Lieutenant Hornblower h-2 Read online

  Lieutenant Hornblower

  ( Hornblower - 2 )

  Cecil Scott Forester

  In this gripping tale of turmoil and triumph on the high seas, Horatio Hornblower emerges from his apprenticeship as midshipman to face new responsibilities thrust upon him by the fortunes of war between Napoleon and Spain. Enduring near-mutiny, bloody hand-to-hand combat with Spanish seamen, deck-splintering sea battles, and the violence and horror of life on the fighting ships of the Napoleonic Wars, the young lieutenant distinguishes himself in his first independent command. He also faces an adventure unique in his experience: Maria.

  Cecil S. Forester

  Lieutenant Hornblower

  Chapter I

  Lieutenant William Bush came on board HMS Renown as she lay at anchor in the Hamoaze and reported himself to the officer of the watch, who was a tall and rather gangling individual with hollow cheeks and a melancholy cast of countenance, whose uniform looked as if it had been put on in the dark and not readjusted since.

  “Glad to have you aboard, sir,” said the officer of the watch. “My name’s Hornblower. The captain’s ashore. First lieutenant went for’ard with the bosun ten minutes ago.”

  “Thank you,” said Bush.

  He looked keenly round him at the infinity of activities which were making the ship ready for a long period of service in distant waters.

  “Hey there! You at the stay tackles! Handsomely! Handsomely! Belay!” Hornblower was bellowing this over Bush’s shoulder. “Mr. Hobbs! Keep an eye on what your men are doing there!”

  “Aye aye, sir,” came a sulky reply.

  “Mr. Hobbs! Lay aft here!”

  A paunchy individual with a thick grey pigtail came rolling aft to where Hornblower stood with Bush at the gangway. He blinked up at Hornblower with the sun in his eyes; the sunlight lit up the sprouting grey beard on his tiers of chins.

  “Mr. Hobbs!” said Hornblower. He spoke quietly, but there was an intensity of spirit underlying his words that surprised Bush. “That powder’s got to come aboard before nightfall and you know it. So don’t use that tone of voice when replying to an order. Answer cheerfully another time. How are you going to get the men to work if you sulk? Get for’ard and see to it.”

  Hornblower was leaning a little forward as he spoke; the hands which he clasped behind him served apparently to balance the jutting chin, but his attitude was negligent compared with the fierce intensity with which he spoke, even though he was speaking in an undertone inaudible to all except the three of them.

  “Aye aye, sir,” said Hobbs, turning to go forward again.

  Bush was making a mental note that this Hornblower was a firebrand when he met his glance and saw to his surprise a ghost of a twinkle in their melancholy depths. In a flash of insight he realised that this fierce young lieutenant was not fierce at all, and that the intensity with which he spoke was entirely assumed—it was almost as if Hornblower had been exercising himself in a foreign language.

  “If they once start sulking you can’t do anything with’em,” explained Hornblower, “and Hobbs is the worst of ‘em—actinggunner, and no good. Lazy as they make ‘em.”

  “I see,” said Bush.

  The duplicity—play acting—of the young lieutenant aroused a momentary suspicion in Bush’s mind. A man who could assume an appearance of wrath and abandon it again with so much facility was not to be trusted. Then, with an inevitable reaction, the twinkle in the brown eyes called up a responsive twinkle in Bush’s frank blue eyes, and he felt a friendly impulse towards Hornblower, but Bush was innately cautious and checked the impulse at once, for there was a long voyage ahead of them and plenty of time for a more considered judgment. Meanwhile he was conscious of a keen scrutiny, and he could see that a question was imminent—and even Bush could guess what it would be. The next moment proved him right.

  “What’s the date of your commission?” asked Hornblower.

  “July ‘96,” said Bush.

  “Thank you,” said Hornblower in a flat tone that conveyed so little information that Bush had to ask the question in his turn.

  “What’s the date of yours?”

  “August ‘97,” said Hornblower. “You’re senior to me. You’re senior to Smith, too—January ‘97.”

  “Are you the junior lieutenant, then?”

  “Yes,” said Hornblower.

  His tone did not reveal any disappointment that the newcomer had proved to be senior to him, but Bush could guess at it. Bush knew by very recent experience what it was to be the junior lieutenant in a ship of the line.

  “You’ll be third,” went on Hornblower. “Smith fourth, and I’m fifth.”

  “I’ll be third?” mused Bush, more to himself than to anyone else.

  Every lieutenant could at least dream, even lieutenants like Bush with no imagination at all. Promotion was at least theoretically possible; from the caterpillar stage of lieutenant one might progress to the butterfly stage of captain, sometimes even without a chrysalis period as commander. Lieutenants undoubtedly were promoted on occasions; most of them, as was to be expected, being men who had friends at Court, or in Parliament, or who had been fortunate enough to attract the attention of an admiral and then lucky enough to be under that admiral’s command at the moment when a vacancy occurred. Most of the captains on the list owed their promotion to one or other of such causes. But sometimes a lieutenant won his promotion through merit—through a combination of merit and good fortune, at least—and sometimes sheer blind chance brought it about. If a ship distinguished herself superlatively in some historic action the first lieutenant might be promoted (oddly enough, that promotion was considered a compliment to her captain), or if the captain should be killed in the action even a moderate success might result in a step for the senior surviving lieutenant who took his place. On the other hand some brilliant boataction, some dashing exploit on shore, might win promotion for the lieutenant in command—the senior, of course. The chances were few enough in all conscience, but there were at least chances.

  But of those few chances the great majority went to the senior lieutenant, to the first lieutenant; the chances of the junior lieutenant were doubly few. So that whenever a lieutenant dreamed of attaining the rank of captain, with its dignity and security and prize money, he soon found himself harking back to the consideration of his seniority as lieutenant. If this next commission of the Renown’s took her away to some place where other lieutenants could not be sent on board by an admiral with favourites, there were only two lives between Bush and the position of first lieutenant with all its added chances of promotion. Naturally he thought about that; equally naturally he did not spare a thought for the fact that the man with whom he was conversing was divided by four lives from that same position.

  “But still, it’s the West Indies for us, anyway,” said Hornblower philosophically. “Yellow fever. Ague. Hurricanes. Poisonous serpents. Bad water. Tropical heat. Putrid fever. And ten times more chances of action than with the Channel fleet.”

  “That’s so,” agreed Bush, appreciatively.

  With only three and four years’ seniority as lieutenants, respectively, the two young men (and with young men’s confidence in their own immortality) could face the dangers of West Indian service with some complacence.

  “Captain’s coming off, sir,” reported the midshipman of the watch hurriedly.

  Hornblower whipped his telescope to eye and trained it on the approaching shore boat.

  “Quite right,” he said. “Run for’ard and tell Mr. Buckland. Bosun’s mates! Sideboys! Lively, now!”

  Captain Sawyer came up through the entry port, touched his hat to the quarterdeck, and looked suspiciously around him. The ship was
in the condition of confusion to be expected when she was completing for foreign service, but that hardly justified the sidelong, shifty glances which Sawyer darted about him. He had a big face and a prominent hawk nose which he turned this way and that as he stood on the quarterdeck. He caught sight of Bush, who came forward and reported himself.

  “You came aboard in my absence, did you?” asked Sawyer.

  “Yes, sir,” said Bush, a little surprised.

  “Who told you I was on shore?”

  “No one, sir.”

  “How did you guess it, then?”

  “I didn’t guess it, sir. I didn’t know you were on shore until Mr. Hornblower told me.”

  “Mr. Hornblower? So you know each other already?”

  “No, sir. I reported to him when I came on board.”

  “So that you could have a few private words without my knowledge?”

  “No, sir.”

  Bush bit off the ‘of course not’ which he was about to add. Brought up in a hard school, Bush had learned to utter no unnecessary words when dealing with a superior officer indulging in the touchiness superior officers might be expected to indulge in. Yet this particular touchiness seemed more unwarranted even than usual.

  “I’ll have you know I allow no one to conspire behind my back, Mr—ah—Bush,” said the captain.

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Bush met the captain’s searching stare with the composure of innocence, but he was doing his best to keep his surprise out of his expression, too, and as he was no actor the struggle may have been evident.

  “You wear your guilt on your face, Mr. Bush,” said the captain. “I’ll remember this.”

  With that he turned away and went below, and Bush, relaxing from his attitude of attention, turned to express his surprise to Hornblower. He was eager to ask questions about this extraordinary behaviour, but they died away on his lips when he saw that Hornblower’s face was set in a wooden unresponsiveness. Puzzled and a little hurt, Bush was about to note Hornblower down as one of the captain’s toadies—or as a madman as well—when he caught sight out of the tail of his eye of the captain’s head reappearing above the deck. Sawyer must have swung round when at the foot of the companion and come up again simply for the purpose of catching his officers off their guard discussing him—and Hornblower knew more about his captain’s habits than Bush did. Bush made an enormous effort to appear natural.

  “Can I have a couple of hands to carry my seachest down?” he asked, hoping that the words did not sound nearly as stilted to the captain as they did to his own ears.

  “Of course, Mr. Bush,” said Hornblower, with a formidable formality. “See to it, if you please, Mr. James.”

  “Ha!” snorted the captain, and disappeared once more down the companion.

  Hornblower flicked one eyebrow at Bush, but that was the only indication he gave, even then, of any recognition that the captain’s actions were at all unusual, and Bush, as he followed his seachest down to his cabin, realised with dismay that this was a ship where no one ventured on any decisive expression of opinion. But the Renown was completing for sea, amid all the attendant bustle and confusion, and Bush was on board, legally one of her officers, and there was nothing he could do except reconcile himself philosophically to his fate. He would have to live through this commission, unless any of the possibilities catalogued by Hornblower in their first conversation should save him the trouble.

  Chapter II

  HMS Renown was clawing her way southward under reefed topsails, a westerly wind laying her over as she thrashed along, heading for those latitudes where she would pick up the northeast trade wind and be able to run direct to her destination in the West Indies. The wind sang in the taut weather-rigging, and blustered around Bush’s ears as he stood on the starboard side of the quarterdeck, balancing to the roll as the roaring wind sent one massive grey wave after another hurrying at the ship; the starboard bow received the wave first, beginning a leisurely climb, heaving the bowsprit up towards the sky, but before the pitch was in any way completed the ship began her roll, heaving slowly over, slowly, slowly, while the bowsprit rose still more steeply. And then as she still rolled the bows shook themselves free and began to slide down the far side of the wave, with the foam creaming round them; the bowsprit began the downward portion of its arc as the ship rose ponderously to an even keel again, and as she heeled a trifle into the wind with the send of the sea under her keel her stern rose while the last of the wave passed under it, her bows dipped, and she completed the corkscrew roll with the massive dignity to be expected of a ponderous fabric that carried five hundred tons of artillery on her decks. Pitch—roll—heave—roll; it was magnificent, rhythmic, majestic, and Bush, balancing on the deck with the practiced ease of ten years’ experience, would have felt almost happy if the freshening of the wind did not bring with it the approaching necessity for another reef, which meant, in accordance with the ship’s standing orders, that the captain should be informed.

  Yet there were some minutes of grace left him, during which he could stand balancing on the deck and allow his mind to wander free. Not that Bush was conscious of any need for meditation—he would have smiled at such a suggestion were anyone to make it to him. But the last few days had passed in a whirl, from the moment when his orders had arrived and he had said goodbye to his mother and sisters (he had had three weeks with them after the Conqueror had paid off) and hurried to Plymouth, counting the money he had left in his pockets to make sure he could pay the postchaise charges. The Renown had been in all the flurry of completing for the West Indian station, and during the thirtysix hours that elapsed before she sailed Bush had hardly time to sit down, let alone sleep—his first good night’s rest had come while the Renown clawed her way across the bay. Yet almost from the moment of his first arrival on board he had been harassed by the fantastic moods of the captain, now madly suspicious and again stupidly easygoing. Bush was not a man sensitive to atmosphere—he was a sturdy soul philosophically prepared to do his duty in any of the difficult conditions to be expected at sea—but he could not help but be conscious of the tenseness and fear that pervaded life in the Renown. He knew that he felt dissatisfied and worried, but he did not know that these were his own forms of tenseness and fear. In three days at sea he had hardly come to know a thing about his colleagues: he could vaguely guess that Buckland, the first lieutenant, was capable and steady, and that Roberts, the second, was kindly and easygoing; Hornblower seemed active and intelligent, Smith a trifle weak; but these deductions were really guesses. The wardroom officers—the lieutenants and the master and the surgeon and the purser—seemed to be secretive and very much inclined to maintain a strict reserve about themselves. Within wide limits this was right and proper—Bush was no frivolous chatterer himself—but the silence was carried to excess when conversation was limited to half a dozen words, all strictly professional. There was much that Bush could have learned speedily about the ship and her crew if the other officers had been prepared to share with him the results of their experience and observations during the year they had been on board, but except for the single hint Bush had received from Hornblower when he came on board no one had uttered a word. If Bush had been given to Gothic flights of imagination he might have thought of himself as a ghost at sea with a company of ghosts, cut off from the world and from each other, ploughing across an endless sea to an unknown destination. As it was he could guess that the secretiveness of the wardroom was the result of the moods of the captain: and that brought him back abruptly to the thought that the wind was still freshening and a second reef was now necessary. He listened to the harping of the rigging, felt the heave of the deck under his feet, and shook his head regretfully. There was nothing for it.

  “Mr. Wellard,” he said to the volunteer beside him. “Go and tell the captain that I think another reef is necessary.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  It was only a few seconds before Wellard was back on deck again.

 
; “Cap’n’s coming himself, sir.”

  “Very good,” said Bush.

  He did not meet Wellard’s eyes as he said the meaningless words; he did not want Wellard to see how he took the news, nor did he want to see any expression that Wellard’s face might wear. Here came the captain, his shaggy long hair whipping in the wind and his hook nose turned this way and that as usual.

  “You want to take in another reef, Mr. Bush?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Bush, and waited for the cutting remark that he expected. It was a pleasant surprise that none was forthcoming. The captain seemed almost genial.

  “Very good, Mr. Bush. Call all hands.”

  The pipes shrilled along the decks.

  “All hands! All hands! All hands to reef tops’ls. All hands!”

  The men came pouring out; the cry of ‘All hands’ brought out the officers from the wardroom and the cabins and the midshipmen’s berths, hastening with their stationbills in their pockets to make sure that the reorganised crew were properly at their stations. The captain’s orders pealed against the wind. Halliards and reef tackles were manned; the ship plunged and rolled over the grey sea under the grey sky so that a landsman might have wondered how a man could keep his footing on deck, far less venture aloft. Then in the midst of the evolution a young voice, soaring with excitement to a high treble, cut through the captain’s orders.

  “’Vast hauling there! ‘Vast hauling!”

  There was a piercing urgency about the order, and obediently the men ceased to pull. Then the captain bellowed from the poop:

  “Who’s that countermanding my orders?”

  “It’s me, sir—Wellard.”

  The young volunteer faced aft and screamed into the wind to make himself heard. From his station aft Bush saw the captain advance to the poop rail; Bush could see he was shaking with rage, his nose pointing forward as though seeking a victim.