Aub-Mat 08 - The Ionian Mission

by Patrick O'Brian

  Returning to the fore-cabin he found Stephen there with Mr Allen and Professor Graham. ‘Captain Aubrey,’ said Stephen, ‘I have been telling Mr Allen that I must decline going with you to Admiral Harte’s apartment. There are circumstances that make it improper for me to make any official appearance in this matter or in any other to do with Intelligence at present.’

  ‘I quite agree,’ said Graham.

  ‘Besides,’ added Stephen, ‘I have to see Dr Harrington and our patient in fifteen minutes.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Allen. ‘Then I shall send a messenger to tell Dr Harrington that you are here. Gentlemen, shall we wait on the Rear-Admiral?’

  Rear-Admiral Harte had never held an independent command of any importance and the prospect of supporting the enormous responsibilities of Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean overwhelmed him. Although it was certain that the Admiralty would not leave him in a post so very far beyond his abilities but would send out a replacement as soon as the news of Admiral Thornton’s incapacity reached London, Harte’s manner and even his appearance were almost unrecognizable. His ill-looking, foxy, close-eyed face wore a look that Jack had never seen on it before, although they were old, old acquaintances -a look of earnest gravity. He was civil to Jack and almost deferential to Allen and Graham, who for their part treated him with no extraordinary respect. Harte had at no time been admitted to the Admiral’s confidence in anything but purely naval matters: he knew almost nothing of the deeply involved political situation and nothing whatsoever about the Admiral’s frail network of intelligence. Allen gave a short account of the position in the Seven Islands, and Harte could be seen straining his weak understanding to follow it:

  ‘Now, sir,’ said Allen, ‘I advert not to the Seven Islands as such but to their former allies and dependencies on the mainland, particularly Kutali and Marga. As you know, the French are still in Marga, and they seem to be as firmly settled there as they are in Corfu: yet a little while ago it was represented to the Commander-in-Chief that the possessor of Kutali could cut Marga’s aqueduct and take the town from behind; while a friendly base at Kutali would make it far easier for us to attack Paxo and Corfu, which even Buonaparte calls the keys of the Adriatic.’

  ‘We are to take Kutali, then?’ said Harte.

  ‘Why, no, sir,’ said Allen patiently. ‘Kutali is Turkish, and we must not offend the Porte. Any evident, unprovoked aggression in this region would give our enemies in Constantinople a great advantage: it must never be forgotten that the French have some very intelligent men there, that the Sultan’s mother is a Frenchwoman, and that Napoleon’s recent successes have very much strengthened the French party. But it so happens that the town, which as you will recall was an independent Christian republic before the treaty of Pressburg, lies between three ill-defined beyliks, and its status has not yet been finally decided in Constantinople. The former governor, whose recent death brought this crisis about, was to hold office only while the town’s position - its privileges and so on -were considered. It is a valuable place: the neighbouring rulers covet it exceedingly and two of them, Ismail and Mustapha, have already approached us for help, while the agent of the third is thought to be in Malta at present.’

  ‘What kind of help do they want?’ asked Harte.

  ‘Guns, sir, and gunpowder.’

  ‘Guns!’ cried Harte, looking at the others: but he said no more, and when first Allen and then Graham explained that in the outlying provinces of the Turkish empire the valis, pashas, agas and beys, though in principle subject to the Sultan, often behaved like independent rulers, increasing their territories by usurpation or by making open war upon one another, he looked displeased.

  ‘Ali Arslan of lannina defeated and killed the Pasha of Scutari not long since,’ said Graham. ‘It is true that Scutari had rebelled: but the same cannot be said for the Derwend-Pasha of Rumelia, nor of Menoglu Bey.’

  ‘The independence increases with the distance from Constantinople,’ said Allen. ‘In Algiers, for example, it is virtually complete, but here it is usually exercised with a certain discretion. They often go to war with one another, but they generally do so with cries of loyalty to the Sultan, for although the Porte will acquiesce in a fait accompli if it is accompanied by the proper offerings, a reasonably good case still has to be made out - the defeated man must be shown to have had treacherous intentions or to have been in correspondence with the enemy.’

  ‘And except in cases where the pasha or vali throws off his allegiance and goes about to cut himself out a completely sovereign state, as Scutari and Pasanvoglu did not long ago and as Ali Pasha will almost certainly do as soon as he can be sure of the Morea- except in cases of total rebellion, I say, the Sultan’s direct appointment is respected in these parts, when at last it is forthcoming in the form of an irade or firman,’ said Graham. ‘The Sultan’s irade is sacred, except to rebels.’

  ‘That is why all three beys also have their agents busy in Constantinople, jockeying for position,’ said Allen. ‘Though to be sure they expect to settle matters much more briskly by themselves, so that the fact of possession, and the increased wealth of possession, may plead in their favour. Unfortunately one of them has also seen fit to make interest with our embassy, which may complicate our task; for whereas the Commander-in-Chief inclines towards Mustapha as a seaman and a former acquaintance - they knew one another when Mustapha was in the Dardanelles - the embassy favours Ismail.’

  ‘Who holds the place at present?’ asked Jack.

  ‘The third man, old Sciahan Bey. That is to say he is sitting quietly in the lower town and the suburbs. The Christians, the Kutaliotes, hold the citadel unmolested. For the moment there is an uneasy truce, no one of the three Turks daring to attack for fear of meeting a coalition of the other two, and the Christians biding their time; but the position will change the moment the cannon arrive.’ Harte stared for a while and then said, ‘So they mean to fight one another, and we are to supply the guns. What do the various sides offer in exchange?’ . ‘Their promises are the same: they will turn the guns against the French in Marga. Having settled us in Kutali they will join in our attack on Marga, the place being taken before there is time for the French party in Constantinople to interfere.’

  ‘I see. Are the guns available?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Two small transports have been prepared and are lying in Valetta. The trouble is we do not know which of the claimants to trust. Ismail openly states that General Donzelot, the commander of Corfu, has made him offers; but this may merely be intended to raise his price. Mustapha says nothing of the kind, but we have a certain amount of intelligence to show that he too may be in contact with the French. So bearing these things in mind, sir, and taking into account the necessity for rapid action, it was thought advisable to send Captain Aubrey, with a political adviser, to view the situation, to meet the beys, to make up his mind on the spot, and, if possible, to carry out the operation.’

  ‘Just so,’ said Harte.

  ‘Perhaps it would be as well to couch the orders in the most general sense, leaving a great deal of room for discretion?’

  ‘Certainly, certainly: just put “use his best endeavours” together with a general statement of the aim of the operation, and leave it at that. Do not tie his hands. Does that suit you, Aubrey? If it don’t, just say the word and the orders shall be wrote to your dictation. I can’t say fairer than that.’

  Jack bowed, and there was a short silence.

  ‘Then there is this point of the Surprise’s crew, sir,’ said Allen. ‘In view of the death of Captain Latham and his first lieutenant, the Commander-in-Chief thought you would agree that the best way of dealing with the situation would be to disperse the entire ship’s company in small groups throughout the squadron and re-man the frigate from the ships that have to go in to refit.’

  ‘God damn me,’ said Harte, ‘I should hang the mutinous buggers if I had my own way, every last one of them. But with both chief witnesses dead, I suppose it must
be so.’

  ‘Since Worcester must go in,’ said Jack, ‘I could pick an excellent frigate’s crew from her people alone, men who are used to working together; several old Surprises among them.’

  ‘Make it so, Aubrey, make it so,’ said Harte: and in the same tone of awkward goodwill he continued, ‘Of course you will have to have a sloop of some kind in company for this sort of expedition: if you like I will try to let you have Babbington in the Dryad.’

  ‘Thank you very much, sir,’ said Jack. ‘I should like that of all things.’

  ‘ “I should like that of all things,” said I, with a winning leer and a bob of my head,’ wrote Jack Aubrey in his letter home, a letter dated from ‘Surprise, at sea’. ‘But I hope, sweetheart, you will not think me ungenerous or mean-spirited when I say I do not trust him: that is to say, I do not trust the long continuance of his goodwill. If I choose the wrong man among these beys or if the operations do not go well, I think he will throw me to the dogs without the least hesitation; and William Babbington after me. Stephen don’t trust him neither.’ He paused; and reflecting that he could not very well describe his friend’s vehement refusal to appear in the character of an intelligence-agent before ‘a man so weak, so choleric, so little master of his passions, and so likely to be indiscreet’ as Harte even though the Rear-Admiral might for the moment be acting Commander-in-Chief, he added ‘which is very sad.” But the words were no sooner written than they struck him as ludicrous, and he was so very far from sad himself, that he laughed aloud.

  ‘What now?’ called Killick angrily from the sleeping-cabin : he was one of the very few who disliked the move into the Surprise and he had been in a most unpleasant temper ever since they left Malta. His immediate predecessor, Captain Latham’s steward, a fornicating sodomite by the name of Hogg, had changed everything - nothing was the same. The night-locker where Killick had always kept needle and thread for small repairs had been moved from starboard to larboard: the midships scuttle under which he had always worked had been blocked up and painted over. He could no longer find anything, nor could he see to sew.

  ‘I was only laughing,’ said Jack.

  ‘If I had that Hogg under my needle now,’ said Killick, giving the hem of Captain Aubrey’s best neckcloth a vicious stab, ‘wouldn’t I learn him to laugh? Oh no: not half I wouldn’t...” His voice diminished in volume, but his nasal whine had a curiously penetrating quality and as Jack carried on with his letter he half-heard the stream of discontent flowing on:’... unhappy ship, and no wonder ... everything changed ... acres of fucking brass ... closed up my scuttle ... how can a poor unfortunate bugger see with no light, sewing black upon black?’ This last was so shrill that it quite broke in upon Jack’s line of thought. ‘If you cannot see in there, carry it out into the stern-gallery,’ he called, forgetting for a moment that they were no longer in the Worcester.

  ‘Which there ain’t no stern-gallery, sir, now we been degraded to a sixth-rate,’ cried Killick with malignant triumph. ‘Stern-galleries is for our betters, and I must toil and moil away in the dark.’

  ‘Killick is in a horrid passion, I am sorry to say,’ wrote Jack, ‘and will not be comforted until we are back in a ship of the line. For my part I do not care if I never see a ship of the line again: after these months of close blockade, a well-found frigate seems the ideal command to me, and I may say the same for all my officers. I am to dine with them today, and we are to have a grand poetic contest, a kind of sweepstake, to be judged by secret ballot. Killick,’ he called, ‘rouse out a glass of bitters, will you? And have one for yourself while you are about it.’ The gunroom’s dinner was earlier than Jack’s usual hour, and he wanted to do honour to their feast.

  ‘Which there ain’t none left, sir,’ replied Killick, pleased for the first time that day. ‘Don’t you remember the case dropped into the hold in consequence of the orlop-scuttle had been shifted, which they never told us, and was stove: so there ain’t none left - all wasted, not even tasted, all gone into the bilge.’

  ‘All wasted

  Not even tasted

  All gone into the bilge,’ he repeated in a lugubrious chant.

  ‘Oh well,’ said Jack, ‘I shall take a turn upon the quarterdeck: that will answer just as well.’

  It answered even better. The hands had already eaten their dinner and drunk their grog but the midshipmen’s berth was rounding out their pease-pudding and pig’s trotters with toasted bloaters, laid in at Valetta, and the smell eddying aft from the galley brought water to his mouth. Yet the bloaters were not really necessary: happiness always gave Jack Aubrey an appetite and at present he was filled with irrational glee, a glee that redoubled as he stood on that familiar quarterdeck, so much nearer to the sea than the Worcester’s, and surveyed the noble spread of canvas that was urging the Surprise eastwards to her meeting with the Dryad at nearly three knots in a breeze so faint that many ships would not have had steerage-way, while at the same time he felt her supple lift and yield to the southern swell, a more living motion than that of any other ship he knew.

  His was largely an irrational happiness and entirely on the surface: he had only to move down one layer in his mind to meet his very real distress for Admiral Thornton, one more for the shocking disappointment of the battle that had escaped them - a battle that might have ranked with St Vincent or the Nile and which would almost certainly have made Tom Pullings a commander (a move particularly near to Aubrey’s heart) - another layer still for his own deeply worrying failure at Barka: and if he sank farther there were always his legal and financial worries at home and his anxiety about his father. The newspapers in Malta had spoken of General Aubrey’s being returned for no less than two constituencies at once; and it appeared that the old gentleman was now twice as loquacious. He spoke against the ministry almost every day, and he was now doing so entirely in the more extreme Radical interest, alas, a real embarrassment to the ministry. And there was not much room for rational glee if Jack looked forward, either, but rather the prospect of an exceedingly difficult situation in which diplomacy rather than hard fighting would be called for, a situation in which he could rely on no support from his chief, a situation in which a mistaken choice might bring his naval career to an end.

  Yet gleeful he was. The tedium of blockade on short commons in a heavy, ill-contrived ship that might publicly disgrace herself at any minute was behind him, at least for the immediate future; the wearisome and in some ways painful transfer, the paper-work and the wrangling with the authorities in Malta was over; the Worcester, that walking corpse, was the dockyard’s corporate anxiety, not his; and although he had left the oratorio behind him he had also left the mumps, that fell disease. He had dispersed his more useless midshipmen and all his youngsters but for two, Calamy and Williamson, for whom he felt a particular responsibility. And he was aboard a thoroughbred frigate, a ship he knew through and through and that he loved entirely, not only for her amiable qualities but because she was part of his youth ? quite apart from the fact that he had commanded her in the Indian Ocean, where she had behaved quite beautifully, he had served in her long, long ago, and even the smell of her cramped and awkward midshipmen’s berth made him feel young again. She was rather small (few smaller left in the service), she was rather old, and although she had been very much strengthened, almost rebuilt, in the Cadiz yard, it would never, never do to take her across to meet the heavy Americans; but he had found to his delight that her refitting had not altered her sailing qualities in the least - she was astonishingly fast for those who knew how to handle her, she could come about like a cutter, and she could eat the wind out of any ship on the station. For this kind of mission, and for the eastern Mediterranean in general, she was everything he could ask (except in broadside weight of metal), above all as he had had the most uncommon good fortune of being able to give her a crew of hand-picked seamen, in which even the afterguard could hand, reef and steer. There were still many who had not sailed with him before the Worcester, but a surpr
ising proportion of the frigate’s two hundred men had done so - all the first and second captains of the guns for example, and nearly all the petty officers - and wherever he looked he saw faces he knew. Even when they were not old shipmates he could put a name to them and a character, whereas in the Worcester far too many had been anonymous. And he observed that they looked remarkably cheerful, as though his own good humour had spread: certainly they had just had their grog, and the weather was fine, and this was a peaceful make-and-mend afternoon, but even so he had rarely seen a more cheerful crew, particularly the old Surprises. ‘A surprising proportion of old Surprises,’ he said to himself, and chuckled.

  ‘The skipper’s luck is in,’ murmured Bonden, as he sat on the gangway, embroidering Surprise on the ribbon of his shore-going hat.

  ‘Well, I hope so, I’m sure,’ said his heavy cousin Joe. ‘It’s been out long enough. Get your great arse off of my new shirt, you whoreson lobster,’ he said mildly to his other neighbour, a Marine.

  ‘I only hope it’s not come in too hearty, that’s all,’ said Bonden, reaching out for the solid wooden truck of number eight gun’s carriage.

  Joe nodded. Although he was a heavy man he perfectly grasped the meaning of Bonden’s ‘luck’. It was not chance, commonplace good fortune, far from it, but a different concept altogether, one of an almost religious nature, like the favour of some god or even in extreme cases like possession; and if it came in too hearty it might prove fatal - too fiery an embrace entirely. In any event it had to be treated with great respect, rarely named, referred to by allusion or alias, never explained. There was no clear necessary connection with moral worth nor with beauty but its possessors were generally well-liked men and tolerably good-looking: and it was often seen to go with a particular kind of happiness. It was this quality, much more than his prizes, the perceived cause rather than the effect, that had made the lower deck speak of Lucky Jack Aubrey early in his career; and it was a piety at the same old heathen level that now made Bonden deprecate any excess.