Authors: Patrick O'Brian
‘Mr Whewell,’ he asked the officer of the watch,
‘what do you make our position?’
‘Just at seven bells, sir, I had a very good
observation and found 35* 17’ and perhaps twelve seconds.’
‘Very good,’ said Jack with satisfaction. ‘Let us
signal Squadron diminish lights, reduce sail.’ Then, leaning
over the rail, ‘Ringle?’
‘Sir?’
‘Close to speak pennant.’
‘William,’ said Jack in conversational tone, some minutes
later, looking down at the young man who stood there, smiling up, his steel
hook gleaming in the foremast ratlines. ‘William, you have been in and out of
Laraish pretty often, I believe?’
‘Oh, a score of times at
least, sir.
There was a young person - that is to say, quite frequently, sir.’
‘And are we near enough for you to recognize the
shore-line?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Then be so good as to look into the harbour, and
if you see more than two or three corsairs - big xebec-rigged corsairs and
galleys - stand half a mile offshore and send up three blue lights, if less,
then red lights and rejoin without the loss of a moment.’
‘Aye-aye, sir. More than three, stand off
half a mile: three blue lights. Less, then red lights and
rejoin without the loss of a moment.’
‘Make it so, Mr Reade. Mr Whewell: Reduce sail in
conformity with pennant.’ And directing his voice upwards, ‘Look afore, there!’
Eight bells: all round Surprise the sentinels
called ‘All’s well’ and prepared to go below, but without much conviction, they
knowing the general situation and their captain’s tone of voice. How right they
were. As soon as the muffled thunder of the watch below hurrying up on deck had
died away, Jack said, loud and clear, to Somers, the relieving officer, ‘Mr
Somers, we may pipe to breakfast at two bells or earlier, and then clear. It is
not worth going below. Look out afore, there.’
He swung over the rail to the larboard ratlines and
ran up to the maintop. ‘Good morning, Wilson,’ he said to the lookout,
and stood gazing away eastward, gazing, gazing.
Two bells, and almost at
once three red lights appeared, spreading like crimson flowers one after
another, fading and drifting away fast downwind. Before the second had reached
its full Jack called down, ‘Pipe to breakfast.’
On the quarterdeck he gave orders to increase sail,
to steer south by south-south-west, and to prepare for action: these of course
were signals, but by word of mouth he sent to tell the cook to use a bucket of
slush to get the galley stove right hot right quick.
‘Stephen,’ he said, walking into the cabin, ‘I am
afraid we must disturb you. William has just let us know that Laraish has no
corsairs: since the wind has been dropping this last watch and more, the
likelihood is that the Indiamen will very soon leave their shelter under the
lee of the Sugar Loaf, sailing for home, and that the corsairs mean to cut them
off. So we are pelting down to stop their capers - we shall be setting
close-reefed topgallants presently - and quite soon we shall have to turn you out
to clear for action. But at least there is this consolation: we shall have an
uncovenanted pot of coffee. It is always far better for the people to have
something in their belly before a fight, even if it is only hot burgoo; and
since the fires are lit, we may as well profit by the situation.’
‘It is our obvious duty,’ said Stephen, with a pale
smile. In the earlier crises of his life he had often, indeed generally, taken
refuge in laudanum, or more recently in coca leaves: on this occasion he had
entirely forsworn them, together with tobacco and anything but the merest token
of wine to avoid singularity; yet he had always despised the stylite or even
hair-shirt kind of asceticism and he was still drinking the last of the pot
with something not far from relish - Jack had left him ten minutes earlier -
when the thundering drum beat to quarters.
He swallowed the remaining grouts and hurried down
to the orlop, where he found Poll and Harris, the ship’s butcher: seamen had
already lashed chests together to form two operating tables and Poll was making
fast the covers of number eight sailcloth with a practised hand - she had
already laid out a selection of saws, catlings, clamps, tourniquets,
leather-covered chains, dressings, splints; while Harris had lined up buckets,
swabs, and the usual boxes for limbs.
To them, after a long pause, entered Dr Jacob, led
by an irascible boy - not a ship’s boy, but a nominal captain’s servant,
entered as a first-class volunteer and looked after by the gunner until he
should be rated midshipman and join their berth - one of those useless little
creatures who had been wished on Jack Aubrey in Gibraltar by former ship-mates,
men he could not refuse, though the original hydrographical Surprise had
carried no learners, only thoroughly trained midshipmen capable of passing
their examination for lieutenant in a year or two.
‘There, sir,’ said the first-class volunteer, ‘it
was as simple as I told you the first time. First left,
second left, down the ladder and second on your right. Your right.’
‘Thank you, thank you,’ said Jacob; and to Stephen,
‘Oh sir, I do beg you to forgive me. I am no great seaman, as you know, and
this great dark wandering labyrinth confounded me - darkness visible. At one
time I found myself by the seat of ease in the head, spray dashing upon me from
the rising wave.’
‘No doubt it will become more familiar in time,’
said Stephen. ‘What do you say to putting a true
razor’s edge on our implements? Poll, my dear, there are two coarse and two
very fine oilstones on the bottom shelf of the medicine chest.’
Each of the surgeons valued himself upon his skill
in sharpening knives of all kinds, scalpels, gouges - almost everything indeed
except saws, which they left to the armourer - and they ground away by the
light of the powerful lamp. There was some degree of silent competition, avowed
only by the slightly ostentatious manner in which each shaved his forearm with
his finished blade and his evident complacency when the skin was left perfectly
bare. Stephen was uniformly successful with the scalpels, but he had to return
the largest catling, a heavy, double-edged, sharp-pointed amputating knife, to
the coarse stone again and again.
‘No sir,’ cried Harris, who could bear it no
longer. ‘Let me show you.’ Stephen was not a particularly sweet tempered man,
above all at this moment when Jacob had scarcely a hair left to show; but
Harris’s professional authority was so evident that he let the heavy catling be
taken - he let the stone be spat upon, the spittle smoothed with an even rapid
drawing movement, heel to tip, then transferred to the fine stone and finished
with an emulsion of spit and oil. ‘There, sir,’ said the butcher, ‘that’s how
we do it in Leadenhall Market, asking your pardon.’
‘Well damn you, Harris,’ said Stephen, having tried
the superlative edge. ‘If ever I have to operate upon you, I shall do so with
an instrument of your own preparing, and...’
He was about to add something more likely to please
when all present raised their heads, listening intently, ignoring the sound of
the hull in a fairly heavy sea, the whole complex voice of the ship; and after
a few seconds there it was again, not thunder but the sound of guns.
On deck Jack had not only the advantage of hearing
more clearly but of seeing too. The squadron had been sailing close inshore,
heading for a point beyond which there rose the modest hill called the Sugar
Loaf: at the first remote sound he had thrown out the signal Make more sail,
and when they came round the point at twelve or even thirteen knots they had
the battle spread out full before them in the little leeward bay, rosy with a
burning ship and lit by innumerable flashes. The East India convoy, under sail, was
being attacked by at least a score of xebecs and galleys, while smallcraft
crammed with Moors waited to board any disabled merchantman.
The convoy, escorted only by a sixteen-gun
brig-sloop, had formed in something of a line and it was protecting itself
moderately well against the xebecs, powerfully armed though they were. But it
was almost helpless against the galleys, which could race downwind of the line
under sail, turn, take to their oars and come up from leeward, raking the
hindmost ships from right aft or on the quarter, where their guns, though
comparatively small and few, could do terrible slaughter, firing from so low
and near, right along the deck, while the galley itself could not be touched by
its victim’s cannon.
The rearmost Indiaman it was that lit the bay - an
enemy shot having no doubt traversed her light-room and powdermagazine - but
even without that, the moonlight, the clear sky and the flashes made the
position perfectly evident. Jack made the signal for independent engagement, emphasized it with two guns, and he launched the
Surprise at what seemed to be the commanding xebec, the corsairs’ leader: the
Moors had no distinct line of battle, but this one wore some red and tawny
pennants.
They met, sailing with the wind on the beam,
Surprise on the starboard tack, the Moor on the larboard. When each was five
points on the other’s bow, Jack backed his foretopsail, and called, ‘On the downward roll: fire from forward as they bear.’
All along the deck the gun-crews crouched
motionless, the captain with the linstock in his hand, glaring along the
barrel. Officers and midshipmen exactly spaced.
Some desultory musket-fire, two or three
well-directed round-shot from the xebec; the tingling sound of a gun hit full
on the barrel; and immediately after the height of the wave Surprise fired a
long rippling broadside from forty yards. The wind blew the smoke back,
blinding them, and when it cleared they saw a most
shocking wreckage, half the xebec’s ports beaten in and her rudder shot away.
They also heard Jack’s roaring ‘Look alive, look alive, there: run ‘em out!’
his order to fill the topsail and the cry ‘Port your helm!’
He took the Surprise right under the xebec’s stern.
The frigate stayed beautifully and ran up the enemy’s side. The next slower,
even more deliberate broadside shattered the Moor entirely. Xebecs were fine nimble
fast-sailing craft, but they were not strongly built and she began to settle at
once, her people crowding the deck and flinging everything that would float
over the side.
Jack saw the whole of the rest of the squadron
engaged, and Ringle playing long bowls with a half-galley that was trying to
get into position to rake an Indiaman: even Dover had come up, in spite of
having lost her main topmast; and the bay resounded with the bellowing of guns.
But already the issue was decided. The convoy and its escort had mauled the
corsairs quite seriously in the first phase and the arrival of six brisk
men-of-war made it absurd to stay. Those xebecs that could spread their huge
lateens on either side, in hare’s ears, and raced away at close on fifteen
knots southward home to Sallee, where with their slight draught they could lie
safely inside the bar; while the uninjured galleys pulled straight into the
wind’s eye, where no sailing ship could follow them. There were some
stragglers, wounded xebecs and such, but there was no point in chasing them:
they were useless as prizes and in any case there were more important things to
do, such as succouring the ship on fire.
The blaze having been mastered by sunrise, and the
combined bosuns and carpenters of the convoy having set about rerigging and
repairing the ship, the commodore and senior captains of the Indiamen waited on
Jack to express their acknowledgements and to hope that his squadron had not
suffered very grievous loss.
‘Two of our men were killed,
I regret to say, in the very first exchange, when a gun was struck on the
muzzle. Otherwise there were only musket-ball and splinter wounds - perhaps a
score of hands in the sick-bay. The rest of the squadron are
in much the same case. But I am afraid your losses must have been more
considerable?’
‘Nothing to touch theirs, sir, I do assure you: the
three galleys that Pomone destroyed or cut in two would have manned a heavy frigate.’ ;
Killick uttered a theatrical cough and when Jack
turned, he said, ‘Beg pardon, sir: which coffee is up, and a little relish.’
The relish consisted of Gibraltar crabs, lobsters, crayfish,
prawns and shrimps and the captains ate them with the keen appetite of those
who had had a long, wearisome, and ultimately extremely dangerous voyage on short
commons from Cape Town on. They looked upon their
host with more than usual benevolence, and with the intention of making an
obliging remark one of them said he was very glad that Commodore Aubrey should
have suffered so little, in what might have been a most bloody engagement.
‘It is true, as the gentleman observes, that we
lost few men,’ replied Jack, ‘but then we had very few men to lose. The
squadron is sadly short of hands, Pomone above all; and I will tell you frankly
that before I knew of your plight I had intended that her boats should have
visited you in the hope of some right seamen. And for my own part I should be
thankful for two or three upper-yard hands and above all for a steady, reliable
master’s mate. When you sailed none of you can have known that the war had
broken out again, so I dare say there are two or three score men in the convoy
who would like to enter voluntarily and take the bounty.’
In the short pause that followed the captains
looked at their chief with a studied want of expression: but he, knowing them
well, gathered the sense of the company - everyone present knew that Jack could
press if he chose - everyone knew how much they owed him - and he replied, ‘I
am sure you are right, sir; and I am sure that none of us would be so wanting
in his duty as to make the slightest difficulty. Word will be passed in all
ships belonging to the convoy, together with a promise that any man joining you
will have his pay-docket to the present date countersigned by me. As for your
two or three active young upper-yard men, I shall certainly send you four of my
own. But where master’s mates are concerned, we are all very poor indeed -
guinea-pigs by the dozen, but nothing that would answer for you, sir. On the
other hand, I could offer you a bright, well-qualified, gentlemanly purser. As
a volunteer, sir,’ he added, seeing the doubt in the Commodore’s eye, a doubt
caused not only by the strangeness of the offer but even more so (for the offer
in itself was by no means unwelcome, though inexplicable) by the countless
formalities surrounding the appointment of a purser in a ship of the Royal Navy
- the sureties,the guarantees, the verbiage, the
paper-work. ‘Purely as a volunteer, just for a few months or so if so desired;
or at least until his domestic affairs are settled. There is a question of
children born when he was on a three-year China voyage. The first he heard
of it was at the Cape on the way back, and he does not like to go home
until the lawyers have dealt with it all: he cannot face going into his own
house with the little bastards running about in it, if I may so express myself
without offence. He is used to the Navy, sir: was captain’s clerk in Hebe, then
purser in Dryad and Hermione, before joining the Company, where his brother has
a China ship.’