The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey

by Patrick O'Brian

  So it is fitting, as we close this last book, to give thanks for what Patrick O’Brian did complete and to celebrate a magnificent life’s work. From the extraordinary juvenile books, through Testimonies and the short stories, to the translations, the wonderful Picasso biography, Joseph Banks, the two Anson novels (the first of which is as good as anything he wrote) and then to the crowning achievement of the twenty completed Aubrey–Maturin novels, it is a body of work to stand comparison with any.

  In the margin of page 49 of the manuscript, he notes down words which show he is thinking about Macbeth’s famous speech on death and reputation:

  Tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow,

  Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

  To the last syllable of recorded time;

  And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

  The way to dusty death …

  But, on the evidence of this last fragment of O’Brian, he was not surrendering, not giving up the ghost. He had another book to write, or perhaps two. He had his craft, his skill, his scholarship, his imagination, his humour, his strong sense of honour – and his courage. When he thinks he has lost much of what he has written, he writes to himself on the last page that he may be able to rebuild the missing pages, but ‘I shall have tea first and concentrate what wits I still possess.’

  Complex and subtle he was: but he was no despairing Macbeth. Rather he was like the aged Ulysses, Aubrey’s ultimate literary forebear, in Tennyson’s poem, setting off once again with undaunted spirit into the unknown:

  Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

  Death closes all: but something ere the end

  Some work of noble note may yet be done,

  Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods …

  I hope that last tea was a good one – like the one the three little girls sought, ‘with cake or at least muffin’.

  Never did a writer deserve it more, nor the gratitude and affection of his readers throughout the world.

  The sails of a square-rigged ship, hung out to dry in a calm.

  1 Flying jib

  2 Jib

  3 Fore topmast staysail

  4 Fore staysail

  5 Foresail, or course

  6 Fore topsail

  7 Fore topgallant

  8 Mainstaysail

  9 Main topmast staysail

  10 Middle staysail

  11 Main topgallant staysail

  12 Mainsail, or course

  13 Maintopsail

  14 Main topgallant

  15 Mizzen staysail

  16 Mizzen topmast staysail

  17 Mizzen topgallant staysail

  18 Mizzen sail

  19 Spanker

  20 Mizzen topsail

  21 Mizzen topgallant

  Illustration source: Serres, Liber Nauticus.

  Courtesy of The Science and Technology Research Center, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundation

  THE FINAL UNFINISHED VOYAGE OF JACK AUBREY

  Chapter One

  * MS I, 1Stephen Maturin squared up to his writing-desk once more: he had been called away to attend to one of the ship’s boys who in the lightness of his heart had contrived to stun himself in the foretop by taking the maul from its place, tossing it to a considerable height and so misjudging the revolutions as it fell that the massive head struck him down, speechless and unnaturally pale. Stephen dressed the wound, such as it was (more bruise than blood and no bone broken) and said to his loblolly-boy, ‘Tell Dr Jacob, when he comes back, that this boy is to have no grog for the next three days, and tomorrow he may keep his hammock.’ Dr Jacob, the surgeon’s mate, was away visiting friends aboard the frigate’s tender, the rapid and windwardly Chesapeake schooner Ringle, and Stephen glanced in her direction, fine on the starboard bow, before going down from the brilliance of noon to the comparatively sombre cabin that he shared with Captain Aubrey.

  He had already written My dear Christine before he was called away, and he had dated the letter Surprise, at sea, in Magellan’s Strait. At his first sitting down he had meant to tell her, with what skill he could command, of the extraordinary beauty of the weather and of the Strait, generally so forbidding: he should certainly have spoken of the favourable wind that had allowed them to keep topgallantsails abroad ever since the morning watch; but above all he should have dwelt upon the happiness that filled the ship, homeward bound after a very long, arduous and most uncommonly dangerous voyage, a well-found ship commanded by a right seaman, a well-liked, deeply-respected fighting captain who, moreover, was soon to hoist his flag. There was no secret about this: Jack Aubrey’s first unrestrained cries of delight on receipt of the blessed order had not escaped his steward nor anyone else within a range of twenty yards: nor had the unwonted floods of rum, the feasts in cabin, gunroom and midshipmen’s MS I, 2berth; and the sacred blue flag itself, the mark of a rear-admiral, lay openly on the fo’c’sle, shaded from too fierce a sun, from untimely drops of spray, by an awning, the sail-maker and his mates, the ship’s tailor and his, titivating it with minute stitches, while every hand aboard added half an inch of seam around its ample verge. It was considered the handsomest ensign in the service.

  But for the moment the flag was absent from Stephen’s mind: indeed the mind itself was in a singular state of absence, hesitation, even stupidity. Before being called to the wretched boy, he had known at least the general trend of the passages that were to follow the words that lay there before him; but now he was filled with doubt, and to give his wits time to settle and clarify he mended his pen, clipping its tip with a minute pair of metal jaws made for the purpose and trimming the sides with a lancet capable of splitting hairs.

  Yet the right free, easy, candid expressions would not come, though the Christine in question was very dear to him: Stephen had long practised medicine, a calling in which discretion is often of great importance; but for an even longer time, if time is to be measured by stress, he had been an intelligence-agent, and here discretion was of the very essence, since an unguarded word or step might lead to the agent’s death and to the death, the often hideous death, of his friends and the destruction of their cause.

  He sat down, his expression still tolerably blank: he was a lean, middle-sized man, unremarkable, of mixed Catalan and Irish origin; but it was the tropical sun and the sea-air that accounted for his dark complexion, not any mixture of Moorish blood, for although his birth was illegitimate (which weighed upon him) his ancestors had been Christians time out of mind. A man of something less than forty, though he looked older as his mind wrestled with the difficulties of giving the intelligent woman he longed to marry a coherent, plausible account of the Surprise’s activities and of her present return, mission accomplished: for as soon as Captain Aubrey joined the South African squadron in the River Plate, going aboard HMS Suffolk, taking command of her and hoisting or causing to be hoisted the flag, blue at the mizzen, her act would turn him into that glorious creature a rear-admiral, MS I, 3the likelihood, the virtual certainty, was that Surprise should return to England, carrying Jack Aubrey’s official dispatch, two young men who were to pass for lieutenant and a great number of papers and certificates from the bosun, carpenter, gunner and purser justifying the expenditure or replacement of almost every item in the ship’s unbelievably complex gear, furnishings and supplies, from pistol-flints to great round-shot and innumerable blocks. There was also a flat, factual, unadorned account of the Surprise’s meetings with the Chilean authorities and of her proceedings, together with volume after volume of her activity in charting and surveying the South American islands and coasts.

  She was one of the smaller frigates, carrying no more than 28 great guns, and although in the right hands she was an outstanding sailer she had been sold out of the service when heavier craft were built and Stephen had bought her: so there she was, eminently seaworthy and available for hire to the Hydrographical Service of the Admiralty once Napoleon had been dealt with and the western world was
at something like peace.

  Her ostensible function was to survey and chart the little-known coasts and innumerable islands of the recently independent republic of Chile and to help form its navy, training the young officers. All this was perfectly avowable and even praiseworthy, but the voyage had other aspects that were never distinctly laid down in written orders but that were implied and understood on either side: and here total candour was wholly out of the question, so that Stephen’s letter home could obviously not be all he wished.

  In the first place, through Stephen’s innumerable connexions, Jack had been appointed commander-in-chief of the Chilean navy as well as Admiralty hydrographer; but the frigate’s voyage had been slow (very foul weather south of the Horn) and when she reached Chile she found that the situation had changed remarkably. MS I, 3aApart from anything else she was met with a bewildering number of juntas, of more or less independent governing bodies belonging to widely differing political parties, one of which had appointed its own commander-in-chief though all were ** MS I, 4obsessed by the fear of a Peruvian invasion by land or sea or both: Peru was still ruled by the Spanish king’s viceroy in Lima, and it still possessed a powerful, well-trained navy.

  After a very great number of vicissitudes, changes of ministry and so on it appeared to Jack that since his main duty, often expressed in London but never committed to writing, was to preserve the independent Chilean republic, the best way of doing so and at the same time of protecting his beloved infant Chilean navy was to attack the Peruvians in their port of Callao and if possible to cut out their powerful frigate Esmeralda, the heaviest, best-armed man-of-war on the Pacific coast of America. This he did with extraordinary success, at the risk of his life; and he brought the Esmeralda back to Valparaiso. He was much flattered and caressed, but later he was treated very shabbily indeed: his men were not paid, they were denied their prize-money from various sources, and upon some pretext his ship was threatened with impoundment. Yet though Jack sometimes behaved like a simpleton by land, and though he was often swindled ashore, he was sea-wise, and having provisioned and stored his ship with the basic supplies needed to carry her at least to some port in the Argentine, he handed the Chileans an ultimatum: either his men must have their due by a given date or he should sail away. They were not paid, and he did sail away. Yet although the Surprise’s voyage had something of the appearance of a failure, in fact the Spanish hold on South America was broken: and although this had not been the Admiralty’s direct order, the result gave immense satisfaction in the proper quarters.

  Furthermore Jack had on board a singularly amiable and gifted young man, the unacknowledged but much beloved illegitimate son of Prince William, Admiral the Duke of Clarence, a zealous sailor and almost certain to be king after his brother’s death. Clarence had a great respect for Captain Aubrey (some of Jack’s actions were indeed MS I, 5extraordinarily brilliant), and through Dr Maturin, who had treated His Highness for a variety of disease, mostly discreditable, had begged Jack to take the youth on this voyage: and young Hanson had distinguished himself as much as any loving naval father could have wished, cutting the Esmeralda’s cable and carrying her out under fire. Yet even this was not all: on the Pacific coast Jack and Stephen had met with a small stout vessel filled with fellow members of the Royal Society, two of whom, ornithologists, were determined to cross the narrow isthmus of Panama and return to London by the Atlantic. And these excellent creatures agreed to take Jack’s dispatches – the news of his famous victory and the preservation of Chile – back to the Admiralty, then in the process of forming a South African squadron. Maturin and his chief, the head of Naval Intelligence, had long since established a system of rapid communication across the Andes, and it was thanks to this arrangement that Jack received the Admiralty’s beautiful reply, a signal requiring him ‘to proceed to the River Plate, there to go aboard HMS Suffolk taking command of her and hoisting his flag, blue at the mizzen,’ that had spread such happiness throughout the ship.

  Yet although the ephemeral Chilean ministry had fallen, to be replaced by one of its many rivals, the satisfaction that might have been supposed to accompany an assured independence was by no means general: there were many Chileans who regretted their old friends and their declared policies. Furthermore the feeling was not confined to Chile: there were many Chilean refugees and many of their Argentinian friends who had resented the Englishmen’s presence and who now even more bitterly resented their absence – to say nothing of those many, many Argentinians who so clearly remembered the British capture of Buenos Aires and the even greater number of those who looked upon them as heretics, given to cursing the Holy Father almost every day.

  Both Maturin and Jacob had caught wind of this feeling both in Chile and during their very beautiful passage of the Strait; and in the afternoon MS I, 6before they were to put in to San Pedro, a small sealing and fishing port at the bottom of an inlet on the northern shore with some sheltered arable land behind it famous for potatoes and cabbages on the one hand and prodigious mussels and crayfish on the other, Stephen said, ‘My dear Jack, in the backwoods of America they say that an evil reputation is like an inextinguishable debt; and we have been so maligned on the Pacific coast that it might be prudent to arm the boats, or even to hale the ship so close to the strand that your great guns command the whole settlement.’

  In the event the few inhabitants of San Pedro did not offer to challenge a reasonably powerful man-of-war moored broadside-on before their settlement, nor the powerful, cutlass-bearing seamen who walked along the quay. Yet although most of the citizens were at least partly Tierra del Fuegians and although none of them could have had any first-hand knowledge of recent events they were sullen and unfriendly, yielding only a few indifferent potatoes and wilted cabbages at an exorbitant price. However, the ship did top up her water from a clear free-running stream, no great distance from its parent glacier; and still with this blessed westerly breeze she pursued her long twisting course through the strait, Jack, Hanson and Daniel perpetually taking bearings, soundings, views of the shore (icy to the southwards, often raining to the north) and establishing a truly remarkable chart.

  Stephen, who had no abilities whatsoever in this direction, confined himself to his medical duties of course (slight though they were, with a healthy crew and such an able assistant as Jacob), to watching and sometimes dissecting the birds, mammals and marine plants and creatures of the strait, and much of this he added to his letter to Christine, she being the only woman of his acquaintance who knew the difference between a jackass penguin and a macaroni and who delighted in the knowledge. She would also delight in the knowledge, reflected her lover, that these most inhospitable shores, often snowy on the south of the strait, always icy on the northern height, nevertheless sheltered at least one parrot or parakeet, a green bird with a fine red tail that flew in noisy groups in the beech-woods, and a minute humming-bird that could be seen sipping nectar from the fuchsias in Tierra del Fuego when the ship was on that side of the channel. MS I, 7He was reasonably well engaged with this letter one afternoon after dinner when Jack, abandoning his fiddle, returned to his surveying, and Stephen, closing his passage on Port Egmont hens (often to be seen), lifted his head to Hanson’s reiterated ‘Sir, if you please.’

  ‘Why, Master dear’ – for Horatio Hanson was acting-master of the ship – ‘I fear you have been waiting. I never heard you.’

  ‘Not at all, sir: it was only that Dr Jacob feared you might have overlooked your appointment.’ At this moment a tiny chime could be heard in the bosom of both, for each possessed wonderfully accurate repeating watches, the one a replacement of the minute timepiece that Stephen had given to Christine, the other Prince William’s parting gift to his son. ‘God love us all, and may I be forgiven,’ cried Stephen, leaping up. ‘It is half three – I am late.’

  ‘Mind your step, sir,’ said Hanson, steadying him. ‘It is blowing up uncommon stiff from the west-north-west – has veered three points in half an hour, and Rin
gle is reefing hard.’

  They made their way forward to the fairly well-lit and now vacant space in the sick-berth which the surgeons reserved for anatomizing – for the past few days they had been busy on a singular, probably undescribed dolphin; and as they carefully pared away, separated and described the muscular parts so they gave them to the cook’s mates, standing there with buckets. The bones they kept for themselves. But today they had been obliged to stop. The frigate’s motion was too great, and in spite of their skill and care their cutting was by no means accurate with the deck so very much awash.

  ‘We are making ready to lie to, sir,’ said Hanson in his ear. ‘And the Captain says he will pass the word when it is fit for you to come on deck. In the mean time he desires you and Dr Jacob will stand by to deal with casualties.’

  The first, to his own infinite shame, was Harding, the senior lieutenant – a straightforward fibula and tibia, which they very soon splinted and MS I, 8bound up: then came the usual series of bumps and bruises, diminishing as the furious gust blew itself out and ending with the Captain’s compliments brought by Awkward Davies, and if now they chose to come on deck they would see ‘a sight like a madhouse’s washing-day – God love us – what rigging we have is fair stuffed, stuffed, with fucking poll-parrots and God knows what. Which I am to bring you up and cop three hundred lashes if you fall.’

  Stephen had of course heard of the South American parrots and he had often seen their little troops, but only from a distance, identifiable from their manner of flight and from their brilliant colour, so very unlike the general drabness of the Strait; and so eager was he to reach the first, entangled in the leeward shrouds, that he would certainly have gone over the side but for Davies’ powerful restraining hand. And it was not only parakeets, though they of course were the most obvious and the most eagerly coveted by hands, who were perfectly accustomed to the African race: even more spectacular and even more wounding were the many kinds of minute birds, including Stephen’s Tierra del Fuegian honey-sucker, that had been dashed against the rigging or the remaining sails with such force that in spite of their lightness they were quite shattered and as the blast died away, deck, lighter rigging and scuppers were jewelled all over with their pitiful but still brilliant fragments. Some of the more solid birds, particularly the parakeets and some red-crested woodpeckers, could be revived and patched to some degree, but upon the whole it was a most dispiriting task, the more so since there was very little hope of identification in most cases. Still Stephen, seconded by his mate, did what they could in the way of retrieval, mostly of skins (exceptionally difficult on that scale) and tiny bones: they took quantities of notes and they did a little something to increase their knowledge of this almost untouched avifauna.