There was not a breath of wind now. The Lydia rolled wildly, to the accompaniment of a spasmodic creaking of woodwork, flapping of sails, and clattering of blocks. Only the clangour of the pumps sounded steadily through the hot air. The Natividad was four miles away now — a mile and a half beyond the farthest range of any of the Lydia’s guns.
“Mr Bush,” said Hornblower. “We will tow with the boats. Have the launch and the cutter hoisted out.”
Bush looked doubtful for a moment. He feared that two could play at that game. But he realised — as Hornblower had realised before him — that the Lydia’s graceful hull would be more amenable to towing than the Natividad’s ungainly bulk, even without counting the possibility that yesterday’s action might have left her with no boat left that would swim. It was Hornblower’s duty to try every course that might bring his ship into action with the enemy.
“Boats away!” roared Harrison. “Cutter’s crew, launch’s crew.”
The pipes of his mates endorsed the orders. The hands tailed on to the tackles, and each boat in turn was swayed up into the air, and lowered outboard, the boats’ crews fending off as the Lydia rolled in the swell.
There began for the boats’ crews a period of the most exhausting and exasperating labour. They would tug and strain at the oars, moving the ponderous boats over the heaving waves, until the tow ropes tightened with a jerk as the strain came upon them. Then, tug as they would, they would seem to make no progress at all, the oar blades foaming impotently through the blue water, until the Lydia consented to crawl forward a little and the whole operation could be repeated. The heaving waves were a hindrance to them — sometimes every man on one side of a boat would catch a simultaneous crab so that the boat would spin round and become a nuisance to the other one — and the Lydia, so graceful and willing when under sail, was a perfect bitch when being towed.
She yawed and she sagged, falling away in the trough on occasions so much that the launch and the cutter were dragged, with much splashing from the oars, stern first after her wavering bows, and then changing her mind and heaving forward so fast after the two ropes that the men, flinging their weight upon the oar looms in expectation of a profitless pull, were precipitated backwards with the ease of progression while in imminent danger of being run down.
They sat naked on the thwarts while the sweat ran in streams down their faces and chests, unable — unlike their comrades at the pumps — to forget their fatigues in the numbness of monotonous work when every moment called for vigilance and attention, tugging painfully away, their agonies of thirst hardly relieved by the allowance of water doled out to them by the petty officers in the sternsheets, tugging away until even hands calloused by years of pulling and hauling cracked and blistered so that the oars were agony to touch.
Hornblower knew well enough the hardship they were undergoing. He went forward and looked down at the toiling seamen, knowing perfectly well that his own body would not be able to endure that labour for more than half an hour at most. He gave orders for an hourly relief at the oars, and he did his best to cheer the men on. He felt an uneasy sympathy for them — three-quarters of them had never been sailors until this commission, and had no desire to be sailors either, but had been swept up by the all-embracing press seven months ago. Hornblower was always able (rather against his will) to do what most of his officers failed to do — he saw his crew not as topmen or hands, but as what they had been before the press caught them, stevedores, wherry men, porters.
He had waggoners and potters — he had even two draper’s assistants and a printer among his crew; men snatched without notice from their families and their employment and forced into this sort of labour, on wretched food, in hideous working conditions, haunted always by the fear of the cat or of Harrison’s rattan, and with the chance of death by drowning or by hostile action to seal the bargain. So imaginative an individualist as Hornblower was bound to feel sympathy with them even when he felt he ought not, especially as he (in common with a few other liberals) found himself growing more and more liberal-minded with the progress of years. But to counterbalance this weakness of his there was his restless nervous anxiety to finish off well any task he had set himself to do. With the Natividad in sight he could not rest until he had engaged her, and when a captain of a ship cannot rest his crew certainly cannot — aching backs or bleeding hands notwithstanding.