Book 5 - Desolation Island

by Patrick O'Brian

  'You too, Stephen?' cried Jack, colouring. 'By God, I—'

  'Do not mistake me, Jack, I beg,' said Stephen, drawing his chair close and speaking into his ear. 'These are not carnal words. I will say no more than this: her arrest was in fact connected with intelligence. That is the meaning of the words you found on the superintendent's instruction "all facilities will be afforded to Dr Maturin, without question". I did not explain them at the time, because the least said in these matters the better. But you will now permit me to observe that the Marine would be better marching up and down the passage, not listening at the door: he would also find it less dull. And in time he might be withdrawn entirely.'

  'The least said the better,' said Jack. 'Just so. It shall be as you direct.' He paced to and fro, his hands behind his back. He had boundless confidence in Stephen, but deep in his mind there was a sense of having been—not tricked, not quite manoeuvred: perhaps managed was the word. He did not care for it at all. It wounded him. He took up his fiddle, and standing there facing the open stern window and looking out on to the wake, he stroked a deep note from the G string and so played on, an improvisation that expressed what he felt as no words could have done. But when Stephen behind him, speaking over the sound, said, 'Forgive me, Jack: sometimes I am compelled to be devious. I do not do it from choice,' the music changed, ended in an abrupt, cheerful pizzicato, and he sat down again. As they finished their bottle, they talked about tropic-birds, the flying-fish they had eaten for breakfast, the very curious phenomenon of a high haze moving in the same direction as the much lower cumulus—something that Jack had never seen in the Trades, where the upper and the lower winds were always contrary—and about the unusual aspect of the sea itself.

  'You know I am to dine with you tomorrow,' said Jack, after a pause. 'I have been wondering, after today's wretched business, whether not to cry off.'

  'It would disappoint Pullings,' said Stephen. 'And Macpherson, who sees to the catering: he has laid on a haggis and some uncommon claret. It would also disappoint Fisher, and no doubt the midshipman Holles, who is also to be our guest.'

  'Holles will eat standing, if I have anything to do with it,' said Jack. 'But perhaps I should come: it might look shabby else, and resentful. Though I doubt it will be such a jovial feast as Tom Pullings might wish in his heart.'

  The wardroom's dinner to the Captain was indeed heavy going at the start, although the Leopard had just run one of her finest distances in this or any other of her voyages, tearing along, top-gallants just holding in the splendid breeze on her quarter, the log racing astern glass after glass, reeling off ten and eleven knots at every cast, and filling all hands with pleasurable excitement. Perhaps haggis was not quite the dish for the occasion: perhaps it was not possible to make a total divorce between service and social matters. Howard was still too shocked to attempt much in that line, but Babbington and Moore did their utmost, drinking with Jack in the most sociable manner, and the purser's droll stories were a very great resource, while the chaplain told them of an unusually well authenticated ghost; the Captain himself produced a creditable flow of small but convivial talk; and when the flaccid remains of the haggis had given way to Jack's favourite dish, soused hog's face, the proper sound of naval gaiety was beginning to build up to its full volume. But now Grant struck in with a singularly misplaced disquisition on the right place to cross the equator. He maintained that twelve degrees west was the only proper longitude; anything more would bring you on to St Roque, anything less into the adverse currents, the swell, and the treacherous winds of Africa. Since Jack had clearly stated his intention of crossing in twenty-one or twenty-two degrees, it was clear to all that these words were untimely; but when Macpherson attempted to start a fresh hare, Grant held up his hand and said, 'Hush, I am speaking,' and his harsh didactic voice went on and on haranguing his restless audience until at last Pullings said, 'How often have you crossed the line, Mr Grant?'

  'Why, twice, as I told you,' said Grant, put out of his stride.

  'I believe Captain Aubrey must have crossed a score of times. Ain't that so, sir?'

  'Why, no,' said Jack. 'Not exactly. Not above eighteen, for I don't count cruising off the mouth of the Amazon. Mr Holles, a glass of wine with you.'

  'Nevertheless,' said Larkin the master, who had drunk a good deal in the forenoon watch and whose fuddled mind was still at the beginning of Grant's observations, 'there is a great deal to be said for even less than twelve degrees.'

  'Oh, clap a stopper over it,' whispered his neighbour, and a dead silence fell, a silence broken by a messenger—'Mr Martin begged the Doctor's pardon, but could wish to see him as soon as might be convenient.'

  'You will excuse me, gentlemen,' said Stephen, folding his napkin. 'I hope to join you again before the cheese, the St Jago goat's milk cheese. Now, sir?' he said to Martin, in the convicts' sickbay. Martin made no reply, but pointed. 'Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,' whispered Stephen. All three patients had broken out in a mulberry-coloured rash, extraordinarily widespread and most ominously dark: there was no possible doubt—this was gaol-fever, and gaol-fever of the most virulent kind. He was certain the moment he saw it, but for conscience's sake he checked the other signs—petechiae, a palpable spleen, brown dry tongue, sores, raging heat: not one was absent.

  'Now we know what we are about,' he said, straightening up. 'Mr Martin, you have kept the most scrupulous notes, I am sure: when we combine our observations I have no doubt that we shall add materially to the literature on this disease. A most interesting set of anomalies hitherto, and now so convincingly resolved. Some cantharides if you please: let Soames prepare three turpentine enemata; and pray pass the shears.' And to the patients, who were feeling rather better now, he said in English, 'Now we are about to attack the root of the malady: be of good heart.'

  They smiled: the strongest of the three said they would see England again, and that he would like to take another hare on Mr Wilson's land. They looked at him gratefully.

  He and Martin plied all the remedies they possessed, all the forms of alleviation they knew—sponging, cold affusions, shaving of the head—but the progress of the disease, from having been extraordinarily slow, now became extraordinarily rapid. As the day wore on to quarters Stephen sent a note aft, asking that the guns might not be fired, although by this time two of the men were in the coma vigil, their eyes were staring wide, but their beings so very far below the surface that no guns would ever rouse them. When hammocks were piped down, the third man entered into a muttering delirium; and at lights out he too passed into coma.

  The lights burned on in the sickbay, and in his patients' gleaming eyes Stephen read ultimate disappointment, loss of trust, and deep reproach. Between two and four in the morning they all died. He and Martin closed their eyes, told the loblolly boy to send for the sailmaker as soon as it was day, and went to bed. As he walked aft to his cabin Stephen noticed that the way had come off the ship: the innumerable sounds that spoke of her movement had fallen silent, and the voice of the water, usually slipping by just above his head, had died away.

  Chapter Five

  The Leopard had lost the north-east trades in 12'30°N., far earlier than Jack had expected: he resisted the notion of total loss as long as he could, but presently he was forced to admit that it was so, that this year the doldrums had moved farther north than usual, and that his ship was in them, well in, having carried the declining breath of the true breeze right down to its last expiring waft. Day after day she lay there with her head all round the compass, inanimate, her sails hanging limp, sometimes rolling so that most hands were sick all over again, rolling so heavy that he struck her topgallantmasts before she should send them overboard, sometimes motionless; and all day long the heat beat down from a veiled sun. The air was thick, with no refreshment even in the morning watch; lightning flickered all round the night horizon; and sometimes by night but more often by day, warm rain came down so hard and thick that the men on deck could hardly breathe and the scuppers
on either side spurted water as though from a powerful hose.

  Sometimes, after these blinding downpours, a breeze would spring up, and he would have the Leopard's head towed round to make something of it. But it was rare that the breeze was on the ship herself; far more often it ruffled the sea half a mile or more away, and then the boats would labour, double-banked, to get her there before it died—vain, exhausting labour, nine times out of ten. And these breezes, such as they were, might come from any quarter; they were as likely to push her back as to help her on. Almost all the time she lay in much the same few square miles of sea, surrounded by her own filth, with empty casks, and floating bottles from the wardroom. Yet this stretch of sea was itself in motion. Whenever he could take a good noon observation or a double amplitude, Jack fixed his position: a perfect sight of the moon and Altair proved that the chronometers he had indulged in—a superlative pair, the pride of their maker—were still within seconds of Greenwich time, and that this sea in which the Leopard wallowed was very slowly drifting west and a little south in a circular motion that would require so great a time for its completion that he looked away from his reckoning. Like every other sailor he had heard of ships in the doldrums lying helpless for weeks and even months, eating their stores and accumulating weed; he had had severe experience of it himself; and as he examined the sky, the sea, the drifting weed, the birds and fishes, the feel of the air, and all those minute differences that mean so much to a man bred to the sea, it appeared to him that the Leopard was in for a very ugly bout. A gloomy ship now, oppressed by heat, and disease, and dread of the future.

  At one time a school of whales passed by, sperm whales on either side, spouting, moving steadily along the surface, half awash, diving, reappearing farther on: some fifty huge calm dark forms travelling fast, some so close to the ship that he could see their blow-holes open. One was a female with a calf no longer than the Leopard's launch. Although the ship had half a dozen whalers among her people, there was not a sound as the school moved past: the crew, frightened by the gaol-fever, dispirited, worn out by towing, merely looked over the side—an apathetic stare, no more. At another time, a great deal of weed appeared, perhaps some slow streamer from the remote Sargasso Sea, and with it a number of birds that he had never seen before.

  It was no use sending for Stephen, however. Stephen was shut into the fore part of the ship: it had been transformed into one vast sickbay, sealed off by bulkheads, forbidden territory from which he never emerged except for the daily burials. Very early in the epidemic he had fumigated the whole ship, section by section, with great quantities of brimstone while the hands were sent into the boats or the tops; then he had retired with all his patients, desiring Jack to have the bulkheads caulked and tarred, in the hope of stopping the spread of the infection.

  A vain hope. During the first week the log had recorded the burial of fourteen convicts, the two remaining turnkeys, and a loblolly boy, all of whom had lived or worked forward, and it had recorded them in Needham's fine copperplate: now it was Jack's far rougher hand that wrote the daily list, for his clerk had gone over the side with two cannon-balls to carry him down and his hammock for a shroud, the first of those abaft the mast to die of the disease.

  Apart from the perpetual supply of fresh rain-water, the circumstances were as bad as they could be, with the enormous oppressive heat, the dispirited vitiated atmosphere, the excessive dread and general despondence that had come over all the crew; and when the disease struck the lower-deck it killed men faster than the plague. They gave up hope, and sometimes it seemed to Stephen that they would almost as soon not take his draughts, but would rather have it over as soon as might be: and soon it was, in many cases—headache, languor, a moderate rise in temperature, and despair at once, even before the rash and the appalling fever, far worse in this stifling heat, and so onwards to what he often believed an unnecessary death. He believed this all the more since his heroic exhibitions of bark and antimony had begun to have effect. There were now eleven convalescents, men who had survived their crises; yet in spite of this clear evidence, there were those who would die, who resigned themselves almost thankfully to death the moment they were brought in.

  'I believe,' he said to Martin, 'that if only a French ship could be seen approaching, if only we could hear the drum beat and the sound of guns in earnest, several of our cases would cure themselves, and the admissions would fall off to a wonderful degree.'

  'You are in the right,' said Martin, taking up his book. 'Spirit is three-quarters of the remedy, as Rhazes observes. But who can dose or measure spirit?' He pressed his hands to his eyes, and went on, 'Now in the case of Roberts, you did say twenty drachms, did you not? I must note it down.'

  'Twenty drachms it was: I am persuaded he can bear it. And pray do note it down. Our notes will be of capital importance. You have kept them very fully, I am sure?'

  'I have indeed,' said Martin wearily.

  'Mr Pullings, sir,' said the new loblolly boy.

  'Bring him in. Well now, Lieutenant Pullings, my dear, you have a vile headache, you feel cold, a distinct rigor about the midriff and in the limbs? Just so. You have come to the right shop,' said Stephen, smiling. 'You are slightly affected, and we can take you in hand in time. We have a prime physic that will suit your case, and belay it with all nines: and you are to observe, Tom, that I will lay a hundred to one upon your hoisting your flag in time. Pullings never yet said die.'

  An hour later Martin asked Dr Maturin to take his pulse: he did so: they looked at one another, and Stephen said, 'I am not sure. There are many other possible causes—you have eaten nothing since yesterday evening. Take some soup and stay below. I shall go on deck this time.'

  He took his best coat off the cleat and put it on, for the Leopard still did these things in the proper manner. He walked along the gangway towards the range of bodies sewn into their hammocks, as Fisher's white surplice showed on the quarterdeck. Stephen did not go farther aft than the maintack block, but stood there with his hat off while the service was read and the dead seamen moved down the slide into the viscid water.

  After this he conversed with Jack at a distance of some ten yards—easy enough in that still air and that silent ship—and paced for a while on the forecastle. By the time he returned to the sickbay there was no doubt remaining as to Martin's state.

  'You will take our twenty drachms?' he said.

  'I will even adventure upon twenty-five,' said Martin, 'and my notes will show its progress from within.'

  From that day onwards Stephen was alone. He had two literate assistants, Herapath and to some degree Fisher, but neither was a medical man, neither could compound his drugs nor judge their administration, and in neither could he confide when the enormous demand exhausted his medicine-chest, so that he was obliged to turn to placebos, mostly of powdered chalk, coloured blue or red. Day and night ran into one, separated only by those pauses when Fisher put on his surplice and followed the dead on deck to bury them. Although even before Martin's death the physic was no more than nominal, the immediate bodily and spiritual care, the nursing of the patients still remained, and to this he applied himself, teaching Herapath all he could; for as he remarked, nursing was quite half the battle. It had saved Martin, who in fact died from a pneumonia that struck him days after the favourable termination of the crisis and after he had written an exact description of the disease from the onset to the first stage of convalescence, the Latin faultless to the last.

  It seemed an endless battle, yet by the calendar only twenty-three days passed before an even more violent deluge than usual brought a northerly breeze in the morning watch that wafted the Leopard down, just to the very outside limit of the region where the south-east trade-wind blew.

  From the sickbay he noticed the deafening downpour, water knee-deep on the decks and cascading into the head, and he heard all hands piped to make sail in the ensuing quietness; but this had happened so often that he paid little attention. Even when he felt her heavy, deeply
weeded bulk surge on and heard the growing hiss of her cutwater shearing through the swell, he was too utterly weary to be pleased, just as he had taken no real satisfaction in the diminishing mortality of these last few days and the absence of fresh cases.

  He slept where he sat, occasionally waking for some call for water or to help a half-seen assistant lash a delirious man into his cot. Yet when he woke in the morning he knew that the ship was in a different world, that she was herself a different world. True, clean, breathable air was gushing down the wind-sail; his whole being was recharged with life.

  These confused waking motions were confirmed on deck. The Leopard had sent up her topgallantmasts—it had taken the reduced crew three-quarters of an hour instead of the usual seventeen minutes and forty seconds—and she was running west-south-west at five or six knots under a cloud of sail. A new and brilliant day, a new and healthy sea, transparent tonic air, the ship alive. Killick had been on the watch, and now he ran forward with coffee-pot and biscuit, laid them carefully in a coil of rope at the appointed place, the limit of the forbidden ground, retreated, and called out, 'Good morning, sir. This is what we have been praying for.' Stephen nodded, took a draught, and asked how the Captain did. 'Which he's just turned in,' said Killick, 'a-laughing like a boy. Says we've cleared the doldrums: the true blessed trade, he says, and never will he touch a stitch till we're at the Cape.'

  Stephen drank his coffee and soaked his biscuit standing by the rail. An extraordinary change had come over the ship: men ran, talked in low cheerful voices, looked like different beings; and there was laughter out on the bowsprit. All this time the routine of the ship had been carried on, but as though the hands were already at least half-dead; orders had been obeyed, but by slow and listless automata. Now the Leopard might have been sailing fresh from Porto Praya, apart from the fact that her decks were so thinly peopled.