In Distant Waters (4 page)

‘Stand by to take in the foretopsail!'

Quilhampton was bawling at his watch. Their response was slow, they seemed dazed, as if the great wave had some strange effect on them. But that was impossible, a figment of Drinkwater's fevered imagination. He held his peace for a moment longer.

‘Man the clewlines and buntlines!'

The men were mustered about the pinrails and Drinkwater was reminded of something he had tried hard to forget; the dilatory action they had fought with a Danish privateer, caught off Duncansby Head, and which had escaped by superior sailing through the rocks off the Orkneys.
By superior sailing
 . . . how that phrase haunted him, that sudden failure in performance that had endangered the ship now as it had done before. His patience snapped.

‘Call all hands damn it! All hands, d'you hear there!'

The squealing pipes made little impact on the gale, but the thin noise roused the ship as Quilhampton continued to shout at his men.

‘Clewlines and buntlines! Haul taut!'

Drinkwater caught sight of the rise and fall of starters, of a scuffle forward of the boats and a man thrust out of the huddle round the mast.

‘Leggo top bowline, there! Lively there! Leggo halliards! Clew down! Clew down, God damn you, clew down!'

‘I think we have trouble forrard, Mr Q . . .'

‘Aye, sir . . . no, there goes the yard . . . lay aloft and furl . . . aloft and furl!'

Men from the watches below were coming on deck and filling the waist with a worse confusion as another crack from aloft met the violence of a heavy leeward roll. Above the shouting and the orders, the wind screamed with renewed venom and the heeling deck bucked and canted beneath their slithering feet. Green water poured aboard and sluiced aft, streaming over the men at the pinrails and knocking several off their feet.

‘Aloft and furl! Mr Comley, damn you, forrard, sir, and hustle the men!'

Perhaps it was the disgruntled look which the boatswain Comley threw at Quilhampton, perhaps the passing of an ague-fit which stimulated Drinkwater to intervene, but he could stand chaos no better than inefficiency and such chaos and inefficiency threatened them all in that wild sea. He began to move forward, along the starboard gangway towards the forechains.

What he found forward of the boats appalled him. The sharp perceptions of a feverish brain, the madness of the morning and the lingering suspicions and doubts about his crew coalesced into an instant comprehension. The few men who had begun to climb into the weather shrouds were half-hearted in their efforts and though no one actively prevented them, there were shouted discouragements thick in the howling air.

‘Don't risk yer life for the bastards, Jimmy . . .'

‘Let the fucking mast go by the board . . . we'll be home the sooner . . .

‘Oi'll fockin' kill you if you so much as lay that rope on me again, so I will . . .'

A man rolled against Drinkwater, one of the boatswain's mates, his face pale in the cruel, horizontal light of dawn, his eye already dark with bruising.

‘Aloft and furl, damn you all!' Drinkwater roared and hoisted himself up into the starboard foremast shrouds. He caught sight
of the small, white face of Midshipman Belchambers. ‘Take my hat and cloak . . .' The wind tore the heavy cloak from his grasp and thrust it at the boy, who escaped thankfully aft.

‘God's bones, d'you want to rot in hell, you damned lubbers? Aloft and furl!' He was aware of sullen faces, the spray stinging them as they looked up at him. The wind tore at his own body and already the cold had found his hands. There was no time to delay. Above them the foretopsail flogged and the mast shook and groaned while something was working loose, its destructive oscillations increasing with every roll of the ship.

He began to climb.

The force of the wind tore at him.
Patrician
was running before it now, throwing away the hard-won windward yards, rolling with an unrestrained ferocity that threatened to tear loose the sprung topmast and send the resulting wrack down on deck. For the preservation of the ship, speed was essential. He did not look down, but the vibration of the thick hemp shrouds told him that men were following him aloft. He fought his way upwards, the thin ratlines twisting beneath his feet and the wind tearing at the bulk of his body, so that his clothing bellied and pulled him forward to where the sea hissed and roared alongside the running frigate. Some active topman drew alongside him.

‘That's it, my lad, up you go, up you go!'

He caught a glimpse of a sheepish grin that was instantly lost as more men caught him up, swinging outwards, into the futtock shrouds with the agility of monkeys. Captains aloft were such a rare event that even the most discontented topman would be put on his mettle to outdo the intrusion.

Midshipman Frey struggled up.

‘Good morning, Mr Frey.' Frey's eyes widened and Drinkwater nodded upwards. ‘Have the goodness to pass ahead of me.'

The boy gulped and swung himself outboard, his back hanging downwards as
Patrician
's hull rolled them out over the sea, then his kicking heels disappeared and Drinkwater took advantage of the return roll and followed him into the top.

Pausing for breath, Drinkwater took stock of the situation. The foretopsail yard, loosed by its halliards, lay roughly over
the top of the foreyard, the huge flapping bunt of sail thundered in wild billows only partially restrained by the weight of the yard and the buntlines and clewlines. Drinkwater waved the topmen aloft and out along the yard. He could see Frey already at the extremity of the windward yardarm, his pea-jacket blown over his back and his sparse shirt-tail flapping madly.

‘Come on lads, lay out and furl that tops'l!'

He clung to the topgallant mast heel-rope downhaul and looked aloft. The fore-topgallantmast had been struck, sent down and lashed parallel to its corresponding topmast to reduce the windage of unneeded tophamper. Now, as he stared upwards, his eyes watering and the wind tugging at him, he saw that the housed topgallantmast was acting like a splint to the fractured mast. The latter had sprung badly, the split starting from a shake in the timber. Drinkwater cursed and wondered how long that spar had been pickling in the mast-pond at Chatham. The topmast was almost split in two; whatever he decided to do, it would have to be quick, before both spars were lost. He peered on deck. Morning had broken now, though the sun had risen into a cloud bank and daylight was dimmed. Its arrival somehow surprised him, such had been his preoccupation.

Quilhampton looked upwards anxiously, clearly considering that Drinkwater's action in going aloft was unseemly. Beside him Fraser stood staring up, one hand clapped over his tricorne hat.

The men were laying in from the yard, having passed the reef-points and Drinkwater called to them to begin to clear the gear away ready to send the topmast down on deck. It would be a long, complex and difficult job in the sea that was running, but he sensed in their changed expressions that the surly disinterest had been replaced by a sudden realisation of the danger they were in. Besides, he had no intention of making life too easy for them; those lost miles to leeward nagged him as he made his way down on deck.

After the clamour of the foretop, the quarterdeck seemed a sanctuary. Fraser began to remonstrate.

‘Sir, you shouldn't ha' . . .'

‘Be damned to you, Fraser, the men are disaffected . . . in
your absence it was necessary I set 'em an example . . . now have the kindness to order the spanker and foretopmast stays'l set . . . just the clew of the spanker, mind you, I want this ship on the wind and then we'll sort out the mess of the foremast . . .'

Fraser nodded his understanding and Drinkwater regretted the jibe at the first lieutenant. It was mean, but he was in a damnably mean mood and meant to ride down this discontent, even if it first meant riding his officers.

‘We'll set a goose-winged maintops'l when we've finished, and see if we can't claw back some of the leeway we've made . . .'

Hill, the elderly sailing master summoned on deck at the cry for all hands, nodded his agreement and put the traverse board back by the binnacle.

‘It's a damn . . .'

‘Deck! Deck there!'

The scream was high pitched and uttered with such urgency that it carried above the gale. The officers looked up at Midshipman Frey. He was leaning against the barricade of the foretop, pointing ahead.

‘Sir! There's a ship, sir . . . a ship! Right ahead!'

‘Impossible!'

That first reaction was gone in an instant. As he scrambled into the mizen rigging Drinkwater's active mind considered the odds of another ship being under their feet in this remote spot. And then he saw her, an irregular, spiky outline flung up against the eastern sky as she breasted a crest. His practised eye saw her hull and her straining sails and then she was gone, separated from them by a wave. She was perhaps three quarters of a mile away.

When she reappeared she was fine to starboard, under close-reefed topsails and beating to windward as
Patrician
had been doing an hour earlier. A curious idleness had filled the hands as they waited for the officers to get over their astonishment. Drinkwater rounded on the latter.

‘Gentlemen! You have your orders, kindly attend to them!' They scattered, like chastened schoolboys. Only Hill, his white hair streaming in the wind, stood close to Drinkwater, trying to catch the stranger in the watch-glass.

Fishing in his pocket Drinkwater pulled out his Dollond glass and raised it to his eye, swearing with the difficulty of focusing it on the other ship.

‘She's a ship of force, sir,' Hill muttered beside him.

Drinkwater grunted agreement. Her dark hull seemed pierced by two rows of gun-ports and, like themselves, she wore no colours. She beat to windward bravely, passing his own lamed ship as she licked her wound and escaped the worst fury of the storm by running before it. Once again that phrase
by superior sailing
was recalled to his mind.

Although not superstitious, Drinkwater was, like most philosophical sailors, aware of the influence of providence and the caprice of fortune. Nothing had yet happened aboard
Patrician
that persuaded him he was in command of anything but an unlucky ship. Among his ill-educated crew he knew that feeling had developed to a conviction since the execution.

‘What d'you make of her, Mr Hill?'

‘With that black hull and making for the Pacific, I'd stake my hat and wig on her being a Don, sir . . .'

‘Your shore-going wig, Mr Hill?' Drinkwater joked grimly and neither man took his glass from his eye.

‘For a certainty, sir . . .'

Drinkwater grunted. He had seen the Spaniards' lugubriously popish fancy for black ships in Cadiz shortly before Trafalgar, but he was recalling the nightmare and its ominous warning. He stared at the ship for other clues, but found none. A minute later she was gone, lost in the bleak and heaving wastes of the Southern Ocean. Captain and master lowered their glasses at the same moment.

‘A Don you say, Mr Hill?'

‘My life upon it, sir.'

Drinkwater shook his head. ‘Rash, Mr Hill, rash . . .'

‘You don't agree, sir?' Drinkwater managed a grin at the obviously discomfited Hill.

‘I've a hunch, Mr Hill, a hunch . . . nothing more and not worth the trouble of a wager . . . come now, let's get a new foretopmast off the booms . . .'

Drinkwater swallowed painfully and stared balefully at the first lieutenant. There were moments, and this was one of them, when he would have wished for the return of Samuel Rogers, for all his drunkenness and bullying temperament. Rogers would have understood what was to be done, but Rogers had been blown to the devil with six score others when the
Zandaam
exploded alongside the
Antigone
off Orfordness, and poor Fraser had inherited the first luff's uneasy berth. A quiet, competent Scot, Fraser was an obsessively worrying type, a man who let anxiety get the better of his spirit which was thereby damped and warped. Drinkwater had once overheard Mount referring to him in conversation with James Quilhampton.

‘If yon Scot,' Mount mimicked in false North British dialect, ‘ever occasioned to fall in the sea, he'd drown.' Then, seeing Quilhampton's puzzled look, he added plainly, ‘He possesses no
buoyancy
.'

Drinkwater regarded Fraser, his expression softening. He was a prey to anxiety himself; he was being unjustly hard on a conscientious officer.

‘It's high summer hereabouts, Mr Fraser, though it has a damned uncivil way of showing it, but I want the men worked . . . d'ye hear? Worked, sir, and damned hard. Not a single task that ain't necessary . . . I'll have no gratuitous hazing, but I want every man-jack of'em to know that they don't refuse to go aloft on
my
ship!'