“Mr. Carslake, you can take my gig over to the Victualling Yard. Mr. Jones, I expect the Yard will need hands to man their lighter. See to that, if you please.”
A moment to spare now to observe the hands at work, to settle his cocked hat square on his head, to clasp his hands behind him, to walk slowly forward, doing his best to look quite cool and imperturbable, as if all this wild activity were the most natural thing in the world.
“Avast heaving there on that stay‑tackle. Belay!”
The powder keg hung suspended just over the deck. Hornblower forced himself to speak coldly, without excitement. A stave of the keg had started a trifle. There was a minute trail of powder grains on the deck; more were dribbling very slowly out.
“Sway that keg back into the hulk. You, bos’n’s mate, get a wet mop and swill that powder off the deck.”
An accident could have fired that powder easily. The flash would pass in either direction; four tons of powder in Atropos, forty, perhaps in the hulk — what would have happened to the massed shipping in the Pool in that event? The men were eyeing him; this would be a suitable moment to encourage them with their work.
“Greenwich Hospital is over there, men,” said Hornblower, pointing down river to the graceful outlines of Wren’s building. “Some of us will wind up there in the end, I expect, but we don’t want to be blown straight there today.”
A feeble enough joke, perhaps, but it raised a grin or two all the same.
“Carry on.”
Hornblower continued his stroll forward, the imperturbable captain who was nevertheless human enough to crack a joke. It was the same sort of acting that he used towards Maria when she seemed likely to be in a difficult mood.
Here was the lighter with the shot, coming along the starboard side. Hornblower looked down into it. Nine‑pounder balls for the four long guns, two forward and two aft; twelve‑pounder balls for the eighteen carronades that constituted the ship’s main armament. The twenty tons of iron made a pathetically small mass lying in the bottom of the lighter, when regarded with the eye of a man who had served in a ship of the line; the old Renown would have discharged that weight of shot in a couple of hours’ fighting. But this dead weight was a very considerable proportion of the load Atropos had to carry. Half of it would be distributed fairly evenly along the ship in the shot‑garlands; where he decided to stow the other ten tons would make all the difference to Atropos, could add a knot to her speed or reduce it by a knot, could make her stiff in a breeze or crank, handy or awkward under sail. He could not reach a decision about that until the rest of the stores were on board and he had had an opportunity of observing her trim. Hornblower ran a keen eye over the nets in which the shot were to be swayed up at the starboard fore‑yardarm, and went back through his mind in search of the data stored away there regarding the breaking strain of Manila line — this, he could tell, had been several years in service.
“Sixteen rounds to the load,” he called down into the lighter, “no more.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
It was typical of Hornblower’s mind that it should spend a moment or two thinking about the effect that would be produced if one of those nets was to give way; the shot would pour down into the lighter again; falling from the height of the yardarm they could go clear through the bottom of the lighter; with all that deadweight on board, the lighter would sink like a stone, there on the edge of the fairway, to be an intolerable nuisance to London’s shipping until divers had painfully cleared the sunken wreck of the shot, and camels had lifted the wreck clear of the channel. The vast shipping of the Port of London could be seriously impeded as a result of a momentary inattention regarding the condition of a cargo net.