Patrick O'Brian - The Hundred Days

‘That would be very kind of you, Stephen. Should you like me to write it down?’

‘If you please.’

Jack scratched for a while, and passing the list he said, ‘You will see that I have underlined blank every time: but in his agitation the poor man might not think to draw all his guns before the first exchange. You will put him in mind of it, if you please...but tactfully, tactfully, if you know what I mean.’

‘What would be a proper time for this visit?’ asked Stephen without the least sign of having heard but reflecting upon his friend’s large, clear, somewhat round and feminine hand, his instant reaction in time of nautical crisis, and his not uncommon ineptitudes.

‘As soon as you have put on your good uniform and Killick has found your best wig. A boat and a bosun’s chair will be ready.’

The captain and the officers of Cerbère were an intelligent set, and since captains usually collect men of a like mind, they were all thoroughly dissatisfied with the present state of affairs. They longed to be out of this ambiguous posture, and it was with a general satisfaction that they saw the light of a boat pulling, man-of-war fashion, from the narrow mouth of the Porte di Spalato. They all of them studied it with their night-glasses and when its obvious intention was to come aboard them, the officer of the watch ordered a bosun’s chair to be rigged: they had already experienced Dr Jacob’s almost fatal attempt at coming up the side.

They hailed the boat as a matter of form, and they were somewhat shocked when the reply ‘a message from the English commodore’, though in French, was not in Jacob’s French. However, they lowered the chair and Stephen came aboard with what grace could be managed with such a vehicle but at least dry, clean and orderly.

He returned the first lieutenant’s salute, said that he should like to speak to the captain, and was shown into the great cabin.

Captain Delalande received him with a grave courtesy and listened to what he had to say in silence: when Stephen had finished he said, ‘Be so good as to tell the Commodore, with my compliments, that I agree to all his proposals, and that I shall reply to his and his consort’s blank broadsides with an equal number, equally blank, that I shall follow him through the Canale di Spalato, and then proceed to Malta.’ He coughed, unbent a little, and proposed coffee.

When they had drunk two cups and eaten two Dalmatian almond biscuits, the tension had so far diminished that Stephen asked whether the captain had ever known the firing of a salute or the like to be accompanied by the involuntary discharge of a ball, the drawing of the cannon having been overlooked.

‘No, sir,’ said Delalande, ‘I have not. When we fire a salute or anything of that nature, we like the gun to make as much noise as possible. And to this end we withdraw the ball - in itself precious enough, I assure you, and much regarded by the Ministry - and replace it with more wads and sometimes a disk or two of wood as well.’

Stephen thanked him and took his leave, escorted by a lieutenant; and not only on the quarterdeck but also in the waist of the ship among the hands he noticed approving, even friendly looks. It was not only in the Royal Navy, he concluded, that secrecy was the rarest commodity aboard a ship.

‘My dear William,’ he said, safely on the tender’s deck, ‘I dare say the moon will be up presently?’

‘In about half an hour, sir,’ said Reade.

‘Then if it can be spared, would you be so very kind as to lend me your little boat and a reliable, grave, sober man to carry Dr Jacob and me ashore in let us say twenty minutes?’

‘Of course I will, sir: should be very happy.’

‘Jack,’ he said, walking into the cabin where the Commodore and his clerk were busy with book after book of accounts, ‘I do beg your pardon for this untimely...’

‘Tomorrow morning, Mr Adams.’

‘...but I have first to tell you that Captain Delalande wholly accepts your proposals: he will expect you at first light tomorrow.’

‘Oh, I am so...’

‘On the other hand the Brotherhood’s messengers have already left for Algiers. Now I must write a minute for Malta and then go to a conference ashore. Until tomorrow, brother.’

‘The doctors are going ashore,’ said Joe Plaice to his old friend Barret Bonden.

‘I don’t blame them,’ said Bonden. ‘I should like to see the sights of Spalato myself. I dare say they are going to burn a candle to some saint.’

‘That’s a genteel way of putting it,’ said Plaice.

At six bells in the middle watch, when all the larboard and most of the starboard guns had been drawn and reloaded with powder that Jack kept for saluting, the doctors came back. They were kindly helped up the side by powerful seamen and they crept, weary and bowed, towards their beds.

‘Wholly shagged out,’ said the gunner’s mate. ‘Dear me, they can’t hardly walk.’

‘Well, we are all of us human,’ said the yeoman of the sheets.

‘There you are, gentlemen,’ called the Commodore from by the wheel. ‘You have come aboard again, I find. Let me advise you to get what sleep you can, for presently there may be too much noise for it.’

‘Kedge up and down,’ cried Whewell from the bows.

‘Win her briskly, Mr Whewell,’ said Jack, and directing his voice aft, ‘Are you ready, Master Gunner?’

‘Ready, aye ready, sir,’ replied the gunner, that bull of Bashan.

‘Mr Woodbine,’ said Jack to the master, ‘we will take her in now: just topsails. You can make out the Frenchman’s lights, I believe?’

‘Oh yes, sir.’

‘Then steer for a point a cable’s length astern of her and then run up her larboard side within fifty yards. But I shall be on deck again by then.’ He walked aft and called over the dark water, ‘Pomone!’

‘Sir?’ replied Captain Vaux.

‘I am about to get under way.’

‘Very good, sir.’

‘Hands to make sail,’ said the master to the bosun, who instantly piped the invariable call. ‘Topsails,’ said the master. In almost total silence the hands appointed to gaskets, sheets, clewlines and buntlines, ties, halyards and then braces carried out their tasks with barely a word, at great speed: a pretty example of exact timing, co-ordination and long-established skill, if there had been anyone there who did not take it for granted.

The topsails rose; they filled and they were sheeted home: the ship began to move, with the warm breeze steady on her larboard quarter. Within moments she had steerageway, and the water spoke down her side, as gently as the breeze in the rigging: out of the shelter of Brazza she began to roll and pitch just a little - it was life renewed after that lying-to.

Light there was none, apart from the faint blur of the moon behind very high cloud - never a star - and here and there remote top-lanterns on the shipping far on the starboard bow and the odd cluster of lights on the distant quay. Dark and silent: so dark that even the topsails grew faint towards the height of the cross-trees.

All along the starboard side the gun-crews stood mute, some just visible above their shaded fighting-lanterns: midshipmen or master’s mates behind them: lieutenants behind each division.

Mr Woodbine kept his eyes fixed on the Cerbère’s lit stern from the moment they cleared the channel: it grew larger, brighter and brighter. He glanced across at the Commodore, who nodded. ‘Round to,’ said Woodbine to the man at the wheel, and then, as Surprise’s turn laid her parallel to the Cerbère, ‘Dyce, very well dyce,’ and he steadied her on this course. When her bows came level with the Frenchman’s quarter the master backed the main topsail, taking the way off her, and Jack cried ‘Fire!’