Book 8 - The Ionian Mission Page 7

  'Mr Whiting,' he said, 'prepare the French colours, the number seventy-seven, and some kind of an answer to their private signal. Let it jam in the halyards.'

  The near haze lifted and there she lay, a seventy-four, high, taut and handsome. Probably the Jemmapes: at all events no ship to decline battle. Yet they were strangely inactive aboard her: the Worcester was coming up on them fast, steering for their starboard quarter, running off that precious distance south of Lorient; but they never stirred. Suddenly he realized that every man-jack aboard her was staring for the Groix light. It came sharp and clear, a double flash, She dropped her topgallantsails, and while they were sheeting home someone caught sight of the Worcester—he distinctly heard trumpets aboard the Frenchman, trumpets and the urgent thunder of a drum. His eyes were so used to the half-light that even without a glass he could see people hurrying about on her decks. After a few moments her colours ran up and she changed helm to cut the Worcester's course. 'Edge off two points,' said Jack to the master at the con. This would bring them still farther south. 'Mr Whiting, French colours if you please. Mr Pullings, battle-lanterns.'

  Battle-lanterns aboard the Frenchman too, lights showing in every port, guns running out. The French number and private signal: the Worcester's slow and evasive reply, which did not deceive the enemy for more than a few moments. Yet even those few moments carried the two ships a furlong farther south, and in a very short while now the Jemmapes—for the Jemmapes she was—would no longer be able to haul up for Lorient. Not that she showed the least sign of wishing to do so: far from it. Her commander was bringing her out in the most handsome manner, evidently determined to join issue as soon as possible, as though he had heard Lord Nelson's maxim 'Never mind manoeuvres: always go straight at 'em.'

  In earlier years Jack would have lain to for the Jemmapes in much the same generous spirit, but now he wanted to make doubly sure of her; he wanted her to try for the weather-gage, and he kept the Worcester away another point and a half, watching the enemy intently as the two ships ran, each abreasting the sea with a fine bow-wave. Hammocks were racing up on deck aboard the Jemmapes: her waist and forecastle was a pretty scene of confusion, and in that man's place, with such a clean-bottomed swift-sailing ship, Jack would have held off until his people were more nearly settled: but not at all, out she came as fast as she could pelt, and Jack saw that his estimate of her speed had been short of the mark. She was indeed a flyer, and once the vital mile was run off he would have to close as fast as ever he could, while he still had the advantage of wind and readiness—close and board. He had never known it fail. All along the Worcester's decks the arms-chests lay open: pistols, cutlasses, wicked boarding-axes.

  He saw the flash of the Frenchman's chaser, the cloud of smoke torn away ahead, and a white plume rose from the grey sea well beyond the Worcester's starboard bow. 'Our colours, Mr Whiting,' he said, fixing the enemy quarterdeck in his telescope. And much louder, 'Maintop there: hoist the short pennant.'

  He saw the shift of helm that would bring the Jemmapes broadside on: she turned, turned and vanished in a cloud of smoke billowing to her topsails, the single timber-shattering discharge that only a stout new ship could afford. The line was good, but they had fired a trifle past the height of the roll and their well-grouped shot tore up a broad patch of sea a hundred yards short. A dozen ricochets came aboard, one smashing the blue cutter; a hole appeared in the mainsail and some blocks fell to the deck behind him—there had been no time to rig netting. A subdued cheer from the forecastle and waist and many an eye looked aft for the order to fire. On the edge of his field of vision he saw Stephen standing by the break of the poop in his nightshirt and breeches: Dr Maturin rarely went to his action-station in the cockpit until there were casualties for him to deal with. But Jack Aubrey's mind was too taken up with the delicate calculations of the coming battle for conversation: he stood there, wholly engrossed, working out the converging courses, the possible variants, the innumerable fine points that must precede the plain hard hammering, when everyone would be much happier. On these occasions, and Stephen had known many of them, Jack was as it were removed, a stranger, quite unlike the cheerful, not over-wise companion he knew so well: a hard, strong face, calm but intensely alive, efficient, decided, a stern face, but one that in some way expressed a fierce and vivid happiness.

  A full minute passed. The second French broadside must be rammed home by now. He would have to suffer two or three of them, and at shortening range, before he could carry out his plan: but a fresh crew hated being fired at without making a reply. 'One more,' he said in his strong voice. 'One more, and then you shall serve them out. Then wait for the word and fire at her tops. Fire steady. Do not waste a shot.' A fierce growl all along, then the Frenchman's roaring fire and almost at the same moment the great hammer-crash of round-shot hitting the Worcester's hull, splinters flying across the deck, wreckage falling from aloft. 'Do not do that, youngster,' said Jack to little Calamy, who had bent double when a shot crossed the quarterdeck. 'You might put your head in the way of a ball.' He glanced fore and aft. No great harm, and he was about to give the order to bear up fire when the wounded maintack tore free. 'Clew up, clew up,' he said, and the wild flapping stopped. 'Starboard three points.'

  'Three points a-starboard it is, sir,' said the quartermaster at the wheel, and in a long smooth glide the Worcester brought her guns to bear. She was head-on to the swell, a fair pitch but no roll. 'Wait for it,' he called. 'At her tops. Waste not a shot. At the word from forward aft.' The wind sang through the rigging. The Frenchmen would be almost running out their guns again: that was the moment to catch them. He must get his broadside in first, fluster them, and hide his ship in smoke. 'Bow guns stand by. Fire.'

  From forward aft the long rolling fire, an enormous all-pervading roar; and a freak of the wind brought the dense smoke eddying back—red smoke, green, blue, crimson and orange, with unearthly tongues of intensely brilliant coloured flame in the greyness. He leapt on to the hammock-cloths to pierce the cloud, the unnatural cloud, yet still it lingered: and no reply from the Jemmapes: 'God love me, what's amiss?' he said aloud, while below him the gun-crews sponged, loaded, rammed and heaved like fury, fresh powder running up from the magazines.

  The smoke cleared at last, and there was the Jemmapes stern-on, running fast, apparently unhurt apart from a small green fire blazing on her poop, running close-hauled for Lorient, shocked and appalled by these new secret weapons—she was already packing on more sail.

  The guns were run out again. At three degrees of elevation he gave her another broadside, a raking broadside at her defenceless stern, a broadside delivered with a fierce, savage cheer. But though several shots struck her hull they did not check her speed; nor did the now-normal flash of the Worcester's fire induce her to lie to; and by the time Jack called 'Hard a-starboard' to go in chase she had gained a quarter of a mile, while fools were capering on the forecastle, cheering, bawling out 'She runs, she runs! We've beat her!'

  The Worcester hauled her wind, the sail-trimmers leapt to the braces and flew aloft to set the upper staysails, but she could not lie as close to her quarry by nearly a whole point, nor, without her mainsail, could she run on a bowline so fast by two knots and more. When the Jemmapes was so far ahead that the bow-chaser could hardly reach her, Jack yawned, gave her one last deliberate, sullen broadside at extreme range, and said 'House your guns. Mr Gill, course south-south-west: all plain sail.' He realized that it was day, that the sun was rising over Lorient, and added 'Dowse the battle-lanterns.' As he spoke he saw Pullings' face and the cruel disappointment on it: had they held their opening fire another five minutes the Jemmapes could never have reached Lorient. With the wind, the Ile de Groix, its reefs, and the shore all lying just so, a close action could have been forced whether the Jemmapes held her course or no: five minutes longer and Pullings would either have been a commander or a corpse. For a successful, evenly-matched action was certain promotion for a surviving first lieutenant: Pullings
' only possible chance of promotion from the long and over-crowded lieutenants' list, since he had no pull, no interest or influence of any kind, no hope apart from his patron's luck or superior ability; and Jack Aubrey had misjudged the situation, one that might never arise again in Tom Pullings' whole career. Jack felt a sadness rise, far greater than his usual depression after a real battle, and looking at the dangling maintack he said in a hard voice, 'What are our casualties, Mr Pullings?'

  'No dead, sir. Three splinter wounds and a crushed foot, no more. And number seven, lower deck, dismounted. But I am sorry to tell you, sir, I am very sorry to tell you, the Doctor has copped it.'

  Chapter Three

  Dr Maturin had taken part in many actions at sea, and although he had twice been captured and once wrecked he had never copped it yet, because as a surgeon he spent most of the time below the water-line, sheltered from splinters, round-shot and grape, in comparative safety if not in comfort. But now he had been wounded in three several places: first a falling shoulder-block knocked him down, then a jagged lump of elm from the hounds of the mizzen topmast ripped off half his scalp, and lastly one of a shower of eighteen-inch splinters driven from the Worcester's quarterdeck berthing by a thirty-two-pound ball struck both his feet as he lay there, struck them flatwise, piercing the list slippers and his soles. The wounds were spectacular and he left an uninterrupted trail of blood as he was carried below, but they were not serious; his assistants sewed him up again—Lewis, the elder man, was a rare hand with a needle—and although the pain was singularly shrill and insistent, Stephen's favourite tincture of laudanum dealt with that. He could take it now with a clear conscience, and with the tolerance resulting from long abuse he drank it by the pint. It was not the wounds, therefore, nor the loss of blood, nor the pain that brought him so low, but rather the incessant flow of visitors.

  His assistants left him pretty well alone, apart from attending to his dressings, for not only was he a dangerous patient, stubborn, dogged and even violent if attempted to be dosed according to any system but his own, but he was also their superior in naval and in medical rank, being a physician and the author of highly-esteemed works on seamen's diseases, an officer much caressed by the Sick and Hurt Board: furthermore he was no more consistent than other men and in spite of his liberal principles and his dislike of constituted authority he was capable of petulant tyranny when confronted with a slime-draught early in the morning. But he had no authority over the Worcester's passengers, and with regard to them the social contract was fully binding. It was their duty to visit the sick unless they were being sick themselves (and poor Dr Davis was prostrated by the slightest roll or pitch); they had nothing else at all to do; and throughout their leisurely, almost windless and unnaturally calm passage across the Bay of Biscay and down the coast of Portugal they succeeded one another in the Captain's dining-cabin, where Stephen's cot had been set up. Nor were they alone. His old shipmates Pullings and Mowett sat with him every day, and very welcome they were; but all the other members of the wardroom came in from time to time, walking on tiptoe and suggesting remedies in low, considerate tones. Men who had listened to him with respectful attention when he was well now gave him advice quite fearlessly; and Killick hovered near at hand with fortifying broth, possets made by the gunner's wife, and galley receipts for strengthening the blood. Had it not been for the blessed opium that allowed him to plane above his irascibility some of the time his wellwishers would have worried him into his coffin, a hammock with two round-shot at his feet, before they raised the Rock of Lisbon; for although he could put up with pain tolerably well he had always found boredom mortal, and the purser, the Marine Captain (strangers to him) and two of the parsons droned on and on. Apart from the inventor of the double-bottomed defecator, whose history he had heard seven times, they had nothing to say, and they said it for what seemed hours, while his smile grew more fixed and rigid until at last it came to resemble the risus sardonicus.

  But in latitude thirty-eight degrees north he began to recover; the feverish petulance left him, he became equable and mild, and his complaisance was no longer a matter of strong self-restraint. He discovered agreeable qualities in two of the clergymen and Professor Graham. When Cape St Vincent showed misty on the larboard bow he was well enough to be carried on deck in an elbow-chair with two capstan-bars lashed to its sides, sedan-fashion, to be shown the desert of grey ocean in which Lieutenant Aubrey, Sir John Jervis, and Commodore Nelson had defeated the greatly superior Spanish fleet on St Valentine's Day in 1797. And when the Worcester lay alongside the New Mole in Gibraltar, taking in fresh supplies and waiting for the levanter to blow out, the strong east wind that prevented her from passing the Strait into the Mediterranean, he sat luxuriating in the sun in the stern-galley, his bandaged feet on a stool, a glass of fresh orange-juice in his hand, and Professor Graham by his side: for although the Scotchman was a grey, somewhat positive, humourless soul he had read a great deal, and now that he had overcome at least some of his initial reserve he was a grateful companion, a man of obvious parts, and in no way a bore. Stephen had received the visit of several acquaintances from the shore, the last of these bringing him specimens of four uncommon cryptogams that he had always longed to see; he gazed at them now with such pleasure, such intensity, that it was some moments before he answered the Professor's question 'What was the language you were speaking with that gentleman?'

  'The language, sir?' he said with a smile—he was feeling unusually cheerful, even merry, 'It was Catalan.' He had been tempted to say Aramaic, out of a spirit of fun; but Graham was too learned, too much of a linguist to swallow that.

  'So you speak the Catalan, Doctor, as well as the French and Spanish?'

  'I have spent much of my life on the shores of the Mediterranean,' said Stephen, 'and in my malleable youth I came by a certain knowledge of the languages spoken at its western end. I do not possess your command of Arabic, however; still less of your Turkish, God forbid.'

  'To revert to our battle,' said Graham, having digested this. 'What I do not understand is why Captain Aubrey should have shot off those extraordinary coloured balls in the first place.'

  'As for that,' said Stephen, smiling at Graham's notion of a battle—from their noble balcony they had the whole bay spread out before them, with Algeciras on the farther shore, where he had taken part in a real action: a hundred and forty-two casualties in HMS Hannibal alone: blood and thunder all day long—'You must know that in their wisdom the Lords of the Admiralty have laid down that for the first six months of his commission no captain may presume to fire more shot a month than one third the number of his guns under various heavy mulcts and penalties; and after that only half as many. Whitehall supposes that the mariners know how to direct their pieces accurately and shoot them off at great speed while the ship is tossing on the billows by instinct: the captains who do not share this amiable illusion buy their own powder, if they can afford it. But powder is costly. A broadside from a ship of this size uses up some two hundredweight, I believe.'

  'Hoot, toot,' said Graham, deeply shocked.

  'Hoot, toot, indeed sir,' said Stephen. 'And at one and tenpence farthing the pound, that comes to a considerable sum.'

  'Twenty, nineteen, five,' said Graham. 'Twenty pounds English, nineteen shillings and five pence.'

  'So you will understand that captains seek the best market for their private powder: this came from a fireworks manufactory—hence the unusual colours.'

  'There was no intention to deceive, then?'

  'Est summum nefas fallere: deceit is gross impiety, my dear sir.'

  Graham stared: then his grave grey face adopted a somewhat artificial smile and he said, 'You speak facetiously, no doubt. But the false colours, the French flag, was certainly intended to draw the enemy closer, so that he might be more readily destroyed; and it almost succeeded. I wonder we did not raise the signal of distress, or even pretend to surrender: that would have brought them closer still.'

  'To the nau
tical mind some false signals are falser than other false signals. At sea there are clearly-understood degrees of iniquity. An otherwise perfectly honourable sea-officer may state by symbol that he is a Frenchman, but he must not state that his ship has struck upon a rock, nor must he lower his colours and then start to fight again, upon pain of universal reprehension. He would have the hiss of the world against him—of the maritime world.'

  'The end proposed is the same in either case, the deception equal. I should certainly hoist all the colours in the spectrum, were it to advance the fall of that wicked man by five minutes. I refer to the self-styled Emperor of the French. War is a time for efficient action, not for the display of fine feelings, nor the discussion of the relative merits of forgery and false pretences.'

  'It is illogical, I admit,' said Stephen, 'but this is the moral law, as perceived by the nautical mind.'

  'The nautical mind,' said Graham. 'Hoot, toot.'

  'The nautical mind has its own logic,' said Stephen, 'and although it may disobey many of the Articles of War with a clear conscience—swearing is forbidden, for example, and yet we daily hear warm, intemperate language, even blasphemous and obscene; so is the sudden spontaneous beating of men who are thought to move too slowly, or starting, as we call it. But you may see a certain amount of it even in this ship, which is more humane than most. Yet all these transgressions and many more, such as that stealing of stores which we term capperbar, or the neglect of religious feasts, are carried only to certain clearly-understood traditional limits, beyond which it is mortal to go. The seamen's moral law may seem strange to landsmen, even whimsical at times; but as we all know, pure reason is not enough, and illogical as their system may be, it does enable them to conduct these enormously complex machines from point to point, in spite of the elements, often boisterous, often adverse, always damp and always capricious.'