Bush and Gerard had certainly secured a fine body of men; Hornblower looked them over as they stood in apathy, or bewilderment, or sullen rage, upon the Sutherland’s main deck. At no warning they had been snatched from the comfort of an Indiaman, with regular pay, ample food, and easy discipline, into the hardships of the King’s service, where the pay was problematic, the food bad, and where their backs were liable to be flogged to the bones at a simple order from their new captain. Even a sailor before the mast could look forward with pleasure to his visit to India, with all its possibilities; but these men were destined instead now to two years of monotony only varied by danger, where disease and the cannon balls of the enemy lay in wait for them.
“I’ll have those boats hoisted in, Mr Rayner,” said Hornblower.
Rayner’s eyelids flickered for a second — he had heard Hornblower’s promise to Captain Osborn, and he knew that more than a hundred of the new arrivals would refuse to volunteer. The boats would only have to be hoisted out again to take them back. But if Hornblower’s wooden expression indicated anything at all, it was that he meant what he said.
“Aye aye, sir,” said Rayner.
Bush was approaching now, paper in hand, having agreed his figures regarding the recruits with Gerard.
“A hundred and twenty, total, sir, as you ordered,” said Bush. “One cooper’s mate — he was a volunteer, one hundred and nine able seamen — two of ’em volunteered; six quarter gunners; four landsmen, all volunteers.”
“Excellent, Mr Bush, Read ’em in. Mr Rayner, square away as soon as those boats are inboard. Mr Vincent! Signal to the convoy. ‘All-men-have-volunteered. Thank you. Good-bye.’ You’ll have to spell out ‘volunteered’ but it’s worth it.”
Hornblower’s high spirits had lured him into saying an unecessary sentence. But when he took himself to task for it he could readily excuse himself. He had a hundred and twenty new hands, nearly all of them able seamen — the Sutherland had nearly her full complement now. More than that, he had guarded himself against the wrath to come. When the inevitable chiding letter arrived from the Admiralty he would be able to write back and say that he had taken the men with the East India Company’s Commodore’s permission; with any good fortune he could keep the ball rolling for another six months. That would give him a year altogether in which to convince the new hands that they had volunteered — by that time some of them at least might be sufficiently enamoured of their new life to swear to that; enough of them to befog the issue, and to afford to an Admiralty, prepared of necessity to look with indulgence on breaches of the pressing regulations, a loophole of excuse not to prosecute him too hard.
“Lord Mornington replying, sir,” said Vincent. “‘Do not understand the signal. Await boat’!”
“Signal ‘Good-bye’ again,” said Hornblower.
Down on the maindeck Bush had hardly finished reading through the Articles of War to the new hands — the necessary formality to make them servants of the King, submissive to the hangman and the cat.
Chapter IX
The Sutherland had reached her rendezvous off Palamos Point, apparently the first of the squadron, for there was no sign as yet of the flagship or of the Caligula. As she beat slowly up under easy sail against the gentle south-easterly wind Gerard was taking advantage of this period of idleness to exercise the crew at the guns. Bush had too long had his way in drilling the crew aloft; it was time for practice with the big guns, as Hornblower had agreed. Under the scorching sun of a Mediterranean midsummer the men, naked to the waist, had sweated rivers running the guns out and in again, training round with handspikes, each man of the crew learning the knack of the flexible rammer — all the mechanical drill which every man at the guns had to learn until he could be trusted to run up, fire, clean, and reload, and to go on doing so for hour after hour, in thick powder smoke and with death all round him. Drill first, marksmanship a long way second, but all the same it was policy to allow the men to fire off the guns a few times — they found compensation in that for the arduous toil at the guns.