Book 16 - The Wine-Dark Sea

by Patrick O'Brian

  'Thank you kindly, your honour ,' said Shelton. 'But what I mean is, we cleared from Callao on the seventh, and while we were getting our stores aboard—tar, cordage, sail-cloth and stockfish—there was a merchantman belonging to Liverpool, homeward-bound from the northwards, in dock, tightening up for her run round the Horn. We cleared on the seventh which it was a Tuesday, homeward-bound too though not really full: not a right good voyage, not heart's content as you might say, but middling. And off the Chinchas at break of day, there was a four-masted ship directly to windward. Man-of-war fashion. The master said, "I know her, mates: she's a friend. A Frenchman out of Bordeaux, a privateer," and he lay to. There was nothing else he could do, dead to leeward of a ship of thirty-two guns with yards like Kingdom Come and the black flag flying at her masthead. But as we lay there he walked fore and aft, gnawing his fingers and saying, "Jeeze, I hope he remembers me. God Almighty, I hope he remembers me. Chuck"—that was his mate and aunt's own child—"Likely he'll remember us, don't you reckon?"

  'Well, he did remember us. He hauled down his black flag and we lay alongside one another, matey-matey. He asked after the Liverpool ship and we told him she would be out of dock in under a month. So he said he would stretch away to the westward for a while on the chance of an English whaler or a China ship and then lie off the Chinchas again: and he told us the sea thirty leagues to the west-north-west was full of whales, thick with whales. We sailed together, separating gradually, and the day after we had sunk his topgallants there we were in the middle of them, spouting all round the compass.'

  'Tell me about her guns.'

  'Thirty-two nine-pounders, sir, or maybe twelves; in any case all brass. Besides her chasers. I never seen a privateer so set out. But I did not like to go aboard or look too curious, let alone ask no questions, not with that crowd of villains.'

  'Was their black flag in earnest?'

  'Oh yes, sir; deadly earnest. They were as thorough-paced a no-quarter-given-or-asked as ever I see—trample the Crucifix any day of the week. But you and your consort could deal with her. I dare say Surprise could do so on her own, though it might be nip and tuck; and she would buy it very dear, they having to sink or be sunk. Which I mean if they are killed they are deaders, and if they are taken they are hanged. It is half a dozen of the one and . . .' His voice died away; he hung his head, a certain coldness having told him that he had been talking too much.

  'As taut as it is long,' said Jack, not unkindly. 'Well, Shelton, is Mr Adams to write you down as pressed or volunteer?'

  'Oh volunteer, sir, if you please,' cried Shelton.

  'Make it so, Mr Adams, and rate him able for the moment: starboard watch,' said Jack. He wrote on a piece of paper. 'Shelton, give this to the officer of the watch. Well, Tom,' he went on after the man had gone, 'what do you think?'

  'I believe him, sir, every word,' said Pullings. 'I am not to put my opinion before yours; but I believe him.'

  'So did I,' said Jack, and the old experienced Adams nodded his head. Jack rang the bell. 'Pass the word for Mr Vidal.' And a few moments later, 'Mr Vidal, when we have seen the whaler's mate and her charts, and when we have shifted as much water out of her as can be done in thirty minutes, you will take command and steer for Callao under moderate sail. We are running down no great way in the hope of a Frenchman, and it is likely we shall overtake you. If we do not, wait there. Mr Adams will give you the necessary papers and the name of our agent: he looked after the frigate's prizes on the way out. You may take the whaler's mate, bosun and cook—no arms, of course, either on themselves or in their chests—and several of our people.'

  'Very good, sir,' said Vidal, unmoved.

  'As for getting the water across, you have half an hour: there is not a minute to lose; and since the sea is a little choppy, spend the oil and spare not. A couple of casks are neither here nor there.'

  'Aye, aye, sir: spend and spare not it is.'

  'Jack!' cried Stephen, coming in to their strangely late and even twilit dinner, 'did you know that those active mariners have brought a large number of hogsheads aboard, and they filled with fresh water?'

  'Have they, indeed?' asked Jack. 'You amaze me.'

  'They have, too. May I have some to sponge my patients and have their clothes washed at last?'

  'Well, I suppose you may have a little for sponging them—a very small bowl would be enough, I am sure—but as for washing clothes—washing clothes, good Lord! That would be a most shocking expenditure, you know. Salt does herrings no harm, nor lobsters; and my shirt has not been washed in fresh water since Heaven knows how long. It is like coarse emery-paper. No. Let us wait for the rain: have you looked at the glass?'

  'I have not.'

  'It began dropping in the first dog. It has already reached twenty-nine inches and it is still falling: look at the meniscus. And the wind is hauling aft. If the rain don't come down in great black squalls tonight or tomorrow, you shall have one of these hogsheads—well, half a hogshead—for your clothes.'

  After a short, dissatisfied silence Dr Maturin said, 'It will be no news to you, sure, that the whaler has slipped away, going, they tell me, to Callao, if ever they can find the place God be with them.'

  'I had noticed it,' said Jack through his sea-pie.

  'But you may not know that two of her men forgot their pills entirely or that in his legitimate agitation Padeen gave Smyth a liniment, not telling him it was to be rubbed in rather than drunk. However, nobody, nobody has told me why we are rushing in this impetuous manner through the turgid sea, with sailors whose names I do not even know, rushing almost directly away, to judge by the sun, away from the Peru I had so longed to see and which you had led me confidently to expect before Bridie's birthday.'

  'I never said which birthday, this or the next.'

  'I wonder you can speak with such levity about my daughter. I have always treated yours with proper respect.'

  'You called them a pair of turnip-headed swabs once, when they were still in long clothes.'

  'For shame, Jack: a hissing shame upon you. Those were your very own words when you showed them to me at Ashgrove before our voyage to the Mauritius. Your soul to the Devil.'

  'Well, perhaps they were. Yes: you are quite right—I remember now—you warned me not to toss them into the air, as being bad for the intellects. I beg pardon. But tell me, brother, has nobody told you what is afoot?'

  'They have not.'

  'Where have you been?'

  'I have been in my cabin downstairs, contemplating on mercury.'

  'A delightful occupation. But he is not to be seen now, you know: he is too near the sun. And to tell you the truth he is neither much of a spectacle nor a great help in navigation, though charming from the purely astronomical point of view.'

  'I meant the metallic element. In its pure state quicksilver is perfectly neutral; you may swallow half a pint without harm. But in its various combinations it is sometimes benign—where would you portly men be without the blue pill?—and sometimes, when exhibited by inexpert hands, its compounds are mortal in doses so small they can hardly be conceived.'

  'So you know nothing of what is going forward?'

  'Brother, how tedious you can be, on occasion. I did hear some cries of "Jolly rogers—jolly rogers—we shall roger them." But in parenthesis, Jack, tell me about this word roger. I have often heard it aboard, but can make out no clear nautical signification.'

  'Oh, it is no sea-term. They use it ashore much more than we do—a low cant expression meaning to swive or couple with.'

  Stephen considered for a moment and then said, 'So roger joins bugger and that even coarser word; and they are all used in defiance and contempt, as though to an enemy; which seems to show a curious light on the lover's subjacent emotions. Conquest, rape, subjugation: have women a private language of the same nature, I wonder?'

  Jack said, 'In some parts of the West Country rams are called Roger, as cats are called Puss; and of course that is their duty; though which came first
, the deed or the doer, the goose or the egg, I am not learned enough to tell.'

  'Would it not be the owl, at all?'

  'Never in life, my poor Stephen. Who ever heard of a golden owl? But let me tell you why we are cracking on like this in what promises to be a very dirty night. There was an Englishman called Shelton in the whaler's crew, a foremast jack in Euryalus when Heneage Dundas had her: he told us of a French four-master, fitted out man-of-war fashion, Alastor by name, that attacks anything she can overpower, whatever its nation; a genuine pirate, wearing the black flag, the Jolly Roger, which means strike and like to or we shall kill every man and boy aboard. We ask no quarter: we give no quarter. We have checked Shelton's account; we have looked at the whaler's chart, pricked all the way from their leaving Callao to yesterday at sunset; and we know just about where the Alastor must be. She means to sail back to the coast and wait off the Chinchas for a Liverpool ship now docking at Callao for the homeward run. Listen!'

  The companion overhead lit with three flashes of extreme brilliance; thunder cracked and bellowed at masthead height; and then came the all-pervading sound of enormous rain, not exactly a roar, but of such a volume that Jack had to lean over the table and raise his powerful voice to tell Stephen that 'now he could sponge his patients, aye, and wash them and their clothes too—there would be enough for the whole ship's company—the first ten minutes would carry off all the filth and then they would whip off the tarpaulins and fill the boats and scuttlebutts.'

  The rain had no great effect on the swell, rolling strong from the north-west, but it flattened the surface almost as effectually as oil, doing away with countless superficial noises, so that the great voice of the rain came right down into the sick-berth itself, and Stephen, on his evening rounds, had to repeat his exclamation, 'I am astonished to see you here, Mr Martin: you are not fit to be up, and must go back to bed directly.' Of course he was not fit to be up. His eyes were deep-sunk in his now boney head, his lips were barely visible; and although he said, 'It was only a passing indisposition as I told you; and now it is over,' he had to grip the medicine-chest to keep upright. 'Nonsense,' said Stephen. 'You must go back to bed directly. That is an order, my dear sir. Padeen, help Mr Martin to his cabin, will you, now?'

  When Stephen's work was done he walked up the ladder and into the gun-room: his was not exactly a seaman's step—there was something too tentative and crablike for that—but no landsman would have accomplished it, paying so little attention to the motion in that pitching ship as she raced with a full-topsail gale three points on her quarter, her stern rising up and up on the following swell; nor would a landsman have stood there, barely conscious of the heave, as he considered his messmates' dwelling-place.

  It was a long dim corridor-like room, some eighteen feet wide and twenty-eight in length, with an almost equally long table running down the middle and the officers' cabin doors opening on to the narrow space on either side—opening outwards, since if they opened the other way they must necessarily crush the man within. There was no one in the gun-room at present apart from a seaman who was polishing the table and the foot of the mizzenmast, which rose nobly through it half-way along, though Wilkins, whose watch had just been relieved, could be heard snoring in the aftermost larboard dog-hole; yet at four bells the table would be lined with men eager for their supper. Dutourd was likely to be invited, and he was certain to talk: the ransomers were nearly always noisy: it was no place for a sick man. He walked into Martin's cabin and sat down by his cot. Since Martin had retired by order their relations were now changed to those between physician and patient, the physician's authority being enormously enhanced by the Articles of War. In any case a certain frontier had been crossed and at present Stephen felt no more hesitation about dealing with this case than he would have done if Martin had all at once run mad, so that he had to be confined.

  Martin's breathing was now easy, and he appeared to be in a very deep, almost comatose sleep; but his pulse made Stephen most uneasy. Presently, shaking his head, he left the cabin: at the foot of the ladder he saw young Wedell coming down, soaked to the skin.

  'Pray, Mr Wedell,' he said, 'is the Captain on deck?'

  'Yes, sir. He is on the forecastle, looking out ahead.' Stephen grasped the hand-rail, but Wedell cried, 'May I take him a message, sir? I am wet as a whale already.'

  'That would be very kind. Pray tell him, with my compliments, that Mr Martin is far from well; that I should like to move him to the larboard midshipmen's berth; and that I should be obliged for two strong sensible hands.'

  The hands in question, Bonden and a powerful forecastle-man who might have been his elder brother, took a quick, seamanlike glance at the situation and with no more than a 'By the head, mate. Handsomely, now,' they unshipped Martin's cot, carrying him forward in it at a soft barefoot trot to the empty larboard berth, where Padeen had cleared the deck and hung a lantern. They were of opinion that 'the Doctor's mate was as drunk as Davy's sow, and indeed the inert relaxation, the now-stertorous breathing, gave that impression.

  It was not the case, however. Nathaniel Martin had lain down in his clothes and now as Stephen and Padeen undressed him, as limp as a man deeply stunned, they saw the recent and exacerbated sores over much of his body.

  'Would this be the leprosy, your honour?' asked Padeen, his low, hesitant speech made slower, more hesitant by the shock.

  'It would not,' said Stephen. 'It is the cruel salt on a very sensitive skin, and an ill habit of constitution. Go and fetch fresh water—it will be to be had by now—warm if ever the galley is lit, two sponges, two towels, and clean sheets from the chest by my bed. Ask Killick for those that were last washed in fresh.'

  'Salt and worse on a sensitive mind; an unhappy mind,' he added to himself. Leprosy he had seen often enough; eczemas of course and prickly heat carried to the extreme, but never anything quite like this. There were many things about Martin's state that he could not make out; and although analogies kept flitting through his mind like clues to the solution of a puzzle, none would settle or cling to its fellows.

  Padeen returned and they washed Martin with warm fresh water all over twice, then laid on sweet oil wherever it would do good, wrapping him at last naked in a clean sheet: no nightshirt was called for in this steady warmth. From time to time he groaned or uttered a disconnected word; twice he opened his eyes, raised his head and stared about, uncomprehending; once he took a little water with inspissated lemon-juice in it; but generally speaking he was wholly inert, and the habitual look of anxiety had left his face.

  When he sent Padeen to bed Stephen sat on. In sponging Martin he had looked very attentively for signs of the veneral disorder that he had at one time suspected: there were none. As a naval surgeon he had a great experience of the matter, and there were no signs at all. He knew, as any medical man must know, that mind could do astonishing things to body—false pregnancies, for example, with evident, tangible lactation and all the other marks of gravidity—but the lesions now before him were of another kind, and more virulent. Martin might believe himself poxed, and the belief might induce skin troubles, some forms of paralysis, constipation or uncontrolled flux, and in a man like Martin all the consequences of extreme anxiety, guilt and self-loathing; but not these particular miseries: he had seen something of the same nature in a patient whose wife was steadily poisoning him. More from intuition than any clear reasoning he expected a crisis of distress either about three in the morning, during what the Navy emphatically called the graveyard watch, when so many people die, or else at dawn.

  He sat on: and although the ship was full of sound—the hissing rush of water along her side, the combined voices of all her rigging under a press of sail, the churn of the pumps, for with such a wind and such a sea she was hauling under the chains and making a fair amount of water, and from time to time the drumming of yet another squall—he was by now so accustomed to it that through the general roar he caught the strokes of the frigate's bell marking the watches through, and
they often coincided with the minute silvery chime of the watch in his pocket.

  He was accustomed to the room, too. At one time the frigate, as a regular man-of-war, had carried several midshipmen, master's mates and others and she needed two berths for them; now, in her present ambiguous position of His Majesty's hired vessel Surprise, engaged in an unavowable intelligence mission but going through the motions of being a privateer, by way of cover, she carried only three, and a single berth, that on the starboard side, was enough. Earlier in the voyage from Sydney Cove, when the stowaway Clarissa was discovered and instantly married to the young gentleman who had concealed her, the couple had had this larboard berth to themselves, and he had often sat with her when the weather was foul and the deck impossible; though their frequent consultations had always taken place in his cabin, where the light was better.

  Dr Maturin, as the frigate's surgeon, belonged officially to the gun-room mess: in fact he nearly always lived in the great cabin with his particular friend Jack Aubrey, sleeping in one of the smaller cabins immediately forward of it, but he remained a member of the mess; and he was the only member of whom poor long-horned Oakes was not jealous. Yet he was the only member who was deeply attached to Clarissa as a person rather than as a means to an end, and the only one who could have taken her affection away from Oakes, if it was affection that the young man valued. To be sure, Stephen was perfectly conscious of her desirability; he was an ordinary sensual man in that respect and although in his long period of opium-eating his ardour had so declined that continence was no virtue, it had since revived with more than common force; yet in his view amorous conversation was significant only if the desire and the liking were shared, and early in their acquaintance it had become clear to him that physical love-making was meaningless to Clarissa, an act of not the slightest consequence. She took not the least pleasure in it and although out of good nature or a wish to be liked she might gratify a 'lover' it might be said that she was chastely unchaste. At that time no moral question was involved. The experience of her childhood—loneliness in a remote country house, early abuse, and a profound ignorance of the ordinary world—accounted for her attitude of mind: there was no bodily imperfection. None of this was written on her forehead, however, nor was she apt to confide in anyone but her physician, and she was packed off with her husband in a prize bound for Batavia amid general disapprobation. They were to go home in an Indiaman, and there, perhaps, Mrs Oakes would stay with Diana while her husband returned to the sea: he was passionately eager to succeed in the Navy.