Patrick O'Brian - The fortune of war

He had a vague awareness of Killick's voice swearing at a Marine - 'Handsomely, handsomely, you fat-arsed, Dutch-built bugger' - and then he came fully to his wits as Stephen leant over him, searching the wound. 'Stephen,' he said. 'Quick, just bind it up, splint it up. You shall have it off afterwards if you wish. I must go on deck.'

Stephen nodded, splinted and bound the arm, and turned to a man lying on his own liver while Jack made his way through the long, long rows among the smell of blood to the ladder. On the quarterdeck he found Chads, equally bandaged, equally pale, with a fine determined light blazing in his eye: Chads was now in command of the ship. He was getting the wreckage of the mizen free, before the heavy floating mast should ram the Java with its butt end, sending her to the bottom a little before her time. The carpenter and the gunner and the armourer were all standing by him, waiting for the chance to have a word. 'Pray go forward, sir, if you can,' he said to Jack. 'If we can get her before the wind we'll board her yet.'

Forward he went along the bloody deck, lurching on the enormous roll and watching the Constitution: she had run ahead out of gunshot and her people were busy knotting and splicing. The thin gun-crews he passed were in high spirits, bawling after the American, challenging her to come back and have it out.

'Game young cocks,' he reflected, hurrying faster. With such men, if only they could get before the wind, and if only they could fall aboard the American, they might carry her yet. He had known victory snatched from a situation worse than this, with an over-confident enemy making a mistake. Constitution had already made at least two very dangerous moves: she might make another.

On the forecastle Babbington and a party of seamen had roused an almost undamaged topgallant mast from the wreckage of the booms and they were trying to make a jury foremast of it. But the Java's roll and even more her pitch was so violent that they were having a cruel time with it; and at every pitch wreckage from the maintop showered down on them, while the remnant of the mainmast itself, with never a shroud on either side and backstays gone, threatened to fall outboard at any moment.

'The mainmast must go,' said Jack. 'Forshaw, jump to the quarterdeck and ask Mr Chads for permission and for the carpenter's crew. Forshaw - where is Forshaw?'

Nobody answered for a moment, and then Babbington said, 'Gone, sir. Blasted over the side.'

'Oh Christ,' said Jack: a very slight pause, and then, 'Holles, cut along.'

Holles came back with the carpenters and their axes. The mast was gone, clean over the side, and the ship was steadier. Chads and all the seamen from aft were now on the forecastle, working on the jury foremast with intense effort and concentration; and all the time the gun-crews cheered and called after the Constitution. The jury-mast rose up, straight up; they made all fast, rigged out a lower studdingsail-boom. The awkward sail rose, filled, and the Java gathered way, answering her helm. She turned, bringing the wind a little abaft the beam, and moved towards the distant Constitution, her tattered ensign flying from the mizen's stump.

With only one arm, and that his left, there was little that Jack could do at this point. He stood by Chads as they turned aft, considering the situation: the deck before them was a shambles; they could see a dozen guns dismounted, and there were others they could not see; the boats were all shattered; and then of course there was the blood. But it was not a hopeless shambles; the one pump that had not been destroyed was pumping hard; the crews stood by their guns, ready and eager; all the boarders had their weapons there at hand; a Marine stepped forward to strike one bell in the first dogwatch - a cracked and tinny sound. Jack fumbled awkwardly for his watch with his left hand, automatically checking the time - a vain attempt: all he brought out was a twisted gold case and a handful of glass and little wheels. The carpenter stepped up to Chads and said, 'Six foot four inches in the well, sir, if you please, and gaining fast.'

'Then we had better go aboard the American at once,' said Chads, with a smile.

They looked forward, and there was the American: she had completed her repairs, and as they watched she filled, wore, and came towards them on the starboard tack.

Now was the time to profit from a God-sent mistake: now or never. If the Constitution would only neglect the weathergage, would only come close enough to allow them to board in a last dash through her fire ... but the Constitution intended nothing of the kind. Deliberately and under perfect control she crossed the Java's bows at rather more than two hundred yards, shivered her main and mizen topsails, and lay there, gently rocking, her whole almost undamaged larboard broadside looking straight at the dismasted Java, ready to rake her again and again. With her single sail right forward the Java could not move into the wind - could no longer approach the Constitution; all she could do was to make a slow starboard turn to bring her seven port guns to bear: by the time they could fire she would have been raked three times at point-blank range - in any case, the Constitution would not wait until they bore, but fill again and circle her. The Constitution lay there: with evident forbearance she did not open fire. Jack could see her captain looking earnestly at them from his quarterdeck.

'No,' said Chads in a dead voice. 'It will not do.' He looked at Jack, who bowed his head: then walked aft, as a resolute man might walk to the gallows, walked between the sparse gun-crews, silent now, and hauled the colours down.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Constitution was sailing northwards with a flowing sheet, helped on her way by the great current that flowed from the Gulf of Mexico; and Dr Maturin stood at her taffrail staring at the wake, white in the indigo blue. Few things could be more favourable for the easy run of a retrospective mind, and Stephen's flowed as free as the stream itself.

The recent past was immediately present to his eye, his mind's or inner eye; it saw the various incidents re-enacting against the background of white water, sometimes blurred and fragmentary, sometimes as sharp as an image in a camera obscura. The ferrying of all the prisoners of war across the heaving sea in the only boat left to the other side, a leaking ten-oared cutter, over a hundred of them wounded. Bonden's cry of 'Why, Boston Joe!' as the American seaman, a former shipmate, put the manacles on him. The burning of the Java; the vast pall of smoke that rose over her as she blew up; the horrible journey to San Salvador in the enormously overcrowded ship on a blazing day with a lifeless following breeze, the Java's unwounded hands in irons and battened down in case they should rise upon their captors - the captors themselves furiously busy with their own repairs. The Constitution's cable-tier turned into one long sickbay, and many shocking wounds to deal with. It was here that he had met Mr Evans, the Constitution's surgeon, and learnt to esteem him: a bold, deft operator with a firm mind, a man whose sole aim was to preserve life and limb and who fought very hard to do so, with great skill, learning, and devotion - a man who made no difference between his own people and the prisoners, and one of the few surgeons he had known who considered the whole man, not only the wound itself. Between them they thought they had saved Captain Lambert, although they very nearly despaired of Jack when the high fever and the look of gangrene appeared: yet in both cases they were wrong - Lambert died the day he was carried ashore and Jack survived, although he was too near death to be moved before the Constitution sailed.

'Lambert died more of misery than of his wounds,' reflected Stephen. 'The third frigate to strike to the Americans! I believe it would have killed Jack, in his already weakened state, had he been in command: even so, he smelt of death.' He contemplated for a while upon stimuli, positive and negative; upon that which had filled the much weakened Leopards with prodigious strength and activity during the battle; upon that which had struck them back to a state of extreme, listless fatigue. 'He has survived, sure, and his functions are much what they should be; but he has had a shocking blow. Sometimes he is positively humble with me, diffident and as it were apologetical, as though detected in false pretences, while with others he is cold, reserved, and on occasion arrogant, so unlike his usual open friendly candour; and a relapse would not surprise me. At present, now that he can defecate with ease, his greatest difficulty is maintaining the dogged mechanical cheerfulness intended to show the American officers that he does not mind it, that he can lose as well as win. I have seen him succeed to admiration when taken by the French; but here the case is altered: these gentlemen are Americans, and the Java was the third frigate their little navy has taken, without a single victory to set off against the defeats. They are indeed a gentlemanly set, with one or two exceptions (for I cannot think highly of those who squirt tobacco-juice past my ear, however skilfully), but they would be more than human if they could conceal their cheerfulness, their sense of well-being, I might even say their perfect happiness at having defeated the first naval power on earth; and even if they could, there would be no hiding the rustic merriment of the ship's company, the jolly carpenters, the facetious men with the caulking-irons.'