Spaniards, if very much goaded, can act almost as quickly as reasonable beings, and that very afternoon the Lys, a French frigate lying in Callao, the port of Lima, received new orders just before she sailed, requiring her to put in at Valparaiso, to take aboard some prisoners of war, who were to be exchanged. Grumbling, the Lys cast off her moorings, worked out her new course, and in time appeared off the Chilean coast. As soon as she was signalled, don José sent Luisa to stay with her aunt Lopes for the weekend, invited his captives to dinner, told them that although it wounded him to the heart to lose them, they must be gone by dawn, as a French ship happened to be passing by Valparaiso, and it would go against his conscience not to give them the earliest possible opportunity of reaching their native land, their homes and their dear ones.
‘How strange it is to be afloat again, Mr Hamilton,’ said Tobias.
‘Yes,’ said Mr Hamilton. ‘I had thought …’ he began, but paused. They were on the quarter-deck of the Lys, watching Valparaiso vanish as the frigate stood out westwards for Juan Fernandez on a fine southerly wind that flung the brilliant spray over the foc’s’le. Around them the French crew argued passionately about the fore-topgallant sail: the second captain thought it should be reefed; the bo’sun, the helmsman and some of the sailors who happened to be standing by assured him that it would not look pretty reefed; a lieutenant said that in his opinion it ought to be taken in altogether, and one of the cooks warmly supported him; the first captain had no views on the matter at all, being a landsman, but he said somebody really ought to wash the deck – it was positively black.
‘I had thought,’ said Mr Hamilton, moving round the gesticulating form of the bo’sun, ‘that I should enjoy it more, however.’ They exchanged a haggard look of mutual comprehension, and as the Lys rose and sank again on the sickening roll they hurried speechless to the lee-rail.
The Lys was a stout, seaworthy vessel; but she also had some of the qualities of a slug and a sea-going pig. She never went faster than six knots at any time – her masts would blow out before she would do better than this very moderate pace – and whenever she found any sort of a sea, she lay down in it and wallowed. This was not entirely her fault, for she was much overloaded with hundreds of chests of bullion; but she could never have been termed a graceful sailer. She had plenty of opportunity for showing off her little ways, for there was a great deal of sea between Valparaiso and the Horn, and she traversed most of it twice, wallowing steadily all the time: she had to do it twice because she sprang a leak very low down in the forepeak some days out from Concepción, where they had loaded cattle for the voyage, and she was obliged to put back all the way to Valparaiso to repair it, arriving in the middle of February, with all hands, including the passengers, pumping day and night.
By March, when they set out again, the best time for passing the Horn had already gone by, and although rounding that terrible cape from west to east was a very different thing from beating into the perpetual western gales, yet it could not really be described as a picnic. The Horn treated them to twelve distinct howling storms, of a kind that they knew only too well, and they had every reason to congratulate themselves upon being aboard a very solid, well-found vessel: they should have been very thankful, but man is an ungrateful beast, and they were shrilly indignant about the cold and the snow – the snow indeed was unreasonable, pouring in from the south-west in such vast quantities day and night and night and day that it filled the bunt of the sails and loaded the Lys so that she grew even more ponderous, in spite of continual shovelling. Their indignation was rendered none the less shrill by the fact that all their clothes were designed for the climate of Santiago: a very light velvet cloak with a crimson lining is a charming garment for sauntering about in an orange-scented garden in the moonlight, while you gently thrum a guitar, but it is a wretched thing to wrap about you in 6o° S when the air is full of flying crystals of ice – particularly when the said cloak is so threadbare as to be almost transparent in places. Don Manuel’s noble loan had run out long ago, for the very good reason that Jack had spent it much too fast; and for these months past they had been limited to their official prisoner’s allowance of four reals a day.
The snow not only made them precious cold, but it also deprived the Lys of a vitally important supply of fresh water. The day after they had made their final departure from Chile it was noticed that although they were admirably well provided with maritime stores and with solid food, they had forgotten to take in their water. This may have been due to the national prejudice against the use of anything but wine, but it was more probably caused by the strange ideas of discipline current aboard: the average Frenchman is very strongly persuaded that he knows best, and the Lys, with a crew of sixty, had fifty-nine commanders – the sixtieth man being dumb from birth. The singular outcry that accompanied the Lys on every stage of her journey amazed and dumbfounded the Royal Navy: but they were obliged to admit that the frigate had come round the Horn, had somehow reached her destination and was now in the act of repeating the process backwards – a remarkable example of the care of Providence. Yet the French way of leaving everything to the higher powers did not always answer. ‘Blue belly!’ cried the second captain, in his native idiom. ‘Sacred blue! Name of a pipe! You have forgotten the water, my faith!’
‘It was not me,’ said the lieutenant sulkily. ‘Besides, there is some that was overlooked from the voyage out. And anyhow, you know how it rains off the Horn: we shall spread a sail and catch as much as we need.’
So on the second day of their voyage they were put to short allowance – a quart a head – and they waited confidently for the rain. But snow, though beautiful and very highly picturesque indeed, is not rain. Philosophically it is all one, perhaps, but you cannot fill a triple tier of water-casks with a blizzard – it is not feasible. They therefore rounded the Horn on a quart a day and began to work up northwards on the same allowance. They kept far, far out to sea, for both captains and the entire crew had a mortal (and very understandable) dread of falling in with the land, and they did not have so much as a shower all through April, nor a drop of rain in May. The winds were kind, the Lys waddled northward at her usual mad speed day after day, a steady creep that might carry her a hundred sea-miles in the twenty-four hours, and the weather grew continually warmer. The daily quart seemed to shrink as they came up to Capricorn, and between the tropic and the line thirst checked the garrulity of the crew to a shocking extent. They reached the equator at the end of May, and after a very hoarse, though protracted discussion it was decided that it would be impossible to reach Europe without a fresh supply, and that they must therefore bear away for Martinique.
This decision was reached with the help of everyone aboard, including the prisoners and the passengers, who, in the prevailing atmosphere of free and democratic discussion (liberty and moral equality and a weakness for making speeches flourished in France long before the Revolution), could not refrain from putting forward their views and sentiments. One of the passengers was don Jorge Juan, who, with some French academicians, had been carrying out philosophical experiments in Peru, measuring degrees of the meridian: he and Tobias pressed very strongly for a detour to Martinique; and there can be no doubt that their advice was influenced by their vehement desire to view the flora and fauna of the West Indies. Captain Cheap was of the same opinion. His advice was even more disingenuous, for he knew very well that there would be British cruisers abroad throughout the Caribbean. He knew that there was no area, outside the chops of the Channel, that was so rich in prizes, nowhere where the Navy cruised with livelier attention – nowhere more likely for the Lys to be taken. He had never come to a tolerable command of Spanish, let alone of French, so he bade Tobias translate for him; and he dwelt very forcibly and lugubriously upon the horrors of a death from thirst in the breathless heal of the doldrums.
Right or wrong the decision was taken: the quartermaster (who happened to be of the contrary opinion) was persuaded to alter course, and they s
teered west-north-west. At the very end of June they made Tobago in the morning, their first sight of land for three months and more – a hundred days of sea, rough, calm, foggy, clear, black with dead-white foam, pure sapphire blue, grey, glaucous and an infinity of colours between, but always fluid and always stretching to the horizon. After three months of sea, particularly when you do not see another ship in all that time, you begin to feel that water is the natural covering of the globe; you begin to doubt the reality of the solid world; and for this reason (as well as a certain reluctance to die of thirst) their landfall was intensely interesting. Tobago jutted black out of the sea, cutting the sky with a hard, ragged line, and the people of the Lys lined the side, staring at the island with as much satisfaction as the inhabitants of the ark when they first saw Ararat above the flood.
From Tobago they shaped their course for Martinique, two days’ sail northwards: but somehow they could not find the island – it did not appear where they looked for it. This will surprise no landsman who, reflecting upon the size of the island and the immense amount of sea in which it is hidden, is amazed that any ship should ever reach it at all, rather than that one should miss: but it is always apt to vex a mariner, and the Lys bore away south-west by south in a thoroughly bad temper. It was thought that the currents had carried them eastward, but when, after a hundred miles, Martinique still did not appear, they decided that they had been mistaken, that they must have been set to the west all the time, and that the thing to do was to steer north until they found Porto Rico (too big to be missed) and start again from there. This they did, and having found Porto Rico they stopped for the night – a very sensible precaution, in Tobias’ opinion, that might with advantage be adopted in the Royal Navy – and steered, the next morning, for the channel between Porto Rico and Hispaniola. Jack was walking on the quarter-deck, admiring the bright blue world and digesting a leisurely breakfast of fried barracuda; Tobias and don Jorge were arguing about mice, and Mr Hamilton was darning his stockings with military precision and a piece of llama’s wool when Captain Cheap suddenly appeared. His usually greyish-yellow face was red; he had an extraordinarily furtive air. ‘Do not display any emotion,’ he whispered to Jack, ‘but look – look.’
There was a barrel bobbing by the frigate’s side, an empty barrel. It turned, light and airy in the breeze, and all at once Jack’s heart gave a great thump – it was a beef-barrel from a man-of-war: there was no mistaking the familiar marks. ‘I was so near to it below that I could not be wrong,’ said the captain, ‘and if we do not see a cruiser before the end of the watch you may call me a looby. That barrel has not been in the sea above an hour.’ He looked up at the masthead – as usual, there was no look-out there – and he said, ‘We must not arouse their suspicions – engage the officers in conversation as much as you can – I shall tell the others.’ He walked off, humming loudly, with a very elaborate affectation of unconsciousness. Soon all the prisoners shared something of the same air; they were unnaturally gay, feverish and talkative; they kept stealing hidden glances round the horizon; and their captors looked at them with amazement and dismay.
Presently a little white fleck showed on the clear horizon: ten minutes later the fleck resolved itself into three – the topgallants of a ship, for certain, and a little beyond there was another. Jack’s flow of talk redoubled, but he was running out of topics, and he had begun to grow very tedious indeed (though not as tedious as Tobias, who had pinned a lieutenant against the binnacle with an unending account of the domestic economy of the honey-bee) when a seaman, walking about the poop, happened to notice that there were two ships, top-sails up already, in their immediate neighbourhood. He gave the alarm, and now, of course, people hurried up to the masthead in great numbers: from there it was quite obvious that the ships were men-of-war, a two-decker and a twenty-gun ship, and that they were in chase of the Lys.
The morning’s breeze was failing fast; by noon it had died to a flat calm, and all the Lys’s canvas (she had spread every stitch she possessed) flapped idly under the sun. In the first panic of the chase her people had determined to run the frigate ashore upon Porto Rico, but now a little reflection upon the character of the Porto Ricans had decided them to take their chance and run for it, north through the Mona Passage. Noon passed, and at four in the afternoon a wind began to sing in the rigging; the Lys heeled a trifle and the water gurgled along her side. The cruisers, away to the leeward, dropped hull-down over the horizon. But very soon they too had the wind; and now, as the sun declined, they came up so fast that it was evident that they could sail three miles to the Lys’s two. The Frenchmen looked hopelessly at their pursuers, and the officers went to their cabins to fill their pockets with their most valuable possessions: the men put on their best clothes, and as the sun went down in a blaze of crimson, a party of them came to where Jack and Tobias were standing in order to give them the nuggets and the little heavy soft leather bags of gold-dust that they had acquired in the New World; for although the English did not usually strip their lower-deck prisoners, they had never been known to let the smallest particle of gold escape them; and, the sailors said, they would rather their friends profited by their capture than people quite unknown.
The prisoners’ most difficult task, in these last hours of the day, was to conceal their glee, and to watch, with a decent show of indifference, the steady approach of their freedom and deliverance. When the sun, with its customary tropical abruptness, dropped below the edge of the sea, the two-decker was hull-up from the quarter-deck of the Lys, and with her studding-sails abroad she was gaining so fast that half an hour would bring her within random shot. In the short interval of velvet darkness before moonrise the Lys altered her course and dowsed her lights, but in this faint breeze she had little hope of gaining any useful distance, and the prisoners, immovably on deck, expected to see the ships alongside at any moment of the night, to hear the warning shot, the English hail and the rattle of the French colours coming down.
‘I suppose there is no danger of their going to sleep?’ said Tobias, in the starlit night. No, they all said, very sharply, there was no such danger – the Royal Navy never went to sleep – did he not know that much, after all this time at sea? – how could he be so strange? – if he had nothing more sensible to say, he might save his breath to cool his porridge – and might as well go to sleep himself, and pass no further remarks.
Tobias followed their advice, and, having a clear conscience and a supple frame inured to hardship, he slept until daylight. He awoke wet with dew, and stared vacantly around for a moment: the sight of Jack pacing moodily to and fro brought it all back to him, and the sight of Jack’s face told him what to expect. The broad Caribbean was as empty as could be; all round the horizon the blue sea was unbroken by the slightest glint of a sail. The Lys was alone, save for a turtle sleeping on the surface a little way off her starboard beam and a man-of-war bird high over the cheerful look-out at the masthead.
The crew were in a charming flow of spirits; they skipped about the deck and carolled in the rigging like so many canary birds, and they were particularly kind and considerate to their downcast prisoners. The first captain broke out his last canister of coffee and sent some of it along to Captain Cheap with his compliments; the cooks (there were five aboard) did their best to allay Jack’s disappointment with an extraordinary object called a pouding anglais. It was not very like anything known on land or sea, but it was very well meant, and it did at least, by its very mass, have a deadening effect. Jack laid down his fork and gave Tobias to understand that the whole thing did not signify, and that after all a French ship would carry them back to Europe just as well as any other – rather quicker, indeed, than if they had to stay aboard a cruiser and then wait about in Jamaica for a homeward-bound convoy.
Convoys, homeward or outward bound, ancient or modern, are governed by a very curious natural law that causes them to blunder about over the surface of the ocean like a mob of half-witted sheep. Ships that behave perfectly wel
l alone become over-excited in a crowd: the merchant captains lose their seamanship, the seamen forget that there is quite a difference between port and starboard and the vessels fall aboard of one another in the most stupefying manner. At one time, in the convoy from Martinique to France to which the Lys belonged, there were no less than eight all together in the morning, some with their bowsprits through the others’ shrouds, some with their yardarms entangled, some apparently lashed together for mutual support, while the men-of-war fumed with impatience and fired whole broadsides to enforce the signal to make sail: and all the while a fast-sailing privateer from Jamaica hovered to windward to make prize of the stragglers.
Slowly across the Atlantic, fifty sail of merchantmen and five men-of-war, with tempers growing shorter every day. The French admiral ran one of the wandering captains up to his main-yardarm and ducked him three times, by way of encouraging the others to keep station, but nothing would answer, and by the time they made Cape Ortegal the poor admiral was as nearly speechless as it is possible for a Frenchman to become, from mere rage.
But it profits us little to contemplate the coarse sentiments of the French admiral: nor would it be improving, or even decent, to record his words when, upon dropping anchor at last in Brest road, his flagship was rammed smartly from behind by the heaviest of the West-Indiamen, and we shall pass them over, together with the dreary interval that the prisoners were obliged to spend in France before orders came down to allow them to go home in the first neutral ship that offered.
The Unknown Shore Page 31
