The Hundred Days (35 page)

‘To be sure, these two long wakes and the infinite
quantity of sea have something of the look of eternity,’ said Jacob.

‘Or of dream. But for my part I do not
think it can last much longer. I have been aboard an Algerine corsair and a
Sallee rover, and since their chief aim is to take by boarding, they are
usually very full of men. Furthermore, unless they intend the raiding of a
distant coast - which is not the case here - a mere dash down the Straits and
so to Durazzo - they rarely carry much in the way of provisions. Then again,
when the galley was using its oars at such a pace I observed the quite
exceptional number of rowers: all these mouths have to be fed.’

Eight bells: the hands were piped to dinner, and
they were still chewing or smelling of rum or both when they came hurrying back
forward to see how the chase lay now. ‘What is your opinion, Tobias Belcher?’
asked Stephen, speaking to a grey-haired seaman from Shelmerston, a shipmate on
former voyages and a member of the Sethian community, renowned for
truthfulness. Belcher looked and considered, and in time he replied that ‘there
was something not wholly Christian about this here weather.’

At this point the gunroom steward came to warn the
doctors that dinner would be on table directly, so they hurried off with
nothing more precise than a vague apprehension. The Surprise, on reverting to a
private ship, had lost her Royal Marine officer, but still with the three
lieutenants, the master, the purser and her two surgeons, it was a fine full
table, with a great volume of talk about the probable outcome of the day - a
volume cut dead just as the pudding came in, by a magistral crash right
forward, the impact of yet another ricochet from one of the galley’s
stern-chasers.

Now, under the blazing sun, there began a curious
form of sea-warfare: a slight strengthening of the breeze reached the frigate
first and brought her within range of the galley’s chasers; but since the
vessels were not directly in line, the galley, in order to aim these guns, had
to shift her helm, exposing some of her quarter. This danger increased with the
wind, which brought Surprise’s foremost guns, trained right forward, into play;
with the further peril that she might put her helm hard over, showing the
galley the whole of her flank and sending a hundred and sixty-eight pounds of
round-shot into the galley’s relatively fragile timbers.

Both captains, the one right forward, the other
right aft, watched one another most intently, trying to detect the slightest
change and to counteract it. Jack had all his forward guns manned, of course,
to give nothing away by movement; and when a favourable gust had brought the
frigate perhaps fifty yards nearer he said to Daniel, in charge of the forward
guns to larboard, ‘Mr Daniel, I am going to put the helm a-lee and fire the
bow-chaser: the moment she goes off, fire as they bear.’ He stepped to the port
bow-chaser, a beautiful brass gun of his own, a nine-pounder: it was already at
what he judged the right elevation, and kneeling to the sight he cried, ‘Helm
a-lee: handsomely, now!’ And as the galley’s stern came just into view he
fired. The ball skipped from the enemy’s wake and through her after-lateen,
while at the same time the three foremost broadside guns sent splinters flying
from the galley’s stern; but they too struck only on the rebound. Very shortly
after, the gust that had brought the frigate nearer,
reached and favoured the corsair, carrying her out of range.

‘By God, it’s hot,’ said Jack: he turned and drank
from the scuttle-butt, imitated by all hands.

And so it went, burning day after burning day; and
now even the moonlit night sky seemed to radiate heat. Day after day, with each
doing all that human skill, ingenuity, craft and malevolence could do to
destroy the enemy, neither gaining any decisive advantage though each wounded
his enemy - wounded him, but far from mortally.

If Jack and Adams his clerk had not kept the ship’s
logbook - the exact record of positions, distances made good, variations in the
wind, observations on the weather, natural phenomena - he would scarcely have
known that it was a Wednesday - the first Wednesday in June - when at last the
wind failed them entirely, and standing in what trifling shade the limp sails
could offer they watched the galley ship her oars and pull, still westwards,
towards what might have been a cloud on the horizon, if this pitiless sky would
have suffered even a single cloud.

This day Stephen had three cases of sunstroke, and
Jack, by way of prevention and diversion, had a sail lowered over the side -
all the edges well clear of this shark-infested water - a truly shocking number
of sharks - leaping in himself to encourage the crew, but finding, alas,
precious little refreshment in the more than luke-warm tide.

Neither surgeon saw fit to join the splashing
throng, and seeing that they were quite unwatched, Stephen undertook to guide
Jacob up into the maintop, from which - the ship having swung with the current
- they could see the galley with a telescope borrowed from the gunroom. It was
not a very perilous ascent, but Daniel and three midshipmen, stark naked, ran
up the side and into the rigging to give them not only advice but active,
expert muscular heaves at moments of crisis.

From the top, Matunin sent them back to their water
with many thanks and the assurance that they should be able to make their own
way down with no more help than the force of gravity: and after breathing for a
while he went on, ‘Amos, I believe you have never been up here before.’

‘Never,’ said Amos Jacob, ‘but I am very glad to be
up here now - Lord, what an expanse: and Lord, how near the galley seems. She
is in active motion. May I have the telescope? Oh God...’ he added in a tone of
utter disgust. ‘But I had foreseen it.’

He passed the telescope. The breeze had filled the
galley’s sails, and the corsairs were throwing many of their manacled rowers
overboard.

They watched in a wholly disgusted silence: and
then Stephen leant over and called, ‘Captain Aubrey, the galley has the wind.
She is sailing towards the island we can see from up here.’

For the cloud had become island, a conical island
hollowed out on the near, the eastern side.

Jack was with them in a moment, dripping wet. ‘I have
heard of their doing that, to save food and water,’ he said. And after a
silence, ‘I do not know that island. But then we are right off any known tract
of the sea.’

‘I believe I have seen it on an old Catalan map in Barcelona,’ said Stephen. ‘And as I
recall its name is Cranc, a crab.’

‘The breeze is joining us,’ said Jack, and he gave
orders for all hands to come aboard: within minutes the frigate was alive
again, her sails full, her bow-wave mounting. And well before the hellish sun
dipped down at last, they were in with the Island Crab. There was not a hand
aboard who had not seen one of the rowers - slave or unransomable captive -
thrown screaming into the sea, the bloody sea, and there was not one who did
not hate and loathe those that did it.

The island was presumably of volcanic origin, an
eruptive peak that had then blown out its east side, leaving a shallow lagoon
with a high wall broken only by a narrow channel through which the sea flowed
in and out. From the tops they could see the galley moored under the rock wall
near the entrance, close to a battered mole and some derelict buildings. She
was entirely sheltered from anything but mortars: and the frigate possessed no
mortars; nor could she enter such shallow water to use her guns.

The gentle topgallant breeze carried her round the
island, surveying and sounding as she went, clean round with only a single
tack: deep water, no apparent reefs, almost no vegetation on the land, no sign,
no sign at all of water: nor, to Stephen’s astonishment, of sea-birds. On the
west side, under quite steep cliffs, there was a little grey-green strand.

Jack had himself rowed to it, with Stephen: and as
they walked on what sand there was, Jack observed that this was high tide; that
the surf must be very severe indeed on this side, after a strong westerly blow;
and that he hoped Stephen had found some interesting creatures in that cave.

‘I found something more interesting still,’ said
Stephen. ‘A total absence of life. Well into June and
not a nestling petrel even. No birds, no bird-lice, no feather mites. And I
tell you what it is, brother: there is an uneasy smell in that rock, those
fissures - pray thrust your nose into this one. I am no chemist, God forbid,
but I very much suspect the presence of a poisonous emanation. That would
account for the near-absence of vegetation, even in June.’ He mused, and while
he was musing Daniel came and said to Jack, ‘Sir, we have a hand in the boat,
McLeod, who was in Centaur in the year four: he says the position here is very
like what it was when Captain Hood took the Diamond Rock. He was a Saint Kilda
cragsman in his youth, and he helped to get the guns up the cliff.’

‘It had not struck me,’ said Jack, ‘but the
situation is indeed very like. Yet could he really carry a line up that cliff?
McLeod,’ he called, and the tall, middle-aged seaman, a recent draught from
Erebus in Gibraltar, came up, awkward and
embarrassed. ‘Do you think you could take a line up that cliff? Right up that
cliff?’

‘I think so, sir,’ said McLeod in his halting
English, ‘with a little well-tempered hand-pick, and a stout peg with a block
to send me up another twenty-five fathom. This is no so
steep as Diamond Rock, but it is softer, and may be false at top.’

‘Should you like to try? If ever it grows too false
you may come down with no shame - it is only an attempt, a trial.’

‘We hauled up twenty-four pounders,’ said McLeod,
not quite following him.

‘Let us shove off at once,’ said Jack, and he led
the way to the boat. They pulled back at a great pace, helped by the current
and buoyed up by recollections of the Diamond Rock, that most uncommon feat -
back to Surprise as she lay so moored that her broadside would shatter the
emerging galley on the starboard side if ever she ventured out, while Ringle
would do the same to larboard.

The bosun roused out coils of the strongest white
line; the armourer blew his forge to an incandescent heat, fashioned wedges
with eye-holes for the blocks, forged and tempered a little hand-pick, one head
a beak, the other a hammer, under McLeod’s supervision.

They were still too hot to hold as the boat pulled
back, though in the mean time McLeod and his cousin had sewn tight sailcloth
climbing shoes.

‘In the Pyrenees I have pursued the izard, God
forgive me, who dwells in the highest peaks,’ said Stephen, standing with his
hands behind his back, watching McLeod’s ascent, ‘but never have I seen such
climbing. He might almost be a gecko.’

It was indeed an extraordinary spectacle, that
stalwart twelve-stone man moving up the almost perpendicular lower cliff,
fissured to be sure, but from below apparently smooth; and when he reached a
more craggy stretch where he could rest and then drive home his peg and make
fast his line, all hands cheered amain. He tossed down his ball of twine for
the next coil and so, heaving it up and putting the coil over his shoulder and
carried on, faster this time, up to the middle height, while his cousin
Alexander, making use of the first line, made his way up. In a surprisingly
short time they were able to look cautiously over the top, the whole lagoon
open below them.

Now, while bold but less wholly intrepid hands
chipped footholds along the line of the first rope and beyond, began one of the
most elaborate cat’s cradles that Jack had ever seen: although it was nothing
to the aerial railway of the Diamond Rock, it was the bosun’s seventh heaven,
and presently all was ready to send a nine-pounder cannon up, sliding along a
steep messenger to a point where it commanded the lagoon: and if a nine-pounder
would not answer, then two fourteen-pounders could not possibly be denied.

By night the Surprise came round at low tide, when
the water was too low for the galley to attempt the outward passage from the
lagoon. And offshore, in excellent holding ground, she dropped two anchors and
then sent hawsers ashore. They rose by means of powerful tackles past the
various staging points to the very summit, where they were made fast to a
complexity of stakes and hauled taut by the ship’s capstan. ‘Chaser away,’ said
Jack, and his personal nine-pounder was made fast to the messenger, slung below
it by iron hoops. At the cry of ‘Handsomely,
handsomely, now,’ the hands at the uppermost winch, under the command of
Whewell, began to turn: the long hawsers, spliced end to end, stretched,
sighed, grew more rigid, and the gun began its smooth progress up along the
messenger. The gun, its emplacement, its munitions, represented a prodigious
amount of labour; but as the sun rose, lighting the lagoon, with the galley up
against its mole, nobody was in the least fatigued.

Jack knew his gun intimately: the distance was
nothing much for a well-bored chaser - a little over a furlong - but as he told
Stephen - who with Jacob, had been carried up like parcels - he had rarely
fired at such a downward angle. ‘I shall just try one or two sighters,’ he
said, ‘aiming at those dilapidated houses. Run her up, shipmates.’ The gun
thumped against its emplacement: Jack shifted the wedge still farther, glared
along the sight, made one more trifling adjustment and clapped the linstock
down, arching his body to let the recoiling nine-pounder shoot back under him.
While the team swabbed, cleaned, reloaded, rammed home the wad and ran her up
again, he stood fanning the smoke and smiling with satisfaction: the shot had
gone right home. And the Moors were swarming about the galley and the mole like
startled ants.

They were corsairs, men of war: they very quickly
grasped their situation, their hopeless situation, and they seized Murad Reis,
manhandled him along to the end of the mole nearest the cliff, tied his hands,
forced him to kneel and called up, ‘Our sins on his head. Our
sins on his head.’ With a single blow one of the corsairs cut Murad’s
head clean off, held it up to the watchers on the cliff and cried, ‘Our sins on
his head. Give us water and we shall be your slaves for ever - you shall have
the galley: you shall have the gold.’