The Thirteen Gun Salute (41 page)

They made their way up, and the enormous force of the wind diminished, for they came into the lee of the trees, the roaring trees; and through what light there was - for it was still day - they saw that the tents were standing. Welby's ditches were gushing a thick muddy stream, tearing up the sward below their outlet, but the camp was not waterlogged and when Jack reached his quarters he found the ground quite firm. Not that he took notice of this not even the shelter from rain for some time: there was Fielding's report of seventeen hands lost in the cutter and six much injured; four lost in the skiff; one hand struck by lightning, and Edwards had to be told that there was not the least hope for the pinnace: it was not until an indefinite period of time had passed and that he was sitting there with Stephen, with the tremendous beating of rain grown habitual and only the more extravagant crashes of thunder or strokes of lightning close at hand exciting attention, that he perceived the dryness of the ground underfoot, the presence of his sea-chest and other possessions laid on trestles, and his chronometers and their case enclosed in a bladder.

Now that there was no longer the stimulus of action, now that there was in fact nothing to be done, they both felt numbed by the mass of events, by their own exertions and by the enormous and continuing noise, which made even common interchange a matter of more effort than they could afford; they sat there companionably enough however, nodding to one another occasionally, at some outrageous thunder-clap or the crash of a forest tree nearby; but beneath it all Jack's ear strained to make out the horrible sound of his ship hammering on the reef.

This he was spared: the general uproar was too great for even a broadside to pierce through from the distance; and from time to time he closed his eyes, bowed his head, and slept. Waking at about three in the morning he noticed a new strain in the universal and all-pervading sound: a tearing, rushing noise like a torrent in spate. And when he had been listening to this for some time, while the lightning flashed overhead, giving an almost continuous light in the tent, sometimes so bright and prolonged that he could see Stephen telling his beads, there came another: not a continuous sound this time but a long deep roar lasting four or five minutes.

'What was that?' he cried.

'A landslide, my dear.'

Torpor again; extreme weariness. But during this stretch of the perpetually roaring, flashing night Stephen did not really sleep; and although at times his mind wandered off to something not far from waking dream it often came back to dwell on the Prabang treaty: Edwards's copy was now lying in Dr Maturin's particular metal-lined medicine-chest, as the safest, driest place in the camp. Its accompanying letter was much what Stephen had expected, except that it was longer, more vehement and less able by far; and its animosity against young Edwards surprised him. Yet since it did not betray his own role even by implication - the envoy made no mention of any source of intelligence whatsoever - the letter would have to go as it stood. At times, when his mind clouded over with fatigue, he was tempted to make it ludicrous for Edwards's sake by adding still another name or two to those who had plotted to lessen the envoy's consequence, to make his task even more difficult and to take away from the merit of what had been accomplished. But in this context such a thing would not do at all; and even if it had been possible it would be pointless, for clearer reflection showed him that the list was already so long that it defeated its own end - the product of a mind unhinged.

The typhoon passed over somewhat after dawn, the rain moving westward and leaving a clear sky, so that Jack waking thought for a moment that this was an immensely-prolonged lightning-flash. The wind was much less, yet the volume of noise was even greater, partly because the tremendous surf was no longer tempered by the downpour but even more because the raging torrent that poured out of the forest and down what had been the grassy triangle was checked by Stephen's landslide, so that it made a series of cataracts. The mass of sward, trees and earth had partly diverted the stream from the encampment, which had lost only its south-east corner, but had turned it full upon the grassy slope above the landing-place. The grassy slope was gone; the landing-place was wholly overlaid; the launch had been shattered and swept out to sea, though the small cutter and some of the spars were still there, caught in the tangle of uprooted trees and bushes on either side of the torrent's mouth.

Jack stepped quietly out of the tent, for Stephen had dropped off in his turn; he looked up at the clean, washed sky and then over the white water to the reef. No ship, of course; but his eye travelled along the line to the island's westward point, where the anchor might possibly have brought her up if she had been heaved over into the deep water without too much damage: a vain hope, only very faintly held.

Several people were moving about the camp, talking in low voices or not at all: Jack had the impression that they were stunned, but glad to be alive. Fielding and Warren were among them, looking to the westward with a little pocketglass.

'Good morning, gentlemen,' he said. 'What do you see?'

'Good morning, sir,' said Fielding, flattening his hair with one hand. 'We believe it may be a substantial piece of wreck.' He passed the glass, and Jack, having peered for a while, said, 'Let us go and see.'

Down the ravaged slope, now steaming in the sun, across the torrent by the tangle of fallen trees with their treasure of boat and spars, and out along a firm, hammered low-tidc strand, littered with coconuts, presumably from Borneo, and with many drowned ring-tailed apes, certainly from here. Several people joined them: Richardson, the bosun, the carpenter, all the midshipmen and many foremast hands. The Captain and the first lieutenant walked ahead and Fielding said in a low voice, 'I am sorry to have to tell you, sir, that the tent which carried away in the south-east corner was the powder-store.'

'Was it, by God? Is there none left?'

'I have not checked that yet, sir: there may be a few barrels set aside as spoilt or damaged, but there cannot be many.'

'Let us hope there are some, at all events.' They walked on without speaking for a while, a radiant day with the long surf booming on the left hand and rushing up the shore in vast fields of white; but nothing like as far as it had rushed in the night - that high-water mark was deep in the forest; and the forest-edge was all hung with weed. 'I believe you were right about the wreck,' said Jack at last, and they walked faster with their shadows long before them on the sand.

'Yes. Yes,' he said, gazing on that familiar side, the frigate's starboard bow and hull as far aft as half way along her waist, something like a quarter of the ship there on the perfect sand, her top-timbers buried but the rest quite free, remarkably unmutilated, the paintwork fresh. 'She must have parted where the floors cross the keel,' he said after a long considering pause.

The others, who had all come up, stood looking at the piece of ship in silence, with a curious respect. At last the carpenter said, 'These floor-timbers were never honest work, sir; not like the futtocks or the rest.'

'I am afraid you are right, Mr Hadley,' said Jack. 'But there is plenty of sound wood, as you observe. Enough for a fair-sized schooner, I make no doubt.'

'Oh yes, sir,' said Hadley, 'plenty enough and to spare.'

'Then, shipmates,' said Jack, smiling at his people, 'let us build one as quick as we can.'

THE END

...continue to Black, Choleric & Married - an essay by P.O'B.

Black, Choleric & Married?

PATRICK O'BRIAN

IT IS WITH A CERTAIN RELUCTANCE that I write about myself, in the first place because such an exercise is very rarely successful, and even when it is, the man does not often coincide with his books, which, if the Platonic 'not who but what' is to be accepted, are the only legitimate objects of curiosity. In the second, because privacy is a jewel; and not only one's own privacy but also that of one's friends, relatives, connexions. Then again it seems to me that confusing the man seated at his table and writing what he means to make public with the person of the same name engaged on some entirely private occupation is quite wrong; while doing so sheds no real light upon the heart of the matter. Who for example would suppose that the Boswell who emerges from the endless working-over of his personal papers was capable of writing a very fine book?

I felt this more strongly when I was young, and when Rupert Hart-Davis asked me to write the blurb for a collection of my short stories I ended it by saying:

As for the personal side, the Spectator for 1 March 1710 begins, 'I have observed, that a reader seldom peruses a Book with much Pleasure, till he knows whether the Writer of it be a black or a fair Man, of mild or choleric Disposition, Married or a Batchelor, with other particulars of the like nature, that conduces very much to the right understanding of an Author.' To gratify this curiosity, which is so natural to a reader, we may state that Mr O'Brian is a black man, choleric and married.

That pleased me at the time, but now it seems perhaps rather overdone; and no doubt there is an ill-defined zone between the public and the private that can be spoken of without egotism; so since the British Library has paid me the very high compliment of producing this bibliography, I will, if I may, say something about the background of the books which it records with such meticulous accuracy.

I shall not deal with my childhood and youth in any detail, however: although the period had its compensations it is not one that I look back upon with much pleasure, partly because my home fell to pieces when my mother died a little after the end of the 1914-1918 War, so that I was sent to live with more or less willing relatives in Connemara and the County Clare and with some family friends in England, and partly because much of the time I was ill, which was not only disagreeable in itself but which also did away with much in the way of regular education and companionship. Fortunately there was a governess, dear Miss O'Mara, and some tutors whom I shall always remember with gratitude: even more fortunately most of these long stays in bed were spent within reach of books, and I read endlessly. Not that I was a chronically bedridden invalid or anything like it - I did go to school from time to time but upon the whole it was a very lonely childhood. (In parenthesis I may observe that although I spent long periods in England, liking the people very much, above all my English stepmother, it was Ireland and France that educated and formed me, in so far as I was educated and formed.)

One of the compensations I have spoken about was the sea. The disease that racked my bosom every now and then did not much affect my strength and when it left me in peace (for there were long remissions) sea-air and sea-voyages were recommended. An uncle had a two-ton sloop and several friends had boats, which was fine; but what was even better was that my particular friend Edward, who shared a tutor with me, had a cousin who possessed an ocean-going yacht, a converted square-rigged merchantman, that he used to crew with undergraduates and fair-sized boys, together with some real seamen, and sail far off into the Atlantic. The young are wonderfully resilient, and although I never became much of a topman, after a while I could hand, reef and steer without disgrace, which allowed more ambitious sailoring later on.

But by this time the Wall Street crash had come and gone; we were in the great depression of the Thirties, and people were learning sometimes successfully, how to live and even entertain without servants to wait at table, cook, wash up, make beds: a civilisation that had never been known before and one that spread a certain gloom.

For my own part I carried on writing - it had never occurred to me to do anything else - and before the War I had produced an indifferent, derivative novel and many short stories, though in the late Thirties I was chiefly taken up with a book on Saint Isidore of Seville and the western bestiary, for which I had done a good deal of reading in the British Museum, at the Bodleian, at the Bibliotheque nationale, in Padua and at the Vatican. But between Munich and the outbreak of war my illness returned with greater severity. This time it left me in a sad way: my strength did not quickly return and I was rejected for active service. While the blitz was on however I drove ambulances in Chelsea; and during one raid when I was out a bomb struck the house, killing nobody but utterly destroying my manuscript and notes.

Some time after the blitz had died away I joined one of those intelligence organisations that flourished in the War, perpetually changing their initials and competing with one another. Our work had to do with France, and more than that I shall not say, since disclosing methods and stratagems that have deceived the enemy once and that may deceive him again seems to me foolish. After the War we retired to Wales (I say we because my wife and I had driven ambulances and served in intelligence together) where we lived for a while in a high Welsh-speaking valley: dear people, splendid mountains, but a terrible climate. Fine snow drifted through the slates and made a dune on our bed: eggs froze solid. Presently sun and wine came to seem essential and in a quick visit to the Roussillon I was lucky enough to find the second floor of a house in a little fishing village. It had been lived in by an old lady whose ass walked up the narrow stairs with her and slept in the back room: the village was largely medieval in those days and she never felt the need for running water or drains. In Wales I had put together a volume of short stories (a delightful burst of real writing after so many years of official reports) and an anthology of voyages; these allowed us to install both and even electricity, and we settled down to swimming (the Mediterranean was just through the town gate in front of our house), to exploring the countryside, and to helping our neighbours harvest their grapes - the hills behind the village were covered with vineyards.

This was a time when the sending of money abroad from England was strictly regulated: we were only allowed �200 a year. This was not wealth, but with care it could be made to suffice, particularly as many things such as rice and olive oil cost half as much in Spain, a few miles to the south. We lived quite well until the end of the year, therefore, waiting for the first of January, when the next �200 should arrive. Months passed and it did not come. Eventually the authorities told us that since we had left England in autumn we should have to wait until the next autumn for our next supply.