The Happy Return

Chapter XX

Inch by inch His Britannic Majesty’s frigate Lydia crept into the bay. The cutter was out ahead, with Rayner sounding industriously, while with a dying breath of air behind her and a shred of sail set the Lydia felt her way between the two headlands into the tortuous channel. Those capes, one each side of the entrance, were steep rocky cliffs, and the one overlapped the other a trifle so that only an eye sharpened by necessity, and which had made the most of its recent opportunities of learning the typical rock formations of that coast could have guessed at the possibility of an expanse of water behind them.

Hornblower took his eye from the ship’s course as she crawled round the corner to study the bay before him. There were mountains all round it, but on the farther side the slope down to the water was not nearly as steep, and on the water’s edge there, at the foot of the dazzling green which clothed the banks all round, there was a hint of golden sand which told of the sort of bottom which he sought. It would be shelving there, without a doubt, and free from rock.

“This seems very suitable,” said Hornblower to Bush.

“Aye aye, sir. Made for the job,” said Bush.

“Then you may drop anchor. We shall start work at once.”

It was terribly hot in that little bay in the island of Coiba. The lofty mountains all about cut off any wind that might be blowing, and at the same time reflected the heat to a focus in the bay. As the cable rasped out through the hawsehole Hornblower felt the heat descend upon him. He was wet with sweat even while he stood still on the quarterdeck; he longed for a bath and for a little leisure, to rest until the cool of the evening, but he could not allow himself any such luxury. Time was, as ever, of vital importance. He must make himself secure before the Spaniards could discover where he had hidden himself.

“Call back the cutter,” he said.

On land it was even hotter than on the water. Hornblower had himself rowed to the sandy beach, sounding as he went, and examining with care the sample of the bottom which the tallow on the bottom of the lead brought up for his inspection. It was sand without a doubt—he could beach the Lydia safely there. He landed in the breathless jungle; there was clearly no human life here, to judge by the pathlessness of the close-packed vegetation. Tall trees and scrub, creepers and parasites, were all tangled together in their silent struggle for life. Strange birds with strange cries flitted through the twilight of the branches; Hornblower’s nostrils were assailed by the reek of the decaying matter beneath his feet. With a sweating escort, musket in hand, about him, he cut his way through the forest. He emerged where the rock was too steep for vegetation ever to have gained a foothold, into the blinding sunlight at the mouth of the bay. He climbed, sweating and exhausted, up the steep ledges. The Lydia floated idly on the dazzling blue of the little bay. The opposite headland frowned down upon him across the mouth, and he studied its soaring ledges through his glass. Then he went back to his ship, to goad his men into frantic activity.

Before she could be beached, before the carpenter and his men could set to work upon her bottom, the Lydia must be lightened. And also, before she could be laid defenceless on her side, this bay must be made secure from all aggressors. Tackles were rigged, and the two-ton eighteen pounders were swayed up from the maindeck. With careful management and exact balancing the cutter could just carry one of these monsters. One at a time they were ferried to the headlands, where Rayner and Gerard were ready at work with parties preparing emplacements. Toiling gangs were set to work preparing rough paths up the faces of the cliffs, and no sooner were these complete than the men were turned on with tackles and ropes to drag the guns up the paths. Powder and shot for the guns followed them, and then food and water for the garrisons. At the end of thirty-six hours of exacting labour the Lydia was a hundred tons lighter, and the entrance to the bay was so defended that any vessel attempting it would have to brave the plunging fire of twenty guns.

In the meanwhile another party had been working like furies on shore above the sandy beach. Here they cleared away a section of forest, and dragged the fallen trees into a rough breast work, and into the rude fort so delimited, among the tree stumps, another party brought up beef barrels, and flour bags, and spars, and guns, and shot, and powder barrels, until the Lydia was a mere empty shell rolling in the tiny waves of the bay. The men stretched canvas shelters for themselves as protection against the frequent tropical showers which deluged on them, and for their officers they built rude timber huts—and one for the women as well.

In giving that order Hornblower made his sole acknowledgment of the women’s existence. During this flurry of work, and under the strain of the responsibility which he bore, he had neither the time nor the surplus energy to spare for conversation with Lady Barbara. He was tired, and the steamy heat drained his energies, but his natural reaction to these conditions, having in mind the need for haste, was to flog himself into working harder and harder, obstinately and unreasonably, so that the days passed in a nightmare of fatigue, during which the minutes he passed with Lady Barbara were like the glimpses a man has of a beautiful woman during delirium.

He drove his men hard from earliest dawn as long as daylight lasted, keeping them slaving away in the crushing heat until they shook their heads over him in rueful admiration. They did not grudge him the efforts he called for; that would have been impossible for British sailors led by a man who was so little prepared to spare himself. And besides, the men displayed the constant characteristics of British crews of working the more cheerfully the more unusual the conditions. Sleeping on beds of sand instead of in their far more comfortable hammocks, working on solid earth instead of on board ship, hemmed in by dense forest instead of engirdled by a distant horizon—all this was stimulating and cheering.

The fireflies in the forest, the strange fruits which were found for them by their impressed prisoners from the Natividad, the very mosquitoes which plagued them, helped at the same time to keep them happy. Down the cliff face beside one of the entrance batteries there tumbled a constant stream of clear water, so that for once in their lives the men were allowed as much fresh water as they could use, and to men who for months at a time had to submit to having a sentry standing guard over their drinking water this was an inexpressible luxury.

Soon, on the sandy shore, and as far as possible from the stored powder barrels, canvas covered and sentry guarded, there were fires lit over which was melted the pitch brought from the boatswain’s store. There had not been enough defaulters during those days to pick all the oakum required—some of the ship’s company had to work at oakum picking while the Lydia was hove over and the carpenter applied himself to the task of settling her bottom to rights. The shot holes were plugged, and strained seams caulked and pitched, the missing sheets of copper were replaced by the last few sheets which the Lydia carried in reserve. For four days the tiny bay was filled with the sound of the caulking hammers at work, and the reek of melting pitch drifted over the still water as the smoking cauldrons were carried across to the working parties.

At the end of that time the carpenter expressed himself as satisfied, and Hornblower, anxiously going over every foot of the ship’s bottom, grudgingly agreed with him. The Lydia was hove off, and still empty, was kedged and towed across the bay until she lay at the foot of the high cliff where one of the batteries was established—the shore was steep enough at this point to allow her to lie close in here when empty of guns and stores. At this point Lieutenant Bush had been busy setting up a projecting gallows, a hundred feet above, and vertically over, the ship’s deck. Painfully, and after many trials, the Lydia was manoeuvred until she could be moored so that the stump of her mizzen mast stood against the plumb line which Bush dropped from the tackles high above. Then the wedges were knocked out, the tackles set to work, and the stump was drawn out of her like a decayed tooth. That part of the work was easy compared with the next step. The seventy-five foot main yard had to be swayed up to the gallows, and then hung vertically down from them; if it had slipped it would have shot down like some monstrous arrow and would have sunk her for certain. When the yard was exactly vertical and exactly above the mizzen mast step it was lowered down, inch by inch, until its solid butt could be coaxed by anxious gangs through the maindeck and through the orlop until it came at last solidly to rest in its step upon the kelson. It only remained then to wedge it firmly in, to set up new shrouds, and the Lydia had once more a mizzen mast which could face the gales of the Horn.

Back at her anchorage, the Lydia could be ballasted once more, with her beef barrels and water barrels, her guns and her shot, save what was left in the entrance batteries. Ballasted and steady upon her keel, she could be re-rigged and her topmasts set up again. Every rope was re-rove, her standing rigging newly set up, replacements affected until she was as efficient a ship as when she had left Portsmouth newly commissioned.

It was then that Hornblower could allow himself time to draw breath and relax. The captain of a ship that is no ship, but only a mere hulk helpless in a landlocked inlet, cannot feel a moment’s peace. A heretic in an Inquisitor’s dungeon is happy compared with him. There is the menacing land all about him, the torment of helplessness as a perpetual goad, the fear of an ignominious siege to wake him in the night. Hornblower was like a man released from a sentence of death when he trod the Lydia’s deck once more and allowed his eye to rove contentedly upward and ever upward through the aspiring rigging, with the clangour of the pumps which had echoed in his ears during the last fortnight’s cruise completely stilled, happy in the consciousness of a staunch ship under his feet, comfortable in the knowledge that there would be no more campaigns to plan until he reached England.

At this very moment they were dismantling one of the entrance batteries, and the guns were being ferried out to the Lydia one by one. Already he had a broadside battery which could fire, a ship which could manoeuvre, and he could snap his fingers at every Spaniard in the Pacific. It was a glorious sensation. He turned and found Lady Barbara on the quarterdeck beside him, and he smiled at her dazzlingly.

“Good morning, ma’am,” he said. “I trust you found your cabin comfortable again?”

Lady Barbara smiled back at him—in fact she almost laughed, so comical was the contrast between this greeting and the scowls she had encountered from him during the last eleven days.

“Thank you, Captain,” she said. “It is marvellously comfortable. Your crew has worked wonders to have done so much in so little time.”

Quite unconsciously he had reached out and taken both her hands in his, and was standing there holding them, smiling all over his face in the sunshine. Lady Barbara felt that it would only need a word from her to set him dancing.

“We shall be at sea before nightfall,” he said, ecstatically.

She could not be dignified with him, any more than she could have been dignified with a baby; she knew enough of men and affairs not to resent his previous preoccupation. Truth to tell, she was a trifle fond of him because of it.

“You are a very fine sailor, sir,” she said to him suddenly. “I doubt if there is another officer in the King’s service who could have done all you have done on this voyage.”

“I am glad you think so, ma’am,” he said, but the spell was broken. He had been reminded of himself, and his cursed self-consciousness closed in upon him again. He dropped her hands, awkwardly, and there was a hint of a blush in his tanned cheeks.

“I have only done my duty,” he mumbled, looking away.

“Many men can do that,” said Lady Barbara, “but few can do it well. The country is your debtor—my sincerest hope is that England will acknowledge the debt.”

The words started a sudden train of thought in Hornblower’s mind; it was a train he had followed up often before. England would only remember that his battle with the Natividad had been unnecessary; that a more fortunate captain would have heard of the new alliance between Spain and England before he had handed the Natividad over to the rebels, and would have saved all the trouble and friction and loss which had resulted. A frigate action with a hundred casualties might be glorious, but an unnecessary action with a hundred casualties was quite inglorious. No one would stop to think that it was his careful obedience to orders and skill in carrying them out which had been the reason of it. He would be blamed for his own merits, and life was suddenly full of bitterness again.

“Your pardon, ma’am,” he said, and he turned away from her and walked forward to bawl orders at the men engaged in swaying an eighteen pounder up from the launch.

Lady Barbara shook her head at his back.

“Bless the man!” she said to herself, softly. “He was almost human for a while.”

Lady Barbara was fast acquiring, in her forced loneliness, the habit of talking to herself like the sole inhabitant of a desert island. She checked herself as soon as she found herself doing so, and went below and rated Hebe soundly for some minor sin of omission in the unpacking of her wardrobe.