He meant first to intimidate her with this heavy ball and then to overcome her by towing his ship within killing range and boarding with his boats -the others were ready for lowering.
‘All hands,’ called Jack in a strong but not unexpected voice, and the seamen below rushed up from their odious leisure. This was followed by a quick succession of orders, and Martin said to Stephen, ‘How they do run about, to be sure. What are those little groups beyond the teapot?’
‘They are duplicates for Sir Joseph Blain.’
‘You have mentioned Sir Joseph before, but I do not believe you have ever told me who he is,’ said Martin, looking a little jealously at a Dynastes imperator of which he had only two examples.
‘His daily bread is Whitehall,’ said Stephen, ‘but his delight is entomology, and he has a fine cabinet of rarities. He was one of the vice-presidents of the Entomological Association last year: I will introduce you when next we are in town. I trust I shall see him quite soon after landing. Amen, amen, amen,’ he said privately with some warmth, for that vile brass box and its monstrous uneasy wealth preyed upon his waking and his sleeping mind.
‘Casks over the side,’ called Jack. ‘Cast off the side-cloths. Mr Mowett, when is that boat going to be hoisted out?’
‘Directly sir, directly,’ cried Mowett from the gangway. But for once the ship’s efficiency failed her. The pin of a block had broken; the tackle was hopelessly jammed, and in spite of the bosun’s furious efforts the boat hung dismally from a single ring until the second cutter was bundled unceremoniously over the quarter. In the meantime, and to his intense vexation, Jack saw the farther sea, the northern sea, ruffling with a breeze coming fast from the west. It reached the Spartan and, filled with suspicion, she swung round to bring it on to her larboard quarter, veering the yawl astern as she moved away eastward, faster and faster, her people bracing round the yards with extraordinary activity.
‘Maintop, colours and the short pennant,’ cried Jack. ‘Master Gunner, put me a ball across her bows: and another through her mainsail if that don’t stop her.’
In the present position the starboard chaser was the only gun that could bear, but in any case Jack would not have used his broadside to begin with. Quite apart from killing people unnecessarily, he had no wish to maul the privateer and then spend days knotting and splicing. If she did not strike and lie to, however, he would have to do so; and all that was needed for the murderous discharge was swinging the ship six points, a simple matter in a sea as smooth as silk.
A simple matter, but for Awkward Davies. The blue cutter had been launched over the side by main force and had shipped a great deal of water in the process, but the crew took no notice of the bath they sat in and pulled furiously ahead to pick up the tow-line. Davies, at stroke oar, caught it: the cutter pulled on a few strokes to take in the slack, and then Davies stood up. His dark, fierce, brutal face was set, a line of white showed between his lips and his eyes were ablaze; taking no notice of Howard’s
squeaking orders he set his foot on the gunwale and gave an enormous heave. The boat instantly tilted, filled and sank.
Few of the cutter’s crew could swim and the situation was complicated by other people, also unable to swim, plunging in after them. By the time they had all been brought aboard, some of them pretty far gone, and by the time the ship had at last been swung round, the Spartan was a great way off. She had seen the horrid accuracy of the chaser, she had seen the long row of unmasked guns and the sudden swarm of men about her decks; she did not mean to wait for any further proof and she was already rigging out her weather studdingsail booms.
‘Fire high,’ said Jack, dripping on to his quarterdeck
– he had fished out the wretched Davies, as well as little Howard, for the third or even fourth time in their long acquaintance – ‘Fire high, and let the smoke clear between each shot.’
No. The broadside speckled the sea in the Spartan’s wake, short and poorly grouped.
‘House your guns,’ he said, and they did so, looking at him nervously. But this was no time for recrimination with the Spartan already making better than five knots
-. a cable’s length farther away every minute – and the breeze, the true, the steady breeze this time, spreading south to reach the Surprise. He studied the course of the wind with the keenest attention, unaware of the towel, the dry shirt and coat that Killick held out, mute for once, and he called ‘Man the fore clew-garnets.’
His mind was wholly concerned with making up these lost miles, for not only had the Spartan gained this flying start, but all the Surprise’s former gain was now so much handicap. The first high gusts reached the frigate’s royals and skysails: she swung round: she gathered steerage-way, and as the sun went down, turning her nascent wake blood-red, he began to make sail. Hitherto she had been beating up, with an array of sharply-braced square sails
and staysails reaching almost to the sky; now she was -to have the breeze on her quarter, or very near, and he set studdingsails aloft and alow, with a ringtail to the driver, bonnets, of course,, and save-ails under the studdingsails and even the driver-boom, brought the foretack to the cathead with a passaree, cast off the maintack and hauled the weather-clew of the maincourse to the yard.
All the hands, from the miserable Davies to the wholly irreproachable Bonden, seemed to be suffering from a sense of collective guilt, and his cold, impersonal, objective orders, with never an oath or a hasty word, designed solely to get the last ounce of thrust out of the breeze, quite daunted them. They hurried about in dead silence, with anxious faces; and when he ordered the fire-engine into the tops so that the sails, being wetted, might draw better, they pumped with such force that the jet reached beyond the royals, which ordinarily called for buckets, sent up with a whip.
In the darkening twilight he concentrated all his powers on the exact trim of sails and braces and presently the ship began to speak: her cutwater split a distinct bow-wave and innumerable small bubbles ran down her side with a continuous hiss, while the slightly increasing wind hummed and sang in the rigging. The moon rose directly ahead, and in her path he saw the Spartan, a magnificent wide-winged spread of canvas, like a distant bird; a distant bird, but no more distant than she had been a little while ago. She was no longer obviously gaining.
He loosened his very strong grip of the fife-rail, yawned from hunger, and glanced fore and aft. Over to leeward’ he was aware of Stephen and Martin smiling at him, as though willing to be spoken to.
‘You are too late for the clock-calm,’ he said, remembering that he had sent to them long ago. ‘There is a light air from the west at present, and with any luck it may grow into a breeze.’
‘We are sorry about the calm,’ said Stephen, ‘but we thought you might like to view our beetles. They are now fully set out for the first time, a most gratifying sight, covering the entire table and the floor. It cannot last however, the gentlemen of the gunroom being so impatient for their supper.’
‘That would give me great pleasure,’ said Jack, with a last searching look under the mainsail to the fully-drawing forecourse. ‘And if the gunroom – after the bugs, of course
– would invite me to take a bite of bread and cheese, how happy I should be. Mr Mowett, pray have the hands piped to supper at last, watch by watch, and tell Killick to rouse me up an elbow-chair, my broad night-glass and a boat-cloak. The dew is falling, so the engine may leave off.’
In this chair, wrapped in his cloak, he spent the
–
long moonlit night, rising at every bell to walk along the gangway to the forecastle and out along the bowsprit to peer at the Spartan with his night-glass between the spritsail course and its topsail. She was maintaining her lead, possibly increasing it, and she was obviously a flyer, commanded by a very able man; but Jack had the feeling that she would not be so happy in heavy weather, and if only the west wind would come on to blow as it sometimes did in these waters, he believed the Surprise would close with her. Apart from anything else he had a way of enabling her to bear an extraordinary press of sail, particularly with the wind abaft the beam: