Patrick O'Brian - The Thirteen Gun Salute

'Lord, sir,' he said to Pullings, 'what more than Gothic glory!'

'I dare say you are right, sir,' said Pullings. 'But we shan't keep it long, I doubt. See how she has started to pitch and roll.' So she had, and with something less than her usual well-bred air and long easy buoyant motion: rarely had she been so deep in the water. 'It is a swell coming up from the south-west, and it is sure to bring us half a gale.'

'Are we overtaking the snow?' asked Standish, peering forward at impenetrable canvas. 'We must be going at an amazing speed.'

'Close on nine knots,' said Pullings. 'And since it was us brought by the wind, we have gained maybe a mile or so. Yet so deep-laden - twelve months' stores and more - the barky cannot do her best, nor nothing like it. With a breeze like this I have seen her run twelve knots off the reel; and at that rate we should have been alongside the snow half an hour ago. But now, in course, she has the wind too, and she may be drawing away a trifle. Most remarkable rapid for a snow: such yards I have rarely seen. Was you to go into the bows with this glass, you could see her plain; and was you to look hard you would see she has set save-sails, too.'

'Thank you,' said Standish absently: his eyes were fixed on the rail as it rose, rose, rose still, hung for an instant and then began its inevitable, deliberate, vertiginous fall.

'Mark you,' continued Pullings, 'if it comes on to blow like the Captain says and I am sure he is right, then we shall have the advantage; for we are the taller ship, and a heavy sea will not wrong us as it will wrong the snow. Hold up, there: over the rail, sir, if you please.'

When Standish had finished this first bout Pullings told him there was nothing like a good vomit - better than bleeding or rhubarb or blue pill - he would soon get used to the motion - and called two amused hands to lead him below. He could barely stand, and his face had turned a yellowish green - his lips were curiously pale.

Standish did not reappear that day, nor would any man at all subject to queasiness have done so, for the half-gale reached them even sooner than they had hoped, and Stephen, deep in his papers though he was, noticed that the Surprise had grown unusually skittish and that the whole sound of the ship had changed: a far greater volume, a far greater urgency. Closing a file and tying its original black French tape around it - poor thin stuff, compared with Dublin tape: a man could hang himself with Dublin tape.- he leant back in his chair; and as he did so he saw Jack Aubrey look cautiously through the door.

'Should you like to see the chase?' asked Jack. 'She is a pretty sight.'

'I should like it of all things,' said Stephen, getting up. 'Jesus, Mary and Joseph, how my back hurts.'

'The sight of the prize will cure it, I am sure.'

The deck - the world in general - now had a very different appearance. The great spread of canvas had shrunk to courses, reefed topsails and spritsail; the deck itself was canted some twenty degrees and the bow-wave flung high white and wide to leeward. A few sparse clouds were racing over the bright blue sky and dark banks had gathered far in the south, but the air was still flashing clear and filled with light - a slightly pinkish light already, the glorious sun so low.

'Clap on to the line,' said Jack, leading him forward; and as Stephen edged along the weather gangway many a hand took his elbow, passing him to a sure hold and telling him to watch out, to take great care; and behind their kindness to him there was a certain grim ferocity.

Pullings was waiting for them in the bows. He said, 'She has not altered course, no not by half a point since first we seen her; she must surely be running for the Cove of Cork, or a little south.'

Jack nodded, and over his shoulder he called, 'Duck up.'

The spritsail puckered and turned, and to his astonishment Stephen saw the chase right ahead, almost within gunshot, very, very much closer than he had expected. She was a black, low ship, all the blacker for her great foaming wake, brilliant white in the sun; and she seemed all the lower for the great breadth of her yards, the dun sails drum-tight upon them as she raced along. Jack had given him his telescope and as Stephen listened with half his mind to the sailors' remarks about double and even triple preventer-stays - extraordinary speed for a snow, even one so well handled - Surprise shockingly handicapped - trim not at all that could be wished, by any means: distinctly by the head - he gazed at the men gathered at the snow's taffrail, and they steadily watching the Surprise, never moving, though the spray often swept across their faces. The glass was exceptionally good and the air so perfectly clear that he distinguished a kittiwake as it moved along the side of the snow, the bird too faintly tinged with pink. He had directed the telescope at the two guns, probably nine-pounders, pointing through the snow's chase-ports when his mind as it were leapt to attention and he instantly returned to the man, to the third man from the left: he focussed with even greater sharpness and there was not the least possible doubt. He was looking at Robert Gough.

Gough too had been a member of the United Irishmen: he and Maturin had agreed that Irishmen should govern Ireland and that Catholics should be emancipated: on everything else they were opposed and had been from the beginning. Gough was one of the leaders of that part of the movement which was in favour of French intervention whereas Maturin was wholly against it - he was against violence and he was even more against importing or in any way helping the new kind of tyranny that had arisen in France, the horribly disappointing sequel of that Revolution which Maturin and most of his friends had welcomed with such joy. When the rising of 1798 was put down with revolting cruelty and with the help of swarms of informers, native, foreign and half-bred, their lives were equally in danger, but since then all similarity had vanished. Gough, with the survivors of his school of thought, had become even more committed to France, whereas Maturin, once he had recovered from the stunning shock, which had coincided with the loss of his sweetheart, had observed the development of an exceedingly dangerous dictatorship, entirely replacing the generous ideas of 1789 but at the same time profiting from them. He had seen the treatment of the Catholic church in France, of the Italian sympathizers in those unfortunate regions overrun by the French, and of the Catalans in his own Catalonia; and well before the end of the Revolutionary War he had seen that this whole system of pillage and oppression, this whole series of police-states must, before everything else, be brought to an end. And everything he had seen since, the subversion of countless states by brute force, the imprisonment of the Pope, the universal bad faith, had confirmed his diagnosis, strengthening him in his conviction that this tyranny, far more intelligent and invasive than anything that had been known, must be destroyed. The freedom of Ireland and of Catalonia were dependent upon its destruction - the defeat of French imperialism was a necessary condition for all the rest.

Yet there was Gough, just over the water, eager for another French landing; and Stephen had the absolute certainty that he was on a mission to Ireland. If the snow were taken Gough would be hanged: the tyranny would be by so much the weaker. But at this all Stephen's old loathing for informers rose up with overwhelming force, his utter revulsion from anything and everything to do with them and the result of their betrayals, the torture, the floggings, the melted pitch on men's heads; and of course the hangings. He could not bear the slightest hint of a connexion between himself and such people; he could not bear being connected in any way whatsoever with the taking of Gough.