Patrick O'Brian - The Hundred Days

Stephen agreed, his eyes following a troop of black storks as they passed over the flagship; and quite suddenly he realized that the Royal Sovereign was no longer flying the courtmartial signal. Indeed, the captains’ barges were already dispersing.

On the way down they walked almost in silence. They had said all that could usefully be said at this point, though more intelligence was to be expected at Mahon - and Stephen very often glanced at the flagship’s main yardarm. In these waters the Commander-in-Chief was all-powerful: he could confirm a court’s sentence of death without the least reference to the King or the Admiralty. In naval courtsmartial sentence was pronounced at once: it was final, with no appeal: and Lord Keith was not one for delay.

By the time they reached the town there was no man hanging from the yardarm; but on the battlements this side of the Southport Gate there were several officers, including Jack Aubrey and some of the Pomone’s people, looking earnestly southward along the strand. Stephen joined them, saying, ‘Sir, may I introduce Dr Jacob, the assistant surgeon of whom I told you?’

‘Very happy, sir,’ said Jack, shaking Jacob’s hand. He would obviously have said more, but at this moment a strong murmur all along from the bastion increased immensely as two boats left the flagship, pulling for the shore and towing a bare grating, the soaked and wretched prisoners upon it. A few minutes later the grating was cast off: a small surf brought it in and the men scrambled in the shallows. There was some sparse cat-calling from the crowd, but not much; and half a dozen people helped them to dry land, dragging their belongings.

‘Dr Jacob, sir,’ said Jack, ‘I hope that you will be able to come aboard without delay. I am eager to be out of sight of this place.’ And privately to Stephen he said, ‘I repeated your “No penetration, no sodomy”, which floored one and all; though I must say that most of them were glad to be floored. I persuaded the others to find no more than gross indecency.’

‘And is being towed ashore on a grating the set penalty for gross indecency?’

‘No. We call it the use and custom of the sea: that is the way it has always been.’

Chapter Two

For several years now Stephen Maturin had been perfectly aware that a life at sea, above all in a man-of-war, was not the waterborne picnic sometimes imagined by those living far inland; but he had never supposed that anything could be quite so arduous as this existence between the two, neither floating free nor firmly ashore, with what conveniences the land might provide.

The squadron, necessarily gathered together in a hurry and necessarily short-handed, had to be thoroughly reorganized, above all the unhappy Pomone: a ship always suffered from a trial for sodomy and although her people had not been in her for anything like an ordinary commission it was long enough for them to feel their position acutely - to resent the calls they heard ashore or the smiles and meaning silence when a group of them walked into a bar. After all, one of their officers had been dismissed from the service in the most ignominious fashion possible and towed ashore on a grating in the view of countless spectators; and some of the discredit clung to his former shipmates. This corporate shame had a thoroughly bad effect on discipline, which had never been the Pomone’s strongest point; and a new captain, with a second lieutenant who knew nobody aboard, was unlikely to remedy this state of affairs in the near future. She did have a good bosun, however, and the gunner, though discouraged, was willing and knowledgeable. He and Captain Pomfret were suitably shocked when the Commodore invited them to accompany Surprise well out into the Strait, off Algeciras, so that both ships might exercise the great guns, firing at towed targets. The Pomones brought their ship out creditably and they were reasonably brisk at the dumb-show of running the eighteen-pounders in and out, but some of the gun-crews were hesitant about firing them. Only three or four in the starboard battery had much notion of anything but point-blank aim or of judging the roll. The first and second captains were competent upon the whole, but the midshipmen in charge of the divisions left much to be desired and some of the ordinary hands belonging to the gun might never have seen an eighteen-pounder fired in earnest before. The fury of the recoil shocked them extremely and after the first wavering, ragged broadside several had to be led or carried below, hurt by iron-taut tackles and breechings or even by the angles of the carriage itself. The Marines who took their places did at least stand clear, but on the whole it was a most lamentable exhibition, and the Surprises had no compunction in making it even more obviously ludicrous by destroying, utterly destroying, the hitherto unscathed target with three broadsides in five minutes and ten seconds.

‘Captain Pomfret,’ said Jack before he left the ship, ‘I can foresee a very great deal of great-gun exercise, morning and afternoon, as well as at quarters: the team must know their pieces through and through, so that they never have to think, as I am sure you are very well aware.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Pomfret, trying to master his distress. ‘The only thing I can advance is that we are cruelly short-handed, and the people have not been together long.’

‘You have enough right seamen to man your pinnace and launch?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Then let your first lieutenant and the second when he joins - I know the Admiral means to let you have an excellent young man - take them out in the middle watch and lie off Cape Spartel till dawn. If they do not press a score of hands out of the passing merchantmen who have not yet heard the news I shall be amazed. But above all keep your people hard at it, the young gentlemen especially - idle young dogs, sauntering about with their hands in their pockets - hard at it: yet do not blackguard them. Praise if ever you can; you will find it answer wonderfully. Next week you may fire live - nothing pleases them more, once they are used to the din.’

Returning to harbour, Jack visited the other ships and vessels of his squadron, requiring each to beat to quarters and at least to cast loose their guns. The exactness of the coiled muzzle-lashing, made fast to the eye-bolt above the port-lid, the seizing of the mid-breeching to the pommelion, the neat arrangement of the sponge, handspike, powderhorn, priming-wire, bed, quoin, train-tackle, shot and all the rest told a knowing eye a great deal about the gun-crew and even more about the midshipman of the sub-division. The Dover, still actively reconverting herself, was in rather a sad way, but not very discreditably so; the others would do at a push, and the little Briseis, one of that numerous class called coffin-brigs from their tendency to turn over and sink, was positively brilliant. He told her captain so, and the hands within earshot visibly swelled with satisfaction.

Back to Surprise and her great cabin, familiar, elegant, but in spite of its conventional name not really spacious enough for all the administrative work he had to do. There were no more than six ships or vessels in the squadron, but their books and papers already overflowed the Commodore’s desk: not much more than a thousand men were concerned, but all those of real importance in the running of the squadron had to be entered on separate slips together with what comments he had so far been able to make on their abilities; and to house these slips he had called upon his joiner to make temporary tray-like wings to his desk, so that eventually he should have all the elements at his disposal laid out, to be rearranged according to the tasks the squadron might be called to undertake. In these quite exceptional circumstances, with no settled ships’ companies apart from those in Surprise and to some extent Briseis, he would have an equally exceptional free hand.