The Reverse of the Medal

PATRICK O'BRIAN

The Reverse of the Medal

W.W. Norton & Company

New York * London

CHAPTER ONE

The West Indies squadron lay off Bridgetown, sheltered from the north-cast tradewind and basking in the brilliant sun. It was a diminished squadron, consisting of little more than the ancient Irresistible, wearing the flag of Sir William Pellew, red at the fore, and two or three battered, worn-out, undermanned stoops, together with a storeship and a transport; for all the seaworthy vessels were far away in the Atlantic or Caribbean, looking for the possible French or American men-of-war and the certain privateers, numerous, well-armed, well-handled, full of men, swift-sailing and eager for their prey, the English and allied merchant ships.

Yet although they were old, weather-worn and often iron-sick they were a pleasant sight lying there on the pure blue sea, as outwardly trim as West Indies spit and polish could make them, with paint and putty disguising the wounds of age and their bright-work all ablaze; and although some of them had suffered so from fever in Jamaica and on the Spanish Main that they could scarcely muster hands enough to win their anchors, there were still plenty of men, both officers and foremast-jacks, who were intimately acquainted with the ship that was beating up against the steady breeze and with many of the people in her. She was the Surprise, a twenty-eight-gun frigate that had been sent to protect the British whalers in the South Seas from the Norfolk, an American man-of-war of roughly equal force. The Surprise was even older than the Irresistible - indeed she had been on her way to the breaker's yard when she was suddenly given the mission-but unlike her she was a sweet sailer, particularly on a bowline; and if she had not been towing a dismasted ship she would certainly have joined the squadron a little after dinner. As things were, however, it was doubtful whether she would be able to do so before the evening gun.

The Admiral was inclined to think that she might manage it; but then the Admiral was somewhat biased by his strong desire to know whether the Surprise had succeeded in her task, and whether the vessel she had in tow was a prize captured in his extensive waters or merely a distressed neutral or a British whaler. In the first case Sir William would be entitled to a twelfth of her value and in the second to nothing whatsoever, not even to the pressing of a few seamen, for the South Sea whalers were protected. He was also influenced by his ardent wish for an evening's music. Sir William was a large bony old man with one forbidding eye and a rough, determined face; he looked very much the practical seaman and formal clothes sat awkwardly upon his powerful frame; but music meant a very great deal to him and it was generally known in the service that he never put to sea without at least a clavichord, and that his steward had been obliged to take tuning lessons in Portsmouth, Valletta, Cape Town and Madras. It was also known that the Admiral was fond of beautiful young men; but as this fondness was reasonably discreet, never leading to any disorder or open scandal, the service regarded it with tolerant amusement, much as it regarded his more openly-avowed but equally incongruous passion for Handel.

One of these beautiful young men, his flag-lieutenant, now stood by him on the poop, a young man who had begun life - naval life - as a reefer so horribly pimpled that be was known as Spotted Dick, but who with the clearing of his skin had suddenly blossomed into a seagoing Apollo: a sea-going Apollo perfectly unaware of his beauty however, attributing his position solely to his zeal and his perfectly genuine professional merits.

The Admiral said, 'It may very well be a prize.' He gazed long through his telescope, and then referring to the captain of the Surprise, he added, 'After all, they call him Lucky Jack Aubrey, and I remember him coming into that damned long narrow harbour of Port Mahon with a train of captured merchantmen at his tail like Halley's comet. That was when Lord Keith had the Mediterranean command: Aubrey must have made him a small fortune at every cruise - a very fine eye for a prize, although... But I was forgetting: you sailed under him, did you not?'

'Oh yes, sir,' cried Apollo. 'Oh yes, indeed. He taught me all the mathematics I know, and he grounded us wonderfully well in seamanship. Never was such a seaman, sir: that is to say, among post-captains.' The Admiral smiled at the young man's enthusiasm, his flush of candid admiration, and as he trained his glass on the Surprise once more he said 'He is a tolerably good hand with a fiddle, too. We played together all through a long quarantine.'

But the flag-lieutenant's enthusiasm was not shared by everyone. Only a few feet below them, in his great cabin, the captain of the Irresistible explained to his wife that Jack Aubrey was not at all the thing. Nor was his ship. 'Those old twenty-eight-gun frigates should have been sent to the knackers yard long ago - they belong to the last age, and are of no sort of use except to make us ridiculous when an American carrying forty-four guns takes one. They are both called frigates, and the landsman don't see the odds. "Oh my eye," he cries, "an American frigate has taken one of ours - the Navy is gone to the dogs - the Navy is no good any more."'

'It must be a great trial, my dear,' said his wife.

'Twenty-four pounders, and scantlings like a line-of-battle ship,' said Captain Goole, who had never been able to digest the American victories. 'And as for Aubrey, well, they call him Lucky Jack, and to be sure he did take a great many prizes in the Mediterranean - Keith favoured him outrageously - gave him cruise after cruise - many people resented it. And then again in the Indian Ocean, when the Mauritius was taken in the year nine. Or was it ten? But I have not heard of anything much since then. No. It is my belief he overdid it - rode his luck to death. There is a tide in the affairs of men...' He hesitated.

'I dare say there is, my dear,' said his wife.

'I do beg, Harriet, that you will not incessantly interrupt every time I open my mouth,' cried Captain Goole. 'There, you have driven it out of my head again.'

'I am sorry, my dear,' said Mrs Goole, closing her eyes. She had come from Jamaica to recover from the fever and to escape being buried among the land-crabs; and sometimes she wondered whether it was a very clever thing to have done.

'However, what the proverb means is that you must make hay while the sun shines but not force things. The minute your luck begins to turn sullen you must strike your topgallantmasts down on deck directly, and take a reef in your topsails, and prepare to batten down your hatches and lie to under a storm staysail if it gets. worse. But what did Jack Aubrey do? He cracked on as though his luck was going to last for ever. He must have made a mint of money in the Mauritius campaign, quite apart from the Med; but did he put it into copper-bottomed two-and-a-half per cent stock and live quietly on the interest? No, he did not. He pranced about, keeping a stable of race-horses and entertaining like a lord-lieutenant and covering his wife with diamonds and taffeta mantuas...'

'Taffeta mantuas, Captain Goole?' cried his wife.

'Well, expensive garments. Paduasoy - Indian muslin- silk: all that kind of thing. And a fur pelisse.'

'How I should love some diamonds and a fur pelisse,' said Mrs Goole, but not aloud: and she conceived a rather favourable opinion of Captain Aubrey.

'Gambling, too,' said her husband. 'I have absolutely seen him lose a thousand guineas at a sitting in Willis's rooms. And then he tried to mend his fortunes by some crackpot scheme of getting silver out of the dross of an ancient lead-mine - trusted in some shady projector to carry it on while he was at sea. I hear he is in a very deep water now.'

'Poor Captain Aubrey,' murmured Mrs Goole.

'But the real trouble with Aubrey,' said the captain after a long pause during which he watched the distant frigate go about on to the larboard tack and head for Needham's Point, 'is that he cannot keep his breeches on.,

This seemed a very general failing in the Navy, for it was the character her husband gave to many, many of his fellow-officers; and in the first days of her marriage Mrs Goole had supposed that the fleet was largely manned by satyrs. Yet none had ever caused Mrs Goole the slightest uneasiness and as far as she was concerned they might all have been glued into their small-clothes. Her husband perceived her want of total conviction and went on, 'No, but I mean he goes beyond all measure: he is a rake, a whoremonger, a sad fellow. When we were midshipmen together in the Resolution, on the Cape station, he hid a black girl called Sally in the cable tiers - used to carry her most of his dinner - cried like a bull-calf when she was discovered and put over the side. The captain turned him before the mast: disrated him and turned him before the mast as a common seaman. But perhaps that was partly because of the tripe, too.'

'The tripe, my dear?'

'Yes. He stole most of the captain's dish of tripe by means of a system of hooks and tackles. We were on precious short commons in our mess, and the girl needed some too - famous tripe it was, famous tripe: I remember it now. So he was turned before the mast for the rest of the commission to learn him morals, and that is why I am senior to him. But it did not answer: presently he was at it again, in the Mediterranean this time, debauching a post-captain's wife when he was only a lieutenant, or a commander at the best.'

'Perhaps he has grown wiser with age and increasing responsibility,' suggested Mrs Goole. 'He is married now, I believe. I met a Mrs Aubrey at Lady Hood's, a very elegant, well-bred woman with a fine family of children.'

'Not a bit of it, not a bit of it,' cried Goole. 'The very last thing I heard of him was that he was careering about Valletta with a red-haired Italian woman. No, no, the leopard don't change his spots. Besides, his father is that mad rakish General Aubrey, the radical member that is always abusing the ministry, and this fellow is his father's son - he was always rash and foolhardy. And now he is going to dismast himself. See how he cracks on! He will certainly run straight on to the Needham's Point reef. He cannot possibly avoid it.'

This seemed to be the general opinion aboard the flagship, and talk died away entirely, to revive some minutes later in laughter and applause as the Surprise, racing towards destruction under a great spread of canvas, put her helm alee, hauled on an unseen spring leading from her larboard cathead to the towline, and spun about like a cutter.

'I have not seen that caper since I was a boy,' said the Admiral, thumping the rail with pleasure. 'Very prettily done. Though you have to be damned sure of your ship and your men to venture upon it, by God. Determined fellow: now he will come in easily on this leg. I am sure he is bringing a prize. Did you smoke the spring to his larboard cathead? Good afternoon to you, ma'am,' - this to Mrs Goole, whose husband had abandoned her for a hundred fathoms of decayed cablet - 'Did you smoke the spring to his larboard cathead? Richardson will explain it to you,' he said, making his rheumatic way down the steps to the quarterdeck.

'Well, ma'am,' said Richardson with a shy, particularly winning smile, 'it was not altogether unlike clubhauling, with the inertia of the tow taking the place of the pull of the Ice-anchor...'

The manoeuvre was particularly appreciated by the watch below, plying spyglasses at the open gunports, and as the Surprise ran in on her last leg they exchanged tales about her - her extraordinary speed if handled right and her awkwardness if handled wrong - and about her present skipper. For with all his faults Jack Aubrey was one of the better-known fighting captains, and although few of the men had been shipmates with him many had friends who had been engaged in one or another of his actions. William Harris's cousin had served with him in his first and perhaps most spectacular battle, when, commanding a squat little fourteen-gun sloop, he boarded and took the Spanish Cacafuego of thirty-two, and now Harris told the tale again, with even greater relish than usual, the captain in question being visible to them all, a yellow-haired figure, tall and clear on his quarterdeck, just abaft the wheel.

'There's my brother Barret,' said Robert Bonden, sail-maker's mate, at another gunport. 'Has been Captain Aubrey's coxswain this many a year. Thinks the world of him, though uncommon taut, and no women allowed.'

'There's Joe Noakes, bringing the red-hot poker for the salute,' said a coal-black seaman, having grasped the spyglass. 'He owes me two dollars and an almost new shore-going Jersey shirt, embroidered with the letter P.'

The smoke of the frigate's last saluting gun had hardly died away before her captain's gig splashed down and began pulling for the flagship in fine style. But half way across the roadstead the gig met the flotilla of bumboats bringing sixpenny whores out to the Surprise: it was a usual though not invariable practice - one that most captains liked on the grounds that it pleased the hands and kept them from sodomy, though others forbade it as bringing the pox and great quantities of illicit spirits aboard, which meant an endless sick-list, fighting, and drunken crime. Jack Aubrey was one of these. In general he loved tradition, but he thought discipline suffered too much from wholesale whoredom on board; and although he took no high moral stand on the matter he thoroughly disliked the sight of the brawling promiscuity of the lower deck of a newly-anchored man-of-war with some hundreds of men and women copulating, some in more or less screened hammocks, some in corners or behind guns, but most quite openly asprawl. His strong voice could now be heard, coming against the breeze, and the Irresistibles grinned.