He got a man with a barrow to take his sea-chest down to the docks. The evening was clearing into sunshine as he stood on the quayside, where a thousand gulls wheeled and screamed above the masts and rigging of a multitude of ships of all kinds. A waterman in a broad-beamed wherry sculled his craft alongside and looked up at him.
"What ship are ye for, sir? Frigate Althea? Layin' to moorings over yonder-put ye aboard in five minutes."
Septimus handed down his sea-chest and got into the wherry. As it shoved off and headed out into the crowded harbour he wondered how long it would be before he set foot on shore again, and what adventures would have befallen him before he came back.
The waterman eyed him knowingly. "Fust ship ye've jined, sir?" he asked. "She's a good 'un, the Althea. Cap'n Sainsbury, he's a proper fire-eater. But they do say as the Fust Lootenant's a rare narsty bit 0' work."
This last news was not encouraging. But Septimus cheered himself with the thought that the First Lieutenant of the Althea could hardly be as nasty as Lieutenant Pyke.
"Yonder's your vessel, sir," said the waterman, jerking his head. "His Majesty's frigate Althea."
Septimus craned his neck to stare ahead. A tall ship, lean of hull, with a long bowsprit thrusting forward like a fencer's foil, lay motionless on the calm harbour waters. The black-painted oaken side of her was lined with a broad band of white, in which gaped the row of open gun-ports. Her three slender masts towered overhead into the golden sunshine, reaching up and up until it seemed a wonder that the Althea didn't overturn with such gigantic structures rearing from her decks. As the wherry came closer Septimus could see tiny figures rerched high up in the web-like rigging. Sometimes they swung from place to place like spiders on a thread. The clear note of a bell floated across the water: dong-dong, dong-dong.
"Four bells," said the waterman. "Ship's time, that is-ye'll be livin' by that soon. I'll pull round to the larboard side," he added.
As the wherry came close under the frigate's side-it looked an enormous wooden wall from that angle-a voice hailed the boat loudly: "Boat ahoy!"
"Aye aye!" roared the waterman in reply. " 'Ear what I said?" he added to Septimus. " 'Aye aye' means there's an officer in my boat. If there 'adn't been, I'd 'ave said 'no-no', see?"
It was dawning on Septimus that in stepping aboard the Althea, his new home, he was entering a world entirely different from anything he had known, with a new language, new ways of telling the time, and new and somewhat awesome surroundings. To get into it, apparently, he had to climb up a dangling ladder made of slats of wood and lengths of rope. Being agile and neat in his movements, he managed it without trouble and arrived on deck. A thin, youngish officer, with a telescope tucked under his arm, had been awaiting him. Septimus had not yet learned that everyone salutes the quarterdeck as they step on board a warship-a custom dating from the days when a Crucifix always stood therebut he remembered to lift his hat to the officer.
"Septimus Quinn, midshipman, sir," he said as confidently as he could.
"Come aboard, Mr. Quinn." The officer had a pleasant smile. "I'm Lieutenant Gifford. Sea-chest? I'll have it sent to the gunroom where your berth is."
It was at this moment that a tall, red-faced man strode across the deck some yards away and disappeared down a hatchway. Septimus stared after him.
"P-pray, sir, who was that?" he stammered.
"That was the First Lieutenant of this vessel," replied Lieutenant Gifford. "His name is Pyke, Lieutenant George Pyke."
Chapter TWO
Masthead
HIS MAJESTY'S FRIGATE Althea was pounding southward through the heavy seas of the Bay of Biscay. A westerly gale had blown for two days and she was carrying very little canvas on the three tall masts that leaned over before the wind, their taut rigging making wild shrill music. A hundred and thirty feet above the wet slant of the deck the lookout crouched in the crow's-nest, occasionally bobbing up to peer round the stormy horizon of sea. With Nelson on watch in the Mediterranean there was little likelihood of any French warship being sighted in these waters, and all the lookout could have reported was that the gale was getting worse. He looked up frequently at the foretopmast above his head, where Mr. Pyke, the Althea's First Lieutenant, had seen fit to have a reefed topsail set.
"That rag ole Lobsterface 'as 'ung out won't stand much more o' this," muttered the lookout at intervals. Lobsterface was the nickname the Althea's crew used for her First Lieutenant - never, of course, to that violent-tempered officer's face.
Down below decks, in the smelly, candle-lit section of the gunroom where the midshipmen had their quarters, three young gentlemen were discussing navigation. Or rather, the largest and oldest of the three was giving his opinion on the navigation which they had been taught during the ten days they had been at sea. Fitzroy Cocker was eighteen, tall and redhaired, and had a temper that matched his hair.
"It's a lot of mumbo-jumbo, demme!" he declared. "All this rigmarole about angles and sextants-it don't make sense. If an officer's got a shipmaster to lay him alongside a Frenchman, that's all he wants, and it's good enough for me, demme!"
As he spoke he was balancing himself between the wooden bulkhead and the fixed table, for the whole of the cabin was tilted at a steep angle. He also had to speak at the top of his loud voice because of the continuous noise of creaking, grinding, banging and howling made by the ship as she fought her way through the storm.
Midshipman the Hon. Charles Barry, a slim dark boy two years younger than Cocker, looked up from the tattered book he was trying to study by the flickering light of the candle.
"Well, we've got to learn the stuff, Fitz," he said. "Might as well buckle to and get it over."
"Bah!" spat Cocker impatiently. He swung round to scowl at the third midshipman, an undersized youngster who was peering through steel-rimmed spectacles at some pencilled calculations he had been making. "As for you, young lickspittle, I suppose you're pretending to like it-currying favour with the senior officers, eh?"
"Pray, sir," retorted Septimus Quinn mildly, "do you really think I've curried any favour with our dear First Lieutenant?"
Charles Barry laughed. "That's true enough, Fitz. Mr. Pyke's done nothing but curse our spectacled midshipman and try to catch him out ever since Quinn joined."
This was not strictly true, but there was truth in it. The First Lieutenant of the frigate had had a great many more important things to do than look for chances of venting his wrath on a junior midshipman; but Mr. George Pyke had made a point of being thoroughly unpleasant whenever Septimus Quinn crossed his path. Septimus had not breathed a word about the encounter with the highwayman on the journey to Portsmouth, but the seamen had picked up some of the tale in the Portsmouth taverns and it was whispered about the ship that young Mr. Quinn had foiled a desperate toby-man while "old Lobsterface" sat still and shouted for help-which was rather unfair to Mr. Pyke.
Septimus had taken a week to get used to the new life of serving in a King's ship, and then had settled into it with the ease of a philosopher. He had quickly learned that he was now the humblest unit in a floating community of two hundred men, where Duty was the most important thing. According to Captain Sainsbury, the ruler of this tiny wooden-walled community. Duty meant knowing exactly what an order meant and obeying that order quickly and correctly even though it meant death to do so. Septimus could see that this was a vital necessity in a ship of war, but he reflected that part of his own duty would be to give orders-when he had learned his job--and that meant that he would be using his own initiative instead of blindly obeying the orders of Lieutenant Pyke or Lieutenant Gifford. It was the thought of some day being able to command and plan for himself that encouraged young Mr. Quinn to stick at his studies of Navigation and Seamanship, much to the disgust of the fault-finding Lieutenant Pyke.