In Distant Waters Read Online Free PDF

spot. And then he saw her, an irregular, spiky outline flung up against the eastern sky as she breasted a crest. His practised eye saw her hull and her straining sails and then she was gone, separated from them by a wave. She was perhaps three quarters of a mile away.
    When she reappeared she was fine to starboard, under close-reefed topsails and beating to windward as
Patrician
had been doing an hour earlier. A curious idleness had filled the hands as they waited for the officers to get over their astonishment. Drinkwater rounded on the latter.
    â€˜Gentlemen! You have your orders, kindly attend to them!’ They scattered, like chastened schoolboys. Only Hill, his white hair streaming in the wind, stood close to Drinkwater, trying to catch the stranger in the watch-glass.
    Fishing in his pocket Drinkwater pulled out his Dollond glass and raised it to his eye, swearing with the difficulty of focusing it on the other ship.
    â€˜She’s a ship of force, sir,’ Hill muttered beside him.
    Drinkwater grunted agreement. Her dark hull seemed pierced by two rows of gun-ports and, like themselves, she wore no colours. She beat to windward bravely, passing his own lamed ship as she licked her wound and escaped the worst fury of the storm by running before it. Once again that phrase
by superior sailing
was recalled to his mind.
    Although not superstitious, Drinkwater was, like most philosophical sailors, aware of the influence of providence and the caprice of fortune. Nothing had yet happened aboard
Patrician
that persuaded him he was in command of anything but an unlucky ship. Among his ill-educated crew he knew that feeling had developed to a conviction since the execution.
    â€˜What d’you make of her, Mr Hill?’
    â€˜With that black hull and making for the Pacific, I’d stake my hat and wig on her being a Don, sir . . .’
    â€˜Your shore-going wig, Mr Hill?’ Drinkwater joked grimly and neither man took his glass from his eye.
    â€˜For a certainty, sir . . .’
    Drinkwater grunted. He had seen the Spaniards’ lugubriously popish fancy for black ships in Cadiz shortly before Trafalgar, but he was recalling the nightmare and its ominous warning. He stared at the ship for other clues, but found none. A minute later she was gone, lost in the bleak and heaving wastes of the Southern Ocean. Captain and master lowered their glasses at the same moment.
    â€˜A Don you say, Mr Hill?’
    â€˜My life upon it, sir.’
    Drinkwater shook his head. ‘Rash, Mr Hill, rash . . .’
    â€˜You don’t agree, sir?’ Drinkwater managed a grin at the obviously discomfited Hill.
    â€˜I’ve a hunch, Mr Hill, a hunch . . . nothing more and not worth the trouble of a wager . . . come now, let’s get a new foretopmast off the booms . . .’

CHAPTER 2
December 1807

The Radoub
    Drinkwater swallowed painfully and stared balefully at the first lieutenant. There were moments, and this was one of them, when he would have wished for the return of Samuel Rogers, for all his drunkenness and bullying temperament. Rogers would have understood what was to be done, but Rogers had been blown to the devil with six score others when the
Zandaam
exploded alongside the
Antigone
off Orfordness, and poor Fraser had inherited the first luff’s uneasy berth. A quiet, competent Scot, Fraser was an obsessively worrying type, a man who let anxiety get the better of his spirit which was thereby damped and warped. Drinkwater had once overheard Mount referring to him in conversation with James Quilhampton.
    â€˜If yon Scot,’ Mount mimicked in false North British dialect, ‘ever occasioned to fall in the sea, he’d drown.’ Then, seeing Quilhampton’s puzzled look, he added plainly, ‘He possesses no
buoyancy
.’
    Drinkwater regarded Fraser, his expression softening. He was a prey to anxiety himself; he was