Master & Commander a-1

by Patrick O'Brian

  'Lord, what a pretty action that was,' said Jack, when the door was closed. 'A hundred and forty-six to fourteen; or fifteen if you count Mrs Dockray. It is just the kind of thing Nelson might have done – prompt – straight at 'em.'

  'You know Lord Nelson, sir?'

  'I had the honour of serving under him at the Nile,' said Jack, 'and of dining in his company twice.' His face broke into a smile at the recollection.

  'May I beg you to tell me what kind of a man he is?'

  'Oh, you would take to him directly, I am sure. He is very slight – frail – I could pick him up (I mean no disrespect) with one hand. But you know he is a very great man directly There is something in philosophy called an electrical particle, is there not? A charged atom, if you follow me. He spoke to me on each occasion. The first time it was to say, "May I trouble you for the salt, sir?"

  – I have always said it as close as I can to his way ever since – you may have noticed it. But the second time I was trying to make my neighbour, a soldier, understand our naval tactics – weather-gage, breaking the line, and so on – and in a pause he leant over with such a smile and said, "Never mind manoeuvres, always go at them." I shall never forget it: never mind manoeuvres – always go at 'em. And at that same dinner he was telling us all how someone had offered him a boat-cloak on a cold night and he had said no, he was quite warm – his zeal for his King and country kept him warm. It sounds absurd, as I tell it, does it not?

  And was it another man, any other man, you would cry out "oh, what pitiful stuff" and dismiss it as mere enthusiasm; but with him you feel your bosom glow, and – now what in the devil's name is it, Mr Richards? Come in or out, there's a good fellow. Don't stand in the door like a God-damned Lenten cock.'

  'Sir,' said the poor clerk, 'you said I might bring you the remaining papers before tea, and your tea is just coming up.'

  'Well, well: so I did,' said Jack. 'God, what an infernal heap. Leave them here, Mr Richards. I will see to them before we reach Cagliari.'

  'The top ones are those which Captain Allen left to be written fair – they only need to be signed, sir,' said the clerk, backing out.

  Jack glanced at the top of the pile, paused, then cried, 'There! There you are. Just so. There's the service for you from clew to earing – the Royal Navy, stock and fluke. You get into a fine flow of patriotic fervour – you are ready to plunge into the thick of the battle – and you are asked to sign this sort of thing.' He passed Stephen the carefully-written sheet.

  His Majesty's Sloop Sophie at sea

  My Lord,

  I am to beg you will be pleased to order a Court Martial to be held on Isaac Wilson (seaman) belonging to the Sloop I have the honour to Command for having committed the unnatural Crime of Sodomy on a Goat, in the Goathouse, on the evening of March 16th.

  I have the Honour' to remain, my Lord,

  Your Lordship's most obedient very humble servant

  The Rt. Hon. Lord Keith, K.B., etc., etc.

  Admiral of the Blue.

  'It is odd how the law always harps upon the unnaturalness of sodomy,' observed Stephen. 'Though I know at least two judges who are paederasts; and of course barristers

  What will happen to him?'

  'Oh, he'll be hanged. Run up at the yard-arm, and boats attending from every ship in the fleet.'

  'That seems a little extreme.'

  'Of course it is. Oh, what an infernal bore – witnesses going over to the flagship by the dozen, days lost… The Sophie a laughing-stock. Why will they report these things? The goat must be slaughtered – that's but fair – and it shall be served out to the mess that informed on him.'

  'Could you not set them both ashore – on separate shores, if you have strong feelings on the moral issue – and sail quietly away?'

  'Well,' said Jack, whose anger had died down. 'Perhaps there is something in what you propose. A dish of tea? You take milk, sir?'

  'Goat's milk, sir?'

  'Why, I suppose it is.'

  'Perhaps without milk, then, if you please. You told me, I believe, that the gunner was ailing. Would this be a convenient time for seeing what I can do for him? Pray, which is the gun-room?'

  'You would expect to find him there, would you not? But in fact his cabin is elsewhere nowadays. Killick will show you. The gun-room, in a sloop, is where the officers mess.'

  In the gun-room itself the master stretched and said to the purser, 'Plenty of elbow-room now, Mr Ricketts.'

  'Very true, Mr Marshall,' said the purser. 'We see great changes these days. And how they will work out I do not know.'

  'Oh, I think they may answer well enough,' said Mr Marshall, slowly picking the crumbs off his waistcoat.

  'All these capers,' went on the purser, in a low, dubious voice. 'The mainyard. The guns. The drafts he pretended to know nothing about. All these new hands there is not room for. The people at watch and watch. Charlie tells me there is a great deal of murmuring.' He jerked his head towards the men's quarters.

  'I dare say there is. I dare say there is. All the old ways changed and all the old messes broken up. And I dare say we may be a little flighty, too, so young and fine with our brand-new epaulette. But if the steady old standing officers back him up, why, then I think it may answer well enough. The carpenter likes him. So does Watt, for he's a good seaman, and that's certain. And Mr Dillon seems to know his profession, too.'

  'Maybe. Maybe,' said the purser, who knew the master's enthusiasms of old.

  'And then again,' went on Mr Marshall, 'things may be a little more lively under the new proprietor. The men will like that, when they grow used to it; and so will the officers,

  I am sure. All that is wanted is for the standing officers to back him up, and it will be plain sailing.'

  'What?' said the purser, cupping his ear, for Mr Dillon was having the guns moved, and amid the general rumbling thunder that accompanied this operation an occasional louder bang obliterated speech. Incidentally, it was this all-pervasive thunder that made their conversation possible, for in general there could be no such thing as private talk in a vessel twenty-six yards long, inhabited by ninety-one men, whose gun-room had even smaller apartments opening off it, screened by very thin wood and, indeed, sometimes by no more than canvas.

  'Plain sailing. I say, if the officers back him up, it will all be plain sailing.'

  'Maybe. But if they do not,' went on Mr Ricketts, 'if they do not, and if he persists in capers of this kind -which I believe it is his nature so to do – why then, I dare say he will exchange out of the old Sophie as quick as Mr Harvey did. For a brig is not a frigate, far less a ship of the line: you are right on top of your people, and they can give you hell or cause you to be broke as easy as kiss my hand.'

  'You don't have to tell me a brig is not a frigate, nor yet a ship of the line, Mr Ricketts,' said the master.

  'Maybe I don't have to tell you a brig is not a frigate, 4 nor yet a ship of the line, Mr Marshall,' said the purser warmly. 'But when you have been at sea as long as I have, Mr Marshall, you will know there is a great deal more than mere seamanship required of a captain. Any damned tarpaulin can manage a ship in a storm,' he went on in a slighting voice, 'and any housewife in breeches can keep the decks clean and the falls just so; but it needs a headpiece' - tapping his own – 'and true bottom and steadiness, as well as conduct, to be the captain of a man-o'-war: and these are qualities not to be found in every Johnny-come-lately – nor in every Jack-lie-by-the-wall, neither,' he added, more or less to himself. 'I don't know, I'm sure.'

  Chapter Four

  The drum rolled and thundered at the Sophie's hatchway. Feet came racing up from below, a desperate rushing sound that made even the tense drum-beat seem more urgent. But apart from the landmen's in the new draft, the men's faces were calm; for this was beating to quarters, an afternoon ritual that many of the crew had performed some two or three thousand times, each running to a particular place by one allotted gun or to a given set of ropes that he knew by heart.
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  No one could have called this a creditable performance, however. Much had been changed in the Sophie's comfortable old routine; the manning of the guns was different; a score of worried, sheep-like landmen had to be pushed and pulled into something like the right place; and since most of the newcomers could not yet be allowed to do anything more than heave under guidance, the sloop's waist was so crowded that men trampled upon one another's toes.

  Ten minutes passed while the Sophie's people seethed about her upper deck and her fighting-tops: Jack stood watching placidly abaft the wheel while Dillon barked orders and the warrant-officers and midshipmen darted furiously about, aware of their captain's gaze and conscious that their anxiety was not improving anything at all. Jack had expected something of a shambles, though not anything quite so unholy as this; but his native good-humour and the delight of feeling even the inept stirring of this machine under his control overcame all other, more righteous, emotions.

  'Why do they do this?' asked Stephen, at his elbow. 'Why do they run about so earnestly?'

  'The idea is that every man shall know exactly where to go in action – in an emergency,' said Jack. 'It would never do if they had to stand pondering. The gun-teams are there at their stations already, you see; and so are Sergeant Quinn's marines, here. The foc's'le men are all there, as far as I can make out; and I dare say the waisters will be in order presently. A captain to each gun, do you see; and a sponger and boarder next to him – the man with the belt and cutlass; they join the boarding-party; and a sail-trimmer, who leaves the gun if we have to brace the yards round, for example, in action; and a fireman, the one with the bucket – his task is to dash out any fire that may start. Now there is Pullings reporting his division ready to Dillon. We shall not be long now.'

  There were plenty of people on the little quarter-deck – the master at the con, the quartermaster at the wheel, the marine sergeant and his small-arms party, the signal midshipman, part of the afterguard, the gun-crews, James Dillon, the clerk, and still others – but Jack and Stephen paced up and down as though they were alone, Jack enveloped in the Olympian majesty of a captain and Stephen caught up within his aura. It was natural enough to Jack, who had known this state of affairs since he was a child, but it was the first time that Stephen had met with it, and it gave him a not altogether disagreeable sensation of waking death: either the absorbed, attentive men on the other side of the glass wall were dead, mere phantasmata, or he was – though in that case it was a strange little death, for although he was used to this sense of isolation, of being a colourless shack in a silent private underworld, he now had a companion, an audible companion. your station, for example, would be below, in what we call the cockpit – not that it is a real cockpit, any more than that fo'c'sle is a real fo'c'sle, in the sense of being raised: but we call it the cockpit – with the midshipmen's sea-chests as your operating table and your instruments all ready.'

  'Is that where I should live?'

  'No, no. We shall fix you up with something better than that. Even when you come under the Articles of War,' said Jack with a smile, 'you will find that we still honour learning; at least to the extent of ten square feet of privacy, and as much fresh air on the quarter-deck as you may choose to breathe in.'

  Stephen nodded. 'Tell me,' he said, in a low voice, some moments later. 'Were I under naval discipline, could that fellow have me whipped?' He nodded towards Mr Marshall.

  'The master?' cried Jack, with inexpressible amazement. 'Yes,' said Stephen, looking attentively at him, with his head slightly inclined to the left.

  'But he is the master…' said Jack. If Stephen had called the Sophie's stem her stern, or her truck her keel, he would have understood the situation directly; but that Stephen should confuse the chain of command, the relative status of a captain and a master, of a commissioned officer and a warrant officer, so subverted the natural order, so undermined the sempiternal universe, that for a moment his mind could hardly encompass it. Yet Jack, though no great scholar, no judge of a hexameter, was tolerably quick, and after gasping no more than twice he said, 'My dear sir, I believe you have been led astray by the words master and master and commander – illogical terms, I must confess. The first is subordinate to the second. You must allow me to explain our naval ranks some time. But in any case you will never be flogged – no, no; you shall not be flogged,' he added, gazing with pure affection, and with something like awe, at so magnificent a prodigy, at an ignorance so very far beyond anything that even his wide-ranging mind had yet conceived.

  James Dillon broke through the glass wall. 'Hands at quarters, sir, if you please,' he said, raising his three-corner hat.

  'Very well, Mr Dillon,' said Jack. 'We will exercise the great guns.

  A four-pounder may not throw a very great weight of metal, and it not be able to pierce two feet of oak half a mile away, as a thirty-two-pounder can; but it does throw a solid three-inch cast-iron ball at a thousand feet a second, which is an ugly thing to receive; and the gun itself is a formidable machine. Its barrel is six feet long; it weighs twelve hundredweight; it stands on a ponderous oak carriage; and when it is fired it leaps back as though it were violently alive.

  The Sophie possessed fourteen of these, seven a side; and the two aftermost guns on the quarter-deck were gleaming brass. Each gun had a crew of four and a man or boy to bring up powder from the magazine. Each group of guns was in charge of a midshipman or a master's mate – Pullings had the six forward guns, Ricketts the four in the waist and Babbington the four farthest aft.

  'Mr Babbington, where is this gun's powder horn?' asked Jack coldly.

  'I don't know, sir,' stammered Babbington, very red. 'It seems to have gone astray.'

  'Quarter-gunner,' said Jack, 'go to Mr Day – no, to his mate, for he is sick – and get another.' His inspection showed no other obvious shortcomings: but when he had had both broadsides run in and out half a dozen times – that is to say when the men had been through all the motions short of actually firing the guns – his face grew long and grave. They were quite extraordinarily slow. They had obviously been trained to fire nothing but whole broadsides at once – very little independent firing. They seemed quite happy with easing their guns gently up to the port at the rate of the slowest of them all: and the whole exercise had an artificial, wooden air. It was true that ordinary convoy-duty in a sloop did not give the men any very passionate conviction of the guns' vital reality, but even so… 'How I wish I could afford a few barrels of powder,' he thought, with a clear image of the gunner's accounts in his mind: forty-nine half barrels in all, seven under the Sophie's full allowance; forty-one of the red, large grain, seven of them white, large grain – restored powder of doubtful strength – and one barrel of fine grain for priming. The barrels held forty-five pounds, so the Sophie would nearly empty one with each double broadside. 'But even so,' he went on, 'I think we can have a couple of rounds: God knows how long these charges have been lying in the guns. Besides,' he added in a voice within his inner voice – a voice from a far deeper level, 'think of the lovely smell.'

  'Very well,' he said aloud. 'Mr Mowett, be so good as to go into my cabin. Sit down by the table-watch and take exact note of the time that elapses between the first and second discharge of each gun. Mr Pullings, we'll start with your division. Number one. Silence, fore and aft.'

  Dead silence fell over the Sophie. The wind sang evenly in her taut weather-rigging, steady at two points abaft the beam. Number one's crew licked their lips nervously. Their gun was in its ordinary position of rest, bowsed up tight against its port and lashed there – put away, as it were.

  'Cast loose your gun.'

  They cast loose the tackles that held the gun hard against the side and cut the spun-yarn frapping that clenched the breeching to hold it firmer still. With a gentle squeal of trucks the gun showed that it was free: a man held each side-tackle, or the Sophie's heel (which made the rear-tackle unnecessary) would have brought the gun inboard before the next word of command.
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  'Level your gun.'

  The sponger pushed his handspike under the thick breech of the gun and with a quick heave levered it up, while number one's captain thrust the wooden wedge more than half-way under, bringing the barrel to the horizontal pointblank position.

  'Out tompion.'

  They let the gun run in fast: the breeching checked its inward course when the muzzle was a foot or so inboard: the sail-trimmer whipped out the carved and painted tompion that plugged it.

  'Run out your gun.'

  Clapping on to the side-tackles they heaved her up hand over hand, running the carriage hard against the side and coiling the falls, coiling them down in wonderfully neat little fakes.

  'Prime.'

  The captain took his priming-iron, thrust it down the touch-hole and pierced the flannel cartridge lying within the gun, poured fine powder from his horn into the open vent and on to the pan, bruising it industriously with the nozzle. The sponger put the flat of his hand over the powder to prevent its blowing away, and the fireman slung the horn behind his back.

  'Point your gun.' And to this order Jack added, 'As she lies,' since he wished to add no complications of traversing or elevating for range at this stage. Two of the gun's crew were now holding the side tackles: the sponger knelt on one side with his head away from the gun, blowing gently on the smouldering slow-match he had taken from its little tub (for the Sophie did not run to flintlocks): the powder-boy stood with the next cartridge in its leather box over on the starboard side directly behind the gun: the captain, holding his vent-bit and sheltering the priming, bent over the gun, staring along its barrel.

  'Fire.'

  The slow-match whipped across. The captain stubbed it hard down on to the priming. For an infinitesimal spark of time there was a hissing, a flash, and then the gun went off with the round, satisfying bang of a pound and more of hard-rammed powder exploding in a confined space. A stab of crimson flame in the smoke, flying morsels of wad, the gun shooting eight feet backwards under the arched body of its captain and between the members of its crew, the deep twang of the breeching as it brought up the recoil -all these were virtually inseparable in time; and before they were over the next order came.