Aub-Mat 08 - The Ionian Mission

by Patrick O'Brian

  At some point in this statement, delivered with increasing force, the moral advantage changed sides; and now Jack Aubrey, sitting square in his chair, opened his orders at the relevant page and passed them to Admiral Thornton, saying, ‘There. I appeal to your candour, sir: would not any man take that to be the heart of the matter?

  Scrupulous respect will be paid to the laws of neutrality.’ While Sir John put on his spectacles again and ran through the orders Harte said that they were written in a great hurry, there not being a moment to lose; that he had not had time to read them over, and the clerk might have mistaken his drift; that a nod was as good as a wink to a blind horse; that he was nevertheless perfectly convinced that his verbal instructions had made his meaning clear -anyone could have told that something was afoot when a seventy-four was sent on such a mission and told to keep a full day’s sail away - anyone could have told that the orders were to be obeyed to the letter. He had nothing to reproach himself with.

  It was disconnected, angry, unskilful and somewhat embarrassing; Admiral Thornton made no reply, but said to Jack, ‘International law must be obeyed, of course: yet even Roman virtue can be overdone, and there is such a thing as being too scrupulous by half, above all in a war of this kind, with an enemy that sticks at nothing. Letting fly first with a broadside in the presence of witnesses is one thing: a scuffle ashore, where the first blow might have come from anyone, is another. Did it never occur to you to land a party of Marines?’

  ‘Yes, sir, it did. Indeed Captain Harris himself put the suggestion forward in the handsomest manner. I am not very much holier than thou, sir, I hope, in matters of this kind, and I should certainly have done so if my orders had not insisted so upon respect for neutrality.’

  ‘They did nothing of the kind,’ said Harte. ‘Properly understood, they did nothing of the kind.’

  Nobody saw fit to comment upon this and after a while Admiral Thornton said ‘Very well, Captain Aubrey. Although the outcome of this affair is unfortunate in the extreme, I do not think we can usefully say any more. Good day to you.”

  ‘Dear Lord above, sweetheart,’ wrote Jack in his serial letter, ‘I have never been so relieved in my life. All the way back in the boat I dared scarcely smile, or even congratulate myself; and there was William Babbington waiting for me with such a look of mortal anxiety on his face, as well there might have been, he having beheld the Admiral in the first full flood of his wrath. I carried him into the stern-gallery, it being a sweet evening with a light breeze at SSW and the squadron standing due east under topgallantsails so that we had a capital sunset spread out before us, and gave him an exact account of what had passed. We were as gay as a pair of schoolboys that have escaped a most prodigious flogging and expulsion, and we called Pullings and Mowett in to sup with us. I could not in decency open my mind to them about the Rear-Admiral - I could not even say how painful it was to hear and see a man of his rank and age sounding and looking so very mean, so very like a scrub - but we understood one another pretty well and Mowett asked me whether I remembered a disrespectful song the hands had made up about him when I had the dear Sophie. It was not the sentiment that Mowett objected to, he said, but the metre, which, it appears, broke the laws of prosody.’ Yet the sentiment was not wholly inoffensive either, since even the moderate chorus ran

  Bugger old Harte, bugger old Harte

  That red-faced son of a blue French fart

  as Jack remembered very well.

  ‘It was a charming supper-party, only wanting Stephen to make it complete; and even he will be with us, wind and weather permitting, in two days’ time. For this morning the Admiral made my signal, received me kindly - no cold glare, no damned icy distance this time, no Captain Aubrey or you, sir - and gave me very welcome orders to proceed to Port Mahon to take certain stores on board and my surgeon, he having had leave of absence in those parts.” The orders had in fact continued, ‘Now, Aubrey, I understand from Dr Maturin that you are acquainted with the nature of some of his more confidential expeditions: he also says that he places the utmost reliance on your discretion, and had rather sail with you than any other captain on the list. At present his occasions take him to the French coast, something west of Villeneuve, I believe: you will therefore carry him to the most suitable point for landing and take him off again as and when you shall between you think best. And I do most sincerely hope that you will bring him back safe, with the least possible delay.’ But obviously this could form no part of his letter. Nor could another subject that dwelt in his mind, rarely quitting his immediate consciousness. He could and did skirt round it, saying ‘I do hope we have a brush with the enemy soon, if only to wipe out the fiasco at Medina. The officers and men who have sailed with me before know that upon the whole I am not wanting in conduct nor I believe I may say in ordinary courage; but most of the ship’s company know little or nothing about me and I think some suppose I did not choose to fight. Now it is a very bad thing for men to sail under a commander they suspect of shyness. They cannot of course respect him, and without respect true discipline goes by the board...” Discipline, as the essence of a fighting-ship, was certainly very dear to Jack Aubrey’s heart; but there were some things dearer still and reputation was one of them. He had not had the least notion of how he valued it until both Harris and Patterson treated him not indeed with disrespect but with something considerably less than their former deference. This was not immediately after his most unpopular order to leave the Frenchmen lying there, when he knew very well that in the first flat anticlimax and disappointment, the letting-down of very high-wrought spirits, the ship would happily have seen him flogged, but some days after Medina. The incident, if anything so evanescent and impalpable could be called an incident, was followed by a series of unquestionable facts - the appearance of several names on the defaulters’ list, charged with fighting, half of them former Skates, half of them men who had sailed with Jack before. Naval justice was crude and amateurish, with no rules of evidence or procedure, but at this quarterdeck level, with the grating rigged for immediate execution, it was not calculated for delay, still less for concealing the real causes at issue, and quite often the truth came out at once, naked and sometimes inconvenient. In this case it appeared that the Skates, comparing Jack’s conduct with that of Captain Allen, their last commander, maintained that Captain Aubrey was less enterprising by far. ‘Captain Allen would have gone straight at ‘em, says he, law or no law: Captain Allen was not near so careful of his health or his paintwork, he says. So I fetch him a little shove, or a nudge as you might call it, to remind him of his manners.’

  This evidence explained the battered appearance of many hands who were not charged at all - Bonden, Davis, Martens and several more of Jack’s lower-deck friends, even placid old Joe Plaice - the equally battered appearance of a number of Marines as well as former Skates, and the increased animosity between soldiers and seamen. It also led Jack to notice or to fancy he noticed changes in the attitude of some of his officers, a lack of the perhaps somewhat exaggerated awe and respect that they thought due to the genuine salamander’s reputation that had surrounded him for so many years, that had made his work so very much easier, and that he accepted as a matter of course.

  All this Jack could have put in his letter, and he might even have added his reflection about a man’s losing his reputation and a woman’s losing her beauty and each of them looking right and left for signs of the loss in much the same manner; but it would not have told Sophie much about her husband’s real trouble, which was a dread that he might in fact have behaved cowardly.

  He had a profound belief in the lower deck’s corporate opinion. There might be a good many fools and landlubbers down there, but the seamen predominated not only in moral force but even in number; and in matters of this kind he had hardly ever known them to be wrong. He had had no great heart for the fight in the first place, none of those tearing spirits and that joy and intense anticipation, like fox-hunting at its best, but fox-hunting raised t
o the hundredth power, which had preceded other actions_Yet that was neither here nor there: a man could be out of form without being chicken-hearted and he had certainly sought out the enemy with all possible zeal, directly offering a close engagement with the odds against him and even trying to provoke it. On the other hand he remembered his relief when he understood that the Frenchmen were not going to fight: an ignoble relief. Or was ignominious the word? Not at all: it was a perfectly reasonable relief at not having to throw an ill-prepared, unseasoned crew into a desperate fight, in which so many of them must certainly be killed, wounded, crippled, maimed. In actions of that kind there was always a most shocking butcher’s bill, and with such a crew it would have been even worse, to say nothing of the strong possibility of defeat.

  As for his refusing to land the Marines, on first recollection it had seemed to him perfectly innocent, decided in perfect good faith, his orders being what he had understood them to be. But the Admiral’s words had shaken him horribly and by now he had argued the matter over with himself so often that what with accusation and indignant denial he could no longer tell just what the true nature of his intention had been: it was obscured by argument. Yet in this matter intention was everything and there was no point in putting the case to any other person on earth. Sophie for example would certainly tell him that he had behaved correctly, but that, though agreeable, would be no real comfort to him since even she could not get inside his head or heart or vitals to inspect his intentions - his intentions as they had been at that moment.

  Nor could Stephen, for that matter: still, Jack looked forward extremely to their meeting, and in something less than two days’ time, when the Worcester rounded to under Cape Mola, unable to enter Mahon harbour because of the north-wester, he took his barge, pulling through the narrow mouth and then beating right up the whole length, board upon board, although an exchange of signals with the officer in charge of Royal Naval stores had told him that nothing but a little Stockholm tar had yet arrived for the squadron. This was water that he and his coxswain and at least four of his bargemen knew as well as Spithead or Hamoaze and they sailed up with a kind of offhand cunning, shaving past the Lazaretto, catching the back-eddy by Cuckold’s Reach (a spacious stretch in these warm latitudes), and slipping through the hospital channel, censuring all changes that had been made since their time. Not that there were many: the Spanish flag rather than the Union flew over various public buildings, and now the Spanish men-of-war in the harbour were not prizes to the Royal Navy but allies, yet upon the whole little had altered. The place still had much of the air of an English Georgian market-town and sea-port set down in an incongruous landscape of vines and olives, with the occasional palm, and a brilliant Mediterranean sky over all.

  As they sailed along Jack pointed out the various places of interest to the youngster at his side, such as St Philip’s, the powder mill, the ordnance-wharf and the mast-yard; but the gangling boy, a spotted first-voyager named Willet, was too much awed by his company, too eager to be ashore, and perhaps too stupid, to absorb much information and as they drew nearer to the town Jack fell silent. ‘We will have a pint of sherry at Joselito’s for old times’ sake,’ he said to himself, ‘order a handsome dinner at the Crown - a beefsteak pudding, a solomon gundy, and those triangular almond cakes to finish with - and then walk about, looking at the places we used to know, until it is ready.’ And then to Bonden, ‘Captain of the port’s office.’

  The barge glided along under a high wall on the far side of the harbour, a wall with a discreet green door leading to the dove-house where he and Molly Harte had first made love. The wall was dotted with capers, growing wild in the interstices of the stones; they were now covered with their strange feathery flowers, as they had been on that occasion, and his mind was still ranging back with a mixture of lubricity and tenderness and indefinite regret when the barge sprang her luff and touched against-the opposing wharf at the Capitania steps. ‘Jump up to the captain of the port, Mr Willet,’ said Jack. ‘Give him my compliments and ask where the Doctor’s victualler lays. Her name is Els Set Dolors.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Willet, looking appalled. ‘Els Set Dolors it is, sir. What language shall I say it in, sir?’

  ‘Spanish or French; and if that don’t answer you may try Latin. Bonden will go with you.’

  ‘The captain of the port’s compliments, sir,’ said the returning Willet, ‘and the Set Dolors lays off la ... la . . .’

  ‘Dogana,’ said Bonden.

  ‘But Dr Maturin is gone to . . .’

  ‘Ciudadela, on a mule.’

  ‘And they do not look to see him back before Sunday evening.’

  ‘Asking your pardon, sir,’ said Bonden, ‘Saturday, I believe.’

  ‘He said Sabbath-oh,’ cried Willet.

  ‘So he did, sir: but the Sabbath is on Saturdays in these parts, we find. Sunday they call Dimanche-oh, or something very like.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Willet,’ said Jack, deeply disappointed. ‘However, I think we may as well have our dinner here, before returning to the ship.’ He reflected for a moment, his eye on the unattached ladies gathering at the waterside: he had put half a guinea of the boy’s allowance into his hand before leaving the Worcester, and although Willet was neither amiable nor intelligent Jack did not wish him to buy a pox with it.

  ‘Eldon,’ he said to the grizzled, hard-faced bow-oar, ‘Mr Willet will have dinner at Bunce’s, and then you will show him the sights of Mahon, the ordnance-store, the careenage, the proving-ground and the Protestant church, the slips if there is anything a-building, and the mad-house if there is time before six o’clock.’ He arranged with Bonden for the bargemen’s dinner, told them to draw straws for boat-keepers, and walked off unattended.

  Sentimental pilgrimages had rarely succeeded with Jack Aubrey: in the few that he had ever deliberately undertaken something had nearly always happened to spoil not only the present but much of the past as well; yet it now seemed that perhaps this might be an exception. The day itself was brilliantly clear, as it had often been when he was in Minorca as a lieutenant and a commander, and it was warm, so that climbing the steps to the upper town he unbuttoned his coat, a far finer coat than that which he wore in those days but one that did not prevent him from being recognized and welcomed at Joselito’s and the other places he called at on his way to the Crown.

  Port Mahon still showed many signs of the enjoining English connection: quite apart from the officers and men from the three Royal Navy vessels in the harbour - two sloops and a gun-brig on convoy-duty - pink faces and hair as bright yellow as Jack Aubrey’s walked about the street. Tea and even buns were to be had, as well as English beer and tobacco, and at Joselito’s there were copies of the London papers, not more than two or three months old. But the high days were gone, the days when the whole Mediterranean fleet lay in Port Mahon and powerful garrisons filled St Philip’s and the citadel: the Royal Navy now relied much more on Malta and Gibraltar; the Spanish navy kept only a couple of brigs in Mahon, while the troops amounted to no more than a few companies of local militia; so it was understandable that the town as a whole should seem rather sleepy, while the places that catered chiefly for sailors and soldiers should have a somewhat deserted air.

  Jack walked into the Crown by the back way, through a courtyard full of orange-trees; and there he sat on the stone rim of the fountain in the middle to draw breath and cool himself after his walk. His cold was gone long since but he was out of form and in any case walking on the hard, unyielding land after weeks and months of having a live deck underfoot always made him gasp. From an upper window came the voice of a woman singing to herself, a long flamenco song with strange intervals and Moorish cadences, often interrupted by the beating of a pillow or the turning of a bed. The throaty contralto reminded Jack of Mercedes, a very, very pretty Minorcan girl he had known in this same inn before his promotion. What would have happened to her? Swept off by some soldier, no doubt; a mother many times over, and fat. But still
jolly, he hoped.

  The song ran on, a lovely dying fall, and Jack listened more and more attentively: there were few things that moved him as deeply as music. Yet he was not all ears, all spirit, either, and in a long pause while a bolster was thrust into a case too small his brute belly gave so eager a twinge that he got up and walked into the taproom, a broad, low, cool, shadowy place with vast barrels let into its walls and a sanded floor. ‘You bloody old fool,’ said a parrot quietly in the silence, but without real conviction. Jack had known this place so thick with tobacco-smoke that you could hardly tell one uniform from another and so full of talk that orders had to be roared as though to the foretop. Now it was as though he were walking in a dream, a dream that respected the material surroundings to the last detail but emptied them of life, and to break the spell he called ‘House. House, there. La casa, ho.’

  No reply: but he was glad to see an enormous bull-mastiff come in from the hall, making the first marks in the newly-sprinkled sand. The Crown had always had fine English mastiffs, and this one, a young brindled bitch with a back broad enough to dine on, must be a granddaughter of those he had known very well. She had never seen him in her life, of course: she sniffed his hand with distant civility and then, obviously unimpressed, paced on to the patio. Jack stepped into the hall, a square hall with two staircases and two English longcase clocks in it, the whole full of brilliant sun: he called again and when the echo of his voice had died away he heard a distant screech of ‘Coming’ and the patter of feet on the corridor above.