Book 16 - The Wine-Dark Sea

by Patrick O'Brian

  'For my own part,' said Captain Aubrey, 'I have no notion of disliking a man for his beliefs, above all if he was born with them. I find I can get along very well with Jews or even . . .' The P of Papists was already formed, and the word was obliged to come out as Pindoos.

  Yet it had hardly fallen upon Stephen's ear before a shriek and the crash of glass expelled embarrassment: young Arthur Wedell, a ransomer of Reade's age, who lived and messed in the midshipmen's berth, fell through the skylight into the cabin.

  Reade had been deprived of youthful company for a great while, and although he was often invited to the gun-room and the cabin he missed it sorely: at first Norton, though a great big fellow for his age, had been too bashful to be much of a companion in the berth, but now that Arthur had been added to them his shyness wore away entirely and the three made enough noise for thirty, laughing and hooting far into the night, playing cricket on the 'tween-decks when the hammocks were out of the way or football in the vacant larboard berth when they were not; but this was the first time they had ever hurled one of their number into the cabin.

  'Mr Grainger,' said Jack, when it had been found that Wedell was not materially injured and when the lieutenant had been summoned from the head, 'Mr Wedell will jump up to the mizzen masthead immediately, Mr Norton to the fore, and you will have Mr Reade whipped up to the main. They will stay there until I call them down. Pass the word for the carpenter; or for my joiner, if Mr Bentley is not in the way.'

  'I have rarely known such delightful weather in what we must, I suppose, call the torrid zone,' said Stephen, dining as usual in the cabin. 'Balmy zephyrs, a placid ocean, two certain Hahnemann's petrels, and perhaps a third.'

  'It would be all very capital for a picnic with ladies on a lake, particularly if they shared your passion for singular birds; but I tell you, Stephen, that these balmy zephyrs of yours have not propelled the ship seventy sea-miles between noon and noon these last four days. It is true that we could get along a little faster ourselves, but clearly we cannot leave the Franklin behind; and with her present rig she is but a dull sailer.'

  'I noticed that you have changed her elegant great triangular sail behind.'

  'Yes. Now that we are making progess with her lower masts we can no longer afford that very long lateen yard: we need it for pole topgallants. Presently you will see that twin jury mainmast of hers replaced by something less horrible made up from everything you can imagine by Mr Bentley and that valuable carpenter we rescued: upper-tree, side-trees, heel-pieces, side-fishes, cheeks, front-fish and cant-pieces, all scarfed, coaked, bolted, hooped and woolded together; it will be a wonderful sight when it is finished, as solid as the Ark of the Covenant. Then with that in place, and the respectable fore and mizzen we already possess, we can send up topmasts and the pole topgallants I was telling you about. That will be best of what breeze there is. How I long to see her royals! I have sworn not to touch my fiddle until they are set.'

  'You are in a great hurry to reach Peru, I find.'

  'Of course I am. So would you be, could you see our bread-room, our spirit-room, reckon up our water and count our pork and beef casks, with all these new hands aboard. Above all our water. We had no time to fill at Moahu, or the Franklin would have run clear. And she having pumped all hers over the side, we are now in a sad way. There is only one thing for it: no fresh water will be allowed for washing clothes or anything else: only a small ration for drinking—no scuttle-butts standing about—and a minimum for the steep-tubs to get what salt off the pork and beef that towing them in a net over the side won't do.'

  'But since we can go so much faster, could you not give the Franklin a modicum, sail briskly on and let her follow? After all, Tom found his way here: he could surely find it back.'

  'What a fellow you are, Stephen. My whole plan is to arm her with our carronades and cruise in company, snapping up what China ships, whalers and fur-traders may appear, then to send Surprise in to Callao with I hope a captured ship or two so that they can be disposed of there and you can go ashore. Tom will be in command—they are used to him in Callao because of the prizes he took on the way out—and the barky will go on topping it the privateer. And while you are looking after your affairs and Tom is victualling, watering and getting in stores, I shall cruise alone offshore, sending in captures from time to time or at all events a boat. But without we spread more canvas we shall never get there before we die of thirst and starvation: that is why I am so eager to see the Franklin fully masted and looking like a Christian ship at last, instead of a God-damned curiosity.'

  'So am I, upon my word,' said Stephen, thinking of his coca-leaves. 'I can hardly wait.'

  'Possess yourself in patience for a day or two, and you will see her set her royals. Then that evening we shall have a concert—we may even sing!'

  At the time Stephen wondered that Jack should speak so thoughtlessly, tempting a Fate that he almost always placated with a perhaps or if we are lucky or tide and weather permitting; and Stephen being by now a thorough-going seaman at least as far as weak superstition was concerned he was more grieved than surprised when a top-maul fell upon Mr Bentley's foot early the next morning. The wound was not dangerous but it confined the carpenter to his cot for a while and in the mean time his crew, most unhappily, fell out with the carpenter from the Franklin. The privateer had taken him from a Hull whaler and he spoke a Yorkshire dialect almost entirely incomprehensible to the west-country hands from Shelmerston, who looked upon him with dislike and suspicion as little better than a foreigner, a French dog or a Turk.

  Work therefore went forward slowly, and not only work on the mast but the innumerable tasks that waited on its erection; and with an equal or even greater dliberation the two ships moved over the quiet sea through this perfect picnic weather. In spite of his eagerness to be in South America it pleased Stephen, who spread himself naked in the sun and even swam with Jack in the mornings: it pleased most of the people, who could devote themselves to a detailed reckoning of the Franklin's worth and the value of the goods she had taken out of her various prizes and dividing the total according to each man's share; and it would have pleased the midshipmen if the Captain had not come down on them like a thousand of bricks. Football was abolished, cricket prohibited, and they were kept strictly to their duty, taking altitudes right and left, showing up their day's working (which rarely amounted to fifty miles of course made good) and writing their journals neat and fair. No blots were allowed, and a mistaken logarithm meant no supper: they walked about barefoot or in list slippers, rarely speaking above a whisper.

  During this time Stephen often went forward to Mr Bentley's cabin to dress and poultice his poor foot, and on these occasions he sometimes heard Dutourd, whose quarters were close at hand, talking to his neighbour the bosun or to the visiting Grainger or Vidal: quite frequently to more, most of them forecastle-men during their watch below. Stephen did not listen particularly but he did notice that when Dutourd was speaking to one or two his voice was that of ordinary human conversation—rather better in fact, since he was unusually good company—but that when several were present he tended to address them in a booming tone and to go on and on. They did not seem to dislike it, though there was little new to be said about equality, the brotherhood of man, the innate goodness and wisdom of human nature unoppressed; but then, he reflected, Dutourd's hearers, Knipperdollings for the most part, were accustomed to much longer discourses at home.

  Mr Bentley's innate wisdom told him that if he remained in the Doctor's list much longer the newcomer would get the credit for the Franklin's mainmast, now nearing completion in spite of doggedness on the part of the carpenter's crew, and this, though he was a good and benevolent man, he could not bear. In spite of the pain he crossed to the prize the morning the last of the Franklin's casualties were buried. The privateer's company had not been together long enough to form a united crew and the dead went over the side with little ceremony and less mourning, though in the general indifference Dutourd did say
a few words, received with approving nods by his former shipmates before they went back to work: they had all volunteered to serve as temporary Surprises, mainly, it was thought, for the sake of the tobacco.

  Mr Bentley was only just in time. The Captain had already gone aboard the Franklin, meaning to take advantage of the calm sea to carry out the delicate manoeuvre of getting the new mast in by the old, the composite old; for by now neither ship could provide adequate sheers. With propitious weather, an eager and highly competent skipper and an eager and highly competent first lieutenant, both of them capable of hard-horse driving, there was certainly not going to be any leisure for mocking at a Yorkshire word: there was not indeed going to be loss of a single minute, and the carpenter heaved himself up the side, limping to his place by the new mainmast's heel.

  Nearly all the Surprise's hands were aboard the prize, prepared to haul, heave, or gather up the wreckage in the by no means improbable event of accident, and it was Stephen who rowed Bentley across in his little skiff: a frightening experience. Having delivered the carpenter, he brought Martin back. The medical men had no place on the crowded, busy, anxious deck: ropes ran in every direction, and wherever they stood they were liable to be in the way: in any case since those Franklins who had been left in the ship were now either healed or buried, Martin's duty there was at an end.

  The frigate's cook, a fine great black man with one leg, and a bearded Thraskite helped them up the side, Martin carrying his mended viola; and leaving the boat to more skilful hands the medicoes leaned on the rail for a while, watching the operations over the water.

  'I wish I could explain what they are about,' said Stephen, 'but this is so much more complex than the business with the sheers that with your own limited command of the seamen's language you might not be able to follow me. Indeed, I might even lead you into error.'

  'How quiet it is,' said Martin. Uncommonly quiet: a gentle heave and set, the yards and rigging answering each with a murmur; but no break and run of water, no singing of the breeze, and scarcely a word from the few hands aboard, grouped on the forecastle and gazing steadily at the Franklin.

  'So quiet,' said Stephen some minutes later, 'that I believe I shall take advantage of it to write in peace for a while. There will soon be a stamping as of wild beasts and cries of belay, avast, and masthead, there.'

  'My dearest Soul,' he wrote, continuing an unfinished sheet, 'I have just ferried Nathaniel Martin back, and I am afraid he regrets his return. He was happier messing along with Tom Pullings in the prize, and on the few occasions when he had come back to help me or to attend a particular dinner I have noticed that he has seemed more ill at ease in the gun-room than he was before. We now have added to our company one of the ransomer mates, recently discharged from the sick-berth, and the loud-voiced confident mirth of the supercargo, the merchant and this mate oppresses him; nor can it be said that the conversation of our two acting-lieutenants is enlivening: both are eminently respectable men, but neither has enough experience of this kind of mess to keep the ransomers in order, so that in Tom's absence the place is more like the ordinary of an inferior Portsmouth tavern than the gun-room of a man-of-war. The officers quite often invite Dutourd, and he does impose a certain respect; but unhappily he is a great talker and in spite of some tolerably emphatic checks he will drift towards philosophic considerations bordering upon politics and religion, the politics being of the Utopian pantisocratic kind and the religion a sort of misty Deism, both of which distress Martin. The poor fellow regrets Dutourd's absence and dreads his presence. I hope that our meals (and it is wonderful how long one spends at table, cooped up with the other members of the mess: it seems longer when some members belch, fart and scratch themselves) will become more tolerable when Tom returns, for I imagine the prize will be sold on the coast, and when Jack regularly dines with us.

  'Yet even in that case I do not think Martin's is likely to be an enviable lot. In this ship there was always a prejudice against him as a cleric, an unlucky man to have aboard; and now that it is known he is a parson in fact, the rector of two of Jack's livings, the prejudice has grown. Then again, as a man of some learning, acquainted with Hebrew, Greek and Latin, he is awkward company for our sectaries: in the event of a theological disagreement, a differing interpretation of the original, they carry no guns at all. And of course by definition he is opposed to Dissent and favourable to episcopacy and tithes; as well as to infant baptism, abhorrent to many of our shipmates. At the same time, being a quiet, introspective man, he completely lacks the ebullient bonhomie that comes so naturally to Dutourd. It is acknowledged aboard that he is a good man, kind as a surgeon's mate, and in former commissions as a letter- or petition-writer (now there is little occasion for either and our few illiterates usually go to Mr Adams). But he is not cordially liked. He has been poor, miserably and visibly poor; now he is by lower-deck standards rich; and some suspect him of being over-elevated. But more than this it is known—in a ship everything is known after the first few thousand miles—that the Captain is not very fond of him; and at sea a captain's opinion is as important to his crew as that of an absolute monarch to his court. It is not that Jack has ever treated him with the least disrespect, but Martin's presence is a constraint upon him; they have little to say to one another; and in short Martin has not accomplished the feat of making a friend of his friend's closest associate. The attempt is rarely successful, I believe, and perhaps Martin never even ventured upon it. However that may be, they are not friends, and this means that he is looked upon by the people with less consideration than I think he deserves. It surprises me: I must say that I thought they would have used him better. Perhaps, as far as many of the ship's present crew are concerned, it is to some degree a question of these wretched tithes, which so many of them resent: and he is now one of those who receive or who will receive the hated impost.

  'In any event, I am afraid he is losing his taste for life. His pleasure in birds and marine creatures has deserted him; and an educated man who takes no delight in natural philosophy has no place in a ship, unless he is a sailor.

  'Yet I remember him in earlier commissions, in much the same circumstances, rejoicing in the distant whale, the stink-pot petrel, his face aglow and his one eye sparkling with satisfaction. He was quite penniless then, apart from his miserable pay; and at those times when cause and effect seem childishly evident I am inclined to blame his prosperity. He now possesses, but has never enjoyed, two livings and what might be called a fair provision in prize-money: from a worldly point of view he is a much more considerable man than he ever has been before; although this makes no difference to his importance aboard it will do so by land, and I think it likely that he exaggerates the happiness which ease and consequence may bring—that he pines for the shore—and its compensation for the disappointments he has suffered at sea. I have disappointed him, I am afraid, and . . .' Stephen held his pen in the air, reflecting upon Clarissa Oakes, a young woman to whom he was much attached, a convict transported for murder, who, escaping, had sailed in the frigate from Sydney Cove to Moahu. He reflected upon her, smiling, and then upon Martin's ambiguous relations with her, which might also have had a deep influence on the people's attitude. If a parson sinned (and Stephen was by no means convinced of it), his sin was multiplied by every sermon he preached. '. . . so have other people, including no doubt himself. Yet like so many poor men he almost certainly mistakes the effect of wealth upon happiness in anything but the first fine flush of possession: he speaks of money very much more often than he did, more often than is quite agreeable; and the other day, referring to his marriage, which is as nearly ideal as can be, he was so thoughtless as to say that it would be even happier with his share of our current prize.' Stephen paused again, and in the silence of the ship he heard Martin playing his viola in his cabin opening off the gun-room: an ascending scale, true enough, then coming down, slower, more hesitant and ending in a prolonged, slightly false, B flat, infinitely sad.

  'I do not h
ave to tell you, my dear,' he went on, 'that although I speak in this high ascetic way about money, I do not, never have, despise a competence: it is the relation of superfluity to happiness that is my text, and I am holier than thou only after two hundred pounds a year.'

  The viola had stopped, and Stephen, locking away his paper, walked into the great cabin, stretched out on the cushioned stern-window locker, gazed for a while at the reflected sunlight dancing overhead, and went to sleep.

  He was woken, as long use had told him he would be woken, by a trampling as of wild beasts as the Surprise's boats were hoisted in: hoarse cries—Oh you impotent booby—the shrilling of the bosun's call—the clash of tackles run up chock-a-block—Handsomely, handsomely now, our William (Grainger to an impetuous young nephew)—but then instead of the usual cries of avast and belay an unexpected unanimous good-natured cheer, accompanied by laughter. 'What can this signify?' he asked himself, and while he was searching for a plausible sea-going answer he became aware of a presence in the cabin, a suppressed giggle. It was Emily and Sarah, standing neatly side by side in white pinafores. 'We have been standing here a great while, sir,' said Sarah, 'whilst you was a-contemplating. The Captain says, should you like to see a marble?'

  'Wonder,' said Emily.

  'Marble,' said Sarah, adding, 'You impotent booby' in a whisper.

  'There you are, Doctor,' cried the Captain as Stephen came on deck, still looking rather stupid. 'Have you been asleep?'

  'Not at all,' said Stephen, 'I very rarely sleep.'

  'Well, if you had been asleep, here is a sight that would wake you even if you were a Letter to the Ephesians. Look over the leeward quarter. The leeward quarter.'

  'Jesus, Mary and Joseph,' cried Stephen, recognizing the Franklin at last. 'What a transformation! She has three tall Christian masts and a vast great number of sails-what splendour in the sun! Sails of every kind, I make no doubt, including topgallant-royals.'