Authors: Patrick O'Brian
‘Bah,’ cried Peter, flinging a handful of sand over the mess and darting out to look at the sky. It looked much the same, a deep, luminous blue, with a few white clouds sailing on the perpetual course of the trades. Far down in the north-east a low bank of dullness promised them their usual refreshing evening shower. On the beach of coral sand, white, tinged with the most delicate pink, the usual surf beat in its long, steady rhythm. The coconut palms stood, bowing graciously after the gust, and their fronds made a gentle clattering over the deep boom of the surf. In the bay the
Centurion
rode with an easy lift and peck to her best bower on the incoming tide: everything looked perfectly normal—a sea-born paradise. But Peter was not the only one to be staring at the sky; there were several seamen on the shore, looking up; and heads popped out of the huts and the storehouse. ‘I don’t know, I’m sure,’ said the master after a deliberate inspection. ‘Will there be wind?’ he asked in Spanish, addressing one of the native prisoners, who was moodily pounding a crab in a bowl. The brown man glanced at the sky, drew up his shoulders and spread his hands in a gesture that he had caught from the Spaniards. ‘Damned heathen,’ muttered Mr Blew, and retired into his shelter, stubbing the ground crossly with his stick.
‘Easy with that barrel there,’ cried Peter, seeing a couple of hands bouncing a small cask on a mound out of mere lightness of heart. ‘There you—swabs, you’ve sprung the chime-hoop. Quartermaster,’ he said sharply to a man who came hurrying out of the palms. ‘You are supposed to be in charge, and here’s a cask staved.’
‘Which it was a very old one, sir,’ said the culprit.
‘They are all very old ones,’ said Peter, ‘and that’s no reason why you should bang them about. Get on with your work in a responsible manner: and the next man I see with sand in his hair will find himself on the defaulters’ list.’ For by way of varying their toil several of the men had been standing on their heads in the sand.
‘Mr Keppel,’ said the second lieutenant, ‘you understand the management of hounds, I believe?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Keppel, without a blush.
‘Then you will take a party to the high part of the island behind the look-out point and secure as many beeves as is practicable. The utmost economy of powder will be observed, Mr Keppel.’
‘Aye-aye, sir.’
‘The armourer will serve out four muskets, flintlock; three pikes, boarding; six knives, skinning; for all of which you will sign. You will draw on the local supplies of dogs and proceed with the utmost despatch. You may take seven men: and you may also secure a reasonable number of swine for the ward-room. Very, very great care will be taken to ensure the good eating qualities of the ward-room swine, Mr Keppel.’
‘Aye-aye, sir. May I make a suggestion, sir?’
‘If it is to the point, Mr Keppel.’
‘Palafox is an eminent hand with a hog, sir, if you please.’
‘Very well. Make it so, Mr Keppel. Have you any observations to make on the equipment?’
‘Yes, sir. A horn, hunting, is required for signalling to the pack.’
‘The service makes no provision for horns, hunting, Mr Keppel. A little seamanlike ingenuity will enable you to cope with the difficulty.’
A couple of hours later the wild cattle of Tinian were on the move. Urged by the weird shrilling of a bo’sun’s pipe, the motley pack herded them in little groups past an ambush where the best shots in the
Centurion
(and there were many to choose from, the crew having been continually schooled in the use of fire-arms) picked off the handsomest beasts.
‘This beats lifting the landlord’s deer,’ said Burrell.
The half-gypsy poacher Soames, from Winchester gaol, replied with his dark, lop-sided grin: he rarely spoke; but after a minute he said, ‘I miss the keepers. It’s hardly natural, like.’
‘That young cock knows how to handle the dogs,’ said Dray.
‘But he’s lifting them off of the line,’ objected Burrell,
listening to Keppel’s ‘Hoick, hoick, get along for’ard,’ and the excited yelping far down the hill.
‘Ain’t he taking advantage of the wind?’ said Dray. ‘Don’t you see as how it is backing? Don’t you know them beasts won’t ever come anigh these dead ’uns upwind of ’em?’
The poacher nodded. ‘He’s a fly cove,’ he said, with strong approval. ‘I wouldn’t mind going out with him in the New Forest. You don’t know nothing, Henry Burrell,’ he added. ‘Can’t you see the wind come round two points already?’
‘It’ll blow up dirty tonight,’ said Burrell, to change the injurious topic.
‘Never you mind if it’ll blow up dirty or not, Henry Burrell,’ said his shipmates. ‘You attend to your duty and stop arguing.’
But the unlucky Burrell was right. The wind backed, turned round again, fairly boxing the compass, and a little before sunset a howling squall, solidly loaded with rain, threatened to carry away the roofs of the trim orderly booths that the hunting-party had erected in a convenient dell.
‘What?’ shrieked Peter, double-lashing the ridge-pole with a twist of sinuous creeper.
‘I said it was beginning to blow,’ roared Keppel, in a lull.
‘That’s right,’ said Peter, but his words were lost in an almighty bellow of thunder.
‘What?’ asked Keppel, at the top of his voice.
‘That’s right,’ repeated Peter.
‘What is?’
‘Never mind,’ said Peter, flapping his hand. Conversation was really impossible, and they sat in the doorway, watching the almost incessant play of the lightning and the fantastic drive of the tropical rain. For two feet from the ground the sodden earth rebounded, a kind of low haze of liquid mud: the air between the flashing plummets of rain was filled with atomised water, heavy and wet in their breath. Everywhere there was noise, a vast, omnipresent bass drumming and the high, varying shriek of the wind.
‘There must be a powerful great surf running down there,’
said Peter, tasting salt on his lips. ‘What a good thing we gackled the cables.’
Keppel roared something, probably to the same effect, but all Peter could make out was the word “off-shore”, and before Keppel could repeat it their attention was diverted by a coconut, which came through the roof with the force of a cannon-ball and smashed against the flank of a pig.
While Peter rapidly fished the broken branch and staunched some of the inpour of rain, Keppel dragged the damaged pig to one side, carefully erased the inscription “Midshipmen’s Mess” and by the blue light of the lightning he wrote “Wardroom Swine” in store-keeper’s chalk. Then he crept through the mud to the two other booths, where the men had stopped up every possible ventilation, had lit a little fire and had already accumulated a solid fug of tobacco-smoke, wet seaman, wet dog, and the smell of a villainous brew over the fire. He made them prop up a well-nourished beast and lie with their heads sheltered under it—there was no point in trying to shift, for they were already two hundred yards from the nearest palms—and then crawled back to do the same in the officers’ hut.
The water rose steadily; and a little after midnight their roof left them bodily, in one movement, like a card. But it was not cold, and they were tolerably accustomed to moisture: they even slept in snatches, for the slaughtered prey made charming soft lying, and they were both heavily bloated with animal food.
They slept enough, in all events, to be lively and brisk when the dawn came up. The wind had gone, and the absence of its noise—greater by far on land than at sea—made everything seem very strange. Indeed, the scene was strange enough apart from that. Everywhere everything about them was a green wreck: everything that could be battered down had been battered down, even to the smallest blade of grass. Branches lay tossed in the wildest confusion: the strong trees stood bare and stripped above the flattened undergrowth. Three dogs and a large white bird lay dead in the stream that now poured
by the huts, struck down by the storm. A few yards away a black furrow showed where the lightning had ripped open the earth. With the rising of the sun a gentle steam mounted all over the destroyed vegetation: and from every point came the unaccustomed purling of streams.
‘Here’s a pretty howdy-do,’ observed Keppel. ‘We shall have to cut out a path down to the bay.’
‘Things have come to an elegant pass when we have to hunt pigs for the wardroom and then hack a road to carry them back,’ said Peter. ‘I propose that we go down and come back with a larger party. After breakfast.’
Keppel, too, was on fire to see the ship: he hesitated: but he was in charge. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Dray, bend a line to that bough. We must make a sledge. Mr Palafox, you will take the compass, if you please, and mark out the shortest line with Burrell and Hobbs. Look alive there, Dray: rig a cross-piece abaft the runner—here, give it to me.’
It was a long, steaming task hauling the carcasses down. The men had to be held in from lurking up into the remaining trees to get an earlier view of the bay, for they too were very anxious for the ship: but they worked hard under Keppel’s impulsion, and for the last few hundred yards, before the woods gave way to the sand, they needed no urging. They fairly ran away with the sledge and burst out of the trees.
There was the beach, the wide bay still roaring with surf: but there was no ship in the bay. No ship out at sea. There was no sign of the
Centurion
on the jagged horizon; no sign at all but her distracted people standing in black, silent groups on the edge of the sea.
‘N
O
, M
R
P
ALAFOX
,’ said the Commodore, ‘I
TELL YOU
again, do not push the saw. Pull, and let me pull.’
‘Aye-aye, sir,’ said Peter, acutely conscious of the sharp eye piercing up at him. The eye was almost all that was to be seen of Mr Anson, who was covered with sawdust: he had chosen the least enviable place, that of bottom-sawyer in the stifling saw-pit, and even he was beginning to feel the heat.
‘Give way, now,’ he said, more kindly. ‘Easy does it.’
‘Pull,’ said Peter to himself. ‘Pull. Not push.’ Four times in the last hour his zeal had led him to aid the Commodore’s long heave by a thrust of his own, and each time the whipping, ten-foot, double-handed saw had bent and bound in the cut. ‘Pull, pull, pull,’ he said, timing his work to the feel of the invisible Commodore. It was quite true: handsomely did it, not brute force. The cut advanced, the dust flew down in even clouds, the long plank divided smoothly from the palm-tree’s bole.
‘One hundred more will do it,’ thought Peter, pulling steadily. ‘And that will make thirty-seven foot this afternoon.’
Another two days might see all the timbers cut, and then they could begin the building of the sides. Already the little Spanish bark lay neatly divided into two, waiting in her dry-dock for the transformation that would enable her to carry a hundred and thirteen men over the remaining two thousand miles of Pacific Ocean. They were going to lengthen her—to make a thirty-nine ton vessel of a fifteen-tonner—to the highest degree that her beam would stand, and already the work was well in hand.
At the ninetieth cut Keppel and a one-eyed hand appeared, waited for the plank to leaf away, and hurried off with it like ants.
‘‘Vast sawing,’ said the Commodore. ‘I must clear my foothold.’ He scooped away the hill of sawdust, shook a cloud of it from his head and collar, blew his nose, spat on his hands, and the sawing recommenced.
Through the even, pulsating hum of the saw Peter could hear the din of the hammers by the forge. They must nearly have finished the iron-work by now, if the hand-made bellows were still working. As regularly as a machine Peter pulled on the saw: automatically he kept his eye fixed on the scored mark by his feet: his body was absorbed in the rhythm of the work, but his mind ran free. Behind him there was the distant crash of a tree. ‘That will be the big one Mr Dennis marked,’ he thought, with satisfaction.
What a difference these twenty days had seen. Three weeks ago, or nearly, the island had been a place of black despair. The
Centurion
had vanished: she had driven in the night, with an off-shore hurricane, reefs to the lee, her guns unsecured, her yards on deck, and scarcely a hundred men aboard—many of them incapable of heavy duty—to work her in that annihilating sea. She had foundered with all hands: that was the sure opinion of most. Foundered within an hour of parting her cables: and that was the verdict of deeply experienced seamen. A few were sanguine enough to hope that she might have driven clear; but the most hopeful could not tell how she was ever to beat up to the island again against the prevailing wind with such a wretched crew and in such a condition as the hurricane must have left her—it being supposed that she swam at all. And when, in the succeeding days and weeks, no miracle occurred—no suddenly reborn
Centurion
appeared in the bay—the sanguine party admitted that they were wrong.
They had been very bad, those early days. In spite of the wonderful refreshment of Tinian, many of the hands, especially the older men, had already taken about as much as flesh and blood could stand. It did not seem that they could face up
to this new blow. There was even a time when the very fabric of naval existence appeared to be on the edge of carrying away—when the discipline of the remaining ship’s company was no longer an unquestioned certainty. Even in such an excellent crew sea-lawyers were not lacking, and they spread the tale that the officers’ commissions were lost with the ship, and that their authority now therefore lapsed on land—that every man was free to do as he chose.
But the Commodore had dealt with that: after his address to the assembled men—one of his very rare addresses, for he was not a loquacious commander—there had been no further breath of mutiny; and although the men had at first confronted their seemingly impossible task with no more than apathetic obedience, Mr Anson’s certainty, his immense prestige among them, their affection for him, and the example of his cheerful, indefatigable industry had worked an extraordinary change.
‘The hands will not be driven,’ he had directed at the council of the officers. ‘They will be shown. These are good men: they need encouragement, not hard words. I need not add,’ he had concluded, dismissing the supposition with a smile—‘I need not add that the officers will show no sign of despondency at any time whatever.’
Of course, he had been right. No seaman who had sailed under Mr Anson was going to stand idly by, watching him labour without lending a hand: and on a much smaller scale, no men of Peter’s watch and division would show a grudging heart when Peter was struggling with the task of warping the bark up to the rollers that were to carry her into the as yet non-existent dry-dock. In a few days the men were wholly recalled to their duty. Without adequate ropes or tackle they ran the bark up the beach by an ingenious system of levers and palm-trunks. They sawed her in half: they remade cordage, improvised an entire forge, adapted, new-fashioned, and reworked old iron, turned themselves from sailors into shipwrights.
The officers would show no despondency. No, they
showed none: but there was none who understood his profession who did not have secret misgivings about cramming a hundred and thirteen men into a thirty-nine-ton bark together with provisions for two thousand miles of sailing. They knew what miserable charts they had ashore: they knew that their only compass was a trifling toy found in the Spanish boat: they knew that they had not a single navigational instrument among them. They showed no despondency: Peter, in the intervals of heavy labour, did not dare to repeat even to himself the forbidding calculations that he had made: but although for his part he worked as hard as ever he could, he was unable to find any gaiety in his heart, even now, three weeks after the catastrophe; for Sean had been aboard the ship when she had driven—Sean, as well as many other friends and people dear to him: Ransome, Mr Walter, Bailey, Mr Brett, half the men with whom he had been through so much; and there was the dear ship herself, the good, brave
Centurion
, a living thing for a sailorman.
‘Please, sir, Mr Dyer’s duty, and may he have the sectional drawing of the upper-futtock riders?’ This was a ship’s boy, panting with haste and heat.
‘They are on my desk, Mr Palafox—stay, I know exactly where they are.’ The Commodore hurried out of the saw-pit and the choking dust. ‘You may come with me, Mr Palafox. We have earned a breather.’
The Commodore’s tent stood on a beautiful stretch of turf overlooking the anchorage, by a strange, overgrown avenue of pillars, the open temple of the former inhabitants, a gentle race who had worshipped there before the Spaniards had taken them all away to die of homesickness and despair in another land. Near the tent a spring bubbled up to make a little pond, sweet and clear. The Commodore flung his hat aside and knelt on the grass. ‘Come on,’ he said, plunging his head and shoulders into the water and gasping with the freshness. ‘This will make you twice the man.’
Peter needed no second invitation. The delicious coolness ran all over him, and, as Mr Anson said, he got up twice the
man. He was shaking the water out of his ears when he saw the Commodore staring fixedly beyond him. He turned. Those blue breeches belonged to Gordon, the lieutenant of the Marines. The blue breeches flew down the slope, vanishing and reappearing among the trees: they emerged on to the open grass. The owner was roaring in broken gasps as he came.
‘The Spaniards,’ thought Peter, with an icy chill.
‘Hawp, hawp,’ bawled the soldier, running even faster. He was before them; a sketchy salute, punctiliously returned, a wildly pointing hand.
‘Control yourself, Mr Gordon,’ said the Commodore sharply.
‘The ship,’ laboured out the gasping soldier. ‘The ship. She’s—coming in.’
What a day it was. Tools were thrown aside in utter disregard of order and arrangement. All up and down the wide shore blazed huge fires with roasting pigs and cattle for the half-starved crew. A babel of talk went up to the sky as the returned survivors told their shipmates the history of the last three weeks: and as they sat, every mess faced straight to the sea, in lines—they could not take their eyes from the
Centurion
as she rode, remarkably trim and ship-shape, on the easy swell.
‘… carried on trailing the sheet-anchor with two cables an end …’
‘… jears broke when we was a-swaying up the main yard …’
‘… black men worked like good ’uns, didn’t you, Sambo? But the Indians were terrified and amazed …’
‘… parson nearly burst hisself at the capstan. Twenty-one hours bringing the anchor home—not a second’s rest …’
‘… driving and perishing on the outrageous billows while you swabs was laughing and talking on shore, a-picking of fruit …’
‘We was not, Henry Burrell. We turned to and built …’
‘Without so much as a halfpenny brad …’
‘Made augers …’
‘Made saws …’
‘No compass, which Mr Brett had took it aboard …’
‘No quadrant, till Hairy Amos kicked one up in the sand and didn’t know what it was until Mr Palafox tore it out of his hand, roaring, like …’
‘Which Joe Welling found vanes to fit ‘un in an old drawer thrown away …’
‘Laid her keel …’
‘All the liquor gone with the ship …’
‘And the tobacco …’
‘Slainte, Sean my dear,’ said Peter, raising his glass.
‘Slainte, Peter a gradh,’ replied Sean, engulfing the comforting punch. ‘And so, your honour,’ he continued, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and sighing with relaxation, ‘the first lieutenant said, “O’Mara, what shall we do? Oh let me have your counsel and aid, if you please.” So I replied, “The first thing to do, Mr Saumarez dear, is to brail up at once.”’
‘Did you indeed, Sean? Well, it was excellent advice, since it brought back the ship.’
‘Sure, I did no more than my duty in sustaining the poor man with my wisdom,’ said Sean, ‘the way you would have lost all your prize money if the ship had not swum, and myself my own sweet fifty pounds.’
‘Why, so I should,’ cried Peter, charmed with the new thought, ‘and now it has come back, joy. The Dear knows I had forgot it entirely. But by my soul it’s welcome back, so it is. Now, Sean, do not exceed with the punch, I entreat, for I must go along and have a word with Mr Walter and Ransome, and ask Mr Brett how he does.’
‘Sure civility is the pearl of elegant breeding,’ said Sean, briskly refilling his glass, ‘and I will treat my messmates to the rest of the bowl.’
‘You were a good, kind island to me,’ said Peter, nodding to Tinian out of the open port, ‘but may I be struck crimson and
purple for ever if I wish to see you again, or anything at all like your foul bottom.’
He had some call to be bitter, they had taken an infinity of precautions to secure the ship: they had hurried stores and water aboard: they had swept and swept for the lost anchors, but in vain: and the third day after the ship had come in, a sudden wind, blowing with the running tide wrenched the anchor out of its hold in the brittle coral, and the men on shore saw her driving again. They rushed for the boats, and the Commodore sent the barge racing back for them. But Peter and Ransome, with a strong party of men, had been well inland after cattle, and when they had come back to the shore they found no ship, nor a single living soul on the sand.
It is true that this was not so desperate a case as it had been before: there was the barge left for them, instruments, hurried instructions, a chart; but it had been quite discouraging at first.
However, the knowledge that they could build—for they had done it already—and the lively example of Mr Anson’s way of tackling difficulties had kept them in tolerable spirits. They had instantly set about reuniting the little bark, quite large enough for the few who were left and very much handier in her original shape.
They were actually rattling down her shrouds when the
Centurion
reappeared: Peter and Ransome had worked out their course for Macao, and although they were very pleased to see the ship again, it was not wholly without regret that they abandoned the glory of an independent command and the certain assumption that they would reach Macao first, to the unspeakable amazement of the
Centurion
when she should arrive.
‘A very creditable piece of work, Mr Ransome,’ the Commodore had said, fixing the bark with his telescope. ‘To have done so much in five days is more than I could have expected, even in much more senior officers. You have done exceedingly well.’
‘Hor,’ said Ransome, mauve with gratification, ‘Palafox done it mostly, sir.’
‘I am sure Mr Palafox behaved very well,’ said the Commodore.
‘I beg pardon, sir,’ said Peter, ‘but I suppose you could not spare a moment to have a look at her?’
‘No, Mr Palafox,’ said the Commodore firmly. ‘I have a deck under my feet: and not even the pleasure of overlooking your work—I can see from here that she is admirably joined—will induce me to leave the ship. Not even the pleasure of seeing the place where we sawed—you remember?—will take me ashore.’
Yes: she had come back. They had finished their watering in one prodigious, continual outpour of energy, much hampered by the want of the long-boat (destroyed at the
Centurion
’s first driving), but spurred on by the dread of a fresh capful of wind, and they with one anchor on such a foul bottom.
And now it was done. Full of bucanned beef, salted pork, fresh water, wood, and, for the moment, fresh fruit in abundance, she was standing out for the open sea. All around him the familiar pattern of naval life was taking shape again. The lift and roll of the ship had awakened his sea-legs: the sound of holystoning the deck filled his mind with peace. At eight bells he would form part of the watch: Mr Saumarez would have something rude to say to him, no doubt: he was at home again, and it was delightful.