the Bay,' said Cotton, tossing the detached foot into a bucket held by his loblolly boy, 'that dismal tract. You may let him go,' he said to the patient's messmates, who had been holding him; and into the grey, sweating face he said, 'John Bates, it is all over now. You will do very well, and that foot will earn you a Greenwich pension or a cook's warrant.'

  The grey, sweating face murmured in a tiny voice, thanking Mr Cotton, and might he keep the foot, for luck?

  'That finishes our urgent cases,' said Mr Cotton, looking round. 'I am infinitely obliged to you, sir. Infinitely obliged; and I wish I had something better to offer you than a dish of tea. But the French stripped us, stripped us like a pack of savages, sir. Fortunately they do not care for tea.'

  'A dish of tea would be most welcome,' said Stephen, and they walked aft to the deserted gun-room. 'A bloody action,' he observed.

  'I have rarely seen a bloodier,' said Mr Cotton. 'Nor, I suspect, a more unnecessary waste of life. Still, the captain has paid for it, for what comfort that may be.'

  'Killed he was?'

  'Killed, or call it what you choose. At all events he is dead,' said Cotton. 'He was brought below at the very beginning—metacarpals of the left foot all abroad. I did what I could, and he insisted on being carried up again—he was a brave man, you know, with all his faults. Then he was hit a second time, but who fired the piece I will not say; nor will I absolutely assert that in the confusion of the night engagement his own people tossed him over the side; but in any case he disappeared. I dare say you have known similar cases.'

  'I have heard of them, of course; and in this particular instance I had some hint of it long ago. Captain Corbett's reputation as a flogging captain had spread pretty wide, I believe.'

  'So wide that the hands mutinied when he was appointed to the ship: refused to take her to sea. I was on leave at the time, and when I came back I was surprised t
o find that the officers sent down from London had persuaded them that he was not as black as he was painted—had persuaded them to return to their duty.'

  'Why were you surprised, sir?'

  'Because those reputations are never wrong. He was as black as he was painted. He flogged those men down to the line, he flogged them across it, and he flogged them all the way up from the Cape.'

  'A parenthesis—did you carry any mail for the Cape, any mail for us?'

  'Yes; and we were to carry yours on to Rodriguez. But as you know, we never touched there—turned right about the moment we had spoken the Emma—and I am sorry to say the Frenchman got it all.'

  'Well, well. And yet the men fought with great spirit, I collect?'

  'With very great spirit; and that was because they had a decent set of officers. Captain Corbett was scarcely on speaking-terms with any of them: never dined in the gun-room but once, never invited. And the men would have fought her even better if they had been taught how to use the guns: never exercised with them once, all because of that holy deck. It must be in a pretty state at this moment. No: the hands had nothing against the officers, who were a decent set of men, as I say, and game to the last—Tullidge fought the ship after the captain was gone, and he was wounded four times; Forder, the second, had a bullet through the lungs, and Parker's head was shot off. Good officers. Once, when we were off Cape St Roque and Corbett was handing out fifty lashes right and left, they asked me whether they might confine him, and I said no. I was sorry for it afterwards, because although the fellow was sane enough ashore, he was mad at sea: mad with authority.'

  'Sure, it is a dangerous draught,' said Stephen. 'Yet some resist it. What is the source of their immunity?'

  'What indeed?' replied Mr Cotton. His weariness was too great for speculation, though not for civility, and when Stephen took his leave he said, 'You were a God-send, Dr Maturin: may I in my turn be of any use to you?'

  'Since you are so good,' said Stephen, 'it does so happen that I have a singularly delicate depressed fracture waiting for me tomorrow, and if by then you feel sufficiently recovered, I should be most grateful for your support. My young man has no experience of the trephine, and my hands are not so steady as they were—they do not possess your admirable firmness of grip.'

  'I shall be with you, sir, at any hour you choose to name,' said Mr Cotton; and Mr Cotton, long accustomed to the ways of the Navy, was true to his word and exact to his time. At the first stroke of six bells in the forenoon watch he came swarming up the Boadicea's side, using his powerful arms alone and trailing his withered leg. Once aboard he shipped his half-crutch, saluted the quarterdeck, brushed an officious bosun's mate aside, and stumped aft. Everything was ready: under an awning that spread the brilliant light stood an upright chair, made fast to cleats, and in it sat Colley the patient, lead coloured, snoring still, and so tightly lashed by his friends that he was as incapable of independent movement as the ship's figurehead. The deck and the tops were strangely crowded with men, many of them feigning busyness, for the old Sophies had told their present shipmates of that memorable day in the year two, when, in much the same light, Dr Maturin had sawed off the top of the gunner's head, had roused out his brains, had set them to rights, and had clapped a silver dome over all, so that the gunner, on coming back to life, was better than new: this they had been told, and they were not going to miss a moment of the instructive and even edifying spectacle. From under the forecastle came the sound of the armourer at his forge, beating a three-shilling piece into a flat and gleaming pancake.

  'I have desired him to await our instructions for the final shape,' said Stephen, 'but he has already sharpened and retempered my largest trephine.' He held up the circular saw, still gleaming from its bath, and suggested that Mr Cotton might like to make the first incision. The medical civilities that followed, the polite insistence and refusal, made the audience impatient; but presently their most morbid hopes were gratified. The patient's shaved scalp, neatly divided from ear to ear and flensed away, hung over his unshaved livid snorting face, and now the doctors, poised above the flayed, shattered skull, were talking in Latin.

  'Whenever they start talking foreign,' observed John Harris, forecastleman, starboard watch, 'you know they are at a stand, and that all is, as you might say, in a manner of speaking, up.'

  'You ain't seen nothing, John Harris,' said Davis, the old Sophie. 'Our doctor is only tipping the civil to the one-legged cove: just you wait until he starts dashing away with his boring-iron.'

  'Such a remarkable thickness of bone, and yet the metopic suture has not united,' said Mr Cotton. 'I have never seen the like, and am deeply gratified. 'But, as you say, it confronts us with a perplexing situation: a dilemma, as one might say.'

  'The answer, as I conceive it, lies in a double perforation,' said Stephen. 'And here the strength and steadiness of your left forearm will prove invaluable. If you would have the goodness to support the parietal here, while I begin my first cut at this point, and if then we change hands, why, there is a real likelihood that we may lift out the whole in one triumphant piece.'

  Had it not been for the need to preserve the appearance of professional infallibility and god-like calm, Mr Cotton would have pursed his lips and shaken his head: as it was he muttered, 'The Lord be with us,' and slid in his flattened probe. Stephen turned back his cuffs, spat on his hands, waited for the roll, placed his point and began his determined cut, the white bone skipping from the eager teeth and Carol swabbing the sawdust away. In the silence the ship's company grew still more intent: the midshipmen's berth, ghouls to a man, craned forward, unchid by their officers. But as the steel bit down into the living head, more than one grew pale, more than one looked away into the rigging; and even Jack, who had seen this grisly performance before, turned his eyes to the horizon, where the distant Astrée and Iphigenia flashed white in the sun.

  He heard Stephen call out the measurements to the armourer as the second cut began; he heard a renewed hammering on the anvil forward; but as he listened a movement far over there to windward seized upon the whole of his attention. Both the Frenchmen were filling: did they mean to edge down at last? He clapped his glass to his eye, saw them come right before the wind, and shut his telescope with a smile: from the busy way they were passing their sheets it was obvious that they were merely wearing once again, as they had done five times since dawn. Yes, they had hauled their wind. Although they had the weather-gage they did not choose to bring him and the crippled Africaine to action; and if he was not very much mistaken, this last manoeuvre had put it out of their power, now that the mountains of La Réunion were looming on the larboard bow and the breeze was likely to veer two points inshore. To be sure, the Africaine still had all her teeth intact, and the Staunch and the Otter could give a shrewd nip in a melee but even so . . . He laughed aloud, and at the same moment he heard Mr Cotton cry, 'Oh, pretty. Oh, very prettily done, sir.'

  Stephen raised the piece of skull entire and held it up to peer at its underside with a look of sober triumph—a moment during which the audience might gaze with fascinated horror into the awful gulf, where Mr Cotton was now fishing for splinters with a pair of whalebone tongs. As he fished, and as a long transverse splinter stirred the depths, an awful voice, deep, slow, thick tongued and as it were drunk, but recognizable as Colley's, spoke from behind the hanging skin and said, 'Jo. Pass that fucking gasket, Jo.' By this time the audience had dwindled, and many of the remaining ghouls were as wan as Colley himself; they revived, however, when the surgeons placed the silver cover on the hole, fastened it down, restored the patient's scalp to its usual place, sewed it up, washed their hands in the scuttle-butt, and dismissed him below. A pleased murmur ran round the ship, and Jack, stepping forward, said, 'I believe I may congratulate you, gentlemen, upon a very delicate manoeuvre?'

  They bridled and said it was nothing so extraordinary—any competent surgeon could have done as much and in any case, they added, with a sincerity that would have cause
d Mrs Colley a dreadful pang, there was no call for congratulation until the inevitable crisis had declared itself: after all, it could not be said that any operation was wholly successful unless the patient at least outlived the crisis. After that the cause of death might reasonably be assigned to a host of other factors.

  'Oh, how I hope he lives,' said Jack, his eye still on the distant enemy. 'Colley is a prime seaman, a capital, steady hand, and can point his gun as well as any man in the ship. Has a large number of children, too, as I recall.'

  All this was very true: Tom Colley, when sober, was a valuable though pugnacious member of his division; he had been bred to the sea and he could hand, reef and steer without having to take thought, and it was a joy to see him dance a hornpipe: the ship would not be the same without him. But beneath this valid reasoning lay a region that the kind observer might have called a sort of mysticism and that others, perhaps more enlightened, would have described as brutish superstition. Jack would not have had it known for the world, but he equated the seaman's recovery with the success of his campaign: and from the behaviour of the Astrée and Iphigenia over there, Colley was in a fair way to resurrection. If Hamelin had been present, flying his broad pennant aboard the Astrée rather than the Vénus, would the French attitude have been more determined? Would those two ships have risked the battle, to destroy all his hopes, whatever the cost to themselves? From what he knew of the French commodore, he doubted it.

  'An impressive document,' said Governor Farquhar, handing back the copy of Pius VII's excommunication of Buonaparte, the hitherto unpromulgated but effective personal, greater excommunication, authenticated by the bishop's seal, 'and although some of the expressions are perhaps not quite Ciceronian, the whole amounts to the most tremendous damnation that I have ever seen. Were I a Catholic, it would make me extremely uneasy in my mind, if I were obliged to have anything to do with the wretch. The Bishop made no difficulty, I presume?' Stephen smiled, and Farquhar went on, 'How I regret your scruples. This would be of the greatest value to the ministry. Surely we should make another copy?'