Those who could not walk were laid in a row with the bodies recovered earlier, and Jack said, ‘How is the tally, Mr Ricketts?’
‘All aboard, sir,’ said the midshipman wearily, ‘except for Jessup,cook’s mate, who broke his leg falling down Pigtail Stairs, and Sennet, Richards and Chambers, of the foretop, who went off to George Town with some soldiers.’
‘Sergeant Quinn?’
But there was no answer to be had from Sergeant Quinn:
he could, and did, remain upright, bolt upright, but his only reply was ‘Yes, sir’ and a salute to everything that was proposed to him.
‘All but three of the marines are aboard, sir,’ said James privately.
‘Thank you, Mr Dillon,’ said Jack, looking over towards the town again: a few pale lights were moving against the darkness of the cliff. ‘Then I think we shall make sail.’
‘Without waiting for the rest of the water, sir?’
‘What does it amount to? Two tons, I believe. Yes: we will take that up another time, together with our stragglers. Now, Mr Watt, all hands to unmoor; and let it be done silently, if you please.’
He said this partly because of a cruel darting agony in his head that made the prospect of roaring and bellowing wonderfully disagreeable and partly because he wished the Sophie’s departure to excite no attention whatsoever. Fortunately she was moored with simple warps fore and aft, so there would be no slow weighing of anchors, no stamp and go at the capstan, no acid shrieking of the fiddle; in any case, the comparatively sober members of the crew were too jaded for anything but a sour, mute, expeditious casting-off – no jolly tars, no hearts of oak, no Britons never, never, in this grey stench of a crapulous dawn. Fortunately, too, he had seen to the repairs, stores and victualling (apart from that cursed last voyage of water) before he or anyone else had set foot on shore; and rarely had he appreciated the reward of virtue more than when the Sophie’s jib filled and her head came round, pointing eastward to the sea, a wooded, watered, well-found vessel beginning her journey back to independence.
An hour later they were in the narrows, with the town and its evil smells sunk in the haze behind them and the brilliant open water out in front. The Sophie’s bowsprit was pointing almost exactly at the white blaze on the horizon that showed the coming of the sun, and the breeze was turning northerly, freshening as it veered. Some of the night’s corpses were in lumpish motion. Presently a hose-pipe would be turned on to them, the deck would return to its rightful condition and the sloop’s daily round would begin again.
An air of surly virtue hung over the Sophie as she made her tedious, frustrating way south and west towards her cruising-ground through calms, uncertain breezes and headwinds –
winds that grew so perverse once they had made their offing that the little Ayre Island beyond the eastern point of Minorca hung obstinately on the northern horizon, sometimes larger, sometimes smaller, but always there.
Thursday, and all hands were piped to witness punishment. The two watches stood on either side of the main-deck, with the cutter and the launch towing behind to make more room; the marines were lined up with their usual precision from number three gun aft; and the little quarter-deck was crowded with the officers.
‘Mr Ricketts, where is your dirk?’ said James Dillon sharply.
‘Forgot it, sir. Beg pardon, sir,’ whispered the midshipman.
‘Put it on at once, and don’t you presume to come on deck improperly dressed.’
Young Ricketts cast a guilty look at his captain as he darted below, and he read nothing but confirmation on Jack’s frowning visage. Indeed, Jack’s views were identical with Dillon’s: these wretched men were going to be flogged and it was their right to have it done with due ceremony -all hands gravely present, the officers with their gold-laced hats and swords, the drummer there to beat a roll.
Henry Andrews, the ship’s corporal, brought up his charges one by one: John Harden, Joseph Bussell, Thomas Cross, Timothy Bryant, Isaac Isaacs, Peter Edwards and John Surel, all accused of drunkenness. No one had anything to say for them: not one had anything to say for himself. ‘A dozen apiece,’ said Jack. ‘And if there were any justice on earth you would have two dozen, Cross. A responsible fellow like you – a gunner’s mate –
for shame.’
It was the Sophie’s custom to flog at the capstan, not at a grating: the men came gloomily forward, slowly stripped off their shirts and adapted themselves to the squat cylinder; and the bosun’s mates, John Bell and John Morgan, tied their wrists on the far side, more for the form than anything else. Then John Bell stood clear, swinging his cat easily in his right hand, with his eye on Jack. Jack nodded and said, ‘Carry on.’
‘One,’ said the bosun solemnly, as the nine knotted cords sighed through the air and clapped against the seaman’s tense bare back. ‘Two. Three. Four. . .
So it went on; and once again Jack’s cold, accustomed eye noticed how cleverly the bosun’s mate set the knotted ends lashing against the capstan itself, yet without giving any appearance of favouring his shipmate. ‘It’s very well,’ he reflected, ‘but either they are getting into the spirit-room
or some son of a bitch has brought a store of liquor aboard. If I could find him, I should have a proper grating rigged, and there would be none of this hocus-pocus. This amount of drunkenness was more than was right: seven in one day. It was nothing to do with the men’s lurid joys ashore, for that was all over – no more than a memory; and as for the paralytic state of the seamen awash in the scuppers as the sloop stood out, that was forgotten too – put down to the easy ways of port, to relaxed harbour discipline, and never held against them. This was something else. Only yesterday he had hesitated about
exercising the guns after dinner, because of the number of men he suspected of having had too much: it was so easy for a tipsy fool to get his foot under a recoiling carriage or his face in front of a muzzle. And in the end he had had them merely run in and out, without firing.
Different ships had different traditions about calling out:
the old Sophies kept mum, but Edwards (one of the new men) had been drafted from the King’s Fisher, where they did not, and he uttered a great howling Oh at the first stroke, which so disturbed the young bosun’s mate that the next two or three wavered uncertainly in the air.
‘Come now, John Bell,’ said the bosun reproachfully, not from any sort of malignance towards Edwards, whom he regarded with the placid impartiality of a butcher weighing up a lamb, but because a job of work had to be done proper; and the rest of the flogging did at least give Edwards some excuse for his shattering crescendo. Shattering, that is to say, to poor John Surel, a meagre little quota-man from ‘Exeter, who had never been beaten before and who now
added the crime of incontinence to that of drunkenness; but he was flogged, for all that, in great squalor, weeping and roaring most pitifully, as the flustered Bell laid into him hard and fast, to get it over quickly.
‘How utterly barbarous this would seem to a spectator that was not habituated to it,’
reflected Stephen. ‘And how little it matters to those that are. Though that child does appear concerned.’ Babbington was indeed looking a little pale and anxious as the unseemly business came to an end, with the moaning Surel handed over to his shamefaced messmates and hurried away.
But how transient was this young gentleman’s pallor and anxiety! Not ten minutes after the swabber had removed all traces of the scene, Babbington was flying about the upper rigging in pursuit of Ricketts, with the clerk toiling with laborious, careful delight a great way behind.
‘Who is that skylarking?’ asked Jack, seeing vague forms through the thin canvas of the main royal. ‘The boys?’
‘The young gentlemen, your honour,’ said the quartermaster.
‘That reminds me,’ said Jack. ‘I want to see them.’
Not long after this the pallor and the anxiety were back again, and with good reason. The midshipmen were supposed to take noon observations to work out the vessel’s position, which they were to write on a piece of paper. These pieces of paper were called the young gentlemen’s workings and they were delivered to the captain by the marine sentry,with the words, ‘The young gentlemen’s workings, sir’; to which Captain Allen (an indolent, easy-going man) had been accustomed to reply,’ – the young gentlemen’s workings’, and toss them out of the window.