The Fortune of War

by Patrick O'Brian

  Indeed the silence of the night was fading fast. Overhead the faint gulls were calling, and at the bottom of the bay Boston was waking up—lights showing the shape of the waterfront, when he glanced astern. But they would not be needed long: Saturn had set, following the moon to rise in Tartary, and already there was a lightening in the east.

  On and on, steadily on, away from the land, the water rippling along the side, the sheet alive in his hand, the tiller under the crook of his knee. The breeze was nothing much, but with the help of the powerful ebb they were making four knots or five with relation to the shore, and now he could feel the beginning of the true ocean, the heave of the open sea, though much attenuated here by reason of the long island.

  'What's amiss?' he asked suddenly.

  'Diana is sick,' said Stephen.

  'Well, well: poor soul. Let her lean out the leeward side.'

  The lightness ahead increased and the long island was no longer a blur but a sharply-outlined black mass, well within gunshot. Diana had collapsed in the bottom of the boat. 'It will have to be worse before it gets better,' he reflected, glancing at her with a dispassionate eye. A string of gulls passed overhead, uttering their usual coarse cynical laughter; droppings fell aboard; and so they ran.

  The breeze was drawing ahead: at this rate of leeway he would probably have to tack to clear the point. And as it drew ahead, so it slackened: the rising sun might swallow it entirely.

  There was no breeze to be wasted. 'Lose not a minute,' he said: and tacking must lose many. Peering under the sail, he watched the island shore coming closer, quite clear now, with people walking about on it and white water off the point. Closer and closer still: he let fly the sheet and grasped an oar, trusting to the strong tide-run to carry them round. A couple of bumps, a rock fended off, and it had done so. A man called out to them from the island. Jack waved, hauled in the sheet, and now they met the swell, setting from the south-east and cutting up against the ebb. At once the scow began a lumbering dance, and a renewed sound of dry retching came from the bows.

  'Put my coat over her,' said Jack, taking it off—an easy task with his arm slung outside. Stephen had already covered her with his, but she shivered still, gritting her teeth and clenching her fists, shivered convulsively.

  Now there was Lovell's Island ahead, a cluster of fishing-boats, blue sky beyond, and brilliant rays shooting up into it from the east: and now the blazing rim of the sun himself, bearable for a moment, and then too powerful by far. The breeze, grown fitful and capricious, suddenly backed right aft, a stronger gust that thrust the scow's head into a rising wave. Diana was soaked: she neither moved nor groaned, flat in the bows.

  'Bail with the bait-pots,' said Jack. 'That is Lovell's Island there ahead. I believe we shall weather it.'

  'Aye? Very well. There is a glutinous substance in these pots: I see the head of a decapod.'

  'Toss it out,' said Jack, 'and bail.'

  'Those, I presume,' said Stephen, nodding towards the small-craft ahead as he bailed, 'are fishing-boats that set out before us. But what is that?'

  Over the shining sea, from the south end of the long island, came a cutter, pulling double-banked, pulling hard and fast into the eye of the wind. Its course would intercept the scow's very soon indeed, the way those men were stretching out.

  'Could you go a little faster, do you think?' asked Stephen.

  Jack shook his head, stepped forward, and slowly lowered down the sail. The cutter was racing towards them: the men were armed—shoulder-belts, cutlasses, tomahawks and pistols—and in the stern-sheets an officer bent urgently towards them, bawling, 'Stretch out, stretch out.'

  The coxswain at his side half rose and roared, 'Make a lane, there.' The small-craft scattered; the cutter dashed through them, turned left-handed in a long curve that took it past the northern point of the big island, and so vanished, still at a racing speed.

  'That was Lawrence exercising his boarders,' observed Jack as he hoisted the sail again. 'He is a taut skipper, all right' He found his heart beating double-time, and he said, 'They will be back aboard the Chesapeake in twenty minutes at this rate, in spite of the tide. How is Diana?'

  'There is a certain degree of prostration, benign prostration.'

  They looked at her: green, hair draggling over her clammy face, eyes closed, mouth clenched tight, a look of mingled death and stubborn resistance. Stephen wiped her cheek. Jack said, 'I shall favour the boat. You might move the bait-pots and that old sack under her head: perhaps she don't like the smell.'

  He took the scow wide of Lovell's Island, south about, to ease the motion: south about, with the battery under his lee, through the channel, and there, as he cleared the southern tip, he saw what his soul had longed to see: topgallantsails and topsails beyond the northernmost of the Brewster islands, a ship standing in from the Graves.

  Without his telescope he could not swear she was the Shannon yet, and he said nothing; but in his heart he had a beautiful calm certainty.

  'You seem pleased, brother?' said Stephen, after a while, looking from the green-yellow to the red and beaming face.

  'Yes, I am, to be candid with you,' said Jack, 'and so will you be, I believe. Do you see that ship, just clear of the northern island now?'

  'I do not.'

  'The northern island—the further island, the one on the left. Hull up, for God's sake.'

  'Ah, I perceive it now. And for what my opinion is worth, I should say it looks quite like a man-of-war. There is a neatness, a certain air, that we associate with a man-of-war.'

  Abandoning all opportunity for wit, Jack laughed aloud and said, 'That is Shannon, standing in for her morning look at the Chesapeake, ha, ha, ha!'

  The Shannon stood on, stemming the tide; the scow, as close-hauled at it would lie, steered to cross her bows. Two miles had separated them at first: with their combined rates of sailing this distance lessened to half a mile in ten minutes, and Jack saw that he could not fetch her on this tack—the scow's leeway was too great—and that going about would leave him in her wake. 'Did I speak too soon?' he thought, and standing up he hailed as he had rarely hailed before. 'The ship ahoy. Shannon ahoy.'

  A moment of the most intense anxiety, and he saw the frigate back her foretopsail: the way came off her just enough to let the scow run alongside. The awkward boat gave her a shrewd thump amidships, and from the deck above a thundering voice, a familiar voice, cried, 'Mind the paintwork, God damn your eyes. Mind the paintwork—fend off. I've a mind to put a round-shot through your bottom.' Then, in a milder tone, 'Well, Jonathan, have you any lobsters aboard? Paul, pass him a line.'

  With the line firm in his hand and ease flooding through his heart, Jack could be facetious now. 'I must ask you to moderate your language, sir; we have a lady in the boat. Pray tell Captain Broke that I should like a word with him. And take your hands out of your pockets when you speak to me, Mr Falkiner.'

  Blank consternation on the broad honest weather-beaten face above, the dawn of wrath, shocked silence, fore and aft, then a huge grin, and Falkiner cried, 'By—dear me, 'tis Captain Aubrey. I beg your pardon, sir. I will jump to the cabin directly. Will you come aboard, sir?'

  Running feet on deck, orders, urgent cries, the rumble of Marines' boots, side-boys running down with baize covered ropes, and Jack, poised on the roll, stepped across the gap and came up the side, piped aboard in style. The Marines presented arms, Jack took off his hat, and there was Broke, napkin in hand, egg dribbling down his chin. 'Why, Jack!' he cried. 'How glad I am to see you. How come you here? How do you do—your arm?'

  'Philip,' said Jack, 'how d'ye do? I came in this boat, I do assure you. Might I beg for a bosun's chair? We have a lady aboard, somewhat indisposed, Sophie's cousin Diana Villiers. And perhaps my surgeon might use it too: he is a prodigious doctor, but no great seaman.'

  Diana was hoisted up, limp, past caring, a dripping dead rat, a dripping dead female rat, and carried into the absent master's cabin. Stephen came up after her and
, bending low to his ear as he struggled out of the bosun's chair, Jack murmured, 'I can say it now: we have escaped—give you joy of your freedom, brother.' He then presented him, 'Doctor Maturin, my particular friend—Captain Broke. I say, Philip, you don't happen to be breakfasting, do you? Poor Maturin here is fairly clemmed, quite wasting away and fractious for want of food.'

  It was extraordinary how naval routine took them in once more: they had not been aboard a few hours before they were entirely at home—they might have been in the Shannon these last weeks or even months, with all the familiar smells and sounds around them, and the familiar motion, unusually pronounced today. Not only had they several former shipmates before the mast, in the gun-room, and in the cabin, but almost every detail of the Shannon's closely ordered life was the same as it had been in their other ships; and when the drum beat Roast Beef of Old England for the officers' dinner Stephen found that he salivated, in spite of his late and copious breakfast. Boston might have been a thousand miles away, but for the fact that it could still be seen, down there at the bottom of its great bay, as the frigate stood out to sea again, her morning's inspection done, to resume her long blockade.

  She was nothing much to look at, just an ordinary thirty-eight-gun eighteen-pounder frigate of about a thousand tons that had been shabbily treated by the dockyard in the article of paint and that had been on the North American station for close on two years in all weathers, most of them unpleasant, with ice forming thick on the yards, rigging, and deck, playing Old Harry with what very little she possessed in the way of ornament or gingerbread work or graces. But she was a happy ship: her people had been together, with few changes for a man-of-war, ever since Broke commissioned her; they were thoroughly used to one another, to their officers, and to their work; and they worked well, a willing, efficient crew of seamen.

  Yet this happiness, at least as far as the gun-room was concerned, was overlaid by a heavy consciousness of defeat, a feeling that with the capture of three Royal Navy frigates in succession the service had fallen far, far below itself, and a most eager restless desire to avenge Guerrière, Macedonian and Java. Stephen became aware of this when Watt, the first lieutenant, led him into the gun-room. Several officers were already there, and they made him very welcome. But once the introductions and the ordinary civilities were over he might have been in the Java again; the atmosphere was much the same—indeed, the officers were even more concerned about the American war. It was even more immediate to them, far more immediate, and they had been on the verge of action ever since it had been declared. From service gossip and the proceedings of the court-martial that acquitted Chads and the surviving officers of the Java they knew far more about the battle with the Constitution than did Stephen, but there were gaps in their knowledge and they plied him with questions: had the Americans used bar-shot? What effect did it have? Were there in fact many British deserters in the Constitution? At what range did she open fire? What did Dr Maturin think of their standard of gunnery? Did her round-shot break to pieces on impact? Was it true that the Americans used sheet-lead for their cartridges?

  'Gentlemen,' said he, 'I was below throughout the battle. I regret my ignorance, but—'

  'But surely,' said Mr Jack, the Shannon's surgeon, 'surely you must have heard when the vangs parted? Surely some casualty must have spoken to you of the vangs?'

  'The Captain's compliments to Doctor Maturin,' said a tall master's mate, hurrying in, 'and he begs the pleasure of his company at dinner.'

  'Mr Cosnahan,' said Stephen, shaking his hand, 'I am delighted to see you again, evidently healthy, apparently sober. My compliments to Captain Broke, and I shall be happy to wait upon him.'

  The higher the rank, the later the dinner. Cosnahan was already greasy from his pudding in the midshipmen's berth before the gun-room had sat down to their boiled cod, and the cabin's meal was still no more than a remote, though not unpleasing, smell in the galley: Stephen had salivated in vain. He quietly slipped a biscuit from the bread-barge into his pocket and returned to Diana.

  She was more prostrate than ever, now that the Shannon was out in her natural habitat, the full Atlantic swell: a cold, glaucous, apathetic figure, racked from time to time by a spasm but otherwise mute and apparently insensible. He had already undressed and sponged her, and there was nothing more that his art could do, apart from warm blankets. He tidied her a little, gazed thoughtfully a while, gnawing on his biscuit, and then went below to the cabin that his old shipmate Falkiner had vacated for him. He checked his papers, now wrapped in sailcloth, and remembering that he had spoken a little sharply in the night, he did what he could to make himself presentable, to do Jack credit in the cabin: clean and trimmed at last, he sat on Falkiner's cot, his newly-acquired watch in his hand, reflecting on Diana.

  He had so very much to reflect upon, so very many aspects of a complex relationship, as well as marriage itself, that unknown state, that his thoughts had not run far beyond a long digression on the singular effects, physical and spiritual, of pregnancy, sometimes admirable, sometimes disastrous, before the elegant hands of the watch and a minute chime within told him that it was time to go. His night's sleep, short though it was, had been extraordinarily profound and restorative: his head still ached, he still found it hard to focus his eyes well enough to read, and his cracked ribs hurt abominably on the least false movement, but he was his own master for immediate purposes; he no longer had to struggle with a vacillating, uncertain, exhausted mind, incapable of decision; and although he could not see clearly as far as Diana was concerned, he was able to thrust his grief and sense of bereavement to one side.

  On the way he met Cosnahan again, sent to fetch him, for Captain Aubrey placed no reliance on his surgeon's punctuality; but blameless for once and even commendable, he walked in with quiet triumph.

  It was a good dinner—oysters, halibut, lobster, turkey-poult, and a massive roly-poly that gave the sailors at least a good deal of unaffected pleasure—and since most of the talk ran on nautical affairs Stephen had plenty of time to consider Captain Broke. He liked what he saw: a slight, dark man, reserved, quiet, grave, and even melancholy, not half Jack's weight but of much the same size in natural authority and determination. They were obviously close friends and at first glance this seemed paradoxical, their styles being so very different, the extremes of what was to be found in the service, as different as the centuries, Jack belonging more to the heartier, more flamboyant, hard-drinking eighteenth, Broke in the more discreet modern age that was spreading so fast, even in the conservative Navy. Yet they were both sailors, and on this plane they were as one; their ideas and their aims were both the same. Jack Aubrey was a fighting captain, made for the sea and violent action; so, in his different way, was Broke, and perhaps his sense of the Royal Navy's defeat was even stronger, if that were possible. He was a man of strong feelings, and although they rarely appeared the occasional gleam left Stephen in no doubt. This was particularly apparent when he and Jack talked about the Chesapeake, now the sole object of the Shannon's long blockade, the sole object of Broke's ambition and passionate desire. They had gone over every detail of her equipment before Stephen joined them, and Jack had been able to tell a great deal, from the exact nature of her carronades to a very close estimate of her crew, which he set at a little under four hundred. And now, when they discussed her commander Jack said, 'Lawrence is a very fine fellow, and I am sure that if his orders do not compel him to sit still, he will give you a meeting with all the pleasure in the world.'

  'Oh how I hope so,' cried Broke with a fine flash. 'I have been waiting for him day after day, with our water running low—half allowance this last week, although I took all Tenedos could spare before sending her off—and the idea of being forced off the station, letting him out or leaving him to Parker, fairly tormented me. I sent in messages by various prisoners I discharged, inviting him to come out; but I dare say they never reached him. I was afraid he might be shy, or that he might share the feelings of so many peopl
e in New England.'

  'Lawrence shy? Never in life,' said Jack emphatically.

  'Well, I am heartily glad of it,' said Broke, and he went on to speak of the feeling in Boston, as far as he had been able to learn it. He had frequently been in touch with the shore and he had gathered a good deal of information, some of which confirmed what Stephen knew while some went well beyond it. 'The Federalist party certainly wish any event which would tend to restore peace,' he observed, 'and that I had from an intelligent person. But just how my man would define any event is a question. It is all very well to subscribe to a general dislike of the war and to give general information on the state of public opinion; but when it comes to specific details that might bring about a defeat, why then, I suppose, one must reflect that it is one's own country that is concerned, however ill-governed it may be. Now I know they have a steam-vessel, armed with six nine-pounders: but when it came to information on that head—her power, her speed, her range of action, the possibility of cutting her off with the boats—my man grew shy. When you were on shore, Doctor Maturin, were you able to make any remarks on this steam-boat of theirs?'

  Alas, Dr Maturin had had no notion of such a vessel: had she indeed a steam-engine mounted in her? What was her means of propulsion?

  'The engine drives great wheels on either side, sir, like those of a water-mill,' said Broke. 'A precious awkward thing to meet with in a calm or in a narrow tideway, since she can sail, not only against wind and tide, but without any wind at all.'

  'With one long twenty-four-pounder in the bows, such a machine could cut you up quite shockingly,' said Jack. 'I mean, in light airs or a calm.'

  The conversation ran on paddle-wheels—on the jet-propulsion advocated by Benjamin Franklin—on the steamer that Broke had seen on a Scotch canal during the peace—those in service upon the Hudson River—their probable value in war—their short range likely to be improved—the dangers of fire—Admiral Sawyer's fury at the suggestion that one might be used in Halifax harbour for towing—the probability that sailors should soon have to turn into vile mechanics, in spite of the Admiralty's steady hatred of such a disgraceful innovation—the shortcomings of the Admiralty in general.