Patrick O'Brian: The Thirteen Gun Salute

A little before two bells the idlers were called and at two bells itself, by pale moonlight, the ritual cleaning of the decks began, although they had been thoroughly washed by showers throughout the middle watch. The grinding of holystones that reverberated through the ship did not wake Jack Aubrey; but the first rasping shudder as the keel scraped on rock brought him out of his cot, wholly alive and present. The moment he was upright the Diane struck with shocking force and flung

him down. Even so he was on deck before the messenger had reached the companion-ladder.

'Man the braces,' he shouted in a voice loud enough to carry over the all-pervading sound of the ship crashing on over the reef. 'Lay all flat aback. Bear a hand, bear a hand. Cheerly there, forward.' The way was coming off the Diane, and now a last heave of the sea set her high on an unseen rock, motionless.

The men of the watch below were pouring up in the half light: almost all the officers were already there. Jack sent a carpenter's mate to sound the well. 'Mr Fielding,' he said, 'let us get the Doctor's skiff over the side.'

'Two foot, sir, and rising moderate,' said the carpenter himself. 'I went down directly.'

'Thank you, Mr Hadley,' said Jack: and the news spread along the deck - only two foot, and rising moderate.

A few more urgent measures and now Richardson was calling from the skiff. 'Three fathom under her stern, sir: two and a half amidships: two under her forefoot. No bottom with this line a cable's length ahead.'

'Clew up all,' said Jack. 'Stand by to let go the best bower.' The half-light was changing: the sun sent a brilliance into the low eastern cloud and then showed above the horizon. Four bells struck. Jack walked forward to see the best bower dropped - a precaution in the event of a very violent squall but taken chiefly by way of general comfort: not all present were heroes - and when he walked back it was day, a day that showed a fairly heavy but declining sea, a sky promising fair weather, and a mile to the north an island, a green-covered sloping island of no great size, perhaps two miles across.

'What of the well, Mr Fielding?' he asked.

'Two foot seven inches, sir, and now we may be gaining. Mr Edwards would like to speak to you, if he may.'

Jack considered, looking over the side. The ship felt dead, as though she were in dry-dock; she had not stirred, much less hammered, since that last terrible heave. And she was unnaturally high in the water. In an aside to the quartermaster and the two helmsmen he said, 'You may leave the wheel,' and then he returned to his contemplation, while the chain-pumps whirred and flung out their stream. The water by the frigate's side confirmed his instinctive guess: she had struck at the last moment of spring-tide high-water; the ebb was already moving fast. Turning he saw Killick, mutely holding up a watch-coat, and beyond him Stephen and Edwards. 'Thankee, Killick,' he said, putting it on. 'Good morning, Doctor. Mr Edwards, good morning to you.'

'Good morning, sir,' said Edwards. 'His Excellency desires his compliments and can he or any of the mission be of service?'

'He is very good: for the moment nothing but keeping those people out of the way' - nodding towards a group of servants huddled in the waist. 'But no doubt he would like to hear of the position. Pray join us, Doctor: this is for your ear too. We have struck an unknown, uncharted reef at high water. We are now aground. I cannot yet tell what damage the ship has suffered, but she is in no immediate danger. There is a strong

likelihood that by lightening her we may float her off the reef at the next high tide. It may then be possible to make her seaworthy enough to take us to Batavia to be docked. In any event we are about to lower down the boats, and it would be as well if Mr Fox with all his people and as much baggage as possible were to go ashore under a proper guard and leave us to our task.'

Chapter 10

Their task, their arduous, complex task: very severe and often highly-skilled labour day and night with peaks of intensity at full tide as extreme as anything Jack had known in his long experience.

All day they lightened ship: perpetually rousing out stores and carrying them to the shore in boatloads; lowering all uppermasts and spars over the side, there to be formed into rafts; starting the ship's water, though none had yet been found on the island (an island inhabited only by ring-tailed apes), and pumping it away by the ton together with the sea-water that still came in almost as fast as they could fling it out. And as they worked they saw the ebb, the most surprisingly rapid ebb, bare the reef on either hand, so that there was white water all around: moderate white water, since there was no considerable sea and the breeze was neither here nor there: but as the ebb proceeded so the ship took more and more of her own unsupported weight, and her timbers groaned again. And now from the boats they could see her plain, standing there unnaturally high, showing her copper, supported by three dark weed-grown heads of rock, two under her quarters and one beneath her keel about as far forward as her belfry, where that last surge had set her down, almost upright, before she could grind her way over the rest of the reef and into deep water.

So upright and so solid was she at low water that once Jack had placed some shores by way of precaution all hands had their dinner aboard, by watches, and with extra allowance to recruit them for the heavy work past and to come. The pumping went on all the time of course, and to its steady churning the carpenter and his crew, with lanterns and with all the hatchways wide open for the help of what reflected sun might get down, crept about the encumbered hold and orlop dealing with what damage they could reach and making out the nature of the rest, the Captain being with them most of the time. Meanwhile the bosun and his mates, together with the most experienced forecastle hands and tierers, roused out the best cable the Diane possessed, the most nearly new and unfrayed, a seventeen-inch cable that they turned end for end - no small undertaking in that confined space, since it weighed three and a half tons - and bent it to the best bower anchor by the wholly unworn end that had always been abaft the bitts: the bitter end. There was thought to be good luck attached to the bitter end, as well as greater strength.

The best bower, backed with the smaller stream anchor, they lowered carefully down into the launch, and at last the boat, moving over the longed-for grateful rising tide, dropped the two into what Fielding and the master, after prolonged sounding in the skiff, considered the best and cleanest holding ground in a most indifferent and rock-strewn anchorage.

All this while the other boats had been plying to and fro, shifting great quantities of stores, lightening the ship as fast as ever they could. And much of the time Stephen and Macmillan had been sitting not in their usual action-station far below where they would now have been a great hindrance, but in the after cabin. This was a time of great hurry and even greater effort and they had already treated many falls, sprains and twists and even one most unfortunate hernia - a good man who had undone himself in his zeal. Now their patient was Mr Blyth. A hen-coop flung from the waist had struck him down in the small cutter and he was bleeding profusely from a scalp-wound: they sewed him up, staunched the flow, and asked him how the ship was doing.

'I hope, oh how I do hope, she will be afloat in half an hour,' he said. 'It is very near high-water; the leak is not much worse, though she sat right down; and the Captain believes he may pluck her off. If she leaks extremely when she is in deep water,

then he means to beach and careen her; she will certainly last as far as the island, and there is a good berth there. The breeze is on the land and we shall drop our courses while the boats tow as well. But I do not believe it will come to that: he thinks she will swim. The lower futtocks have suffered, in course; but he thinks she will swim, with the pumps going and maybe a sail fothered over the bottom, until we reach Batavia. But the first thing to do is to pluck her off. Hark!'