Rodney Stone by Arthur Conan Doyle (affordable ebook reader txt) 📗

our supper, my father led me into the great coffee-room, where a hundred or more officers may have been assembled, drinking their wine and smoking their long clay pipes, until the air was as thick as the main-deck in a close-fought action.  As we entered we found ourselves face to face with an elderly officer who was coming out.  He was a man with large, thoughtful eyes, and a full, placid face—such a face as one would expect from a philosopher and a philanthropist, rather than from a fighting seaman.

“Here’s Cuddie Collingwood,” whispered my father.

“Halloa, Lieutenant Stone!” cried the famous admiral very cheerily.  “I have scarce caught a glimpse of you since you came aboard the Excellent after St. Vincent.  You had the luck to be at the Nile also, I understand?”

“I was third of the Theseus, under Millar, sir.”

“It nearly broke my heart to have missed it.  I have not yet outlived it.  To think of such a gallant service, and I engaged in harassing the market-boats, the miserable cabbage-carriers of St. Luccars!”

“Your plight was better than mine, Sir Cuthbert,” said a voice from behind us, and a large man in the full uniform of a post-captain took a step forward to include himself in our circle.  His mastiff face was heavy with emotion, and he shook his head miserably as he spoke.

“Yes, yes, Troubridge, I can understand and sympathize with your feelings.”

“I passed through torment that night, Collingwood.  It left a mark on me that I shall never lose until I go over the ship’s side in a canvas cover.  To have my beautiful Culloden laid on a sandbank just out of gunshot.  To hear and see the fight the whole night through, and never to pull a lanyard or take the tompions out of my guns.  Twice I opened my pistol-case to blow out my brains, and it was but the thought that Nelson might have a use for me that held me back.”

Collingwood shook the hand of the unfortunate captain.

“Admiral Nelson was not long in finding a use for you, Troubridge,” said he.  “We have all heard of your siege of Capua, and how you ran up your ship’s guns without trenches or parallels, and fired point-blank through the embrasures.”

The melancholy cleared away from the massive face of the big seaman, and his deep laughter filled the room.

“I’m not clever enough or slow enough for their Z-Z fashions,” said he.  “We got alongside and slapped it in through their port-holes until they struck their colours.  But where have you been, Sir Cuthbert?”

“With my wife and my two little lasses at Morpeth in the North Country.  I have but seen them this once in ten years, and it may be ten more, for all I know, ere I see them again.  I have been doing good work for the fleet up yonder.”

“I had thought, sir, that it was inland,” said my father.

Collingwood took a little black bag out of his pocket and shook it.

“Inland it is,” said he, “and yet I have done good work for the fleet there.  What do you suppose I hold in this bag?”

“Bullets,” said Troubridge.

“Something that a sailor needs even more than that,” answered the admiral, and turning it over he tilted a pile of acorns on to his palm.  “I carry them with me in my country walks, and where I see a fruitful nook I thrust one deep with the end of my cane.  My oak trees may fight those rascals over the water when I am long forgotten.  Do you know, lieutenant, how many oaks go to make an eighty-gun ship?”

My father shook his head.

“Two thousand, no less.  For every two-decked ship that carries the white ensign there is a grove the less in England.  So how are our grandsons to beat the French if we do not give them the trees with which to build their ships?”

He replaced his bag in his pocket, and then, passing his arm through Troubridge’s, they went through the door together.

“There’s a man whose life might help you to trim your own course,” said my father, as we took our seats at a vacant table.  “He is ever the same quiet gentleman, with his thoughts busy for the comfort of his ship’s company, and his heart with his wife and children whom he has so seldom seen.  It is said in the fleet that an oath has never passed his lips, Rodney, though how he managed when he was first lieutenant of a raw crew is more than I can conceive.  But they all love Cuddie, for they know he’s an angel to fight.  How d’ye do, Captain Foley?  My respects, Sir Ed’ard!  Why, if they could but press the company, they would man a corvette with flag officers.”

“There’s many a man here, Rodney,” continued my father, as he glanced about him, “whose name may never find its way into any book save his own ship’s log, but who in his own way has set as fine an example as any admiral of them all.  We know them, and talk of them in the fleet, though they may never be bawled in the streets of London.  There’s as much seamanship and pluck in a good cutter action as in a line-o’-battleship fight, though you may not come by a title nor the thanks of Parliament for it.  There’s Hamilton, for example, the quiet, pale-faced man who is learning against the pillar.  It was he who, with six rowing-boats, cut out the 44-gun frigate Hermione from under the muzzles of two hundred shore-guns in the harbour of Puerto Cabello.  No finer action was done in the whole war.  There’s Jaheel Brenton, with the whiskers.  It was he who attacked twelve Spanish gunboats in his one little brig, and made four of them strike to him.  There’s Walker, of the Rose cutter, who, with thirteen men, engaged three French privateers with crews of a hundred and forty-six.  He sank one, captured one, and chased the third.  How are you, Captain Ball?  I hope I see you well?”

Two or three of my father’s acquaintances who had been sitting close by drew up their chairs to us, and soon quite a circle had formed, all talking loudly and arguing upon sea matters, shaking their long, red-tipped pipes at each other as they spoke.  My father whispered in my ear that his neighbour was Captain Foley, of the Goliath, who led the van at the Nile, and that the tall, thin, foxy-haired man opposite was Lord Cochrane, the most dashing frigate captain in the Service.  Even at Friar’s Oak we had heard how, in the little Speedy, of fourteen small guns with fifty-four men, he had carried by boarding the Spanish frigate Gamo with her crew of three hundred.  It was easy to see that he was a quick, irascible, high-blooded man, for he was talking hotly about his grievances with a flush of anger upon his freckled cheeks.

“We shall never do any good upon the ocean until we have hanged the dockyard contractors,” he cried.  “I’d have a dead dockyard contractor as a figure-head for every first-rate in the fleet, and a provision dealer for every frigate.  I know them with their puttied seams and their devil bolts, risking five hundred lives that they may steal a few pounds’ worth of copper.  What became of the Chance, and of the Martin, and of the Orestes?  They foundered at sea, and were never heard of more, and I say that the crews of them were murdered men.”

Lord Cochrane seemed to be expressing the views of all, for a murmur of assent, with a mutter of hearty, deep-sea curses, ran round the circle.

“Those rascals over yonder manage things better,” said an old one-eyed captain, with the blue-and-white riband for St. Vincent peeping out of his third buttonhole.  “They sheer away their heads if they get up to any foolery.  Did ever a vessel come out of Toulon as my 38-gun frigate did from Plymouth last year, with her masts rolling about until her shrouds were like iron bars on one side and hanging in festoons upon the other?  The meanest sloop that ever sailed out of France would have overmatched her, and then it would be on me, and not on this Devonport bungler, that a court-martial would be called.”

They loved to grumble, those old salts, for as soon as one had shot off his grievance his neighbour would follow with another, each more bitter than the last.

“Look at our sails!” cried Captain Foley.  “Put a French and a British ship at anchor together, and how can you tell which is which?”

“Frenchy has his fore and maintop-gallant masts about equal,” said my father.

“In the old ships, maybe, but how many of the new are laid down on the French model?  No, there’s no way of telling them at anchor.  But let them hoist sail, and how d’you tell them then?”

“Frenchy has white sails,” cried several.

“And ours are black and rotten.  That’s the difference.  No wonder they outsail us when the wind can blow through our canvas.”

“In the Speedy,” said Cochrane, “the sailcloth was so thin that, when I made my observation, I always took my meridian through the foretopsail and my horizon through the foresail.”

There was a general laugh at this, and then at it they all went again, letting off into speech all those weary broodings and silent troubles which had rankled during long years of service, for an iron discipline prevented them from speaking when their feet were upon their own quarter-decks.  One told of his powder, six pounds of which were needed to throw a ball a thousand yards.  Another cursed the Admiralty Courts, where a prize goes in as a full-rigged ship and comes out as a schooner.  The old captain spoke of the promotions by Parliamentary interest which had put many a youngster into the captain’s cabin when he should have been in the gun-room.  And then they came back to the difficulty of finding crews for their vessels, and they all together raised up their voices and wailed.

“What is the use of building fresh ships,” cried Foley, “when even with a ten-pound bounty you can’t man the ships that you have got?”

But Lord Cochrane was on the other side in this question.

“You’d have the men, sir, if you treated them well when you got them,” said he.  “Admiral Nelson can get his ships manned.  So can Admiral Collingwood.  Why?  Because he has thought for the men, and so the men have thought for him.  Let men and officers know and respect each other, and there’s no difficulty in keeping a ship’s company.  It’s the infernal plan of turning a crew over from ship to ship and leaving the officers behind that rots the Navy.  But I have never found a difficulty, and I dare swear that if I hoist my pennant to-morrow I shall have all my old Speedies back, and as many volunteers as I care to take.”

“That is very well, my lord,” said the old captain, with some warmth; “when the Jacks hear that the Speedy took fifty vessels in thirteen months, they are sure to volunteer to serve with her commander.  Every good cruiser can fill her complement quickly enough.  But it is not the cruisers that fight the country’s battles and blockade the enemy’s ports.  I say that all prize-money should be divided equally among the whole fleet, and until you have such a rule, the smartest men will always be found where they are of least service to any one but themselves.”

This speech produced a chorus of protests from the cruiser officers and a hearty agreement from the line-of-battleship men, who seemed to be in the majority in the circle which had gathered round.  From the flushed faces and angry glances it was evident that the question was one upon which there was strong feeling upon both sides.

“What the cruiser gets the cruiser earns,” cried a frigate captain.

“Do you mean to say, sir,” said Captain Foley, “that the duties of an officer upon a cruiser demand more care or higher professional ability than those of one who is employed upon blockade service, with a lee coast under him whenever the wind shifts to the west, and the topmasts of an enemy’s squadron for ever in his sight?”

“I do not claim higher ability, sir.”

“Then why should you claim higher pay?  Can you deny that a seaman before the mast makes more in a fast frigate than a lieutenant can in a battleship?”

“It was only last year,” said a very gentlemanly-looking officer, who might have passed for a buck upon town had his skin not been burned to copper in such sunshine as never bursts upon London—“it was only last year that I brought the old Alexander back from the Mediterranean, floating like an empty barrel and carrying nothing but honour for her cargo.  In the Channel we fell in with the frigate Minerva from the Western Ocean, with her lee ports under water and her hatches bursting with the plunder which had been too valuable to trust to the prize crews.  She had ingots of silver along her