'Of course.'
'Well goodbye, old fellow. Good fortune and thank you for your solicitude when I was aloft. Appleby considered you saved my life.'
'Then we are quits,' White said, following his sea-chest over the rail with a gallant smile that seemed to cause him some agony. Drinkwater, suffering himself, grinned unsympathetically.
After the departure of the officers and their dunnage of sea-chests, bundles, portmanteaux, sword-cases, hat-boxes and quadrant-boxes, the frigate's remaining boats were sent in to the boat-pond and she was left with a dockyard punt of uncertain antiquity to attend her. At noon the ship was boarded by the paymaster and his clerks who brought with them an iron-bound chest with its escort of marines from the dockyard detachment. The men were mustered to the shrilling of the pipes in an excited crowd under the final authority of the boatswain and his mates. They turned out in all the splendid finery of their best shore-going outfits, sporting ribboned hats, decorated pea-jackets, elaborately worked belts of white sennet and trousers with extravagantly flared legs. Many held their shoes in their hands and those who had donned theirs walked with the exaggerated awkwardness of men quite unused to such things. As each man received his due reward, signing or marking the purser's and the surgeon's ledgers for the deductions he had accrued over the commission, he turned away with a wide grin, picked up his ditty-bag and went to the rail in quest of transport. Word had passed along the river, and boats and wherries arrived to lie expectantly off Cyclops's quarters from where the unfortunate crew were confronted with the first joy of the shore, being subjected to the ravages of land-sharks who were demanding exorbitant charges to ferry them ashore.
In the wake of this exodus, the ship sank into a state of suspension, the silence along her decks eerie to those who had known them crowded with men and full of the buzz of human occupation.
Responsibility for the ship now fell upon the standing warrant officers, for Drinkwater's acting commission ceased the day Cyclops decommissioned, and in the absence of a master, the gunner was the senior. Drinkwater remained on board unofficially, his sole purpose in lingering to augment his knowledge and study, for he had received word from the Trinity House that he could attend for examination in a little over a fortnight and he was determined to secure at the very least a certificate as master as soon as possible. With the approval of the gunner, he therefore remained in the gunroom, and in that now echoing space once loud with Devaux and Wheeler's discourse, he unrolled Blackmore's charts and studied the legacy the old man had left him. Apart from a treatise on navigation, Drinkwater had found a dictionary and, to his surprise, some works of poetry. Somehow the memory of the sailing master and his didactic lectures on the mysteries of lunar distances did not square with the love-poems of Herrick and Rochester. Oddly, though, there seemed a strange, almost sinister message from beyond the grave implicit in a slim anthology which contained a work by Richard Kempenfelt. He read a couplet out loud:
This discovery briefly diverted his thoughts to Elizabeth and the book of hers that he had found containing a hymn of the admiral's. But it was the manuscript books which most fascinated Drinkwater for, from his first appointment as second mate of a merchantman, Blackmore had kept notebooks containing details of anchorages and ports and the dangers of their approaches, of landfalls, conspicuous features, leads through swatchways and gatways, and the exhibited lights and daymarks of lighthouses and alarm vessels. Interspersed with the carefully scribed text were exquisite drawings, some washed in with water-colours, which turned these compendiums into private rutters of sailing directions. It was a double surprise to find these talents in the old man, filling Drinkwater with a profound regret that he had not done so earlier, that he had in some way failed the dead man. The discovery of these things after Blackmore's death laid a poignant burden upon him, a feeling of lost opportunity.
To the inhabitants of the cockpit as a whole, Blackmore had been a fussy old woman whose interest in versines, Napier's logarithms and plane sailing were as obsessive as they were boring. Fortunately Drinkwater had not found them so, and as a result had benefited from Blackmore's patiently shared experience. He was too young to know that such enthusiasm was enough for Blackmore and had decided the dying man to leave his professional papers to his aptest pupil.
Drinkwater turned the pages of Blackmore's rutters. They charted the dead man's life from the Gulf of Riga to the Dardanelles. There were notes on anchorages on the coasts of Kurland and Corsica, on ice in the Baltic and on the currents in the Strait of Gibraltar. There were notes of the approaches to Stralsund and some complex clearing marks off Ushant. There were observations on Blackmore's native Harwich Harbour, and on the Rivers Humber and Mersey, together with a neat chartlet of the Galuda River in South Carolina. Drinkwater shuddered. He remembered the Galuda too well, its mosquitoes, its dead and the manner of their dying. He did not care to think of such things and dismissed them from his mind. In an effort to concentrate, he wrote to Elizabeth, then bent himself to his studies.
Trinity House was an impressive building, situated on the rising ground of Tower Hill. Iron railings provided a forecourt to the stone façade, the ground floor of which comprised an arched entrance with Ionic columns supporting a plain entablature pierced by tall windows. These in turn were interspersed with ornate embellishments comprising the Corporation's arms and the medallions of King George III and Queen Charlotte, together with representations of nautical instruments and lighthouses. The Elder Brethren who formed the ruling court of this ancient body, as well as licensing pilots and buoying out the Thames Estuary, the Downs and Yarmouth Roads, and generally overseeing their own and private lighthouses, also examined the proficiency of candidates seeking warrants as masters or mates in the Royal Navy.
It was a contentious matter, for to command a brig-sloop or unrated ship of less than twenty guns, a lieutenant or commander was supposed to have passed an examination before the Elder Brethren of the Trinity House. Indeed, implicit in the very rank 'Master and Commander' was lodged an acknowledgement of navigational skill, allowing the holder the courtesy title of 'Captain', without the confirmed and irreversible rights attaching to that of 'Post-Captain'. Therein lay the rub. Despite the fact that the Brethren were mariners of experience, all having commanded ships, and in spite of the Corporation being empowered by Royal Charter, they were themselves merchant masters. Officers holding commissions from the King considered that to submit to such examination was an affront to their dignity. Thus the exigencies of service at sea and abroad, and the expediences of special cases, combined with the more powerful influences of blood and interest almost to negate the wise provision of this regulation. It was, therefore, unfortunately observed mostly in the breach. The resulting ineptitude of many commissioned officers as navigators had frequently caused danger to naval ships and ensured continuing employment for those men brought up in merchantmen, whose humbler path led them into the navy as masters and mates. These men had their certificates from the Trinity House and their warrants from the Navy Board but, competent though they might be, commissioned they were not.
Strictly according to regulation, a midshipman was not permitted to act as prize-master unless he had passed for master's mate and thus demonstrated his competence to bring his prize safely into port. A mixture of luck and expedience had secured Drinkwater his own warrant as master's mate when he had served briefly in the Corporation's yacht under Captain Poulter. At the time she had been flying the flag of Captain Anthony Calvert, an Elder Brother on his way to the westward from Plymouth, and Calvert had obtained a certificate for the young Midshipman Drinkwater. Despite this brief service in the Corporation's buoy-yacht, this was the first time Drinkwater had visited the elegant headquarters on Tower Hill, built by Samuel Wyatt.