Master and Commander

by Patrick O'Brian

  'Very true, Mr Ricketts,' said the bosun. 'And I can't say I have ever really liked those cross-catharpings. But you're wide of the mark when you say it's all the main chance. Look at this hawser-laid stuff, now: better rope you'll never see. And there's no rogue's yarn in it,' he said, teasing out an end with his marlin-spike. 'Look for yourself. And why is there no rogue's yarn in it, Mr Ricketts? Because it never come off of the King's yard, that's why: Mr Screw-penny Bleeding Commissioner Brown never set eyes on it. Which Goldilocks bought it out of his own pocket, as likewise the paint you're a-sitting on. So there, you mean-souled dough-faced son of a cow-poxed bitch,' he would have added, if he had not been a peaceable, quiet sort of a man, and if the drum had not begun to beat to quarters.

  'Pass the word for my cox'n,' said Jack after the drum had beat the retreat. The word passed—cap'n's cox'n, cap'n's cox'n, come on George, show a leg George, at the double George, you're in trouble George, George is going to be crucified, ha, ha, ha—and Barret Bonden appeared. 'Bonden, I want the boat's crew to look their best: washed, shaved, trimmed, straw hats, Guernsey frocks, ribbons.'

  'Aye aye, sir,' said Bonden with an impassive face and his heart brimming with inquiry. Shaved? Trimmed? Of a Tuesday? They mustered clean to divisions on Thursdays and Sundays: but to be shaved on Tuesday—on a Tuesday at sea! He hurried off to the ship's barber, and by the time half the cutter's crew were as rosy and smooth as art could make them the answer to his questions appeared. They rounded Cape Dartuch, and Ciudadela came into view on the starboard bow; but instead of sailing steadily north-west the Sophie bore up for the town, heaving to in fifteen fathom water with her foretopsail aback a quarter of a mile from the mole.

  'Where's Simmons?' asked James, quickly passing the cutter's crew in review.

  'Reported sick, sir,' said Bonden, and in a lower voice, 'His birthday, sir.'

  James nodded. Yet the substitution of Davies was not very clever, for although he was much of a size, and filled the straw hat with Sophie embroidered on its ribbon, he was an intense blue-black and could not but be noticed. However, there was no time to do anything about it now, for here was the captain, very fine in his best uniform, best sword and gold-laced hat.

  'I do not expect to be more than an hour or so, Mr Dillon,' said Jack, with an odd mixture of conscious stiffness and hidden excitement; and as the bosun sprung his call he stepped down into the scrubbed and gleaming cutter. Bonden had judged better than James Dillon: the cutter's crew might have been all the colours of the rainbow, or even pied, for all Captain Aubrey cared at this moment.

  The sun set in a somewhat troubled sky; the bells of Ciudadela rang for the Angelus and the Sophie's for the last dog watch; the moon. rose, very near the full, swimming up gloriously behind Black Point. Hammocks were piped down. The watch changed. Seized by Lucock's passion for navigation, all the midshipmen took observations of the moon as it mounted, and of the fixed stars, one by one. Eight bells, and the middle watch. The lights of Ciudadela all going out.

  'Cutter's away, sir,' reported the sentry at last, and ten minutes later Jack came up the side. He was very pale, and in the strong moonlight he looked deathly—black hole for a mouth, hollows for his eyes. 'Are you still on deck, Mr Dillon?' he said, with an attempt at a smile. 'Make sail, if you please: the tail of the sea-breeze will carry us out,' he said, and walked uncertainly into his cabin.

  Chapter Ten

  'Maimomdes has an account of a lute-player who, required to perform upon some stated occasion, found that he had entirely forgot not only the piece but the whole art of playing, fingering, everything,' wrote Stephen 'I have some times had a dread of the same thing happening to me; a not irrational dread, since I once experienced a deprivation of a similar nature coming back to Aghamore when I was a boy, coming back after an eight years' absence, I went to see Bridie Coolan, and she spoke to me in Irish. Her voice was intimately familiar (none more, my own wet-nurse), so were the intonations and even the very words, yet nothing could I understand—her words conveyed no meaning whatever. I was dumbfounded at my loss. What puts me in mind of this is my discovery that I no longer know what my friends feel, intend, or even mean. It is clear that JA met with a severe disappointment in Ciudadela, one that he feels more deeply than I should have supposed possible, in him; and it is clear that JD is still in a state of great unhappiness: but beyond that I know almost nothing—they do not speak and I can no longer look into them. My own testiness does not help, to be sure. I must guard against a strong and increasing tendency to indulge in dogged, sullen conduct—the conduct of vexation (much promoted by want of exercise); but I confess that much as I love them, I could wish them both to the Devil, with their high-flown, egocentrical points of honour and their purblind spurring one another on to remarkable exploits that may very well end in unnecessary death. In their death, which is their concern: but also in mine, to say nothing of the rest of the ship's company. A slaughtered crew, a sunken ship, and my collections destroyed—these do not weigh at all against their punctilios. There is a systematic flocci-naucinihili-pilification of all other aspects of existence that angers me. I spend half my time purging them, bleeding them, prescribing low diet and soporifics. They both eat far too much, and drink far too much, especially JD. Sometimes I am afraid they have closed themselves to me because they have agreed upon a meeting next time we come ashore, and they know very well I should stop it. How they vex my very spirit! If they had the scrubbing of the decks, the hoisting of the sails, the cleaning of the heads, we should hear little enough of these fine vapourings. I have no patience with them. They are strangely immature for men of their age and their position: though, indeed, it is to be supposed that if they were not, they would not be here—the mature, the ponderate mind does not embark itself upon a man-of-war—is not to be found wandering about the face of the ocean in quest of violence. For all his sensibility (and he played his transcription of Deh vieni with a truly exquisite delicacy, just before we reached Ciudadela), JA is in many ways more suited to be a pirate chief in the Caribbean a hundred years ago: and for all his acumen JD is in danger of becoming an enthusiast—a latter-day Loyola, if he is not knocked on the head first, or run through the body. I am much exercised in my mind by that unfortunate conversation . . .

  The Sophie, to the astonishment of her people, had not headed for Barcelona after leaving Ciudadela, but west-north-west; and at daybreak, rounding Cape Salou within hail of the shore, she had picked up a richly-laden Spanish coaster of some two hundred tons, mounting (but not firing) six six-pounders—had picked her up from the landward side as neatly as though the rendezvous had been fixed weeks ahead and the Spanish captain had kept his hour to the minute. 'A very profitable commercial venture,' said James, watching the prize disappear in the east, bound with a favourable wind for Port Mahon, while they beat up, tack upon tack, to their northern cruising-ground, one of the busiest sea-lanes in the world. But that (though unhappy in itself) was not the conversation Stephen had in mind.

  No. That came later, after dinner, when he was on the quarterdeck with James. They were talking, in an easy, off-hand manner, about differences in national habit—the Spaniards' late hours; the French way of all leaving the table together, men and women, and going directly into the drawing-room; the Irish habit of staying with the wine until one of the guests suggested moving; the English way of leaving this to the host; the remarkable difference in duelling habits.

  'Rencounters are most uncommon in England,' observed James.

  'Indeed they are,' said Stephen. 'I was astonished, when first I went to London, to find that a man might not go out from one year's end to the other.'

  'Yes,' said James. 'Ideas upon matters of honour are altogether different in the two kingdoms. Before now I have given Englishmen provocation that would necessarily have called for a meeting in Ireland, with no result. We should call that remarkably timid; or is shy the word?' He shrugged, and he was about to continue when the cabin skylight in the surface of the quart
er-deck opened and Jack's head and massive shoulders appeared. 'I should never have thought so ingenuous a face could look so black and wicked,' thought Stephen.

  'Did JD say that on purpose?' he wrote. 'I do not know for sure, though I suspect he did—it would be all of a piece with the remarks he has been making recently, remarks that may be unintentional, merely tactless, but that all tend to present reasonable caution in an odious and, indeed, a contemptible light. I do not know. I should have known once. But all I know now is that when JA is in a rage with his superiors, irked by the subordination of the service, spurred on by his restless, uneasy temperament, or (as at present) lacerated by his mistress' infidelity, he flies to violence as a relief—to action. JD, urged on by entirely different furies, does the same. The difference is that whereas I believe JA merely longs for the shattering noise, immense activity of mind and body, and the all-embracing sense of the present moment, I am very much afraid that J D wants more.' He closed the book and stared at its cover for a long while, far, far away, until a knock recalled him to the Sophie.

  'Mr Ricketts,' he said, 'what may I do for you?'

  'Sir,' said the midshipman, 'the captain says, will you please to come on deck and view the coast?'

  'To the left of the smoke, southwards, that is the hill of Montjuich, with the great castle; and the projection to the right is Barceloneta,' said Stephen. 'And rising there behind the city you can make out Tibidabo: I saw my first red-footed falcon there, when I was a boy. Then continuing the line from Tibidabo through the cathedral to the sea, there is the Moll de Santa Creu, with the great mercantile port: and to the left of it the basin where the King's ships and the gunboats lie.'

  'Many gunboats?' asked Jack.

  'I dare say: but I never made it my study.'

  Jack nodded, looked keenly round the bay to fix its details in his mind once more and, leaning down, he called, 'Deck? Lower away: handsomely now. Babbington, look alive with that line.'

  Stephen rose six inches from his perch at the masthead, and with his hands folded to prevent their involuntary clutching at passing ropes, yards, blocks, and with the ape-nimble Babbington keeping pace, heaving him in towards the weather backstay, he descended through the dizzy void to the deck, where they let him out of the cocoon in which they had hoisted him aloft; for no one on board had the least opinion of his abilities as a seaman.

  He thanked them absently and went below, where the sailmaker's mates were sewing Tom Simmons into his hammock.

  'We are just waiting for the shot, sir,' they said; and as they spoke Mr Day appeared, carrying a net of the Sophie's cannonballs.

  'I thought I would pay him the attention myself,' said the gunner, arranging them at the young man's feet with a practised hand. 'He was shipmates with me in the Phoebe: though always unhealthy, even then,' he added, as a quick afterthought.

  'Oh, yes: Tom was never strong,' said one of the sail-maker's mates, cutting the thread on his broken eye-tooth.

  These words, and a certain unusual delicacy of regard, were intended to comfort Stephen, who had lost his patient: in spite of all his efforts the four-day coma had deepened to its ultimate point.

  'Tell me, Mr Day,' he said, when the sailmakers had gone, 'just how much did he drink? I have asked his friends, but they give evasive answers—indeed, they lie.'

  'Of course they do, sir: for it is against the law. How much did he drink? Why, now, Tom was a popular young chap, so I dare say he had the whole allowance, bating maybe a sip or two just to moisten their victuals. That would make it close on a quart.'

  'A quart. Well, it is a great deal: but I am surprised it should kill a man. At an admixture of three to one, that amounts to six ounces or so—inebriating, but scarcely lethal.'

  'Lord, Doctor,' said the gunner, looking at him with affectionate pity, 'that ain't the mixture. That's the rum.'

  'A quart of rum? Of neat rum?' cried Stephen.

  'That's right, sir. Each man has his half-pint a day, at twice, so that makes a quart for each mess for dinner and for supper: and that is what the water is added to. Oh dear me,' he said, laughing gently and patting the poor corpse on the deck between them, 'if they was only to get half a pint of three-water grog we should soon have a bloody mutiny on our hands. And quite right, too.'

  'Half a pint of spirits a day for every man?' said Stephen, flushing with anger. 'A great tumbler? I shall tell the captain—shall insist upon its being poured over the side.'

  'And so we commit his body to the deep,' said Jack, closing the book. Tom Simmons' messmates tilted the grating: there was the sound of sliding canvas, a gentle splash and a long train of bubbles rising up through the clear water.

  'Now, Mr Dillon,' he said, with something of the formal tone of his reading still in his voice, 'I think we may carry on with the weapons and the painting.'

  The sloop was lying to, well over the horizon from Barcelona; and a little while after Tom Simmons had reached the bottom in four hundred fathoms she was far on her way to becoming a white-painted snow with black top-sides, with a horse—a length of cable bowsed rigidly vertical—to stand for the trysail mast of that vessel; while at the same time the grindstone mounted on the fo'c'sle turned steadily, putting a keener edge, a sharper point, on cutlasses, pikes, boarding-axes, marines' bayonets, midshipmen's dirks, officers' swords.

  The Sophie was as busy as she could well be, but there was a curious gravity with it all: it was natural that a man's messmates should be low after burying him, and even his whole watch. (for Tom Simmons had been well liked—would never have had so deadly a birthday present otherwise); but this solemnity affected the whole ship's company and there was none of those odd bursts of song on the fo'c'sle, none of those ritual jokes called out. There was a quiet, brooding atmosphere, not at all angry or sullen, but—Stephen, lying in his cot (he had been up all night with poor Simmons) tried to hit upon the definition—oppressive?—fearful?—vaticinatory? But in spite of all the deeply shocking noise of Mr Day and his party overhauling the shot-lockers, scaling all the balls with any rust or irregularity upon them, and trundling them back down an echoing plane, hundreds and hundreds of four-pound cannon-balls clashing and growling and being beaten, he went to sleep before he could accomplish it.

  He woke to the sound of his own name. 'Dr Maturin? No, certainly you may not see Dr Maturin,' said the master's voice in the gun-room. 'You may leave a message with me, and I will tell him at dinner-time, if he wakes up by then.'

  'I was to ask him what physic would answer for a slack-going horse,' quavered Ellis, now filled with doubt.

  'And who told you to ask him that? That villain Babbington, I swear. For shame, to be such a flat, after all these weeks at sea.'

  This particular atmosphere had not reached the midshipmen's berth, then; or if so it had already dissipated. What private lives the young led, he reflected, how very much apart: their happiness how widely independent of circumstance. He was thinking of his own childhood—the then intensity of the present—happiness not then a matter of retrospection nor of undue moment—when the howling of the bosun's pipe for dinner caused his stomach to give a sharp sudden grinding wring and he swung his legs over the side. 'I am grown a naval animal,' he observed.

  These were the fat days of the beginning of a cruise; there was still soft tack on the table, and Dillon, standing bowed under the beams to carve a noble saddle of mutton, said, 'You will find the most prodigious transformation when you go on deck. We are no longer a brig, but a snow.'

  'With an extra mast,' explained the master, holding up three fingers.

  'Indeed?' said Stephen, eagerly passing up his plate. 'Pray, why is this? For speed, for expediency, for comeliness?'

  'To amuse the enemy.'

  The meal continued with considerations on the art of war, the relative merits of Mahon cheese and Cheshire, and the surprising depth of the Mediterranean only a short way off the land; and once again Stephen noticed the curious skill (the outcome, no doubt, of many years at sea and
the tradition of generations of tight-packed mariners) with which even so gross a man as the purser helped to keep the conversation going, smoothing over the dislikes and tensions—with platitudes, quite often, but with flow enough to make the dinner not only easy, but even mildly enjoyable.

  'Take care, Doctor,' said the master, steadying him from behind on the companion ladder. 'She's beginning to roll.'

  She was indeed, and although the Sophie's deck was only so trifling a height from what might be called her subaqueous gun-room, the motion up there was remarkably greater: Stephen staggered, took hold of a stanchion and gazed about him expectantly.

  'Where is your prodigious great transformation?' he cried. 'Where is this third mast, that is to amuse the enemy? Where is the merriment in practising upon a landman, where the wit? Upon my honour, Mr Farcical Comic, any poteen-swilling shoneen off the bog would be more delicate. Are you not sensible it is very wrong?'

  'Oh, sir,' cried Mr Marshall, shocked by the sudden extreme ferocity of Stephen's glare, 'upon my word—Mr Dillon, I appeal to you . . .'

  'Dear shipmate, joy,' said James, leading Stephen to the horse, that stout rope running parallel to the mainmast and some six inches behind it, 'allow me to assure you that to a seaman's eye this is a mast, a third mast: and presently you will see something very like the old fore-and-aft mainsail set upon it as a trysail, at the same time as a cro'jack on the yard above our heads. No seaman afloat would ever take us for a brig.'