The Surgeon's Mate

by Patrick O'Brian

  The same minds had worked out their route and the details of their journey, and although he had seen what could be accomplished by efficient organization when urgent intelligence had to move fast, he had never experienced anything as smoothly effective as this. Only once, three miles beyond Villeneuve, was there the slightest delay, when a horse cast a shoe; otherwise they rolled across Picardy, rolled across Artois with never an unforeseen pause. They passed columns of troops, many of them mere boys, all marching north, long lines of cavalry remounts, a siege-train, ammunition and victualling waggons, field artillery; and every time the road was cleared well before they swept by.

  Stephen knew very well that most French victories had been founded on brilliant staff-work, and it was clear that the conspiracy included some eminent staff-officers; yet he sometimes felt that this perfection could not endure, that some senior general commanding an important post might require explanations and confirmation from Paris, or that some other faction that valued Johnson and his government should send after them or worse still use the semaphore telegraph whose towers he saw on every hill. But he was mistaken: they ran into Calais at high water, with the cartel, HMS Oedipus, in the harbour, ready to sail on the ebb; and there was even a moderate off-shore breeze.

  'You will have a comfortable voyage at least,' he said, for it had been agreed that d'Anglars should accompany him, if only to make everything doubly clear to his cousin Blacas and to the titular king. 'That ship, or rather brig, is a particularly fine sailer: a good, dry, weatherly sea-boat, as we say. Furthermore, the ocean is placid.'

  'I am glad of that,' said d'Anglars. 'The last time I crossed I was very dangerously ill. I was obliged to lie down.'

  Apart from smugglers, the Channel knew no vessels more discreet than these cartels; they moored in a discreet, shielded part of the harbour, and when they belonged to the Royal Navy, as did the Oedipus of course, they were commanded by unusually discreet captains, often quite senior men temporarily detached for the purpose. Jack, sitting in the window of the private house where they were waiting to embark, was therefore surprised to see William Babbington on the quarterdeck, obviously directing proceedings; for Babbington had served under him as a midshipman and a lieutenant, and although Jack knew he had been made commander into the captured Sylphide—Jack had in fact written many letters and stirred up his friends to that very effect—Babbington still seemed to him remarkably young for such a position.

  But young or not, Captain Babbington understood the meaning of the word discretion as well as any man in the service; and when his passengers, English and French, came aboard there was no hint of recognition in his correct, civil reception, no hint on either side. He directed a midshipman to take Captain Aubrey, Dr Maturin and the lady to his cabin, the foreign gentlemen to the gun-room: this being done, he looked fore and aft, and in a creditable imitation of Jack's quarterdeck voice he roared 'All hands unmoor ship.'

  The Oedipus cleared the wharf under forestaysail and jib, with her topsails on the cap; she hoisted home her yards in the fairway and ran past the north buoy, wafting very gently and discreetly through the crowd of fishing-boats and coming to the outer roads in a little over half an hour. Here Captain Babbington let fall his courses and some pretty severe remarks about the sloth of the midshipmen at the larboard gaskets, a sloth that foretold the ruin of the Navy within a very short lapse of time. He had just uttered this prophecy, which he had first heard from Jack at the age of twelve, when a tall shadow fell across the deck, and turning he saw the original prophet himself, looking nervous, apprehensive, uneasy, timid, a striking sight for one who had gone into action with Captain Aubrey as often as William Babbington.

  'Shall we go below, sir?' he asked, smiling uncertainly.

  'Why, I believe I shall take the air for a while,' said Jack, moving aft to the taffrail. 'It is rather hot down there.'

  'Carry on, Mr Somerville,' said Babbington, and he joined his former captain by the ensign-staff.

  'They are at it hammer and tongs,' said Jack in a low, private voice. 'Hammer and goddam tongs. They might have been married this twelvemonth and more.'

  'Dear me,' said Babbington, appalled.

  The yards were braced just so, the Oedipus was heading for Dover over a quiet, gently rippling sea, her deck was almost as steady as a table, and now that all was coiled down and pretty there was scarcely a sound but the wind in her rigging, the distant cry of gulls, and the water slipping down her side. They were standing not far from the cabin skylight, and in the comparative silence they distinctly heard the words, 'God's death, Maturin, what an obstinate stubborn pigheaded brute you are, upon my honour. You always were.'

  'Perhaps you would like to see our figurehead, sir,' said Babbington. 'It is a new one: in the Grecian taste, I believe.'

  Oedipus might well have been in the Grecian taste, if the Greeks had been much given to very thick paint, an insipid smirk, eyes fixed in a meaningless glare, and scarlet cheeks. The two captains stared at the image and after a while Jack said, 'I was never any great fist at the classics, but was there not something rather odd about his feet?'

  'I believe there was, sir. But fortunately they don't show, he being cut off at the waist.'

  'Though now I come to think of it, was it not his marriage, rather than his feet?'

  'Perhaps it was both, sir: they might go together. And I seem to recall something in Gregory's Polite Education to that effect.'

  Captain Aubrey pondered, staring at the dolphin-striker. 'I have it,' he cried. 'You are quite right: both marriage and feet. I remember the Doctor telling me the whole story when we lay alongside Jocasta in Rosia Bay. I do not mean the least fling at your figurehead, still less your brig, Babbington, but that family was not really quite the thing, you know. There were some very odd capers, and it ended unhappy. But then the relationships between men and women are often very odd, and I am afraid they often end unhappy. How do you find your martingales answer, led single like that?'

  In the cabin Diana said, 'Stephen, dear, how can you possibly expect any woman to marry you when you present it as a mere matter of expediency? As something forced upon her?'

  'I only said that Johnson was in Paris, that the English ports were closed against you as an enemy alien, and that you had no choice,' said Stephen, looking miserable, confused and upset. 'I have been trying to get that into your thick head this hour at least, Villiers.'

  'There—there you go again,' cried Diana. 'Surely you must know, surely you must feel that any woman, even a woman as battered as I am, must look for something more—more, what shall I say?—more romantic in an offer of marriage? Even if I were to marry you, which is totally inconceivable, I should never, never do so after such a grovelling, such an utterly mundane and businesslike proposal. It is a question of common good manners, or ordinary civility. Really, Maturin, I wonder at you.'

  'Yet indeed, Diana, I love you dearly,' said Stephen in a dejected tone, looking down.

  '. . . the whole point is that we save a bobstay,' said Babbington on the forecastle. His eye lifted to the upper rigging, and directing his voice aft he called, 'Mr Somerville, I believe we may set topgallantsails.'

  Bosun's piping, cries of 'Lay aloft—lay out—let fall, let fall,' and the Oedipus spread more canvas with a smooth celerity that warmed her commander's heart, conscious as he was of Jack Aubrey's gaze. The captains were back at their martingales and dolphin-strikers when a tiny shrill young gentleman, Babbington's sister's son, came running forward and said 'Uncle William, she wants you in the cabin.' Then recollecting himself and blushing he pulled off his hat and said 'If you please, sir, the lady in the cabin's compliments to Captain Babbington and would be glad of a word with him at his leisure. And Captain Aubrey too, sir, if you please.'

  They hurried aft: the marine sentry opened the door with a significant look—significant of what?—and they walked in. Babbington at once saw that his passengers were friends again: rather solemn, but strangely contented, holding hands
like a happy country pair. Instantly his spirits rose. He cried 'Oh Mrs Villiers, how delightful to see you! Lord, Doctor, how very welcome you are. What will you take? I have a whole crate of champagne. Tom! Tom, there. Rouse out the champagne.'

  'Captain Babbington, my dear,' said Stephen, 'when do you expect to be in Dover?'

  'Oh, in two or three hours, no more, with this breeze and tide. Why,' he said with a grin, 'was you to shin up to the maintruck, you would see the white cliffs from here.'

  'Then there is not a moment to lose. I have a service to beg.'

  'I shall be only too happy—delighted.'

  'I desire you to marry us.'

  'Very well, sir,' said Babbington. 'Tom! Tom there. The prayerbook.'

  'William,' said Jack in an aside, 'do you know the drill?'

  'Oh yes, sir. You always taught us to be prepared for the unexpected, you remember: it comes before the burial-service. Thankee, Tom: now pass the word for my clerk, will you? Ah, Mr Adam: the log and the proper certificates for a marriage, if you please. Note the time, and stand by to give the responses. Now, sir, who gives the lady away?'

  A moment's hesitation, and then Jack, catching Diana's eye, cried 'I do, as next of kin. And most uncommon happy and honoured to do so,' he added.

  'Then you stand here, sir, if you please,' said Babbington, taking his station behind the mahogany table and checking pens, paper and inkpot. 'Doctor, have you a ring?

  'I have,' said Stephen, producing the amethyst.

  Babbington placed them, opened the book, and in a clear sea-officer's voice, without the least hint of affectation or levity, he read the service through. Jack listened to the familiar, intensely moving words: at 'till death us do part' his eyes clouded; and when it came to Do you Stephen and Do you Diana his mind ran back so strongly to his own wedding that Sophie might have been there at his side.

  'I now pronounce you man and wife,' said Babbington, closing the book; and still with the same gravity, but with great happiness showing through it, 'Mrs Maturin, dear Doctor, I give you all the joy in the world.'

  The Jack Aubrey Novels:

  an editorial report

  RICHARD OLLARD

  PATRICK O'BRIAN has long established himself as a writer whose brilliance commends the acclaim of the critics and whose sheer readability has brought all his historical novels into print in both paperback and hardback on both sides of the Atlantic.

  I say 'long' with a certain authority. I accepted with delight the first novel of the series, Master and Commander, more than twenty years ago. Fifteen novels later I take no less pleasure and pride than I did on its first publication. The manuscript was offered to me by the agent Richard Scott Simon, who told me that it had been jointly commissioned by an English and an American publishing house (who shall be nameless) and neither wished to proceed. I succeeded in communicating my enthusiasm to my sales and publicity colleagues and sent a proof copy to Mary Renault, then at the height of her fame as the novelist of ancient Athens (The Last of the Wine) and of Alexander the Great. She came up with a splendid recommendation, even more splendidly amplified for the second novel Post Captain: 'Master and Commander' raised almost dangerously high expectations; Post Captain triumphantly surpasses them. Mr O'Brian does not just have the chief qualifications of a first-class historical novelist, he has them all.'

  And Sir Francis Chichester, fresh from his single-handed voyage round the world, described it as 'the best sea-story I have ever read'.

  These two judgements contain the core of what everyone has since enjoyed and admired. O'Brian is a first class storyteller. He writes about the sea and ships with a power no other author now commands. To all this he adds a breadth of learning and an imaginative sympathy with his period that never gets in the way of these first two qualities.

  The greatest of all British naval victories, the Battle of Trafalgar, sealed in the hour of triumph by the death in action of the greatest of British admirals, was fought on 21 October 1805. Every year since then Trafalgar Night has been celebrated in the ships and shore establishments of the Royal Navy. On that night Patrick O'Brian and I look forward to meeting each other at a dinner of naval historians which is generally held at the Garrick Club in London, though we have once been permitted to meet in the great cabin of Nelson's flagship now preserved in her own dry dock at Portsmouth. He is present there as a widely recognised authority on the Navy of Nelson's day. Scholarship underpins his evocation of that long-vanished world of wooden ships and pig-tailed sailors. And his scholarship, like every thing else about him, is individual and independent. He has ploughed his own furrow, clear of schools, universities and cliques.

  The best books about sea life under sail have been written by authors whose interests stretched beyond the world of salt water. Two Years Before the Mast, that compellingly readable classic by a Boston intellectual with its marvellous double take of the Californian coast before and after the Gold Rush, owes its sharpness of perception to the fact that the whole world of spars and sheets, of masts and stays, was unfamiliar to its writer. He saw them with a fresh and wondering eye and communicates his wonder to the reader.

  So, it rapidly becomes apparent, it is with the series of novels that Patrick O'Brian has written set in the Navy of Nelson and beyond to the war of 1812. Not only are the minute details of seamanship observed and described with the exactitude of an expert: so is every other aspect of the world in which Britain's two great wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France were fought. The politics, the language, the recreations, the diet, the furniture, all the surface externals, are perfectly in period. So, too, are the ideas and the manners, a much more difficult and subtle achievement. If the characters from one of Jane Austen's novels were to encounter those from one of Patrick O'Brian's, they would have no difficulty in communicating with each other. They might not take to each other. Jane Austen's naval officers, drawn no doubt from her two naval brothers and their friends, might have though Jack Aubrey, Patrick O'Brian's central character, somewhat coarse-fibred, but they would have recognised each other as messmates.

  Jane Austen's business with her naval characters is exclusively with their social and domestic relationships. She never—perish the thought!—describes a battle or concerns herself with the squalor and brutishness of a seaman's life. In fact there are no seamen in her books, only sea officers. Patrick O'Brian's novels on the other hand are centred on ship life. The handling and fighting of the vessel, her preservation from the dangers of the sea and the violence of the enemy, require the skill and courage of the prime seamen who race aloft, who fire the guns, who man the boats, as well as the expert knowledge of such specialists as the gunner, the bosun, the carpenter and the quartermaster who would not have messed in the wardroom. These figures are as conspicuous in O'Brian's books as they would have been in real life. Their attitudes, prejudices and antecedents are as faithfully rendered as those of their social superiors.

  Neither, it must be stressed, is romanticised. The officers are, generally speaking, ambitious professionals in a highly competitive profession. The Royal Navy in Nelson's day offered a career open to the talents to an extent that, in Britain at any rate, no other profession did. Few of the officers who rose to the top were aristocrats or the sons of the rich. For tunes were made, peerages bestowed, estates and honours were the reward of success. Failure and feebleness were correspondingly swept aside. Even at the height of the war there were far more officers than there were ships to command: and in peacetime the disproportion was vast. The money to be earned came not from an officer's salary but from the prizes taken and the enemy warships captured. Prize money was the great incentive, an incentive in which everyone from admiral to common seaman had a share, though of course a far from equal one. The officers, and above all the captain, came off best. But the degree of mutual dependence was an important feature of the system. A captain needed efficient officers, alert and active seamen, a taut ship, if he were to catch his prey. The ship's company wanted a dari
ng (and lucky) commander if there was to be anything to show for their efforts.

  Of course this is not to deny that Jack Aubrey and his fellows in fiction, or Nelson and his band of brothers in historical fact, were actuated by patriotism and personal courage. Obviously they were. Beyond that, both officers and men felt a passionate pride in the service.

  Come, cheer up, my lads, 'tis to glory we steer.

  To add something more to this wonderful year.

  Heart of oak are our ships. Heart of oak are our men.

  We've beat them before and we'll beat them again.

  This was not mere tub-thumping but an axiom that had been put to the proof. Any understanding or portrayal of the Royal Navy in its classic age must begin from an acceptance of these two powerful drives, personal ambition and team spirit—or esprit de corps as the French more elegantly put it.

  Thus though O'Brian does not romanticise his hero, showing him to be lecherous, gluttonous and fiercely keen to make money, he is fully alive to his romantic side. Jack speaks with veneration of Nelson, who once asked him to pass the salt when they were dining at the same table. He rejoices generously and without a tincture of self-interest in the success of his brother officers even when it means that they are passing him in the race for promotion and command. And his own love of adventure and his own fighting instinct lead him time and again into hazardous actions from which the hope of personal profit is either remote or non-existent. To get at the enemy wherever he can be found was the first principle of Nelsonic conduct.