Patrick O'Brian - The Yellow Admiral

'I hope to God he don't explode,' said anxious, unhappy Killick.

'God help the poor bugger he explodes upon,' said Bonden.

Solution or at all events relief through the very great and varied emotion of battle came in sight on a Monday. The day before, Bellona like all the other ships and vessels in the squadron, had rigged church: Jack Aubrey could hardly have been called a religious man, but as well as his many superstitions he also had his pieties. He revered the sound if not the full implication of the Book of Common Prayer, the Lessons and the usual psalms and readings: the other rituals such as the inspection of the entire ship and every soul aboard her, clean, shaved, sober and toeing a given line or rather seam, soothed his mind; and although today he did not feel up to reading a sermon he and all his people were pei~ectly satisfied with the even more usual Articles of War, which, through immemorial use, had acquired ecclesiastical qualities of their own. It is true that there were obvious and extremely painful associations with the parish church at Woolcombe, but the great heave of the sea, the creak of the rigging and the smell of tar put a great enough distance between the two and it was not until he had returned to his cabin that an unlucky shifting of some papers to make room for his prayer-book showed him Sophie's letter clear and the sense of desolation, fury and extreme distress returned with even greater force.

Jack Aubrey was on deck this Monday morning, having sent his breakfast away - four eggs untouched, congealing in their butter - and he saw the Admiral's signal. The Charlotte was a talkative ship, and although this was usually thought a tiresome characteristic it did give the signal-officers a great deal of practice, and now he heard Callow read off the hoists almost as they appeared, without referring to the book. The squadron was to proceed, in line abreast, on a west-south-westerly course under all plain sail, the Bellona at the southern tip: yet the glass was dropping; the southern sky, or as much of it as could be seen under the low cloud, was wanting in promise; and the sea of this ebbing tide had some curious pallid streaks, apparently rising from the depths. The first lieutenant and the master looked grave. Harding had dined with the Charlotte's wardroom the day before and he had learnt that this sweep was being carried out primarily in order to find how fast and how accurately a signal could travel from one extremity of the line - the unusually wide-spread line - to the other and back again. Lord Stranraer had another admiral, an expert on signals, aboard as a guest.

Presently they were all under way and the line, after a great deal of nagging from the flag, was as straight on the surface of the ocean as the earth's curvature would allow. But this perfection did not last: a little before dinner the Charlotte made the signal for the squadron to tack together, emphasized by a gun; and as far as could be seen it was obeyed with tolerable regularity right across the broad front; though a second gun seemed to show that at least one ship on the far eastern end had been slow or had even missed the signal altogether - there was a good deal of murk over there. Another explanation was that the unknown ship, having already mixed its noon-day grog, was so infuriated by this untimely order that it delayed out of mere bloody-mindedness.

Having come about, the squadron made a fair board, quite time enough to eat their quarter of a pound of cheese (this was a banyan day), and then returned to the former course, though with a little more west in it.

Easy sailing: but presently the weather thickened, and the sound of the wind in the rigging rose steadily until it had traversed a full octave. Jack called for preventer-stays.

'We shall soon be going home,' said Harding to Miller, who now had the watch; and by home he meant that dismal stretch of sea off Keller's Island where the Admiral liked to shelter when the sea, wind and rain threatened to become more outrageous than usual.

'Reef topsails, Mr Miller, if you please,' said Jack. The topgallants had disappeared long since, and even the Ringle, as trim as a duck away there to leeward, showed little more

than a handkerchief on each mast and a third right forward.

'Hands reef topsails' came the cry and the sharp cutting bosun's pipe: and as the men raced aloft Jack, gazing over the larboard bow, caught hints of whiteness away down in the troubled grey, the growing sea and its now much wilder crests.

'Port your helm,' he said quietly to Compton, the older of the two men at the wheel, a hand who knew him well, and the tone of his voice. Compton and his mate eased the great plunging ship a trifle to starboard, opening Jack a view as he stood there swaying to the sea, the telescope to his good eye.

A long pause, an electric tension on the quarterdeck and right along the waist of the ship, filled with men who knew or knew of him; then the first of a series of blinding squalls of mixed rain, sleet and snow; and when it had passed Callow said hesitantly, 'Sir, I believe I saw Monmouth repeat Tack all together just before she vanished.'

Jack and his officers stared briefly eastward. 'I see nothing,' he said. 'Did you make out any signal, Mr Harding?'

'None, sir.'

'Mr Callow: make enemy in sight two leagues south-west by south heading north-west. Mr Miller, shake out the reefs in the foretopsail: set fore topmast staysail half in.' He stepped over to the wheel and with his eye on those remote flecks in the infinity of other greys and whiteness, all shifting incessantly, he set a course to intercept the vessel, the enemy, the very probable enemy.

The ship's company, including those who had escaped from the sick-berth along with their attendants, lined the side. If there were any so morose as to disbelieve the Captain's implied declaration, they did not mention it. From his early days as an astonishingly successful frigate-captain, coming home with a tail of captured ships and a fortune in prize-money, Jack had acquired the status of a mythical being or something very like it, a being whose judgment in these matters could not be wrong; and any scepticism would have been most furiously resented.

The event confirmed the believers in their creed. Within half an hour the chase, raised high on a towering wave, was seen to be a frigate wearing French colours, herself pursuing a merchantman. She was not a national ship, however, but one of those powerful, fast-sailing privateers from Vannes or Lorient that were more deadly as commerce-raiders than the regular men-of-war and that were now making the most of what war was left to them, often running very extreme risks within miles of the Channel fleet.

She was called Les Deux Fr�s and so intent was she on her prey - already within long shot, but they far preferred boarding, in case a ball, causing a leak, should spoil the cargo - that she did not make out the Bellona, partly veiled in a squall for some minutes. On doing so she instantly bore up, bringing the wind not right aft but on her quarter, her best point of sailing; at the same time, out of mere spite, she fired at the merchantman and almost immediately set her flying jib. Little good did either do. The shot missed and the sail blew out of its boltrope.

Still, she fled along, throwing a splendid bow-wave, her heavy crew tending the sail with the utmost attention and risking long shots at the seventy-four in the hope of wounding her sails and cutting up her rigging, conceivably knocking away a yard or a topmast: after all, the Deux Fr�s carried a by no means contemptible armament, including some carronades. But even more than that every man and boy aboard knew that their last three captures in the chops of the Channel had made them the richest privateer afloat.

She fled with the utmost zeal therefore, almost as fast as the Ringle steadily there on her starboard bow, just out of shot. She fled with all the earnest desire to preserve wealth and freedom that can be imagined and with almost superhuman skill; but short of the Bellona being struck by lightning - a good deal was flashing above the low cloud-cover she had no chance. For the sea was rising: minute by minute the crests were higher, the spume tearing away from their tops, and the hollows between them were deeper and wider; and in seas of this magnitude no frigate could outsail a well-handled ship of the line to windward of her, since in these deep valleys the frigate was becalmed, while the seventy-four (which in any case could spread more sail) was not, or not entirely, and she retained the momentum of her sixteen hundred tons. 'It is going to be a dirty night,' said Jack to the officer of the watch. 'Pray pass the word for the gunner. Master Gunner,' he went on, 'we will not touch the lower-deck port-lids, but it would be as well to ready the forward larboard eighteen-pounders. You drew them all yesterday, I believe?'