H.M.S. Surprise

by Patrick O'Brian

  His remarks upon the efficiency required in a man-of-war were delivered in little more than a conversational tone, but they were not inaudible, and when he emerged after having looked at the holds, cable-tiers and fore-peak, the frigate's people had an air of mixed delight and apprehension. They were charmed that the bosun had copped it—all of them, that is to say, who would not be spending their holy Sunday afternoon in 'rousing them all out, sir, every last storm-stays'l, every drabbler, every bonnet: do you hear me, now?'—but apprehensive lest their own sins he discovered, lest they cop it next; for this skipper was a bleeding tartar, mate, a right hard horse.

  However, he returned to the quarterdeck without biting or savaging anyone in his path, peered up between the awnings at the pyramid of canvas, still just drawing, and said to Mr Hervey, 'We will rig church, if you please.'

  Chairs and benches appeared on the quarterdeck; the cutlass-rack, decently covered with signal flags, became a reading-desk; the ship's bell began to toll. The seamen flocked aft; the officers and the civilians of the envoy's suite stood at their places, waiting for Mr Stanhope, who walked slowly to his chair on the captain's right, propped on the one side by his chaplain and on the other by his secretary. He looked grey and wan among all these mahogany-red faces, almost ghost-like: he had never wanted to go to Kampong; he had not even known where Kampong was until they gave him this mission; and he hated the sea. But now that the Surprise was sailing on the gentle breeze her roll was far less distressing—hardly perceptible so long as he kept his eyes from the rail and the horizon beyond—and the familiar Church of England service was a comfort to him among all these strange intricacies of rope, wood and canvas and in this intolerably heated unbreathable air. He followed its course with an attention as profound as that of the seamen; he joined in the well-known psalms in a faint tenor, drowned by the deep thunder of the captain on his left and yet sweetly prolonged in the remote, celestial voice of the Welsh lookout high on the fore-royal jacks. But when the parson announced the text of his sermon, Mr Stanhope's mind wandered far away to the coolness of his parish church at home, the dim light of sapphires in the east window, the tranquillity of the family tombs, and he closed his eyes.

  He wandered alone. The moment the Reverend Mr White said, 'The sixth verse of Psalm 75: promotion cometh neither from the east, nor from the west, nor from the south,' the flagging devotion of the midshipmen to leeward and of the lieutenants to windward revived, sprang to vivid life. They sat forward in attitudes of tense expectancy; and Jack, who might be called upon to preach himself, if he were to command a ship without a chaplain, reflected, 'A flaming good text, upon my word.'

  Yet when at length it appeared that promotion cameth not from the north either, as the sharper midshipmen had supposed, but rather from a course of conduct that Mr White proposed to describe under ten main heads, they slowly sank back; and when even this promotion was found to be not of the present world, they abandoned him altogether in favour of reflections upon their dinner, their Sunday dinner, the plum-duff that was simmering under the equatorial sun with no more than a glowing cinder to keep it on the boil. They glanced up at the sails, flapping now as the breeze died away: they pondered on the likelihood of a studdingsail being put over the side, to swim in. 'If I can square old Babbington,' thought Callow, who had also been invited to dine in the gun-room at two o'clock, 'I shall get two dinners. I can dart below the moment we have shot the sun, and—'

  'On deck there,' came from the sky. 'On deck there. Sail ho!'

  'Where away?' called Jack, as the chaplain broke off.

  'Two points on the starboard bow, sir.'

  'Keep her away, Davidge,' said Jack to the man at the wheel, who, though in the midst of the congregation, was not of it, and who had never opened his mouth for hymn, psalm, response or prayer. 'Carry on, Mr White, if you please: I beg your pardon.'

  Looks darted to and fro across the quarterdeck—wild surmise, intense excitement. Jack felt extreme moral pressure building up all round him, but, apart from a quick glance at his watch, he remained immovable, listening to the chaplain with his head slightly on one side, grave, attentive.

  'Tenthly and lastly,' said Mr White, speaking faster.

  Below, in the airy shadowed empty berth-deck, Stephen walked up and down, reading the chapter on scurvy in Blane's Diseases of Seamen: he heard the hail, paused, paused again, and said to the cat, 'How is this? The cry of a sail and no turmoil, no instant activity? What is afoot?' The cat pursed its lips. Stephen reopened his book and read in it until he heard the two-hundredfold 'Amen' above his head.

  On deck the church was disappearing in the midst of a universal excited buzz—glances at the captain, glances over the hammock-cloths towards the horizon, where a flash of white could be seen on the rise. The chairs and benches were hurried below, the hassocks turned back to wads for the great guns, the cutlasses resumed their plain Old Testament character, but since the first nine heads of Mr White's discourse had taken a long, long time, almost till noon itself, sextants and quadrants already came tumbling up before the prayer-books had vanished. The sun was close to the zenith, and this was nearly the moment to take his altitude. The quarterdeck awning was rolled back, the pitiless naked light beat down; and as the master, his mates, the midshipmen, the first lieutenant and the captain took their accustomed stations for this high moment, the beginning of the naval day, they had no more shadow than a little pool of darkness at their feet. It was a solemn five minutes, particularly for the midshipmen—their captain insisted upon accurate observation—and yet no one seemed to care greatly about the sun: no one, until Stephen Maturin, walking up to Jack, said, 'What is this I hear about a strange sail?'

  'Just a moment,' said Jack, stepping to the quarterdeck bulwark, raising his sextant, bringing the sun down to the horizon and noting his reading on the little ivory tablet. 'Sail? Oh, that is only St Paul's Rocks, you know. They will not run away. If this breeze don't die on us, you will see 'em quite close after dinner—prodigiously curious—gulls, boobies, and so on.'

  The news instantly ran through the ship—rocks, not ships; any God-damned lubber as had travelled farther than Margate knew St Paul's Rocks—and all hands returned to their keen expectation of dinner, which followed immediately after the altitude. The cooks of all the messes stood with their wooden kids near the galley; the mate of the hold began the mixing of the grog, watched with intensity by the quartermasters and the purser's steward; the smell of rum mingled with that of cooking and eddied about the deck; saliva poured into a hundred and ninety-seven mouths; the bosun stood with his call poised on the break of the forecastle. On the gangway the master lowered his sextant, walked aft to Mr Hervey and said, 'Twelve o'clock, sir: fifty-eight minutes north.'

  The first lieutenant turned to Jack, took off his hat, and said, 'Twelve o'clock, sir, if you please, and fifty-eight minutes north.'

  Jack turned to the officer of the watch and said, 'Mr Nicolls, make it twelve.'

  The officer of the watch called out to the mate of the watch, 'Make it twelve.'

  The mate of the watch said to the quartermaster, 'Strike eight bells'; the quartermaster roared at the Marine sentry, 'Turn the glass and strike the bell!' And at the first stroke Nicolls called along the length of the ship to the bosun, 'Pipe to dinner.'

  The bosun piped, no doubt, but little did the quarterdeck hear of it, for the clash of mess-kids, the roaring of the cooks, the tramp of feet and the confused din of the various messes banging their plates. In this weather the men dined on deck, among their guns, each mess fixing itself as accurately as possible above its own table below, and so Jack led Stephen into his cabin.

  'What did you think of the people?' he asked.

  'You were quite right,' said Stephen. 'It is scurvy. All my authorities agree—weakness, diffused muscular pain, petechia, tender gums, ill breath—and M'Alister has no doubt of it. He is an intelligent fellow; has seen many cases. I have gone into the matter, and I find that nearly all the men
affected come from the Racoon. They were months at sea before being turned over to us.'

  'So that is where the mischief lies,' cried Jack. 'Of course. But you will be able to put them right. Oh yes, you will set them up directly.'

  'I wish I could share your confidence; I wish I could feel persuaded that our lime-juice were not sophisticated. Tell me, is there anything green grows upon those rocks of yours?'

  'Never a blade, never a single blade,' said Jack. 'And no water, either.'

  'Well,' said Stephen, drawing up his shoulders. 'I shall do my best with what we have.'

  'I am sure you will, my dear Stephen,' cried Jack, flinging off his coat and with it part of his care. He had an unlimited faith in Stephen's powers; and although he had seen a ship's company badly hit by the disease, with hardly enough hands to win the anchor or make sail, let alone fight the ship, he thought of the forties, of the great western gales far south of the line, with an easier mind. 'It is a great comfort to me to have you aboard: it is like sailing with a piece of the True Cross.'

  'Stuff, stuff,' said Stephen peevishly. 'I do wish you would get that weak notion out of your mind. Medicine can do very little; surgery less. I can purge you, bleed you, worm you at a pinch, set your leg or take it off, and that is very nearly all. What could Hippocrates, Galen, Rhazes, what can Blanc, what can Trotter do for a carcinoma, a lupus, a sarcoma?' He had often tried to eradicate Jack's simple faith; but Jack had seen him trepan the gunner of the Sophie, saw a hole in his skull and expose the brain; and Stephen, looking at Jack's knowing smile, his air of civil reserve, knew that he had not succeeded this time, either. The Sophies, to a man, had known that if he chose Dr Maturin could save anyone, so long as the tide had not turned; and Jack was so thoroughly a seaman that he shared nearly all their beliefs, though in a somewhat more polished form. He said, 'What do you say to a glass of Madeira before we go to the gun-room? I believe they have killed their younger pig for us, and Madeira is a capital foundation for pork.'

  Madeira did very well as a foundation, burgundy as an accompaniment, and port as a settler; though all would have been better if they had been a little under blood-heat. 'How long the human frame can withstand this abuse,' thought Stephen, looking round the table, 'remains to be seen.' He was eating biscuit rubbed with garlic himself, and he had drunk thin cold. black coffee, on grounds both of theory and personal practice; but as he looked round the table he was obliged to admit that so far the frames were supporting it tolerably well. Jack, with a deep stratum of duff upon a couple of pounds of swine's flesh and root-vegetables, was perhaps a little nearer apoplexy than usual, but the bright blue eyes in his scarlet face were not suffused—there was no immediate danger. The same could be said for the fat Mr Hervey, who had eaten and drunk himself out of his habitual constraint: his round face was like the rising sun, supposing the sun to wrinkle with merriment. All the faces there, except for Nicolls's, were a fine red, but Hervey's outshone the rest. There was an attaching simplicity about the first lieutenant; no striving contention, no pretence, no sort of aggression. How would such a man behave in hand-to-hand action? Would his politeness (and Hervey was very much the gentleman) put him at a fatal disadvantage? In any event, he was quite out of place here, poor fellow; far more suitable for a parsonage or a fellowship. He was the victim of innumerable naval connections, an influential family full of admirals whose summum bonum was a flag and who by means of book-time and every other form of decent corruption meant to impel him into command at the earliest possible age. He had passed for lieutenant before a board of his grandfather's protégés, who gravely wrote that they had examined 'Mr Hervey . . . who appears to be twenty years of age. He produceth Certificates . . . of his Diligence and Sobriety; he can splice, knot, reef a sail, work a Ship in sailing, shift his Tides, keep a Reckoning of a Ship's Way by Plane Sailing and Mercator; observe by Sun or Star, and find the Variation of the Compass, and is qualified to do the Duty of an able Seaman and Midshipman'—all lies, but for the mathematical part, since he had almost no real sea-going experience. He would be made commander as soon as they reached his uncle, the admiral on the East India station; and a few months later he would be an anxious, ineffectual, diffident post-captain. He and the purser would have been happier if they had changed places; Bowes, the purser, had been unable to go to sea as a boy, but being enamoured of the naval life (his brother was a captain) he had bought a purser's place, and in spite of his club-foot he had distinguished himself in several desperate cutting-out expeditions. He was always on deck, understood the manoeuvres perfectly, and prided himself on sailing a boat; he knew a great deal about the sea, and although he was not a particularly good purser he was an honest one: an uncommon bird. Pullings was much as he had always been, a thin, amiable, loose-limbed youth, delighted to be a lieutenant (his highest ambition), delighted to be in the same ship as Captain Aubrey: how did he manage to remain so tubular, eating with the thoughtless avidity of a wolf? Harrowby, the master: a broad, spade-shaped face set in a smile—he was smiling now, with his wide mouth open at the corners, the middle closed. It gave an impression of falsity; perhaps unfairly, for although the master was an ignorant, confident man there might be no conscious duplicity there. No teeth. Fair receding hair worn cropped; a vast domed forehead, ordinarily pale, now red and beaded with sweat. An indifferent navigator, it seemed. He owed his advance to Gambier, that evangelical admiral, and when ashore he was a lay-preacher, belonging to some west-country sect. Stephen often saw him in the sick-bay, coming to visit the invalids. 'There is good in them all,' he said. 'We must try to bring them up to our level.'

  Maturin: 'How do you propose to effect this?'

  Harrowby: 'I rely upon unction and personal magnetism.'

  Yet he did in fact bring them wine and chicken; he wrote letters for them and gave or lent small sums of money. He was ready and eager to give; perhaps readier than others to receive. Active: zealous; healthy; extremely clean; somewhat excited, He caught Stephen's eye and smiled wider, nodding kindly.

  Etherege, the Marine lieutenant, was as red as his coat; at the moment he was surreptitiously undoing his belt, looking round with a general benevolence. A small round-headed man who rarely spoke; yet he gave no impression of taciturnity—his lively expression and his frequent laugh took the place of conversation. He had indeed very little to say, but he was welcome wherever he went.

  Nicolls: he was something else again. The only comparatively pale face in the cheerful ring: a black-haired man, self-contained, not one to be pushed about. He would have been the skeleton at this orderly, somewhat formal feast if he had not been making an obvious effort at conviviality; but his face was set in unhappiness, and his present application to the port did not seem to be doing him much good. Stephen had seen much of him in Gibraltar, years before, and they had dined together with the 42nd Foot at Chatham, when Nicolls had had to be carried back to his ship, singing like a canary-bird; but that was immediately before his marriage and no doubt he was in a state of nervous tension. In those days Stephen had thought him a typical sea-officer, somewhat reserved but good company, one of those who naturally combined good breeding with the necessary roughness of their profession, with a bulkhead between the two. Typical sea-officer: the phrase was not without meaning, but how to define it? In every gathering of sailors you would see a few from whom the rest seemed variants; but how few to colour a whole profession! To colour it—to set its tone. Off-hand he could not think of more than a dozen out of the hundreds he had met: Dundas, Riou, Seymour, Jack, perhaps Cochrane; but no, Cochrane ashore was too flamboyant to be typical, too full of himself, too conscious of his own value, too much affected by that Scotch love of a grievance; and there was that unfortunate title hanging about his neck, a beloved millstone. There was something of Cochrane in Jack, a restless impatience of authority, a strong persuasion of being in the right; but not enough to disqualify him, not nearly enough; and in any case it had been diminishing fast these last years.

  What were
the constants? A cheerful resilience; a competent readiness; an open conversability; a certain candour. How much of this was the sea, the common stimuli? How much was the profession the choice of those who shared a particular cast of mind?

  'The captain is under way,' whispered his neighbour, touching his shoulder and bending to speak in his ear.

  'Why, so he is,' said Stephen, getting to his feet. 'He has catted his fish.'

  They slowly climbed the companion-ladder. The heat on deck was even greater than below now that the breeze had died away entirely. On the larboard side a sail had been lowered into the water, buoyed at its extremities and weighted in the middle to form a swimming-bath, and half the ship's company were splashing about in it. To starboard, perhaps two miles away, lay the rocks, no longer anything like ships at all, but still dazzling white from the edge of the deep blue sea to their tops, some fifty feet above the surface in the case of the biggest—so white that the slow surf showed creamy in comparison. A cloud of gannets sailed overhead, with a mingling of dark, smaller terns: every now and then a gannet dived straight down into the sea with a splash like a four-pounder ball.

  'Mr Babbington, pray lend me your spy-glass,' cried Stephen; and when he had gazed for a while, 'Oh how I wish I were there. Jack—that is to say, Captain Aubrey—may I have a boat?'

  'My dear Doctor,' said Jack, 'I am sure you would not have asked, if you had remembered it was Sunday afternoon.' Sunday afternoon was holy. It was the men's only holiday, wind, weather and the malice of the enemy permitting, and they prepared for it with enormous labour on Saturday and on Sunday morning. 'Now I must go below and see to that infernal sail-room,' he said, turning quickly away from his friend's disappointment. 'You will not forget that we are to call upon Mr Stanhope before quarters?'

  'I will pull you across, if you choose,' said Nicolls, a moment later. 'I am sure Hervey will let us have the jolly-boat.'