Richard Woodman - In Distant Waters

Fraser caught the reproach in Drinkwater's eyes and coloured at his own negligence. He had taken so much of Patrician's gear from the dockyard on trust, since she had been so recently refitted after being cut down to a razee.

'Yes, sir.'

'Very well. You can carry out an inventory of the tradesmen's stores and have a party assist the cooper to stum some casks ready for watering and if that ain't enough, Mr Fraser, do not neglect the fact that we lost two good topsails this morning… in short, sir, I want you to radoub the ship!'

'Aye, sir…'

'And the officers are to take an active part, Mr Fraser… no driving the men, I want 'em led , sir, led by officers so that, when the time comes, they'll follow without hesitation…'

'The time, sir… ?' Fraser essayed curiously catching a moment of mellowing by the captain.

'Aye, Mr Fraser… the time… which may catch a ship at a disadvantage and deliver her to the devil in an instant.'

'Or a Don, sir?'

'You comprehend my meaning… very well, see to it at once. Pipe all hands… Mr Hill and I will tend the deck.'

Drinkwater remained on deck the whole of that day. They set more sail and began to claw back the lost miles to windward. At apparent noon both he and Hill were gratified by twenty minutes of sunshine during which they obtained a perfect meridian altitude and fixed their latitude.

'Fifty-six degrees, fifty-seven minutes south, Mr Hill?'

'Fifty-five minutes, sir…'

'Close enough then… let us split the difference and lay that off on the chart…'

Both men reboxed their instruments, Hill's old quadrant in its triangular box, Drinkwater's Hadley sextant in a rectangular case fitted out with green baize and a selection of telescopes, shades and adjusting tools which gave it the appearance of a surgeon's knife-box. Drinkwater caught the look of satisfaction in Hill's eyes as he handed over the closed case to Midshipman Belchambers.

'I never claimed Hadley's sextant a better instrument than my old quadrant, Mr Hill…'

Hill smiled back. 'No, sir, but they say the best tunes are played on old fiddles.'

They made their way below, pocketing their tablets and pencils to allow them to grasp the ropes of the companion ways. They leaned over the chart and Hill manipulated the parallel rules, striking the pencil line from west to east on the parallel of fifty-six degrees, fifty-six minutes southerly latitude.

'Well clear of the Horn and the Diego Ramirez Islands.' Drinkwater indicated a group of islands some sixty miles southwest of Cape Horn. They fell silent, both pondering the unspoken question: their longitude?

Were they yet west of the Horn, able to lay the ship's head to the north of west and pass up into the Pacific? Or were they still east of the meridian of the Cape, or Diego Ramirez? That longitude of sixty-eight thirty-seven west?

'Perhaps we will be able to obtain a lunar observation later,' observed Hill. 'The sky shows signs of clearing.'

'Yes,' agreed Drinkwater, 'we might also obtain our longitude by chronometer, though I know your general prejudice against the contrivance.'

Hill looked sidelong at the gimballed clock-face in its lashed box. Cook had proved its usefulness thirty years ago, but Hill preferred the complex computations of a lunar observation to the simpler solution of the hour-angle problem which, he thought, smacked too much of necromancy. Drinkwater smiled wryly and changed the subject as he rolled up the chart.

'I hope to water at Juan Fernandez by mid-January, Mr Hill.'

'Aye, aye, sir… we'll have enough casks by then.' Hill referred to the stumming then in progress in the orlop deck where sulphurous smoke emanated from the primitive cleaning process. 'And the labour'll do the men no harm.'

'Quite so.' Drinkwater put the chart and rules away, preparing to return to the deck but Hill stopped him, taking advantage of the intimacy permitted a sailing master and the long familiarity the two men had known.

'Sir… that ship, the one we sighted this morning… it has been worrying me that you thought my opinion in error…'

I have the advantage of you, Mr Hill.' Drinkwater smiled again, so that Hill was reminded of the eager young acting lieutenant he had long ago known on the cutter Kestrel .

'I'm sorry, sir, I didn't intend to pry…'

'Oh, the contents of my orders are such that their secrecy applies principally to their comprehension. The truth is that I don't believe that ship was a Don.' He looked up at the old master. Hill was massaging his arm, a wound acquired at Camperdown; his expression was rueful.

'The truth is, I think she was Russian.'

Captain Drinkwater stood at the weather hance regarding the long deck of the Patrician . Wrapped in his boat-cloak he ignored the frequent patterings of spray. There was some abatement in the gale and the wind backed a touch, enabling them to claw more westing against wind and the Cape Horn current that set against them at a couple of knots. Midshipman Belchambers hovered near, ready to dash below for sextant and chronometer should the sun appear again. To windward, patches of blue sky punctuated the low, rolling cumulus and it was hard to comprehend the fact that this was the season of high-summer in the southern hemisphere. There was little in the leaden aspect of the clouds, nor the grey streaked and heaving mass of the ocean to suggest it.

Along the deck and aloft men worked in groups and singly. Lieutenant Quilhampton swung about the mainmast with Midshipman Frey and Comley, the boatswain, was overhauling gear on the fo'c's'le and keeping a lively eye on a party of men in each set of weather shrouds who were rattling down. The grim, motionless presence of Captain Drinkwater intimidated them all, for it had slowly permeated the collective consciousness of the hands that their peevish unwillingness to obey orders had not only been let off lightly, but had endangered the ship. To a degree Drinkwater sensed this contrition, partly because he also shared much of the men's embittered feelings. For, notwithstanding their task and the problems which beset it, the voyage had not been a happy one.

From the moment they had run Stanham to the fore-yardarm, it seemed, providence had ceased to smile on them. Ordered north with a convoy to Leith Roads from the London River, Patrician had dragged her anchor in an easterly gale in the Firth of Forth. Drinkwater had been dining aboard another ship at the time, in the company of an old friend and messmate from his days as a midshipman.

Sir Richard White had got into Leith Roads three days earlier after his seventy-four-gun Titan had been badly mauled in a gale off the Naze of Norway where Sir Richard had been engaged in a successful operation extirpating nests of Danish privateers hiding in the fiords. He had also enjoyed a considerable profit from the destruction of Danish and Norwegian trade, having a broad pendant hoisted as commodore and two sloops and a cutter under his direction for prosecuting this lucrative little campaign.

Sitting in his comfortably furnished cabin, Drinkwater was reminded that there was another Royal Navy to that which he himself belonged, a service dedicated to the self-advancement of its privileged members. He did not blame Sir Richard for taking advantage of his position, any more than he blamed him for inheriting a baronetcy. It was now that the recollection of his old friend's circumstances rankled, as he wrestled with a disaffected crew, a contrary gale and the remotest ocean in the world. But he had enjoyed the conviviality of the distant evening. Sir Richard's officers were pleasant and made much of Drinkwater. He could imagine White's briefing prior to his arrival; his guest was a friend, a seaman of the old school, a tarpaulin of considerable experience, and so on and so forth, all designed to provoke good-natured but superior attitudes. Drinkwater was too old to worry much, though when he thought about such things, they still angered him. At the time he had enjoyed White's company. They had grumbled over the income tax, and agreed on the excellence of the port. They had deplored the standard of young officers and disagreed over the propriety of the new regulation that made masters and pursers equal in status to the commissioned officers. And then the news had come that Patrician was making signals of distress and Drinkwater had had a rough and wet return to his ship in his gig, to find chaos in place of an ordered anchor watch and the ship dragging from sheer neglect of the cable at the turn of the tide. The contrast with the well-ordered state of affairs aboard Titan was inescapable.