Patrick O'Brian - The Commodore

As these minutes passed he realized, with an extraordinary intensity, just what his fortune, lying in its chests below, meant to him and his daughter and to a thousand aspects of his life. It had not occurred to him that money could have such value - that he could prize it so much. Gulls drifted between the Ringle and the cape, waves breaking along its shore. He turned a haggard face to the men at the helm and as though he felt the look Reade glanced back at him. The young man's expression had something of that happy wildness Stephen had often seen in Jack Aubrey at times of crisis, and smiling he called 'Stand by, Doctor. Watch out,' adding some words to Slade about a biscuit. Then he and Bonden, their hands on the triple-turned rope and the tiller, their eyes fixed to the leach of the foresail, eased the helm alee, and still more alee.

Stephen saw the dreadful shore of the cape, now so close, racing away to the left. He saw its seaward end appear, just clear of their larboard bow, at ten yards perhaps. He heard young Reade cry 'Toss it hard.' Slade flung the biscuit, hit the rock, and in a roar of laughter they were past, round into the open sea.

The lugger fired an ineffectual gun and tacked, incapable of weathering the cape, losing ground, impetus, and her prize. The pursuit continued for some hours, but by noon the lugger was hull-down in the east, hopelessly outsailed.

The Ringle carried on in a state of extraordinary good humour, often laughing, often reminding one another that 'they had weathered that old Cape Vares within biscuit-toss, ha, ha, ha!' Some tried to explain their triumph to Mrs Oakes and Brigid, but although they conveyed their happiness and sense of good fortune they had not fully succeeded before the Ringle opened the port of Corunna, or as some said, the Groyne.

As Stephen stood in the bows, smiling at the busy harbour and the town, Mould sidled casually up to him and out of the corner of his mouth be said 'Me and my mates know the Groyne as well as we know Shelmerston: this is where we used to come for our brandy. And if so be you should like to have the goods landed discreet, as I might say, we know a party, dead honest, or he would have been scragged long since, that might answer.'

'Thank you, Mould, thank you very much for your kind suggestion but this time - this time, eh? - I mean to land them in all legality. And that is what I am going to tell the captain of the port and his people. But I am very much obliged to you and your friends for your good will.'

Some hours later Stephen, sitting in the cabin with a perfectly mute Reade and the two senior port authorities, said 'And apart from the martial stores belonging to this vessel, the tender to His Britannic Majesty's ship Bellona, that you saw so recently, none of which constitutes merchandise, there is nothing except some treasure belonging to me personally, which I mean to lodge with the Bank of the Holy Ghost and of Commerce in this city - I am acquainted with don Jose Ruiz, its director, who shipped it to me in the first place. As it is in minted gold, in English guineas, it is of course exempt from duty.'

'Does it amount to a great deal?'

'The number of guineas I cannot tell, but the weight, I believe, is somewhere between five and six tons. That is why I must beg you to do me the very great kindness of giving this vessel a berth against the quay, and, if you possibly can, to lend me a score of trustworthy able-bodied men to carry the chests. Here' - waving to two fat little canvas bags - I have put up a sum that I hope you will distribute as you think fit. May I take it that we are in agreement, gentlemen? For if so, I must hurry ashore, speak to don Jose about the gold, and then go straight up and pay my compliments to the Governor.'

'Oh sir,' they cried, 'the Governor is half way to Valladolid by now. He will be distracted with grief.'

'But Colonel don Patricio FitzGerald y Saavedra is still with us, I trust?'

'Oh certainly, certainly, don Patricio is with us still, and all his men.'

'Cousin Stephen!' cried the Colonel, 'how happy I am to see you. What good wind brings you to Galicia?'

'First tell me do I see you well and happy?' Kindly used by Fortune?'

'Faith, her privates me: but never let a soldier complain. Pray carry on.'

'Well, now, Patrick, I have brought my daughter Brigid and the lady who looks after her, because I should like them to spend some time with Aunt Petronilla in Avila: they have a servant, Padeen Colman, but with the country so disturbed and the journey so long, and myself bound to part, I do not like to let them go alone, without a word of Spanish between them. Ruiz, at the bank, has bespoken a carriage with a French-speaking courier and the usual guards, but if you could lend me even half a dozen of your troopers and an officer you would oblige me extremely, and I should be oh so much happier, sailing away.'

The Colonel obliged him extremely; but no one looking at Stephen's face as he stood in the Ringles bows, watching eight horses draw a lumbering great coach up the hill behind Corunna, with a cavalry escort before and behind, and two hands waving white handkerchiefs, waving and waving until they were lost in the distance would have thought that he looked oh so much happier.

'Now, sir,' said Reade, in an embarrassed compassionate voice as Stephen came into the cabin, 'we mean to cast off our moorings the moment this hulking great Portuguese gets out of the way; but I do not believe, sir, that you ever told me our next rendezvous if we did not find the Commodore at the Groyne.'

'Did I not?' asked Stephen. He pondered, and pondered again. 'Jesus, Mary and Joseph,' he murmured, 'I have forgotten its name. The word is on the top back edge of my mind - it eludes me - petrels nest there: perhaps puffins - bats, in a vast great windy cave - some way out in the sea - islands - I have it: the Berlings! The Berlings it is, on my soul.'

Chapter Six

In the afternoon of Saturday, with the Berlings in sight on the larboard bow, the topgallant-sail breeze that had been bowling the Ringle along so handsomely since Cape Finisterre almost entirely deserted her, stunned perhaps by the roar of battle away in the south-west, to starboard.

The schooner, cleared for action, packed on more and more canvas, slanting down into what air there was towards the dimness on the starboard bow. Dr Maturin, torn from the rail where he had been observing the clouds of disturbed, uneasy sea-birds as they drifted in wide circles about their distant rocks, was sent below to that dim, cramped triangular space in which he would have to treat the wounded, single-handed, if the Ringle could work south-west in time to join the fray, the prodigious fray, judging from the din of full broadsides from line-of-battle ships, no less.

Mould, the oldest but the lightest hand aboard, a wizened sinner five feet tall, was at the masthead with a glass: the heady scent of powder was already drifting faint across the deck when he called 'On deck, there. I can see over the smokeband and the murk. It's only the squadron at target-practice. I see Bellona's broad pennant. I see Stately clear.'

The kindly breeze revived as he spoke, sweeping aside the low-lying swathes of gun-smoke, revealing the entire force, now increased by two brigs and a schooner from Lisbon, and wafting the Ringle down at a fine pace towards her rendezvous.

Reade hurried below to release the Doctor. 'It was more like a real battle, a fleet engagement, than anything I have ever heard,' he said. 'If you take my glass you will see that they have been firing both sides, at different sets of targets towed down the line. Both sides! Have you ever known such a thing, sir?'

'Never,' replied Stephen, with the utmost truth. His actionstation was in the cockpit or its equivalent: and although on certain clearly defined occasions when the drum had not beat to quarters he had been allowed to watch the officers, midshipmen and hands going through the great-gun exercises, he had never seen them going through the motions of fighting both sides of the ship at once. It rarely happened even in battle except when the engagement turned into a general m�e, as it did at Trafalgar, and virtually never in practice, one of the reasons being the cost of powder. Government allowed a certain meagre ration, enough for only a trifling amount of practice with the guns actually firing: anything beyond this had to be paid for by the captain, and few captains were both thoroughly persuaded of the importance of gunnery and rich enough to buy the amount of powder needed to make a ship's company so expert that they could fire three well-directed broadsides in five minutes. Some, though like Thomas of the Thames reasonably well-to-do, felt that briskness in manoeuvre, shining brass, gleaming paintwork, well blacked yards and natural British valour would answer for all purposes, and their great-gun exercise amounted to nothing more than running the guns in and out in dumb-show, never using even the Government allowance: most of these officers had seen little action or none at all. Jack Aubrey, on the other hand, had seen more fighting at sea than most; and he, like many of his friends, was convinced that no amount of courage would beat an enemy of roughly equal force who had the weathergage and who could fire faster and more accurately. Furthermore, he had seen the disastrous effect of not training the crew to fight both sides. Once, for example, when he was a passenger in HMS Java she had met the USS Constitution: at one point in the battle the American presented her vulnerable stern to the British ship, but the hands, who had been firing the starboard guns, had neither the wit nor above all the training to rake her effectively with those to larboard. The Constitution moved off almost unharmed, and although somewhat later the Java, full of spirit, tried to board her, it was no good. By the end of that December day the dismal Java was captured and burnt, while her surviving people, including Jack, were carried away prisoners to Boston.