Post Captain (27 page)

He fixed the frigate in the grey round of the objective, swaying to counterbalance the sloop's roll, pitch and shudder, and as the Polychrest's windward gun went off behind him he saw the blue-white-blue break out aboard her, curving far out to leeward, and the momentary whiff from her answering gun. 'Make our number,' he said, relaxing. He gave orders for the mousing of the horses, desired Mr Parker to see what he could make of the frigate, sent Haines forward, and settled to watch in peace.

'Three of them, sir,' said Mr Parker. 'And I think the first is Amethyst.'

Three there were, in line ahead. 'Amethyst she is, sir,' said the signal midshipman, huddling his book under the shelter of his bosom. They were directly in his wake, steering the same course. But the Polychrest's leeway was such that in a very short while he saw them not head-on, but from an angle, an angle that increased with alarming speed, so that in five minutes he was watching them over the weather quarter. They had already struck their topgallantmasts, but they were still carrying their topsails atrip - their full, expert crews could reef them in a moment. The first was indeed the Amethyst; the second he could not make out - perhaps the Minerve; the third was the Franchise, with his old friend Heneage Dundas aboard, a post captain, in command of a beautiful French-built thirty-six-gun frigate; Dundas, five years junior to him as a lieutenant, thirteen months as master and commander; Jack had cobbed him repeatedly in the midshipmen's berth of Old Ironsides: and would do so again. There he was, standing up on the slide of a quarterdeck carronade, as pleased as Punch, waving his hat. Jack raised his own, and the wind took his bright yellow hair, tearing it from the ribbon behind, and streamed it away north-westward. As if in reply a hoist ran up to the Franchise's mizen-peak.

'Alphabetic, sir,' said the midshipman, spelling it out. 'P S - oh yes, Psalms. Psalms cxlvii, 10.'

'Acknowledge,' said Jack who was no Biblical scholar.

Two guns from the Amethyst, and the frigates tacked in succession, moving like so many models on a sheet of glass: round they went, each exactly in the same piece of water, keeping their stations as though they were linked together. It was a beautifully executed manoeuvre, above all with such a head-sea and such a wind, the result of years of training - a crew that pulled together, officers that knew their ship.

He shook his head, staring after the frigates as they vanished into the gloom. Eight bells struck. 'Mr Parker,' he said, 'we will get the topgallantmasts down on deck, and then we will wear.' By the time the masts were struck there would be no satirical friends to watch from a distance.

'I beg your pardon, sir?' asked Parker, with an anxious poke of his head.

Jack repeated his order and retired to the taffrail to let his first lieutenant carry on.

Glancing at the Polychrest's wake to judge her leeway he noticed a little dark bird, fluttering weakly just over the water with its legs dangling; it vanished under the larboard quarter, and as he moved across to make sure of it, he tripped over something soft, about knee-height, something very like a limpet - the child Parslow, under his sou-wester.

'Why, Mr Parslow,' he said, picking him up, 'you are properly rigged now, I see. You will be glad of it. Run below to the doctor and tell him, if he chooses to see a stormy petrel, he has but to come on deck.'

It was not a stormy petrel, but a much rarer cousin with yellow feet - so rare that Stephen could not identify him until he pittered across a wave so close that those yellow feet showed clear.

'If rarity and the force of the storm are in direct proportion,' he reflected, watching it attentively, 'then we are in for a most prodigious hurricane. I shall not mention it, however.'

A frightful crash forward: the foretopgallantmast brought itself down on deck more briskly than in the smartest frigate, half stunning Mr Parker and plunging Jack into manoeuvres more suitable for a petrel than a mariner. Throughout the night the wind backed until it was blowing hard from the north; there it stayed, north-east, north, or north-west, never allowing more than close-reefed topsails, if that, for nine days on end, nine days of rain, snow, steep wicked seas, and a perpetual fighting for their lives; nine days in which Jack rarely left the deck and young Parslow never once took off his clothes; nine days of wearing, lying to, scudding under bare poles, and never a sight of the sun - no notion of their position within fifty miles and more. And when at last a strong south-wester allowed them to make up their enormous leeway, their noonday observation showed that they were where they had started from.

Early in the blow a lee-lurch, laying the Polychrest on her beam-ends, had shot the dazed first lieutenant down the main hatchway, damaging his shoulder, and he had spent the rest of the time in his cot, with the water washing about it often enough, and in great pain. Jack was sorry for the pain, in an abstract way, though it seemed fair that one so fond of inflicting agony should feel a touch of it, but he was heartily glad of Parker's absence - the man was incompetent, incompetent for such a situation as this. He was conscientious, he did his duty as he understood it; but he was no seaman.

The master, Pullings, Rossall, the senior master's mate, the bosun and the gunner were seamen; so were a dozen of the hands. Babbington and Allen, another oldster, were shaping well; and as for the rest of the people, they at least knew what they were to haul upon at the word of command. This long week's blow, when they were close on foundering twice a day and when everybody knew it, had crammed a deal of training into a short time - short when measured by the calendar rather than by mortal dread.

Training in manoeuvres of every kind, but particularly in the use of the pumps: they had not stopped for an hour since the second day of the blow.

Now as they sailed up the Channel, passing Selsey Bill with a light air on the quarter and topgallantsails set, with the galley fires lighted at last and a hot dinner in their bellies, he felt that they might not be disgraced when the Polychrest reached her station; and she would reach it now, he was sure, even if she had to tide it all the way - no unlikely event, with this wind dying on him She would not be disgraced he was short-handed, of course, and there were seventeen men in the sick-bay - two hernias, five bad falls with broken bones, and the rest the usual wounds from falling spars or blocks or ropes crossing a hand or leg. One landsman, an unemployed glover from Shepton Mallet, had been lost overboard, and a thief from the Winchester assizes had gone raving, staring, barking mad off Ushant: yet on the other hand, sea-sickness had vanished, and even the quota-men from the inland gaols could walk about the deck without much danger to themselves or others. The crew were a poor-looking set, upon the whole, but when he had had time to exercise them at the guns, it was not impossible that he might make a passable man-of-war out of the Polychrest. He knew her tolerably well now: he and the master (he had a great esteem for Mr Goodridge) had worked out a sail-plan that made the most of what qualities she possessed, and when he could alter her trim to bring her by the head and rake her masts she might do better; but he could not love her. She was a mean-spirited vessel, radically vicious, cross-grained, laboursome, cruel in her unreliability; and he could not love her. She had disappointed him so often when even a log canoe would have risen to the occasion that his strong natural affection for his command had dwindled quite away. He had sailed in some rough old tubs, ponderous things with no perceptible virtue to the outsider, but he had always been able to find excuses for them - they had always been the finest ships in the history of the Navy for some particular quality - and this had never happened to him before. The feeling was so strange, the disloyalty so uncomfortable, that it was some time before he would acknowledge it; and when he did -he was pacing the quarterdeck after his solitary dinner at the time - it gave him such uneasiness of mind that he turned to the midshipman of the watch, who was clinging motionless to a stanchion, and said, 'Mr Parslow, you will find the Doctor in the sick-bay..

'Find him yourself,' said Parslow.

Was it possible that these words had been uttered? Jack paused in his stride. From the rigid blankness of the quartermaster, the man at the wheel, and the gunner's mates busy with the aftermost port carronade, and from the mute writhing of the midshipmen on the gangway, it was clear that they had.

'I tell you what it is, Goldilocks,' went on Parslow, closing one eye, 'don't you try to come it high over me, for I've a spirit that won't brook it. Find him yourself.'

'Pass the word for the bosun's mate,' said Jack. 'Quartermaster, Mr Parslow's hammock, if you please.' The bosun's mate came running aft, his starter in his hand. 'Seize the young gentleman to the gun in my cabin.'

The young gentleman had released his hold on the stanchion; he was now lying on the deck, protesting that he should not be beaten, that he should dirk any man who presumed to lay a hand upon him - he was an officer. The bosun's mate picked him up by the small of the back: the sentry opened and closed the cabin door. A startled cry and then some treble oaths that made the grinning quarterdeck stretch its eyes, the whole punctuated by the measured thump of a rope's end; and then Mr Parslow, sobbing bitterly, was led out by the hand. 'Lash him into his hammock, Rogers,' said Jack. 'Mr Pullings, Mr Pullings, the grog for the midshipmen's berth is stopped until further orders.'

That evening in his cabin he said to Stephen, 'Do you know what those blackguards in the midshipmen's berth did to young Parslow?'

'Whether or no, you are going to tell me,' observed Stephen, helping himself to rum.

'They made him beastly drunk and then sent him on deck. Almost the first day they might have turned in for their watch below, the first time they are not up to their knees in water, they can think of nothing better to do than to make a youngster drunk. They shall not do it again, however. I have stopped their grog.'

'It would be as well if you were to stop the whole ship's grog. A most pernicious custom, a very gross abuse of animal appetite, a monstrous aberration - half a pint of rum, forsooth! I should not have a quarter of the men under my care, was it not for your vile rum. They are brought down with their limbs, ribs, collar-bones shattered, having fallen from the rigging drunk - diligent, stout, attentive men who would never fall when sober. Come, let us pour it secretly away.'

'And have a mutiny on our hands? Thank you very kindly. No: I should rather have them three sheets in the wind now and again, but willing to do their duty the rest of the time. Mutiny. It makes your blood run cold to think of it. Men you have worked with right through the commission and liked, growing cold and secret; no jokes, no singing out, no good wilt; the ship falling into two camps, with the undecided men puzzled and wretched in between. And then the shot-rolling by night.'

'Shot-rolling?'

'They roll shot along the deck in the night-watches, to let you know their mind, and maybe to catch an officer's legs.'

'As for mutinies in general,' said Stephen, 'I am all in favour of 'em. You take men from their homes or their chosen occupations, you confine them in insalubrious conditions upon a wholly inadequate diet, you subject them to the tyranny of bosun's mates, you expose them to unimagined perils; what is more, you defraud them of their meagre food, pay and allowances - everything but this sacred rum of yours. Had I been at Spithead, I should certainty have joined the mutineers. Indeed, I am astonished at their moderation.'

'Pray, Stephen, do not speak like this, flattering about the service; it makes me so very tow. I know things are not perfect, but I cannot reform the world and run a man-of-war. In any case, be candid, and think of the Sophie - think of any happy ship.'

'There are such things, sure; but they depend upon the whim, the digestion and the virtue of one or two men, and that is iniquitous. I am opposed to authority, that egg of misery and oppression; I am opposed to it largely for what it does to those who exercise it.'

'Well,' said Jack, 'it has done me no good. This afternoon I was savaged by a midshipman, and now I am harassed by my own surgeon. Come, Stephen, drink up, and let us have some music.' But instead of tuning his fiddle he reached beyond it, saying, 'Here is something that will interest you. Have you ever heard of robber-bolts?'

'I have not.'

'This is one.' He held out a short solid copper cylinder with a great nut on the end of it. 'As you know, bolts are to hold the hull together, going right through her timbers; and the best are copper, against the corrosion. They are expensive - I believe two pounds of copper, a short piece of bolt, will pay a shipwright's wages for a day. But if you are a damned villain, you cut off the middle, drive each end home and pocket the money for the length of copper in between. Nobody is any the wiser until the frame opens; and that may not happen until the ship is on the other side of the world. And even then she may founder, leaving no witnesses.'

'When did you know this?'

'I suspected it from the start. I knew she would be a damned job, coming from Hickman's; and then the fellows at the yard were so fulsome, so free with their hampers. But I was certain only the other day. Now that she has worked a little, it is easier to be certain. I pulled this one out with my fingers.'

'Could you not have made representations in the proper quarters?'

'Yes. I could have asked for a survey and waited for a month or six weeks: and then where should I have been? It is a dockyard matter, and you hear very rum tales of ships being passed whatever their state, and small clerks setting up their carriages. No. I preferred to take her out; and indeed, she has withstood quite a blow. I shall have her hove down if ever I can - if ever I can find the right moment, or if she will not float without it.'

They remained silent for a while, and all the time the steady throb of the pumps sounded through the cabin, and, almost keeping time, the barking of the lunatic.

'I must give that man some more of my laudanum,' said Stephen, half to himself.