Book 4 - The Mauritius Command

by Patrick O'Brian

  'I hope to God they are right,' said Jack. He stepped down to the quarterdeck and looked at the log-board again. He was strongly tempted to go up into the top or even to the masthead; but that would singularize the whole thing too much—draw too much attention to it—and he returned to his lonely poop, only desiring the officer of the watch to send a good man aloft with a night-glass and bid him keep a sharp look-out.

  He was still on the poop when the eastern stars began to pale: the morning watch had been called long since and men were moving about the dim deck, sprinkling sand. Jack's certainties had vanished an hour ago: his neat isosceles triangle had fled down the wind, routed by a thousand fresh unknown quantities. He stood still now, leaning on the rail and searching the horizon from the west to south-west. The blazing rim of the sun thrust up; light shot into the eastern sky; and the lookout hailed 'Sail ho.'

  'Where away?' cried Jack.

  'On the starboard beam, sir. Wasp. A-lying to.'

  And there indeed she was, hull-down, well to the east, her triangular sails just nicking the rising sun. Jack called down to the quarterdeck, 'Make sail to close her,' and resumed his pacing. The steady grind of holystones, the slap of swabs: full day-time life returned to the Raisonable as she set her topgallants and ran fast along the line that should cut the schooner's path. When his powerful glass had shown him Stephen walking about far over there, Jack went below, said, 'Breakfast in the after-cabin, Killick,' and stretched himself out on his cot for a while. Presently he heard the officer of the watch call for a bosun's chair, agitated cries of 'Handsomely, handsomely, there. Boom him off the backstay,' and a little later Stephen's familiar step.

  'Good morning, Stephen,' he said. 'You look as pleased as Punch—the trip was to your liking, I hope and trust?'

  'The most delightful trip, I thank you, Jack; and a very good morning to you too. Most delightful . . . look!' He held out his two hands, opened them cautiously and disclosed an enormous egg.

  'Well, it is a prodigious fine egg, to be sure,' said Jack: then, raising his voice, 'Killick, light along the breakfast, will you? Bear a hand, there.'

  'Other things have I brought with me,' said Stephen, drawing a green-baize parcel from his pocket and a large cloth bag. 'But nothing in comparison with the truly regal gift of that most deserving young man Fortescue. For what you see there, Jack, is nothing less than the concrete evidence of the albatross's gigantic love. Whereas this'—pointing to the gently heaving parcel—'is no more than a poll-parrot of the common green, or West African, species, too loquacious for its own good.' He undid the baize, snipped the band confining the parrot's wings, and set the bird upon its feet. The parrot instantly cried. 'A bas Buonaparte. Salaud, salaud, salaud,' in a metallic, indignant voice, climbed on to the back of his chair, and began to preen its ruffled feathers. 'The cloth bag, on the other hand, contains some of the finest coffee I have ever tasted; it grows to great advantage upon the island.'

  Breakfast appeared, and when they were alone again Jack said, 'So you did not spend all your time ashore bird's nesting, I collect. Would it be proper to tell me anything about the rest of your journey?'

  'Oh, that,' said Stephen, setting his egg sideways upon a butter-dish to see it at a better angle. 'Yes, yes: it was a straightforward piece of routine, perfectly simple, as I told you. Fruitful, however. I shall not tell you about my interlocutor—far better to know nothing in these cases—apart from saying that I take him to be a wholly reliable source, exceptionable only in his prolonged retention of this indiscreet fowl, a fault of which he was himself most sensible. Nor shall I trouble you with the political aspect: but I have a clear notion of the military side. I believe it to be a true statement of the position, and am not without hope that it will give you pleasure. In the first place, our accession of strength is as yet unknown: in the second, the two most recently captured Indiamen, the Europe and the Streatham, are in St Paul's road, on the other side of the island, together with their captor, the frigate Caroline, whose inward parts are alleged to require some attention that will keep her there for perhaps a fortnight. In fact her captain, a most amiable young man called Feretier, is attached to the wife of the Governor, General Desbrusleys, a passionate gentleman who is at odds with Captain Saint-Michiel, the commandant of St Paul's, and with most of the other officers on La Réunion. At present he is at Saint-Denis: his forces amount to something over three thousand men, including the militia; but they are stationed at various points, twenty and even thirty miles apart over difficult mountain country; and although St Paul's is strongly defended by batteries and fortifications mounting, let us see, nine and eight is seventeen—I write seven and I retain one; five and five is ten, and with the one that I retained, eleven—mounting a hundred and seventeen guns, you may consider it practicable, in spite of the difficulty of landing on these shores, to which you have so frequently adverted. This rude sketch shows the approximate location of the batteries. This the disposition of the troops. You will forgive me for labouring the obvious when I say, that if you do decide to act, then celerity is everything. 'Lose not a minute', as you would put it.'

  'Lord, Stephen, how happy you make me,' said Jack, taking the paper and comparing it with his chart of St Paul's dstead and the shore. 'Yes, yes: I see. A crossing fire, of course. Forty-two-pounders, I dare say; and well served, no doubt. There is no possibility of cutthing the Indiamen or the frigate out, none at all, without we take the batteries. And that we cannot do with our Marines and seamen: but three or four hundred soldiers from Rodriguez would just tip the scale, I do believe. We could not hold the place, of course, but we might take the ships—there is a fair chance that we take the ships.' He stared at the paper and at his chart. 'Yes: a tough nut, to be sure; but if only I can persuade the soldiers on Rodriguez to move at once, and if only we can get our men ashore, I believe we can crack it. St Paul's is on the leeward side, where the surf is not so wicked unless the wind lies in the west . . . but I quite take your point about losing no time, Stephen . . .' He ran out of the cabin, and a few moments later Stephen, turning the egg over in his hands, heard the Raisonable begin to speak as she bore up for Rodriguez, spreading sail after sail: the masts complained, the taut rigging sang with a greater urgency, the sound of the water racing along her side mounted to a diffused roar; the complex orchestra of cordage, wood under stress, moving sea and wind, all-pervading sound, exalting to the sea-borne ear—a sound that never slackened day or night while the squadron made good its five hundred miles with the strong, steady south-east wind just abaft the beam.

  Rodriguez: the low dome of the island lay clear on the starboard bow at dawn on Thursday, a greenish dome, its skyline stuck with palm-trees, in a green lagoon; all round the immense surrounding reef the white of breakers, and beyond it the intense blue of the open sea, uninterrupted for five thousand miles to windward. A man-of-war bird passed a few feet overhead, its long forked tall opening and closing as it glided through the swirling currents about the forestaysail and the jibs, but neither Jack nor Stephen moved their steady gaze from the land. On a flat tongue of land with a large house upon it and some huts, neat rows of tents could already be seen: no great number of them, but enough to shelter the three or four hundred soldiers that might make the descent on La Réunion a possibility, if only their commanding officer could be induced to stir. Jack had seen combined operations by the score, few of them a pleasant memory; and the likelihood of miserable jealousies between army and navy, the divided command, to say nothing of divided councils, were clear in his mind. He was superior to Lieutenant-Colonel Keating in rank, but that gave him a mere precedence, no right to issue orders: it would have to be a true, willing cooperation or nothing. He must rely upon his powers of exposition: and as though an unremitting glare might carry conviction, he kept the glass trained on the house, moving it only occasionally to glance at the gap in the surf that showed the narrow passage into the lagoon.

  Stephen's mind was largely taken up with the same considerations; yet
part of it was also aware, vividly aware, that the island gliding towards him was the home of an enormous land tortoise, not perhaps quite so vast as Testudo aubreii, discovered and named by himself on a comparable island in this same ocean, but even so one of the wonders of the world; and, more important still, that until recently it had been the home, the only home, of the solitaire, a bird in some ways resembling the dodo, equally extinct alas, but still less known to science, even in fragmentary remains. He turned over a number of approaches to this subject, none wholly satisfactory, given Jack's gross insensibility to all science without an immediate application: for Captain Aubrey, as for the rest of brute creation, there were only two kinds of birds, the edible and the inedible. Even after prolonged meditation, during which the squadron reduced sail for the first time in fifty-two hours, he could produce no more than a timid 'Were we compelled to stay a short while . . .' that passed unnoticed, for as he spoke Jack raised his speaking-trumpet and hailed the Néréide, saying 'Lead in, if you please, Captain Corbett. And preserve us from evil.'

  'Amen,' said a forecastleman automatically, glancing at the Commodore with horror as soon as the word was out of his mouth.

  '. . . perhaps I might be allowed a party,' continued Stephen, 'a very small party, consisting only of ambulant cases . . .' He would have added 'to look for bones', if the Commodore's eager determined expression had not convinced him that he might as well have pleaded with the ship's figurehead.

  The barge splashed down into the calm waters of the lagoon, its crew stretched out as they were bid, and this same eager determined expression advanced with long strides up the coral beach to meet Colonel Keating. They exchanged salutes, shook hands, and the soldier said, 'You will not remember me, sir, but I was at a dinner given in your honour at Calcutta after your magnificent defence of the China fleet.'

  'Certainly I remember you, sir,' said Jack, who had indeed some recollection of this tall, lean figure—a long-nosed, capable face that raised his hopes, 'and am very happy to see you again.'

  The Colonel looked pleased, and as he led Jack through a double hedge of his men, Englishmen of the 56th Foot on the one side, turbaned sepoys of the 2nd regiment of Bombay Infantry on the other, he observed, 'How delighted we were to see you coming in. We have been so cruelly bored on this dismal rock, these last few months—reduced to tortoise-races—nothing to look forward to except the arrival of the main body next year—nothing to shoot except guinea-fowl.' Jack instantly seized upon the opening and said, 'If we are of the same mind, Colonel, I believe I can do away with your boredom. I can offer you something better than guinea-fowl to shoot at.'

  'Can you, by God?' cried the soldier, with a look as keen as Jack's. 'I rather hoped something might be afoot, when I saw you come ashore so quick.'

  In the tents, drinking tepid sherbet, Jack stated the case: he felt almost certain that the Colonel, though mute, was with him, but even so his heart thumped strangely as he spoke the words that must bring the answer, positive, negative, or temporizing: 'And so, sir, I should value your appreciation of the position.'

  'Sure, I am of your mind entirely,' said Keating straight away. 'There are only two things that make me hesitate—hesitate as the officer commanding the troops on Rodriguez, I mean, not as Harry Keating. The first is that I have barely four hundred men here, a mere advance-party to build the fort and prepare the lines. It was never imagined that I should move until the arrival of the main body with the next monsoon, and I might be broke for stirring, for leaving my command. Yet as against that, I know the Company loves you like a son, so I might equally well be broke for not falling in with your plan of campaign. As far as that goes, then, I should choose to follow my own inclination, which is the same as yours, sir. The second is this question of landing through the surf—the choice of our disembarkation. As you pointed out so candidly, there lies the crux. For with no more than your Marines and what seamen you can spare—say six hundred men with my few companies—it must necessarily be nip and tuck. My men, and particularly the sepoys, are not clever in boats: if we do not land cleanly and carry their works out of hand, a neat coup de main, there will be the Devil to pay, once their columns start coming in from Saint-Denis and the other places. If I could be satisfied on that point, I should cry "done directly".'

  'I cannot pretend to be well acquainted with the western side of the island myself,' said Jack, 'but I have two captains here with a vast deal of local knowledge. Let us hear what they have to say.'

  Colonel Keating's conscience longed to be satisfied, and it would have taken far less to do so than Corbett's vehement assertion that landing on the west side, north of St Paul's, so long as the wind stayed in the south-east, which it did three hundred days in the year, was as easy as kiss my hand, particularly when this was reinforced by Clonfert's still more positive statement that even with a westerly wind he would undertake to set a thousand men ashore in a sheltered cove accessible through gaps in the reef known to his black pilot. But the Colonel was less pleased when the two captains disagreed violently upon the best place for the landing, Clonfert maintaining that the St Giles inlet was the obvious choice, Corbett that no one but a blockhead would attempt anything but the Pointe des Galets, adding, in reply to Clonfert's objection that it was seven miles from St Paul's, that he conceived the opinion of a post-captain with a real knowledge of these waters, acquired over many years of service on the station during this war and the last, was likely to carry more weight than that of a very young commander. The Colonel retired into a grave, formal absence while the captains wrangled, the veiled personalities growing more naked until the Commodore called both to order, not without asperity. And somewhat later Keating's delight in the company of the sailors was damped again when Lord Clonfert abruptly excused himself before the end of dinner and left the tent as pale as he had been red at the beginning of the meal—a redness attributable to the Commodore's words, delivered in what was meant to be the privacy of the nascent fort: 'Lord Clonfert, I am exceedingly concerned that this display of ill-feeling should have taken place, above all that it should have taken place in the presence of Colonel Keating. You forget the respect due to senior officers, sir. This must not occur again.'

  'Lord, Stephen,' cried Jack as he came into the stern-gallery of the Raisonable, where Dr Maturin sat gazing wistfully at the land, 'what a capital fellow that Keating is! You might almost think he was a sailor. "When do you wish my men to be aboard?" says he. "Would six o'clock suit?" says I. "Perfectly, sir," says he; turns about, says to Major O'Neil, "Strike camp," and the tents vanish—the thing is done, with no more words bar a request that his Hindus should be given no salt beef and his Mahometans no salt pork. That is the kind of soldier I love! In three hours we shall be at sea! Néréide is preparing to receive them at this minute. Are you not delighted, Stephen?'

  'Oh, excessively delighted; delighted beyond measure. But Jack, am I to understand that no shore-leave is to be allowed—that we are to be hurried from this place as we were hurried from the parturient whale off Cape Agulhas? I begged Mr Lloyd for a boat, a small boat, but he declared that it was as much as his skin was worth to suffer me to go without an order from you, adding, with an inhuman leer, that he thought the Commodore would have anchors atrip before the ebb. Yet surely it would be of immeasurable benefit to all hands, to be indulged in running about and frolicking, if no farther than the strand?'

  'Bless you, Stephen,' said Jack, 'you shall have your boat, for what bugs you may gather in two hours and a half; for two hours and a half it is, mark you well, not a minute more; and I shall send Bonden with you.'

  Stephen was making his laborious way down the sternladder, his searching foot was already poised over the boat itself, when the Otter's yawl pulled alongside and a midshipman said, 'Dr Maturin, sir?'

  Stephen writhed his neck round, directing a grim look at the young man: all his professional life ashore had been haunted by these vile messengers; innumerable concerts, theatres, operas, dinners, promised treats
had been wrecked or interrupted by fools, mooncalves, who, to gain some private end, had broken a leg, had fits, or fallen into a catalepsy. 'Go and see my mate, Mr Carol,' he said.

  'Dr McAdam's particular compliments to Dr Maturin,' went on the midshipman, 'and would be most grateful for his present advice.'

  'Hell and death,' said Stephen. He crept up the ladder, flung some medical objects into a bag, and crept down again, holding the bag in his teeth.

  A worried, perfectly sober McAdam received him aboard the Otter. 'You wished to see this case in its crisis, Doctor: pray step below,' he said in public; and in private, 'This is the crisis, God damn me, and a tear-my-guts out crisis too. I am relieved to have you to consult with, colleague—am in three minds at the least.' He led him into the captain's cabin, and there, on the sofa, lay Lord Clonfert, doubled up with pain. He made a real attempt at mastering it to greet Stephen and to thank him for coming—'Most benevolent—vastly obliged—désolé to receive him in these conditions'—but the strong gripes cut him very short.

  Stephen examined him carefully, asked questions, examined him again, and the doctors withdrew. The attentive ears that hung about the neighbourhood could make precious little of their Latin, but it was understood that Dr Maturin would have nothing to do with Dr McAdam's iliac passion, still less his Lucatellus' balsam; that he slightly inclined to a colonic spasm; that he believed Dr McAdam might do well to exhibit helleborus niger in the heroic dose of twenty minims, together with forty drops of thebaic tincture and sixty of antimonial wine, accompanied, naturally, with a little Armenian bole, as a temporary expedient; he had known it answer in tormina of much the same kind (though less intense) that afflicted a purser, a wealthy purser who dreaded detection when the ship paid off; but this was a particularly difficult, interesting case, and one that called for a more prolonged consultation. Dr Maturin would send for the other lenitives he had mentioned, and when the enemata had had their effect, Dr McAdam might choose to walk on the island to discuss the matter at greater length: Dr Maturin always thought more clearly, when walking. The ears dispersed during the coming and going of the messenger; they made nothing of the administration of the drugs other than the fact that the groans in the cabin stopped; but they did catch some words about 'delighted to attend the opening of the body, in the event of a contrary result' that earned Dr Maturin some brooding glances as the two medical men went over the side, for the Otters loved their captain.