Patrick O'Brian - The Hundred Days

‘Should you like to try? If ever it grows too false you may come down with no shame - it is only an attempt, a trial.’

‘We hauled up twenty-four pounders,’ said McLeod, not quite following him.

‘Let us shove off at once,’ said Jack, and he led the way to the boat. They pulled back at a great pace, helped by the current and buoyed up by recollections of the Diamond Rock, that most uncommon feat - back to Surprise as she lay so moored that her broadside would shatter the emerging galley on the starboard side if ever she ventured out, while Ringle would do the same to larboard.

The bosun roused out coils of the strongest white line; the armourer blew his forge to an incandescent heat, fashioned wedges with eye-holes for the blocks, forged and tempered a little hand-pick, one head a beak, the other a hammer, under McLeod’s supervision.

They were still too hot to hold as the boat pulled back, though in the mean time McLeod and his cousin had sewn tight sailcloth climbing shoes.

‘In the Pyrenees I have pursued the izard, God forgive me, who dwells in the highest peaks,’ said Stephen, standing with his hands behind his back, watching McLeod’s ascent, ‘but never have I seen such climbing. He might almost be a gecko.’

It was indeed an extraordinary spectacle, that stalwart twelve-stone man moving up the almost perpendicular lower cliff, fissured to be sure, but from below apparently smooth; and when he reached a more craggy stretch where he could rest and then drive home his peg and make fast his line, all hands cheered amain. He tossed down his ball of twine for the next coil and so, heaving it up and putting the coil over his shoulder and carried on, faster this time, up to the middle height, while his cousin Alexander, making use of the first line, made his way up. In a surprisingly short time they were able to look cautiously over the top, the whole lagoon open below them.

Now, while bold but less wholly intrepid hands chipped footholds along the line of the first rope and beyond, began one of the most elaborate cat’s cradles that Jack had ever seen: although it was nothing to the aerial railway of the Diamond Rock, it was the bosun’s seventh heaven, and presently all was ready to send a nine-pounder cannon up, sliding along a steep messenger to a point where it commanded the lagoon: and if a nine-pounder would not answer, then two fourteen-pounders could not possibly be denied.

By night the Surprise came round at low tide, when the water was too low for the galley to attempt the outward passage from the lagoon. And offshore, in excellent holding ground, she dropped two anchors and then sent hawsers ashore. They rose by means of powerful tackles past the various staging points to the very summit, where they were made fast to a complexity of stakes and hauled taut by the ship’s capstan. ‘Chaser away,’ said Jack, and his personal nine-pounder was made fast to the messenger, slung below it by iron hoops. At the cry of ‘Handsomely, handsomely, now,’ the hands at the uppermost winch, under the command of Whewell, began to turn: the long hawsers, spliced end to end, stretched, sighed, grew more rigid, and the gun began its smooth progress up along the messenger. The gun, its emplacement, its munitions, represented a prodigious amount of labour; but as the sun rose, lighting the lagoon, with the galley up against its mole, nobody was in the least fatigued.

Jack knew his gun intimately: the distance was nothing much for a well-bored chaser - a little over a furlong - but as he told Stephen - who with Jacob, had been carried up like parcels - he had rarely fired at such a downward angle. ‘I shall just try one or two sighters,’ he said, ‘aiming at those dilapidated houses. Run her up, shipmates.’ The gun thumped against its emplacement: Jack shifted the wedge still farther, glared along the sight, made one more trifling adjustment and clapped the linstock down, arching his body to let the recoiling nine-pounder shoot back under him. While the team swabbed, cleaned, reloaded, rammed home the wad and ran her up again, he stood fanning the smoke and smiling with satisfaction: the shot had gone right home. And the Moors were swarming about the galley and the mole like startled ants.

They were corsairs, men of war: they very quickly grasped their situation, their hopeless situation, and they seized Murad Reis, manhandled him along to the end of the mole nearest the cliff, tied his hands, forced him to kneel and called up, ‘Our sins on his head. Our sins on his head.’ With a single blow one of the corsairs cut Murad’s head clean off, held it up to the watchers on the cliff and cried, ‘Our sins on his head. Give us water and we shall be your slaves for ever - you shall have the galley: you shall have the gold.’

Some were drinking the blood, but most were gazing up, holding out supplicatory hands.

‘Will you answer, Dr Jacob?’ asked Jack.

‘It would wholly compromise my position,’ said Jacob. ‘Let us wait a little. I believe they have some other resource.’

They had: some moments later a dozen almost naked powerful seamen, deeply sunburnt, scored with whip lashes but recognizably white, were pushed forward, and their leader, squaring up to the cliff, called out in a hoarse Port of London voice, ‘God bless King George. Which we are British subjects, taken out of the Three Brothers, Trade’s Increase and other craft: and should be very grateful to your honour for a drop of anything wet. Amen.’

‘Hear him,’ croaked the others. ‘Right parched we are. Drinking piss this last week.’

‘Listen,’ said Jack in his strong, carrying voice. ‘You take the Moors’ weapons and pile them at the end of the mole, tie their hands, and I shall signal the schooner to send in a boat full of fresh water and something to eat.’

The British subjects uttered a hoarse discordant cheer; Jack fired three or four times at random to keep up the tension; and the weapons came piling up on the mole.

Just off the lagoon the Surprises, overflowing with satisfaction and wit, carried out the small heavy, heavy, wonderfully heavy little chests from the galley to those places deep in the Surprise where their weight would be most useful as ballast. The Moorish prisoners, reasonably fed and watered,were stowed in the cable-tiers. They were, at least for the time being, very low in their spirits: indeed morally destroyed: but Jack had seen strange surprising changes in men freed from mortal danger: he reckoned with the resilience of the human spirit, particularly the maritime human spirit; and having, with his officers, fixed the ship’s position with the utmost accuracy he set her course for the nearest point in Africa, where he meant to put them ashore.

For the moment however he and Stephen were breakfasting in comfort, gazing with some complacency at the island Cranc. ‘Jacob tells me,’ said Stephen, ‘that in Moorish Arabic the place is now called Fortnight Island. It had been a moderately prosperous fishing and corsair port - dates, carobs, pearl oysters, coral - hence the mole and the ruins - until the time of, I think, Mulei Hassan; but then a new eruption destroyed the few springs, broke the aqueducts and cisterns and slowly liberated that noxious vapour we observed. It seems that you can breathe it for fourteen days with nothing but headaches and gastric pains; but on the fifteenth you die.’

‘I beg pardon for interrupting you, sir,’ said Harding, ‘but you desired me to tell you when all was aboard. The last chest has just been handed down.’ As he spoke his usually grave face spread in a most infectious smile: that last case, carried staggering by strong men, weighed well over a hundred and twelve pounds, and Harding, though not an avaricious or grasping man, knew just how many ounces of that mass belonged to him as prize-money.