Mr. McCullum was awaiting him in the Governor’s anteroom. He was a burly, heavy‑set man in his early thirties, blue‑eyed and with a thick mat of black hair.
“Captain Horatio Hornblower?” there was a roll to the “r’s” which betrayed the county of his origin.
“Mr. McCullum?”
“Of the Company’s Service.”
The two men eyed each other.
“You are to take passage in my ship?”
“Aye.”
The fellow carried himself with an air of vast independence. Yet judging by the scantiness of the silver lace on his uniform, and by the fact that he wore no sword, he was not of a very lofty position in the Company’s hierarchy.
“Who are these native assistants of yours?”
“Three Sinhalese divers.”
“Sinhalese?”
Hornblower said the word with caution. He had never heard it before, at least pronounced in that way. He suspected that it meant something to do with Ceylon, but he was not going to make a display of his ignorance.
“Pearl divers from Ceylon,” said McCullum.
So he had guessed right. But he could not imagine for one moment why Collingwood, at grips with the French in the Mediterranean, should need Ceylonese pearl divers.
“And what is your official position, Mr. McCullum?”
“I am wreck‑master and salvage director of the Coromandel Coast.”
That went far to explain the man’s ostentatious lack of deference. He was one of those experts whose skill made them too valuable to be trifled with. He might have drifted out to India as a cabin boy or apprentice; presumably he had been treated like a menial while young, but he had learned a trade so well as now to be indispensable and in a position to repay the slights he had endured earlier. The more the gold lace he was addressing the brusquer was likely to be his manner.
“Very well, Mr. McCullum. I shall be sailing immediately and I shall be glad if you will come on board with your assistants at the earliest possible moment. Within an hour. Do you have any equipment with you to be shipped?”
“Very little besides my chest and the divers’ bundles. They are ready, along with the food for them.”
“Food?”
“The poor bodies” — McCullum narrowed the vowel sound until the word sounded like “puir” — “are benighted heathen, followers of Buddha. They wellnigh died on the voyage here, never having known what it was to have a full belly before. A scrap of vegetable, a drop of oil, a bit of fish for a relish. That’s what they’re used to living on.”
Oil? Vegetables? Ships of war could hardly be expected to supply such things.
“I’ve a puncheon of Spanish olive oil for them,” explained McCullum. “They’ve taken kindly to it, although it’s far removed from their buffalo butter. Lentils and onions and carrots. Give them salt beef and they’d die, and that would be poor business after shipping them all round the Cape of Good Hope.”
The statement was made with apparent callousness, but Hornblower suspected that the manner concealed some consideration for his unfortunate subordinates so far from their homes. He began to like McCullum a little better.
“I’ll give orders for them to be well looked after,” he said.
“Thank you.” That was the first shade of politeness that had crept into McCullum’s speech. “The poor devils have been perishing of cold here on the Rock. That makes them homesick, like, and a long way they are from home, too.”
“Why have they been sent here in any case?” asked Hornblower. That question had been striving for utterance for some time; he had not asked it because it would have given McCullum too good an opportunity to snub him.
“Because they can dive in sixteen and a half fathoms,” said McCullum, staring straight at him.
It was not quite a snub; Hornblower was aware that he owed the modification to his promise that they would be well treated. He would not risk another question despite his consuming curiosity. He was completely puzzled as to why the Mediterranean Fleet should need divers who could go down through a hundred feet of water. He contented himself with ending the interview with an offer to send a boat for McCullum and his men.