Presently this ship will haul off, heave her wind, and spend hours, hours I say, bombarding the empty sea on the pretext of airing the mariners’ intellects and in fact doing nothing but frighten the birds: yet she would never consider stopping for five minutes to let us pick up so much as an annelid.’
Stephen knew that he had said all this before, off the many, many islands and remote uninhabited shores they had passed, irretrievably passed; he knew that he might be being a bore; yet the tolerant smile on Martin’s face, though very slight indeed, vexed him extremely.
After dinner – they had eaten alone – he said to Jack, ‘At breakfast yesterday, when you were telling me about your first days at sea, I quoted Hobbes.’
‘The learned cove that spoke of midshipmen as being nasty, brutish and short?”
‘Well, in fact he was speaking of man’s life, unimproved man’s life: it was I that borrowed his words and applied them to the young gentlemen.’ ‘Very well applied too.’
‘Certainly. Yet later conscience told me that my words were not only improper but also inaccurate. I looked out the passage this morning, and of course my conscience was right
– is it ever wrong? – and I had omitted the words solitary and poor. “Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” was what he said. And though poor may have been appropriate …”
‘Appropriatissimo,’ said Jack.
‘The solitude had nothing to do with the overcrowded berth of your childhood. The false quotation was therefore one of those flashy worthless attempts at wit that I so much reprehend in others. Yet the point of all this is not to beat my breast crying mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, but rather to tell you that on the very same page I found that Hobbes, a learned cove, as you so rightly say, considered glory, after competition and diffidence, mankind’s third principal cause of quarrel, so that trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion or any other sign of undervalue, were enough to bring violence about. Nay, destruction. I had read this passage before of course – it was on the same page, as I said –
but its full force had escaped me until today, when just such a trifle . . .’ ‘Come in,’ called Jack.
‘Captain Pullings’ compliments and duty, sir,’ said Reade, ‘and he believed you wished to know the moment the targets were ready.’
The targets were ready, rafts made of empty beef-casks and what odd pieces of plank and rail the carpenter could bring himself to part with, each with a square of bunting flying aloft.
The gun-crews were ready too, and had been ever since the Captain’s words to Clarissa were reported to the forecastle and confirmed by messages sent to the carpenter and the disappearance of the gunner and his mates into the forward magazine, where with infinite precautions they lit the lantern in the light-room and sat next door filling cartridges, stiff flannel bags made to take the due charge of powder, by the light that came through the double glass windows.
Each gun-crew naturally wished to wipe the eye of its neighbours, indeed of all other gun-crews aboard; but they were all eager to mollify their skipper, partly because it was more agreeable to sail under a captain that did not flog you and stop your grog, but even more because many were deeply attached to him and were eager to regain his esteem, while all hands freely acknowledged his seamanship and fighting qualities. Throughout the last dogwatch of Sunday, therefore, and in what few moments of leisure the forenoon and afternoon watches of Monday allowed, the captains of the guns and their crews titivated their piece, making sure that all blocks ran free, that all crows, worms, sponges, handspikes and other instruments that ought to be there were there in fact, smoothing their already well-smoothed roundshot, gently swabbing the name painted over the gun-port: Towser, Nancy Dawson, Spitfire, Revenge. This checking and re-checking was carried out by each member of the crew, by the midshipman in charge of a division of guns, by the officers, and of course by Mr Smith the gunner himself – everything was passed in review, from the upper-deck twelve-pounders and the long nines in the forecastle chase-ports to the twenty-four-pounder carron-ades on the quarterdeck.
No one therefore was either astonished or caught unprepared when, the drum having beaten to quarters and Mrs Oakes having appeared at the barricade, Captain Aubrey called ‘Silence’ in the midst of the expectant hush: a purely formal word, followed by ‘Cast loose your guns,’ and ‘Mr Bulkeley, carry on.’
After this no more orders were called for. The bosun and his mates eased the first target over the headrail, paused until it was rather better than a quarter of a mile aft and to leeward, then launched another, and so until there was a string of five going away to the south-west. The Surprise had been sailing close-hauled under topsails and topgallants during this; and after a considering pause Jack bore up and brought the wind on her larboard quarter: the sail-trimmers, aware of his motions, left their guns without a word, clapping on to brace and sheet until she was steady on her new course, when they belayed and returned to the stations like automata, no words having passed.
With the wind so far abaft the beam there was much less noise in the rigging, less from the bow-wave and little indeed from the following sea. The men had mostly stripped to the waist; those with pigtails had clubbed them; many had tied black or red handkerchiefs round their heads. They stood or knelt in their set positions – the powder-man with his cartridge-box directly behind his gun far to larboard; the gun-heavers right against the ship’s side with handspike or crowbar away from it; the boarders with their cutlasses and pistols, the fireman with his bucket, standing like statues; the match-holder kneeling clear of the murderous recoil; the captain glaring along the barrel; and as the target came in sight, fine on the starboard bow, a quarter of a mile away, murmuring words to his crew for pointing and elevation. And all this time the smell of slow-match in the tubs drifted along the deck.
‘From forward aft,’ called Jack as the first target came within range. ‘D’ye hear me, there: from forward aft.’
The match-holders reached behind them, seized the match and knelt by the captain again, blowing the ashes off its glow.
‘Starboard a point,’ said Jack to the helmsman, and then much louder ‘From forward aft: fire.’
The extreme tension broke as the bow-gun’s captain whipped the proffered match across to the touch-hole and the gun went off with a deafening crash, leaping bodily from the deck and instantly racing back between its minders with frightful speed. But even before it was brought up by the breeching, the scream of its trucks and the great twang of the rope was drowned by the crash of its neighbour and so down the line in a prodigious thunder-clap that went on and on, the jets of smoke stabbed through and through with orange flame, a roar that was taken up in a different voice by the quarterdeck car-ronades.
The wind drove the smoke away to leeward and the later shot could be seen raising white fountains in the general boil where the raft had been or skipping with immense bounds over the sea towards or even beyond it.
Already the foremost guns, held in on the recoil, were being wormed, sponged and reloaded; but before they were run out again one after another with the usual rumbling crash, Jack heard a clapping, thin and remote to his somewhat deafened ears, and turning he saw Mrs Oakes’ delighted face. Her eyes were dark with emotion and she cried ‘Oh how splendid! Oh what glory!’
Jack said ‘It was just a rippling broadside, not to strain her timbers. They will start again directly.’
‘How I wish Dr Maturin were here. Such prodigious …” She could not find the word.
‘Directly’ in this case meant two full minutes after the first discharge, a leisurely performance compared with the Surprise’s three accurate broadsides in three minutes eight seconds which she had achieved in the days when she was manned entirely by highly-trained men-of-war’s men; but now many of her people were privateers who had always shipped by the lay, having no wages but sharing in the proceeds of the voyage less the expenses. They therefore had a deeply-engrained hatred of waste and they could not be brought to add to the expenses by blazing away with powder at eighteen pence a pound, as though it were free – paid for by the King. In most cases Jack had mixed the gun-crews, to avoid jealousies; but Sudden Death for example was manned entirely by the frigate’s Sethians, privateers and members of a religious body in Shelmerston, excellent seamen, sober and reliable, but even more unwilling than most to waste a shot, and very deliberate in their aim. Still, by training their guns as far aft as they possibly could they did manage to send most of their shots close to the remains of the target.