H.M.S. Surprise (34 page)

The Surprise's topsail billowed out, came down, collapsed; and across the water they hear a thin answering cheer from the shattered corvette.

A forward gun sent a hail of grape along the Berceau's deck, knocking down a dozen men and cutting away her colours. 'Cease fire there, God rot you all in hell,' cried Jack. 'Secure those guns. Mr Stourton, hands to knot and splice.'

'She struck,' said a voice in the waist, as the Surprise swept on. The Berceau, hulled again and again, low in the water and by the head, swung heavily round, and they saw a figure running up the mizen-shrouds with fresh colours. Jack took his hat off to her captain, standing there on his bloody quarterdeck seventy yards away; the Frenchman returned the salute, but still, as his remaining larboard guns came to bear he fired a ragged broadside after the frigate, and then, as she reached the limit of his range, another, in a last attempt at preventing her escape. A vain attempt: not a shot came home, and the Surprise was still far ahead of the Marengo on her larboard quarter and the two frigates away to starboard.

Jack glanced at the sun: no more than an hour to go, alas. He could not hope to lead them very far this moonless night, if indeed he could lead them at all for what was left of the day. 'Mr Babbington, take your party into the top and give the appearance of trying to get things shipshape - you may cockbill the yard. Mr Callow - where is that midshipman?'

'He was carried below, sir,' said Stourton. 'Hit on the head.'

'Mr Lee, then. Signal partial engagement, heavy damage; request assistance. Enemy bearing north-north-east and north-north-west, and carry on with the half-minute gun. Mr Stourton, a fire in the waist would do no harm:

plenty of smoke. One of the coppers filled with slush and tow might answer. Let there be some turmoil.'

He walked to the taffrail and surveyed the broad sea astern. The brig had gone to the assistance of the Berceau: the Marengo maintained her position on the larboard quarter, coming along at a fine pace and perhaps gaining a little. As he expected, she was signalling to the Sémillante and the Belle Poule - a talkative nation, though gallant - and

she was no doubt telling them to make more sail, for the Belle Poule set her main-royal, which instantly carried away. For the moment everything was well in hand.

He went below. 'Dr Maturin,' he said, 'what is your casualty-list?'

'Three splinter-wounds, sir, none serious, I am happy to report, and one moderate concussion.'

' How is Mr Callow?'

'There he is, on the floor - on the deck - just behind you. A block fell upon his head.'

'Shall you open his skull?' asked Jack, with a vivid recollection of Stephen trepanning the gunner on the quarterdeck of the Sophie, exposing his brains, to the admiration of all.

'No. Oh, no. I am afraid his condition would not justify the step. He will do very well as he is. Now Jenkins here had a truly narrow escape, with his splinter. When M'Alister and I cut it out -'

'Which it came off of the hounds of the mainmast, sir,' said Jenkins, holding up a wickedly sharp piece of wood, two feet long.

- we found his innominate artery pulsing against its tip. The twentieth part of an inch more, or a trifling want of attention, and William Jenkins would have become an involuntary hero.'

'Well done, Jenkins,' said Jack. 'Well done indeed,' and he went on to inquire after the other two - a forearm laid open, and an ugly scalp-wound. 'Is this Mr White?' catching sight of another body.

'Yes. He was a little overcome when we raised John Saddler's scalp and desired him to hold it while we sewed it on: yet there was virtually no blood. A passing syncope:

he will be quite recovered by a little fresh air. May he go on deck, presently?'

'Oh, this minute, if he chooses. We had a slight brush with the corvette - such a gallant fellow: he came on most amazingly until Mr Bowes brought his foremast by the board - but now we are running before the wind, far out of range. Let him come on deck by all means.'

On deck the black smoke was belching from the frigate's waist, streaming away ahead of her, the ship's boys were hurrying about with swabs, buckets and the fire engine, Babbington was roaring cursing in the top, waving his arms, all hands looked pleased with themselves and sly; and the pursuers had gained a quarter of a mile.

Far on the starboard beam the sun was sinking behind a blood-red haze; sinking, sinking, and it was gone. Already the night was sweeping up from the east, a starless night with no moon, and pale phosphorescent fire had begun to gleam in the frigate's wake.

After sunset, when the French sails were no more than the faintest hint of whiteness far astern, to be fixed only by the recurrent flash of the admiral's top-lantern, the Surprise sent up a number of blue lights, set her undamaged main-topsail, and ran fast and faster southwestwards.

At eight bells in the first watch she hauled to the wind in the pitchy darkness; and having given his orders for the night, Jack said to Stephen, 'We must turn in and get what sleep we can: I expect a busy day tomorrow.'

'Do you feel that M. de Linois is not wholly deceived?'

'I hope he is, I am sure: he ought to be, and he has certainly come after us as if he were. But he is a deep old file, a through-going seaman, and I shall be glad to see nothing to the east of us, when we join the China fleet in the morning.'

'Do you mean he might dart about and fling himself between us, guided by mere intuition? Surely that would argue a prescience in the Admiral exceeding the limits of our common humanity. A thorough-going seaman is not necessarily a seer. Attention to the nice adjustment of the sails is one thing; vaticination another. Honest Jack, if you snore in that deep, pragmatical fashion, Sophie is going to spend many an uneasy night.. It occurs to

me,' he said, looking at his friend, who, according to his long-established habit, had plunged straight into the dark comfortable pit of sleep from which nothing would rouse him but the cry of a sail or a change in the wind, 'it occurs to mc, that our race must have a natural propensity to ugliness. You are not an ill-looking fellow, and were almost handsome before you were so pierced, blown up and banged by the enemy and so exposed to the elements; and you are to marry a truly beautiful young woman; yet I make no doubt you will between you produce little common babies, that mewl, pewl and roar all in that same tedious, deeply vulgar, self-centred monotone, drool, cut their teeth, and grow up into plain blockheads. Generation after generation, and no increase in beauty; none in intelligence. On the analogy of dogs, or even of horses, the rich should stand nine foot high and the poor run about under the table. This does not occur: yet the absence of improvement never stops men desiring the company of beautiful women. Not indeed that when I think of Diana I have the least notion of children. I should never voluntarily add to the unhappiness of the world by bringing even more people into it in any case; but even if that were in my mind, the idea of Diana as a mother is absurd. There is nothing maternal about her whatsoever: her virtues are of another kind.' He turned the wick down to a small line of blue flame and crept on to the steeply-sloping deck, where he wedged himself between a coil of rope and the side and watched the dim tearing sea, the clearing sky with stars blazing in the gaps of cloud, reflecting upon Diana's virtues, defining them, and listening to the successive bells, the responding cry of 'All's well' right round the ship, until the first lightening of the eastern sky.

'I've brought you a mug of coffee, Doctor,' said Pullings, looming at his side. 'And when you have drunk it up, I am going to call the skipper. He will be most uncommon pleased.' He still spoke in his quiet night-watch voice, although the idlers had been called already, and the ship was filling with activity.

'What will please him so, Thomas Pullings? You are a good creature, to he sure, to bring me this roborative, stimulating drink: I am obliged to you. What will please him so?'

'Why, the Indiamen's toplights have been in sight this last glass and more, and when dawn comes up I dare say we shall see them a-shaking out the reef in their topsails just exactly where he reckoned to find 'em: such artful navigation you would scarcely credit. He has come it the Tom Cox's traverse over Linois.'

Jack appeared, and the spreading light showed forty sail of merchantmen stretched wide along the western sea; he smiled, and opened his mouth to speak when the spreading light also betrayed the Surprise to a distant vessel in the cast, which instantly burst into a perfect frenzy of gunfire, like a small and solitary battle.

'Jump up the masthead, Braithwaite,' he said, 'and tell me what you make of her.'

The expected answer came floating down. 'That French brig, sir. Signalling like fury. And I believe I make out a sail bearing something north of her.'

it was just as he had feared: Linois had sent the brig northwards early in the night, and now she was reporting the presence of the Surprise, if not of the China fleet, to her friends over the horizon.

The long-drawn-out ruse had failed, He had meant to draw Linois so far to the south and west during the night that the Surprise, doubling back towards the China fleet in the darkness, would be far out of sight by morning. With the frigate's great speed (and how they had cracked on!) he should have done it: yet he had not. Either one of the French squadron had caught the gleam of her sails as she ran northwards through the pursuing line, or Linois had had an intuition that something was amiss - that he was being attempted to be made a fool of - and had called off the chase, sending the brig back to his old cruising-ground and then following her with the rest of his ships after an hour or so, crowding sail for the track of the China fleet. Yet his ruse had not failed entirely: it had gained essential time. How much time? Jack set course for the Indiamen and made his way into the crosstrees: the accursed brig lay some four leagues off, still carrying on like a Guy Fawkes' night, and the farther sail perhaps as much again - he would scarcely have seen her but for the purity of the horizon at this hour, which magnified the nick of her topgallants in the line of brilliant sky. He had no doubt that she was one of the frigates, and that the whole of Linois's squadron, less the corvette, was strung out on the likely passage of the Indiaman. They could outsail the convoy; and with this unvarying monsoon there was no avoiding them. But they could not outsail the convoy by a great deal: and it would take Linois the greater part of the day to concentrate his force and come up with the China fleet.

The senior captains came hurrying aboard the Surprise, headed by Mr Muffit, their commodore. The signal flying from the frigate's maintruck and the commodore's energetic gathering of the stragglers had given them a general idea of the situation; they were anxious, disturbed, grave; but some, alas, were also garrulous, given to exclamation, to blaming the authorities for not protecting them, and to theories about where Linois had really been all this time. The Company's service was a capable, disciplined body, but its regulations required the commodore to listen to the views of his captains in council before any decisive action; and like all councils of war this was wordy, indefinite, inclined to pessimism. Jack had never so regretted the superior rigour of the Royal Navy as he did during the vague discourse of a Mr Craig, who was concerned to show what might have been the case, had they not waited for the Botany Bay ship and the two Portuguese.

'Gentlemen,' cried Jack at last, addressing himself to the three or four other determined men at the table, 'this is no time for talking. There are only two things for it: we must either run or fight. If you run, Linois will snap up your fleet piecemeal, for I can stop only one of his frigates, while the Marengo can sail five leagues to your three and blow any two of you out of the water. If we fight, if we concentrate our force, we can answer him gun for gun.'

'Who is to fight the guns?' asked a voice.

'I will come to that, sir. What is more, Linois is a sear out of a dockyard and he is three thousand miles from the isle of France: he is short of stores, and single spar or fifty fathom of two-inch rope is of a hundred times more consequence to him than it is to us - I doubt there is a spare topmast in his whole squadron. In duty he must not risk grave damage: he must not press home his attack against a determined resistance.'

'How do you know he has not refitted in Batavia?'

'We will leave that for the moment, if you please,' said Jack. 'We have no time to lose. Here is my plan. You have three more ships than Linois reckoned for: the three best-armed ships will wear men-of-war pendants and the blue ensign -,

'We are not allowed to wear Royal Navy colours.'

'Will you give me leave to proceed, sir? That is entirely my responsibility, and I will take it upon myself to give the necessary permission. The larger Indiamen will form in line of battle, taking all available men out of the rest of the convoy to work the guns and sending the smaller ships away to leeward. I shall send an officer aboard each ship supposed to be a man-of-war, and all the quarter-gunners I can spare. With a close, well-formed line, our numbers are such that we can double upon his van or rear and overwhelm him with numbers: with one or two of your fine ships on one side of him and Surprise on the other, I will answer for it if we can beat the seventy-four, let alone the frigates.'

'Hear him, hear him,' cried Mr Muffit, taking Jack by the hand. 'That's the spirit, God's my life!'

In the confusion of voices it became clear that although there was eager and indeed enthusiastic support, one captain even beating the table and roaring, 'We'll thump 'em again and again,' there were others who were not of the same opinion. Who had ever heard of merchant ships with encumbered decks and few hands holding out for five minutes against powerful men-of-war? - most of them had only miserable eighteen-pounder cannonades - a far, far better plan was to separate: some would surely escape

- the Dorsetshire was certain she could outrun the French -could the gentleman give any example of a ship with a 270 lb broadside resisting an enemy that could throw 950 lb?