The Mauritius Command (13 page)
"Once you have had a brush with them, you mean?"
"No. Once I have seen them, even hull down on the horizon."
"Could you indeed judge of their abilities at so remote a view?"
"Of course," said Jack a little impatiently. "What a fellow you are, Stephen. Any sailor can tell a great deal from the way another sailor sets his jib, or goes about, or flashes out his stuns'ls, just as you could tell a great deal about a doctor from the way he whipped off a leg."
"Always this whipping off of a leg. It is my belief that for you people the whole noble art of medicine is summed up in the whipping off of a leg. I met a man yesterday--and he was so polite as to call on me today, quite sober--who would soon put you into a better way of thinking. He is the Otter's surgeon. I should probably have to cultivate his acquaintance in any event, for our own purposes, since the Otter is, as you would say, an inshore prig', but I do not regret it now that I have met him. He is, or was, a man of shining parts. But to return to our odds: you would set them at five to three in favour of the French?"
"Something of that kind. If you add up guns and crews and tonnage it is a great deal worse; but of course I cannot really speak to the probability until I see them. Yet although I have sent a hundred Boadiceas to lend a hand aboard the Sirius, and although I know Pym is doing his utmost to get her ready for sea, our own ship has to take in six months" stores, and I should love to careen her too, the last chance of a clean bottom for God knows how long--I cannot see how we can sail before Saturday's tide. I shall keep the people hard at it, and harry the arsenal until they wish me damned, but apart from that there is nothing I can do: there is nothing that the Archangel Gabriel could do. So what do you say to some music, Stephen? We might work out some variations on "Begone Dull Care"."
CHAPTER FOUR
The squadron, standing north-east with the urgent tradewind on the beam, made a noble sight; their perfect line covered half a mile of sea--and such a sea: the Indian Ocean at its finest, a sapphire not too deep, a blue that turned their worn sails a dazzling white. Sirius, Nereide, Raisonable, Boadicea, Otter, and away to leeward the East India Company's fast-sailing armed schooner Wasp, while beyond the Wasp, so exactly placed that it outlined her triangular courses, floated the only bank of cloud in the sky, the flat bottomed clouds hanging over the mountains of La Reunion, themselves beneath the horizon.
The Cape and its uneasy storms lay two thousand miles astern, south and westward, eighteen days" sweet sailing; and by now the crews had long since recovered from the extreme exertion of getting their ships ready for sea three tides before it seemed humanly possible. But once at sea new exertions awaited them: for one thing, the perfection of this line, with each ship keeping station on the pendant at exactly a cable's length, could be achieved only by incessant care and watchfulness. The Sirius, with her foul bottom, kept setting and taking in her topgallants; the Nereide had perpetually to struggle against her tendency to sag to leeward; and Jack, standing on the poop of the Raisonable, saw that his dear but somewhat sluggish Boadicea was having an anxious time of it--Eliot was fiddling with his royals--while only the pendant-ship, fast in spite of her antiquity, and the Otter were at ease. And for another, all the ships except the Boadicea were disturbed, upset and harassed by the Commodore's passion for gunnery.
He had begun as soon as they sank Cape Agulhas, and although they were by no means reconciled to the exercise they were used to his ways; they were quite sure what the Commodore would be at at this point in the afternoon watch when they saw the Raisonable signal to the Wasp and then bid the squadron wear together. Up and down the line the bosuns" calls shrilled high and clear, the hands stood poised upon their toes (for the competition between the ships was very keen, the horror of public disgrace very great), and the moment the Raisonable deviated from her line the others began their turn: round they came, as trim as could be, forming the line with their larboard tacks aboard, the wind one point free, a reversed line, with the Otter leading. They had no great press of sail and this was a simple manoeuvre; even so, it was well executed; there was not much amiss with their seamanship, reflected Jack, looking over the taffrail at the Nereide's masts, all in one line, eclipsing those of the Sirius, her next astern. Meanwhile the schooner had cast off the targets, and she was making sail with remarkable diligence, being eager to run out of range as soon as possible.
It was an understandable eagerness, for as usual the Otter opened a fine brisk fire a little before her guns could really be said to bear, and her wilder shot whipped up the sea between the schooner and the target. Her second broadside was nearer the mark, and might have hit it if the Otters had waited for the top of the roll: her third resembled the first, except that one ball did skip over the target: and she did not manage a fourth. Jack, watch in hand, was calling the figures to the mathematical midshipman he had brought with him when the Boadicea spoke out, pitching her shot a trifle high but sweeping the hypothetical deck; her second broadside struck the enemy square amidships, and with rapturous cries her third and fourth demolished the floating wreckage. "One minute fifty-five seconds," wrote Spotted Dick upon his slate, following it with two points of admiration. "As they bear, Mr Whittington," called Jack. The Raisonable was understood to play no competitive role in all this: because of her age she could not blaze away with the single, timber- shattering roar of a younger ship, but every third gun of her lower deck, half charged, and several of her lighter pieces produced a slow rolling fire that would have done a certain amount of damage. Far more damage than the full but almost comically inept broadsides of the Nereide: two broadsides only, and those fired so high that no more than a single shot went home--a shot almost certainly fired by one of the quarter-gunners that Jack had most reluctantly sent into her. Then came Sirius, with two deliberate broadsides and then her five aftermost guns as the battered target went astern: slow but quite accurate at this moderate range.
Jack had neither the time nor the powder for any more. As soon as the guns were housed he signalled Tack in succession and called the schooner under his lee. From the moment they weighed from Simon's Town he had watched the sailing of the ships under his command with a very close attention, but never had he kept his glass o fixedly upon any one of them as now he kept it upon the Wasp as she came racing up close-hauled, throwing white water right down her lee-raii. She was a beautiful craft, beautifully handled, and she sailed closer to the wind than e would have thought possible; yet his anxious, worn expression did not lighten when she rounded to and lay here under the Raisonable's quarter, her captain looking up at her lofty poop with an inquiring face.
Jack nodded absently to the schooner, told the signal-lieutenant to summon the captain of the Sirius, stepped aft with a speaking-trumpet and hailed the Boadicea, desiring her acting-captain to come aboard. The Commodore received them rather formally in the fore-cabin, where Mr Peter handed Eliot written orders to proceed to the Mauritius in company with the Sirius, there to lie off Port-Louis, the capital and the chief port, in the orth-west of the island, and to rendezvous with the rest of the squadron on that station: in the intervening time they were to watch the motions of the enemy and to gain all the information they could. To these orders Jack added a clear direction not to engage in any action unless the odds were heavily in their favour, together with some advice about arriving off Sable Point after dark and sending in boats to look into the harbour at crack of dawn, so that they could pull out against the sea-breeze. Then, in his care for the Boadicea, he was going on to beg Eliot not to carry too great a press of sail, not to set his royals--a spar carried away in these latitudes was a terrible loss--she must be humoured, not drove--when he realized that he sounded more like a mother-hen than was quite right. He stifled his recommendation about the Boadicea's starboard cathead, saw them over the side, watched their ships steer north, and went below again, going right aft to the great cabin, where Stephen sat at a table, encoding letters on paper of surprising thinness.
"The great advantage of these ark-like vessels," observed Stephen, "is that one can at least speak in privacy. The Admiral, with his luxury of dining-room, bedroom, antechamber, forecabin, and then this magnificence with the balcony behind, could riot at his ease; the Commodore can freely speak his mind. A mind that is, I fear, oppressed by melancholy thoughts?"
"Yes: commodious, ain't it?" said Jack, stepping out on to the stern-gallery, from which he could see the Wasp, rising and failing ten feet on the long smooth swell and shivering her foretopsail from time to time to keep her pace down to that of the two-decker. Coming back he said, "Stephen, I do so hate this vile scheme of yours."
"I know you do, my dear," said Stephen, "You have frequently mentioned it. And each time I have replied, that in the first place the contacts and the information I seek are of essential importance; and in the second, that the risk is negligible. I walk two hundred paces along a strand clearly defined by palm- trees; I call at the second house I see--a house of which I have an accurate drawing--I make a contact of inestimable value, receive my information, deliver these documents, whose extreme tenuity, you see"--holding them out--"renders them edible, as tradition doth require--I walk back to the boat and so to your swift-sailing machine, to join you, with the blessing, for breakfast. I promise not to linger, Jack, though La Reunion is another Ophir, to the philosophic mind."
Jack paced up and down: all that Stephen said was perfectly reasonable. Yet not so many years ago Jack had fetched him out of Port Mahon more dead than alive, Port Mahon in Minorca, where he had been caught on a secret mission, interrogated with all the barbarity of the Inquisition, and very nearly destroyed.
"Minorca was entirely different," said Stephen. "In that case I had been undermined at home. Here the possibility does not exist."
"It is not only that," said Jack, coming to a halt in front of a chart of the coast of La Reunion. "Just look at these God-damned reefs. Think of the surf. I have told you again and again, Stephen, these inshore waters are hellish dangerous--reefs everywhere, half of "em uncharted, the most tremendous surf. I know what I am talking about. I was here as a boy. There is scarcely a beach where you can land in safety, even when the swell is more moderate by half , To get into your Petite Anse you must run through a gap in the reef not a cable's length across even at high tide, by moonlight. And what if this Company's chap don't find it? He is no pilot for these waters: admits it candidly."
"The alternative is to go in the Otter. Clonfert does know these shores; and he has a native pilot. And since I shall have to spend some time in the Otter sooner or later, I am eager to know her captain. Much will depend upon our understanding."
"Certainly he knows this coast," said Jack, "but then the coast knows him. He has been in and out a score of times on this east side alone. The Otter is very recognizable, and if any fishing-boat or aviso or watchman on the cliffs sees her standing in, then every soldier and militiaman on the island will be running about, shooting the first thing that stirs. No: if it has to be, then the schooner is the right choice. Her captain is a steady young fellow and a good seaman; nothing flash or gimcrack about him or his Wasp. Besides, there is the time."
"Sure, I should prefer the schooner. She leaves us at Rodriguez for Bombay, as I understand it, and that will preserve my character a little longer."
"Well," said Jack in the most unwilling voice. "But I tell you, Stephen, I shall give him absolute orders to return immediately if he cannot make out his leading marks at once, or at the least sign of movement ashore. And Stephen, I must tell you this, too: if the scheme goes wrong, I cannot land a party to bring you off."
"It would be madness to attempt any such thing," said Stephen placidly; and after a slight pause, "Honest Jack, would it be uncivil to remind you, that time waits for no man? This also applies, they tell me, to the tide."
"Then at least," cried Jack, "I can send Bonden with you, and have a carronade mounted in the boat."
"That would be kind; and might I suggest that black men for the boat's crew would be a diabolically cunning stroke, by way of amusing the enemy? For we must assume that he sees in the dark, the creature."
"I shall attend to it this minute," said Jack, and he left Stephen to his encoding.
A little before four bells in the afternoon watch Dr Maturin was lowered like a parcel on to the heaving deck of the Wasp, where Bonden seized him, cast off the five fathoms of stout line that had held him motionless (no one had the least opinion of his powers of self-preservation, at sea) and led him aft, whispering, "Don't forget to pull off your hat, sir."
It was a round hat of French manufacture, and Stephen took it off to the schooner's quarterdeck and to her captain with something of an air; then turning about with the intention of waving it to Jack he found that he was gazing over a broad lane of sea at the Raisonable's stolid figurehead. The schooner had already crossed the two-decker's bows, and she was now flying goose-winged towards the clouds that hung over La Reunion.
"If you will step this way, sir, said the captain of the Wasp, "I believe we shall find our dinner ready."
At the same moment Killick mounted to the poop of the Raisonable, where Jack was staring after the schooner, and stated, with something of his old acerbity, that "the gentlemen were treading on one another's toes in the halfdeck this ten minutes past: and his honour still in his trousers." Abruptly Jack realized that he had forgotten his invitation to the wardroom, that he was improperly dressed--north of Capricorn once more he had reverted to the free and easy ducks--and that he was in danger of committing unpunctuality. He darted below, huddled on his uniform, and shot into the great cabin just as five bells struck. Here he received his guests, the sailors in their best blue coats, the soldiers in their scarlet, and all of them red faced in the heat, for they had had their finery on for the last half hour at least: presently he led them to the dining-table, where the skylight admitted the rays of the ardent sun, and they grew redder still. At the beginning of a cruise, and often right through it, these feasts, theoretically the gathering of equals for social intercourse but in fact the almost obligatory attendance of men belonging to different steps of a rigid and never-forgotten hierarchy, tended to be ponderous affairs. Jack was perfectly aware of it, and he exerted himself to give some semblance of spontaneity to his entertainment. He tried very hard, and at one point, feeling for the sufferings of the Marine captain whose stock was bringing him nearer and nearer to a cerebral congestion, he even though of bidding them take off their heavy coats: but that would never do--a disproportioned thought indeed--for although he naturally liked his guests to enjoy themselves, he must not conciliate their goodwill by the least improper concession; they must enjoy themselves within the limits of naval convention, and these limits certainly did not extend to turning the cabin into a bawdy-house. He confined himself to ordering the awning, removed for Stephen's aerial voyage, to be rigged again, and water to be dashed upon the deck.
Although his heart was not in it, he laboured on: yet artificial conviviality is rarely infectious, and still they sat, hot, prim, polite. Convention required that no man but Jack Aubrey should initiate any conversation, and since they had not yet taken the measure of their new Commodore they obeyed it religiously. Presently he began to run short of topics, and he was reduced to urging them to eat and drink. For his own part he could only go through the motions of eating--his stomach was quite closed--but as a grateful coolness began to come down from the shaded skylight, wafted by the unvarying south- east trade, the bottle went about more briskly. Even before the port came to the table each man had a shining, glazed appearance, a tendency to stare and hold himself very straight, and each man behaved with even greater care as the decanter went its rounds--tolerably dismal rounds, as Jack could not but inwardly confess.