Drinkwater put out his hand for the packet of orders. Already his head was formulating the likely signals for his convoy. How the devil could he extend comprehensive protection with a single ship?
'Will you send a sloop with me in support, sir?'
'I doubt I can spare one,' Drury said bluntly. 'When will you be ready for sea?'
'You promised me a week, sir, of which five days yet remain.'
'Very well. And now to a more immediate business ...'
'Sir?' Drinkwater frowned, puzzled.
'I want to hoist my flag in Patrician, Captain Drinkwater, just for a day or two.'
CHAPTER 4
The Dragon's Roar
Captain Drinkwater looked across the strip of grey water between his barge and that of the Dedaigneuse, and met Dawson's eye. He smiled encouragingly at the young post-captain. Dawson smiled back, a trifle apprehensively.
The two captains' barges were leading a flotilla of the squadron's boats, their crews bending to their oars and leaving millions of concentric circles expanding in their wakes to mark the dip, dip, dip of the blades. In each boat sat a small detachment of marines, muskets gleaming between their knees.
Dawson was in command, for Drury had ordered him to proceed the twelve miles upstream from Whampoa to obtain stores (in particular liquor) from the European factories at Canton and to determine the whereabouts of the specie. Drinkwater, out of a sense of curiosity and the realisation that his presence aboard Patrician was frustrating Fraser in his attempts to refit the ship, had volunteered his own services and those of a midshipman and his barge. The whiff of action had persuaded Mount to come with a file of his marines and Drury himself had, at the last minute, hailed Dawson's passing boat and climbed aboard. Perhaps it was the admiral's presence that rattled Dawson.
Or perhaps it was the situation that was rapidly deteriorating and that promised trouble ahead of them, that caused the young captain's anxiety. Drinkwater did not know.
To be truthful, he did not much care. The whole sorry business seemed utterly incomprehensible and as distant from his pursuit of Russian warships and defeating the French as if he were engaged at single-stick practice on Hadley Common.
The fact was that he was a mended man; his physical collapse had given him time to recover his faculties and his vigour. He wanted to be off with the convoy, to get out of the Pearl River and headed, if not for home, then for the staging post of Penang. He had vague thoughts of persuading Pellew to take ship in Patrician when he handed over the chief command to Drury, as a guarantee of their destination. That, he thought, would make a fine Christmas gift to his ship's company. But the silver specie had yet to come down from Canton and Patrician was not ready to proceed; so when Drury announced his intention of sending Dawson upstream with the squadron's boats, Drinkwater had found the suggestion of adventure irresistible.
And so, judging by their efforts, had his men. They were all volunteers, all save Tregembo, who followed his captain out of affection, though he would never admit it was more than duty. Drinkwater looked at the men closely as they plied their oars. They looked well enough on their diet of, what had they christened it? Ah yes, he recalled the crude jest, the coarse synonymous phrase for coition, bird's nest pie.
'River's more or less deserted, sir,' remarked Acting Lieutenant Frey beside him.
It was true. Though sampans and a few small junks moved up and down the river, the normal volume of traffic with which they had become familiar was no longer visible.
'I suppose they know what we're up to, Mr Frey.'
'I suppose so, sir.'
It was all an appalling tangle, Drinkwater mused. At Macao an affronted Portuguese population were suffering the occupation of the Company's sepoys, anxious to see the British gone. In the European 'factories' at Canton an increasingly beleaguered group of merchant agents were anxious to get out of China at least some of the huge deficit owed by the native merchants. The mandarins and Viceroy, organs of the Imperial civil
service, had to maintain their own 'face' and power, while at the same time obeying the orders of the Emperor in Peking who, celestially indifferent to the fate of Canton, wanted all contact with the fan kwei, the barbarian 'red-devils', broken off. Meanwhile at Whampoa the ship-masters and the Select Committee wanted to use Drury's armament to force the Chinese to pay up and the Viceroy to permit trading to continue. Drury, declaring the whole thing a 'complex, crooked, left-handed, winding mode of proceeding', had himself joined the boat operation to stop the matter getting entirely out of hand.
Beside Drinkwater, Frey suddenly craned his neck and stared ahead. Drinkwater followed his gaze. The roofs of Canton were coming into view. The tall, narrow-fronted buildings of the factories, marked by the flag-poles and the flaunting foreign colours, lay downstream from the more distant pagodas and the yellow walls of the city which rose from a higgledy-piggledy mass of scratch-built housing clustered about its buttresses.
'Canton ...', muttered Frey, speaking without knowing it. Drinkwater smiled inwardly. He must remember to call in the midshipmen's journals in a week or two, and see what Mr Frey's skill with brush and water-colour made of the scene.
'Boats ahead, sir!' The call came from the barge's bow. Drinkwater stood up, steadying his knee against a thwart. In the next boat Dawson did the same.
They were strung across the river, lying to a boom of ropes, eight or nine heavy junks, and just below them, sampans which appeared to be full of armed men, men with what looked like medieval hauberks of heavy cloth or leather over their, robes, and small metal caps with horsehair plumes.
'They've got bows and arrows, sir!' reported the bowman, and the sailors and marines burst out laughing with good-natured contempt.
Drinkwater, appraising the cordon of junks, judged the passage of the river effectively barred, unless they were going to break Drury's injunction not to open fire. He cast a quick look at either bank. There were cavalry drawn up and though they
would be seriously hampered by the multitude of people that stood curiously along the margin of the river, the entire mass was a formidable barrier to their progress.
'Easy there, Mr Frey, easy ...'
'Pull easy, lads ...'
The oarsmen slackened their efforts and Drinkwater heard Drury hailing him.
'Cap'n Drinkwater! I'm pushing on ahead ... do you hang back in my support. My interpreter tells me one of the junks bears an admiral.'
'Very well, sir. And good luck.'
Drury waved his hand and sat down again. Drinkwater saw him lean forward and exchange remarks with the interpreter. Dawson's face was set grimly.
'Oars, Mr Frey.' He turned and waved to the boats astern. As Dawson's barge pulled forward, the flotilla followed Drinkwater's example, their oars lifting horizontally, silver drops of water running along the looms, while the boats slowed, gliding in the admiral's wake.
Drinkwater watched as a perceptible ripple of excitement seemed to transmit itself from one bank to the other via the armed junks, at the sight of the single boat detaching itself from the others.
'What the devil's the admiral trying to do?' muttered Mount.
'Negotiate, Mr Mount,' said Drinkwater, 'and I'll trouble you not to open fire without my express authority.' Drinkwater repeated the order to the lieutenant in the adjacent boat, with instructions to pass it along the line. Drury had been explicit upon the point.