Patrick O'Brian - The Mauritius Command

This was the sight of a score of Africalnes plunging into the sea, swimming across, and swarming up the side of the Boadicea. They were in a state of wild enthusiasm, joy and rage strangely mingled: nearly all sense of discipline was gone and they crowded dripping on the quarterdeck, begging the Commodore to renew the action--they would fight his guns for him--they would be happy to serve under Captain Aubrey--not like under some brass bound buggers--they knew him--and they knew he could serve those French farts out for what they done--take on two of them at any time like kiss your hand -'I know you can do it, sir," cried one with a bloody dressing round his upper arm, "I was shipmates along of you in Sophie, when we fucked the big Spaniard. Don't say no, sir."

"I am glad to see you, Herold," said Jack, "and I wish I could say yes, with all my heart. But you are a seaman--look how they lay. Three hours stern chase, and five French frigates to northwards ready to come down for the Africaine. I understand your feelings, lads, but it's no go. Bear a hand with a towline, and we shall take your barky into St Paul's and refit her: then you shall serve the Frenchmen out yourselves." They looked longingly at the Astree and the Iphigenia, and they sighed; but as seamen they had nothing to say. "How is Captain Corbetff asked Jack. "Did the French take him aboard?"

Silence. Then, "Don't know, sir." He looked at them in surprise. In front of him was a row of closed faces: the rare, immediate, man-to-man contact was entirely gone: he had run straight into the brick wall of lower-deck dumbness, the covering-up solidarity he knew so well, often stupid, generally transparent, but always unbreakable. "Don't know, sir," was the only answer he would ever get.

CHAPTER NINE

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Slowly the Boadicea dragged the Africaine southwards through the rising swell: she behaved like a sodden treetrunk of enormous size, now lagging sullenly so that the Boadicea's masts complained and Seymour's hoarse whisper--all that was left of his voice--desired the hands "to start that- sheet before everything carried away', now darting unpredictably at the Boadicea's stern and then slewing so that the towline jerked from the sea, a rigid bar of rope on the verge of rupture, squirting water from every strand; and above all she rolled, a dead lurching drunken gunwale-roll that made the surgeons" work even more hazardous and delicate than usual.

Stephen was there, helping poor Mr Cotton, an elderly cripple who had scarcely recovered from a bout of dysentery and who had been overcome with work from the first few minutes of the action. Even now, after a shocking number of deaths below, sixty or seventy cases remained, lying all along the berthdeck: there was plenty of room, at least, since the French had killed forty-nine men outright and had taken fifty prisoners away. The Africaines who remained, helped by a party from the Boadicea, were busily lashing what spars they possessed to the stumps of the masts, and towards nightfall they were able to set three staysails, which at once gave the frigate back her life, so that she moved like a sentient being once more, with no more of a roll than a reasonable ship.

"What a relief," said Mr Cotton, plying his saw. "At one time I feared I was about to be seasick again seasick after all these years afloat! A ligature, if you please. Are you subject to the seasickness, Dr Maturin?"

"I have known it in the Bay."

"Ah, the Bay," said Cotton, tossing the detached foot into a bucket held by his loblolly boy, "that dismal tract. You may let him go," he said to the patient's messmates, who had been holding him; and into the grey, sweating face he said, "John Bates, it is all over now. You will do very well, and that foot will earn you a Greenwich pension or a cook's warrant."

The grey, sweating face murmured in a tiny voice, thanking Mr Cotton, and might he keep the foot, for luck?

"That finishes our urgent cases," said Mr Cotton, looking round. "I am infinitely obliged to you, sir. Infinitely obliged; and I wish I had something better to offer you than a dish of tea. But the French stripped us, stripped us like a pack of savages, sir. Fortunately they do not care for tea."

"A dish of tea would be most welcome," said Stephen, and they walked aft to the deserted gunroom. "A bloody action," he observed.

"I have rarely seen a bloodier," said Mr Cotton. "Nor, I suspect, a more unnecessary waste of life. Still, the captain has paid for it, for what comfort that may be."

"Killed he was?"

"Killed, or call it what you choose. At all events he is dead," said Cotton. "He was brought below at the very beginning--metacarpals of the left foot all abroad. I did what I could, and he insisted on being carried up again--he was a brave man, you know, with all his faults. Then he was hit a second time, but who fired the piece I will not say; nor will I absolutely assert that in the confusion of the night engagement his own people tossed him over the side; but in any case he disappeared. I dare say you have known similar cases."

"I have heard of them, of course; and in this particular instance I had some hint of it long ago. Captain Corbett's reputation as a flogging captain had spread pretty wide, I believe."

"So wide that the hands mutinied when he was appointed to the ship: refused to take her to sea. I was on leave at the time, and when I came back I was surprised to find that the officers sent down from London had persuaded them that he was not as black as he was painted--had persuaded them to return to their duty."

"Why were you surprised, sir?"

"Because those reputations are never wrong. He was as black as he was painted. He flogged those men down to the line, he flogged them across it, and he flogged them all the way up from the Cape."

"A parenthesis--did you carry any mail for the Cape, any mail for us?"

"Yes; and we were to carry yours on to Rodriguez. But as you know, we never touched there--turned right about the moment we had spoken the Emma- and I am sorry to say the Frenchman got it all."

"Well, well. And yet the men fought with great spirit, I collect?"

"With very great spirit; and that was because they had a decent set of officers. Captain Corbett was scarcely on speaking-terms with any of them: never dined in the gunroom but once, never invited. And the men would have fought her even better if they had been taught how to use the guns: never exercised with them once, all because of that holy deck. It must be in a pretty state at this moment. No: the hands had nothing against the officers, who were a decent set of men, as I say, and game to the last--Tullidge fought the ship after the captain was gone, and he was wounded four times; Forder, the second, had a bullet through the lungs, and Parker's head was shot off. Good officers. Once, when we were off Cape St Roque and Corbett was handing out fifty lashes right and left, they asked me whether they might confine him, and I said no. I was sorry for it afterwards, because although the fellow was sane enough ashore, he was mad at sea: mad with authority."

"Sure, it is a dangerous draught," said Stephen. "Yet some resist it. What is the source of their immunity?"

"What indeed?" replied Mr Cotton. His weariness was too great for speculation, though not for civility, and when Stephen took his leave he said, "You were a God-send, Dr Maturin: may I in my turn be of any use to you?"

"Since you are so good," said Stephen, "it does so happen that I have a singularly delicate depressed fracture waiting for me tomorrow, and if by then you feel sufficiently recovered, I should be most grateful for your support. My young man has no experience of the trephine, and my hands are not so steady as they were--they do not possess your admirable firmness of grip."