Man Of War

‘Call him, if you will.’

Lambe beckoned the midshipman, who sped down the companion ladder as if the drummer were beating to quarters.

‘Sir!’ he squeaked, a discernibly new telescope peeping from beneath his cloak.

Peto returned the salute. ‘Mr Lambe informs me that you sustained an injury yesterday. Have you yet reported to the surgeon?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Why not?’

‘I did not consider it serious enough, sir.’

‘Indeed? Have you some medical qualification?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Then kindly give yourself the benefit of the surgeon’s, else how am I to rely upon what you see through that telescope of yours . . . It is a new telescope, is it not?’

‘It is, sir. I bought it of Mr Adams.’

Peto wondered what Adams – whoever he was (another midshipman, he supposed) – would make do with instead, but that was not his direct concern; he could leave the discipline of the midshipmen to Lambe. ‘Very well. Help yourself to coffee, Mr Pelham,’ he said, and with a measure of warmth, indicating the tray which Flowerdew had placed on the gallery locker.

‘Thank you, sir,’ replied the midshipman, fairly taken aback.

Lambe smiled to himself. He had fair roasted Pelham after the business of the parallax, and was himself thinking of some magnanimous gesture. This more than saved him the effort.

‘How old are you, Mr Pelham?’

‘Seventeen come next month, sir.’

‘And where are you from; where do your people live?’

‘I was born in Plymouth, sir. My father was captain of Repulse. He is dead now, sir; my mother also.’

Peto rather wished he had not asked. He was sentimental enough to believe a man must have a home to return to. And even though his own parents were now gone, he had the prospect of a warm heart and hearth. A smile almost overcame him, indeed, at the thought of Miss Elizabeth Hervey – Lady Peto – in the hall of that handsome Norfolk manor, advancing smiling to greet him on his return from some commission or other . . . He cleared his throat. ‘I am sorry to hear it, Mr Pelham. I did not know your father, though I know Repulse to have had a fine reputation in her day.’

‘He was killed off New Orleans, sir.’

Peto now dimly recalled the loss of the ship in that wretched and unnecessary campaign: Mr Midshipman Pelham had been semi-orphaned a long time . . . ‘And your mother?’

‘She died as I was born, sir. I was brought up by an aunt until such time as I could go to sea.’

A full orphan – Peto almost groaned; he ought to have expected it.

‘Mr Pelham was a volunteer at twelve, sir, on my last ship,’ said Lambe.

It told Peto a good deal about them both. ‘Then I trust you shall pass for lieutenant quickly, Mr Pelham. There is no time to lose even in these days of peace.’

‘I intend doing so, sir.’

Peto nodded thoughtfully. ‘Good. Capital, capital . . . And I would that you dine with me and Mr Lambe this evening.’

Pelham’s boyish but handsome face lit up like a signal lamp. ‘Thank you kindly, sir.’

Flowerdew returned with two bowls of oat gruel. Peto took a spoonful, as gingerly as he felt he might in such company, and tasted the crew’s breakfast.

Perhaps his memory – or his palate – played tricks on him, for he found it not nearly as repulsive as usual. In the East Indies, his former station, they had had a very decent porridge of corn and cinnamon, but the oatmeal cakes which the Victualling Board supplied were rough rations indeed, and boiled up in the galley copper, with water a month or more in the hold, the gruel was better fit for the sty under the forecastle. The Board held it to be a necessary corrective to the otherwise constipating ship’s diet, but the majority of men, Peto recalled, thought it a far better emetic.

Lambe saw his surprise. ‘We have an active purser. He sent back a good deal of the provender first offered.’

Peto nodded appreciatively. Time was when a captain appointed his own man, or rather put forward his clerk’s name to the Admiralty, but of late there had been a fashion to place experience in the position, for too often the purser had been in truck with the merchants who supplied the ship (and, shame to relate, in truck with the captain as well). ‘And real coffee to be had, you say, Mr Lambe? Remarkable.’ The old ‘Scotch coffee’ of the mess decks had been a foul brew, burnt biscuit boiled up to a black paste in rank water, and sugared until it could hold no more. ‘I shall expect to see contented faces and good constitutions at my inspection.’

‘You may depend upon it, sir, as ever it has been,’ replied Lambe, just as wryly.

At a half past eight o’clock, Peto descended the companion ladder to the upper deck and began his first inspection of Prince Rupert. Lambe accompanied him together with the boatswain, three mates, the master-at-arms and two corporals, the serjeant of marines and several midshipmen, whose job it would be to attend on any observation the captain made. He began with the larboard battery, walking slowly, hands clasped behind his back, here and there nodding to a salute, here and there bringing some fault, or something he would have done otherwise, to Lambe’s attention, who at once delegated the business of correction to the appropriate member of the party, whence followed a good deal of barking and growling while Peto continued his advance along the line of eighteen-pounders. He then turned aft to walk the starboard battery, the routine as before. By and large he approved of what he found: so much of it was new made, and the men looked likely – and for all their sanding and swabbing, they were clean and serviceably dressed.

It took him but an hour to see over the gun-decks, though he fancied he missed nothing; long years inspecting and being inspected had given him an unfailing eye. But all this was merely preparation: the guns were lashed and the instruments of gunnery fastened up; he would see later what sharp work the gun-crews could make of it.

He descended to the magazine, taking off his shoes, as standing orders required, to have a good look about the inside. The gunner was a big, powerfully made man, who had to stoop at his station. He spoke softly, as if noise as well as sparks were a danger; Peto felt certain of him at once. As he did too of the carpenter, who conducted him along the hull walk – always a place for grazing the forehead and bruising the shoulders – with a running commentary on the state of the timbers, pumps, masts and spars. ‘Not once above ten inches, sir, the well,’ he reported with palpable pride.

Peto nodded appreciatively; maintaining the depth of water below the maximum permitted of fifteen inches (without excessive pumping) was remarkable in a ship of Rupert’s age, and not long re- commissioned. ‘Very good, Mr Storr,’ he said as they came to the cockpit, turning to him directly now and fixing him with a quizzical look: ‘We have met before, I think.’

The carpenter’s face shone as bright as had Midshipman Pelham’s. ‘We ’ave, sir – on Amphion.’

It was eighteen years ago. Peto nodded. ‘Mate to that old dog Pollard, as I recall, Mr Storr?’

‘Ay, sir. And many a good trick ’e taught me,’ replied the carpenter, lapsing into broader Devon. ‘Amphion wor a good ship, sir.’

‘That she was, and in what I have seen so far I believe we may say that Rupert follows her.’

‘She does that, sir. As strong a framing as you’d see.’

Peto clapped his hand on the carpenter’s shoulder – a perhaps familiar gesture, but one he felt entirely at ease with. ‘I’m obliged to you, Mr Storr.’

Next was the midshipmen’s berth, which was not likely to be so obliging. Peto was never inclined to be intrusive, for he remembered well enough the cherished sense of private space (‘privacy’ would be a wholly inapt word) when he himself had been a midshipman, but the berth – little more than an enclosure knocked up by Storr’s mates – bore all too evidently the signs of late breakfasting.