‘It is our obvious duty,’ said Stephen, with a pale smile. In the earlier crises of his life he had often, indeed generally, taken refuge in laudanum, or more recently in coca leaves:
on this occasion he had entirely forsworn them, together with tobacco and anything but the merest token of wine to avoid singularity; yet he had always despised the stylite or even hair-shirt kind of asceticism and he was still drinking the last of the pot with something not far from relish – Jack had left him ten minutes earlier – when the thundering drum beat to quarters.
He swallowed the remaining grouts and hurried down to the orlop, where he found Poll and Harris, the ship’s butcher: seamen had already lashed chests together to form two operating tables and Poll was making fast the covers of number eight sailcloth with a practised hand – she had already laid out a selection of saws, catlings, clamps, tourniquets, leather-covered chains, dressings, splints; while Harris had lined up buckets, swabs, and the usual boxes for limbs.
To them, after a long pause, entered Dr Jacob, led by an irascible boy – not a ship’s boy, but a nominal captain’s servant, entered as a first-class volunteer and looked after by the gunner until he should be rated midshipman and join their berth – one of those useless little creatures who had been wished on Jack Aubrey in Gibraltar by former shipmates, men he could not refuse, though the original hydrographical Surprise had carried no learners, only thoroughly trained midshipmen capable of passing their examination for lieutenant in a year or two.
‘There, sir,’ said the first-class volunteer, ‘it was as simple as I told you the first time. First left, second left, down the ladder and second on your right. Your right.’
‘Thank you, thank you,’ said Jacob; and to Stephen, ‘Oh sir, I do beg you to forgive me. I am no great seaman, as you know, and this great dark wandering labyrinth confounded me – darkness visible. At one time I found myself by the seat of ease in the head, spray dashing upon me from the rising wave.’
‘No doubt it will become more familiar in time,’ said Stephen. ‘What do you say to putting a true razor’s edge on our implements? Poll, my dear, there are two coarse and two very fine oilstones on the bottom shelf of the medicine chest.’
Each of the surgeons valued himself upon his skill in sharpening knives of all kinds, scalpels, gouges – almost everything indeed except saws, which they left to the armourer –
and they ground away by the light of the powerful lamp. There was some degree of silent competition, avowed only by the slightly ostentatious manner in which each shaved his forearm with his finished blade and his evident complacency when the skin was left perfectly bare. Stephen was uniformly successful with the scalpels, but he had to return the largest catling, a heavy, double-edged, sharp-pointed amputating knife, to the coarse stone again and again.
‘No sir,’ cried Harris, who could bear it no longer. ‘Let me show you.’ Stephen was not a particularly sweet tempered man, above all at this moment when Jacob had scarcely a hair left to show; but Harris’s professional authority was so evident that he let the heavy catling be taken – he let the stone be spat upon, the spittle smoothed with an even rapid drawing movement, heel to tip, then transferred to the fine stone and finished with an emulsion of spit and oil. ‘There, sir,’ said the butcher, ‘that’s how we do it in Leadenhall Market, asking your pardon.’
‘Well damn you, Harris,’ said Stephen, having tried the superlative edge. ‘If ever I have to operate upon you, I shall do so with an instrument of your own preparing, and . .
He was about to add something more likely to please when all present raised their heads, listening intently, ignoring the sound of the hull in a fairly heavy sea, the whole complex voice of the ship; and after a few seconds there it was again, not thunder but the sound of guns.
On deck Jack had not only the advantage of hearing more clearly but of seeing too.
The squadron had been sailing close inshore, heading for a point beyond which there rose the modest hill called the Sugar Loaf: at the first remote sound he had thrown out the signal Make more sail, and when they came round the point at twelve or even thirteen knots they had the battle spread out full before them in the little leeward bay, rosy with a burning ship and lit by innumerable flashes. The East India convoy, under sail, was being attacked by at least a score of xebecs and galleys, while smallcraft crammed with Moors waited to board any disabled merchantman.
The convoy, escorted only by a sixteen-gun brig-sloop, had formed in something of a line and it was protecting itself moderately well against the xebecs, powerfully armed though they were. But it was almost helpless against the galleys, which could race downwind of the line under sail, turn, take to their oars and come up from leeward, raking the hindmost ships from right aft or on the quarter, where their guns, though comparatively small and few, could do terrible slaughter, firing from so low and near, right along the deck, while the galley itself could not be touched by its victim’s cannon.
The rearmost Indiaman it was that lit the bay – an enemy
shot having no doubt traversed her light-room and powdermagazine – but even without that, the moonlight, the clear sky and the flashes made the position perfectly evident. Jack made the signal for independent engagement, emphasized it with two guns, and he launched the Surprise at what seemed to be the commanding xebec, the corsairs’ leader: the Moors had no distinct line of battle, but this one wore some red and tawny pennants.
They met, sailing with the wind on the beam, Surprise on the starboard tack, the Moor on the larboard. When each was five points on the other’s bow, Jack backed his foretopsail, and called, ‘On the downward roll: fire from forward as they bear.’
All along the deck the gun-crews crouched motionless, the captain with the linstock in his hand, glaring along the barrel. Officers and midshipmen exactly spaced.
Some desultory musket-fire, two or three well-directed round-shot from the xebec; the tingling sound of a gun hit full on the barrel; and immediately after the height of the wave Surprise fired a long rippling broadside from forty yards. The wind blew the smoke back, blinding them, and when it cleared they saw a most shocking wreckage, half the xebec’s ports beaten in and her rudder shot away. They also heard Jack’s roaring ‘Look alive, look alive, there: run ’em out!’ his order to fill the topsail and the cry ‘Port your helm!’
He took the Surprise right under the xebec’s stern. The frigate stayed beautifully and ran up the enemy’s side. The next slower, even more deliberate broadside shattered the Moor entirely. Xebecs were fine nimble fast-sailing craft, but they were not strongly built and she began to settle at once, her people crowding the deck and flinging everything that would float over the side.
Jack saw the whole of the rest of the squadron engaged, and Ringle playing long bowls with a half-galley that was trying to get into position to rake an Indiaman: even Dover had come up, in spite of having lost her main topmast; and the bay resounded with the bellowing of guns. But already the issue was decided.
The convoy and its escort had mauled the corsairs quite seriously in the first phase and the arrival of six brisk men-of-war made it absurd to stay. Those xebecs that could spread their huge lateens on either side, in hare’s ears, and raced away at close on fifteen knots southward home to Sallee, where with their slight draught they could lie safely inside the bar; while the uninjured galleys pulled straight into the wind’s eye, where no sailing ship could follow them. There were some stragglers, wounded xebecs and such, but there was no point in chasing them: they were useless as prizes and in any case there were more important things to do, such as succouring the ship on fire.
The blaze having been mastered by sunrise, and the combined bosuns and carpenters of the convoy having set about rerigging and repairing the ship, the commodore and senior captains of the Indiamen waited on Jack to express their acknowledgements and to hope that his squadron had not suffered very grievous loss.
‘Two of our men were killed, I regret to say, in the very first exchange, when a gun was struck on the muzzle. Otherwise there were only musket-ball and splinter wounds –
perhaps a score of hands in the sick-bay. The rest of the squadron are in much the same case. But I am afraid your losses must have been more considerable?’