Man Of War mh-9

by Allan Mallinson

  ‘Your pleasure, then, sir?’

  It was an old-fashioned locution, but it seemed apt: they stood on the quarterdeck of a first-rate, within hailing of that brave Rock, as if waiting to step onto the stage – and a great stage at that. The wind was freshening; Peto clasped his hands decisively behind his back, and gave the order to begin the great undertaking: ‘Weigh anchor; make sail!’

  Lambe smiled with that knowing pride that properly passed between a lieutenant and his captain. ‘Ay-ay, sir!’

  It was six bells of the afternoon watch, one hour before the supper time. Hands knew they must be doubly sharp about it, and the officers that their new captain would be watching like a hawk. Peto adjusted his watch to the ship’s time – three o’clock – clasped his hands more tightly behind his back and affected all the detachment he could. He would hope to speak not at all until sail was set (and here he would learn what sort of a sailing-master he had in Shand, a warrant officer he had not before encountered), and then he would tell Lambe to set a course for Syracuse.

  At once the little boats – the girls and ‘Jews’ – were all of a bob as the trade were bustled off ship unceremoniously, with or without their earnings, and the merchants with or without their credit. Boatswain’s mates did the bustling, while the officers did their best at placating. But this was one of His Majesty’s ships of war, and there was no room for argument once the captain had given an order: everywhere was activity, and all directed to the execution of that command.

  On the middle gun-deck eight dozen men, marines mainly, began bearing on the capstan bars – donkey work if ever there was – while on the lower deck, the ship’s boys stood ready to lash the messenger rope, which the capstan turned, to the anchor cable as it came through the hawse hole, and then to follow it aft to the hatchway and unclip the ‘nipper’ so that the cable passed down to the orlop deck, where as many men again stood by to stow it. Weighing anchor was the least popular of all the dangerous and gruelling work of a ship’s routine, as noisome on the orlop (the cable was invariably rank after any time in the water) as it was backbreaking at the capstan. Only the nippers enjoyed it, as well they might, for they had to be agile and dextrous rather than mere substitutes for horsepower.

  Had he been aboard Nisus, Peto could have observed this work; from Rupert’s quarterdeck he would see only the forecastle gang, mustered ready to cat and fish the anchor. They would be all he saw of the industry required to raise it (or them if the current required more than one anchor: there were two at the bow, eighty hundredweight apiece, and the burden of the sodden cable on top of that). He could not judge with what effort and skill the crew worked, only by the result – which, in the end, was all that must concern him.

  Meanwhile, all hands not bent to weighing anchor – the starboard watch and the idlers – fell in to their stations, the topmen confidently climbing the shrouds and edging along the yards, ready. The master had ordered all sail set. Peto approved. The wind was quite decidedly freshening, but it would be as well to get decent steerage-way to round the point of the Rock without having to stand too much out to sea. They would have to get the topgallants in once they were in open water if the wind continued to blow up like this, but in all probability that would be a couple of hours more – time at least for the larboard watch to have something hot inside them.

  ‘Signal to Archer: Take station to windward.’

  ‘Ay-ay, sir!’ The signal midshipman scuttled off to the poop deck and his flag lockers. An easy signal: Peto noted that he had it run up in under the minute.

  ‘Anchor aweigh, sir!’ came the call from the hawse hole not long after, repeated up the hatchways until the quarterdeck had it.

  Peto nodded, if barely perceptibly. An efficient signal officer, and the anchor off the seabed sharply: it was as it should be, but he had known it otherwise. The master made no move, however. Peto wondered, but then thought him right: with a full set of sail and a lee anchor there was every chance of fouling. Better to wait until the ring broke surface and the hook of the cat tackle had been put through.

  In a few minutes more, ‘Hooked!’ came the cry, and at once the master raised his speaking-trumpet: ‘Halyards!’

  Peto checked his watch. Fifteen minutes: not too bad in twenty fathoms. But it was the topmen he wanted to see. They had gone up the shrouds smartly enough – but a ship at anchor and nothing but a breeze . . .

  The foremast topmen had the gaskets off the fastest, then the main and mizzen at one and the same time, topgallant yards first, then tops and then lower – just as should be, a sight to please the most critical gaze. Peto screwed up his eyes in the sudden glare as the chalk-white canvas unfurled evenly, like rolls of haberdasher’s calico on a show-frame, the sail trimmers so deft with the sheets that the light wind at once caught sail full and braced. Off came the topmen smartly, and then the master’s mates barked at the trimmers to haul on the ties and halyards to raise the yards.

  Rupert was under weigh. Peto checked his watch again: five more minutes.

  Lambe saw, and was certain they were deserving of praise. ‘They were good topmen we had out of Portsmouth, sir, and they had a fair go of it in Biscay.’

  ‘Very gratifying, Mr Lambe,’ agreed Peto, with just enough of a note of encouragement while reserving his final judgement. He would want to see them shorten sail in a squall before pronouncing himself entirely satisfied. ‘The gun-crews?’

  ‘Not so practised, I’m afraid, sir. Guns were double lashed for most of the passage.’

  ‘Mm.’ Peto was not so sure. A frigate was tossed about a good deal more than a three-decker, and he had not had occasion to run more than a couple of days without drilling the gun-crews. ‘Could they not have exercised on the upper deck?’ The lightest guns of the main battery were naturally on the upper deck (he had been glad to find the eighteen-pounder – which had served him so well in Nisus – on Rupert’s upper deck, rather than the twenty-four as had lately been fashionable).

  ‘They could have, yes, sir.’

  Peto would not press him. It was the captain’s business to exercise the crew, and he suspected Lambe had done his best. ‘Well, we had better clear for action tomorrow and have a thorough go.’

  Lambe had expected it. Peto’s reputation assuredly sailed before him. But it was one thing to exercise the crews by gun or even deck, and quite another by broadside. He knew it would be a not altogether happy affair: the standing officers and mates would know their business well enough, but the landsmen . . . There would be shouting, cursing and a good deal of bruising; perhaps a case or two for the surgeon, or even for the chaplain. But if they were to see action they must needs learn soon how to clear quickly and completely – and the lieutenants how to command their gun-decks. There was nothing quite like a man-of-war broadsiding. ‘Ay-ay, sir!’ he rasped.

  Peto returned to his attitude of studied silence. It was strange, he marked, how the sounds of the ship – the creaking of timber, the groaning of rigging and sail – he heard, but at the back of his mind. Hear them he must, for they told him how his new ship handled, but he did not have to listen; long years at sea had somehow accustomed his ear to effortless attention. Yet the screaming of the gulls above the promising wake commanded his notice just as if they had been his crew speaking, for they seemed to be welcoming him back to their world. He had been ashore some time, after all. On the beach indeed.

  And what a world it was, his as much as theirs, the prospect restorative, the sun on his back, so that he felt as some basking amphibian warming on a stone to invigorate its colder blood. Soon he would be entirely in his element again. Unless he looked aft, the sun he now saw only in effect and reflection – the lengthening shadows on the deck, the glinting white horses as the sea heaped at the bows – but it was the sun of the Mediterranean, of the south: it touched him differently; it touched the water differently. And although there was not yet the taste of salt on his lips, the air was the briny pure of the ocean, as different from that on land as c
ountry air from town.

  He breathed it deep but hid his contentment. For the moment he must observe how Rupert answered, how she ran. Her master knew best her sailing qualities, and he would watch without words (if that were possible, strange as it felt) as Mr Shand conned her beyond the Punta de Europa and into the Mediterranean true. Then, with sea space enough for Rupert to make headway in any wind, he could retire to his cabin to read more of her papers while the boatswain piped hands to supper: a half-hour’s solitude perhaps, until at five o’clock, an hour or so before dark, Lambe would call the crew to their stations, the guns would be cast loose, the pumps rigged, the lifebuoys placed in position, and the quarterdeck officers – the lieutenants and midshipmen – would make their inspection and report to him, and thence to the captain, that the ship was in good order for the night. After that – and not before – he, Peto, could retire, bathe, change his linen and . . . (he sighed) entertain Miss Rebecca Codrington.

  The very devil of it! His first evening he would as a rule have had his lieutenant and two or three of the others, the master perhaps, and the chaplain (being a son of the parsonage, despite some distinctly unreligious views, he did favour a chaplain when there was one, which was not often on a frigate, and certainly never in his experience one of any profound learning – ‘the Reverend Mr Lack-Latin’). Why in heaven’s name was Codrington’s daughter going to Malta? He sighed again, and shrugged: fool of a question; why should she not be going to Malta? That was what daughters did, he supposed – go to see their fathers. He shook his head; it was extraordinary how little he knew of what young ladies did. Except that Miss Rebecca Codrington was but a child. He shook his head again. No, that would not do. She was by his own reckoning thirteen or fourteen: no longer, as the rascals of the midshipmen’s berth would have it, ‘jail-bait’. But as far as he was concerned Miss Rebecca Codrington was a minor – whatever the law said – and he would not have her subjected to any familiarity. Then came further doubts: he supposed she ate the same food as a grown-up woman . . .

  With the wind now abeam and freshening by the minute (he pulled his hat on a fraction tighter), they were beginning to make leeway. There was more than enough sea space to tack clear of the point, however, or even to wear it, especially with the sea running so calm. Peto was beginning to wonder when the master would take in sail, or brace them round, but Mr Shand merely turned Rupert another point into the wind. Still he would not interfere: the ship was in no danger. Shand was just risking having to call all hands on deck to shorten sail quickly.

  In five more minutes Peto saw for certain that Rupert’s line of movement through the water would take her well clear of the point, and with the wind veering if anything she would probably only increase the clearing distance. Nisus would not have answered like that, he knew; she would be making more leeway, and running perhaps two knots faster. He had told the old hands that a three-decker could handle as well as a frigate, and he knew it – as long as the captain gave his orders five knots faster. He would, anyway, have to learn Rupert’s handling keenly, and he was glad of Shand’s no doubt unintended demonstration of how she ran in light airs.

  Half an hour later, Shand ordered the helm to starboard, and sail braced square. Rupert’s bow began turning away from the wind and the fast-falling sun, and the smiles on the faces of trimmers and topmen alike said it all. The screaming of the gulls fell away to the growing noise of timber and rope, the assurance that the ship was straining – working.

  ‘Carry on, Mr Lambe,’ said Peto, satisfied, quitting his chosen place aft of the wheel and to weather, touching his hat to acknowledge the salute he did not see but knew had been given. He could now at least leave the quarter-deck, entirely content, and with that face the prospect of dinner with some equanimity.

  He went to his cabin. Flowerdew had laid the table already. The glasses, flatware and cutlery were well set, with not the slightest disturbance as Rupert continued to gather speed. He wondered if Miss Rebecca Codrington suffered at all from seasickness, for if she did she was fortunate indeed that there was such weather at this time of year; the change of seasons could bring the severest of storms in the western Mediterranean. Seasickness had never troubled him, no matter how heavy the weather. He fancied he could at least in that respect claim superiority to Nelson; and to countless others, for that matter – seasoned hands – who would cast up for days in the lightest swell at the start of a voyage, until they found their sea legs, to remain untroubled by the worst of things thereafter. It would, of course, be more convenient if his passenger confined herself to her cabin (though the crew would not be able to clear so fully for practice-action tomorrow), but he would wish seasickness on no one save the King’s enemies.

  He sat in his ‘Madeira chair’ and shuffled a few papers. None of them detained him (the purser, and his clerk, had done their work well). He laid them aside, and took out Elizabeth’s letter once more. He unwrapped it and gazed at those delighting words again: My dear Captain Peto, and Your ever affectionate Elizabeth Hervey. Such words as he had never seen, or heard! And, oh, how he wished she were here now, in this fine place, his cabin, on the finest of ships. He did not recollect that, before, when he had been at sea, he had ever had a thought of anything but being at sea; he left the shore behind him, and with it all land-bound thoughts. Until now. It was the strangest thing. Neither did he think it unseamanlike, as once undoubtedly he would have done. But, he warned himself, he had better have a care: it would not do to moon – certainly not to be seen to moon. He supposed that married officers somehow attained a sort of . . . equipoise. Perhaps he would, too, a few days out from Gibraltar. It undoubtedly did not serve, sitting unoccupied in his cabin, thus. Better that he be on deck, even though there was no need. And why should there be need? He might enjoy the last of the sun.

  The sun, indeed, was fast nearing the horizon, and the words of Milton came to mind. They did so frequently. He had first heard them a dozen years before, aboard his beloved Nisus on her passage east, to India. His new acquaintance, Captain Hervey, ADC to the first soldier of Europe, had several times recited them, since when Peto had read all of Milton’s work, and some of it twice and three times over. And the gilded Car of Day / His glowing Axle doth allay / In the steep Atlantick stream.

  What a fortunate encounter his with Hervey had been; though not at all propitious at first. Yet now he was possessed of a fine friend, who would indeed be soon connected to him by marriage. He wondered how his friend fared at the extremity of that dark continent to starboard. And although he was not in the habit of regular prayer (other than the seaman’s need of comfort in the storm) he found himself asking for a blessing for his friend – and for his friend’s family.

  The bell sounded the hour. Peto snapped to, and addressed himself to the present – the evening muster. He did not intend going about the ship on this first day at sea (he must leave his lieutenant a little space so soon out and under a new captain), but he would walk the gangboard to the forecastle, casting an eye over as much as he could, animate and otherwise, without too much appearance of inspection.

  Marines stood by the carronades, their fighting quarters. It was not unusual, but on the whole he preferred the jollies to be under small arms: they did more service in picking off an enemy’s sharpshooters aloft than raking the decks with grape. He would speak of it to Lambe before tomorrow’s exercise. But what else he saw he approved of – and it was all so different from his own time in a ship of the Line, in Nelson’s day: at evening muster, with the second rum issue not two hours before (and twice the ration it was today) there would be many a man fumbling and stumbling in his stupor, thrashed by the petty officers with a knotted rope end, until some wretched word of insubordination saw him clapped in irons for captain’s punishment – the cat at the grating – next morning. But that had perforce been the way; what other was there with men brought and kept aboard against their will?

  He had disliked it, of course; none but a captain predisposed to cruelty co
uld have liked it (there were such men, he would admit). Without the rum few men would have transgressed so; but how could a crew be kept content without grog? Yes, there had been some temperance men – by conviction or through poor constitution – who would drink cocoa or tea instead, trading their tots for coin or credit, but the great majority lived for their rum. It was only the rum ration that had made life bearable. Peto wondered, deep down, if it could be otherwise today were it to come to war with the Turk. He turned and made his way back along the gangboard on the opposite side, passed the guns on the quarterdeck with but a glance, and climbed the companion to the poop.

  Two midshipmen stood smartly to attention, and two clerks behind them. Peto looked them up and down in an unofficial sort of way, before fixing on the one: ‘Let me see your telescope, Mr Pelham.’

  The signal midshipman handed it to him.

  Peto trained it on Archer half a mile ahead and to larboard. ‘You know what is parallax, Mr Pelham?’

  ‘I do, sir.’

  ‘Do you consider that your telescope has parallax error?’

  Pelham hesitated. ‘I had not, sir.’

  ‘I very much fear that it does.’ He handed back the instrument.

  Pelham put it back under his arm and continued to stand at attention.

  ‘Have a look, man!’

  The unfortunate midshipman did as he was bid. ‘Sir, I see it now.’

  Peto turned and stalked away. There was little to be served by telling the man (if man were truly the right word; boy seemed more apt) that he ought to have discovered the error for himself before they left Gibraltar, so that he might have had it rectified – or have found a new one. Neither did Peto want abject humiliation for him in front of two of the crew. All the same, his signal midshipman . . . What did it portend, that below the surface of what he saw with approval – indeed, at his first look below that surface – there was inadequacy?