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bomberqueen17 · 11 days

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Liveblogging the Aubreyad: Post Captain Part Three

I promise, this book really is that long. It's not that I'm rambling. I mean I am a little, but.

OK installment one was fly honeys and financial ruin, installment two was Bear Fursona and How Many Indiamen Has Tom Pullings Been In Please Read The Footnotes On This One, and we left off with Jack Finally Gets A Ship And Asks For One Big Favor. So now we are going to find out about this Disaster Boat and the Big Favor.

But first I can't resist this exchange between Stephen and Sophia, Jack's would-be wife prospect. Stephen and Sophie have hit it off as platonic friends and confide in one another a great deal, and Stephen is trying to convince Sophie that if she would just tell Jack she's into him then Jack would do what he had to do to make it happen. She refuses, she couldn't possibly, but meanwhile she is trying to explain to Stephen that Diana treats him like shit because she's trying to figure out if Stephen is into her or not, so if he would just fucking tell her he's into her she would stop being such a raging bitch to him, and Stephen, completely devoid of any self-analysis of this situation, breaks off his contemplation of how very wrong Sophie is to ignore his advice to explain to her that of course he must ignore her advice.

So while Jack is in his interview with Lord Melville, Stephen and Sophie are walking in a nearby park, and have this exchange.

'If you had seen him last night at Lady Keith's, you would not have worried. To be sure, he lost the rest of his ear in the Indiaman - but that was nothing.' 'His ear!' cried Sophia, turning white and coming to a dead halt in the middle of the Parade. 'You are standing in a puddle, my dear. Let me lead you to dry land. Yes, his ear, his right ear, or what there was left of it. But it was nothing. I sewed it on again; and as I say, if you had seen him last night, you would have been easy in your mind.' [...]'What a good friend you are to him, Dr Maturin. His other friends are so grateful to you.’ ‘I sew his ears on from time to time, sure.'

Anyway: The Big Favor, below.

So Jack repairs aboard HMS Disaster Polychrest to fit her out, she never having sailed anywhere before and for good reason, and Stephen turns up shortly in Portsmouth and sends Jack a note to let him know he's arrived. Jack responds, not having shipped any paper or pens aboard, by sending a messenger by way of reply. Brace yourself for the absolute onslaught of human sunshine that is about to follow:

A thundering on the stairs, as though someone had released a bull; the door burst inwards, trembling, and Pullings appeared, lighting up the room with his happiness and his new blue coat. 'I'm made, sir,' he cried, seizing Stephen's hand. 'Made at last! My commission came down with the mail. Oh, wish me joy!' 'Why, so I do,' said Stephen, wincing in that iron grip, 'if more joy you can contain - if more felicity will not make your cup overflow. Have you been drinking, Lieutenant Pullings? Pray sit in a chair like a rational being, and do not spring about the room.' 'Oh say it again, sir,' said the lieutenant, sitting and gazing at Stephen with pure love beaming from his face. 'Not a drop.' [...] 'Lieutenant, will you drink a glass of wine, a glass of sherry-wine?' 'You've said it again, sir,' cried Pullings, with another burst of effulgence. ('You would swear that light actually emanated from that face,' observed Stephen privately.) 'I take it very kind. Just a drop, if you please. I am not going to get drunk until tomorrow night - my feast.'

Pullings does indeed throw a party, to which both Jack and Stephen are invited. But first, the situation-- Pullings is the junior lieutenant, and Jack's first lieutenant is a Mr. Parker, who has been a lieutenant 35 years and never been given a command of his own, for reasons that become obvious: he is not good at his job. He doesn't totally understand how ships work, and focuses instead on cosmetic issues, and to motivate the men he constantly yells at them and beats them and generally is a terror to them. But he has influential friends-- not influential enough to get him his step, but influential enough that Jack is stuck with him.

The staffing of the ship is not ideal either, as they're very short-handed and of the men they have, most are Not Sailors. Pullings goes out to press men out of an incoming Indiaman ("won't she already be stripped?" asks Stephen, and Tom laughs at him.

“Love you, sir, I made two voyages in her. There are hidey-holes under her half-deck you would never dream of, without you helped to stow men into 'em. I'll have half a dozen men out of her, or you may say, black's the white of your eye, Tom Pullings. Lieutenant Tom Pullings,' he added, secretly.

I already included this one in the Indiaman Body Count Tally)

As a bit of a consolation, though, somehow Barret Bonden and his cousin Joe Plaice show up, bold as brass, rowing straight through that harbor openly to report aboard, so Jack has his coxswain back.

(We find out, alas, that Bonden's nephew George Lucock, who Jack had rated midshipman in the Sophie, couldn't get a Navy ship as a mid and wound up pressed as a foremast jack out of a merchantman and into HMS York, which recently went down with all hands in a blow-- built by the same corrupt dockyard as the Polychrest, so she probably came apart at the seams in the heavy storm-swell. Jack is sorely grieved, having valued the young man highly.)

So Barret Bonden takes the captain ashore in his barge to attend TOM PULLINGS's celebratory feast, at an inn near the shore in Gosport-- his parents have come, and his sweetheart.

The young man was standing there with his parents and an astonishingly pretty girl, a sweet little pink creature in lace mittens with immense blue eyes and an expression of grave alarm. 'I should like to take her home and keep her as a pet,' thought Jack, looking down at her with great benevolence.

The party goes well (Stephen bonds delightedly with Mrs. Pullings over their mutual love of mushrooms) but then the bailiffs show up, having been tipped off that Jack is there. Jack gets out the window but there are more waiting for him outside the inn and he can't jump down. So he hollers "Polychrest!" down to the end of the lane where his barge is moored, and up the street come running his barge crew, led by the loyal and extremely capable Barret Bonden, who knocks the head cop flat out with a wooden stave. "Pullings," Jack says once the bailiffs have fled, leaving several of their number stretched unconscious in the mud, "press those men," and so they go back to the ship with several additional hands.

By sea law this is perfectly legal. They have out-copped the fucking cops, and are very pleased with themselves.

So the next day they go out to sea and immediately find out that however little they expected out of the Polychrest, she is in fact much worse. She has so much leeway-- meaning, the wind pushes her bodily across the surface of the water no matter which direction she is meant to be sailing in or how closely she is steered-- that she is manageable only in wide vast open empty stretches of water, but her construction means she has no hold for supplies to be stored in, so she cannot make long voyages over vast open empty stretches of water. She must be used for duties that put her close in to the shore, but she cannot be steered well enough to be close in to the shore.

As a bonus they find out that she is actually slightly better at going backwards than forwards, which is. Well, embarrassing, and unexpected. But Jack can sail anything, and does, so on they go to rendezvous with the blockading Channel fleet.

Additional supporting characters revealed at this time include my son William Babbington, he of the venereal diseases, and a new tiny baby named Parslow, who mostly exists for Babbington to play wicked pranks upon.

HMS Failboat reaches the Channel fleet, whose job it is to keep the French from invading. This is a very real danger, there are hundreds of thousands of French troops sitting on the other side of the channel quite openly in a state of high preparedness and Napoleon around this time said "Let us be masters of the Channel for six hours and we are masters of the world."

But the commander of this patrolling squadron at this time is our old enemy Admiral Harte, yon blue-faced son of an old French fart whom we have known and loathed these years, and he really, really sucks.

Meanwhile in shipboard life, Stephen has fallen afoul of the incompetent Parker, who he catches gratutiously torturing the men out of his misguided ideas of how discipline works. This obliges Jack to openly interfere; he had been trying to be diplomatic with Parker, but he cannot overlook this. He handles it very competently, making Stephen and Parker apologize formally to one another and dismiss the incident, and then berating Parker in private. Stephen is coldly furious and offers to quit on the spot, but is talked down. He does however take a short leave and go ashore, where he visits Sophie and tells her among other things that Jack isn't eating very much because he's too poor to lay in his own private supplies, which is customary for ship captains.

And so Killick comes aboard, bearing extravagant amounts of food sent as gifts by Sophie. Jack actually almost cries, it's such a kind and also necessary thing for her to have done. And it's good timing, because Canning comes to dine. (He is Jewish and there is a funny sidebar as Jack tries to find out from the Bible [Stephen is astonished that he owns a copy] whether Jews can eat venison. The answer, as far as the unfussy Canning is concerned, is yes.)

So the dinner is a success, but then they immediately put to sea again. But not far out to sea. And Jack goes repeatedly ashore to visit-- Diana, not Sophie. Diana, who is in Dover, which is easy for the squadron to get to. (Sophie is farther away and also he cannot see her because her mother would not allow it, and she has refused to tell him openly that she wants this, though one would think the food she sent would have been a clue. And yet.) But Jack goes to visit Diana even in peril of being arrested, to the detriment of his duty, to the damage of his reputation, delaying the sailing of convoys he's meant to escort, imperiling his career. Which is what she wants. It's easy for men to say they care about her, but in her state she demands sacrifices to prove it, which Stephen provides as well but in his case she wants declarations, which he won't make.

Back aboard, Jack is trying to fix the ship's rigging to make her sail forwards more often, and Stephen is bonding with the new Marine captain over the various martial arts. The Marine asks if he should like to do some fencing practice. "Would that be quite regular?" Stephen asks, apparently without a hint of irony continuing "I have a horror of the least appearance of eccentricity."

Really. Do you now.

Anyhow they do practice fencing and pistol-shooting, and Jack is astonished to realize that his mildly bumbling friend is actually an incredible shot and a very skilled fencer. Stephen's university days had involved rather an extreme amount of dueling and he is extremely well-practiced and skilled at these arts.

HMS Failboat meets the Bellone, their old frienemy. They could chase her off and simply take the prizes she was escorting, but Jack knows that she does too much damage to English commercial traffic to be allowed to continue, so he doggedly chases her, leaving the prizes behind. He cannot take her, but drives her onto the rocks of the Spanish coast, and watches the surf break her back.

Admiral Harte doesn't give a fuck about this, he's just mad Jack didn't take the prizes.

Stephen is called away to do intelligence work, which Jack still knows nothing about really-- he has some inklings that there are depths to Stephen, but has no idea what those depths really are. Stephen visits Diana and Sophie on the way again, and again, Diana tries to get him to show concrete interest and he won't; he then tells Sophie she absolutely must show Jack some concrete interest but she says she can't and then counter-insists that he absolutely must be more direct with Diana, and he refuses. (I begin to see why this book is so long...)

Stephen is landed by the dark of the moon on the Spanish coast, and some undefinable time later he returns, deeply tanned, and tells everyone he's been in Ireland seeing to tedious family business.

He meets Heneage Dundas, who begs him to tell Jack that everyone has noticed him going ashore so much, it is entirely obvious to everyone what he is doing and it does not look good to anyone. He begs Stephen to tell Jack, lest Jack imperil what few chances he has to advance his career. Dundas is himself a notorious womanizer, so coming from him, this is really, really saying something.

Back aboard, Stephen finds the ship thoroughly unhappy, badgered by Parker's hard-horse willy-nilly torture, unbolstered by any real help from a despondent Jack, after a boring and unproductive convoy escort to the Baltic. But, Jack brought Stephen a souvenir-- a narwhal horn-- and Stephen is delighted.

So delighted he resolves to try to convey Dundas's message. Jack, already sensitive because he knows he's behaving badly, takes it amiss, answers him sharply, carelessly uses the word bastard to which Stephen, being one, is extremely sensitive. Stephen cannot abide it, demands Jack withdraw, and Jack, too angry, doubles down instead, pointing out that Stephen coming back deeply suntanned from a trip to Ireland is beyond believing and makes one question whether Stephen is telling the truth about anything-- which is of course entirely the wrong thing to ever say to someone who has fought as many duels as Stephen, and so of course Stephen goes to ask Dundas to second him in a duel.

Jack belatedly withdraws the word bastard but nothing else, which isn't going to cut it. But the scheduling is prohibitive, so the whole thing drags on unresolved.

Jack goes ashore once more to see Diana, but her servant says she isn't at home; he sneaks around back and discovers that indeed she is there, entertaining Canning in her bedroom.

Admiral Harte now orders the Failboat to go and traverse a very dangerous set of inshore channels to look in upon a French harbor. Now, either Harte is trying to get him killed, or is genuinely ignorant enough not to realize that the Polychrest is fatally unsuited to this mission, but Jack is so dispirited that he merely registers a dull formal protest about it (Failboat's hull has indeed started to come apart and it needs refitting already), then goes away shrugging on what amounts to a suicide mission.

Stephen meanwhile has been noticing that the men are increasingly sullen, but attributes it to the falling-out he has had with Jack-- most of the crew has been treating him poorly now that he is clearly no longer the Captain's Favorite. But in the sick bay he hears the men talking about their plans for mutiny. So he goes, dutifully, to tell Jack: the men will mutiny once they are close to France, and plan to carry the ship to a French harbor once the officers are dead. He will not name names, he is no informer, but he felt it his duty to report the fact of the matter.

Jack knew this was coming, they had been rolling shot in the night and he is not unaware of the state of the ship. He has a solution.

'Men,' said Jack, 'I know damned well what's going on. I know damned well what's going on; and I won't have it. What simple fellows you are, to listen to a parcel of makee-clever sea-lawyers and politicians, glib, quick-talking coves. Some of you have put your necks into the noose. I say your necks into the noose. You see the Ville de Paris over there?' Every head turned to the line-of-battle ship on the horizon. 'I have only to signal her, or half a dozen other cruisers, and run you up to the yardarm with the Rogue's March playing. Damned fools, to listen to such talk. But I am not going to signal to the Ville de Paris nor to any other king's ship. Why not? Because the Polychrest is going into action this very night, that's why. I am not going to have it said in the fleet that any Polychrest is afraid of hard knocks.”

No punishment, the incident will not be logged, but they are going to go on this possible suicide mission here and now and either fucking do the impossible or fucking die trying.

Everyone is pleased by this, except Parker, so off they go, making it to their target in shockingly good time. The navigation is incredibly tricky, and Jack does not know the waters, so he is relying entirely on his master, who is a Channel pilot. He double and triple-checks everything with the master, but the master is absolutely confident, despite the fog that has rolled in, despite how tricky this harbor in specific is. No, they are in the right place, the master is perfectly confident, this is going exactly as planned, and so they are definitely going to--

They run hard aground on a sandbar, midsentence. They were in the wrong place, the master having confused one distinctive headland with another identical distinctive headland. They are now hard aground under the overlapping fire of two heavy, well-staffed land batteries, the fog is lifting, and the gunboats from the harbor are coming out to destroy them.

The only way off the sandbar is to carry an anchor out some distance and then winch themselves off with it, but none of the smaller boats they possess are strong enough to carry the anchor. They will have to go steal one from the harbor. Having decided this within the first three seconds of realizing the situation, Jack then realizes that it would be faster, better, to go cut out a large enough vessel from that harbor to simply directly tow the Polychrest off. And there is in fact a 20-gun corvette there, the Fanciulla, anchored under the batteries, but so close under them that their guns could not bear on her. She is the ship they were meant to locate, and there she is. And why not cut her out? It's suicidal but then this whole thing was anyway.

So he calls for volunteers for this absolutely madcap, reckless plan, and is stunned when most of the men onboard follow him with zero hesitation; he has to order some to stay behind to keep the ship, having already ordered some others off on a distraction gambit to draw the gunboats off.

They reach the corvette; Babbington gets shot and Jack saves him, it's only his arm that is broken, he tucks it into his shirt and fights on, desperately. Pullings cuts the cables with his bloody axe, the Fanciulla is theirs-- the battery has not realized the ship is taken and does not fire on them as they make their way back out to the Polychrest, only belatedly opening fire when they're most of the way there. They pass a cable, set the sails, get on the capstan bars, and are working to tow the Polychrest off-- it has started to move-- they're nearly there-- and then the cable is cut by shot from the batteries, and there is no surviving boat to carry another cable.

So Jack, already wounded but determined, swims over to the Fanciulla to get another cable. He is wounded again in the water, and comes aboard exhausted and bleeding heavily. No one else can swim, and the Fanciulla cannot come any closer without grounding herself as well. So he takes the heavy cable and sets off back to the Polychrest, nearly drowns, but gets there, seeing double. Bonden has to haul him out of the water, he cannot stand, but finally heaves to his feet to take a place at the capstan in the final desperate effort to get the Polychrest unstuck.

She floats. But she has been hulled upwards of 200 times by the batteries' heavy shot, and above all, her poorly-built hull is coming apart at the seams. She cannot swim long.

They tow her out. A large number of transport ships had fled the harbor when the fighting started, meaning to get clear of whatever happened, and they are all out in the shipping lane, milling about and completely confused. The Polychrest and Fanciulla sink several, take one that blunders into them and gets stuck, and leave flaming chaos behind them. Which was, after all, the substance of Jack's orders.

They get everything they can off the Polychrest, and then, finally, she sinks. And so does Jack, massively short on blood.

But the book is not over, no. There's more, but this is another suitable place for an intermission.

Stay tuned for: Gibbon crimes, sixty thousand bees, romantic heartbreak and separate resolution (not the same romance), and somebody gets a promotion. Two somebodies! ... one of them is really not who you would expect.

#liveblogging the aubreyad #post captain #jack aubrey #stephen maturin

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napoleonic-sexyman-tournament · 8 months

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Friends, enemies, comrades, Jacobins, Monarchist, Bonapartists, gather round. We have an important announcement:

The continent is beset with war. A tenacious general from Corsica has ignited conflict from Madrid to Moscow and made ancient dynasties tremble. Depending on your particular political leanings, this is either the triumph of a great man out of the chaos of The Terror, a betrayal of the values of the French Revolution, or the rule of the greatest upstart tyrant since Caesar.

But, our grand tournament is here to ask the most important question: Now that the flower of European nobility is arrayed on the battlefield in the sexiest uniforms that European history has yet produced (or indeed, may ever produce), who is the most fuckable?

The bracket is here: full bracket and just quadrant I

Want to nominate someone from the Western Hemisphere who was involved in the ever so sexy dismantling of the Spanish empire? (or the Portuguese or French American colonies as well) You can do it here

The People have created this list of nominees:

France:

Jean Lannes

Josephine de Beauharnais

Thérésa Tallien

Jean-Andoche Junot

Joseph Fouché

Charles Maurice de Talleyrand

Joachim Murat

Michel Ney

Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (Charles XIV of Sweden)

Louis-Francois Lejeune

Pierre Jacques Étienne Cambrinne

Napoleon I

Marshal Louis-Gabriel Suchet

Jacques de Trobriand

Jean de dieu soult.

François-Étienne-Christophe Kellermann

17.Louis Davout

Pauline Bonaparte, Duchess of Guastalla

Eugène de Beauharnais

Jean-Baptiste Bessières

Antoine-Jean Gros

Jérôme Bonaparte

Andrea Masséna

Antoine Charles Louis de Lasalle

Germaine de Staël

Thomas-Alexandre Dumas

René de Traviere (The Purple Mask)

Claude Victor Perrin

Laurent de Gouvion Saint-Cyr

François Joseph Lefebvre

Major Andre Cotard (Hornblower Series)

Edouard Mortier

Hippolyte Charles

Nicolas Charles Oudinot

Emmanuel de Grouchy

Pierre-Charles Villeneuve

Géraud Duroc

Georges Pontmercy (Les Mis)

Auguste Frédéric Louis Viesse de Marmont

Juliette Récamier

Bon-Adrien Jeannot de Moncey

Louis-Alexandre Berthier

Étienne Jacques-Joseph-Alexandre Macdonald

Jean-Mathieu-Philibert Sérurier

Catherine Dominique de Pérignon

Guillaume Marie-Anne Brune

Jean-Baptiste Jourdan

Charles-Pierre Augereau

Auguste François-Marie de Colbert-Chabanais

England:

Richard Sharpe (The Sharpe Series)

Tom Pullings (Master and Commander)

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington

Jonathan Strange (Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell)

Captain Jack Aubrey (Aubrey/Maturin books)

Horatio Hornblower (the Hornblower Books)

William Laurence (The Temeraire Series)

Henry Paget, 1st Marquess of Anglesey

Beau Brummell

Emma, Lady Hamilton

Benjamin Bathurst

Horatio Nelson

Admiral Edward Pellew

Sir Philip Bowes Vere Broke

Sidney Smith

Percy Smythe, 6th Viscount Strangford

George IV

Capt. Anthony Trumbull (The Pride and the Passion)

Barbara Childe (An Infamous Army)

Doctor Maturin (Aubrey/Maturin books)

William Pitt the Younger

Robert Stewart, 2nd Marquess of Londonderry (Lord Castlereagh)

George Canning

Scotland:

Thomas Cochrane

Colquhoun Grant

Ireland:

Arthur O'Connor

Thomas Russell

Robert Emmet

Austria:

Klemens von Metternich

Friedrich Bianchi, Duke of Casalanza

Franz I/II

Archduke Karl

Marie Louise

Franz Grillparzer

Wilhelmine von Biron

Poland:

Wincenty Krasiński

Józef Antoni Poniatowski

Józef Zajączek

Maria Walewska

Władysław Franciszek Jabłonowski

Adam Jerzy Czartoryski

Antoni Amilkar Kosiński

Zofia Czartoryska-Zamoyska

Stanislaw Kurcyusz

Russia:

Alexander I Pavlovich

Alexander Andreevich Durov

Prince Andrei (War and Peace)

Pyotr Bagration

Mikhail Miloradovich

Levin August von Bennigsen

Pavel Stroganov

Empress Elizabeth Alexeievna

Karl Wilhelm von Toll

Dmitri Kuruta

Alexander Alexeevich Tuchkov

Barclay de Tolly

Fyodor Grigorevich Gogel

Ekaterina Pavlovna Bagration

Ippolit Kuragin (War and Peace)

Prussia:

Louise von Mecklenburg-Strelitz

Gebard von Blücher

Carl von Clausewitz

Frederick William III

Gerhard von Scharnhorst

Louis Ferdinand of Prussia

Friederike of Mecklenburg-Strelitz

Alexander von Humboldt

Dorothea von Biron

The Netherlands:

Ida St Elme

Wiliam, Prince of Orange

The Papal States:

Pius VII

Portugal:

João Severiano Maciel da Costa

Spain:

Juan Martín Díez

José de Palafox

Inês Bilbatua (Goya's Ghosts)

Haiti:

Alexandre Pétion

Sardinia:

Vittorio Emanuele I

Lombardy:

Alessandro Manzoni

Denmark:

Frederik VI

Sweden:

Gustav IV Adolph

#napoleonic sexyman tournament #new pinned post for now

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