Book 15 - Clarissa Oakes

by Patrick O'Brian

  And indeed there were so many taboos, personal, tribal, national, woven into the texture of the island's life that this little gaffe passed almost unnoticed, certainly without any embarrassment on the part of Puolani, and the feast went on and on, most of the sailors soon recovering their appetite. After the fish and turtle—the best turtle in the South Seas—came fowls, cooked in the Polynesian manner, dogs, eggs and young fat pigs; all this with great quantities of chief's kava, a more heady brew than usual.

  The feast, and there was a great deal of it, eaten over a very long time, was accompanied by singing, the music of flutes, drums of various pitch, and something between a harp and a lyre: and when even fruit would scarcely go down, the dancing began.

  There were some of the exactly-timed evolutions and manoeuvres they had seen far to the south, in Annamooka, and they were received with applause; but not with nearly such hearty applause as the much freer hula, danced with great skill, grace and enthusiasm by a number of young women.

  'I am glad Martin is not here,' said Stephen in Jack's ear. 'He could never have approved these licentious postures and wanton looks.'

  'Perhaps not,' said Jack. 'For my own part I do not find them objectionable, however.'

  Nor did West. His appetite had been more severely checked than most by the sight of the Frenchman's ring-finger in his bowl, but now he had recovered entirely and he was leaning forward, gazing with passionate intensity at the second girl from the left.

  Jack did not object: not at all; but sleep was rising up with such force that for some time now he had not dared shut his eyes for fear of dropping off and more than off—deep, deep down. He stifled a yawn and looked wistfully at the stimulating kava bowl—the cup-bearer too was engrossed by the motions of the second girl on the left. Puolani caught his glance, reached out and filled him a bumper with kind, comforting, apologetic words.

  More conches, a great howl of conches. The girls withdrew to a thunder of applause, with whistles and cheers from the frigate's crew, and to his surprise Jack saw that the sun was already dipping. Silence returned at last; and a figure eight feet tall, a man entirely covered with basket-work, came into the square before the Queen. He had two drummers with him, one deep, one shrill, and when they had beaten three measures he broke out in a high falsetto of surprising volume, rising and falling to a rhythm that certainly existed for many of his hearers, since they bowed and nodded, but that neither Jack nor Stephen could make out. Tapia whispered 'He is telling the Queen's family right back and back.' Again and again Jack tried to seize the pattern but always at some crucial point his attention wandered and all was to begin again: he closed his eyes to concentrate on the chant alone, and this was fatal.

  To his extreme confusion he woke to find the whole table smiling at him. The wickerwork figure was gone, and already the fires showed red in the more than twilight.

  Two powerful men heaved him gently to his feet and led him away. On the threshold he turned, as in a dream, and made his bow. Puolani, with the kindest look, returned it: then there was a warm darkness and these sure hands; they took his feather cloak, he slipped off his clothes and they lowered him on to the wonderful ease of the long, flat, soft couch in the house that had been built for him.

  He had rarely been so tired, had rarely gone so very far down; yet he rose up clear and fresh, no muddiness, no staring about; he knew, as a sailor knows, that it was near the end of the middle watch, and the tide was on the turn; he knew that there was someone in the room, and as he sat up a strong arm pressed him back, a warm, scented arm. He was not altogether surprised—perhaps his half-waking mind had caught the scent—nor at all displeased: his heart began to beat violently, and he made room.

  First light was coming through the door when he heard Tom Pullings' agitated whisper, 'Sir, sir, excuse me, sir. The Franklin is in the offing. Sir, sir . . .'

  'Pipe down, Tom,' he murmured, pulling on his clothes. She was still asleep, flat, her head back, her mouth open, looking perfectly beautiful. He slid round the opening and they hurried down. The village was still asleep, apart from a few fishermen: Oakes had sent the boats in and already a second carronade was moving down over the rollers.

  'Mr Oakes's duty, sir,' said Bonden, 'and Franklin was seen in the west as soon as it was day: she stood in, doubted all was right, let fall her courses and steered south-west. She will show round the headland any minute now, sir. And sir, he sent the drum.'

  'Very good, Bonden. Watkins, beat to arms. Doctor, Mr Adams, come along with me. Captain Pullings, carry on.'

  As the jollyboat pulled out across the bay the Franklin appeared: quite unmistakable. Long and low, a right privateer. She was suspicious, but not particularly alarmed—no topgallants, and she had not even let the night-time reef out of her topsails.

  Jack felt extraordinarily well as he ran up the side. 'Good morning, Mr Oakes,' he said, 'well done indeed.' To Killick's mate (for Killick was still on shore), 'Breakfast in twenty minutes,' and to Mr Adams, just arrived, 'Mr Adams, pray write out Mr Oakes's acting order in due form, and the dispatches and letters we drafted.' He glanced at the shore, where the laggard Surprises were now hurrying about like purposeful bees, flung his shirt and trousers on to the capstan-head, and dived deep into the clear green water.

  Even after breakfast the Franklin was obviously in two minds, for she threw out a signal intelligible no doubt to her countrymen; a sign to which Jack, old in deception, replied with a vague hoist that went up and down, the halliard constantly jammed, wasting irreplaceable minutes.

  The carronades were coming home with incredible speed, and their munitions: there was an appearance of hopeless chaos, with people coming up the side from helping the Truelove to weigh, very heavy weights being lowered, boats swinging inboard; but soon after Pullings had said 'All hands have reported, sir, and the bosun's chair is rigged,' Jack turned to Oakes. 'Here is your acting order, Mr Oakes, and the large wrapper holds all the other papers: so now, if Mrs Oakes is ready, perhaps you should go aboard your command.'

  Clarissa stepped from the rail and said in her high clear voice 'Please let me thank you, sir, for your great goodness to me; I shall always be extremely grateful.'

  He said 'We have been very happy to have you with us. A prosperous voyage to you both, and pray give my dear love to England.'

  She turned to Stephen, who kissed her on both cheeks, said 'God bless, my dear,' and handed her to the bosun's chair, which lowered her into the Truelove's boat. He watched them go aboard and heard the shout 'Three cheers for the Surprise,' followed by 'Huzzay, huzzay, huzzay!' with all the force and conviction that the rescued crew could give.

  'Three cheers for Truelove,' cried Jack, and suspending their work the Surprises answered 'Huzzay, huzzay, huzzay!' with great good humour, for many of them were very fond of Oakes and all had the tenderest regard for their prize.

  Now the Truelove was drawing away: Clarissa appeared at her taffrail, and she and Stephen waved.

  'All hands unmoor ship,' called Jack, and to Pullings, in a conversational tone, 'We can demolish the crow's nest as we go.'

  Stephen stood there while behind him the capstan turned and clicked to the usual cries; each anchor rose in turn to the invariable orders and responses; and all at once he realized that the frigate too was under way, rapidly making sail and moving faster and faster eastwards after her flying quarry, so that the distance between the ships was increasing with dreadful speed; before he was prepared for it the Truelove was no more than a remote ship upon the sea; and there was no longer any human contact at all.

  The Jack Aubrey Novels:

  an editorial report

  RICHARD OLLARD

  PATRICK O'BRIAN has long established himself as a writer whose brilliance commends the acclaim of the critics and whose sheer readability has brought all his historical novels into print in both paperback and hardback on both sides of the Atlantic.

  I say 'long' with a certain authority. I accepted with delight the first novel
of the series, Master and Commander, more than twenty years ago. Fifteen novels later I take no less pleasure and pride than I did on its first publication. The manuscript was offered to me by the agent Richard Scott Simon, who told me that it had been jointly commissioned by an English and an American publishing house (who shall be nameless) and neither wished to proceed. I succeeded in communicating my enthusiasm to my sales and publicity colleagues and sent a proof copy to Mary Renault, then at the height of her fame as the novelist of ancient Athens (The Last of the Wine) and of Alexander the Great. She came up with a splendid recommendation, even more splendidly amplified for the second novel Post Captain: 'Master and Commander' raised almost dangerously high expectations; Post Captain triumphantly surpasses them. Mr O'Brian does not just have the chief qualifications of a first-class historical novelist, he has them all.'

  And Sir Francis Chichester, fresh from his single-handed voyage round the world, described it as 'the best sea-story I have ever read'.

  These two judgements contain the core of what everyone has since enjoyed and admired. O'Brian is a first class storyteller. He writes about the sea and ships with a power no other author now commands. To all this he adds a breadth of learning and an imaginative sympathy with his period that never gets in the way of these first two qualities.

  The greatest of all British naval victories, the Battle of Trafalgar, sealed in the hour of triumph by the death in action of the greatest of British admirals, was fought on 21 October 1805. Every year since then Trafalgar Night has been celebrated in the ships and shore establishments of the Royal Navy. On that night Patrick O'Brian and I look forward to meeting each other at a dinner of naval historians which is generally held at the Garrick Club in London, though we have once been permitted to meet in the great cabin of Nelson's flagship now preserved in her own dry dock at Portsmouth. He is present there as a widely recognised authority on the Navy of Nelson's day. Scholarship underpins his evocation of that long-vanished world of wooden ships and pig-tailed sailors. And his scholarship, like every thing else about him, is individual and independent. He has ploughed his own furrow, clear of schools, universities and cliques.

  The best books about sea life under sail have been written by authors whose interests stretched beyond the world of salt water. Two Years Before the Mast, that compellingly readable classic by a Boston intellectual with its marvellous double take of the Californian coast before and after the Gold Rush, owes its sharpness of perception to the fact that the whole world of spars and sheets, of masts and stays, was unfamiliar to its writer. He saw them with a fresh and wondering eye and communicates his wonder to the reader.

  So, it rapidly becomes apparent, it is with the series of novels that Patrick O'Brian has written set in the Navy of Nelson and beyond to the war of 1812. Not only are the minute details of seamanship observed and described with the exactitude of an expert: so is every other aspect of the world in which Britain's two great wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France were fought. The politics, the language, the recreations, the diet, the furniture, all the surface externals, are perfectly in period. So, too, are the ideas and the manners, a much more difficult and subtle achievement. If the characters from one of Jane Austen's novels were to encounter those from one of Patrick O'Brian's, they would have no difficulty in communicating with each other. They might not take to each other. Jane Austen's naval officers, drawn no doubt from her two naval brothers and their friends, might have though Jack Aubrey, Patrick O'Brian's central character, somewhat coarse-fibred, but they would have recognised each other as messmates.

  Jane Austen's business with her naval characters is exclusively with their social and domestic relationships. She never—perish the thought!—describes a battle or concerns herself with the squalor and brutishness of a seaman's life. In fact there are no seamen in her books, only sea officers. Patrick O'Brian's novels on the other hand are centred on ship life. The handling and fighting of the vessel, her preservation from the dangers of the sea and the violence of the enemy, require the skill and courage of the prime seamen who race aloft, who fire the guns, who man the boats, as well as the expert knowledge of such specialists as the gunner, the bosun, the carpenter and the quartermaster who would not have messed in the wardroom. These figures are as conspicuous in O'Brian's books as they would have been in real life. Their attitudes, prejudices and antecedents are as faithfully rendered as those of their social superiors.

  Neither, it must be stressed, is romanticised. The officers are, generally speaking, ambitious professionals in a highly competitive profession. The Royal Navy in Nelson's day offered a career open to the talents to an extent that, in Britain at any rate, no other profession did. Few of the officers who rose to the top were aristocrats or the sons of the rich. For tunes were made, peerages bestowed, estates and honours were the reward of success. Failure and feebleness were correspondingly swept aside. Even at the height of the war there were far more officers than there were ships to command: and in peacetime the disproportion was vast. The money to be earned came not from an officer's salary but from the prizes taken and the enemy warships captured. Prize money was the great incentive, an incentive in which everyone from admiral to common seaman had a share, though of course a far from equal one. The officers, and above all the captain, came off best. But the degree of mutual dependence was an important feature of the system. A captain needed efficient officers, alert and active seamen, a taut ship, if he were to catch his prey. The ship's company wanted a daring (and lucky) commander if there was to be anything to show for their efforts.

  Of course this is not to deny that Jack Aubrey and his fellows in fiction, or Nelson and his band of brothers in historical fact, were actuated by patriotism and personal courage. Obviously they were. Beyond that, both officers and men felt a passionate pride in the service.

  Come, cheer up, my lads, 'tis to glory we steer.

  To add something more to this wonderful year.

  Heart of oak are our ships. Heart of oak are our men.

  We've beat them before and we'll beat them again.

  This was not mere tub-thumping but an axiom that had been put to the proof. Any understanding or portrayal of the Royal Navy in its classic age must begin from an acceptance of these two powerful drives, personal ambition and team spirit—or esprit de corps as the French more elegantly put it.

  Thus though O'Brian does not romanticise his hero, showing him to be lecherous, gluttonous and fiercely keen to make money, he is fully alive to his romantic side. Jack speaks with veneration of Nelson, who once asked him to pass the salt when they were dining at the same table. He rejoices generously and without a tincture of self-interest in the success of his brother officers even when it means that they are passing him in the race for promotion and command. And his own love of adventure and his own fighting instinct lead him time and again into hazardous actions from which the hope of personal profit is either remote or non-existent. To get at the enemy wherever he can be found was the first principle of Nelsonic conduct.

  It was qualified, naturally, by professionalism. Only an idiot or an incompetent would pick a fight against over whelming superiority of force. In the very first novel in the series, Master and Commander, Jack Aubrey, holding his first command in a small brig, finds himself in this unenviable position no less than four times. On one occasion he succeeds in disguising himself as a private neutral vessel (an age-old ruse de guerre, which had still plenty of life left in it in the war of 1939-1945). On another he just succeeds in running away, eluding the pursuit that is gaining on him by dropping decoy lights after darkness has fallen. On the third, since flight is impossible, he attacks his far stronger adversary and captures her by a combination of better seamanship, better gunnery and the sheer ferocity and unexpectedness of boarding a ship more than twice his own size. On the fourth and last, falling in with a powerful squadron of battleships who have the wind of him, he strikes his colours. Surrender under such circumstances is no disgrace. Professionals
have no use for pointless slaughter.

  Jack, though subtly drawn, is not a subtle character. He convinces by his roast beef, hearty straightforwardness. But his officers are by no means all of his type. The First Lieutenant of the Sophie, the brig Jack commands in Master and Commander, is a proud Irish aristocrat who had had political connexions in his native country which he is anxious to conceal. He is by the same token a secret Roman Catholic, which would at that date have disabled him from holding any civil or military office under the Crown. He openly despises Jack's anxiety to make money out of prize-taking and is secretly irritated by his uninformed Protestant prejudices. Another officer, the Master, who is charged with navigation and the handling of the ship, is of obviously homosexual disposition. Obviously that is to everyone aboard except Jack. All of them, in short, are individualised, not taken out of stock, whether the stock be historical or literary. And all of them speak and react, read (if they do read) and think, in the idiom of their time. They could not come out of The Cruel Sea or The Caine Mutiny to take two of the best-known novels about the war of 1939-1945.

  The same is true of the sailors. Some of them are jolly Jack Tars who are familiar from the fact and fiction of every age of the Navy. But a number are pressed men and foreigners. The shortage of seamen was the perennial problem of a country that only maintained a small naval establishment in time of peace. When war came the Admiralty expected to man its ships with the sailors who had been earning their living as fishermen or in the coastwise or ocean trades. By this means somebody else had to pick up the pay cheque except when the men were actually wanted for active service. Since both fishing and seaborne trade had to go on in war as in peace this meant that there were simply not enough men to go round—and the unhealthy conditions of life at sea, particularly in climates such as the West Indies, rapidly intensified the shortage. Death in battle was a marginal factor in the statistics of maritime mortality.