Dyson and Brookland remained standing in an ever widening pool of water. Southwick had made a reasonably good job of sobering them up. They weren't still completely drunk, yet they weren't quite sober.
'Brookland, you're the senior man. What were you doing?'
'Just drinking, sir.'
'What happened then, a bottle get up and hit you?'
He heard the Tritons trying to restrain their laughter. It was working... so far. There'd been no gasp when he'd sentenced Harris.
'Come on, man, I asked you a question.'
'Don't rightly recall, sir. I was fighting someone.'
'Who?'
'Slushy, I think. But he wasn't in a Marine's uniform. Then there was the cook. And the Master. Lots of Marines.'
'You fought them all?'
'Oh no, sir,' the man exclaimed. 'No, I mean that when I was fighting I... I'm sorry, sir, I don't really remember what happened, except I was fighting Slushy.'
'Dyson—what have you to say for yourself?'
Dyson shook his head and nearly toppled over. Straightening himself up with an effort he tried to focus his eyes on Ramage.
'Fightin', sir. Brookland and me. My fault, sir. I think I 'ad a fight with a Marine, too. I 'it the cook with an empty bottle.'
'Oh—now why did you do that?'
'Don't get on with him too well,' Dyson said with drunken honesty. 'Wasn't a pre... pre-medulitated attackle. I mean I didn't...'
'You lilt him on the spur of the moment?'
That's it, sir,' Dyson said gratefully.
'Very well, two dozen lashes for each of you. Now get them below, Corporal; they make the quarterdeck look untidy.'
As the corporal bustled and shouted, the remaining Marines stamping and wheeling amid small clouds of pipeclay, Ramage walked aft to the taffrail and watched the Triton's wake.
Guilt, he thought to himself, was a matter of circumstances, necessity and degree. He had just flouted the Admiralty by charging the men with drunkenness instead of conspiracy to mutiny; he'd then flouted the Admiralty again in ordering them to be given what was, in fact, an almost dangerously light sentence. But officially no captain, whether of a tiny brig or a 74-gun ship of the line, could punish a man with more than a dozen lashes. If the crime warranted more than a dozen, then officially the man had to be brought to trial before a court martial, who could order more—as many lashes as they thought fit (there was no limit: 500 was a common sentence for desertion) or even hanging. But it was an order most captains ignored.
Some ignored it for the men's own good—better break a rule and give a man a swift couple of dozen than bring him before a court martial which might take a couple of months to assemble and then decide to make an example of him (or be fed up with a succession of petty cases) and sentence him to a hundred lashes.
But Ramage had no illusions about other captains who broke the rule because they enjoyed seeing men flogged. A few years ago there was the case of Captain Bligh; now there was talk of a captain out in the West Indies, Hugh Pigot, son of old Admiral Pigot, who gloated when he saw the tails of a cat laying open a man's bare back. For a moment Ramage almost envied him: .better perhaps to be able to gloat than stand there with your stomach empty because you knew you'd be sick if you ate anything, and breathing deeply and standing on your toes to stop yourself fainting. And hating the circumstances which forced you to have a man flogged.
But Ramage recognized the symptoms of self-pity and told himself: I was given command of a ship knowing what it entails. I have to fill in forms by the dozen for the Admiralty, the Navy Board, the Board of Ordnance, the Sick and Hurt Board ... I have to take unwilling and often stupid men and train them, and keep them well-fed and as fit as possible despite bad food and often appalling conditions.
I have to lead 'em and punish 'em when necessary. Sometimes when going into action I have to give orders which will certainly kill one, a dozen or all of them. I am—if I do the job properly—their teacher and leader, judge and jury. Yes, and father-confessor and friend as well.
As far as the Admiralty are concerned, whether I succeed or not has little to do with my promotion; where that's concerned it's more important to have influence in Parliament! The surest way to quick promotion is to be closely related to someone worth five votes to the Government in the House of Commons ... But whether the system is good or bad, it is the system; neither I nor anyone else can change it, whether----- 'Deck there!'
The shout was from the lookout at the foremast and South-wick, snatching up the speaking trumpet, bellowed a reply.
The man shouted back: 'Land, sir. A headland I think, two points on the starboard bow; can just see it in the haze.'
Southwick acknowledged, looked around for Appleby and demanded: 'Would you recognize the Lizard if you saw it?'
'Yes sir, I've seen it several times.'
'Good. Take the "bring 'em near" and get aloft.'
Ramage idly watched him scurry forward and begin the long climb up the ratlines. The Lizard...
*
The blue-grey smudge on the starboard quarter began slowly to fade and drop below the horizon, and Ramage watched the bosun's mate sitting on the coaming of the main hatch. Every movement the man made irritated him; everything about him was irritating.
Evan Evans was a tall and almost painfully thin Welshman who viewed the world, when he was sober, with doleful disapproval. However, his enormous nose—it looked like a purple cucumber stuck on as a joke—had an uncanny instinct for pointing into a tot of rum, and he had been one of the most popular of the Kathleen's petty officers.
But Evans was now making up three cat-o'-nine-tails for the flogging tomorrow morning.
It 'was a tradition—perhaps there'd been an Admiralty order, though Ramage had never seen it—that a man was never flogged on the day the captain pronounced the sentence: always the next.
No doubt the seamen thought it was to give the sentenced men time to work up a dread of the punishment facing them; but Ramage knew that, by tradition anyway, it was to give the captain time for second thoughts hi case he had acted too harshly in the heat of the moment. And, curiously enough, the delay was doubly to the men's advantage. If those to be flogged were popular then many of their shipmates illicitly hoarded their most valued possession, their morning and evening tots of rum, so that (if it could not be smuggled to the prisoners to drink before being marched on deck) they had something to deaden the pain after the punishment. M the punishment was given the same day as the sentence there'd be no time for hoarding.
Evan Evans was working slowly and steadily; there was a dreadful fascination in watching him which, Ramage noticed, everyone else shared: not a seaman walked past without glancing at him. But the man worked methodically, oblivious to stares and, because of his rating, immune from unpleasant comments.
Beside him on the deck were three pieces of thick rope, each a couple of feet long and an inch in diameter. They were for the handles. From a coil of braided line Evans had already cut twenty-seven pieces, each just over two feet long and a quarter of an inch in diameter. They would form the tails.
As Ramage paced miserably up and down the weather side of the quarterdeck, pausing occasionally to glance at the set of the sails and check the course the helmsmen were steering. Evans went on with his work. He picked up one length of thick rope and put it across his knees. From the brim of his tarred hat he took a sailmaker's needle and threaded it with twine.
With a slowness that did not hide his deftness, he made a sailmaker's whipping at one end of the rope, preventing the strands coming undone. After whipping an end of each of the other two thick pieces he put them down on the deck again. Then he patiently whipped one end of each of the twenty-seven tails.