Patrick O'Brian - The Mauritius Command

The sound of the bosun's call, the clash of the Marines presenting arms, told him that Jack Aubrey's body, quick or dead, was at this moment walking about within a few yards of him. Stephen dusted sand upon his book, closed it, and waited for the door to open.

The officer who appeared did indeed resemble Commodore rather than Lieutenant Aubrey, even after he had flung his coat and with it the marks of rank on to a nearby locker. He was bloated with food and wine; his eyes were red and there were liverish circles under them; and he was obviously far too hot. But as well as the jaded look of a man who has been obliged to eat and drink far too much and then sit in an open carriage for twenty miles in a torrid dust-storm, wearing clothes calculated for the English Channel, his face had an expression of discouragement.

"Oh for some more soldiers like Keating," he said wearily. "I cannot get them to move. We had a council after dinner, and I represented to them, that with the regiments under their command we could take La Reunion out of hand: the Raisonable would serve as a troop-carrier. St Paul's is wide open, with not one stone of the batteries standing on another. They agreed, and groaned, and lamented--they could not move without an order from the Horse-Guards; it had always been understood that the necessary forces were to come from the Madras establishment, perhaps with the next monsoon if transports could be found; if not, with the monsoon after that. By the next monsoon, said 1, La Reunion would be bristling with guns, whereas now the French had very few, and those few served by men with no appetite for a battle of any kind: by the next monsoon their spirits would have revived, and they would have been reinforced from the Mauritius. Very true, said the soldiers, wagging their heads; but they feared that the plan worked out by the staff must stand: should I like to go shooting warthogs with them on Saturday? And to crown all, the brig was not a packet but a merchantman from the Azores--no letters of any kind. We might as well be at the back of the moon."

"It is very trying, indeed," said Stephen. "What say you to some barley-water, with lime-juice in it? And then a swim? We could take a boat to the island where the seals live."

To a cooler, fresher Jack he offered what comfort he could provide. He left the stolid torpor of the soldiers to one side--neither had really believed in the possibility of stirring them, after the dismal end of the unauthorized expedition to Buenos Aires from this very station not many years before- and concentrated on the changed perception of time during periods of activity; these busy weeks had assumed an importance unjustified by their sidereal, or as he might say their absolute measure; with regard to exterior events they still remained mere weeks; it had been unreasonable to expect anything on their return to the Cape; but now a ship might come in any day at all, loaded with mail.

"I hope you are right, Stephen," said Jack, balancing on the gunwale and rubbing the long blue wound on his back. "Sophie has been very much in my mind these last few days, and even the children. I dreamt of her last night, a huddled, uneasy dream; and I long to hear from her." After a considering pause he said, "I did bring back some more pleasant news, however: the Admiral is fairly confident of being able to add Iphigenia and Magicienne to the squadron within the next few weeks; he had word from Sumatra. But of course they will be coming from the east--not the least possibility of anything from home. The old Leopard, too, though nobody wants her: iron sick throughout, a real graveyard ship."

"The packet will come in from one day to the next, and it will bring a budget of tax-demands, bills, and an account of the usual domestic catastrophes: news of mumps, chicken-pox, a leaking tap; my prophetic soul sees it beneath the horizon."

The days dropped by while the Boadicea, her holds emptied and herself heaved down with purchase to bollards on the shore, had her foul bottom cleaned; Jack set up his telescope with a new counterbalance that worked perfectly on land; Stephen saw his lion, a pride of lions; and then, although it had mistaken the horizon, his prophetic soul was shown to have been right: news did come in. But it was not domestic news, nor from the west: the flying Wasp had turned about in mid-ocean and had come racing back to the Cape to report that the French had taken three more Indiamen, HM sloop Victor, and the powerful Portuguese frigate Minerva.

The Vinus and the Manche, already at sea when the squadron looked into Port-Louis, had captured the Windham, the United Kingdom, and the Charlton, all Indiamen of the highest value. The Bellone, slipping out past the blockade by night, had taken the eighteen-gun Victor, and then she and her prize had set about the Minerva, which mounted fifty-two guns, but which mounted them in vain against the fury of the French attack. The Portuguese, now La Minerve, was at present in Port-Louis, manned by seamen from the Canonniere and some deserters: the Indiamen, the Venus and the Manche were probably there too, but of that the Wasp was not quite sure.

Before the turn of the tide Jack was at sea, the wart-hogs, the soldiers, and even his telescope left behind: he had shifted his pendant into the Boadicea, for the hurricane months were not far away, and the Raisonable could not face them. He was back in his own Boadicea, driving her through variable and sometimes contrary winds until they reached the steady south-east trade, when she lay over with her lee-rail under white water, her deck sloping like the roof of Ashgrove Cottage, and began to tear off her two hundred and fifty and even three hundred nautical miles between one noon observation and the next; for there was some remote hope of catching the Frenchmen and their prizes, cutting them off before they reached Mauritius.

On the second Sunday after their departure, with church rigged, Jack was reading the Articles of War in a loud, official, comminatory voice by way of sermon and all hands were trying to keep upright (for not a sail might be attempted to be touched). He had just reached article XXIX, which dealt with sodomy by hanging the sodomite and which always made Spotted Dick and other midshipmen swell purple from suppressed giggling at every monthly repetition, when two ships heaved in sight. They were a great way off, and without interrupting her devotions, such as they might be with every mind fixed earnestly upon the mast-head, the Boadicea edged away to gain the weather-gage. But by the time Jack had reached All crimes not capital (there were precious few), and well before he cleared the ship for action, the windward stranger broke out the private signal. In answer to the Boadicea's she made her number: the Magicienne; and her companion was the Windham.

The Magicienne, said Captain Curtis, coming aboard the Commodore, had retaken the Indiamen off the east coast of Mauritius. The Windham had been separated from her captor, the Vinus, during a tremendous sudden blow in seventeen degrees south; the Magicienne had snapped her up after something of a chase, beating to windward all day, and had then stood on all night in the hope of finding the French frigate. Curtis had found her at sunset, looking like a scarecrow with only her lower masts standing and a few scraps of canvas aboard, far away right under the land, creeping in with her tattered forecourse alone. But unhappily the land to which she was creeping was the entrance to Grand-Port; and when the land-breeze set in, blowing straight in her teeth, the Magicienne had the mortification of seeing the Vinus towed right under the guns of the Ile de la Passe, at the entrance to the haven.

"By the next morning, sir, when I could stand in," said Curtis apologetically, "she was half way up to the far end, and with my ammunition so low--only eleven rounds to a gun--and the Indiaman in such a state, I did not think it right to follow her."