Patrick O'Brian - Post captain

For once the Polychrest cast prettily to larboard and bore away on the height of the tide. A gentle breeze abaft the beam carried her shaving round the South Foreland, and by the time the hands were piped to supper they were in sight of Dover. Stephen came on deck by way of the fore-​hatch from the sick-​bay, and walked into the bows. As he stepped on to the forecastle the talk stopped dead, and he noticed an odd, sullen, shifty glance from old Plaice and Lakey. He had grown used to reserve from Bonden these last few days, for Bonden was the captain’s coxswain, and he supposed Plaice had caught it by family affection; but it surprised him from Lakey, a noisy man with an open, cheerful heart. Presently he went below again, and he was busy with Mr Thompson when he heard ‘All hands ’bout ship’ as the Polychrest stood out into the offing. It was generally known that they were bound down-​Channel to look into a French port: some said Wimereux, others Boulogne, and some pushed as far as Dieppe; but when the gun-​room sat down to supper the news went about that Chaulieu was their goal.

Stephen had never heard of the place. Smithers (who had recovered his spirits) knew it well: ‘My friend, the Marquis of Dorset, was always there in his yacht, during the peace; and he was for ever begging me to run across with him - “Tis absolutely no more than a day and a night in my cutter,” he would say. “You should come, George -we can’t do without you and your flute.”‘

Mr Goodridge, who looked thoughtful and withdrawn, added nothing to the conversation. After a discussion of yachts, their astonishing luxury and sailing qualities, it returned to Mr Smithers’s triumphs, his yacht-​owning friends, and their touching devotion to him; to the fatigues of the London season, and the difficulty of keeping débutantes at a decent distance. Once again Stephen noticed that all this pleased Parker; that although Parker was a man of respectable family and, in his way, a ‘hard horse’, he encouraged Smithers, listening attentively, and as it were taking something of it to himself. It surprised Stephen, but it did not raise his spirits; and leaning across the table he said privately to the master, ‘I should be obliged, Mr Goodridge, if you would tell me something about this port.’

‘Come with me, then, Doctor,’ said the master. ‘I have the charts spread out in my cabin. It will be easier to explain with these shoals laid down before us.’

‘These, I take it, are sandbanks,’ said Stephen.

‘Just so. And the little figures show the depth at high water and at low: the red is where they are above the surface.’

‘A perilous maze. I did not know that so much sand could congregate in one place.’

‘Why, it is the set of the tides, do you see - they run precious fast round Point Noir and the Prelleys -and these old rivers. In ancient times they must have been much bigger, to have carried down all that silt.’

‘Have you a larger map, to give me a general view?’

‘Just behind you, sir, under Bishop Ussher.’

This was more like the maps he was used to: it showed the Channel coast of France, running almost north and south below Etaples until a little beyond the mouth of the Risle, where it tended away westwards for three or four miles to form a shallow bay, or rather a rounded corner, ending on the west with the lie Saint-​Jacques, a little pear-​shaped island five hundred yards from the shore, which then resumed its southerly direction and ran off the page in the direction of Abbeville. In the inner angle of this rounded corner, the point where the coast began to run westward, there was a rectangle marked Square Tower, then nothing, not even a hamlet, for a mile westward, until a headland thrust out into the sea for two hundred yards: a star on top of it, and the name Fort de la Convention. Its shape was like that of the island, but in this case the pear had not quite succeeded in dropping off the mainland. These two pears, St Jacques and Convention, were something less than two miles apart, and between them, at the mouth of a modest stream called the Divonne, lay Chaulieu. It had been a considerable port in mediaeval times, but it had silted up; and the notorious banks in the bay had still further discouraged its trade. Yet it had its advantages: the island sheltered it from western gales and the banks from the north; the fierce tides kept its inner and outer roads clear, and for the last few years the French government had been cleaning the harbour, carrying an ambitious breakwater out to protect it from the north-​east, and deepening the channels. The work had gone on right through the Peace of Amiens, for Chaulieu revived would be a valuable port for Bonaparte’s invasion-​flotilla as it crept up the coast from every port or even fishing-​village capable of building a lugger right down to Biarritz - crept up to its assembly-​points, Etaples, Boulogne, Wimereux and the rest. There were already over two thousand of these prams, cannonières and transports, and Chaulieu had built a dozen.

‘This is where their slips are,’ said Goodridge, pointing to the mouth of the little river. ‘And this is where they are doing most of their dredging and stone-​work, just inside the harbour jetty. It makes the harbour almost useless for the moment, but they don’t care for that. They can lie snug in the inner road, under Convention; or in the outer, for that matter, under St Jacques, unless it comes on to blow from the north-​east. And now I come to think of it, I believe I have a print. Yes: here we are.’ He held out an odd-​shaped volume with long strips of the coast seen from the offing, half a dozen to a page. A dull low coast, with nothing but these curious chalky rises each side of the mean village: both much of a height, and both, as he saw looking closely, crowned by the unmistakable hand of the industrious, ubiquitous Vauban.

‘Vauban,’ observed Stephen, ‘is like aniseed in a cake: a little is excellent; but how soon one sickens - these inevitable pepper-​pots, from Alsace to the Roussillon.’ He turned back to the chart. Now it was clear to him that the inner road, starting just outside the harbour and running up north-​east past the Fort de la Convention on its headland, was protected by two long sandbanks, half a mile off the shore, labelled West Anvil and East Anvil; and that the outer road, parallel to the first, but on the seaward side of the Anvils, was sheltered on the east by the island and on the north by Old Paul Hill’s bank. These two good anchorages sloped diagonally across the page, from low left to high right, and they were separated by the Anvils: but whereas the inner road was not much above half a mile wide and two long, the outer was a fine stretch of water, certainly twice that size. ‘How curious that these banks should have English names,’ he said. ‘Pray, is this usual?’

‘Oh, yes: anything by sea, we feel we own, just as we call Setubal St Ubes, and Coruna The Groyne, and so on: this one here we call the Galloper, after ours, it being much the

same shape. And the Anvils we call anvils because with a north-​wester and a making tide, the hollow seas bang away on them rap-​rap, first the one and the other, like you was in a smithy. I ran in here once in a cutter, by the Goulet’- pointing to the narrow passage between the island and the main - ‘in ‘88 or ‘89, with a stiff north-​wester, into the inner road, and the spoondrift came in off the bank so thick you could hardly breathe.’

‘There is an odd symmetry in the arrangement of these banks, and in these promontories: perhaps there may be a connection. What a maze of channels! How shall you come in? Not by the Goulet, I presume, since it is so close to the fort on the island - I should not have called it a promontory: it is an island, though from the print it looks much the same, being seen head-​on.’