Hornblower and the Hotspur. C. S. Forester

So it was, Hornblower remembered. He had added that paragraph after reading Cornwallis’s orders regarding stations to be assumed in westerly gales. Simmonds had boiled three hundred pounds of salt pork in Hotspur’s cauldrons, as well as three hundred pounds of dried peas, before the weather had compelled the galley fires to be extinguished.

“Pretty nigh on cooked, anyway, sir,” said Huffnell.

So that for the next three days — four at a pinch — the hands would have something more to eat than dry biscuit. They would have cold parboiled pork and cold pease porridge; the latter was what the Man in the Moon burned his mouth on according to the nursery rhyme.

“Thank you, Mr Huffnell. It’s unlikely that this gale will last more than four days.”

That was actually the length of time that gale lasted, the gale that ushered in the worst winter in human memory, following the best summer. For those four days Hotspur lay hove‑to, pounded by the sea, flogged by the wind, while Hornblower made anxious calculations regarding leeway and drift; as the wind backed northerly his attention was diverted from Ushant to the north to the Isle de Sein to the south of the approaches to Brest. It was not until the fifth day that Hotspur was able to set three‑reefed top‑sails and thrash her way back to station while Simmonds managed to start his galley fires again and to provide the crew — and Hornblower — with hot boiled beef as a change from cold boiled pork.

Even then that three‑reefed gale maintained the long Atlantic rollers in all their original vastness, so that Hotspur soared over them and slithered unhappily down the far side, adding her own corkscrew motion as her weather‑bow met the swells, her own special stagger when a rogue wave crashed into her, and the worse lurch when — infrequently — a higher wave than usual blanketed her sails so that she reeled over her decks. But an hour’s work at the pumps every watch kept the bilges dear, and by tacking every two hours Hotspur was able to beat painfully out to sea again — not more than half a mile’s gain to windward on each tack — and recover the comparative safety of her original station before the next storm.

It was as if in payment for that fair weather summer that these gales blew, and perhaps that was not an altogether fanciful thought; to Hornblower’s mind there might be some substance to the theory that prolonged local high pressure during the summer now meant that the pent‑up dirty weather to the westward could exert more than its usual force. However that might be, the mere fresh gale that endured for four days after the first storm then worked up again into a tempest, blowing eternally from the westward with almost hurricane force; grey dreary days of lowering cloud, and wild black nights, with the wind howling unceasingly in the rigging until the ear was sated with the noise, until no price seemed too great to pay for five minutes of peace — and yet no price however great could buy even a second of peace. The creaking and the groaning of Hotspur’s fabric blended with the noise of the wind, and the actual woodwork of the ship vibrated with the vibration of the rigging until it seemed as if body and mind, exhausted with the din and with the fatigues of mere movement, could not endure for another minute, and yet went on to endure for days.

The tempest died down to a fresh gale, to a point when the top‑sails needed only a single reef, and then, unbelievably, worked up into a tempest again, the third in a month, during which all on board renewed the bruises that covered them as a result of being flung about by the motion of the ship. And it was during that tempest that Hornblower went through a spiritual crisis. It was not a mere question of calculation, it went far deeper than that, even though he did his best to appear quite imperturbable as Bush and Huffnell and Wallis the surgeon made their daily reports. He might have called them into a formal council of war; he might have covered himself by asking for their opinions in writing, to be produced in evidence should there be a court of inquiry, but that was not in his nature. Responsibility was the air he breathed; he could no more bring himself to evade it than he could hold his breath indefinitely.

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