Book 16 - The Wine-Dark Sea

by Patrick O'Brian

  The very young man blushed, choked on his fish, and in a strained voice, looking nervously at his companions, said, 'Well, sir, I seen the ordinary kind.'

  'Look out to leeward, a little afore the beam, and you will see one a long way out of the ordinary.'

  'It was not there when we set to breakfast,' said Joe Plaice.

  'And to leeward too, oh dear, oh dear,' said Johnson. 'God bless us.'

  'Amen,' said the others.

  Far over, in the ill-defined region between sea and sky, there was an iridiscent patch, roughly oval, of the size that an outstretched hand might cover; and its colours, sometimes faint, sometimes surprisingly vivid, shifted right through the spectrum.

  'A wind-gall to windward means rain, as you know very well,' said Jack. 'But a wind-gall to leeward means very dirty weather indeed. So Joe, you had better make another cast: let us eat while we can.'

  The other sea-creatures were of the same opinion. The launch was now in the middle of the northward-flowing Peruvian current and for some reason the animalculae that lived there had begun one of those immense increases in population that can colour the whole sea red or make it as turbid as pea-soup. The anchovies, blind with greed, devoured huge quantities; medium-sized fishes and squids ate the anchovies with reckless abandon, scarcely aware that they themselves were being preyed upon by fishes much larger than themselves, the bonitoes and their kind, by sea-lions, by great flights of pelicans, boobies, cormorants, gulls and a singularly beautiful tern, while agile penguins raced along just beneath the surface.

  The launch's crew spent most of the forenoon making all fast, sending up preventer stays and shrouds and preparing what number one canvas they possessed. A little before dinner-time, when a tall white rock, a sea-lions' island much haunted by birds, the sea-mark for Callao Head, showed plain on the starboard bow, nicking the horizon ten miles away, with the remote almost cloud-like snow-topped Andes far beyond, the wind began blowing out of a clear high pale-blue sky. It could be seen coming, a dun-coloured haze from the east, right off shore; it did not come with any sudden violence, but it increased steadily to a shrieking blast that flattened the sea, bringing with it great quantities of very fine sand and dust that gritted between their teeth and blurred their sight.

  In the interval between the first pleasant hum in the rigging that woke the launch to life and the scream that overcame everything but a shout they came abreast of the tall white rock, Jack at the tiller, all hands leaning far out to windward to balance the boat and the launch tearing through the water at a pace somewhere between nightmare and ecstasy. As they passed under the lee of the island they heard the sea-lions barking and young Ben laughed aloud. 'You would laugh the other side of your face, young fellow, if you could feel how this God-damned tiller works with the strain,' said Jack to himself, and he noticed that Plaice was looking very grave indeed. Joe Plaice, he reflected, must be close on sixty: much battered in the wars.

  And now at last the wind was working up an ugly sea: the waves had no great fetch and they were short and steep, growing rapidly steeper, with their crests streaming off before them. As soon as the boat was past the rock it was clear that she could not go on under this press of sail. The seamen looked aft: Jack nodded. No word passed but all moving together they carried out the perilous manoeuvre of wearing, carrying the launch back into the lee, there close-reefing the main and foresail, sending up a storm fore-staysail and creeping out to sea again.

  For the rest of daylight—and brilliant daylight it was, with never a cloud to be seen—this answered well enough and they supped by watches on biscuit and oatmeal beaten up with sugar and water: grog, of course, served out by Captain Aubrey. There was even enough of a pause for Killick to dress Jack's eye and to tell him he would certainly lose it if he did not put back to the barky, where it could be kept dry.

  'Nonsense,' said Jack. 'It is much better. I can see perfectly well: it is only the bright light I cannot stand.'

  'Then at least let me cut a patch out of the flap of your hat, sir, so you can wear the two together, like Lord Nelson, tied over your head with a scarf, if it blows.'

  It blew. The patch was barely on before the making of it would have been impossible: the voice of the wind in the rigging rose half an octave in half an hour and the boat was flung about with shocking violence. Most of that night they were obliged to lie to under a storm trysail and a scrap of the jib—a night of brilliant moon, beaming over a sea white from horizon to horizon. Tomorrow it must blow out, they said; but it did not. The days followed one another and the nights, everything on the point of carrying away, a perpetual series of crises; sometimes they advanced until they were in sight of the island guarding Callao and the cliffs: sometimes they were beaten back; and presently, though this was approaching the austral midsummer, the wind, blowing off the high Cordillera, grew perishing cold to those who were always dripping wet. Wet, and now hungry. The unhappy Ben contrived not only to scrape his shins to the bone but also to lose their precious keg of oatmeal overboard; and on Thursday their rations were cut by half.

  When Jack announced this in a shout as they huddled together in the starboard cuddy he added the ritual

  'Two upon four of us

  Thank God there are no more of us,'

  and he was pleased to see an answering smile upon those worn, cruelly tired faces.

  But there was no smile on Sunday, when at dawn they heard the sea-lions quite close at hand and realized that they had been driven back for the seventh time by a wind that was stronger still and even growing, a wind that must have blown the Franklin and her prize far, far into the western ocean.

  Chapter Eight

  Long practice and a certain natural ability enabled Stephen Maturin to compose a semi-official report of some length in his head and to encode a condensed version from memory, leaving no potentially dangerous papers after the message itself had gone. This required an exceptional power of recollection, but he had an exceptional power of recollection and it had been trained from boyhood in rote-learning: he could repeat the entirety of the Aeneid, and he had the private code by heart—the code, that is to say, in which he and Sir Joseph Blaine, the head of naval intelligence, wrote to one another.

  'God between us and evil, my dear Joseph,' he began, 'but I believe I can report an uncommonly promising beginning, an uncommonly promising situation, with things moving at an extraordinary, dreamlike speed. To begin with I was introduced to General Hurtado, a former Knight of Malta, who, though a soldier, is very much in favour of independence, partly because Charles IV was rude to his father but even more because both the present Viceroy and his predecessor seemed to him trifling ill-bred upstarts; this is not an unusual pattern in Spain and here the animosity is very much increased by the fact that in a letter the present Viceroy omitted the Excelenzia to which Hurtado is by courtesy entitled; yet what is more unexpected by far is that he is strongly opposed to slavery and that although he holds a command from which most officers have hitherto retired with enough wealth to ballast the ship that took them back to Spain, he is quite poor. As for his hatred of slavery, he shares it with several of my friends who were also Knights of Malta and I believe it comes from his time in the galleys of the Order: and as for the king's rudeness, it consisted of addressing the general's father as "my relative" rather than "my cousin", which was due to his rank, an offence never to be forgotten, since Hurtado is immeasurably proud.

  'It was indeed the Knights of Malta who brought us cordially well acquainted, for although I had an excellent introduction from a political point of view, it was our many common friends in the Order that gave our meetings quite a different aspect—our common friends and our common attachment to the Sierra Leone scheme for settling liberated slaves, to which we are both subscribers.

  'The first occasion was a ride in the barren wastes that lie beyond the reach of irrigation all round Lima. These expeditions are called hunting, and on feast-days the more athletic citizens urge their horses about the
stony deserts in search of a more or less fabulous creature said to resemble a hare and blaze away at the very few things that move, usually a dingy, inedible passerine which I take to be a dwarvish subspecies of Sturnus horridus. I collected three beetles for you, of which all I can say is that they belong to the pentamera and that I am astonished that even such meagre, attenuated creatures could scrape a living from the desolation we travelled over. The General was more fortunate. He brought down a singularly beautiful tern, the Sterna ynca of Suarez: I can only suppose that it was taking a direct path from a curve in the river to some better fishing-ground along the coast; but the event was so rare, so nearly unknown, that it gave the General the utmost satisfaction—he declared there could be no finer omen for our future conversations.

  'A good omen is always welcome: yet if it were not presumptuous I should feel inclined to say that there is comparatively little doubt about the outcome of these conversations, three of the high ecclesiastics and four governors being already wholly committed to us, together with those for whom they speak; while the officers in command of the regiments that must be moved are tolerably venal men, and we have ample funds at hand. Yet at the same time certain forms must still be observed: there must be persuasion, a gentle violence, before they can decently fall.

  'We are to have a preliminary meeting without these gentlemen on Wednesday to arrange the details of payment and to decide whether Castro should be invited to the main conference on Friday. He is being very discreetly sounded at this moment, in the palace itself: the empty palace, for the Viceroy is hurrying to quell a disturbance in far northern Peru. He left with his military household and some other troops soon after I had met the last of our friends here who were still in Lima and he is already ten days' journey along the road.

  'I could not have come at a more fortunate moment, when the Viceroy had alienated so many of the Creoles and so much of the army; when the desire for independence had risen to such a height; when he was about to remove himself and his surest friends from the capital; and when the ground had been to a certain extent prepared. It would perhaps have been wiser to start with Chile, where Bernardo O'Higgins (close kin to our Vicar-General) has so considerable a following; but given the present aspect of affairs, to say nothing of my direct, explicit instructions, I believe we may do very well here. It is true that time is all-important, with that smooth coordination of troop-movements, declarations, and the summoning of a Peruvian council that will present the Viceroy with a fait accompli on his return, a very well established fait accompli, with all these movements carried out and an overwhelming force in the citadel; yet most fortunately General Hurtado has an unusual sense of the passing hour, and he is a most capable chief of staff, the most capable in the Spanish service.

  'How I wish I could give you the results of the full conference or even of the preliminary meeting, but I am to ride into the mountains directly, and the messengers who carry this to the Atlantic coast will be gone before I can be back. May I beg you to send the enclosed half-sheet down to Hampshire?'

  'My dear,' he wrote on the half-sheet in question, 'this is the merest hasty scribble to bring you both my fondest love from our most recent port of call, and to tell you that all is well with us, except for poor Martin, who has been obliged to be sent home for his health. With the blessing, this note will reach you some three months before he arrives: please tell his wife that I am confident she will see him quite restored.

  'This is a pleasant climate, for gentle sea-breezes temper the heat; but they assure me it never rains at all, not at all, ever; and although there are damp fogs throughout the winter they are not enough to relieve the almost total sterility of the desert, stony or sandy, that lies along the coast, the virtual absence of life, animal or vegetable. Yet I have already achieved one of my greatest ambitions: I have seen the condor. And you will be pleased to learn that I have already collected seven distinct species of mouse (five inhabit the fringe of the desert, one its very heart, and the seventh was making a nest in my papers), while the rivers, of course, which are fed from the high far-off snows and which therefore flow their strongest in the summer, provide their valleys and their irrigated fields with a valuable flora and fauna. But it is the high mountain that I long to see, with its plants and creatures unlike any others in the world; at this moment I am booted and spurred for a journey to the moderate heights. My mule stands in a courtyard close at hand, and across his saddle-bow he bears a poncho, an oblong piece of cloth with a hole in the middle, through which I shall put my head when I reach five or six thousand feet.

  'Now God bless you, my dearest love; and pray kiss Brigid for me.

  He sat back, reflecting with the utmost tenderness upon his wife Diana, that fierce, spirited young woman, and upon their daughter, whom he had not seen but whom he pictured as a very small child in a pinafore, walking by now, perhaps already conversable. Once again his watch broke in upon his wandering thoughts: a watch that would have been a more valuable guide if he had wound it the night before. He folded his papers, carried them into Gayongos' private room, and rehearsed his direction once more. 'You cannot miss it,' said Gayongos, 'but I wish you may get there before nightfall. You are starting more than three hours late.' Stephen bent his head; he could not but admit it. 'And there is a cruel wind blowing right in your face,' added Gayongos. He led Stephen through a daedal of passages and stables to a courtyard where the mule was standing, a tall, intelligent animal that recognized their destination after their first two or three turns through Lima streets, making his way through the gate beyond the Misericordia convent without guidance and striking into the road that ran a little north of east towards the mountains along the left of the river, a fine turbulent great stream, growing day by day as the season advanced.

  The road was not much frequented at present, though on Friday and Saturday it would be full of people going up to the shrine of Our Lady of Huenca; and it grew less beyond the limits of irrigated land. The mule was an ambler with a long easy motion and Stephen sat quite relaxed upon his back: the river-banks had a reasonable population of birds, while the occasional reptile crossed the road and large flying beetles were common as long as the carob-groves lasted. Part of Stephen's mind recorded them, but the strong east wind and the dust made it hard to see with any sharp definition and in any case the rest of his being was so taken up with the possibility, indeed the strong probability, of a brilliant success for his mission within the next eight days or even less that he never stopped or reached for his pocket-glass. The whole scheme had matured so quickly, because of his excellent relations with Hurtado and O'Higgins and above all because of the Viceroy's departure, that his spirits, usually so well under control, were now in something of a fluster. This was a condition he had seen often enough in his colleagues, but finding it in himself put him somewhat out of countenance.

  Once more he went over the various moves, the replacing of stated regiments by others, the convocation of wholly committed supporters, the summoning of a council, the issue of a proclamation, the rapid dispatch of guns to command three essential bridges: as he named them in order they seemed simple enough, and his heart beat so that he could hear it. Yet he had some acquaintance with the military mind, the Spanish military mind, and with that of the Spanish conspirator; and before now he had seen a series of actions that were simple in themselves, but that had of necessity to be carried out in sequence, fall into hopeless chaos for want of a sense of time, for want of common efficiency, or because of hidden jealousies.

  He wished he had not used such confident, presumptuous words in writing to Blaine. From very early times men had believed that it was unwise, even impious, to tempt fate: the ancient generations were not to be despised. The confident system of his youth—universal reform, universal changes, universal happiness and freedom—had ended in something very like universal tyranny and oppression. The ancient generations were not to be despised; and the seamen's firm belief that Friday was unlucky was perhaps less foolish than the
philosophe's conviction that all the days of the week could be rendered happy by the application of an enlightened system of laws. He wished the main conference had not been set for Friday.

  Blushing at his momentary weakness, he turned his mind to Hurtado. The General might have some small absurdities such as a delight in being fine (he wore the stars of his three orders at all times) and setting an inordinate value on pedigree: he took more pleasure in recounting the stages of his descent, through his maternal grandmother, from Wilfred the Shaggy than in speaking of the four brilliant victories he had won as commander or the other battles in which he had served with such distinction. On all other subjects however he was not only a rational being but one with an unusually acute and ready mind: an active man, a born organizer, and an uncommonly effective ally in such a concern. His abilities, his known honesty, his high reputation in the army, and his influence throughout Peru made him the most valuable friend that ever Stephen could have found.

  The white milestones filed by, and many crosses commemorating death by earthquake, murder, accident. For some little while the mule had not been pacing uphill with the same steady determination. He had been gazing from side to side; and now, giving Stephen a significant look, he turned off the road into the last carob-trees. By this point the road had wound some way from the Rimac, which could be heard roaring in the gorge below, but a small tributary stream ran through among the trees and in this Stephen and the mule drank heartily.