Book 2 - Post Captain

by Patrick O'Brian

  The new-lit galley stove sent a whiff of smoke eddying aft, together with the smell of burgoo, and at the same time he heard the head-pumps beginning to work. Up and down, up and down, with his hands behind his back and his chin tucked into his griego against the biting air: up and down. The figure of the Polychrest was as clear in his mind as if she had been a model held up to a lamp, and he studied her reaction to the creeping influence of the tide, and the lateral thrust of the wind, the eddies deep under her strangely placed rudders . . .

  The after-guard were sprinkling the quarterdeck with their buckets, carefully avoiding his walk, and after them came the sand-men. The bosun was on deck: Malloch, a short, bull-like young fellow; had been bosun's mate in the crack Ixion. Jack heard his shout and the thwack of his cane as he started a man on the fo'c'sle. And all the time there was the measured thump of the carronade, the now distant gun of the man-of-war, the horns away to port, the steady chant of the man heaving the lead in the chains—'by the mark nine . . . ho yo ho yo . . . and a quarter nine.'

  The rake of the masts was a great consideration, of course. Jack was an intuitive rather than a scientific sailor, and in his mental image of the Polychrest her backstays tautened until the angle of her masts looked right and some inner voice said 'Belay there'. The holystones began their steady grinding: the decks could do with it, after the shambles of a hurried fitting-out. These were such familiar sounds and smells, these innumerable difficulties were so very much part of the world he had known from childhood, that he felt as though he had been returned to his own element. It was not that he did not like the land—capital place; such games, such fun—but the difficulties there, the complications, were so vague and imprecise, reaching one behind another, no end to them: nothing a man could get hold of. Here, although life was complex enough in all conscience, he could at least attempt to cope with anything that turned up. Life at sea had the great advantage that . . . something was amiss. He tried to place it, glancing sharply fore and aft in the greyness of approaching day. The fishing-boats that had been sailing on a parallel course were now astern: their melancholy wailing sounded almost from the Polychrest's wake. The Bill must be no great way ahead. It was time to go about. A damned foolish moment to choose, with the people busy, and he would have preferred to wait until the watch below was on deck; but she might have made even more leeway than he had allowed for, and only a fool would run any risk for the sake of neatness.

  'We will put her about, Mr Goodridge,' he said.

  The bosun started his call. Brooms, buckets, swabs, squeegees, holystones, prayer-books, brass rags flew into sheltered places as his mates roared down the hatches 'All hands, all hands 'bout ship' and then vanished below to drive the sleepers up—those few so worn with toil, seasickness and desolation, that they were unconscious in spite of the carronade and the echoing thunder of the holystones. The score or so of right seamen had been at their stations ten minutes—Pullings and the bosun on the fo'c'sle, the gunner and his mates at the maintack, the carpenter at the foresheet, the Marines at the mainsheet, the maintopmen and the after-guard on the quarterdeck, at the braces—before the last desperate half-clothed bewildered landsman was hunted up, shoved and beaten and cobbed into his place.

  'Bear up,' said Jack to the timoneer, waiting for this Bartholomew Fair performance to come to an end—a bosun's mate was now belabouring the former tipstaff with his persuader, to help him understand the difference between a stay and a bowline. And when he felt a little more way on the sloop, saw something like order on deck, and judged the moment ripe, he called, 'Ready about.'

  'Ready about, sir,' came the answer.

  'Luff up handsomely, now,' he said quietly to the man at the wheel, and then loud and clear, 'Helm's a-lee. Fore topsheet, fore topbowline, stays'l sheet, let go.' The full-bellied curves of the headsails sagged and collapsed; the Polychrest moved in a long smooth curve up towards the direction of the wind.

  'Off tacks and sheets.'

  Everything was ready for the decisive order that would bring the yards flying round; everything was as calm and unhurried as the sloop's slow curve through this grey, heaving, formless world; there was time and to spare. And that was just as well, he thought, seeing the way they were shifting the sheets over the stays—something between cat's cradle and puss-in-the-corner.

  Her curve was slower now; and now the swell was coming more and more on to her starboard bow, heaving against her course. Slowly up and up: within two points of the wind, a point and a half, and the words 'Mainsail haul' had been long formed in his mouth when he realized that the deep steady sound to port and astern, the sound that was coming so clear and loud through the intent, waiting silence, was that of the breakers on Selsey Bill. She had made twice and three times the leeway he and the master had reckoned for. At the same moment he felt an essential change in her motion, a dead sullenness: she was going to miss stays. She was not going to travel up into the eye of the wind and carry on beyond it, so that the sails, braced round, would fill on the larboard side and bear her out to sea.

  A ship that would not stay must wear—she must fall off from the wind, right round the way she came and much farther still, pivoting about her stern in a great leeward sweep until she had the wind aft, turning, turning until she could bring it astern and then at last on her other side, turning still until she was heading in the direction she desired—a long, long turn: and in this case, with this tide, swell and wind, the Polychrest would need a mile to accomplish it, a mile of leeway before she could brace up sharp and head out into the Channel.

  She was losing her headway; her sails were flapping dismally in the silence; with every thrust of the sea she was nearer the unseen shore. The alternatives flew through his mind: he could let her fall off, set the driver and try again; he could wear and risk it, coming to an anchor if he had cut it too fine—an ignominious, horribly time-wasting process, or he could box-haul her. But dared he box-haul her with this crew? While these possibilities ran past his inner scrutineer a remote corner of his mind called out shrilly against the injustice of missing stays—unknown in such conditions, monstrous, a malignancy designed to make him late on his station, to allow Harte to call him unofficerlike, no seaman, a dawdling Sybarite, a slow-arse. That was the danger: there was no peril in this sea, nothing but a consciousness of having misjudged things, and the likelihood of an ugly, unanswerable rebuke from a man he despised.

  These thoughts had their being between the time he heard the splash of the lead and the cry 'By the deep eight' As the next cry came, 'A half less eight' he said to himself, 'I shall box-haul her.' And aloud, 'Haul up main and mizzen tops'ls. Fore tops'l sheet hard a-weather. Foretops'l sharp aback: clap on to that brace. Look alive on the fo'c'sle there. Lee bowlines, lee bowlines.'

  As if she had run into a gentle cushion, the Polychrest's headway stopped—he felt her underfoot—and she began to move backwards, the headsails and her lee-helm paying her round as she went. 'Square main and mizzen yards. Jump to those braces, now.'

  She might not like turning up into the wind, but with her strange sharp stern she was very good at going backwards. He had never known such a sternway.

  'And a half eight,' from the chains.

  Round she went: the squared main and mizzen yards lay parallel with the wind, the topsails shaking. Farther, farther; and now the wind was abaft her beam, and by rights her sternway should have stopped; but it did not; she was still travelling with remarkable speed in the wrong direction. He filled the topsails, gave her weather helm, and still she slid backwards in this insane contradiction of all known principles. For a moment all the certainties of his world quivered—he caught a dumbfounded, appalled glance from the master—and then with a sigh from the masts and stays, the strangest straining groan, the Polychrest's motion passed through a barely perceptible immobility to headway. She brought the wind right aft, then on to her larboard quarter; and hauling out the mizzen and trimming all sharp, he set the course, dismissed the watch below, and w
alked into his cabin, relief flooding into him. The bases of the universe were firm again, the Polychrest was heading straight out into the offing with the wind one point free; the crew had not done very badly, no time worth mentioning had been lost; and with any luck his steward would have brewed a decent pot of coffee. He sat on a locker, wedging himself against the bulkhead as she rolled: over his head there was the hurrying of feet as ropes were coiled down and made trim, and then came the long-interrupted sounds of cleaning—a bear, a great padded, shot-laden block of stone, started growling on the deck eighteen inches from his ears: he blinked once or twice, smiled, and smiling went fast asleep.

  He was still asleep when the hands were piped to dinner, sleeping still when the gun-room sat down to its gammon and spinach, and for the first time Stephen saw all the Polychrest's officers together—all except for Pullings, who had the watch, and who was walking the quarterdeck with his hands behind his back, pacing in as close an imitation of Captain Aubrey as his form could manage, and remembering, every now and then, to look stern, devilish, as like a right tartar as possible, in spite of his bubbling happiness. At the head of the table sat Mr Parker, an acquaintance of some days' standing, a tall, spare, disapproving man, rather good-looking, apart from the expression on his face; then the lieutenant of Marines in his scarlet coat, a black-haired Scotsman from the Hebrides whose face was so marked by the smallpox that it was difficult to make out what habitual expression it might wear; he had a very well-bred turn, however; and Macdonald was his name. Mr Jones the purser, his neighbour, was also a black man, but there the likeness stopped; the purser was a drooping little flaccid man with pendulous cheeks either side of a fleshy red mouth; his face was the colour of cheese, and this uniform pallor swept up his high forehead to a baldness that reached from ear to ear. His straight hair grew only in a fringe round this pool, hanging some way down his neck, and in whiskers; yet a strong beard showed blue on his waxy cheeks, a very powerful growth. His appearance was that of a small shopkeeper; but there was little time to judge of his conversation, for at the sight of his plate he started from the table with a watery belch, rushed staggering to the quarter-gallery, and was seen no more. Then there was the master, still yawning from his morning watch. He was a slight, elderly, grizzled man with bright blue eyes, and he said little as he set to his table at the beginning of the meal: Stephen was habitually silent; the others were feeling their way with their new messmates, and their knowledge that the surgeon was the captain's particular friend acted as a further check.

  However, as Stephen's appetite waned, so his desire for information increased, and laying down his knife and fork he said to the master, 'Pray, sir, what is the function of the curious sloping metal-lined cylindrical place immediately in front of my store-room? What is its name?'

  'Why, Doctor,' said Mr Goodridge, 'what to call it I do not rightly know, other than an abomination; but the ship-wrights spoke of it as the combustion-chamber, so I take it it was where the secret weapon was stowed. It used to lead out on deck where the fo'c'sle is now.'

  'What kind of a secret weapon?' asked Macdonald.

  'Something in the nature of a rocket, I believe.'

  'Yes,' said the first lieutenant, 'a kind of enormous rocket without a stick. It was the ship that was to be the stick, and those levered chutes for shot were intended to bring her by the head or by the stern for elevation: the weapon was calculated to destroy a first-rate at the distance of a mile, but it had to be amidships, to counteract the roll, and that was the reason for the system of lateral keels and rudders.'

  'If the rocket was the calibre of the chamber, then the recoil must have been prodigious,' said Macdonald.

  'Prodigious,' said Mr Parker. 'That was why the sharp stern was imagined, to prevent the sudden thrust destroying her bottom—the whole ship recoiled, whereas a square stern, by resisting, would be crushed. Even so, they had to put a mass of timber where the stern-post should be, to take the first impact.' A very exalted personage had been present at the experimental firing that had cost the inventor his life, and he had told Mr Parker that the ship had darted back her whole length, at the same time being pressed down in the water as far as her wing-transoms. The exalted personage had been against it from the start; Mr Congreve, who went down with the party, had said it would never answer; and it had not answered—these innovations never did. Mr Parker was against any break with tradition; it would never answer in the Navy; he did not care for these flint-locks for the guns, for example; although indeed they took a fine polish, and looked well enough, for an inspection.

  'How did the poor gentleman come to be killed?' asked the master.

  'It seems that he would light the fuse himself, and as it hung fire, he put his head into the chamber to see what was amiss, when it exploded.'

  'Well, I am sorry for him,' said Mr Goodridge. 'But if it had to be, it might have been as well if he had sent the ship to the bottom at the same time. A cranker, more unseaworthy craft I never saw, and I have seen a mort in my time. She made more leeway than a common raft between St Helen's and the Bill, for all the sharp floor and sliding keels, and she gripes like a man-trap. Then she goes and misses stays in a mill-pond. There is no pleasing her. She reminds me of Mrs Goodridge—whatever you do is wrong. If the captain had not box-hauled her in a flash, why, I don't know where we might have come to. A most seamanlike manoeuvre, I must say; though I should not have ventured it myself, not with such a ragamuffin crew. And indeed she had more sternway upon her than I should have thought possible. As you say, sir, she was built to recoil, and I thought she was going to go on recoiling until we were brought up all standing on the coast of France. A crinkum-crankum piece of work, in my opinion, and 'tis the Lord's blessing we have a right seaman in command; but what even he will do, or what the Archangel Gabriel would do, if it comes on to blow, I do not know, I am sure. The Channel is not so broad as all that; and in point of searoom, what this here craft requires, is the great Southern Ocean, at its widest part.'

  The master's words were prompted by the Polychrest's increasing roll; it sent the bread-barge careering over the table, and a midshipman into Jack's cabin, with the news that the wind was shifting into the east, a little mouse-like child, stiff in his best uniform, with his dirk at his side—he had slept with it.

  'Thank you, Mr—' said Jack. 'I do not believe I remember your name.'

  'Parslow, sir, if you please.'

  Of course. The Commissioner's protégé, a naval widow's son. 'What have you been doing to your face, Mr Parslow?' he asked, looking at the red, gaping, lint-flecked wound that ran across that smooth oval cheek from ear to chin.

  'I was shaving, sir,' said Mr Parslow with a pride he could not conceal. 'Shaving, sir, and a huge great wave came.'

  'Show it to the doctor, and tell him, with my compliments, that I should be glad if he would drink tea with me. Why are you in your number one rig?'

  'They said—it was thought I ought to show an example to the men, sir, this being my first day at sea.'

  'Very proper. But I should put on some foul-weather clothes now. Tell me, did they send you for the key of the keelson?'

  'Yes, sir; and I looked for it everywhere. Bonden told me he thought the gunner's daughter might have it, but when I asked Mr Rolfe, he said he was sorry, he was not a married man.'

  'Well, well. You have foul-weather clothes?'

  'Why, sir, there are a great many things in my chest, my sea-chest, that the shopman told Mama I should be equipped with. And I have my father's sou-wester.'

  'Mr Babbington will show you what to put on. Tell him with my compliments, that he will show you what to put on,' he added, remembering that gentleman's inhuman barbarity. 'Do not wipe your nose upon your sleeve, Mr Parslow. It ain't genteel.'

  'No, sir. Beg pardon, sir.'

  'Cut along then,' said Jack irritably. 'Am I a Goddamned wet nurse?' he asked his pea-jacket.

  On deck he was greeted by a squall of rain mixed with sleet and spray. The wind
had increased to a fine fresh breeze, sweeping the fog away and replacing it by a low sky—bands of weeping cloud against a steely grey, black on the eastern horizon; a nasty short choppy sea was getting up against the tide, and although the Polychrest was holding her course well enough, she was shipping a good deal of water, and her very moderate spread of canvas laid her over as though she had topgallants abroad. So she was as crank as he had feared; and a wet ship into the bargain. There were two men at the wheel, and from the way they were cramped on to the spokes it was clear they were having to fight hard to keep her from flying up into the wind.

  He studied the log-board, made a rough calculation of the position, adding a triple leeway, and decided to wear in half an hour, when both watches would be on deck. He had plenty of room, and there was no point in harassing the few good men he had aboard, particularly as the sky looked changeable, menacing, damned unpleasant—they might have a dirty night of it. And he would get the topgallantmasts down on deck before long. 'Mr Parker,' he said, 'we will take another reef in the foretopsail, if you please.'

  The bosun's call, the rush of hands, the volley of orders through Parker's speaking-trumpet—'Halliards let fly—clap on to that brace—Mr Malloch, touch up those hands at the brace.' The yards came round, the wind spilled from the sail and the Polychrest righted herself, at the same time making such a cruel gripe that the man at the con had to fling himself at the wheel to prevent her being taken aback 'Lay out—look alive, there—you, sir, you on the yardarm, are you asleep? Are you going to pass the—weather earing? Damn your eyes, are you going to stow that bunt? Mr Rossall, take that man's name. Lay in.'