A ship that would not stay must wear – she must fall off from the wind, right round the way she came and much farther still, pivoting about her stern in a great leeward sweep until she had the wind aft, turning, turning until she could bring it astern and then at last on her other side, turning still until she was heading in the direction she desired – a long, long turn: and in this case, with this tide, swell and wind, the Polychrest would need a mile to
accomplish it, a mile of leeway before she could brace up sharp and head out into the Channel.
She was losing her headway; her sails were flapping dismally in the silence; with every thrust of the sea she was nearer the unseen shore. The alternatives flew through his mind: he could let her fall off, set the driver and try
again; he could wear and risk it, coming to an anchor if he had cut it too fine – an ignominious, horribly time-wasting process, or he could box-haul her. But dared he box-haul her with this crew? While these possibilities ran past his inner scrutineer a remote corner of his mind called out shrilly against the injustice of missing stays – unknown in such conditions, monstrous, a malignancy designed to make him late on his station, to allow 1-larte to call him unofficerlike, no seaman, a dawdling Sybarite, a slow-arse. That was the danger: there was no peril in this sea, nothing but a consciousness of having misjudged things, and the likelihood of an ugly, unanswerable rebuke from a man he despised.
These thoughts had their being between the time he heard the splash of the lead and the cry By the deep eight’ As the next cry came, A half less eight’ he said to himself, ‘I shall box-haul her.’ And aloud, ‘Haul up main and mizen tops’ls. Fore tops’l sheet hard a-weather.
Foretops’l sharp aback: clap on to that brace. Look alive on the fo’c’sle there. Lee bowlines, lee bowlines.’
As if she had run into a gentle cushion, the Polychrest’s headway stopped – he felt her underfoot – and she began to move backwards, the headsails and her lee-helm paying her round as she went. ‘Square main and mizen yards. Jump to those braces, now.’
She might not like turning up into the wind, but with her strange sharp stern she was very good at going backwards. He had never known such a sternway.
‘And a half eight,’ from the chains.
Round she went: the squared main and mizen yards lay parallel with the wind, the topsails shaking. Farther, farther; and now the wind was abaft her beam, and by rights her sternway should have stopped; but it did not; she was still travelling with remarkable speed in the wrong direction. He filled the topsails, gave her weather helm, and still she slid backwards in this insane contradiction of all known principles. For a moment all the certainties of
his world quivered – he caught a dumbfounded, appalled glance from the master – and then with a sigh from the masts and stays, the strangest straining groan, the Polychrest’s motion passed through a barely perceptible immobility to headway. She brought the wind right aft, then on to her larboard quarter; and hauling out the mizen and trimming all sharp, he set the course, dismissed the watch below, and walked into his cabin, relief flooding into him. The bases of the universe were firm again, the Polychrest was heading straight out into the offing with the wind one point free; the crew had not done very badly, no time worth mentioning had been lost; and with any luck his steward would have brewed a
decent pot of coffee. He sat on a locker, wedging himself against the bulkhead as she rolled: over his head there was the hurrying of feet as ropes were coiled down and made trim, and then came the long-interrupted sounds of cleaning – a bear, a great padded, shot-laden block of stone, started growling on the deck eighteen inches from his ears: he blinked once or twice, smiled, and smiling went fast asleep.
He was still asleep when the hands were piped to dinner, sleeping still when the gun-room sat down to its gammon and spinach, and for the first time Stephen saw all the Polychrest’s officers together – all except for Pullings, who had the watch, and who was walking the quarterdeck with his hands behind his back, pacing in as close an imitation of Captain Aubrey as his form could manage, and remembering, every now and then, to look stern, devilish, as like a right tartar as possible, in spite of his bubbling happiness. At the head of the table sat Mr Parker, an acquaintance of some days’ standing, a tall, spare, disapproving man, rather good-looking, apart from the expression on his face; then the lieutenant of Marines in his scarlet coat, a black-haired Scotsman from the Hebrides whose face was so marked by the smallpox that it was difficult to make out what habitual expression it might wear; he had a very well-bred turn, however; and Macdonald was his name. Mr Jones the purser, his neighbour, was also a black man, but there the likeness stopped; the purser was a drooping little flaccid man with pendulous cheeks either side of a fleshy red mouth; his face was the colour of cheese, and this uniform pallor swept up his high forehead to a baldness that reached from ear to ear. His straight hair grew only in a fringe round this pool, hanging some way down his neck, and in whiskers; yet a strong beard showed blue on his waxy cheeks, a very powerful growth.
His appearance was that of a small shopkeeper; but there was little time to judge of his conversation, for at the sight of his plate he started from the table with a watery belch, rushed staggering to the quarter-gallery, and was seen no more. Then there was the master, still yawning from his morning watch. He was a slight, elderly, grizzled man with bright blue eyes, and he said little as he set to his table at the beginning of the meal: Stephen was habitually
silent; the others were feeling their way with their new messmates, and their knowledge that the surgeon was the captain’s particular friend acted as a further check.
However, as Stephen’s appetite waned, so his desire for information increased, and laying down his knife and fork he said to the master, ‘Pray, sir, what is the function of the curious sloping metal-lined cylindrical place immediately in front of my store-room? What is its name?’
‘Why, Doctor,’ said Mr Goodridge, ‘what to call it I do not rightly know, other than an abomination; but the ship-wrights spoke of it as the combustion-chamber, so I take it it was where the secret weapon was stowed. It used to lead out on deck where the fo’c’sle is now.’
‘What kind of a secret weapon?’ asked Macdonald.
‘Something in the nature of a rocket, I believe.’
‘Yes,’ said the first lieutenant, ‘a kind of enormous rocket without a stick. It was the ship that was to be the stick, and those levered chutes for shot were intended to bring her by the head or by the stern for elevation: the weapon was calculated to destroy a first-rate at the distance of a mile, but it had to be amidships, to counteract the roll, and that was the reason for the system of lateral keels and rudders.’
‘If the rocket was the calibre of the chamber, then the recoil must have been prodigious,’
said Macdonald.
‘Prodigious,’ said Mr Parker. ‘That was why the sharp stern was imagined, to prevent the sudden thrust destroying her bottom – the whole ship recoiled, whereas a square stern, by resisting, would be crushed. Even so, they had to put a mass of timber where the stern-post should be, to take the first impact.’ A very exalted personage had been present at the experimental firing that had cost the inventor his life, and he had told Mr Parker that the ship had darted back her whole length, at the same time being pressed down in the water as far as her wing-transoms. The exalted personage had been against it from the start; Mr Congreve, who went down with the party, had said it would never answer; and it had not answered – these innovations never did. Mr Parker was against any break with tradition; it would never answer in the Navy; he did not care for these flint-locks for the guns, for example; although indeed they took a fine polish, and looked well enough, for an inspection.
‘How did the poor gentleman come to be killed?’ asked the master.
‘It seems that he would light the fuse himself, and as it hung fire, he put his head into the chamber to see what was amiss, when it exploded.’