The first boat to carry anything to the island brought back the secretary, Edwards, with the envoy’s compliments, and
should it be convenient for Captain Aubrey to come ashore, Mr Fox would be happy to have an interview, as a matter of some urgency.
‘Please put my reply in the proper form,’ said Jack, smiling at the poor young man.
‘I am far too stupid to do so this morning. Something in the line of happy – delighted –
earliest convenience, if you please: compliments, of course.’ And when Edwards had gone he said to Stephen, ‘I shall go, when I have had a cat-nap; but what a time for standing on ceremony, for God’s sake. He might just as well have come here in the same boat.’
Fox seemed to have some sense of this when he greeted Aubrey at the landing-place – a haggard, ill-looking, dead-tired Aubrey, in spite of his cat-nap. ‘It is very good of you to come, sir, after what I am sure was a trying day and night; and I should not have troubled you if I had not felt it urgently necessary to consult you on the King’s service.
Shall we walk along the shore?’ They turned from the miscellaneous heaps of files, tape-bound papers, baggage, bales and stores, with disconsolate people sitting about among
them, and paced slowly towards the farther end of the little bay, where the sand curved away to rocks that thrust far into the sea.
‘I speak under correction, sir,’ began Fox after a few steps, ‘but as I understand it, in spite of your heroic efforts the ship has remained on her reef and must there remain until the next spring-tide.’
‘Just
so.’
‘And even then it is not quite certain that she will come off, or that having come off she can sail to Batavia without more or less prolonged repairs.’
‘There is almost no absolute certainty at sea.’
‘Yet in all this we do have one firm unquestioned fact: she cannot float until next spring-tide. Now I do not speak in the least sense of criticism, far less of blame, but I do put it to you, Captain Aubrey, that this delay would be most prejudicial to His Majesty’s service, and that it is therefore my duty to ask you to have me conveyed to Batavia in one of the larger boats.
The loss of more time may have incalculable effects on the general strategy at home – as you know, the balance is so fine that the detachment of a single ship can make an enormous difference – and it may have more immediate and obvious effects on the East India Company’s actions. The Directors must know as soon as possible whether or not they can risk this season’s Indiamen on the China voyage; and all this has the greatest influence on the country’s prosperity and its power of waging war.’ And after a pause in which Jack was turning this over in his weary mind, ‘Come, it is barely two days’ sail with the steady breeze of this time of the year; and the Governor will instantly send ships and artisans in case the Diane needs extensive repairs.’
‘It is close on two hundred miles to Batavia,’ said Jack. ‘And these are dangerous waters. I am not familiar with the South China Sea or what its sky foretells, and my instruments are out of order. There is the weather; there are the Malays, the Dyaks and the Chinese.’
‘I have known these waters for thirty-five years; and Loder,
who has sailed right round Java in just such a boat as the
pinnace, has known them almost as long He foretells fair
weather, our Malays foretell fair weather, and well armed we should be quite at our ease. I put it to you again: this is a
matter of duty.’
They walked on in silence, and when they reached the end of the cove Jack sat down on the rock, reflecting. ‘Very well,’ he said at last. ‘I will let you have the pinnace with a carronade in her bows and a couple of hands to work it – muskets for all your people – an officer to navigate, and a coxswain.’
‘Thank you, Aubrey, thank you,’ cried Fox, shaking his hand. ‘I am deeply obliged. .
. but I expected no less of you, sir.’
‘I shall send the pinnace in at eleven o’clock, manned and rigged. There are provisions, water and firing already ashore. I wish you a quick and fortunate passage: my best compliments to Mr Raffles, if you please.’
Returning to the ship he said to Fielding, ‘The envoy is away
306for Batavia in the pinnace, armed with a twenty-four-pound carronade, a dozen muskets and proper ammunition. They have all they need in the way of stores. I shall need three volunteers, one fit to act as coxswain, and an officer to take them there.’
To Stephen he said, ‘Fox cannot wait for the moon. He is off to Batavia with his treaty: I have agreed to let him have the pinnace.’
‘Is this a sensible man’s undertaking, Jack?’ asked Stephen in a low, troubled voice. ‘It is not a mad, disproportionate venture?’
‘Mad? Lord, no. Batavia is only a couple of hundred miles away. Bligh sailed close on four thousand in a smaller boat, much less well-found than our pinnace.’
‘Your pinnace,’ observed Stephen; and in fact it was Jack’s private property.
‘Well, yes. But I hope to see it again, you know.’
‘He will be accompanied by competent people? He will not give wild improper orders?’ Stephen went on, willing to soothe his uneasy conscience.
‘He may give wild improper orders,’ said Jack, smiling wearily, ‘but no one will take any notice. One of our officers will be in command.’
The officer in question was Elliott, who had had the watch when the Diane struck.
He knew very well that if he had remembered his orders and had reefed topsails when the breeze increased the ship would have been making no more than three or four knots at the moment of impact rather than a full eight. A cruel blow in any case, but probably not a disastrous one. Jack knew it, since he had seen the full topsails laid aback; and Elliott knew that he knew it. Neither had said anything, but Jack at once agreed to his request that he should take the pinnace, led him through the charts and observations and checked his instruments, lending him a better azimuth compass.
Elliott left the ship in what was in fact his first command a little before eleven. He was at the landing-place at the stated
time; and then followed one of those intolerable delays typical of landsmen –
packages forgotten, fetched, exchanged for others, confused; arguments, screeching, counter-orders; arrangements changed – and Jack, who had intended to remain on deck until the pinnace sailed by into the offing, went below and slept for twenty minutes: he had not turned in all night.
Hauled back into the present world, he stood on the motionless quarterdeck, taking off his hat to the distant Fox, equally erect, equally bareheaded, as the pinnace, quarter of a mile away, went about and headed south-south-west.
‘Well, Mr Fielding,’ he said, having gazed for a while at the decks and the distant shore, ‘they have left us looking not unlike Rag Fair: decks all ahoo, and the beach like a gypsy encampment after the constables have taken them all away. Is that Mr Edwards I see over there, in the black breeches?’
‘Yes, sir. He told me he was to be left behind with a copy of the treaty, in case of accident.’
‘Oh, indeed? After dinner, then, let all hands make things look a little more shipshape here – I should like my joiner and his mates to put the cabin back as it was –
and then repair on shore and put that mass of objects into some kind of an order before we lighten the ship any further. We cannot go on living indefinitely with a disused pawnshop just at hand:
furthermore, we must set about finding water.’
A real sleep before his own dinner, and above all dinner itself did wonders for Captain Aubrey. ‘I once ate my mutton at an inn called The Ship Aground,’ he said to his guests, ‘but I never thought to do so in sober earnest: a very whimsical idea, upon my word. Mr Edwards, a glass of wine with you, sir. Captain Welby, I know I must not speak of service matters at table, but pray put me in mind of the word that has been on the tip of my tongue this last half hour – the subject I must consult with you when we go ashore – the learned word for setting up tents and so on.’
‘Castramentation, sir,’ said Welby, beaming with decent triumph – it was rare that a soldier could triumph aboard a man-of-war-‘And there is more to it than might be supposed.’