‘That was rather a ragged ripple, I am afraid,’ said Jack to Mrs Oakes. ‘I trust we shall do better next time.’
They did better, much better: one minute forty seconds between broadsides, the first raising the target high on a turmoil of white water, the second scattering it all abroad.
‘Make fast your guns,’ cried Jack over the cheering – Clarissa’s pipe could be heard as shrill as Reade’s – and he took the ship across the line of targets to engage the next two with the larboard guns, already cast loose by the second captains.
Firing from to-leeward meant that the flight and pitch of the shot could be followed more exactly, and when Jack, having given the order ‘House your guns’ turned to Clarissa, not without pride, and asked her how she had liked it, she cried ‘Oh sir, I am quite hoarse with hallooing and amazed with the sound and the glory. Dear me, I had no notion . . . What a terrible, splendid thing a battle must be: like the Day of Judgment.’ And after a pause,
‘Pray what do you mean to do with the fifth?’
‘That, ma’am, is for the bow-chasers.’ He looked affectionately at her face, glowing with candid excitement and enthusiasm – she had never looked so animated nor half so handsome – and for a moment he was inclined to invite her to come forward and see the fine-work of firing a gun. But he hesitated, put the notion aside as out of place and walked along the gangway over the happy, sweating gun-crew in the waist as they were securing their guns, bowsing all lashings taut and talking in the loud, after-broadside voice about their wonderful accuracy and speed. ‘Though mark you,’ said the captain of Spitfire, ‘we should have been even quicker, if some people had been more sudden than dead.’ His neighbour, the bearded Sethian Slade, captain of the gun called Sudden Death, instantly replied ‘And we should have been even more accurate, if some other people had been more deadly than sudden.’
Respect for their Captain, immediately overhead, restrained the Sethians’ joy, but they beat Slade on the back and shook both his hands, while even the Spitfire crew laughed and said ‘That got you in the balls, Ned.’
The bow-chasers on the forecastle were what the Navy called brass long nine-pounders.
They were in fact made of bronze rather than brass, but the force of the word was such that the hands polished them assiduously, producing all the shine that bronze was capable of: on the other hand they were long and they did take nine-pound balls; they were also as accurate as smooth-bore cannon could well be. They both belonged to Jack:
one he had bought in Sydney, the other he had had time out of mind and he knew its temper, its kick, its tendency to shoot better from the third ball to the twelfth, when it called for a rest to cool – if this were denied, it was apt to leap and break its breeching.
Both Jack and Tom Pullings loved to fire a great gun. Each had his own picked crew and each pointed his own chaser: each now fired three rounds; and as Jack himself had taught Pullings, then a long-legged midshipman in his first command, how to point a gun, their style was very much the same. One shot, though true for line, a little long; the next a trifle short; while Jack’s third scattered the barrels and Pullings’ leapt skipping through the wreckage. With the ship taking the swell abeam, the roll scarcely affected guns firing ahead, and she hardly pitched at all; so with a range of five hundred yards, rapidly narrowing, this was no outstanding feat of gunnery; but it thoroughly pleased the gunners and delighted the hands. Mrs Oakes’ congratulations could not have been kinder, and in the excitement both West and Davidge ventured ‘Give you joy of your shooting, sir.’
All this had taken a remarkably short time measured by clock rather than by activity and emotion, and a little before sunset all hands were summoned aft. When they were assembled in their usual unseemly heap their Captain surveyed them with a benevolence they had not seen this many a weary day and night and in his strong voice he said
‘Shipmates, we have warmed our guns and new-charged them: no fear of damp powder or charges that have to be drawn. And that is just as well, because we may have to use them in a couple of days or so. I will tell you the position. There is a British ship and her crew captured in Moahu, the island we are heading for, by the natives and their friend an American privateer, the Franklin, ship-rigged, twenty-two nine-pounders, French crew.
The island is used by some English fur-traders on the Nootka-Canton run, and by certain South Sea whalers; and she may try to snap some more of them up. She nearly had the Daisy, as you heard in Annamooka. So we must put a stop to her capers. When we cut the Diane out of St Martin’s I was able to tell you just how she lay. This time I cannot do so, although the master of the Daisy gave me a chart of the harbour and the approaches; but I do not think we shall go very far wrong by laying her alongside and boarding in the smoke.’
The Surprises, who had been listening with the utmost intensity, nodded their heads and uttered an affirmative growl, interspersed with ‘that’s right, mate’ and ‘board her in the smoke, ha, ha.’
‘But we want no trouble,’ said Jack. ‘We do not want any of our people to be knocked on the head, if we can avoid it. So since she will be pleased at the sight of a whaler, English or American, our best plan is to sail in looking as much like one as ever we can. Of course there may be no sailing in: she may have thrown up batteries each side of the narrows and she may smoke what we are at: and we may have to deal with the situation some other way. But in any case the first thing to do is to make the ship into a whaler: we turned her into a blue Spanish barque once, as I dare say you remember; and that answered quite well.’ General laughter, and a cry of ‘God love us, how we sweated!’ ‘Now I know at least a score of you have been in the Greenland or South Seas fishery at one time or another, and I want those hands to choose the three longest-headed, most experienced men among them to help us change the barky into a whaler, a tired, shabby, down-at-heel, three-years-at-sea old whaler, short-handed and peaceful.’
Chapter Nine
An old tired shabby whaler, with a crow’s nest aloft, trying-out gear and general filth on deck and deeply squalid sides stood into Pabay, the north-eastern port of Moahu, in Kalahua’s territory, just making headway against the ebb under a single blue-patched foretopsail.
In her crow’s nest stood her even shabbier master in a blackguardly round hat, crammed up against his unshaven mate, both of them gauging the wind and the distance between the two headlands on either side of the entrance. ‘We should get out in two tacks at slack water or on the ebb,’ said Jack, and they returned to their examination of the far end, where the wide, sheltered bay drew in before broadening into the harbour itself.
‘We shall open the narrows any minute now, sir,’ said Pullings.
Jack nodded. ‘I do not see a hint of a battery on either side,” he said: and then as the narrows opened he called down ‘Mr West, come up the sheet and drop the kedge.’
‘Nor no privateer neither,’ said Pullings. ‘The fat round tub of a ship right down against the shore where the stream comes in is a Nootka fur-trader, if ever there was one.’
Jack nodded again: he had had her in his glass for some time and after a silence he said
‘She must be the Truelove. She was hove down just there when Wainwright left her. They have come at the leak. She has crossed her yards and bent her sails, and she is riding low: stores and water aboard for sure.’
‘Nothing could be a better example of Dr Falconer’s general position,’ said Stephen, standing with Martin in the mizentop. ‘The whole is volcanic, with coral superimposed here and there and lying around the edge in reefs. That mountain, that truncated cone rising behind the jagged hills, certainly has a crater at the top. It is no doubt the volcano he wished to explore. Indeed, there is a little cloud of what may well be smoke just over it.’
‘Certainly. Furthermore, the extreme luxuriance of the vegetation surely implies a volcanic soil: do but consider that impenetrable forest – I say impenetrable, but now I see a road along the stream.’