In Distant Waters (5 page)

Drinkwater drew breath, his anger at his predicament concentrated on the helpless Fraser.

‘Aye, aye, sir.' But the first lieutenant hesitated.

‘Well, Mr Fraser? What's the trouble?'

‘Well, sir . . . such tasks . . . we've sent down the foretopmast . . .'

‘Tasks? Are you suggesting your imagination cannot supply
tasks
? Good God man, was there ever a want of tasks on a man-o'-war?'

It was clear that Fraser's imagination fell somewhat short of Drinkwater's expectation. The captain sighed resignedly as the frigate lurched and trembled. A sea smashed against her weather bow and the spray whipped aft, stinging their faces.

‘Turn up all watches, Mr Fraser. I want the people worked until they drop. I don't care that it blows a gale, nor that the ship's doing a dido, or that every man-jack of 'em hates my lights by sunset, but we had one brush with an enemy off the Orkneys that I don't want repeated . . . and that ship we sighted this morning, be he Don or Devil, bore
two
decks of guns. If we have to fight her in our present condition, Mr Fraser, I'll not answer for the consequences . . . d'you comprehend my meaning? And I mean the officers to turn-out too . . .'

‘The officers, sir?' Fraser's jaw dropped a little further. Anxiety about the unstable state of the crew and the captain's reaction to their behaviour this morning was worming his belly. Drinkwater pressed relentlessly on.

‘Now, as to tasks, Mr Fraser, you may rattle down the lower shrouds, slush the new topmast and reeve a new heel-rope. I don't doubt an inspection of the gun-deck will reveal a few of the gun-lashings working and the same goes for the boat gripes. Let's have the well sounded hourly and kept dry as a parson's throat. Have the gunner detail a party to make up more cartridges, the quarter-gunners to reknap the flints in the upper deck gun-locks and overhaul the shot lockers. Turn a party to on scaling the worst-corroded balls and send some men to change all the shot in the garlands. Get an officer aloft with a midshipman and a pencil to carry out an examination of all the spars for further shakes and let me have their findings in writing . . .'

Fraser caught the reproach in Drinkwater's eyes and coloured at his own negligence. He had taken so much of
Patrician
's gear
from the dockyard on trust, since she had been so recently refitted after being cut down to a razée.

‘Yes, sir.'

‘Very well. You can carry out an inventory of the tradesmen's stores and have a party assist the cooper to stum some casks ready for watering and if that ain't enough, Mr Fraser, do not neglect the fact that we lost two good topsails this morning . . . in short, sir, I want you to
radoub
the ship!'

‘Aye, sir . . .'

‘And the officers are to take an active part, Mr Fraser . . . no driving the men, I want 'em
led
, sir,
led
by officers so that, when the time comes, they'll follow without hesitation . . .'

‘The time, sir . . . ?' Fraser essayed curiously catching a moment of mellowing by the captain.

‘Aye, Mr Fraser . . . the time . . . which may catch a ship at a disadvantage and deliver her to the devil in an instant.'

‘Or a Don, sir?'

‘You comprehend my meaning . . . very well, see to it at once. Pipe all hands . . . Mr Hill and I will tend the deck.'

Drinkwater remained on deck the whole of that day. They set more sail and began to claw back the lost miles to windward. At apparent noon both he and Hill were gratified by twenty minutes of sunshine during which they obtained a perfect meridian altitude and fixed their latitude.

‘Fifty-six degrees, fifty-seven minutes south, Mr Hill?'

‘Fifty-five minutes, sir . . .'

‘Close enough then . . . let us split the difference and lay that off on the chart . . .'

Both men reboxed their instruments, Hill's old quadrant in its triangular box, Drinkwater's Hadley sextant in a rectangular case fitted out with green baize and a selection of telescopes, shades and adjusting tools which gave it the appearance of a surgeon's knife-box. Drinkwater caught the look of satisfaction in Hill's eyes as he handed over the closed case to Midshipman Belchambers.

‘I never claimed Hadley's sextant a better instrument than my old quadrant, Mr Hill . . .'

Hill smiled back. ‘No sir, but they say the best tunes are played on old fiddles.'

They made their way below, pocketing their tablets and pencils to allow them to grasp the ropes of the companionways. They leaned over the chart and Hill manipulated the parallel rules, striking the pencil line from west to east on the parallel of fifty-six degrees, fifty-six minutes southerly latitude.

‘Well clear of the Horn and the Diego Ramirez Islands.' Drinkwater indicated a group of islands some sixty miles southwest of Cape Horn. They fell silent, both pondering the unspoken question: their longitude?

Were they yet west of the Horn, able to lay the ship's head to the north of west and pass up into the Pacific? Or were they still east of the meridian of the Cape, or Diego Ramirez? That longitude of sixty-eight thirty-seven west?

‘Perhaps we will be able to obtain a lunar observation later,' observed Hill. ‘The sky shows signs of clearing.'

‘Yes,' agreed Drinkwater, ‘we might also obtain our longitude by chronometer, though I know your general prejudice against the contrivance.'

Hill looked sidelong at the gimballed clock-face in its lashed box. Cook had proved its usefulness thirty years ago, but Hill preferred the complex computations of a lunar observation to the simpler solution of the hour-angle problem which, he thought, smacked too much of necromancy. Drinkwater smiled wryly and changed the subject as he rolled up the chart.

‘I hope to water at Juan Fernandez by mid-January, Mr Hill.'

‘Aye, aye, sir . . . we'll have enough casks by then.' Hill referred to the stumming then in progress in the orlop deck where sulphurous smoke emanated from the primitive cleaning process. ‘And the labour'll do the men no harm.'

‘Quite so.' Drinkwater put the chart and rules away, preparing to return to the deck but Hill stopped him, taking advantage of the intimacy permitted a sailing master and the long familiarity the two men had known.

‘Sir . . . that ship, the one we sighted this morning . . . it has been worrying me that you thought my opinion in error . . .'

‘I have the advantage of you, Mr Hill,' Drinkwater smiled
again, so that Hill was reminded of the eager young acting lieutenant he had long ago known on the cutter
Kestrel
.

‘I'm sorry, sir, I didn't intend to pry . . .'

‘Oh, the content of my orders are such that their secrecy applies principally to their comprehension. The truth is that I don't believe that ship was a Don.' He looked up at the old master. Hill was massaging his arm, a wound acquired at Camperdown; his expression was rueful.

‘The truth is, I think she was Russian.'

Captain Drinkwater stood at the weather hance regarding the long deck of the
Patrician
. Wrapped in his boat-cloak he ignored the frequent patterings of spray. There was some abatement in the gale and the wind backed a touch, enabling them to claw more westing against wind and the Cape Horn current that set against them at a couple of knots. Midshipman Belchambers hovered near, ready to dash below for sextant and chronometer should the sun appear again. To windward, patches of blue sky punctuated the low, rolling cumulus and it was hard to comprehend the fact that this was the season of high-summer in the southern hemisphere. There was little in the leaden aspect of the clouds, nor the grey streaked and heaving mass of the ocean to suggest it.

Along the deck and aloft men worked in groups and singly. Lieutenant Quilhampton swung about the mainmast with Midshipman Frey and Comley, the boatswain, was overhauling gear on the fo'c's'le and keeping a lively eye on a party of men in each set of weather shrouds who were rattling down. The grim, motionless presence of Captain Drinkwater intimidated them all, for it had slowly permeated the collective consciousness of the hands that their peevish unwillingness to obey orders had not only been let off lightly, but had endangered the ship. To a degree Drinkwater sensed this contrition, partly because he also shared much of the men's embittered feelings. For, notwithstanding their task and the problems which beset it, the voyage had not been a happy one.

From the moment they had run Stanham to the fore-yardarm, it seemed, providence had ceased to smile on them.
Ordered north with a convoy to Leith Roads from the London River,
Patrician
had dragged her anchor in an easterly gale in the Firth of Forth. Drinkwater had been dining aboard another ship at the time, in the company of an old friend and messmate from his days as a midshipman.

Sir Richard White had got into Leith Roads three days earlier after his seventy-four gun
Titan
had been badly mauled in a gale off the Naze of Norway where Sir Richard had been engaged in a successful operation extirpating nests of Danish privateers hiding in the fiords. He had also enjoyed a considerable profit from the destruction of Danish and Norwegian trade, having a broad pendant hoisted as commodore and two sloops and a cutter under his direction for prosecuting this lucrative little campaign.

Sitting in his comfortably furnished cabin, Drinkwater was reminded that there was another Royal Navy to that which he himself belonged, a service dedicated to the self-advancement of its privileged members. He did not blame Sir Richard for taking advantage of his position, any more than he blamed him for inheriting a baronetcy. It was now that the recollection of his old friend's circumstances rankled, as he wrestled with a disaffected crew, a contrary gale and the remotest ocean in the world. But he had enjoyed the conviviality of the distant evening. Sir Richard's officers were pleasant and made much of Drinkwater. He could imagine White's briefing prior to his arrival; his guest was a friend, a seaman of the old school, a tarpaulin of considerable experience, and so on and so forth, all designed to provoke good-natured but superior attitudes. Drinkwater was too old to worry much, though when he thought about such things, they still angered him. At the time he had enjoyed White's company. They had grumbled over the income tax, and agreed on the excellence of the port. They had deplored the standard of young officers and disagreed over the propriety of the new regulation that made masters and pursers equal in status to the commissioned officers. And then the news had come that
Patrician
was making signals of distress and Drinkwater had had a rough and wet return to his ship in his gig, to find chaos in place of an ordered anchor watch and the ship dragging from sheer neglect
of the cable at the turn of the tide. The contrast with the well-ordered state of affairs aboard
Titan
was inescapable.

In a fury he had ordered the ship under way, only to recall that he had given Lieutenant Quilhampton shore-leave, and been compelled to fetch a second anchor. Poor Quilhampton. Drinkwater looked up at him in the maintop dictating some memorandum to Frey. They were as close to friendship as a commander and his second lieutenant could be, for Drinkwater's wife and Quilhampton's mother enjoyed an intimacy and Quilhampton had been Drinkwater's earliest protégé. He felt a surge of anger against the Admiralty, the war and the whole bloody predicament of his ship at the thought of poor Quilhampton. The young man was wasting the best years of his life, crossed in love by the implacable exigencies of the naval service. Drinkwater wished it was he, and not Fraser, who was first lieutenant.

‘Your steward enquires if you wish for some coffee, Captain?'

‘Eh? Oh, thank you Derrick . . .'

Drinkwater roused himself from his reverie and nodded to his clerk. Derrick's face had lost neither its sadness, nor its pallor in the months since his impressment by Mr Mylchrist and the cutter's crew. Taken from the banks of the River Colne as he walked from Colchester to Wivenhoe, Derrick had protested his refusal to take part in belligerent operations with such force and eloquence that the matter had eventually been brought to Drinkwater's attention. So too had the strange offender. Drinkwater remembered the man's first appearance in his cabin on that last forenoon at anchor at the Nore, some five days after they had hanged Stanham.

‘Take off your hat!' an outraged Lieutenant Mylchrist had ordered, but the man had merely shaken his head and addressed Drinkwater in a manner that brought further fury to the third lieutenant's suffused face.

‘Friend, I cannot serve on thy ship, for I abhor all war . . .'

‘Be silent, damn you! And call the captain “sir” when you address him . . .'

‘Thank you, Mr Mylchrist, that will do . . . I think I know the temper of this man.' Drinkwater turned to the solemn yet
somehow dignified figure. ‘You are of the Quaker persuasion, are you not?'

‘I am . . .'

‘Very well . . . I cannot return you to the shore, you are part of the ship's company . . .'

‘But I . . .'

‘But I shall respect your convictions. Can you read and write? Good, then you may be entered as my clerk . . . attend to the matter, Mr Mylchrist . . .'

And so Drinkwater had increased his personal staff by a clerk, adding Derrick to Mullender, his steward, and Tregembo, his coxswain, and finding the quiet, resigned Quaker an asset to the day-to-day running of the ship. If he had entertained any doubts as to the man infecting the ship's company with his peculiar brand of dissenting cant, he need not have worried. The hands regarded Derrick with a good-natured contempt, the kind of attitude they reserved for the moon-struck and the shambling, half-idiotic luetic that kept the heads clean.

‘Thank you Derrick. Tell Mullender I shall come below . . .'