Book 1 - Master & Commander

by Patrick O'Brian

  'You are an antinomian,' said Jack.

  'I am a pragmatist,' said Stephen. 'Come, let us drink up our wine, and I will compound you a dose—requies Nicholai. Perhaps tomorrow you should be let blood: it is three weeks since you was let blood.'

  'Well, I will swallow your dose,' said Jack. 'But I tell you what—tomorrow night I shall be in among those gunboats and I shall do the blood-letting. And don't they wish they may relish it.'

  The Sophie's allowance of fresh water for washing was very small, and she made no allowance of soap at all. Those men who had blackened themselves and one another with paint remained darker than was pleasant; and those who had worked in the wrecked galley, covering themselves with grease and soot from the coppers and the stove, looked, if anything, worse—they had a curiously bestial and savage appearance, worst of all in those that had fair hair.

  'The only respectable-looking fellows are the black men,' said Jack. 'They are all still aboard, I believe?'

  'Davies went with Mr Mowett in the privateer, sir,' said James, 'but the rest are still with us.'

  'Counting the men left in Mahon and the prize-crews, how many are we short at the moment?'

  'Thirty-six, sir. We are fifty-four all told.'

  'Very good. That gives us elbow-room. Let them have as much sleep as possible, Mr Dillon: we shall stand in at midnight.'

  Summer had come back after the rain—a gentle, steady tramontana, warm, clear air, and phosphorescence on the sea. The lights of Barcelona twinkled with uncommon brilliance, and over the middle part of the city floated a luminous cloud: the gunboats guarding the approaches to the port could be made out quite clearly against this background before ever they saw the darkened Sophie: they were farther out than usual, and they were obviously on the alert.

  'As soon as they start to come for us,' reflected Jack, 'we will set topgallants, steer for the orange light, then haul our wind at the last moment and run between the two on the northern end of the line.' His heart was going with a steady, even beat, a little faster than usual. Stephen had drawn off ten ounces of blood, and he thought he felt much the better for it. At all events his mind was as clear and sharp as he could wish.

  The moon's tip appeared above the sea. A gunboat fired: deep, booming note—the voice of an old solitary hound.

  'The light, Mr Ellis,' said Jack, and a blue flare soared up, designed to confuse the enemy. It was answered with Spanish signals, hoists of coloured lights, and then another gun, far over to the right. 'Topgallants,' he said. 'Jeffreys, steer for that orange mark.'

  This was splendid: the Sophie was running in fast, prepared, confident and happy. But the gunboats were not coming on as he had hoped. Now one would spin about and fire, and now another; but on the whole they were falling back. To stir them up the sloop yawed and sent her broadside skipping among them—with some effect, to judge by a distant howl. Yet still the gunboats moved away. 'Damn this,' said Jack. 'They are trying to lead us on. Mr Dillon, trysail and staysails. We'll make a dash for that fellow farthest out.'

  The Sophie came round fast and brought the wind on to her beam: heeling over so that the silk black water lapped at her port-sills, she raced towards the nearest gunboat. But now the others showed what they could do if they chose: they all faced about in a moment and kept up a continuous raking fire, while the chosen gunboat fled quartering away, keeping the Sophie's unprotected stern towards them. A glancing blow from a thirty-six-pounder made her whole hull ring again; another passed just above head-height the whole length of the deck; two neatly severed backstays fell across Babbington, Pullings and the man at the wheel, knocking them down; a heavy block clattered on to the wheel itself as James leapt for its spokes.

  'We'll tack, Mr Dillon,' said Jack; and a few moments later the Sophie flew up into the wind.

  The men working the sloop moved with the unthinking smoothness of long practice; but seen suddenly picked out by the flashes of the gunboats' fire they seemed to be jerking like so many puppets. Just after the order 'let go and haul' there were six shots in quick succession, and he saw the marines at the mainsheet in a rapid series of galvanic motions—a few inches between each illumination—but throughout they wore exactly the same concentrated diligent expressions of men tallying with all their might.

  'Close hauled, sir?' asked James.

  'One point free,' said Jack. 'But gently, gently: let us see if we can draw them out. Drop the maintopsailyard a couple of feet and slacken away the starboard lift—let us look as though we were winged. Mr Watt, the topgallant backstays are our first care.'

  And so they all moved back again across the same miles of sea, the Sophie knotting and splicing, the gunboats following and firing steadily, the old left-handed moon climbing with her usual indifference.

  There was not much conviction in the pursuit: but even so, a little while after James Dillon had reported the completion of the essential repairs, Jack said, 'If we go about and set all sail like lightning, I believe we can cut those heavy chaps off from the land.'

  'All hands about ship,' said James. The bosun started his call, and racing to his post by the maintopsail bowline Isaac Isaacs said to John Lakev, 'We are going to cut those two heavy buggers off from the land,' with intense satisfaction.

  So they might have, if an unlucky shot had not struck the Sophie's foretopgallant yard. They saved the sail, but her speed dropped at once and the gunboats pulled away ahead, away and away until they were safe behind their mole.

  'Now, Mr Ellis,' said James, as the light of dawn showed just how much the sloop's rigging had suffered in the night, 'here is a most capital opportunity for learning your profession; why, I dare say there is enough to keep you busy until sunset, or even longer, with every variety of splice, knot, service and parcelling you could desire.' He was singularly gay, and from time to time, as he hurried about the deck, he hummed or chanted a sort of song.

  There was the swaying up of the new yard, too, some shotholes to be repaired and the bowsprit to be new gammoned, for the strangest grazing ricochet had cut half the turns without ever touching the wood—something the oldest seamen aboard had never yet beheld, a wonder to be recorded in the log. The Sophie lay there unmolested, putting herself to rights all through that sunny gentle day, as busy as a hive, watchful, prepared, bristling with pugnicity. It was a curious atmosphere aboard her: the men knew very well they were going in again very soon, perhaps for some raid on the coast, perhaps for some cutting-out expedition; their mood was affected by many things—by their captures of yesterday and last Tuesday (the consensus was that each man was worth fourteen guineas more than when he sailed); by their captain's continuing gravity; by the strong conviction aboard that he had private intelligence of Spanish sailings; and by the sudden strange merriment or even levity of their lieutenant. He had found Michael and Joseph Kelly, Matthew Johnson and John Melsom busily pilfering aboard the Felipe V, between decks, a very serious court-martial offence (although custom winked at the taking of anything above hatches) and one that he particularly abhorred as being 'a damned privateer's trick'; yet he had not reported them. They kept peering at him from behind masts, spars, boats; and so did their guilty messmates, for the Sophies were much given to rapine. The outcome of all these factors was an odd busy restrained quietly cheerful attentiveness, with a note of anxiety in it.

  With all hands so busy, Stephen scrupled to go forward to his elm-tree pump, through whose unshipped head he daily observed the wonders of the deep and where his presence was now so usual that he might have been the pump itself for all the restraint he placed upon the men's conversation; but he caught this note and he shared the uneasiness that produced it.

  James was in tearing spirits at dinner; he had invited Pullings and Babbington informally, and their presence, together with Marshall's absence, gave the meal something of the air of a festivity, in spite of the purser's brooding silence. Stephen watched him as he joined in the chorus of Rabbington's song, thundering out

  And this is law,
I will maintain

  Until my dying day, sir,

  That whatsoever king shall reign,

  I will be Vicar of Bray, sir

  in a steady roar.

  'Well done,' he cried, thumping the table. 'Now a glass of wine all round to whet our whistles, and then we must be on deck again, though that is a cursed thing for a host to say. What a relief it is, to be fighting with king's ships again, rather than these damned privateers,' he observed, a propos of nothing, when the young men and the purser had withdrawn.

  'What a romantic creature you are, to be sure,' said Stephen. 'A ball fired from a privateer's cannon makes the same hole as a king's.'

  'Me, romantic?' cried James with real indignation, an angry light coming into his green eyes.

  'Yes, my dear,' said Stephen, taking snuff. 'You will be telling me next about their divine right.'

  'Well, at least even you, with your wild enthusiastic levelling notions, will not deny that the King is the sole fount of honour?'

  'Not I,' said Stephen. 'Not for a moment.'

  'When I was last at home,' said James, filling Stephen's glass, 'we waked old Terence Healy. He had been my grandfather's tenant. And there was a song they sang there has been in the middle part of my mind all day—I cannot quite bring it to the front, to sing it.'

  'Was it an Irish song or an English?'

  'There were English words as well. One line went

  Oh the wild geese a-flying a-flying a-flying,

  The wild geese a-swimming upon the grey sea.'

  Stephen whistled a bar and then, in his disagreeable crake, he sang

  'They will never return, for the white horse has scunnered

  Has scunnered has scunnered

  The white horse has scunnered upon the green lea.'

  'That's it—that's it. Bless you,' cried James, and walked off, humming the air, to see that the Sophie was gathering the utmost of her strength.

  She made her way out to sea at sunset, with a great show of farewell for ever and set her course soberly for Minorca; and some time before dawn she ran inshore again, still with the same good breeze a little east of north. But now there was a true autumnal nip in it, and a dampness that brought fungi in beech woods to Stephen's mind; and over the water lay impalpable wafting hazes, some of them a most uncommon brown.

  The Sophie was standing in with her starboard tacks aboard, steering west-north-west; hammocks had been piped up and stowed in the nettings; the smell of coffee and frying bacon mingled together in the eddies that swirled on the weatherside of her taut trysail. Wide on the port bow the brown mist still hid the Llobregat valley and the mouth of the river, but farther up the coast towards the dim city looming there on the horizon, the rising sun had burnt off all but a few patches of haze—those that remained might have been headlands, islands, sandbanks.

  'I know, I know, those gunboats were trying to lead us into some trap,' said Jack, 'and am with child to know what it was.' Jack was no great hand at dissembling, and Stephen was instantly persuaded that he knew the nature of the trap perfectly well, or at least had a very good notion of what it was likely to be.

  The sun worked upon the surface of the water, doing wonderful things to its colour, raising new mists, dissolving others, sending exquisite patterns of shadow among the taut lines of the rigging and the pure curves of the sails and down on to the white deck, now being scrubbed whiter, to the steady grinding noise of holystones: with a swift yet imperceptible movement it breathed away a blue-grey cape and revealed a large ship three points on the starboard bow, running southwards under the land. The look-out called that she was there, but in a matter-of-fact voice, formally, for as the cloud-bank dissolved she was hull-up from the deck.

  'Very well,' said Jack, clasping his glass to after a long stare. 'What do you make of her, Mr Dillon?'

  'I rather think she is our old friend, sir,' said James.

  'So do I. Set the mainstaysail and haul up to close her. Swabs aft, dry the deck. And let the hands go to breakfast at once, Mr Dillon. Should you care to take a cup of coffee with the Doctor and me? It would be a sad shame to waste it.'

  'Very happy, sir.'

  There was almost no conversation during their breakfast. Jack said, 'I suppose you would like us to put on silk stockings, Doctor?'

  'Why silk stockings, for all love?'

  'Oh, everyone says it is easier for the surgeon, if he has to cut one up.'

  'Yes. Yes, certainly. Pray do by all means put on silk stockings.'

  No conversation, but there was a remarkable feeling of easy companionship, and Jack, standing up to put on his uniform coat, said to James, 'You are certainly right, you know,' as though they had been talking about the identity of the stranger throughout the meal.

  On deck again he saw that it was so, of course: the vessel over there was the Cacafuego; she had altered course to meet the Sophie, and she was in the act of setting her studdingsails. In his telescope he could see the vermilion gleam of her side in the sun.

  'All hands aft,' he said, and as they waited for the crew to assemble Stephen could see that a smile kept spreading on his face—that he had to make a conscious effort to repress it and look grave.

  'Men,' he said, looking over them with pleasure. 'That's the Cacafuego to windward, you know. Now some of you were not quite pleased when we let her go without a compliment last time; but now, with our gunnery the best in the fleet, why, it is another thing. So, Mr Dillon, we will clear for action, if you please.'

  When he began to speak perhaps half the Sophies were gazing at him with uncomplicated pleasurable excitement; perhaps a quarter looked a little troubled; and the rest had downcast and anxious faces. But the self-possessed happiness radiating from their captain and his lieutenant, and the spontaneous delighted cheer from the first half of the crew, changed this wonderfully; and as they set about clearing the sloop there were not above four or five who looked glum—the others might have been going to the fair.

  The Cacafuego, square-rigged at present, was running down, turning in a steady westward sweep to get to windward and seaward of the Sophie; and the Sophie was pointing up close into the wind; so that by the time they were a long half-mile apart she was directly open to a raking broadside from the frigate, the thirty-two-gun frigate.

  'The pleasant thing about fighting with the Spaniards, Mr Ellis,' said Jack, smiling at his great round eyes and solemn face, 'is not that they are shy, for they are not, but that they are never, never ready.'

  The Cacafuego had now almost reached the station that her captain had set his mind upon: she fired a gun and broke out the Spanish colours.

  'The American flag, Mr Babbington,' said Jack. 'That will give them something to think about. Note down the time, Mr Richards.'

  The distance was lessening very fast now. Second after second; not minute after minute. The Sophie was pointing astern of the Cacafuego, as though she meant to cut her wake; and not a gun could the sloop bring to bear. There was a total silence aboard as every man stood ready for the order to tack—an order that might not come before the broadside.

  'Stand by with the ensign,' said Jack in a low voice: and louder, 'Right, Mr Dillon.'

  'Helm's a-lee,' and the bosun's call sounded almost at the same moment; the Sophie spun on her heel, ran up the English colours, steadied and filled on her new course and ran close-hauled straight for the Spaniard's side. The Cacafuego fired at once, a crashing broadside that shot over and among the Sophie's topgallants, making four holes, no more. The Sophies cheered to a man and stood tense and eager by their treble-shotted guns.

  'Full elevation. Not a shot till we touch,' cried Jack in a tremendous voice, watching the hen-coops, boxes and lumber tossing overboard from the frigate. Through the smoke he could see ducks swimming away from one coop, and a panic-stricken cat on a box. The smell of powder-smoke reached them, and the dispersing mist. Closer, closer: they would be becalmed under the Spaniard's lee at the last moment, but they would have way enough . . . He cou
ld see the round blackness of her guns' mouths now, and as he watched so they erupted, the flashes brilliant in the smoke and a great white bank of it hiding the frigate's side. Too high again, he observed, but there was no room for any particular emotion as he searched through the faults in the smoke to put the sioop right up against the frigate's mainchains.

  'Hard over,' he shouted; and as the grinding crash came, 'Fire!'

  The xebec-frigate was low in the water, but the Sophie was lower still. With her yards locked in the Cacafuego's rigging she lay there, and her guns were below the level of the frigate's ports. She fired straight up through the Cacafuego's deck, and her first broadside, at a six-inch range, did shocking devastation. There was a momentary silence after the Sophie's cheer, and in that half-second's pause Jack could hear a confused screaming on the Spaniard's quarter-deck. Then the Spanish guns spoke again, irregular now, but immensely loud, firing three feet above his head.

  The Sophie's broadside was firing in a splendid roll, one-two-three-four-five-six-seven, with a half-beat at the end and a rumbling of the trucks; and in the fourth or fifth pause James seized his arm and shouted, 'They gave the order to board.'