Man Of War

The barge cut through the swell with scarcely a motion but headway – testament to the determination with which her crew was bending oars. In the stern sat Captain Sir Laughton Peto RN, his eyes fixed on their objective, His Majesty’s Ship Prince Rupert – glorious sight against the backdrop of the Rock. To Peto’s mind Rupert was in no measure diminished by the towering crag; her three decks, her lofty masts, somehow outsoared the shadow of that Pillar of Hercules. Neither were her batteries belittled by those of the massive Montague Bastion, which Peto himself had only lately quit. Impregnable as was the citadel-Rock, Rupert was yet the most powerful of His Majesty’s ships at sea, a floating fortress able to send any of the King’s enemies to the bottom, as her forebears had done two decades earlier (and not many leagues to westward).

Any ship of the Royal Navy would look admirable at anchor in Gibraltar Bay, reckoned Peto: the Rock and the ‘Nelson chequer’ were as perfect a unity as any he could think of. As perfect as if they had been in Plymouth Sound, at Spithead, the Nore, or at Portsmouth. And Peto had been intent on nothing but the great three-decker from the moment he stepped into his barge.

She was an arresting picture, to be sure, but neither did it do for a captain, especially one of his seniority, to have eyes for so mere a thing as a boat’s crew; his attention must be on more elevated affairs than a midshipman and a dozen ratings. Above all, though, it was opportunity to study his new command as an enemy might. Peto was acquainted by reputation with her sailing qualities, but how might another, impudent, man-of-war’s captain judge her capability? He fancied he might know what a Frenchman would think. That mattered not these days, however; it was what a Turk thought that counted, for a year ago the Duke of Wellington, on the instructions of the foreign secretary, Mr Canning, had signed a protocol in St Petersburg by which Russia, France and Great Britain would mediate in the Greeks’ struggle for independence; and increasingly that protocol looked like a declaration of war on the Ottoman Turks.

What a mazy business it all was too: the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, on his sickbed for months, and in April the King sending for Canning to form a government, in which many including the ‘Iron Duke’ then refused to serve; and now Canning himself dead and the feeble Goderich in his place. Peto did not envy Admiral Codrington, the commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean, whose squadron he was to join: how might the admiral do the government’s will in Greek waters when the government itself scarcely knew what was its will? He could not carp, however, for he was the beneficiary of that uncertainty: soon after Rupert had left Portsmouth, where formerly she had been laid up in Ordinary, their lordships at the Admiralty had sent a signal of recall to her captain (and promotion to flag rank), followed by an order for him, Peto, to proceed at once to Gibraltar to take command in his stead.

The wind was strengthening. Peto did not have to take his eyes off his ship to perceive it. Nor did he need to crane his neck to mark the frigate-bird that accompanied them, tempting a prospect though such an infrequent visitor was – and sure weather vane too, for he had frequently observed how the bird preceded changeable weather, as if borne by some herald of new air. With a freshening westerly it would not be long before Rupert could make sail; and he willed, unspoken, for hands to pull even smarter for their wooden world – his wooden world.

He had waited a long age for this moment, for command of a first-rate; waited in fading expectation. Well, it were better come late than never. And so now he sat silent, perhaps even inscrutable (he could hope), in undress uniform beneath his boatcloak: closed double-breasted coat with fall-down collar, double epaulettes for his post seniority, with his India sword hanging short on his left side in a black-leather scabbard; and within a couple of cables’ length of another great milestone of his nautical life.