Master and Commander

by Patrick O'Brian

  'I dare say they are vexed,' said Jack, smiling. 'And I dare say they call me Beelzebub. But that don't make me Beelzebub.'

  'Does it not? Does it not? Ah? Well, however that may be, you have angered, you have stirred up the mercantile interest along the coast to a most prodigious degree. There is a wealthy man by the name of Mateu who is wonderfully incensed against you. The quicksilver belonged to him, and being contraband it was not insured; so did the vessel you cut out at Almoraira; and the cargo of the tartan burnt off Tortosa—half of that was his. He is well with the ministry. He has moved their indolence and they have allowed him and his friends to charter one of their men-of-war . . .'

  'Not charter, my dear sir: no private person can possibly charter a man-of-war, a national vessel, a King's ship, not even in Spain.'

  'Oh? Perhaps I use the wrong term: I often use the wrong term in naval matters. However. A ship of force, not only to protect the coasting trade but even more to pursue the Sophie, who is perfectly well known now, both by name and by description. This I had from Mateu's own cousin as we danced—'

  'You danced?' cried Jack, far more astonished than if Stephen had said 'as we ate our cold roast baby'.

  'Certainty I danced. Why would I not dance, pray?'

  'Certainty you are to dance—most uncommon graceful, I am sure. I only wondered . . . but did you indeed go about dancing?'

  'I did. You have not travelled in Catalonia, sir, I believe?'

  'Not I.'

  'Then I must tell you that on Sunday mornings it is the custom, in that country, for people of all ages and conditions to dance, on coming out of church: so I was dancing with Ramon Mateu i Cadafalch in the square before the cathedral church of Tarragona, where I had gone to hear the Palestrina Missa Brevis. The dance is a particular dance, a round called the sardana; and if you will reach me your fiddle I will play you the air of the one I have in mind. Though you must imagine I am a harsh braying hoboy.' Plays.

  'It is a charming melody, to be sure. Somewhat in the Moorish taste, is it not? But upon my word it makes my flesh creep, to think of you rambling about the countryside in ports—in towns. I had imagined you would have gone to earth, that you would have kept close with your friend, hidden in her room . . . that is to say . . .'

  'Yet I had told you, had I not, that I could ride the length and breadth of that country without a question or a moment's uneasiness?'

  'So you had. So you had.' Jack reflected for a while. 'And so, of course, if you chose, you could find out what ships and convoys were sailing, when expected, how laden, and so on. Even the galleons themselves, I dare say?'

  'Certainly I could,' said Stephen, 'if I chose to play the spy. It is a curious and apparently illogical set of notions, is it not, that makes it right and natural to speak of the Sophie's enemies, yet beyond any question wrong, dishonourable and indecent to speak of her prey?'

  'Yes,' said Jack, looking at him wistfully. 'You must give a hare her law, there is no doubt. But what do you tell me about this ship of force? What is her rate? How many guns does she carry? Where does she lie?'

  'Cacafuego is her name.'

  'Cacafuego? Cacafuego? I have never heard of her. So at least she cannot be a ship of the line How is she rigged?'

  Stephen paused 'I am ashamed to say I did not ask,' he said 'But from the satisfaction with which her name was pronounced, I take her to be some prepotent great argosy'

  'Well, we must try to keep out of her way and since she knows what we look like, we must try to change our appearance. It is wonderful what a coat of paint and a waist-cloth will do, or even an oddly patched jib or a fished topmast—by the way, I suppose they told you in the boat why we were compelled to maroon you?'

  'They told me about the frigates and your boarding the American.'

  'Yes: and precious stuff it was, too. There were no such people aboard—Dillon searched her for close on an hour. I was just as glad, for I remembered you had told me the United Irishmen were good creatures, on the whole—far better than those other fellows, whose name I forget. Steel boys, white boys, orange boys?'

  'United Irishmen? I had understood them to be French. They told me the American ship had been searched for some Frenchmen.'

  'They were only pretending to be Frenchmen. That is to say, if they had been there at all, they might have pretended to be French. That is why I sent Dillon, who speaks it so well. But they were not, you see; and in my opinion the whole thing was so much cock. I was just as glad, as I say; but it seemed to upset Dillon most strangely. I suppose he was very eager to take them: or he was very much put out at our cruise being cut short. Ever since then however, I must not bore you with all that. You heard about the prisoners?'

  'That the frigates had been so good as to give you fifty of theirs?'

  'Merely for their own convenience! It was not for the good of the service at all. A most shabby, unscrupulous thing!' cried Jack, his eyes starting from his head at the recollection. 'But I dished 'em, though. As soon as we were done with the American we bore away for the Amelia, told her we had drawn a blank and made our signal for parting company; and a couple of hours later, the wind serving, we landed every man jack on Dragon Island.'

  'Off Majorca?'

  'Just so.'

  'But is not that wrong? Will you not be reproved—court-martialled?'

  Jack winced, and clapping his hand to wood he said, 'Pray never say that ill-conditioned word. The mere sound of it is enough to spoil the day.'

  'But will you not get into trouble?'

  'Not if I put into Mahon with a thundering great prize at my tail,' said Jack, laughing. 'For now we may just have time to go and lie off Barcelona, do you see, if the wind is kind—I had quite set my heart upon it. We shall just have time for a quick stroke or two and then we must bear away for Mahon with anything we may have caught, for we certainly cannot spare another prize-crew, with our numbers so reduced. And we certainly cannot stay out much longer, without we eat our boots.'

  'Still and all . . .'

  'Never look so concerned, dear Doctor. There was no specific order as to where to land them, no order at all; and, of course, I'll square the head-money. Besides, I am covered: all my officers formally agreed that our shortage of water and provisions compelled us to do so—Marshall and Ricketts and even Dillon, although he was so chuff and pope-holy about it all.'

  The Sophie reeked of grilled sardines and fresh paint. She lay fifteen miles off Cape Tortosa in a dead calm, wallowing on the oily swell; and the blue smoke of the sardines she had bought out of a night-fishing barca-longa (she had bought the whole catch) still hung sickeningly about her 'tweendecks; her sails and rigging, half an hour after dinner.

  The bosun had a large working-party slung over her side, spreading yellow paint over the neat dockyard black and white; the sailmaker and a dozen palm-and-pricket men were busy at a long narrow strip of canvas designed to conceal her warlike character; and her lieutenant was pulling round her in the jolly-boat to judge of the effect. He was alone, except for her surgeon, and he was saying '. . . everything. I did everything in my power to avoid it. Everything, breaking all measures. I altered course, I shortened sail—unthinkable in the service—blackmailing the master to do so; and yet in the morning there she lay, two miles away under our lee, where she had no conceivable right to be. Ahoy, Mr Watt! Six inches lower all round.'

  'It was just as well. If any other man had gone aboard they might have been taken.'

  A pause, and James said, 'He leant over the table, so close I had his stinking breath in my face, and with a hateful yellow look he poured out this ugly stuff. I had already made up my mind, as I said; yet it looked exactly as though I were yielding to a vulgar threat. And two minutes later I was sure I had.'

  'But you had not: it is a sick fancy. Indeed, it is not far from morose delectation: take great care of that sin, James, I beg. As for the rest, it is a pity you mind it so. What does it amount to, in the long run?'

  'A man would have to be
three parts dead not to mind it so; and quite dead to a sense of duty, to say nothing of . . . Mr Watt, that will do very well.'

  Stephen sat there, weighing the advantage of saying 'Do not hate Jack Aubrey for it: do not drink so much: do not destroy yourself for what will not last' against the disadvantage of setting off an explosion; for in spite of his apparent calm, James Dillon was on a hair-trigger, in a state of pitiful exacerbation. Stephen could not decide, shrugged, lifting his right hand, palm upwards, in a gesture that meant 'Bah, let it go,' and to himself he observed, 'However, I shall oblige him to take a black draught this evening—that at least I can do—and some comfortable mandragora; and in my diary I shall write "J D, required to play Iscariot either with his right hand or with his left, and hating the necessity (the absolute necessity), concentrates all this hatred upon poor JA, which is a remarkable instance of the human process; for, in fact, JD does not dislike JA at all—far from it."

  'At least,' said James, pulling back to the Sophie, 'I do hope that after all this discreditable shuffling we may be taken into action. It has a wonderful way of reconciling a man with himself: and with everybody else, sometimes.'

  'What is that fellow in the buff waistcoat doing on the quarterdeck?'

  'That is Pram. Captain Aubrey is dressing him as a Danish officer; it is part of our plan of disguise. Do not you remember the yellow waistcoat the master of the Clomer wore? It is customary with them.'

  'I do not. Tell me, do such things often happen, at sea?'

  'Oh, yes. It is a perfectly legitimate ruse de guerre. Often we amuse the enemy with false signals too—anything but those of distress. Take great care of the paint, now.'

  At this point Stephen fell straight into the sea—into the hollow of the sea between the boat and the side of the sloop as they drew away from one another. He sank at once, rose just as they came together, struck his head between the two and sank again, bubbling. Most of the Sophie's people who could swim leapt into the water, Jack among them; and others ran with boat-hooks, a dolphin-striker, two small grapnels, an ugly barbed hook on a chain; but it was the brothers Sponge that found him, five fathoms down (heavy bones for his size, no fat, lead-soled half-boots) and brought him up, his clothes blacker than usual, his face more white, and he streaming with water, furiously indignant.

  It was no epoch-making event, but it was a useful one, since it provided the gun-room with a topic of conversation at a moment when very hard work was needed to maintain the appearance of a civilized community. A good deal of the time James was heavy, inattentive and silent; his eyes were bloodshot from the grog he swallowed, but it seemed neither to cheer nor yet to fuddle him. The master was almost equally withdrawn, and he sat there stealing covert glances at Dillon from time to time. So when they were all at table they went into the subject of swimming quite exhaustively—its rarity among seamen, its advantages (the preservation of life: the pleasure to be derived from it, in suitable climates: the carrying of a line ashore in an emergency), its disadvantages (the prolongation of death-agonies in shipwreck, in falling overboard unseen: flying in the face of nature—had God meant men to swim, etc.), the curious inability of young seals to swim, the use of bladders, the best ways of learning and practising the art of swimming.

  'The only right way to swim,' said the purser for the seventh time, 'is to join your hands like you were saying your prayers'—he narrowed his eyes, joined his hands very exactly—'and shoot them out so—' This time he did strike the bottle, which plunged violently into the solomongundy and thence, deep in thick gravy, into Marshall's lap.

  'I knew you would do it,' cried the master, springing about and mopping himself. 'I told you so. I said "Soonar or latar you'll knock down that damned decantar", and you can't swim a stroke—prating like a whoreson ottar. You have wrecked my best nankeen trousars.'

  'I didn't go for to do it,' said the purser sullenly; and the evening relapsed into a barbarous gloom.

  Indeed, as the Sophie beat up, tack upon tack, to the northward, she could not have been described as a very cheerful sloop. In his beautiful little cabin Jack sat reading Steel's Navy List and feeling low, not so much because he had over-eaten again, and not so much because of the great number of men senior to him on the list, as because he was so aware of this feeling aboard. He could not know the precise nature of the complicated miseries inhabiting Dillon and Marshall. He could not tell that three yards from him James Dillon was trying to fend off despair with a series of invocations and a haggard attempt at resignation, while the whole of his mind that was not taken up with increasingly mechanical prayer converted its unhappy turmoil into hatred for the established order, for authority and so for captains, and for all those who, never having had a moment's conflict of duty or honour in their lives, could condemn him out of hand. And although Jack could hear the master's shoes crunching on the deck some inches above his head, he could not possibly divine the particular emotional disturbance and the sickening dread of exposure that filled the poor man's loving heart. But he knew very well that his tight, self-contained world was hopelessly out of tune and be was haunted by the depressing sentiment of failure—of not having succeeded in what he had set out to do. He would very much have liked to ask Stephen Maturin the reasons for this failure; he would very much have liked to talk to him on indifferent subjects and to have played a little music; but he knew that an invitation to the captain's cabin was very like an order, if only because the refusing of it was so extraordinary—that had been borne in upon him very strongly the other morning, when he had been so amazed by Dillon's refusal. Where there was no equality there was no companionship: when a man was obliged to say 'Yes, sir,' his agreement was of no worth even if it happened to be true. He had known these things all his service life; they were perfectly evident; but he had never thought they would apply so fully, and to him.

  Farther down in the sloop, in the almost deserted midshipmen's berth, the melancholy was even more profound: the youngsters were, in fact, weeping as they sat. Ever since Mowett and Pullings had gone off in prizes these two had been at watch and watch, which meant that neither ever had more than four hours' sleep—hard at that dormouse, lovebed age that so clings to its warm hammock; then again in writing their dutiful letters they had contrived to cover themselves with ink, and had been sharply rebuked for their appearance; what is more, Babbington, unable to think of anything to put, had filled his pages with asking after everybody at home and in the village, human beings, dogs, horses, cats, birds, and even the great hall clock, to such an extent that he was now filled with an overwhelming nostalgia. He was also afraid that his hair and teeth were going to fall out and his bones soften, while sores and blotches covered his face and body—the inevitable result of conversing with harlots, as the wise old-experienced clerk Richards had assured him. Young Ricketts' woe had quite another source: his father had been talking of a transfer into a store-ship or a transport, as being safer and far more homelike, and young Ricketts had accepted the prospect of separation with wonderful fortitude; but now it appeared that there was to be no separation—that he, young Ricketts, was to go too, torn from the Sophie and the life he loved so passionately. Marshall, seeing him staggering with weariness, had sent him below, and there he sat on his sea-chest, resting his face in his hands at half-past three in the morning, too tired even to creep into his hammock; and the tears oozed between his fingers.

  Before the mast there was much less sadness, although there were several men—far more than usual—who looked forward with no pleasure to Thursday morning, when they were to be flogged. Most of the others had nothing positive to be glum about, apart from the hard work and the short commons; yet nevertheless the Sophie was already so very much of a community that every man aboard was conscious of something out of joint, something more than their officers' snappishness—what, they could not tell; but it took away from their ordinary genial flow. The gloom on the quarter-deck seeped forward, reaching as far as the goat-house, the manger, and even the hawse-
holes themselves.

  The Sophie, then, considered as an entity, was not at the top of her form as she worked through the night on the dying tramontana; nor yet in the morning, when the northerly weather was followed (as it so often happens in those waters) by wreathing mists from the south-west, very lovely for those who do not have to navigate a vessel through them, close in shore, and the forerunners of a blazing day. But this state was nothing in comparison with the tense alarm, not to say the dejection and even dread, that Stephen discovered when he stepped on to the quarter-deck just at sunrise.

  He had been woken by the drum beating to quarters. He had gone directly to the cockpit, and there with Cheslin's help he had arranged his instruments. A bright eager face from the upper regions had announced 'a thundering great xebec round the cape, right in with the land'. He acknowledged this with mild approval, and after a while he fell to sharpening his catlin; then he sharpened his lancets and then his fleam-toothed saw with a little hone that he had bought for the purpose in Tortosa. Time passed, and the face was replaced by another, a very much altered pallid face that delivered the captain's compliments and desired him to come on deck.

  'Good morning, Doctor,' said Jack, and Stephen noticed that his smile was strained, his eyes hard and wary. 'It looks as though we had caught a Tartar.' He nodded over the water towards a long, sharp, strikingly beautiful vessel, bright light red against the sullen cliffs behind. She lay low in the water for her size (four times the Sophie's bulk), but a high kind of flying platform carried out her stern, so that it jutted far over her counter, while a singular beak-like projection advanced her prow a good twenty feet beyond her stem. Her main and mizzen masts bore immense curved double tapering lateen yards, whose sails were spilling the south-east air to allow the Sophie to come up with her; and even at this distance Stephen noticed that the yards, too, were red. Her starboard broadside, facing the Sophie, had no less than sixteen gun-ports in it; and her decks were extraordinarily crowded with men