'It is kind of you to say that, Stephen,' said Jack, looking at him affectionately, 'and it is capital reasoning. But I know the news reached India House six weeks ago. Brenton told me. No. They used to call me Lucky Jack Aubrey, you remember; and so I was, in my time. But I am not as lucky as all that. Lord Keith told me luck has its end, and mine is out. I set my sights too high, that's all. What do you say to a tune?'
'With all my heart.'
With the rain coming down outside and the hanging lamp swinging wide as the sea got up, they soared away through their Corelli, through their Hummel, and Jack had his bow poised for Boccherini when he brought it screeching down on the strings and said, 'That was a gun.'
They sat motionless, their heads up, and a dripping midshipman knocked and burst in. 'Mr Pullings's compliments, sir,' he said, 'and he believes there is a sail to leeward.'
'Thank you, Mr Lee. I shall be on deck directly.' He snatched up his cloak and said, 'God send it is a Frenchman. I had rather meet a Frenchman now than—' He vanished, and Stephen put the instruments away.
On deck the cold rain and the freshening south-wester took his breath away after the air of the cabin, where the tropical heat, stored up under the line, still seeped from the hold, He came up behind Pullings, who was crouched at the rail with his glass. 'Where away, Tom?' he said.
'Right on the quarter, sir, I reckon, in that patch of half moonlight. I caught the flash, and just for a moment I thought I saw her putting about. Will you take a look, sir?'
Pullings could see her tolerably well, a ship under top-sails three miles off, standing from them on the starboard tack—a ship that had signalled to some unseen consort or convoy that she was going about; but he was attached to his captain, he was distressed by his unhappiness, and he wished to offer him this small triumph.
'By God, Pullings, you are right. A ship. On the starboard tack, close-hauled. Wear, clew up topsails, fetch her wake, and see how near she will let us come. There is no hurry now,' he muttered. Then raising his voice, 'All hands wear ship.'
The pipes and the roaring bosun's mate roused the sleeping watch below, and some minutes later the Surprise was running down to cross the stranger's wake under courses alone, almost certainly invisible in this darkness. She had the wind two points free and she gained steadily, creeping up on the stranger, guns run out, shielded battle-lanterns faintly glowing along the main-deck, bell silenced, orders given in an undertone. Jack and Pullings stood on the forecastle, staring through the rain: there was no need for a glass now, none at all; and a break in the cloud had shown them she was a frigate.
If she was what he hoped she was, he would give her such a broadside in the first moment, and before the surprise was over he would cross under her stern and rake her twice, perhaps three times, and then lie upon her quarter. Closer, closer: he heard her bell; seven bells in the graveyard watch, and still no hail. Closer, and the sky was lightening in the east.
'Stand by the clew-lines,' he called softly. 'Bellow, mind your priming.' Still closer: his heart was pounding like a mallet. 'Let fall,' he cried. The topsails flashed out, they were sheeted home in an instant and the Surprise surged forward, racing up on the stranger's quarter.
Shouts and bellowing ahead. 'What ship is that?' he roared into the confusion. 'What ship is that?' And over his shoulder, 'Back foretops'l. Man clew-garnets.'
The Surprise was within pistol-shot, all her guns bearing, and he heard the returning hail 'Euryalus. What ship is that?'
'Surprise. Heave to or I sink you,' he replied; but the true fire had gone. Under his breath he said, 'God damn you all to hell, for a set of lubbers.' Yet hope said it might still be a ruse, and as the ships came up into the wind he stood there still, twice his natural size and all aglow.
But Euryalus she was, and there was Miller in his nightshirt on the quarterdeck: Miller, far senior to him. He pitied the officer of the watch, the lookouts; there would be the devil to pay—many a bloody back in the morning. 'Aubrey,' hailed Miller, 'where the devil do you come from?'
'East Indies, sir. Last from the Island.'
'Why the devil did you not make the night-signal like a Christian? If this is a joke, sir, a God-damned pleasantry, I am not amused. Where the hell is my cloak? I am getting wet. Mr Lemmon, Mr Lemmon, I will have a word with you presently, Mr Lemmon. Aubrey, instead of arsing about like a jack-in-the-box, just you run down to Ethalion and tell him to mend his pace. Good day to you.' He disappeared with a savage growl; and from the bow port under Jack's feet a voice said 'Euryalus?'
'What?' said an answering voice from Euryalus's after-most port.
'Ballocks to you.'
The Surprise bore up, ran leisurely down to the straggling Ethalion in the growing light—a shamefully great way off—made the private signal and repeated Captain Miller's order.
The Ethalion acknowledged, and Jack was laying the course for Finisterre when Church, the signal midshipman this watch, and an inexpert one, too, said, 'She is signalling again, sir.' He stared through his telescope, struggled with the leaves of his book, and with the help of the yeoman he slowly read it off. 'Captain Surprise I have two wool—no, women for you. Next hoist. One young. Please come to breakfast.'
Jack took the wheel, bawling out, 'Make sail, bear a hand, bear a hand, bear a hand, look alive.'
The Surprise shot across the Ethalion's bows and rounded to under her lee. He gazed across with a look of extreme apprehension, trying to believe and to disbelieve; and Heneage Dundas called out from her quarterdeck, 'Good morning, Jack; I have Miss Williams here. Will you come across?'
The boat splashed down, half-filling in the choppy sea; it pulled across; Jack leapt for the side, raced up, touched his hat to the quarterdeck, crushed Dundas in his arms, and was led to the cabin, unshaved, unwashed, wet, ablaze with joy.
Sophie curtseyed, Jack bowed; they both blushed extremely, and Dundas left them, saying he would see to breakfast.
Endearments, a hearty kiss. Endless explanations, perpetually interrupted and re-begun—dear Captain Dundas, so infinitely considerate, had exchanged into this ship—had been away on a cruise—and they had been obliged to chase a privateer almost to the Bahamas, and had very nearly caught him. Several shots had been fired!
'I tell you what it is, Sophie,' cried Jack, 'I have a parson aboard! I have been cursing him up hill and down dale for a Jonah, but now how glad I am: he shall marry us this morning.'
'No, my dear,' said Sophia. 'Properly, and at home, and with Mama's consent, yes—whenever you like. She will never refuse now; but I did promise it. The minute we get home, you shall marry me in Champflower church, if you really wish it. But if you don't, I will sail round and round the world with you, my dear. How is Stephen?'
'Stephen? Lord, sweetheart, what a selfish brute I am—a most shocking damned thing has happened. He thought he was to marry her, he longed to marry her—it was quite understood, I believe. She was coming home in an Indiaman, and at Madeira she left her and bolted with an American, a very rich American, they say. It was the best thing that could possibly have happened for him, but I would give my right hand to have her back, he looks so low. Sophie, it would break your heart to see him. But you will be kind, I know.'
Her eyes filled with tears, but before she could reply her maid came in, bobbed severely to Jack, and said breakfast was ready. The maid disapproved of the whole proceeding; and from the frightened, deprecating look of the steward behind her, it was clear that she disapproved of sailors, too.
Breakfast, with Dundas giving Jack a circumstantial account of his exchange and of the privateer and insisting on a rehearsal of the action with Linois, was a long, rambling meal, with dishes pushed aside and pieces of toast representing ships, which Jack manoeuvred with his left hand, holding Sophia's under the table with his right, and showing the disposition of his line at different stages of the battle, while she listened with eager intelligence and a firm grasp of the weather-gauge. A rambling, exquisite meal, that was brought
to a close by the fury of Captain Miller's repeated guns.
They came on deck; Jack called for a bosun's chair to be rigged, and while it was preparing Stephen and Sophie waved to one another without a pause, smiling and crying out, 'How are you, Stephen?' 'How are you, my dear?' Jack said, 'Heneage, I am so very much obliged to you, so deeply obliged. Now I have but to run Sophie and my treasure home, and the future is pure Paradise.'
Arms and the Man
CHARLTON HESTON
THE TROUBLE with writing about Patrick O’Brian’s books is that they are so engrossing. Dipping into one to find hooks to hang your comments on, you are mesmerised anew by his storyteller’s spell through twenty, thirty pages, simply for the sheer pleasure he gives you. Instead of writing about his novels, you read them again for the third time. Though rewarding, this is an inadequate response to your publisher’s deadline.
The fact is that O’Brian is one of the best writers now working in the English language. Though his range extends to biography and non-fiction, the fullest expression of his extraordinary gifts is in the series of novels chronicling the careers of Captain Jack Aubrey, R.N., and his friend and shipmate, Dr Stephen Maturin, in the English sea wars against Napoleon in the early years of the nineteenth century. They are, each one of them, superb.
They are also irresistibly readable, indeed all but impossible to put down. When a new volume appears, colleagues, close friends, even blood kin can turn testy, waiting their turn to read it.
From the beginning, critics compared O’Brian favourably with C. S. Forester, long considered to be the master marine novelist. Some years ago I was stranded, bookless, on a film location in Norway where the only novels available in English at the local bookshop were the entire Forester oeuvre, which I re-read over some weeks, from start to finish. O’Brian is the better writer, ‘by a long sea mile’, as Long John Silver, one of the greatest of all sea-going characters, put it. Not only in overall knowledge and a deeply saturated sense of character, dialogue and period, but with a sure feel for comedy totally absent in Forester’s work, O’Brian eclipses his distinguished predecessor.
'Arms and the man I sing'—Virgil set a high standard for those who would write of war. The best, from Homer through Shakespeare, Stendhal and Tolstoy to Hemingway in this century, wrote only of battle on land, often with tragic, edged eloquence. Melville and Conrad, the greatest writers inspired by the sea, never took up Virgil’s challenge. We can only speculate as to why.
Perhaps it had to do with the random nature of naval warfare in ancient times. Warships were barely more than floating forts full of troops. Nautical technology was so primitive that battles often dissolved into random naval scuffles, determined largely by luck, rather than by skill or enterprise.
This may be why there is very little serious writing about sea warfare in this period, none of it remarkable. Mark Antony’s defeat at the battle of Actium changed the course of history profoundly, yet Plutarch covers it thinly. Cervantes actually fought in the Battle of Lepanto, an historically crucial sea battle in which he was permanently maimed (fortunately his left hand, not his right). Yet he never wrote a word about it.
By the end of the eighteenth century, England, of all the great powers, had best learned the need for efficient ships and men trained to fight them. I am convinced Patrick O’Brian was somehow there when England held the seas against the French, so vividly real is the narrative which breathes life into Jack Aubrey’s crucial contribution in those years.
Ashore, afloat, in battle and in bed, in English country manors and in fetid French prisons, Aubrey leaps undeniably to life. He is the paradigm of a fighting captain in Nelson’s navy. With the deck of a frigate under his feet (even a sloop or a leaking dory), he is an instinctive and sagacious tactician, a steadfast and compassionate comrade and a leader to measure beside Alexander (or Nelson, his own idol).
But ashore, Aubrey, if not quite a fish out of water, is still more than a little out of his depth. On a quarterdeck, he almost never puts a foot wrong; on shore, he is touchingly, sometimes laughably, vulnerable. He makes mistakes a boy might avoid—unless, like Aubrey, he had spent most of his life at sea.
O’Brian, on the other hand, never errs, ashore or afloat. His ear for the nuances of English speech at the turn of the eighteenth century, with a smatter of French, Catalan and Latin as well, is uncanny. I have made a good part of my living sorting out the differences in accent and usage in English over the centuries and across national and regional boundaries. O’Brian does all this so effortlessly you would swear he simply wills himself back into the nineteenth century and takes notes: table talk that seems straight out of Jane Austen; fo’c’s’le hands ashore on liberty; Admiralty Lords in solemn convocation at Whitehall—he catches it all flawlessly. 'Yes!' you think reading the witty, textured exchanges. 'This is surely what they were like.' Only an extraordinary writer can do that.
For the sea battles crucial to the Homeric saga he sings, O’Brian made a brilliant choice, outlined in his preface to the very first volume in the series, Master and Commander:
When one is writing about the Royal Navy of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it is difficult to avoid understatements . . . very often the improbable reality outruns fiction. Even an industrious imagination could scarcely produce the frail shape of commodore Nelson leaping from his battered seventy-four-gun Captain through the quarter-gallery window of the eighty-gun San Nicolas, taking her and hurrying on across her deck to board the towering hundred-and-twelve-gun San Josef, where 'I did receive the swords of the vanquished Spaniards, which I gave to William Fearney, one of my bargemen, who put them, with the greatest sang froid, under his arm.' (Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander)
O’Brian uses elements of this incredible action, immortalised in British naval history as 'Nelson’s bridge', in this first Aubrey novel. Indeed, he is careful to draw on Admiralty records. When describing almost every one of the myriad actions in his novels he meticulously details the weather, the relative strengths of the ships and the tactic used. And not only when fighting the French, Spanish, or American foes but also when up against the forces of Nature—storms, icebergs and lee shores—or pirate assaults and treacherous betrayals that beset Jack Aubrey throughout the years of his service.
Of course, as film-makers know too well, the best-laid action scenes, however accurately depicted, will not a movie make, never mind a novel. In the end, it all depends on the people in the story, and whether you care about them. Patrick O’Brian crowds his pages with richly complex and eminently memorable characters you do indeed come to care about deeply, from admirals to aborigines, Siamese sultans, Spanish sergeants, Dutch merchants, Boston revolutionaries, and wonderfully drawn women of every kind and condition, including two disparate English ladies, whose function I shall not reveal, and a touching pair of ten-year-old Polynesian orphan girls who end up as surgeon’s mates. You would swear any one of them could have stepped out of history. Indeed, some have.
The most rewarding of all are the sailors who run through the novels. Aubrey’s crew, some beginning as pubescent midshipmen later promoted to other ships and higher rank, some of whom you come to know so well that you mourn their deaths in action or accident as you would a friend.
There is Tom Pullings, whom we first see as a gangly boy midshipman determined to rise, serving steadfastly through desperate disfigurement caused by a sabre cut through the hinge of his jaw, yet somehow preserving his youthful good humour and rock solid balance as a rated captain.
Bonden is Aubrey’s coxswain, the essence of the British ranker from the Wars of the Roses through Desert Storm, and Awkward Davies, an immensely strong and able but clumsy seaman, devoted to Aubrey who saved him from drowning. With Bonden, he flanks Jack in every boarding action, armed with a butcher’s cleaver and literally foaming at the mouth in the sweet, obscene ecstasy of battle.
There’s also Preserved Killick (O’Brian has a lovely instinct for names), Jack’s personal stew
ard. Killick is an absolute Jewish mother of a man, nagging, sulking, forever complaining and conniving for the Captain’s good, as he sees it:
Coat torn in five places—cutlass slash in the forearm which how can I ever darn that? Bullet ole all singed, never get the powder-marks out. Breeches all a-hoo, and all this nasty blood everywhere, like you’d been a-wallowing in a lay-stall, sir. What Miss would say, I don’t know, sir, God strike me blind. Epaulette acked, fair acked to pieces. (Jesus what a life.) (Patrick O'Brian, H.M.S. Surprise)
Finally and triumphantly, though, the heart of the novels, lifting them to literature of the first order, is the friendship between Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. Appropriately, they meet in the first paragraph of the first novel, where they soon seem headed for the duelling ground. Instead, they become shipmates and, in Jack’s phrase, 'particular friends'.
Though they could hardly be more unlike, you understand at once why they become friends: they complement each other so well. Where Jack is open, sanguine, a highly physical doer and shaker, Stephen is reserved, intellectual, and secretive. Stephen is in fact a spy, serving British Intelligence to superb effect. He is also a surgeon on most of Jack’s ships, an anatomist, biologist, cryptographer, a deadly duellist with a sword and a crack shot. He is also a hopeless landlubber and an innocent afloat.
As he does with Jack Aubrey in making him totally plausible and meticulously accurate as a Nelsonian frigate captain, O’Brian goes to great pains, either through exhaustive research or a well of natural wisdom, to make Stephen Maturin not only a fascinating and many-faceted man, but the essence of an early nineteenth-century physician and scientist, no easy task. He is, in fact, the most complete doctor in fiction. Doyle’s Dr Watson, Shaw’s and Chekov’s several doctors are interesting characters with medical bags, but rarely functioning as physicians. Dr Zhivago is a well-drawn protagonist, but not significantly a doctor. Maturin’s medical skills are called on again and again, in a whole variety of circumstances, always in accord with the science of his time and usually crucial to the plot.
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