The Ionian Mission (39 page)

   'Oh sir,' cried Babbington, as Rowan darted over the side, 'I really must be allowed to protest—to deny—'

   'You will not deny that they are women, surely? I can tell the difference between Adam and Eve as quick as the next man, even if you cannot; just as I can tell the difference between an active zealous officer and a lubber that lies in port indulging his whims. It is of no use trying to impose upon me.'

   'No, sir. But these are all respectable women.'

   'Then why are they leering over the side like that, and making gestures?'

   'It is only their way, sir. They are all Lesbians—'

   'And no doubt they are all parsons' daughters, your cousins in the third degree, like that wench in Ceylon.'

   '—and Lesbians always join their hands like that, to show respect.'

   'You are becoming an authority on the motions of Greek women, it appears.'

   'Oh sir,' cried Babbington, his voice growing shriller still. 'I know you do not like women aboard—'

   'I believe I have had occasion to mention it to you some fifty or sixty times in the last ten years.'

   'But if you will allow me to explain—'

   'It would be interesting to hear how the presence of thirty-seven, no, thirty-eight young women in one of His Majesty's sloops can be explained; but since I like some decency to be preserved on my quarterdeck, perhaps the explanation had better take place in the cabin.' And in the cabin he said, 'Upon my word, William, this is coming it pretty high. Thirty-eight wenches at a time is coming it pretty high.'

   'So it would be, sir, if there were any guilty or even shall I say cheerful intent; but upon my honour, I am blameless in thought, word, and deed. Well, in word and deed, anyhow.'

   'Perhaps you had better begin the explanation.'

   'Well, sir, as soon as I had seen the transports into Argostoli I shaped a course for the Strophades, and towards the end of the day we sighted a sail far to leeward, flying signals of distress. She proved to be a Tunis corsair that had been dismasted in a squall and had run clean out of water, having so many prisoners aboard. She had been raiding the islands for women, and she had done far better than she expected—chanced upon a kind of sewing-bee on the shore at Naxos and then all the young female part of a wedding in Lesbos, taken as they were crossing Peramo harbour in boats.'

   'The dogs,' said Jack. 'So these are the women?'

   'Not all of them, sir,' said Babbington. 'We told the Moors, of course, that the Christians must be given up, in the nature of things; and we told the women that they should be taken back to Greece. But then it appeared that those from Naxos, who had been aboard quite a long time, did not want to be parted from their corsairs, whereas those from Lesbos did—they were absolutely passionate about going home. We could not quite make it out at first, but presently the Naxiotes and the Lesbians started calling names and pulling one another's hair, and everything became quite clear. So we separated them as gently as we could—my bosun was bitten to the bone, and several hands cruelly scratched—helped the Moors set up a jury-mast, gave them biscuit and water enough to carry them home, and made all possible sail to join you at the rendezvous. And here I am, sir, quite happy to be publicly reproached, abused, and amazingly vilified, so long as I am conscious of having done my duty.'

   'Well, damme, William, I am sorry: I am very sorry, indeed I am. But injustice is a rule of the service, as you know very well; and since you have to have a good deal of undeserved abuse, you might just as well have it from your friends.'

   'Certainly, sir. And now, sir, what must I do?'

   'You must drink a few glasses of madeira, and then you must turn about while the wind serves, and take all your pretty creatures, your
virgoes intactoes
I am sure, to Cephalonia and entrust them to Major de Bosset, the governor. He is an uncommon energetic, reliable officer and understands the Greek; he will look after them, victualling them on the shore establishment, until he finds a good stolid trader going to Lesbos. Killick,' he called, raising his voice from habit, although his steward could he heard breathing heavily on the other side of the bulkhead, eavesdropping as usual, 'Killick, light along some madeira, and ask the Doctor and Mr Pullings if they would like to step below.'

   'I must tell the Doctor of a prodigious kind of pelican that flew over us off Zante,' said Babbington. 'And I must not forget the Turkish frigate we saw not long before I met you. She gave us a civil gun when we showed our colours, and I returned it; but we did not speak, because she was chasing a felucca to leeward, cracking on most surprising for a Turk, studdingsails aloft and alow on either side.'

   The Turkish frigate, said Professor Graham, who had a recent list of the Sultan's men-of-war, was the
Torgud
of thirty guns. She and the
Kitabi
of twenty guns, together with a few smaller things, constituted the command of Mustapha, the ruler of Karia and the Capitan-Bey or senior naval officer in these waters: indeed, they might be said to belong to Mustapha himself, since he used them just as he saw fit, without any reference to Constantinople. And this was fair enough, since Constantinople never produced the men's wages, and Mustapha was obliged to feed and pay them himself. He was said, however, to be an active, zealous officer, and after they had been sailing an hour or two, with the mainland of Epirus looming high and jagged ahead and the
Bonhomme Richard
and the
Dryad
lost to view long since, they came across signs of his activity and zeal—the charred remains of a felucca, shattered by gunfire but still just awash and still just recognizable. Then, perfectly recognizable, twenty or thirty corpses drifting in a line along the current: all Greek, all stripped, some headless, some with their throats cut, some impaled, and three roughly crucified, Saint Andrew fashion, on the felucca's broken sweeps.

The
Surprise
lay off Mesenteron, moored in fifteen fathom water, pitching gently as she gazed at the harbour, a harbour silted up long since and now full of tree-trunks from the last flood of the river that meandered through the low-lying unhealthy town. Two castles guarded the tree-trunks and the score of smallcraft inside the harbour: the castles had once belonged to Venice and the winged lion of St Mark still stood in bold relief upon their outward walls, but now they flew the Turkish crescent. The frigate had saluted them on dropping anchor and they had replied, the roar of cannon sending up clouds of pelicans from an unseen lagoon.

   But since then nothing had happened: nothing to the purpose, that is to say. The pelicans had recovered their wits, flying back in long straight lines to their brackish mud, and the fishing-boats continued to mill about in the harbour, spearing squids as they rose to the surface in the ecstasies of ten-armed copulation; yet no canopied official boat shoved off from the castle jetty, no pasha showed his horse-tail banner, and aboard the frigate there was a distinct sense of anticlimax.

   A sailor's eye would have seen that she was even trimmer than usual, with her furled sails skinned up in the bunt and her head-braces lying in perfect Flemish fakes, while even a landsman would have noticed that the officers had abandoned their usual working clothes of easy nankeen pantaloons and light jackets for undress uniform and Hessian boots, while the bargemen were already in their snowy trousers, bright blue jackets and best straw hats, ready to row their Captain ashore as soon as he was invited. Yet the invitation did not come. The castle showed no sign of life and Captain Aubrey was certainly not going to make the first move: he sat in his great cabin, elegantly and even splendidly dressed but for the fact that his gold-laced coat lay on a chair with his Patriotic Fund hundred-guinea sword beside it, while his neckcloth was as yet untied and his breeches unbuckled at the knee. He was drinking a supplementary pot of coffee and eating biscuits with a fine equanimity, fully prepared either to see Ismail Bey, if that gentleman appeared or sent a proper message, or to sail northward for an interview with Mustapha. Or failing Mustapha, then with Sciahan Bey in Kutali itself. He had wished to see his three Turks in regular succession, travelling up the coast from Ismail's Mesenteron to Mustapha's Karia and so past Marga and its Frenchmen to Kutali, thus spending the least possible time in preliminaries. But with such a delicate mission as this he was certainly not going to allow himself to fret over details, and if his Turks did not chance to be at home as he passed by, then he would take them in another order: in any event he intended to be at sea, well out at sea, before the evening. At quarters yesterday the ship's gunnery had disappointed him, and although the hands' tearing high spirits over the prize had something to do with their criminal levity and indifferent shooting it was also true that they were not yet quite at home with the frigate's guns. A couple of hours' steady practice, live practice, would do wonders, even though it meant burning much of the powder he had taken out of the prize.

   Ismail's absence did not vex him unduly, therefore, but it did puzzle him: in these circumstances, where the cannon he could provide would probably mean victory to any one of the three sides, he had expected an eager welcome—janissaries playing a Turkish march, fireworks, perhaps an oriental carpet laid out. Was this apparent indifference Turkish policy, a common manoeuvre in the East? He would have liked to ask Professor Graham: but early in the day, as soon as the mountains of Epirus grew clear on the eastern sky, the Professor and Dr Maturin had made their way into the maintop, helped and guarded by Honey and Maitland, both master's mates and both powerful young men, there to survey the classic ground. It was not Attica, it was not even Boeotia, but it was still just Greece, and the poor young gentlemen were bored to a galloping pallor, intolerably bored with accounts of Theopompus and the Molossians, of Agathocles and the Molossians, of Themistocles and the Molossians with his speech at full length, of the Actian games, and even of the battle of Actium itself, though neither Graham nor Maturin could remember which side had the weather-gage. Their only relief from boredom came when Graham, in the heat of declamation (Plutarch on Pyrrhus), stepped backwards into the lubber's hole, and when they were sent down for maps and an azimuth compass so that it might be determined which mountain on the skyline concealed Dodona and its speaking oak—'Dodona, young gentlemen, which Homer describes as the hole of the Selli, who sleep upon the ground and do not wash their feet.'

   'Perhaps that is Graham,' thought Jack, hearing someone speaking to the sentry at the cabin door. But no, it was Stephen, attracted by the smell of coffee wafting up and perhaps a little overcome by Graham's elephantine memory (he was now treating the master's mates to Polybius, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Pausanias, all of them on the subject of Pyrrhus, born and nurtured in those blue-grey mountains ahead.)

   'I was thinking of Graham,' said Jack.

   'So was I,' Stephen instantly replied. 'The other day he explained to me that the Navy was a school for cowardice, and I meant to ask you for some heads of argument on the other side. I was reminded of his contention as I came down just now, because I heard a midshipman reproving a foremast hand.'

   'How did Graham make this out?' asked Jack. 'Killick, light along another cup.'

   'He began by saying that he had seen an admiral throw an inkwell at a post-captain, and that the post-captain, a choleric and masterful man, overcame his desire to retaliate by a very great exertion of self-discipline, explaining afterwards that if he had raised his hand to his superior officer it would have been the end of his career—even in theory of his life. Graham observed that the admiral could blackguard and even assault the captain with impunity, just as the captain could blackguard and even assault his lieutenants and they their inferiors and so on to the penultimate member of the ship's company. He said that the admiral, from his earliest days in the Navy, had seen the cowardly practice of abusing and beating men who could not reply, their hands being tied; and that, his mind having been long schooled in cowardice and he wearing the impregnable armour of the King's commission, it now appeared quite natural to him to do so. I did not answer directly, meaning to ask your views first: I was reminded of it by hearing this boy revile a seaman and threaten him with a rope's end, when in a state of nature the man would have put him to silence. Even in the present unnatural conditions the sailor was sufficiently human and incautious to reply:'

   'Who was the midshipman?' asked Jack with strong displeasure.

   'My dear, I am sorry that my face should look at all like an informer's,' said Stephen. 'But tell me now, how can I best confound Professor Graham?'

   'Why, as to that,' said Jack, blowing on his coffee-cup and staring out of the stern-window at the harbour, 'as to that . . . if you do not choose to call him a pragmatical clinchpoop and kick his breech, which you might think ungenteel, perhaps you could tell him to judge the pudding by its fruit.'