Free The Devil's Own Luck by David Donachie Page B

absent-mindedly. He was looking everywhere, absorbing a mass of detail. The deck was spotless, the ropes and the countless instruments needed to work the guns all slung in proper fashion. From forrard they heard the bleat, and the smell, of his own sheep in the manger.
    “The debilitating effects of power. I remember Father first telling me how much power a captain had. He was quite sanguine about it. The effect, I mean. I must say it horrified me.”
    “Perhaps it’s Bentley,” said Harry. “That is the premier’s name?”
    “It is. Swarthy-looking cove with small eyes.”
    “That can be a very powerful post. Depends on the captain, mark you. Outhwaite hinted as much. The first lieutenant really runs the ship. If he wants a man punished badly enough, there is little a captain can do to stand in his way. See that man there—” Harry indicated with his head. “Over by the capstan. See how he moves. Very stiff.”
    “A recent victim?”
    Harry nodded. “And not the only one I’ve noticed.”
    “Yet it is generally agreed that flogging achieves nothing. That it makes a good man bad, and a bad man worse.”
    “Easily said in the comfort of a salon, James. But if you are at sea, with an inexperienced crew, and half of them pressed men or the scourings of the gaols, how do you keep them in check?”
    “Some captains manage.”
    “A few. Not many. Can’t say that it’s something I’d want to use, but I can envisage many a situation in which I wouldn’t want to be without it.”
    “I wonder what you would have been like as a commander.” James smiled. “Hang ‘em high, I shouldn’t wonder.”
    Harry looked wistfully about the gundeck. It could have been his, all this. “Let’s go and get some air,” he said, heading for the stairwell.
    As they came on to the quarterdeck they could hear a raised voice.
    “Bentley,” said James.
    “The deck looks like a whore’s bedroom, sir. Your want of ability is plain to a landsman’s eye.”
    Harry looked along the deck. It seemed fine to him, and he knew himself to be a stickler about such things. One thing had struck his eye. He noticed that the great guns, bowsed tight against the ship’s side, were rarely used. The deck behind them was as smooth as all the other planking. If the crews had been given regular training on the guns, there would be grooves in the deck where they had been run in and out.
    That was how it had been on the deck of the Medusa, with constant dumb shows, as well as the real thing. Firing guns was an expensive business, easier perhaps for him than for Carter, who had to account for his expenditure of powder and shot to the Admiralty. There were those in the higher reaches of the service who could see the sense in having well-trained gun crews. But they were in the minority, outnumbered by those who saw it as a waste of time, not to mention the clerks of the Ordinance Board, who saw only a waste of money.
    To Harry it was false economy. Why eschew gunnery and engage yard-arm to yard-arm, when you could stand off, and using the greater sailing experience of your crew pound your adversary from a distance? Carter was obviously one of the old school, who preferred to rely on the bulldog tenacity of their crews in an engagement. The voice was raised again.
    “And now you tell me that you alone are responsible, sir, that the hands have not been slacking in their duty. I say that either you are blind or incompetent, sir. Or perhaps you are avoiding the truth.”
    Everyone was still, the officers, the midshipmen, and the hands. Yet there was no surprise on their faces to see one officer’s public humiliation of another, in full view and hearing of the entire ship’s company. To call a man a liar in such circumstances was coming it very high.
    “What I said, sir,” replied the other officer in a tense voice, “was that if anyone has been slacking, and I have not observed it, then I bear sole responsibility.”
    “You also have a