The Reverse of the Medal (10 page)

He had another cause for satisfaction in the frigate's stores, so handsomely replenished in Bridgetown by the Admiral's direct, insistent order. He and the bosun and the carpenter had had to ponder so heavily over the use of a few fathoms of cordage or a couple of deals for so long that it was a sensuous delight to move about among the bales, coils and casks, smelling pitch, paint, new rope and sailcloth and freshly-sawn wood. He had also laid in supplies of his own, so that he was able to return to his round of dinners, inviting his officers with a certain style in the traditional way: he liked all his officers, and he revered the traditions of the service.

But his cause for satisfaction was of course his ship. It seemed to him that she had never sailed so sweetly, and that her people had never worked so well and heartily together. He knew that this was almost certainly the last leg of her last voyage, but he had known that she was mortal for a great while now and the knowledge had become a kind of quiet heartbreak, always in the background, so that at present he took very particular notice of her excellence and of each day he passed on her.

Each day had its own character; it could not be otherwise at sea; but during this early calm progress before the frigate picked up the westerlies they were wonderfully alike. The immemorial sequence of cleaning the upper decks in the earliest morning, pumping ship, piping up hammocks, piping hands to breakfast, cleaning the maindeck, piping to the various morning exercises, the solemn observation of noon, hands piped to dinner, grog piped up, the officers drummed to the gunroom dinner, the afternoon occupations, hands piped to supper, more grog, then quarters, with the thundrous great guns flashing and roaring in the twilight - the immemorial sequence, punctuated by bells, was so quickly and firmly restored that it might never have been broken. This was the sort of sailing everybody was used to, and now that the Agent Victualler in Bridgetown had done his duty by them this was the diet that everybody was used to as well; there were no more dolphin sausages served out to confound the mind and the calendar, no more imperfectly smoked penguins, but the regular and natural succession of salt pork, dried peas, salt beef, more dried peas, more salt pork; so that the days, though so much alike, could be told apart in a moment from the smell of the galley coppers.

It all gave a pleasant illusion of eternity, this quiet sailing under a perfect sky towards a horizon perpetually five miles ahead, never nearer; but at the same time every man aboard, apart from the Gibraltar lunatics and one home grown innocent called Henry, knew that there was no permanence about it at all. For one thing, the paying-off pennant was already being prepared, a splendid silk streamer the length of the ship and more that was to be hoisted the day she went out of commission and all her people, paid at last, changed from members of a tight-knit community to solitary individuals. For another, since everybody was determined that if the barky were to be laid up in ordinary or if she were to go to the breaker's yard, then she should go in style, they spent a great deal of their time beautifying her. She had been much battered south of the Horn, and all that Mr Mowett had screwed out of the Bridgetown yard and all that he had bought out of his own pocket - best gold leaf and two pots of vermilion - would hardly be enough to bring her to full perfection.

Given the Surprise's very high standards and her first lieutenant's love of perfection the prettying and the pennant would in any case have been difficult and time-consuming; they were rendered very much more so by the frigate's deck-cargo and side-cloths. These were designed to give her the appearance of a merchantman, and the first was made up of empty casks that could eventually be knocked down and used for firewood, while the second were long strips of cloth painted with the likeness of gunports and fastened along the frigate's sides, covering her real gunports and giving a fine impression of falsity, particularly when they rippled in the breeze.

The Surprises had long been used to their Captain's ways and they took great delight in this disguise; there was something piratical about it and something of the biter bit (or to be bit) that pleased their very souls; and although the Spartan, a far-ranging privateer, could scarcely be expected for several hundred miles they worked double-tides on the painted portlids, going over them again and again to get them just wrong, just a little too large and out of true, so that a sharp, predatory eye should pride itself on seeing through the deceit and close without hesitation. Nor did they make the least objection to striking down the deck-cargo in order to make a clean sweep fore and aft every evening for quarters.

This was Jack's favourite time of the day, and the time when he was proudest of his ship and her people. He had always been a great believer in gunnery, and at great cost in time, spirit and private powder he had trained his gun-crews to something very near the highest pitch of efficiency their instruments allowed.

At different times the Surprise had been armed in different ways. At one point she had carried almost nothing but carronades, short, light guns that shot a very heavy ball for a very small charge of powder, so that with her twenty-four thirty-two-pounders and her eight eighteen-pounders she could throw a broadside of no less than 456 pounds, more than the gundeck of a line-of-battle ship. But she could not throw them very far nor very accurately, and although these carronades, these smashers as they were called, were wonderfully effective at close quarters so long as they did not overturn or set the ship's sides on fire because of their shortness, Jack did not think much of them for blue-water sailing. At close quarters he preferred boarding to battering, and at a distance he preferred the fine-work of exact, very carefully aimed gunfire in rippling broadsides. At present the frigate carried twenty-two twelve-pounders on her maindeck and two beautiful brass long nines, Captain Aubrey's private property, the gift of a grateful Turk, that might be fitted in the chase-ports below or that might, in suitable weather, take the place of the two forecastle carronades. She possessed six twenty-four-pounder carronades, but since they tended to oppress her in heavy seas they were often struck down into the hold; and in any case it was the cannon, the real guns, that Jack Aubrey loved. With them he could only command a broadside of 141 pounds, but he knew very well that even a hundredweight of iron hitting a ship in the right place could wound her terribly, and like a fair number of other commanders - his friend Philip Broke, for example - he was convinced of the truth of Collingwood's dictum 'If a ship can fire three well-directed broadsides in five minutes, no enemy can resist them.'

By dint of long, arduous and costly training he had brought this figure down to three broadsides in three minutes ten seconds. The training was costly in the most obvious sense, for in this matter as in many others the Admiralty did not see eye to eye with Captain Aubrey and the regulations allowed him only a pitiful amount of powder apart from that blazed away in action; all the rest had to be supplied by him, and at the present rate a broadside cost close on a guinea.

For some little time after they had left the last of the sargasso weed astern, the evening exercise had consisted of no more than dumb show, of heaving the great guns in and out and going through the motions of firing them; but Thursday was Sophie's birthday, and her husband meant to make the heavens ring by way of celebrating it. Furthermore the conditions were almost ideal - a topgallant breeze in the south-west, an easy, moderate swell - and he hoped the ship might beat her record.

Like most records it had something artificial about it. Long before the drum beat for quarters the men knew that they were going to fire in earnest, since they had heard the Captain tell the first lieutenant to have a raft and three beef-barrels and a red flag prepared; yet although there was nothing spontaneous or unexpected about the simulated battle they took their attempt upon the record very seriously. The crew of the brass chasers, for example, spent a good deal of their watch below in going over the nine-pound balls with a hammer, removing irregularities; for these long, accurate guns had very little windage, and they called for glass-smooth round-shot. Once the preliminaries were over - once the drum had beat, once the disguise had been cleared away, once all the cabin bulkheads had been knocked down so that there should be a clean sweep fore and aft, with the decks wetted and sanded, damp fearnought screens over the hatchways to the magazine, and all hands at their action stations, the pigtailed members of the gun-crews (and that was most of them, the Surprise following the old days) doubled their queues and tied them short: some took off their shirts, and many knotted a handkerchief round their foreheads against the sweat. They stood easy, each in a place he knew intimately well, with his own particular tackle-fall, rammer, sponge, powder-horn, wad, handspike, crow or round-shot just at hand, the lieutenants behind their divisions and the midshipmen behind their groups of guns, and they watched the blue cutter towing the raft away over the sea. The breeze hummed gently through the rigging; smoke from the slow-match in the tubs wafted here and there about the deck.

In the silence Jack's words to the master were heard clearly on the forecastle. 'Mr Allen, we will haul our wind two points, if you please. Mr Calamy, jump down to the orlop and ask the Doctor, with my compliments, for the loan of his watch.'

The Surprise turned to larboard; the cutter reappeared, casting off her tow: tension mounted, and the men spat on their hands or hitched their trousers. Then came the ritual words: 'Silence fore and aft. Cast loose your guns. Level your guns. Out tompions. Run out your guns.' And here there was a universal roar as eighteen tons of metal were heaved out as fast as they could go. 'Prime. Fire from forward as they bear.'

The target was bobbing out there on the flashing sea, well beyond the accurate reach of carronades. Bonden, the captain of number two, the starboard chaser, crouched over his piece, glaring along the barrel: the elevation was right, but to point it true he made little jerks of his head to the men with the crow on one side and the handspike on the other, they standing with their backs to the ship's side to heave the ton and a half of brass a trifle one way or another. The long brass gun in the broad bow-port could be trained very far forward, and presently Bonden had the target full over his dispart sight; but he was as eager as his Captain to beat the record and he would not fire until the number four gun on his right, Wilful Murder by name, should also have it clear. Unbreathing moments, two heaves of the long slow swell, and then the murmur from Wilful Murder. 'Whenever you like, mate.'

Bonden reached out his hand for the glowing match and clapped the pink end down on the touch-hole, arching his body to let the instantly recoiling gun shoot inboard under him. They were scarcely aware of the enormous ringing crack and the jet of flame, the flying bits of wad, the smoke and the twang of the breeching: they took them for granted as they held the gun firm, sponged it, rammed the cartridge home, the ball and the wad, and ran the piece up again with a satisfying thump - took them as much for granted as the deeper report of number four, instantly followed by Towser, number six, and so on in double quick time to twenty-two and twenty-four, Jumping Billy and True Blue, which were in Jack's sleeping-place and great cabin respectively, or as the dense white smoke that eddied in the breeze; but their motions, though extremely rapid, exact and powerful, were so nearly automatic that most of the crew had time to see the flight of their ball and the fountain of water as it pitched just under the target. 'A hairsbreadth, a hairsbreadth...' muttered Bonden, bent over the reloaded, pointed gun; and then he whipped the glowing match across.

On the quarterdeck Jack stood holding Stephen's watch - a fine Breguet with a centre seconds hand - and he craned to rise above the smoke of the present broadside. The first had covered the target with white water, not a single ball badly astray: this one was even better, sending two of the barrels and most of the raft into the air. 'Well done, well done, by God,' he cried, very nearly pounding the watch to pieces on the rail. He checked himself and passed it to Calamy, his aide-dc-camp. 'Note the very second twenty-four has fired,' he said and skipped from a carronade-slide into the lower shrouds to see the fall of the next discharge. The broadside began as the ship rose under him almost to the height of the roll and it reached twenty-four before she had heeled back half a strake, a long roaring peal, a bank of smoke pierced through with lightning stabs, and beyond it all the flight of the shot, as pretty a grouping as he had ever seen, all close together, all well pitched up, leaving nothing of the target whatsoever. He jumped down on to the deck and looked at Calamy, who replied with a grin, 'Three minutes and eight seconds, sir, if you please.'

Jack laughed with pleasure. 'We have done it,' he said. 'Yet what I really value is the accuracy. Any fool can bang off quick, but this was deadly, deadly.' He walked along the line of guns and their jolly, sweating crews, particularly commending the captains of Viper, Mad Anthony, Bulldog and Nancy's Fancy for their briskness, but warning them that if they grew any brisker it would be a simultaneous discharge - the guns would all go off together - and that would never do. Her timbers would not stand it now. They would fall apart, and he had far rather they stayed together, in case they should see this heavy privateer, the Spartan.

They saw her three times. A little before dawn no more than three days after this outstanding exercise, Mr Honey, the officer of the watch, sent a lookout to the masthead as usual, this being the very best time for finding an enemy close at hand, stronger or weaker as the case might be. It had been a thick, murky night, and there were still veils of mist turning and drifting on the breeze when the man hailed the deck - a sail, a sail to leeward.

'Where away?' called Honey, who could see nothing from the deck.

'Right on our beam, sir,' came the answer. 'But I can't make her out any more. A ship, I think. Maybe a long mile away.'