Book 17 - The Commodore

by Patrick O'Brian

  'Beware and take care of the Bight of Benin;

  'There's one comes out for forty goes in,' Stephen chanted.

  'What a fellow you are, Stephen,' cried Jack, in a tone of real displeasure. 'How can you think of singing, or groaning, a foolish unlucky old song like that, aboard a ship that is going to the Bight? I wonder at it, after so many years at sea.'

  'Why, Jack, I am sorry to have offended you—the Dear knows where I heard it—the words rose of themselves, by mere association. But I shall not sing it again, I promise you.'

  'It is not that I am in the least degree superstitious,' said Jack, far from mollified, 'but everyone who knows anything about the sea knows it is a song sung in ships that have come out of the Bight, by way of making game of those that are going in. Do not sing it again until we are homeward bound, I beg. It might bring bad luck and it is certain to upset the hands.'

  'I am very sorry for it, so I am too, and shall never do so again. But tell me about this Bight, Jack: are there sirens along its shores, or terrible reefs? And where is it, at all?'

  'I will show you exactly on the charts in the master's day cabin, when we pass,' said Jack, 'but for the moment,'—reaching for paper and pencil—'here is a rough idea. I leave the Grain Coast to one side, because the noise we did make at Sherbro and that we shall make at Philip's Island will raise the whole country; but here, going east, is the Ivory Coast, with several promising estuaries and lagoons; then we carry on steadily east and a little north of east right into the Gulf, coming to the Gold Coast, with places like Dixcove and Sekondi and Cape Coast Castle and Winneba, all great markets, and so on to the Slave Coast in this great bay, which is the Bight of Benin itself—the Bight of Biafra is farther on—where the winds grow very troublesome and there is a strong current setting east—the fever very bad, too—wretched waters except for fore-and-aft vessels. But that is where so many slavers go: to Grand Popo and Whydah. I do not think we can go much beyond Whydah, however, though in the mangrove country beyond there is Brass and Bonny and the Calabars, Old and New. But by then I think we shall have to stand out if ever we can, stand due south for the Line and pick up the south-east trades about St Thomas's Island, which is clear of the Bights and their calms and false breezes. That is my plan: though I forgot to say that Ringle and the schooner Active will ply inshore and off, continually reporting, either directly or by signal to Camilla or Laurel to repeat the pennant, since they will lie between us and the inshore craft. And by the way, I am going to break poor Dick's heart by making him change his fine tall man-of-war's topmast for wretched topgallant poles—the same for Camilla, so that the watchers on shore will take them for common merchantmen.'

  'Then as I understand it,' said Stephen, paying no attention to Captain Richardson's coming distress, 'this vessel, this Bellona, is not even to see the coast throughout the entire expedition.'

  'Only in the very unlikely case of a row that the brigs and Camilla and Laurel, mounting sixty guns and more between them, cannot deal with. Though of course one might catch the odd glimpse of mountains from the topgallant crosstrees from time to time.'

  Stephen turned away, his arm over the back of his chair.

  'You are grieving about your potto I am afraid,' said Jack after an awkward silence. 'But you will have a fine run ashore tomorrow, when we have dealt with whatever is lying in the harbour of Philip's Island. And I dare say you could go in occasionally when the Ringle comes out to report or carry orders back. Though if it comes to that, you could always exchange with the surgeon of Camilla, Laurel, or one of the inshore brigs.'

  'No. They have tied me to a stake: I cannot fly, but bear-like I must fight the course,' said Stephen with a creditable smile. 'Not a very dreadful course, for all love: it is only that I was so extravagantly indulged in the East Indies and New Holland and Peru. No, not at all. Now one more cup of coffee and I must attend to my calculus, nearly always a difficult subject.'

  'So you have suddenly taken to the calculus?' cried Jack. 'How very glad I am—amazed—quite stunned. By just calculus I take it you mean the differential rather than the infinitesimal? If I can be of any help . . .'

  'You are very good, my dear,' said Stephen, putting down his cup and rising, 'but I mean the vesical calculus, no more: what is commonly known as a stone in the bladder, the utmost reach of my mathematics. I must be away.'

  'Oh,' said Jack, feeling oddly dashed. 'You will not forget it is Sunday?' he called after Stephen's back.

  There was little likelihood of Stephen's being able to forget that it was Sunday, for not only did Killick take away and hide his newly-curled and powdered best wig, his newly-brushed second-best coat and breeches, but the loblolly-boy said, 'Asking your pardon, sir, but you ain't forgot it is Sunday?' while both his assistants, separately and tactfully, asked him whether he had remembered it. 'As though I were a brute-beast, unable to tell good from evil, Sunday from common days of the week,' he exclaimed; but his indignation was tempered by a consciousness that he had in fact risen from his cot unaware of this interesting distinction, and that he had shaved close by mere chance. 'Yet I should very soon have made it out,' he said. 'The atmosphere aboard a Sunday man-of-war is entirely different.'

  Indeed it was, with five or six hundred men washing, shaving, or being shaved, plaiting their tie-mates' pigtails, drawing clean hammocks, putting on their best clothes for mustering by divisions and then church, all in great haste, all in a bitterly confined space with a heat and humidity great enough to hatch eggs, and all after having brought the ship and everything visible in her to an exemplary state of cleanliness if wooden and of brilliance if metal.

  The Anglican aspect of Sunday did not affect Stephen, but the ritual cleanliness did, and he, with his assistants and loblolly-boy, were present, sober, and properly dressed, with their instruments laid out all agleam and their patients rigidly straight in their cots when Captain Pullings and his first lieutenant, Mr Harding, came round to inspect them. So did the convention of the Captain dining with his officers: but this did not take place until after church had been rigged—an awning shaded the quarterdeck, an ensign over an arms-chest to serve as a lectern from which prayers and sermons were delivered if the ship carried a chaplain (which the Bellona did not) or by the captain; though a captain might well prefer reading the Articles of War. Stephen therefore had time, after the inspection of the sick-berth, to make his way to the poop, where he had a fine view of the Royal Marines, close on a hundred of them, drawn up exactly in their scarlet and pipe-clayed glory, and of the long, somewhat more wavering lines of seamen, clean and trim, standing in their easy, round-shouldered way, covering the decks fore and aft, a sight that always gave him a certain pleasure.

  During the service itself he joined other Catholics for a recital of a Saint Brigid's rosary under the forecastle: they were of all possible colours and origins, and some were momentarily confused by the unusual number of Aves, but wherever they came from their Latin was recognizably the same; there was a sense of being at home; and they recited away in an agreeable unison while from aft came the sound of Anglican hymns and a psalm. They both finished at about the same time, and Stephen walked back to the quarterdeck, overtaking Captain Pullings as he was walking into the coach, where he lived, necessarily resigning the cabin to the Commodore. 'Well, Tom,' he said, 'so you have survived your ordeal?'—As Captain of the Bellona he had just read one of South's shorter sermons to the people—'I have, sir: it comes a little easier, as you said; but sometimes I wish we were just a pack of wicked heathens. Lord, I could do with my dinner, and a drink.'

  Dinner, when it came, was quite exceptionally good; and for the best part of an hour before the Bellona's officers and their guests sat down, a hot wind had been blowing off the land—hot, but startlingly dry, so that their uniform no longer clung to them and their appetite revived amazingly.

  'This is the first blast of the dry season,' said Whewell, talking to Stephen across the table. 'The two will chop and change for about a wee
k or two, and then I dare say we shall have a right harmattan, the decks covered with brown dust and everything splitting, and then it settles in till Lady Day.'

  The conversation ran on dry seasons—far better than wet—the delight of satisfying an enormous thirst—and presently Stephen, turning to his right-hand neighbour, a Marine lieutenant from the Stately, said how he admired the soldiers' endurance of either extreme, standing there like images in the sun or the bitter cold, or marching, wheeling and countermarching with such perfect regularity. 'There is something wonderfully agreeable in the sight of that self-command—or one might almost say relinquishment of self—in that formal, rhythmic precision, the tuck of drum, the stamp and clash of arms. Whether it has anything to do with war or not, I cannot tell; but the spectacle delights me.'

  'How I agree with you, sir,' said the Marine. 'And it has always seemed to me that there is something far more to drill than simply training in steadiness and obedience to the word of command. Little do I know of the Pyrrhic dance, yet it pleases me to imagine that it was in the nature of our manoeuvres, only with a clearly-acknowledged, rather than a dimly-perceived, sacred function. The Foot Guards offer a fine example of what I mean, when they troop their colours.'

  'The religious element in dancing can scarcely be denied. After all, David danced before the Ark of the Covenant, and in those parts of Spain where the Mozarabic rite is preserved a measured dance still forms part of the Mass.' Here Stephen was called upon to drink a glass of wine with Captain Pullings, while his neighbour joined an animated discussion on the preservation of game at the other end of the table.

  The meal wound on: the first lieutenant carved a saddle of mutton and then a leg in a way that did the Bellona credit, and the claret decanters pursued their steady round. Yet presently even the subject of putting down pheasants and circumventing poachers was exhausted, and Stephen, finding his Marine disengaged, said, 'One thing that I do remember about the Pyrrhic dance is that it was danced in armour.'

  'I am happy to hear you say so, sir,' said the young man with a smile—a strikingly handsome young man—'for it strengthens my point, since we do the same. To be sure, we admit the degeneration that has taken place since Hector and Lysander and we have reduced our equipment in due proportion; but mutatis mutandis, we still drill, or dance, in armour.'

  'Do you indeed?' cried Stephen. 'I had never noticed it.'

  'Why, this, sir,' said the Royal Marine, tapping his gorget, a little silver crescent hanging on the front of his red coat, 'this is a breast-plate. Somewhat smaller than the breast-plate Achilles wore, but then so are our deserts.' He laughed very cheerfully, seizing a decanter on the wing, filled Stephen's glass and his own. He had not drunk the half before Tom Pullings held up his hand, and in a dead silence the cry from the masthead was repeated, coming down clear and plain through the open hatchways and gunports: 'On deck, there. Land ho! Land broad on the larboard bow.'

  'Mr Harding, you will excuse me: I must acquaint the Commodore. Gentlemen, pray carry on with your dinner. In case I do not come back, thank you all for your hospitality.'

  He did not come back: and since there was little point in leaving their meat to see very distant land they did carry on. The hot, almost parching wind was blowing stronger and although some officers called for negus or lemon shrub, others quenched their rising thirst with claret, and a fresh dozen had to be brought up.

  In time, with the absence of the captain and the presence of a newly-promoted first lieutenant with little natural authority, the talk grew louder and much more free. Stephen and his Marine had to raise their voices for their words to be heard at all—words still connected with such things as the formal dancing of the last age in France and with drill as applied to cavalry and whole fleets—and Stephen was disagreeably aware that his neighbour was drinking, had drunk, too much, and that his attention had wandered to the conversation at the purser's end, where they were talking, often several at once, about sodomy.

  'You may say what you like,' said the tall, thin lieutenant, second of the Thames, 'but they are never really men. They may have pretty ways and read books and so on, but they will not toe the scratch in a fight. I had two in a gun-crew when I was a mid in Britannia, and when things grew rather hot they hid between the scuttle-butt and the capstan.'

  Other views were heard, other convictions and experiences, some tolerant, even benign, but most more or less violently opposed to sodomites.

  'In this atmosphere I scarcely think it would be worth mentioning Patroclus or the Theban Legion,' murmured Stephen, but the Marine was too intent on the general medley of voices to pay attention: he filled another glass and drank it without taking his eyes from the group round the purser.

  'You may say what you like,' said the tall, thin lieutenant, 'but even if I had the same tastes I should be very sorry to have to go into action aboard a ship commanded by one of them, however stately.'

  'If that is a fling against my ship, sir,' cried the Marine, pushing his chair back and standing up, very pale, 'I must ask you to withdraw it at once. The Stately's fighting qualities admit no sort of question.'

  'I was not aware that you belonged to Stately, sir,' said the lieutenant.

  'I see that there are others who do not choose to toe the scratch,' said the Marine; and now there was a general movement to separate the two men, general clamour, general extreme concern. Eventually both were put into their separate boats, the Stately's most unhappily manned by some of her captain's young ladies.

  Already the land was high and clear: the hot wind blew as strong and as fair as could be wished and the Bellona, Stately and Thames were nearing the point at which they should cut off any fugitive escaping from Philip's Island. But already signals were passing from the inshore brigs to the pennant by way of the Laurel—there were no fugitives to be cut off—the harbour was empty—the slavers were not to appear for three days, they having been delayed at Takondi, and although the barracoons, the great slave-pens, had held many negroes when the inshore force arrived, they had now been marched off.

  Jack Aubrey altered course, and by the grace of the tide and the evening breeze his three ships ran straight into the harbour, conned by Square, who knew the inlets and anchorages intimately well. The signal for all captains broke out aboard the Bellona before her anchor was down, and the boats converged upon her in the brief tropical dusk.

  After he had conferred with them he said to Stephen, 'I intend to stand out to sea again, out of sight, sending the brigs and schooners east along the coast to the Muni lagoon, to stop any coastwise boats or canoes that might carry warning, and to lay those fellows aboard as soon as they are here in the harbour. According to Whewell's predictions and to Square's—a capital seaman, that Square—and to the barometer there is a very fair chance of our catching them, three Dutchmen and a Dane, bound for the Havana. So if you like to go ashore this evening with Square you could have a couple of days naturalizing along your river: there is a little Kroo village where you could pass the night. But you would have to be here on the shore and ready to put off without the loss of a minute at high tide on Wednesday.'

  'What time would that be?' asked Stephen, glowing inwardly.

  'Why, at seven in the evening, in course,' said Jack, rather impatiently: even now he found Stephen's inability to adapt his mind to the rhythm of moon and tide barely credible in a man of his parts. He paused, considered, and then in quite a different tone he went on, 'Yet Stephen, I cannot but remember what you said about no shore-leave at Freetown after sunset, because of the miasmas and noxious exhalations, and I do beg you will take the utmost care—stay indoors, and walk out only when the day is aired.'

  'Thank you for your care of me, my dear,' said Stephen, 'but never let the climate grieve your generous heart. Freetown has a deathly fever-swamp at hand: even horses cannot live long in Freetown. But I shall be walking by a broad brisk river with falls, and miasmata are not to be feared by running water. It is your stagnant pool that engenders fever. N
ow I must arrange my collecting-bags and paper sheets, choose proper garments—are there leeches?—consult with honest Square and plan our route. In two days, going steady, we might pass his plain with baobabs and monstrous bats and reach the country of the potto and Temminck's pangolin!'

  Chapter Nine

  It was not until several days after they left Philip's Island that Stephen had a quiet evening in the cabin, to spread his hurried notes and some of his botanical specimens and begin a detailed account of his journey up the Sinon river. He had of course told Jack of the pygmy hippopotamus, the red bush pig, the froward elephant that chased him into a baobab tree, the bay-thighed monkeys, the chimpanzees (mild, curious, though timid), a terrestrial orchid higher than himself, with rose-pink flowers, the Kroo python that Square addressed in a respectful chant and that watched them, turning its head, as they paced meekly by, the seven different hornbills, the two pangolins, the large variety of beetles of course and a scorpion seven and a half inches long, together with sun-birds and weavers.

  'And your potto?' asked Jack. 'I hope you saw your potto?'

  'I saw him, sure,' said Stephen. 'Clear on a long bare branch tilted to the moon, and he gazing down with his great round eyes. I dare say he advanced a foot or even eighteen inches while I watched him.'

  'Did you shoot him?'

  'I did not. I am not naturalist enough. Nor would you have done so. But I did shoot a fishing vulture that I prize; and if it prove a nondescript, as I trust it will, I shall name it after the ship.'

  Those early days on the island and the opposite shore had been full of activity. There was some malarial fever already among those who had raided Sherbro, and although the captured slavers—they had sailed confidently into the harbour without the least precaution—had no more than half a cargo each, many of the negroes had been aboard since Old Calabar, and some were in a bad way. Now, however, the two Dutchmen and the Dane had been sent off with prize-crews to Freetown, and the two-deckers, together with the slow, heavy-sailing Thames and the Aurora, had weighed by night, standing out to sea, well out beyond even the highest tree's horizon, to head eastward, to the Bight of Benin, thus setting the Commodore's plan in motion. In the morning those on the Bellona's quarterdeck could make out the Laurel's humble topsails on the larboard beam, and the Laurel was in touch with the inshore brigs; all was in train; the ship settled back into ordinary daily life, and Stephen was able to arrange his specimens in some sort of order, skin his birds, and label everything before sheer quantity (it had been a rich expedition) overwhelmed fallible memory. In all this he had John Square's informed and valuable help; but when, after dinner, he sat down to the task of writing an exact account he was alone. Usually, once he had sunk into the proper mood and had marshalled all his facts he wrote quite fast; but now, although the picture of that blessed river, the clear strand between the water and the forest, and a fishing vulture overhead was exactly present in his mind, names, time of day and the sequence of events were less clear by far; and they would not easily yield to what mental effort he could bring to bear. Languor: muscular pain: incipient headache: stupidity.