Clarissa Oakes (32 page)

   'From forward aft,' called Jack as the first target came within range. 'D'ye hear me, there: from forward aft.'

   The match-holders reached behind them, seized the match and knelt by the captain again, blowing the ashes off its glow.

   'Starboard a point,' said Jack to the helmsman, and then much louder 'From forward aft: fire.'

   The extreme tension broke as the bow-gun's captain whipped the proffered match across to the touch-hole and the gun went off with a deafening crash, leaping bodily from the deck and instantly racing back between its minders with frightful speed. But even before it was brought up by the breeching, the scream of its trucks and the great twang of the rope was drowned by the crash of its neighbour and so down the line in a prodigious thunder-clap that went on and on, the jets of smoke stabbed through and through with orange flame, a roar that was taken up in a different voice by the quarterdeck carronades. The wind drove the smoke away to leeward and the later shot could be seen raising white fountains in the general boil where the raft had been or skipping with immense bounds over the sea towards or even beyond it.

   Already the foremost guns, held in on the recoil, were being wormed, sponged and reloaded; but before they were run out again one after another with the usual rumbling crash, Jack heard a clapping, thin and remote to his somewhat deafened ears, and turning he saw Mrs Oakes' delighted face. Her eyes were dark with emotion and she cried 'Oh how splendid! Oh what glory!'

   Jack said 'It was just a rippling broadside, not to strain her timbers. They will start again directly.'

   'How I wish Dr Maturin were here. Such prodigious . . .' She could not find the word.

   'Directly' in this case meant two full minutes after the first discharge, a leisurely performance compared with the
Surprise's
three accurate broadsides in three minutes eight seconds which she had achieved in the days when she was manned entirely by highly-trained men-of-war's men; but now many of her people were privateers who had always shipped by the lay, having no wages but sharing in the proceeds of the voyage less the expenses. They therefore had a deeply-engrained hatred of waste and they could not be brought to add to the expenses by blazing away with powder at eighteen pence a pound, as though it were free—paid for by the King. In most cases Jack had mixed the gun-crews, to avoid jealousies; but
Sudden Death
for example was manned entirely by the frigate's Sethians, privateers and members of a religious body in Shelmerston, excellent seamen, sober and reliable, but even more unwilling than most to waste a shot, and very deliberate in their aim. Still, by training their guns as far aft as they possibly could they did manage to send most of their shots close to the remains of the target.

   'That was rather a ragged ripple, I am afraid,' said Jack to Mrs Oakes. 'I trust we shall do better next time.'

   They did better, much better: one minute forty seconds between broadsides, the first raising the target high on a turmoil of white water, the second scattering it all abroad. 'Make fast your guns,' cried Jack over the cheering—Clarissa's pipe could be heard as shrill as Reade's—and he took the ship across the line of targets to engage the next two with the larboard guns, already cast loose by the second captains.

   Firing from to-leeward meant that the flight and pitch of the shot could be followed more exactly, and when Jack, having given the order 'House your guns' turned to Clarissa, not without pride, and asked her how she had liked it, she cried 'Oh sir, I am quite hoarse with hallooing and amazed with the sound and the glory. Dear me, I had no notion . . . What a terrible, splendid thing a battle must be: like the Day of Judgment.' And after a pause, 'Pray what do you mean to do with the fifth?'

   'That, ma'am, is for the bow-chasers.' He looked affectionately at her face, glowing with candid excitement and enthusiasm—she had never looked so animated nor half so handsome—and for a moment he was inclined to invite her to come forward and see the fine-work of firing a gun. But he hesitated, put the notion aside as out of place and walked along the gangway over the happy, sweating gun-crew in the waist as they were securing their guns, bowsing all lashings taut and talking in the loud, after-broadside voice about their wonderful accuracy and speed. 'Though mark you,' said the captain of
Spitfire
, 'we should have been even quicker, if
some people
had been more
sudden
than
dead
.' His neighbour, the bearded Sethian Slade, captain of the gun called
Sudden Death
, instantly replied 'And we should have been even more accurate, if some other people had been more
deadly
than
sudden
.' Respect for their Captain, immediately overhead, restrained the Sethians' joy, but they beat Slade on the back and shook both his hands, while even the
Spitfire
crew laughed and said 'That got you in the balls, Ned.'

   The bow-chasers on the forecastle were what the Navy called brass long nine-pounders. They were in fact made of bronze rather than brass, but the force of the word was such that the hands polished them assiduously, producing all the shine that bronze was capable of: on the other hand they were long and they did take nine-pound balls; they were also as accurate as smooth-bore cannon could well be. They both belonged to Jack: one he had bought in Sydney, the other he had had time out of mind and he knew its temper, its kick, its tendency to shoot better from the third ball to the twelfth, when it called for a rest to cool—if this were denied, it was apt to leap and break its breeching.

   Both Jack and Tom Pullings loved to fire a great gun. Each had his own picked crew and each pointed his own chaser: each now fired three rounds; and as Jack himself had taught Pullings, then a long-legged midshipman in his first command, how to point a gun, their style was very much the same. One shot, though true for line, a little long; the next a trifle short; while Jack's third scattered the barrels and Pullings' leapt skipping through the wreckage. With the ship taking the swell abeam, the roll scarcely affected guns firing ahead, and she hardly pitched at all; so with a range of five hundred yards, rapidly narrowing, this was no outstanding feat of gunnery; but it thoroughly pleased the gunners and delighted the hands. Mrs Oakes' congratulations could not have been kinder, and in the excitement both West and Davidge ventured 'Give you joy of your shooting, sir.'

All this had taken a remarkably short time measured by clock rather than by activity and emotion, and a little before sunset all hands were summoned aft. When they were assembled in their usual unseemly heap their Captain surveyed them with a benevolence they had not seen this many a weary day and night and in his strong voice he said, 'Shipmates, we have warmed our guns and new-charged them: no fear of damp powder or charges that have to be drawn. And that is just as well, because we may have to use them in a couple of days or so. I will tell you the position. There is a British ship and her crew captured in Moahu, the island we are heading for, by the natives and their friend an American privateer, the
Franklin
, ship-rigged, twenty-two nine-pounders, French crew. The island is used by some English fur-traders on the Nootka-Canton run, and by certain South Sea whalers; and she may try to snap some more of them up. She nearly had the
Daisy
, as you heard in Annamooka. So we must put a stop to her capers. When we cut the
Diane
out of St Martin's I was able to tell you just how she lay. This time I cannot do so, although the master of the
Daisy
gave me a chart of the harbour and the approaches; but I do not think we shall go very far wrong by laying her alongside and boarding in the smoke.'

   The Surprises, who had been listening with the utmost intensity, nodded their heads and uttered an affirmative growl, interspersed with 'that's right, mate' and 'board her in the smoke, ha, ha.'

   'But we want no trouble,' said Jack. 'We do not want any of our people to be knocked on the head, if we can avoid it. So since she will be pleased at the sight of a whaler, English or American, our best plan is to sail in looking as much like one as ever we can. Of course there may be no sailing in: she may have thrown up batteries each side of the narrows and she may smoke what we are at: and we may have to deal with the situation some other way. But in any case the first thing to do is to make the ship into a whaler: we turned her into a blue Spanish barque once, as I dare say you remember; and that answered quite well.' General laughter, and a cry of 'God love us, how we sweated!' 'Now I know at least a score of you have been in the Greenland or South Seas fishery at one time or another, and I want those hands to choose the three longest-headed, most experienced men among them to help us change the barky into a whaler, a tired, shabby, down-at-heel, three-years-at-sea old whaler, short-handed and peaceful.'

An old tired shabby whaler, with a crow's nest aloft, trying-out gear and general filth on deck and deeply squalid sides stood into Pabay, the north-eastern port of Moahu, in Kalahua's territory, just making headway against the ebb under a single blue-patched foretopsail.

   In her crow's nest stood her even shabbier master in a blackguardly round hat, crammed up against his unshaven mate, both of them gauging the wind and the distance between the two headlands on either side of the entrance. 'We should get out in two tacks at slack water or on the ebb,' said Jack, and they returned to their examination of the far end, where the wide, sheltered bay drew in before broadening into the harbour itself.

   'We shall open the narrows any minute now, sir,' said Pullings.

   Jack nodded. 'I do not see a hint of a battery on either side,' he said: and then as the narrows opened he called down 'Mr West, come up the sheet and drop the kedge.'

   'Nor no privateer neither,' said Pullings. 'The fat round tub of a ship right down against the shore where the stream comes in is a Nootka fur-trader, if ever there was one.'

   Jack nodded again: he had had her in his glass for some time and after a silence he said 'She must be the
Truelove
. She was hove down just there when Wainwright left her. They have come at the leak. She has crossed her yards and bent her sails, and she is riding low: stores and water aboard for sure.'

'Nothing could be a better example of Dr Falconer's general position,' said Stephen, standing with Martin in the mizzentop. 'The whole is volcanic, with coral superimposed here and there and lying around the edge in reefs. That mountain, that truncated cone rising behind the jagged hills, certainly has a crater at the top. It is no doubt the volcano he wished to explore. Indeed, there is a little cloud of what may well be smoke just over it.'

   'Certainly. Furthermore, the extreme luxuriance of the vegetation surely implies a volcanic soil: do but consider that impenetrable forest—I say impenetrable, but now I see a road along the stream.'

   'Then again these strands, now coral, now lava-black, argue repeated eruptions.'

   'We hear of submarine outbursts of extraordinary violence.'

   'Iceland, says Sir Joseph Banks, is blessed not only with birds so remarkable as the gerfalcon, the harlequin duck and both phalaropes, but also with sensible volcanic phenomena at virtually all seasons.'

'There is something I do not like about that village,' said Jack. 'Wainwright spoke of it as full of people—crowded—and now there are very few walking about. And they are only women and children with here and there an old man; the canoes are all drawn up, most of them high up.'

   Pullings was digesting this, and the absence of nets spread out to dry, when two girls, helped by a band of children, slid a small two-hulled canoe down the sand and put off, the girls managing the immense sail with no apparent difficulty, steering very close to the wind and travelling with extraordinary speed.

   Jack heaved himself out of the deep crow's nest: the top-gallantmasts gave a warning creak. 'Take care, sir,' cried Pullings: Jack frowned, let himself gently down to the cross-trees, reaching out for a standing backstay and shot down to the quarterdeck like a well-controlled meteor, landing with a thump and hands just this side the scorching-point. 'Pass the word for Owen,' he said; and to Owen, 'Hail the canoe in South Seas as it approaches the narrows: hail it very civil.'

   'Very civil it is, sir,' said Owen. Yet he had no time to make his compliment, for in their friendly Polynesian way the girls hailed them first, smiling up and waving a free hand.

   'Ask them to come aboard,' said Jack. 'Mention feathers, coloured handkerchiefs.'

   Words passed, but the girls, though amused and half-tempted by feathers and coloured handkerchiefs, did not choose to come up the side; and to be sure, the few visible Surprises looked deeply unappetizing. Nevertheless they stayed long enough to make three rings about the ship, handling their craft with a skill that was a joy to behold, and to answer the question 'Where is the
Franklin?
' 'Gone to chase a ship.' 'Where are all the men?' 'Gone to war. Kalahua is going to eat Queen Puolani: he has taken the gun.'