Captain's Surrender (4 page)

Chapter 4
"Mr. Hawkes, let us suppose it is heavy weather, the fog is so thick that you cannot see the other ships of the fleet. What is the admiral's signal to bring to and lie by, with head-sails to the mast, with the starboard tack aboard?"
"Um..."
Mr. Hawkes was a boy who greatly resembled his rat, Summersgill thought as he sat in the gunroom reading his predecessor's reports of French privateers about the shores of Bermuda, his fears of an invasion by American forces, and the roaring illegal trade in weapons smuggled to those same forces for huge amounts of money in defiance of all self interest and principle.
Across the table from him Bess, now recovered, darned stockings and kept her head down. Emily was sitting in front of a slate, in common with five of the rapscallions known as "young gentlemen". Boys who looked to Summersgill scarcely old enough to be in breeches.
"Mr. Hawkes, please say something before we begin to grow barnacles."
"He'll fire eight guns, sir."
"You're on the reef, Mr. Hawkes. Your ship has just sunk with all hands, and when they write home to your poor, weeping mother they will say 'if only he'd paid more attention in his classes'. And Mr. Anderson? If you wipe your nose on your cuff one more time, I will cut it off and give it to you as a keepsake."
The senior midshipman—a Mr. Andrews—in charge of this little school was himself a youth barely old enough to be at university, who kept the boys in check by his ready, sarcastic wit, without reliance either on the cane or profanity. On this first examination, Summersgill was satisfied that he could leave Emily here to be occupied without having to fear for her moral safety or her delicacy of mind.
"On the starboard tack he will fire six guns. Eight for larboard. Enough; everything away before muster, now."
The schoolroom was packed away in the blink of an eye, and the boys were neatening themselves, tensely earnest, when drums began hammering on every deck. The boys were out of the door before Summersgill had time to stand up, their teacher grabbing his coat with one hand and straightening his neck-cloth with the other.
"Is it a battle?" said Summersgill, wondering if he had time to run to his cabin for his sword.
"No, sir, just muster." Andrews stopped and looked at him with an anxious expression. "All hands to witness
punishment. The ladies should go down to the hold."
"What is so shameful that I am not permitted to see?" asked Emily caustically, rising and putting her slate away in a large bag.
"Not shameful, miss." The midshipman spared her a glance—and now he noticed it, it was surprising how little the lad had looked at her and how lacking in admiration was his gaze now. Summersgill approved; the boy obviously knew his place. "Just an unpleasantness you'd do better to be spared."
He turned a dark, meaningful gaze on Summersgill. "It isn't a fit sight, sir. Frankly, I'd keep the boys down here, too, if I could." Having struggled into his coat as he was speaking, he twitched it straight and shivered slightly. "I must go. Please, you really don't want her to see. Believe me."
"Go down to the hold, Emily," Summersgill said, his heart sinking. "You too, Bess. My wife will be glad of the company— you know how she gets in confined spaces. We must ... respect the customs of the sea." Privately, he felt that this was a great fuss about nothing. Emily—who had attended hangings since she was ten—was no shrinking miss to be spared the sight of crime's due punishment.
The silence on deck as he came out into the wind made his confidence falter. Hangings were social occasions, full of the common solidarity of the honest, and the sense of heightened life that came from being so near to death. Here there was none of that. The same despair he had felt onboard from the first now mantled a hundred fold over the gleaming lines of men, casting an irony over their beautifully laundered best Sunday clothes and a shadow over every resentful face.
One of the gratings which covered hatchways had been set upright, and now Henry Addings, convicted of "answering back", was secured to it with rough cables. The boatswain was handed a red bag and withdrew the famous cat of nine tails—a nasty looking object with its long thongs greased so they would cut deeper.
"Ready, sir."
"Five dozen," said Walker with a look of anticipation. "And lay on with a will."
Henry Addings did not scream until the thirtieth stroke. By the fortieth he had lost consciousness and hung like a freshly slaughtered carcass from his restraints, a pool of blood spreading about his feet, white gleams of backbone and ribs showing through the lace-work of his flesh. The boatswain switched arms to prevent himself from growing tired, the officers looking on with blank, indifferent faces. Walker licked his lips. Summersgill raised his handkerchief to his mouth and bit his forefinger. As a distraction, it did not help.
"Jabe Aken. Maliciously and persistently slow in the execution of his duties." An undernourished looking creature who walked away from the beating, whimpering and slower than ever.
"Perseverance Atkins. Last man down from the studdingsail booms on three separate occasions Thursday."
It dawned on Summersgill with horror that they were working their way through the alphabet. The deck was already aswim with blood, pouring into the scuppers and thence to the sea. The boatswain and his mates had taken off their shoes and rolled up their trouser-legs to stop themselves slipping in it. The wind had dropped away and the warm reek of gore rose over the quarterdeck, cut with ammonia as Atkins pissed himself on the forty-first stroke.
"Joe Bainsford. Last man down from the masthead Thursday."
Joe Bainsford had the long plait, the silk scarf, and ribbonembroidered trousers that had been pointed out to Summersgill as the identifying signs of a long-term career sailor—worth his weight in gold to the king. Hearing his name, an almost inaudible growl went through the massed ranks of men.
"Arthur Berry. Answering back and slovenly treatment of the ship's ropes."
Berry screamed from the first stroke, the noises growing progressively more and more bestial until Summersgill wanted to stop his ears, to close his eyes, to pretend he was back on land. No wonder Peter had shocked him so by displaying a harshness Summersgill had not known the man possessed. Appalled did not even begin to describe what he felt.
The faces on the quarterdeck were hardly less inhuman than those in the waist of the ship, fixed in attitudes of sheer indifference. Only the boys—standing by their divisions— trembled or smiled as their natures dictated, the larval forms of the stern or gloating tyrants they would one day become.
The count moved on too slowly, and Summersgill looked away to the sea for comfort. But even there this ritual was grotesquely mirrored. Sharks kept pace with the ship, their bodies blue in the clear water, dashing and snapping in frenzy at the blood.
"Patrick Hare. Papist blasphemy and expressing opinions sympathetic to the Irish rebellion."
Patrick Hare was gagged with a metal spike that split his lips open on both sides and made him drool blood. His back was already raw—scabbed and half healed from a previous punishment.
"Spreading sedition is a crime against the whole ship's company," said Walker, stirring out of a kind of trance of glory—his face shining. "And treason is a capital offense..."
"Sir," as first lieutenant, Peter was standing at Walker's elbow. "I was present when this incident occurred," he said, "Hare expressed a sympathy with the Catholic suffragist movement—which is not an illegal nor a treasonous organization."
"He added a great deal more in Irish, sir," said the second lieutenant.
"And the speaking of Irish is an offense in itself," Walker finished with a smile. "Let him have twenty."
"Twenty lashes, sir?" asked the boatswain with a tinge of disappointment.
"Twenty dozen."
Tears leaked from Patrick Hare's tightly closed eyes and ran into his torn mouth as he was tied to the grating.
"Sir," said Kenyon again, "might I remind you that, only last week, Doctor O'Connor said he was not to be punished again for a month, to let his heart recover from the strain."
"O'Connor? Yes, well, he would say that, wouldn't he? These people are as thick as thieves." Walker frowned at the boatswain. "Well? Lay on, man."
"Sir..." there was an unmistakable urgency in Kenyon's tone now. Too much, for at the sound of it the captain's face suffused with red. His lips drew away from his teeth; his eyes disappeared into fleshy slits.
"Do you want to join him, Mr. Kenyon? Well? Do you? The next time you question me, I will have you under the lash, sir, admiral's favorite or not. Do you understand me?"
"I do." Peter bowed his head, and a muscle worked in the angle of his jaw. "I understand you very well," he said in a meek, polite voice that made Walker turn back to his business with a smile. But Summersgill had seen the young man's eyes, alive with fury and a kind of sympathetic fear, and he heard the criticism at the heart of this surrender.
* * * *

They threw Hare's body over the side along with a boy of thirteen called Joseph Zacharias, guilty of falling asleep on watch, who had been given the choice of starving to death or being thrown out to swim home. He was alive when the sharks got him, but the prevailing opinion was that it was still the better choice.

"I have never seen such a travesty of justice," said Summersgill. In the afternoon, when every spot had been scoured from the decks, the men were below, mending their clothes, and a chill rain had set in above, he had found Peter in the wardroom, head bent over a glass of port as though to veil his betraying eyes from the world. "No wonder the Admiralty have such a difficulty in recruiting enough men. Is it the same throughout the navy?"

"I wonder you ask me, sir." The young man looked up with a glitter of green fury and shame like the sudden sparking of an emerald.

"I ask you because it's clear to me that a bruised face is a small price to pay to be spared the lash. Because I have never for one moment believed that
this
is the career you love so well and write so eloquently about to your poor mother that she simply has to read the letters to all her neighbors."

Kenyon gave a snort that might have been laughter and passed the decanter. "You know, sir," he said quietly, "that I am as recently come to this ship as you are yourself. But that time has been long enough for me to learn that Bates is an awkward, unhandy, ill-tempered rogue." He looked down, drawing a little noose on the table in the ever-present damp. "And that Hare was a good man. Well liked. Ready with a kindness. You understand? I spared the wrong one. I should have found a way to..."

Silence for a moment, and Summersgill wondered how many of the other blank-faced officers suffered so, how many of the boys wept into their pillows every night, mute and hopeless. "
Is
this how the whole navy works? Is this how
you
would run a ship?"

Kenyon looked at him sideways, with a wary look such as Summersgill had never seen on his open face before, then drained his glass and stood. "Would you like to climb to the fighting top, sir? There is a fine view. I can recommend it."

There was not, in fact, a view worthy of the name—gray waves and gray drizzle slanting sideways across the surface of the sea. Water ran down the masts and the rigging about them with a faint, musical trickle, and Summersgill huddled in his borrowed oilskins and felt impressed with himself for climbing to this eminence without a second's fear.

"On the
Northumberland
we used to dance," said Kenyon, who stood with one hand on the shrouds, leaning out into unsupported air. "All the long weeks of sailing with the trade winds—the mids would skylark and the men dance and sing. The officers ... we put on a play, with a musical review and poetry readings."

"Not like this."
"No." He turned with a flash of sudden intensity. "I'm not saying that we didn't flog. We have the combings of the jails thrust on us to turn into sailors. Dumb, illiterate, violent brutes, who don't understand anything but force. I am no opponent of flogging at need, God knows. But..."
He fell silent again, and Summersgill could see the keen gaze automatically sweep the rigging and deck, whether looking for nautical perfection or for the captain's spies, Summersgill didn't know.
"Do you remember my tutor, Mr. Allenby?" said Kenyon, seemingly at random. "He was a great judge of horses. He used to say that the last thing you want is a hunter so broken that it will only obey. You should hope for loyalty and a spirit to match your own, and to establish a rapport with it, such that—if you fell—it would return for you out of affection. There is no comparison, he said, between the lengths that a friend will go for you and the grudging obedience of a slave." Looking down from the dizzying height into the waves, he said, "I have often thought the world would do well to heed his wisdom."
"Is a ship much like a horse?" Summersgill asked, amused by the realization that this was the answer to his question. He had not yet caught the young man openly saying anything seditious. Not even critical. But such innocent lying, such halfhearted concealment of the truth beneath so obvious a metaphor! Poor Peter! He would never make much of a conspirator.
"It is like a horse, sir, in the sense that a horse is faster and stronger than a man. Only man's authority over the beast prevents him from being trampled into the dirt every time he applies the whip. In the same way, the
Nimrod
has seven hundred and ninety-three men, and forty-five officers, including the boys. Only our authority and the affection—or terror—in which we are held prevents the men from realizing their own strength. When they trust us and believe in us, all is well. When they don't..."
Summersgill felt for a moment as though the frail platform on which he sat had lurched toward the sea. He had been thinking of Peter's dilemma as a personal one, much like his own—the distress of a reasonable and fastidious gentleman at having to participate in a distasteful system. But there was more than disgust at play here—there was a mortal, abject dread.
The bestial faces of the sailors flashed into his mind, gazing up in silent, powerless hatred at the gold braided figures on the quarterdeck. Suppose their hatred did at last boil over? What example of restraint and kindness had they been set? It didn't bear thinking about.
"Mutiny?"
Kenyon gave him a smile as thin as a garrote. "Indeed. I must therefore do everything in my power to support the present regime. And you had best pray, sir, that the men continue terrified of their captain and in awe of their officers. Because if it ever crossed their minds that he—and we—are only human, I should not give you a farthing for our lives."