The Valiant Sailors Read online

  “Hands to witness punishment!” the Boatswain shouted, at the pitch of his powerful lungs, from the upper deck. “All hands muster aft to witness punishment!”

  Martin Fox appeared from below and Phillip left the quarterdeck to join him. The pipes shrilled and the men came crowding up from every part of the ship, to fall in in their allotted lines, the divisional officers in front, facing their men, and the Marines, in their scarlet uniforms, to the right of the blue-frocked seamen. Fox said in a tense whisper, before taking his place with his own division, “Don’t weaken, Phillip … whatever happens, you must not weaken.”

  “I know it,” Phillip assured him grimly. “That is what he wants, isn’t it?”

  “You must leave this to Fraser,” the younger man warned. “He has the right to intervene … but you have not. And the Captain will know he’s your brother if you attempt to do so.”

  Phillip nodded, stoney faced. The warning, he was aware, was kindly meant and he would be well advised to heed it but … he called the ship’s company to attention, his voice harsh with strain.

  Graham was brought on deck, stripped to the waist, his wrists pinioned in front of him. He walked past the assembled men without faltering, his cheeks white beneath their coating of tan but his face betraying no emotion. Two boatswain’s mates triced him to the grating which had been rigged under the mizzen-stay and one of them picked up the cat-o’-nine-tails and stood, balancing it carefully in his big red hands, stolidly awaiting the order to begin. On the prisoner’s other side a Marine drummer also waited, drumsticks raised, both face and eyes devoid of expression. The Boatswain, a massive Welshman named Williams, glanced expectantly at Phillip.

  “Six dozen lashes, is it, sir?”

  The Captain answered him. He, too, had crossed from the quarterdeck, the Surgeon at his heels, and he advanced until he was within a few feet of the bound and helpless prisoner. “Six dozen lashes,” he confirmed, with icy emphasis. “To be laid on well. Bo’sun’s mate, you know your duty!”

  Angus Fraser stared down at the deck beneath his feet, saying nothing, and Phillip’s heart sank. Obviously he had done all he could be expected to do and he had failed … it was no use hoping that he would attempt to intervene further. A cough, after all, was scarcely sufficient to justify his risking North’s displeasure and Graham had claimed that he was fit… .

  The drum rolled and the burly boatswain’s mate stepped forward, swinging the whip behind his head, to bring its knotted thongs hissing expertly across Graham’s naked shoulders. The first stroke drew blood, raising a line of ugly red weals on the tautly stretched skin. The petty officer raised his whip again and the second and third strokes, following swiftly on the first, wrung a strangled gasp of pain from his victim. But, as blow succeeded blow, Graham stoically controlled himself. The tails of the lash cut viciously into the bare flesh of his back and shoulders but he endured the savage punishment in silence, broken only once by a groan he could not suppress.

  Phillip, with difficulty, fought down his rising nausea. He had been compelled to witness other floggings in the past and, although none had failed to sicken him, the majority had, at least, been administered to men who deserved them … to persistent offenders and to those guilty of crimes which demanded harsh retribution. He had deplored the necessity for flogging but, since this had been part and parcel of naval discipline throughout his training, he had never previously questioned its necessity. Indeed, it was only since serving under Captain North’s command that he had seen such punishment meted out for minor offences and now, as he stood rigidly to attention in front of the ranks of motionless seamen and Marines, he had to exercise an iron restraint to prevent himself crying out in futile protest against the injustice his brother was suffering.

  For this was injustice, he thought bitterly. North would never have ordered a search of Graham’s kit nor, in all probability, would he have sentenced him to so severe a flogging had his name been anything but Hazard. He might, perhaps, have listened to the Surgeon’s pleas had he not suspected that the seaman he had put under arrest was, in fact, an ex-officer and the brother of his First Lieutenant.

  Now he was seeking confirmation of his suspicions and Phillip’s throat ached with the effort it cost him to remain silent. The only way in which he could hope to allay Captain North’s suspicions was, he knew, by pretending indifference and by treating the brutal spectacle he was being forced to witness as if it were merely another flogging, inflicted on a man who meant nothing to him. As Martin Fox had warned him a short while ago, he could not afford to weaken … he had somehow to make the lie he had told seem convincing. If he failed to do so, then this persecution of his brother would be continued. North would use Graham in order to bring him to heel, would use him ruthlessly and unscrupulously, as he was attempting to do at this moment … Graham would be the trump card he would keep up his sleeve, to be produced should his First Lieutenant be tempted to rebel against him in the future.

  Phillip’s resolution hardened. He willed himself to stand rigidly to attention, to show as little emotion as the woodenfaced seamen at his back but the strain was becoming almost unendurable … his hands clenched fiercely at his sides as he struggled for control.

  His brother’s back, he saw, was reduced to a bloody pulp but still the lash bit into it, cutting the bruised and tortured flesh to ribbons. There would be scars, he thought, scars which would mark Graham to the end of his days … he shivered, feeling his brother’s pain as if it were his own and wishing, sick with shame and disgust, that it might have been.

  At the end of the first three dozen lashes, the boatswain’s mate paused. His relief took the cat-o’-nine-tails from him and was moving into position to continue the flogging when Angus Fraser thrust past him and went to the prisoner’s side.

  “Wait …” his voice broke the silence, sounding unnaturally loud but, Phillip heard thankfully, authoritative and determined. The Surgeon bent over Graham’s slumped body, lifted his head and put out a hand to touch his face.

  “This man is barely conscious, sir,” he said, over his shoulder, to the Captain. “In my professional opinion, he should not be subjected to further punishment.”

  “Unconscious, is he, Doctor? Then he must be revived. Bo’sun’s mate …” North jerked his head. The two petty officers hesitated and then the man with the whip set it down and picked up a bucket of seawater which stood in readiness by the rail. He sluiced its contents over Graham’s head and face, as the Surgeon reluctantly moved aside and, his face without expression, reached for the cat again.

  “All right to go on, sir?” he asked the Surgeon tonelessly, as Graham gasped and spluttered back to consciousness and then was seized by a violent fit of coughing.

  Once more it was North himself who replied to the question. “The sentence,” he declared, an edge to his voice, “is six dozen lashes. This man has received only three dozen and he is now conscious. Carry on, bo’sun’s mate.”

  The dreadful punishment continued and the Captain stood with folded arms, a curiously repellent smile playing about his lips as he watched. He was still smiling when he turned, after a while, to glance in the direction of his First Lieutenant. That smile, with its hint of derisive triumph, was suddenly more than Phillip could stomach. He took a pace forward, white with anger but, before he was able to utter a single one of the damning words he had planned to fling into the smiling face of his commander, an interruption came from a totally unexpected quarter.

  “Captain North, I beg you to put a stop to this!”

  A small, elegantly dressed figure emerged from the companion-hatch and Phillip came to a standstill, staring at her in shocked dismay. He had neither seen or heard Mademoiselle Sophie’s approach, had not suspected her presence until she spoke, and he wondered for how long she had been there. What, he asked himself, what in the name of heaven was the Baroness von Mauthner thinking of to allow her innocent charge to wander about on deck unaccompanied? That she should have witnessed so terri
ble a spectacle filled him with outraged horror and he signed urgently to the boatswain’s mate to put down his whip, hoping that—when she realized what was going on—Mademoiselle Sophie would retire below.

  She did not do so. Instead she crossed the deck with regal dignity and without hesitation, her head held high, and an astonished gasp went up from the massed ranks of seamen and Marines as they caught sight of her, most of them goggling at her in bewilderment, as if she were a vision from another world. Indeed, Phillip thought, as bewildered as the rest, she might have been a vision with her queenly bearing and the calm assurance with which she walked straight up to the startled North and addressed herself to him.

  “Captain North …” her clear young voice did not falter and, if she was aware of the sensation her arrival had caused, she gave no sign of it.

  The Captain removed his gold laced cap. “Forgive me, mam’zelle, but you should not be here,” he began. “You …”

  Mademoiselle Sophie silenced him with an imperiously raised hand. “I had imagined myself on board a Russian ship,” she told him icily, “where it is a commonplace occurrence for a sailor to be beaten to death. But the Russians are savages, in your view, are they not? And you are about to go to war with them?”

  “That is so, mam’zelle. But you …” North was visibly disconcerted, his face flushed, and he stammered in his agitation. “You must understand, you must realize …”

  “I understand,” she stated accusingly, “that this is a British ship and your men all volunteers—not conscripts, Captain. Yet it would seem that there is little to choose between your method of maintaining order and discipline and that of the Russians, which you affect to despise.”

  “Mam’zelle, I assure you, we flog only when it is necessary,” North defended. “We …” but Mademoiselle Sophie ignored him, her gaze going to the limp figure which hung, unconscious and bleeding, from the grating. For the first time since she had come on deck her voice shook and there were tears in her eyes as she said, “Oh, that poor, poor man! You have all but killed him, Captain North.”

  “Cut him down,” North ordered. “And take him below.”

  Boatswain Williams and his two mates obeyed him with alacrity and, accompanied by the Surgeon, they hustled the unconscious Graham down the hatchway and out of sight.

  Phillip expelled his breath in a tense sigh of gratitude and relief and saw that his own feelings were reflected in the faces of the men grouped about him. No one moved, however, and they were silent, but suddenly the tension was over, the intolerable strain which they had all had to endure was, miraculously, at an end. The small, erect figure of Mademoiselle Sophie still drew every eye and she said, as if she had only then become aware of this, “I will go below now, Captain.”

  “Certainly, mam’zelle.” Red of face and obviously much put out by the turn events had taken, Captain North continued to treat her with exaggerated, almost servile respect, Phillip observed, and his bewilderment returned full force when he saw the Captain offer her his arm. “Permit me to escort you.”

  “Thank you. But that poor man, will he …”

  “The Surgeon will take care of him, mam’zelle.”

  Her dignity impeccable, Mademoiselle Sophie laid her hand on the Captain’s sleeve and they walked across the deck together. The men stared after them, their faces, as before, Phillip noticed, reflecting his own curiously conflicting emotions. He waited with them and, when the Captain returned, once more called them to attention. Divine Service, always brief save on Sunday mornings, was concluded with more than its usual brevity, North reading the prayers in a rapid, toneless voice and, all too obviously, impatient to have done.

  When it was over and the men dismissed, he turned to Phillip, his eyes blazing with barely suppressed fury. “Now, Mr Hazard, we will exercise these lubberly scum! We will exercise them until they are sorry they were ever born and sorrier still that they volunteered to serve in this ship. Beat to quarters!”

  “Now, sir?” Phillip’s jaw dropped.

  “Devil take it, Mr Hazard, are you hard of hearing? Now, of course now! I want the ship cleared for action and the guns loaded and run out …” He issued a string of orders and, without waiting for Phillip’s dutiful, “Aye, aye, sir,” spun round and made for the quarterdeck, bellowing for the officer of the watch.

  After that, life for the ship’s company of the Trojan became a nightmare. As the ship worked up into the Bay of Biscay in the teeth of a rising gale, the men were driven relentlessly and, despite the storm, North showed them no mercy. Evolutions aloft were followed by gunnery practice and, if any exercise was not carried out as smartly as the Captain demanded, it had to be repeated, sometimes more than once. The watch below were called to quarters twice during one bitter, wind-torn night, battle lanterns lit and the guns loaded and run-out. Decks were scrubbed and holystoned at seven bells in the Middle Watch and then—because the Captain chanced to find a discarded swab-tail beneath one of the main deck guns—the whole process had to be gone through again, before he would permit the men to go to breakfast.

  The pumps were manned and three fire drills ordered the day before the ship reached Gibraltar and, during the Second Dog Watch, lower yards and topmasts—struck owing to bad weather—were sent up and struck again in a gale-force East wind, one man falling from the rigging and being lost in the heavy seas.

  Cape Spartel, on the African coast, was sighted soon after dawn on Wednesday morning but the strong easterly wind blowing through the Straits of Gibraltar made further progress difficult. After several fruitless tacks from Cape St Vincent to Tangiers and then back to Tarifa, under double-reefed topsails, the Captain ordered the screw lowered. Rolling unpleasantly, Trojan began at last to make headway against the wind but both officers and men were exhausted and many, even among the hardened seamen, suffering from seasickness when, just after noon on Wednesday, 23rd March, Europa Point came into sight off the port bow.

  The ship ran in under her engines and dropped anchor off the Quarantine Mole. Shortly afterwards a launch came out, bearing the Governor and a number of Port Health officials and—the quarantine regulations being waived in deference to the Governor—the Captain and the two passengers were taken ashore in his launch. But there was neither rest nor shore leave for the weary, disgruntled men … coaling commenced immediately and was continued next day, from first light to mid-afternoon.

  Phillip, begrimed with black dust and suffering from prolonged lack of sleep, had many things to worry him, even when the last barge had pushed off from the ship’s side on its way back to the coaling station on shore. He was anxious— and with reason—about morale in general and his brother’s state of mind in particular.

  Graham was making a slow and painful recovery from the effects of the brutal flogging he had received and the change in him was both noticeable and alarming. His cough troubled him constantly and he slept badly, if at all. In addition, he was morose and bitter, reluctant to see or talk to anyone. When he could be prevailed upon to do so, his conversation was invariably about Captain North and he repeated, over and over again, the story of the ill-fated Guillemot, offering this as a warning to any who would listen.

  Surgeon Fraser, who had contrived to smuggle him into his own small cabin until he should be fit to resume his duties, expressed concern on his patient’s account but, although assiduous in his efforts to restore Graham to physical health, could suggest no way in which his self-inflicted mental torment might be alleviated.

  “You could, perhaps, endeavour to talk to him, Mr Hazard,” he said, without much conviction. “More important still, you might encourage him to talk to you because this might help him. He has a grievance, of course, which is only to be expected in the circumstances but, in addition, he appears to have what amounts to an obsession concerning Captain North. And that, as I’m sure you realize, could be dangerous. If, when he returns to duty, he should air some of the views he has expressed to me all too freely on the lower deck, it might cause trouble. The
men are in an ugly mood and there will be some among them, I fear, who may pay too much attention to what he tells them.”

  Phillip shared the Surgeon’s fears since he, even more than Angus Fraser, was aware of the increasing discontent among the men, for he had daily evidence of it. But it was not easy to find time to spend with his brother and when, usually at the expense of his sleep, he did manage to steal half an hour, Graham—although willing enough to unburden himself on the subject of Captain North—obstinately refused to heed his warnings.

  “It is I, my dear Phillip, who am warning you, don’t you understand? This Captain of yours is not fit to be entrusted with the command of a coal barge, much less with that of a thirty-gun frigate! He is a sadistic murderer and if you give him even half a chance, he will drive this ship’s company to mutiny, as he drove the poor devils in the Guillemot. Oh, I may be skulking down here in the Surgeon’s cabin all day but I know what’s going on … the watch below isn’t getting any time below, is it? North calls all hands at any hour of the day or night when he happens to feel like it, does he not?”

  “Yes,” Phillip conceded, “he does. But he’s entitled to … the drills are slow and he has to have the ship ready to go into action by the time we join the Fleet.”

  “The drills are slow,” Graham pointed out unanswerably, “because the men won’t put their hearts into them, Phillip. And they never will, whilst North is in command … you know that as well as I do. For God’s sake, he’s driving them without mercy! He’s driving you as hard as he’s driving anyone and you’re his First Lieutenant. Phillip, how much sleep is he letting you have? No, don’t answer—you’re getting even less than the men, judging by your appearance. You should look at your face in a mirror sometime … it will shock you.”

  He was right, Phillip thought wearily. But there was little he could do to help, either himself or the men, so long as North remained the officially appointed Captain of the Trojan but he continued, nevertheless, to worry a great deal.