Richard Woodman - In Distant Waters

Quilhampton looked upwards anxiously, clearly considering that Drinkwater's action in going aloft was unseemly. Beside him Fraser stood staring up, one hand clapped over his tricorne hat.

The men were laying in from the yard, having passed the reef-points, and Drinkwater called to them to begin to clear the gear away ready to send the topmast down on deck. It would be a long, complex and difficult job in the sea that was running, but he sensed in their changed expressions that the surly disinterest had been replaced by a sudden realisation of the danger they were in. Besides, he had no intention of making life too easy for them; those lost miles to leeward nagged him as he made his way down on deck.

After the clamour of the foretop, the quarterdeck seemed a sanctuary. Fraser began to remonstrate.

'Sir, you shouldn't ha'…'

'Be damned to you, Fraser, the men are disaffected… in your absence it was necessary I set 'em an example… now have the kindness to order the spanker and foretopmast stays'l set… just the clew of the spanker, mind you, I want this ship on the wind and then we'll sort out the mess of the foremast…'

Fraser nodded his understanding and Drinkwater regretted the jibe at the first lieutenant. It was mean, but he was in a damnably mean mood and meant to ride down this discontent, even if it first meant riding his officers.

'We'll set a goose-winged maintops'l when we've finished, and see if we can't claw back some of the leeway we've made…'

Hill, the elderly sailing master summoned on deck at the cry for all hands, nodded his agreement and put the traverse board back by the binnacle.

'It's a damn…'

'Deck! Deck there!'

The scream was high-pitched and uttered with such urgency that it carried above the gale. The officers looked up at Midshipman Frey. He was leaning against the barricade of the fore-top, pointing ahead.

'Sir! There's a ship, sir… a ship! Right ahead!'

'Impossible!'

That first reaction was gone in an instant. As he scrambled into the mizen rigging Drinkwater's active mind considered the odds of another ship being under their feet in this remote spot. And then he saw her, an irregular, spiky outline flung up against the eastern sky as she breasted a crest. His practised eye saw her hull and her straining sails and then she was gone, separated from them by a wave. She was perhaps three quarters of a mile away.

When she reappeared she was fine to starboard, under close-reefed topsails and beating to windward as Patrician had been doing an hour earlier. A curious idleness had filled the hands as they waited for the officers to get over their astonishment. Drinkwater rounded on the latter.

'Gentlemen! You have your orders, kindly attend to them!' They scattered, like chastened schoolboys. Only Hill, his white hair streaming in the wind, stood close to Drinkwater, trying to catch the stranger in the watch-glass.

Fishing in his pocket Drinkwater pulled out his Dollond glass and raised it to his eye, swearing with the difficulty of focusing it on the other ship.

'She's a ship of force, sir,' Hill muttered beside him.

Drinkwater grunted agreement. Her dark hull seemed pierced by two rows of gun-ports and, like themselves, she wore no colours. She beat to windward bravely, passing his own lamed ship as she licked her wound and escaped the worst fury of the storm by running before it. Once again that phrase by superior sailing was recalled to his mind.

Although not superstitious, Drinkwater was, like most philosophical sailors, aware of the influence of providence and the caprice of fortune. Nothing had yet happened aboard Patrician that persuaded him he was in command of anything but an unlucky ship. Among his ill-educated crew he knew that feeling had developed to a conviction since the execution.

'What d'you make of her, Mr Hill?'

With that black hull and making for the Pacific, I'd stake my hat and wig on her being a Don, sir…'

'Your shore-going wig, Mr Hill?' Drinkwater joked grimly and neither man took his glass from his eye.

'For a certainty, sir…'

Drinkwater grunted. He had seen the Spaniards' lugubriously popish fancy for black ships in Cadiz shortly before Trafalgar, but he was recalling the nightmare and its ominous warning. He stared at the ship for other clues, but found none. A minute later she was gone, lost in the bleak and heaving wastes of the Southern Ocean. Captain and master lowered their glasses at the same moment.

'A Don you say, Mr Hill?'

'My life upon it, sir.'

Drinkwater shook his head. 'Rash, Mr Hill, rash…'

'You don't agree, sir?' Drinkwater managed a grin at the obviously discomfited Hill.

'I've a hunch, Mr Hill, a hunch… nothing more and not worth the trouble of a wager… come now, let's get a new foretopmast off the booms…'

Drinkwater swallowed painfully and stared balefully at the first lieutenant. There were moments, and this was one of them, when he would have wished for the return of Samuel Rogers, for all his drunkenness and bullying temperament. Rogers would have understood what was to be done, but Rogers had been blown to the devil with six score others when the Zaandam exploded alongside the Antigone off Orfordness, and poor Fraser had inherited the first luff's uneasy berth. A quiet, competent Scot, Fraser was an obsessively worrying type, a man who let anxiety get the better of his spirit which was thereby damped and warped. Drinkwater had once overheard Mount referring to him in conversation with James Quilhampton.

'If yon Scot,' Mount mimicked in false North British dialect, 'ever occasioned to fall in the sea, he'd drown.' Then, seeing Quilhampton's puzzled look, he added plainly, 'He possesses no buoyancy .'

Drinkwater regarded Fraser, his expression softening. He was a prey to anxiety himself; he was being unjustly hard on a conscientious officer.

'It's high summer hereabouts, Mr Fraser, though it has a damned uncivil way of showing it, but I want the men worked… d'ye hear? Worked, sir, and damned hard. Not a single task that ain't necessary… I'll have no gratuitous hazing, but I want every manjack of 'em to know that they don't refuse to go aloft on my ship!'

Drinkwater drew breath, his anger at his predicament concentrated on the helpless Fraser.

'Aye, aye, sir.' But the first lieutenant hesitated.

'Well, Mr Fraser? What's the trouble?'

'Well, sir… such tasks… we've sent down the foretopmast…'

'Tasks? Are you suggesting your imagination cannot supply tasks ? Good God, man, was there ever a want of tasks on a man-o'-war?'

It was clear that Fraser's imagination fell somewhat short of Drinkwater's expectation. The captain sighed resignedly as the frigate lurched and trembled. A sea smashed against her weather bow and the spray whipped aft, stinging their faces.

'Turn up all watches, Mr Fraser. I want the people worked until they drop. I don't care that it blows a gale, nor that the ship's doing a dido, or that every manjack of 'em hates my lights by sunset, but we had one brush with an enemy off the Orkneys that I don't want repeated… and that ship we sighted this morning, be he Don or Devil, bore two decks of guns. If we have to fight her in our present condition, Mr Fraser, I'll not answer for the consequences… d'you comprehend my meaning? And I mean the officers to turn-out too…'

'The officers, sir?' Fraser's jaw dropped a little further. Anxiety about the unstable state of the crew and the captain's reaction to their behaviour this morning was worming his belly. Drinkwater pressed relentlessly on.

'Now, as to tasks, Mr Fraser, you may rattle down the lower shrouds, slush the new topmast and reeve a new heel-rope. I don't doubt an inspection of the gun-deck will reveal a few of the gun-lashings working and the same goes for the boat gripes. Let's have the well sounded hourly and kept dry as a parson's throat. Have the gunner detail a party to make up more cartridges, the quarter-gunners to reknap the flints in the upper deck gun-locks and overhaul the shot lockers. Turn a party to on scaling the worst-corroded balls and send some men to change all the shot in the garlands. Get an officer aloft with a midshipman and a pencil to carry out an examination of all the spars for further shakes and let me have their findings in writing…'