"The flying squadron" - читать интересную книгу автора (Вудмен Ричард)

CHAPTER 4    The Paineite    

The last of the daylight faded in the west; ahead the sky seemed pallid with foreboding, Drinkwater thought, drawing his cloak the tighter around him and shifting his attention to the upper yards. There would be a strengthening of the wind before morning.

'Very well, Mr Gordon. You may shorten down. Clew up the main course and let us have the t'garn's off her!'

'Main clew garnets, there! Look lively! Stand by to raise main tacks and sheets!'

A bank of clouds gathered darkly against the vanishing day. The twilight of sunset was always the most poignant hour of the seaman's day and, just as the small hours of the middle watch endowed trivial matters with a terrible gravity, this crepuscular hour invested thoughts with sombre shadows.

What was it, Drinkwater thought, that so troubled him? Did this daily marking of time punctuate the passage of his life? Or was it a gale he feared, rolling towards them from the vicinity of Cape Hatteras, the disaffected mood of his officers, or the poor quality of his crew? Once he would have striven with every fibre of his being to lick them into shape; this evening he felt the task beyond him. He was tired, too old for this young man's game. He should not have come back to sea, but quietly farmed his hundred acres, visited the Woodbridge horse fair and sought a pocket borough.

Damn it, he was not old! He could ascend the rigging with the agility of the topmen now running up to douse the flogging topgallants as they thundered in their buntlines. There were men up there far older than himself!

No, he was disturbed by the vague shadow of a new war, for he sensed it as inevitable as much as it was incomprehensible. No matter the pros and contras of diplomacy adduced by Vansittart; no matter the crude claims and counter-claims advanced by his fire-brand officers, the fact of a war between the United States and Great Britain being in the interests of neither country was obvious. Only Napoleon Bonaparte could profit. Much might be laid at the door of his agents in fomenting the suspicion existing between London and Washington.

Despite these considerations, it piqued him to think he had been placed back in command of Patrician precisely because he was ageing. The Ministry wanted no hothead frigate captain with only a score of summers to his credit hanging off the Virginia capes, landing a diplomatic messenger on the one hand and impressing American seamen from American ships on the other. He ought to be flattered, he thought, an ironic and private smile twitching the corners of his mouth. He detested the new breed of sea-officer nurtured on victory and assumptions of invincibility. They had never tasted the bitterness of bloody defeat any more than many of them had participated in a victorious action. This current presumption of superiority was a dangerous delusion, but he had heard it expressed enough while he had been ashore in Plymouth. Thank heaven his own officers seemed relatively free of it.

Shortened down, the frigate rode easier, still standing doggedly to windward. Eight bells struck as the watch changed, and in the gathering darkness Drinkwater saw Gordon hand over to Frey. He caught the simultaneous glance of both their heads and the faint blur of their faces as they looked in his direction. He remembered so well the compound of fear and respect he had felt for most of his own commanders, all of them men with feet of clay; old Hope of the Cyclops, Griffiths of the Kestrel and the Hellebore.

Christ, he was morbid! Was this an onset of the blue devils? It was time to go below. Vansittart had sensibly taken to his cot the moment the weather livened up, now he would do the same. The gale would arrive by dawn, time enough to worry then. For the nonce he could drown his megrims in sleep.

And yet he lingered on, his shoulder braced against the black hemp shrouds that rose to the mizen top, feeling the faint vibration of their tension as Patrician harnessed the power of the wind and drove her twelve hundred tons into its teeth.

What an odd thing a ship was, he thought, curious in its component parts: fifteen hundred oaks, several score of pine and spruce trees, tons of iron and copper, miles of hemp and coir, tar, flax and cotton. Full of water and stores to support its living muscles and brains which now in part huddled about the deck and in part slung their hammocks in the corporate misery of the berth deck. Men dreaming of homes, of wives, lovers, children; young men dreaming of prize money, old men dreaming of death. Men troubled by lust or infirmities, men scheming or men hating. Men confined by the power confided by Almighty God in the Sovereign Prince King George III, mad by reputation, puissant by the force of the twin batteries of cannon Patrician and a thousand ships like her bore on every ocean of the globe.

And he, Nathaniel Drinkwater, post-captain in His Britannic Majesty's Royal Navy, directed this arm of policy, and took Henry St John Vansittart to pow-wow in the lodges of the Yankees in the vain hope of averting a war! Would His Majesty's ministers concede the real point of American objection and lift the ordinances against American trade? Or would the greater preoccupations, the maintaining of a naval blockade of Europe and the supply of a British, a Portuguese and a Spanish army in the Iberian peninsula, blind them to the dangers inherent in failing to appease the Americans. And if they did comply with Washington's demands, would the Americans be content to the extent of suppressing their desire for Canada?

Two bells struck; the passing of time surprised him, the watch had been changed an hour earlier. It was quite dark now, the horizon reduced to the white rearing crest of the next wave ahead as it surged out of the gloom. Drinkwater was stiff and cramped, his muscles cracked as he straightened up.

The truth was, he wanted to go home. 'Ah, well,' he muttered, 'I have that in common with most of the fellows aboard.'

His left leg had gone to sleep and he almost fell as he tried to walk. 'Damn,' he swore under his breath, hobbling to peer into the binnacle and check the course. The pain of returning circulation made him wince.

'Course sou'west by west...' began the quartermaster.

'Yes, yes, I can see that,' Drinkwater said testily. Frey loomed up alongside. Drinkwater was in no mood for pleasantries. 'Good-night, Mr Frey,' he said, then called dutifully from the head of the companionway, 'don't hesitate to call me if this wind freshens further.'

'Aye, aye, sir,' the young officer responded confidently. All's right with the world, Drinkwater thought, heartened by Frey's cheerful tone. Mentally cursing the megrims, he descended to the gun deck and the stiffening marine outside his cabin door.

He had no idea afterwards why he paused there. He thought it might have been a lurch of the ship which prevented him momentarily from passing into the sanctuary of his cabin; on the other hand, the marine, a punctilious private named Todd, made a smart showing of his salute and Drinkwater threw back his cloak to free his hand to acknowledge this and open the door. Whatever the cause he was certain it was no more than some practical delay, not premonition or extra-sensory perception.

Yet in that moment of hiatus he knew something was wrong. Quite what, it took him a moment to discover, but the watchful, expectant look in Todd's eyes rang an alarm in Captain Drinkwater's consciousness. He passed into his cabin and stood, his back against the door, listening.

The ship was unusually quiet.

One became accustomed to its myriad creakings and groanings. One heard instead the noises of people, from the soft murmurs of men chatting in their messes, sitting and smoking at the tables suspended between the guns, or idling on the berth deck, through the louder shouts of abuse or jocularity to the bawled orders and shrilling of pipes. The denser concentrations of humanity, like the marines' quarters or the midshipmen's so-called gun­room, produced their own noise, and the low hum generated by a watch below during the daytime was quite different from that produced, as now, when the watches below should have been asleep, or at least turned in.

What had troubled him outside his cabin door was not a total silence, but a curious modulation somewhere that was not right, existing alongside an equally curious lack of noise to which he could not lay a cause.

Irritated and a little alarmed, still cloaked though he had tossed his hat aside, he threw open the door and stalked outside. The gun deck was quiet. The men who slept there appeared to have turned in, for the few lamps showed bulging hammocks above the faintly gleaming gun breeches.

He turned abruptly and descended to the berth deck. Immediately he knew something was wrong. He sensed rather than saw a movement, but clearly heard the hissed caveat that greeted his intrusion. He moved quickly forward, ducking under hammocks and brushing them with his head and shoulders. Many of those slung were full and he provoked the occasional grunted protest from them, but more were empty and, with a mounting sense of apprehension, he dodged forward, aware of someone moving parallel to himself, trying to beat him but, having to move in semi-concealment, not making such light work of it.

He could hear the source of that strange modulation as he drew up beside the bitts and suddenly saw below him a press of men crowded into the cable-tier. Their faces were rapt, lit by the grim light of a brace of battle-lanterns as the listened in silence to a voice which, though it spoke in a low tone, carried with it such a weight of conviction it sounded upon the ears like a shout.

So strong was the impact of this oration that it, as much as astonishment, made Drinkwater pause to listen. In the wings of the berth deck, his shadower paused too.

'The rights of kings might be supported as an argument; nay, friends, adopted as a principle for good government were it not for the fact that it in all cases without exception reduces us to the status of subjects and, moreover, many of us to abject and necessary poverty. For to glorify one requires a court whose purpose is adulatory, if not purely idolatrous, and which, to support itself, requires the extraction of taxes from the subjected.

'Furthermore, it promotes excessive pride amongst those close to the throne. This in turn excites envy among the middling sort who, gaining as they are power in the manufacturies, seek to adopt the manners and privileges of noblemen. Under the heels of this triple despotism are ground the poor, the weak, the hungry, the dispossessed, the homeless and the helpless: men, women and children — free-born Britons every one, God help them!'

Drinkwater drew back in retreat. He had not seen the speaker but knew the man's identity: Thurston, the Paineite, the disaffected seducer of men's minds, a suborner, a canting levelling republican subversive ...

Drinkwater flew up the ladder and Todd snapped to attention, his face an enigmatic mask. Drinkwater had no idea whether or not the marine knew of the combination gathered in the cable-tier, but he surely must have done. Without pausing, saying nothing, but conveying much to the sentry, he sought the refuge of his cabin, his mind a whirl.

He had suspected something of the sort as he had edged forward under the hammocks. A meeting of Methodists, perhaps, even a mutinous assembly, but this, this was intolerable ...

Why had he done nothing about it?

The thought brought him up with a round turn. The man keeping cave had known of his presence, if not his identity; Todd would soon let them know the captain had been down to the orlop and come up again looking as though he had seen a ghost! Good God, what was the matter with him?

And then the appalling thought struck him that Thurston spoke with an irrefutable logic. What little he knew of the Court of St James and the prancing, perfumed and portentious Regent, struck a note of revulsion in his puritan heart...

And yet his duty, his allegiance ...

'God's bones!' he raged. What was he going to do, flog the lot of them? Suppose the bosun's mates refused? And how could he discover who was in attendance and who had turned in? Could he punish Thurston alone, and for what? Speaking a truth that some called sedition? White had been lenient; had White caught the refreshing breath of truth and let the man escape the horrors of the law's worst excess?

'God damn them!' he snarled, finding himself at the decanter stowed in its fiddle. His hand was already on the stopper when he realized he had no time for such indulgence. He had to do something, something which was both everything and nothing, something that would not rouse them to spontaneous and hot-headed mutiny, for what Thurston was undoubtedly ignorant of was the fact that he might ignite something of which he was not master. Yet Drinkwater had to signify his displeasure, his disapproval and his power, in order to dissuade them from ever attempting any mass action. He realized what he faced was not mutiny, not something he could quell by summoning the marines and arming his officers. That would be desperate enough, for God's sake!

What he faced was something infinitely worse: its results would be mass desertion in the United States.

Patrician slammed into a wave and Drinkwater felt her bow thrust into the air as she climbed over it and fell into the trough beyond.

'God damn!' he swore again, with a mindless and futile anger. Then he snatched up his hat. Out on the gun deck he knew his visit had disturbed them. There was a low murmur of voices as men hurriedly turned in; he knew he had rattled them. Even if they did not know yet it was the captain who had discovered their meeting, they would guess it had been an officer.

He emerged on to the quarterdeck. All was still well there, he consoled himself. They would do nothing until they arrived in American waters. Unless, of course, they decided to seize the ship ...

'Sir . ..' Frey began, seeing the captain unexpectedly on deck.

'Call all hands,' Drinkwater snapped, 'upon the instant, d'you hear?'

'Aye, sir ...' An astonished Frey relayed the order and the bosun's mate of the watch piped and shouted at the hatchways.

Drinkwater drew his cloak around him, stood at the windward hance and watched them turn up.

'Sir ... ?'

'Double reef the tops'ls, Mr Frey, and look lively, a watch to each mast.' Drinkwater cut poor Frey off short and watched for Thurston. The men emerged, many of them stumbling uncertainly, torn unceremoniously from their hammocks by the shrilling of the pipes. Drinkwater was not an inhumane commander and worked his crew in three watches. To be turned up like this suggested some disaster in the offing, perhaps an enemy, and to the uncertainty of those aware their political meeting had been discovered was now to be added this element of panic.

Frey and his bosun's mate were already translating Drinkwater's order: 'Way aloft, topmen! Double reef the tops'ls! Hands by the lee braces, halliards and bow­lines...!'

Drinkwater had no difficulty in singling out Thurston. The man made no effort to merge inconspicuously with the mass of the people, but stood stock still for a moment, at the far end of the starboard gangway. There was no one between them, until a petty officer shoved him roughly into his station with a cut of his starter across Thurston's buttocks.

With a sudden feeling of guilt, Drinkwater turned away. Was he one of Thurston's 'middling sort', apeing the manners and seeking the privileges of a discredited nobility? Was the acquisition of Gantley Hall such an act?

'Is something the matter?'

'Eh, what?'

Vansittart stood beside him, the silk dressing-gown flamboyant even in the darkness of a rising gale.

'Matter, Mr Vansittart?' said Drinkwater, aware of the irony of his situation, 'Why no, we are shortening sail, there's a blow coming on.'

'Oh dear. Then we are to be further delayed.'

'I'm afraid so, but this is one thing we cannot change — the weather, I mean,' he added. Vansittart shuffled away. 'My dear fellow,' Drinkwater said after him in a low, inaudible voice, 'if only you knew by what a slender silken thread the world holds together.'

Far above him men laid out to secure the reef points. Thus far he had the measure of them, and Deo gratias, the wind was freshening rapidly!

'Call all hands!'

Drinkwater clapped a hand to his hat as Patrician lurched into another wave and the resulting explosion of spray hissed over the weather bow, a fine grey cloud in the first glimmer of dawn. Jamming himself in his familiar station at the mizen rigging he waited for the men to turn up. The bosun's pipes pierced his tired brain and rang in his ears, for he had not slept a wink.

'Another reef, sir?' Lieutenant Gordon struggled up the deck towards him, his cloak flapping wildly in the down-draught from the double reefed main topsail. In the lee of the mizen rigging what passed for shelter enabled the two sea-officers to speak without actually shouting. Gordon's expectant face was visible now as the light grew.

'No, Mr Gordon. All hands to lay aft. And I want the officers and marines drawn up properly. Please make my wishes known.' Drinkwater saw the look of uncertainty at the unusual nature of the instruction cross Gordon's face. 'Do you pass the word, if you please,' Drinkwater prompted. He rasped a fist across his stubbled chin. His eyes were hot and gritty with sleeplessness and he felt a petulant temper hovering. He had spent the night wondering what best to do to stave off the trouble he knew was brewing, trouble far worse than a little bad blood between his officers. He tried to imagine what the wholesale desertion of a British frigate's crew would mean in terms of repercussions. In the United States it would be hailed as a moral victory, evidence of the rottenness and tyranny of monarchy, a sign of the rightness of the emerging cause, perhaps even fuel for the fire of rebellion certain prominent Americans wished to ignite in Canada.

For the Royal Navy itself it would be a dishonour. Already the trickle of deserters from British men-of-war had prompted the stop-and-search policy of cruiser captains, a prime cause of the deterioration in Anglo-American relations. The Americans were justifiably touchy about interference with their ships. The practice of British officers boarding them on the high seas and taking men out of them on the flimsy pretext that they had been British seamen, was a high-handed action, a deliberate dishonour to their flag and a provocation designed to humiliate them. The extent to which this arrogant practice prevailed was uncertain, as was the counter-rumour that trained British seamen made up the gun-crews aboard Yankee frigates; men who would give good account of themselves if it came to a fight, desperate men who resented having been pressed from their homes but who were, nevertheless, traitors.

In this atmosphere of half-truths and exaggeration the defection of Patrician's people would be a death-blow for British hopes of avoiding war. The Ministry in London might be able to overlook the case of 'mistaken identity' which had allegedly occurred the night the USS President fired into the inferior Little Belt; it would be quite unable to extend this tolerance to the desertion of an entire ship's company. His Majesty's frigate Patrician would become notorious, synonymous with the Hermione, whose crew had mutinied and carried their frigate into a Spanish-American port, or the Danae's people who had surrendered to the French. Such considerations made Drinkwater's blood run cold, not merely for himself and the helpless, humiliated and shameful state to which he would be reduced, but also for the awful disruption to the mission which would otherwise avert a stupid rupture with the United States.

He had been tortured for hours by this spectre, his mind unable to find any solution, as though he faced an inevitable situation, not something of which luck, or providence, had given him forewarning. His lurking bad temper was as much directed at himself and his lack of an imaginative response, as against the men now emerging into the dawn. In all conscience he could not blame them, and therein lay the roots of his moral paralysis. He devoutly wished he did not see their side of the coin, that he felt able to haul Thurston out of their grumbling ranks and flog the man senseless as an example to them all. It would tone down the upsurge of their rebelliousness.

Christ, that was no answer!

How could he blame them? Some had been at sea continuously for years. There were faces there, he remembered, who had stayed at sea when the Peace of Amiens had been signed, loyal volunteers to the sea-service, men who had made up the crew of the corvette Melusine when war had broken out again. They, poor devils, had had their loyalty well and truly acknowledged when turned over without leave of absence into the newly commissioning frigate Antigone, from which, following their captain, they had passed into this very ship in the fall of 1807. Ten years would be the minimum they would have served.

And to them must be added the droves of unwilling pressed men, come aboard in dribs and drabs from the guardships and the press tenders, but who now made up the largest proportion of Patrician's company. Among these came petty criminals, men on the run from creditors or cuckolds, betrayed husbands, men cut loose from the bonds of family, seeking obscurity in the wooden walls of dear old England, fathers of bastards, poxed and spavined wretches and, worst of all, those men of education and expectations whom fate had found wanting in some way or another.

What had they to expect from the Royal Navy? The volunteers had been denied leave, the pressed ripped from their homes, the fugitives and the intelligent found no refuge but the inevitable end of them all, to be worn down by labour, if death by disease or action did not carry them off first.

Nathaniel Drinkwater had faced mutiny before and beaten it, but none of this gave him much confidence, for he had been aware on each of these occasions that he had obtained but a temporary advantage, a battle or a skirmish in a war in which victory was unobtainable. And now, in addition to the catalogue of mismanagement and oppression, the Paineite Thurston had introduced the explosive constituent of something more potent than gunpowder: political logic. Clear, concise and incontrovertible, it had set France afire twenty-two years earlier; it had turned the world on its ears and unleashed a conflict men were already calling the Great War.

Drinkwater found himself again searching for Thurston; the man whom White had sent down in a rare mood of leniency, to stir up the lower deck of the Patrician instead of digging turnips on the shores of Botany Bay; Thurston, the man who had smiled and whom Drinkwater conceived might, in vastly different circumstances, have been a friend ...

And yet the idea still did not seem absurd. He had known one such man before. Perhaps, he thought wildly, they were growing in number, increasing to torture liberally inclined fools like himself until, inexorably, they achieved their aim: the overthrow of monarchy and aristocracy, the reform of Parliament and the introduction of republicanism. That too had happened in England once before, and in English America within his own lifetime.

He recalled the Quaker Derrick, whose fate had been uncertain, lost when the gun-brig Tracker had been over­whelmed by Danish gunboats off Tonning and poor James Quilhampton had been compelled to surrender his first command. Derrick had not succeeded because he did not proselytize. Thurston was dangerously different.

God, what a train of gloomy thoughts chased each other through his weary mind! Would Moncrieff never have his infernal marines fallen in? And where the deuce was Metcalfe? Christ Almighty, what a burden he was turning out to be!

Why the hell had their Lordships saddled the ship with such a nonentity? He had asked for Fraser, but Fraser, his old first luff, had been ill, and Metcalfe had survived from the last commission when he had served as second lieutenant. It was true he was a good shot, but that did not make him a good officer.

'May I ask ... ?'

'No, you may not!' Drinkwater snapped as the first lieutenant materialized in the disturbingly insinuating way he had. Metcalfe fell back a pace and Drinkwater, meanly gratified at the small humiliation thus inflicted, roused himself and stepped forward. In doing so he appeared to drive the first lieutenant downhill, a sight at once mildly comic, but also threatening. The ship's company, whatever the seductions of Thurston's republican polemic, were more certain of Captain Drinkwater's mettle than he was himself.

'Off hats, Mr Metcalfe,' he said quietly, and Metcalfe's voice cracked with sudden nervous anticipation as he shouted the command.

Drinkwater stared at the ship's company and the ship's company stared back. Some of them were shivering in the cold; some eyed him darkly, well knowing why they had been summoned; others wore the look of blank incomprehension and this was chiefly true of the officers, though one or two made a gallant attempt at pretending they knew why the lower deck had been cleared at so ungodly an hour.

Despite the rising howl of the wind, the hiss of the sea and the creaks and groans of the ship, the waist of the Patrician was silent. Drinkwater withdrew the small book from beneath his cloak, cleared his throat and began to read in a loud voice.

'If any person in or belonging to the Fleet shall make or endeavour to make any mutinous assembly upon any pretence whatsoever, every person offending herein, and being convicted thereof, shall suffer death: And if any person shall utter any words of sedition or mutiny he shall suffer death…'

The words were familiar to them all, for on the fourth Sunday of every month, in place of the liturgy of the Anglican Church, the Articles of War were read to every ship's company in commission by their commanding officer. But this morning was not the fourth Sunday in the month, not did Drinkwater read them all. He excised some of the legal provisos of Articles Nineteen and Twenty, and cut them to their essential bone; he laid heavy emphasis on certain words and punctuated his sentences with pauses and glares at his disaffected flock. He read with peculiar and deliberate slowness, eschewing the normal mumbling run-through to which even the most punctilious captain had succumbed by the end of the routinely morbid catechism.

'If any person shall conceal any traitorous or mutinous practice or design, he shall suffer death ... or shall conceal any traitorous or mutinous words spoken by any to the prejudice of His Majesty or Government, or any words, practice or design, tending to the hindrance of the service, and shall not forthwith reveal the same to the commanding officer, or being present at any mutiny or sedition, shall not use his utmost endeavours to suppress the same, he shall be punished…'

Drinkwater closed the book with a snap. 'That is all, Mr Metcalfe. You may carry on and dismiss the hands.' As Drinkwater stepped towards the companionway Moncrieff called his men to attention and, with some difficulty on the plunging deck, had them present arms.

Drinkwater must remember to thank Moncrieff for that salute; it was quick-witted of him to invest the departure of Captain Drinkwater from the quarterdeck with the full panoply of ceremony. Drinkwater devoutly hoped its effect would not be lost on the men, aware of the theatricality of his own performance. All those who had listened to Thurston's able and seductive sermon would, he believed, now be pricked by individual guilt and, as he found himself in the shadows of the gun deck, he wondered how many would report the seditious proceedings.

Not many, he found himself privately hoping. He did not yet wish for the dissolution of his crew. Only an honourable peace could permit that.

'Sir, has something occurred?'

Drinkwater laid down his pen and looked up at Metcalfe. For once the man was flustered, unsure of himself. This was a side of his first lieutenant Drinkwater had not yet observed.

'A very great deal, Mr Metcalfe.'

'But when, sir?'

'When you were asleep, or perhaps taking wine in the wardroom, I imagine.' A slight mockery in the captain's voice alarmed Metcalfe.

'But what, sir?' asked Metcalfe desperately and Drinkwater admitted to a certain malicious amusement at his expense.

'Tut-tut, Mr Metcalfe, can you not guess? Surely the Articles I read out were explicit enough. What does the scuttlebutt in the wardroom suggest?'

The question further confused Metcalfe, for the opinion in the wardroom, expressed fully by every officer, was that the captain, perceptive though he was, had got wind of the gaming combination, mistaken it for some sort of mutinous meeting and misconstrued the whole affair. In this conclusion, the debating officers were chiefly concerned to unhorse their overbearing mess-president, and they had succeeded, for a covert conference had been observed between Metcalfe and Midshipman Porter, after which torn pages of a note-book had been seen floating astern. Thoroughly alarmed, Metcalfe had sought this unsuccessful interview with the captain.

'Sir, I must request, as first lieutenant, you take me into your confidence.'

'That I am not prepared to do, Mr Metcalfe,' Drinkwater said carefully, aware that he felt no confidence in the man and could not bare his soul. To admit to his second-in-command that he had discovered a seditious meeting would be an admission to Metcalfe of something he wished to remain between himself and those at whom he had aimed this morning's exercise in intimidation. Besides, strictly speaking, he should report the matter to their Lordships, and to inform Metcalfe of the circumstances and subsequently do nothing would be to lay himself open to charges of dereliction of duty. He would have to tell Metcalfe something, of course.

But his refusal to confide in Metcalfe had struck his subordinate's conscience and, unbeknown to Drinkwater, no further explanation was necessary. Metcalfe assumed the worst as far as he, a self-interested man, was concerned. In his guilty retreat he gave up both his chance of a clue that it was not his malpractice of betting on the crew's wrestling which had caused the morning's drama, as well as Captain Drinkwater's rather ingenious explanation of why he had acted so extraordinarily.

It was to Gordon that he spoke about Thurston. The memory of the Quaker Derrick had brought its own solution; what had been done once might be done again. 'The man is in your division and seems a likely character, a man of some education and no seaman.'

'I’m afraid I know little about him, sir,' Gordon admitted.

'You should,' Drinkwater said curtly. 'Anyway, to the point. I have no clerk, and want a writer. You may send him aft at eight bells.'

As for an explanation of the morning's events digestible enough for the officers, it was Frey to whom he revealed his fabricated motive.

'It was necessary,' he afterwards told Frey as they paced the quarterdeck together that afternoon when a watery sunshine marked the passing of the gale, 'because as we approach the American coast, I wish to dissuade the men from any thoughts of desertion.'

'But you spoke only of mutiny or sedition, sir,' commented the shrewd Frey.

'I intend to spring the Articles on desertion upon another occasion. This was but a preamble.'

They exchanged glances. Frey was undeceived, and for reasons of his own he passed on this intelligence only to those whom he knew to dislike the unfortunate Metcalfe.