Patrick O'Brian - Post captain

and hailed ‘Polychrest’ in a tone that echoed back from Portsmouth and stopped the mild gossip in the launch stone dead. ‘Polychrest!’

‘Sir?’ came back Bonden’s voice out of the dripping gloom.

‘Double up to the inn, d’ye hear me? Up the lane. Bring your stretchers.’

‘Aye-​aye, sir.’

In a moment the launch was empty. Stretchers, the boat’s long wooden footrests, meant a row. The captain was no doubt pressing some hands, and they, pressed men themselves, did not mean to miss a second of the fun.

The pounding of feet at the end of the lane, coming nearer: behind, the sway and crash of chairs, oaths, a doubtful battle. ‘Here, here! Right under the window,’ cried Jack, and there they were, a little wet mob, gasping, gaping up. ‘Make a ring, now. Stand from under!’ He jumped, picked himself up and cried, ‘Down to the boat. Bear a hand, bear a hand!’

For the first moment the gang in the street hung back, but as the head tipstaff and his men came racing out of the inn shouting ‘In the name of the law! Way there, in the name of the law!’ they closed, and the narrow lane was filled with the sound of hard dry blows, grunts, the crash of wood upon wood. The sailors, with Jack in the middle, pushed fast in the direction of the sea.

‘In the name of the law!’ cried the tipstaff again, making a most desperate attempt to break through.

‘- the law,’ cried the seamen, and Bonden, grappling with the bailiff, wrenched the staff from him. He flung it right down the lane, fairly into the water, and said, ‘You’ve lost your commission now, mate. I can hit you now, mate, so you watch out, I say. You watch out, cully, or you’ll come home by Weeping Cross.’

The bailiff uttered a low growl, pulled out his hanger and hurled himself at Jack. ‘Artful, eh?’ said Bonden, and brought his stretcher down on his head. He fell in the mud, to be trampled upon by Pullings and his friends, pouring out of the inn. At this the gang broke and fled, calling out that they should fetch their friends, the watch, the military, and leaving two of their number stretched upon the ground.

‘Mr Pullings, press those men, if you please,’ cried Jack from the boat. ‘And that fellow in the mud. Two more? Capital. All aboard? Where’s the Doctor? Pass the word for the Doctor. Ah, there you are. Shove off. Altogether, now, give way. Give way cheerly. What a prime hand he will make, to be sure,’ he added in an aside, ‘once he’s used to our ways - a proper bulldog of a man.’

At two bells that morning watch the Polychrest was slipping quietly through the cold grey sea, the cold grey air, for at midnight the wind had come a little east of south, and in order not to lose a minute (a ship could be windbound for weeks on end in the Channel at this season) Jack had given orders to unmoor, although the tide was making. A gentle breeze it was, not enough to dispel the fog or raise more than a ripple on the long oily swell, and the Polychrest could have carried a great spread of canvas; however, she was under little more than her topsails, and she ghosted along, with little more than a whisper of water the length of her side.

The tall dark form of her captain, much larger in his foul-​weather clothes, stood over on the windward side of the quarterdeck. At the sound of the log being heaved, the cry of ‘Turn’ and ’stop’ and the thump of its coming aboard again, he turned. ‘Mr Babbington, what do you have?’ he called.

‘Two knots and a three fathom, if you please, sir.’

Jack nodded. Somewhere out there in the darkness on the larboard bow there would be Selsey Bill, and presently he might have to tack: for the moment he had plenty of room - the persistent howling under the lee came from the horns of the inshore fishing-​boats, and they were a good mile away. To seaward there was the thump of a gun every few minutes - a man-​of-​war bound for Portsmouth, no doubt, on the opposite tack - and the Polychrest’s bow carronade answered regularly with quarter charges.

‘At least there will be four men who know how to handle one by morning,’ he reflected.

In a way it was unfortunate that this first acquaintance with his ship should come at a time when there was no horizon, when sea and air could not be told apart; but he was not sorry for it, upon the whole - it gained him some hours at least, it sent Gosport, its squalors and its possible complications far astern, and in any case he had been on fire to know how she handled in the open sea ever since he had set eyes on the Polychrest. She had the strangest motion, a kind of nervous lift and shudder like a horse about to shy, as she rose to the swell, a kind of twist in her roll that he had never known before.

Mr Goodridge, the master, could be seen in the glow of the binnacle, standing by the quartermaster at the con. He was a reserved, elderly man of great experience, once the master of a ship of the line, but broken for fighting with the chaplain and only recently put on the list again; and he was as intent upon the Polychrest’s behaviour as his captain.

‘What do you make of her, Mr Goodridge?’ asked Jack, walking over to the wheel.

‘Why, sir, for ardent griping, I have never seen the like.’ Jack took the wheel, and indeed, even at the rate of sailing, there was a steady, powerful thrust against him:

the Polychrest wanted to get her head right up into the eye of the wind. He let her have her way, and then, just before the sails began to shiver the griping stopped; the helm went dead under his hand, and her odd corkscrew motion changed its rhythm entirely. He could not make it out, but stood there puzzling as he gently eased the Polychrest back on to her course. It was as though she had two centres of rotation, two pivots: if not three. . . obviously jib, foresail and a reef in the mizen topsail would keep her off, but that was not the trouble - that would not account for this sluggish helm, this sudden lack of response.

‘Three inches in the well, sir,’ said the carpenter’s mate, making his routine report.

‘Three inches in the well, if you please, sir,’ said the master.

‘Ay,’ said Jack. It was negligible: she had not had anything of a trial yet, no working in a heavy sea; but at least it proved that those strange sliding keels and the nameless peculiarity of her quickwork did not mean that the water poured straight in: a comfortable reflection, for he had misgivings. ‘No doubt we shall find what trim suits her best,’ he observed to the master and went back to the rail, half consciously trying to recreate his quarterdeck pacing in the little Sophie, while his mind, worn fine by Pullings’ feast, by the prolonged turmoil of unmooring with a foul hawse and by the anxiety of getting under way in a crowded road, turned to the problem of the forces acting upon the vessel.

The new-​lit galley stove sent a whiff of smoke eddying aft, together with the smell of burgoo, and at the same time he heard the head-​pumps beginning to work. Up and down, up and down, with his hands behind his back and his chin tucked into his griego against the biting air: up and down. The figure of the Polychrest was as clear in his mind as if she had been a model held up to a lamp, and he studied her reaction to the creeping influence of the tide, and the lateral thrust of the wind, the eddies deep under her strangely placed rudders .

The after-​guard were sprinkling the quarterdeck with their buckets, carefully avoiding his walk, and after them came the sand-​men. The bosun was on deck: Malloch, a short, bull-​like young fellow; had been bosun’s mate in the crack Ixion. Jack heard his shout and the thwack of his cane as he started a man on the fo’c’sle. And all the time there was the measured thump of the carronade, the now distant gun of the man-​of-​war, the horns away to port, the steady chant of the man heaving the lead in the chains - ‘by the mark nine. . . ho yo ho yo. . . and a quarter nine.’