Desolation Island (22 page)

The next day brought the answer: twelve black Portuguese, and Jack was to try again in the afternoon, his last chance before the Leopard sailed on the evening tide. 'But,' observed Bonden, rowing Stephen to the apothecary's for his final lading, 'I doubt he'll find another soul.'

'May not he press some from the English ship that has just come in?'

'Oh no, sir,' said Bonden, laughing, 'not in a foreign port, he can't. Besides, she's a whaler for the South Sea, so most of her men will have protections, even if we meet her far out in the offing. Nor he won't get no volunteers out of her, neither, not for the old Leopard, if they haven't sailed with him before. No, no, they won't go into the Leopard of their own free will, not an old wessel of her unlikely rep.'

'But surely she is a very fine ship? Better than new, the Captain said.'

'Well, now,' said Bonden, 'I don't go for to set myself up as a King Solomon, but I know what the common chap that has used the sea for some time says to himself. He says, this here old Leopard may have a good skipper, no preachee-floggee hard-horse, as we say, but she is wery old, and cruel short-handed: we shall be worked to the bone, so damn the Leopard. For why? Because she is a floating coffin, and unlucky at that.'

'Nay, Bonden, the Captain told me distinctly, and I recall his very words, that she had been thoroughly overhauled, with Snodgrass's diagonal braces, and Roberts's iron-plate knees, so that she was now the finest fifty-gun ship afloat.'

'As to her being the finest fifty-gun ship afloat, why, fair enough. Because why? Because there's only Grampus in the ring, bar two or three more we call the Baltic Hearses. But as for them knees and braces... Well now, sir,' said Bonden, glancing over his shoulder and shooting the boat through a gap between a mob of smallcraft and the outer buoy. He did not speak again for some while, and when he did it was to say in an obstinate, contentious voice, 'They can talk to me about Captain Seymour and Lord Cochrane and Captain Hoste and all the rest of them, but I say our skipper's the finest fighting captain in the fleet; and I served under Lord Viscount Nelson, didn't I? I'd like to see the man that denies it. Who wiped a Spanish frigate's eye in a fourteen-gun brig, and made her strike? Who fought the Polychrest till she sunk under him, and swapped her for a corvette cut out from right under their guns?'

'I know, Bonden,' said Stephen mildly. 'I was there.'

'Who set about a French seventy-four in a twenty-eightgun frigate?' cried Bonden, angrier still. 'But then,' he went on in quite another tone, low and confidential, 'when we're ashore, sometimes we're a little at sea, if you understand me, sir. Which, being as straight as a die, we sometimes believe them quick-talking coves are dead honest too, with their patent knees and braces and goddam silver-mines, pardon the expression, sir. Now 'tis natural for any captain to think his command the finest ship that ever was: but sometimes, being stuffed up with knees and braces, we might perhaps think her finer than is quite reason, and believe it and say it too, without a lie.'

'Leopard,' called the master of that fine American bark the Asa Foulkes, who recognized the boat.

'Asa Foulkes,' replied Bonden, with an offensive variation of the name and a scornful laugh.

'Do you lack for any hands? We got three Liverpool Irishmen aboard, and a quartermaster that ran from the Melampus. Why don't you come and press them?' Merriment aboard the bark, and cries of 'Bloody old Leopard.'

'From the look of your topsides and your harbour stow,' said Bonden, now abreast of the Asa Foulkes, 'you ain't got a single seaman in the barky for us to take. My advice to you, old Boston Bean, is to go right back to Sodom, Massachusetts, by foot, and try to find a real sailorman or two.' A general roar from the Asa Foulkes, a bucket of slush thrown in the direction of the boat, and Bonden, who had never at any time looked at the American, said, 'That settled his hash. Now where to first, sir?'

'I must go to the apothecary, the hospital, and the American consul. Pray choose the point most nearly equidistant from all three.'

To this point, no later than Bonden, from long experience, had expected him to be, Stephen returned, bearing a parrot for the carpenter. He was followed by two slaves carrying drugs enough to dose the whole ship's company for eighteen months, and by two nuns with an iced pudding wrapped in wool. 'Ten thousand thanks again, dear mothers,' he said. 'This is for your poor; and pray for the soul of Stephen Maturin, I beg.' To the slaves, 'Gentlemen, here is for your trouble: commend me to the esteemed apothecary.' To Bonden, 'Now homewards, if you please, and ply your oars like Nelson at the Nile.'

When they cleared the inner harbour and the roadstead came into sight, he said, 'Now there is the odd boat quite close to our Leopard.' Bonden replied with an amiable grunt, no more: and after a quarter of a mile Stephen went on: 'In all my sea-going experience, I have never seen so odd a boat.' At the thought of all Dr Maturin's sea-going experience, Bonden gave a secret smile, and said, 'Is that so, sir?'

'It is like a brig, with two masts, you understand. But they are arsy-versy.'

Bonden looked over his shoulder. His expression changed. He took two powerful strokes, and as the boat glided along he stared again. 'She's one of our frigates, and she's lost her foremast at the partners: jury bowsprit; and her head's all ahoo. Nymph, thirty-two, if I do not mistake: a fine sailer.'

He did not mistake. The Nymph, Captain Fielding, from the Cape for Jamaica with despatches and so home, had run into a Dutch seventy-four, the Waakzaamheid, in a blinding rainstorm just north of the line. There had been a brief action in which the Nymph's foremast had been wounded; but by carrying all the sail she dared she had clean outrun her much heavier opponent in a two days' chase. By the time the Dutchman hauled his wind and gave over, the Nymph was close in with the shore, and a little later a freakish gust off Cape Branco took her aback, bringing her foremast by the board. Fortunately the Dutchman was quite out of sight, last seen steering south, chasing no more; and Captain Fielding had brought his ship down to Recife to refit before continuing his journey.

Fielding was senior to Jack. In his opinion no good purpose could be served by whipping up a jury foremast and putting to sea in company with the Leopard to search for the Waakzaamheid. Apart from the fact that the Nymph was carrying despatches, which prohibited her from going in chase of wild geese, the Dutchman sailed faster than the Leopard, though not so fast as the Nymph, and Fielding had no wish to lie there being clawed by a seventy-four while the Leopard came lumbering up; particularly as she was so short-handed as to be little use when she got there. Nor could he spare the Leopard any hands: Aubrey would find plenty at the Cape. And were he in Aubrey's place, he would give the Waakzaamheid a wide berth; she was a fair sailer, commanded by a determined fellow who understood his business, and she was well-manned - she had given the Nymph three broadsides in little over five minutes. Their parting was rather cold, although Jack did regale him with the greater part of Stephen's pudding, an act, which as Jack himself observed, had few equals in the course of naval history, the present heat and all circumstances being borne in mind.

'For my part, I rejoice,' said Stephen, as the Leopard fished her best bower and America faded on the western sky. 'I had messages of some consequence, and that swift-sailing, cautious Nymph will carry my duplicates much faster than the originals.'

Knowing of the presence of a hostile ship of the line in the same ocean, the Leopard redoubled her attention to gunnery. Although the presence was remote and almost entirely theoretical, since from the Nymph's account the Waakzaamheid must be something in the nature of five hundred miles to the south and west, the Leopard's guns rattled in and out every evening after quarters, and often in the forenoon watch as well.

'For, do you see,' said the commander, 'now that we have cleaned up the Mauritius and La Reunion, a Dutch ship in these waters can mean only one thing: she must be intended to reinforce Van Daendels in the Spice Islands. And to get there, she must steer much the same course with ours, at least to the height of the Cape.' He had not the slightest wish to meet her. In the course of his career he had taken on greater odds, but the Waakzaamheid was a Dutchman, and Jack Aubrey had been present at Camperdown, a midshipman stationed on the lower deck of the Ardent, sixty-four, when the Vrijheid killed or wounded one hundred and forty-nine of his shipmates out of four hundred and twenty-one and reduced the Ardent to something very near a wreck: this, and all that he had heard of the Dutch, filled him with respect for their seamanship and their fighting qualities. 'You may call them Butterboxes,' he said, 'but they thumped us most cruelly not so very long ago, and burnt the Chatham yard and God knows how many ships in the Medway.' He would have been circumspect, where a Dutchman was concerned, had the odds been even: as they stood, they were as seventy-four to fifty-two against him in guns, and far more in men. He did his best to lessen the disparity by improving the speed and accuracy of the Leopard's fire; but he could not hope to fight all his guns and manoeuvre her at the same time until the Cape should furnish him with a hundred and thirty hands, far less board and carry a determined enemy of the size of the Waakzaamheid. Of the prime seamen who had served with him before and who were used to his notions of how a gun should be handled, he had enough to provide captains and crews for one full upper-deck broadside: for the moment the lower deck had to do as best it could with the rest, with thin crews so supplemented with Marines that no soldiers would be available for small-arms fire until the invalids should recover; and these crews were so disposed that the least efficient were amidships, in what was known as the slaughterhouse because in action most of the enemy's fire was concentrated upon it. The weaker crews on the lower deck: for although her twenty-four-pounders could bite hard, sending a ball through two feet of solid oak at seven hundred yards, the Leopard carried her lower gun-ports no higher from the water than the other ships of her class, and if she were brought to action with much of a sea running, they would necessarily be closed on the leeward side, and perhaps on the windward too.

He had a good gunner in Mr Burton, one who thoroughly agreed with his Captain's practice of firing live, rather than confining himself to the dumb-show of running the pieces in and out. He had a dozen excellent captains, and he was perfectly seconded by Babbington on the lower deck, and by Moore the Marine; while the older midshipmen, who loved this kind of exercise, with its bang and briskness and excitement and competition, paid great attention to their divisions. But Grant was a dead weight. His service had been limited to transports, harbour duties, and exploration, and through no fault of his own he had never been in battle; he was a good navigator, but he could not know the inward nature of a fight at sea: nor did he seem willing to learn. It was as though he did not really believe in the possibility of action or the need for anything but formal preparation for it; and his attitude, his tolerably obvious attitude, infected many of those whose idea of battle was as hazy as his own - a general smoke and thunder at close quarters, with the Royal Navy winning as a matter of course.

After one or two private interviews with Grant which did not succeed in shaking the older man's obstinate self-complacency, in spite of his perfectly correct 'Yes, sir' at every pregnant pause, Jack wrote him down as just one more burden to be borne, by no means inconsiderable, but far less important than the herd of landsmen on the lower deck; and he carried on with the task of turning the Leopard into a fighting-machine as efficient as his means would allow, entirely changing his methods, suiting them to his strange little crew and, as he put it himself, 'cutting his coat according to his cloth.'

The forenoon sessions took place in the great cabin itself. Here there stood Jack's own brass nine-pounders, ordinarily housed fore and aft, to take up less room. They were part of the spoils of Mauritius, light, beautiful guns, and he had had them carefully rebored to take English nine-pound shot: he had also had them painted a dull chocolate-brown, to do away with some of the incessant polishing that took up so much time in a ship - time that could be far better spent. But this humane, sensible move ran counter to some deep naval instinct: Killick and his mates, taking advantage of a few small chips in the paint round the lock and the touch-hole, had gradually increased the area of visible brass until the guns now blazed from muzzle to pomellion. Now Jack spoilt the beauty of the great cabin by causing Mr Gray to build the equivalent of a deep wing-transom, with the corresponding knees, massive enough to withstand the recoil of his brass ninepounders, so that by removing the stern windows as though to ship deadlights, together with some of the gingerbread-work from the gallery, he could use them as chasers, firing from a higher station than the more usual gunroom ports. And this he did almost every day under his own immediate supervision, bringing in different teams, sometimes of officers alone, led by himself - how he loved pointing the gun - sometimes of midshipmen, but more often of the two extremes of the lower deck, the first and second captains on the one hand, and the boobies, the downright creeping lubbers on the other, in the hope that the best might grow better and the worst learn the exercise at least well enough to be of some use to the ship. This firing of the stern-chase had the great advantage of allowing him to shoot at empty casks bobbing away in the wake, so that those who aimed them could see the results of their aiming at various ranges; and all this without heaving the ship to for the boats to tow out a target.

On the other hand, it made a shambles of the cabin. Most Captain's stewards would have cried out at seeing their housekeeping blasted to every wind that blew, their cherished brass, paintwork, checkered sailcloth, deck, windows, desecrated as though by battle; and Killick, old in insubordination and dumb insolence, indulged for old times' sake and grown tyrannical, was perhaps the most crabbed steward in any rated ship, an Attila to the swabbers and ship's boys under his sway, and a source of anxiety to his Captain. But Jack was happily inspired to invite him to touch off the first discharge, and after that the glory of the cabin might go hang - deck-rings and metal slides might wreck the checkered cloth, garlands of hammered shot, wet swabs, and sooty worms might ruin the unvarying symmetry of this drawing-room, adorned with swords on one hand and with telescopes on the other, the pistols forming a tasteful sunburst in between and the chairs and tables always just so, taking their bearings from the mahogany wine-cooler by the starboard quarter-gallery door, and the whole place might reek of powder-smoke -Killick was there, eyeing the slow-match that was to fire the gun, much as a terrier might eye a rat or a groom his bride. A single shot would make him civil, and even obliging, for a week.