Treason's Harbour

by Patrick O'Brian

  Chapter Five

  The Dromedary was running before the wind, so directly before the wind that there was scarcely a breath of air on deck nor a whisper in the rigging: a silent ship, apart from the run of water down her side and the creak of her masts and yards as she pitched on the gentle following swell. Silent, in spite of the tight-packed crowd of men on her quarterdeck, for the Dromedary had rigged church.

  She was quite used to doing so, since she often carried soldiers from one place to another, and soldiers were more often provided with chaplains than sailors; her carpenter had turned the capstan just abaft the mainmast into a perfectly acceptable desk, and her sailmaker had turned a spare piece of number eight canvas into a surplice that would have graced a bishop. Mr Martin had taken it off in preparation for his sermon, and in the attentive, respectful silence he was now looking at a little paper of notes. Jack, sitting in an elbow-chair beside Mr Allen, saw that he meant to give them something of his own rather than read from Dean Donne or Archbishop Tillotson according to his usual modest custom, and that the prospect made him anxious.

  'My text is from Ecclesiastes, the twelfth chapter, the eighth verse: Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, all is vanity,' the chaplain began, and in the pause that followed his auditors looked at him with pleased expectation. The wind was fair; the ship had been sailing at a steady five to six knots ever since they left Malta, with a few fine points of eight and nine, and Jack, whose dead reckoning and observations agreed closely with Allen's, confidently expected that they should make their landfall that forenoon: he had quite ceased urging the ship on by a continual effort of will and an unreasonable contraction of his stomach muscles, and now, as he disposed himself to listen to Mr Martin, he was aware of a fine bubbling excitement in the background of his mind, very much like that of his much younger days. The men too were in a happy mood: they were dressed quite as fancy as the Dromedaries; Sunday pork and duff were not much above an hour away, to say nothing of their grog; and it was pretty general knowledge that the Red Sea might hold some kind of a plum.

  'When I repaired aboard the Worcester at the beginning of my naval ministry,' went on Mr Martin, 'the very first words I heard were "Sweepers, sweepers there." ' The congregation smiled and nodded: nothing could be more true to life in a self-respecting man-of-war, particularly with Mr Pullings as her first lieutenant. 'And the next morning I was awaked by the sound of holystones and swabs as the people cleaned the deck, while in the afternoon they painted a large part of the vessel's side.' He went on in this way for some time: his hearers were pleased when his description was technically accurate; they were pleased when he stumbled slightly; and they were still more pleased when he spoke of his visit to their own ship, 'the Joyful Surprise, as she is called in the service, a frigate that was pointed out to me as the most beautiful in the Mediterranean, and the best sailer, though small.'

  Since he was a Papist Stephen Maturin took no part in these proceedings; but as he had lingered a little too long in the mizzentop, watching a possible Caspian tern through Captain Aubrey's telescope until the service had actually begun, he necessarily heard all that was sung and said. During the hymns and psalms, which a certain rivalry between Surprises and Dromedaries rendered more vehement than musical, his attention wandered, returning to his anonymous letter and his thoughts of Diana—of her particular sort of faithfulness—of her extremely spirited resentment of any slight—and it occurred to him that she was not unlike a falcon he had known when he was a boy in his godfather's house in Spain, a haggard, a wild-caught peregrine of extraordinary dash and courage, death to herons, ducks and even geese, very gentle with those she liked but wholly irreconcilable and indeed dangerous if she was offended. Once the young Stephen had fed a goshawk before the falcon, and she had never come to him again, only staring implacably with that great fierce dark eye. 'I shall never offend Diana, however,' he observed. 'Amen,' sang the congregation and it was shortly after that Mr Martin began to preach. Stephen was unacquainted with Anglican pulpit oratory, and he listened with considerable interest. 'What is his drift?' he wondered, as the chaplain ran through the many, many operations of cleaning and maintenance aboard a man-of-war.

  'Yet what is the end of all this polishing and scouring and painting at last?' asked Mr Martin. 'The shipbreaker's yard, that is the end. The ship is sold out of the service, and perhaps she spends some years as a merchantman; but then, unless she founder or burn, she comes to the fatal yard, a mere hulk. Even the most beautiful ship, even the Joyful Surprise, ends as firewood and old iron.' Stephen glanced at the Surprise's standing officers, her bosun, gunner and carpenter, men who had been with her for years and years, outlasting captains, lieutenants and surgeons: the carpenter, a peaceful man by temperament and occupation, was merely puzzled, but Mr Hollar and Mr Borell were staring at the parson with narrowed eyes, pursed lips and a look of intense suspicious and dawning hostility. From the mizzentop he could not see Jack Aubrey's face, but from his unusually straight and rigid back he supposed it had a tolerably grim expression; and many of the older hands were certainly far from pleased.

  As though aware of the strong feelings around him Mr Martin passed rapidly on, inviting his hearers to consider a man in his voyage through life—his care of his person, washing, clothing and feeding it—care of his health—sometimes very great care, with exercise, riding, abstinence, sea-bathing, flannel waistcoats, cold baths, blooding and sweating, physic and diet—yet all to no end—to inevitable defeat at last—to final defeat and perhaps drivelling imbecility, by way of decrepitude—if not to an early death then to old age and loss of health, loss of friends, loss of all comforts, when body and mind were least able to stand it—the unbearable separation of husband and wife—and all ineluctable, the necessary common lot—no surprise in this world, ultimate defeat and death being the only certainties—no surprise, above all no joyful surprise.

  'On deck, there,' called the lookout on the foretop-gallantsail yard. 'Land fine on the starboard bow.'

  This hail and the total change of atmosphere it brought about cut Mr Martin's flow entirely. He did his best to make it clear that although the earthly life of a man might be compared with that of a ship, a man had an immortal part which a ship had not, and that the perpetual cleansing and maintenance of that immortal part would indeed lead to a joyful surprise, whereas neglect, even in the form of thoughtless insobriety and incontinence, must end in everlasting death. But he had already lost the sympathy of some of his hearers and the attention of many more; he was not a gifted speaker in any case and being thrown out diminished his confidence and his powers still farther; discouraged, he resumed his surplice and brought the service to its traditional end.

  A few moments after the last amen Mr Allen led the way to the maintop. 'There, sir,' he said with modest triumph, passing the telescope to Jack. 'The mound on the right is Tina fort, and the mound on the left is old Pelusium: quite a tolerable landfall, though I say it myself.'

  'As pretty a landfall as ever I saw,' said Jack. 'I congratulate you, sir.' He studied the low, distant shore-line for a while and then said 'Do you make out an odd kind of cloud a little north-west of the fort?'

  'That would be the waterfowl over the Pelusiac mouth,' said Allen. 'It is only a vile great slough now, and they breed there by wholesale—cranes and water-crows and such. They keep up a sad gabble by night, if you lay over there with a south-west wind, and foul your deck some inches deep.'

  'The Doctor will be pleased to hear of them, though,' said Jack. 'He loves a curious bird,' and a little later, when he was drinking a glass of madeira below, he said, 'I have a joyful surprise for you, Stephen. Mr Allen tells me there are countless waterfowl over the silted-up Pelusian mouth.'

  'My dear,' said Stephen, 'I am perfectly aware of it. This extremity of the delta is famous throughout the Christian world as the haunt of the purple gallinule, to say nothing of a thousand other wonders of creation: and I am perfectly aware that you will hurry me away from it at
once, without the least remorse, as you have so often done before. Indeed, I wonder at your being so unfeeling as to mention the place at all.'

  'Not really without remorse,' said Jack, filling Stephen's glass again. 'But the fact of the matter is, there is not a moment to lose, if you understand me. We have had the most amazing luck hitherto, with this blessed breeze day after day—such a passage as you would hardly dare pray for—and now there is a real possibility of our being off Mubara well before the full of the moon; so it would be the world's pity to spoil our chances for the sake of a purple gallinule. But if we bring it off—I say if we bring it off, Stephen,' said Jack clapping his hand to the wooden table-leg, 'then you and Martin shall have your bellyful of gallinules, red, white and blue: aye, and of double-headed eagles, too, both in the Red Sea and here when we re-embark, that I promise you.' He paused, whistling gently.

  'Tell me, Stephen,' he went on at last, 'do you happen to know what is meant by a purse?'

  'I take it to signify a small pouch or bag used for carrying money on the person. I have seen several examples in my time; and have even possessed one myself.'

  'I should have said, what do Turks mean by it?'

  'Five thousand piastres.'

  'Lord above,' said Jack. He was not a particularly greedy man, nor in the least degree avaricious, but even in his youth, well before he fell in love with the higher mathematics, he had been pretty quick at working out prize-money, like most sailors; and now his mind, long used to astronomical and navigational calculation, worked out a captain's share of the sterling equivalent of five thousand purses in a matter of seconds, presenting him with a shining sum that would not only deal with his horribly entangled affairs at home but go a long way to restoring his fortune—a fortune that he had won by a combination of excellent seamanship, hard fighting, and uncommon good luck, and that he had lost or at least gravely imperilled by being too trustful on shore, by supposing that landsmen were more straightforward and candid than was in fact the case, and by signing legal documents without reading them on being assured that 'they were mere formalities'. 'Well,' he said, 'that is very gratifying news, upon my word: very gratifying indeed.' He filled their glasses again and said, 'I have not spoken of this caper before, because it was all so very hypothetical, so very much up in the air. It still is, of course. But tell me, Stephen, what do you think of the likelihood of success?'

  'In this particular matter my opinion is worth almost nothing,' said Stephen. 'But as a general principle I should say that any expedition which has been talked about as much as this is unlikely to take the enemy by surprise. It was a common topic in Malta, and there is not a man aboard who does not know where we are bound. On the other hand there is this completely new aspect—the agreement with the French and the coming of the galley with French engineers, gunners and treasure. Of course, I have no knowledge whatsoever of the source of the intelligence or its value; but Mr Pocock was perfectly convinced of its soundness, and Mr Pocock is no fool.'

  'I am so glad you think so,' said Jack. 'That was exactly my impression.' He smiled, and in his mind's eye, bright and clear, he saw the Mubara galley pulling steadily northwards, heavily ballasted and swimming rather deep. 'There are still joyful surprises in this world, whatever Mr Martin may say,' he observed. 'I have known dozens of 'em. You heard his sermon, I believe?'

  'I was on the mizzentop.'

  'I could wish he had not talked about the ship like that.'

  'Sure, he did it out of compliment to you—a thank-offering.'

  'Oh, certainly: do not think me ungrateful. I am sure he meant it very kindly, and am much obliged to him for his politeness. But the hands are out of temper, and Mowett is furious. He says he will never be able to get them to priddy the deck with a whole heart again, nor take pains with the paintwork, now that it has been preached down as a vanity, and as something leading to the knacker's yard.'

  'If he had not been interrupted, I am sure he would have made a better fist of it—I am sure he would have made his figurative language clear to the meanest understanding: but even so, unless one is a second Bossuet, perhaps it is a mistake to use tropes and parallels in this eminently unpoetic age.'

  'Not so hellfire unpoetical as all that, brother,' said Jack. 'Rowan came out with as fine a thing as ever I heard only this very morning, just before we rigged church. He and the second mate were looking at the six-pounders and he said "Oh ye mortal engines, whose rude throats/Th'immortal Jove's dread clamours counterfeit." '

  'Capital, capital. I doubt if Shakespeare could have done much better,' said Stephen, nodding gravely. Of late he had noticed a very vicious tendency in these two young men, a tendency to indulge in bare-faced theft, each confident that the other's reading scarcely went beyond Robinson's Elements of Navigation.

  'Wittles is up,' said Killick, appearing in the doorway together with the homely reek of boiled cabbage.

  'And now I come to think of it,' went on Jack, emptying his glass, 'perhaps you may be mistaken about tropes and parallels too. I caught the allusion directly, and I said to Allen, "He means the thunder, I believe." "Yes," says Allen, "I smoked it at once." Smoked it at once,' repeated Jack, smiling pleasantly as the possibility of a brilliant play on the words cannon and smoke hovered in his mind. Yet even as he turned the matter over it was eclipsed by an even better thing. 'But perhaps Rowan is a second Bossuet,' he said. His deep, fruity, intensely amused laugh filled the cabin, filled the after part of the Dromedary and echoed forward; he went scarlet in the face, and redder still. Killick and Stephen stood looking at him, grinning in spite of themselves, until his breath was gone; and reduced to a wheeze he wiped his eyes and stood up, still murmuring 'A second Bossuet. Oh Lord . . .'

  During the course of dinner the smell of cabbage and boiled mutton changed abruptly to that of rotting mud, for the transport, standing in, had crossed the invisible frontier where the westerly breeze reached her not from the open sea but from the Nile delta and the great Pelusian marsh itself. Mr Martin had been rather silent hitherto, in spite of having been invited to drink wine with Captain Aubrey, Mr Adams, Mr Rowan, Dr Maturin and even, most surprisingly, with the melancholy and extremely abstemious Mr Gill; but now his face lightened. He darted a look of intelligence at Stephen, and as soon as he decently could he left the table.

  Stephen had some doses to put up for those invalids who would have to be left behind, but when this was done and the physic and powders entrusted to the Dromedary's first mate, a discreet middle-aged Scotchman, he too hurried on deck. The shore was much closer than he had expected, a long flat shore with a shallow beach of a rufous ochre that made the sea an even more surprising blue: dunes behind it, and beyond the dunes a mound with a fort on top and something in the nature of a village on its flanks: some two miles away on the left hand another mound, and through the shimmering heat there seemed to be ruins scattered over it. A very few palms dotted here and there. Otherwise nothing but an infinity of sand, pale sand, the Desert of Sin.

  Mr Allen had taken everything in but the foretopsail and the ship was gliding in with little more than steerage-way upon her, anchor ready to be dropped and a leadsman in the channels calling the depths in steady sequence. 'By the deep twenty; by the deep eighteen; by the mark seventeen . . .' Almost every soul aboard was on deck, gazing earnestly at the shore: and gazing, as was usual upon such delicate occasions, in profound silence. It was with some surprise, therefore, that Stephen heard a cheerful hooting from over the side, and when he reached the rail it was with far greater surprise that he saw Hairabedian gambolling in the sea. He had understood that the dragoman often bathed in the Bosphorus, and he had heard him lament that the ship was never becalmed so that he might make a dip; but he had supposed that if the Armenian ever really went out of his depth it was only for a few galvanic, convulsive strokes like his own, certainly nothing like this boisterous amphibian sporting among the billows. Hairabedian easily kept pace with the ship, sometimes flinging his short thick body half out o
f the water and sometimes diving under her and merging the other side, spouting water like a Triton. But his hallooing and bubbling vexed Mr Allen, who did not always hear his leadsman's cry: seeing this, Jack leant over the rail and called out 'Mr Hairabedian, pray come aboard at once.

  Mr Hairabedian did so and stood there in a pair of black calico drawers tied at the knee and waist with white tapes which gave him a somewhat whimsical appearance: water dripped from his squat, shaggy, barrel-shaped person and from the fringe of black hair round his bald pate, but he had caught the air of disapproval and his broad frog-like grin of delight was gone, replaced by a look of profound submission. His embarrassment did not last, however: Mr Allen gave the word to let go, the anchor splashed down, the cable ran out, the ship swung head to wind, and the gunner began his eleven-gun salute, this number having been agreed to be given and received long since.

  But the gunfire seemed to stun the Turks; or perhaps it had never roused them from their torpor. In any event there was no reply. During the long waiting silence Jack swelled with indignation. For himself he would put up with a good deal of offhand treatment or downright incivility, but he found the least slight to the Royal Navy perfectly intolerable: and this was not the least of slights by any means—the returning of salutes was a very serious matter indeed. Staring at the fort through his telescope he saw that what he had thought to be a village was in fact no more than a collection of tents with a number of asses and camels among them, together with a few depressed, unmilitary figures sitting in the shade—the whole thing was like some dismal, somnolent fair. In the fort itself there was no movement of any kind. 'Mr Hairabedian,' he said, 'jump into your clothes directly. Mr Mowett, go ashore and desire Mr Hairabedian to ask them what they are about—what they are thinking of. Bonden, my gig as quick as you like.'