In Distant Waters Read online

  ‘Quite so.’ Drinkwater put the chart and rules away, preparing to return to the deck but Hill stopped him, taking advantage of the intimacy permitted a sailing master and the long familiarity the two men had known.

  ‘Sir . . . that ship, the one we sighted this morning . . . it has been worrying me that you thought my opinion in error . . .’

  ‘I have the advantage of you, Mr Hill,’ Drinkwater smiled again, so that Hill was reminded of the eager young acting lieutenant he had long ago known on the cutter Kestrel.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t intend to pry . . .’

  ‘Oh, the content of my orders are such that their secrecy applies principally to their comprehension. The truth is that I don’t believe that ship was a Don.’ He looked up at the old master. Hill was massaging his arm, a wound acquired at Camperdown; his expression was rueful.

  ‘The truth is, I think she was Russian.’

  Captain Drinkwater stood at the weather hance regarding the long deck of the Patrician. Wrapped in his boat-cloak he ignored the frequent patterings of spray. There was some abatement in the gale and the wind backed a touch, enabling them to claw more westing against wind and the Cape Horn current that set against them at a couple of knots. Midshipman Belchambers hovered near, ready to dash below for sextant and chronometer should the sun appear again. To windward, patches of blue sky punctuated the low, rolling cumulus and it was hard to comprehend the fact that this was the season of high-summer in the southern hemisphere. There was little in the leaden aspect of the clouds, nor the grey streaked and heaving mass of the ocean to suggest it.

  Along the deck and aloft men worked in groups and singly. Lieutenant Quilhampton swung about the mainmast with Midshipman Frey and Comley, the boatswain, was overhauling gear on the fo’c’s’le and keeping a lively eye on a party of men in each set of weather shrouds who were rattling down. The grim, motionless presence of Captain Drinkwater intimidated them all, for it had slowly permeated the collective consciousness of the hands that their peevish unwillingness to obey orders had not only been let off lightly, but had endangered the ship. To a degree Drinkwater sensed this contrition, partly because he also shared much of the men’s embittered feelings. For, notwithstanding their task and the problems which beset it, the voyage had not been a happy one.

  From the moment they had run Stanham to the fore-yardarm, it seemed, providence had ceased to smile on them. Ordered north with a convoy to Leith Roads from the London River, Patrician had dragged her anchor in an easterly gale in the Firth of Forth. Drinkwater had been dining aboard another ship at the time, in the company of an old friend and messmate from his days as a midshipman.

  Sir Richard White had got into Leith Roads three days earlier after his seventy-four gun Titan had been badly mauled in a gale off the Naze of Norway where Sir Richard had been engaged in a successful operation extirpating nests of Danish privateers hiding in the fiords. He had also enjoyed a considerable profit from the destruction of Danish and Norwegian trade, having a broad pendant hoisted as commodore and two sloops and a cutter under his direction for prosecuting this lucrative little campaign.

  Sitting in his comfortably furnished cabin, Drinkwater was reminded that there was another Royal Navy to that which he himself belonged, a service dedicated to the self-advancement of its privileged members. He did not blame Sir Richard for taking advantage of his position, any more than he blamed him for inheriting a baronetcy. It was now that the recollection of his old friend’s circumstances rankled, as he wrestled with a disaffected crew, a contrary gale and the remotest ocean in the world. But he had enjoyed the conviviality of the distant evening. Sir Richard’s officers were pleasant and made much of Drinkwater. He could imagine White’s briefing prior to his arrival; his guest was a friend, a seaman of the old school, a tarpaulin of considerable experience, and so on and so forth, all designed to provoke good-natured but superior attitudes. Drinkwater was too old to worry much, though when he thought about such things, they still angered him. At the time he had enjoyed White’s company. They had grumbled over the income tax, and agreed on the excellence of the port. They had deplored the standard of young officers and disagreed over the propriety of the new regulation that made masters and pursers equal in status to the commissioned officers. And then the news had come that Patrician was making signals of distress and Drinkwater had had a rough and wet return to his ship in his gig, to find chaos in place of an ordered anchor watch and the ship dragging from sheer neglect of the cable at the turn of the tide. The contrast with the well-ordered state of affairs aboard Titan was inescapable.

  In a fury he had ordered the ship under way, only to recall that he had given Lieutenant Quilhampton shore-leave, and been compelled to fetch a second anchor. Poor Quilhampton. Drinkwater looked up at him in the maintop dictating some memorandum to Frey. They were as close to friendship as a commander and his second lieutenant could be, for Drinkwater’s wife and Quilhampton’s mother enjoyed an intimacy and Quilhampton had been Drinkwater’s earliest protégé. He felt a surge of anger against the Admiralty, the war and the whole bloody predicament of his ship at the thought of poor Quilhampton. The young man was wasting the best years of his life, crossed in love by the implacable exigencies of the naval service. Drinkwater wished it was he, and not Fraser, who was first lieutenant.

  ‘Your steward enquires if you wish for some coffee, Captain?’

  ‘Eh? Oh, thank you Derrick . . .’

  Drinkwater roused himself from his reverie and nodded to his clerk. Derrick’s face had lost neither its sadness, nor its pallor in the months since his impressment by Mr Mylchrist and the cutter’s crew. Taken from the banks of the River Colne as he walked from Colchester to Wivenhoe, Derrick had protested his refusal to take part in belligerent operations with such force and eloquence that the matter had eventually been brought to Drinkwater’s attention. So too had the strange offender. Drinkwater remembered the man’s first appearance in his cabin on that last forenoon at anchor at the Nore, some five days after they had hanged Stanham.

  ‘Take off your hat!’ an outraged Lieutenant Mylchrist had ordered, but the man had merely shaken his head and addressed Drinkwater in a manner that brought further fury to the third lieutenant’s suffused face.

  ‘Friend, I cannot serve on thy ship, for I abhor all war . . .’

  ‘Be silent, damn you! And call the captain “sir” when you address him . . .’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Mylchrist, that will do . . . I think I know the temper of this man.’ Drinkwater turned to the solemn yet somehow dignified figure. ‘You are of the Quaker persuasion, are you not?’

  ‘I am . . .’

  ‘Very well . . . I cannot return you to the shore, you are part of the ship’s company . . .’

  ‘But I . . .’

  ‘But I shall respect your convictions. Can you read and write? Good, then you may be entered as my clerk . . . attend to the matter, Mr Mylchrist . . .’

  And so Drinkwater had increased his personal staff by a clerk, adding Derrick to Mullender, his steward, and Tregembo, his coxswain, and finding the quiet, resigned Quaker an asset to the day-to-day running of the ship. If he had entertained any doubts as to the man infecting the ship’s company with his peculiar brand of dissenting cant, he need not have worried. The hands regarded Derrick with a good-natured contempt, the kind of attitude they reserved for the moon-struck and the shambling, half-idiotic luetic that kept the heads clean.

  ‘Thank you Derrick. Tell Mullender I shall come below . . .’

  ‘Very well, Captain, and I have the purser’s accounts fair-copied and ready for your signature.’

  Drinkwater took another look round the deck and, as Derrick stood aside, he went below for a warming mug of coffee.

  ‘Deuced if I understand the man,’ Lieutenant Mylchrist tossed off the pot of shrub and stared with distaste at the suet pudding the wardroom steward laid before him. His eyes met those of his messmates, staring from faces that were tired from unaccustome
d exertion. ‘He’s a damned slave-driver, though why he had to drive us . . .’

  ‘Stuff your gape with that pudding, Johnnie, there’s a good fellow,’ said Mount, with a note of asperity in his voice. ‘Ah, Fraser, here, sit down . . . Steward! Bring the first lieutenant a bottle!’

  ‘Thank you Mount.’

  ‘Well, there’s one consolation . . .’

  ‘And what might that be?’ enquired the chastened Mylchrist.

  ‘We’ll all sleep like logs tonight.’

  ‘Except those of us with a watch to keep,’ muttered Mylchrist.

  ‘You make sure you keep it, cully, not like that episode in Leith Road where you neglected the basic . . .’

  ‘All right, all right, there’s no need to go over that again . . .’

  ‘Maybe not, you see yourself as a victim today, but the plain facts are that you’ll be a worse victim if you don’t take the captain’s point.’

  Mount stared round the table. He was, with the exception of Hill, the oldest officer in Patrician’s wardroom, something of a Dutch-uncle to the lieutenants.

  ‘Well what exactly is the captain’s point?’ asked Mylchrist sourly.

  ‘That this ship is a bloody shambles and has no right to be.’

  ‘She’s no different from the other ships I’ve served aboard . . .’

  ‘Bloody Channel Fleet two days from home and a couple of cruises in the Med. For God’s sake Johnnie don’t show how wet you are. Goddamn it man, Midshipman Wickham was in the Arctic freezing his balls off before you’d heard a shot in anger . . .’

  ‘Now look here, Mount, don’t you dare patronise me . . .’

  ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen, be silent!’ Fraser snapped, and an uneasy truce settled on the table. ‘Mount’s right . . . so is the captain . . . it’s no your place to strut so branky, Johnnie . . . the men say she’s a donsie ship . . .’

  ‘Poppycock, Fraser . . . the ship’s not unlucky, for that I take to be your meaning. The trouble is we’re out of sorts, frayed like worn ropes . . .’ Mount smiled reassuringly at Fraser, ‘and that business off the Orkney upset us all.’

  ‘Captain Drinkwater most of all,’ said Quilhampton, speaking for the first time. ‘I think he feels the shame of that more keenly than the rest of us.’

  Quilhampton rose and reached for his hat and greygoe. ‘I must relieve Hill . . .’ He left the wardroom and a contemplative silence in which they each relived the shame of the action with the Danish privateer. They had chased her for four hours, sighting her at dawn, hull down to leeward ten miles to the east of the Pentland Skerries. The Dane had run, but once it was clear the heavy frigate could outsail her in the strong westerly wind, she had tacked and stood boldly towards the Patrician. Unbeknown to the captain on the quarterdeck above, the two lieutenants on the gun-deck had relaxed, assuming the capture to be a mere formality once the intelligence of the privateer’s turn had been passed to them. Despite the shot from a bow-chaser the Dane had not slackened her pace, but run to leeward of the Patrician and the sudden broadside that Lieutenant Mylchrist’s battery had been ordered to fire had been ragged and ineffectual, only succeeding in puncturing the privateer’s sails.

  Once to windward the Danish commander sailed his nimble vessel like a wizard. Though Drinkwater turned in his wake, the Dane beat upwind with an impressive agility. Whenever the Patrician closed the range to cannon shot, the Dane tacked, keeping a press of canvas aloft so that the momentary disadvantage he suffered while he gathered way on the new tack was compensated for by the attention the Patrician had to pay to going about.

  With two hours to sunset the privateer had slipped into Sanday Sound, taking advantage of the weather tide that sluiced through the rocks, islets and Orcadian islands with which her commander was more familiar than either Drinkwater or Hill. In the end, as darkness closed over the Patrician and caution forced her to haul off the land, the Danish privateer had escaped.

  It was not Hill, but Drinkwater himself who turned the deck over to Quilhampton.

  ‘Well, James, you have the ship.’ Isolated by the howl of the wind, Drinkwater unwound with uncharacteristic informality. He fixed the younger man with a perceptive stare.

  ‘Sir?’ said Quilhampton, puzzled.

  ‘You have not spoken of it, James . . . the matter upon which you solicited my advice in Leith Road . . .’ Drinkwater prompted, ‘the matter of matrimony, damn it.’

  ‘Oh . . . no, sir . . . no. But as you said, ’tis likely to be a damnably long voyage.’ Quilhampton’s answer was evasive and he avoided the captain’s eyes, searching the horizon with an expression of despair.

  He wondered if it were an accident caused by the violent motion of the ship as Drinkwater went below, or whether the slight pressure against his shoulder had been a gesture of commiseration.

  CHAPTER 3

  December 1808

  Manhunt

  The islands of Juan Fernandez bear no resemblance to my impression of Crusoe’s refuge . . .

  Drinkwater wrote in his journal, then laid down his pen, leaned back in his chair and stared rapturously out of the stern windows. The sashes were lifted and the gentle breeze that wafted into the cabin bore the sweet scent of a lush vegetation dominated by the sandalwood trees. He closed his eyes and drew the air in through his nostrils, a calm contentment filling him. For the first time in weeks his cabin bore a civilised air, being upon an even keel. Drinkwater turned back to his journal, rejected the idea of an attempt to rival Defoe and continued writing.

  We sighted the peak of El Yunque on the 3rd instant, a fair landfall but occupied by the Spaniards, and, unwilling to advertise our presence upon the Pacific coasts of America, took departure for Farther-out Island, thirty leagues to the westward where we found anchorage in ninefathoms with a sandy bottom, wood and water in plenty, an abundance of pig and goats. There are seals and sea-elephants and several species of humming-bird. The men have been exercised at their leisure, a circumstance which gives me great heart after our recent difficulties . . .

  He laid his pen down again and rose, stretching. They lay at anchor within half a mile of the beach and he could see the launch drawn up on the sand, the two boat-keepers paddling like children in the shallows. The warmth of a sun almost overhead lay over the anchorage like a benediction, filling the ship with a langorous air.

  ‘Lotus-eating . . .’ he murmured. Leaning his hands on the sill of the window he looked up at the rugged volcanic summit of the island rising precipitously from foothills that were covered in rich vegetation. Unlike the main island of the archipelago, Más-a-Fuera, Farther-out Island, did not possess the anvil-peak of El Yunque, but it was impressively beautiful to men whose eyes had been starved of the sight of green leaves.

  An occasional shot echoed up the ravines, evidence of Mount’s hunting party flushing the wild pig from the undergrowth. The thought of dining that evening on roast pork brought the juices to Drinkwater’s mouth in anticipation and further enhanced his feeling of contentment. They could take a short break here, give the men a run ashore, replenish their wood and water, dine all hands in the very lap of luxury and even, perhaps, if they could find someone among the crew conversant with the process, make some goat’s milk cheese.

  He returned to his table, picked up a pen and began to write again. The breeze ruffled his shirt and through the skylight the sunshine beat down, warming the old ache in his mangled shoulder.

  The mood of the people is much improved since our arrival. Their faces wear smiles this day and I am sanguine that the outbreaks of sporadic drunkenness, of petty-theft and brawling that accompanied our passage of the Atlantic, will cease now that we are brought into better climes and the men become resigned to their task . . .

  He looked up and saw the launch coming off, its waist full of filled barricoes of sweet water. Through the skylight he heard orders being given to the watch on deck in preparation for hoisting the casks into the hold. If they worked well today and tomorrow he would give each watch a
day’s leave of absence and they could scramble about the island like children on holiday.

  By noon they had reached the tree-line. Quilhampton in the lead gave a great whoop, like a Red-Indian, for it was to be the halting point of the expedition. Drinkwater was panting with the unaccustomed exertion, watching Frey and Belchambers scamper about the increasing number of rocky outcrops that made their appearance as the valley had narrowed and risen.

  As behove the intelligence of naval officers it had been considered necessary to make some purpose of the day. Not for them the wild and aimless wandering of the men, whose liberty infected them like quarts of unwatered rum. Far below they could hear the shouts and laughter of their unconfined spirits as they chased about the ferny undergrowth. Besides, if the men were to give vent to their pent-up emotions, it was incumbent upon the officers to make way for them. So it had been Quilhampton who had decided the walk ashore should become an expedition, and Drinkwater who had suggested they traced one of the streams upwards to its source.

  Accompanied by the second lieutenant, the two midshipmen, Mr Lallo the surgeon and Derrick the Quaker clerk, they had set off after breaking their fasts and parading divisions. Those left aboard had worn glum expressions, despite promises of their turn tomorrow, such was the liberating infection of the island upon those destined to run amok today.

  The officers began their expedition at the watering place where the stream ran sluggishly out over a bed of pebbles and sand, spreading itself into a tiny delta and carving miniature cliffs and escarpments through the foreshore. But it soon narrowed, its bed deeper and its current swifter, passing beneath a cover of sandalwood trees which already showed evidence of the axe marks of man.

  ‘The oleaginous qualities of this species,’ pronounced Lallo, patting one of the dark red tree-boles with a proprietorial hand, ‘produces an oil which may, I believe, be substituted for copaiba oil as well as forming an admixture for Indian attars . . .’