Patrick O'Brian - Desolation island

esteemed apothecary.' To Bonden, "Now homewards, if you please, and ply your oars like Nelson at the Nile."

When they cleared the inner harbour and the roadstead came into sight, he said, "Now there is the odd boat quite close to our Leopard.' Bonden replied with an amiable grunt, no more: and after a quarter of a mile Stephen went on: 'In all my sea-going experience, I have never seen so odd a boat.' At the thought of all Dr Maturin's sea-going experience, Bonden gave a secret smile, and said, "Is that so, sir?"

"It is like a brig, with two masts, you understand. But they are arsy-versy."

Bonden looked over his shoulder. His expression changed. He took two powerful strokes, and as the boat glided along he stared again. "She's one of our frigates, and she's lost her foremast at the partners: jury bowsprit; and her head's all ahoo. Nymph, thirty-two, if I do not mistake: a fine sailer."

He did not mistake. The Nymph, Captain Fielding, from the Cape for Jamaica with despatches and so home, had run into a Dutch seventy-four, the Waakzaamheid, in a blinding rainstorm just north of the line. There had been a brief action in which the Nymph's foremast had been wounded; but by carrying all the sail she dared she had clean outrun her much heavier opponent in a two days' chase. By the time the Dutchman hauled his wind and gave over, the Nymph was close in with the shore, and a little later a freakish gust off Cape Branco took her aback, bringing her foremast by the board. Fortunately the Dutchman was quite out of sight, last seen steering south, chasing no more; and Captain Fielding had brought his ship down to Recife to refit before continuing his journey.

Fielding was senior to Jack. In his opinion no good purpose could be served by whipping up a jury foremast and putting to sea in company with the Leopard to search for the Waakzaamheid. Apart from the fact that the Nymph was carrying despatches, which prohibited her

from going in chase of wild geese, the Dutchman sailed faster than the Leopard, though not so fast as the Nymph, and Fielding had no wish to Iie there being clawed by a seventy-four while the Leopard came lumbering up; particularly as she was so short-handed as to be little use when she got there. Nor could he spare the Leopard any hands: Aubrey would find plenty at the Cape. And were he in Aubrey's place, he would give the Waakzaamheid a wide berth; she was a fair sailer, commanded by a determined fellow who understood his business, and she was well manned - she had given the Nymph three broadsides in little over five minutes. Their parting was rather cold, although Jack did regale him with the greater part of Stephen's pudding, an act, which as Jack himself observed, had few equals in the course of naval history, the present heat and all circumstances being borne in mind.

"For my part, I rejoice," said Stephen, as the Leopard fished her best bower and America faded on the western sky. "I had messages of some consequence, and that swift-sailing, cautious Nymph will carry my duplicates much faster than the originals."

CHAPTER SIX

Knowing of the presence of a hostile ship of the line in the same ocean, the Leopard redoubled her attention to gunnery. Although the presence was remote and almost entirely theoretical, since from the Nymph's account the Waakzaamheid must be something in the nature of five hundred miles to the south and west, the Leopard's guns rattled in and out every evening after quarters, and often in the forenoon watch as well.

"For, do you see," said the commander, "now that we have cleaned up the Mauritius and La Reunion, a Dutch ship in these waters can mean only one thing: she must be intended to reinforce Van Daendels in the Spice Islands. And to get there, she must steer much the same course with ours, at least to the height of the Cape.' He had not the slightest wish to meet her. In the course of his career he had taken on greater odds, but the Waakzaamheid was a Dutchman, and Jack Aubrey had been present at Camperdown, a midshipman stationed on the lower deck of the Ardent, sixty-four, when the Vrijheid killed or wounded one hundred and forty-nine of his shipmates out of four hundred and twenty-one and reduced the Ardent to something very near a wreck: this, and all that he had heard of the Dutch, filled him with respect for their seamanship and their fighting qualities. "You may call them Butterboxes," he said, "but they thumped us most cruelly not so very long ago, and burnt the Chatham yard and God knows how many ships in the Medway.' He would have been circumspect, where a Dutchman was concerned, had the odds been even: as they stood, they were as seventy-four to fifty two against him in guns, and far more in men. He did his best to lessen the disparity by

improving the speed and accuracy of the Leopard's fire; but he could not hope to fight all his guns and manoeuvre her at the same time until the Cape should furnish him with a hundred and thirty hands, far less board and carry a determined enemy of the size of the Waakzaamheid. Of the prime seamen who had served with him before and who were used to his notions of how a gun should be handled, he had enough to provide captains and crews for one full upper-deck broadside: for the moment the lower deck had to do as best it could with the rest, with thin crews so supplemented with Marines that no soldiers would be available for small-arms fire until the invalids should recover; and these crews were so disposed that the least efficient were amidships, in what was known as the slaughterhouse because in action most of the enemy's fire was concentrated upon it. The weaker crews on the lower deck: for although her twenty-four-pounders could bite hard, sending a ball through two feet of solid oak at seven hundred yards, the Leopard carried her lower gun-ports no higher from the water than the other ships of her class, and if she were brought to action with much of a sea running, they would necessarily be closed on the leeward side, and perhaps on the windward too.

He had a good gunner in Mr Burton, one who thoroughly agreed with his Captain's practice of firing live, rather than confining himself to the dumb show of running the pieces in and out. He had a dozen excellent captains, and he was perfectly seconded by Babbington on the lower deck, and by Moore the Marine; while the older midshipmen, who loved this kind of exercise, with its bang and briskness and excitement and competition, paid great attention to their divisions. But Grant was a dead weight. His service had been limited to transports, harbour duties, and exploration, and through no fault of his own he had never been in battle; he was a good navigator, but he could not know the inward nature of a fight at sea: nor did he seem willing to learn. It was as though he did not really

believe in the possibility of action or the need for anything but formal preparation for it; and his attitude, his tolerably obvious attitude, infected many of those whose idea of battle was as hazy as his own - a general smoke and thunder at close quarters, with the Royal Navy winning as a matter of course.

After one or two private interviews with Grant which did not succeed in shaking the older man's obstinate self -complacency, in spite of his perfectly correct 'Yes, sir' at every pregnant pause, Jack wrote him down as Just one more burden to be borne, by no means inconsiderable, but far less important than the herd of landsmen on the lower deck; and he carried on with the task of turning the Leopard into a fighting-machine as efficient as his means would allow, entirely changing his methods, suiting them to his strange little crew and, as he put it himself, "cutting his coat according to his cloth."

The forenoon sessions took place in the great cabin itself. Here there stood Jack's own brass nine-pounders, ordinarily housed fore and aft, to take up less room. They were part of the spoils of Mauritius, light, beautiful guns, and he had had them carefully rebored to take English nine-pound shot: he had also had them painted a dull chocolate-brown, to do away with some of the incessant polishing that took up so much time in a ship - time that could be far better spent. But this humane, sensible move ran counter to some deep naval instinct: Killick and his mates, taking advantage of a few small chips in the paint round the lock and the touch-hole, had gradually increased the area of visible brass until the guns now blazed from muzzle to pomellion. Now Jack spoilt the beauty of the great cabin by causing Mr Gray to build the equivalent of a deep wing-transom, with the corresponding knees, massive enough to withstand the recoil of his brass nine-pounders, so that by removing the stern windows as though to ship deadlights, together with some of the gingerbread-work from the gallery, he could use them as