He was pleased with his young gentlemen too. Circumstances had compelled him, much against his will, to take no less than six squeakers, some of them first-voyagers, of no use to man or beast. But he always had been a conscientious captain, and these being all sons of sea-officers he had determined to do his best for them: he had not only shipped a schoolmaster, but he had made sure that his schoolmaster, who was also the chaplain, could teach them Latin and Greek. He had suffered much from his own lack of education and he wished these boys to be literate creatures, to whom the difference between an ablative absolute and a prolative infinitive was as evident as that between a ship and a brig; he therefore supported Mr Martin’s efforts with encouragement of his own, sometimes delivered with the victim seized to a gun, his bottom bare, but more often taking the form of sumptuous breakfasts in the Captain’s cabin or suet puddings sent below. The results were not perhaps quite all that might have been hoped for, since practical seamanship in often trying conditions had to take precedence, and it did not seem probable that a Bentley or a Porson would burst upon an astonished world from the midshipmen’s berth in
HMS Surprise; yet even so Jack could truthfully swear that the frigate had the most accomplished berth in the entire service. Often during the middle watch he would come on deck and call the reefer on duty over to join his pacing, desiring him at the same time to decline a Latin noun or conjugate a verb in Greek.
‘They are decent youngsters,’ he said. ‘They are reasonably well based in simple navigation, and they have a tolerable notion of seamanship, particularly Calamy and Williamson, who are such old hands. And with all this Latin and Greek – why, their own families would hardly recognize them.’ This was no doubt true, for in addition to the Latin and Greek they had learnt much about the nature of the high southern latitudes, extreme cold, short commons, and the early stages of scurvy. In the course of learning Boyle had had three ribs stove in; Calamy had gone bald, and although he now had some downy hair it was not very beautiful; Williamson had lost some toes and the tips of both ears from frost-bite; Howard seemed permanently stunted, and want of teeth made him look very old, while Blakeney and Webber had suddenly shot up, all awkwardness, ankles, wrists and broken voices. They were also familiar with violent death, adultery and self-murder; but the knowledge did not seem to oppress them; they remained vapid, cheerful, very apt to race about the higher rigging like apes at play, to lie late in bed in the morning, and to neglect their duty at the least hint of fun elsewhere.
He had another cause for satisfaction in the frigate’s stores, so handsomely replenished in Bridgetown by the Admiral’s direct, insistent order. He and the bosun and the carpenter had had to ponder so heavily over the use of a few fathoms of cordage or a couple of deals for so long that it was a sensuous delight to move about among the bales, coils and casks, smelling pitch, paint, new rope and sailcloth and freshly-sawn wood. He had also laid in supplies of his own, so that he was able to return to his round of dinners, inviting his officers with a certain style in the traditional way: he liked all his officers, and he revered the traditions of the service.
But his cause for satisfaction was of course his ship. It seemed to him that she had never sailed so sweetly, and that her people had never worked so well and heartily together. He knew that this was almost certainly the last leg of her last voyage, but he had known that she was mortal for a great while now and the knowledge had become a kind of quiet heartbreak, always in the background, so that at present he took very particular notice of her excellence and of each day he passed on her.
Each day had its own character; it could not be otherwise at sea; but during this early calm progress before the frigate picked up the westerlies they were wonderfully alike. The immemorial sequence of cleaning the upper decks in the earliest morning, pumping ship, piping up hammocks, piping hands to breakfast, cleaning the maindeck, piping to the various morning exercises, the solemn observation of noon, hands piped to dinner, grog piped up, the officers drummed to the gunroom dinner, the afternoon occupations, hands piped to supper, more grog, then quarters, with the thundrous great guns flashing and roaring in the twilight – the immemorial sequence, punctuated by bells, was so quickly and
firmly restored that it might never have been broken. This was the sort of sailing everybody was used to, and now that the Agent Victualler in Bridgetown had done his duty by them this was the diet that everybody was used to as well; there were no more dolphin sausages served out to confound the mind and the calendar, no more imperfectly smoked penguins, but the regular and natural succession of salt pork, dried peas, salt beef, more dried peas, more salt pork; so that the days, though so much alike, could be told apart in a moment from the smell of the galley coppers.
It all gave a pleasant illusion of eternity, this quiet
sailing under a perfect sky towards a horizon perpetually five miles ahead, never nearer; but at the same time every man aboard, apart from the Gibraltar lunatics and one home grown innocent called Henry, knew that there was no permanence about it at all. For one thing, the paying-off pennant was already being prepared, a splendid silk streamer the length of the ship and more that was to be hoisted the day she went out of commission and all her people, paid at last, changed from members of a tight-knit community to solitary individuals. For another, since everybody was determined that if the barky were to be laid up in ordinary or if she were to go to the breaker’s yard, then she should go in style, they spent a great deal of their time beautifying her. She had been much battered south of the Horn, and all that Mr Mowett had screwed out of the Bridgetown yard and all that he had bought out of his own pocket – best gold leaf and two pots of vermilion – would hardly be enough to bring her to full perfection.
Given the Surprise’s very high standards and her first lieutenant’s love of perfection the prettying and the pennant would in any case have been difficult and time-consuming; they were rendered very much more so by the frigate’s deck-cargo and side-cloths. These were designed to give her the appearance of a merchantman, and the first was made up of empty casks that could eventually be knocked down and used for firewood, while the second were long strips of cloth painted with the likeness of gunports and fastened along the frigate’s sides, covering her real gunports and giving a fine impression of falsity, particularly when they rippled in the breeze.
The Surprises had long been used to their Captain’s ways and they took great delight in this disguise; there was something piratical about it and something of the biter bit (or to be bit) that pleased their very souls; and although the Spartan, a far-ranging privateer, could scarcely be expected for several hundred miles they worked
double-tides on the painted portlids, going over them again and again to get them just wrong, just a little too large and out of true, so that a sharp, predatory eye should pride itself on seeing through the deceit and close without hesitation. Nor did they make the least objection to striking down the deck-cargo in order to make a clean sweep fore and aft every evening for quarters.
This was Jack’s favourite time of the day, and the time when he was proudest of his ship and her people. He had always been a great believer in gunnery, and at great cost in time, spirit and private powder he had trained his gun-crews to something very near the highest pitch of efficiency their instruments allowed.
At different times the Surprise had been armed in different ways. At one point she had carried almost nothing but carronades, short, light guns that shot a very heavy ball for a very small charge of powder, so that with her twenty-four thirty-two-pounders and her eight eighteen-pounders she could throw a broadside of no less than 456 pounds, more than the gundeck of a line-of-battle ship. But she could not throw them very far nor very accurately, and although these carronades, these smashers as they were called, were wonderfully effective at close quarters so long as they did not overturn or set the ship’s sides on fire because of their shortness, Jack did not think much of them for blue-water sailing. At close quarters he preferred boarding to battering, and at a distance he preferred the fine-work of exact, very carefully aimed gunfire in rippling broadsides. At present the frigate carried twenty-two twelve-pounders on her maindeck and two beautiful brass long nines, Captain Aubrey’s private property, the gift of a grateful Turk, that might be fitted in the chase-ports below or that might, in suitable weather, take the place of the two forecastle carronades. She possessed six twenty-four-pounder carronades, but since they tended to oppress her in heavy seas they were often struck down into the hold; and in any case it was the cannon, the