Hervey 09 - Man Of War (9 page)

This much they knew already, to be sure – the entire crew indeed, for the previous captain’s orders had been the same – but it was indeed the custom, and it did no harm to make the connection in men’s minds between the Admiralty in its exalted remoteness and their ship and her commanding officer; and it gave the older hands a certain standing when they went back to their messes to report to their shipmates what the new captain was like.

‘Have any of you men served with me before?’ Peto’s voice was that of a seasoned officer hailing against the wind.

He did not expect any to answer ‘Ay’; nor did any.

‘Then I shall tell you that I have been a frigate man for long years, and will have
Rupert
answer as if she were a frigate too. It
can
be done, for you are all
professional
seamen – not men taken from their homes, or assize men – and therefore you can cut about the tops a deal better than many a crew I had when we fought Bonaparte.’

He paused for dramatic effect. There was a murmur of what sounded like approval.

‘Pipe down,’ snapped the boatswain.

Peto judged it the time: he had begun by reading them the Admiralty’s authority; he had told them of his service and flattered them by reminding them of their own status and capacity; now he would tell them what the enemy demanded. ‘I do not require this for my own amusement, mark you. I shall not send you running aloft to make sport, or hold you at gun drill for the accolade of fastest in the fleet. No, I shall do these things whenever it is necessary because our adversary the Turkish devil, being sober and vigilant, will otherwise cause His Britannic Majesty’s Ship
Prince Rupert
, and those who sail in her, untoward damage. Sailors, we have the habit of victory to preserve!’

Peto waited for the approving buzz, then set his jaw, turned confidently and stepped off aft.

The knot of men parted to let him through. ‘Three cheers for Captain Sir Laughton Peto! Hip-hip!’

‘Hurragh!’

‘Hip-hip!’

‘Hurragh!’

‘Hip-hip!’

‘Hurragh!’

It had gone well, he told himself as he made for the admiral’s quarters. These things were not
always
done well: it was not always possible to judge the words aptly if the crew’s humour was not known.

A few eavesdroppers knuckled their foreheads sharply as he passed, and the sentry presented arms.

He rapped smartly at the door on the larboard side (both doors opened on the steerage, which served as dining room and office, but to starboard was the state room, where the cot would be, and he counted it indelicate to present himself thus). As a rule after knocking he would have entered, but the admiral’s daughter was not the admiral.

The lady’s maid answered.

Peto at once took charge. ‘I am the captain, come to pay respects to Miss Codrington.’

The maid (Peto thought she looked more like a governess, for she was closer his age and wore spectacles) curtsied. ‘Good afternoon, sir.’

Peto stepped into the steerage and glanced about with an inspecting eye. A cover lay on the table, and the chairs were likewise shrouded. The bulkheads were fresh painted – eau de nil – and the deck sailcloth gleamed in its black and white chequer; all evidence of Lambe’s percipience and industry. He waited for the maid to lead him to the admiral’s day apartment.

‘The captain, Miss Rebecca.’

Peto entered, stooping slightly to remove his hat. It was the first time he had been in such quarters in more years than he cared to remember, and he did not wish to collide with a beam. But if a beam were occasionally intrusive, the admiral’s apartments were otherwise of some dimension, near twice the size of his own cabin, which was itself commodious by any nautical standard. At a writing table facing the stern lights was the daughter of the man who would soon take possession. She rose and turned, and curtsied.

‘Good afternoon, Captain.’

Peto could scarce believe what he saw, nor at first could he quite reply. The admiral’s daughter was but thirteen or fourteen. He cleared his throat. ‘You are very welcome on board, Miss Codrington,’ he said uneasily, making a brisk bow.

‘Thank you, Captain,’ she replied, smiling. ‘But I cannot answer to “Miss Codrington” for I have two elder sisters unwed. My name is Rebecca.’

Peto cleared his throat again. He was unused to such self-possession in the ablest midshipman, let alone a slip of a girl. ‘Well then, Miss Rebecca, my name is Peto, and I should be honoured if you would join my lieutenant and me at dinner.’

‘Thank you, Captain Peto; it is I who should be honoured.’

Peto cast his inspecting eye about the apartment as best he could, a shade awkwardly, for it was the first time he had visited female quarters, however temporary they were. He cleared his throat once more. ‘Very well; very well. I bid you good day then, Miss Co—, Miss Rebecca.’ And he turned and took his leave, gathering up his authority again as he did so.

He took the rungs of the companion ladder purposefully, but scowling. The occupants of the quarterdeck saluted. Those merely taking their ease moved at once to the lee side, while the officer of the watch – a midshipman, since
Rupert
lay at anchor – presented himself.

‘Elphinstone, sir. Signal from the port admiral: the governor’s compliments; he will not now come aboard.’

Peto studied the youth in whose charge was his ship. Seventeen, eighteen years? Grandson, grandnephew perhaps? Lord Keith had died but five years ago . . . ‘Thank you, Mr Elphinstone,’ he said thoughtfully.

Lieutenant Lambe had returned on deck.

‘The governor is not coming aboard, it seems,’ said Peto, returning his salute.

‘Your pleasure, then, sir?’

It was an old-fashioned locution, but it seemed apt: they stood on the quarterdeck of a first-rate, within hailing of that brave Rock, as if waiting to step onto the stage – and a great stage at that. The wind was freshening; Peto clasped his hands decisively behind his back, and gave the order to begin the great undertaking: ‘Weigh anchor; make sail!’

Lambe smiled with that knowing pride that properly passed between a lieutenant and his captain. ‘Ay-ay, sir!’

It was six bells of the afternoon watch, one hour before the supper time. Hands knew they must be doubly sharp about it, and the officers that their new captain would be watching like a hawk. Peto adjusted his watch to the ship’s time – three o’clock – clasped his hands more tightly behind his back and affected all the detachment he could. He would hope to speak not at all until sail was set (and here he would learn what sort of a sailing-master he had in Shand, a warrant officer he had not before encountered), and then he would tell Lambe to set a course for Syracuse.

At once the little boats – the girls and ‘Jews’ – were all of a bob as the trade were bustled off ship unceremoniously, with or without their earnings, and the merchants with or without their credit. Boatswain’s mates did the bustling, while the officers did their best at placating. But this was one of His Majesty’s ships of war, and there was no room for argument once the captain had given an order: everywhere was activity, and all directed to the execution of that command.

On the middle gun-deck eight dozen men, marines mainly, began bearing on the capstan bars – donkey work if ever there was – while on the lower deck, the ship’s boys stood ready to lash the messenger rope, which the capstan turned, to the anchor cable as it came through the hawse hole, and then to follow it aft to the hatchway and unclip the ‘nipper’ so that the cable passed down to the orlop deck, where as many men again stood by to stow it. Weighing anchor was the least popular of all the dangerous and gruelling work of a ship’s routine, as noisome on the orlop (the cable was invariably rank after any time in the water) as it was backbreaking at the capstan. Only the nippers enjoyed it, as well they might, for they had to be agile and dextrous rather than mere substitutes for horsepower.

Had he been aboard
Nisus
, Peto could have observed this work; from
Rupert
’s quarterdeck he would see only the forecastle gang, mustered ready to cat and fish the anchor. They would be all he saw of the industry required to raise it (or
them
if the current required more than one anchor: there were two at the bow, eighty hundredweight apiece, and the burden of the sodden cable on top of that). He could not judge with what effort and skill the crew worked, only by the result – which, in the end, was all that must concern him.

Meanwhile, all hands not bent to weighing anchor – the starboard watch and the idlers – fell in to their stations, the topmen confidently climbing the shrouds and edging along the yards, ready. The master had ordered all sail set. Peto approved. The wind was quite decidedly freshening, but it would be as well to get decent steerage-way to round the point of the Rock without having to stand too much out to sea. They would have to get the topgallants in once they were in open water if the wind continued to blow up like this, but in all probability that would be a couple of hours more – time at least for the larboard watch to have something hot inside them.

‘Signal to
Archer
: Take station to windward.’

‘Ay-ay, sir!’ The signal midshipman scuttled off to the poop deck and his flag lockers. An easy signal: Peto noted that he had it run up in under the minute.

‘Anchor aweigh, sir!’ came the call from the hawse hole not long after, repeated up the hatchways until the quarterdeck had it.

Peto nodded, if barely perceptibly. An efficient signal officer, and the anchor off the seabed sharply: it was as it should be, but he had known it otherwise. The master made no move, however. Peto wondered, but then thought him right: with a full set of sail and a lee anchor there was every chance of fouling. Better to wait until the ring broke surface and the hook of the cat tackle had been put through.

In a few minutes more, ‘Hooked!’ came the cry, and at once the master raised his speaking-trumpet: ‘Halyards!’

Peto checked his watch. Fifteen minutes: not
too
bad in twenty fathoms. But it was the topmen he wanted to see. They had gone up the shrouds smartly enough – but a ship at anchor and nothing but a breeze . . .

The foremast topmen had the gaskets off the fastest, then the main and mizzen at one and the same time, topgallant yards first, then tops and then lower – just as should be, a sight to please the most critical gaze. Peto screwed up his eyes in the sudden glare as the chalk-white canvas unfurled evenly, like rolls of haberdasher’s calico on a show-frame, the sail trimmers so deft with the sheets that the light wind at once caught sail full and braced. Off came the topmen smartly, and then the master’s mates barked at the trimmers to haul on the ties and halyards to raise the yards.

Rupert
was under weigh. Peto checked his watch again: five more minutes.

Lambe saw, and was certain they were deserving of praise. ‘They were good topmen we had out of Portsmouth, sir, and they had a fair go of it in Biscay.’

‘Very gratifying, Mr Lambe,’ agreed Peto, with just enough of a note of encouragement while reserving his final judgement. He would want to see them shorten sail in a squall before pronouncing himself entirely satisfied. ‘The gun-crews?’

‘Not so practised, I’m afraid, sir. Guns were double lashed for most of the passage.’

‘Mm.’ Peto was not so sure. A frigate was tossed about a good deal more than a three-decker, and he had not had occasion to run more than a couple of days without drilling the gun-crews. ‘Could they not have exercised on the upper deck?’ The lightest guns of the main battery were naturally on the upper deck (he had been glad to find the eighteen-pounder – which had served him so well in
Nisus
– on
Rupert
’s upper deck, rather than the twenty-four as had lately been fashionable).

‘They could have, yes, sir.’

Peto would not press him. It was the captain’s business to exercise the crew, and he suspected Lambe had done his best. ‘Well, we had better clear for action tomorrow and have a thorough go.’

Lambe had expected it. Peto’s reputation assuredly sailed before him. But it was one thing to exercise the crews by gun or even deck, and quite another by broadside. He knew it would be a not altogether happy affair: the standing officers and mates would know their business well enough, but the landsmen . . . There would be shouting, cursing and a good deal of bruising; perhaps a case or two for the surgeon, or even for the chaplain. But if they
were
to see action they must needs learn soon how to clear quickly and completely – and the lieutenants how to command their gun-decks. There was nothing quite like a man-of-war broadsiding. ‘Ay-ay, sir!’ he rasped.

Peto returned to his attitude of studied silence. It was strange, he marked, how the sounds of the ship – the creaking of timber, the groaning of rigging and sail – he heard, but at the back of his mind. Hear them he must, for they told him how his new ship handled, but he did not have to
listen
; long years at sea had somehow accustomed his ear to effortless attention. Yet the screaming of the gulls above the promising wake commanded his notice just as if they had been his crew speaking, for they seemed to be welcoming him back to their world. He had been ashore some time, after all. On the beach indeed.

And what a world it was, his as much as theirs, the prospect restorative, the sun on his back, so that he felt as some basking amphibian warming on a stone to invigorate its colder blood. Soon he would be entirely in his element again. Unless he looked aft, the sun he now saw only in effect and reflection – the lengthening shadows on the deck, the glinting white horses as the sea heaped at the bows – but it was the sun of the Mediterranean, of the south: it touched him differently; it touched the water differently. And although there was not yet the taste of salt on his lips, the air was the briny pure of the ocean, as different from that on land as country air from town.

He breathed it deep but hid his contentment. For the moment he must observe how
Rupert
answered, how she ran. Her master knew best her sailing qualities, and he would watch without words (if that were possible, strange as it felt) as Mr Shand conned her beyond the Punta de Europa and into the Mediterranean true. Then, with sea space enough for
Rupert
to make headway in any wind, he could retire to his cabin to read more of her papers while the boatswain piped hands to supper: a half-hour’s solitude perhaps, until at five o’clock, an hour or so before dark, Lambe would call the crew to their stations, the guns would be cast loose, the pumps rigged, the lifebuoys placed in position, and the quarterdeck officers – the lieutenants and midshipmen – would make their inspection and report to him, and thence to the captain, that the ship was in good order for the night. After that – and not before – he, Peto, could retire, bathe, change his linen and . . . (he sighed) entertain Miss Rebecca Codrington.