Chapter Seven
‘WHEN THE WIND SHIFTS AGAINST THE SUN, TRUST IT NOT, FOR back twill run,’ said the sailmaker’s mate, squinting at the sky through the eye of his needle. ‘No, Mr Palafox,’ he added, ‘you must put the cringle so, and your palm so. We don’t do it Greenock-fashion in the Navy.’
They were on the fo’c’sle, sitting cross-legged among a vast area of canvas, and the working-party was reinforcing everything that could be reinforced. The squadron was three days out of St Catherine’s, where they had worked almost without intermission; but still there was a great deal to be done, and aboard the Centurion at least, the ’tween-decks were still crowded with stores, and there was even less room to move than before. Some of the stores (and four hundred men eat and drink far more than a ton a day, even on Navy rations) were still on the hoof, in the form of little lumpish black cattle, whose dismal noise could be heard from far below, together with the steady nagging sound of Sean reasoning, though only verbally now, with the butcher, on the subject of glory.
‘“Trust it not, for back ’twill run”,’ repeated Peter. ‘That’s poetry.’
‘Aye. And it’s truth too, as we shall find before the moon comes up. Now, sir, if you will kindly move your stern from the luff of this here sail, maybe we can come at it more easy.’
‘You may expect bad weather,’ announced Peter, entering the midshipmen’s berth.
‘Don’t be so pompous, Teague,’ said Bailey.
‘Anyone would think he had invented the weather,’ said Preston.
‘They have so much of it in Ireland that he thinks he is part-proprietor,’ said Hope.
‘It rains every day there,’ said Keppel.
‘It does not,’ cried Peter. ‘Or at least, not very much. But you are a set of low, ignorant fellows, and I am resolved not to notice you. And who’s been at my sea-chest? A man cannot leave anything in this berth, unless he takes it with him.’
‘I did,’ said Bailey. ‘I have to see the Commodore, and I hadn’t a clean shirt.’
‘Then you ought to have turned your own inside out, as you always do for mustering.’
‘Oh, what a lie!’ cried Bailey, going very red. ‘I never did, except that once.’
‘You always do: it is very noisome, Bailey. And it was a great piece of folly to go to sea with only one shirt to your name.’
‘I had two,’ cried Bailey, ‘and anyway it’s all very well for you to talk, with all FitzGerald’s dunnage and a dozen of everything. I think it is perfectly disgusting to go prancing about like a South Sea Bubble, with cambric flying in every direction. I’ve a month’s mind to heave it all overboard, except for what the berth decides are strict necessities.’
‘You and who to help you?’ asked Peter, advancing with a meaning pace.
‘You leave me alone,’ said Bailey, moving briskly sideways. ‘I am all dressed up, and washed, and I am not going through it all over again for the pleasure of giving you a beating. But you are far too well-off: it is not decent in a midshipman.’
‘“Angustam, amici, pauperiem pati
Robustus acri militia puer
Condiscat,” ’ said Elliot, coming in, ‘And I bet you cannot construe that, Palafox.’
‘Certainly I can,’ said Peter, who had heard it many, many times from Mr Walter—almost every time, indeed, that he had applied to that worthy man for a guinea from the small stock the chaplain held for him. ‘But I do not choose to display my learning.’
‘Ha, ha,’ said Keppel.
‘Can you do it?’
‘I dare say,’ said Keppel. ‘Anyway, I lay a month’s pay I can make out more words than Teague. Tip us the verse again, Elliot.’ Keppel paused. ‘It’s Horace, I know,’ he said. ‘We did it at school. Angustem pauperiem, the anxious pauper. Militia, the anxious, or care-worn, military pauper—the midshipman, in short. Amici acri, sour friends—the other fellows in the berth. Condiscat—oh well, never mind. What do you make of it, Teague?’
Peter pushed aside the moulting ape—the one survivor of the many creatures from Madeira: Agamemnon had coped with the rest—and declaimed, ‘Let the robust youth, my friends, be trained to endure pinching want in the active exercise of arms.’
‘Exactly what I said,’ cried Keppel: but eight bells struck away his words, and the robust youths whose watch was called hurried on deck.
Peter’s was the first watch, and in the dead hours of the night it became clear that the prediction was coming true. The top-lantern was already swinging in a great and increasing arc overhead, while aft the great poop-lantern rose and fell against a darkness so close and dense that it seemed as if the black sky had come far down under the force of the wind to hem them in. It was a great hot wind from the east, gusty and full of flaws, and it came over the Centurion’s larboard quarter, bringing flat-long sheets of spray across the deck: they handed the topgallant-sails, and Peter, going aloft, heard the masts singing for the first time in his life. He knew all the notes of the rigging very well, but this was something new, a deep and vibrant groan that one could feel as well as dimly hear, and it was caused, he found, by the working of the masts against one another in the trestle-trees and caps: the masts themselves were alive, bending and tense in spite of the bar-tight weather-rigging.
Yet still the Centurion buried her lee-rails in a white line of foam, palely luminous in the dark: at six bells all hands were turned up to shorten sail again, and at eight bells Peter tumbled below more dead than alive, helped on his way by a green sea that smothered the quarter-deck waist deep.
He was soaked, but stifled with heat, and he swung himself into his hammock without taking off more than his jacket, for it was ten to one that the watch below would be piped up before very long.
‘It is scarcely worth while going to sleep,’ he thought, staring at the lamp as it lurched in time with his hammock.
Then, through a confused dream of drums and guns, came the sound of the middle watch coming below and Ransome’s voice calling upon him to rise and shine. ‘It’s beginning to blow,’ he said. ‘Take care on deck, young Teague.’
The first thing that met Peter’s eye was the white top of a wave towering over the fife-rails, and the next was the first lieutenant’s irritated face.
‘Mr Palafox,’ he said in a voice that sounded clearly above the roar of the wind, the uninterrupted thunder of the sea and the loud harping of the mizzen shrouds, ‘what do you mean by being late on deck? Go below, sir, and do not present yourself again with your hair uncombed. This is a man-of-war, not the Calais packet. I shall expect to see you again in fifteen seconds, properly dressed and brushed.’
At four bells Peter and Bailey were below again, breakfasting on a tin mug of small beer and a ship’s biscuit. ‘You wouldn’t believe how it is blowing,’ Peter told the only midshipman awake.
‘Is the sun up yet?’ asked Hope sleepily.
‘No,’ said Bailey, wringing some more sea out of his pocket. ‘But you couldn’t see it if it was. There’s a fog you could cut with a knife.’
‘And it is blowing,’ said Peter, ‘with a preternatural blast.’
‘I wish you would shut up,’ said Keppel.
‘You and your preter-thingummy blasts,’ said Ransome, suddenly waking up. ‘Why, when I was in the Royal Oak off the Sound I had my pigtail blown off, and never reckoned it out of the way. Is your pigtail blew off yet?’
‘No,’ said Peter.
‘Well, then,’ said Ransome, instantly going to sleep.
On deck Peter, with the small comfort and the small beer inside him, found that the fog had whitened, and now the substance of it could be seen tearing through the rigging: so the sun had risen. But even after half an hour the drum-tight fore-topsail was still no more than a curved grey hint in he racing whiteness, and still the wall of fog enclosed the ship, sailing with it at a breakneck pace: from the dim wall to the windward the grey waves came racing faster still, curling high, sweeping with a shocking speed along the Centurion’s sid
e; and all the time their tops were whipped off in long lines before them—hard water, not blowing foam, which hurled across the deck and filled the air. With the rising of the sun the wind increased.
‘Mr Elliot,’ said the first lieutenant, ‘go for’ard and see that number two is double-breeched. Mr Palafox, my compliments to the Commodore, and the wind is freshening.’
Peter’s aye-aye was choked by a hissing mass of water that hit his face just as he opened his mouth: it was as if someone had flung a bucketful with great force, at very close range, and a good deal went down. He hurried up the sloping deck, scrambling under the lee of the men at the wheel, passed the sentry at the cabin door, and plunged, dripping, into the presence of the Commodore. He found the great man in a night-cap, firmly stayed fore and aft, in the act of shaving himself with a gleaming razor.
‘Thank you, Mr Palafox,’ said the Commodore, deftly timing his stroke to the pitch of the ship. ‘My compliments to Mr Saunders, if you please, and I will be on deck in three minutes.’
Four minutes later, as the quarter-deck guns barked out the order to the invisible squadron to bring to with the larboard tacks aboard, Peter was half-way up to the fore-topsail yard, with his hands just below the heels of Matthews, the captain of the foretop, and below him the hitherto clean-swept deck was alive with men as the crew prepared to hand the topsails, bunt the main-course and bring the ship into the wind.
Handing a sail, a square-sail, consists of going out along the yard, with your feet below it on a rope slung parallel with the yard, attached to it, and called the horse; the yard comes to your middle, and when you have reached your proper place on the yard you lean over it and grapple with the sail that bellies out below you while men on deck haul on the buntlines and clewlines to raise the lower part of the sail up towards the yard, thus helping you to wrap the sail close to it, making all fast with the gaskets and so furling it. It sounds fairly simple; and in theory it is fairly simple; but when the sail has an area of three thousand square feet, and when huge quantities of it balloon with enormous violence into your face, nearly knocking you off your perch and quite ripping all the careful folds of canvas from under your hands (which usually means that the men on either side of you have their hard-won sail torn away too, so that they hate your vitals), and when the wind is so strong that every inch of the canvas is frantically alive, so strong that the horse tends perpetually to fly into the bunt of the sail, leaving you without a footing, why then it all becomes more complicated, particularly when everything is done in a howling fog. However, there is this compensation: if the wind is blowing hard enough you scarcely can fall off, because you are pinned to the whipping yard by its force, bent in a hair-pin’s curve. Yet if it is impossible to fall to the deck, it is also very difficult to get down there by any less drastic method, because once the sail is furled the wind has a free passage, the horse is even more violently strained away towards the bowsprit, and you are held between Heaven and the sea until the wind chooses to abate or until you manage to elude it by judicious writhes and gropings inwards along the yard. What released Peter was not any diminution of the wind, nor his cramped inching towards the slings, but the movement of the ship: with immense way on her still, despite the reduction of sail, the Centurion turned into the eye of the wind and lay there pitching furiously, held by her reefed mizzen. In the same moment the gale, which had hitherto pinned Peter to the yard from behind, came full into his face and hurled him backwards from it; the horse also shot out to its sternward limit, and Peter, whose legs were shorter than those of the men for whom the distance between the horse and the yard had been calculated, lost his footing. He had his right hand firmly round the gasket, however, and for a moment he presented the interesting spectacle of an almost horizontal body, slightly attached to the foretopmast yard, slowly revolving about its own axis. Matthews, the man outside him, who had been waiting with what patience he could muster until Peter should reach the slings, leant inwards, grasped Peter by the hair and dragged him forward over the yard, at the same time hooking his bare foot round the horse and bringing it under Peter’s searching toes: this done, and the midshipman settled, Matthews crawled bodily over him and hurried down—he had a nice bloater toasting by the galley fire, and he did not want it to get too brown, any more than he wanted to receive the stinging whack from the bos’un’s rope’s end which was the usual reward of being the last man on deck.
‘Mr Palafox,’ said the second lieutenant, ‘you are not to play in the rigging. This is no time for acrobatics. And do not rub your scalp when I am speaking to you. In spite of the fog I saw you imitating an ape on the fore-topmast yard just now: there is no need to emulate the same creature on the quarterdeck. The ape, sir, is not an animal that a sea-officer should take for his model, whatever you may suppose from the manners and appearance of the midshipmen’s berth.’
‘What is this I hear, young man?’ said Mr Walter, meeting him at four bells in the forenoon watch. ‘It is said that you take advantage of the prevailing obscurity to amuse yourself aloft. I wonder at it. It might have been hoped that your recent illness would have turned your mind into a more serious course.’
‘Now let there be no monkeying about in this watch,’ said Mr Brett, at noon. ‘Mr Palafox, you may take—no, not Mr Palafox. Mr Bailey, you may take a glass up and see what you can make out as the fog lifts. Mr Palafox, you may make yourself useful to Mr Randall in the shot-lockers. There you will find less to tempt you to untimely gambolling.’
‘Aye-aye, sir,’ said Peter, acutely aware that the Commodore, as well as two or three of the land-officers, was just behind the officer of the watch: he vanished, and far down by the well he saw nothing of the coming of the sky, nor of the reappearance of part of the squadron through the tearing veils of mist. Part of the squadron: for the Pearl was no longer there. The Pearl was gone, and no amount of scanning of the clear horizon could find the remotest trace of her. And at first the rumour, which instantly penetrated to every part of the ship, reaching the shot lockers five minutes after the fact was reported on the quarter-deck, gave out that the Tryal had also disappeared: but a little later it was said that she had been seen a great way to the leeward, with her mainmast gone, and that the Gloucester had been ordered to bear down and take her in tow.
‘I hope she swims, I am sure,’ said the gunner, meaning the Pearl, ‘but there was a cruel amount of sickness in her. I saw Captain Kidd looking wholly pale when I went aboard her last. Howsoever, she should have rode it out, unless she loosed her guns, which is barely likely, seeing she has a good gunner in Mr Webb. We were shipmates in the year twenty-eight, in the Vanguard, ninety—the same as what they call the Duke, only nobody minds it. Pass me that tally, will you, Mr Palafox?’
The tally lay between two balls in a partially-filled shot-garland, and as Peter groped for it in the dim light of a bleary lantern, one of the twenty-four pound cannon-balls, impelled by the pitch of the Centurion in the enormous swell, rolled with a deep growl against the other, nipping Peter’s finger so that tears of anguish came into his eyes and he sprang about very briskly, waving his hand and roaring.
‘This is what I mean about her loosing her guns,’ said Mr Randall when Peter had quietened down. ‘You perceive the force of a ball rolling free for scantly a foot: now consider the force of a gun that has broke loose, and think what a whole broadside rolling free can do. And you must consider, too, that the roll is much less down here than it is on the gun-deck even, let alone the upper; for she rolls from her keelson, do you see, though she pitches regardless. But I tell you what it is, Mr Palafox,’ he added, after a long pause, filled with the dull, thunderous grumbling of ball, chain and double-headed shot as the tons and tons of iron shifted gently and settled with the varying strains of the bucking sea: ‘I tell you what it is,’ he repeated, notching the tally. ‘I did not altogether like to hear you sing out so loud over a little pinch. We did ought to remember the Spartan boy, Mr Palafox.’
This wretched fellow,
this Spartan boy (a half-wit, in Peter’s private judgment), had haunted the Rectory of Ballynasaggart, and had followed him aboard to appear on eight separate occasions in Mr Walter’s conversation: Peter was perfectly well acquainted with him and his stupid ways; but he wished to be civil to the gunner, so with as much appearance of interest as he could summon with a handful of agony to distract him he said, ‘The Spartan boy, Mr Randall?’
‘He had stolen a fox, which he hid it under his gown, and when his elders were talking, the fox started to gnaw the boy.’ Mr Randall made a lobster’s claw of his right hand and snapped it to indicate the gnawing. ‘But did he sing out, Mr Palafox? Did he cry, “—the—fox. I will rouse it out of my gown”—for they wore gowns in those days, Mr Palafox—“and dowse it overboard”? No. Not he. He sat quiet while his elders were talking and the fox gnawed through his stomach, through his liver, clean through his anatomies until it reached his heart. Which is a clear proof that you should not cry out when pinched—a trifle that happens to a gunner fifty times a day.’
Peter thought that it was a clear proof that the elder Spartans talked far too much: but after a moment’s thought he decided to suppress this reflection as being disrespectful, and instead he asked, ‘Would it not have done to have slipped the fox quietly out, without interrupting or saying anything?’
‘It might have been more expedient,’ admitted the gunner, ‘but, oh goodness me, how very much less moral.’
‘Why did he want the fox in the first place, Mr Randall, sir?’
‘A very fair question, Mr Palafox,’ said the gunner evasively. ‘However, we will not go into that just now, for it scarcely would be fit. They had some very old-fashioned ways in those times, you know. Very old-fashioned, they were: and Papists, I make no doubt. When I was a boy there were some old master-gunners who always made a cross on the ball before they loaded, which was left over from the old days when they aimed their pieces at the Turks and such, and reckoned that a cross on the ball would send any Turk to hell; which is all part and parcel of the same thing, do you see? Mumbo-jumbo, as you might say.’