'You may be right, Harry,' said Drinkwater, amused at the pompous expression on the surgeon's face.
'May, sirrah? Of course I am right! I was right about Bolton, was I not? I questioned his mental stability and, poof! Suddenly he's off and then, when he's taken he becomes a suicide.' Appleby flicked his fingers.
Drinkwater nodded. 'Aye Harry, but even you doubted your own prognosis when he did not run earlier. He did leave it to the last minute, even you must admit that.'
'Nat, my boy,' gloated Appleby the gleam of intellectual triumph in his eyes, 'one always has to leave suicide until the last minute!'
'You're just good at guess-work, you damned rogue,' he said, wondering what Appleby would make of his own suspicions and convictions.
'Oh ho! Is that so?' said Appleby rolling his eyes in mock outrage, his chins quivering. 'Well my strutting bantam cock, listen to old Harry, there's more that I can tell you…' He was suddenly serious, with that comic pedagoguish expression that betokened, in Appleby, complete sincerity.
'I'll back my instinct over trouble in the fleet…' Drinkwater looked up sharply.
'Go on,' he said, content to let Appleby have his head for once.
'Look, Nat, this cutter's an exception, small ships usually are, but you are well aware to what I refer, the denial of liberty, the shameful arrears of pay, the refusal of many captains to sanction the purchase of fresh food even in port and the general abuses of a significant proportion of our brother officers, these can only have a most undesirable effect.
'Take the current rate of pay for an able seaman, Nathaniel. It is twenty-four shillings, twelve florins for risking scurvy, pox, typhus, gangrene, not to mention death itself at the hands of the enemy… d'you realise that sum was fixed in the days of the Commonwealth…' Appleby's indignation was justly righteous. To be truthful Drinkwater did not know that, but he had no time to acknowledge his ignorance before Appleby continued his grim catalogue of grievances.
'To this you must add the vast disparity of prize money, the short measure given by so many pursers that has added the purser's pound of fourteen ounces to the avoirdupois scale; you must add the abatement of pay when a man is sick or unfit for duty, even if the injury was sustained in the line of that duty; you must add deductions to pay for a chaplain when one is borne on the books, the deductions for Greenwich Hospital and the Chatham Chest…' Appleby was becoming more and more strident, counting the items off on his fingers, his chins quivering with passion.
'And if that were not enough when a man is gricomed by the whores that are the only women he is permitted to lie with, according to usage and custom, he must
'The families of seamen starve in the gutters while their menfolk are incarcerated on board ship, frequently unpaid for years and when they do return home they are as like to be turned over to a ship newly commissioning as occasion demands.
'I tell you, Nathaniel, these are
Drinkwater sighed. Appleby was right. There was worse too. As the prime seamen were pressed out of homeward merchant ships the Lord Mayor's men and the quota men filled the Press Tenders, bringing into the fleet not hardened seamen, but the misfits of society, men without luck but not without intelligence; demagogues, lower deck lawyers; men who saw in the example of France a way to power, to overturn vested interest in the stirring name of the people. With a pot so near the boil, was the purpose and presence of Capitaine Santhonax at Sheerness to stir it a little? The proximity of Sheerness to Tunbridge occurred to him. A feeling of alarm, of duty imperfectly performed, swept over him.
'Aye, Harry. Happen you are right, though I hope not. It might be a bloody business…'
'Of course, Nat!
'Half the admirals are blind. Look how they ridiculed John Clerk of Eldin because he was able to point out how to win battles. Now they all scrabble to fight on his principles. Look how the powdered physicians of the fleet ignored Lind's anti-scorbutic theories, how difficult it was for Douglas to get his cartridges taken seriously. Remember Patrick Ferguson's rifle? Oh, the list of thinking men pointing out the obvious to the establishment is endless… what the deuce are you laughing at?'
'Your inconsistent consistency,' grinned Nathaniel.
'What the devil d'you mean?'
'Well you are right, Harry, of course, these things are always the same, the prophet unrecognised in his own land.'
'So, I'm correct.
'But you yourself objected to Sir Sydney Smith meddling in your sick bay, and Sir Sydney has a reputation for an original mind. You are therefore inconsistent with your principles in your own behaviour, whilst being comfortingly consistent with the rest of us mortal men.'
'Why you damned impertinent puppy!'
Drinkwater dodged the empty tankard that sailed towards his head.
Thus it was that they rubbed along together while things went from bad to worse for British arms. Sir John Jervis evacuated the Mediterranean while Admiral Morard de Galles sailed from Brest with an army embarked for Ireland. That he was frustrated in landing General Hoche and his seasoned troops was a piece of luck undeserved by the British. The south-westerly gale that ruined the enterprise over Christmas 1796 seemed to the Irish patriot, Wolfe Tone, to deny the existence of a just God, while in the British fleet the gross mismanagement of Lord Bridport and Sir John Colpoys only reduced the morale of the officers and increased the disaffection of the men.
Again only the frigates had restored a little glitter to tarnished British laurels. And that at a heavy price. Pellew, now in the
In the North Sea, action of even this Pyrrhic kind was denied Admiral Duncan's squadron. Maintaining his headquarters in Yarmouth Roads, where he was in telegraphic communication with London, Duncan kept his inshore frigates off the Texel and his cutters in the gattways through the Haakagronden, as close as his lieutenant- commanders dared be. Duncan's fleet was an exiguous collection of old ships, many of sixty-four guns and none larger than a third rate. The admiral flew his flag in the aptly named
The Dutch, under Vice-Admiral de Winter, were an unknown force. Memories of Dutch ferocity from King Charles's day lingered still, forgotten the humiliation of losing their fleet to a brigade of French cavalry galloping over the ice in which they were frozen. For like the Spanish they were now the allies of France, but unlike them their country was a proclaimed republic. Republicanism had crossed the Rhine, as Drinkwater had predicted, and the combination of a Franco-Dutch fleet to make another attempt on Ireland was a frightening prospect, given the uneasy state of that unhappy coun-try.
Then, as the wintry weather gave way to milder, springlike days, news of a different kind came. The victory of St Valentine's Day it was called at first, then later the Battle of Cape St Vincent. Jervis had been made an earl and the remarkable, erratic Captain Nelson, having left the line of battle to cut off the Spanish van from escape, had received a knighthood.
The air of triumph even permeated
