The Thirteen Gun Salute Read Online Free PDF

made up his mind how to deal with the situation.
    A glance at the vane showed him that the breeze had backed far enough; and the sky said that in all likelihood it would go on backing until at least sunset. The gangways and the forecastle were reasonably clear, and after a considering pause he said, 'Captain Pullings, I believe we may attend to the foretopsailyard at last.'
    In the present violent putting to sea, earlier than all expectation, both watches were strangely mingled, with duties and stations far out of the ordinary run; and it so happened that most of the Orkneymen were on the forecastle, gathered round their leader Macaulay. Pullings gave the orders loud and clear, the bosun piped them in the shorthand of the sea, and the hands on the forecastle instantly clapped on to the falls, Macaulay at their head.
    A slight pause, and then, throwing his weight on the rope, he sang out
    'Heisa, heisa,'
    followed by his mates in perfect unison,
    'Heisa, heisa,
    Vorsa, vorsa,
    You, you.
    One long pull
    More power
    Young blood
    Ha ha ha hough.'
    They sang on a scale unknown to Jack, with intervals he had never heard; and the last line, a falsetto shriek as the blocks clashed together, quite astonished him.
    He looked aft, where Stephen would ordinarily be leaning over the taffrail gazing at the wake. No Stephen. 'I suppose the Doctor has gone below,' he said. 'He would have liked that. We might ease off again and ask him to come on deck.'
    'I doubt we might get a short answer,' said Pullings in a low voice. 'He is sitting there with so many papers he might be paying off a first-rate, and he roared at Mr Martin just now like a bull.'
    As far as devotion was concerned, Nathaniel Martin's was directed more towards Maturin than Aubrey, and Stephen's snappishness had quite wounded him - a snappishness that Martin had scarcely known in him before, but that seemed to be growing sharper and more frequent.
    There was to be sure some excuse for it on this occasion, since a moderate lee-lurch had sent Martin staggering from one piled chair to another, upsetting and mingling four carefully separated heaps of paper, while the draught he let in spread them over the cabin deck like a whitish carpet.
    Their presence arose from the fact that the British government was not alone in wishing to change the state of affairs in the Spanish and even Portuguese possessions in South America: the French hoped to do the same, and well before London's tentative contacts with the potential rebels in Chile, Peru and elsewhere, the French had carried their much more ambitious (and much more avowable) plans to the verge of action. They had equipped a new frigate that was to cruise upon Allied merchantmen and particularly South Sea whalers while at the same time landing agents, arms and money on the coast of Chile. It was this frigate, the Diane, that Jack Aubrey had cut out from St Martin's just before she sailed, and in her he had captured all the French agents' information and instruction, all their correspondents' views of the various local situations, all the names of French sympathizers and of those whose loyalty had been or could be purchased. All this was encoded according to four separate systems, and it was these systems that Martin had upset, together with their substrata of Maturin's involved private business - university chairs, annuities, settlements and the like. All the French papers would have to be sorted all over again, 'then read in clear, digested and committed to memory, with perhaps some of the more forgettable points re-encoded for future reference. Ordinarily the great bulk of this work would have been done by Sir Joseph's department, but in this instance both he and Stephen agreed that they should keep the existence of the whole mass of papers to themselves.
    Martin retired to the orlop, where by the light of a battlelantern he finished entering the ship's medical stores in a book and then wrote labels for the bottles and boxes in the