The Golden Ocean

by Patrick O'Brian

  But if Peter found one day’s waiting hard, he, in common with the entire squadron, found two, three and four days’ waiting harder still. Yet four days did not see the barge back again: it was a full week before their intense anxiety and suspense found relief.

  At four bells in the forenoon watch the look-out reported a sail.

  ‘Lug-sail, sir,’ he answered the deck. ‘It might be the barge.’

  ‘Mr Palafox, take up your glass, if you please,’ said the Commodore; and a very few minutes later Peter hailed. ‘Deck, sir. It is the barge. She’s broke out the private signal. Now she’s making another.’

  ‘What is it, Mr Palafox?’ This was the Commodore’s voice in the waiting silence.

  A long pause, while Peter made doubly sure. ‘It is the blue ensign reversed, sir,’ he reported in a toneless voice.

  He did not hurry down. The bearer of ill news is an unwelcome figure. The blue ensign reversed meant that the galleon was already in; that she lay under the hundred guns of the castle in Acapulco harbour; and that they had lost their chance of the wealth of the East.

  They had not been unprepared: the frustrating hours, stretching to days, weeks and months of irretrievable delay had gnawed into their confidence. Yet the absolute confirmation of the worst was a blow whose stunning force was proportionate to the brilliance of their golden hopes; and they took it hard—very hard.

  ‘What a glum, perishing berthful of swabs you are, to be sure,’ said Ransome, who, fresh from a week in an open boat, was shovelling down turtle hash with a cheerfulness that scarcely endeared him to his companions.

  ‘Oh, shut up, you crow,’ said Peter.

  ‘Stow it,’ said Bailey.

  ‘What did he say?’ asked Keppel, cupping his frost-bitten ear.

  ‘He said we were gloomy,’ bawled Preston.

  ‘—him, and his—blue ensign, reversed,’ said Keppel.

  ‘Well, strike me,’ cried Ransome, ‘this is a fine, ’micable welcome for a cove with good news, brought three hundred miles, most of it pulling—hard tack and damned little water all the way.’

  ‘What good news?’ asked Peter, with a sudden renewal of interest.

  ‘Crush me if I tell you now,’ replied Ransome, sulkily. ‘Pass the soup. And take your great thumb out of it.’

  ‘He hasn’t got any news,’ said Preston.

  ‘Oh, an’t I?’ cried Ransome, rising at once. ‘Didn’t you see them blackamoors what we took?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the berth, somewhat agog, but not very much.

  ‘Well, we took ‘em by night in Acapulco harbour.’

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘What of it? Ah, what of it?’ said Ransome. ‘Ay, what indeed?’ Once Ransome had become oracular there was nothing to be done: no threats, no kind words would affect his obstinacy then, and they all knew it. They plied him with food, and waited.

  ‘… so the third day we open the right harbour at last,’ he said, smiling now and replete. ‘And in the night we come paddling soft in the dark for Acapulco, which is a long town in the bottom of a bay, a good harbour as we judged. And under the loom of an island we see this canoe with the blackamoors fishing over the side. So we bears away for their light and takes ’em up, and Mr Dennis asks ’em what they know. And they tell him four things. One, the galleon is in. Two, there was a garrison on that island guarding the harbour until three days before, which they must have took us if they had still been there. Three, that the Governor withdrew the redcoats, because why? Because he reckoned that the squadron was not in these parts any more. Four, that the Governor give out by proclamation that the galleon would sail as usual on the 14th March, and the merchants were to hold themselves ready. And I will tell you something else,’ said Ransome, looking round the half-circle of fascinated listeners with a gleam of fierce satisfaction in his kind, weather-beaten face. ‘We missed her on the way in, and that was a bitter hard stroke: but bound from Manilla to Acapulco she carries merchandise, which we would a’ had to carry home again with all the risks of spoiling and being done down by the landsmen, for the Spaniards won’t ransom a cargo, not if it rains—’

  ‘Brass cats?’ suggested Bailey.

  ‘Brass cats and dogs,’ said Ransom, ‘which we know very well, to our cost. Besides, she is the size of a first-rate, and there would not be room for half her stuff aboard us and the Gloucester, not with our own stores in the holds. But mark me,’ he said, bringing his fist into his hand, ‘when she is bound for Manilla, she carries nothing but silver and gold. That stows away. That don’t take room. We rouses the ballast over the side and puts gold in its place. Lord love your heart, there’s no better ballast nor gold.’

  When the Commodore laid down their stations on the chart, the tracing looked very like a fan, an open fan with spokes. The handpiece, the conjunction of the spokes, was Acapulco, where the galleon lay, and radiating from this spot ran five lines, each fifteen leagues long. The first terminated in the Carmelo; the second in the Centurion, three leagues on Carmelo’s starboard beam; then, at the same interval, the Tryal’s Prize, the Gloucester and the Carmen—a curve of ships that made the fan’s periphery. Between them the ships covered some seventy miles of sea, and with incessant vigilance they kept watch day after day, while the Centurion’s cutter and the Gloucester’s lay inshore, four leagues off by day, close in at night, to signal the first movement of the galleon.

  The galleon herself was an intimately familiar shape to Peter: he, with Mr Dennis and the cutter’s crew, stared at her with the most unwinking concentration throughout the night. Spaniards, in general, are not early risers, but on the other hand, they never seem willing to go to bed at all, and often the cutter’s crew could see the galleon plain by the lights of Acapulco for most of the hours of darkness. At other times their night-trained eyes, aided by the gleam of the stars, pierced through the warm, velvety blackness (it was always dead calm inshore by night) to make her out as she lay moored to two enormous trees, deep within the gun-ringed harbour. She was difficult to see, for the little island and the Punto del Griso shut the harbour’s mouth, and only by creeping along the north-eastern shore of Acapulco bay, well within the castle’s range, could they get more than a stern-on glimpse. Yet every night they saw her, and every night Peter, with a strong night-glass, made out all the features of her massive build: he knew her very well.

  The fourteenth day of March was the day she was to sail. The Governor had proclaimed it by a drum throughout the town: and there was not a man afloat who did not trust in the Governor’s promptitude—nor was there a soul so dull that he could not reckon the difference between New Style and Old, the Julian calendar and the Gregorian, which made the Spanish March 14th fall on the English 3rd. If the expedition had done nothing else, it had at least produced a crew of ready-reckoners: men who before could barely count beyond ten, nor tell the time upon a clock, could now without a moment’s hesitation convert seven hundred and ninety-three thousand pieces of eight into guineas and then work out a hundred and seventy-third share of it.

  So on the third of March, Old Style, there was a watching and an expectancy aboard the squadron and the boats that can rarely have been paralleled in the long record of naval vigils—an expectancy so great that Peter, gasping under the unrelenting sun in the little overcrowded boat, tried to slacken his own share in it. It seemed to him unlucky to hope with such positive and utter confidence. It seemed to him that somehow it must warn the Spaniards—that they must feel uneasily aware of the tension and of the concentrated, singly-focused, unremitting glare of so many eyes.

  For his part he tried to throw doubt into his mind. There were the three missing Negroes to arouse suspicion in Acapulco: there was the possibility of the squadron’s topsails having been seen from the high land that floated always on their horizon, the mountains behind the town. And yet, in spite of all his caution, his heart beat so that he could hardly breathe as the pure dawn came up over Mexico on the appointed day: it beat high at noon, when the pi
tiless heat drove straight down on to the unheeding cutter’s crew: but it was filled with choking bitterness when at last the laggard sun dipped in a crimson blaze below the western sea.

  He was armed against disappointment, but not strongly armed enough. Like nearly all his shipmates, he still had a violent belief that the galleon would sail—that delays must always occur—that the Negroes were mistaken—a thousand logical reasons, and some that were not logical at all: he felt that she must sail because they had all worked so hard—they had cleaned the ships’ bottoms, they had brought the squadron to the highest pitch of readiness with devoted toil, they had sacrificed some of their prizes to concentrate their force, they had worked like galley-slaves, and they had deserved the galleon. So she must come—she must.

  He felt this very strongly, even after the squadron, terribly short of water, had stood off and on, rigidly in station, for still another twenty days, during which Passion Week had come and gone (that brought a fresh jet of confidence, for no Spanish ship would stir in Passion Week) and still the sea was bare. He felt it even to the last moment, when the stormy season was coming fast, and when it was clear that the squadron could not keep the sea without fresh water: in his mind, his intellect, it was plain that the galleon had been warned and would not sail; and yet when he heard the final order, ‘We will make sail, if you please, Mr Brett: the course north-east,’ he turned away from the quarter-deck with a feeling in his heart like death.

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘WHERE’S MY JOURNAL?’ ASKED PETER.

  He could get no answer, but he persisted, angrily, and at length Wilson said carelessly over his shoulder, ‘You don’t mean that book with the green cover, do you?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Oh well, I dare say that is the one we chucked out. You did chuck a book of some sort out of this young fellow’s place, did you not, Hill?’

  ‘Where is it?’ cried Peter.

  ‘Overboard, of course,’ said Wilson, ‘and that is where you will find yourself if you don’t stop your noise. Hill, your deal.’

  Peter hesitated, glaring at Wilson’s wide back: then he turned and ran on deck. He went into the foretop. He had intended to go much farther aloft, but in the top he paused for breath, leaning wearily against the stock of the pattarero, and he decided to stay there.

  ‘The swabs,’ he exclaimed, with hot indignation, ‘the infamous swabs.’ He clenched his fist; then let it go. Only a little while back and he would not have borne it: but now he felt so utterly unlike himself—uneasy, apprehensive; as if his courage were watered. Yet still he would take it up with them when he went down, he assured himself. Nervously he looked over his shoulder at the main-staysail. ‘If that goes on pulling like that,’ he thought, ‘it will start the mast again. I am sure the crack is growing.’ This was the horrible fissure in the Centurion’s foremast that had been discovered and strongly fished by the carpenters a few days after they had finally sunk the mountains of Acapulco behind them at the beginning of their western voyage for China, the whole width of the greatest ocean in the world, with a storm that had crippled the Gloucester to start them on their way.

  He would certainly resent it openly and force an explanation: but not today, perhaps. He was feeling like a jelly-fish today.

  What an odious thing to do, to throw his journal overboard. So needlessly cruel—such an unkind, hard thing to do. There had been a great deal in that journal, everything from their arrival at Chequetan for water for their great westward voyage—Chequetan, where he had finished the first volume with a lively account of Mr Walter and the electrical fish, the torpedo—right up to the burning of the Gloucester in latitude 12° 17’ N. and longitude 151° 30’ E.

  These two, Wilson and Hill, together with Pollock, were midshipmen from the Gloucester, and in them and the other officers of that ship Peter had caught a glimpse—more than a glimpse by now—of another kind of naval life. He had guessed, from what little he had seen aboard the other ships of the squadron, the ships that were not commanded by Mr Anson’s own lieutenants, and from the tales of the other midshipmen who, like Ransome, had served under many captains, that the Centurion was a happy ship and that he was unusually fortunate in starting his career aboard her: but how exceptionally happy a ship she was he had not realised until these newcomers had settled down in the berth. They were all senior to Peter, who was indeed the most junior present; and Wilson and Hill, finding Peter’s quarters more to their liking than their own, had moved in without ceremony. But it was not only that—that was a question of seniority, and there was no arguing with the prescriptive rights of the service—not only that, nor principally that: they also imported a brutal kind of horse-play. They picked on their fellow-Gloucester Pollock, a small, frightened fellow who had been their butt since St Helen’s, and they showed every intention of making life a misery for Peter, Bailey and Preston too. They drove the hands very hard, with a delight in being unpleasant that was a revelation to Peter—an attitude that was faithfully reflected in the behaviour of the Gloucester’s crew, who were an awkward lot of men, unwilling except in strong emergency, brutalised, accustomed to frequent floggings, and withdrawn from human contact with their officers. The midshipmen of the Gloucester, in this respect, showed some of the qualities of their captain and his lieutenants, exactly as the Centurion’s berth bore witness to Mr Anson. It was not that Wilson and Hill were downright blackguards; but they had been brought up in a tradition of hard, loud-mouthed coarseness, severity to the men, and loutish practical jokes of whose cruelty they were largely unaware, together with a wearisome striving for dominance, for being cock of the walk, that apparently never slackened.

  They were good seamen, and courageous (qualities which are certainly to be found with a taste for bullying, whatever moral tales may say), but the attributes upon which they chiefly valued themselves were those which made them most disagreeable as companions and to the world in general. The Centurion’s berth was not, and never had been, an abode of plaster saints: they bellowed and swore at one another and at the men, but their language—their meaning, rather—was essentially different from the Gloucester’s filthiness; and above all, the berth had hitherto been an essentially friendly place, with plenty of fooling about in it, but no domineering whatsoever.

  Wilson and Hill, then, were not yet downright blackguards: for example, they had never intended to throw Peter’s journal overboard—it had flown through the open port by misadvertence—and they were ashamed, though too ill-bred to bring themselves to apologise: but they were nasty fellows to have about, very much nastier than they knew. Not blackguards yet, though if they survived and carried on in the same way, it seemed that they might very well develop into specimens of the slave-driver captain, that horrible, sometimes half-mad figure that stained the naval record for too long, and made some ships a floating hell. If they survived—that was a proviso with a real meaning; for apart from the perpetual dangers of the sea, officers of that stamp had a way of disappearing in the night. Men will only stand so much: and the kind of men produced by that kind of discipline have been known to turn to their own wild sense of justice in the dark.

  Hitherto they had steered clear of Ransome and Keppel; but from what little Pollock had to say, Bailey, Preston and young Balthaser of the Tryal looked upon the future with misgiving. Peter should have bitten hard at their first attempt, but he had not: he had fumbled the first and best occasion, hesitating like a hen crossing the road.

  ‘I don’t know what come over you, Teague,’ said Ransome, afterwards. ‘You wouldn’t have suffered a half of that hazing from us.’

  ‘Well, you said yourself that we ought to do the civil, and let them settle down and find their feet. You talked about guests, and so on.’

  ‘That’s right, cully,’ said Ransome, scratching his head. ‘I did say that.’ He was a very unquarrelsome fellow: he valued peace in the berth very highly. He had, all his life, been accustomed to the roughest brand of humour, so the newcomers’ ba
boonery had offended him less. He also despised the kind of senior midshipman who was always using his superiority, and, in addition, he was used to seeing each man take his own part. But, on the other hand, he now felt obscurely that these fellows were ‘swinging their weight about too much, by half’.

  ‘Would you like for me to shove in my oar?’ he asked doubtfully, after a long pause.

  ‘No, thank you,’ replied Peter crisply. ‘I can look after myself if they want any kind of trouble. But thank you all the same, Ransome.’

  It was all very well to say that, reflected Peter now, sitting down in the top: but how to cope with the situation was another matter entirely. Gross, over-fed, under-bred bumpkins. If he had spoken out when he ought there would have been no question of losing his journal: it would never have come to that point.

  There had been such a lot in that private log. He had looked forward to reading it to them at home. But perhaps he could patch it together—thread that narrative back into a line. It began on the surf-bound Mexican coast, five thousand sea-miles behind them, where they burnt the Tryal’s Prize and the Carmelo and watered the ships. Then there was the anxious cruise off Acapulco again for the cutter, left there as a scout in the unlikely chance of the galleon’s weighing. The cutter with Mr Hughes of the Tryal, Sean, and four of the best seamen the Centurion could find. The waiting for the cutter and the days passing, dropping by, hope fading, the stormy season just at hand, and no cutter: Spanish prisoners sent into Acapulco to the Governor, promising the release of all the rest if the cutter’s crew (taken, perhaps) were given up. Then the sight of the cutter itself, not taken by the Spaniards but beaten off stations by currents and winds, yet capable of finding its way back after forty-three days on the hostile sea, half the time without water—an astonishing feat of seamanship that had nearly cost the crew their lives. Poor Sean: as they handed him up the side he was so thin that Peter could carry him with ease.