Book 17 - The Commodore

by Patrick O'Brian

  'So you have, brother,' said Jack, looking at him affectionately. 'I am of course required and directed to advise with you on difficult points and I shall show you the whole set of papers presently, when you are at leisure—though in passing let me say that the Admiralty, having observed that the loss of men from disease was sometimes very great on the West African coast, said that in the early period a severely sick or diseased ship might collect a judicious number of invalids from other vessels and stretch away to Ascension Island, where refreshments were to be had in the form of turtles in the proper season, clear fresh water, and certain green plants.'

  'Ah, Ascension . . .' said Stephen in a voice of longing.

  'And they say that the present governor of Sierra Leone is my old shipmate James Wood. You remember James Wood, Stephen? He was shot through the throat at Porto Vecchio and talks in a wheeze: we went aboard him in the Downs when he had the Hebe, and he came to stay at Ashgrove.'

  'The cheerful gentleman who filled his ship with such unconscionable amounts of rope and paint and the like?'

  'Just so—no stickler for form—he loved to go to sea in a well-found ship, even if it meant conciliating the dockyard people to a surprising degree. And an uncommon keen hand at whist.'

  'I remember him perfectly.'

  'Of course you do,' said Jack, smiling at the recollection of Captain Wood's jovial way with a bribe, his acquisition of one of the flagship's spare anchors. 'And since you know everything about the second part,' he continued in little more than a whisper, 'I shan't go on about it at all—not a word—tace is the Latin for a candlestick. But I will tell you about the first, about knocking the slavers on the head: we are required to make a great roaring din straight away and amaze all observers, as well as liberating as many slaves as possible. Now I have no experience of this particular service at all, and although I have glanced at the earlier commanders' tolerably meagre remarks I should still like to know a great deal more, and I believe asking questions it the only way of finding out. You cannot ask questions of a book or a report, but a word to the cove that wrote is would make everything clear. So I mean to summon all captains and ask them what they know; and then I shall invite them to dinner tomorrow.' He strode forward and called down to the quarterdeck 'Captain Pullings.'

  'Sir?'

  'Let us heave out the signal for all captains.'

  'Aye aye, sir. Mr Miller'—to the officer of the watch—'All captains.'

  'Aye aye, sir. Mr Soames . . .' And so it went from signal lieutenant to the signal midshipman and thus to the yeoman of the signals himself, who had had plenty of time to prepare the hoist All captains repair aboard pennant that broke out at the Bellona's masthead a moment later, to be echoed along the line by the repeating brigs and to spread consternation in many a cabin, where captains flung off their duck trousers and nankeen jackets—it was a hot day, with the breeze aft—and struggled sweating into white stockings, white breeches and white waistcoat, the whole topped with a blue broadcloth gold-laced coat.

  They arrived in no particular order but in excellent time, only the Thames's barge being somewhat late—her captain could be heard cursing his midshipman, his coxswain and 'that son of a bitch at bow-oar' for the best part of five minutes. When they were all assembled on the poop, which seemed to Jack an airier, more informal place than the quarterdeck, he said to them, 'Gentlemen, I must tell you that my orders require the squadron to make a very strong demonstration of force at our first arrival on the coast. I have the remarks and observations of earlier commodores on the station, but I should also like to question officers who have been on this service. Have any of you been engaged, or any of your officers?'

  A general murmur, a looking at one another, and Jack, turning to Captain Thomas, who had long served in the West Indies and who owned property there, asked him whether he had anything particular to say.

  'Why me?' cried Thomas. 'Why should I have anything particular to say about slavery?' Then, seeing the astonishment on the faces all round him, he checked himself, coughed, and went on, 'I ask pardon, sir, if I have spoken a little abruptly—I was put out by my bargemen's stupidity. No, I have nothing particular to say.' Here he checked again, and Stephen and Mr Adams' eyes met in a fleeting glance; the expression of neither altered in the least degree, but each was certain that the swallowed words were a eulogy of the trade and indeed of slavery itself.

  'Well, I am sorry to have drawn a blank covert,' said Jack, looking round his captains' uniform stupidity. 'But my predecessors' reports make it perfectly clear that much of this service is inshore, smallcraft work, and I must desire all officers present to ensure that their boats are in very good order, with their crews thoroughly accustomed to stepping masts and proceeding under sail for considerable distances. Mr Howard, I believe I saw you lower down your launch in a most surprising brisk manner the day before yesterday.'

  'Yes, sir,' said Howard, laughingly. 'It was the usual idiot ship's boy. He harpooned a bonito with such zeal that he flung himself out of the bridle-port on to the fish, the harpoon fast to his wrist. Fortunately the launch was in the act of being shifted, so we got her over the side straight away and saved our only decent weapon.'

  'Well done,' said Jack, 'well done indeed. And the word weapon reminds me: getting boats over the side quick and handling them well is very important, but it must not, must not, affect our great-gun exercises, which, as you will all admit, still leave something to be desired. Yet tomorrow is a somewhat exceptional day; and tomorrow I hope and trust the exercise will leave you all time enough to dine with me.'

  Two bells, and Killick, his mate and three mess attendants walked carefully up the poop ladder, the first two carrying trays with decanters of all things proper to be drunk at such an hour, the others with glasses to drink them from.

  As the captains were being piped over the side Stephen's friend Howard came, and standing by him said discreetly, 'Of course, Maturin, you know the Commodore infinitely better than I do: is he very exact and naval in his use of the word officer?'

  'Fairly so, I believe: certainly punctilious in the use of rank and title. He could no more bear the Swedish knight than could Nelson. But he is the most reasonable of men.'

  'To be sure. I was astonished at the cogency, sequence and clarity of his account of nutation at the Royal Society—Scholey took me—and for several days I believe I understood not only nutation but even the precession of the equinoxes.'

  'Sure, he is the great astronomer of the world.'

  'Yes. But my point is this: in the Aurora I have an elderly master's mate called Whewell. And a master's mate, as you know very well, is not an officer in our ordinary use of the word—a commission officer. He served his time, passed his public or quasi-public examination for lieutenant, but failed to pass for gentleman—in short, the examining officers, conferring in private, did not think him one, and so no commission was ever made out. Yet he is a good seaman and he knows a great deal about slave-ships and their ways.'

  'Then I am perfectly certain that the Commodore would like to see him.'

  'He could hardly ask better. Whewell was born in Jamaica, the son of a ship-owner: he first went to sea in one of his father's merchantmen, carrying goods and some slaves, and then Dick Harrison took him into the Euterpe, on the quarterdeck. During the peace he served in one of the Thomas's regular slavers as a mate, but he sickened of it and was glad to get back into the service, into John West's Euryalus, and then with me.'

  'I did not know that Captain Thomas owned slavers.'

  'It is a family concern; but he is extremely sensitive about it since the law abolished the trade—don't choose to have it known.'

  Whewell was aboard within ten minutes in spite of having had to shave and change into his best uniform. He was a short, straight, round-headed man of about thirty-five, far from handsome: the smallpox had marked his face terribly, and where it was not pitted by the disease an exploding twelve-pounder cartridge-case had covered it with a dense sprinkling
of black dots; furthermore his teeth were very bad, gapped and discoloured. Yet this positive ugliness did not account for his present position in the Navy—perhaps the most uncomfortable of them all—since as Jack knew very well midshipmen worse-looking by far had been given a commission on passing for lieutenant at Somerset House. No: the trouble was the yellow tinge in what complexion Whewell could be said to possess—the evident legacy of an African great-grandmother.

  'Sit down, Mr Whewell,' said Jack, rising as he came into the great cabin. 'You are no doubt aware that our squadron is intended to put down the slave-trade, or at least to discourage it as much as possible. I am told that you have a considerable knowledge of the subject: pray give me a brief account of your experience. And Dr Maturin here would also like to know something of the matter: not the nautical side or the particular winds in the Bight of Benin, you understand, but the more general aspects.'

  'Well, sir,' said Whewell, looking Jack straight in the face while he ordered his thoughts, 'I was born in Kingston, where my father owned some merchantmen, and when I was a boy I used often to go along in one or another of them, trading in the islands, up to the States or across to Africa, to Cape Palmas and right along into the Gulf, for palm-oil, gold if we could get it, Guinea pepper and elephants' teeth; and some negroes if they were offering, but not many, since we were not regular slavers, fitted up to deal with them by wholesale. So I came to know those waters, particularly in the Gulf, tolerably well. Then after some while my father told his old acquaintance Captain Harrison that I was wild to go aboard a man-of-war, and he very kindly took me on to his quarterdeck in Euterpe, lying in Kingston at the time. I served in her for three years and then followed my captain into the Topaz, where he rated me master's mate. That was just before the peace, when the ship was paid off at Chatham. I made my way back to Jamaica and took what I could find—my father had left off business by then—mostly small merchantmen to Guinea and south right down to Cabinda or over to Brazil. A few negroes, as before; but although I was thoroughly used to slavers and their ways, particularly the big Liverpool ships, I never sailed in one until I went aboard the Elkins in Montego Bay; and then, although the owners had made out she carried mixed cargoes, I saw she was a high flyer in that line the moment I set foot on deck.'

  'How could you tell that, sir?' asked Stephen.

  'Why, sir, her galley overflowed in every direction: ordinarily a ship has coppers enough to cook for the crew—in this case say thirty hands—but here they were calculated for keeping four or five hundred slaves alive for the four or five thousand miles of the middle passage: say a couple of months. And her water was in proportion. Then again she had a slave-deck, which was perfect proof.'

  'I do not think I know the term.'

  'Well, it is not a deck at all, in the sense of planking, but rather a set of gratings covering the whole space set aside for the slaves and letting air into it; and about two or two and a half feet under these gratings they sit, or squat, usually in rows running athwartships, the men forward, chained in pairs, and the women aft.'

  'Even in two and a half feet they could barely sit upright, let alone stand.'

  'No, sir. And it is often less.'

  'How many might there be, at all?'

  'Broadly speaking, as many as they can cram in. The usual reckoning is three for every ton the ship gauges, so the Elkins, that I was in, could stow five hundred, she being a hundred and seventy ton; and that may answer for a quick passage. But there are some that force them in so tight that if one man moves all must move; and then unless there are leading winds most of the way, the result is terrible.'

  'When are they let out?'

  'Never at all when they are within swimming distance of the land; at sea, by groups in the daytime.'

  'What of cleanliness by night?'

  'There is none, sir; none whatsoever. Some ships turn a hose on the filth and man the pumps in the forenoon watch, and some make the negroes clean up and then wash on deck—they are all stark naked—with vinegar in the water; but even so a slaver stinks a mile and more to leeward.'

  'Surely,' said Stephen, 'with such filth, such crowding in such foul air and this heat, surely disease must ensue?'

  'Yes, sir, it does. Even if the blacks have not suffered very much when they are captured and then marched down to the coast and kept in the barracoon, and even if they don't have to sit waiting cooped up on the slave-deck for a week or so until the cargo is completed, the flux very often starts the third or fourth day, about the time the sea-sickness stops, and then they generally start dying: sometimes, it seems, of mere misery. Even in a reasonably careful ship where they whipped the slaves that would not eat and made them run about the deck for the air and exercise, I have known twenty a day go over the side, a week out from Whydah. It is not reckoned extraordinary if a third of the cargo is lost.'

  'Do no intelligent masters calculate that a more humane policy might be more profitable? After all, a stout negro fetches from forty to sixty pounds at the auction block.'

  'There are a few, sir: men that pride themselves on presenting prime stock, as they put it. Some even have fattening farms, with medical care. But most find it don't answer. The profits, even with a third loss, are so great now the trade is illegal, that they think it best to cram full every time, whatever the risk; and there is always the chance of a fair wind out of the Bight and a quick and healthy run.'

  'What kind of vessels are they are present?' asked Jack.

  'Well, sir, after the passing of the act abolishing the trade and the coming of the preventive squadron, most of the ships gave up. There are a few fast-sailing brigs on the Bahia or Rio voyage from the Bight—I say nothing about the old-fashioned Portuguese south of the line, because they are protected—but most of the slavers now are schooners, faster on a wind and more weatherly, from quite small craft up to the new three-hundred-ton Baltimore clippers, sailing under Spanish colours, often false, with a more or less American crew and a master that says he is a Spaniard, the Spaniards not being subject to our law. But now, since the preventive squadron was withdrawn, some of the old hands have come back, patching up their old ships, more or less, and making the Havana run. They usually know the coast very well, and the chiefs, and sometimes they run in where a stranger would not dare to go. Yet the larger craft have to load through the surf by canoes in many places. It is all inshore work on a very low coast all the way down to the Bight of Biafra, mangrove swamps and mud for hundreds of miles and mosquitoes so thick you can hardly breathe, particularly in the rainy season: though every now and then there are inlets, little gaps in the forest if you know where to look, and that is where the smaller schooners go, sometimes taking a full cargo aboard in a day.'

  'Do you know the whole of the Coast, Mr Whewell?' asked Jack.

  'I should not say I was a pilot for the country between Cape Lopez and Benguela, sir, but I am pretty well acquainted with the rest.'

  'Then let us look at this general chart, and work down from the north. I should like you to give me a rough idea of local conditions, currents, breezes of course, active markets and so on. Then another day, with Captain Pullings, the master, and my secretary to take notes, we will go over it all more thoroughly. Now here is Sierra Leone and Freetown . . . Doctor,' he called, 'you are very welcome to stay, if you choose; but I must warn you that from now on our discussion is likely to be purely nautical, dull work for a landsman.'

  'What makes you think that I resemble a landsman, Commodore, I beg? I am salted to the bone; a pickled herring. But, however'—looking at his watch—'my sick-berth calls me. Good day to you, Mr Whewell. One day I hope you will have time to tell me a little of the West African mammals: I believe there are no less than three species of pangolin.'

  The next day was that of the Commodore's dinner to his captains, a day rendered wearisome beyond expression for those who lived aft by the incessant, ill-tempered and querulous activity of the Commodore's steward, Preserved Killick, his mate Grimble, the Commodore
's and Captain's cooks, and as many hands as they could press into their service to turn out, scrub, swab, polish, replace and arrange with a truly forbidding rigour, the whole accompanied by a high-pitched nagging stream of abuse and complaint that drove Jack on to the quarterdeck, where once again he showed the youngsters the right way of handling a sextant and examined the midshipmen's berth on their knowledge of the chief navigational stars, and Stephen to the orlop, where he read through his assistants' notes until he was interrupted by a ship's boy who told him that the Stately's surgeon had called to see him.

  Mr Giffard and Stephen were fairly well acquainted—well enough, in any case, for Giffard's initial embarrassment to persuade Stephen that this was not an ordinary visit nor a request for the loan of a carboy of Venice treacle or a hundredweight of portable soup and some lint. And indeed, after a tedious discussion of the trade wind, Giffard asked whether they might talk privately. Stephen led him back to the orlop, to his little cabin, and there Giffard said, 'This may be considered a proper subject for two medical men, I trust: I think I betray no confidences or offend against professional discretion when I say that our captain is a paederast, that he calls young foremast hands into his cabin by night, and that the officers are much concerned, since these youths are much favoured, which in time will destroy discipline altogether. It is already much loosened, but they hesitate to take any official action, which must necessarily result in ignominious hanging and throw great discredit on the ship; and they hope that a private word to the Commodore would have the desired effect. A medical man, a friend, and an old shipmate . . .' His voice died away.