The Golden Ocean

by Patrick O'Brian

  ‘And you measure its shadow,’ said Elliot, seeing the English garden with the shade of the steeple running across it as far as the red brick wall. And you find the stick’s shadow is just six feet long. Then you pace out the shadow of your tree, and you find there is a hundred and twenty feet of it. So how high is the tree?’

  Peter thought for a long while. ‘It’s a desperate tall one,’ he said, doubtfully, ‘to be throwing a shadow like that, unless it was late in the evening.’

  ‘No: listen,’ said Elliot, ‘your stick’s shadow is six feet long, and the stick’s height is four feet. Your tree’s shadow is a hundred and twenty feet long. Then how high is the tree?’

  ‘Eighty feet,’ said Peter, with a slow grin of intelligence spreading across his face. ‘I said it was a desperate tall one.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Elliot. ‘But why is it so?’

  ‘The Rule of Three, perhaps?’ suggested Peter.

  ‘No. It is because the proportions of the triangles are the same, always. Here are your triangles …’

  The lesson went on. Elliot was not a particularly gay companion—he had had too much of his youth battered out of him by heavy care and responsibility for that—but he understood the problem thoroughly, and he had the gift of making it comprehensible, of passing on his knowledge; which Mr Thomas had not, nor the writer of Peter’s manual. Added to that he was patient, good-natured and steady: so when the Centurion crossed the Tropic of Cancer, Peter, who was not a stupid fellow at all, though a trifle mercurial, was aware of it by his own unaided calculation.

  ‘There,’ said Mr Thomas, with qualified approval, looking over his shoulder. ‘I knew you could do it. Your former reckonings were either wanton idleness, Mr Palafox, or pure vice. If not a combination of the two. Now, gentlemen, it can hardly have escaped your notice that somewhere between the tropics lies the equinoctial line.’

  ‘Just half-way,’ said Peter, with conscious pride.

  ‘Mr Palafox sets us all right,’ said the schoolmaster. ‘And that being the case, we may expect to enter the zone of equatorial calms very shortly. There, no doubt, we shall have the pleasure of towing the ship in intervals of calling all hands to trim sail; for the doldrums, young gentlemen, is the sailor’s purgatory, and they will put an end to your idleness, destructive of morals and discipline alike.’

  ‘Are they very horrible, sir?’ asked Peter.

  ‘Greasy horrible,’ replied the master, with satisfaction, ‘with scum floating on the sea and miasmas that rot the living flesh from off your bones.’

  ‘Perhaps they will not be so bad,’ said Keppel—for Mr Thomas was in a good humour—’After all, the Trades were not what was expected, were they, sir?’

  ‘They will be bad enough, Mr Keppel, I assure you. I do not expect above half the midshipmen’s berth to survive: oh, how sorry we shall be; and how the work of the ship will suffer.’

  ‘But the trade winds were not steady, were they, sir? Why was that, sir?’

  ‘You may put it down to the cursed malignity of fate if you wish, Mr Keppel. It is all part of the same misfortune that has dogged this ship from the moment she was commissioned. It began early, with the coming aboard of a bunch of midshipmen, each one more grossly ignorant of his profession than the last. I have never seen the like in five and thirty years of sea—look at Mr Bailey’s fadge of a reckoning here. It is all part and parcel of the decline of the service. This modern Navy, with its fine uniforms and frills and pampering of the lower deck like cossets, does not produce midshipmen like the alert, intelligent, seamanlike youngsters—now, Mr Palafox, what’s to do?’

  ‘I was only putting on my coat, sir.’

  ‘What do you want with a coat in this heat? Don’t you see the deck quite drawn with the sun?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Peter, shivering.

  ‘Then it is great nonsense to say you are cold. However, the equator will warm you up, ha, ha. And it will comfort Mr Bailey, too. He will find it is a great comfort and a great help to his navigation to see the line drawn across the sea, with all the degrees marked plain in red.’

  But the sun blaring down from the height of the sky brought no warmth into Peter for the rest of the lesson, nor for the rest of the day. The breathless hot night could not get the ice out of him, either. The next day it was worse, and so it went on as the ship ran south. For days and days he lay shivering in his hammock, with blankets piled over him. His wits went astray for most of the time, and he raved in delirium: sometimes he searched and searched through a crimson sea for the names of the Spanish ships; sometimes he worked navigational problems with endless anxiety over and over again; sometimes he was at home, but the misfortunes of Elliot’s father had accompanied him, and everything was a confusion of inexplicable sorrow; sometimes he was on his journey with FitzGerald, but they never progressed, though the time raced by as they struggled vainly with a shadowy opposition of dreams; and sometimes he was standing by FitzGerald’s chair, as he had done for all those smoky lamp-lit hours in the Indiaman off Funchal while FitzGerald played with the Company’s officers for shocking stakes—but this time FitzGerald lost instead of winning, lost all the time, and staking all his credit and his future in one last desperate game, lost that, and turned his cold, hard gambler’s face on Peter with bitter enmity. Yet now and then he was conscious, and he had a confused recollection of different events, separate in time and often with neither beginning nor end. One was the voice of the surgeon.

  ‘So you have a calenture too, my young friend. Well, a slime-draught will set you on your feet directly. See that he has it three times a day.’

  Then it was the surgeon again.

  ‘No, sir, I am afraid the poor lad has a putrid fever—the same as most of the others on my list.’

  ‘Is it bad, Mr Woodfall? What do you think of his state?’ That was the Commodore’s voice, anxious and strangely resonant.

  ‘Well, sir—it is early to say. We have buried thirty-six, counting the three today. But he is young. However, I would not care to promise a recovery.’

  ‘You will do all that is feasible, Mr Woodfall. If there is anything in my stores that can be of any use—wine or …’

  Then it was the infernal noise of hammering that rang through his head and somebody told him that air-scuttles were being cut in the ship: and sometimes he heard snatches of the funeral service on deck—Mr Walter’s grave voice saying ‘… and so we commit his body to the deep,’ and the splash.

  There were many sounds that came through—the piping of the captains up the side, hushed but excited voices speaking of a chase, the thunder of gunnery practice, often repeated, and the thousand noises of the working of the ship. Ransome’s hoarse whisper, ‘I tell you what, cully, if you croak, I’ll rip out the flaming saw-bones’ lights and cram ’em down his throat.’ But most often it was Sean, talking in the soft language of their home, quietly singing the ancient songs, the weaving-chant and the rowing-song, that he had heard before he could even talk or stand.

  But the sickness, the breaking head, the chasing nightmares of delirium came to an end at last; and they moved him, very weak and poorly, up out of the fetid stench and heat of the ’tween-decks to the upper-deck, where he lay in the clean morning air, swinging in his hammock under the blue sky and the white sails while the warm south-east wind sang in the rigging and the Centurion ran with flowing sheets westward under Capricorn. All down the waist of the ship other hammocks swung in exact time with the easy roll and pitch: not far from a quarter of the ship’s company was there or still below, too sick to be moved.

  ‘Mr Palafox, I am heartily glad to see you looking better,’ said the master, appearing by his side.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Peter, hurriedly removing the lemon from his mouth—both he and Sean had a passion for lemons, and had laid in a store at Madeira.

  ‘I have often been below to see you,’ said Mr Blew, ‘and so has Mr Saunders. But you were in a sad way—raving like a lost soul. On one oc
casion you addressed the first lieutenant as an ill-faced, mangy son of a Rural Dean, and on another you asked me whether my mother knew that I was out. This was a very high pitch of delirium, Mr Palafox. But, however, your intellectuals are now restored to at least their former pitch, eh? Ha, ha.’

  Peter smiled, but palely, for the good man’s laugh thundered in his ear, and the horny hand patting him on the shoulder jarred him from head to foot.

  ‘So I have brought you our position, like if you were an Admiral already,’ continued the master, giving him a slip of paper.

  ‘Thank you, sir, very much indeed,’ said Peter. ‘24° 10’ S., 38° 52’ W. But, sir,’ he cried, ‘I have missed the equator. Oh, Mr Blew!’

  ‘Dear me, yes,’ said the master. ‘We crossed it long ago, in about 28° West. Why, we have been in soundings these five or six days past. But never mind, my boy,’ he said, seeing Peter’s disappointment, ‘you will certainly cross it again, if we survive the passage of the Horn.’

  Mr Blew left him; the officer of the watch passed by with a kind word, and some of the men of Peter’s division grinned hairily into the hammock, with signs meant to encourage him; but it was a busy time of the ship’s day, and Peter had sunk into a delicious half-sleep when the cry of ‘Land ho’ from the mast-head galvanised him and the entire ship’s company. There was an instant darting into the rigging: many of the hammocks—all, indeed, that were filled by sea-men—writhed impotently: and again the hail floated down. ‘Land ho, four points—five points—on the starboard bow.’

  It was six weeks since Madeira had disappeared beneath the horizon, six weeks of unbroken sea, and everybody in the ship was passionately eager to see the landfall. The quarter-deck was crowded, and even the land officers discussed the matter, earnestly peering through telescopes in as nautical a fashion as they could manage.

  Very soon, unable to see anything but the backs of Marines and idlers, Peter had fretted himself into a smoking rage.

  ‘It’s Brazil,’ said Keppel, running by.

  ‘I can’t see,’ cried Peter, in a weak scream.

  It appeared that Keppel had not heard, for he did not stop, and Peter fumed some more, glaring malignantly at the impervious red backs of the soldiers. But two minutes later a block rushed silently down a foot from his head and he heard Keppel’s voice in the rigging. ‘Make fast and sway him up,’ said Keppel.

  ‘Make fast it is,’ said Ransome, hurriedly and furtively taking several turns round Peter’s body to lash him into his hammock. ‘For to stop you falling out, cock,’ he explained in a secret wheeze at Peter’s ear. ‘Because why? There’s a dozen hammer-heads alongside, ravening like a charity school. The bollo-sharks prefer the leeward side, for the dead ’uns,’ he added, as a piece of information calculated to gratify an invalid. ‘Here he comes—handsomely, now.’ And Peter felt himself rise: he mounted until he reached a strange position, sloping at forty-five degrees from the horizontal with his head uppermost, and there he hung, something like a swaddled baby, placidly regarding the purple land that now stretched long across the lowest sky, more fixed than any cloud. It was neatly done, while every eye in the ship was turned elsewhere, and for a long while it remained undetected, long enough for a slight return of the fever, aided by the excitement, to make Peter’s head wonderfully light, and to people the distant land with an interesting host of creeping elephants. However, one striking irregularity in the orderly row of hammocks was bound to attract unfavourable notice sooner or later.

  ‘Who is in that hammock up there?’ asked the Commodore.

  ‘Which, sir?’ came the first lieutenant’s anxious voice: then much more loudly. ‘Mr Palafox, what are you doing there?’

  ‘Admiring the New World, sir,’ called Peter. ‘An’t it pure?’

  ‘Who presumed to raise that hammock?’

  ‘Loving hands unseen,’ cried Peter, giggling feebly. ‘Nautical enterprise, cock.’

  ‘Mr Palafox, you will hear from me.’

  ‘Liberty for ever,’ cried Peter, freeing one arm and waving it. ‘Three times huzzay,’ and he madly flung a half-sucked lemon straight at the quarter-deck.

  ‘Sir,’ said Mr Walter’s agitated voice in the awful hush, ‘sir, consider—the boy is out of his mind. Fevered, sir.’

  ‘He’ll be out of his skin directly,’ said the first lieutenant.

  ‘Mr Saunders,’ said the Commodore crisply, ‘I should like that hammock trimmed at once, if you please.’

  The squadron lay at anchor in the harbour of Santa Catarina, or St Catherine’s, as they all called it, on the analogy of St Helen’s and by way of showing their independence—no truck with silly foreign names. Christmas had come and gone: a strange Christmas, with ninety-five degrees of humid heat, and a feast of boiled parrots and something that was alleged to have been a monkey. Peter was still nominally on the sick-list, but he was sufficiently recovered to make a sad beast of himself; and in spite of the surgeon’s prognostication of a tenesmus, his iron digestion, trained on Rectory cooking for years, surmounted parrot without a murmur—indeed, he appeared to thrive upon it, for after a very little while he deserted the hospital tent and haunted the Centurion, where every inch of standing rigging was being set up afresh for their voyage round the Horn.

  It was on the second day of returning to the ship that he was the solitary witness of Ransome’s joke. Ransome was in charge of a party sending up preventer-shrouds at the mainmast. ‘It’s a preventer-shroud,’ he explained to Peter, ‘for to prevent ’er from rolling the mast by the board.’

  After some little time he looked up from his work with a startled look, which was succeeded by a gleam of delighted surprise. ‘That was a joke,’ he cried, hardly able to believe it yet. ‘I made a joke. I said, “It’s a preventer-shroud, to prevent ‘er from rolling her mast by the board,” come heavy weather. To prevent ’er. A preventer to prevent ’er. Do you smoke it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Peter. ‘Ha, ha.’

  ‘Oh, I wish your mate was here,’ said Ransome, ‘the other Teague, I mean—now don’t get into a mother, no offence, cully. He dearly loved a joke. I must tell the …’

  He hurried off to tell the working-party. ‘Hor, hor,’ said the working-party, but rather shortly; they did not really believe that this flight of wit was spontaneous. They were convinced that it had been prepared well in advance, probably from a book; and Hairy Amos gave it as his opinion that ‘Mr Ransome, though a tolerable good seaman, was trying to fly too high, by half.”

  It was not only the fascination of Ransome’s jokes (for Ransome, once launched on his career, strained every limb to make another) that drew Peter aboard, nor even the exceedingly interesting work in hand; but in fact the island was a dismal place. There were the hospital tents, with sick and dying men—they buried forty Centurions alone—and then in the stifling heat, the morning fogs, the evening mosquitoes in their clouds, followed by the nocturnal sand-flies, the baffling and sticky impenetrability of the jungle, rank unhealthy jungle hemming in the few paths; and all this did somewhat counteract the charm of the brilliant macaws in every tree, the monkeys peering down, the wonderful fruit that the few inhabitants whom the grasping and avaricious governor would allow to trade with them brought to the guarded edge of the encampment. All these things weighed heavily against the fascination of the New World—the high land of Brazil (High Brazil, they called it) could be seen from the island—and the delights of the low latitudes, like the fire-flies and the fantastic flowers: and after reflection Peter decided that he liked the Tropics, but not very much. And then again, with so much doing all around him and he feeling so very much better, he felt left out and disagreeably like a shirker.

  The squadron was busy indeed. The Tryal was hove right down—the sloop’s tall masts had been giving endless trouble—and every ship rang with the blunt sound of the caulkers’ hammers; there were miles and miles of rigging to be rove, great guns to be struck down into the hold to reduce rolling, an infinity of vital tasks, quit
e apart from the wooding, watering and victualling of the ships. They were short-handed, as they always had been, and men were dying fast of tropical disease: everything must be done at great speed, not only to leave such an unhealthy place, and not only to reach the Horn before the onset of the austral winter, but to be at sea in the highest possible state of preparedness in case of a meeting with the Spanish squadron.

  ‘They mount three hundred and four guns to our combined two hundred and thirty-six,’ said Elliot, ‘and that gives them sixty-eight more than us, quite apart from their extra weight of metal—the Guipuscoa has thirty-sixes in her lower tier.’

  ‘But they are only Spaniards,’ observed Peter.

  ‘Dagoes,’ said Preston.

  ‘There you go again,’ said Ransome, ‘calling names. How can you be so simple? Don’t you know they have been rounding the Horn and sailing the South Sea these hundred year and more, where we never been? You got to be a right seaman to do that, ain’t you? It is just like these farming coves by land. They say, “Oh, it is only a parcel of Spaniards,” they say. “Our men beat them, in course.” So you get no thanks because it is only natural, and if you are beat because you was out-gunned and out-manned and you could not open your gun-deck ports, which we swim too low to open ’em now in a hatful of wind, and the Spaniard has a tumble-home as high as a first-rate with all his guns in play—why, then they are down on you, these City coves and these farmers, like a hundred of bricks, and call you a pitiful fellow. No. You can say whatever you like,’ he continued obstinately, although no one had contradicted him, ‘but the Spaniards can build ships and sail ’em and fight ’em too.’

  ‘It stands to reason they can,’ said Elliot, ‘and in the wardroom they say there is a correspondence between the governor of this place and the Spaniards on the mainland: so they will know our force now, if they did not know it before; and they will take their measures accordingly.’

  ‘You can say what you like,’ repeated Ransome, shaking his head, ‘but if the Spaniards can’t build ships and sail ’em and fight ’em too, you may call me Jack Pudding.’