It was well for the Hotspur that she was under the command of a man to whom any form of idleness or monotony was supremely distasteful. The charts of the Iroise were notoriously inaccurate; Hotspur set herself to run line after line of soundings, to take series after series of careful triangulations from the headlands and hilltops. When the fleet ran short of silver sand, so necessary to keep the decks spotless white, it was Hotspur who supplied the deficiency, finding tiny lost beaches round the coast where a park could land – trespassing upon Bonaparte’s vaunted dominion over Europe – to fill sacks with the precious commodity. There were fishing competitions, whereby the lower-deck’s rooted objection to fish as an item of diet was almost overcome; a prize of a pound of tobacco for the biggest catch by an individual mess set all the messes to work on devising more novel fish-hooks and baits. There were experiments in ship-handling, when obsolescent and novel methods were tested, when by careful and accurate measurement with the log the effect of goose-winging the topsails was ascertained; or, it being assumed that the rudder was lost, the watch keeping officers tried their hands at manoeuvring the ship by the sails alone.
Hornblower himself found mental exercise in working out navigational problems. Conditions were ideal for taking lunar observations, and by their aid it was possible to arrive at an accurate determination of longitude – a subject of debate since the days of the Carthaginians – at the cost of endless calculations. Hornblower was determined to perfect himself in this method, and his officers and young gentlemen bewailed the decision, for they, too, had to make lunar observations and work out the resulting sums. The longitude of the Little Girls was calculated on board the Hotspur a hundred times that summer, with nearly a hundred different results.
To Hornblower it was a satisfactory occupation, the more satisfactory as it became obvious that he was acquiring the necessary knack. He tried to acquire the same facility in another direction, without the same satisfaction, as he wrote his weekly letters to Maria. There was only a limited number of endearments, only a limited number of ways of saying that he missed her, that he hoped her pregnancy was progressing favourably. There was only the one way of excusing himself for not returning to England as he had promised to do, and Maria was inclined to be a little peevish in her letters regarding the exigencies of the service. When the water-hoys arrived periodically and the enormous labour had to be undertaken of transferring the already stale liquid into the Hotspur Hornblower always found himself thinking that getting those eighteen tons of water on board meant another month of writing letters to Maria.
CHAPTER 13
Hotspur’s bell struck two double strokes; it was six o’clock in the evening, and the first dog watch had come to an end in the gathering darkness.
“Sunset, sir,” said Bush.
“Yes,” agreed Hornblower.
“Six o’clock exactly. The equinox, sir.”
“Yes,” agreed Hornblower again; he knew perfectly well what was coming.
“We’ll have a westerly gale, sir, or my name’s not William Bush.”
“Very likely,” said Hornblower, who had been sniffing the air all day long.
Hornblower was a heretic in this matter. He did not believe that the mere changing from a day a minute longer than twelve hours to one a minute shorter made gales blow from out of the west. Gales happened to blow at this time because winter was setting in, but ninety-nine men out of a hundred firmly believed in a more direct, although more mysterious causation.
“Wind’s freshening and sea’s getting up a bit, sir,” went on Bush, inexorably.
“Yes.”
Hornblower fought down the temptation to declare that it was not because the sun happened to set at six o’clock, for he knew that if he expressed such an opinion it would be received with the tolerant and concealed disagreement accorded to the opinions of children and eccentrics and captains.
“We’ve water for twenty-eight days, sir. Twenty-four allowing for spillage and ullage.”
“Thirty-six, on short allowance,” corrected Hornblower.
“Yes, sir,” said Bush, with a world of significance in those two syllables.