Gentleman Captain

by J. D. Davies

  Gale sniffed and looked steadily at me with the wan, distant expression that I would come to know so well. 'You won't find it unusual for long, Captain. It's to be said daily, on every one of His Majesty's ships, from Easter Sunday until the day of judgement. We'll be heartily sick of it within a month.'

  Ah. So your prayer book—'

  He nodded lightly. 'The new book of Common Prayer, now being despatched to all the parishes in the land by direct command of King, Parliament, and Convocation, to be adopted in place of the old one from this Easter. The weekend after next, in other words. A sure path to salvation for a nation that lost its way, Captain Quinton.'

  I could not tell whether Gale's remark was spiritual or sarcastic, although I suspected the latter. 'I'd heard there's to be a new book, of course–my brother attended the debates in the House of Lords. But I was not aware that the copies had already been sent out.'

  The chaplain smiled. 'As Christians, Captain Quinton, we believe that when the last trump sounds, we shall all stand naked and equal before the judgement seat. Until that dread day, however, we all live most unequally.' He turned with a gesture, and we strolled towards the poop. 'You, sir, are the brother of an earl, which gives you the command of a king's man-of-war at a most tender age.' I felt my face grow hot with the seeming impertinence of his observation, but he continued as if unaware. 'Whereas I ... well, Captain, for all my manifest faults and sins, nobody can take away the fact that Billy Sancroft and I are the oldest and best of friends from our Cambridge days. When we were newly matriculated at Emmanuel, we wagered that by our sixtieth birthdays he would be Archbishop of Canterbury, and I, of York. Now, with thirteen years to go, he is the personal chaplain to King Charles, and I am the chaplain of the Jupiter...' He waved vaguely towards the deck abaft the mainmast, where a clutch of men stood patiently waiting to speak to him. 'We may conclude with some certainty that he will win his part of the wager, and I shall lose mine.'

  Gale was silent for a moment, looking intently out towards the Isle of Wight. Then he shrugged, as though he had reconciled himself to his unequal fate. 'But Billy still throws his old friend some scraps, like my position on this ship and an early copy of the new prayer book. In truth, it surprises me that he doesn't think I'll sell it off to a crooked printer and make cheap copies to undercut the royal printers' monopoly. Come to that, I'm not entirely certain why I haven't.'

  A sot, at sea for the money. Yet there was plainly more than that to Francis Gale, and I wished to cultivate this unexpected, sober side of my chaplain. After all, he, Stafford Peverell, and Vyvyan were the only men aboard whose rank and station remotely approached my own, and I had less love for Peverell even than Vyvyan had for me. Gale was a younger son of Shropshire gentry who had been stout for the king in the civil wars, which had been particularly murderous in that county; or so the incorrigibly inquisitive Musk had established within a day of being aboard. Gale had fought with the royal armies in both England and Ireland, it was said. That alone, regardless of his connection to one of the king's favourite clerics, would have made him a fit guest at my table. And perhaps he, of all the men on board, had enough authority and common sense to lay to rest this blasted talk of murder, as unsettling to the crew as to their captain. I invited him to dine with me that same day. He smiled but momentarily, and shook his head.

  'No, Captain Quinton, I think we'll not eat together, this day.'

  For a moment, the shock of the offence silenced me. 'Sir,' I said at length, 'refusing your captain's invitation is—'

  'Yes, unforgivable, I know, by all the laws of the navy, which have almost the same force as those of God, et cetera, et cetera. But I have a prior invitation from a bottle of crusted port wine, Captain, and by I know not what means, it seems to have brought some of its friends to keep it company. And you, too, have a prior and pressing commitment, of course.' I was flummoxed, but before I could speak, Francis Gale looked skyward, as though casting his eyes to the heaven he served.

  'The westerly's dropped away entirely, Captain Quinton,' he said quietly. 'And an old boatswain of my acquaintance who shared a bottle with me at the Red Lion yesterday assures me that by dusk today, we'll have a lively southerly to carry us out of the Solent. Royal Martyr is just hoisting the signal to make ready to sail. You'll need to prepare your ship for the sea, Captain. As I don't doubt you already know.'

  The next hours resembled one of Signor Dante's circles of hell. I had myself rowed across to Royal Martyr, there to receive Judge's brusque command. We would sail with the afternoon's ebb, which would carry us easily out of the Solent's western mouth. Lanherne took a boat back into Portsmouth to round up the ticket-of-leave men who were still ashore. The crew's midday meal was rushed and perfunctory, despite Janks' valiant efforts, but the men still queued in orderly fashion to have small beer ladled into their tankards from an open barrel by the mainmast. Victuallers' boats thronged back and forth. We took on chickens, a dozen sheep, and three goats; only my express command prevented the acquisition of a cow, on the grounds that we were bound for Scotland, not Sumatra, and that we already stank like a farm. Other boats took off the wives and the women who perhaps were not quite wives, accompanied by much sobbing from those departing, and some relief from at least a few of those remaining. Men climbed rigging and fanned out along the footropes to ready the sails, long tied tightly to the yards. Surgeon Skeen dealt with his first casualty of the voyage, a stupid brute of a Cornish boy who dislocated two fingers when he missed his grip on the main yard and was saved from falling to his death only by Treninnick's quick reaction. Ali Reis kept up an endless concert of lively tunes on his fiddle, though I had little time to wonder how a Moor had learned such an instrument or the tune of 'Loath to Depart'. I hastily penned brief letters to my trinity of official correspondents–King Charles, Duke James, and Mister Pepys–and to that other trinity, my mother, brother, and wife. Between them, Musk and Janks the cook conjured for me the sustenance of some fine ham, an unusually edible biscuit, and a fine draught of Hull ale.

  On deck again, and as best I could, I took the measure of my officers. Stanton, the gunner, was quietly competent, carefully checking each of the great guns, their carriages and tackle, then going below to attend to the powder room and its manifests. Boatswain Ap paced up and down the deck, issuing instructions that hardly a man could understand and waving his rattan cane vaguely in the air–yet at his approach they all sprang to and ran to attend to three or four separate tasks in quick order, perhaps in the hope that one of them might have been the object of his unintelligible command. The carpenter, Penbaron, was below, attending no doubt to the whipstaff and the rudder, about which he seemed to have an obsession equal only to his fears for the mizzen; he was convinced that when the Deptford yard refitted it a year or so before, they sold off the good new rudder intended for the ship and simply fitted back in place the original, carefully repaired and disguised to conceal the shipwrights' fraud. This was too close for comfort to my own experience of the yard's workmanship, even if it had saved my life, so I left him to his work. I saw no sign of Janks, of course, though smoke wafted continually from the pipe that led from the galley down in the hold.

  Stafford Peverell the purser was, alas, all too much in evidence. He shared the quarterdeck with me, though neither of us deigned to speak to the other. He looked out over the scene with an expression of weary contempt until one of the ship's boys, careless of his footing, fell onto a marlinspike and almost lost an eye, at which he roared with laughter. Perhaps I should have upbraided him there and then, but it did not do for officers to undermine each other in public; moreover, Peverell was a man of good birth–albeit of the worst manners–and still deserving of the honour due to his rank. So I told myself, although in my heart, my dislike of this callous creature grew apace. Of the last of my officers, the Reverend Gale, there was no sign at all.

  Landon, the master, had placed a table on the quarterdeck, setting it out with priggish formality. On it were arranged those st
range books of sea-charts, mathematical symbols, and secret wisdom that sailors call 'waggoners'. At noon, Landon and his masters' mates raised strangely fashioned instruments, somewhat akin to one of my grandfather's dials, and looked towards the sun, then at the likes of St Thomas's church, Southsea Fort, and the white tower of the Gilkicker seamark. The mates chattered excitedly to each other and to Landon, who eventually informed me gravely that we had a true observation, and thus the new sea-day had commenced. I felt just as awkward at this ritual as I had aboard the Happy Restoration, when old Aldred had reported to me each noon-tide in equally solemn tones. For the mariners, this was clearly a great event, a daily papal conclave that resulted in the election of a series of meaningless numbers, written down with all due reverence in our ship's journal. As far as I was concerned, they may as well have been speaking to me in old Aramaic or Cornish.

  I felt a searing pang of regret that I would spend a second commission as captain in utter ignorance of the ways of the sea. It was clear now that Kit Farrell had never received my letter and would not be joining the voyage, and I could not demean the heir to Ravensden before the likes of Landon by asking him to teach me the sea-method. As for James Vyvyan, he had plainly learned much from his uncle Harker. He knew the names of the ropes, yards, and sails, could speak confidently to the master about bearings, and moved among the crew as we made ready for sea, giving a cheerful word of encouragement here, a gentle word of admonishment there. Three years younger than I and far more complete a sea officer, he had the respect of the men, and I did not; nor would I, then or ever. Vyvyan might well have disliked me on sight for taking his uncle's place and not listening to his fool's babble about murder, I thought, but in that moment I suddenly hated James Vyvyan with a harsher passion than any he could have ever felt towards me. It was that cold, irrational, jealous hatred that comes to us when we know, in our heart of hearts, that another man is our better. Vyvyan's easy competence threw my own abiding ignorance into sharp focus. I could not ask him to teach me what he knew. I would not give him that pleasure; nor would I learn the sea indirectly from the still all-pervasive ghost of Captain James Harker.

  It was nearly six when I stood once more on the quarterdeck, the ignorant gentleman captain in all his splendour, watching through the gathering gloom as the sails fell from the yards on Royal Martyr, and Judge's ship began to make her way very slowly on the tide. Vyvyan, Landon and Ap all watched me expectantly. After a moment, my lieutenant coughed and addressed me, no doubt mischievously but with a perfectly neutral face.

  'Do you wish to give the commands to take us to sea, sir?'

  I thought suddenly of the Happy Restoration in her dying moments in the storm at Kinsale; the last time I had been called upon to give a sea command. I saw the men falling from her doomed, upright hull...

  'No, Lieutenant,' said I. 'Mister Landon, you will take us out, if you will.'

  I would not give James Vyvyan the satisfaction of giving the commands, though I did not have the slightest doubt that his uncle had taught him how to do so.

  Landon began the strange litany with a shout. 'Hale in the anchor, there!' The crew on the great spoked man-wheel called the capstan began their push, accompanied by the rhythmic stamping of Ali Reis's foot as he fiddled in time with their efforts. The anchor cable rose from the sea-bed, groaning and wailing like a hundred dying men. Once the anchor was clear of the water, Landon moved from side to side of the quarterdeck, bellowing his instructions in sequence.

  'Let go the weather braces! Loose the mainsail! Cast off the weather sheet! Let fall the mainsail!'

  The cries were repeated by the petty officers in charge of the various parts of the ship, Cornish throats answering Landon's Kentish voice. One by one, the great swathes of Lincolnshire canvas began to fall from their yards, and the light wind breathing across to us from the Isle of Wight began to fill them. Men raced each other up and down the great nets called shrouds that stretched up into the masts. They moved back and forth along the yards and their footropes with a disregard for the height and their own mortality that never ceased to impress and terrify me. At the top of the foremost of our three masts, the simian tin miner Treninnick scuttled about with breathtaking speed, just as Coxswain Lanherne had described. All this time, Landon kept up his ceaseless barrage of commands.

  'Cast off the main brace! Cast off the main topsail! Hale aft the main sheet!'

  At the pull of their teams, great ropes tightened, fixing the sails into place. Landon shouted commands about strange sea-beasts called clewlines, bowlines and the like, and seemed particularly exercised by the incompetence of those attending to a creature called a crojack. James Vyvyan, ten times the seaman that I was, lambasted the men on the main mast for committing the mortal sin of 'luffing'. And there I stood, upon the quarterdeck, watching as if I were a spectator at a play or a bear-baiting; detached, remote, uninvolved.

  We were moving now, indiscernibly at first, but as old Aldred had taught me to do on the Happy Restoration, I lined up my eye on one rope and on the tower of the church at Gosport. Slowly, very slowly, the rope began to move away from the tower. The Jupiter's timbers began to creak a little more, in a song of greeting, or perhaps of protest, to her natural home.

  A ship setting her sails is a glorious sight, especially by evening's dying light. It is truly a sight to elevate even the dullest heart. As we became a proper man-of-war, rather than a great mass of idle wood swaying on an anchor with the tides, I saw the Royal Martyr moving out ahead of us, her sails already well set, her great red-white-red ensign spilling over her stern lanterns, newly lit. Uplifted despite myself by the entire spectacle, I turned cheerily to Phineas Musk.

  'Well, Musk, you're going to sea on a king's ship. What d'you make of it, man?'

  'Rather be in London town, sir, taking ale and veal stew up at the City of York,' the dullest heart replied. Musk was already faintly green, even though the ship's movement was as yet barely noticeable and the wind was the lightest of sighs. But his talk of food and drink reminded me of one duty, at least, that I could perform successfully as captain.

  'Musk, go round the ship and present my compliments to each of the warrant officers. I request–no, I require their company in my cabin at seven o'clock, there to toast success and good fortune to the voyage of the Jupiter.'

  James Vyvyan, who had come up to the quarterdeck and was in earshot, said, 'Two bells of the second dog watch, sir. Not seven o'clock, with respect, when we're at sea.'

  At that moment, I wished the nephew dead, rather than the uncle; although of course, he was entirely right to correct me thus, for the custom of the sea must prevail over even the most ignorant who pass upon it. I corrected myself to Musk, who slouched away in evident bad odour, complaining to himself that the steward to a great noble house had been reduced to a mere messenger boy, carrying invitations to ignorant pettifogging scum like carpenters and surgeons.

  A good gust of wind caught our sails at last. The Jupiter began to make proper headway, and I walked to the starboard rail to take my last look at old Portsmouth before it receded. As I did so, I heard the shout of a lookout–I think it was Trenance–and saw a boat with a small square sail set, tacking rapidly towards us from the Portsmouth shore. It was one of the myriad fishing craft that regularly thronged the Solent, and the boy on the tiller and the man at the sail were presumably father and son, and her regular crew. Between them sat their passenger, Kit Farrell.

  Chapter Eight

  'So Rame Head bears three points away to larboard,' I said uncertainly, staring hard at the headland off to our right, dark and menacing in the morning murk. A little hermit's chapel was just visible on its summit. Behind us, the sun fought a battle to break through dull clouds. It was a cold morn, the day on the cusp of glory or gloom.

  'To starboard, sir,' said Kit Farrell, with unwarranted patience. 'Starboard, right. Larboard, left. We go by the sides of the ship, sir, not by our own viewpoint, so that although the Rame is to your left as you
see it now, it is starboard beam of the ship herself.'

  'That cannot be so, I'd say,' came the dry, quibbling voice of Phineas Musk. Aboard a ship for barely a week and already he fancied himself an expert on the sea, as he did on all else. 'If larboard is left, Mister Farrell, why does Master Landon, there, keep telling the man on that ... that whip-thing down below, to port the helm when he wants us to go left?'

  'The custom of the sea, Mister Musk. Starboard, larboard, are words altogether too similar for commands. Imagine calling one out in a storm, say, and the helmsman at the whipstaff mishearing and setting the ship's head on the other bearing. So if we wish to steer to the larboard, we order "Port the helm!"'

  Musk grunted, evidently still convinced of his own innate superiority and half-suspecting that Kit's 'custom of the sea' was in truth a deliberate ruse designed to confuse and confound Phineas Musk.

  A smile on his round and ruddy face, Kit turned back to me. 'So, Captain, what would you say was now the relative bearing of the ship on our other tack?'

  I looked off to the left–to larboard–to the distant sail that one of our men aloft had first sighted almost an hour before. I was aware of Landon's inscrutable gaze upon me from his position on the far side of the quarterdeck, and was glad that James Vyvyan was asleep below, having stood his watch for most of the night. I looked down at the face of the instrument that Farrell and Landon called a meridian compass, and looked again at the far-off sail. 'Five points,' I said.

  Kit Farrell nodded. 'Five points it is, Captain. And the wind?'

  I looked at the set of our sails, the way that they faced the country beyond Rame, and at our ensign, streaming hard in the strengthening breeze. I recalled how the direction of the breeze had changed the previous evening.