talk with the Admiral's secretary, with no more than another bow and a significant look as though to say 'You see how I am taken up- my time is not my own.'
During these morning hours Jack Aubrey was in the dockyard, conferring with the shipwrights far down in the bowels of his dear Surprise. The shipwrights and those who controlled them were profoundly corrupt, but they did allow that there was a world of difference between government money and private money, and that a captain's personal outlay called for real value in return; furthermore they were capable of expert craftsmanhip, and Jack was thoroughly satisfied with her fine new Dalmatian oak diagonal hanging-knees and the stringers abaft the mainchains, where the frigate had been cruelly mauled. He also believed the shipwrights when they told him that apart from saints' days they had just over a full week's work to do. They were tolerably vague about the number of saints' days, however, and as Jack climbed the temporary ladders to the ravaged deck, brushing wood-shavings off his coat and breeches, they sent for the calendar, telling off the holidays one after another and disagreeing furiously about whether St Aniceto and St Cucufat amounted to twelve hours or only an afternoon for carpenters as well as caulkers. Jack wrote it all down. He knew the Admiral of old: Sir Francis might not have been the first officer in the Navy to require his people to do everything at the double, but he was certainly one of the most forceful and persistent; he hated sloth on the quarterdeck as much as anywhere else, and when he called for a decision, a report, or a statement of a ship's condition he liked to have it very briskly. Sometimes of course these brisk decisions, reports or statements did not wear quite so well as more deliberate, pondered versions; but, as he said, 'If you stand considering which leg to put into your breeches first, you are likely to lose your tide; and in the meanwhile your breech is bare.' He maintained that speed was the essence of attack; and in his own actions this had certainly proved true.
'Mr Ward,' said Jack to his clerk, who was waiting on the quarterdeck with the ship's open list under his arm, 'be so good as to draw up a statement of condition showing that Surprise should be ready for sea in thirteen days, her guns in, her water completed and her shrouds rattled down, and let me have it as soon as the muster is over.'
They walked over the brow to the black huts where the Surprises lived. Captain Aubrey was expected and all his officers were present to receive him; poor lost Thomas Pullings was also there, standing somewhat apart so as not to appear to be encroaching upon the territory of William Mowett, his successor. Four more commanders had been made in the Mediterranean fleet alone: they too had been turned loose upon the Maltese beach, and if any vacancy occurred - an improbable state of affairs - it was likely that one of them would be given it, all four having considerable interest. He now wore a plain round jacket rather than his gold-laced splendour, and an old, old sea-worn hat; but most of the other officers were also in working clothes - all, indeed, except for Mr Gill the master and Mr Adams the purser, who both had assignations in Valletta - because as soon as the inspection was over the whole ship's company was marching off to shoot for Mr Pullings' prize, a weekly iced cake in the form of a target that was much valued by the men and that gave the Commander a tenuous remaining connection with the ship. Marching off by boat, that is to say, for as nothing would induce them to keep in step or stand up straight their officers were unwilling to parade them through streets filled with redcoats, and they were to be taken as far as possible by sea. They were now standing in free and easy attitudes holding their muskets more or less as they saw fit: and when, his formal tour being over, Jack said to Mowett, 'Mr Mowett, we will muster by the open list, if you please,' and Mowett said to the bosun 'All hands to muster,' and the bosun sprung his call, uttering the sequence of howls and short sharp notes designed to bring people from the farthest depths of the orlop and forepeak, the seamen piled their weapons in heaps that would have made any soldier blush and assembled in a straggling group on the bald dusty stretch of ground that purported to be the larboard side of the quarterdeck. The clerk called their names, and one by one they crossed over, just abaft an imaginary mainmast, to the starboard, touching their foreheads to their captain as they did so and calling out 'Here, sir.'
They were a sadly diminished band. Although some of course were in hospital, naval prison or military guardhouse, many, far too many had been drafted away. Yet for all that, Jack had fought with extraordinary fury for his older shipmates and his best seamen, sometimes going so far as substitution, misrepresentation and downright falsehood when he was absolutely forced to give up a certain number, and now, as they crossed over, there was scarcely one he had not known for years. Some indeed had served in his very first command, the fourteen-gun brig Sophie; and among the rest there were hardly any boys, no landsmen and no ordinary seamen. They were all able, and many of them might have been rated quartermaster in a flagship: at least as far as skill was concerned. They looked at him with mild affection as they went by, and he looked at them with profound disgust. Never, never had he seen such a squalid crew: crapulous, down-at-heel, frowsty. Mowett and Rowan and the master's mates laboured heroically keeping them busy through much of the day, but it would have been inhuman to deny them all liberty, and worse than inhuman ? contrary to custom. And if this liberty were to go on much longer . . . Davis had not answered his name, twice repeated.
'Has Davis run?' asked Jack eagerly. Davis was his Old Man of the Sea, a dark, powerful, dangerous fellow who insisted upon volunteering or being transferred into any ship Captain Aubrey commanded; and nothing, nothing, would induce him to desert.
'I am afraid not, sir,' said Mowett. 'He only took some Scotch soldiers' kilts away from them, and they have laid him up in their guard-room.'
Much the same kind of fate accounted for the temporary absence of three more Surprises. Far graver was the real difference between this muster and the last, no less than eleven men having been taken to hospital, four with Malta fever, four with the great pox, two with limbs broken in drunken falls, and one pierced with a Maltese knife, while a twelfth was in prison, waiting trial for a rape. There were no desertions, however, although several merchant vessels had been in and out: the Surprises were mostly steady men-of-war's men, and they belonged to a happy ship.
'Well, at least I have all the figures,' said Jack, sighing and shaking his head.
It was just as well that he had got them then, for he had scarcely finished his notes and uttered the wish that the frigate might have a chaplain - 'Someone to reclaim them - the fear of Hell-fire might do better than the cat - anything to stop this wasting away'- when a midshipman arrived, at the double, requiring his presence aboard the Commander-in-Chief.
Thanking Heaven that he had put on a good uniform for the muster, Jack said, 'Captain Pullings, would you be so very kind as to take my place? I was just going to see our people at the hospital. Mr Mowett, carry on. Bonden, my gig. Youngster,' - to the flagship's midshipman, who had come across in a dghaisa - 'come along with me. It will save you fourpence.'
As the gig sped across the Grand Harbour Jack said 'I thought the Admiral was ashore.'
'So he is, sir,' said the boy in his high clear treble, 'but he said he would be aboard long before I found you, and longer still before you put on your breeches.' The gig's crew grinned, and bow-oar uttered a strangled hoot. 'But I did not even go to the lady's house,' the boy went on in perfect innocence, 'because one of our bargemen said he had seen you putting off at Nix Mangiare steps for the dockyard, and I found you first go!'
Going up the Caledonia's side, Jack noticed with satisfaction that the gathering of officers on the quarterdeck was far more impressive than was called for by the arrival of a mere post-captain: clearly the Admiral had .not yet returned. Indeed, the Caledonia's bell had time to be struck twice while Jack was talking to her commander before the Admiral's barge was seen to shove off and come racing out, pulling double-banked as though for a wager. The whole quarterdeck stiffened: the bosun's mates wetted their calls, the Marines straightened their stocks, the
