more accurately.'
'Once you have had a brush with them, you mean?'
'No. Once I have seen them, even hull down on the horizon.'
'Could you indeed judge of their abilities at so remote a view?'
'Of course,' said Jack a little impatiently. 'What a fellow you are, Stephen. Any sailor can tell a great deal from the way another sailor sets his jib, or goes about, or flashes out his stuns'ls, just as you could tell a great deal about a doctor from the way he whipped off a leg.'
'Always this whipping off of a leg. It is my belief that for you people the whole noble art of medicine is summed up in the whipping off of a leg. I met a man yesterday--and he was so polite as to call on me today, quite sober--who would soon put you into a better way of thinking. He is the Otter's surgeon. I should probably have to cultivate his acquaintance in any event, for our own purposes, since the Otter is, as you would say, an inshore prig', but I do not regret it now that I have met him. He is, or was, a man of shining parts. But to return to our odds: you would set them at five to three in favour of the French?'
'Something of that kind. If you add up guns and crews and tonnage it is a great deal worse; but of course I cannot really speak to the probability until I see them. Yet although I have sent a hundred Boadiceas to lend a hand aboard the Sirius, and although I know Pym is doing his utmost to get her ready for sea, our own ship has to take in six months' stores, and I should love to careen her too, the last chance of a clean bottom for God knows how long--I cannot see how we can sail before Saturday's tide. I shall keep the people hard at it, and harry the arsenal until they wish me damned, but apart from that there is nothing I can do: there is nothing that the Archangel Gabriel could do. So what do you say to some music, Stephen? We might work out some variations on 'Begone Dull Care'.'
Chapter Four
The squadron, standing north-east with the urgent tradewind on the beam, made a noble sight; their perfect line covered half a mile of sea--and such a sea: the Indian Ocean at its finest, a sapphire not too deep, a blue that turned their worn sails a dazzling white. Sirius, Nereide, Raisonable, Boadicea, Otter, and away to leeward the East India Company's fast-sailing armed schooner Wasp, while beyond the Wasp, so exactly placed that it outlined her triangular courses, floated the only bank of cloud in the sky, the flat bottomed clouds hanging over the mountains of La Reunion, themselves beneath the horizon.
The Cape and its uneasy storms lay two thousand miles astern, south and westward, eighteen days' sweet sailing; and by now the crews had long since recovered from the extreme exertion of getting their ships ready for sea three tides before it seemed humanly possible. But once at sea new exertions awaited them: for one thing, the perfection of this line, with each ship keeping station on the pendant at exactly a cable's length, could be achieved only by incessant care and watchfulness. The Sirius, with her foul bottom, kept setting and taking in her topgallants; the Nereide had perpetually to struggle against her tendency to sag to leeward; and Jack, standing on the poop of the Raisonable, saw that his dear but somewhat sluggish Boadicea was having an anxious time of it-- Eliot was fiddling with his royals--while only the pendant-ship, fast in spite of her antiquity, and the Otter were at ease. And for another, all the ships except the Boadicea were disturbed, upset and harassed by the Commodore's passion for gunnery.
He had begun as soon as they sank Cape Agulhas, and although they were by no means reconciled to the exercise they were used to his ways; they were quite sure what the Commodore would be at at this point in the afternoon watch when they saw the Raisonable signal to the Wasp and then bid the squadron wear together. Up and down the line the bosuns' calls shrilled high and clear, the hands stood poised upon their toes (for the competition between the ships was very keen, the horror of public disgrace very great), and the moment the Raisonable deviated from her line the others began their turn: round they came, as trim as could be, forming the line with their larboard tacks aboard, the wind one point free, a reversed line, with the Otter leading. They had no great press of sail and this was a simple manoeuvre; even so, it was well executed; there was not much amiss with their seamanship, reflected Jack, looking over the taffrail at the Nereide's masts, all in one line, eclipsing those of the Sirius, her next astern. Meanwhile the schooner had cast off the targets, and she was making sail with remarkable diligence, being eager to run out of range as soon as possible.
It was an understandable eagerness, for as usual the Otter opened a fine brisk fire a little before her guns could really be said to bear, and her wilder shot whipped up the sea between the schooner and the target. Her second broadside was nearer the mark, and might have hit it if the Otters had waited for the top of the roll: her third resembled the first, except that one ball did skip over the target: and she did not manage a fourth. Jack, watch in hand, was calling the figures to the mathematical midshipman he had brought with him when the Boadicea spoke out, pitching her shot a trifle high but sweeping the hypothetical deck; her second broadside struck the enemy square amidships, and with rapturous cries her third and fourth demolished the floating wreckage. 'One minute fifty-five seconds,' wrote Spotted Dick upon his slate, following it with two points of admiration. 'As they bear, Mr Whittington,' called Jack. The Raisonable was understood to play no competitive role in all this: because of her age she could not blaze away with the single, timber- shattering roar of a younger ship, but every third gun of her lower deck, half charged, and several of her lighter pieces produced a slow rolling fire that would have done a certain amount of damage. Far more damage than the full but almost comically inept broadsides of the Nereide: two broadsides only, and those fired so high that no more than a single shot went home--a shot almost certainly fired by one of the quarter-gunners that Jack had most reluctantly sent into her. Then came Sirius, with two deliberate broadsides and then her five aftermost guns as the battered target went astern: slow but quite accurate at this moderate range.
Jack had neither the time nor the powder for any more. As soon as the guns were housed he signalled Tack in succession and called the schooner under his lee. From the moment they weighed from Simon's Town he had watched the sailing of the ships under his command with a very close attention, but never had he kept his glass o fixedly upon any one of them as now he kept it upon the Wasp as she came racing up close-hauled, throwing white water right down her lee-raii. She was a beautiful craft, beautifully handled, and she sailed closer to the wind than e would have thought possible; yet his anxious, worn expression did not lighten when she rounded to and lay here under the Raisonable's quarter, her captain looking up at her lofty poop with an inquiring face.
Jack nodded absently to the schooner, told the signal-lieutenant to summon the captain of the Sirius, stepped aft with a speaking-trumpet and hailed the Boadicea, desiring her acting-captain to come aboard. The Commodore received them rather formally in the fore-cabin, where Mr Peter handed Eliot written orders to proceed to the Mauritius in company with the Sirius, there to lie off Port-Louis, the capital and the chief port, in the orth-west of the island, and to rendezvous with the rest of the squadron on that station: in the intervening time they were to watch the motions of the enemy and to gain all the information they could. To these orders Jack added a clear direction not to engage in any action unless the odds were heavily in their favour, together with some advice about arriving off Sable Point after dark and sending in boats to look into the harbour at crack of dawn, so that they could pull out against the sea-breeze. Then, in his care for the Boadicea, he was going on to beg Eliot not to carry too great a press of sail, not to set his royals--a spar carried away in these latitudes was a terrible loss--she must be humoured, not drove--when he realized that he sounded more like a mother-hen than was quite right. He stifled his recommendation about the Boadicea? starboard cathead, saw them over the side, watched their ships steer north, and went below again, going right aft to the great cabin, where Stephen sat at a table, encoding letters on paper of surprising thinness.
