Neither pleased him. It was slack water – a very low tide indeed – and there was an odd heave and shudder on the surface, a motion not unlike twitching. The sky had been somewhat veiled before dinner. Now it was hazy and low: no breeze at all, and the exposed rocks smelt disagreeable in the
oppressive heat. A large pale fish, a shark of a kind he had not seen before, passed slowly by.
He watched the sea; and even before the turn of the tide he saw an unnatural swell set in: unnaturally sudden, unnaturally strong. His uneasiness increased, and after half an hour he turned to the master.
‘Mr Warren,’ he said, ‘the signal for officers and all boats, if you please; and meanwhile let the people get ready to lay out the small bower as before, but with two cables.’
Over on a level stretch of green outside the camp he saw the ordered pattern of a game of cricket break up and the players run down to the landing-place; and already the surf was sending its long lines of white along the shore.
‘Mr Warren,’ he said again, ‘I did ask whether you had a barometer, did I not?’
‘Yes, sir, you did; and I had to say I gave it to Dr Graham to have adjusted in Plymouth. It is still there, in course.’
Jack nodded and walked up and down, looking eastward at each turn, for not only was the swell coming from that direction but the horizon and the sky for ten degrees above it was taking on a dark coppery glare rarely to be seen.
‘Mr Fielding,’ he said as soon as the first lieutenant was aboard, ‘is the Doctor on shore?’
‘Yes, sir: he is under the impression that you may go for a walk in the forest with him, and perhaps climb down the farther cliff. He has a coil of stout, supple line and Sorley, a cragsman from one of the Scotch islands.’
‘Not today, I am afraid. Let all hands turn to and lighten ship: carronades, small arms, ammunition; whatever purser, carpenter, gunner, armourer, sailmaker and bosun think most important in their own line; then the hands’ bags and chests, officers’ personal property. And beg the Doctor to come aboard for his own things and the medicine-chest.’
Doctor Maturin came by the first returning boat, and though the tide of flood was not yet a half hour old, surf was breaking high on the rocks that closed the little bay on the west, breaking at unusually long and solemn intervals. He found Jack in the cabin with his clerk, assembling the ship’s documents, registers, signal-books, the enormous and sometimes most secret paper-work of a man-of-war. ‘Mr Butcher,’ said Jack, ‘do not for Heaven’s sake let us forget Mr Humboldt’s readings: they are on that locker over there. Let them be packed up with my hydrographical remarks.’
‘I will take them at once, sir,’ said Butcher, who had suffered from these hundreds of hours of accurate measurement and who valued them at their true worth.
‘Brother,’ said Stephen, when the clerk had staggered off with the files clutched to his bosom, ‘what is afoot?’
‘I am not sure,’ said Jack, ‘but it may be your St Cecilia:
And when that last and dreadful hour
This crumbling pageant shall devour,
The trumpet shall be heard on high,
The dead shall live, the living die,
And Music shall untune the sky.
Look out to the east, will you?’ They gazed through the stern window, where deep purple was massing beneath the coppery glare. ‘I only remember to have seen a sky like that once,’ said Jack after a long considering pause, ‘and that was when we were in the South Sea, standing for the Marquesas. You saw precious little of it, because a lee-lurch tossed you into the waist and you hit your head on a gun, but it came before a most stupendous blow, that same blow that wrecked the Norfolk. I do not like this sudden swell, neither. So I am clearing the ship as much as ever I can and I beg you will have everything you value taken ashore, and all your physic and saws and pills. If I am wrong, there is no great harm; they can only call me an old woman.’
It was perfectly clear that by now none of the seamen belonging to the frigate were going to call their Captain an old woman; they were all of his opinion, and their total conviction infected the afterguard, the landmen and the first-voyage Marines, vexed at first
by the loss of their game of cricket but now silent, casting anxious glances at the eastern sky.
The boats plied to and fro at racing speed, but with the making tide the much fiercer surf ran farther up the beach, much farther every voyage, however fast they pulled; and soon it was very hard to work the boats out through it to the ship. Worse: the ship being stern-on to the swell gave no shelter and coming alongside grew more and more perilous, so that chests, stores, cases had to be lowered or often tossed from the head-rails.
It was now that Jack called his first lieutenant below and said, ‘Mr Fielding, if this develops as I fear it may, let each officer be prepared to get his division ashore when I give the word. There will be no piping abandon ship, no calling out or excitement, just a plain going ashore in due order.’
For nearly an hour longer the swell grew without a breath of wind, and the great solemn crash came echoing back from the rocks; and towards the end of this hour the ship first began to shift on her bed. Jack had already given the word and little by little the ship had emptied until now there were only four men of the final boat-load still aboard, the Captain, his steward, the sentry guarding the spirit-room and a hand who was not quite right in the head. The purple had spread over half the sky, the coppery light over almost all the rest, reaching the far horizon here and there. From the darkness far astern there was a low constant thunder and the reflexion of lightning all along the eastern sky. Then with a howl the wind came racing across the sea in a white squall: one moment the air was calm and the next the full blast was on them, flying shattered water cutting their breath and blurring their sight. The launch, crammed with its last cargo, was hooked on to the forechains, only just holding, and Fielding roared with all his might, ‘Come on, sir. For God’s sake come on.’
Jack was at the break of the quarterdeck with the others. ‘Get along forward,’ he said to them and darted into the cabin to check: nobody. A last look and he raced along to the ship’s head and strode into the boat as it rose to the level of the rail. The moment Bonden and the bowman let go the boat shot away, flying before the terrible wind, rising and falling enor314
315mously; and away ahead Jack saw the large cutter pooped by a breaker, turn and roll over and over in the killing surf. But before the launch was half way to the shore the wind brought rain, a great black hurtling mass of warm rain; and now they were in the very midst of the thunder, stunning, ear-splitting thunder just overhead and lightning all about them.
‘Back water all,’ roared Bonden above the uproar, poising the launch on the back of a towering wave. ‘Give way, oh Christ give way.’
The heavy boat rose, rose, and sped for the beach, grounding high in a smother of foam. The whole crew was lining the shore and those who could find a hold ran her up the streaming sand and then by skids far up beyond the highest tide mark, close to the remaining cutter. The skiff was nowhere to be seen.
Jack had often noticed, and now he noticed it again, that in time of extreme emergency men often seemed to go beyond dread, pain and fatigue; and for noise, danger and the overturning of all natural order this was as extreme as a great fleet-action fought yardarm to yardarm. As they waded up the yielding slope and through the unbelievable rain, carrying their burdens, a line of trees on the edge of the forest blazed blue-green, and the lightning leapt back from them into the sky with a hiss. He bent to
shout into a quartermaster’s ear, ‘Look after Charlie,’ for the half-wit was crying, his knuckles to his eyes, and it looked as though he might lose his senses altogether. ‘Aye aye, sir,’ replied the quartermaster, as though it were the most natural thing in the world,
‘I’ll change him directly we’re under cover.’
They made their way up, and the enormous force of the wind diminished, for they came into the lee of the trees, the roaring trees; and through what light there was – for it was still day – they saw that the tents were standing. Welby’s ditches were gushing a thick muddy stream, tearing up the sward below their outlet, but the camp was not waterlogged and when Jack reached his quarters he found the ground quite firm. Not that he took notice of this not even the shelter from