The quartermaster unhooked the last and waved his arm; the pilot turned to Standish, said, ‘Now, sir, if you please,’ and guided him to the rail, helped him to mount upon it and balance there, grasping a shroud, and said ‘Just spring across to them steps at the top of the rise; spring easy before she falls.’ With a boat-hook he pulled the cutter as close to the ship as was right in this choppy sea and right under the steps.
The Surprise, stored for a very long voyage, was low in the water, yet even so some twelve feet of wet side rose from the sea-level; and the steps, though wide, were startlingly shallow. Stephen and Martin stood immediately above him, by a gangway stanchion, leaning down and giving advice: Standish was the only man belonging to the
ship who knew less about the sea than they (he had never left the land before) and they did not dislike sharing their knowledge.
‘You are to consider,’ said Stephen, ‘that the inward slope of the ship’s flank, the tumblehome as we call it, makes the steps far less vertical than they seem. Furthermore, when the ship rolls from you, showing her copper, the angle is even more advantageous.’
‘The great thing is not to hesitate,’ said Martin. ‘A determined spring at the right moment, and the impetus will carry you up directly. I am sure you have seen a cat fly up a much steeper wall, only touching once or twice. Impetus; it is all impetus.’
The two vessels wallowed companionably for a while.
‘Leap, leap!’ cried Martin at the third upward rise.
‘Stay,’ said Stephen, holding up his hand. ‘The roll, or heave, is wrong.’
Standish relaxed again, breathing hard. ‘Come on, sir,’ said the pilot impatiently as the boat rose once more. Standish gauged the distance and gave a convulsive spring; he had much over-estimated the expanse of water and he struck the side with great force, missing the steps entirely and falling straight back into the sea. The pilot instantly shoved off, to prevent the next surge from crushing him between the cutter and the ship. Standish came to the surface, spouting water; the pilot lunged with his boat-hook, but missing his collar, tore his scalp. Standish sank again, and the cutter, no longer anchored to the Surprise, drove before the wind. ‘I can’t swim,’ roared the pilot, and Jack, looking up from his precious hygrometer, cyanograph and the rest, grasped the situation at once.
Flinging off his coat, he plunged straight over the side, striking the purser as he rose again and driving him down breathless a good four fathoms, into quite dim water. This however gave time for entering ropes to be shipped and for a line with a man-harness hitch to be passed down, so that when Jack – a practised hand – brought Standish’s head clear of the water, the purser could be hauled aboard and the Captain could walk up the steps of his ship at his ease.
He found Standish sitting on a carronade-slide and gasping while the surgeons examined his wound. ‘Nothing at all,’ said
Stephen. ‘A mere superficial tear. Mr Martin will sew it up in a trice.’
‘I am most exceedingly obliged to you, sir,’ said the purser, standing up and fairly pouring blood from the superficial tear.
‘My dear sir, I beg you will not think of it,’ replied Jack, shaking his bloody hand.
Leaning over the rail he called out to the pilot, who was clawing up into the wind, ‘All’s well’, and ran below, where a furious Killick was waiting with a towel, a dry shirt and trousers. ‘And these here woollen drawers, sir,’ he said. ‘You done it again – you are always a-doing of it – but this time you will catch your death, without you put on these woollen drawers. Who ever heard of dipping his bare arse off of the Eddystone? It is worse than the North Pole: far worse.’
Standish had been led right aft to be stitched in a really good light, and they were swabbing his blood from the deck, the slide and even the metal of the carronade. Opinion among the foremast hands was quite strongly against the purser.
‘A pretty beginning,’ said Awkward Davies, who like many other Surprises had been rescued by Jack Aubrey but who very much disliked sharing this distinction. ‘Nothing could bring worse luck.’
‘He has ruined the Captain’s fine pantaloons with his nasty blood,’ said a forecastleman. ‘It never comes out.’
‘Now he is being sick,’ observed old Plaice.
‘Mr Martin is handing him below.’
Standish and his perfectly proper, indeed absolutely called for, expression of gratitude having disappeared, faintly belching, Jack returned to the quarterdeck and said to Stephen, ‘Let me show you my splendid hygrometer. Here are spare blades, at the side of the case, do you see – uncommon neat. And wonderfully sensitive, much more so than the whalebone kind. Should you like to breathe upon it? What a piece of luck poor Standish did not bring it over in his pocket. That would have damped its spirit, I believe.’
Jack laughed heartily, showed Stephen the cyanoscope, and walked him away to the taffrail, where he said quietly, ‘I wish you had been here a little while ago. The Orkneymen sang out in a most surprising manner. I
had never heard them before, what with the refitting, the coppering, the quarter-davits, and they being kept busy in the hold; but before we get under way again I think it can be repeated, and I should like you to tell me what you make of their cadences.’
The Surprise had been lying to all this time, although the pilot-cutter was now no more than a speck beyond the Eddystone and the ships of the line had altered course to enter the Sound; and many a questioning glance had been cast at her captain. He now walked forward and said, ‘Mr Davidge, I am not quite pleased with the foretopsailyard; pray let it be eased off and settled a trifle more snug. Then we may get under way again, setting the foretopgallant: the course south-west by south. I should like to see it done by Macaulay and his mates,’ he added, ‘with the after-guard tailing on.’
The usual cries, pipes and running feet, and then after a moment’s pause that outlandish song:
Heisa, heisa,
Vorsa, vorsa,
Vou, you.
One long pull,
More power,
Young blood.
More mud.
‘I believe they may have it from the Hebrides,’ said Stephen. ‘It is not unlike the seal-singing of those parts; or indeed some I have heard in the far, far west of Ireland, on Belmullet, where the phalarope lives.’
Jack nodded. He was considering the fact that ‘more mud’ had replaced the wild shriek, and that the blocks had not clashed together with the haulers’ zeal. He would go into that with Stephen later, and ask him whether it was a deformation of Gaelic. Or Norse? An expression of opinion? In any event, it had a strange beauty. For the moment there was the foretopgallant to be set.
More orders, more piping, more running feet: hands racing
aloft. The cry ‘Let fall, let fall,’ and the topgallant billowed loose; they sheeted it home and the Orkneymen clapped on to the halliards. The sail rose, filling round and taut as the yard moved up and the men sang
Afore the wind, afore the wind
God send, God send
Fair weather, fair weather,
Many prizes, many prizes.
The naval Surprises might not hold with shanties in general but they thoroughly approved of this one, above all its sentiment; and with ship swinging to the true south-west by west and gathering speed, all those forward of the quarterdeck repeated Many prizes, many prizes.
37
Chapter 2
Fair weather, fair weather bore the Surprise right out beyond the chops of the Channel, to the lonely waters Jack preferred for priddying the decks and making all ship-shape and man-of-war fashion before he turned south for Portugal. It was not that as a letter of marque he feared any pressing of his hands, nor incivility on the part of any considerable King’s ship; for in the first place he had his protection from the Admiralty and in the second those few senior officers in the home or Mediterranean fleets who might hive offered to treat the Surprise as a common privateer – obliging Aubrey to lie to, to come up under their lee, bring his papers aboard, justify his existence, answer questions and so on – knew that now he was a member of parliament he was likely to be restored to the list. But on the one hand he preferred to avoid the invitations of even the well-inclined (apart from intimate friends) and the slight awkwardness of their reception of him as a mere civilian; and on the other he would as soon do without the nuisance of the busy unrated vessels of the smaller kind commanded by lieutenants or even by master’s mates. They could be dealt with, of course, but it was a time-wasting bore, an irritation.