Yesterday’s post was fiction. Today’s sounds like fiction but is true. It starts in Pondolàndia – where? Is that what pretentious people call Poundland?
The year is 1782 and we are aboard, the Grosvenor, an East Indiaman – that’s what ships of the East India Company were called, ‘though Jack Aubrey called them tea-waggons. I have made mistakes map reading on long walks; 18th century mariners were prone to significant error too. That is until my Mendoza ancestor published a treatise on navigation in 1787 that remained in use until the early years of the 20th century. Early on the morning of 4th August 1782 the captain of the watch thought he was 200 miles out to sea. The lookout saw land and the Grosvenor foundered on rocks. Of the 138 crew and eighteen passengers only one passenger and ten crew perished.
However, navigation let them down again. The Captain reckoned they were 400 km from the Dutch Cape Colony but it was 600 km and he should have walked north to a Portuguese colony at Delagoa Bay. Only eighteen survived the march, the others dying of starvation or exhaustion. A “nasty, brutish and short” tale.
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Meanwhile I am living in Patrick O’Brian’s world. I (sometimes) show a leg at three bells for the news and Farming Today, followed by the real Today programme. Later I stow the hammocks, swab the decks, clean the galley and check the tide clock. Then I go ashore with Bertie getting back at two bells, or a little earlier, to splice the mainbrace. Yo-ho-ho!
If you are unfamiliar with bells, the Royal Navy day was (is it still?) divided into six watches of four hours. A thirty-minute hourglass (or egg-timer) measured each watch into eight increments. I thought the dog watch (I will resist a Bertie remark) was in the middle of the night but, as so often, I’m mistaken. It is between 4.00 pm and 8.00 pm and that watch is split in two – cur-tailed as Stephen Maturin observes – so as to allow the watches time for dinner. There is a further peculiarity of the dog watch. At 6.30 pm it should be five bells but this was the signal for the navy to mutiny at the Nore in 1797 so, closing the hatch after the ship has foundered, it’s marked by one bell. You might suppose Bell’s whisky, the distillery was founded in 1798, is a nod to naval time-keeping but you’d be wrong. It is named for Arthur Bell who took over the distillery in the 19th century and raised standards but not the White Ensign.
I cannot resist a Bertie picture; tail down, wistful – he wants to go to bed and it’s only two bells in the last dog watch.
