Book 6 - The Fortune Of War Page 8

  The news was received with mixed feelings aboard La Flèche: some of the officers who still felt strongly about the War of Independence welcomed it; others, who had American friends or who thought that the whole affair had been shockingly bungled by the Tories and the army and that in any case a desire for independence was natural, regretted it. Others again left politics to politicians, but supposed that if they had to fight the Americans as well as Bonaparte and his allies, then it was all part of their calling; and at least there might be some hope of prize-money. The glorious days of Spanish treasure-ships were gone for ever; French prizes were precious thin on the ground; but American merchantmen had taken to carrying much of the world's trade, and they might be met with anywhere at all. Bonden told Stephen that upon the whole the lower deck was not pleased: apart from the regular man-of-war's men, they were mostly hands taken out of merchantships or pressed on shore; many had sailed in American vessels and all had had American shipmates. Although they liked the notion of prize-money, they could not see much sense in fighting Americans: there were half a dozen Americans aboard at this moment, and they were practically the same as Englishmen—no airs or graces about them—and you could not say fairer than that. Fighting the French was different; they were foreigners, and somehow it came natural. But generally speaking the whole ship's company looked upon this new war as a matter of no great importance; there might be some advantage in it, but as a contest it was neither here nor there, compared to the war with France. No details had reached the Cape, but everybody knew that the Americans did not possess a single ship of the line, whereas the Royal Navy had over a hundred actually at sea, to say nothing of those building or in reserve.

  Yet although the issue of the war as far as it concerned the sailors was a foregone conclusion—the Royal Navy had, after all, spent the last twenty years beating every fleet that was brought against it, taking, burning or sinking the enemy in the mass or in detail wherever he floated—Captain Yorke for one was doubtful, if not despondent, about the outcome on land. If the Americans had beaten the British army in eighty-one they might do so again, particularly as so many of the best regiments were engaged in the Peninsula; and then the French in Quebec could scarcely be expected to show much zeal on the English side. What he feared was a sudden crossing of the border to take the naval base of Halifax from behind. That would be extremely inconvenient; but even so he was quite happy about the naval side. There were the West Indies, there was Bermuda, there were of course the home bases, and he and Jack fell to working out the composition of the squadron required to keep the American navy in check or to destroy it, in the event of a general engagement, on the assumption that Halifax was gone.

  They had always taken a keen professional interest in the navies of other powers, even of so young a power as the United States, and when Stephen asked 'What does the American navy consist of, pray?' they were able to answer him at once.

  'Apart from their sloops and brigs, they have only eight frigates', said Yorke. 'Eight, no more. It would be stark staring madness to declare war with only eight frigates when your opponents have more than six hundred cruisers at sea, if you meant to do anything in the naval line; but of course their real aim is Canada—they cannot mean to do anything at sea, except for snapping up a few prizes before their ships are taken or blockaded in the Chesapeake.'

  'Eight frigates,' said Jack. 'Two of them we should scarcely call frigates at all, nowadays; a thirty-two and a twenty-eight by the name of Adams; then three eighteen-pounders, rated thirty-eight guns apiece, much the same as ours though perhaps a little beamier, Constellation, Congress, and Chesapeake; and then three more, heavier than anything we have, President, Constitution, and United States, all rated forty-four guns and all carrying twenty-four-pounders. I dare say Acasta will be ordered to the American station to cope with them, together with Endymion and Indefatigable. I shall like that; there is splendid shooting behind Halifax.'

  'When you say heavier than anything we possess, do you mean in physical bulk, or in the magnitude of their artillery?'

  'I really meant the guns. They have long twenty-fours as opposed to our eighteens—they fire balls that weigh four and twenty pounds, rather than eighteen. Six pound more, do you see?' said Jack kindly. 'But, of course one goes with t'other. The American forty-fours must gauge about fifteen hundred ton, while our thirty-eights are only a trifle over a thousand. Acasta is one thousand one hundred and sixty, if I don't mistake, and she carries forty eighteen-pounders.'

  'Would not this preponderance give the enemy a great advantage? Suppose he were to dash his beakhead against you, would not his greater mass bear you down, as the Turks were borne down at Lepanto?'

  'Dear Doctor,' said Yorke, 'those are galley tactics. In modern scientific war mere weight does not signify, except that the thickness of your scantlings is some protection to your gun-crews at long range and enables you to carry heavier guns. Yardarm to yardarm, it does not make much odds: an eighteen-pound ball will do just about as much damage as a twenty-four, if the guns are well pointed and well served. When I was third of the Sybille, 38, we set about La Forte, of forty-four twenty-four-pounders, and when we took her we found we had killed and wounded a hundred and twenty-five of her people, while they only killed five of ours. We dismasted her entirely, too, and lost not one of our own. That was in ninety-nine.'

  'And then in Trafalgar year,' said Jack, 'Tom Baker—you remember Tom Baker, Stephen, the very ugly, carroty-haired man with a pretty wife that dotes upon him—Tom Baker, in Phoenix, 36, and an uncommonly small thirty-six, took Didon, 40, in a very bloody fight. But I tell you what, Yorke, it will never do to send too many liners; you cannot expect any frigate, forty-four or not, to come out and engage with a ship of the line. Now I suggest Acasta, Egyptienne . . .'

  Stephen's attention wandered, and presently he took up his 'cello, whispering over the strings. He had made his views on this hurtful, unnecessary war—unnecessary and yet, with such a ministry, perhaps inevitable—clear to Wallis long ago: he was not going to repeat himself. What preoccupied him was the effect it might have upon Diana Villiers, pinned in what was now an enemy country; and upon intelligence. Yet from the point of view of intelligence, he was infinitely more concerned with Catalonia; he longed to be there, and although La Flèche was at present dashing into the south Atlantic in the same magnificent style as that with which she had traversed the Indian Ocean, he was obliged to command his mind with unusual force to prevent it breaking out into sterile impatience and complaints. He thought that Yorke might well be right about Canada, but he could not care a great deal about the hypothetical naval war. If it took place, many men on both sides would no doubt be killed or cruelly maimed, a great many women would be made bitterly unhappy, a great deal of energy, material, and treasure would be wasted—diverted from the only real contest—but whatever the event the war would remain a side-issue, a piece of wanton, bloody foolishness. He wished Jack and Yorke would be less prolix, less inclined to neglect music for the American navy: he was tired of their ideal squadrons, their strategy, and their new naval bases.

  The American navy was the staple diet of conversation: the American navy day after day after day. To escape it he spent more time on deck or in the mizzentop. They were in albatross waters now, running up the cold current to the west of Africa, and long did he gaze for those splendid wings over the long greenish swell. But when the darkness or the cold—and it was unusually cold, so cold that he blessed the day he had landed his marsupials, creatures subject to bronchial complaints—drove him down to the gun-room, there he always found the Americans again, and not only their frigates but every one of their eight brigs and sloops from the Hornet, 20, to the Viper, 12, with every wearisome detail of shifting guns and boat-carronades, swivels in the tops and along the gangway.

  Here the feeling was quite different. Mr Warner had no fear for Canada, no fear for Halifax; nor did he give a rap for the American navy. And as he was the only man aboard who had fought the A
mericans, his opinion carried weight. 'When I was a midshipman in the year eighty, sir,' said he, 'serving under Foul-Weather Jack Byron on the American station, we saw a great deal of them. Contemptible, sir, contemptible: they never fought a single action with any credit. Filthy ships: more like privateers than a real navy. But what can you expect of people who think Commodore is a permanent rank, and who chew tobacco on the quarterdeck, squirting their spittle right, left and centre?'

  'Yet perhaps they may have improved with the passage of time,' said Stephen, 'I seem to remember that during their abortive little war with France in seventeen ninety-nine their frigate Constellation took L'Insurgente.'

  'Very true, sir; but you are forgetting that Constellation carried twenty-four-pounders and Insurgente twelves. You are forgetting that La Vengeance, who carried eighteens, knocked Constellation all to pieces. And, Doctor, you are forgetting that in both these actions the Yankees were engaged with foreigners, not with Englishmen.'

  'Ah,' said Stephen, 'that I cannot deny.'

  'My brother Numps—' said the purser.

  'Vengeance carried forty-two-pound brass carronades,' said the second lieutenant, 'and that I know very well, for I was third of the Seine when we took her in the Mona Passage.'

  'My brother Numps—' said the purser.

  'And these carronades were mounted on a new non-recoiling principle: let me draw it on the cloth.'

  Despairing of a wider audience, the purser turned to Stephen and McLean; but Stephen, feeling that no good could come of brother Numps, nor of the non-recoiling principle, glided from his place.

  The discussion carried on in the gun-room without him, still on the subject of the Americans, for it seemed that Numps had visited the United States: and it continued in the cabin, perhaps at a slightly higher level, but still very tedious for one who was not a sailor. There were times when it seemed to Stephen that they would never stop, and that boredom would be the death of him, since to escape their endless prating he was obliged either to pace the deck in the cold dampness or to take refuge in the fore-peak, which was equally cold and damp, with the reek of a charnel-house added. His cabin was not altogether without comfort, but it was separated from the midshipmen's berth by so thin a bulkhead that even the stout balls of wax that he thrust into his ears could not keep out their din. 'As I grow older,' he reflected, 'I become less tolerant of noise, boredom, and promiscuity; I never was well suited to a life at sea.'

  Then abruptly, from one day to the next, La Flèche was in deep blue water; the early morning air was warm; waistcoats and comforters were stowed away, and the noonday sun was observed by a quarterdeck full of men and boys in light round jackets. Soon the jackets disappeared, and they passed under Capricorn in shirt-sleeves: dinner with the Captain, which entailed full uniform, was no longer looked forward to so eagerly, except among the midshipmen, a penurious, hungry crew, whose small supply of private stores, bought at the Cape, had long since been squandered in high living, and who were now growing thin on salt horse and biscuit, no more.

  It was well north of Capricorn that their fantastic luck with the wind deserted them. The south-east trades had had so little south in them that La Flèche was nearer Brazil than she had intended to be when they died away altogether, leaving her wallowing on a heavy swell under a sun so huge, so very near, and so furious that even at first dawn the metal of the guns was still quite hot.

  After a week of this, when all real recollection of the cold had vanished, when even coolness seemed to belong to some ideal existence, a faint breeze, coming down from the equator, directly against their wishes, filled the sails at last, giving the ship life and motion. Now Warner could exert all his seamanship, the, parboiled hands all their zeal, in beating slowly north.

  He did so with admirable skill, applauded by those, such as Captain Aubrey, who could appreciate his endeavours, ignored by others, such as Stephen and McLean, who cared for none of these things. They had some interesting sunstrokes in their sickbay now, together with the usual diseases that some of the hands had found time to acquire in their few moments of free or stolen time at Simon's Town; but still their main preoccupation was what remained undecomposed of the treasures in the forepeak, mostly bones, salted skins, and small creatures or organs in alcohol. Everything was at least catalogued by now, and much was fully described. McLean was a fanatical describer, a dissector of wonderful dexterity: a most dogged, stubborn worker. After a day of such heat that tar dropped from the rigging and the pitch in the deck-seams bubbled under foot—perhaps the twentieth of such days in succession, with all the ship's boats towing astern to keep them watertight—Stephen left him down in his private lair, dissecting an eared seal's foetus, the pride of their largest jar of spirits. Although this was probably the foetus of the new species that was to be called Otaria macleanii and that was to win them undying glory, Stephen could no longer bear the dense cloud of tobacco-smoke (for McLean worked with his pipe in his mouth), the fumes of alcohol, and the enclosed, fetid heat, after the gun-room supper of pease-pudding. He wished McLean good night, warned him not to overtax his eyes, heard his abstracted grunt, and groped his way up ladders to the deck. The watch had been set long since, and the ship was very quiet: she was slipping along under topsails alone with the wind one point free, making perhaps a couple of knots through the long easy swell. The master had the watch, and he was not one to badger the hands with jib and staysails after a wearing day hogging and boot-topping the ship's weed-grown sides for some minute increase of speed. Stephen could see him, as his eyes grew accustomed to the dark, standing near the quartermaster at the con, in the glow of the binnacle light. Beyond him, by the taffrail, Jack was showing his midshipmen the stars, and Forshaw's high young voice could be heard piping about the Southern Cross. Such stars! The young moon had set, and they blazed there in a velvet sky, hanging, he would have sworn, at different heights, with Mars a startling red among them. A certain refreshment rose from the sea, a damp exhalation almost cool, and Stephen walked forward across the space amidships where in ordinary times the boats stood on their chocks and which was now strewn with sleeping or at least recumbent figures, their heads enveloped in their jackets. He made his way through them to the bows, then carefully out along the bowsprit as far as the spritsail yard. There he turned, and sitting easy, let himself go to the smooth motion of the ship, gazing now at the ghostly foretopsail, now up at the masthead describing intricate regular curves among the stars, and again down at the cutwater, perpetually advancing, never reaching him, shearing the black sea with a faint white gleam. There was a continual living sound of blocks heaving, the strain and slight creak of wood and cordage, the hiss and ripple and surge of the water: he was very tired, quite why he could not tell, unless it was the effort of keeping his mind from anxious, fruitless worrying about Diana—she was very present to his inward eye these days—and the events in Catalonia. Back there in the ship the bells struck one after another, and every time the sentinels called 'All's well' from their various stations. Perhaps it was their reiterated cries that impressed their sense upon his unreasoning part, perhaps several of a thousand other causes, but after some time his tiredness was no longer a jaded, harassed fatigue but mild, calm, physical weariness, a comfortable desire for sleep. He crept back, holding his breath and any rope that came to hand: if Jack or Bonden should discover him he would have to endure their reproaches: he would be harshly blamed. However, he managed the descent and walked aft; Jack and his star-gazers were no longer there, so after a word with the master and a long stare at the wake, the faintly phosphorescent starlit wake with the boats black in it, like little whales, he went below.

  Unfortunately the midshipmen were still keeping it up. The liveliest of the ship's young gentlemen had been brought up by his uncle, an Oxford don, and he had instituted gaudy nights. This was one of them, and through his wax Stephen could hear

  Our Captain was very good to us,

  He dipped his prick in phosphorus;

  It s
hed a light all through the night

  And steered us through the Bosphorus.

  Again and again they sang it, and again and again there was the howl of laughter at the end: it seemed to grow funnier with each repetition, and by four bells they could not get beyond 'was very good to us' before they were overcome by mirth.

  'Four bells, the vile brute-beasts,' said Stephen, ramming the wax still further home. But five bells he never heard. He was deep, deep down; and his next impression was one of extreme, general, incoherent violence—Jack shaking him, pulling him bodily out of his cot, shouting 'Fire, fire, the ship's on fire. Get up on deck.'

  He could see almost nothing for the smoke, but snatching up a book and writing-case he followed Jack's fleeting lantern along the deserted orlop to the forehatch. The whole deck was aglow with a rosy light reflected from the smoke and the sails, and an occasional tongue of flame could be seen above the main hatchway. Hoses were playing, half-naked men heaving strongly at the pumps. He stood there for a moment in his shirt, grasping the situation; then he turned to dart down to his cabin, but the scorching smoke drove him back directly, and as he emerged so a fountain of brilliant flame shot up from the cabin skylight. The main and mizzen topsails and all their tarred rigging took fire at once: blazing pieces fell on the deck, starting other fires—coils of rope, wood tinder-dry all flared with an extraordinary speed and brilliance—and now there was a vast omnipresent roar as the main fire took an unconquerable hold.

  The men started from the pumps and ran to the side, all looking at Captain Yorke. 'Starboard watch away,' he cried. 'Easy, easy, there. Leopards to the blue cutter.'