To the Indies Read online

  Table of Contents

  To The Indies

  Publishing Information

  Author Information

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  To The Indies

  by

  C. S. Forester

  Publishing Information

  To The Indies

  by C. S. Forester

  © Copyright 1940 by C. S. Forester

  Copyright renewed 1978 by Estate of C.S.Forester

  mobi edition Copyright 2012 by eNet Press Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published by eNet Press Inc.

  16580 Maple Circle, Lake Oswego OR 97034

  Digitized in the United States of America in 2011

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  www.enetpress.com

  Cover designed by Eric Savage; www.savagecreative.com

  ISBN 978-1-61886-121-4

  Author Information

  Cecil Scott ‘C. S.’ Forester was the pen name of Cecil Louis Troughton Smith (27 August 1899 — 2 April 1966), an English novelist who rose to fame with tales of naval warfare. His most notable works were the 11-book Horatio Hornblower Saga, depicting a Royal Navy officer during the Napoleonic era, and The African Queen (filmed in 1951 by John Huston, with Humphrey Bogart and Kathrine Hepburn). His novels A Ship of the Line and Flying Colors were jointly awarded the 1938 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

  Captain Horatio Hornblower was filmed with Gregory Peck in 1950. Mr. Midshipman Hornblower (1999), Lieutenant Hornblower (2001) and episodes from Hornblower and the Hotspur (2002) were filmed as mini-series.

  Forester was born in Cairo, growing up in London, and educated at Alleyn’s School, Dulwich College, and Guy’s Hospital, but did not complete his studies at the latter. He married Kathleen Belcher in 1926, had two sons, John and George, and divorced in 1945. His elder son, John, wrote a biography of his father.

  During World War II, Forester moved to the United States where he wrote propaganda to encourage America to join the Allies. He eventually settled in Berkeley, California. In 1947, he married Dorothy Foster.

  Forester wrote many other novels, among them The General; Peninsular War novels Rifleman Dodd and The Gun (filmed as The Pride and the Passion in 1957); and seafaring stories that did not involve Hornblower, such as Brown on Resolution (filmed as Sailor of the King in 1953); The Captain from Connecticut; The Ship; The Good Shepherd; and The Last Nine Days of the Bismarck, which was used as the basis of the screenplay for the 1960 film Sink the Bismarck! Forester is also credited as story writer for several movies not based on his published fiction, including Commandos Strike at Dawn (1942); Forester is credited with the story for the movie Eagle Squadron (1942).

  The 12 volume series of the chronological Hornblower Saga with first published dates:

  Vol #1 1949 January 1793 — November 1797 Mr. Midshipman Hornblower

  Vol #2 1951 Spring 1800 — March 1803 Lieutenant Hornblower

  Vol #3 1962 March 1803 — April 1805 Hornblower and the Hotspur

  Vol #4 1967 April 1805 — Summer - Fall 1805 Hornblower During the Crisis

  Vol #5 1953 December 1805 — January 1808 Hornblower and the Atropos

  Vol #6 1937 June 1808 — Summer 1809 Beat to Quarters or The Happy Return

  Vol #7 1938 May 1810 — October 1810 Ship of the Line or A Ship of the Line

  Vol #8 1938 November 1810 — Fall 1811 Flying Colours

  Vol #9 1945 April 1812 — December 1812 Commodore Hornblower

  Vol #10 1946 October 1813 — June 1815 Lord Hornblower

  Vol #11 1958 May 1821 — October 1823 Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies

  Vol #12 ‘40-’67 1796-1799-1810-1812-1848 Hornblower Addendum — Five Stories

  Maps & Commentary 1964 The Hornblower Companion

  10 of the 12 volumes of the Hornblower Sagas are published as ebooks by eNet Press.

  Other major works of C. S. Forester with first published dates:

  1926 Payment Deferred

  1929 Nelson

  1929 Brown on Resolution or Single Handed

  1932 Rifleman Dodd

  1933 The Gun

  1935 The African Queen

  1936 The General

  1941 Captain from Connecticut

  1943 The Ship

  1948 The Sky and the Forest

  1950 Randall and the River of Time

  1954 The Nightmare

  1955 The Good Shepherd

  1953 The Barbary Pirates

  1956 The Age of Fighting Sail

  1959 Last Nine Days of the Bismarck

  1964 The Hornblower Companion

  1969 The Man in the Yellow Raft (Collected stories from World War II and 1960’s)

  1971 Gold from Crete (Collected stories from World War II)

  Chapter 1

  The learned Narciso Rich was washing his shirt. He had a wooden bucket over the side on the end of a rope, and, having filled it — with difficulty because of its tendency to float and the lack of motion of the ship — he had swung it up to the foredeck. Although it was late afternoon, it was still stifling hot, and Rich endeavored to stay as much as possible in the shadow cast by the mast and sail, but that was not easy, because the ship was swinging about slowly and aimlessly in the flat calm. The sun stung his bare skin, brown though the latter already was. Yet Rich could not postpone what he was doing until nightfall, because the work in hand necessitated a good light — he was freeing his shirt of the insect pests which swarmed in it.

  There were grim thoughts running through his mind as he bent over his revolting task. Firstly, he knew by experience that his shirt was far easier to clean than the leather breeches which he wore, and on which he would have to start work next. Next, he would not stay clean very long; not in this ship, where every man was alive with lice, and where the very planking swarmed with loathsome creatures which hastened out at nightfall to suck human blood. At this very moment, when he stopped to think about it, he thought he could distinguish their hideous stench, among the other stinks which reached his nostrils.

  It was a strange piece of work for him to be doing. Not since his student days had he had to abase himself in this fashion, and for the last five years he had had servants to wait on him in his own house, after he had attained eminence in his profession. Without immodesty he could look on himself as in the first rank of jurisconsults in the triple kingdom of Aragon, and as certainly the second, and possibly the first, authority on the universal maritime code of Catalonia. Merchant princes from Pisa and Florence and Marseille — the very Doge of Venice, for the matter — had sent deputations, almost embassies, to request his judgment upon points in dispute, and had listened attentively to his explanations of the law, and had paid in gold for them. Now he was washing his own shirt under an equinoctial sun.

  And — he admitted it to himself with all a lawyer’s realism — it was his own fault. He need not have joined this expedition. The King had summoned him to consultation; a pretty tangle they had got their affairs into, His Highness and the Admiral, as a result of not consulting expert legal opinion when drawing up their first agreement, which was exactly what always happened when two laymen tried to s
ave lawyers’ fees. Rich remembered His Highness’ inquiring glance; the subject under discussion was which able-bodied young lawyer it would be best to send out to the Indies to watch over the royal interests and to try to straighten out the legal muddles there. A hot wave of recklessness had swept Rich away.

  “I could go myself, Highness,” he had said, with an appearance of jesting.

  At that moment he had felt weary of the dull round of a lawyer’s life, of the dignified robes, of the solemn pretense to infallibility, of the eternal weariness of explaining to muddled minds the petty points — often the same points over and over again — which to him were clarity itself. He had suddenly realized that he was forty, and aging, and that the twenty years which had elapsed since his journey back to Barcelona from Padua had brought him nothing except the worldly success which seemed to him, momentarily, of small account. With pitiless self-analysis Rich, sousing his shirt in the bucket, reminded himself that at that time the prospect of wearing a sword at his side had made a definite appeal to him, as though he had been a hare-brained boy to be attracted by toys.

  His Highness’ lantern jaw had dropped a little in surprise.

  “There is nothing we should like better,” he had said.

  There had still been a chance of escape. Instant retraction would have left him at peace in his quiet house in Barcelona, and yet he had thrown away the opportunity.

  “There is no reason why I should not go, Highness,” he had said, like a fool, and after that there was no chance of withdrawal save at the risk of royal displeasure, and the displeasure of King Ferdinand was more perilous even than a voyage to the Indies.

  So here he was, eaten alive by vermin, and roasting under a tropical sun in a ship which seemed as though she would never again feel a breath of wind, so long had she drifted in these equatorial calms. He was indeed the only person on board, of all the hundred and thirty who crowded her, who was displaying any sign of activity. The Admiral and his servants were invisible in the great after-cabin, and the rest of the horde were lying idly in the shade of the bulwarks and of the break of the foredeck. They were more accustomed to filth and vermin than he was; his fastidious nostrils could distinguish the reek of their dirty bodies and unwashed clothing as one strand of the tangled skein of stinks — salted cod, not too well preserved, and rotting cheese, and fermenting beans. The least unpleasing and most prevalent odor was the vinegary smell of spilt wine drying in the heat — the wine barrels in the waist had been badly coopered, and wine was continually sweating out between the staves, the supply dwindling daily although to them it was of more value now than the gold they were seeking. The tremendous rain-storms of the last few days, accompanied by hardly a breadth of wind, had brought them drinking water, but it was drinking water flavored with sea salt and tar as a result of having to be caught in sails before being run into the casks. It was vastly unattractive water, especially to Spaniards with their discriminating taste in drinking water; Rich suspected the water of being the cause of the bowel complaint which was beginning to plague them all.

  His shirt was finished now, and he put it on, reveling in the coolness of the wet material against his skin, while he stripped off his breeches — it was repulsive and unpleasing to be naked. It was strange that among all the dangers and discomforts he had expected — the fevers, the poisoned arrows, the fire-breathing dragons, the tempests and rocks, he had never anticipated the vermin which now held so important a place in his thoughts. Saint Francis of Assisi, of blessed memory, had spoken of lice as the pearls of poverty. Rich, bending over his disgusting task, shuddered at the unorthodoxy of disapproving of anything Saint Francis had said, until he reassured himself with the thought that divine Providence had not blessed him with the Saint’s humility. There was a whiff of heresy about that, too, now he came to think about it. But he pulled himself together sturdily; his immortal soul could not really be endangered by his cleansing the seams of his breeches. De minimis non curat lex. He could argue a good case with Saint Peter on that point.

  These breeches were fiendishly difficult to clean; cold sea water was not the most helpful medium in which to attempt it. Boiling water, if he could be sure of not hardening the leather, would be far more efficacious. Or a hot knife-blade, run along the seams. But there was no chance of heating a knife-blade or of boiling water: the cooking fire on the stone hearth in the waist was out, and had not been lighted for — how many days? Five? Six? The days had been so much alike that he could not remember. The heat had been too great for the cooks to do their work, so the cooks had said, and the Admiral had believed them. The Admiral did not care whether his food was hot or cold, sweet or rotten; probably he did not even notice. Presumably he was now in his great cabin, dreaming over his charts, revolving fresh theories. Rich pointed out to himself that the Admiral, even if he were too gentle with the men, was hard enough on himself, and even though he was grasping in his efforts to adhere to the letter of that absurd agreement with the Crown, he was at least prepared to devote every thought in his head and every breath in his body to the furtherance of the objects of that agreement.

  This southerly course which they were following now — or would be following, if there were only a wind — would take them into a region of burning sun and brilliant moon; it had done so, for that matter, already. That would greatly increase their chances of obtaining precious metals. The golden glory of the sun and the silver brightness of the moon must obviously engender and stimulate the growth of gold and silver. The soil should be thick with them in this climate, when they reached land. The Portuguese had discovered more and more gold the farther south they pushed their exploration of Africa, which was a clear confirmation of the theory. Shiploads of gold and silver would make Spain rich and powerful. There would be content and plenty in the land. There would be bread on the table of every peasant, and the court of Their Highnesses would be the most brilliant in Christendom.

  The Admiral saw this plainly enough. It would be a much shorter cut than the tedious methods of trade. The other Indian islands he had discovered had obviously been pretty close to the dominions of the Great Khan. That wealthy region of ‘Cibao’ that the natives of Española talked about must most probably be the island of Japan, often referred to as ‘Cipangu’, which was known to lie adjacent to the coast of China. For that matter the Admiral had reached the confines of the Great Khan’s dominions in his previous voyage. The great land of Cuba at which he had touched — the name obviously recalled that of Kublai Khan, whom Marco Polo had encountered in his travels to the East. Rich was aware that more than one wild theorist had put forward the suggestion that Cuba was just another island, vaster than any yet known, larger even than Sicily, but the Admiral did not agree. The Admiral was much the more likely to be right. He had proved himself right over the tremendous question of the practicability of reaching the Indies by sailing westward, so that he was hardly likely to be wrong over the simple question as to whether Cuba was part of the mainland or not. Kublai Khan’s court was wealthy, and his empire wide; trade with him might produce benefits, but nothing nearly so great as winning great shiploads of gold without the tiresome necessity of trading.

  So Rich had thoroughly approved of this southerly course, which would carry them to the gold-bearing barbaric countries and keep them clear of Cuba and Japan and the other Chinese territories. He was only a tiny bit doubtful now, and that merely on account of practical details. To the north of them lay a region where the wind blew eternally from the eastward; he had sailed through it, he had observed the phenomenon with his own senses. Always from the eastern quarter, sometimes from the north of east, very occasionally from the south of east, that wind blew. If there was a region where there was always a wind blowing, was it not likely that there was another where the wind never blew? They had had days and days of calm. If they were to push farther south still they might reach an area where the calm would be eternal, where they would drift helpless until they died.

  Rich looked about hi
m. Westward the sky was beginning to display the marvelous reds and golds of another sunset. Overside was the deep clear blue of the sea, in which lay a long wreath of golden weed — a pleasing color contrast. A little flock of flying fish rose from the sea as he looked, and skimmed along, and vanished again; the dark furrows they left behind them on the glassy surface vanished as quickly. In the bows, black against the coloring sky, stood the lookout, his hand resting on the forestay. Aft stood the helmsman, the tiller idle at his side. Far astern, almost on the horizon, he could see the brown sail and the red sail of their consorts, wallowing, like them, helpless in the calm. Lovely, and yet sinister, was the way the scene appeared to Rich. Standing barelegged on the fore-deck of the Holy Name, his breeches in his hand, and with the sunset lowering round him, he felt a twinge of lonely fear.