Patrick O'Brian: The Hundred Days

No moon, of course; but the suffused starlight gave a practised eye a fair view of the Spanish skyline - Punta Carnero, Punta Secreta, Punta del Fraile, and Punta Acebuche were all astern: Tarifa was not far off.

‘Topsails alone,’ said Jack quite low; and some of the way came off the ship.

‘Four knots and two fathoms, sir, if you please,’ said the midshipman in charge of the log, murmuring low.

There was a steadily mounting sense of crisis aboard, and for some time now the quartermaster had sounded the bells only with his knuckles. Almost no talk or even whispering along the deck, where the guns were already run out and the slow-match smouldered in the tubs.

It was Daniel in the blue cutter who first saw the galley, inshore of him and already under sail, two fine lateens sheeted well in and rounded with the breeze. He sent up a blue light and its lasting effulgence showed the enemy clear, the sea, and its own smoke, still more distinctly drifting from the south.

The galley was not quite as deeply engaged in the Strait as Jack could have wished, but she lay pretty well: pretty well, indeed. He signalled Ringle to pick up the cutter and follow him, then spread all the canvas the Surprise could carry in this moderate breeze, increasing as it backed, and he hauled her as close as ever she would lie.

The galley, seeing that she had been detected by perhaps as many as three men-of-war - possibly with others towards the eastern end warned of her approach - abandoned all hope of racing through the channel, struck her sails and took to her oars, steering into the eye of the wind.

The frigate’s great spread of white sail showed clearly enough in the starlight for Murad Reis to chance a long shot with his larboard chaser when the galley was head-and-stern in line with Surprise: the heavy guns could not be traversed: they had to be aimed by means of the vessel that carried them, and he moved the rudder with an expert hand.

A long shot: but the combination of good aiming, excellent bore and powder, and the toss of the sea caused the twentyfour pound ball to strike the second gun of the Surprise’s starboard,broadside, killing Bonden, its captain, and young Hallam, the midshipman of the division. Once the gun had been secured Jack ran the length of the battery, checking the captains’ pointing - though indeed the low-lying galley was but the faintest blur - urging highest elevation and then, on the rise, he cried, ‘Fire!’

Even with his night-glass in the maintop he could not make out for sure whether the guns had had any effect: but after a few more distant exchanges in which the Surprise received only a harmless, spent ricochet, it seemed probable. At all events, after twenty minutes the galley’s pace seemed to slacken, either because of damaged oars (terribly vulnerable to broadside fire) or because that first dash had exhausted the rowers.

While his glass focused on what was almost certainly the galley (for their courses were convergent) Jack ordered a forward gun to fire, and in the flash he distinctly saw her making sail.

She was fast, and her lateen rig gave her the advantage on a wind; but in their present positions and with the breeze still backing steadily, any attempt on her part to cross the frigate’s bows or stern before the changing wind made it quite impossible would expose her to at least three or four unanswerable broadsides: a galley, however heavy, wellhandled and however dangerous her bow- and stern-chasers, could not stand broadside-to-broadside combat with a manof-war mounting fourteen twelve-pounders a side, apart from chasers, swivel-guns in the tops, and musketry, to say nothing of much stouter timbers.

There was no possibility of boarding, either, without the certainty of being raked fore and aft several times before coming alongside; and although Murad Reis had boarded and taken merchantmen heavier than Surprise, the truly naval speed and efficiency of her broadside convinced him that the attempt would not answer and he turned to the only other alternative - that of outsailing her (a galley could be very fast in a reasonably smooth sea with a following wind) and so of casting an eastward loop at the end of a very long run, thus, perhaps, regaining the weather-gage and freedom.

The morning sun, rising over Africa, showed the galley almost exactly where Jack had expected her, about two miles away westward: her two lateens out on either side making the most of the topgallant south-west-by-south wind: and so they ran all that pure cloudless day, and even the next, when sea, wind and current were almost exactly the same. But the extreme tension of that first day, when every man, woman and boy tried to urge the frigate on with clenched stomach muscles and extraordinary zeal in racing aloft or doing anything that might possibly increase the vessel’s speed, diminished to the extent that the people went about their ordinary duties - cleaning decks, stowing hammocks, directing the fire-hoses high into the sails to help them draw a little better, eating their breakfast and the like - without perpetually breaking off to look at the chase. One boy even went to tell Stephen of a curious bird, a brown-faced booby; and Stephen and Jacob were much less often disturbed in their favourite observation-point right forward, by the starboard cathead. They had little or nothing to do in the sickberth that could not safely be left to Poll and Maggie. Jack was as active as any of his officers in drawing the last ounce of thrust from the breeze; and in any case Jack was disinclined for any other occupation whatsoever. He was, of course, very thoroughly acquainted with sudden death, but this time he felt the loss of Bonden, an admirable sailor, and of young Hallam, the son of an old shipmate, very deeply indeed.

This day was most uncommoply hot, and the next, a Monday, hotter still: Jacob, in the most natural way in the world, put on a turban, and Stephen, without much urging, a knotted white handkerchief. ‘This might go on for ever,’ he observed before dinner, settling down on his coil of rope.

‘To be sure, these two long wakes and the infinite quantity of sea have something of the look of eternity,’ said Jacob.

‘Or of dream. But for my part I do not think it can last much longer. I have been aboard an Algerine corsair and a Sallee rover, and since their chief aim is to take by boarding, they are usually very full of men. Furthermore, unless they intend the raiding of a distant coast - which is not the case here - a mere dash down the Straits and so to Durazzo - they rarely carry much in the way of provisions. Then again, when the galley was using its oars at such a pace I observed the quite exceptional number of rowers: all these mouths have to be fed.’

Eight bells: the hands were piped to dinner, and they were still chewing or smelling of rum or both when they came hurrying back forward to see how the chase lay now. ‘What is your opinion, Tobias Belcher?’ asked Stephen, speaking to a grey-haired seaman from Shelmerston, a shipmate on former voyages and a member of the Sethian community, renowned for truthfulness. Belcher looked and considered, and in time he replied that ‘there was something not wholly Christian about this here weather.’

At this point the gunroom steward came to warn the doctors that dinner would be on table directly, so they hurried off with nothing more precise than a vague apprehension. The Surprise, on reverting to a private ship, had lost her Royal Marine officer, but still with the three lieutenants, the master, the purser and her two surgeons, it was a fine full table, with a great volume of talk about the probable outcome of the day - a volume cut dead just as the pudding came in, by a magistral crash right forward, the impact of yet another ricochet from one of the galley’s stern-chasers.