Patrick O'Brian: The Hundred Days

Now, under the blazing sun, there began a curious form of sea-warfare: a slight strengthening of the breeze reached the frigate first and brought her within range of the galley’s chasers; but since the vessels were not directly in line, the galley, in order to aim these guns, had to shift her helm, exposing some of her quarter. This danger increased with the wind, which brought Surprise’s foremost guns, trained right forward, into play; with the further peril that she might put her helm hard over, showing the galley the whole of her flank and sending a hundred and sixty-eight pounds of round-shot into the galley’s relatively fragile timbers.

Both captains, the one right forward, the other right aft, watched one another most intently, trying to detect the slightest change and to counteract it. Jack had all his forward guns manned, of course, to give nothing away by movement; and when a favourable gust had brought the frigate perhaps fifty yards nearer he said to Daniel, in charge of the forward guns to larboard, ‘Mr Daniel, I am going to put the helm a-lee and fire the bow-chaser: the moment she goes off, fire as they bear.’ He stepped to the port bow-chaser, a beautiful brass gun of his own, a nine-pounder: it was already at what he judged the right elevation, and kneeling to the sight he cried, ‘Helm a-lee: handsomely, now!’ And as the galley’s stern came just into view he fired. The ball skipped from the enemy’s wake and through her after-lateen, while at the same time the three foremost broadside guns sent splinters flying from the galley’s stern; but they too struck only on the rebound. Very shortly after, the gust that had brought the frigate nearer, reached and favoured the corsair, carrying her out of range.

‘By God, it’s hot,’ said Jack: he turned and drank from the scuttle-butt, imitated by all hands.

And so it went, burning day after burning day; and now even the moonlit night sky seemed to radiate heat. Day after day, with each doing all that human skill, ingenuity, craft and malevolence could do to destroy the enemy, neither gaining any decisive advantage though each wounded his enemy - wounded him, but far from mortally.

If Jack and Adams his clerk had not kept the ship’s logbook - the exact record of positions, distances made good, variations in the wind, observations on the weather, natural phenomena - he would scarcely have known that it was a Wednesday - the first Wednesday in June - when at last the wind failed them entirely, and standing in what trifling shade the limp sails could offer they watched the galley ship her oars and pull, still westwards, towards what might have been a cloud on the horizon, if this pitiless sky would have suffered even a single cloud.

This day Stephen had three cases of sunstroke, and Jack, by way of prevention and diversion, had a sail lowered over the side - all the edges well clear of this shark-infested water - a truly shocking number of sharks - leaping in himself to encourage the crew, but finding, alas, precious little refreshment in the more than luke-warm tide.

Neither surgeon saw fit to join the splashing throng, and seeing that they were quite unwatched, Stephen undertook to guide Jacob up into the maintop, from which - the ship having swung with the current - they could see the galley with a telescope borrowed from the gunroom. It was not a very perilous ascent, but Daniel and three midshipmen, stark naked, ran up the side and into the rigging to give them not only advice but active, expert muscular heaves at moments of crisis.

From the top, Matunin sent them back to their water with many thanks and the assurance that they should be able to make their own way down with no more help than the force of gravity: and after breathing for a while he went on, ‘Amos, I believe you have never been up here before.’

‘Never,’ said Amos Jacob, ‘but I am very glad to be up here now - Lord, what an expanse: and Lord, how near the galley seems. She is in active motion. May I have the telescope? Oh God...’ he added in a tone of utter disgust. ‘But I had foreseen it.’

He passed the telescope. The breeze had filled the galley’s sails, and the corsairs were throwing many of their manacled rowers overboard.

They watched in a wholly disgusted silence: and then Stephen leant over and called, ‘Captain Aubrey, the galley has the wind. She is sailing towards the island we can see from up here.’

For the cloud had become island, a conical island hollowed out on the near, the eastern side.

Jack was with them in a moment, dripping wet. ‘I have heard of their doing that, to save food and water,’ he said. And after a silence, ‘I do not know that island. But then we are right off any known tract of the sea.’

‘I believe I have seen it on an old Catalan map in Barcelona,’ said Stephen. ‘And as I recall its name is Cranc, a crab.’

‘The breeze is joining us,’ said Jack, and he gave orders for all hands to come aboard: within minutes the frigate was alive again, her sails full, her bow-wave mounting. And well before the hellish sun dipped down at last, they were in with the Island Crab. There was not a hand aboard who had not seen one of the rowers - slave or unransomable captive - thrown screaming into the sea, the bloody sea, and there was not one who did not hate and loathe those that did it.

The island was presumably of volcanic origin, an eruptive peak that had then blown out its east side, leaving a shallow lagoon with a high wall broken only by a narrow channel through which the sea flowed in and out. From the tops they could see the galley moored under the rock wall near the entrance, close to a battered mole and some derelict buildings. She was entirely sheltered from anything but mortars: and the frigate possessed no mortars; nor could she enter such shallow water to use her guns.

The gentle topgallant breeze carried her round the island, surveying and sounding as she went, clean round with only a single tack: deep water, no apparent reefs, almost no vegetation on the land, no sign, no sign at all of water: nor, to Stephen’s astonishment, of sea-birds. On the west side, under quite steep cliffs, there was a little grey-green strand.

Jack had himself rowed to it, with Stephen: and as they walked on what sand there was, Jack observed that this was high tide; that the surf must be very severe indeed on this side, after a strong westerly blow; and that he hoped Stephen had found some interesting creatures in that cave.

‘I found something more interesting still,’ said Stephen. ‘A total absence of life. Well into June and not a nestling petrel even. No birds, no bird-lice, no feather mites. And I tell you what it is, brother: there is an uneasy smell in that rock, those fissures - pray thrust your nose into this one. I am no chemist, God forbid, but I very much suspect the presence of a poisonous emanation. That would account for the near-absence of vegetation, even in June.’ He mused, and while he was musing Daniel came and said to Jack, ‘Sir, we have a hand in the boat, McLeod, who was in Centaur in the year four: he says the position here is very like what it was when Captain Hood took the Diamond Rock. He was a Saint Kilda cragsman in his youth, and he helped to get the guns up the cliff.’

‘It had not struck me,’ said Jack, ‘but the situation is indeed very like. Yet could he really carry a line up that cliff? McLeod,’ he called, and the tall, middle-aged seaman, a recent draught from Erebus in Gibraltar, came up, awkward and embarrassed. ‘Do you think you could take a line up that cliff? Right up that cliff?’

‘I think so, sir,’ said McLeod in his halting English, ‘with a little well-tempered hand-pick, and a stout peg with a block to send me up another twenty-five fathom. This is no so steep as Diamond Rock, but it is softer, and may be false at top.’