The Unknown Shore (8 page)

But Tobias had lived through a very great deal in the course of
that day: he had been hunted down by the press-gang and taken, restored to his friends with surprising violence, clothed, examined by Mr Eliot, examined by the surgeons, and provided with a warrant, a ship, a career and the prospect of seeing creatures unknown to natural philosophy in the immediate future; and now, in the moments that had just passed, it had seemed that the process was to be reversed. The speed at which they had had to move – flying to Marlborough Street for money, to Mrs Fuller’s for his indenture and his remaining possessions, quite apart from the racing about with Mr Eliot – had left no time for eating, and now Tobias was quite exhausted with nervous tension, hunger and emotion. He said ‘Sack?’ nodded for a minute, and quietly observed, ‘It was a very good sort of sack, in the first place.’ He then went to sleep, so utterly and completely to sleep that he was obliged to be lashed on to the luggage to keep him on the coach at all, and Jack supported him to stop him from falling sideways as the coach ran through Guildford, Godalming, Mousehill, Seven Thorns, Petersfield, all the way past Purbrook and right up Portsdown Hill, from whose height the whole vast expanse of the harbour could be seen, the dockyard, the fortifications and, far out, under the sheltering Isle of Wight, the squadron riding at St Helen’s, the
Centurion,
the
Gloucester,
the
Severn,
the
Pearl,
the
Tryall
sloop and the
Wager.

T
HE SQUADRON
did not sail that Saturday. Mr Eliot learnt that it was not to sail the minute he set foot to ground in Portsmouth, from the most authoritative of all sources, his own captain. Captain Kidd was coming out of the Crown, in company with Captain Mitchel of the
Pearl,
as the coach pulled up, and as soon as he saw the surgeon he called out, ‘You might have come down by the wagon, doctor, if you had pleased, ha, ha,’ with the greatest good humour.

Mr Eliot had served forty years in the Navy, and he received the news with perfect equanimity, only observing that the Admiralty would find it cheaper to cut their throats out of hand, than to kill them by sending them round the Horn still later in the year. Jack was also quite unmoved by learning that all their frantic hurry had been useless; he remarked that it would be just as well for Toby to have a decent meal and to spend the rest of the night in a bed ashore – it was always more agreeable to report to one’s ship in the morning.

The morning of Saturday was as sweet and clear and blue as an English summer’s day can be. Tobias had woken to the sound of gulls, and to the realisation of what yesterday had done and what today was to bring – a very vivid, sudden and delightful awakening. He found that Jack was up already, washed, dressed and fully alive, peering at Gosport through a telescope.

‘Would you like to have a look?’ he said. ‘You can’t see St Helen’s from here, but if you screw yourself into the corner, you can get a charming view of the hospital.’

Tobias looked at Haslar, looked at three herring-gulls, several black-headed gulls and a shag. ‘Gulls, eh, Jack?’ he said, with a triumphant munch of his jaws. ‘Sea-birds. I shall go out and look at ‘em more closely.’

‘Don’t you think it,’ said Jack.

‘Must I not go out?’

‘No,’ said Jack, very firmly. ‘You are never to go out, Toby, unless I am with you. Not by land, anyhow. So don’t you think it.’

Tobias could not but acknowledge the justice of this, and Jack, having gained his point, instantly proposed taking a turn while breakfast was preparing.

If he had wished to display the naval might of England at its greatest advantage, he could not have chosen a better day: the vast fleet against Carthagena and the Spanish main was fitting out, as well as their own squadron, and men-of-war of every rate lay at Spithead, with transports among them, and tenders and ships’ boats perpetually coming and going, their white sails on the sea answering to the scraps of white cloud that were passing easily over the pure blue sky. The royal dockyard, the greatest in the world, reared its astonishing forest of masts in even more profusion than usual, and although the day was a holiday in the civilian part of the town, the yard echoed and re-bellowed with the din of hammers. The clear, sharp air from the sea mingled with the smell of tar, paint and cordage from the dockyard and with a certain spirituous mixture of brandy and rum that emanated from the town in general.

Jack pointed out their own squadron over at St Helen’s, too far to be distinguished without a glass; he pointed out the
Royal George,
a three-decker with a hundred guns, and all the other rates, from the first right down to the
Salamander,
a bomb-ketch of eight guns (and those of the smallest kind); he defined a ship of the line and a frigate, a ship, a barque and a brig, and he would have defined a great deal more had he not been interrupted by the sound of cheering. It was the
Lively,
a sloop of war, coming out of the harbour: she glided down to within a few yards of them; her gaff-topsail took the breeze, her close-hauled mainsail filled with a huge smooth curve, and she heeled away, running faster and faster, as though she herself made the wind; it was as pretty a sight as could be imagined – new paint, new canvas, gleaming decks and shining brass; her new commander’s pride and joy – and the long wake straight as she sailed so tightly for the green island over the water.

‘How did you like that, Toby?’ asked Jack, when the cheering had died away. Tobias did not reply, but he slowly gnashed his teeth, and his white face showed a flush of delight.

On the way back to the Crown Jack pointed out a vice-admiral
of the blue and two post-captains, and he thought it was well to profit by Tobias’ present nautical enthusiasm to impress upon him the necessity for a due respect for rank.

‘You cannot conceive,’ he said, earnestly spreading butter upon his toast in the coffee-room of the Crown, ‘my dear Toby, you cannot
conceive
the gulf between a captain and a mere person.’ He went on in this strain, while Tobias ate four boiled eggs out of a napkin; but he doubted whether he was doing much good, and for some pensive moments he envisaged the consequences of Tobias’ turning upon the commodore with reasons in favour of a democratic management of the squadron. However, his mind, saturated with buttered toast and coffee, did not dwell for long upon this, and with a sudden grin he said, ‘It is infernal good luck, by the way, that we don’t sail directly: you would have had to put up with purser’s slops and whatever we could have bought at Madeira, or wherever it is we water. But now we can fill you a sea-chest in a decent sort of way.’ Jack, like all his relatives on his father’s side, was impatient of ready money; solvency, with gold jingling in his pocket, seemed to him a thoroughly unnatural condition; and few things gave him a more lively pleasure than spending. The thought of spending a considerable amount, very quickly, and upon Tobias, filled him with such an agreeable sense of anticipation that he whistled aloud. Jack had a true and melodious whistle, but it was rather loud indoors, and a yellow-faced lieutenant at the next table put his hand to his forehead and glared at them with pure hatred. ‘But,’ said Jack, glancing at the clock, ‘we had better report first; besides, that will enable you to find out what you will need in the way of saws and knives and so on.’

They walked down to the water and called for a boat.
‘Wager,’
said Jack, stepping neatly in. ‘Easy,’ he said, picking Tobias out of the bottom and setting him upright. Tobias had stepped in while the boat was rising, and (as it has happened to so many landsmen) he had ignominiously doubled up at the knees. ‘It was the wave,’ Jack explained.

‘Was it indeed?’ said Tobias. ‘The billow? I shall grow accustomed to them in time, no doubt.’

It was a long pull, but the morning was so splendid, the fleet and its activities so absorbing, that for more than half of the way they sat silent: when the
Wager was
well in sight, Jack bade the waterman
bear away for the head of the squadron, and so come down to her, she lying in the last berth but one.

‘But you said go straight for the store-ship first,’ said the waterman.

Jack had been thinking of the
Wager
by the same plain shameful name, but it stung him exceedingly to hear anyone else say it, and he desired the waterman very passionately to stow his gab and to attend to his duty. The waterman, who had been cursed by admirals before Jack was born, took this with provoking calm, only observing that ‘it would be an extra fourpence, and twopence for the oaths.’

‘Store-ship,’ muttered Jack. ‘Damn your eyes.’ But as they came abreast of St Helen’s church, where the commodore lay, and turned to pass down the line, his spirits revived: it was a beautiful line of ships, and he explained them to Tobias as they passed. ‘The
Centurion,’
he said, ‘she’s a sixty-gun ship, do you see? A fourth rate. Damn it, Toby, that’s where we should be, alongside of Keppel and Ransome. Look, going along by the hances, there’s the commodore – do you see him, Toby? He is pointing down into the waist.’

‘I see him,’ said Toby, looking attentively at the august form of Mr Anson. ‘Shall we pull off our hats, and wave?’

‘No, no,’ cried Jack, for the
Centurion
was no distance away at all, and he could even hear the commodore’s voice. ‘Give way,’ he called to the boatman, and he hastily drew Tobias’ attention to the
Gloucester,
the next in line, and then to the
Severn,
both fifty-gun ships. ‘Who commands the
Severn
now?’ he asked the boatman.

‘Captain Legge,’ said the boatman. ‘A lord’s son. The honourable Legge, as they say. You can do anything you please if you are a lord’s son’ – spitting virtuously into the sea. ‘If I was a lord’s son,’ said the boatman, ‘do you think as I should be a-sitting here, toiling and moiling all day long?’

‘Do you moil a great deal?’ asked Tobias.

‘Like a porpoise, governor; and likewise toil. But was I a lord’s son, I should sit a-taking of my ease in a cutter with pink taffety sails: because why? Because honest worth has no countenance these days.’

‘Captain Legge was with Admiral Vernon at Porto Bello,’ said Jack. ‘He was in the
Pearl
then. And there
is
the
Pearl:
ain’t she elegant?’ She was, indeed; and she had the aura of a famous victory about her still. When Jack had looked long enough at her, he added, ‘Forty. She is one of the old forty-gun ships, but she is a very fine
sailer on a wind, they say – will outsail anything. Captain Mitchel has her now. The sloop lying inside her is the
Tryall:
belongs to us.’

‘But you described a sloop as a vessel with one mast and a sail out behind,’ objected Tobias, seeing two undeniable and very tall masts before him, and a square rig.

‘Ah, she’s only
called
a sloop,’ said Jack. ‘It is perfectly logical really – we do not mean that she
is
a sloop.’ He did not elucidate this statement, but looked fixedly towards the
Wager,
which they were now approaching. ‘Well, here we are,’ he said, after a few moments, and he glanced anxiously at Tobias to see whether he would be disappointed: but to Tobias the
Wager
looked very much like any other ship. She was about a hundred feet long, as opposed to the hundred and fifty of the fourth rates, and she had but a single row of gun-ports; but still she was a high and beautiful ship, far beyond anything that Tobias had aspired to. Searching for something agreeable to say (for he felt Jack’s eye upon him), he stared at her for a while, screwing his face hideously to one side and scratching his right thigh. ‘It is wider than the others,’ he said at last, ‘and, I presume, less liable to be overset.’

It was quite true: the
Wager
was broad in the beam, wide and motherly; she was built to carry a large quantity of merchandise at a prudent pace, and in spite of her naval trim and Captain Kidd’s lavish use of dockyard paint she had (to a knowing eye) nothing of the high-bred, dangerous air of a man-of-war. She was undisguisably a former Indiaman, a store-ship; and however worthy she might be, and however little liable to be overset, Jack thought that it would be difficult to love her.

‘Well, never mind,’ he said; and to the waterman, ‘Lay us alongside, then. Toby,’ he said, in a low but urgent voice, ‘you will be discreet, I beg? You will remember not to scratch or look awry or squint when officers are talking to you? Do just as I do, eh? And manage it so that you come aboard her with your right foot first – it is amazingly lucky.’

It was amazingly lucky, too, that the sea was so calm, so unusually calm; for many a landsman going aboard for the first time has been confronted with the towering ship’s side, rising and falling in nasty, cold, dangerous black water while the boat dances here and there in imminent peril of being crushed or sucked under, and he must
make the journey, dry and undisgraced, over the varying gulf and up the appalling slippery height to the longed-for deck. But Tobias had merely to step from a well-behaved boat to a scarcely-moving ship and walk to the entering-port: which was just as well, for he stopped to ponder at the water-line, and had there been any hint of a swell he must inevitably have been ducked, if not washed off and drowned at the very moment in which his nautical career began.

It was perfectly evident to Jack as he went up the side and as he went from the entering-port to the quarter-deck that the
Wager
had had no intention of sailing that Saturday: she was half deserted, and although her decks were being quite briskly washed she had a comparatively somnolent air. These were momentary impressions, received as he approached the officer of the watch, with Toby just behind him, to report for duty, to announce his presence in a correct and official manner.

Mr Clerk, the master of the
Wager,
was a mild, elderly man, with a bleached, sea-washed appearance and watery blue eyes; he received them kindly, told Jack that the purser had been asking for him, told Tobias that Mr Eliot was in the cockpit at that very moment, and called one of his mates to show them the way. ‘Mr Jones,’ he said, in his nasal East Anglian voice, ‘you will take these gentlemen below, if you please, and see them properly bestowed.’

From the poop to the quarter-deck proper, and thence to the dim light of the upper deck, where Tobias, trying to see too much at once, tripped over the handle of a swab and measured his length (five feet five and a half inches): he brought his forehead against the unsympathetic surface of a gun, and jarred it till it rang again; the master’s mate picked him up, told him that he had fallen down, and that he should take care – that he should look where he was going. At the same time a fat man in a greasy black coat, a pale fat man with the face of a cellar-dweller, hurried down from the shadows and greeted them.

‘Mr Byron?’ he said. ‘The honourable Mr Byron?’

‘At your service, sir,’ said Jack coldly.

‘My name is Hervey – purser,’ said the fat man. ‘And I have saved you a cabin. May I have the pleasure – ?’

‘You are very good,’ said Jack. ‘Mr Hervey, this is Mr Barrow, the surgeon’s mate, who has just joined.’

‘Servant,’ said the purser with a distant nod, and hurrying Jack away by a moist grip of his elbow he continued, ‘I have the honour of being known to your grandfather …’

‘Old Greasy,’ muttered the master’s mate. ‘Come on, young Sawbones, and mind your step.’ Mr Jones spoke in this unceremonious manner not from any native moroseness or incivility of mind, but because he had taken a disgust at the purser’s obsequious tone. They went on a little circuitously towards the cockpit, for part of the gun-deck was at that time shut off, with its ports netted or closed, for the better retention of the lately pressed men, who would escape if ever they could: he led the way along the deck, up and down again, and so to a hatchway that vanished into the total darkness; his voice floated up, advising Tobias to mind the cascabel, with an odd reverberating hollowness, and Tobias, whose eyes were still filled with the yellow flashing coruscations of his fall, followed him by the sound, like a bat. Presently the darkness became a little less intense, and in addition to the smell of bilge, sea, pitch and hemp, Tobias caught the familiar odour of medicaments: they rounded a canvas screen, and there was Mr Eliot, standing in the middle of the cockpit with a farthing candle in his hand and an expression of marked discontent upon his face.