“It is never enough, monsieur,” explained the Frenchman—Hornblower was acquainted with Spanish methods, and could understand—“and sometimes it does not come at all. Because of the wind, monsieur. When the wind is in the east, monsieur, we starve.”
Bush was looking at the chart and the sailing directions for the Western Mediterranean.
“That’s right, sir,” he announced. “There’s only one landing beach, and that’s on the east. It’s impracticable to land in easterly winds. It mentions the two wells and says there’s no wood.”
“They are supposed to bring food twice a week, monsieur,” said the Frenchman. “But sometimes it has been three weeks before they have been able to put it ashore.”
“Three weeks!”
“Yes, monsieur.”
“But—but—”
“Those of us who are wise have little stores hidden away in the rocks for those times, monsieur. We have to defend them, of course. And as for the others—There is usually plenty of one kind of food for them to eat, monsieur. There are not twentythousand of us by now.”
Hornblower looked out through the cabin window at the dull smudge on the horizon where, in this enlightened nineteenth century, actual cannibalism was still taking place.
“God bless us all!” said Bush, solemnly.
“There had been no food for a week when we escaped yesterday, monsieur. But easterly winds always bring driftwood, as well as famine. We found two treetrunks, Marcel and I. There were many who wanted to take the chance, monsieur. But we are strong, stronger than most on the island.”
The Frenchman looked almost with complacency down at his skinny arms.
“Yes indeed we are,” said Marcel. “Even if your ship had not seen us, we might have reached Spain alive. I suppose our Emperor has now conquered all the mainland?”
“Not yet,” replied Hornblower briefly. He was not prepared at short notice to try to explain the vast chaos which was acquiring the name of the Peninsular War.
“The Spaniards still hold Valencia,” he said. “If you had managed to get there they would only have sent you back to Cabrera.”
The Frenchmen looked at each other; they would have grown voluble again, but Hornblower checked them testily.
“Go and try to sleep,” he said, and he stamped out of the cabin.
Up on deck the air seemed purer, after the foul pictures which the Frenchmen’s stories had called up in his mind. Hornblower loathed human suffering; he walked his deck tormented by the thought of the starving Frenchmen on Cabrera. This brisk Levanter, blowing from the east, would go on blowing for another week at least, if he could read weather signs—and he thought he could. It was none of his business to worry about French prisoners of war in Spanish hands. Cabrera lay out of his course. British government stores should be conserved strictly for the use of his own ship. He would have the devil’s own time explaining to his admiral if he did anything to relieve the misery on Cabrera. No sensible man would attempt it; every sensible man would shrug his shoulders and do his best to forget about this whole beastly business of Frenchmen devouring their own dead among the rocks of Cabrera. Yet by laying the Sutherland as close to the wind as she would lie he could just fetch the island now. Any further delay would mean a long beat to windward. Hornblower crossed the deck and gave his orders, and without another word, solely by the look in his eye, he dared his lieutenants to question him as to his intentions. Then he went back to his walk, pacing up and down, up and down, trying to think out a method of how to land stores on a surfbeaten beach.
That queer mathematical ability of his was working to its utmost. Into his mind there came a whole series of ballistic formulae. Scientific gunnery was in its infancy, in its utter babyhood; it was only in the last few years that the arsenal authorities at Woolwich had begun to experiment practically in the endeavour to obtain data as to the behaviour of the weapons they turned out in such numbers. And most of their attention had been devoted to the big ships’ guns and not to the little 6pounder boat gun whose employment was contemplated by Hornblower. And besides that, he was intending to use the 6pounder in a way that had never been contemplated by the Woolwich authorities or by anyone else at all, as far as he knew. So far, nobody had thought of employing a gun to bridge a gap with a line as he was thinking of doing. If his plan did not succeed, he would have to think of another one—but he thought it was worth trying.
He broke off his train of thought to issue a whole series of orders to his puzzled subordinates. The blacksmith was given orders to forge an iron rod with a loop at the end and to wrap it with oakum and twine to fit the bore of the long boat’s 6pounder. The bos’un had to get out 100 fathoms of the finest hemp line that the ship possessed and work it into utter flexibility by straining every inch round a belayingpin and then coil it away with perfect symmetry into one of the oaken firebuckets. The cooper and his mates were set to work breaking out beef casks, half emptying them, and then heading them up securely. A puzzled bos’un’s mate was set to work with half a dozen hands linking these twenty halfempty casks into an immense chain, like beads on a string where every bead was represented by a cask containing 2hundredweight of meat connected with its fellows by 60 yards of cable. The deck of the Sutherland presented a pretty tangle to any possible observer by the time all these operations were well started. And through the gathering evening the Sutherland held her course steadily, closehauled for Cabrera.
At dawn she was there, and the earliest hint of daylight found her nosing her way cautiously towards the beach, from which even here, with the wind in the wrong direction, could be heard the thunderous beat of the surf.
“That’s the dagos’ victuallingship, I’ll lay a guinea,” said Bush with his glass to his eye.
It was a small brig, hull down and hove to, over on the horizon.
“Yes,” said Hornblower—the speech deserved no more ample rejoinder. He was much too occupied looking through his own glass at the craggy beach of rock on which the Spaniards had seen fit to place twentythousand men. It was just a grey fragment, one single ridge projecting like a tooth from the blue Mediterranean, its steep slopes unrelieved by any trace of green. Around its foot the rollers broke into white fountains of spray—Hornblower could see the waves reaching 20 or 30 feet up the cliffs as they beat upon them—save in the centre where a long flurry of foam revealed the landing beach and all its dangers. It was a wicked enough place.
“Can’t blame the dagos for not landing stores here in an easterly wind,” said Bush, and this time he received no answer at all.
“Hoist out the longboat,” Hornblower rasped; when approaching a difficult task he would take out no insurance by minor politeness for his subordinates’ sympathy in the event of failure.
The bos’un’s mates twittered on their pipes while Harrison, the bos’un, repeated the order in his resounding bellow. The tackles were manned and the longboat was swung up from her chocks and hoisted overside. The longboat’s crew stood fending her off as the Sutherland surged in the choppy sea.
“I’m going in her, Mr Bush,” said Hornblower briefly.
He took hold of one of the falls and lowered himself down; his unathletic figure dangled in ungainly fashion while the longboat’s crew fell over each other in their haste to protect his fall. It was a source of continual inward disturbance to Hornblower that the poorest topman in his whole ship was better on a rope than he was himself. He managed just well enough, and with only a small loss of dignity, with a 3foot drop as a result of his not quite correctly estimating the relative movements of the ship and the boat. Somebody picked up his hat and gave it to him and he clapped it on his head again.