Company Of Spears

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Lord Byron, ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’

XX

TO GLORY WE STEER

Gibraltar

Captain Sir Laughton Peto was not a dressy man. If the officers and crew of His Majesty’s Ship Prince Rupert (120 guns) did not know of his character and capability then that was their look-out: no amount of gold braid could make up for reputation.

Peto’s time with Admiral Hoste, not least in the action at Lissa, his command of Nisus with the East India Squadron, then commodore of the frigate squadron in the Mediterranean, and lately command of Liffey while commodore of the flotilla for the Burmese war – these things were warranty enough of his fitness for command of a first-rate. Not that it was any business of the officers and crew: he, Captain Sir Laughton Peto, held his commission from the Lord High Admiral himself. These things were not to be questioned, on pain of flogging or the yard-arm. Except that he considered himself to be an enlightened captain, convinced that having a man do his bidding willingly meant the man did it twice as well as he would if he were merely driven to it. Threatening to start the last man down a sheet might increase the speed of the watch’s descent, but men fell in their dread of the knotted rope-end. Threatening to start the slowest team in gunnery practice risked the sponging done ill: a ‘premature’ could kill or maim every last one of them. Except, of course, it was one thing to have a crew follow willingly a captain who was everywhere, as he might be able to be on a frigate, but quite another when his station was the quarterdeck, as it must be with a line-of-battle ship. Nisus had but one gundeck. In action the captain might see all. Prince Rupert had three, of which the two that hurled the greatest weight of shot were the lower ones, where the guncrews worked in semi-darkness and for whom in action the captain was as remote a figure as the Almighty Himself. The art of such a command, Peto knew full well, was in all that went before, so that the men had as perfect a fear of their captain’s wrath – and even better a desire for his love – as indeed they had for their Heavenly Maker. If that truly required the lash, he would not shrink from it, but at heart he was one with Hervey: more men were flattered into virtue than bullied out of vice.

Rupert had a fair reputation herself. Like the Admiralty’s other first-rates she had not seen action in a long time – Peto thought it probably in the West Indies – but being later built she had been kept in full commission for longer after the peace of 1815. He knew her first lieutenant just a little, and what little he knew he approved of. Rupert looked in good trim, handsome even, as she rode at anchor in Gibraltar Bay against the background of the towering Rock.

Any ship would look handsome at Gibraltar, reckoned Peto, as hands pulled smartly for their wooden world – his wooden world. The barge cut through the modest swell with scarcely any motion but headway: not a degree of observable roll, nor more than ten of pitch – testament to the power with which hands were bending oars.