The Wine-Dark Sea

by Patrick O'Brian

  'My duty and best compliments to the Captain, and shall be happy to wait on him,' said Martin.

  'And Franklin has hailed to say that Captain Pullings has put his jaw out again,' - this to Dr Maturin.

  'I shall be over in a moment,' said Stephen. 'Pray, Mr Norton, get them to lower down my little skiff. Padeen,' he called in Irish to his huge loblolly boy, 'leap into the little boat, will you now, and row me over.'

  'Shall I bring bandages and perhaps the Batavia salve?' asked Martin.

  'Never in life. Do not stir: I have known this wound since it was made.'

  That was many years since, in the Ionian Sea, when a Turk gave Pullings a terrible slash on the side of his face with a scimitar, so damaging his cheekbone and the articulation of the joint that it often slipped, particularly when Captain Pullings was calling out with more than usual force. Stephen had put it more or less right at the time, and now he did so again; but it was a delicate little operation, and one that required a hand with a knowledge of the wound.

  This was the first time Stephen had been aboard the Franklin for any length of time since the earlier critical days, when his horizon was almost entirely bounded by the walls of his operating and dressing stations - blood and bones, splints, lint, tow and bandages, saws, retractors, artery-hooks - and he had had little time to see her as a ship, to see her from within. Nor of course had Tom Pullings been able to show the Doctor his new command, already very near to his heart. 'I am so glad you was not obliged to come across before we had our whole armament aboard,' he said. 'Now you will see how trim and neat they sit in their ports, and how well they can traverse, particularly those amidships; and I will show you our new cross-catharpins, rigged this very afternoon. They bring in the foremast and aftermast shrouds, as I dare say you noticed when Padeen was pulling you over. And there are a vast number of other things that will astonish you.'

  A vast number indeed: a vaster number of objects than Dr Maturin had supposed to exist in any ship afloat. Long, long ago, at the beginning of Stephen's naval career, Pullings, then a long, thin midshipman, had shown him over His Majesty's ship Sophie, a brig, Jack Aubrey's first, dwarfish command: he had done so kindly, conscientiously, but as a subordinate displaying her main features to a landsman. Now it was a captain showing his new ship to a man with many years of sea-experience, and Stephen was spared nothing at all: a fancy-line rigged on new principles, these cross-catharpins of course, drawings of an improved dumb-chalder to be shipped when she docked at Callao. Yet although his guide was now burlier by far, and almost unrecognizable from his frightful wound, there was the same ingenuous open friendliness, an unchanged pleasure in life, in sea-going life, and Stephen followed him about, admiring, and exclaiming, 'Dear me, how very fine' until the sun set, and the twilight, sweeping over the sky with tropical rapidity, soon left even Pullings without anything to point at.

  'Thank you for showing me your ship,' said Stephen, going over the side. 'For her size, she is the beauty of the world.'

  'Not at all,' said Tom, simpering. 'But I am afraid I was too long-winded.'

  'Never in life, my dear. God bless now. Padeen, shove away. Give off.'

  'Good night, sir," said the seven Sethians, their smiles gleaming in the massive beards, as they thrust the skiff clear with a boom.

  'Good night, Doctor,' called Pullings. 'I forgot the plan of the new fairleads, but I promise to show it you tomorrow: the Captain has invited me to dinner.'

  'I am glad of that,' thought Stephen, waving his hat. 'It will make the party less awkward.'

  He did not see Martin again that evening, but he thought of him from time to time; and when he had turned in, when he was lying in his cot, very gently rocking on the quiet sea, he reflected not so much upon the outburst of that afternoon as upon the notion of changing identity. He had known it often enough. A delightful child, even a delightful early adolescent, interested in everything, alive, affectionate, would turn into a thick, heavy, stupid brute and never recover: ageing men would become wholly self-centred, indifferent to those who had been their friends, avaricious. Yet apart from the very strong, very ugly passions arising from inheritance or political disagreement he had not known it in men neither young nor old. He swung, and thought, his mind wandering free, sometimes to the allied but quite distinct subject of inconstancy in love; and presently he found that this too was to be a sleepless night.

  The moon was high when he came on deck, and there was a heavy dew. 'Why, then,' he asked, feeling the rail wet under his hand, 'with so heavy a dew is the moon not veiled? Nor yet the stars?'

  'Have you come on deck, sir?' asked Vidal, who had the middle watch.

  'I have, too,' said Maturin, 'and should be obliged if you would tell me about the dew. One says it falls: but does it fall in fact? And if it fall, where does it fall from? And why in falling does it not obscure the moon?'

  'Little do I know of the dew, sir,' said Vidal. 'All I can say is that it loves a clear night and air as near still as can be: and every sailor knows it tightens all cordage right wicked, so you must slacken all over if you do not want your masts wrung. It is a very heavy dew tonight, to be sure,' he went on, having reflected, 'and we have clapped garlands on the masts to collect it as it trickles down: if you listen you can hear it running into the butts. It don't amount to much, and it don't taste very good, the masts having been paid with slush; but I have known many a voyage when it was uncommon welcome. And in any case it is fresh, and will wash a shirt clear of salt; or even better' -lowering his voice - 'a pair of drawers. The salt is devilish severe on the parts. Which reminds me, sir: I must beg some more of your ointment.'

  'By all means. Look in at the sick-berth when I make my morning rounds, and Padeen will whip you up a gallipot directly.'

  Silence: a vast moonlit space, but no horizon. Stephen gazed up at the dew-soaked sails, dark in the moon-shadow, the topgallants and topsails rounding just enough to send the ship whispering along, the courses hanging slack.

  'As for the dew,' said Vidal after a while, 'you might ask Mr Dutourd. There's a learned gentleman for you! Not in physic, of course, but more in the philosophical and moral line: though as I understand it he has many friends in Paris who make experiments with the electric fluid, gas-balloons, the weight of air - that kind of thing - and perhaps dew might have come into it. But what a pleasure it is to hear him talk about moral politics! The rights of man, brotherhood, you know, and equality! He has edified us many an hour with his observations, you might almost say his oratory, on the just republic. And the colony he planned -no privileges, no oppression; no money, no greed; everything held in common, like in a mess with good shipmates - no statutes, no lawyers - the voice of the people the only law, the only court of justice - everybody to worship the Supreme Being just as he sees fit - no interference, no compulsion, complete freedom.'

  'It sounds like the earthly Paradise.'

  'That is what many of our people say. And some declare they would not have been so eager to stop Mr Dutourd if they had known what he was about - might even have joined him.'

  'Do they not reflect that he was preying on our whalers and merchantmen, and helping Kalahua in his war with Puolani?'

  'Oh, as for the privateering side, that was entirely his Yankee sailing-master, and they would certainly never have joined in that - not against their own countrymen, though natural enough, in war-time, on the part of a foreigner. No: it was the colony that pleased them so, with its peace and equality and a decent life without working yourself to the bone and an old age that don't bear thinking on.'

  'Peace and equality, with all my heart,' said Stephen.

  'But you shake your head, sir, and I dare say you are thinking about that war. It was sadly misrepresented, but Mr Dutourd has made everything quite clear. The sides had been spoiling for a fight time out of mind, and once Kalahua had hired those riffraff Frenchmen from the Sandwich Islands with muskets there was no holding him. They had nothing to do with Mr Dutourd's settlers. No. W
hat Mr D meant to do was to sail in with a show of force and set himself between them, then establish his own colony and win both sides over by example and persuasion. And as for persuasion...! If you had heard him you would have been convinced directly: he has a wonderful gift, you might say an unction, even in a foreign language. Our people think the world of him.'

  'He certainly speaks English remarkably well.'

  'And not only that, sir. He is remarkably good to what were his own men. You know how he sat up with them night after night in the sick-berth until they were either cured or put over the side. And although the master of the Franklin and his mates were right hard-horse drivers, the men who are with us now say Mr D was always stepping in to protect them - would not have them flogged.'

  At this point, just before eight bells, a sleepy, yawning Grainger came on deck to relieve his shipmate; and the starboard watch, most of whom had been sleeping in the waist, began to stir: the ship came to a muted sort of life. 'Three knots, sir, if you please,' reported young Wedell, now an acting midshipman. And in the usual piping, calling, hurrying sounds of the change - all fairly discreet at four o'clock in the morning - Stephen slipped away to his cabin. There was something curiously pleasing about the Knipperdollings' credulity, he reflected as he lay there with his hands behind his head: an amiable simplicity: and he was still smiling when he went to sleep.

  To sleep, but not for long. Presently the idlers were called, and they joined the watch in the daily ritual of cleaning the decks, pumping floods of sea-water over them, sanding, holystoning and swabbing them, flogging them dry by the rising of the sun. There were hardened sailors who could sleep through all this -Jack Aubrey was one, and he could be heard snoring yet - but Stephen was not. On this occasion it did not make him unhappy or fretful, however, and he lay there placidly thinking of a number of pleasant things. Clarissa came into his mind: she too had something of that simplicity, in spite of a life as hard as could well be imagined.

  'Are you awake?' asked Jack Aubrey in a hoarse whisper through a crack in the door.

  'I am not,' said Stephen. 'Nor do I choose to swim; but I will take coffee with you when you return to the ship. The animal,' he added to himself. 'I never heard him get up.' It was true. Jack weighed far too much, but he was still remarkably light on his feet.

  With this fine brisk start to the day Dr Maturin was early for his morning rounds, a rare thing in one with so vague a notion of time. These rounds amounted to little from the strictly surgical point of view, but Stephen still had some obstinate gleets and poxes. In long, fairly quiet passages these and scurvy were the medical man's daily fare; but whereas Stephen could oblige the seamen to avoid scurvy by drinking lemon-juice in their grog, no power on earth could prevent them from hurrying to bawdy-houses as soon as they were ashore. These cases he treated with calomel and guaiacum, and it was usual for the draughts to be prepared by Martin: Stephen was not satisfied with the progress of two of his patients and he had resolved upon dosing them in the far more radical Viennese manner when he saw a beetle on the deck just this side of the half-open door, clear in the light of the dispensary lantern, a yellow beetle. A longicorn of course, but what longicorn? An active longicorn, in any event. He dropped on to his hands and knees and crept silently towards it: with the beetle in his handkerchief, he looked up. His advance had brought the door directly in front of him, with the whole dispensary lit, clear, and as it were in another world: there was Martin, gravely mixing the last of his row of draughts, and as Stephen watched he raised the glass and drank it off.

  Stephen rose to his feet and coughed. Martin turned sharply. 'Good morning, sir,' he said, whipping the glass under his apron. The greeting was civil, but mechanically so, with no spontaneous smile. He had obviously not forgotten yesterday's unpleasantness and he appeared both to resent his exclusion from the passage to the Franklin and to expect resentment on Stephen's part for his offensive remarks. Stephen was in fact of a saturnine temperament, as Martin knew: he could even have been called revengeful, and he found it difficult to forgive a slight. But there was more than this; it was as though Martin had just escaped being detected in an act he was very willing to conceal, and there was some remaining tinge of defiant hostility about his attitude.

  Padeen came in, and having called on God to bless the gentlemen he announced, with some difficulty, that the sick-berth was ready for their honours. The medical men went from cot to cot, Stephen asking each man how he did, taking his pulse and examining his peccant parts: he discussed each case briefly with his assistant, in Latin, and Martin wrote down his observations in a book: as the book closed so Padeen gave each seaman his draught and pills.

  When it was over they returned to the dispensary and while Padeen was washing the glasses Stephen said, 'I am not satisfied with Grant or MacDuff and intend to put them on the Viennese treatment next week.'

  'My authorities speak of it, but I do not recall that they name its principle.'

  'It is the murias hydrargi corrosivus.'

  'The phial next to the myrrh? I have never known it used.'

  'Just so. I reserve it for the most obdurate cases: there are grave disadvantages... Now, Padeen, what is amiss?'

  Padeen's stammer, always bad, grew worse with emotion, but in time it appeared that there had been ten glasses in the cupboard an hour ago, not even an hour ago, and they shining: now there were only nine. He held up his spread hands with one finger folded down and repeated 'Nine.'

  'I am so sorry, sir,' said Martin. 'I broke one when I was mixing the draughts, and I forgot to tell Padeen.'

  Both Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin were much attached to their wives, and both wrote to them at quite frequent intervals; but whereas Jack's letters owed their whole existence to the hope that they would reach home by some means or another -merchantman, man-of-war or packet - or failing that that they would travel there in his own sea-chest and be read aloud to Sophie with explanations of just how the wind lay or the current set, Stephen's were not always intended to be sent at all. Sometimes he wrote them in order to be in some kind of contact with Diana, however remote and one-sided; sometimes to clarify things in his own mind; sometimes for the relief (and pleasure) of saying things that he could say to no one else, and these of course had but an ephemeral life.

  'My dearest soul,' he wrote, 'when the last element of a problem, code or puzzle falls into place the solution is sometimes so obvious that one claps one's hand to one's forehead crying, "Fool, not to have seen that before." For some considerable time now, as you would know very well if we had some power of instant communication, I have been concerned about the change in my relations with Nathaniel Martin, by the change in him, and by his unhappiness. Many and sound reasons did I adduce when last I wrote, naming an undue concern with money and a conviction that its possession should in common justice win him more consideration and happiness than he possesses, as well as many other causes such as jealousy, the boredom of uncongenial companions from whom there is no escape, a longing for home, wife, relations, consequence, peace and quiet, and a fundamental unsuitability for naval life, prolonged naval life. But I did not mention the efficient cause because I did not perceive it until today, though it should have been evident enough from his intense application to Astruc, Booerhaave, Lind, Hunter and what few other authorities on the venereal distemper we possess (we lack both Locker and van Swieten), and even more from his curiously persistent eager detailed enquiries about the possibility of infection from using the same seat of ease, drinking from the same cup, kissing, toying and the like. Whether he has the disease I cannot tell for sure without a proper examination, though I doubt he has it physically: metaphysically however he is in a very bad way. Whether he lay with her or not in fact he certainly wished to do so and he is clerk enough to know that the wish is the sin; and being also persuaded that he is diseased he looks upon himself with horror, unclean without and within. Unhappily he has taken yesterday's disagreement more seriously than I did - our relations are a c
ool civility at the best - and in these circumstances he will not consult me. Nor obviously can I obtrude my services. Self-hatred usually seems more likely to generate hatred of others (or at least surliness and a sense of grievance) than mansuetude. Poor fellow, he is invited to dine in the cabin this afternoon, and to bring his viola. I dread some kind of eclat: he is in a very nervous state."

  There was a confident knock on the door and Mr Reade walked smiling in, quite sure of his welcome. From time to time what was left of his arm needed dressing, and this was one of the appointed days: Stephen had forgotten it; Padeen had not, and the bandage stood on the aftermost locker. While it was putting on, fold after exactly-spaced fold, Reade said, 'Oh sir, I had a wonderful thought in the graveyard watch. Please would you do me a great kindness?'

  'I might,' said Stephen.

  'I was thinking about going to Somerset House to pass for lieutenant when we get home.'

  'But you are not nearly old enough, my dear.'

  'No, sir: but you can always add a year or two: the examining captains only put "appears to be nineteen years of age", you know. Besides, I shall be nineteen in time, of course, particularly if we go on at this pace; and I have my proper certificates of sea-time served. No. The thing that worried me was that since I am now only a tripod rather than a quadrupod, they might be doubtful about passing me. So I have to have everything on my side. These calm days I have been copying out my journals fair - you have to show them up, you know - and in the night it suddenly occurred to me that it would be a brilliant stroke and amaze the captains, was I to add some seamanlike details in French.'