westerly, and spray was now visiting the deck. No land was visible, even by telescope, and seabirds were fewer by the hour. Peto was wrapped likewise in a cloak and stood alone at the stern rail, legs braced a little apart, a hand fastened on one of the shrouds. Hervey walked as close to the rail as he could without actually placing a hand on it, the ship’s motion sufficiently pronounced now to make him a shade insecure. Peto smiled as he reached the stern. ‘Worry not: in six months you’ll be rushing to the tops like an old hand!’
Hervey looked unconvinced, and then not a little anxious as it occurred to him that Peto might have summoned him to begin this very practice.
The captain’s preoccupations were otherwise, however. ‘Since you are evidently an officer of singular attachment to your profession, I judge that you might be an availing interlocutor in the art of war.’
Hervey had no idea of what he alluded to. ‘You flatter me greatly, sir—’
‘Yes, yes, yes — but do I suppose correctly that you have an eye for more than a horse?’
He smiled. It seemed that the duke, at least, believed so. ‘Try me, sir,’ he replied.
‘Certain notions of warfare, acquired these past six years, I am minded to commit to the page.’
Hervey wiped the stinging salt spray from his eyes and pulled his shako lower. ‘Notions particular to war at sea?’
Peto thought a moment before replying. ‘At first I should have considered them so, but I am no longer sure, for it seems to me that the general precepts ought equally to apply on land. What do you know of the affair at Lissa?’
Hervey now had his legs braced twice as wide as Peto’s, and a tighter grip on a shroud line. ‘I know that an English squadron defeated a French one twice its strength.’
‘Just so, Hervey, just so.’ Peto’s voice was beginning to rise against the wind. ‘Four of the French’s were forty-gun frigates, too — though to say
Hervey made respectful noises.
Peto now revealed he was writing a memento. ‘I gave a public lecture on Lissa — at Gresham’s College in the City. A publisher approached me thereafter.’
His evident pride in both was endearing. Hervey nodded in appreciation.
‘I intend, in a supplementary chapter, to draw lessons from the action, developing a more general theory,’ he added.
Hervey asked if he would be challenging any Admiralty document thereby.
‘There are the Standing Instructions, yes. And these are added to by fleet instructions. Lord Howe’s are still the basis for our fighting.’
‘And these are deficient?’
Peto looked rather irritated. ‘They don’t want for quality! I wish merely to develop a general design for captains of frigates — and it’s only of frigates I speak, for the future is with them.’
‘And the import of Lissa?’
Peto looked happier again. ‘In the Royal Navy it is a precept, by which an officer is taught, that navigation precedes gunnery.’
Spray was now beginning to reach high, yet Peto was not inclined to move. Hervey pulled up his collar and further inclined his ear towards him.
‘Captain Hoste prevailed at Lissa because he handled
Despite the distraction of having to keep his balance, Hervey saw how it must be so (indeed, he wished they were a little closer to the shore themselves). In any case, there could be no doubting the captain’s aptness for such a treatise, for Peto had walked the quarterdeck with Hoste, who had himself walked the deck with Nelson.
‘And I tell you this,’ he continued, now so fired by his subject that his voice had risen well above the wind, ‘there is wonderful pleasure to be had cruising, but it’s nothing to manoeuvring to advantage in shallow waters. The Nile was, to my mind, the most famous of victories!’
Hervey would not have gainsaid that.
‘Do you recall Bonaparte’s lament? “Wherever you find a fathom of water, there you will find the British!” Oh yes, Hervey, believe me: it’s shallow waters that truly test a captain.’
‘I shall remember it,’ he replied, smiling. ‘A fathom only, you say?’
‘It is all that
Even in the cold and the spray — and the effort to stay on his feet — Hervey could see the vigour in Peto’s thinking. And if he could pass just a little of his time at sea in discourse such as this he might well increase his own fitness for command, for it was evident that in the handling of a frigate and a troop of cavalry there was more than a little similitude. As to this being any more than a theoretical fitness, however, he could only confide, for everywhere, they agreed — even in India — there was peace on earth.
IV. A PROSPEROUS VOYAGE
Hervey had written so many letters during his otherwise idle hours that they filled one of his hatboxes. But to one man he had yet to commit his thoughts, for Daniel Coates was neither family, nor regiment, nor superior. Daniel Coates was a man who would wish to hear of his thoughts as they touched upon his military condition, so that he might compare them with his own experience, which, in the space of the ten years he had been Hervey’s self-appointed tutor in practical soldiering, he had shared unsparingly. Daniel Coates, formerly General Tarleton’s trumpeter in the first American war, had lived peaceably on Salisbury Plain for twenty years, first as shepherd, then as agister, with sheep so numerous they had made him rich even by the wool standard of that county. Hervey would hold that he owed his life on a dozen occasions to that veteran’s generosity and tireless instruction — and never more so than at Waterloo, when Coates’s clever new carbine had been all that stood between him and a French lancer’s bullet. He had left the letter until this time so that he might reflect properly on the half-year he had passed in the wooden world.
