Patrick O'Brian - H.M.S. Surprise

‘Yes. He was a little overcome when we raised John Saddler’s scalp and desired him to hold it while we sewed it on: yet there was virtually no blood. A passing syncope:

he will be quite recovered by a little fresh air. May he go on deck, presently?’

‘Oh, this minute, if he chooses. We had a slight brush with the corvette - such a gallant fellow: he came on most amazingly until Mr Bowes brought his foremast by the board - but now we are running before the wind, far out of range. Let him come on deck by all means.’

On deck the black smoke was belching from the frigate’s waist, streaming away ahead of her, the ship’s boys were hurrying about with swabs, buckets and the fire engine, Babbington was roaring cursing in the top, waving his arms, all hands looked pleased with themselves and sly; and the pursuers had gained a quarter of a mile.

Far on the starboard beam the sun was sinking behind a blood-​red haze; sinking, sinking, and it was gone. Already the night was sweeping up from the east, a starless night with no moon, and pale phosphorescent fire had begun to gleam in the frigate’s wake.

After sunset, when the French sails were no more than the faintest hint of whiteness far astern, to be fixed only by the recurrent flash of the admiral’s top-​lantern, the Surprise sent up a number of blue lights, set her undamaged main-​topsail, and ran fast and faster southwestwards.

At eight bells in the first watch she hauled to the wind in the pitchy darkness; and having given his orders for the night, Jack said to Stephen, ‘We must turn in and get what sleep we can: I expect a busy day tomorrow.’

‘Do you feel that M. de Linois is not wholly deceived?’

‘I hope he is, I am sure: he ought to be, and he has certainly come after us as if he were. But he is a deep old file, a through-​going seaman, and I shall be glad to see nothing to the east of us, when we join the China fleet in the morning.’

‘Do you mean he might dart about and fling himself between us, guided by mere intuition? Surely that would argue a prescience in the Admiral exceeding the limits of our common humanity. A thorough-​going seaman is not necessarily a seer. Attention to the nice adjustment of the sails is one thing; vaticination another. Honest Jack, if you snore in that deep, pragmatical fashion, Sophie is going to spend many an uneasy night.. It occurs to

me,’ he said, looking at his friend, who, according to his long-​established habit, had plunged straight into the dark comfortable pit of sleep from which nothing would rouse him but the cry of a sail or a change in the wind, ‘it occurs to mc, that our race must have a natural propensity to ugliness. You are not an ill-​looking fellow, and were almost handsome before you were so pierced, blown up and banged by the enemy and so exposed to the elements; and you are to marry a truly beautiful young woman; yet I make no doubt you will between you produce little common babies, that mewl, pewl and roar all in that same tedious, deeply vulgar, self-​centred monotone, drool, cut their teeth, and grow up into plain blockheads. Generation after generation, and no increase in beauty; none in intelligence. On the analogy of dogs, or even of horses, the rich should stand nine foot high and the poor run about under the table. This does not occur: yet the absence of improvement never stops men desiring the company of beautiful women. Not indeed that when I think of Diana I have the least notion of children. I should never voluntarily add to the unhappiness of the world by bringing even more people into it in any case; but even if that were in my mind, the idea of Diana as a mother is absurd. There is nothing maternal about her whatsoever: her virtues are of another kind.’ He turned the wick down to a small line of blue flame and crept on to the steeply-​sloping deck, where he wedged himself between a coil of rope and the side and watched the dim tearing sea, the clearing sky with stars blazing in the gaps of cloud, reflecting upon Diana’s virtues, defining them, and listening to the successive bells, the responding cry of ‘All’s well’ right round the ship, until the first lightening of the eastern sky.

‘I’ve brought you a mug of coffee, Doctor,’ said Pullings, looming at his side. ‘And when you have drunk it up, I am going to call the skipper. He will be most uncommon pleased.’ He still spoke in his quiet night-​watch voice, although the idlers had been called already, and the ship was filling with activity.

‘What will please him so, Thomas Pullings? You are a good creature, to he sure, to bring me this roborative, stimulating drink: I am obliged to you. What will please him so?’

‘Why, the Indiamen’s toplights have been in sight this last glass and more, and when dawn comes up I dare say we shall see them a-​shaking out the reef in their topsails just exactly where he reckoned to find ‘em: such artful navigation you would scarcely credit. He has come it the Tom Cox’s traverse over Linois.’

Jack appeared, and the spreading light showed forty sail of merchantmen stretched wide along the western sea; he smiled, and opened his mouth to speak when the spreading light also betrayed the Surprise to a distant vessel in the cast, which instantly burst into a perfect frenzy of gunfire, like a small and solitary battle.

‘Jump up the masthead, Braithwaite,’ he said, ‘and tell me what you make of her.’

The expected answer came floating down. ‘That French brig, sir. Signalling like fury. And I believe I make out a sail bearing something north of her.’

it was just as he had feared: Linois had sent the brig northwards early in the night, and now she was reporting the presence of the Surprise, if not of the China fleet, to her friends over the horizon.

The long-​drawn-​out ruse had failed, He had meant to draw Linois so far to the south and west during the night that the Surprise, doubling back towards the China fleet in the darkness, would be far out of sight by morning. With the frigate’s great speed (and how they had cracked on!) he should have done it: yet he had not. Either one of the French squadron had caught the gleam of her sails as she ran northwards through the pursuing line, or Linois had had an intuition that something was amiss - that he was being attempted to be made a fool of - and had called off the chase, sending the brig back to his old cruising-​ground and then following her with the rest of his ships after an hour or so, crowding sail for the track of the China fleet. Yet his ruse had not failed entirely: it had gained essential time. How much time? Jack set course for the Indiamen and made his way into the crosstrees: the accursed brig lay some four leagues off, still carrying on like a Guy Fawkes’ night, and the farther sail perhaps as much again - he would scarcely have seen her but for the purity of the horizon at this hour, which magnified the nick of her topgallants in the line of brilliant sky. He had no doubt that she was one of the frigates, and that the whole of Linois’s squadron, less the corvette, was strung out on the likely passage of the Indiaman. They could outsail the convoy; and with this unvarying monsoon there was no avoiding them. But they could not outsail the convoy by a great deal: and it would take Linois the greater part of the day to concentrate his force and come up with the China fleet.

The senior captains came hurrying aboard the Surprise, headed by Mr Muffit, their commodore. The signal flying from the frigate’s maintruck and the commodore’s energetic gathering of the stragglers had given them a general idea of the situation; they were anxious, disturbed, grave; but some, alas, were also garrulous, given to exclamation, to blaming the authorities for not protecting them, and to theories about where Linois had really been all this time. The Company’s service was a capable, disciplined body, but its regulations required the commodore to listen to the views of his captains in council before any decisive action; and like all councils of war this was wordy, indefinite, inclined to pessimism. Jack had never so regretted the superior rigour of the Royal Navy as he did during the vague discourse of a Mr Craig, who was concerned to show what might have been the case, had they not waited for the Botany Bay ship and the two Portuguese.