The Thirteen Gun Salute (4 page)

In the present violent putting to sea, earlier than all expectation, both watches were strangely mingled, with duties and stations far out of the ordinary run; and it so happened that most of the Orkneymen were on the forecastle, gathered round their leader Macaulay. Pullings gave the orders loud and clear, the bosun piped them in the shorthand of the sea, and the hands on the forecastle instantly clapped on to the falls, Macaulay at their head.

A slight pause, and then, throwing his weight on the rope, he sang out

'Heisa, heisa,'

followed by his mates in perfect unison,

'Heisa, heisa,

Vorsa, vorsa,

You, you.

One long pull

More power

Young blood

Ha ha ha hough.'

They sang on a scale unknown to Jack, with intervals he had never heard; and the last line, a falsetto shriek as the blocks clashed together, quite astonished him.

He looked aft, where Stephen would ordinarily be leaning over the taffrail gazing at the wake. No Stephen. 'I suppose the Doctor has gone below,' he said. 'He would have liked that. We might ease off again and ask him to come on deck.'

'I doubt we might get a short answer,' said Pullings in a low voice. 'He is sitting there with so many papers he might be paying off a first-rate, and he roared at Mr Martin just now like a bull.'

As far as devotion was concerned, Nathaniel Martin's was directed more towards Maturin than Aubrey, and Stephen's snappishness had quite wounded him - a snappishness that Martin had scarcely known in him before, but that seemed to be growing sharper and more frequent.

There was to be sure some excuse for it on this occasion, since a moderate lee-lurch had sent Martin staggering from one piled chair to another, upsetting and mingling four carefully separated heaps of paper, while the draught he let in spread them over the cabin deck like a whitish carpet.

Their presence arose from the fact that the British government was not alone in wishing to change the state of affairs in the Spanish and even Portuguese possessions in South America: the French hoped to do the same, and well before London's tentative contacts with the potential rebels in Chile, Peru and elsewhere, the French had carried their much more ambitious (and much more avowable) plans to the verge of action. They had equipped a new frigate that was to cruise upon Allied merchantmen and particularly South Sea whalers while at the same time landing agents, arms and money on the coast of Chile. It was this frigate, the Diane, that Jack Aubrey had cut out from St Martin's just before she sailed, and in her he had captured all the French agents' information and instruction, all their correspondents' views of the various local situations, all the names of French sympathizers and of those whose loyalty had been or could be purchased. All this was encoded according to four separate systems, and it was these systems that Martin had upset, together with their substrata of Maturin's involved private business - university chairs, annuities, settlements and the like. All the French papers would have to be sorted all over again, 'then read in clear, digested and committed to memory, with perhaps some of the more forgettable points re-encoded for future reference. Ordinarily the great bulk of this work would have been done by Sir Joseph's department, but in this instance both he and Stephen agreed that they should keep the existence of the whole mass of papers to themselves.

Martin retired to the orlop, where by the light of a battlelantern he finished entering the ship's medical stores in a book and then wrote labels for the bottles and boxes in the medicine-chest, a new, particularly massive affair with two locks.

From these he went on to check their surgical instruments, the grim saws, retractors, artery-hooks, gags, leather-covered chains; and then the more massive substances such as portable soup, stored in flat wooden cases of thirty-six slabs apiece, lime and lemon juice, plaster of Paris for healing broken limbs in the oriental manner (much favoured now by Dr Maturin), and neat square bales of lint, each marked with the broad arrow. He was turning over the last (already attacked by rats) when Stephen joined him. 'Everything seems to be in order,' said Martin, 'except that I have not been able to find more than this single case-bottle quart of laudanum, instead of all our usual five-gallon carboys.'

'There is only that one quart,' said Stephen. 'I have decided to employ it no more, except in the greatest emergency.'

'It used to be your panacea,' observed Martin, his mind drifting away to the builders at home: were they attending to the roof at this moment? He doubted it: he would send a note to Mr Huge by the Plymouth pilot-boat.

'I am no more infallible than Paracelsus, who used antimony for a great many years,' replied Maturin. 'There are grave objections to the frequent exhibition of laudanum, I find.'

'Yes, yes, of course,' said Martin, clapping his hand to his forehead. 'I beg your pardon.'

There were indeed very grave objections. Padeen, Stephen's Irish servant and loblolly-boy, often in and about the sick-berth and the medical stores, had become deeply addicted to laudanum, the alcoholic tincture of opium. Stephen, late in discovering the fact, had done what he could, but what he could do was not enough; and at the time he was disabled. Padeen deserted the ship when she touched at Leith, and being unable to get his opium by fair means- he was illiterate, barely comprehensible in English, and he knew the substance only by the name of tincture - had taken it by force, breaking into an apothecary's house by night and tasting till he found it.

This had happened in Edinburgh, far from Stephen's knowledge until the very end; but all the talent of the Scottish bar could not disguise the fact that a capital offence had been committed or that the big wild Papist at the bar was guilty of it. Padeen was sentenced to death, and it had required all the force of Jack Aubrey's influence as member for Milford to have the hanging commuted to transportation. Padeen had been sent, with many hundred more, in the next convoy to Botany Bay; but at least he carried an earnest recommendation from Dr Martin to the surgeon of the ship and the medical officer in the colony and one from Sir Joseph Banks to the Governor of New South Wales.

'I beg your pardon,' said Martin again. 'How my mind came to...'

A hail on deck, the distant reverberation of running feet, the perceptible rotation of the deck and the dying away of the complex sound of a ship in motion relieved him from his embarrassment. 'It is stopping,' he said.

'We are lying up,' said Stephen. 'Let us go above, having first locked the chest and dowsed the light.'

They climbed quite nimbly up the dim, familiar ladders - seamen in this if in nothing else - and emerged blinking into the brilliant light of day; and there was the Eddystone a mile to the north-westward, with the mainland rather hazy beyond it and four ships of the line close hauled for the Sound.

'Are you not amazed, Doctor?' asked Davidge, the officer of the watch.

'Certainly,' said Stephen, looking at the lighthouse with the ring of surf at its foot and the halo of gulls over its head. 'As noble an erection as could well be conceived.'

'No, no,' said Davidge. 'The decks, the brasswork, the squared yards, all fit for an admiral's inspection.'

'Nothing could be neater, or more trim,' said Stephen; and still gazing at the lighthouse he saw a pilot-cutter, obviously bound for the frigate and obviously receiving signals from her and replying to them.

'Thank God I have my letters prepared,' he cried, and ran down to his cabin. By the time he had actually found the letters and brought them on deck, direct hailing had replaced the signals, and he heard the cutter being desired to come under the ship's lee and to pass up the parcels first.

'I told you I mean to carry out a chain of observations for Humboldt, did I not?' said Jack, breaking off his conversation with the pilot. 'A chain right round to the Pacific. There is an improved dipping-needle in one of those cases, together with a very delicate hygrometer of his own invention, a better azimuth-compass than anything I possess, and a Geneva cyanograph, as well as spare thermometers graduated by Ramsden. The pilot says they can go into a man's pocket, with a shove; but I shall not trust them to anything but a whip: in any case there is the post.'

The cutter came alongside, Mr Standish, the frigate's new purser, beaming up at his friends. 'Now just you sit there, sir,' said the pilot, guiding him to a coil of rope, 'and stay quiet while the valuables are got aboard.'

The mail-bag came first, and Jack, sorting its meagre contents, said, 'A bundle of letters for you, Doctor, and a parcel, as heavy as one of the girls' plum-puddings: post paid, I am happy to say.' This was followed by a number of little cases, Standish's violin, and an object that looked like a telescope but that was a rolled-up chart showing Humboldt's maximum and minimum sea-temperatures over a vast stretch of ocean, all placed successively in a net attached to a whip from the yard-arm which gently rose and gently fell to the traditional cry of Two - six, two - six, the nearest thing to a shanty (apart from the bowline-haul) countenanced by the strictly Royal Navy members of the crew.

The quartermaster unhooked the last and waved his arm; the pilot turned to Standish, said, 'Now, sir, if you please,' and guided him to the rail, helped him to mount upon it and balance there, grasping a shroud, and said 'Just spring across to them steps at the top of the rise; spring easy before she falls.' With a boat-hook he pulled the cutter as close to the ship as was right in this choppy sea and right under the steps.

The Surprise, stored for a very long voyage, was low in the water, yet even so some twelve feet of wet side rose from the sea-level; and the steps, though wide, were startlingly shallow. Stephen and Martin stood immediately above him, by a gangway stanchion, leaning down and giving advice: Standish was the only man belonging to the ship who knew less about the sea than they (he had never left the land before) and they did not dislike sharing their knowledge.

'You are to consider,' said Stephen, 'that the inward slope of the ship's flank, the tumblehome as we call it, makes the steps far less vertical than they seem. Furthermore, when the ship rolls from you, showing her copper, the angle is even more advantageous.'

'The great thing is not to hesitate,' said Martin. 'A determined spring at the right moment, and the impetus will carry you up directly. I am sure you have seen a cat fly up a much steeper wall, only touching once or twice. Impetus; it is all impetus.'

The two vessels wallowed companionably for a while.

'Leap, leap!' cried Martin at the third upward rise.

'Stay,' said Stephen, holding up his hand. 'The roll, or heave, is wrong.'

Standish relaxed again, breathing hard. 'Come on, sir,' said the pilot impatiently as the boat rose once more. Standish gauged the distance and gave a convulsive spring; he had much over-estimated the expanse of water and he struck the side with great force, missing the steps entirely and falling straight back into the sea. The pilot instantly shoved off, to prevent the next surge from crushing him between the cutter and the ship. Standish came to the surface, spouting water; the pilot lunged with his boat-hook, but missing his collar, tore his scalp. Standish sank again, and the cutter, no longer anchored to the Surprise, drove before the wind. 'I can't swim,' roared the pilot, and Jack, looking up from his precious hygrometer, cyanograph and the rest, grasped the situation at once.

Flinging off his coat, he plunged straight over the side, striking the purser as he rose again and driving him down breathless a good four fathoms, into quite dim water. This however gave time for entering ropes to be shipped and for a line with a man-harness hitch to be passed down, so that when Jack - a practised hand - brought Standish's head clear of the water, the purser could be hauled aboard and the Captain could walk up the steps of his ship at his ease.

He found Standish sitting on a carronade-slide and gasping while the surgeons examined his wound. 'Nothing at all,' said Stephen. 'A mere superficial tear. Mr Martin will sew it up in a trice.'

'I am most exceedingly obliged to you, sir,' said the purser, standing up and fairly pouring blood from the superficial tear.

'My dear sir, I beg you will not think of it,' replied Jack, shaking his bloody hand. Leaning over the rail he called out to the pilot, who was clawing up into the wind, 'All's well', and ran below, where a furious Killick was waiting with a towel, a dry shirt and trousers. 'And these here woollen drawers, sir,' he said. 'You done it again - you are always a-doing of it - but this time you will catch your death, without you put on these woollen drawers. Who ever heard of dipping his bare arse off of the Eddystone? It is worse than the North Pole: far worse.'

Standish had been led right aft to be stitched in a really good light, and they were swabbing his blood from the deck, the slide and even the metal of the carronade. Opinion among the foremast hands was quite strongly against the purser.

'A pretty beginning,' said Awkward Davies, who like many other Surprises had been rescued by Jack Aubrey but who very much disliked sharing this distinction. 'Nothing could bring worse luck.'

'He has ruined the Captain's fine pantaloons with his nasty blood,' said a forecastleman. 'It never comes out.'

'Now he is being sick,' observed old Plaice.

'Mr Martin is handing him below.'

Standish and his perfectly proper, indeed absolutely called for, expression of gratitude having disappeared, faintly belching, Jack returned to the quarterdeck and said to Stephen, 'Let me show you my splendid hygrometer. Here are spare blades, at the side of the case, do you see - uncommon neat. And wonderfully sensitive, much more so than the whalebone kind. Should you like to breathe upon it? What a piece of luck poor Standish did not bring it over in his pocket. That would have damped its spirit, I believe.' Jack laughed heartily, showed Stephen the cyanoscope, and walked him away to the taffrail, where he said quietly, 'I wish you had been here a little while ago. The Orkneymen sang out in a most surprising manner. I had never heard them before, what with the refitting, the coppering, the quarter-davits, and they being kept busy in the hold; but before we get under way again I think it can be repeated, and I should like you to tell me what you make of their cadences.'