Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [67]
Hallion was a reckless sort, forever getting hurt because he did things in ways they shouldn't be done. He had a positive genius for doing things wrong, poor wretch.
Their faces were wrinkled and drab, as if they'd been salted in a beef barrel, instead of exposed to the sun. Yet all of them worked to the best of their ability, perhaps because that pale gambler Henry Dean worked with them, as did Swede and even the captain, except when the latter was ashore, getting the cordage into barges and making sure that it reached us with a minimum of delay. Only Neal Butler remained in the cabin, copying and copying The Seaman's Secrets onto his stitched sheets.
"We'll take no chances," Captain Dean said, "and I won't feel safe if anyoneanyone at allcatches a glimpse of that boy while we're still at this anchorage."
Page 155
So every one of the five of us in the Nottingham's cabin heaved a sigh of relief when, on the morning of August 2nd, the last bargeload of cordage came aboard. Even before it was lowered into the hold, our anchors were aweigh, and we were headed downstream for the Nore, that sandy islet at the mouth of the Thames where outbound merchantmen assemble to wait for warships assigned to convoy them out of England's privateer-infested narrow waters and in the general direction of their desired havens.
As we came down among the sixty-odd vessels anchored at the Nore, Captain Dean eyed them disparagingly. "Look at their hulls," he told me. "Hardly a galley among 'em: bluff bows, like tubs. If we get many like that in our convoy, we'll have to strike out on our own."
"If you strike out on your own," Langman warned, "this ship'll. have another owner in a week's time."
"Is that a threat, Mr. Langman?" Captain Dean asked mildly.
Langman's face was a dusky red. "No!" he shouted. "But I took this ship myself when I was with Woodes Rogers, and I know how easy she is to take! You let a French privateer lay her aboard and where'll you be?"
"I'll be awake, Mr. Langman," Captain Dean said. "I think perhaps her crew was asleep when you took her."
Langman went forward, seething.
That passage between Langman and Captain Dean was characteristic of their attitudes. Captain Dean's idol, whom he quoted and to whom he referred more frequently than did Langman to Woodes Rogers, was Sir Isaac Newton. Dean had corresponded with Newton regarding an improved method of finding the longitude of a ship at sea;
Page 156
and he admired Newton immeasurably for his invention of the reflecting telescope.
But at any mention of either of these additions to human knowledge, Langman became not only outrageous, but almost incoherent with fury.
''Longitude!" he'd sputter. "What do you want of more longitude! All you need is latitude! If this Newton finds out what you're hoping he'll learn about longitude, he'll take the bread right out of the mouths of sailors. Any damn fool will be able to navigate. I say let well enough alone! Why foul your own nest?"
His attitude toward Newton's reflecting telescope was even worse, and he went so far as to insist that such a telescope was impossible. Nonsense, he called it.
Captain Dean listened to his tirades against Newton and his reflecting telescope with a placid face. "Mr. Langman," he said, "I've looked through Sir Isaac Newton's reflecting telescope. By using prisms, he makes it possible to see things that you couldn't see at all through an ordinary telescope."
"Prisms!" Langman snorted. "There's no such thing! Even if there was, you couldn't clog a telescope with one of 'em and still use it!"
"Seeing is believing," the captain said.
"Like hell it is," Langman said. "I've seen ships sailing upside down! I've seen sun dogs, with four suns around a central sun! That doesn't mean ships sail upside down, does it, or that there's five suns?