"Do you suppose it is likely to b.u.mp the boat?" asked Martin in a low voice.
"Sure he may well do so, by rising suddenly; or sometimes they are known to take a run and launch themselves bodily into the middle, or athwartships as we say, snapping right and left."
"I wonder you can speak with such levity," said Martin. "And you too a married man."
A silence fell, broken from time to time by the splash of a deep-diving b.o.o.by and the remote shrilling of bosun"s calls. A bird dived close at hand, down and down: the shark moved smoothly from under the boat: its bulk covered the diving form and carried on into the depths, growing steadily dimmer though still huge when it vanished. Three or four feathers floated up. "Will he come back, do you imagine?" asked Martin, still gazing down with shaded eyes.
"I do not," said Stephen. "The flesh of the b.o.o.by is acrid and rank, and I have no doubt he thinks we belong to the same genus at least."
From over the sea came an urgent piping and Captain Aubrey"s powerful voice urging haste. In rapid succession all the frigate"s boats were lowered down; their crews leapt into them with the breakneck speed they would have shown if a valuable prize had just heaved up; and lines having been pa.s.sed they began towing the ship in the direction of the b.o.o.bies.
By the time the Surprise reached them the sun was already far down the sky. The fish had stopped biting; the squids and their prey had sunk out of sight; and as soon as the boats were hoisted in the hands were piped to a belated supper, with precious little rum served out.
"What a comfort it is to have solid heart of oak beneath one"s feet," said Martin as they took their pots fishes rods buckets and specimens out of the skiff. "I had never felt the dreadful fragility of this boat - planking not half an inch thick - so much as when I saw that horrible creature almost touching it. I have never felt more uneasy in my life. As I peered down it rolled a little and gave me a cold look that I shall not soon forget."
Supper was hardly swallowed before the drum beat for quarters. The cabins vanished in the usual clean sweep fore and aft; Stephen hid his specimens together with a large number of squids in the quarter-gallery and hurried to the sick-berth, his action-station; the great guns were cast loose, and the drooping officers reported "All present and sober, if you please."
They were soberer still by the time they had performed the great-gun exercise - running in the cannon (five hundredweight to a man) - running the ma.s.sive object out again as far as possible, laying the tackle-falls in neat fakes - pointing the guns in a given direction - going through the motions of firing - running in, going through the motions of worming, sponging and reloading - replacing the tompion - housing and making all fast - a dozen turns apiece, each separately timed by their inflexible Captain, and then a full broadside together: all this in dumb show. They were not indulged in a single round of live ammunition, for although the magazines were tolerably full (powder being one of the few things that New South Wales could supply) Jack Aubrey had no intention whatsoever of giving them pleasure: he was profoundly displeased with his officers and men, and with himself for not having detected this spirit of faction earlier. He was in no mood for indulgence of any kind, and the hands knew it.
There was no singing or dancing on the forecastle during what little remained of the sweetest evening. The hands sat about, dog-tired, until the setting of the watch. They did not resent the skipper"s anger: they knew it was justified: they hoped it would not last.
A vain hope. All through the variables they were kept on the run, manning and arming boats, lowering them down and hoisting them in until they achieved twenty-five minutes twenty seconds for the one and nineteen minutes fifty seconds for the other: they could also send up lower yards and topmasts and cross topgallant yards in four minutes four seconds; and apart from shifting topmasts every now and then there was always the bending of new sails, painting ship and a remarkable amount of small-arms and cutla.s.s exercise.
Throughout this time Jack kept his severity for the quarterdeck: once in the cabin he was as amiable as ever. He played his violin to Stephen"s "cello with his usual wholehearted enjoyment, and apart from the deep lines in his weatherbeaten face there was little to show the strain he was under.
"Lord, Stephen," said he, after a day of particularly wearing exercise, "I cannot tell you what a refuge this cabin is, and what a happiness it is for me to have you to talk to and play music with. Most captains have trouble with their ship"s people from time to time - on occasion it is a continual sullen covert war - and unless they make cronies of their first lieutenants, as some do, they have to chew over it alone. I do not wonder that so many of them grow strange or b.l.o.o.d.y-minded; or run melancholy mad, for that matter."
Even when they did reach the full north-east trades there was no relaxation of his manner on deck: he was fairly cordial to Pullings, Oakes and Reade, always civil to Martin and markedly polite to Clarissa when he saw her; but he remained stern, impersonal, remote and exigent with the other officers and the foremast jacks. Nor was there much relaxation in their daily and nightly toil, for the trade-wind proved more northerly and considerably less steady than he could have wished, and this called for the nicest management of the helm, a continual attention to brace and bowline and a frequent change of jibs and staysails if the Surprise were both to keep her course and run off her two hundred sea-miles between one noon observation and the next. He spent most of his waking hours on deck with Pullings, and he liked West, Davidge and Oakes to spend much of theirs aloft, supervising the exact carrying-out of his orders or even antic.i.p.ating them. They grew worn and lean; they were haunted by the dread of being found asleep on their watch; and the gunroom dinners were silent less from animosity than extreme fatigue. None of them had ever known a ship driven so hard so long.
"My dear" wrote Stephen.
"We are now in the realm of the trade wind and we fly along at an exhilarating pace; but sailing against the wind (or as nearly against it as lies within the abilities of a square-rigged ship) is very unlike sailing before it, very unlike those luxurious days of rolling down to St Helena when one sits under an awning admiring the sea or reading one"s book and when the mariners are not required to touch the flowing sheet. Now we lean over to a dangerous degree, and the spray or even solid water comes sweeping back with uncommon vehemence. Jack comes down soaked: not that he comes down often, because sailing of this kind requires his presence on deck. It would be much, much easier for all concerned if he would spread fewer sails and keep the wind one point free; yet he means not only to reach Moahu as soon as ever he can but he also, and above all, wishes to deal with the present situation by recalling all hands to their duty; and he is doing so with a greater authority than I knew he possessed.
"Whether he will succeed in his purpose I do not know. He sees the trouble as being caused by the enmity between the officers who are attracted to Mrs Oakes, and these officers being supported by their own men, so that there are rival clans in the ship. But there are complexities that escape him, and now that I have time and to spare and the cabin to myself I shall endeavour to set them out as well as I can. The divisions, if I may so call them, amount to at least half a dozen: there are those (the majority) who condemn Clarissa for lying with any member of the quarterdeck at all apart from her husband; those who condemn her for lying with any officer but their own; those who support Oakes without reserve (they belong for the most part to his division and they are known as the Oak-Apples); those who condemn him for having beaten his wife; those who support their divisional officer whatever his situation with regard to her; and those who still look upon Clarissa with affectionate esteem - the sailmaker, for example, has recently made her a tarpaulin cloak, in which she now sits by the taffrail.
"Even if it were right for me to open my mind to Jack, I doubt it would be useful: I do not think I could ever make him understand that for her the s.e.xual act is trivial, of no consequence. Our ordinary salute, the kiss, is held infamous among the j.a.panese if bestowed in public: with them, says Pinto, it is as much a deed of darkness or at least of total privacy as physical love-making is with us. For her, because of the particularity of her bringing-up, kiss and coition are much the same in insignificance; furthermore, she takes not the slightest pleasure in either. If therefore, through a variety of motives in which good nature and even compa.s.sion certainly have a part as well as a general desire to be liked, she has admitted some men to her bed, she has done so very innocently: "If an ill-looking pitiful fellow with say a thorn in his foot begged you to take it out, sure you would consent, even if doing so were rather unpleasant than otherwise." To her astonishment she had found herself loved and hated in various degrees, rather than merely liked, by those she obliged; and condemned by many who were in no way concerned.
"At different times I had tried to explain the violent male desire for exclusive possession - the standard by which a wide variety of partners if not promiscuity is laudable in oneself, vile in women - the want of sequence or even common honesty of mind coupled with unshakable conviction - the unreasonable yet very strong and very painful emotions that arise from jealousy (a feeling to which she is almost entirely a stranger) - and the very great force of rivalry. I also told her, with authority, that nothing can be done aboard ship without its being known. I spoke each time at some length, with real concern for her; she listened attentively and I think she believed me. In any event she is determined to renounce fornication: though how she will fare I know not. She has lit a fire that will not easily be put out; and although for the moment Jack keeps all hands in such a state of perpetual activity that the members of the gunroom mess can hardly put one foot in front of the other when they come below, these pa.s.sions, confined as they are in s.p.a.ce, may burst out later with a shocking force."
He sat there, lost in his reflections, until Killick came in and said, as he had so often said before, "Why, sir, you are sitting in the dark." He brought a light, a lantern that swung in gimbals, and Stephen returned to his contemplation, holding his pen in the air.
"Scribble, scribble, scribble, Dr Maturin," said Jack.
"You are not wet at all, I find," said Stephen.
"No," said Jack. "Not to put too fine a point on it, I am quite dry; and was you to put your nose above the coaming and look at the dog-vane, you would see why. The wind has veered a whole point, and the spray goes well away to leeward. In any case the sea has gone down. Could you do with a cup of coffee and a breadfruit biscuit?"
"I could, too."
"Killick! Killick, there."
"Sir?" said Killick, still unnaturally meek, though a shade of the familiar shrewishness could now be detected. Indeed, he had recovered enough a.s.surance to bring them only a meagre plate of the dried breadfruit slices, he being devoted to them himself.
The coffee came; and when half had been drunk Jack said "Do you remember that I spoke to you about a flying column?"
"I remember it well; and I wondered at the time how and where it was to fly."
Jack took a sheet from his desk and said "This is Wainwright"s chart of Moahu, and I am particularly grateful to him for the soundings of the reef off Pabay here in the north, and the channel into the harbour: the same for Eeahu down in the south. This hatching across the neck of the hourgla.s.s - a d.a.m.ned wide neck for an hourgla.s.s, I may say - represents the mountains that separate the two lobes, Kalahua"s country in the top half, Queen Puolani"s in the bottom. Now my plan is to sail straight into Pabay, preferably in the evening, but that depends on tide and weather, to sail in looking as like a whaler as possible, and to lay the Franklin aboard directly, dealing with her out of hand as we did the Diane at St Martin"s. But time and tide may not serve, and she may have thrown up batteries on either side of the narrows, using the Truelove"s guns. I may have to lie off and deal with them first. So it seems to me that if things do not go as smooth as they did at St Martin"s, we should land a body of men here" -pointing to a bay half a mile south of the harbour - "to make a diversion - to take them from behind while we are battering them from in front. That is my flying column; and what I should like you to do as a medical man is to help me choose the most active, intelligent and of course healthy of the twenty or thirty men we can afford. I do not want any poxed hands - and I know you have the usual crop after Annamooka - or bursten bellies, however brave they may be, nor any ancients, above thirty-five. They must be extremely nimble. So please look at the list Tom and I have drawn up and tell me if there is an objection to any of the names from a medical point of view."
"Very well," said Stephen: and having run his eyes down the list he went on "Tell me, are we far from Moahu?"
"About four days sail. I mean to ease off tomorrow, and give them a quiet Sunday: then target-practice on Monday, to air their intellects; and in the evening I may tell them what is afoot."
"I see. Now as to your list, I have made a mark against the least medically sound: it is not necessarily discreditable at all."
"Many thanks. Then of course there is the command; but I hesitate to question you about your messmates ..."
Stephen"s face closed: he said, "Purely as the ship"s surgeon, I should make no exception to any of them."
"I am happy to hear it."
There was a somewhat embarra.s.sed silence, and to break it Stephen said "Had we but world enough and time you could choose your band in the Irish manner. Did I ever tell you of Finn MacCool?"
"The gentleman that was so fond of salmon?"
"Himself. Now he commanded the forces of the nation, the Fianna Eirion, and none was accepted into any of the seven cohorts - I quote from a fallible memory, Jack, but at least I am sure of my figures - until he had learned the twelve Irish books of poetry and could say them without book: if the party to be accepted would defend himself with his target and sword from nine throws of the javelin from nine of the company that would stand but nine ridges from him at distance, and either cut the javelin with his sword or receive them all on his target without bleeding on him, he would be accepted; otherwise not. If the party running through the thickest wood of Ireland were overtaken by any of the seven cohorts and they pursuing him with all their might and main he would not be taken of them in their company. But if he had outrun them all without loss of any hair of his head, without breaking any old stick under his feet and he leaping over any tree that he should meet as high as the top of his head without impediment, and stooping under a tree as low as his knee and taking a thorn out of his foot (if it should chance to be in it) with his nail without impediment of his running, all which if he had done, he would be accepted as one of the company: otherwise not."
"Twelve books, did you say?"
"Twelve, upon my soul."
"And all by heart? Alas, with a Sunday coming between, I doubt it can be accomplished.
The Sunday in question was emphatically a day of rest, of as much rest as was feasible in a ship at sea. It is true that hammocks were piped up half an hour earlier than usual and that breakfast was swallowed fast so that the deck could be brought to a high state of perfection, with what little bra.s.s the frigate possessed blazing in the sun and all the ship"s pigtails (the Surprise, rather old-fashioned in some respects, still had well over fifty, some of a most impressive length) untwined, often washed and always plaited afresh by the seaman"s tie-mate, while all hands put on the clean clothes washed on Thursday and made themselves fine for divisions.
Divisions pa.s.sed off perfectly well: the wind, though less powerful than it had been for some days, was steady and dead true to its quarter, with never a gust or a flurry; and the Captain, though scarcely jovial, could be said to have lost his wickedness; while when church was rigged it was observed that he had abandoned the Articles, leaving the sermon to Mr Martin.
Martin had no gift for preaching; he did not feel himself qualified to instruct others in moral, still less in spiritual, matters, and his few sermons in the Surprise, delivered long ago when he sailed as a chaplain rather than as surgeon"s a.s.sistant, had been ill-received. He now therefore confined himself to reading the works of more able or at least more confident men; and as Stephen reached the half-deck on his way to the cabin from the sick-berth, where he had said a rosary with Padeen and some other Papists, he heard Martin"s voice: "Let no man say, I could not miss a fortune, for I have studied all my youth. How many men have studied more nights than he hath done hours, and studied themselves blind and mad in the mathematics, and yet wither in beggary in a corner? Let him never add, But I studied in a useful and gainful profession. How many have done so too, and yet never compa.s.sed the favour of a judge? And how many that have had all that, have struck upon a rock, even at full sea, and perished there?" And then some time later: "What a dim vespers of a glorious festival, what a poor half-holiday, is Methusalem"s nine hundred years to eternity! What a poor account hath that man that says, This land hath been in my name, and in my ancestors" from the conquest! What a yesterday is that? Not six hundred years. If I could believe the transmigration of souls and think that my soul had been successively in some creature or other since the Creation, what a yesterday is that? Not six thousand years. What a yesterday for the past, what a tomorrow for the future is any term that can be comprehended in cipher or counters?"
Jack dined that day, and dined well, off Stephen"s fish, last year"s lamb, and a thumping great spotted dog, his guests being Stephen himself of course, Pullings, Martin and Reade. With the ship running fast and easy, the water racing down her side in a speaking stream, they could not but be happy - a subdued happiness however in Pullings and Reade, still oppressed by the shameful exhibition at Annamooka - and after dinner they moved up to the quarterdeck for their coffee.
Mrs Oakes, who dined a little after twelve, had already been there for some time, her chair installed at the leeward end of the taffrail and her feet resting on a cheese of wads placed there by William Honey, an admirer still, like the rest of his mess. She was alone, her husband, West and even Adams being fast asleep, as indeed were almost all hands who were not actually on duty - the main and fore tops were filled with seamen asprawl on the folded studdingsails, their mouths open and their eyes shut, like Dutch boors in a harvest-field; and Davidge, the officer of the watch, had taken up his usual position by the weather hances. Jack led his troop aft and asked her how she did. "Very well indeed, sir, I thank you," she said. "It would be an ungrateful woman that did not feel amazingly well, being carried over the sea in this splendid fashion. Driving fast on a turnpike in a well-hung carriage is charming, but it is nothing in comparison of this."
Jack poured her coffee and they talked about the disadvantages of travel by land - coaches overturning, horses running away, horses refusing to run at all, crowded inns. That is to say Jack, Clarissa and Stephen talked. The others stood holding their little delicate cups, looking as easy as they could and simpering from time to time, until at last Martin contributed an account of a very wretched journey across Dartmoor in a gig whose wheels came off as night was falling, a rainstorm beating in from the west, the linch-pin lost in a bottomless mire and the horses audibly weeping. Martin was not one of those few men who can speak naturally when they are in a false position, and Stephen observed that Clarissa was secretly amused: yet she helped him along with polite attention and timely cries of "Heavens!" "Dear me" and "How very horrid it must have been."
From this, perhaps as an ill.u.s.tration of the greater ease of travel by sea, the conversation pa.s.sed on to her foot-rest. "Why is it called a wad of cheese?" she asked.
"A cheese of wads, I believe, ma"am," said Jack. "Cheese because it is a cylinder like a tall thin Stilton, and wads because that is what the cloth is filled with. I dare say you have seen a man load his fowling-piece?" Clarissa bowed. "First he puts in his powder, then his shot, and then with his ramrod he thrusts down a wad to hold everything in place until he wishes to fire. That is just what we do with the great guns; only of course the wads are much bigger."
Again Clarissa bent her head by way of agreement, and Stephen had the impression or rather the certainty that if she had spoken her voice would have been as unnatural as Martin"s.
"Now that I come to think of it," said Jack, gazing amiably at the eastern horizon, upon which Christmas Island should soon appear if his two chronometers, his last lunars and his noonday observation were correct. "Now that I reflect, I do not believe you have ever seen the operation: you have always been below. We mean to have target-practice tomorrow, and if it would amuse you to watch, pray come on deck. You could see everything quite well, was you to stand amidships, by the barricade. Though perhaps you may not like the explosions. I know that elegant females" - smiling - "do not always like it when one fires even a fowling-piece at anything like close quarters."
"Oh, sir," said Clarissa, "I am not so elegant a female as to mind the report of a gun: and I should very much like to see your target-practice tomorrow. But now I think I must go and rouse my husband; he particularly desired me to wake him well before his watch."
She rose; they bowed; and as she went down the companion-ladder the lookout at the masthead cried "Land ho! On deck, there, land on the starboard bow. A low sort of long island," he added in a subdued voice for the benefit of his friends in the maintops, "with more of them f.u.c.king palm-trees."
Early on Monday morning, with the sun slanting low across the long even swell so that its rounded summits, a furlong apart, were visible, though very soon they would be quite lost in the little fret of superficial waves, Captain Aubrey spread top-gallantsails, and the hands racing aloft very nearly crushed Stephen and Martin as they crouched in the mizen-top, training the gla.s.s aft over the rail, gazing back at the land and the cloud of birds over it.
"I am persuaded that it is a vast atoll," said Stephen. "Vast; prodigiously extensive. Were we to climb higher still we might perhaps see across it, or at least make out a segment of the great circle."
"I should be sorry to disturb the men at their work," said Martin.
Stephen looked up as the hands came fleeting down, the outer men leaping in from the yardarm like so many gibbons, and did not press the point. He said "We have been sailing past it almost all night: and though the rim of the lagoon may be no more than a musket-shot across at any given point, that still amounts to an enormous surface with no doubt a comparably enormous quant.i.ty of animals and vegetable life - the palms and the birds we have seen from afar, and some low bushes; but who knows what interesting predators, what wholly unexpected parasites they may have, to say nothing of undescribed forms of mollusc, insect, arachnid . . . there may even be some antediluvian mammals - a peculiar bat - that would confer immortality upon us. But shall we ever see it? No, sir. We shall not. Presently this ship will haul off, heave her wind, and spend hours, hours I say, bombarding the empty sea on the pretext of airing the mariners" intellects and in fact doing nothing but frighten the birds: yet she would never consider stopping for five minutes to let us pick up so much as an annelid."
Stephen knew that he had said all this before, off the many, many islands and remote uninhabited sh.o.r.es they had pa.s.sed, irretrievably pa.s.sed; he knew that he might be being a bore; yet the tolerant smile on Martin"s face, though very slight indeed, vexed him extremely.
After dinner - they had eaten alone - he said to Jack, "At breakfast yesterday, when you were telling me about your first days at sea, I quoted Hobbes."
"The learned cove that spoke of midshipmen as being nasty, brutish and short?"
"Well, in fact he was speaking of man"s life, unimproved man"s life: it was I that borrowed his words and applied them to the young gentlemen." "Very well applied too."
"Certainly. Yet later conscience told me that my words were not only improper but also inaccurate. I looked out the pa.s.sage this morning, and of course my conscience was right - is it ever wrong? - and I had omitted the words solitary and poor. "Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" was what he said. And though poor may have been appropriate ..." "Appropriatissimo," said Jack.
"The solitude had nothing to do with the overcrowded berth of your childhood. The false quotation was therefore one of those flashy worthless attempts at wit that I so much reprehend in others. Yet the point of all this is not to beat my breast crying mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, but rather to tell you that on the very same page I found that Hobbes, a learned cove, as you so rightly say, considered glory, after compet.i.tion and diffidence, mankind"s third princ.i.p.al cause of quarrel, so that trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion or any other sign of undervalue, were enough to bring violence about. Nay, destruction. I had read this pa.s.sage before of course - it was on the same page, as I said - but its full force had escaped me until today, when just such a trifle . . ." "Come in," called Jack.
"Captain Pullings" compliments and duty, sir," said Reade, "and he believed you wished to know the moment the targets were ready."
The targets were ready, rafts made of empty beef-casks and what odd pieces of plank and rail the carpenter could bring himself to part with, each with a square of bunting flying aloft. The gun-crews were ready too, and had been ever since the Captain"s words to Clarissa were reported to the forecastle and confirmed by messages sent to the carpenter and the disappearance of the gunner and his mates into the forward magazine, where with infinite precautions they lit the lantern in the light-room and sat next door filling cartridges, stiff flannel bags made to take the due charge of powder, by the light that came through the double gla.s.s windows.
Each gun-crew naturally wished to wipe the eye of its neighbours, indeed of all other gun-crews aboard; but they were all eager to mollify their skipper, partly because it was more agreeable to sail under a captain that did not flog you and stop your grog, but even more because many were deeply attached to him and were eager to regain his esteem, while all hands freely acknowledged his seamanship and fighting qualities. Throughout the last dogwatch of Sunday, therefore, and in what few moments of leisure the forenoon and afternoon watches of Monday allowed, the captains of the guns and their crews t.i.tivated their piece, making sure that all blocks ran free, that all crows, worms, sponges, handspikes and other instruments that ought to be there were there in fact, smoothing their already well-smoothed roundshot, gently swabbing the name painted over the gun-port: Towser, Nancy Dawson, Spitfire, Revenge. This checking and re-checking was carried out by each member of the crew, by the midshipman in charge of a division of guns, by the officers, and of course by Mr Smith the gunner himself - everything was pa.s.sed in review, from the upper-deck twelve-pounders and the long nines in the forecastle chase-ports to the twenty-four-pounder carron-ades on the quarterdeck.
No one therefore was either astonished or caught unprepared when, the drum having beaten to quarters and Mrs Oakes having appeared at the barricade, Captain Aubrey called "Silence" in the midst of the expectant hush: a purely formal word, followed by "Cast loose your guns," and "Mr Bulkeley, carry on."
After this no more orders were called for. The bosun and his mates eased the first target over the headrail, paused until it was rather better than a quarter of a mile aft and to leeward, then launched another, and so until there was a string of five going away to the south-west. The Surprise had been sailing close-hauled under topsails and topgallants during this; and after a considering pause Jack bore up and brought the wind on her larboard quarter: the sail-trimmers, aware of his motions, left their guns without a word, clapping on to brace and sheet until she was steady on her new course, when they belayed and returned to the stations like automata, no words having pa.s.sed.
With the wind so far abaft the beam there was much less noise in the rigging, less from the bow-wave and little indeed from the following sea. The men had mostly stripped to the waist; those with pigtails had clubbed them; many had tied black or red handkerchiefs round their heads. They stood or knelt in their set positions - the powder-man with his cartridge-box directly behind his gun far to larboard; the gun-heavers right against the ship"s side with handspike or crowbar away from it; the boarders with their cutla.s.ses and pistols, the fireman with his bucket, standing like statues; the match-holder kneeling clear of the murderous recoil; the captain glaring along the barrel; and as the target came in sight, fine on the starboard bow, a quarter of a mile away, murmuring words to his crew for pointing and elevation. And all this time the smell of slow-match in the tubs drifted along the deck.
"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 tw.a.n.g 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 car-ronades. 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 hoa.r.s.e 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 b.a.l.l.s, Ned."
The bow-chasers on the forecastle were what the Navy called bra.s.s long nine-pounders. They were in fact made of bronze rather than bra.s.s, but the force of the word was such that the hands polished them a.s.siduously, producing all the shine that bronze was capable of: on the other hand they were long and they did take nine-pound b.a.l.l.s; 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 a.s.sembled 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 "G.o.d 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."