Man Of War

The foremast topmen had the gaskets off the fastest, then the main and mizzen at one and the same time, topgallant yards first, then tops and then lower – just as should be, a sight to please the most critical gaze. Peto screwed up his eyes in the sudden glare as the chalk-white canvas unfurled evenly, like rolls of haberdasher’s calico on a show-frame, the sail trimmers so deft with the sheets that the light wind at once caught sail full and braced. Off came the topmen smartly, and then the master’s mates barked at the trimmers to haul on the ties and halyards to raise the yards.

Rupert was under weigh. Peto checked his watch again: five more minutes.

Lambe saw, and was certain they were deserving of praise. ‘They were good topmen we had out of Portsmouth, sir, and they had a fair go of it in Biscay.’

‘Very gratifying, Mr Lambe,’ agreed Peto, with just enough of a note of encouragement while reserving his final judgement. He would want to see them shorten sail in a squall before pronouncing himself entirely satisfied. ‘The gun-crews?’

‘Not so practised, I’m afraid, sir. Guns were double lashed for most of the passage.’

‘Mm.’ Peto was not so sure. A frigate was tossed about a good deal more than a three-decker, and he had not had occasion to run more than a couple of days without drilling the gun-crews. ‘Could they not have exercised on the upper deck?’ The lightest guns of the main battery were naturally on the upper deck (he had been glad to find the eighteen-pounder – which had served him so well in Nisus – on Rupert’s upper deck, rather than the twenty-four as had lately been fashionable).

‘They could have, yes, sir.’

Peto would not press him. It was the captain’s business to exercise the crew, and he suspected Lambe had done his best. ‘Well, we had better clear for action tomorrow and have a thorough go.’

Lambe had expected it. Peto’s reputation assuredly sailed before him. But it was one thing to exercise the crews by gun or even deck, and quite another by broadside. He knew it would be a not altogether happy affair: the standing officers and mates would know their business well enough, but the landsmen . . . There would be shouting, cursing and a good deal of bruising; perhaps a case or two for the surgeon, or even for the chaplain. But if they were to see action they must needs learn soon how to clear quickly and completely – and the lieutenants how to command their gun-decks. There was nothing quite like a man-of-war broadsiding. ‘Ay-ay, sir!’ he rasped.

Peto returned to his attitude of studied silence. It was strange, he marked, how the sounds of the ship – the creaking of timber, the groaning of rigging and sail – he heard, but at the back of his mind. Hear them he must, for they told him how his new ship handled, but he did not have to listen; long years at sea had somehow accustomed his ear to effortless attention. Yet the screaming of the gulls above the promising wake commanded his notice just as if they had been his crew speaking, for they seemed to be welcoming him back to their world. He had been ashore some time, after all. On the beach indeed.

And what a world it was, his as much as theirs, the prospect restorative, the sun on his back, so that he felt as some basking amphibian warming on a stone to invigorate its colder blood. Soon he would be entirely in his element again. Unless he looked aft, the sun he now saw only in effect and reflection – the lengthening shadows on the deck, the glinting white horses as the sea heaped at the bows – but it was the sun of the Mediterranean, of the south: it touched him differently; it touched the water differently. And although there was not yet the taste of salt on his lips, the air was the briny pure of the ocean, as different from that on land as country air from town.

He breathed it deep but hid his contentment. For the moment he must observe how Rupert answered, how she ran. Her master knew best her sailing qualities, and he would watch without words (if that were possible, strange as it felt) as Mr Shand conned her beyond the Punta de Europa and into the Mediterranean true. Then, with sea space enough for Rupert to make headway in any wind, he could retire to his cabin to read more of her papers while the boatswain piped hands to supper: a half-hour’s solitude perhaps, until at five o’clock, an hour or so before dark, Lambe would call the crew to their stations, the guns would be cast loose, the pumps rigged, the lifebuoys placed in position, and the quarterdeck officers – the lieutenants and midshipmen – would make their inspection and report to him, and thence to the captain, that the ship was in good order for the night. After that – and not before – he, Peto, could retire, bathe, change his linen and . . . (he sighed) entertain Miss Rebecca Codrington.