– a man-of-war bound for Portsmouth, no doubt, on the opposite tack – and the Polychrest’s bow carronade answered regularly with quarter charges.
‘At least there will be four men who know how to handle one by morning,’ he reflected.
In a way it was unfortunate that this first acquaintance with his ship should come at a time when there was no horizon, when sea and air could not be told apart; but he was not sorry for it, upon the whole – it gained him some hours at least, it sent Gosport, its squalors and its possible complications far astern, and in any case he had been on fire to know how she handled in the open sea ever since he had set eyes on the Polychrest. She had the strangest motion, a kind of nervous lift and shudder like a horse about to shy, as she rose to the swell, a kind of twist in her roll that he had never known before.
Mr Goodridge, the master, could be seen in the glow of the binnacle, standing by the quartermaster at the con. He was a reserved, elderly man of great experience, once the master of a ship of the line, but broken for fighting with the chaplain and only recently put on the list again; and he was as intent upon the Polychrest’s behaviour as his captain.
‘What do you make of her, Mr Goodridge?’ asked Jack, walking over to the wheel.
‘Why, sir, for ardent griping, I have never seen the like.’ Jack took the wheel, and indeed, even at the rate of sailing, there was a steady, powerful thrust against him: the Polychrest wanted to get her head right up into the eye of the wind. He let her have her way, and then, just before the sails began to shiver the griping stopped; the helm went dead under his hand, and her odd corkscrew motion changed its rhythm entirely. He could not make it out, but stood there puzzling as he gently eased the Polychrest back on to her course. It was as though she had two centres of rotation, two pivots: if not three. . .
obviously jib, foresail and a reef in the mizen topsail would keep her off, but that was not the trouble – that would not account for this sluggish helm, this sudden lack of response.
‘Three inches in the well, sir,’ said the carpenter’s mate, making his routine report.
‘Three inches in the well, if you please, sir,’ said the master.
‘Ay,’ said Jack. It was negligible: she had not had anything of a trial yet, no working in a heavy sea; but at least it proved that those strange sliding keels and the nameless peculiarity of her quickwork did not mean that the water poured straight in: a comfortable reflection, for he had misgivings. ‘No doubt we shall find what trim suits her best,’ he
observed to the master and went back to the rail, half consciously trying to recreate his quarterdeck pacing in the little Sophie, while his mind, worn fine by Pullings’ feast, by the prolonged turmoil of unmooring with a foul hawse and by the anxiety of getting under way in a crowded road, turned to the problem of the forces acting upon the vessel.
The new-lit galley stove sent a whiff of smoke eddying aft, together with the smell of burgoo, and at the same time he heard the head-pumps beginning to work. Up and down, up and down, with his hands behind his back and
his chin tucked into his griego against the biting air: up and down. The figure of the Polychrest was as clear in his mind as if she had been a model held up to a lamp, and he studied her reaction to the creeping influence of the tide, and the lateral thrust of the wind, the eddies deep under her strangely placed rudders .
The after-guard were sprinkling the quarterdeck with their buckets, carefully avoiding his walk, and after them came the sand-men. The bosun was on deck: Malloch, a short, bull-like young fellow; had been bosun’s mate in the crack Ixion. Jack heard his shout and the thwack of his cane as he started a man on the fo’c’sle. And all the time there was the measured thump of the carronade, the now distant gun of the man-of-war, the horns away to port, the steady chant of the man heaving the lead in the chains – ‘by the mark nine. . .
ho yo ho yo. . . and a quarter nine.’
The rake of the masts was a great consideration, of course. Jack was an intuitive rather than a scientific sailor, and in his mental image of the Polychrest her backstays tautened until the angle of her masts looked right and some inner voice said ‘Belay there’. The holystones began their steady grinding: the decks could do with it, after the shambles of a hurried fitting-out. These were such familiar sounds and smells, these innumerable difficulties were so very much part of the world he had known from childhood, that he felt as though he had been returned to his own element. It was not that he did not like the land
– capital place; such games, such fun – but the difficulties there, the complications, were so vague and imprecise, reaching one behind another, no end to them: nothing a man could get hold of. Here, although life was complex enough in all conscience, he could at least attempt to cope with anything that turned up. Life at sea had the great advantage that something was amiss. He tried to place it, glancing sharply fore and aft in the greyness of approaching day. The fishing-boats that had been sailing on a parallel course were now astern: their melancholy wailing sounded almost
from the Polychrest’s wake. The Bill must be no great way ahead. It was time to go about.
A damned foolish moment to choose, with the people busy, and he would have preferred to wait until the watch below was on deck; but she might have made even more leeway than he had allowed for, and only a fool would run any risk for the sake of neatness.
‘We will put her about, Mr Goodridge,’ he said.
The bosun started his call. Brooms, buckets, swabs, squeegees, holystones, prayer-books, brass rags flew into sheltered places as his mates roared down the hatches ‘All hands, all hands ’bout ship’ and then vanished below to drive the sleepers up – those few so worn with toil, seasickness and desolation, that they were unconscious in spite of the carronade and the echoing thunder of the holystones. The score or so of right seamen had been at their stations ten minutes – Pullings and the bosun on the fo’c’sle, the gunner and his mates at the maintack, the carpenter at the foresheet, the Marines at the mainsheet, the maintopmen and the after-guard on the quarterdeck, at the braces – before the last desperate half-clothed bewildered landsman was hunted up, shoved and beaten and cobbed into his place.
‘Bear up,’ said Jack to the timoneer, waiting for this Bartholomew Fair performance to come to an end – a bosun’s mate was now belabouring the former tipstaff with his persuader, to help him understand the difference between a stay and a bowline. And when he felt a little more way on the sloop, saw something like order on deck, and judged the moment ripe, he called, ‘Ready about.’
‘Ready about, sir,’ came the answer.
‘Luff up handsomely, now,’ he said quietly to the man at the wheel, and then loud and clear, ‘Helm’s a-lee. Fore topsheet, fore topbowline, stays’l sheet, let go.’ The full-bellied curves of the headsails sagged and collapsed; the Polychrest moved in a long smooth curve up towards the direction of the wind.
‘Off tacks and sheets.’
Everything was ready for the decisive order that would bring the yards flying round; everything was as calm and unhurried as the sloop’s slow curve through this grey, heaving, formless world; there was time and to spare. And that was just as well, he thought, seeing the way they were shifting the sheets over the stays – something between cat’s cradle and puss-in-the-corner.
Her curve was slower now; and now the swell was coming more and more on to her starboard bow, heaving against her course. Slowly up and up: within two points of the wind, a point and a half, and the words ‘Mainsail haul’ had been long formed in his mouth when he realized that the deep steady sound to port and astern, the sound that was coming so clear and loud through the intent, waiting silence, was that of the breakers on Selsey Bill. She had made twice and three times the leeway he and the master had reckoned for. At the same moment he felt an essential change in her motion, a dead sullenness: she was going to miss stays. She was not going to travel up into the eye of the wind and carry on beyond it, so that the sails, braced round, would fill on the larboard side and bear her out to sea.