He broke off his train of thought to issue a whole series of orders to his puzzled subordinates. The blacksmith was given orders to forge an iron rod with a loop at the end and to wrap it with oakum and twine to fit the bore of the long boat’s 6-pounder. The bos’un had to get out 100 fathoms of the finest hemp line that the ship possessed and work it into utter flexibility by straining every inch round a belaying-pin and then coil it away with perfect symmetry into one of the oaken fire-buckets. The cooper and his mates were set to work breaking out beef casks, half emptying them, and then heading them up securely. A puzzled bos’un’s mate was set to work with half a dozen hands linking these twenty half-empty casks into an immense chain, like beads on a string where every bead was represented by a cask containing 2-hundredweight of meat connected with its fellows by 60 yards of cable. The deck of the Sutherland presented a pretty tangle to any possible observer by the time all these operations were well started. And through the gathering evening the Sutherland held her course steadily, closehauled for Cabrera.
At dawn she was there, and the earliest hint of daylight found her nosing her way cautiously towards the beach, from which even here, with the wind in the wrong direction, could be heard the thunderous beat of the surf.
“That’s the dagos’ victualling-ship, I’ll lay a guinea,” said Bush with his glass to his eye.
It was a small brig, hull down and hove to, over on the horizon.
“Yes,” said Hornblower, the speech deserved no more ample rejoinder. He was much too occupied looking through his own glass at the craggy beach of rock on which the Spaniards had seen fit to place twenty-thousand men. It was just a grey fragment, one single ridge projecting like a tooth from the blue Mediterranean, its steep slopes unrelieved by any trace of green. Around its foot the rollers broke into white fountains of spray, Hornblower could see the waves reaching 20 or 30 feet up the cliffs as they beat upon them, save in the centre where a long flurry of foam revealed the landing beach and all its dangers. It was a wicked enough place.
“Can’t blame the dagos for not landing stores here in an easterly wind,” said Bush, and this time he received no answer at all.
“Hoist out the long-boat,” Hornblower rasped; when approaching a difficult task he would take out no insurance by minor politeness for his subordinates’ sympathy in the event of failure.
The bos’un’s mates twittered on their pipes while Harrison, the bos’un, repeated the order in his resounding bellow. The tackles were manned and the long-boat was swung up from her chocks and hoisted overside. The long-boat’s crew stood fending her off as the Sutherland surged in the choppy sea.
“I’m going in her, Mr Bush,” said Hornblower briefly.
He took hold of one of the falls and lowered himself down; his unathletic figure dangled in ungainly fashion while the longboat’s crew fell over each other in their haste to protect his fall. It was a source of continual inward disturbance to Hornblower that the poorest topman in his whole ship was better on a rope than he was himself. He managed just well enough, and with only a small loss of dignity, with a 3-foot drop as a result of his not quite correctly estimating the relative movements of the ship and the boat. Somebody picked up his hat and gave it to him and he clapped it on his head again.
“Give way,” he snapped, and the long-boat crept under oars over the surging sea towards the distant beach.
Now, with his glass, Hornblower could see little figures pouring down to the water’s edge on Cabrera. They were all as naked as the two men he picked up yesterday; Hornblower wondered what it was like to climb about with a bare skin over the jagged rocks of Cabrera; he wondered what it was like to try and live naked through a winter storm with only a hollow in a rock for shelter. He felt sick with the thought of all the horror and misery which that jagged lump of rock must have witnessed for the past two years. He was glad he was going to make this small attempt at relief. He put away his glass and walked forward between the rowers to where the 6-pounder was mounted in the bows.