Blue at the Mizzen

by Patrick O'Brian

  'For some time he ranged up and down, making speeches about injustice and spending a mint of money on lawyers—he had inherited—and then he vanished, coming into these parts, as I understand it, with the reputation of one who loved freedom and who had suffered for it. There are a good many English merchants in Chile and the Argentine: some of them liked having a genuine baronet about, and some of them and of their South American friends were all in favour of freedom, so long as it was freedom from Spain—freedom to shoot your admiral in Hyde Park was another matter, but it was swept along with the general cry of liberty.'

  'By the way, does the gentleman speak Spanish?'

  'Oh, remarkably well, I am told.'

  Chapter Seven

  On a singularly beautiful morning well south of those vile calms and enervating breathless heat the Surprise hauled to the wind well off the looming American coast, and Jack, walking up and down with a piece of toast in his hand, said, 'Stephen, do you choose to go into the top? With this gentle, steady roll the masts scarcely move at all.'

  'Is it the Sugar Loaf you wish to see?'

  'I should be happy to see the Loaf—indeed, I can already make him out on the rise—but for this occasion I could wish him away, since what really concerns me at present is the activity in the port, the coming and going, the yards: and the Sugar Loaf hides almost everything. But I shall have to send Ringle in any case, to arrange for victuals, water and wood: perhaps you had rather go in her?'

  'Not at all. I am perfectly willing to climb to whatever pinnacle you choose.'

  'Mr Hanson,' called Jack. 'Mr Wells. The Doctor is going aloft. You will act as hand and foot fasts, as and when required.'

  'Aye-aye, sir, aye-aye,' they replied; and he swung himself into the absurdly familiar ladder-way, mounting with the smooth ease of a powerful, very well trained body to the maintop, where he greeted the look-out and drew breath for a while to ease his friend's somewhat more laborious progress.

  Stephen arrived, pale and if not anxious then truly worn, followed by his attendants, and they all sat for a while, gazing at the mainland and the schooner with the Captain's glass.

  It was quite true: the masts were in no considerable state of motion. Yet even so, at the next stage, the not very awful crosstrees, Jack said that that would answer very well. He gazed for a while, pointing out various remote inland heights; and then, reaching out for a backstay, his own expeditious form of descent, he desired the young men to see the Doctor safely bestowed when he wished to return to the deck, and so vanished.

  Arriving with little more than a muffled thump, he caused Ringle's signal to be thrown out, requiring her to come within hail; and then, spurred by the scent of breakfast, he hurried into the cabin. Presently Stephen joined him, paler still, but with the assurance of one who now walked upon comparatively firm ground: Killick plied him with coffee, bacon, sausage, toast; and quite soon his equanimity and even cheerfulness resumed their usual placid height.

  'I do hope,' said Jack, 'that Dr Jacob would be so good as to accompany William into Rio, and speaking Portuguese find out all he discreetly can about the Asp: William will know all the questions to ask, but it would come much better through someone not obviously English—someone, say, who was acquainted with her in Valletta, before she left the service, and who naturally takes an interest in her.'

  'Am I right in supposing that ideally William should be a passing figure, preoccupied with other maritime affairs, and that Jacob should be an idle passenger, walking about the docks to see something of Brazil, largely ignorant of the sea, but interested in his earthbound fashion?'

  'You are wholly in the right of it, brother: that is exactly what I should have asked. A trifle of coffee?'

  At this point Killick announced Mr Woodbine's desire to see the Captain directly or almost so; the near approach of Ringle; and the news that those African cats had got at the mangoes—'And what they ain't ate, they've spoilt,' he added with an obscure surly triumph.

  Mr Woodbine's mission was concerned solely with a certain deviation from truth on the part of the pintles, observed and exactly measured in this pellucid calm—a deviation forecast by Mr Seppings when he installed the new stern-post, the correction being provided by three simple operations, clearly figured by young Mr Seppings in a drawing to be found in the case holding the necessary implements. The next interview was nothing like so satisfactory: William Reade did not feel that his explanations of a series of basic questions about the revived Asp had penetrated the layers of Dr Jacob's ignorance of both English and Portuguese nautical language. He knew very well what Captain Aubrey wanted to learn, but he felt that apart from making the usual arrangements for water and stores, he was going on a fool's errand. 'You might as well try to shave with a butter-knife,' he muttered, taking his seat next to a sombre Jacob in Ringle's gig.

  On the other hand, Jacob, though indeed as impenetrably stupid in some respects as the most prejudiced seaman could wish, was also a remarkable draughtsman. This was of course most apparent in his beautifully exact and explicit anatomical drawings; but he was perfectly capable of changing scale, attitude and nature of description; and his drawings, produced in the cabin from rough sketches and combined with Reade's vivid technical description, gave Jack Aubrey a very clear impression of the renewed, the almost entirely rebuilt Asp.

  'I doubt I should have recognised her, sir, with this fine long line running aft'—he traced in on Jacob's profile—'and I must do the Doctor the justice of saying that he could not have struck it off better had he been bred to the trade. My only question is whether, with these extra feet, she will be as windwardly as she was—her one good point. Faster, for sure: but as windwardly? I wonder.'

  'I dare say you are right.' Jack did not choose to be more specific, but he spoke gravely; and as William Reade carried on with his description of the Asp's improved armament, including a most elegant pair of long brass chasers right forward, his face, ordinarily so cheerful, grew graver still.

  'My dear,' wrote Stephen, 'many a year have I spent sailing the sea in ships, but rarely have I felt such a corporate sense of concern: it is certainly not a defined uneasiness, for the Surprise is sound, as all hands know, she is well supplied, and she carries an ample crew of seamen perfectly well used to working together. Yet there is a want of cheer, of those conventional jokes, semi-insults and jocular repartees that make up so much of the very small change in shipboard life; and what puzzles me extremely is that it is quasi-universal. It may spare the midshipmen's berth and the little small gathering of ship's boys, but it is fairly general elsewhere. I noticed it first when we were lying in the wholly sunless estuary of the River Plate, having sent the tender over that vast and as far as I could see birdless waste to Buenos Aires, carrying among other burdens a message to you in which I pointed out the extraordinary contrast between your African water, teeming with both familiar and wildly exotic duck, geese, anhingas, waders from the most minute of stints to Ardea goliath, and this prodigious desert, inhabited perhaps to the extreme limit of my glass by one moulting black-crested grebe. How ardently I hope that my note may reach you in Dorsetshire, bearing as it does more affection than is ordinarily enclosed in a common sailcloth cover.

  'It is true that I date this—gloom, untoward atmosphere—from our dreary sojourn in the River Plate, and for a while I foolishly tried to account for its mood by the absence of creatures: but of course that was sad nonsense. As soon as the schooner rejoins, and as soon as we resume our course we shall necessarily begin to see the southern birds; already, before we dropped anchor here, a few skuas from the Falklands had been observed and in a very short time the various penguins will be commonplace.

  'No. I must find a more rational basis for this prevalent mood. Part of it may arise from the odd in-between nature of the season, neither one thing nor another: much more from the general knowledge that we are to sail into the Pacific by way of the Horn rather than attempt Magellan's Strait, which Jack Aubrey dislikes extremely, taken
from east to west, the farther reaches calling for some manoeuvres that are exceptionally perilous in a strong westerly blow.

  'I think it may fairly be said that no one man in a ship has as much influence as her captain: and I believe that the strength of that influence is very, very much increased when the captain has commanded the ship, her officers and her company for many years, which is of course the case with Captain Aubrey. His expression, his daily mood, his tone of voice are naturally, automatically and universally observed—not out of curiosity or intense personal interest but as any man—sailor, farmer, fisherman—subject to the weather frequently looks at the sky. Now except as a friend I am not particularly subject to the great man's state of mind, his état d'âme, yet I find myself curiously affected . . .'

  Here the letter came to a halt, starting again many days later with a different pen, dipped into a different ink, and written on a somewhat discoloured sheet of paper: 'My dear, it is not without a real regret that I see the absolute loss of so many pages, swept off by an intemperate gust, pummelled and pounded by intrusive sea-water intimately mixed with ice swilling with the utmost violence about the sodden cabin while poor Surprise lay on her beam-ends on one of the innumerable uncharted reefs in this forbidding part of the world and while I and the blessed Poll Skeeping bandaged, splinted and dosed the hands injured by a gun forced from its emplacement by the furious thrust of ice. At present we are on an even keel once more, gliding under courses and close-reefed topsails along the inward—the leeward—side of one of the countless islands that fringe this desolate end of the world.

  'These pages, now reduced to pulp, were little more than a kind of diary, a daily musing that I liked to share with you—reports of the increasing numbers of penguins (even some emperors), albatrosses, petrels great and small, seals of course and sea-lions, and that beautiful sinister creature the killer whale, sometimes in numerous bands. But they did contain an apology for addressing you in this familiar style, which I justified by the fact that as I was not an absolutely and formally rejected suitor, such a degree of ease could be considered permissible (though perhaps blameworthy: even indelicate). And they contained a passage that described our coming to the Cape of the Eleven Thousand Virgins, beyond which lay the broad and tranquil mouth of Magellan's Strait, perhaps a dozen miles across: the wind was fair, on our larboard quarter; yet there was no call to change sail or course. The seamen lined the landward side and they watched the strait go by, most with a face as grave as their captain's. No remarks of any kind: the silence broken only by the regular stroke of the bell.

  'Since then, and since our passage of the Strait Le Maire, which leads only from one part of the main ocean to a worse part a little south, we have had foul weather, far, far more ice than is usual at this time of the year, and the very strong wind has a far greater southerly component than most ships encounter; and of course this makes the ice much more dangerous, much more plentiful. It is mostly floe-ice, great flat sheets of no great depth, rarely more than our skilled whalers (and we have several aboard) and the bowgrace with which we are adorned can deal with; but occasionally great ice-mountains are to be seen—sometimes, when the sky is clear, of an extraordinary green, blue or turquoise beauty. Our whalers say that as the season advances, above all with so much south in the wind, we shall see many more. From a purely aesthetic point of view, they are a most noble spectacle; for these great and continuous winds, with so very long a fetch, build up monstrous waves, perhaps a hundred feet tall, and when they break against an even taller mass of ice with enormous, deliberate force, it is a very magnificent spectacle.

  'Yet their presence, and the presence of the vast waves, the largely adverse winds, oblige us to make what westward advance we can achieve under the lee—the sometimes astonishingly complete lee—of the many, many islands. Sometimes, after days of perpetual and wearing fight against the weather, we will put into a sheltered bay, rest, fish (mostly for a kind of succulent cod) and dredge up enormous mussels from no great depth.

  'We are lying in just such a bay at present, and Jack Aubrey and I have supped on these same delights. As I think you know, when he was a boy he was acquainted with the Byron family. There may have been some family connexion—I am not sure—but in any case he knew the Admiral, nicknamed Foul-Weather Jack in the service, admired him greatly and often repeated his anecdotes. You may recall that when he was a midshipman the Admiral sailed in the unfortunate Wager, one of the squadron with which Anson made his famous circumnavigation: the Wager was wrecked in the Chonos archipelago, and Byron and some of his shipmates lived among the Indians of those parts—lived very, very hard indeed. And he would tell how the women, some of whom were quite kind to him, would do practically all the work. It was they who handled the canoes, for example—fragile craft perpetually over-setting—and few of the men could swim, whereas the women were taught from childhood. And they did the fishing, laying out nets and then setting their dogs to drive the fish into them, little intelligent smooth dogs, sometimes painted, that could dive and swim under water. They cooked too, and made what few clothes any of them ever had: but most went bare, or with just a piece of seal-skin slung about them and kept to windward. The men walked about the strand gathering fuel, sometimes hunting, but not with much success. They did make fires, however, even when everything was sopping wet, as it usually was; and they signalled with the smoke, passing messages to a considerable distance. But, my dear, I wander, and it is time for my rounds. Hands have been piped to weigh the anchor; the deck echoes with the steady tramp of feet, the click-click-click of the pawls as the cable comes home; and I remember now that we were to profit by the making tide to move to a headland from which we could see the main ocean, the open sea.'

  Eight bells: the usual morning rituals, one of which was Stephen's rounds. The sick-berth was sparsely inhabited at present, but one cot, containing a Swedish whaler called Bjorn, who had broken three ribs in a recent blow, already had a visitor—Hanson, to whose division the seaman belonged.

  'You are doing very well,' said Stephen in that rather loud, distinct voice that even quite intelligent medical men use to their foreign patients, 'and if Mr Hanson will call a shipmate to make sure you do not fall, you may go up on deck for a while, now that the ship is so still.'

  The morning ceremonies also included breakfast, and while they were eating it, Stephen said, 'It is very pleasant to see how the young men take care of the hands who belong to their division. Ever since the boisterous weather that filled the sick-berth, there has not been a day when two or three of them have not come to ask how their shipmates do.'

  'It would be a damned odd, unhappy ship where they did not,' said Jack. 'There is no right feeling where the officers do not feel a real concern for their men: if you were to serve in other ships, I think you would find it much the same throughout the service.'

  Stephen did not wholly agree, but he said nothing; and before he had poured his next cup of coffee Whewell, the officer of the watch, came in and said, 'I beg pardon for interrupting you, sir, but we have just opened the strait and I am afraid it is blowing very hard outside, and the making tide is coming through like a millstream, carrying damned—carrying awkward great lumps of ice.'

  'I am sorry to hear it, Mr Whewell,' said Jack, 'but unless our reckoning is very far out it will be slack-water before long. Pray drop a kedge, but keep the breeze right aft, so that we can look through the strait when we choose. I shall be on deck directly.'

  'My dear,' wrote Stephen, 'I followed them on deck: we were still in the lee of the tall black cliff to larboard, with just steerage-way on us; but overhead the wind raced across the gap with a deep and steady roar, while through the passage to the open sea the 'awkward great lumps of ice' to which Mr Whewell referred were irregular masses the size of a moderate haystack, presumably the fragments of some huge ice-mountain that had driven with full shattering forces on the outer cliff. We (though not Ringle) might have survived a glancing blow from one of them, but there seeme
d no hope whatsoever for the canoe that was trying to cross the tide at its farther extremities—I mean on our right-hand or starboard side, where the current ran violently up the shore.

  'For some moments I did not understand what was happening, but then Hanson and his seamen quickly explained, and passed me a telescope. In the canoe was a young woman with a piece of seal-skin over one shoulder and a paddle in both hands: in the floor of the canoe, covered with nets, half a dozen small crouching dogs, right aft an older woman, completely naked, holding a basket of fish and an equally naked baby. They all glistened with the rain and flying spray: it was just not freezing. The girl, with an extraordinary mastery of her craft, tried again and again to slip between the great blocks of ice, often touching but never being upset. We watched with the most extreme attention and anxiety. At last, the blocks coming in an almost uninterrupted train, she spun the craft round, and now running with the current as it curved across the channel to our side, she ran within hail. Captain Aubrey called out, offering a rope. She dared not take it: I think the check would have destroyed the frail canoe. Bjorn shouted and she replied. Someone threw a blanket, clear into the older woman's grasp: she was seen to smile and they were swept on along the shore, checking their way on a small shingly strand with something of a hovel behind it, smoke from a fire, and some naked men who sauntered down for the fish, the dogs and the blanket.