Post captain, page 37
in me whenever he chooses. And then again, what should I have the air of, suddenly growing abject now that I know he is such a deadly old file?’ Yet throughout this period of indulgence some other part of his brain was dealing with the immediate problem, and almost without a transition he said, ‘By God, I wish I had Macdonald.’ This had nothing to do with a desire for comfort or council - he knew that Macdonald disapproved of him - but for efficiency. Macdonald was an officerlike man; this puppy Smithers was not. Still, he might not be wholly inept.
He rang his bell, and said, ‘Pass the word for Mr Smithers.’
‘Sit down, Mr Smithers. Tell me over the names of your Marines, if you please. Very good: and there is your sergeant, of course. Now listen to what I say. Think of each of these men separately, with great attention, and tell me whether or no each is to be relied upon.’
‘Why, of course they are, sir,’ cried Smithers.
‘No, no. Think, man, think,’ said Jack, trying to force some responsibility from that pink smirk. ‘Think, and reply when you have really thought. This is of the very first consequence.’
His look was exceedingly penetrating and savage; it had effect. Smithers lost countenance and began to swear. He did evidently put his mind into painful motion; his lips could be seen moving, telling over the muster; and after some time he came up with the answer, ‘Perfectly reliable, sir. Except for a man called - well, he has the same name as me; but no sort of connection, of course - a Papist from Ireland.’
‘You will answer for that? You are dead certain of what you say? I say dead certain?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Smithers, staring, terribly upset.
‘Thank you, Mr Smithers. You are to mention this conversation to no one. That is a direct, absolute order. And you are to display no uneasiness. Pray desire Mr Goodridge to come here at once.’
‘Mr Goodridge,’ he said, standing at his chart-table, ‘be so good as to give me our position.’
‘Exact, sir, or within a league or two?’ asked the master, with his head on one side and his left eye closed.
‘Exact.’
‘I must bring the log-board, sir.’ Jack nodded. The master returned, took up scale and compasses, and pricked the chart. ‘There, sir.’
‘I see. We are under courses and topsails?’
‘Yes, sir. We agreed to run down easy for Sunday’s tide, if you remember, so as not to hang about in the offing, we being so recognizable.’
‘I believe, I believe,’ said Jack, studying the chart and the board, ‘I believe that we may catch this evening’s tide. What do you say, Master?’
‘If the wind holds, sir, so we may, by cracking on regardless. I should not care to answer for the wind, though. The glass is rising.’
‘Not mine,’ said Jack, looking at his barometer. ‘I should like to see Mr Parker, if you please: and in the meantime it would be as well to get the stuns’ls, royals and skylines into the tops.
‘Mr Parker, we have a mutiny on our hands. I intend to take the Polychrest into action at the earliest possible moment, by way of dealing with the situation. We shall crowd sail to reach Chaulieu tonight. But before making sail I shall speak to the men. Let the gunner load the two aftermost guns with grape. The officers are to assemble on the quarterdeck at six bells - in ten minutes - with their side-arms. The Marines will fall in with their muskets on the fo’c’sle. No hurry or concern will be shown before that time. When all hands are called the guns will be traversed for’ard, with an oldster standing by each one. When I have spoken to the hands and we make sail, no man is to be struck or started until further orders.’
‘May I offer an observation, sir?’
‘Thank you, Mr Parker, no. Those are my orders.’
‘Very good, sir.’
He had no confidence in Parker’s judgment. If he had asked the advice of any man aboard it would have been Goodridge. But this was his responsibility as captain of the ship and his alone. In any case, he felt that he knew more about mutinous hands than anyone on the quarterdeck of the Polychrest: as a disrated midshipman he had served before the mast in a discontented ship on the Cape station - he knew it from the other side. He had a great affection for the foremast jack, and if he did not know for certain what would go with the lower deck, at least he was quite sure what would not.
He looked at his watch, put on his best coat, and walked on to the quarterdeck. Six bells in the forenoon watch. His officers were gathering round him, silent, very grave.
‘All hands aft, if you please, Mr Parker,’ he said.
The shrill pipes, the roaring down hatchways, the stampede, the red coats trooping forward through the throng. Silence, but for the tapping of the reef-points overhead.
‘Men,’ said Jack, ‘I know damned well what’s going on. I know damned well what’s going on; and I won’t have it. What simple fellows you are, to listen to a parcel of makee-clever sea-lawyers and politicians, glib, quick-talking coves. Some of you have put your necks into the noose. I say your necks into the noose. You see the Ville de Paris over there?’ Every head turned to the line-of-battle ship on the horizon. ‘I have only to signal her, or half a dozen other cruisers, and run you up to the yardarm with the Rogue’s March playing. Damned fools, to listen to such talk. But I am not going to signal to the Ville de Paris nor to any other king’s ship. Why not? Because the Polychrest is going into action this very night, that’s why. I am not going to have it said in the fleet that any Polychrest is afraid of hard knocks.’
‘That’s right,’ said a voice - Joe Plaice, well out in front, his mouth wide open.
‘It’s not you, sir,’ said another, unseen. ‘It’s him, old Parker, the hard-horse bugger’.
‘I’m going to take the Polychrest in tonight,’ Jack went on, in a growing roar of conviction, ‘and I’m going to hammer the Frenchmen in Chaulieu, in their own port, dy’ye hear me? If there’s any man here afraid of hard knocks, he’d better stay behind. Is there any man here, afraid of hard knocks?’
A kind of universal growl, not ill-natured: some laughter; further cries of ‘that hard-horse bugger’.
‘Silence fore and aft. Well, I’m glad there ain’t. There are some awkward hands among us still - look at that wicked ugly slab-line - and some men that talk too much, but I never thought there was a faint heart aboard. They may say the Polychrest ain’t very quick in stays; they may say she don’t furl her tops’ls all that pretty; but if they say she’s shy, if they say she don’t like hard knocks, why, black the white of my eye. When we thumped it into the Bellone, there wasn’t a single foremast jack that did not do his duty like a lion. So we’ll run into Chaulieu, I say, and we’ll hammer Bonaparte. That’s the right way to bring the war to an end - that’s the right way, not listening to a set of galley-rangers and clever chaps - and the sooner it’s over and you can go home, the better I’ll be pleased. I know it’s not a bed of roses, looking after our country the way we have to. Now I tell you this, and mark what I do say. There is going to be no punishment over this business: it will not even be logged, and there’s my word upon it. There is going to be no punishment. But every man and boy must attend to his duty tonight, he must mind it very carefully, because Chaulieu is a tough nut to crack - an awkward set of shoals - an awkward tide - and we must be every hand to his rope, and haul with a will, d’ye hear? Quick’s the word and sharp’s the action. Now I am going to pick some men for the barge, and then we shall crowd all the sail she can bear.’ He walked into the tight crowd of men, into the low buzz of talk, the whispers, and silence went before him. Smiling, confident faces, worried faces or blank, some apprehensive, some brute-terrified and savage. ‘Davis,’ he said, ‘go along into the barge.’ The man’s eyes were frightened as a wild beast’s: he darted looks left and right. ‘Come on, now, come along, you heard what I said,’ said Jack quietly, and Davis lumbered aft, bowed and unnatural. The silence was general now, the atmosphere quite different. But he was not going to leave these men to have dinner with their messmates and try some desperate foolery. He was in a state of exceedingly acute awareness; he had no shadow of a doubt of the men he chose. ‘Wilcocks, into the barge. Anderson.’ He was far in among them. He had no weapons. ‘Johnson. Look alive.’ The tension was heightening very fast; it must go no higher. ‘Bonden, into the barge,’ he said, looking over his coxswain’s head. ‘Me, sir?’ cried Bonden piteously. ‘Cut along,’ said Jack. ‘Bantock, Lakey, Screech.’ The low excited talk had begun again on the periphery. Men who could not be suspected were being sent into the barge: they were going aft, down the sternladder and into the boat towing behind: this was no punishment, nor no threat of punishment. He flemished down the offending slab-line in a seamanlike manner and walked back to the quarterdeck.
‘Now, Polychrests,’ he said, ‘now we are going to crack on until she groans again. Stuns’ls aloft and alow, royals, and, damn me, royal stuns’ls and skys’ls if she’ll bear ‘em. The sooner we’re there; the sooner we’re home. Topmen, upperyardmen, are you ready?’
‘Ready, aye ready, sir.’ A comfortable, good body of sound - relief, thankfulness?
‘Then at the word, up you go. Lay aloft!’
The Polychrest bloomed like a white rose. Her rarely-used studdingsails stretched out brilliant white one after another, her brand-new royals shone high, and above them all, her hitherto unseen skysails twinkled in the sun. The ship groaned and groaned again as they were sheeted home; she plunged her forefoot deep while behind her the barge raced along in her wake, the water almost to its gunwales.
If the Polychrest could be said to have a good point of sailing, it was with the wind three points abaft the beam; and here the wind stayed all day, scarcely varying from west-north-west by north, and blowing with a gentle urgency that kept all eyes aloft for the safety of her royals and skysails. She was cracking on indeed, racing down the Channel as though their lives depended upon it, making so much water that Mr Gray the carpenter, coming up from the well, officially registered his protest. She did carry away a skysail, and at one point a large unidentified object tore from her bottom, but the leagues raced away in her wake, and Jack, perpetually on the quarterdeck, could almost have loved her.
On the forecastle the watch below were at their make and mend; the watch on duty were kept busy, necessarily busy, trimming sail; and everybody seemed to be enjoying the speed, the racing tension to get the last ounce out of her. His orders about starting were being punctually obeyed; and so far no man or boy seemed to move any slower for it. The men in the barge had been brought aboard, lest it should tow under, and they had had their dinner in the galley: he was not afraid of them now - their influence was gone, their shipmates avoided them. Davis, the really dangerous brute for a sudden reckless explosion, seemed wholly amazed; and Wilcocks, the eloquent attorney’s clerk turned pickpocket, could find no one to listen to him. The seamen, for the most part, had turned with their usual calm volatility from one disaster to the interval before the next. For the moment he had the situation in hand.
His only anxiety was the wind. As the afternoon wore on it grew fainter and more irregular, giving every sign of falling away altogether with the setting of the sun: as the damp evening settled from the sky, with the dew tightening the rigging, it revived a little, still breathing from the longed-for north-west; but there was no trusting to it.
By six o’clock they had run off their distance, standing in to raise the unmistakable tower and headland of Point Noir, with a cross-bearing on Camaret; but now, as they steered east-south-east to make the coast a little north of Chaulieu, the haze thickened, thickened, until at the very entrance to Chaulieu bay itself, they found themselves in a fog, their royals faint blurs high over the deck - a fog that lay a little above the smoothly swelling surface of the sea, and that was torn in long wafts of thick and clear, faintly luminous from the rising moon.
They were no more than a little late for their tide, and they stood in steadily with the master at the con and two leads going without a pause - ‘By the deep eight, by the deep eight, by the mark ten, a quarter less ten, by the deep nine, and a half seven, by the mark five, a quarter less five, and a half four.’ The bottom was shelving fast. ‘We are on the edge of the outer bank, sir,’ said the master, looking at the sample of shelly ooze from the lead. ‘All well. Tops’ls alone, I believe.’
‘She is yours, Mr Goodridge,’ said Jack, and he stood back a step, while the ship whispered through the water and the master took her in. She had been cleared for action long before; the hands were silent and attentive; the ship answered her helm promptly as she worked through the channels, sheets and braces tightening at the word. ‘That will be the Galloper,’ said the master, nodding towards a stretch of pale water on the starboard bow. ‘Starboard a point. Two points. Steady - easy, now. As she goes. Port your helm. Hard over.’ Silence. Dead silence in the fog.
‘Morgan’s Knock to larboard, sir,’ he said, coming aft. Jack was glad to hear it. Their last sure cross-bearing seemed a terribly long time ago; and this was blindman’s buff: it was water he did not know. With Morgan’s Knock astern, they would have to bear westward round the tail of Old Paul Hill’s bank, and then head a little south of east and so into the outer road, crossing the Ile Saint-Jacques. ‘Starboard three points,’ said the master, and the ship swung to the west. It was wonderful how these old Channel pilots knew their sea: by the smell and feel of it, no doubt. ‘Mind your bowline, for’ard there,’ called the master in a low voice. A long, long pause, with the Polychrest close-hauled to the now freshening breeze. ‘Down with your helm, now. Steady, steady. As she goes. Look, sir, on the larboard bow - that’s St Jacques.’ A tear in the fog, and there, about a mile away, rose a tall white mass with a fortification on its top and half-way down its side.
‘Well done, Mr Goodridge, well done indeed.’
‘On deck, there,’ hailed the look-out. ‘Sail on the larboard beam. Oh, a mort of craft,’ he added conversationally. ‘Eight, nine - a proper old crowd of ‘em.’
‘They’ll be at the far end of the outer road, sir,’ said the master. ‘We are in it now.’
The breeze was tearing great windows in the fog, and gazing over to port Jack had a sudden vision of an assembly of fair-sized vessels, ship- and brig-rigged, bright in the moonlight. These were his prey, the transports and cannonières for the invasion.
‘You are happy that they are in the outer road, Mr Goodridge?’ he asked.
‘Oh, yes, sir. We just had St Jacques bearing south-south-east. There’s nothing but open water between you and them.’ ‘Down with your helm,’ said Jack. With the wind on her larboard quarter the Polychrest ran through the sea, going fast in with the tide, straight for the gun-vessels.
‘Out tompions,’ he said. ‘Stand to your guns.’ He meant to run right in among them, firing both sides, to get the very most out of the surprise and the first discharge, for a moment after it all hell would break loose from the batteries, and the men would never be so steady again. The mist had drifted across again, but it was clearing - he could see them dimly, coming closer and closer.
‘Not a gun till. . . ‘he called, and a shock threw him flat on the deck. The Polychrest was brought up all standing. She had run full tilt on to the West Anvil.
This was plain as he got to his feet and the clearing of the fog showed one fort right astern and another almost exactly alike on the starboard bow, forts that woke to instant life with a shattering roar, a blast of flame that lit the sky. They had mistaken Convention for St Jacques, the inner road for the outer: they had come in by a different channel, and the vessels were separated from him by an impassable spit of sand. Those ships were in the inner, not the outer road. By some miracle the Polychrest had all her masts still standing: she lifted on the swell and ground a little farther on to the bank.
‘Up sheets,’ he shouted, full voice - no call for silence now. ‘Up sheets.’ The strain on the masts eased. ‘Parker, Pullings, Babbington, Rossall, get the guns aft.’ If she were only hanging by her forefoot this might bring her off. On the far side of the bank a great flurry of canvas - ships getting under way in every direction - and amidst this confusion two distinct well-ordered shapes steering to cross his bows. Gun-brigs, which marked their presence by two double jets of fire, meaning to rake him from stern to stern. ‘Leave the fo’c’sle guns,’ he cried. ‘Mr Rossall, Adams, keep up a steady fire on those brigs.’
Now the moon shone out with surprising brilliance, and as the wind blew away the smoke, it showed the batteries as clear as day. It showed the whole inner road, crowded with shipping - a corvette moored right up against Convention, under its guns; certainly the ship Thetis and Andromeda had chased in, his quarry. ‘A damned-fool place to moor her’ - one thought among countless others racing through his head. It showed the deck of the Polychrest, most of the men well disciplined, over their amazement, working fast at the guns, trundling them aft, not much concerned by the thunder of the forts. St Jacques was firing wide, afraid of hitting its own people ahead of the Polychrest. Convention had not yet got the range: the iron hail was still high overhead. The gun-brigs were more dangerous.
He clapped on to a rope, helped run a gun aft, called for coigns to wedge them until they could make fast.
‘All the people aft. All hands, all hands aft. We’ll jounce her off. All jump together at the word. One, two. One, two.’ They jumped, a hundred men together:
would their weight and the weight of the guns slide her off into deep water? ‘One, two. One, two.’ It would not. “Vast jumping.’ He ran forward, looking hard and quick right round the port; glanced at his watch. A quarter past nine - not much left of the flood. ‘Get all the boats over the side. Mr Parker,’ he said, ‘carronade into the barge.’
She had to be got off. A bower anchor carried out, dropped in deep water and heaved upon would bring her off: but even the barge could not bear the weight of such an anchor. A larger vessel must be cut out. A ball passed within a few feet of him, and its wind made him stagger. A cheer from forward, as the starboard carronade hit one of the gun-brigs square on the figurehead. Something had to be cut out. The transports were all crowding sail for the Ras du Point; they could not be caught in time. There were some small luggers in the harbour mouth; the corvette alone under Convention’s guns. Absurdly close under Convention’s guns, moored fore and aft, fifty yards from the shore, broad-side and headed towards St Jacques. Why not the corvette herself? He dismissed the question as absurd. But why not? The risk would be enormous, but ‘no greater than lying here under the cross-fire, once the batteries had the range. It was very near to wild mad recklessness; but it was not quite there. And with the corvette in his possession there would be no need to carry out an anchor - a time-consuming job.
