H.M.S. Surprise

by Patrick O'Brian

  'But still,' said Jack, after a long pause, 'but still, we are homeward bound. Homeward bound at last! I am afraid I am required to touch at Calcutta; but it will be touch and go—Calcutta fare thee well, and home as fast as she will fly. Indeed,' he added, having reflected for a while, for a whistling pause, 'if we start to fly this very moment, we may yet overhaul the China fleet, and send our packets off. They are slow, close-reef topsails-every-night old tubs, for all their man-of-war airs and graces. You should not have said that about lovers, Stephen.'

  Chapter Nine

  It was in longitude eighty-nine east that the frigate caught them. A string of lights had been seen towards the end of the middle watch, and as the sun came up most of the Surprise's people were on deck to contemplate the cloud of sails that stretched along the horizon: thirty-nine ships and a brig in two separate bodies;

  They had scattered somewhat in the night, and now they were closing up in response to their commodore's signals, the laggards crowding sail on the moderate northeast breeze. The leeward division, if such a wandering heap could be called a division, was made up of country ships bound for Calcutta, Madras or Bombay, and some foreigners who had joined them for safety from pirates and to profit by their exact navigation; it straggled for three miles along the distant sea. But those to windward, all sixteen of them the larger kind of Indiamen that made the uninterrupted voyage from Canton to London, were already in a formation that would not have done much discredit to the Navy.

  'And are you indeed fully persuaded that they are not men-of-war?' asked Mr White. 'They look wonderfully like, with their rows of guns; wonderfully like, to a lands-man's eye.'

  'They do, do they not?' said Stephen. 'It is their study so to appear; but I believe that if you look closer you will see water-butts placed, stowed, between the guns, and a variety of bales on deck, which would never be countenanced in the service. And the various flags and streams that fly in the appropriate places are quite different: I am not prepared to say just in what the difference lies, but to the seaman it is instantly apparent—they are not the royal insignia. Then again, you will have noticed that the Captain has given orders to close them; which I conceive he would scarcely have done, had they been an enemy fleet of such magnitude.'

  'He said, "Keep your luff," and followed it with an oath,' said the chaplain, narrowing his eyes.

  'It is all one,' said Stephen. 'They speak in tropes, at sea.'

  From his perch in the main crosstrees Pullings summoned William Church aloft, a very small midshipman in his first voyage, who seemed rather to have shrunk than to have grown in the course of it. 'Now, younker,' he said, 'you are always flattering about the wealth of the Orient and the way you never seen none of it in Bombay nor parts east but only mud and flies and a mortal lot of sea: well, now, just take a look through this spyglass at the ship wearing the pendant. She's the Lushington: I made two voyages in her. Then next astern there's the Warley: a very sweet sailer—works herself, almost—and fast, for an Indiaman: trim lines—you could take her for a heavy frigate, if you had not been aboard. You see they carry forestaysails, just as we do: they are the only merchantmen you will ever see with a forestaysail. Some call it impertinence. And then the one with her topsail atrip, that they are making such a cock of trimming—Judas Priest, what a Hornchurch fair! They have forgot to pass the staysail sheet—you see the mate in a passion, a-running along the gangway? I can hear him from here. It is always the same with these Lascars: they are tolerable good seamen, sometimes, but they forget their ABC, and they can't be got to do their duty brisk, no not if it is ever so. Then on her quarter, with the patched inner jib, that's the Hope: or maybe she's the Ocean—they're much of a muchness, out of the same yard and off of the same draught. But any gait, all of 'em you see in this weather line, is what we call twelve-hundred-tonners; though to be sure some gauges thirteen and even fifteen hundred ton, Thames measurement. Wexford, there, with her brass fo'c'sle eight-pounder winking in the sun, she does: but we call her a twelve hundred ton ship.'

  'Sir, might it not be simpler to call her a fifteen hundred ton ship?'

  'Simpler, maybe: but it would never do. You don't want to be upsetting the old ways. Oh dear me, no. God's my life, if the Captain was to hear you carrying on in that reckless Jacobin, democratical line, why, I dare say he would turn you adrift on a three-inch plank, with both your ears nailed down to it, to learn you bashfulness, the way he served three young gentlemen in the Med. No, no: you don't want to go arsing around with the old ways: the French did so, and look at the scrape it has gotten them into. But what I called you up here for, was to show you this here wealth of the Orient. Just you look ahead of the commodore to the leading ship, Ganges, if I don't mistake, and now cast your eye to old slowbelly in the rear, setting his topgallants and sagging to leeward something cruel. Look hard, now, because you will not likely see such a sight again; for there you have a clear six millions of money, not counting the officers' private ventures. Six million of money: God love us, what a prize!'

  The officers who were wafting this enormous treasure across the ocean in their leisurely East-India fashion were well rewarded for doing so; this pleased them, because, among other things, it allowed them to be magnificently hospitable; and they were the most hospitable souls afloat. No sooner had Captain Muffit, the commodore, made out the frigate's tall mainmast in the light of dawn, than he sent for his chief steward, his head Chinese and his head Indian cook; and signals broke out aboard the Lushington: the one to the Surprise, Request honour of captain's and officers' company to dinner, the other to the convoy, All ships: pretty young female passengers required dine frigate's officers. Repeat young. Repeat pretty.

  The Surprise ran within a cable's length of the Lushington. Boats plied to and fro along the fleet, bringing young women in silk dresses and eager officers in blue and gold. The Indiaman's splendid stateroom was filled with people, filled with cheerful noise—news of Europe, of India and the farther East; news of the war, of common acquaintances, gossip; inane but cheerful conversation; riddles! toasts to the Royal Navy, to the honourable East-India Company, to trade's increase—and the frigate's officers filled themselves with splendid food, with charming wine. Mr Church's neighbour, a lovely rounded creature with golden hair, treated him with the attentive respect due to his uniform, urging him to try a little more of this lacquered duck, a trifle of pork, a few more slices of pineapple, calling for Canton buns, exchanging her third plate of pudding with him—no one would notice but even her overflowing goodwill sought to restrain his hand at last. It sought in vain: Church had secured to himself a cake in the form of the Kwan-Yin pagoda, there were eight stories still to go, and his beloved captain's motto was Lose not a minute. He lost none in small-talk, at all events, but silently ate on and on. She looked anxiously round—gazed at the frigate's surgeon, sitting in moody silence opposite her—but found no help. When the ladies withdrew, instantly followed by Babbington, who muttered something about 'his handkerchief being left in the boat', she paused by the Lushington's chief officer and said, 'Pray, sir, take care of the blue child; I am sure he will do himself a mischief.'

  She watched him apprehensively as he went down the side; but her eye could not follow, nor her heart conceive, his rapid progress from the frigate's deck to the midshipmen's berth, where those who had been obliged to stay aboard were sitting down to a feast sent across by the Indiaman.

  For his part Jack could not manage a second dinner when he reached the Surprise again, nor indeed anything of a solid nature; but throwing off his coat, neckcloth, waistcoat and breeches, he called for nankeen trousers and coffee. 'You will join me in another pot, Stephen?' he said. 'Lord, how delightful it is to have room to move.' The envoy's suite, apart from Mr White, who was too poor to pay his passage, had removed into an Indiaman, and the great cabin was itself again. 'And how glad I am to be shot of that wicked little scrub Atkins.'

  'He was a nuisance, but he was not a wicked man. Weak he was, and silly.'


  'When you say weak you say all the rest. You are much too inclined to find excuses for scrubs, Stephen: you preserved that ill-conditioned brute Scriven from the gallows, nourished him in your bosom, gave him your countenance, and who paid for it? J. Aubrey paid for it. Here is the coffee—after such a dinner your soul calls out for coffee . . . A most capital dinner, upon my word. The duck was the best I have ever tasted.'

  'I was sorry to see you help yourself to him a fourth time: duck is a melancholy meat. In any case the rich sauce in which it bathed was not at all the thing for a subject of your corpulence. Apoplexy lurks in dishes of that kind. I signalled to you, but you did not attend.'

  'Is that why you were looking so mumchance?'

  'I was displeased with my neighbours, too.'

  'The nymphs in green? Delightful girls.'

  'It is clear you have been a great while at sea, to call those sandy-haired coarse-featured pimply short-necked thick-fingered vulgar-minded lubricious blockheads by such a name. Nymphs, forsooth. If they were nymphs, they must have had their being in a tolerably rank and stagnant pool: the wench on my left had an ill breath, and turning for relief I found her sister had a worse; and the upper garment of neither was free from reproach. Worse lay below, I make no doubt. "La, sister," cries the one to the other, breathing across me—vile teeth; and "La, sister," cries the other. I have no notion of two sisters wearing the same clothes, the same flaunting meretricious gawds, the same tortured Gorgon curls low over their brutish criminal foreheads, it bespeaks a superfetation of vulgarity, both innate and studiously acquired. And when I think that their teeming loins will people the East . . . Pray pour me out another cup of coffee. Confident brutes 'He might have added that these young ladies had instantly started to talk to him about a Mrs Villiers of Bombay who had just reached Calcutta—the Doctor must have heard of her in Bombay?—she was nothing but an adventuress, how dreadful—they had seen her at the Governor's, dressed very outrée; not at all good-looking; they wondered at the reports—people were obliged to receive her and pretend not to know, because her gentleman-friend—say 'protector', sister—was vastly important, lived in the highest style, quite princely—it was said she was ruining him. He was a vastly genteel creature—tall—such an air and address, you would almost think he was one of us—he had looked at Aggie in such a particular way! They both tittered into their balled-up grubby handkerchiefs, slapping one another behind his bowed back.

  He was turning it over in his mind whether to say, 'These women spoke malignantly about Diana Villiers, which angered me: I asked her to marry me in Bombay, and I am to have her reply in Calcutta. I have meant to tell you this for some time: candour required such a statement earlier. I trust you will forgive my apparent lack of candour,' when Jack said, 'Well, and so you did not altogether like them, I collect? I am sorry for it. My neighbour and I agreed wonderfully well—Muffit, I mean. The girl my other side was a ninnyhammer: no bosom. I thought these girls with no bosoms were exploded long ago. I took to him amazingly; a thorough-going seaman, not at all the usual Company's commander—not that I mean to imply they are not seamen; but they are rather pianissimo, if you know what I mean.'

  'I know what pianissimo means.'

  'He has exactly my idea about stepping the royal-mast abaft the topgallant with its heel on the top-cap; he actually has it rigged so, as I dare say you noticed, and swears it gives him an extra knot in moderate airs. I am determined to try it. He is an excellent fellow: he promised to put our packet aboard a pilot-boat the moment he was in soundings.'

  'I wish you may have desired Sophie to come to Madeira,' muttered Stephen.

  'And he has some notions of gunnery, too, which is rare enough even in the Navy. He does his best to exercise his people, but he is most pitifully equipped, poor fellow.'

  'There seemed to me a formidable array of guns. More than we possess, if I do not mistake.'

  'They were not guns, my poor Stephen. They were cannonades.'

  'What are cannonades?'

  'Why, they are cannonades—medium eighteens. How can I explain. You know a carronade, I am sure?'

  'Certainly I do. The short thing on slides, ignoble in its proportions, that throws an immense ball. I have noticed several about the ship.'

  'What a lynx you are, upon my honour: nothing escapes you. And clearly you know a cannon, a great gun? Well now, conceive of an unlucky bastard cross between the two, something that weighs a mere twenty-eight hundredweight and jumps in the air and breaks its breeching every time you offer to fire it, and that will not strike true at five hundred yards, no not at fifty, and there you have your cannonade. But even if the Company had some notion of its own interests and gave him real guns, who is to fire them off? He would need three hundred and fifty men, and what has he got? A hundred and forty, most of them cooks and stewards: and Lascar cooks and stewards at that. Dear Lord above, what a way to trundle six millions about the world! Yet he has sound views on stepping a royal; I am determined to try it, if only on the foremast.'

  Two days later the Surprise, alone on a misty heaving sea, was trying it. The carpenter and his crew had wrought all morning, and now, dinner having been cut short, the long mast was swaying up through the intricate tracery of the rigging. This was a delicate task in a heavy swell, and Jack had not only heaved to but he had stopped the midday grog: he wanted no fuddled enthusiasm heaving on the top-rope, and he knew very well that the delay would stimulate zeal—that no one would put up with a moment's dawdling—that no man would presume to pause to gasp in the oppressive, thundery heat for fear of what his mates would do.

  Up and up it went, and peering with half-closed eyes into the glare of the covered sun, he guided it inch by inch, co-ordinating the successive heaves with the pitching of the ship. The last half foot, and the whole ship's company held its breath, eyes fixed on the heel of the mast. It crept a little higher, the new top-rope creaking in the block and sending down a cloud of shakings then with a jerk and a shudder along its whole length the heel lifted over the top-cap.

  'Handsomely, handsomely!' cried jack. A trifle more: at the masthead the bosun flung up his hand. 'Lower away.' The top-rope slackened; the heel of the mast settled down inside the step; and it was done.

  The Surprises let out a universal sigh. The maintopsail and forecourse dropped like the curtain at the end of a harrowing drama; they were sheeted home, and the bosun piped belay. The frigate answered at once, and as he felt the way on her jack gazed up at the new royal-mast, rigidly parallel with the topgallant and rising high above with a splendid promise of elastic strength: he felt a dart of pure joy, not merely because of the mast, nor because of the sweet motion of the ship—his own dear ship—nor yet because he was afloat and in command. It was a plenitude of being—

  'On deck, there,' called the lookout in a hesitant, deprecating howl. 'Sail on the larboard bow' Two maybe.' Hesitant, because reporting the China fleet for a third time was absurd; deprecating, because he should have done so long ago, instead of staring at the perilous drama of the mast.

  His hail excited little interest, or none: grog was to be served out the moment the mast was secured and the yard across. Willing hands, well ahead of orders, were busy with the two pair of shrouds, the stoppings on the yard; impatient men were waiting in the crosstrees ready to clap on the braces. However, Jack and his first lieutenant looked attentively at the hazy ships, looming unnaturally large some four miles ahead and growing rapidly clearer as the frigate sailed towards them—she was making five knots already on the steady north-east wind.

  'Who is that old-fashioned fellow who carries his mizzentopmast staysail under the maintop?' said Stourton. 'I believe I can make out two more behind them. I am astonished they should have come up with us so soon; after all . . .'

  'Stourton—Stourton,' cried Jack, 'it is Linois. Haul your wind! Hard a-port, hard over. Let fall the maincourse, there. Strike the pendant. Forestaysail: maintopgallant. Marines, Marines, there: clap on to the mainbrace. B
ear a hand, bear a hand. Mr Etherege, stir up your men.'

  Babbington came running aft to report the foreroyalyard across, and the frigate's sudden turn, coinciding with a heavy roll, threw him off his balance: he fell sprawling at his captain's feet. 'Butcher!' cried Jack, 'Mr Babbington, this is carrying a proper deference too far.'

  'Yard across, sir, if you please,' said Babbington: and seeing the wild glee on Jack's face, the mad brilliance of his eye, he presumed on their old acquaintance to say, 'Sir, what's afoot?'

  'Linois is afoot,' said Jack, with a grin. 'Mr Stourton, backstays to that mast at once, and preventers. Do not let them set up the shrouds too taut; we must not have it wrung. All stuns'ls and kites into the tops. Give her what sail she can carry. And then I believe you may prepare to clear for action.'

  Slinging his glass, he ran up the masthead like a boy. The Surprise had spun round on her heel; she was now steadying on her course, close-hauled and heading north, leaning far over to larboard as the sail increased upon her and her bow-wave began to fling the water wide. The Frenchmen were fading a little in the haze, but he could see the nearest signalling. Both had been sailing on a course designed to intercept the Surprise—they had seen him first—and now they were following his turn in chase. They would never fetch his wake unless they tacked, however; they had been too far ahead for that. Beyond them he could make out a larger ship: another farther to the south-west, and something indistinct on the blurred horizon—perhaps a brig. These three were still sailing large, and clearly the whole squadron had been in line abreast, strung out to sweep twenty miles of sea; and they were standing directly for the path the slow China fleet would traverse next day.

  Thunder had been grumbling and crashing since the morning, and now in the midst of a distant peal there was the sound of a gun. The Admiral, no doubt, calling in his leeward ships.

  'Mr Stourton,' he called, 'Dutch ensign and two or three hoists of the first signal-flags that come to hand, with a gun to windward—two guns.'