O'Brian Patrick - Aub-Mat 13 - The Thirteen Gun Salute

The Thirteen Gun Salute

by Patrick O,Brian

Chapter 1

In spite of the hurry, many wives and many sweethearts had come to see the ship off, and

those members of her company who were not taken up with sailing her on her difficult

course close-hauled to the brisk south-east breeze, watched the white flutter of their

handkerchiefs far across the water until Black Point hid them entirely, shut them right out.

The married men on the quarterdeck of the Surprise stepped back from the rail with

a sigh and clapped their telescopes to. They were all sincerely attached to their wives, and

they all - Jack Aubrey, her commander, Captain Pullings, a volunteer acting as his first

lieutenant, Stephen Maturin, her surgeon, and Nathaniel Martin, his assistant - they all

regretted the parting extremely. Yet it so happened that from a variety of official delays

and other causes they had all had an unusually long spell of domesticity; some had found

their consequence much reduced by the coming of a baby; others had suffered from

occasional differences of opinion, from relatives by marriage, smoking chimneys, leaks in

the roof, rates, taxes, the

social round, insubordination; and turning they now looked to the clear south-west, the

light-blue sky with a fleet of white rounded clouds marching over it in the right direction,

the darker blue sea drawn to a tight line high on the horizon, and beyond that horizon

endless possibilities even now, in spite of their late and inauspicious start.

It would be an absurd exaggeration to speak of a feeling of escape or holiday; but

underlying the regret there was a sense of a return to a simpler world, one in which the

roof, or what passed for it, was not expected to be universally waterproof, where chimneys

and the poor-rate amounted to little, where a

settled hierarchy, independent of moral or intellectual merit, did away if not with difference

of opinion then at least with its more candid expression, a world in which there were no

morning calls and in which servants could not give notice; a world devoid of most

comforts, complex enough in all conscience, and not without its dangers, yet one whose

complexity was as who should say more direct, less infinitely various; and above all a

world that they were used to. Jack Aubrey, by a mere count of days, must have spent

more time afloat than ashore; and if the formative years of his youth were given greater

value, an impartial observer might have set him down as nine-tenths marine, particularly

as his strongest emotions had all been known at sea. To be sure, love and an encounter

with the law at its most unjust had marked him deeply by land, but these feelings, powerful

though they were, could not equal those he had known as a sailor in number or intensity.

Quite apart from the extreme perils of storm and shipwreck natural to his calling, he had

fought in more great fleet battles and in more single-ship actions than most officers of his

time. He had boarded many and many an enemy and it was at these times that he felt

most wholly alive. Ordinarily he was not at all aggressive - a cheerful, sanguine, friendly,

good-natured creature, severe only in the event of bad seamanship - but when he was on

a Frenchman's deck, sword in hand, he felt a wild and savage joy, a fulness of being, like

no other; and he remembered every detail of blows given or received, every detail of the

whole engagement, with the most vivid clarity.

In this he was quite unlike his friend Maturin, who disliked violence and who took no

pleasure in any battle whatsoever. When he was obliged to fight he did so with a cold

efficiency, but never without an apprehension that had continually to be mastered,

disliking both the occasion and the recollection of

it.

Martin, the surgeon's mate, was no berserker either, perhaps in part because he

was a clergyman (though unbeneficed and for this occasion 'unreverend' too, since he had

left his cloth

behind for the voyage, the immensely long voyage, perhaps a circumnavigation, sailing as

Maturin's assistant) but quite certainly because he could feel no anger, no fighting anger,

until he had been seriously attacked, and not a very great deal even then - only a wild,

indignant sense of defence. Indeed there were probably as many attitudes towards battle

in the ship as there were men, and as many kinds of courage; yet though the variation

might run from Awkward Davis's dark lethal subhuman fury to Barret Bonden's simple

delight in the excitement, the immense excitement, there was nobody aboard the Surprise

who could possibly have been called shy. With very few exceptions they were all

professional fighting seamen. Some had originally come from blue-water privateers, some

from inshore smugglers and some from men-of-war; but they were a hand-picked crew

(because of his peculiar circumstances Jack Aubrey had had his choice of large numbers)

and now they had been together long enough, with a good deal of foul weather and some

very hard fighting, to have formed a distinct community with a great sense of their ship

and a great pride in her.

A somewhat anomalous community however in a ship that looked so very like a

man-of-war, for not only did it contain no Marines, no uniformed officers and no

midshipmen, but people walked about at ease, even with their hands in their pockets;

there was a certain amount of laughter in the forecastle in spite of the parting; and the

quartermaster at the con, wiping a tear from his cheek and shaking his grey head, did not

scruple to address Jack directly: 'I shall never see her like again, sir. The loveliest young

woman in Shelmerston.'

'A lovely young woman indeed, Heaven,' said Jack. 'Mrs Heaven, if I do not

mistake?'

'Why, sir, in a manner of speaking: but some might say more on the porcupine-lay,

the roving-line, if you understand me.'

'There is a great deal to be said for porcupines, Heaven:

Solomon had a thousand, and Solomon knew what o'clock it was, I believe. You will

certainly see her again.'

But the Surprise herself was anomalous too. Although she looked so very

like a King's ship she was in fact only a letter of marque, a private man-of-war licensed to

cruise upon the enemy; yet she was no ordinary letter of marque either, since government

was paying her expenses to go to the South Seas, there to harry the French and

American whalers and fur-traders and any enemy war-ship that might be within her

capacity. This would normally have brought her much nearer the status of one of His

Majesty's hired vessels, particularly as her people were exempted from impressment; but

it so happened that the administration's real aim was to enable Dr Maturin to look into the

possibility of independent states arising in Chile and Peru

- of their being helped to arise - thus weakening the Spanish empire. Since Spain was at

this time England's ally the aim could not possibly be avowed, nor the payments, nor

indeed anything to do with the whole potentially embarrassing affair.

This however did not worry the Surprises to the least degree. The hands knew that

they had their precious exemption and that they had succeeded in remaining on the

books, the highly selective books, of the most extraordinarily successful privateer afloat,

one whose recent list of prizes had enabled even the humblest seamen she carried to play

ducks and drakes with gold pieces if they chose. Several of them and several of their

shipmates had so chosen throughout the unexpectedly long period of refitting before the

South American voyage, and they were now paupers once more, though very cheerful

paupers, since what had happened before might very well happen again

- was almost certain to happen again - and even a short cruise, let alone one into the

South Sea, might bring Captain Aubrey back with so many prizes at his tail that the port of

Shelmerston would be choked for the second time.

Yet rather more of them, particularly the two- and two-anda-half-share hands, had

listened to their captain's advice. Captam Aubrey was remarkably good at giving financial

advice:

he cried up thrift, caution, small returns (the Navy Five per cents were the very utmost limit

of what he would approve), perpetual vigilance and strict economy. It was known through-

out the maritime world that although Lucky Jack Aubrey had quite certainly earned his

nickname at sea, making at least three fortunes before the last astonishing stroke, he had

also been spectacularly unfortunate by land. At certain periods he had been extravagant,

maintaining a racing stable and cutting a figure at Brooks's; at others he had been

credulous, believing in projectors and their schemes; and generally speaking disaster had

attended upon his undertakings. It was therefore perfectly clear to an objective eye that no

one had less right to give advice. Yet among seamen, Aubrey's handling of a ship, his

behaviour when he brought that ship into action, his list of victories and his list of prizes

outweighed a certain want of practical management; and his words, always very kindly

intended, always adapted to the means and the understanding of his hearers, had great

influence, rather as Tom Cribb's on a point of foreign politics might have done, and some

of the Surprises, all of them married men with children, retired from the sea. But none,

except a sailmaker's mate who was married to the daughter and sole heiress of a carrier,

had retired very far, and the seven new inns or ale-houses called the Aubrey Arms and

with those arms (azure, three sheep's heads erased, proper) on their sign-posts, now

scattered about the country were all within easy reach of the strand - and, it must be

admitted, of the publican's smuggling brothers, uncles, cousins, nephews, and even God

preserve us grandchildren. Yet the prudent and uxorious amounted to so small a

proportion of the frigate's people that even when they were added to the paupers they

hardly took away from the second anomaly, which was that the Surprise was also a ship

largely filled with men who were sailing away under no compulsion on the part of authority,

poverty ot want of employment, men who had considerable sums at home and who were

setting out on this prodigious voyage for something more - something less definite than

gain and more important. With such a multiplicity of characters the 'more' was necessarily

somewhat shapeless, though some obvious part of it had to do with going far foreign,

seeing new countries, cutting capers on Tom Tiddler's ground

and perhaps picking up gold and silver, sailing in a happy ship, sailing away in war-time

from the strong likelihood of eventual impressment and forced service under officers of a

very different character - it was not the fighting that the Shelmerstonians disliked, nor even

the hard lying and short commons, but the often unnecessarily harsh discipline, the

hazing, the starting and sometimes the direct oppression. And although there was not a

heart that did not delight in spoil - a sack of doubloons would make any man chuckle - a

real and vehement desire for it was rarely a prime ingredient.

There were some men of course whose 'more' was eminently clear. Jack Aubrey

did not give a damn for money: his sole aim was reinstatement in the service and

restoration to the list of post-captains in the Royal Navy, with his former seniority if

possible. All this had been semi-officially and conditionally offered after his cutting-out of

the Diane; and it had been absolutely promised him after his election to parliament, or

rather after his cousin had given him the pocket borough of Milford. But at last, at very

long last, Aubrey had grown less sanguine, less confident in promises; his brief

acquaintance with the House and his fellow-members had told him a great deal about the

fragility of the administration and therefore of its undertakings; he did not for a moment

doubt the present First Lord's word, but he knew that in the event of a change of ministry

this word, this purely personal, verbal word, would not necessarily bind Melville's

successor. He also knew - and this was a fresh though not entirely unforeseen

development - that the Regent was by no means favourable to him. It arose partly from

the fact that the Regent's naval brother, the Duke of Clarence, was both one of Jack's

most fervent advocates and one of the Regent's most outspoken critics - the brothers

were scarcely on speaking-terms; furthermore several strongly independent Whiggish

admirals also said that Aubrey absolutely must be reinstated; and then by way of

completing things Jack had made one of his rare adventures into literature. On hearing

that in the course of a drawing-room the Regent's mistress Lady Hertford had been rude

to Diana Maturin, his

cousin by marriage and his best friend's wife, he said angrily and in rather too public a

place, 'Birds of a feather, birds of a feather; fowl in their own nest, all tarred with the same

brush. Dryden put it very well, speaking of another great man's mistresses: he said - he

said - I have it. He said false, foolish, old, ill-natured and ill-bred. Aye: there's no beating

Dryden. False, foolish, old, ill-natured and ill-bred - nothing more ill-bred than being uncivil

at a levee or a drawing-room.'

It was his former shipmate Mowett who had told him the quotation and it was his

present shipmate Maturin who told him that the words had reached the royal ear. Stephen

had the news from his friend and close colleague Sir Joseph Blaine, the head of naval

intelligence, who added, 'If we could tell who was in the backgammon room at the time,

we might possibly be able to put a name on the worm in the apple.'

A worm in the apple there was. Some time before this two singularly well-placed

French agents, Ledward of the Treasury and Wray of the Admiralty, had concocted a

charge against Jack Aubrey: with Wray's intimate knowledge of naval officers' movements

and Ledward's of the criminal world the accusation was so cleverly framed that it

convinced a Guildhall jury and Jack was found guilty of rigging the Stock Exchange, fined,

pilloried, and of course struck off the Navy List. The charge was false and its falsity was

proved by a discontented enemy agent who betrayed Ledward and his friend, giving

unquestionable evidence of their treachery; yet neither had been arrested, and now both

were known to be in Paris. Blaine was sure they had been protected by some remarkably

influential friend, probably some very high permanent official: this man (or possibly this

small group of men), whose identity neither Blaine nor his colleagues could make out in

spite of all their pains, was still active, still potentially very dangerous And

• since at beast part of Wray's plot had been directed against Aubrey out of personal

malevolence, it was almost certainly this shadowy protector's influence that lay behind the

odd official delay and reluctance that had met any proposals in

favour of the now obviously innocent Aubrey up until the moment he became a member of

parliament.

'The worm is still with us,' said Blaine. 'He must be reasonably conspicuous from

his office; it is very probable that he has an unorthodox attachment for Wray; and if very

delicate enquiries tell us that a distinguished man with ambiguous tastes - and even the

greatest care cannot conceal these things from servants - was in the backgammon room

on Friday, why, then, we may pin him at last.'

'Certainly,' said Stephen, 'if we accept that the only man present willing to carry ill-

natured gossip was the worm in question.'

'Very true,' said Blaine. 'Still, it might give some slight hint or indication. But in any

case, I do beg you will urge our friend to be discreet. Tell him that although the First Lord

is an honourable man the present complexion of affairs is such that he may be physically

incapable of fulfilling his promises; he may be excluded from the Admiralty. Tell Aubrey to

be very cautious in his certainties; and tell him to put to sea as soon as ever he can. Tell

him that quite apart from obvious considerations there are obscure forces that may do him

harm.'

Jack Aubrey had little notion of his friend's mathematical or astronomical abilities and

none whatsoever of his seamanship, while his performance at billiards, tennis or fives, let

alone cricket, would have been contemptible if they had not excited such a degree of

hopeless compassion; but where physic, a foreign language and political intelligence were

concerned, Maturin might have been all the Sibyls rolled into one, together with the Witch

of Edmonton, Old Moore, Mother Shipton and even the holy Nautical Almanack, and no

sooner had Stephen finished his account with the words 'It is thought you might be well

advised to put to sea quite soon. Not only would it place those concerned before a fait

accompli but it would also - forgive me, brother - prevent you from committing yourself

farther in some unguarded moment or in the event of

provocation, ' than Jack gave him a piercing look and asked 'Should I put to sea

directly?'

'I believe so,' said Stephen.

Jack nodded, turned towards Ashgrove Cottage and hailed 'The house, ahoy. Ho,

Killick, there,' in a voice that would quite certainly reach across the intervening two

hundred yards.

He need not have called out so loud, for after a decent pause Killick stepped from

behind the hedge, where he had been listening. How such an awkward, slab-sided

creature could have got along by that sparse and dwarvish hedge undetected Stephen

could not tell. This newly-planned bowling-green had seemed an ideal place for

confidential remarks, the best apart from the inconveniently remote open down; Stephen

had chosen it deliberately, but although he was experienced in these things he was not

infallible, and once again Killick had done him brown. He consoled himself with reflecting

that the

•steward's eavesdropping was perfectly disinterested - the true miser's love for coins as

coins, not as a means of exchange - and that his loyalty to Jack's interests (as perceived

by Killick) was beyond all question.

'Killick,' said Aubrey, 'sea-chest for tomorrow at dawn; and pass the word for

Bonden.'

'Sea-chest for tomorrow at dawn it is, sir; and Bonden to report to the skittle-alley,'

replied Killick without any change whatsoever in his wooden expression; but when he had

gone a little way he stopped, crept back to the hedge again and peered at them for a while

through the branches. There were no bowling-greens in the remote estuarine hamlet

where Preserved Killick had been born, but there was, there always had been, a skittle-

alley; and this was the term he used - used with a steady obstinacy typical of his dogged,

thoroughly awkward nature.

And yet, reflected Stephen as they paced up and down as though on a green or at

least greenish quarterdeck, Killick was nearly in the right of it: this had no close

resemblance to a bowling-green, any more than Jack Aubrey's rose-garden looked like

anything planted by a Christian for his pleasure.

Most skills were to be found in a man-of-war - the Surprise's Sethians, for example, with

only the armourer and a carpenter's mate to help them, had run themselves up a new

meeting-house in what was understood to be the Babylonian taste, with a chain of great

gilded S's on each of its marble walls - but in the present case gardening did not seem to

be one of them. Certainly fine scything was not. The green was covered with crescent-

shaped pecks where the ill-directed blade had plunged into the sward: some of the pecks

were bald with a yellow surround, others were bald entirely; and their presence had

apparently encouraged all the moles of the neighbourhood to throw up their mounds

beside them.

It was the most superficial part of his mind that made these reflexions: below there

was a mixture of surprise and consternation, largely wordless. Surprise because although

he thought he knew Jack Aubrey very well he had clearly under-estimated the

measureless importance he attached to every aspect of this voyage. Consternation

because he had not meant to be taken literally. This 'sea-chest for tomorrow at dawn'

would be exceedingly inconvenient to Stephen - he had a great deal of business to attend

to before sailing, more than he could comfortably do even in the five or six days allotted -

but he had so phrased his words, particularly the discourse that preceded the direct

warning, that he could think of no way of going back on them with any sort of consistency.

In any case, his invention was at a particularly low ebb; so was his memory - if he had

recalled that the frigate was already fully victualled for her great voyage he would have

been less oracular. He was in a thoroughly bad state of mind and temper, dissatisfied with

the people in his banking-house, dissatisfied with the universities in which he meant to

endow chairs of comparative anatomy; he was hungry; and he was cross with his wife,

who had said in her clear ringing voice, 'I will tell you what, Maturin, if this baby of ours has

anything like the discontented, bilious, liverish expression you have brought down from

town, it shall be changed out of hand for something more cheerful from the Foundling

Hospital.'

Of course in theory he could say 'The ship will not sail until I am ready', for

absurdly enough he was her owner; but here theory was so utterly remote from any

conceivable practice, the relations between Aubrey and himself being what they were, that

he never dwelt on it; and in his hurry of spirits and the muddled thinking caused by ill-

temper he hit upon nothing else before Bonden came at the double and the Goat's and the

George's post-chaises were bespoke, express messengers sent off to Shelmerston,

London and Plymouth; and even if Maturin had spoken with the tongues of angels it was

now too late for him to recant with any decency at all.

'Lord, Stephen,' said Jack, cocking his ear towards the clock-tower in the stable-

yard, a fine great yard now filled with Diana's Arabians, 'we must go and shift ourselves.

Dinner will be ready in half an hour.'

'Oh for all love,' cried Stephen with a most unusual jet of ill-humour, 'must our lives

be ruled by bells on land as well as by sea?'

'Dear Stephen,' said Jack, looking down on him kindly, though with a little surprise,

'this is Liberty Hall, you know. If you had rather take a cold pork pie and a bottle of wine

into the summer-house, do not feel the least constraint. For my own part, I do not choose

to disoblige Sophie, who means to put on a prodigious fine gown: I believe it is our

wedding-day, Or perhaps her mother's. And in any case Edward Smith is coming.'

As it happened Stephen did not choose to disoblige Diana either. They had recently

had a larger number of disputes than usual, including a quite furious battle about Barham

Down. The place was too large and far too remote for a woman living by herself; the grass

was by no means suitable for a stud-farm she had seen the aftermath from the meadows:

poor thin stuff. And the hard pocked surface of the gallops would knock delicate hooves to

pieces. She would be far better off staying with Sophie and using Jack's unoccupied

downs - such grass, second only to the Curragh of Kildare. This led on to the inadvisability

of her riding at all while she was pregnant and

to her reply 'My God, Maturin, how you do go on. Anyone would think I was a prize

heifer. You are turning this baby into an infernal bore.'

He regretted their disagreements extremely, particularly since they had grown more

- not so much more acrimonious or vehement as more spirited since their real marriage,

their marriage in a church. During their former cohabitation they had quarrelled, of course;

but very mildly - never a raised voice nor an oath, no broken furniture at all or even plates.

Their marriage however had coincided with Stephen's giving up his long-established and

habitual taking of opium, and although he was a physician it was only at this point that he

fully realized what a very soothing effect his draught had had upon him, how very much it

had calmed his body as well as his mind, and what a shamefully inadequate husband it

had made him, particularly for a woman like Diana. The change in his behaviour, the very

decided change (for when undulled by laudanum he was of an ardent temperament) had

added an almost entirely new and almost entirely beneficent depth to their connexion; and

although it was in all likelihood the cause of the heat with which they now argued, each

preserving an imperilled independence, it was quite certainly the cause of this baby. When

Stephen had first heard that foetal heart beat, his own had stopped dead and then

turnedover. He was filled with a joy he had never known before, and with a kind of

adoration for Diana.

The association of ideas led him to say, when they were half-way to the house,

'Jack, in my hurry I had almost forgot to tell you that I had two letters from Sam and two

about him, all delivered from the same Lisbon packet. In both he sends you his most

respectful and affectionate greetings -'Jack's face flushed with pleasure '- and I believe his

affairs are in a most promising way.'

'I am delighted, delighted to hear it,' said Jack. 'He is a dear good boy.' Sam Panda,

as tall as Aubrey and even broader, was Jack's natural son, as black as polished ebony

yet absurdly recognizable - the same carriage, the same big man's gentle-

ness, even the same features, transposed to another key. He had been brought up by

Irish missionary priests in South Africa, and he was now in minor orders; he was unusually

intelligent and from the merely temporal point of view he had a brilliant career before him,

if only a dispensation would allow him to be ordained priest, for without one no bastard

could advance much higher than an exorcist. Stephen had taken a great liking to him at

their first meeting in the West Indies, and he had been using his influence in Rome and

elsewhere. 'Indeed,' Stephen went on, his vexation of spirit diminishing as he spoke, 'I

believe all that is needed now is the good word of the Patriarch, which I trust I may obtain

when we touch at Lisbon.'

'Patriarch?' cried Jack, laughing loud. 'Is there really a Patriarch in Lisbon? A living

Patriarch?'

'Of course there is a Patriarch. How do you suppose the Portuguese church could

get along without a Patriarch? Even your quite recent sects find what they call bishops

and indeed archbishops forsooth necessary. Every schoolboy knows that there are and

always have been Patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, the

Indies, Venice, and, as I say, of Lisbon.'

'You astonish me, Stephen. I had always imagined that patriarchs were very, very

old gentlemen in ancient times, with beards to their knees and long robes - Abraham,

Methusalem, Anchises and so on. But you have Patriarchs actually walking about, ha, ha,

ha!' He laughed with such good humour and amusement that it was impossible to

preserve a sullen or dogged expression. 'Forgive me, Stephen. I am only an ignorant

sailorman, you know, and mean no disrespect - Patriarchs, oh Lord!' They reached the

O'Brian Patrick - Aub-Mat 13 - The Thirteen Gun Salute

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