Post captain, p.23
Post captain, page 23
‘How did the poor gentleman come to be killed?’ asked the master.
‘It seems that he would light the fuse himself, and as it hung fire, he put his head into the chamber to see what was amiss, when it exploded.’
‘Well, I am sorry for him,’ said Mr Goodridge. ‘But if it had to be, it might have been as well if he had sent the ship to the bottom at the same time. A cranker, more unseaworthy craft I never saw, and I have seen a mort in my time. She made more leeway than a common raft between St Helen’s and the Bill, for all the sharp floor and sliding keels, and she gripes like a man-trap. Then she goes and misses stays in a mill-pond. There is no pleasing her. She reminds me of Mrs Goodridge - whatever you do is wrong. If the captain had not box-hauled her in a flash, why, I don’t know where we might have come to. A most seamanlike manoeuvre, I must say; though I should not have ventured it myself, not with such a ragamuffin crew. And indeed she had more sternway upon her than I should have thought possible. As you say, sir, she was built to recoil, and I thought she was going to go on recoiling until we were brought up all standing on the coast of France. A crinkum-crankum piece of work, in my opinion, and ’tis the Lord’s blessing we have a right seaman in command; but what even he will do, or what the Archangel Gabriel would do, if it comes on to blow, I do not know, I am sure. The Channel is not so broad as all that; and in point of searoom, what this here craft requires, is the great Southern Ocean, at its widest part.’
The master’s words were prompted by the Polychrest’s increasing roll; it sent the bread-barge careering over the table, and a midshipman into Jack’s cabin, with the news that the wind was shifting into the east, a little mouse-like child, stiff in his best uniform, with his dirk at his side -he had slept with it.
‘Thank you, Mr - ’said Jack. ‘I do not believe I remember your name.’
‘Parslow, sir, if you please.’
Of course. The Commissioner’s protégé, a naval widow’s son. ‘What have you been doing to your face, Mr Parslow?’ he asked, looking at the red, gaping, lint-flecked wound that ran across that smooth oval cheek from ear to chin.
‘I was shaving, sir,’ said Mr Parslow with a pride he could not conceal. ‘Shaving, sir, and a huge great wave came.’
‘Show it to the doctor, and tell him, with my compliments, that I should be glad if he would drink tea with mc. Why arc you in your number one rig?’
‘They said - it was thought I ought to show an example to the men, sir, this being my first day at sea.’
‘Very proper. But I should put on some foul-weather clothes now. Tell me, did they send you for the key of the keelson?’
‘Yes, sir; and I looked for it everywhere. Bonden told me he thought the gunner’s daughter might have it, but when I asked Mr Rolfe, he said he was sorry, he was not a married man.’
‘Well, well. You have foul-weather clothes?’
‘Why, sir, there are a great many things in my chest, my sea-chest, that the shopman told Mama I should be equipped with. And I have my father’s sou-wester.’
‘Mr Babbington will show you what to put on. Tell him with my compliments, that he will show you what to put on,’ he added, remembering that gentleman’s inhuman barbarity. ‘Do not wipe your nose upon your sleeve, Mr Parslow. It ain’t genteel.’
‘No, sir. Beg pardon, sir.’
‘Cut along then,’ said Jack irritably. ‘Am I a Goddamned wet nurse?’ he asked his pea-jacket.
On deck he was greeted by a squall of rain mixed with sleet and spray. The wind had increased to a fine fresh breeze, sweeping the fog away and replacing it by a low sky - bands of weeping cloud against a steely grey, black on the eastern horizon; a nasty short choppy sea was getting up against the tide, and although the Polychrest was holding her course well enough, she was shipping a good deal of water, and her very moderate spread of canvas laid her over as though she had topgallants abroad. So she was as crank as he had feared; and a wet ship into the bargain. There were two men at the wheel, and from the way they were cramped on to the spokes it was clear they were having to fight hard to keep her from flying up into the wind.
He studied the log-board, made a rough calculation of the position, adding a triple leeway, and decided to wear in half an hour, when both watches would be on deck. He had plenty of room, and there was no point in harassing the few good men he had aboard, particularly as the sky looked changeable, menacing, damned unpleasant - they might have a dirty night of it. And he would get the topgallantmasts down on deck before long. ‘Mr Parker,’ he said, ‘we will take another reef in the foretopsail, if you please.’
The bosun’s call, the rush of hands, the volley of orders through Parker’s speaking-trumpet - ‘Halliards let fly - clap on to that brace - Mr Malloch, touch up those hands at the brace.’ The yards came round, the wind spilled from the sail and the Polychrest righted herself, at the same time making such a cruel gripe that the man at the con had to fling himself at the wheel to prevent her being taken aback ‘Lay out - look alive, there - you, sir, you on the yardarm, are you asleep? Are you going to pass the weather earing? Damn your eyes, are you going to stow that bunt? Mr Rossall, take that man’s name. Lay in.’
Through the clamour Jack watched the men aloft The man on the yardarm was young Haines, from the Lord Mornington, he knew his trade, might make a good captain of the foretop. He saw his foot slip as he scrambled in towards the mast - those horses wanted mousing.
‘Send the last man off the yard aft,’ called the first lieutenant, red in the face from shouting. ‘Start him, Mr Malloch.’
This same old foolery - the last man off was the first man on, the man who went right out on to the yardarm. It was a hard service - it had to be a hard service - but there was no need to make it harder, discouraging the willing hands. The people were going to have plenty to do: it was a pity for them to waste their strength beating one another. And yet again it was easy to seek a cheap popularity by checking an officer in public - easy, and disastrous in the long run.
‘Sail ho!’ hailed the look-out.
‘Where away?’
‘Right astern, sir.’
She came up out of a dark smudge of half-frozen rain, a frigate hull-up already, on the same tack as the Polychrest and overhauling her very fast. French or English? He was no great way from Cherbourg. ‘Make the private signal,’ said Jack. ‘Mr Parker, your glass, if you please.’
He fixed the frigate in the grey round of the objective, swaying to counterbalance the sloop’s roll, pitch and shudder, and as the Polychrest’s windward gun went off behind him he saw the blue-white-blue break out aboard her, curving far out to leeward, and the momentary whiff from her answering gun. ‘Make our number,’ he said, relaxing. He gave orders for the mousing of the horses, desired Mr Parker to see what he could make of the frigate, sent Haines forward, and settled to watch in peace.
‘Three of them, sir,’ said Mr Parker. ‘And I think the first is Amethyst.’
Three there were, in line ahead. ‘Amethyst she is, sir,’ said the signal midshipman, huddling his book under the shelter of his bosom. They were directly in his wake, steering the same course. But the Polychrest’s leeway was such that in a very short while he saw them not head-on, but from an angle, an angle that increased with alarming speed, so that in five minutes he was watching them over the weather quarter. They had already struck their topgallantmasts, but they were still carrying their topsails atrip - their full, expert crews could reef them in a moment. The first was indeed the Amethyst; the second he could not make out - perhaps the Minerve; the third was the Franchise, with his old friend Heneage Dundas aboard, a post captain, in command of a beautiful French-built thirty-six-gun frigate; Dundas, five years junior to him as a lieutenant, thirteen months as master and commander; Jack had cobbed him repeatedly in the midshipmen’s berth of Old Ironsides: and would do so again. There he was, standing up on the slide of a quarterdeck carronade, as pleased as Punch, waving his hat. Jack raised his own, and the wind took his bright yellow hair, tearing it from the ribbon behind, and streamed it away north-westward. As if in reply a hoist ran up to the Franchise’s mizen-peak.
‘Alphabetic, sir,’ said the midshipman, spelling it out. ‘P S - oh yes, Psalms. Psalms cxlvii, 10.’
‘Acknowledge,’ said Jack who was no Biblical scholar.
Two guns from the Amethyst, and the frigates tacked in succession, moving like so many models on a sheet of glass: round they went, each exactly in the same piece of water, keeping their stations as though they were linked together. It was a beautifully executed manoeuvre, above all with such a head-sea and such a wind, the result of years of training - a crew that pulled together, officers that knew their ship.
He shook his head, staring after the frigates as they vanished into the gloom. Eight bells struck. ‘Mr Parker,’ he said, ‘we will get the topgallantmasts down on deck, and then we will wear.’ By the time the masts were struck there would be no satirical friends to watch from a distance.
‘I beg your pardon, sir?’ asked Parker, with an anxious poke of his head.
Jack repeated his order and retired to the taffrail to let his first lieutenant carry on.
Glancing at the Polychrest’s wake to judge her leeway he noticed a little dark bird, fluttering weakly just over the water with its legs dangling; it vanished under the larboard quarter, and as he moved across to make sure of it, he tripped over something soft, about knee-height, something very like a limpet - the child Parslow, under his sou-wester.
‘Why, Mr Parslow,’ he said, picking him up, ‘you are properly rigged now, I see. You will be glad of it. Run below to the doctor and tell him, if he chooses to see a stormy petrel, he has but to come on deck.’
It was not a stormy petrel, but a much rarer cousin with yellow feet - so rare that Stephen could not identify him until he pittered across a wave so close that those yellow feet showed clear.
‘If rarity and the force of the storm are in direct proportion,’ he reflected, watching it attentively, ‘then we are in for a most prodigious hurricane. I shall not mention it, however.’
A frightful crash forward: the foretopgallantmast brought itself down on deck more briskly than in the smartest frigate, half stunning Mr Parker and plunging Jack into manoeuvres more suitable for a petrel than a mariner. Throughout the night the wind backed until it was blowing hard from the north; there it stayed, north-east, north, or north-west, never allowing more than close-reefed topsails, if that, for nine days on end, nine days of rain, snow, steep wicked seas, and a perpetual fighting for their lives; nine days in which Jack rarely left the deck and young Parslow never once took off his clothes; nine days of wearing, lying to, scudding under bare poles, and never a sight of the sun - no notion of their position within fifty miles and more. And when at last a strong south-wester allowed them to make up their enormous leeway, their noonday observation showed that they were where they had started from.
Early in the blow a lee-lurch, laying the Polychrest on her beam-ends, had shot the dazed first lieutenant down the main hatchway, damaging his shoulder, and he had spent the rest of the time in his cot, with the water washing about it often enough, and in great pain. Jack was sorry for the pain, in an abstract way, though it seemed fair that one so fond of inflicting agony should feel a touch of it, but he was heartily glad of Parker’s absence - the man was incompetent, incompetent for such a situation as this. He was conscientious, he did his duty as he understood it; but he was no seaman.
The master, Pullings, Rossall, the senior master’s mate, the bosun and the gunner were seamen; so were a dozen of the hands. Babbington and Allen, another oldster, were shaping well; and as for the rest of the people, they at least knew what they were to haul upon at the word of command. This long week’s blow, when they were close on foundering twice a day and when everybody knew it, had crammed a deal of training into a short time - short when measured by the calendar rather than by mortal dread.
Training in manoeuvres of every kind, but particularly in the use of the pumps: they had not stopped for an hour since the second day of the blow.
Now as they sailed up the Channel, passing Selsey Bill with a light air on the quarter and topgallantsails set, with the galley fires lighted at last and a hot dinner in their bellies, he felt that they might not be disgraced when the Polychrest reached her station; and she would reach it now, he was sure, even if she had to tide it all the way - no unlikely event, with this wind dying on him She would not be disgraced he was short-handed, of course, and there were seventeen men in the sick-bay - two hernias, five bad falls with broken bones, and the rest the usual wounds from falling spars or blocks or ropes crossing a hand or leg. One landsman, an unemployed glover from Shepton Mallet, had been lost overboard, and a thief from the Winchester assizes had gone raving, staring, barking mad off Ushant: yet on the other hand, sea-sickness had vanished, and even the quota-men from the inland gaols could walk about the deck without much danger to themselves or others. The crew were a poor-looking set, upon the whole, but when he had had time to exercise them at the guns, it was not impossible that he might make a passable man-of-war out of the Polychrest. He knew her tolerably well now: he and the master (he had a great esteem for Mr Goodridge) had worked out a sail-plan that made the most of what qualities she possessed, and when he could alter her trim to bring her by the head and rake her masts she might do better; but he could not love her. She was a mean-spirited vessel, radically vicious, cross-grained, laboursome, cruel in her unreliability; and he could not love her. She had disappointed him so often when even a log canoe would have risen to the occasion that his strong natural affection for his command had dwindled quite away. He had sailed in some rough old tubs, ponderous things with no perceptible virtue to the outsider, but he had always been able to find excuses for them - they had always been the finest ships in the history of the Navy for some particular quality - and this had never happened to him before. The feeling was so strange, the disloyalty so uncomfortable, that it was some time before he would acknowledge it; and when he did -he was pacing the quarterdeck after his solitary dinner at the time - it gave him such uneasiness of mind that he turned to the midshipman of the watch, who was clinging motionless to a stanchion, and said, ‘Mr Parslow, you will find the Doctor in the sick-bay. .
‘Find him yourself,’ said Parslow.
Was it possible that these words had been uttered? Jack paused in his stride. From the rigid blankness of the quartermaster, the man at the wheel, and the gunner’s mates busy with the aftermost port carronade, and from the mute writhing of the midshipmen on the gangway, it was clear that they had.
‘I tell you what it is, Goldilocks,’ went on Parslow, closing one eye, ‘don’t you try to come it high over me, for I’ve a spirit that won’t brook it. Find him yourself.’
‘Pass the word for the bosun’s mate,’ said Jack. ‘Quartermaster, Mr Parslow’s hammock, if you please.’ The bosun’s mate came running aft, his starter in his hand. ‘Seize the young gentleman to the gun in my cabin.’
The young gentleman had released his hold on the stanchion; he was now lying on the deck, protesting that he should not be beaten, that he should dirk any man who presumed to lay a hand upon him - he was an officer. The bosun’s mate picked him up by the small of the back: the sentry opened and closed the cabin door. A startled cry and then some treble oaths that made the grinning quarterdeck stretch its eyes, the whole punctuated by the measured thump of a rope’s end; and then Mr Parslow, sobbing bitterly, was led out by the hand. ‘Lash him into his hammock, Rogers,’ said Jack. ‘Mr Pullings, Mr Pullings, the grog for the midshipmen’s berth is stopped until further orders.’
That evening in his cabin he said to Stephen, ‘Do you know what those blackguards in the midshipmen’s berth did to young Parslow?’
‘Whether or no, you are going to tell me,’ observed Stephen, helping himself to rum.
‘They made him beastly drunk and then sent him on deck. Almost the first day they might have turned in for their watch below, the first time they are not up to their knees in water, they can think of nothing better to do than to make a youngster drunk. They shall not do it again, however. I have stopped their grog.’
‘It would be as well if you were to stop the whole ship’s grog. A most pernicious custom, a very gross abuse of animal appetite, a monstrous aberration - half a pint of rum, forsooth! I should not have a quarter of the men under my care, was it not for your vile rum. They are brought down with their limbs, ribs, collar-bones shattered, having fallen from the rigging drunk - diligent, stout, attentive men who would never fall when sober. Come, let us pour it secretly away.’
‘And have a mutiny on our hands? Thank you very kindly. No: I should rather have them three sheets in the wind now and again, but willing to do their duty the rest of the time. Mutiny. It makes your blood run cold to think of it. Men you have worked with right through the commission and liked, growing cold and secret; no jokes, no singing out, no good wilt; the ship falling into two camps, with the undecided men puzzled and wretched in between. And then the shot-rolling by night.’
‘Shot-rolling?’
‘They roll shot along the deck in the night-watches, to let you know their mind, and maybe to catch an officer’s legs.’
