The Discovery Of Slowness

by Sten Nadolny

  A lot of the time John just stood around, not knowing what to do and always where he was in the way. ‘That fellow’s really no great shakes,’ Fowler remarked. ‘He’s not a bad sort,’ said Matthew, ‘only he’s a bit hard of hearing just now from the battle.’ Fowler thought to himself: ‘That’s a month ago by now.’

  One deck below, Sherard was talking: ‘B’cause John’s incredibly strong. He strangled a Dane to death with his bare hands. But he was my friend even before that.’

  When John got a whiff of that talk he suffered even more. True, they meant well, and he didn’t want to disappoint them under any circumstances. But he didn’t know how to help himself, still less what to do with such praise. At night, when the slain men on the bottom of the sea didn’t reappear, he dreamed of a strange figure: symmetrical, smooth without sharp edges, a friendly, well-ordered plane, not quite a square and not quite a circle, with an evenly proportioned drawing inside. Suddenly, however, it would transform itself into something tangled and splintered. It exploded into an ungeometrical grimace and became so nasty and threatening that John awoke bathed in sweat and was afraid of going back to sleep, in dread of its return. In the end, he feared the smooth, geometrical figure almost more than the dreadful one it turned into.

  The Investigator – formerly named the Xenophone – was a sloop which had suffered honourable wounds. In the middle of the war against France, the Admiralty couldn’t spare a better ship for exploration. ‘As soon as I hear the word exploration,’ said Master Gunner Colpits, ‘I know at once: clear the pumps.’ If only they hadn’t changed the ship’s name. That provoked fate even more. Mr Colpits believed in the magical significance of certain days. In Gravesend he had had all days of misfortune recorded for the next three years. The woman who read his fortune in the stars had told him: ‘You must watch out that you don’t perish with the ship. If you get away when she runs aground, you’ll have a long life.’ It didn’t speak well for Mr Colpits that the crew knew this by heart as early as Sheerness.

  When Matthew read out the Admiralty orders before the start of the voyage, he stuck out his lower jaw so that his teeth showed, and said sharply, ‘The stars tell us only where the ship is located – nothing else.’

  Almost the entire crew hailed from Lincolnshire, as if Matthew had collected on one single ship those few among the farmers’ sons of the county who weren’t afraid of the sea. The twin brothers Kirkeby came from the city of Lincoln and were famous for their muscles. With their own hands – the oxen had collapsed – they had pulled a fully laden cart over the Steep Hill up to the church. The two of them looked very much alike; one could tell them apart only by the phrases they used. Stanley’s comment was usually ‘That’s just what the doctor ordered.’ Olof said only ‘Beastly good!’ – about the weather, the tobacco, the work, the captain’s wife: ‘Beastly good!’

  Then there was Mockridge, the cross-eyed helmsman with the clay pipe. He had one talking eye and one listening eye. If John looked into the long-range, listening eye, he often understood Mockridge’s words before they were out. Most of the time, though, it was safer to look into the short-range, talking eye.

  Mr Fowler and Mr Samuel Flinders were lieutenants and arrogant like so many of their kind. The crew called them ‘luffs’ because they were windbags. Seventy-four men, three cats, and thirty sheep made up the ship’s population. After two days John knew them all – even the sheep, and especially the scientists: one astronomer, one botanist, and two painters. Each of them had his own servant. Nathaniel Bell was also a midshipman, and not yet twelve years old. He suffered badly from homesickness immediately on the pier in Sheerness, although his three older brothers were with him and reassured him. Even the familiar smell given off by the sheep didn’t help: it merely increased his suffering.

  Sheep dung, according to Mr Colpits, could be extremely useful. ‘For caulking small leaks, the best thing you can get,’ he announced lugubriously. ‘Alas, we must expect bigger ones.’

  The Investigator was a warship, so there had to be ten Marines and a drummer on board. They were commanded by a corporal, and he, in turn, by a sergeant. In port, they had already drilled diligently and marched up and down on deck until they got in the cargo officer’s way. Mr Hillier let them know that he needed the space for more important work; loading and storing of provisions was a job to John’s liking. Where should they stow two spare oars? Where to put fifty boxes of soil for plant specimens? Was it true that zwieback and pickled meat would last one and a half years, and the rum for two years? John calculated. The books in the cabin – if one included the Encyclopædia Britannica – contained enough material for a solid year. Where to put the presents for the natives: five hundred axes and hatchets, one hundred hammers, ten kegs of nails, five hundred pocket knives, three hundred pairs of scissors, innumerable pieces of coloured and transparent glass, ear and finger rings, glass beads, colourful ribbons, sewing-needles, and ninety medallions with the King’s picture on them. Every item was noted carefully on double-entry lists, and Mr Hillier knew in his sleep where each could be found. Matthew replaced some of the great guns with light carronades, and even those he stowed where they were least in the way. When Mr Colpits’s face showed that he was going to make a remark about that, Matthew was before him: ‘We’re researchers. We’re getting a pass from the French government.’

  The first annoyance. For a time no one could talk to Matthew, and everyone stayed out of his way: scientists, midshipmen and cats, even the cook.

  In Sheerness two high officials of the Admiralty inspected the ship. Most of Matthew’s requests had been granted: brand-new sails had been hauled up the rigging, looking like thick sausages; new ropes of good Baltic flax were put in where the old ropes had turned brittle. The bow shone with copper up to the hawse-holes, for they had to count on drift ice. But then the great gentlemen noticed women’s washing on a line. A woman on board? On such a long voyage? ‘Impossible!’ they said, and Ann, to whom no one in the crew bore the slightest ill will, had to leave the ship. Women were usually tolerated quite well on ships which didn’t actually go into battle. You heroes of administration! You weren’t willing to allow cheerful, healthy, comforting Ann to remain with her Matthew. The captain was white with rage. ‘Never again,’ he muttered in a peculiarly low voice. ‘I’ll never again follow just any asinine instruction from above. I won’t even read that rubbish!’

  They put to sea. The next annoyance already awaited them. Before Dover, Matthew sent the pilot away and relied on sea charts. A few miles farther on, in Dungeness, the ship ran aground on a sandbank. They trimmed the sails and lowered the boats into the water. The current helped. Shortly they got free. But now the Investigator had to go to Portsmouth into dry dock before starting her long voyage. They had to check whether the ship had been damaged below the waterline. Matthew dropped a quiet remark – though distinctly audible to all – about the Admiralty and its charts.

  Mr Colpits, however, was glad. He viewed the sandbank as the one mishap that had been prophesied, and believed that now he wouldn’t perish. Mockridge thought of other things. ‘Portsmouth,’ he mused. ‘I know a lot of girls there.’ The eye geared to distances had already focused firmly on girls. Stanley Kirkeby agreed and declared that this was just what the doctor ordered. His brother Olof was silent. He always judged only after the fact. Every ‘Beastly good!’ presupposed a present test. Also, it wasn’t sure yet whether the crew would even be allowed ashore.

  John Franklin wanted to be like every man. He therefore listened closely when the others talked about women. ‘I like ’em with bigger hips,’ said the gunner. Boatswain Douglas wagged his head: ‘Depends, depends.’ The gardener had a different opinion. Obviously, they all visualised precisely what their recollections offered. John was especially interested in how one went about this practically. He approached Mockridge and put some carefully thought-out questions to him about when and how. Here, too, the answer was mostly ‘Depends,’ but John remained obstinate. ‘Does
the man undress the woman first?’ he asked. Mockridge mused for an unusually long time. ‘It gives me pleasure that way,’ he said. ‘But you’re the suitor. Things are done the way you want them.’ The way Mockridge did them was surely the way it was done. John was still concerned about the many buttons. ‘Where things are buttoned, tied and laced, you have to find out for yourself. And don’t forget: pay cruder compliments only to older women. Are you scared?’ John was indeed scared, and for that reason, completely against his instincts, he started to tell how before Copenhagen he had after all … with his bare hands … a soldier. He was immediately ashamed. Mockridge looked at John gently, with his listening eye geared to distance, and turned his sharp, talking eye on the bowl of his pipe. ‘Once you lie with a woman, you’ll be able to forget Copenhagen.’

  On land, John wanted to gaze at all the women, trying to memorise their clothes. But there was so much to see that he almost lost sight of his objective. The city was brimming with scores of sailors; so many young men in one place didn’t exist anywhere else in the world, and he was part of it. He also wore a uniform, and if he just stood there he was one of them. He didn’t know how to dance, though, and there was much dancing.

  He couldn’t see enough of the town hall. It was a narrow building in the middle of the main street, with vehicles crowding around it. Then there was the semaphore tower in the harbour, where many arms were waving to receive and confirm orders from the Admiralty in London. For the first time, John sat in a seamen’s tavern. The innkeeper asked for his order and he read off one of the names written above the bar: Lydia. They all laughed, because that was the name of a ship out of Portsmouth. Those names were inscribed as solemnly as were the drinks.

  Fortified by a Luther and Calvin, he again turned his attention to women. Their dresses varied greatly. Common to them all were the respectable, menacingly protruding bows of their bodices. What standing or running rigging was hidden underneath was not easy to make out. It would all come out upon sampling. Mockridge took him to a house on Keppel Row and said, ‘Mary Rose is all right. You’ll have fun. She’s a sweet fat girl, always gay. When she laughs she wrinkles her nose.’ John waited outside in front of a low building while Mockridge negotiated something inside. The windows of the house were blind or curtained. If one wanted to see anything one had to go in. Then Mockridge appeared and took him indoors.

  John discovered that Mary Rose wasn’t fat. Nor did she wrinkle her nose. She had a bony face: her forehead was high, as though it had been put together from many arched lines. Something about her reminded him of a ship. She was a mano’- war of the female sex. First, she pushed up a window to let in some light: then she examined John carefully. ‘Did you fall into a bush?’ she asked, pointing at his head and hands. ‘That was no bush. I was in the battle of Copenhagen,’ John answered, subdued, and stopped.

  ‘And you have your four shillings?’ John nodded. Since she fell silent, he saw his task clearly before him. ‘I will now undress you,’ he said intrepidly. She looked amused under the multiple arches of her eyelids, eyebrows, skull bones and the little bays where her hair began. ‘That’s what you think,’ she said, smiling. Her gentle mouth could say mocking phrases in a very friendly way. In any case, so far this was nothing to run away from.

  Half an hour later John was still there. ‘I’m interested in everything I don’t know yet,’ he said.

  ‘Why don’t you grab this––do you like it?’

  ‘Yes, but things aren’t functioning right with me,’ John ascertained with some disenchantment.

  ‘That’s not so important. There are enough big guns around here.’

  At that very moment the door opened, and a large, fat man stood there with a questioning face. Obviously he wanted to come in.

  ‘Out with you!’ Mary Rose shouted. The fat man went away.

  ‘That was Jack. He’s a big gun, for example – in feeding himself and in guzzling.’ Mary Rose was in a good humour. ‘Once when his ship had run aground they threw him overboard and the keel came free at once.’ She leaned back and laughed heartily, her eyes closed. John could now view her knee and thigh and imagined how it went on from there. He picked up his trousers from the chair, checked what was up or down. Then he rummaged until he brought out the four shillings. ‘Yes, you’ll have to pay,’ said Mary Rose, ‘or else you’ll think you had no fun at all.’ She took hold of his head. John’s lips felt her eyebrows; he felt the tiny hairs. Gentle and peaceful was this feeling. No need to strain or to plan anything, for it was her hands that moved his head back and forth. ‘You’re a serious lad,’ she said, ‘and that’s a good thing. When you get older you’ll be a gentleman. Let me see you again. It’ll work next time. I know that.’ John rummaged in his pocket once more. ‘Here,’ he began, ‘I’ve got a brass chainlink.’ He gave it to her as a present. She took it and said nothing. When he left, she said in a rough voice: ‘Trip up old Jack when you go out, will you? If he breaks his neck I’ll have the night off.’

  When John got back to the ship, for once both Mockridge’s eyes seemed to focus on him at the same angle. ‘How was it?’ John reflected for a moment, then made a decision and stuck to it. ‘I’m in love,’ he said. ‘Only I was a bit discouraged at first because of the buttons.’ That was no lie, really. For a long time the pleasant scent of her skin lingered in his mind. And he continued to hope that the slowness of women had something to do with his own.

  No damage to the ship below the waterline. Now Matthew also had his pass for the Investigator and, despite the mishaps at Dungeness, the blessing of the naval authorities. Another researcher, Dr Brown, and the long-awaited master sailmaker Thistle had also come on board; the crew was complete. Matthew gave the order to weigh anchor.

  Four days later they came upon the Channel fleet – not a pleasant sight. There they were lying again, those hulks with their high decks crammed to the top with gunpowder and iron, better suited for shooting than for sailing, waiting in ambush for the French.

  ‘Never again,’ John said with relief. They were heading for waters outside Europe where their only concern would be observations and good maps. The beautiful strange world – he would now really have to see it, or he could no longer believe in it. The sea itself had to lift him out of his doldrums. He was no longer a child. When Sherard said once, just as in the old days. ‘I watch like hawk,’ a strange feeling came over him as though he had to weep for something lost.

  But now he was on the way.

  Whoever goes to sea cannot be desperate for long. There was too much work for that. Matthew put his crew of farm boys through their paces until their eyes fell shut while they were still standing. John learned not only all the manoeuvres and battle stations but also every block, every fitting, every seam. He knew where ropes and chains squeezed each other, how to fit each eye into its place, how to splice rope-ends, how to fix the topmasts to the mainmasts. He knew the commands for all sailing manoeuvres from memory, and there were many of them. His only worry was the tomcat Trim, a beauty of a grey tabby who didn’t feel the slightest pity. The animal sat at table in the midshipmen’s mess where, he discovered, his paw could easily knock a piece of meat off the slowest midshipman’s fork – to be devoured later, in some safe place. The trick succeeded much too often. John’s table companions now looked forward to it, choking with laughter. Dejected, John noticed that this made Trim more and more popular. It was, however, one of those worries over which one could forget bigger ones.

  The awful figure at night appeared more and more rarely. In his dreams John was now busy setting sails. He heard his own voice yelling: ‘Sheet forward! To the topsail lines! Haul tight! Hoist topsails! Belay topsail lines!’ And the ship reliably did exactly what she was supposed to do.

  At the outset of their navigation lessons Matthew said he didn’t believe that anyone in the world could do anything without knowing the stars by name and position. Then he explained the firmament and the sextant. John already knew how to find his way, but now he
held the precious instrument in his hand for the first time. Mirror and calibration marks on the segmental scale were precise to one-sixtieth of an inch. A ruler with the Oriental girl’s name of Alhidade turned in the centre. John learned first of all never to drop a sextant on the floor, and next how to operate it. ‘Either precise figures or prayers. There’s no third way,’ said Matthew. When he peered through the diopter to establish their bearings, he himself came to look like a precision instrument: his left eye closed, surrounded by small sixtieth-of-an-inch wrinkles, nose snubbed, upper lip pursed as though in an expression of deepest contempt for all imprecision. His chin pulled back as far as this was possible for Matthew. There stood a man who knew exactly what to look at before he acted. John and Sherard agreed that they loved Matthew best when he took bearings.

  Then there were the chronometers, which Matthew lovingly called the guardians of time. Only by fixing Greenwich mean time precisely could one calculate which longitude had been reached, either west or east. These time guardians had been built individually by craftsmen working by hand over a long period of time, and they bore proud names: Earnshaw’s Nos. 520 and 543; Kendall’s No. 55, Arnold’s No. 176. Each had its very own face – black ornaments on shining white – and each in its own sweet way was a little fast or slow. Only synchronisation guaranteed precision. Each individual quirk was brought to light through constant comparisons. Clocks were creatures. The greatest miracle about them was that the driving-power of the spring was perfectly balanced by the mysterious braking-power of the anchor. If a time guardian was slow by only one minute, the error in calculating one’s position amounted to fifteen sea miles. The compass, Walker No. 1, was also a respectable figure. It was so sensitive that it tended to overreact, especially in the proximity of cannons.