All Hands
(Patrick O'Brian's fictional -- and superb -- Desolation Island features an account of a battle between HMS Leopard and a Dutch privateer of greater strength,the Waakzaamheid. Taking place in high winds and angry, dangerous seas, the battle is a masterful example of O'Brian's work.In 1999, members of Norton's interactive "Gunroom" contributed fiction written from alternative points of view using some of O'Brian's most famous scenes. "All Hands" was a part of that response collection, written from the point of view of Waakzaamheid's loblolly boy, or surgeon's assistant, on the enemy ship. The below does include a spoiler, so if you are an O'Brian reader who has not yet finished Desolation Island ... be warned! Come back to this later.)
----------------
All hands," was the call I heard down the corridor, four men in ragged unison cried "all hands," and I looked to my own -- bright red from the dying and rust from the already dead, and I said to the surgeon, "Sir ..."
And he mouthed "go."
We had felt the sea's insistence; we had heard the ship's great groaning, and the surgeon knew the meaning of her sound. I was no sailor, but I went, ordered aye, I went, tumbling over splintered wood and shattered men and out the cable tier and up the ladder, clinging to the slick, wild ride of the ladder -- up, down, up, up, up again and down and ever down, and up, achieving the deck on the flat of my sliding belly, pink with blood and salt water.
Lennert, impetigo, once smeared with hog's lard and sulphur to soothe him, rolled freely fore-and-aft upon the maindeck. He was dead, sure, beyond my catch or anyone's, beyond, at last, his interminable itch. There was too much to do: roaring water, straining wood, the predatory bark of cannon, the answering clap and bang from crippled prey, a confusion of men amid fallen lines and blinding ocean. I say there was too much to do to rid ourselves of Lennert, rolling.
Pushed to duty, I dutifully clung there, but I have never loved the sea, and I did not love it then, nor the ship, whose brave and wallowing bones I understood but could not cherish. Among the company, was I, the least useful seaman there, the only one whose reason overcame his lust? Rapt they were around me and able with it: hands to the ship, thoughts to the sea, aye, to the sea and to their precious Waakzaamheid, and to the ship ahead, the bundling, wayward, wounded bug of a bastard ship ahead. I would have left this to another day, a more tractable ocean, though I say I do not know this business -- and so I pulled, by God, I pulled what line I was given to pull, and I kept my footing, too.
How long could this be managed, this heave of climb and downward rushing to gain victory by inches?
Bark, silence, bang. Bark, silence, bang. Bark and bang and more salt water, the screams of the falling and fallen. How long could this be managed?
Why could we not catch her? Why did she not sink? Damn the wretched English, damn the wretched English; may we live to take and damn the wretche--
A thought-shattering crash. A ship's company gone dumb.
And then the sigh of the Waakzaamheid, immediately wise and pregnant with apology. Her foremast groaned, held, for a heart-lifting moment held, then buckled, falling free of unnerved stays. I remember gush, the black gluttony of water, a shriek of parted shrouds. Rise and rise and yaw and roll and water. Lennert spinning, a ship's company in flight. "All hands," I thought at last intelligence. "All hands." The sea turned upon us then. I remember -- surprise without recoil, the numb that follows the blow from a lover, unexpected.
