The Corvette

Chapter Twenty Greater Love Hath no Man

 August-September 1803 

They had assembled all the French prisoners ashore prior to burning the Requin. Flanked by Mount and Singleton and escorted by a file of marines, Drinkwater inspected the hovels that made up the French settlement. Drawn apart from the privateersmen and regarded with a curious hostility by a crowd of eskimos, an untidy, starveling huddle of men watched their approach cautiously. They wore the remnants of military greatcoats, their feet bound in rags and their shoulders covered in skins. Most hid their faces. They were Bonaparte's Arctic 'colonists'.

Explanation came slowly, as though the revelation of horror should not be sudden. They were military ghosts, two companies of Invalides, a euphemism for the broken remnants of Bonaparte's vaunted Egyptian and Syrian campaigns. A handful of men who had regained France after the desertion of Bonaparte and the assassination of his successor Kleber; men who had returned home from annexed Egypt where their accounts of what had happened and the decay of their bodies were a double embarrassment to the authorities.

Drinkwater remembered the purulent eyes of the men he had fought hand to hand off Kosseir on the Egyptian coast of the Red Sea. Perhaps some of these poor devils had been in the garrison that had so gallantly resisted the British squadron under Captain Lidgbird Ball. He surveyed the diseased remnants of French ambition who had been trepanned to Greenland in an attempt to form a trading post to acquire furs for the French army. Here they could supply the voracious wants of the First Consul's armies at the expense of degrading the eskimos, exchanging liquor for furs, liquor that came through the agency of British whalers.

Under Drinkwater's scrutiny several of the Frenchmen drew themselves up, still soldiers, such was the power of military influence. The rags fell away from their faces. The ravages of bilharzia, trachoma-induced blindness, skin diseases, frostbite and God alone knew what other contagions burned in them.

Drinkwater turned aside, sickened. He met the eyes of Singleton. 'Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,' said the missionary softly.

'Where is this man Vrolicq?' Drinkwater muttered through clenched teeth.

Mount had the privateer's commander and officers quartered in a wretched stone and willow-roofed hovel. They stood blinking in the pale sunshine that filtered through a thin overcast and stared at the British officers.

Jean Vrolicq, corsair, republican opportunist and war-profiteer regarded Drinkwater through dark, suspicious eyes. He was a small man whose hardiness and energy seemed somehow refined, as though reduced to its essence in these latitudes, and disdaining a larger body. His face was bearded, seamed and tanned, his eyes chips of coal. Drinkwater recognised the man who had wounded him during their first action with the Requin.

'So, Captain, today you remember you have prisoners, eh?' Vrolicq's English was good, his accent suggesting a familiarity with Cornwall that was doubtless allied to the practice of 'free trade'.

'Tell me, M'sieur, was this trade you had with Captain Ellerby profitable to yourself?'

Perhaps Vrolicq thought Drinkwater was corruptible instead of merely curious, angling for a speculative cargo aside from his duty.

'But yes, Captain, and also for the carrier.' The man grinned rapaciously. 'You British are expert at making laws from which profits can be made with ease. You are equally good at breaking your own laws, which is perhaps why you make them, yes? Ellerby, he traded furs for cognac, his friends traded gold for cognac. We French now have gold in France and cognac in Greenland. Ellerby has furs which he also trades. To us French. So we have gold, cognac and furs. Ellerby has a little profit. It is clever, yes? And because your King George has a wise Parliament who all like a little French cognac' The disdain was clear in Vrolicq's voice. But it was equally clear why Ellerby had not wanted Drinkwater's presence in the Greenland Sea, yet needed his protection in soundings off the British coast where an unscrupulous naval officer might board him in search of men and discover he had tiers of furs over his barrels of whale blubber. If Ellerby's plan had not been disrupted he and Waller would have been at the rendezvous off Shetland at the end of September and allowed Drinkwater to escort them safely into the Humber. And how assiduously Drinkwater had striven to afford Ellerby the very protection he needed for his nefarious trade!

'It is quite possible,' said Vrolicq, breaking into Drinkwater's thoughts, 'that you might yourself profit a little…'

'Go to the devil!' snapped Drinkwater, turning away and striding down the beach towards the waiting boat.

Drinkwater stood on the quarterdeck wrapped in the bear-skin given him by the officers. It was piercingly cold, the damp tendrils of a fog reaching down into the bay from the heights surrounding them. The daylight was dreary with mist; the Arctic summer was coming to its end.

'Boat approaching, sir.' Drinkwater acknowledged Frey's report and watched one of the Nimrod's boats, commandeered to replace Melusine's losses, as it was pulled out from the curve of dark sand and shingle that marked the beach at Nagtoralik. He waited patiently while Obadiah Singleton clambered over the rail, nodded him a greeting, then ushered him below to the sanctuary of the cabin.

'Well Obadiah, you received my note. I am about to sail. All the ships are ready and the wind, what there is of it, will take us clear of the bay as soon as this fog lifts. This is the last chance to change your mind.'

'That is out of the question, Nathaniel.' Singleton smiled his rare smile. All pretence at rank had long since vanished between the two men. Singleton's determination to stay and minister to the human flotsam on the shores of the bay ran contrary to all of Drinkwater's instincts. He could not quite believe that Singleton would remain. 'Oh, I know what you intend to say. 'Remember whom you are to cope withal; a sort of vagabonds, rascals and runaways, a scum of Bretagnes, and base lackey peasants whom their o'er cloyed country vomits forth to desperate ventures, and assured destruction…' King Richard the Third, Nathaniel. That last clause is most appropriate. Scarcely any will survive the coming winter. There is evidence of typhus…'

'Typhus!'

'Yes, what you call the ship or gaol fever…'

'I know damned well what typhus is…'

'Well then you know that as a divine I should urge you to take mercy upon them, to have compassion even at the risk of infecting your ship's company. As a physician I warn you against further contact with them. There is not only typhus, there is…'

'I know, I know. I do not wish to reflect upon the whole catalogue of ills that infests this morbid place. So you advise me to take no action. To leave them here to rot.'

'This is the first time, Nathaniel, that I have seen you indecisive.' Singleton smiled again.

'There is no need to enjoy the experience, damn it!'

'Forgive me. Perhaps one thing I have learned during our acquaintance is that true decisions are seldom made upon philosophical lines. Sometimes the burdens of your position are too great for one man to bear. It is God's will that I surrogate for your conscience.'

'And what will happen to you, Obadiah? Eh?'

'I do not know. Let us leave that to God. You were bidden to land me upon the coast of Greenland. You have done your duty.'

'And Vrolicq?'

'Vrolicq is an agent of the devil. Leave him to me and to God.'

'I have already offered you whatever you wish for out of the ships. Surely you till take my pistols…'

'Thank you, no. I have taken such necessaries as I thought desirable out of the Recjuin before you fired her yesterday. I have everything I need.' He paused. 'I am at peace, Nathaniel. Do not worry on my account. It is you who work for implacable masters. It was Christ's essential gospel that we should love our enemies.'

'I do not understand you, damned if I do.'

'John, fifteen, verse thirteen,' he held out his hand. 'Farewell, Nathaniel.'