The Golden Ocean (18 page)

‘You hold your tongue,’ cried Peter, with monstrous injustice.
‘And new-reeve that tackle at once. Green, what are you gaping at? Is this a—picnic? I’ll have the next man flogged who looks up from his work. Gibbering like a lot of French monkeys. Who tied this lubberly knot? Don’t you know a parbuckle?’

Quite demurely the men hoisted the blubber. Since those far-off days in the Channel, Peter’s voice had taken on an entirely different ring; un-selfconsciously it could make the menacing noises to which the men were accustomed—noises that were personally directed and were yet essentially impersonal: rank talking to rating, not a boy to a man. He was not much older in years, and he looked much like an ordinary boy: yet on occasion out of that boy’s face could look a man old in hard experience—a disconcerting sight, but not a rare one in the Navy, where a midshipman might have been in action ten times by the age of fourteen, and have seen violent death looking straight at him in a hundred different shapes. But what was more important was that the men really liked him: they knew he understood his work: they knew how he had behaved when the wind blew strong: and he had not spent so many of his watches below bearing a hand in the indescribable squalor of the ’tween-decks—twenty or thirty fit men cannot look after two hundred sick and dying as well as work a ship through those dreadful seas—he had not done that for nothing, and they let him fulminate without resentment.

He cooled off quite soon: for it is the custom in the Navy for the officers to share in all the very nasty work—the Commodore had carried stretchers with Peter at the other end when they first unloaded the fetid sick-bay—and by the time the
Centurion
’s topgallants had disappeared, Peter, greasy from head to foot, was seen to smile.

‘I sailed along of a cove once, sir,’ said Hairy Amos, throwing a handful of tried-out blubber under the cauldron, ‘as what lived on this here for seven months on end.’

‘Did he, though?’ said Peter, looking at the frittered blubber attentively.

‘Yes, sir, he did, withouten lie, strike me—’

‘You are not to swear, Amos,’ said Peter.

‘No, sir. Beg pardon, sir. Which he was one of these Hull whalers, and by mistake he got left with three or four mates, a hunting reindeer—a sort of flat-footed wild cow, sir—in Greenland: and they had been trying-out whale blubber, same as like we are trying-out sea-lion blubber. So when they had ate up their reindeers, and they see as how the master had abandoned them for the winter, which the winter is precious long in those parts—’

‘No it ain’t,’ said Burrows.

‘Yes it is,’ said Amos.

‘No it ain’t,’ said Burrows. ‘Not alongside of the Horn, it ain’t.’

‘Who are you?’ asked Green, who had nothing whatever to do with the discussion, and who knew perfectly well who Burrows was, having slept within eighteen inches of him throughout the commission.

‘Pipe down,’ cried Peter. ‘Strike me—Hairy Amos, go on.’

‘Which the winter in those parts is very, very long,’ said Hairy Amos slowly, fixing Burrows with his eye. ‘So they said, “Strike us—, we shall have to eat the fritters, what we have tried-out blubber of, these four months past.” And so they did; and so they was all rescued come the summer,’ concluded Amos.

‘What happened next?’ asked Smith.

‘Nothing.’

‘Well, that’s a rotten yarn,’ said Burrows, and the boiling-party appeared to agree.

‘Hur,’ cried Amos, vexed by this reception, ‘which I had the honour of addressing my remarks to Mr Palafox, not to a lot of crawling longshoremen. I mean to say, my old shipmate said as how these fritters, the whale fritters, I mean, not these
here
fritters, what we are trying-out now—’

‘How did your shipmate know about our fritters?’ asked Burrows suspiciously. ‘What call had he to go on about our fritters? They are very good fritters.’

‘Not these fritters,’ cried Amos, lost in the complexity, and now convicted in the eyes of the party of disloyalty to the ship, whose fritters were far better than the
Gloucester
’s fritters or the
Tryal
’s, let alone the distant fritters of some unknown Hull whaler.

‘What did he say about the Greenland fritters?’ asked Peter.

‘He said, sir,’ replied Hairy Amos impressively, ‘which these was his very words, “Whale fritters,” sir, “is the loathlyest meat in the world.”’

This was greeted by a stony silence: the men refused to be impressed by Amos’s friend, or to pay him any credit; and after a while Burrows said, ‘You and your fritters.’

‘I only passed the remark,’ mumbled Amos.

‘You and your remarks,’ said Burrows. ‘I never heard such a tale.’

‘If you know a better, Burrows,’ said Peter, stirring the fire, ‘you tell it.’

‘Hor, hor,’ cried Hairy Amos, ‘that’s right, sir. Fair enough, hor, hor.’

They were waiting for the sea-lion blubber to yield its oil—it was wanted to give the
Centurion
boot-hose tops—and there was nothing to do but wait, now that the casks were all neatly arranged and the next boiling of seal-lions were flayed.

Burrows scratched his head. ‘Well, sir,’ he said at last, ‘I don’t set up for to be a literary gent’—glaring at Amos—‘but at least I can tell a
true
tale of what happened to me, and not to some lubber in God-knows-where, with so-called fritters or wild cows with stuns’l booms rigged fore and aft. It was in the year twenty-one—or was it twenty-two? No, it was twenty-one, without a word of lie, for it was the same year that I married Sue, a laundress then as she is now, God bless her, second door past the Lion in Thursday Street, Deptford: you can’t miss it, and if you do the Lion will always send a potboy to show you the way—shirts got up directly and sailors’ tarpaulins mended as well as officers’ linen, by S. Burrows: and she can show you her lines, not like some people’s so-called females—’ another glare at Amos, who blushed and hung his
wicked old hairy head. ‘In the year twenty-one I shipped aboard of the
Rose
, P. Rogers master, of two hundred and forty ton, from the Pool for the Coast with a mixed cargo; and we was four days south and west of St Vincent when a Sallee rover laid us along. Well, we fought as long as we could, but they grappled us tight and come over the side yelling blue murder—a lot of nasty black men with swords, two hundred of ’em and more. So they sorts us out and puts us in rows, a-peering into our hands. And those as had horny hands they put to one side, and the rest—a few gentlemen passengers and the merchants, they drops overboard, seeing a gentleman’s no sort of use—begging your pardon, sir.’

‘Never mind,’ said Peter, laughing as loud as the rest of the party and looking at his hands, which would certainly have kept him aboard the rover.

‘Which I mean, no use in the slave-market of Sallee,’ explained Burrows anxiously, ‘for I am sure they are very useful for—for—’

‘Navigation?’ suggested Green.

‘No,’ said Burrows. ‘Any shell-back mate can do that. For—’

‘Parsons?’ said Smith.

‘No,’ said Burrows. ‘The apostles were all from the lower-deck. Not parsons.’

‘Scholards?’ said Amos.

‘Scholards, maybe,’ said Burrows, doubtfully. ‘Anyhow, very useful and valuable, I am sure, for something. But not in the market of Sallee, where they carried us. And I was sold to a Jew-man named Isaac, which he was a very good master to me, and gave me my liberty when the fleet lay off Tangiers, where he lived then, having removed; which would have been handsome in a Christian or a renegado, and he was only a Jew, poor man. But he said according to his religion when you had served seven year—’

‘Mr Palafox, sir?’ This was a stranger, a man from the
Tryal
, and the Centurions stared at him in wooden silence, jerking their thumbs or their heads towards Peter.

‘Mr Palafox, sir? Compliments of
Tryal
’s midshipmen and would be honoured to see Mr Palafox to dinner.’

‘My best compliments to the
Tryal
’s midshipmen,’ said Peter graciously, from amidst the oil and blubber, ‘and I shall esteem myself most happy.’

‘Aye-aye, sir,’ said the seaman, and padded away, muttering ‘… shall esteem hisself happy, shall esteem hisself—best compliments and shall esteem….’

It was difficult in fact to esteem himself very happy while the
Centurion
was at sea. Quite apart from his bitter initial disappointment, he found that he was lost without her: he had for so long identified himself with the ship. But he was not strongly miserable, either: in addition to a naturally sanguine temperament he had plenty of work (nauseating, but important), and he prided himself on the tier of casks that awaited the
Centurion
’s pleasure—a full tier placed ostentatiously near the
Gloucester
’s and
Tryal
’s and out-topping them both. The surviving midshipmen of the
Tryal
—Balthaser, Todd and Bentley—were cheerful, hospitable souls, and they invited him often. The
Gloucester
’s berth was not nearly so much to his liking, although they were perfectly civil to a guest and did more than their duty: he did not come to know them at all well, however. Captain Saunders also asked him to dine: but Captain Saunders had too recently been his first lieutenant, with the power of the high justice, the middle and the low, for Peter to rid himself of a feeling of guilt in his presence, although Captain Saunders was the most amiable of hosts—a totally different being from the Number One who had so often and so insistently mentioned Peter’s shortcomings from the other side of the disciplinary table. Peter mentioned this feeling to Bentley, who laughed, and said, ‘It’s always like that. Did you hear about Mr Anson at Portsmouth? He went to Sir Charles with an Admiralty order for three hundred hands—flat order, no nonsense. But he had been a snotty—sounds funny, don’t it, the Commodore a midshipman, ha, ha—under Sir Charles, and the Admiral (who knew about the order, you see, and wanted every man-jack for the fleet) sang
out, “Mr Anson, take your hands out of your pockets this minute.” Which cooked his goose without another word said.’

‘It’s the
Centurion
,’ said Peter, positively.

‘I doubt it,’ said Todd.

‘I tell you it is,’ cried Peter. ‘Look at that sprits’l tops’l—do you see the damned awkward great patch in the starboard leach? I put it there myself. There, as she rises. And t’other is a prize she has taken.’

‘I doubt it,’ said Todd.

‘Bah,’ said Peter, clapping his telescope to and darting down the hill.

‘Please, sir, may I come too?’ he asked, purple in the face with speed, as Mr Saunders stepped into his cutter—the signal for the sloop’s captain was flying from the
Centurion
’s distant mizzen.

‘Make haste, then,’ said the captain, and Peter skipped into the boat as they shoved off on the wave.

The cutter pulled at racing speed, for the men were as eager to see the prize as Captain Saunders and Peter, and to hear the news: but it seemed a tedious age before the ship and the boat came together.

The grinning berth greeted Peter with a flood of wonderful details.

‘Pizarro’s squadron turned back at the Horn,’ said Preston. ‘Lost two ships.’

‘And the rest battered beyond belief—all condemned, ha, ha,’ said Bailey.

‘And the Spaniards were on the island until a day or two before we came in. Only a country force, armed merchantmen, but they would have chewed us up: and there we were cursing like mad because we couldn’t find it earlier.’

‘We had such a chase.’

‘Lost her and found her again—Mr Saumarez leaping about the main-royal truck all night.’

‘Crowded on everything, including my wipe.’

‘Ran her down in the evening.’

‘Fired four shots.’

‘And she let fly her sheets and halliards in alarm.’

‘She did, really. Never seen such a sight—washing day nothing to it—royals, stuns’ls and all.’

‘Loaded with silver.’

‘And sugar and things—cloth.’

‘Twenty-three cases of dollars, two hundredweight apiece.’

‘And masses of plate.’

‘And fifty-three hands—Lord, what a help they’ll be.’

sang Keppel, coming below. ‘Mr Palafox, sir,’ he said with an elegant bow, ‘allow me the pleasure of congratulating you on being far better off than you were last week.’

‘What, do I get some?’ asked Peter, looking pleased.

‘Oh, yes. You get some, although you were only lounging about under the palm-trees while we ran horrible dangers afloat: there were four real six-pounders shot off, bang, bang, bang, and Bailey had a fit.’

‘Where’s Ransome?’

‘In the prize. So is your man, watching the Dons like a hawk. Let’s go and wave.’

The prize,
Nuestra Señora
del
Monte Carmelo
, was sailing under the
Centurion
’s lee—a handsome, high-built Spanish ship with a noble poop, upon which stood Mr Saumarez, and Ransome near him. Ransome saw them, but did not venture to signal overtly: instead he waited until the first lieutenant had walked to the weather-rail and then he slapped his pocket, nudged the air with his elbow, raised an imaginary bottle, curved his arm as one who would dance—indicating thereby that they were all on fiddler’s green now, and that it was very delightful. But the humour of his gestures overcame him, and
they heard a hoarse, stifled bellow float over the water, saw Mr Saumarez turn sharply and Ransome’s head bend attentively to the signal-book, while hard words passed on the
Carmelo
’s poop: these appeared to wound Ransome to the heart, for when the first lieutenant had resumed his station, Ransome was seen to apply an immense spotted handkerchief to his eyes, and from time to time he was obliged to wring it dry.

Sean was at the break of the fo’c’sle, armed, and glaring now down the forehatch, now into the waist of the prize, where a few disconsolate Spanish passengers stood sadly about: he was obsessed with the idea that someone, somewhere, was hiding some yet undiscovered silver, and the impossibility of seeing all the captives at once was wearing him to a hag-ridden shadow. He saw Peter out of the corner of his eye, touched his forelock, and without ever removing his piercing gaze from a tiny yellow Spanish merchant, suspected of having moidores in the heels of his shoes, Sean laid his forefinger to the side of his nose in a very significant and portentous way.