Desolation Island (26 page)

'Never in life, ma'am. This is only what we term a reconnaissance. There will be no battle, at all.'

'Oh,' said she, rather disappointed: and after a while, 'Do not you find it very cold, with only a cotton jacket on? My spencer is lined, but I protest it scarcely keeps me from shivering.'

'This jacket is silk, ma'am. The finest Recife silk, and impervious to the blast.'

'There I must undeceive you, sir. It is cotton, twilled cotton, the kind we call jean; I am afraid the shopman of Recife had no conscience, the dog.'

'It was a woman,' said Stephen, in a low voice, looking at his sleeve.

'I shall knit you a comforter. Is that the ship out in front there? We were looking in the wrong direction.'

There she lay, four or five miles off, hull-up from the Leopard's poop.

'Just so,' said Stephen. 'Exactly where the Captain and I expected it.'

'It looks very small, and a great way off. I wonder that they should make such a coil, hammering away like Gipsies. Tell me, how far are we from the Cape?'

'Something in the nature of a thousand miles, I take it.'

'Lord, a thousand miles! You will certainly have your comforter before that.'

Stephen thanked her, handed her below into the now not unwelcome fug, and returned to the quarterdeck. Everyone was quiet, and all eyes but the helmsman's were fixed on the strange sail, by no means so distant now. She was certainly a two-decker, certainly Dutch, and probably a seventy-four. She held steadily to her course, steering south-south-west with the wind at south-east by east a half east, not pointing up very close for her trim therefore, and sailing rather heavy.

Six knots to the Leopard's seven or rather better; though it was true that the Leopard had more sail abroad. At this rate a considerable time must pass before there was much likelihood of communication, unless the Dutchman heaved to or shortened sail. At present he showed no sign of doing either: ploughed steadily on, his bluff bows shouldering the swell, as though the Leopard did not exist. Combermere, a signal midshipman, had had little opportunity of exercising his skill this voyage; and he was now studying his book with frantic zeal by the open flag-locker, hoping that the yeoman at his side might know more than himself. Most of the other people on the leeward side of the quarterdeck were calm enough: they conversed in low voices, not to disturb the Captain over there, with his telescope poised on the hammocks in their netting. The ship was cleared for action, but this, or something very like it, happened every day at quarters, and there was little sense of extreme urgency. Those who had been in battle, particularly under Captain Aubrey, were rather quiet; those who had not were somewhat talkative. 'Look, look,' cried Mr Fisher, pointing to a fork-tailed petrel, 'there is a swallow. What a good omen! And so far from land.'

'It is a Mother Cary's chicken,' said Grant. 'Procellaria pelagica.'

'Surely it is a fork-tailed petrel,' said Stephen.

'I think not. The fork-tailed petrel is not to be found in these latitudes. That is Procellaria pelagica, one of what we call the turbinares.' He went on to tell Stephen a number of facts about birds in general, in a didactic tone that was but too familiar to the wardroom.

'Mr Combermere,' said Jack at last. 'Pennant and colours. Mr Larkin' - to the master by the wheel - 'give her a point and a half.'

The Leopard stated that she was a British man-of-war in commission, and fell off a little so that the message should be unmistakable. Half a minute passed, and then the Dutchman stated that he too was a British man-of-war in commission: he backed his foretopsail, hauled up his courses, and lay to, presenting his broadside.

'Private signal,' said Jack. 'And make our number.'

The private signal soared up and broke out. Jack's glass was trained upon the Dutchman's quarterdeck: he saw the answering hoist prepared - rather slow - he saw it move up the signal halliard - rather slow again, with the distance between the ships lessening all this time - and then come down from half way. 'Stand by to start the bowlines,' he said, without removing his eye from the glass. The Dutchman's hoist was moving up again, apparently corrected: up and up, and it broke out. The wrong reply: a mere nonsense of flags heaved out in the hope of a lucky chance. 'Hard over,' he said, and the helmsman spun the wheel. 'Mr Combermere, enemy of superior force in sight: general chase to south-south-west. Two guns to leeward, and keep it flying. And let us hope he understands it.'

At the same time the blue ensign vanished from the Waakzaamheid's peak, her own colours raced up, her side disappeared behind a cloud of smoke, and she put before the wind. A few heart-beats later the deep roar of her guns reached the Leopard, and before it had died, close on half a ton of shot, fired at extreme range, tore up the sea. The shots were admirably well grouped, but they fell short at first graze: several carried on, skipping over the swell in long bounds, and three reached their mark, a hole appeared in the maincourse; the tight-packed hammocks just by Mr Fisher's head lurched inwards; and there was a ringing thump somewhere forward.

The Leopard had already brought the wind abaft the beam: now it was on her quarter, and she was running fast towards the setting sun. 'Royals and weather studdingsails,' said Jack, and he walked on to the poop to watch the Waakzaamheid. She had lost way, lying-to, and although she dropped her courses and sheeted home so briskly that he nodded with approval, and although she too set royals and studdingsails, it was long before she began to make up the distance lost. And even then, with this light breeze, she did not gain.

'Mr Grant,' he said, 'come up the fore and main topsail sheets half a fathom: the pitch-barrel to the stern-davits: and pass the word for Mr Burton.'

In the bare, stripped cabin he said to the gunner, 'Now, Mr Burton, we shall have some fun.' The Leopard's speed was lessening, in answer to Jack's order, and with it the distance between the ships. Their pieces, the brass nine-pounders, were already loaded and run out: they stared along the gleaming barrels at the Waakzaamheid coming slowly up and throwing a fine bow-wave. The gun-crews crouched on either side; the slow-match smouldered in its tubs; the powder-men stood well behind, holding their cartridges.

'Whenever you please, Mr Burton,' said Jack: and as he spoke there was a flash on the Dutchman's forecastle - his bow-chaser trying the range. 'Handspike, Bill,' murmured the gunner: he eased his quoin to give a slightly greater elevation, paused for the Leopard's pitch, and pulled the lanyard. The gun roared and leaped back under his arched body: the wet swab was already down its throat as the crew held the gun inboard, and Burton craned out to see the fall of his shot. A little short, but straight and true.

Jack fired: much the same result. He sent to check the Leopard's way a trifle more, and some minutes later, when the Waakzaamheid was nearer by a hundred yards, the gunner made a hole in her foresail with a ricochet. From then on the nine-pounders fired as fast as they could load, bawling away in the rapidly fading light until they were too hot to touch and they jumped clear of the deck at each recoil. They did no great damage, although Jack was almost certain he had got home three times, before the sudden darkness hid their target altogether. The last thing they saw of the Waakzaamheid that night was a distant blaze as she yawed and let fly with her full broadsides, firing at the Leopard's flashes, but firing quite in vain.

'House your guns,' said Jack: and raising his voice, 'Let go the barrel. Handsomely now.'

The barrel of burning pitch, with crackers artfully disposed about it, gently touched the sea and floated off, emitting quite lifelike spurts of flame, as though from cannon, as it went.

Out on the quarterdeck he gave the order for the sheets to be hauled aft. He was soaking with sweat, tired, and happy. 'Well, Mr Grant,' he said, 'I do not think we need beat to quarters today. What have you to report?'

'Just the hole in the mainsail, sir, and a little rigging cut; but I am afraid their first broadside damaged our scroll-work: knocked off the larboard leopard's nose.'

'The Leopard's lost her nose,' said Jack to Stephen some time later, when the ship could be allowed a glim behind her deadlights and the dark-lanterns were put out. 'If I were not so fagged, I believe I could make a joke about that, with so much pox aboard,' and he laughed very heartily at the thought of his near approach to wit.

'When am I to be given my supper?' asked Stephen. 'You invited me to partake of toasted cheese, in luxury. I find no luxury, but a shambles: I find no toasted cheese, but a host groping for jocosity about what is in fact a grave and painful disease. Yet stay, I think I do perceive the smell of cheese above the powder-reek and the stench of that vile dark-lantern. Killick, belay there; are you now about the cheese?'

'Which it's just coming up, ain't it?' said Killick angrily. He had not been allowed to fire a single shot, and he muttered something about 'those that worshipped their bellies... blowing out their gaffs by day and by night, never satisfied.'

'In the interval,' said Stephen, 'might I hope to be told the outcome of all this hurry and banging and disturbance?'

'Why, it is clear enough,' said Jack. 'In half a glass we shall haul our wind, cross the Dutchman's wake, get to windward of him, crowd all the sail we can, and so say farewell. Old Butterbox did everything he could; he very nearly made us uncomfortable, and if there had been a heavier sea he might have succeeded, because a bigger ship has a greater advantage when the sea runs high; and now all that remains to him is to make up the southing he has lost, cracking on regardless if he believes the signal I threw out to our imaginary friends, while we stand on for the Cape, having, I trust, bleared the honest burgher's eye, each of us peacefully carrying on our occasions, diverging farther and farther every watch all through the night, so that by dawn we may well be a hundred miles apart.'

Dawn broke, and once again Jack was knocked up; once again he was torn from the arms of an ideal Mrs Wogan with the news of a ship fine on the larboard bow. This time the Leopard's top-gallants had already vanished, but it was little more than a gesture to the conventions of war, because this time the Waakzaamheid was a good three miles nearer, perfectly recognizable in spite of the mist hanging over the cold milky sea - hanging and parting in the light air from the east, so that sometimes she almost entirely vanished and sometimes she looked spectral, unnaturally large, as she bore up, spread her wings, and headed for the Leopard.

They were already at the edge of the westerly current, and the breeze chopped up the pale surface; but there was nothing of a sea, nothing resembling the great rollers with the hills and dales that so favoured a heavier ship, and by noon the Leopard, setting all she could carry and steering south-west, had run the Waakzaamheid out of sight.

'May we cry Io triumphe?' asked Stephen at dinner. 'It is two hours since she vanished, wallowing in impotent rage.'

'I am not going to cry Io anything at all until we pick up our moorings in Simon's Bay,' cried Jack. 'With Turnbull and Holles here, I did not like to say anything at breakfast, but I do not know that I have ever seen anything so shocking in all my life as that Dutchman at dawn, sitting there to the windward, between us and the Cape. It was exactly as though he had been leaning over my shoulder last night, while I worked out our course. And I am by no means easy in my mind about this morning's performance, neither. It was too far off to be certain, with the haze, but I had an ugly feeling he was not chasing wholehearted. No skysails, as I dare say you remarked. Maybe his pole topgallantmasts will not bear 'em; but it seemed to me he was not so much eager to catch us as to drive us south, away to the leeward. In his place, and with his advantage in men, I should try to carry the ship by boarding, rather than batter her into matchwood and maybe have her sink on me: what a triumph to carry a sound fifty-gun ship with him to the Indies! And he may be waiting for his opportunity. However, I shall do all I can to cross his wake tonight, and if only I can get the weather-gage, with the wind anywhere east of south, I shall try a luffing match with him. We can lie closer to the wind, and those broad-bottomed ships always sag to leeward more than we do. So in any sea where Leopard can stay, I believe we could leave him a great way astern by beating up, leave him for good and all; and I hope to be windward of him tomorrow.'

A vain hope. Jack's plan of crossing the Dutchman's wake in the night was frustrated by a dead calm; and in the afternoon of the next day, while all hands were bending a fresh suit of heavy-weather sails, the Waakzaamheid was seen in the north-east, bringing up the breeze. She was a noble sight, with studdingsails aloft and alow, gleaming under the clouded sky - towering canvas that gleamed with a more than ordinary and as it were inward glow, for she too had shifted her suit in preparation for the winds to be expected farther south - but the Leopards could not admire her. They had all seen the spent ball that damaged the figurehead, and they all knew that behind the lower-deck ports of the approaching Waakzaamheid lay a long tier of Dutch thirty-two-pounders, throwing metal nearly half as heavy again as their own guns. The best part of the Leopard's hull was heart of oak, so was the best part of her crew; but there was not a man aboard who concealed his delight when the breeze reached the Leopard too, filled her stout new canvas, and caused the water to gurgle under her counter as she gathered way.. A little later the capricious air began to fail the Waakzaamheid: she put down her helm and opened a distant cannonade that effectually killed what little wind there was.

Slow, deliberate fire, gun by gun from her upper tier: single shot with a heavy charge of powder; almost always short, but remarkably good practice; and some of the ricochets came aboard. He could not hope to accomplish a great deal at this distance - his twelve-pound upperdeck shot could not do half as much harm after the first graze as the Dutchman's twenty-four-pounders - but there was always the chance of carrying away a spar or cutting up the rigging, which would be all to the good with the Waakzaamheid five or six thousand miles from her nearest source of supply. And then a stray shot might hit a cartridge-box or a lantern between decks, starting a fire and even blowing up the magazine: it was long, long odds, but he had known it happen. Yet there were other, far more important considerations. Since her captain delighted in gunnery, and since he was well-to-do, the Leopard was exceptionally rich in powder and shot; and if Jack, by provoking the Waakzaamheid, could induce her to fire shot for shot, sending most of it into the sea, he would be relatively the gainer. Then he knew very well that even the most intrepid heroes did not much relish sitting mute, waiting to be fired at; and many of the Leopard's landsmen were not heroic at all. Furthermore, experience had taught him that no target on earth could excite such a zeal, such careful, deliberate aiming, as one's fellow men: this was a perfect opportunity for getting the best into his gun. crews; the Leopard made the fullest use of it, and occasionally the fall of her shot would send water over the Dutchman's side, while twice, to rapturous cheers, the well-served number seven gun struck home, whereas the Waakzaamheid did nothing but send one spent ball into the Leopard's hammock-netting. Yet Jack had a growing, disagreeable conviction that his colleague over the water had exactly the same thing in mind, that he too was