The Flying Squadron (6 page)

After the officers had left, Drinkwater motioned Vansittart to remain behind. He refilled their glasses while Mullender clattered the dishes in the adjacent pantry.

‘I am glad to see you fully recovered from the sickness, Mr Vansittart, and in such good form. I am afraid they are not sophisticates where political matters are concerned.'

‘I thought my presence offended them, they seemed so taciturn.'

Drinkwater laughed. ‘You marked their odd behaviour then, but discovered the wrong cause.'

‘I think not, Captain, though I own to that apprehension initially. It seemed to me they find Metcalfe overbearing.'

‘Yes, you are right,' agreed Drinkwater admiringly. Vansittart was no fool, though there was no point in dwelling upon the subject. ‘As to their attitude to our present assignment, they have been too closely bred to war and would delight in licking what they consider to be the upstart Yankees.'

‘You have reservations, Captain?'

‘I am old enough to have served in the last American
war and, in a lifetime of service, have found it to be a foolish man who underestimates his adversary.'

Vansittart nodded, his face suddenly wise beyond his years, borne down by the responsibility of his task.

‘You are more than a mere messenger.'

Vansittart looked up, his eyes shrewd. He could hold his liquor too, Drinkwater acknowledged.

‘Yes. It is likely that we will give ground on the matter of impressment. It will be a great
coup
for John Quincy Adams who has been alleging our perfidious actions are on a par with murder. He claims several thousand such cases and it will set a deal of lawyers pettifogging over the rules governing neutrals but . . .' he shrugged.

‘Needs must when the devil drives, eh?'

‘It defuses any action mediated towards Canada. You see, Captain, there is a rumour, gathered by persons close to French affairs, which suggests the Americans will claim certain oceanic rights over the Gulf Stream, and that they are approaching France for the means to build seventy-five men-o'-war . . .'

‘And John Quincy Adams has been hob-nobbing with Count Rumiantsev in Russia . . .'

‘How the devil d'you know about that?' Vansittart's eyebrows rose in astonishment. ‘Ah, I collect: Lord Dungarth.'

Drinkwater nodded. ‘He has from time to time seen fit to enlighten me.'

‘He seeks to draw Russia back to the old Coalition and reaffirm an alliance with Great Britain again.'

‘Yes.' Drinkwater thought of the dropsically obese, one-legged man whom he had first known as a dashing young first lieutenant in the war with the American rebels a generation earlier. ‘He has devoted his life to the defeat of the French.'

‘It is not entirely that which prompts this appeasement of the Americans, nor the news of Adams and the Russians combining against us. The truth is that a halting of trade with America is having a bad effect on our industries. The mercantile lobby is active in Parliament and though the Luddites are hanged when caught, their cause cannot be thus easily suppressed. Public disorder',
Vansittart said, leaning forward slightly and lowering his voice confidentially, the exaggeration betraying a degree of insobriety, ‘is currently tying down more regiments of light dragoons then the French are in Spain.'

Drinkwater knew of the frame-breaking riots. Skilled unemployed men, deprived of their trades by newfangled machines, had taken the law into their own hands and the law had fought back with its customary savage reprisals. He thought of the Paineite, Thurston, occupied somewhere about the
Patrician
.

He refilled Vansittart's glass. ‘So politics are again guided by expedience, eh, Vansittart?' he said. He raised his own glass and stared at the dark ruby port, then looked directly at his young passenger.

‘D'you reckon you can do it?'

‘Not a doubt, Captain. They shouted loudest about sailors' rights, whatever their true motives. We'll concede that point and all will be well.'

‘But for one thing,' Drinkwater said, squinting at his glass again, ‘which I doubt you have taken into account.'

‘Oh? And what is that?'

‘It will encourage our men to desert.'

In the hermetic life of a ship the smallest matters assume an unreal importance. This is often the case when a voyage has just begun, as with His Majesty's frigate
Patrician
, during the process of shaking down, when men thrown together under the iron rule of naval discipline jostle each other for the means by which to express themselves, to keep and maintain their own sense of identity.

The obligations of duty combined with those of dutifulness to suppress the natural instincts of the officers in a subtler and more dangerous way than among the ratings. The stuffy formalities and the rigid, pretentious hierarchies mixed uneasily with a cultivated and assumed languor in the wardroom. The officers were fortunate in having their cabins. Convention permitted private retreat, but while this was more civilized, it tended to prolong the incubation of trouble.

Elsewhere, on the berth and gun decks, men frequently abused each other and came quickly to blows. Such explosions were usually regulated by the lower deck's own, inimitable ruling, and while fights were swift and decisive, they were rarely bloody or degenerated into brawls. The bosun's mates and other petty officers charged with the maintenance of order knew how far to let things go before intervening.

The midshipmen's berth, by its very proximity and open location in the orlop, generally knew about these
disturbances, but a tacit and unspoken agreement existed between the men and the younkers, for the latter too often had recourse to their own fists.

While the officers festered in their differences and disagreements, the fights held in the semi-secret rendezvous of the cable tiers provided a cause for betting and gaming, as much natural releases for men pent up within the stinking confines of one of His Britannic Majesty's ships of war, as the catharsis felt by the protagonists themselves.

The tiny, insignificant causes of disorder, whether in the wardroom, the gunroom or the berth deck, fuelled the ship's gossip, or scuttlebutt. Their triviality was rarely a measure of their importance. This lay chiefly in their ability to rouse sentiment and cause diversions.

In the case of Mr Frey's dislocation with Mr Metcalfe, it united the wardroom almost unanimously behind the third lieutenant.
Almost
unanimously, because Mr Wyatt refused to take sides, his coarse nature impervious to aesthetic considerations, while Mr Simpson the chaplain pretended a charitable neutrality, though Metcalfe's manner deeply offended him.

It was this strained atmosphere that the officers took with them to dinner with Captain Drinkwater and although they might have left it behind them in their commander's presence, it was Metcalfe's peculiar comments about the captain which prevented this. The cause of the trouble had been nonsensical enough. Mr Frey, during his afternoon watch below, had spread a sheet of paper on the wardroom table upon which he was executing some water-colour sketches. He had brought a large number of pencil drawings back from the
Patrician
's circumnavigation. Some of these had been of hydrographic interest and had been worked up, overlaid with washes, and submitted to the Admiralty. Their lordships had expressed their approbation and Frey, by way of diversion as much as seeking further approval, had decided to embellish all his folio of drawings, many of which were competent and fascinating records of the frigate's sojourn on the coasts of China and Borneo. They ranged from a spirited representation of an attack on the stronghold
of piratical Sea-Dyaks and the horrors of a typhoon to dreamy washes showing the Pearl River under calm, grey skies, the background pierced with the exotic spires of pagodas and the foreground filled with the bat-winged sails of junks tacking up under the high poops of anchored Indiamen.

Returning from some roving inspection, Metcalfe had entered the wardroom and sat without comment in his customary chair. Tipping it back on its rear legs against the heel of the ship he nonchalantly threw both feet upon the table. One heel rested upon, and tore, the corner of a sheet of Frey's cartridge paper. Frey looked up from his work with brush and paints. ‘If you please, sir . . .' he said, at which Metcalfe adjusted his feet and succeeded in extending the tear. Instead of the margin of the paper being damaged, the washed-over drawing was ripped still further.

In the argument which followed, Frey was constrained by his subordinate rank and his outrage, which made him almost mute with indignation. Metcalfe protested Frey had no business ‘covering the whole damned table with rubbish', and compounded his vandalism by picking up the drawing by a corner. Already old and browned at the edges, the paper tore completely in half as he held it for the inspection of the others. Frey went deathly pale.

‘Have a care, sir . . .' he breathed almost inaudibly and Moncrieff, suddenly alerted to the seriousness of a situation which warranted a challenge, rallied to Frey's support. He lamented the first lieutenant's carelessness and when Metcalfe rounded on him, damning his insolence, Moncrieff coloured dangerously and put his hand on his empty hip.

‘By God, sir, had you done that to me I should have drawn upon you,' he hissed as Simpson came forward to restrain him and Pym emerged from his cabin to stare over his glasses at Metcalfe.

The first lieutenant continued to bluster and Simpson expressed regret that Metcalfe had not the manners to apologize. The consensus of opinion had gathered against Metcalfe. He resorted to a damning of them all for being the captain's lickspittle and reviled Captain Drinkwater
for an incompetent tarpaulin officer who, by his very age, was barely fit to command a frigate, had been passed over for a line-of-battle ship and clearly deserved no better than to be commander of the glorified dispatch-boat that the
Patrician
had become. This irrational outburst astounded the officers. They stood silent with disbelief as Metcalfe's bravado ran its erratic course and he finally slammed out of the wardroom.

For a moment nobody moved, then Frey began to put his paints and paper away and, as always, the routine of the ship reasserted itself. The watch was called, and Frey prepared to go on deck.

‘Thank you, Moncrieff,' Frey said as the marine officer bent and retrieved half the water-colour sketch, ‘I mean for your support.'

‘I can't take the measure of the man,' Moncrieff said, puzzled and staring at the closed door of the wardroom, ‘what does he hope to gain by such conduct?'

Frey shrugged. ‘I don't know.'

‘You kept your temper very well, Mr Frey,' put in the Reverend Simpson, ‘under somewhat extreme provocation.' The chaplain's thin, soft fingers had reached out for one of the sketches. ‘These are really very good . . . but not worth fighting over.'

‘I collect Mr Metcalfe's distempered spirit may be something to beware of, gentlemen. Well, we are expected for dinner . . .'

Frey cooled off during his watch, his anger subsiding to mere annoyance. He regretted being unable to dine with Drinkwater but could not have sat at the same table as Metcalfe that afternoon. Nor could he, at the end of his watch, return to the wardroom where Metcalfe, being a creature of predictable habit, would be drinking a glass of wine. At such times, the man was at his most truculent and critical, and habitually found some small matter to complain of, a gun in one's battery untidily lashed, a rusty round-shot in the garlands, or a seaman upon whom some misdemeanour could be pinned but in which his divisional officer was implicated. It was remarkable, Frey reflected, how in so short a time Metcalfe has impressed his generally
unpleasant character upon the ship.

Resolved not to return to the wardroom, Frey decided instead to visit Midshipman Belchambers in the gunroom on the pretext of giving him some instruction. Immediately upon descending to the gloom of the orlop he realized his mistake. The surprised and furtive looks of men about him, the quick evasive slinking away and the whispered warning of a commissioned presence seemed to Frey's overwrought nerves to echo into the dark recesses of the ship with a sinister significance. Off-duty marines in their berth just forward of the midshipmen's den stopped polishing boots and bayonets. The midshipmen themselves wore expressions of guilt and Frey was just in time to see a book snapped shut, a pencil hurriedly concealed and a stack of promissory notes swept out of sight. He caught Mr Midshipman Porter's eye.

‘What are you running a book on, Mr Porter?'

‘Er, a book, sir? Er, nothing, sir . . .'

Frey looked about him. The collusion of the midshipmen argued against anything serious being wrong. He had not disturbed a mutinous assembly and would be best advised to turn a blind eye to the matter.