Patrick O'Brian - Post captain

On deck he was greeted by a squall of rain mixed with sleet and spray. The wind had increased to a fine fresh breeze, sweeping the fog away and replacing it by a low sky - bands of weeping cloud against a steely grey, black on the eastern horizon; a nasty short choppy sea was getting up against the tide, and although the Polychrest was holding her course well enough, she was shipping a good deal of water, and her very moderate spread of canvas laid her over as though she had topgallants abroad. So she was as crank as he had feared; and a wet ship into the bargain. There were two men at the wheel, and from the way they were cramped on to the spokes it was clear they were having to fight hard to keep her from flying up into the wind.

He studied the log-​board, made a rough calculation of the position, adding a triple leeway, and decided to wear in half an hour, when both watches would be on deck. He had plenty of room, and there was no point in harassing the few good men he had aboard, particularly as the sky looked changeable, menacing, damned unpleasant - they might have a dirty night of it. And he would get the topgallantmasts down on deck before long. ‘Mr Parker,’ he said, ‘we will take another reef in the foretopsail, if you please.’

The bosun’s call, the rush of hands, the volley of orders through Parker’s speaking-​trumpet - ‘Halliards let fly - clap on to that brace - Mr Malloch, touch up those hands at the brace.’ The yards came round, the wind spilled from the sail and the Polychrest righted herself, at the same time making such a cruel gripe that the man at the con had to fling himself at the wheel to prevent her being taken aback ‘Lay out - look alive, there - you, sir, you on the yardarm, are you asleep? Are you going to pass the weather earing? Damn your eyes, are you going to stow that bunt? Mr Rossall, take that man’s name. Lay in.’

Through the clamour Jack watched the men aloft The man on the yardarm was young Haines, from the Lord Mornington, he knew his trade, might make a good captain of the foretop. He saw his foot slip as he scrambled in towards the mast - those horses wanted mousing.

‘Send the last man off the yard aft,’ called the first lieutenant, red in the face from shouting. ‘Start him, Mr Malloch.’

This same old foolery - the last man off was the first man on, the man who went right out on to the yardarm. It was a hard service - it had to be a hard service - but there was no need to make it harder, discouraging the willing hands. The people were going to have plenty to do: it was a pity for them to waste their strength beating one another. And yet again it was easy to seek a cheap popularity by checking an officer in public - easy, and disastrous in the long run.

‘Sail ho!’ hailed the look-​out.

‘Where away?’

‘Right astern, sir.’

She came up out of a dark smudge of half-​frozen rain, a frigate hull-​up already, on the same tack as the Polychrest and overhauling her very fast. French or English? He was no great way from Cherbourg. ‘Make the private signal,’ said Jack. ‘Mr Parker, your glass, if you please.’

He fixed the frigate in the grey round of the objective, swaying to counterbalance the sloop’s roll, pitch and shudder, and as the Polychrest’s windward gun went off behind him he saw the blue-​white-​blue break out aboard her, curving far out to leeward, and the momentary whiff from her answering gun. ‘Make our number,’ he said, relaxing. He gave orders for the mousing of the horses, desired Mr Parker to see what he could make of the frigate, sent Haines forward, and settled to watch in peace.

‘Three of them, sir,’ said Mr Parker. ‘And I think the first is Amethyst.’

Three there were, in line ahead. ‘Amethyst she is, sir,’ said the signal midshipman, huddling his book under the shelter of his bosom. They were directly in his wake, steering the same course. But the Polychrest’s leeway was such that in a very short while he saw them not head-​on, but from an angle, an angle that increased with alarming speed, so that in five minutes he was watching them over the weather quarter. They had already struck their topgallantmasts, but they were still carrying their topsails atrip - their full, expert crews could reef them in a moment. The first was indeed the Amethyst; the second he could not make out - perhaps the Minerve; the third was the Franchise, with his old friend Heneage Dundas aboard, a post captain, in command of a beautiful French-​built thirty-​six-​gun frigate; Dundas, five years junior to him as a lieutenant, thirteen months as master and commander; Jack had cobbed him repeatedly in the midshipmen’s berth of Old Ironsides: and would do so again. There he was, standing up on the slide of a quarterdeck carronade, as pleased as Punch, waving his hat. Jack raised his own, and the wind took his bright yellow hair, tearing it from the ribbon behind, and streamed it away north-​westward. As if in reply a hoist ran up to the Franchise’s mizen-​peak.

‘Alphabetic, sir,’ said the midshipman, spelling it out. ‘P S - oh yes, Psalms. Psalms cxlvii, 10.’

‘Acknowledge,’ said Jack who was no Biblical scholar.

Two guns from the Amethyst, and the frigates tacked in succession, moving like so many models on a sheet of glass: round they went, each exactly in the same piece of water, keeping their stations as though they were linked together. It was a beautifully executed manoeuvre, above all with such a head-​sea and such a wind, the result of years of training - a crew that pulled together, officers that knew their ship.

He shook his head, staring after the frigates as they vanished into the gloom. Eight bells struck. ‘Mr Parker,’ he said, ‘we will get the topgallantmasts down on deck, and then we will wear.’ By the time the masts were struck there would be no satirical friends to watch from a distance.

‘I beg your pardon, sir?’ asked Parker, with an anxious poke of his head.

Jack repeated his order and retired to the taffrail to let his first lieutenant carry on.

Glancing at the Polychrest’s wake to judge her leeway he noticed a little dark bird, fluttering weakly just over the water with its legs dangling; it vanished under the larboard quarter, and as he moved across to make sure of it, he tripped over something soft, about knee-​height, something very like a limpet - the child Parslow, under his sou-​wester.

‘Why, Mr Parslow,’ he said, picking him up, ‘you are properly rigged now, I see. You will be glad of it. Run below to the doctor and tell him, if he chooses to see a stormy petrel, he has but to come on deck.’

It was not a stormy petrel, but a much rarer cousin with yellow feet - so rare that Stephen could not identify him until he pittered across a wave so close that those yellow feet showed clear.

‘If rarity and the force of the storm are in direct proportion,’ he reflected, watching it attentively, ‘then we are in for a most prodigious hurricane. I shall not mention it, however.’

A frightful crash forward: the foretopgallantmast brought itself down on deck more briskly than in the smartest frigate, half stunning Mr Parker and plunging Jack into manoeuvres more suitable for a petrel than a mariner. Throughout the night the wind backed until it was blowing hard from the north; there it stayed, north-​east, north, or north-​west, never allowing more than close-​reefed topsails, if that, for nine days on end, nine days of rain, snow, steep wicked seas, and a perpetual fighting for their lives; nine days in which Jack rarely left the deck and young Parslow never once took off his clothes; nine days of wearing, lying to, scudding under bare poles, and never a sight of the sun - no notion of their position within fifty miles and more. And when at last a strong south-​wester allowed them to make up their enormous leeway, their noonday observation showed that they were where they had started from.