Victory (13 page)

“But it's a ratter. And we have a swarm of rats on board.”

“We have cats for that, Sam,” said Lessimore wearily, so I decided to keep my ideas to myself.

“What's the Italian for dog?” I said.

“Cannay,” said Lessimore. “Let's have those chickens, smart now.”

But I had sixpence in my pocket from our rat sales, and a piece of ship's bread that William had given me, and there was something I wanted to do with them. It was only when we were back in the ship's boat, pulling toward
Victory
, that Arthur Lessimore realized what I was holding under my coat. The ugly little dog was cuddled up against me quiet as could be, partly because it was hoping for more bread and partly out of astonishment at finding itself cuddled by anyone in the world.

“Are you mad, boy?” said the quartermaster. “Over the side with it, this minute!”

I knew he had a soft spot for me though, so I tried to sound as young and trusting as I could. “Oh please sir, let me keep it. Just to give it a try against the rats. Surely Mr. Burke would be much obliged if we could save his stores.”

Walter Burke, the purser, was not the most popular man in the ship because pursers were famous for watering the wine and giving short weight—but his gratitude could be a valuable thing.

Arthur Lessimore gave a snort; I wasn't sure whether it was agreement or laughter. “Keep your jacket closed,” he said.

And the dog must have understood the value of not being seen or heard, because he was still and quiet as a mouse all the way over the side of the ship and down into the hold. That was where Tommy and Stephen and I took him. Then I let him go. We stood there, watching. He nosed about for a bit, and then he slipped gently behind a barrel—and there was a rattling flurry of movement back there, and a high screech, and out came my Cannay, dragging a rat almost as big as himself.

He did this five times in succession, and then we took him and the rats up to the galley and showed them to the cook.

“I'll be damned,” said Charles Carroll, and he went to the steep tub where the salt port was soaking, hooked out a lump of it, set it on a chopping board and hacked off a piece the size of his fist. He dropped the pork back into the tub and gave the piece to Cannay, who was watching him, quivering. I can't think of anything nastier than raw fatty salt pork—it was terrible even after it was cooked—but the little dog wolfed it down, looked up at us and, having no tail, wagged his rear end.

The cook's fat tabby cat Pricker came sidling round
into the galley and saw Cannay. Her tail went straight up in the air and she hissed at him.

“Best hold your tongue, cat,” said the cook. “And take lessons from this little bugger.”

And so an ugly little Sardinian dog came to live on board HMS
Victory
for a while, to join the pigs and goats and sheep, chickens and ducks and cats—and the green parrot belonging to the topman Richard Bacon, which could make a noise like a drumroll, squawk out “Splice the mainbrace!” and sing a shanty that would have made the chaplain have a fit. Cannay spent a lot of his time in the hold, and I spent a lot of my time cleaning up after him, but the rat population shrank to a much lower level. Even the cat Pricker, inspired or jealous, began catching a few.

Our income from dead rats went down, but it was worth it to be rid of the certain sight of those pairs of red eyes gleaming out from the dark corners of the hold. Cannay was wonderful. And I think the Navy gave him the best time of his life.

Though I was working some of the time with Mr. Smith and the sailmakers, I was not in the end written down as his apprentice, because it turned out that my hands weren't big enough to handle the needles and leather palms that have to be used in working with canvas. I could only sew lighter stuff. I was just too young for proper sailmaking—even though I had already grown out of the clothes issued to me when I first joined the ship. Lieutenant Quilliam had
stopped in front of me at one Sunday morning inspection and poked his cane at my shirtsleeves, which now ended halfway up my forearms.

“Sam Robbins,” he said, “you look like something out of the poorhouse. Go to the purser for a new set of slops—I will write you a permission.”

“Aye aye, sir,” I said reluctantly—for the clothes you were issued by the purser would be charged against your pay, on that distant day when the ship came back to port and its crew was paid off. So for a while I looked very smart with new blue trousers and two new striped shirts, though they needed a lot of washing because I was still looking after the poultry when Mr. Smith had no need of me. We no longer had to muck out the pigs, though; they had all been eaten.

Autumn came again, and more storms with it, and one tossing day Colin Turner fell down a hatchway and broke his arm. It was bound to a piece of wood and he was back about again within a week, but the surgeon forbade him to use the arm—and that was a piece of luck for me, because Colin was powder monkey to the number six gun on the lower gundeck, and they put me there in his place. I was delighted. Now I really felt I belonged to the ship.

We lived our whole lives with and around guns, on the
Victory
. She bristled with cannon, those three decks of them, with the biggest guns down on the lowest of the three. Two decks below that, under the waterline and safe from cannonshot, was the grand magazine where all the powder and shot was kept. You couldn't get anywhere near
the magazine without permission, and there were guards to keep everyone away; one accidental spark there, and the whole ship could blow up. Even a rat gnawing through a gunpowder bag and leaving a little explosive trail could be a disaster, so the magazine walls were lined with copper to keep the rats out.

When the drum beat to quarters—calling us to battle stations—everyone on the ship had his own precise duties. We had seen no real action on
Victory
since the day I came aboard, but gunnery practice was endless; the Admiral wanted us ready. The men knew he was sick to death of waiting for the French Navy to come out of Toulon harbor and fight—but when they did come, he was bound and determined to win.

Up to now my job had been to run to the galley at the call of the drum, to help Mr. Carroll and Tommy put out the cooking fires, and then to stay there, after filling buckets with fresh water to be set beside each gun during the action for the men to drink. Other people would be filling tubs with salt water pumped from the sea, to put out fires, wetting down the sails, scattering wet sand on the decks. The whole ship was stripped for action in a sort of whirlwind, mess tables and officers' furniture whisked out of the way, the cannons released and run out, and all the gunners' supplies put in place. Most of the men stripped to the waist too, and tied scarves round their ears to keep out at least a bit of the tremendous roar of the guns.

Before my first practice, Jonathan, who was part of the
number six gun crew, told me I should strip too now that I was part of active duty.

“Your shirt gets in the way,” he said. “And the surgeon's happier without it.”

“The surgeon?”

“If you take a musket ball in the chest, a piece of your shirt likely goes in with it. The surgeon may cut the ball out, but if he don't see that bit of cloth, the wound goes bad and you die.”

“Oh,” I said shakily, and ever afterward whipped off my shirt the moment the drums began beating out
Hearts of Oak
for quarters.

Down on the lower gundeck there were thirty great black cannon, each firing a thirty-two-pound ball that could smash a huge hole in the side of an enemy ship, or knock down a mast with a direct hit. It took fourteen men to load and fire each gun, and my job was to keep them supplied with the gunpowder that fired the shot. Behind each cannonball they loaded a cartridge, a flannel cylinder as long as my forearm, packed tight with gunpowder.

Jonathan handed me a long wooden box. “This is your cartridge case,” he said. “Your salt box, they call it. You carry the cartridge in there at all times—otherwise, a spark hits it and it blows up and takes you with it.”

I was listening very hard, half excited, half scared.

“I am the powderman of the crew,” he said. “I stand here by the breech, I give you the empty case, you run like the clappers down through the hatchway to the orlop deck.
Each hatchway has wetted blankets hanging, against sparks. Dick Bacon is the next man in our line, he'll be waiting for you there with a new cartridge from the magazine, in its case. You swap cases and you run back here with the new one and give it to me. Got that?”

“Aye aye, sir,” I said.

“I give you the empty case, you run again—the gun is loaded, it fires, and if the recoil caught you it would smash you to bits, but by then you are running back for the next cartridge—and so it goes. Understand?”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“And wear shoes. A powder monkey with a broken toe is no use to anyone.”

“Thank you, Jonathan.”

But I wasn't prepared for the crashing thunderous reality of gunnery practice, the stinking black smoke filling the decks and hatchways, the flurry of boys and men running to and fro for cartridges and shot, the murderous backward leap of the recoiling guns. At every practice there was some sort of accident, a limb broken by a jumping gun, a terrible burn from powder exploding. And this wasn't even real action.

The gun crews loved gunnery practice though, and before long so did I. Each crew competed with the next, for speed and accuracy, and the officers watched us like hawks and toured the gundecks, cursing and threatening us and urging us on. I ran and jumped and dodged, I wanted to be the quickest powder monkey on the ship.

Once I came skidding up to my gun with a full cartridge case just at the moment when the bosun's pipe shrilled for a cease-fire, and the shouts rang out
“Belay there!”
—and I found myself facing gold braid and blue jackets as I cannoned full into two officers. I was so full of excitement that I was still laughing with delight, even as I raised my head and looked up into the strong stern face of Captain Hardy.

I stood frozen, clutching my salt box, but before the captain could say a word there was a laugh from the smaller man beside him, and a voice, soft and rather light, with a faint country accent:

“That's the face of my fleet, Hardy, look at the joy in it! What's your name, boy?”

I looked at the pale face and the pinned empty sleeve and I knew it was Vice-Admiral Nelson. And he was smiling at me.

I touched my fingers to my forehead in a panic, and my voice came out in a squeak. “Sam Robbins, Your Honor.”

“Well, Sam,” he said, “you are part of the fastest crew on this deck, and good luck to you all. An extra tot for these men.”

Our crew gave a hoarse ragged cheer, and the officers went away. And that was one of the very best days of my whole life.

In the middle of our second winter in the Mediterranean, the French fleet did move out of Toulon, and for weeks we sailed to and fro through rough seas searching for them,
only to find in the end that a gale had driven them back into harbor.

“They'll be out again,” said Mr. Smith at the mess table, whacking his piece of bread on the table to break it and knock any maggots out. He nodded his head wisely. “You mark my words. It won't be long. Bonaparte wants to invade England, he'll want all his ships in the Channel.”

My uncle said, “The carpenter heard Mr. Quilliam say Spain has declared war on us again.”

“Spanish Navy never yet beat ours,” Jonathan said.

“Surely not, but Boney has the whole of Europe on his side now. He has the pride of the devil, that one—crowned himself Emperor, took the crown right out of the hands of the Pope and set it on his own head!”

Mr. Smith squished a piece of boiled turnip onto a bit of bread. He said, “Such big thoughts, and him not but a small little man.”

Jonathan said, “Our Admiral is a small little man too, but a lion inside.”

“God bless him!” they all said, and raised their mugs and drank to Nelson, even though they had only the tail-end of the Mediterranean red wine they called black strap—since all the rum had long ago run out. There was nothing in my mug but an inch of stale water, but I drank his health too.

And before spring was out, a frigate came bowling over the sea to tell us that the French had run for it, and were out of Toulon. We went all around looking for them, and then two weeks later word came that they had gone west and
were out past Gibraltar, in the open sea. Everyone knew that the Admiral must be wild to get after them. But we were shut in the Mediterranean and we hadn't the right wind. Slowly we worked our way west against light headwinds, and you never saw so many seamen whistling to the air, or following other private spells, to try and summon up a levanter, the strong easterly wind that would help us on our way. But none came.

We reached Gibraltar, and cast anchor with the wind still foul. That did give pleasure to the officers and men who were allowed ashore (I was not one of them this time) while we took on fresh water and supplies, and sent all the ship's linens ashore to be washed in fresh water for the first time in many months. Off went the boats to the great rock, full of eager men.

Hugh Portfield and I were on deck, scrubbing clean the chicken coops that would soon have new birds in them, and with us was a seaman pumping up seawater to wash them off. I never did know his name; like Tommy, he came from Jamaica and spoke that singing English. We were all working away when suddenly there was a great bang as one of the cannons on the upper gundeck went off. The smoke from it puffed out over the water. We all stopped, staring.

Figures were moving about on the quarterdeck. I could see the Admiral's starred coat, and his cocked hat with the green shade that sheltered his eyes. Then a flag was run up at the foremast, a white rectangle on a blue ground.