Book 5 - Desolation Island

by Patrick O'Brian

  'You are to consider, madam, that the captain of a man-of-war has a great many things to occupy his mind.'

  She folded her hands in her lap, looked down, and said, 'Oh yes, to be sure,' in a low, submissive voice.

  Stephen walked away, quite pleased with his pompous, official tone—a good initial position from which to retreat—and reached the forepeak, now clean and as sweet as ever it could be. While he was gazing at it, the enormous pandemonium of all hands to dinner broke out overhead, a familiar pandemonium, preceded, but only just preceded, by the striking of eight bells and the bosun's pipes. Stephen detained a deeply unwilling but civil carpenter's mate for close on ten minutes with his views on the proper accommodation for convicts, and then travelled aft along the lower deck, lighter now that the larboard gun-ports were open, and tight-packed with men, three hundred and more, all sitting at their tables slung between the guns, loudly eating their two pounds of salt beef and a pound of biscuit a head (for this was a Tuesday). The mess deck at dinner time was an impossible, an inconceivable place for an officer, except on Christmas Day, and those who did not know him were worried and distressed. But many of the Leopards had either sailed with Dr Maturin or knew of his ways by the reports of friends: they regarded him as a very valuable creature, but as one unaccountable for his actions outside the sickbay or the cockpit, being brutally ignorant of everything to do with the sea—could scarcely tell the difference between port and starboard, right and wrong—almost an innocent, as one might say. A gentleman to be boasted of, being a genuine physician as well as the boldest hand with a saw in the fleet, but to be concealed from view as much as possible, when in company with other ships. 'Do not stir, I beg,' he cried, as he paced along between the chewing faces, friendly or bemused as the case might be; he was in something of a brown study, reflecting upon the comparison between Diana Villiers and Mrs Wogan, and it was only a particularly familiar face that brought him out of it, the large, red, smiling face of Barret Bonden, Jack Aubrey's coxswain who stood there, swaying with the motion of the ship and holding up a small spoon, clearly for his edification.

  'Barrett Bonden,' he said, 'what are you at? Let you all sit down, for God's love.'

  The mess, eight powerful man-of-war's men with pigtails to their waists, and an insubstantial, irregular ninth sat down. 'Which we are feeding Herapath, sir,' said Bonden. 'Tom Davis pounds the biscuit in the mess-kid here, Joe Plaice mixes in our juice in t'other, to make a right smooth pap, and I send it home with this little spoon, a very small spoon, like you said, your honour. A silver teaspoon Killick lent me from the cabin.'

  Stephen looked at the first kid, which contained a good pound of shattered biscuit, and at the second, which held a rather greater quantity of pap: he considered Herapath (barely recognizable in his purser's slops) whose eyes were fixed with painful eagerness upon the spoon. 'Well,' said he, 'if you give him a third part of what is in the tub, and the rest at five times, say at each eighth bell, you may make a seaman of him yet, rather than a corpse; for you are to observe, that it is less the dimensions of the spoon, than the sum total, the aggregate of the pap, that counts.'

  In the great cabin he found the Leopard's captain sitting in the midst of a large quantity of papers: it was clear that he had a great many things to occupy his mind, but Stephen had every intention of adding more as soon as Jack should have finished with the purser's accounts. In the meantime he continued his reflection: the comparison between Diana Villiers and Mrs Wogan really would not hold. They both had black hair and blue eyes, and they were much of an age; but Mrs Wogan was a good two inches shorter, and those two inches made an extraordinary difference—the difference between a woman who was tall and one who was not. Cleopatra's nose. But above all, Mrs Wogan lacked the infinite grace that ravished Stephen's heart every time Diana walked across a room. As to her face, it was scarcely fair to judge, after what she had been through so very recently: yet in spite of the want of bloom and the yellowish complexion, there was a likeness, a superficial likeness striking enough to make even a casual observer think of some close relationship; but as far as he could judge in this short space of time, Mrs Wogan's face had been formed by a somewhat gentler habit of mind. It was resolute enough; but in spite of her dangerous calling he thought it the outward expression of a milder, less cruel and imperious, and perhaps a more naive and even affectionate nature: not that that was saying much. A leopard to Diana's tiger, perhaps. 'A poor figure,' he said, remembering the leopards he had known, none remarkable for mildness or naivety. 'But smaller in any case: on a smaller scale.'

  'There, Mr Benton,' said Jack. 'All square by the lifts and braces.' And when the purser had borne his books away, 'Stephen, I am all yours.'

  'Then be so good as to bring your mind to bear on my convicts. I say my convicts, because I am answerable for their health, which, let me tell you, is tolerably precarious.'

  'Yes, yes, Pullings and I have dealt with that. Hammocks are to be slung in the forepeak, Navy-fashion—no more of that vile straw. The people are to be aired on the forecastle, a dozen at a time, once in the forenoon and once in the first dog-watch; your wind-sail will have been rigged before the day is out; and when you and the chaplain have reported on them, we shall see which can be let out of irons. For exercise, they can pump ship.'

  'And Mrs Wogan, is she too to pump ship? As a medical man, I tell you she cannot long survive in that damp, mephitic, lightless cupboard. She too must have air.'

  'Ah, there you have me, Stephen. What are we to do with her? I have found a note in the superintendent's papers: he was directed to allow her all proper indulgences consistent with security and good order—the services of a female attendant—her own stores to the extent of one and a half ton. No word about exercise.'

  'What is the custom in the common transports that go to Botany Bay, when they carry privileged persons?'

  'I don't know. I asked the turnkeys—God-damned half-baked whoreson lubbers—and all they could tell me was that Barrington, the pickpocket, you remember, was allowed to mess with the bosun. But that is neither here nor there: he was only a flash kiddy, while Mrs Wogan is clearly a gentlewoman . . . By the way, Stephen, did you notice the extraordinary likeness between her and Diana?'

  'I did not, sir,' said Stephen, and a brief silence followed, in which Jack regretted having mentioned a name that might have caused a wound—'Laid by the lee again, Jack'—and at the same time he wondered how it came about that Stephen should have grown so hellfire peevish these recent days.

  'I cannot very well invite her to walk the quarterdeck,' he said. 'That would certainly be improper, since she has been condemned. A very dangerous woman, it appears—blazed away right, left and centre when she was taken.'

  'Certainly you would not wish to associate with a malefactor; though I believe there is an excellent precedent for doing so, as your chaplain may tell you. Then as you so rightly say, there is the danger; and I appreciate your anxiety to the full. No doubt she has a brace of pistols in her pocket. Allow me to suggest, however, that she should have the liberty of walking on the gangway at stated intervals, and occasionally, in clement weather, upon the poop. I must confess that to reach the poop she would have to traverse the holy quarterdeck, and your not unnatural apprehension—I shall not say your timidity—will no doubt require you to have a carronade, loaded with grape, trained upon her as she does so. Nevertheless, this seems to me a valid solution of the difficulty.'

  Jack was well acquainted with Stephen's ferocious defence of his patients, even the most unseamanlike of them, once they were under his hands: adding to this the likeness that had so struck him, and to his friend's present unparalleled acerbity (for Stephen had not spoken with a smile: there had been a cruel edge to his voice), he checked the words that were rising in his throat. It called for a considerable effort, however, for Jack was neither the most patient nor the most long-suffering of men, and it seemed to him that on this occasion Stephen had let his tongue run away with him. Rather st
iffly he said, 'I shall consider of it,' and for once he was not displeased when the drum beat Roast Beef of Old England a moment later, summoning Dr Maturin away to his dinner in the wardroom.

  The Leopard's was a fine great wardroom, with plenty of space for all its officers and for the guests they loved to invite, in their hospitable Navy fashion; a long room terminating in a vast stern-window right across its breadth, and one that seemed longer still because of the twenty-foot table running down its middle. The lieutenants' cabins on either side: boarding-pikes, tomahawks, cutlasses, pistols, swords, arranged in tasteful groups upon the bulkhead and the sides. And today, almost for the first time, it had its full complement; for during the quite exceptionally rough passage down the Channel and across the Bay, dinner had rarely seen more than half a dozen at a time. Now the only man missing was Turnbull, the officer of the watch; there were blue coats in plenty, with scarlet for the Marines, black for the chaplain, and watchet-blue purser's jackets for the boys that waited behind the sailors' chairs, all bright and fresh at this beginning of a new commission; a pleasant sight in the brilliance of the reflected sun, but one that had little effect on Stephen's morosity. He had rarely felt a more general irritation nor less certainty of being able to control it, and he plied his spoon as though salvation lay at the bottom of his soup-plate. In a way it did: the barley-broth, glutinous and lenitive, helped to bring his inner man more nearly in harmony with his outward appearance—so much for free-will—and by the time they reached the first remove little effort was needed for a proper complaisance. The conversation at the wardroom table was banal in the extreme, commonplace and polite: a caution natural in men who were to be messmates for the next couple of years or so and who wished to sound their way at first, and to find out their messmates' nature, neither giving nor receiving any offence that might rankle for the next ten thousand miles, to break out at last in the Antipodes.

  The English, Stephen knew—and most of those sitting round the table were Englishmen—were extremely sensitive to social difference; he was conscious of a set of ears accurately tuned to minute differences of intonation, and he was particularly pleased to hear Pullings's fine southern burr: surely it argued a steady though wholly unaggressive self-confidence, a particular kind of strength. He contemplated Pullings as the first lieutenant stood there carving the round of beef, and it occurred to him that he had been singularly unobservant. He had known Pullings so long, from the time when Pullings had been a leggy master's mate, that Pullings seemed endowed with perpetual youth: Stephen had not seen maturity come down on him. To be sure, in company with Jack, the patron he loved and admired, Pullings still seemed very young: but here, in his own wardroom, he surprised Stephen with his size and his easy authority. Clearly he had left his youth in Hampshire, perhaps quite a long time ago: he was on his way to becoming one of those strong, eminently valuable lower-deck commanders in the line of Cook or Bowen; and until now Stephen had never noticed it.

  He ran his eye down the men sitting opposite him. Moore, the Marine captain, on Pullings's left; then Grant, the Leopard's second lieutenant, a middle-aged, precise-looking man; Macpherson, the senior Marine lieutenant, a black Highlander with an unusual, intelligent face; Larkin, the master, a young man for the post and an able navigator, but surely that vinous appearance so early in the day boded no good; Benton, the purser, a jolly little round soul with a moist and twinkling eye, like the landlord of a lively tavern, or a prosperous bagman. His side-whiskers almost met under his chin: he wore a number of ornaments, even at sea; and he was ingenuously pleased with his own person, particularly his shapely leg—he was, he confessed, a lady's man.

  On Stephen's right sat the younger subaltern, a youth who, apart from the differences in uniform, looked almost exactly like the Marine servant Stephen had chosen, the stupidest of the sixty allotted to the ship: both had the same thick, pale lips, the dense, lightless skin, the oyster-coloured protruding eyes, and in repose their faces wore the same expression of offended astonishment; and their foreheads both gave the impression of a prodigious depth of bone. Howard was the young man's name: he had been unable to engage Stephen's attention, and he was now talking to his other neighbour, a guest from the midshipmen's berth called Byron—talking about the peerage with an enthusiasm that brought a flush to his large, pallid face. Babbington, the third lieutenant, on Stephen's left, was another old shipmate; for although he still looked very boyish, Stephen had cured him of various discreditable diseases in the Mediterranean as far back as the year nought. His precocious, enduring passion for the opposite sex had stunted his growth, but this had not damped his general ardour, and he was giving a spirited account of a fox-chase when he was called away—the Newfoundland dog he had brought aboard, an animal the size of a calf, had seen fit to guard the blue cutter, in which Babbington had laid his Guernsey frock, and to forbid anyone to touch so much as its gunwale. His going revealed the black-coated figure of the Reverend Mr Fisher, sitting on Pullings's right. Stephen looked at him attentively. A tall, athletic man, fair, perhaps five and thirty, rather good-looking than otherwise, with an eager, somewhat nervous expression: he was now drinking a glass of wine with Captain Moore, and Stephen noticed that the nails of his outstretched hand were bitten to the quick, while the back of it and the exposed wrist showed an ugly eczema.

  'Mr Fisher, sir,' he said a moment later. 'I do not believe I have had the honour of being introduced to you. I am Maturin, the surgeon.' And after an exchange of civilities he said, 'I am delighted to have another colleague aboard, for since the spiritual and the physical are so inseparably entwined, perhaps the chaplain and the surgeon may be so called, quite apart from their necessary collaboration in the cockpit. Pray, sir, have you read physic, at all?'

  No, Mr Fisher had not: he would have done so had he been collated to a country benefice: many country clergymen did so, and he should certainly have followed their example: a knowledge of medicine would have enabled him to do good—even more good. A shepherd must know how to use his tar-box both literally and figuratively; for as Dr Maturin so rightly observed, the disorders of his sheep might partake of two natures at the least.

  This statement threw a slight chill upon the atmosphere; yet on the whole the wardroom's opinion of Mr Fisher was favourable: he was eager to please and to be pleased; and although they did not care for being regarded as a parcel of sheep, a remark of that nature was excusable in a parson.

  Their opinion was echoed in Stephen's diary, which he wrote in his nasty cabin on the orlop during the intervals between dinner and the burial service, after which he was to review the convicts with the chaplain and make his report. He might have had part of Jack's splendour, a spacious region of his own, as he had done before, when he was the Captain's guest; but in the Leopard he did not wish the surgeon to seem unduly privileged; and in any case he was singularly indifferent to his surroundings. 'I met the chaplain today,' he wrote. 'He is a conversible man, and of some reading: not perhaps very sensible, and possibly somewhat given to enthusiasm. But he may not do himself justice. He is nervous, and ill at ease; he lacks composure. Yet he may prove a valuable addition to the mess. I feel moderately drawn to him, and if I were on land I should say that I intended to continue the acquaintance. At sea there is no choice.' He continued with a description of his symptoms—the reviving appetite—the specificity of the intense yearning somewhat diminished—the crisis of the weaning perhaps behind him. 'To be so caught,' he wrote, 'and by so old a friend! The two Winchester quarts in the late Mr Simpson's chest, do they represent a danger or rather a safeguard, a standing evidence of resolution—indeed, of freedom recovered?' He pondered over this point, sinking into a deep meditation, his lips pursed, his head on one side, his eyes stretched wide, staring at his 'cello case. After having beaten on Stephen's door for some time in vain, the midshipman who had been sent to fetch him on deck opened it and said, 'I hope I do not disturb you, sir; but the Captain thought you would wish to be present at the burial.'


  'Thank you, thank you, Mr—Mr Byron, is it not?' said Stephen, holding his lantern towards the young man's face. 'I shall come upstairs directly.'

  He reached the quarterdeck in time for the last words and the four splashes: surgeon, superintendent, and two convicts; the last being the only cases he had ever known of actual death from seasickness. 'Though no doubt,' he observed to Mr Martin, 'partial asphyxia, near starvation, a vicious habit of body, and a prolonged confinement were contributory causes.'

  The Leopard's logbook wasted no time on causes, nor comments: it confined itself to facts: 'Tuesday, 22d. Wind SE. Course S27W. Distance 45. Position 42°40'N 10°11'W, Cape Finisterre E by S 12 leagues. Fresh gales, clear weather. People variously employed. At 5 committed bodies of William Simpson, John Alexander, Robert Smith, and Edward Marno to the deep. Swifted foretop-mast futtocks. Killed a bullock weight 522 lb.' While for his part her captain, in his serial letter to his wife, confined himself to effects: there was nothing like a funeral for sobering the crew. This evening none of the midshipmen would go skylarking, which was just as well, since the youngsters who had never been to sea before simply were not up to racing to the masthead and sliding down a backstay with anything like safety if there was a sea running. The child Boyle had brought Jack's heart into his mouth in the chops of the Channel by trying to reach the main-truck, with the ship pitching like a young horse being broke. 'There are ten of them altogether,' he said, 'and I am responsible to their parents: it makes me feel like an anxious hen. Not that some of them are in much danger, except of a beating. The boy I rated captain's servant for Harding's sake, is an odious little villain—I have already had to stop his grog—and there are a couple more among the oldsters, nephews of men who were kind to me, that are more like vermin than anything I like to see on my quarterdeck. But to go back to the funeral. Mr Fisher, the chaplain, read the service in a very proper manner, which pleased all hands; and although I do not care for parsons aboard, it seems to me that we could have done much worse. He is a gentlemanlike fellow; he seems to understand his duty: and at present he is about to sort out the convicts in the forepeak with Stephen, poor unfortunate creatures. As for Stephen, he is grown devilish crabbed, and I am afraid he is far, far from being happy. There is a female convict aboard, the very spit of Diana, and it seems to me that the reminder wounds him: said there was no likeness at all—rapped it out sharp and brought me up all standing. A most striking young woman, and no doubt a person of some consequence, since she berths alone and has her servant, while the others, God help them, live and mess in a hole where we would not keep our pigs. But we have fine weather now, after our blow, and the south-easter I had been praying for. The dear Leopard proves remarkably stiff, and weatherly as well. As I write, we have the wind one point free, and she has been tearing off her nine miles in the hour ever since this morning. At this rate (for I believe the wind is settled in that quarter) we may raise the Island in a fortnight, in spite of our lying-to, and Stephen will have sun and swimming and curious spiders to cheer his heart again. Sweetheart, in the night I was thinking of the stable drains, and I beg you will desire Mr Horridge to make sure they are really deep, and brick-lined . . .'