Aub-Mat 08 - The Ionian Mission

by Patrick O'Brian

  ‘Welcome aboard, sir,’ said Jack, stepping forward with his hand held out. ‘Professor Graham, pray tell the gentlemen they are welcome aboard, and suggest that we should take coffee in the cabin.’

  ‘So you speak Turkish,’ said Mustapha, gently patting Graham’s cheek. ‘Very good, very good. Then Ulusan can go back to the boat.’

  ‘Would he not like to take some refreshment in the gunroom?’ asked Jack, seeing Ulusan bow and turn away.

  ‘The Capitan-Bey says he might be tempted to drink wine and even spirits, forbidden to Mussulmans,’ said Graham. ‘He is better in the boat.’

  In the cabin Jack was pleased to find that the Capitan-Bey could smile and even laugh. The extreme gravity of his hosts at Mesenteron had weighed upon his spirits, making an already serious matter positively funereal: furthermore Ismail and his advisers had always looked at the table when addressing him - a part of Turkish manners, perhaps^but disconcerting; and now, with Mustapha’s shrewd, knowing, often amused eye fixed steadily on his he felt much more at home. They were curious orange-yellow eyes, and they looked small in that huge face: smaller still when Mustapha smiled. The red-dyed beard would part, showing a broad gleam of teeth, and the eyes would almost vanish in the luxuriant bristling hair. This happened more and more often as the afternoon wore on and it was found that Mustapha could quite easily be tempted to drink wine and even spirits.

  They had been for a tour of the frigate, during which it had become evident that Mustapha, though a judge of a ship, was even more devoted to a gun. He was fascinated by the improvements that Jack had borrowed from Philip Broke of the Shannon, at least for his chasers, and he fairly gloated over the heavy carronades, the genuine smashers, that lined the Surprise’s quarterdeck; for his ideal engagement was a furious battery at ever-diminishing range, followed by boarding.

  ‘I love guns,’ he said when they were back in the cabin, smoking the hubblebubble and drinking punch. ‘They are not to be had, now that Venice is gone, and I need all I can get to take Kutali. I am delighted you have brought me so many.’

  ‘And I should be delighted to give them to a fellow-seaman,’ said Jack, smiling. ‘But they are my master’s guns and I must deliver them to the ally best suited for helping us to turn the French out of Marga. As I believe you know, two other gentlemen have proposed their services, and in justice I must hear what all those concerned may have to say.’

  ‘I can tell you what Ismail has said,’ cried Mustapha. ‘He has said that I am an illiterate corsair, hand in glove with the French, not to be trusted for a moment. And Sciahan will tell you I am in league with Ali Pasha, plotting to rebel against the Sultan - not to be trusted for a moment, ha, ha, ha! But neither can say I did not conquer Djerba and pacify the Morea in a two years’ campaign - a hundred towns and villages in flames! And neither can be of the least use in helping you to turn the French out of Marga: Ismail is a mere Egyptian eunuch, terrified by the sound and sight of battle, and Sciahan is too old for anything like war - negotiation is his line, and that will never answer with the French. Whereas once I hold Kutali, the thing is done! We attack from land and sea, while at the same moment all the Mussulmans in the town rise up. Nothing can withstand the shock - believe me, Captain, nothing can withstand the shock. Come and look at my ship: you will see what she is capable of: you will sec what kind of men I have aboard.’

  ‘Hairy buggers,’ muttered Bonden, gazing up the side as his Captain went aboard the Torgud, welcomed by the clash of cymbals; and by this he meant not only bearded but savage, fierce, dark, passionate, rough, fiery, vicious and tigerish. Jack had much the same impression, and he had more of a right to it since he saw the whole crew, the surprisingly numerous crew: they all had a certain family look although they were of many different races and colours, from shining black to the sour-cheese grey of Bcssarabians; they were presumably united by religion, certainly by their awe of the Capitan-Bey - defaulters in the Torgud were cut up for bait - and they visibly trembled before him. The officers all appeared to be Turks, and judging from the knowledgeable zeal with which they showed their great guns and small arms they understood the fighting part of their profession, while the way the ship had rounded served to prove that at least some of them were competent seamen; yet none seemed to have the slightest notion of order, discipline, or cleanliness, except as far as the guns were concerned. These were all brass, and they all gleamed nobly in the declining sun; apart from that the Torgud appeared to possess no first lieutenant, no bosun, no captain of the sweepers. The rigging was knotted rather than spliced when repair was needed, the planking of the deck could not be seen at all for dirt, and between the guns lay little heaps of human excrement. Yet in spite of this the Torgud was evidently a formidable vessel, not unlike a larger, much more dangerous version of the pirate ships Jack had seen in the West Indies: he had little time for reflection however, because as Mustapha showed his ship he also expounded his plan of attack on Kutali, explained it with an exuberant vitality that called for the closest attention, particularly as Graham was sometimes at a loss for a sea-term. In essence the attack was to be a bombardment by shallow-draught gunboats armed with the cannon Jack would supply, and this would be followed by a general assault. Mustapha had nearly forty suitable caiques up and down the coast; they would open half a dozen breaches in the wall, and his men would carry the place by storm. He looked attentively at Jack, but Jack, having nothing to say about an attack on a town whose shore he did not know and whose defenders and fortifications he had never seen, merely bent his head politely. In any case, much of his mind was taken up by the extraordinary half-seen spectacle of the midships cannon. The middle gun in the long row of brass eighteen-pounders seemed to tower over its fellows in the strangest way; but its uncommonly large portlid was shut at the moment and the sailmaker had spread his work over much of its bulk.

  ‘This is my heart’s delight,’ said Mustapha, waving the canvas away; and to his astonishment Jack beheld a thirty-six-pounder, an unheard-of, preposterous weapon for a frigate - even a first-rate line-of-battle ship carried no more than thirty-two pounders and those only on the lowest tier - and so massive that it dwarfed its neighbours. And over against it, on the larboard side, there was its fellow, its necessary counterpoise.

  ‘I have never seen such a beautiful gun,’ cried Jack, examining the dolphins that twined round the King of Portugal’s arms and the well-worn touch-hole. ‘But do you indeed find they answer the weight and the confusion?’ he asked, looking keenly at the reinforced deck and side and the triple ringbolts; and until they reached the cabin they discussed the advantages and disadvantages of the arrangement, the inconvenience of different calibres on the same deck, the extra weight so high in the ship and its effect on her roll in heavy weather, as opposed to the crippling effect of thirty-six pound shot hitting the enemy at a distance.

  In the cabin itself, a singularly gorgeous room hung with crimson damask, the appearance of coffee broke the thread, and in any case it was evident that Jack was about to leave: he could not be persuaded to stay any longer, nor to visit the nearby port of Karia, because he had a rendezvous with his consort the Dryad. This being established Mustapha went over his plan of attack again, with a reasonably convincing account of the forces at his disposal, and once again he stated his opinion of Sciahan Bey and Ismail.

  Sciahan’s chief crime, apart from greed and avarice, was age, cold-blooded, incompetent age, and Jack had the impression that although Mustapha would certainly expel Sciahan from Kutali if he could, perhaps killing him in the process, he did not really dislike him. With Ismail it was quite a different matter: here there were detailed, persuasive charges of faithlessness, hypocrisy and disloyalty - Mustapha’s voice grew even stronger, his eye more terrible: he called upon God to curse his children’s children if ever he allowed that vile unmanly traitor to get the better of him.

  Jack had seen some passionate men, but none who seemed to swell so much, nor whose great clenched fist trembled so with
rage, none whose eyes became more suffused with red. Clearly there was something very much more than competition for the disputed town between Mustapha and Ismail: though on the other hand there was no doubt that Mustapha was also extremely eager to possess Kutali.

  The Capitan-Bey boomed organ-toned, and in the barge alongside Bonden said, ‘How their skipper does carry on, to be sure: like a bull in a barn.’

  At this the portlid of the starboard thirty-six-pounder opened and a hairy, turbanned face peered out. ‘Well, you’ll know me again, mate,’ observed Bonden, having been stared at for a full unwinking minute.

  ‘Barret Bonden,’ said the hairy face, ‘you don’t remember me.’

  ‘I can’t say as how I do, mate, behind all them whiskers.’

  ‘Ezekiel Edwards, quarter-gunner in Isis when you was captain of the foretop. Zeke Edwards: ran when we was off of Tiberoon.’

  ‘Zeke Edwards,’ said Bonden, nodding his head. ‘Yes.’ Then, ‘What are you doing in this barky? Was you took? Are you a prisoner?’

  ‘No. Which I belong to her. Gunner’s mate.’

  Bonden considered him for a moment, and said, ‘So you turned Turk, and grew a full set, and clapped a pudding-cloth round your head.’

  ‘That’s right, mate. Being I never was brought up religious; and being I was circumcised already, any gate.’

  The other bargemen had been gazing steadily at Edwards with their mouths open; they now closed them and stared with wooden disapproval out to sea: but he had spoken with such an awkward, urgent, pleading tone, as though longing beyond expression to hear and utter Christian sounds, that Bonden replied. Rather severely he asked what Edwards was doing with that thirty-six-pounder - what a thirty-six-pounder was doing in a frigate, for Christ’s sake, a long thirty-six-pounder?

  This released a flood of words, a stumbling confidential rush with scraps of Greek and Turkish and lingua franca mixed with the burring West Country English, all delivered into Bonden’s disapproving, half-averted ear. The guns were from Corfu, from the French general in Corfu; and he had let the skipper have them because why? Because they was Portuguese and did not take the French thirty-six-pound ball, nor any other bloody ball now made, that was why. But the Capitan-Bey did not care for that: he had marble round-shot made by the Greeks in the island of Paros, smooth as glass. The trouble was, they often cracked if not stowed very careful; and then they cost a mint of money. You could not blaze away with half a dozen rounds just to keep your hand in - you could not fling marble balls about, not marble balls at nineteen piastres a piece.

  ‘Marble balls,’ said Bonden, obscurely feeling some reflection upon the Surprise and her plain iron round-shot. ‘Marble balls my arse.’

  ‘I never seen such a filthy mud-scow as this here in all my life,’ remarked bow-oar, spitting to leeward. ‘Don’t they never wash down the heads?’

  Edwards instantly grasped the implication and he cried out very humbly that he had not meant to top it the nob nor to come it the heavy; he did not go for to make them believe the shot-locker was crammed with marble balls -no, no, there was not but five for the starboard gun and four for t’other, one of them chipped. More he could not say, for now cymbals clashed, shrill drums beat and conchs brayed loud as Captain Aubrey made his farewells and stepped down into the barge with Professor Graham, sitting thoughtful and silent as they were rowed back in the twilight.

  Thoughtful and silent again on this quarterdeck at dawn, with Marga almost vanishing on the starboard quarter: he levelled his telescope, took a last look at the rock-built citadel, the great Venetian mole, and resumed his pacing. Silent: partly because it had long been his habit to go up and down the windward side of whatever vessel he commanded as long as he could without disturbing the ship’s routine, and partly because neither of his advisers was awake, they having discussed Mustapha and Ismail well into the middle watch. Thoughtful, because although Mustapha was a fine fellow in some ways, he was not likely to show much zeal in turning the French out of Marga if he was on such friendly terms with General Donzclot in Corfu: Bondcn’s report had reached him through Killick with his first cup of coffee, and then Bonden had confirmed it himself.

  As he turned his eye caught the flash of a sail in the offing, far beyond the Dryad: she had joined at nightfall and she was now keeping her station abreast of the Surprise, they being spread out in the faint hope of snapping up some vessel bound for the French in Corfu, or better still one from the French in Corfu to their friends in Marga. Automatically he pointed his telescope, but realizing that he could not possibly spare the time to chase anything at such a distance - it was only a little trabaccolo in any case - he shifted his gaze to the Dryad and found himself looking straight at Babbington, who was leaning on the quarter-rail with a very pretty young woman in a sort of pink, lacy garment. He was showing her something over the side, and they were both laughing very cheerfully.

  Jack clapped his glass to. He remembered that Babbington, coming aboard to report, had muttered something about giving a lift to a respectable Italian matron, an officer’s widow, from Cephalonia to Santa Maura - being compelled to keep her aboard, the wind not serving for Santa Maura and he being so unwilling to delay Captain Aubrey at the rendezvous. A matron could of course be no more than twenty and a widow could perfectly well be cheerful: but it would not do - it really would not do.

  The next turn brought him face to face with something else that would not do. Young Williamson, the midshipman of the watch, was looking wretchedly peaked and ill again: the boy was not strong enough for a life at sea and Jack would never have taken him if he had not been Dick Williamson’s son. He had wanted no first voyagers, no children who should not relieve the deck at four in the morning on an empty belly, and here he was, still answerable to their mothers for two of them at a time when he needed all his powers for infinitely more important problems than the moral and physical welfare of a pair of squeakers. He would invite the boy to breakfast and at the same time beg Stephen to look at him. In any case Stephen ought to be up by now: Cape Stavro was already looming on the starboard bow, and he must not miss the opening of Kutali Bay.

  ‘Mr Williamson,’ he called, and the boy gave a guilty start, ‘pray go down to Dr Maturin’s cabin, and if he is awake tell him with my compliments that we are about to open Kutali Bay, which is reckoned a prodigious fine spectacle. And perhaps you would give us the pleasure of your company at breakfast.’

  While he waited for Stephen, and a long wait it was, Dr Maturin having ensured sleep at last by four successive doses, Jack watched the shore go by, a prodigious fine spectacle in itself, now that they were drawing in with the land - a steep-to shore of towering light-grey cliffs rising straight from deep water and backed by mountains, precipitous, jagged mountains reaching high up the sky with the early light cutting across them from a little south of east so that they stood out clear, range after range of them, seven deep, the vast forests green on the sunward side, the bald crags shining grey. Ordinarily Jack disliked being near any coast at all; he was a blue-water sailor, one who liked plenty of sea-room under his lee, fifty leagues or so; but here he had a hundred fathoms beneath his keel within gunshot of the land and in any case the weather had been unusually kind. It was now treating them to a topgallant zephyr a point or so before the beam that might have been specially ordained to carry them round the cape and into the bay: but whether it would waft them eastwards again to Kutali was doubtful; it had a somewhat languishing, dying air and perhaps they should be obliged to wait for the sea-breeze to set in to complete their voyage round the great peninsula.

  In fact the zephyr dropped entirely while they were still at breakfast. But this was an unusually prolonged meal and there had been time not only for the Surprise to round the cape and reach the middle of the bay but for Dr Maturin to recover his humanity. He had begun the day in a very sullen, dogged, and unappreciative mood indeed, opposed to natural beauties of any kind; but now, led out, well-fed, well-coffee’d, to smoke his morning
cigar and admire the view he was perfectly ready to admit that he had seen few more glorious sights than Kutali and its setting. The water of the bay was gently rippled in some few places but glass-smooth in others, and in the purest of these natural mirrors they could see the astonishing peaks that rose from the sea with the whole town at their feet - all this reversed, and superimposed upon the image stood ships and boats, most as it were suspended, hanging motionless, a few creeping across the surface with sweeps or sculls. The dead calm, the cloudless sky, the stillness of the ship and perhaps this sense of being on or even in a looking-glass gave an extraordinary impression of silence and people spoke unnaturally low.

  The close-packed town itself had the appearance of a double cone - grey battlements, red roofs, white walls repeated in the mirror-image - until a chance air destroyed the reflection. This did not affect the walls of the upper town or the citadel, but with its double vanishing the lower town’s ramparts suddenly shrank to half its height. It no longer looked very formidable, and Jack saw that Mustapha’s plan of battering it with gunboats was perfectly feasible.

  Although at first sight Kutali looked compact, rising in one triangular mass from the sea up the mountainside, it was in fact built in three parts: the lowest straggled out on either side of the fortified harbour and here the wall had been spread too far, too thin. It was vulnerable, and as far as Jack could see, looking steadily through his telescope, the defences of the middle town would not stand any very determined assault either. But, he reflected, looking up at the heavily fortified upper town, the Christian town with its church towers showing above the battlements, even a small battery of cannon up there, even three or four twelve-pounders, well plied, would make the attack impossible, by sinking the gunboats as they came within range. There was no need for massive fortifications below, so long as the sea and the lower ground was commanded by artillery.