Patrick O'Brian - Post captain

The rake of the masts was a great consideration, of course. Jack was an intuitive rather than a scientific sailor, and in his mental image of the Polychrest her backstays tautened until the angle of her masts looked right and some inner voice said ‘Belay there’. The holystones began their steady grinding: the decks could do with it, after the shambles of a hurried fitting-​out. These were such familiar sounds and smells, these innumerable difficulties were so very much part of the world he had known from childhood, that he felt as though he had been returned to his own element. It was not that he did not like the land - capital place; such games, such fun - but the difficulties there, the complications, were so vague and imprecise, reaching one behind another, no end to them: nothing a man could get hold of. Here, although life was complex enough in all conscience, he could at least attempt to cope with anything that turned up. Life at sea had the great advantage that

something was amiss. He tried to place it, glancing sharply fore and aft in the greyness of approaching day. The fishing-​boats that had been sailing on a parallel course were now astern: their melancholy wailing sounded almost from the Polychrest’s wake. The Bill must be no great way ahead. It was time to go about. A damned foolish moment to choose, with the people busy, and he would have preferred to wait until the watch below was on deck; but she might have made even more leeway than he had allowed for, and only a fool would run any risk for the sake of neatness.

‘We will put her about, Mr Goodridge,’ he said.

The bosun started his call. Brooms, buckets, swabs, squeegees, holystones, prayer-​books, brass rags flew into sheltered places as his mates roared down the hatches ‘All hands, all hands ’bout ship’ and then vanished below to drive the sleepers up - those few so worn with toil, seasickness and desolation, that they were unconscious in spite of the carronade and the echoing thunder of the holystones. The score or so of right seamen had been at their stations ten minutes - Pullings and the bosun on the fo’c’sle, the gunner and his mates at the maintack, the carpenter at the foresheet, the Marines at the mainsheet, the maintopmen and the after-​guard on the quarterdeck, at the braces - before the last desperate half-​clothed bewildered landsman was hunted up, shoved and beaten and cobbed into his place.

‘Bear up,’ said Jack to the timoneer, waiting for this Bartholomew Fair performance to come to an end - a bosun’s mate was now belabouring the former tipstaff with his persuader, to help him understand the difference between a stay and a bowline. And when he felt a little more way on the sloop, saw something like order on deck, and judged the moment ripe, he called, ‘Ready about.’

‘Ready about, sir,’ came the answer.

‘Luff up handsomely, now,’ he said quietly to the man at the wheel, and then loud and clear, ‘Helm’s a-​lee. Fore topsheet, fore topbowline, stays’l sheet, let go.’ The full-​bellied curves of the headsails sagged and collapsed; the Polychrest moved in a long smooth curve up towards the direction of the wind.

‘Off tacks and sheets.’

Everything was ready for the decisive order that would bring the yards flying round; everything was as calm and unhurried as the sloop’s slow curve through this grey, heaving, formless world; there was time and to spare. And that was just as well, he thought, seeing the way they were shifting the sheets over the stays - something between cat’s cradle and puss-​in-​the-​corner.

Her curve was slower now; and now the swell was coming more and more on to her starboard bow, heaving against her course. Slowly up and up: within two points of the wind, a point and a half, and the words ‘Mainsail haul’ had been long formed in his mouth when he realized that the deep steady sound to port and astern, the sound that was coming so clear and loud through the intent, waiting silence, was that of the breakers on Selsey Bill. She had made twice and three times the leeway he and the master had reckoned for. At the same moment he felt an essential change in her motion, a dead sullenness: she was going to miss stays. She was not going to travel up into the eye of the wind and carry on beyond it, so that the sails, braced round, would fill on the larboard side and bear her out to sea.

A ship that would not stay must wear - she must fall off from the wind, right round the way she came and much farther still, pivoting about her stern in a great leeward sweep until she had the wind aft, turning, turning until she could bring it astern and then at last on her other side, turning still until she was heading in the direction she desired - a long, long turn: and in this case, with this tide, swell and wind, the Polychrest would need a mile to accomplish it, a mile of leeway before she could brace up sharp and head out into the Channel. She was losing her headway; her sails were flapping dismally in the silence; with every thrust of the sea she was nearer the unseen shore. The alternatives flew through his mind: he could let her fall off, set the driver and try again; he could wear and risk it, coming to an anchor if he had cut it too fine - an ignominious, horribly time-​wasting process, or he could box-​haul her. But dared he box-​haul her with this crew? While these possibilities ran past his inner scrutineer a remote corner of his mind called out shrilly against the injustice of missing stays - unknown in such conditions, monstrous, a malignancy designed to make him late on his station, to allow Harte to call him unofficerlike, no seaman, a dawdling Sybarite, a slow-​arse. That was the danger: there was no peril in this sea, nothing but a consciousness of having misjudged things, and the likelihood of an ugly, unanswerable rebuke from a man he despised.

These thoughts had their being between the time he heard the splash of the lead and the cry By the deep eight’ As the next cry came, A half less eight’ he said to himself, ‘I shall box-​haul her.’ And aloud, ‘Haul up main and mizen tops’ls. Fore tops’l sheet hard a-​weather.

Foretops’l sharp aback: clap on to that brace. Look alive on the fo’c’sle there. Lee bowlines, lee bowlines.’

As if she had run into a gentle cushion, the Polychrest’s headway stopped - he felt her underfoot - and she began to move backwards, the headsails and her lee-​helm paying her round as she went. ‘Square main and mizen yards. Jump to those braces, now.’

She might not like turning up into the wind, but with her strange sharp stern she was very good at going backwards. He had never known such a sternway.

‘And a half eight,’ from the chains.

Round she went: the squared main and mizen yards lay parallel with the wind, the topsails shaking. Farther, farther; and now the wind was abaft her beam, and by rights her sternway should have stopped; but it did not; she was still travelling with remarkable speed in the wrong direction. He filled the topsails, gave her weather helm, and still she slid backwards in this insane contradiction of all known principles. For a moment all the certainties of his world quivered - he caught a dumbfounded, appalled glance from the master - and then with a sigh from the masts and stays, the strangest straining groan, the Polychrest’s motion passed through a barely perceptible immobility to headway. She brought the wind right aft, then on to her larboard quarter; and hauling out the mizen and trimming all sharp, he set the course, dismissed the watch below, and walked into his cabin, relief flooding into him. The bases of the universe were firm again, the Polychrest was heading straight out into the offing with the wind one point free; the crew had not done very badly, no time worth mentioning had been lost; and with any luck his steward would have brewed a decent pot of coffee. He sat on a locker, wedging himself against the bulkhead as she rolled: over his head there was the hurrying of feet as ropes were coiled down and made trim, and then came the long-​interrupted sounds of cleaning - a bear, a great padded, shot-​laden block of stone, started growling on the deck eighteen inches from his ears: he blinked once or twice, smiled, and smiling went fast asleep.