The Golden Ocean Read online

  When Peter next came on deck darkness had fallen. His head was proof against the master’s port, for he had been weaned on poteen that would burst into blue flame a yard from the fire—it was usual in Ballynasaggart to employ whiskey as the universal medicine, and indeed it was almost the only thing that kept the inhabitants alive under the perpetual drizzle of rain.

  It was a profound darkness that filled the warm night—no moon, no stars but the riding-lights of other vessels near at hand. He stood against the rail, and the brig worked silently in on the tide past St Helen’s; scarcely a ripple moved her, but the black water gleaming along the side in the reflection of the great stern-lantern showed that she was under way. There were lights on shore, scattered like a necklace broken, and lights at sea, moving steadily to their unseen destinations: voices in the dark, mysterious in their invisibility, and once a ghostly form, pale whiteness reaching into the sky, swept by them, a man-of-war bound for the Jamaica station. He heard the order ‘Hands to the braces’ and a pattering of feet: then the ship was gone.

  ‘Joe!’ hailed the mate of the Mary Rose, shattering the enchantment.

  ‘Ho!’ answered a very loud voice from out of the night.

  ‘Where’s Centurion lying?’

  ‘How come you’re so soon?’ countered the unseen Joe. ‘We did not look for to see you this tide.’

  ‘Is she at St Helen’s yet?’

  ‘Nor this week neither,’ said Joe, apparently right under their stern.

  ‘Joe!’ hailed the master.

  ‘Ho!’ replied the voice, which had secretly moved quite round the brig.

  ‘Spit-ed,’ said Joe, sulkily; and was heard no more.

  ‘She’s lying at Spithead,’ interpreted the master, ‘and that being so, young gentlemen, you had best lie aboard tonight and take a pair of oars over in the morning, after a good breakfast—which you won’t see many more of them.’

  ‘That is very kind of you, sir,’ said Peter.

  ‘Which it is agreeable to my sentiments, sir,’ said the master of the Mary Rose, with a profound inclination, ‘to be of service to the gentlemen of the Navy.’

  He left the rail, and Peter heard him recommend the man at the wheel to keep to the middle of the channel if he wished to retain his blazing head on his flaming shoulders. ‘I had better prepare everything tonight,’ thought Peter, and he went below. There he found Sean before him, brushing clothes as well as he could by the light of a small swinging lamp. A considerable heap of dried Irish mud showed the pitch of his zeal.

  ‘Listen, Peter a gradh,’ he whispered, with anxiety filling his voice. ‘Your honour will never forget my petition? Sure you will keep it in mind?’

  Peter’s reply was lost in a sudden rumbling din that vibrated solemnly through the brig as they let go the anchor, but he nodded, and when it was over he said, ‘I’ll do all I can, Sean my dear, indeed I will: but I wish you had brought a paper of recommendation.’

  The Centurion. His Majesty’s ship Centurion: she lay with her yards across, trim, shining with cleanliness even under the grey sky of the morning, her decks a scene of intense activity; parties of seamen in canvas trousers hurried with buckets and mops; a half-company of red-coated Marines performed their exercise with a rhythmic stamping and crash to the beat of a drum.

  ‘I say, Palafox,’ said FitzGerald, who was first up the side, ‘do you see that—’

  ‘You, sir,’ cried an angry voice behind them; ‘you there! Who the devil are you?’ It was the officer of the watch, who knew very well who they were, but who nevertheless stared down upon them with a fierce and disciplinary eye. ‘What is your business? What do you mean by wandering about his Majesty’s ship like a pack of geese on a common?’ These last words were addressed to Peter, who had unhappily made three paces in the wrong direction.

  ‘I was looking for Mr Walter,’ he replied in a faltering voice.

  ‘Roaming up and down the ship like a parcel of apes,’ continued the officer of the watch. ‘Get off this ship directly, and come back and report yourself to me in a proper manner. And salute the quarter-deck when you come aboard, do you hear?’

  FitzGerald was scarlet with anger: he took a hasty step forward as the officer turned, but Peter seized him by the arm and pulled him away. ‘Don’t be an ass,’ he hissed, dragging him to the side. ‘You can cut his throat later.’

  They vanished and then reappeared. Peter took off his hat as he set foot on the deck and advanced towards the officer of the watch, who returned his salute.

  ‘My name is Palafox, sir,’ he said.

  ‘Reporting for duty,’ prompted the officer.

  ‘Reporting for duty,’ said Peter.

  ‘Mr Palafox,’ said the officer, holding out his hand, ‘I am happy to welcome you aboard.’

  FitzGerald in his turn was made welcome to the Centurion, and the officer said, ‘Have you your dunnage with you? Your sea-chests,’ he added, seeing their blank expressions. ‘Those are your things, are they?’ he asked, looking beyond them to where Sean stood with FitzGerald’s portmanteau on his shoulder and a little leather parcel that belonged to Peter. ‘Those are your things, eh? You have left your sea-chests ashore? Unwise. Never part with your chest—ordered to sea in five minutes—never see it again. Jennings, take the dunnage and show the gentlemen their quarters. Master-at-arms, seize that man. Pin him. Collar him before he’s over the side. He has not got a certificate, has he?’ he asked Peter, who stood there appalled at the sight of poor Sean immovably wedged in the grasp of two powerful sailors and a Marine.

  ‘I am sure my father would have given him one,’ said Peter, ‘and I assure you, sir, he bears the best character of anyone in our parish.’

  ‘Your servant, is he? Well, I’m sorry for it,’ said Mr Saumarez, with his eyes gleaming with greed; ‘but it’s all one, you know.’

  ‘Oh sir,’ cried Peter, ‘I can vouch for him, upon my word I can. I was going to beg your interest with Mr Anson to have him admitted to the ship. He is a first-rate seaman, and he is very eager to serve in the fleet. If a certificate is necessary, I will write home at once.’

  For a moment Mr Saumarez appeared to suspect that Peter might be presuming to make game of him, and bent a very ominous look upon him; but his brow cleared, and he said, ‘Very well, Mr Palafox. I believe I can assure you that your request will be granted. Master-at-arms, take the man below. Mr Dennis will read him in.’

  ‘Thank you, sir; I am extremely obliged,’ said Peter, fervently shaking the officer’s hand; and Sean, blessing his honour’s magnanimous heart, hurried the wondering master-at-arms below while the sailors stood around gazing with wild surmise.

  ‘What the devil,’ cried Mr Saumarez, slowly recovering; ‘is there no work to do in this ship? Mr Bowes, why are those hands standing about like a parcel of in-calf heifers? Mr Walsh, your party is at a standstill. Good heavens, this is not fiddlers’ green. Has nobody ever seen an honest man ask to serve his country, as a privilege, in his Majesty’s fleet?’

  ‘No sir,’ said an unfortunate gunner’s mate, who conceived that these words were addressed to him. ‘Only the officers, sir.’

  ‘Hold your tongue, sir,’ cried Mr Saumarez; ‘and get on with your work, or by the living …’

  ‘I wonder when the fellow is going to show us our quarters,’ said FitzGerald, as he crouched under a beam in the half-darkness.

  ‘I believe these are our quarters,’ said Peter, uncertainly, feeling with his hand for something to sit on.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said FitzGerald. ‘You could not decently mew up a cat in this horrible booth.’

  ‘Beg parding, sir,’ said Jennings, appearing again, ‘but I can’t find your sea-chests nowhere.’

  ‘Never mind,’ said FitzGerald, fishing out their last half-crown. ‘There’s for your trouble. Now just show us our quarters, will you?’

  ‘Thankee, sir,’ said Jennings, spitting on the coin, ‘but I have shown you your quarters; no codding, I have. This here is
the midshipmen’s berth.’

  ‘Oh,’ said FitzGerald.

  ‘Do you know if Mr Walter is aboard?’ asked Peter. ‘I should like to wait upon him, if he is.’

  ‘Chapling, sir? Oh yes, sir, he’s in his cabing. Shall I show you the way?’

  ‘If you please.’

  ‘Not been to sea before, sir?’ asked Jennings, hurrying along.

  ‘No,’ said Peter.

  ‘Which I thought not,’ said Jennings, with a grin that reached to his ears, ‘from the way you talked about your man’s certificate.’

  ‘Did I say something wrong?’ asked Peter, stopping under a grating that let through the light of day.

  ‘Well, you mistook of the lieutenant’s meaning, if I may say so,’ said Jennings. ‘He meant a certificate, a paper of writing, to say as how your man was exempt from the service. And you meant a character to get him into the service. Hor, hor,’ laughed Jennings, leaning against a standard in honest mirth. ‘Lord bless your innocence, there’s the hottest press out in twenty year—not a officer aboard but Mr Saumarez and the fifth and the chapling—all the rest is out with gangs as far as Lyme and Seaford—and you begging and pleading to have him took aboard. Oh, hor hor hor hor!’

  ‘Oh,’ said Peter, not very pleased at being thought innocent, ‘I see.’

  ‘All what we’ve got from the bridewells and gaols is shut up in the orlop in case they escapes—tinkers and mumpers and half-wits, not a seaman to be had for love or money, and the ship wanting of two hundred, and them all running to the inland counties for fear of the press, and hiding in barns. Oh, hor hor hor!’

  ‘Well, that will do,’ said Peter, quite sharply, and without more than a muffled heave Jennings brought him to the chaplain’s cabin.

  ‘Good morning, sir,’ said Peter into the gloom. ‘I am Peter Palafox, and I have brought you a letter from my father.’

  ‘I am very happy to see you,’ said Mr Walter, and Peter had a vague impression of a tall figure rising among the shadows: he heard a thud as Mr Walter struck his head, not on the ceiling, for ships do not possess them, or at least not where you can hit your head on them getting up, but on the place which a mere landsman would call by that name. He also heard something that sounded wonderfully like a stifled oath, and then Mr Walter said, ‘I always hit my head on that—on that disagreeable spot. But come, Mr Palafox, or Peter, as I think I may venture to call you, for I knew you before you were born, let us find somewhere where you can sit down and make yourself comfortable. How is my excellent old friend, and your mother? No, you cannot move that. That is a gun. Here, shift the papers from my sea-chest, and sit on that. It is rather dark in here,’ he added.

  ‘So you have arrived from Ireland,’ he said as they settled down.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ replied Peter, handing him his father’s letter.

  ‘Thank you. You will forgive me if I open it at once: it is not every day that I have the pleasure—you see, one can read quite well by holding the paper so, where the light comes in through the crack. When the port is open you can see the whole extent of my domain, of course—remarkably spacious. One might almost think oneself in a hundred-gun ship: though naturally my stores take up a good deal of space. But, however, they are doing something to the port, and it has to remain closed. Ha, ha. Your father remembers our days at the university. He reminds me of our avidity for sausages—for maids of honour. Ha, ha. Sad dogs we were. Roaring blades. But we were not in orders then.’

  He read on in silence, bent sideways to catch the single shaft of light; and Peter, his eyes growing used to the dimness, made out the shape of a table, two chairs and a hanging canvas cot piled with books; these and the chaplain would have filled the cabin too full for comfort, but in addition there was an immense gun, like a couchant elephant, right in the middle, and the sea-chest, as big as a coffin, upon which he was sitting, embowered in more papers and books. It already called for uncommon agility to move from one side of the cabin to the other, and Peter tried to imagine what it would be like in a hollow sea. ‘And how,’ he wondered, ‘do they ever come at the gun to fire it?’

  ‘Well, well, well,’ said the chaplain, folding the letter and putting it aside with an affectionate pat. ‘It seems no more than yesterday that we two walked the High, discussing the Church and State. Dear me.’

  ‘Sir,’ said Peter, nervously beginning the speech that he had prepared, ‘I have to thank you most heartily for your great goodness in obtaining—’

  ‘Not a word,’ cried the chaplain, removing his wig and waving it with a courtly air, ‘not a word, I beg. Your father has already expressed himself in the most handsome way. I only hope that you and the service will suit. The Navy is not always what might be called a bed of roses. There is hard lying, short rations sometimes, and always the perils of the sea.

  Illi robur et aes triplex

  circa pectus erat, qui fragilem truci

  commisit pelago ratem

  primus—

  I am sure that your father’s son is familiar with Horace?’

  Peter cautiously said that he was pretty well acquainted with the gentleman, but he did not commit himself any further.

  ‘Now,’ said Mr Walter, ‘I dare say that you have a good many questions to ask?’

  ‘If you please, sir,’ said Peter, ‘first may I ask how they fire that gun, and then what a sea-chest is, and why do they keep asking me where mine is?’

  ‘Why, in action,’ said the chaplain, indicating the walls of the little room, ‘they knock down these bulkheads. The cabins disappear and the whole deck is one long open space, so that they can come at the guns and run them out of the ports. That is called clearing for action. As for your sea-chest, that is the chest that contains your belongings, your slops, your tarpaulin jackets, your nautical instruments, your uniforms—in short everything but your personal stores, which you can entrust to the attendant on the midshipmen’s berth, a very good honest fellow named Jennings.’

  ‘Uniforms, sir?’ cried Peter with extreme dismay. ‘But we thought the Navy called for no uniform. The King’s cockade in your hat, sure, but no uniform at all: and at home we all said how fortunate it was I was going into the sea-service, for my father could never have set me up in the Army, regimentals costing the teeth from your head—being so very dear, sir.’

  ‘Why, to be sure that was the case until these last years,’ said Mr Walter. ‘But now most officers wear the same clothes as the gentleman who received you—you took notice of him, no doubt, in his blue laced coat and his white breeches. All the officers in our squadron wear the same, and many commanders insist upon their young gentlemen being so dressed. Mr Anson is most particular. But it is the other things in your sea-chest that are even more important: your navigating instruments, quadrant, parallel rulers, scales and all the rest; your linen; your bedding … Our first lieutenant is rigorous in these matters, and only the other day, only on Thursday I say, he turned away a wretched boy who had the effrontery to appear without so much as his Necessary Tables, to say nothing of a proper supply of other things. Mr Saumarez said, very rightly, that on a long voyage a youngster’s welfare depended essentially upon his equipment—he must be provided with clothes for the tropics and for the high latitudes, quite apart from his weapons and in course stores and money for his mess and for the schoolmaster. That is what we mean by the term sea-chest: the sum total of a young gentleman’s equipment, as well as the brass-bound wooden envelope that contains it.’

  ‘Sir,’ said Peter in a low voice, ‘I have no sea-chest.’

  ‘No sea-chest?’ cried the chaplain.

  ‘No sea-chest, sir; nor anything in it at all.’

  ‘Dear me, dear me,’ said the chaplain in a shocked undertone, gazing at him in the dim light. ‘No sea-chest whatsoever?’

  ‘None whatsoever, sir, upon my honour. Only a little small kilageen, as we say, made of leather. From Seamus Joyce’s old cow, that died.’

  ‘And pray what is in it?’

&nbs
p; ‘Six shirts and some stockings, sir. And a spare coat, with my handkerchiefs laid in the one pocket and my Bible in the other.’

  ‘A quadrant, perhaps?’

  ‘Never the ghost of a quadrant, sir. We were sure—indeed my mother was positive—that the service provided these things …’

  ‘My poor boy, my poor boy,’ said the chaplain, shaking his head sadly. ‘What a great way off you do live, to be sure. Six shirts for a voyage that may last two or three years? Oh dear me, dear me. Do you know where we are bound?’

  ‘Yes, sir. We are bound for the Great South Sea, there to cruise upon the Spaniards, and confound ’em unawares.’

  ‘You know that? Good heavens above! It is supposed to be a secret. Who told you?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Peter vaguely, for his mind was too much taken up with the dreadful news to be much concerned with the question, ‘oh, everybody said so, at home. Michael Noonan the excise man, Patrick Lynch the sow-gelder—everyone.’

  ‘Even in that remote waste,’ said the chaplain to himself. ‘That is how State secrets are kept in this degenerate age. I must tell the Commodore. How long have the Spaniards been aware of the plan, I wonder?’ He paused. ‘However, we must get back to the matter in hand. So you have no sea-chest, Peter, I collect?’

  ‘No sea-chest, sir,’ said Peter again, looking so wan that even in this dim light the chaplain could make out his distress. They remained silent for some moments, Peter’s heart dying within him—so near to his goal, the ship actually stirring under his feet at this minute, and then to be turned back—and Mr Walter’s mind busily turning over the meagre resources of a lean, lean purse and an overloaded credit.

  ‘Peter,’ he said, ‘you must know that unhappily I am not a rich man, and that my own provision for this great voyage has quite exhausted what wealth I had. I cannot tell what to do, upon my word. To equip you very modestly might cost as much as twenty pound …’

  ‘Oh sir,’ said Peter faintly. In Ballynasaggart twenty pounds kept the whole family for twelve months of the year.