They were months of frightful peril for England, with the Grande Armée, two hundred thousand strong, poised within thirty miles of the Kentish beaches, but they were months of tranquillity for Hotspur, even with a score of hostile battleships in sight. There were occasional flurries when the coasters tried too boldly to enter or leave; there were occasional busy moments when squalls came down and topsails had to be reefed. There were encounters after dark with fishing vessels, conversations over a glass of rum with the Breton captains, purchases of crabs and lobsters and pilchards — and of the latest decree of the Inscription Maritime, or of a week-old copy of the Moniteur.
Hornblower’s telescope revealed ant-like hordes of workmen rebuilding the blown-up batteries, and for a couple of weeks he watched the building of scaffolding and the erection of sheers on the Petit Minou, and, for three continuous days, as a result, the slow elevation to the vertical of the new mast of the semaphore station. The subsequent days added horizontal and vertical arms; before the summer was over those arms were whirling about reporting once more the movements of the blockading squadron.
Much good might that do the French, huddled in their anchored ships in the Roads. Inertia and a sense of inferiority would work their will on the unfortunate crews. The ships ready for sea might slowly increase in number; men might slowly be found for them, but every day the balance of fighting quality, of naval power, swung faster and faster over in favour of the British, constantly exercising at sea, and constantly reinforced by the seaborne tribute of the world.
There was a price to be paid; the dominion of the seas was not given freely by destiny. The Channel Fleet paid in blood, in lives, as well as in the sacrifice of the freedom and leisure of every officer and man on board. There was a constant petty drain. Ordinary sickness took only small toll; among men in the prime of life isolated from the rest of the world illnesses were few, although it was noticeable that after the arrival of victualling ships from England epidemics of colds would sweep through the fleet, while rheumatism — the sailor’s disease — was always present.
The losses were mainly due to other causes. There were men who, in a moment of carelessness or inattention, fell from the yard. There were the men who ruptured themselves, and they were many, for despite the ingenuity of blocks and tackles there were heavy weights to haul about by sheer manpower. There were crushed fingers and crushed feet when ponderous casks of salted provisions were lowered into boats from the storeships and hauled up on to the decks of the fighting ships. And frequently a lacerated limb would end — despite all the care of the surgeons — in gangrene, in amputation, and death. There were the careless men who, during target practice with the cannon, lost their arms by ramming a cartridge into an improperly sponged gun, or who did not remove themselves from the line of recoil. Three times that year there were men who died in quarrels, when boredom changed to hysteria and knives were drawn; and on each of those occasions another life was lost, a life for a life, a hanging with the other ships clustered round and the crews lining the sides to learn what happened when a man lost his temper. And once the crews manned the sides to see what happened when a wretched young seaman paid the price for a crime worse even than murder — for raising his fist to his superior officer. Incidents of that sort were inevitable as the ships beat back and forth monotonously, over the eternal grey inhospitable sea.
It was well for the Hotspur that she was under the command of a man to whom any form of idleness or monotony was supremely distasteful. The charts of the Iroise were notoriously inaccurate; Hotspur set herself to run line after line of soundings, to take series after series of careful triangulations from the headlands and hilltops. When the fleet ran short of silver sand, so necessary to keep the decks spotless white, it was Hotspur who supplied the deficiency, finding tiny lost beaches round the coast where a park could land — trespassing upon Bonaparte’s vaunted dominion over Europe — to fill sacks with the precious commodity. There were fishing competitions, whereby the lower-deck’s rooted objection to fish as an item of diet was almost overcome; a prize of a pound of tobacco for the biggest catch by an individual mess set all the messes to work on devising more novel fish-hooks and baits. There were experiments in ship-handling, when obsolescent and novel methods were tested, when by careful and accurate measurement with the log the effect of goose-winging the topsails was ascertained; or, it being assumed that the rudder was lost, the watch keeping officers tried their hands at manoeuvring the ship by the sails alone.
Hornblower himself found mental exercise in working out navigational problems. Conditions were ideal for taking lunar observations, and by their aid it was possible to arrive at an accurate determination of longitude — a subject of debate since the days of the Carthaginians — at the cost of endless calculations. Hornblower was determined to perfect himself in this method, and his officers and young gentlemen bewailed the decision, for they, too, had to make lunar observations and work out the resulting sums. The longitude of the Little Girls was calculated on board the Hotspur a hundred times that summer, with nearly a hundred different results.
To Hornblower it was a satisfactory occupation, the more satisfactory as it became obvious that he was acquiring the necessary knack. He tried to acquire the same facility in another direction, without the same satisfaction, as he wrote his weekly letters to Maria. There was only a limited number of endearments, only a limited number of ways of saying that he missed her, that he hoped her pregnancy was progressing favourably. There was only the one way of excusing himself for not returning to England as he had promised to do, and Maria was inclined to be a little peevish in her letters regarding the exigencies of the service. When the water-hoys arrived periodically and the enormous labour had to be undertaken of transferring the already stale liquid into the Hotspur Hornblower always found himself thinking that getting those eighteen tons of water on board meant another month of writing letters to Maria.
Chapter 13
Hotspur‘s bell struck two double strokes; it was six o’clock in the evening, and the first dog watch had come to an end in the gathering darkness.
“Sunset, sir,” said Bush.
“Yes,” agreed Hornblower.
“Six o’clock exactly. The equinox, sir.”
“Yes,” agreed Hornblower again; he knew perfectly well what was coming.
“We’ll have a westerly gale, sir, or my name’s not William Bush.”
“Very likely,” said Hornblower, who had been sniffing the air all day long.
Hornblower was a heretic in this matter. He did not believe that the mere changing from a day a minute longer than twelve hours to one a minute shorter made gales blow from out of the west. Gales happened to blow at this time because winter was setting in, but ninety-nine men out of a hundred firmly believed in a more direct, although more mysterious causation.
“Wind’s freshening and sea’s getting up a bit, sir,” went on Bush, inexorably.
“Yes.”
Hornblower fought down the temptation to declare that it was not because the sun happened to set at six o’clock, for he knew that if he expressed such an opinion it would be received with the tolerant and concealed disagreement accorded to the opinions of children and eccentrics and captains.