The Reverse of the Medal

The Reverse of the Medal by Patrick O’Brian Page A

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Authors: Patrick O’Brian
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since they tended to oppress her in heavy seas they were often struck down into the hold; and in any case it was the cannon, the real guns, that Jack Aubrey loved. With them he could only command a broadside of 141 pounds, but he knew very well that even a hundredweight of iron hitting a ship in the right place could wound her terribly, and like a fair number of other commanders - his friend Philip Broke, for example - he was convinced of the truth of Collingwood's dictum 'If a ship can fire three well-directed broadsides in five minutes, no enemy can resist them.'
    By dint of long, arduous and costly training he had brought this figure down to three broadsides in three minutes ten seconds. The training was costly in the most obvious sense, for in this matter as in many others the Admiralty did not see eye to eye with Captain Aubrey and the regulations allowed him only a pitiful amount of powder apart from that blazed away in action; all the rest had to be supplied by him, and at the present rate a broadside cost close on a guinea.
    For some little time after they had left the last of the sargasso weed astern, the evening exercise had consisted of no more than dumb show, of heaving the great guns in and out and going through the motions of firing them; but Thursday was Sophie's birthday, and her husband meant to make the heavens ring by way of celebrating it. Furthermore the conditions were almost ideal - a topgallant breeze in the south-west, an easy, moderate swell - and he hoped the ship might beat her record.
    Like most records it had something artificial about it. Long before the drum beat for quarters the men knew that they were going to fire in earnest, since they had heard the Captain tell the first lieutenant to have a raft and three beef-barrels and a red flag prepared; yet although there was nothing spontaneous or unexpected about the simulated battle they took their attempt upon the record very seriously. The crew of the brass chasers, for example, spent a good deal of their watch below in going over the nine-pound balls with a hammer, removing irregularities; for these long, accurate guns had very little windage, and they called for glass-smooth round-shot. Once the preliminaries were over - once the drum had beat, once the disguise had been cleared away, once all the cabin bulkheads had been knocked down so that there should be a clean sweep fore and aft, with the decks wetted and sanded, damp fearnought screens over the hatchways to the magazine, and all hands at their action stations, the pigtailed members of the gun-crews (and that was most of them, the Surprise following the old days) doubled their queues and tied them short: some took off their shirts, and many knotted a handkerchief round their foreheads against the sweat. They stood easy, each in a place he knew intimately well, with his own particular tackle-fall, rammer, sponge, powder-horn, wad, handspike, crow or round-shot just at hand, the lieutenants behind their divisions and the midshipmen behind their groups of guns, and they watched the blue cutter towing the raft away over the sea. The breeze hummed gently through the rigging; smoke from the slow-match in the tubs wafted here and there about the deck.
    In the silence Jack's words to the master were heard clearly on the forecastle. 'Mr Allen, we will haul our wind two points, if you please. Mr Calamy, jump down to the orlop and ask the Doctor, with my compliments, for the loan of his watch.'
    The Surprise turned to larboard; the cutter reappeared, casting off her tow: tension mounted, and the men spat on their hands or hitched their trousers. Then came the ritual words: 'Silence fore and aft. Cast loose your guns. Level your guns. Out tompions. Run out your guns.' And here there was a universal roar as eighteen tons of metal were heaved out as fast as they could go. 'Prime. Fire from forward as they bear.'
    The target was bobbing out there on the flashing sea, well beyond the accurate reach of

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