VI
THE COMMON ROUND
HMS Prince Rupert, the first morning at sea
The unlit sail gave Peto a night of broken sleep.
A quarter of an hour after first sighting, the ship had turned east to steer the same course as Rupert, some half a mile off the starboard beam. Lieutenant Lambe reported this while Peto and Rebecca Codrington were still at table. Peto had listened with care but with no great concern. Sailing as they both now were before the wind, the other ship no longer had the advantage. He asked where was Archer: Lambe said she was eight or nine cables, a mile perhaps, ahead and to larboard still. It was where Peto would have expected her to be – pity, since intercepting an unknown ship was precisely the thing a sloop did well. He had a mind to order a warning shot across the unlit’s bows, which would have the merit too of signalling to Archer to attend on new orders, but that would mean the sloop heaving to while Rupert came up within hailing distance. They could signal with lights, but Peto knew it was a hit and miss affair for all but the simplest of codes. If he were really troubled by having an unlit sail on his starboard beam he would clear for action, yet the likelihood of there being a Turkish man-of-war this far west was surely very slim; and he was not going to turn out the entire crew merely to demonstrate that he had the will to do so.
He therefore told Lambe to have the watch keep a sharp eye, to fire a warning gun if cloud covered the moon and the lookouts lost sight of her, and to report to him hourly. Then at first light the midshipman on the forecastle recognized her as a Genoan pinnace, and Lambe signalled Archer to intercept her and enquire why she sailed unlit – which by four bells of the morning watch she was able to do. Archer reported that the Genoan’s captain claimed she had been shadowed by pirates since leaving Ceuta, and, darkened, had sought to shake them off while taking ‘sanctuary’ close on a man-of-war. Peto had no reason to doubt him, and wished the Genoan well by return, especially since her captain sent across a fair-sized parmijan and half a dozen flasks of Tuscan red.
Pirates: the very devil, the whole of the Barbary coast and beyond – Peto had given many of them a watery grave and had hanged almost as many more when he had been commodore of the frigate squadron; when, indeed, he had gone into their very nests with the Americans (fine fellows, Americans; he was glad he had never used powder against them in the late war). They would be plying in and out of Algiers no doubt, exactly as before. When the Turks were sent back to Constantinople he expected Codrington would turn his attention to them. Not that that would be a job for a three-decker; they might stand in at Malta for a week or so until their lordships recalled Rupert to home waters – back to being a guardship, with a skeleton crew and long days ashore. Or even back into the Ordinary, dismasted and ungunned. But why worry himself about that now? Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
There would be evil today right enough: it was not possible to inspect a King’s ship, no matter how diligent its lieutenant, without finding something amiss. All he could hope for when he made his first rounds was that the faults could be righted by sweat rather than blood, and from within the ship’s own resources. His old friend the commissioner at Gibraltar had told him he believed Rupert to be well found, but he would only know for certain when he had seen for himself.
At eight o’clock Peto came on to the quarterdeck. For three hours the idlers and larboard watch had been holystoning the decks and swilling the dirty sand into the waterways and scuppers. The swabbers had flogged the decks until they were dry, and the trusted hands had brightened the brasswork about the rails and bitts. And when the sanding, holystoning, swabbing and polishing was done, other hands had flemished down the ropes and stowed the washdeck gear, so that by seven o’clock the work had been practically finished. When Lieutenant Lambe came back on deck after his morning shave he had professed himself pleased with things – as well he might, for this was but the day’s routine (every day barring Sunday), although the boatswain’s mates had known full well that a keener eye would be cast on their charges on this morning. At half past he had sent the mates below to pipe ‘All hands. Up hammocks’, and the entire crew – sleepers as well as watch – had scurried with their lashed-up bedding to the upper-deck nettings, where the quartermasters and midshipmen supervised the stowing, after which Lambe had been able to dismiss them to breakfast.
‘Good morning, sir,’ he said brightly, touching his hat. ‘Seven knots at present, five in the night.’
Peto nodded. It was a morning exactly as the evening’s red light had promised – the shepherd’s delight, but the sailor’s even more so. He loved Norfolk as loyally as any man (his father, and his father before him, had been born next-the-sea) but the fairest day in Nelson’s county could not compare with such a morning at sea, the sun on his face, the wind filling the sail, and the air as pure as the water of the Arethusa spring. He glanced at the rate-of-sailing board: a following wind and twenty miles during the middle watch (the calculation was simple enough). ‘Thank you, Mr Lambe. Have the master set royals and t’gallants when I am finished my inspection, if the wind does not freshen by much. We ought to be making nine knots while the sea is favourable.’
‘Ay-ay, sir.’
‘Have you had your breakfast?’
‘I have, sir.’
‘Do you have any objection to a little more?’
Lambe looked faintly bemused. ‘By no means, sir.’
Peto turned to his steward, who had come on deck with a coffee pot and cups. ‘Would you bring us a plate apiece of the ship’s burgoo?’
Flowerdew poured them coffee and then shuffled off in the stooping gait he adopted when asked to do something he found contrary to his own ideas of what was proper (or expedient).
‘Is that Mr Pelham I observe on the poop?’
‘It is, sir. He stood the middle watch, and came back on deck as soon as it was light enough to signal to Archer.’
‘Call him, if you will.’
Lambe beckoned the midshipman, who sped down the companion ladder as if the drummer were beating to quarters.
‘Sir!’ he squeaked, a discernibly new telescope peeping from beneath his cloak.
Peto returned the salute. ‘Mr Lambe informs me that you sustained an injury yesterday. Have you yet reported to the surgeon?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Why not?’
‘I did not consider it serious enough, sir.’
‘Indeed? Have you some medical qualification?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Then kindly give yourself the benefit of the surgeon’s, else how am I to rely upon what you see through that telescope of yours . . . It is a new telescope, is it not?’
‘It is, sir. I bought it of Mr Adams.’
Peto wondered what Adams – whoever he was (another midshipman, he supposed) – would make do with instead, but that was not his direct concern; he could leave the discipline of the midshipmen to Lambe. ‘Very well. Help yourself to coffee, Mr Pelham,’ he said, and with a measure of warmth, indicating the tray which Flowerdew had placed on the gallery locker.
‘Thank you, sir,’ replied the midshipman, fairly taken aback.
Lambe smiled to himself. He had fair roasted Pelham after the business of the parallax, and was himself thinking of some magnanimous gesture. This more than saved him the effort.
‘How old are you, Mr Pelham?’
‘Seventeen come next month, sir.’
‘And where are you from; where do your people live?’
‘I was born in Plymouth, sir. My father was captain of Repulse. He is dead now, sir; my mother also.’
Peto rather wished he had not asked. He was sentimental enough to believe a man must have a home to return to. And even though his own parents were now gone, he had the prospect of a warm heart and hearth. A smile almost overcame him, indeed, at the thought of Miss Elizabeth Hervey – Lady Peto – in the hall of that handsome Norfolk manor, advancing smiling to greet him on his return from some commission or other . . . He cl
eared his throat. ‘I am sorry to hear it, Mr Pelham. I did not know your father, though I know Repulse to have had a fine reputation in her day.’
‘He was killed off New Orleans, sir.’
Peto now dimly recalled the loss of the ship in that wretched and unnecessary campaign: Mr Midshipman Pelham had been semi-orphaned a long time . . . ‘And your mother?’
‘She died as I was born, sir. I was brought up by an aunt until such time as I could go to sea.’
A full orphan – Peto almost groaned; he ought to have expected it.
‘Mr Pelham was a volunteer at twelve, sir, on my last ship,’ said Lambe.
It told Peto a good deal about them both. ‘Then I trust you shall pass for lieutenant quickly, Mr Pelham. There is no time to lose even in these days of peace.’
‘I intend doing so, sir.’
Peto nodded thoughtfully. ‘Good. Capital, capital . . . And I would that you dine with me and Mr Lambe this evening.’
Pelham’s boyish but handsome face lit up like a signal lamp. ‘Thank you kindly, sir.’
Flowerdew returned with two bowls of oat gruel. Peto took a spoonful, as gingerly as he felt he might in such company, and tasted the crew’s breakfast.
Perhaps his memory – or his palate – played tricks on him, for he found it not nearly as repulsive as usual. In the East Indies, his former station, they had had a very decent porridge of corn and cinnamon, but the oatmeal cakes which the Victualling Board supplied were rough rations indeed, and boiled up in the galley copper, with water a month or more in the hold, the gruel was better fit for the sty under the forecastle. The Board held it to be a necessary corrective to the otherwise constipating ship’s diet, but the majority of men, Peto recalled, thought it a far better emetic.
Lambe saw his surprise. ‘We have an active purser. He sent back a good deal of the provender first offered.’
Peto nodded appreciatively. Time was when a captain appointed his own man, or rather put forward his clerk’s name to the Admiralty, but of late there had been a fashion to place experience in the position, for too often the purser had been in truck with the merchants who supplied the ship (and, shame to relate, in truck with the captain as well). ‘And real coffee to be had, you say, Mr Lambe? Remarkable.’ The old ‘Scotch coffee’ of the mess decks had been a foul brew, burnt biscuit boiled up to a black paste in rank water, and sugared until it could hold no more. ‘I shall expect to see contented faces and good constitutions at my inspection.’
‘You may depend upon it, sir, as ever it has been,’ replied Lambe, just as wryly.
At a half past eight o’clock, Peto descended the companion ladder to the upper deck and began his first inspection of Prince Rupert. Lambe accompanied him together with the boatswain, three mates, the master-at-arms and two corporals, the serjeant of marines and several midshipmen, whose job it would be to attend on any observation the captain made. He began with the larboard battery, walking slowly, hands clasped behind his back, here and there nodding to a salute, here and there bringing some fault, or something he would have done otherwise, to Lambe’s attention, who at once delegated the business of correction to the appropriate member of the party, whence followed a good deal of barking and growling while Peto continued his advance along the line of eighteen-pounders. He then turned aft to walk the starboard battery, the routine as before. By and large he approved of what he found: so much of it was new made, and the men looked likely – and for all their sanding and swabbing, they were clean and serviceably dressed.
It took him but an hour to see over the gun-decks, though he fancied he missed nothing; long years inspecting and being inspected had given him an unfailing eye. But all this was merely preparation: the guns were lashed and the instruments of gunnery fastened up; he would see later what sharp work the gun-crews could make of it.
He descended to the magazine, taking off his shoes, as standing orders required, to have a good look about the inside. The gunner was a big, powerfully made man, who had to stoop at his station. He spoke softly, as if noise as well as sparks were a danger; Peto felt certain of him at once. As he did too of the carpenter, who conducted him along the hull walk – always a place for grazing the forehead and bruising the shoulders – with a running commentary on the state of the timbers, pumps, masts and spars. ‘Not once above ten inches, sir, the well,’ he reported with palpable pride.
Peto nodded appreciatively; maintaining the depth of water below the maximum permitted of fifteen inches (without excessive pumping) was remarkable in a ship of Rupert’s age, and not long re-commissioned. ‘Very good, Mr Storr,’ he said as they came to the cockpit, turning to him directly now and fixing him with a quizzical look: ‘We have met before, I think.’
The carpenter’s face shone as bright as had Midshipman Pelham’s. ‘We ’ave, sir – on Amphion.’
It was eighteen years ago. Peto nodded. ‘Mate to that old dog Pollard, as I recall, Mr Storr?’
‘Ay, sir. And many a good trick ’e taught me,’ replied the carpenter, lapsing into broader Devon. ‘Amphion wor a good ship, sir.’
‘That she was, and in what I have seen so far I believe we may say that Rupert follows her.’
‘She does that, sir. As strong a framing as you’d see.’
Peto clapped his hand on the carpenter’s shoulder – a perhaps familiar gesture, but one he felt entirely at ease with. ‘I’m obliged to you, Mr Storr.’
Next was the midshipmen’s berth, which was not likely to be so obliging. Peto was never inclined to be intrusive, for he remembered well enough the cherished sense of private space (‘privacy’ would be a wholly inapt word) when he himself had been a midshipman, but the berth – little more than an enclosure knocked up by Storr’s mates – bore all too evidently the signs of late breakfasting.
‘Mr Lambe, who is senior here?’ (he knew the answer well enough, but there were ready ears to entertain).
‘Lord Yarborough, sir.’
‘Indeed? Then inform my Lord Yarborough, if you please, that he will have his fellow officers bestir themselves betimes.’
‘Ay-ay, sir!’
‘Mr Craig, have this berth turned out, if you will!’
‘Ay-ay, sir,’ replied the boatswain, with relish.
‘Very well, and now last to the surgeon’s. D’ye suppose he expects us?’
Peto’s eyes were now accustomed to the orlop’s gloom, but even so, he had to blink to believe them as he entered the cockpit. ‘What in the name of God . . .’
The surgeon, a shortish, wiry man of about thirty, wearing a black Melton coat and a stock like a parson’s, stepped forward. ‘Good morning, sir.’
They had shaken hands the day before, but Peto had not been able to take much measure of him. He looked a capable sort – an intelligent face, high forehead, good hands, if perhaps his physique lacked the obvious power for the more strenuous of amputations. ‘Mr Morrissey, what is the meaning of this?’ He knew he ought by rights to be addressing the question to his lieutenant, but the affront was taking place in the surgeon’s own part of ship.
Morrissey looked rather more puzzled by the captain’s displeasure than dismayed. ‘With respect, sir, I understand it to be the custom that a woman repairs to the cockpit when “Quarters” are sounded. That is what they do here.’
‘I know what is the custom, Mr Morrissey, but . . .’ He turned to his lieutenant. ‘Why are these women aboard, Mr Lambe?’
‘They drew lots at Portsmouth, sir, and were to be put off at Gibraltar for the first merchantman to Malta, but their husbands made representations, and since we had become obliged to convey Miss Codrington to Malta I considered that it would be inequitable to put them off.’
Peto huffed. Since when had equity any part in the customs of the service? But he was well aware of the Admiralty’s new leniency towards women (the order now being simply that ‘no ship is to be too much pestered with wives’). Lambe was right: it served no good to compel a sailor’s wife – however loose the term
– to leave her husband’s ship while the admiral’s daughter enjoyed the comforts of the admiral’s apartments. No matter that the presence of the one would have no effect on the discipline of the ship, while the other could only tend in the very opposite direction.
‘Very well,’ he said, clearing his throat, and trying not to stare too much at the surgeon’s temporary auxiliaries: there were a dozen of them, one or two distinctly matronly, clearly the true partners of a lifetime, but several of them (it was surely no trick of the light?) uncommonly pretty. How the times were changing!
He cleared his throat again, took out his hunter and held it to the lantern above the surgeon’s table. A quarter before six bells – eleven o’clock; he could have an hour’s practice at the guns before the watches changed. It would be enough to see how sharp was the crew. ‘Very well, Mr Lambe, let us be about our business: we shall beat to quarters and clear for action!’
The order shrilled from hatch to hatch as the relay of midshipmen passed the word ‘arsey-varsey’ – from orlop to quarterdeck – until the drummer of marines caught it and began beating ‘Hearts of Oak’ in rapid time. Everywhere men sprang to their tasks like hounds to the scent. Peto had seen it so many times that it ought to have been a commonplace, but the thrill of the drumming, and the blood-lusting heaving on the guns never failed to set his own blood coursing, as if it would burst from his very veins. His hand twitched for the hilt of his sword (Flowerdew would be waiting with it on the quarterdeck, as he had always done): now they would see what the crew of His Majesty’s Ship Prince Rupert were made of.
Giving the order on the orlop was not without its advantages, however unusual: it allowed Peto a fair impression of each gun-deck as he made his way to his own station. The carpenter and his mates had already made aft, like terriers, to the officers’ quarters to unship the bulkheads – he had no fears on account of Mr Storr and his men – but other hands looked less capable, less ferocious in their clearing of comforts and the like. The boatswain knew it too: he was already among them flaying and lashing. In Nelson’s day he would have used the knotted rope; now he could only use his tongue (at least when there were witnesses). But with what violence and volume did Craig assault the crewmen thus! And with most palpable effect as the mates hurled trenchers and pots through the gunports to speed the effort.
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