‘I believe I have seen it on an old Catalan map in Barcelona,’ said Stephen. ‘And as I recall its name is Cranc, a crab.’
‘The breeze is joining us,’ said Jack, and he gave orders for all hands to come aboard: within minutes the frigate was alive again, her sails full, her bow-wave mounting.
And well before the hellish sun dipped down at last, they were in with the Island Crab.
There was not a hand aboard who had not seen one of the rowers – slave or unransomable captive – thrown screaming into the sea, the bloody sea, and there was not one who did not hate and loathe those that did it.
The island was presumably of volcanic origin, an eruptive peak that had then blown out its east side, leaving a shallow lagoon with a high wall broken only by a narrow channel through which the sea flowed in and out. From the tops they could see the galley moored under the rock wall near the entrance, close to a battered mole and some derelict buildings. She was entirely sheltered from anything but mortars: and the frigate possessed no mortars; nor could she enter such shallow water to use her guns.
The gentle topgallant breeze carried her round the island, surveying and sounding as she went, clean round with only a single tack: deep water, no apparent reefs, almost no vegetation on the land, no sign, no sign at all of water: nor, to Stephen’s astonishment, of sea-birds. On the west side, under quite steep cliffs, there was a little grey-green strand.
Jack had himself rowed to it, with Stephen: and as they walked on what sand there was, Jack observed that this was high tide; that the surf must be very severe indeed on this side, after a strong westerly blow; and that he hoped Stephen had found some interesting creatures in that cave.
‘I found something more interesting still,’ said Stephen. ‘A total absence of life. Well into June and not a nestling petrel even. No birds, no bird-lice, no feather mites. And I tell you what it is, brother: there is an uneasy smell in that rock, those fissures – pray thrust your nose into this one. I am no chemist, God forbid, but I very much suspect the presence of a poisonous emanation. That would account for the near-absence of vegetation, even in June.’ He mused, and while he was musing Daniel came and said to Jack, ‘Sir, we have a hand in the boat, McLeod, who was in Centaur in the year four: he says the position here is very like what it was when Captain Hood took the Diamond Rock.
He was a Saint Kilda cragsman in his youth, and he helped to get the guns up the cliff.’
‘It had not struck me,’ said Jack, ‘but the situation is indeed very like. Yet could he really carry a line up that cliff? McLeod,’ he called, and the tall, middle-aged seaman, a recent draught from Erebus in Gibraltar, came up, awkward and embarrassed. ‘Do you think you could take a line up that cliff? Right up that cliff?’
‘I think so, sir,’ said McLeod in his halting English, ‘with a little well-tempered hand-pick, and a stout peg with a block to send me up another twenty-five fathom. This is no so steep as Diamond Rock, but it is softer, and may be false at top.’
‘Should you like to try? If ever it grows too false you may come down with no shame – it is only an attempt, a trial.’
‘We hauled up twenty-four pounders,’ said McLeod, not quite following him.
‘Let us shove off at once,’ said Jack, and he led the way to the boat. They pulled back at a great pace, helped by the current and buoyed up by recollections of the Diamond
Rock, that most uncommon feat – back to Surprise as she lay so moored that her broadside would shatter the emerging galley on the starboard side if ever she ventured out, while Ringle would do the same to larboard.
The bosun roused out coils of the strongest white line; the armourer blew his forge to an incandescent heat, fashioned wedges with eye-holes for the blocks, forged and tempered a little hand-pick, one head a beak, the other a hammer, under McLeod’s supervision.
They were still too hot to hold as the boat pulled back, though in the mean time McLeod and his cousin had sewn tight sailcloth climbing shoes.
‘In the Pyrenees I have pursued the izard, God forgive me, who dwells in the highest peaks,’ said Stephen, standing with his hands behind his back, watching McLeod’s ascent, ‘but never have I seen such climbing. He might almost be a gecko.’
It was indeed an extraordinary spectacle, that stalwart twelve-stone man moving up the almost perpendicular lower cliff, fissured to be sure, but from below apparently smooth; and when he reached a ncore craggy stretch where he could rest and then drive home his peg and make fast his line, all hands cheered amain. He tossed down his ball of twine for the next coil and so, heaving it up and putting the coil over his shoulder and carried on, faster this time, up to the middle height, while his cousin Alexander, making use of the first line, made his way up. In a surprisingly short time they were able to look cautiously over the top, the whole lagoon open below them.
Now, while bold but less wholly intrepid hands chipped footholds along the line of the first rope and beyond, began one of the most elaborate cat’s cradles that Jack had ever seen: although it was nothing to the aerial railway of the Diamond Rock, it was the bosun’s seventh heaven, and presently all was ready to send a nine-poundçr cannon up, sliding along a steep messenger to a point where it commanded the lagoon: and if a nine-pounder would not answer, then two fourteen-pounders could not possibly be denied.
By night the Surprise came round at low tide, when the water was too low for the galley to attempt the outward passage from the lagoon. And offshore, in excellent holding ground, she dropped two anchors and then sent hawsers ashore. They rose by means of powerful tackles past the various staging points to the very summit, where they were made fast to a complexity of stakes and hauled taut by the ship’s capstan. ‘Chaser away,’
said Jack, and his personal nine-pounder was made fast to the messenger, slung below it by iron hoops. At the cry of ‘Handsomely, handsomely, now,’ the hands at the uppermost winch, under the command of Whewell, began to turn: the long hawsers, spliced end to end, stretched, sighed, grew more rigid, and the gun began its smooth progress up along the messenger. The gun, its emplacement, its munitions, represented a prodigious amount of labour; but as the sun rose, lighting the lagoon, with the galley up against its mole, nobody was in the least fatigued.
Jack knew his gun intimately: the distance was nothing much for a well-bored chaser – a little over a furlong – but as he told Stephen – who with Jacob, had been carried up like parcels – he had rarely fired at such a downward angle. ‘I shall just try one or two sighters,’ he said, ‘aiming at those dilapidated houses. Run her up, shipmates.’ The gun thumped against its emplacement: Jack shifted the wedge still farther, glared along the
sight, made one more trifling adjustment and clapped the linstock down, arching his body to let the recoiling nine-pounder shoot back under him. While the team swabbed, cleaned, reloaded, rammed home the wad and ran her up again, he stood fanning the smoke and smiling with satisfaction: the shot had gone right home. And the Moors were swarming about the galley and the mole like startled ants.
They were corsairs, men ofwar: they very quickly grasped their situation, their hopeless situation, and they seized Murad Reis, manhandled him along to the end of the mole nearest the cliff, tied his hands, forced him to kneel and called up, ‘Our sins on his head. Our sins on his head.’ With a single blow one of the corsairs cut Murad’s head clean off, held it up to the watchers on the cliff and cried, ‘Our sins on his head. Give us water and we shall be your slaves for ever – you shall have the galley: you shall have the gold.’
Some were drinking the blood, but most were gazing up, holding out supplicatory hands.
‘Will you answer, Dr Jacob?’ asked Jack.
‘It would wholly compromise my position,’ said Jacob. ‘Let us wait a little. I believe they have some other resource.’
They had: some moments later a dozen almost naked powerful seamen, deeply sunburnt, scored with whip lashes but recognizably white, were pushed forward, and their leader, squaring up to the cliff, called out in a hoarse Port of London voice, ‘God bless King George. Which we are British subjects, taken out of the Three Brothers, Trade’s Increase and other craft: and should be very grateful to your honour for a drop of anything wet. Amen.’