Difference between revisions of "Hackley"

Latest revision as of 14:32, 9 November 2008

Character Profile[edit]

Biography[edit]

Hackley was one of the ten crew members chosen to accompany Temeraire and Laurence to Peking, along with Granby, Keynes, Riggs, Therrows, Dunne, Blythe, Martin, Willoughby and Digby. (Emily Roland and Peter Dyer also went, on George Staunton's advice. As they were children, they were not counted against the limit of ten set by Prince Yongxing.)

When the crew was buried in an avalanche in the Pamirs - inadvertently set off by Temeraire, when he used the Divine Wind to intimidate Arkady and his band of feral dragons - Hackley was one of the men who was dug up from underneath the snow "pale and still," along with Granby, Riggs and Dunne. Bathing in the hot springs in the ferals' cavern did them much good, but the riflemen were still not wholly recovered by the time the party reached Istanbul, being inclined to sneeze at inopportune moments.

In Istanbul, a Muslim city where women were generally veiled if not secluded entirely, Hackley seemed to follow Dunne's lead right into a series of misadventures involving women.

The final straw came when Dunne and Hackley were caught trying to sneak into the seraglio where the palace women were secluded. The customary sentence for this was death. Laurence managed to get the officers' lives spared by suggesting that since there were no disinterested witnesses to swear that Dunne and Hackley had actually seen the women - which it later turned out that they had - they ought to be given the benefit of the doubt and "only" flogged. In return, however, he was forced to accept that he had to do the same and give the benefit of the doubt to the Turks' feeble explanations as to the deaths of the British ambassador and the disappearance of the gold sent to pay for the dragon eggs.

As a result of this mess, Dunne and Hackley were turned out of the flight crew and flogged by the armourer, Mr. Pratt, although Laurence scanted a bit on the count of the strokes, which was nearer to forty than the fifty the sentence called for. Salyer, who had been on guard when Dunne and Hackley snuck off and who had only lately been made midwingman, was reduced back to ensign and "started" (caned) with a freshly cut switch.

Both Dunne and Hackley - only recently completely recovered from the avalanche - were ill for some time after the flogging, Hackley more severely so as he was slighter in build.