The Unknown Shore (32 page)

Right or wrong the decision was taken: the quartermaster (who happened to be of the contrary opinion) was persuaded to alter course, and they steered west-north-west. At the very end of June they made Tobago in the morning, their first sight of land for three months and more – a hundred days of sea, rough, calm, foggy, clear, black with dead-white foam, pure sapphire blue, grey, glaucous and an infinity of colours between, but always fluid and always stretching to the horizon. After three months of sea, particularly when you do not see another ship in all that time, you begin to feel that water is the natural covering of the globe; you begin to doubt the reality of the solid world; and for this reason (as well as a certain reluctance to die of thirst) their landfall was intensely interesting. Tobago jutted black out of the sea, cutting the sky with a hard, ragged line, and the people of the
Lys
lined the side, staring at the island with as much satisfaction as the inhabitants of the ark when they first saw Ararat above the flood.

From Tobago they shaped their course for Martinique, two days’ sail northwards: but somehow they could not find the island – it did not appear where they looked for it. This will surprise no landsman who, reflecting upon the size of the island and the immense amount of sea in which it is hidden, is amazed that any ship should ever reach it at all, rather than that one should miss: but it is always apt
to vex a mariner, and the
Lys
bore away south-west by south in a thoroughly bad temper. It was thought that the currents had carried them eastward, but when, after a hundred miles, Martinique still did not appear, they decided that they had been mistaken, that they must have been set to the west all the time, and that the thing to do was to steer north until they found Porto Rico (too big to be missed) and start again from there. This they did, and having found Porto Rico they stopped for the night – a very sensible precaution, in Tobias’ opinion, that might with advantage be adopted in the Royal Navy – and steered, the next morning, for the channel between Porto Rico and Hispaniola. Jack was walking on the quarter-deck, admiring the bright blue world and digesting a leisurely breakfast of fried barracuda; Tobias and don Jorge were arguing about mice, and Mr Hamilton was darning his stockings with military precision and a piece of llama’s wool when Captain Cheap suddenly appeared. His usually greyish-yellow face was red; he had an extraordinarily furtive air. ‘Do not display any emotion,’ he whispered to Jack, ‘but look – look.’

There was a barrel bobbing by the frigate’s side, an empty barrel. It turned, light and airy in the breeze, and all at once Jack’s heart gave a great thump – it was a beef-barrel from a man-of-war: there was no mistaking the familiar marks. ‘I was so near to it below that I could not be wrong,’ said the captain, ‘and if we do not see a cruiser before the end of the watch you may call me a looby. That barrel has not been in the sea above an hour.’ He looked up at the masthead – as usual, there was no look-out there – and he said, ‘We must not arouse their suspicions – engage the officers in conversation as much as you can – I shall tell the others.’ He walked off, humming loudly, with a very elaborate affectation of unconsciousness. Soon all the prisoners shared something of the same air; they were unnaturally gay, feverish and talkative; they kept stealing hidden glances round the horizon; and their captors looked at them with amazement and dismay.

Presently a little white fleck showed on the clear horizon: ten minutes later the fleck resolved itself into three – the topgallants of a ship, for certain, and a little beyond there was another. Jack’s flow of talk redoubled, but he was running out of topics, and he had begun to grow very tedious indeed (though not as tedious as Tobias,
who had pinned a lieutenant against the binnacle with an unending account of the domestic economy of the honey-bee) when a seaman, walking about the poop, happened to notice that there were two ships, top-sails up already, in their immediate neighbourhood. He gave the alarm, and now, of course, people hurried up to the masthead in great numbers: from there it was quite obvious that the ships were men-of-war, a two-decker and a twenty-gun ship, and that they were in chase of the
Lys.

The morning’s breeze was failing fast; by noon it had died to a flat calm, and all the
Lys’s
canvas (she had spread every stitch she possessed) flapped idly under the sun. In the first panic of the chase her people had determined to run the frigate ashore upon Porto Rico, but now a little reflection upon the character of the Porto Ricans had decided them to take their chance and run for it, north through the Mona Passage. Noon passed, and at four in the afternoon a wind began to sing in the rigging; the
Lys
heeled a trifle and the water gurgled along her side. The cruisers, away to the leeward, dropped hull-down over the horizon. But very soon they too had the wind; and now, as the sun declined, they came up so fast that it was evident that they could sail three miles to the
Lys’s
two. The Frenchmen looked hopelessly at their pursuers, and the officers went to their cabins to fill their pockets with their most valuable possessions: the men put on their best clothes, and as the sun went down in a blaze of crimson, a party of them came to where Jack and Tobias were standing in order to give them the nuggets and the little heavy soft leather bags of gold-dust that they had acquired in the New World; for although the English did not usually strip their lower-deck prisoners, they had never been known to let the smallest particle of gold escape them; and, the sailors said, they would rather their friends profited by their capture than people quite unknown.

The prisoners’ most difficult task, in these last hours of the day, was to conceal their glee, and to watch, with a decent show of indifference, the steady approach of their freedom and deliverance. When the sun, with its customary tropical abruptness, dropped below the edge of the sea, the two-decker was hull-up from the quarter-deck of the
Lys,
and with her studding-sails abroad she was gaining so fast that half an hour would bring her within random shot. In the
short interval of velvet darkness before moonrise the
Lys
altered her course and dowsed her lights, but in this faint breeze she had little hope of gaining any useful distance, and the prisoners, immovably on deck, expected to see the ships alongside at any moment of the night, to hear the warning shot, the English hail and the rattle of the French colours coming down.

‘I suppose there is no danger of their going to sleep?’ said Tobias, in the starlit night. No, they all said, very sharply, there was no such danger – the Royal Navy
never
went to sleep – did he not know that much, after all this time at sea? – how could he be so strange? – if he had nothing more sensible to say, he might save his breath to cool his porridge – and might as well go to sleep himself, and pass no further remarks.

Tobias followed their advice, and, having a clear conscience and a supple frame inured to hardship, he slept until daylight. He awoke wet with dew, and stared vacantly around for a moment: the sight of Jack pacing moodily to and fro brought it all back to him, and the sight of Jack’s face told him what to expect. The broad Caribbean was as empty as could be; all round the horizon the blue sea was unbroken by the slightest glint of a sail. The
Lys
was alone, save for a turtle sleeping on the surface a little way off her starboard beam and a man-of-war bird high over the cheerful look-out at the masthead.

The crew were in a charming flow of spirits; they skipped about the deck and carolled in the rigging like so many canary birds, and they were particularly kind and considerate to their downcast prisoners. The first captain broke out his last canister of coffee and sent some of it along to Captain Cheap with his compliments; the cooks (there were five aboard) did their best to allay Jack’s disappointment with an extraordinary object called a
pouding anglais.
It was not very like anything known on land or sea, but it was very well meant, and it did at least, by its very mass, have a deadening effect. Jack laid down his fork and gave Tobias to understand that the whole thing did not signify, and that after all a French ship would carry them back to Europe just as well as any other – rather quicker, indeed, than if they had to stay aboard a cruiser and then wait about in Jamaica for a homeward-bound convoy.

Convoys, homeward or outward bound, ancient or modern, are
governed by a very curious natural law that causes them to blunder about over the surface of the ocean like a mob of half-witted sheep. Ships that behave perfectly well alone become over-excited in a crowd: the merchant captains lose their seamanship, the seamen forget that there is quite a difference between port and starboard and the vessels fall aboard of one another in the most stupefying manner. At one time, in the convoy from Martinique to France to which the
Lys
belonged, there were no less than eight all together in the morning, some with their bowsprits through the others’ shrouds, some with their yardarms entangled, some apparently lashed together for mutual support, while the men-of-war fumed with impatience and fired whole broadsides to enforce the signal to make sail: and all the while a fast-sailing privateer from Jamaica hovered to windward to make prize of the stragglers.

Slowly across the Atlantic, fifty sail of merchantmen and five men-of-war, with tempers growing shorter every day. The French admiral ran one of the wandering captains up to his main-yardarm and ducked him three times, by way of encouraging the others to keep station, but nothing would answer, and by the time they made Cape Ortegal the poor admiral was as nearly speechless as it is possible for a Frenchman to become, from mere rage.

But it profits us little to contemplate the coarse sentiments of the French admiral: nor would it be improving, or even decent, to record his words when, upon dropping anchor at last in Brest road, his flagship was rammed smartly from behind by the heaviest of the West-Indiamen, and we shall pass them over, together with the dreary interval that the prisoners were obliged to spend in France before orders came down to allow them to go home in the first neutral ship that offered.

Behold them, then, upon the greasy deck of a Dutch dogger, in sight of Dover. ‘No violence, Mr Byron, if you please,’ said Captain Cheap.

Jack was scarlet in the face with anger, and he had a belaying-pin in his hand; but he fell back a step at the command. This was proof of a very high degree of self-control, for the Dutch skipper, having promised to carry them from Morlaix to Dover, and having been paid in advance, now had the brazen effrontery to say that wind and tide did not serve – that he was obliged to go on to the Lowlands.

‘He is a false rogue,’ cried Jack, who was never one for concealing his opinions.

‘Let him be, let him be,’ said Captain Cheap, who was too weak and ill to resist. He had never recovered his health, even in the sweet climate of Santiago, and since they had come into northern waters and the winter (it was February now) he had been very poorly.

The skipper blew a scornful whiff from his pipe and shifted the spokes of his wheel: Dover diminished in the distance, and the grey waves of the Channel came slopping aboard with the turn of the tide. Below, in an evil booth that reeked of old bait, Tobias and Mr Hamilton groaned faintly in unison. They had both been quite horribly sick the whole of the way up from Morlaix (which is in Brittany), and the dogger seemed to have been carefully designed to keep them in that condition indefinitely: it was a vessel of shallow draught, as broad as it was long, and it had a great well in the middle, meant for keeping fish alive – a sea-going pudding-basin that lurched, pitched, tossed and rolled every moment of the day and night, and smelt most abominably. ‘Another hour, and it will be over,’ said Mr Hamilton, for Jack had come below to tell them as soon as Dover cliffs had appeared.

‘Another hour can just be borne,’ said Tobias – ‘perhaps.’

Jack walked up and down, in a towering rage: he was a long-suffering, good-tempered creature nearly always, but the Dutchman’s insolent fraud vexed his very soul. Besides, they would have to find their passage from Holland to England now, out of a very thin purse indeed. Dover was gone, and even its cliffs were fading into the haze: a Swedish brig came past, very deep-laden; over towards Dunkirk a hoy beat into the wind with a great deal of fuss. The Channel was full of shipping – there were at least half a dozen other sails, near and far, to be seen from the dogger. Jack stared at them gloomily.

Suddenly his attention was fixed: to windward there was a ship that had just put about. None but a man-of-war on patrol was likely to do that, and Jack, running up the shrouds for a better view, saw that he was right: furthermore, she reminded him more and more strongly of the
Squirrel,
in which he had served. Five minutes later the varying positions of the dogger and the man-of-war showed him the unmistakable rails of the
Squirrel’s
head, and with a melodious
howl he leapt down on deck. In a moment he had started the dogger’s sheets and let them fly before the amazed Dutchmen could stop him.

Letting fly the sheets is a most emphatic signal: it can mean several things, and the
Squirrel,
with a natural curiosity, instantly bore down to know which. A boat came bobbing across, and at the hail ‘Dogger ahoy,’ Jack left the safety of the rigging. ‘Dick Penn,’ he called over the side, ‘strike me down if it is not Dick Penn. Will you not take us out of this infernal old tub, and carry us into Dover?’

A very grim lieutenant came aboard, determined to know who this was who made free with his name – this very foreign-looking object who seemed to think that he could make game of the Navy. ‘Why, damn your eyes,’ he cried, with delighted recognition dawning in his countenance; ‘it’s Jack Byron, dressed up as a Don.’

Jack had had the poetical intention of picking up the first handful of English soil and cherishing it, but it was raining steadily when the
Squirrel’s
cutter landed them, and the earth was all chalky mud, with skim-milk-coloured puddles standing on it, so he was obliged to come ashore like an ordinary Christian. They stood shivering in their thin Spanish clothes while the seamen hoisted up the seven crates of birds, plants, serpents, fishes in spirits, dried bats and skeletons, and the pitiful little bundles of their own possessions. ‘It will have to be a guinea,’ whispered Mr Hamilton urgently.