They watched without expression. They had watched such punishments before and those that were intelligent enough to realise knew he had been lenient. Three dozen lashes was more than he normally administered, but it was downright soft on four bloody fools who had run in a place like China and had then been discovered in the very convoy the bloody ship was escorting!
'Twelve!'
Mr Comley intoned the strokes like those of a bell. The bosun's mate stopped and handed over the cat to another that the thrasher might not ease the violence of his stripes through fatigue. Their Lordships thought of everything ...
'Thirteen!'
Old Tregembo watched, sensing the mood of his fellows as vaguely contemptuous of the four men for having been caught so easily. Quilhampton watched full of the knowledge that Drinkwater had agonised over the decision and confident that he had come to the right, the only decision open to a reasonable man. Fraser, the cares of first lieutenant weighing upon him, felt a stirring of disapproval. He would have preferred the matter handed over to the admiral at Madras, or Calcutta or wherever he was, removing the stigma of it from the ship. Sometimes he envied Drinkwater's impeccable, irreproachable acceptance of his responsibilities, sometimes he disapproved of it. Like every second-in-command in history, Fraser knew what he would have done in the circumstances, and that it would have been diametrically opposite to what was now happening ...
'Twenty!'
It never occurred to Fraser that he would have handed the matter over through weakness, for there were half a dozen good reasons why, in his heart, he felt his own decision would have been the right one. Nor did it occur to him that Drinkwater had given more than the most superficial consideration to the matter.
'Twenty-four!'
The bosun's mates changed again for the last dozen. The man's back was laid open now. The cat bit into one vast bruise that had burst into a flayed mass of dark, bloody flesh. Lallo, the surgeon, stared at it, only half seeing more toil for him and his mates, his eyes fixed with a greater calculation on the men amidships, computing, or attempting to compute, how many had already taken the infection of the yaws ...
'Thirty!'
He had heard someone mutter the words 'humane punishment' as they had assembled on the quarterdeck in response to the cry for all hands to muster. It seemed a sophisticated conceit to run words like that together in justification of so barbaric a ritual. Not that Lallo condemned the flogging from any lofty principle; he was too old to think the world would ever set itself to rights, but to talk of 'humane punishment' was almost as stupid a thing to do as to run away from a man-o'-war; almost deserving of the same treatment too, he thought morosely ...
'Thirty-one!'
Derrick made himself watch, though revulsion rose in his throat on hardly suppressed upwellings of bile. He had seen this evil so often now, perpetrated on the whim of a man he both liked and respected. Intellectually he understood all Drinkwater's motives, both official and unofficial. But the inherent brutalising of them all he condemned as utterly evil. It reaffirmed his pacifism, revived his faith, for without war there would not be this grim, so-called necessity ...
'Thirty-two!'
The deserter was hanging by his wrist lashings now, unconscious like some early martyr. Blood ran down to the deck and trickled from his mouth where the leather pad had become dislodged. Senseless he hung there in the sunshine upon the golden, scrubbed timber of the grating so that Midshipman Chirkov was reminded of an icon, the glittering uniforms of the marines an encrustation of rubies, the naval officers a semicircle of sapphires. Fumes of opium still whirled in his brain, enhancing his hearing so that he heard the involuntary exhalations of the man's lungs as the sodden cat thrashed its final strokes upon the rib-cage. Chirkov felt nothing for the victim. All sensations were inwards. The flogging did not even remind him of his own humiliation. He saw only the strange beauty of the agonised body.
'Thirty-five!'
Midshipman Belchambers waited to faint. To his eternal shame he had fainted several times when witnessing punishment and, although he had since that humiliating period seen action and distinguished himself, he still feared that irresistible loss of control ...
'Thirty-six! Water! Cut him down!'
The man's body twitched as the green-white water slopped not ungently over his bloodied back, but he was unconscious as the bosun's mates sliced the lashings at his wrists and dragged him to one side where his messmates took him. Midshipman Belchambers took a deep breath. He was rather pleased with himself ...
'Next!'
Like Chirkov, Morris's hearing was acute. A pipe of opium made it so and the sounds from the quarterdeck revived old, old memories in Morris's mind, memories that the drug uncoiled in lascivious scrolls drawn in graphically slow motion across the mind's eye.
He fondled the boy's ear, realising that these were days of sublime happiness. Not only was he basking in the anticipation of personal success, but that was heightened by the unexpected bonus of encompassing the ruin of a man he had once attempted to love. To the expectation of revenge he now found added the knowledge that that youthful paragon had been brought low in the world, low enough to have his delicate nature sullied by the grim necessity of ordering floggings.
'Ah, my fine friend, how has the bloom withered upon the stalk, eh?' He chuckled, pleased, seeing in his mind's eye that it was Drinkwater's back that received the thrashing of the cat.
His grip suddenly tightened on the boy's ear, turning the puckish face towards his own bloated and puffy flesh.
'Tonight! Tonight we will do it. It will have to be tonight. And then, my little imp, we shall see, oh, yes, we shall see ...'
The boy grunted, the spittle in his throat, his mouth opening.
But Morris had averted his own hooded eyes, for above his head he heard more noises of punishment ...
'One! Two!'
And he smiled.
Despite his conviction of the rightness of Drinkwater's decision to mete out swift and humane justice to the deserters, Lieutenant Quilhampton did not share the captain's analysis of the people's collective attitude. For one thing he was less accustomed than Drinkwater to thinking of the ship's company as one amorphous mass. Rather, to him they were a sum of many separate parts, some of whom, those who fulfilled their duties in his division, were well known to him. But part of this disagreement was attributable to his own involvement in the stilling of their mutinous spirit in the Baltic. He knew that for a while he had sat on a powder keg and alone had snuffed out an already sputtering fuse. He was, therefore, upon his guard in the hours following the floggings. Loyalty, this apprehension about the explosive mood of the hands and his eager longing to return home, stopped him from sleeping, and men nudged each other from mess-table to mess-table and hammock to hammock, as Quilhampton prowled about the ship on one pretext or another.
But the mood of the ship was not threatening, for with that swift change that occurs at sea like the lifting of cloud shadows or a shift in the wind, the reported sight of blue islands to the south of them set their minds on a new tack, dispelling the gloom of the morning and setting their imaginations on anticipation of arrival at Prince of Wales Island, Pulo Penang, first stage on their homeward track.