Patrick O'Brian - The fortune of war

'I am glad Lambert has a decent prize at last,' said he.

'He has always been a most unlucky wight, and never was there a man who needed money more - half a dozen boys and an invalid wife. No luck at any time: if ever he took a merchantman it was re-taken before it reached home, and of the three enemy ships he captured, two sank under him, and he had battered the third so hard that Government refused to buy her for the service. Then he was on shore for a couple of years, living in lodgings in Gosport with all his brood, a damned uneasy life; and now they have given him Java, about as expensive a command as you could wish. Burning to have a go at the Americans, like all of us, and then to be sent off to Bombay, with a shipful of guests, no chance of distinguishing himself, and precious little of any prizes. They might have sent Hislop in an Indiaman; it was cruel to tie up a fellow like Lambert, as good a fighting captain as any man afloat. And what a crew!'

'What is the matter with them? Are they disaffected? Mutinous?'

'No, no. They are honest creatures, I believe, God help them; but I doubt he has a hundred real seamen aboard. How they contrived to take the William I cannot imagine, with so many landsmen and assorted vermin in the ship -such a Bartholomew Fair, striking topgallantmasts, I have rarely seen. It reminded me of our early days in Polychrest. And as for the forward guns at quarters... but it is not fair to judge Lambert or his officers. She is only forty-odd days out of Spithead, and she had foul weather for the first twenty of them; so they have not had time to work up their gun-crews. They will come to it in time, I dare say; Lambert has a very good notion of gunnery, and Chads, his first lieutenant, is a very scientific officer. He dearly loves a gun.'

'What did Captain Lambert mean by saying, when you suggested a real discharge, a live discharge, that you were to remember the regulation, and that he had already been rapped on the knuckles for exceeding his allowance?'

'Why, there is a strict rule that for the first six months of a commission no captain is allowed to fire more shot a month than a third the number of his guns; and after the first six months, only half as much.'

'Then you must have infringed the regulation almost every day; I scarcely remember quarters without the firing. of guns. Sometimes all of them, on both sides, with small-arms and swivels from the tops as well.'

'Yes, but that was powder and shot I had either captured or bought. Most captains who can afford it and who care for gunnery get round the regulation that way. Lambert cannot afford it; and although Chads might be able to, he could not possibly put himself forward.'

'Mr Chads is wealthy, I collect. Did he do well in prize-money?'

'Not that I have ever heard of. He went a far more compendious way about it - cut out the only daughter of a Turkey merchant in very dashing style with a chaise and four. A thirty thousand pounder, I have heard tell.'

Mr Chads might be rich, but he was not proud; nor was he impatient. Early in the morning some days later, when they had raised the high land of Brazil and were in hourly expectation of the William, Stephen came across him in the bows, showing a particularly stupid, though willing, gun-crew how to point their weapon. Again and again he made them and their midshipman heave it in and out, go through the motions of loading, taking aim, and firing: he clapped on to the tackles himself, plied the handspike, tried to make them understand the ideas of elevation, point-blank range, line of metal, the difference between firing on the upward and the downward roll. He praised their real efforts, saved two of the duller lands-men from having their feet crushed off by the moving carriage, and promised they should fire a live round at a target presently. He showed them how to bowse their gun tight against its port and make all fast, so that the two tons of concentrated weight should not start lurching about the deck; and then, wiping his face, he joined the Doctor, saying, 'They will do very well. Good, sensible, steady men.'

'Surely, sir,' said Stephen, 'it must call for a very nice appreciation of distance, of angle, and of direction, to judge the right moment for firing off a piece, when both the deck and the target are in motion?'

'It does, Doctor, it does indeed,' said Chads. 'But it is wonderful what use will do. Some men get the knack of it very soon - a matter of eye and tact - and they will fire amazingly well at a thousand yards after a couple of months.'

'On deck, there,' hailed the look-out from on high, in an unemphatic tone. 'Sail fine on the starboard bow.'

'Is she William?' called the officer of the watch.

'William she is, sir,' replied the look-out, after a considering pause. 'And a-closing of us fast.'

Chads glanced towards the remote loom of Brazil to the westward, and said, 'I shall be glad to have her alongside again. There are three of my best gun-captains in the prize-crew, and one landsman who has come along amazingly. But we shall be losing you and the other Leopards, sir, and we shall all be sorry for that.'

'I shall be sorry too: I should have liked another view of your ingenious sight. There were some points that I did not quite apprehend.' Mr Chads had invented a device, designed to take some of the uncertainty out of gunnery at sea and adapted to the meanest understanding: and he had spent the evening hours of Thursday explaining it to Stephen. 'But I suppose that I must pack up my belongings.'

They were not inconsiderable; the Java's gunroom had done the Leopards proud, and Stephen for one had never possessed so many handkerchiefs in his life. But the word brought his vanished collections to his mind. He dismissed them at once. A woman whose acquaintance he greatly valued had once remarked that it was foolish to reflect on the past except where that past was agreeable: he did his best to observe the precept, but it was not much use - a sense of bereavement would keep breaking in. Nor had it been much use to the lady in question; she had withered away after the death of his cousin Kevin, a young man in the Austrian service.

A slow packer he was, and inefficient; if Killick had not come to him, having stowed the Captain's sea-bag, Stephen might have gone on staring at the handkerchiefs, the neckcloths, and the warm-weather drawers until the drum called him away to dinner.

'Come, sir, show a leg,' said Killick angrily. 'William's alongside. We'll never get a decent cabin without you show a leg - Mr Babbington and Mr Byron and all them wicked reefers nipping aboard of her like ferrets, swiping all the decent berths. This is no good at all - ' upending the sailcloth bag and starting again. He packed with quick, deft movements, and grew more nearly amiable. 'There's a fine howdy-do on deck, sir,' he said. 'A sail in the offing, and the whole quarterdeck a-staring through their spy-glasses. Some say she's a Portuguese razee -,

'What is a razee?'

'Why, a cut-down ship of the line, in course. Upper deck cut off, and all her guns behind one line of ports. Surely you know that, sir? Howsomever, Bonden been up at the jacks this last glass, and swears she's their Constitution, which he saw her and went aboard to visit his friend Joe Warren when they were in the Med, tickling up the Barbary States. But never mind, sir; you're quite safe. You'll be aboard William, and in a decent berth too, in five minutes, or my name's not Preserved Killick.'

No one on the quarterdeck was as positive as Bonden; the nature, the relative size of a ship might easily be mistaken at such a distance, and there was a strong likelihood of her being the Portuguese razee that was known to be in these waters; but Stephen walked into an atmosphere of eager hope and confident expectation. His colleague Fox, for example, was transformed from a bowed, depressed, though kindly, middle-aged man to an upright, bright-eyed creature, no older than his assistants; he turned his flushed face to Stephen and cried, 'Give you joy, Dr Maturin; I believe we have the enemy under our lee.'