The Mauritius Command (7 page)

Southward still, with Canopus and Achernar high overhead, and Jack showed his attentive midshipmen the new constellations, Musca, Pavo, Chamaeleon and many more, all glowing in the warm, pellucid air.

Strange, unpredictable weather, for even when the Boadicea found the trades in 4" south they proved apathetic and fitful. It was clear that this was not to be a rapid passage, but although Jack often whistled for a breeze, a stronger breeze, he was not deeply worried by the length of their voyage: his ship was well- found, several storms of rain had filled her water, and her men were remarkably healthy; and as the weeks turned into months it came to him that this was a happy period, a time set apart, lying between the anxieties of home on the one hand and those that would surely be waiting for him in the Indian Ocean, where his real work would begin. And then although he longed for the "real thing" to start, he knew that no power on earth could bring him to it any earlier: he and Fellowes had done all they could to increase the frigate's rate of sailing, and they had accomplished much; but they could not command the wind. So with a tranquil conscience and that fatalism which sailors must acquire if they are not to perish of frustration, he rejoiced in this opportunity for making the Boadicea into something like his notion of a crack frigate, a fighting-machine manned entirely by able seamen, men-of war's men, every one of them an expert gun-layer and a devil with the boarding-axe and cutlass.

Insensibly the lubberly part of the Boadicea's crew began to resemble sailormen as the unchanging naval routine came to be their only real way of life, a life in which it was natural and inevitable that all hands should be piped just before eight bells in the middle watch and that the sleepers should start from their hammocks to the muster and then to the scrubbing of the decks in the first light of dawn; that all hands should be piped to dinner at eight bells in the forenoon watch, that this dinner should consist of cheese and duff on Monday, two pounds of salt beef on Tuesday, dried peas and duff on Wednesday, one pound of salt pork on Thursday, dried peas and cheese on Friday, two more pounds of salt beef on Saturday, a pound of salt pork and some such treat as figgy-dowdy on Sunday, always accompanied by a daily pound of biscuit; that at one bell dinner should be followed by a pint of grog, that after supper (with another pint of grog) all hands should repair to their action-stations at the beat of the drum, and that eventually hammocks should be piped down so that the watch below might have four hours of sleep before being roused again at midnight for another spell on deck. This and the perpetual living movement of the deck underfoot, and the sight of nothing but the Atlantic Ocean clear round the horizon, nothing but endless sea and sky, cut them off from the land so completely that it seemed another world, with no immediacy at all, and they adopted the values of the sea.

They also came to resemble sailormen in appearance, since one hour and forty minutes after the Boadicea had passed under the tropic of Cancer the carpenter's mate banged two brass nails into the deck, exactly twelve yards apart: twelve yards of duck, needles and thread were served out to each man, together with sennet, and they were desired to make themselves hot weather frocks, trousers and broad- brimmed hats. This they did, helped by their handier colleagues, to such effect that at next Sunday's divisions the landsmen dressed in a mixture of ragfair clothes and purser's slops, old leather breeches, greasy waistcoats and battered hats, had vanished, and their captain paced along lines of men as clean and white in their way as the Marines, drawn up on the quarterdeck, were clean and red in theirs.

There were still some fools belonging to the afterguard who were only good for heaving on a given rope; there were a dozen or so in either watch whose heads could not stand the swingeing ration of grog and who were continually punished for drunkenness; and there were some remaining hard cases; but on the whole he was pleased with them: a very decent set of men. He was pleased with his officers too, apart from Buchan and the purser, a very tall yellow-faced man with knock-knees and huge splay feet, upon whose books Jack kept a very sharp eye indeed: all three lieutenants seconded him with admirable zeal, and the older midshipmen were of real value.

Not the least part of that wonderfully lucky stroke off the Dry Salvages was the Boadicea's acquisition of a large quantity of ammunition. Regulations confined Jack to a hundred round-shot for each of his long eighteen pounders, and he had to hoard them with jealous care, for there was no certainty of any more at the Cape--a wretched situation in which he knew that if he did not train his gun-crews by firing live they would not know how to do it when the moment came, and that if he did then at the same critical juncture they might have nothing left to fire--but from that blessed day onwards the Boadicea's daily exercise with the great guns had not been the usual dumbshow. Certainly the crews rattled their eighteen-pounders in and out, going through all the motions of firing them, from casting loose to housing; but since the MW's twenty-four-pound balls fitted the Boadicea's carronades and her nine- pound the two chase-guns, every evening heard their savage roar: every man was accustomed to the deadly leap of the recoiling gun, to the flash and the din and to seizing his tackle, rammer or wad with automatic speed in the dense swirling powder-smoke. And on high days, as when they saluted the tropic of Capricorn with a double broadside, it was a pleasure to see their spirit: they demolished a raft of empty beef barrels at something over five hundred yards and ran their guns up again, cheering madly, to blast the scattered remains in a trifle less than two minutes. It was nothing like the mortal rate of fire that Jack so valued; it was not even the three broadsides in five minutes that was coming to be thought normal by those captains who cared for gunnery, far less the three in two minutes that Jack had achieved in other commissions; but it was accurate, and a good deal faster than some ships he knew.

This "time out', this happy interval with a straightforward and agreeable task in hand, sailing through warm seas with winds that, though often languid, were rarely downright contrary, sailing southwards in a comfortable ship with an excellent cook, ample stores and good company, had its less delightful sides, however.

His telescope was a disappointment. It was not that he could not see Jupiter: the planet gleamed in his eyepiece like a banded gold pea. But because of the ship's motion he could not keep it there long enough or steadily enough to fix the local time of its moons" eclipses and thus find his longitude. Neither the theory (which was by no means new) nor the telescope was at fault: it was the cleverly weighted cradle slung from the maintopgallantmast stay that he had designed to compensate for the pitch and roll that did not answer, in spite of all his alterations; and night after night he swung there cursing and swearing, surrounded by midshipmen armed with clean swabs, whose duty it was to enhance the compensation by thrusting him gently at the word of command.

The young gentlemen: he led them a hard life, insisting upon a very high degree of promptitude and activity; but apart from these sessions with the telescope, which they loathed entirely, and from their navigation classes, they thoroughly approved of their captain and of the splendid breakfasts and dinners to which he often invited them, although on due occasion he beat them with frightful strength on the bare breech in his cabin, usually for such crimes as stealing the gunroom's food or repeatedly walking about with their hands in their pockets. For his part he found them an engaging set of young fellows, though given to lying long in their hammocks, to consulting their ease, and to greed; and in one of them, Mr Richardson, generally known as Spotted Dick, because of his pimples, he detected a mathematician of uncommon promise. Jack taught them navigation himself, the Boadicea's schoolmaster being incapable of maintaining discipline, and it soon became apparent to him that he should have to keep his wits as sharp as his razor not to be outstripped by his pupil on the finer points of spherical trigonometry, to say nothing of the stars.

Then there was Mr Farquhar. Jack esteemed him as an intelligent, capable, gentlemanlike man with remarkable powers of conversation, excellent company for the space of a dinner, although he drank no wine, or even for a week; but Mr Farquhar had been bred to the law, and perhaps because of this a little too much of his conversation took the form of questioning, so that Jack sometimes felt that he was being examined at his own table. Furthermore, Mr Farquhar often used Latin expressions that made Jack uneasy, and referred to authors Jack had never read: Stephen had always done the same (indeed, it would have been difficult to refer to any author with whom Jack was acquainted apart from those who wrote on foxhunting, naval tactics, or astronomy), but with Stephen it was entirely different. Jack loved him, and had not the least objection to granting him all the erudition in the world, while remaining inwardly convinced that in all practical matters other than physic and surgery Stephen should never be allowed out alone. Mr Farquhar, however, seemed to assume that a deep knowledge of the law and of the public business embraced the whole field of useful human endeavour.

Yet Mr Farquhar's vastly superior knowledge of politics and even his far more galling superiority at chess would have been as nothing, if he had had some ear for music: he had none. It was their love of music that had brought Jack and Stephen together in the first place: the one played the fiddle and the other the "cello, neither brilliantly, yet both well enough to take deep pleasure in their evening concerts after retreat; they had played throughout every voyage they had made together, never interrupted by anything but the requirements of the service, the utmost extremity of foul weather, or by the enemy. But now Mr Farquhar was sharing the great cabin, and he was as indifferent to Haydn as he was to Mozart; as he observed, he would not give a farthing candle for either of them, or for Handel. The rustling of his book as they played, the way he tapped his snuffbox and blew his nose, took away from their pleasure; and in any case, Jack, brought up in the tradition of naval hospitality, felt bound to do all he could to make his guest comfortable, even to the extent of giving up his fiddle in favour of whist, which he did not care for, and of calling in the senior Marine lieutenant as the fourth, a man he did not much care for either.

Their guest was not always with them, however, for during the frequent calms Jack often took the jolly- boat and rowed away to swim, to inspect the frigate's trim from a distance, and to talk with Stephen in private. "You cannot possibly dislike him," he said, skimming over the swell towards a patch of drifting weed where Stephen thought it possible they might find a southern variety of sea-horse or a pelagic crab related to those he had discovered under the line, "but I shall not be altogether sorry to set him down on shore."

"I can and do dislike him intensely when he pins my king and a rook with his lurking knight," said Stephen. "At most other times I find him a valuable companion, an eager, searching, perspicacious intelligence. To be sure, he has no ear at all, but he is not without a tincture of poetry: he has an interesting theory on the mystic role of kings, founded upon his study of tenures in petty serjeanty."

Jack's concern with petty serjeanty was so slight that he carried straight on, "I dare say I have been in command too long. When I was a lieutenant, messing with the rest, I used to put up with people far, far more trying than Farquhar. There was a surgeon in the Agamemnon that used to play "Greensleeves" on his flute every evening, and every evening he broke down at exactly the same place. Harry Turnbull, our premier--he was killed at the Nile--used to turn pale as he came nearer and nearer to it. That was in the West Indies, and tempers were uncommon short but no one said anything except Clonfert. It don't sound much, "Greensleeves', but it was a pretty good example of that give and take there has to be, when you are all crammed up together for a long commission: for if you start falling out, why, there's an end to all comfort, as you know very well, Stephen. I wish I may not have lost the way of it, what with age and the luxury of being post--the luxury of solitude."

"So you are acquainted with Lord Clonfert, I find? What kind of a man is he, tell?"

"Ours was a very slight acquaintance," said Jack evasively. "He only came into the ship just before we were ordered home, and then he exchanged into the Mars."

"An able, dashing man, I believe?"

"Oh," said Jack, gazing beyond Stephen's head at the Boadicea, a lovely sight on the lonely sea, "the Agamemnon's wardroom was crowded, she wearing a flag; so I hardly knew him. But he has made quite a reputation for himself since those days."

Stephen sniffed. He was perfectly aware of Jack's dislike for saying anything unpleasant about a former shipmate, and although he honoured the principle in theory, in practice he found it somewhat irritating.

Jack's acquaintaince with Lord Clonfert had in fact been brief, but it had left its mark. They had been ordered away with the boats to take, burn or destroy a privateer lying far up a broad, shallow creek, out of range of the Agamemnon's guns, an estuary lined with mangroves, whose unbuoyed channels through the mudbanks presented many interesting problems of navigation, particularly as the boats had to advance against the fire of the privateer and of some guns planted on the shore.

Clonfert's boats took the north channel, Jack's the southern; and by the time for the final dash across the open water where the privateer was moored Clonfert's were grouped behind a spit of land somewhat nearer to the ship than Jack's. Jack emerged from the narrow channel, waved his hat, gave a cheer, urged his men "to stretch out now, like good "uns" and steered straight for the enemy's starboard mainchains through the heavy smoke, convinced that Clonfert's party would board on the other side. He heard the answering cheer, but it was the cheer of spectators rather than of participants: Clonfert's boats did not intend to stir. Jack realized this in the last fifty yards, but he was committed and it was " too late to do anything but race on. The privateersmen fought hard: they killed several Agamemnons, among them a midshipman to whom Jack was much attached, and wounded many more. For some minutes it was doubtful who should drive whom over the side--a cruel, bitter little action, vicious hand-to-hand murder in the fading light--and then the French Captain, flinging his empty pistols at Jack's head, leapt the rail and swam for it, followed by most of his remaining men. It was not the safety of the shore that he was seeking, however, but the second battery of guns that he had mounted there; and these he turned straight on to the ship, to sweep her deck with grape at point-blank range. Although Jack had received a shrewd rap on the head, his wits were about him still, and before the first discharge he had cut the cables and let fall the foretopsall to the nascent land-breeze, so that there was already way upon her when the fire began. With the luck that never deserted him in those days he steered her through the one channel in which she would not ground, and the light air took her out; though not before the grapeshot had wounded another man, cut away the crossjack halliards, and scored him across the ribs with a wound like a blow from a red-hot poker, knocking him flat into a pool of blood. They picked up the other boats and returned to the Agamemnon, Clonfert taking over.