The Road to Samarcand

by Patrick O'Brian

  “Well, I got two buckets over my head, one for being a swab and the other for being an American citizen, and they damped my ardour for the moment. They put a rope into my hand, and I heaved as tame as Mary’s little lamb. But after a while I began to feel better, and when I had got some duff into me and had managed to keep it down, I said to this fellow—his name was Lars Gunnar, and he was second mate—‘You can’t do this to me,’ I said, ‘I am an American citizen.’ When he had knocked me down again he picked me up and leaned me against the rails and addressed me in these words, ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘you poor bum, you’re a citizen of this ship now, and a hundred brass-bound consuls won’t keep you alive if you don’t work.’ He was quite right. Every time I got in the least uppish or made a landlubber’s mistake right up in the to’garn-stuns’ls, way up in the air miles above the deck, Lars Gunnar would beat me up; and if it was not him, it would be the master or the first mate. I was never a very timid fellow, but they knew how to keep their footing on a heaving deck, and how to crack a man with a belaying-pin, and I did not: anyhow, each one was as big as the side of a house, and I got weary of skinning my knuckles on their heads with no effect at all. They were terribly short-handed, and they drove their crew like blacks, but, even so, we were too late to slip round the Horn easily, and we beat to and fro for what seemed like years. It was a very bad passage, and two of the men were lost overboard, but somehow I survived, and by the time we dropped anchor in Antofagasta roads I had learnt a wonderful lot about being a sailor.

  “Now they sound tough, from what I have said, and they were tough: but they were not a bad lot of men at all. If you worked hard—and I did, when I understood how badly it was needed coming round the Horn—they treated you very well. They had shanghaied me because they felt that their ship’s need was more important than my comfort, and they beat me up so that I should be some use to the ship, not out of any personal spite against me—it was just like hammering a horseshoe into the right shape, no ill-will in it at all.

  “By the time we reached Chile I had come to the conclusion that I liked the sea. I had started out a weedy, lanky young chap, but at the end of this voyage, and it was a very long one, I had filled out and put on weight. When we were ashore in Antofagasta I beat the daylights out of Lars Gunnar and helped him back to the ship more dead than alive. They were still short-handed, for they had been able to pick up nothing more than a decrepit old Portuguese in Antofagasta, and they were desperate about their return passage. Lars and the Old Man asked me as civilly as they could—and to see them being civil was a wonderful sight, like two polar-bears trying to behave as if they were on a Sunday-school outing—to ship back with them, as a favour. Well, I had no people to worry about: there was only my sister, and I wrote to her to say that I was going on a voyage to see the world—I knew she would not worry in the least, as she was used to my comings and goings, and I signed on with them. It was a wonderful voyage, down to Australia with nitrates, and then with grain to Helsinki, where we paid off. I crossed the Atlantic again in a Cunarder, as a passenger this time, and very queer it felt; but when I got home everything seemed dull and flat. I fooled around on shore for some time, and then I took to studying navigation and so on and got my ticket. Some of my relatives said that it was a waste of an expensive classical education to be a nasty, low, common sailorman, but my sister thought it was fine, and so did your great-uncle Simon, who in spite of being a professor of pastoral theology was quite a rich man.

  “He was a dear old gentleman, and although he knew nothing about the sea at all, except that he rather suspected it was the sharp end of a ship that went first, he left me enough to buy my own schooner after I had risen to the dizzy height of a mastermariner’s certificate.” He suddenly stopped and cocked his head, listening intently. “No, they won’t be moving yet,” he said, after a minute. “What was I talking about? Oh, yes, I was telling—by the way, do you know whether your horrible dog can retrieve in water?”

  “Chang will do whatever he is told,” said Derrick. “He is a very intelligent dog.”

  Chang, hearing his name, stood up and waved his tail.

  “If he is,” said Sullivan, “he conceals it very well.” He knocked out his pipe, packed it carefully and re-lit it. For some time he was silent: then he began again, “Yes. I had my own schooner. I had been a good many voyages in steam, but it was not the same thing. There is nothing like sail; nothing like it at all. I knocked about all over the place in her, chiefly in the South Seas—pearling and copra—but I was going to tell you how I became a pirate, and that started in South America, in the Republic of Rococo. I had got mixed up with one of their revolutions, but if I were to tell you all about that the dawn flighting would be over before I had begun. The long and the short of it was that my friend, Porfirio Broll, came out on top: he wasn’t a bad chap at all; we used to call him Little Brolly at college, and I believe he really did have some sound notions about liberty. Anyway, he was President, and he made me a full-blown admiral. Now that was very kind, and it would have been kinder still if Rococo had ever got around to building a navy, but it had not. I pointed this out to Porfirio, and he gave me the choice of being Postmaster-General, Ambassador to Luxemburg or Minister without portfolio: I said that we would call it quits if he would give me the right to work a guano island that I had sighted off the coast. He jumped at the idea, and gave me a nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine-year lease of the island, all written out on a fine piece of parchment and covered with seals.

  “As soon as I had got my lease I set sail for my island. It was only a couple of sheer rocks stuck in the sea a hundred miles from anywhere, and nothing lived on it but sea-birds. There was no anchorage to speak of, and there was no water, but the guano had never been touched, and it lay twenty feet thick all over the island—it is the droppings of gulls, you know, and the best fertiliser in the world. It was a very valuable find indeed, and I was in a fair way to make my fortune. I put some convicts ashore—Porfirio had provided me with his predecessor’s cabinet—and left them to provide a cargo against my return while I went off to arrange about selling the stuff. The first cargo was all ready according to plan, and I began to work out how many voyages it would need before I could buy Long Island and the county Mayo, where we came from.

  “But the next time I went back to the island for a fresh cargo I found a ship lying there, and all my convicts busy loading her up to the Plimsoll line with my guano. In Rococo Porfirio had got in the way of a bullet, and he had stopped being a president the moment he had begun on his new career as a corpse and a national martyr. There was a new president—they can’t rest easy without one in those parts—and he had leased the island to a group of businessmen in El Liberador. All this seemed very unjust to me, so I waited until their ship was laden, and then in my capacity as Lord High Admiral of Rococo I confiscated ship, cargo and all. It is true that I did it in the dead of night, in rather an unofficial way, but it was foolish of them to get so annoyed. They called me a wrong-doer and a man of wrath and all sorts of unkind things, including a pirate, until I persuaded them to stop with a belaying-pin: I put them ashore on the Spanish main and told them to consult a lawyer. They would find one, I said, by marching through the jungle for a month or two towards the north: but I assured them that it was hardly worth the trouble and expense, because I had a perfectly good and legal lease, which could not be upset by their President, who was only an upstart rebel.

  “Some time later I heard that they had got home, and that the rebel government had proclaimed me a pirate. They had even offered a reward to anyone who should catch me, and they had ordered the entire navy of Rococo, which consisted of the Presidential pleasure-launch and one confiscated dinghy without a bottom, to search for me on the high seas. I wrote to them and said that my nine hundred and ninety-nine years was not up yet, but that when it was, I would resign the islands to the next comer: I thought that was fair enough. But the new company fitted out another vessel, stuck guns all over it, and cam
e back to my island. I lay hull down on the horizon, watching them from my cross-trees, and when they had loaded her and fixed her hatches I confiscated her again. It was rather more boisterous, but I had a mixed crew of Solomon Islanders and Irishmen, and we overcame their objections.

  “When the company heard about this, they were hopping mad: they hired a tough skipper with his own crew to get the guano. I had heard a good deal about this man. They called him the Hellbender, and they said he used railroad ties for toothpicks.

  “He came to my island a good while before I was expecting him, and half my men were ashore when he hove up out of the mist. I had to cut and run for it, leaving the cargo ready on the little wharf we had made. I slipped round behind the island, got my men off in the night, and then came round to try conclusions with him. But the current was setting very strong, and the wind was against me, so I was delayed longer than I could have wished, and by the time I had worked round the island I could only see his tops’ls over the rim of the sea to the west. That made me think a bit, for nobody but a first-rate sailor could have picked up my guano and turned around so quickly. I cracked on everything we had, and by the evening he ran into a calm, so that I could see his vessel clearly in the distance. She was a tops’l schooner, with lovely lines, and she was being very well handled. My ship, the one I had then, was a good sort of a ship in her way, comfortable and beamy, but she would not come as close to the wind as he could, being in ballast; and with a weedy bottom too, having been so long at sea, we were as slow as a dead porpoise compared with him. Presently he got the wind again, and it was our turn for the calm: he went away straight into the eye of the breeze, and we were left there without a sail drawing.

  “The next day we never saw him at all, nor the next, and I had to resign myself to the loss of that cargo. But it galled me. It galled me very much, and the more I thought of it, the more it galled me. It was my island: I had discovered it and I had first worked it, and I dare say that an international court, working on the broad principles of equity, would have upheld my lease. Anyway, I was determined to uphold it, and I set a man ashore to tell me when the tops’l schooner next set out.

  “When I got the signal I kept her just in sight, and then I doubled back to the mainland. I hid the ship up a lonely creek, and we marched overland to the mouth of the river—El Liberador is some way up the Rococo river, you know, and they have a tug to bring vessels up the narrow part to the city. I had kept her in sight until she had started loading, so I knew we would not have long to wait. Sure enough, three tides later, the tug came down. We stopped her in mid-stream and invited her crew to take their ease under hatches for a while.

  “Then, when the tide began to flow, the tops’l schooner came in over the bar. It was pitch-black night when we went down into the estuary and hailed her. They never suspected a thing, and threw us a line: we got the tow aboard and made all fast. Then, very gently, and stopping every now and then as if we were having trouble with our engines, we edged her round and towed her out across the bar. I had arranged to have the shore-lights doused—a few dollars can work wonders there—and I reckoned that a man who did not know the river very well would never know that he had been turned about. But we had not got very far before a great voice came bawling through the night, telling us to heave to. We did not reply, and presently we heard them working on the hawser. I flashed the searchlight on to them, and said that I would shoot the first man who touched the tow: that stopped them for a bit, but then a bullet came whipping across and smashed the searchlight. I rigged up another, but by that time they had brought a hatch up for’ard as a shield, and they were busy casting off the tow, so we boarded them.

  “They were a tougher crew than I had expected, but we were fairly evenly matched. There was no light for shooting, which was a good thing, or we should have destroyed one another entirely, like the Kilkenny cats. It was their skipper who gave us the most trouble. He rushed up and down the deck with a capstan-bar in each hand, laying about him like a man threshing beans in a hurry—only the beans were my men, and by the time the moon rose they were getting a little discouraged. I got at him once or twice, but each time we were pushed apart by other swabs getting in the way: at last I did reach him, and we set to very briskly. He had either broken his capstan-bars or thrown them away by this time, and we went to it with our fists, hammer and tongs. He was a heavier man, I found, and he packed a terrible punch, but I had a longer reach, and I spoilt his face for him. But banging his face did not seem to do much good, and when he got in close he paid it back with interest. He had me up against the rails and thumped away at my ribs like a steam-engine. I knew I could not hold out much longer, so I grabbed him by the neck and flung myself backwards over the rails into the sea, still holding him. I had learnt to swim before I could walk, and I felt that maybe I could deal with him better in the water. I lay there for a moment, getting back my breath, and he floundered about like a grampus, blowing and bellowing. He went under once or twice, and as far as I could judge he was more concerned with keeping afloat than looking out for me. I came up behind him and gripped his head. He threshed about like mad, and I had a pretty business keeping free of him, but when I had ducked him a good many times and had filled him up with sea-water he began to weaken. Then I whispered in his ear, ‘You’re for the sharks in five minutes if you don’t give in, my man.’ He said, ‘I’ll see you hanged first, you dirty pirate,’ and he turned to bite my hand. So I began to drown him in good earnest—mark over.”

  Sullivan reached for his gun. There was the sound of wings high overhead, and they listened tensely. The noise circled above them and came lower. Suddenly his gun leapt to his shoulder: two orange flames stabbed the darkness, and from out on the lake came two heavy splashes, one after the other, and a threshing in the water.

  Sullivan waited for a moment, with his gun poised, to see whether the duck would circle again, but they swung wide and high.

  “Now let’s see whether your animal can do his stuff,” he said.

  “Fetch, Chang,” said Derrick, pointing to the lake. Chang hurled himself in, and they heard him splashing in the distance.

  “I really believe there’s some good in the old flea-bag,” said Sullivan. “It sounds as though he were trying to bring them both.”

  “Fetch them, Chang,” called Derrick, hoping desperately that his uncle was right. Chang barked in answer, and they heard them surging towards them. He reappeared, dripping and charmed with himself: there was a large stick in his mouth.

  “That will be very useful for cooking the birds, no doubt,” said Sullivan.

  “Ducks, Chang. Go and fetch the ducks. Birds on the water.” For half a moment Derrick thought of flapping his arms and going quack, quack to help Chang understand. The dog looked worried, and offered the stick again. “No, not that,” said Derrick, scarlet in the face. “Fetch the ducks, Chang. Ducks, there’s a good dog.” Chang was very willing to please, and he plunged in again, but Derrick was almost certain that he would only bring back another stick.

  “Don’t blame him,” said Sullivan. “You can’t expect beauty as well as intelligence. We’ll try and shoot them so that they fall over the land next time. They were widgeon, by the sound of them.”

  Chang swam back. In his mouth, beautifully held by one wing, there was a fine teal.

  “Good dog,” cried Sullivan, giving him a piece of meat. “Why, that’s strange, this is a teal.”

  “Perhaps there was just one teal among the widgeon,” said Derrick, trying to conceal his triumph, and it appeared that he was right, for the next bird that Chang brought in was a widgeon, a lovely drake, with a sulphur-yellow crest.

  “How did you manage to hit them, Uncle Terry?” asked Derrick, smoothing the widgeon’s feathers. “I never saw them at all.”

  “Nor did I,” replied Sullivan. “You can’t wait to see them in this light. You have to shoot at the sound. It’ll be better in half an hour. These were probably the first birds to get moving.”
r />   They stood in silence for a while, listening for the duck. “Did you drown the man?” asked Derrick eventually.

  “What man? Oh, Ross. No, I didn’t drown him, but I let him get thoroughly waterlogged, and then I towed him back to his schooner. By that time I found my crew had licked his—they were not much good without their skipper—and they hauled us aboard. At first I was afraid that I had overdone it: he looked too much like a corpse altogether. But when we had up-ended him and let the ocean out of him he came to. But he was very sick for a long while, and I had to nurse him carefully—it was touch and go with him for weeks. I ran his schooner up the coast and tied up alongside my ship for a while. I found that he had no great liking for his job, or for his employers, who had never paid him and never would, for by the time we had transferred the cargo we had news that there had been another revolution in Rococo. Well, to cut it short, we took a liking to one another, and we decided to ship together. I sold my cargo, ship and lease to a big American company, who could deal with the legal side of the matter better than I could, and we sailed for the Friendly Islands after copra. That sounds like mallard. They’re coming our way. Now you take the birds on the right, and shoot well ahead.”

  The sound of the wings came down as the duck planed in to pitch on the lake. The four shots cracked out, and there were two splashes in the water. Chang stood tense and expectant.

  “You want to shoot well ahead as they are crossing,” said Sullivan, reloading. “Wait for it, now, they are circling again.” He knocked another bird out of the flight, but before Chang could bring it in there were more duck overhead, Muscovy duck this time, and from then on they stood there as the dawn came grey around them, shooting so often that the barrels of their guns were warm.

  “I think that will do,” said Sullivan at last, surveying the pile of birds in the butt.