Book 16 - The Wine-Dark Sea

by Patrick O'Brian

  He thought of it with pleasure as he went to sleep; and its absence the next day, together with a want of that cheerfulness so usual on deck, struck him with all the more force when he took the air in the forenoon after a trying, anxious time with the sick-berth, where neither burns nor foot were doing well, and with his collections, where a vile moth was breeding among the feathers and no pepper, no pepper left in the entire ship to discourage it. He arrived on deck not by climbing the companion-ladder to the quarterdeck in the usual way but by the fore-hatchway, having traversed the berth-deck to consider Dutourd's former cabin for the amputation in case his suspicion of an incipient pneumonia (that frequent sequel) should prove to be true. This brought him into the waist of the ship, filled with hands. They touched their hats and wished him good-day, but mechanically, with barely a smile, and returned to their low, anxious, intent conversations, frequently calling up in subdued voices to their companions thick along the starboard gangway.

  He pushed through to the quarterdeck; and there were the same grave faces, grey with cold and discouragement, looking fixedly to windward, that is to say a little south of the ship's modest wake. 'What is afoot?' he murmured in Reade's ear.

  'Stand over here, sir,' said Reade, guiding him to the rail, 'and look out to windward.'

  A topsail schooner sailing large: and some miles beyond her a ship, also standing north-north-east with topgallants and studdingsails abroad, a glorious sight; but one that gave no pleasure.

  'It is that brutal great American, come to snap us up,' said Reade.

  'Shame on him, after such a handsome message,' murmured Wedel.

  'Where is the Captain?'

  'Aloft, sir; but,' Reade whispered, 'he don't see very well today. Both eyes water so in the cold.'

  'It is cold, sure,' said Stephen. He focused his best newly-cleaned glass, a superlative piece made for him by Dolland with a somewhat greater magnification than was usual in the Navy, for identifying birds; and presently he said, 'Tell me, Mr Reade: frigates have but one row of guns, have they not?'

  'Yes, sir. Just one,' said Reade patiently, holding up a single finger.

  'Well, this boat, or vessel, has two; as well as some each end.'

  'Nay, sir,' said Reade, shaking his head: then urgently, 'Please may I have a look? Oh sir,' he shrieked to Pullings at the taffrail, 'she ain't the Yankee. She's a two decker. A sixty-four-gun ship—the Doctor saw her.'

  'On deck, there,' came Jack's voice from on high, cutting through the unworthy hubbub. 'She's a sixty-four-gun ship, the old Berenice, I think—yes, the old Berenice—from the New South Wales station. Bery nicey too,' he added, with a private chuckle.

  'And that, much nearer to us,' said Stephen to the ecstatic Reade, 'is what we at sea term a schooner; but you need not be afraid. She carries little in the way of guns.'

  'A Baltimore clipper, sir, I believe,' said Mr Adams.

  'Indeed? I could have sworn she was a schooner, in spite of those rectangular sails in front.'

  'Certainly, sir. She is certainly a schooner in rig. The clipper part refers to her hull.'

  'Oh, she has a hull as well, has she? I was not aware. But pray tell me, Mr Adams, do you think you could find a little small bag of pepper, just half a stone or so, in the Captain's storeroom itself?'

  'Sir, I have searched it through and through, in spite of that wicked Killick, and—see, she is rounding to.'

  The schooner checked her way and a tall young midshipman, standing on her low rail and holding a shroud, hailed, 'The ship ahoy—if ship you can be called, poor hulk [this in an undertone]—what ship is that?'

  'His Majesty's hired vessel Surprise,' replied Tom. 'Captain Pullings.'

  All along her side the schooner's hands stood grinning, staring, making offensive gestures: the Surprises looked back with stony hatred.

  'Come aboard with your papers,' said the midshipman.

  'Take that American contraption back to the Berenice,' roared Jack, half-way down the ratlines, 'and tell Captain Dundas with Captain Aubrey's compliments that he will wait upon him. D'ye hear me, there?'

  'Yes, sir,' replied the midshipman, and on either side of him the simpering stopped dead. 'Aye aye, sir: Captain Aubrey's compliments . . . Sir,' he called across the widening lane, 'may I say Philip Aubrey is aboard?'

  Oh the mirth aboard the Surprise. Several of the younger men leapt into the rigging, ostentatiously slapping their buttocks at the schooner as she fled away, sailing unbelievably close to the wind. But more, many more of the hands gathered in the waist or on the forecastle, oblivious of the cold, revelling in their prize-money preserved, even as it were restored, laughing, clapping one another on the back.

  The ships drew near; nearer. 'I know perfectly well what he is going to say,' murmured Jack to Stephen as they stood there in their boat-cloaks by the gangway stanchions. 'He is going to call out, "Well, Jack, whom the Lord loveth He chastizeth", and all his people will set up a silly cackle. There's Philip! Lord, how he has shot up.' Philip was Jack Aubrey's half-brother, last seen as a youngster aboard Dundas's previous command.

  The Surprise, with her frail spars, could not easily get her launch over the side, and Dundas was sending his barge for them. It was lowered down in a seamanlike manner, and as it shoved off Captain Dundas, waving his hat from the Berenice's quarterdeck, called, 'Well, Jack, whom the Lord loveth He chastizeth, ha, ha, ha! You must be a prime favourite up above. Heavens, you are in a horrid state.'

  'Captain Dundas, sir,' cried Stephen, 'Do you think you could oblige me with a few pounds of fresh black pepper?'

  The reply was lost as Jack's bosun and his mates piped their Captain over the side: a howling repeated three minutes later as the Berenice piped him aboard.

  Stephen, Pullings and Philip withdrew from their splendid dinner quite early, Stephen carrying his pepper; and Jack said, 'Old Hen, what a pleasant young fellow you have made of Philip. I am so grateful.'

  'Not at all,' said Dundas. 'He might have been born to the sea. Cobbold says he will rate him master's mate in Hyperion, next year, if you would like it.'

  'I should like it very much indeed. It is time he was out of leading-strings; though yours I am sure were the kindest in the world.'

  They sat comfortably together—very old friends and shipmates—sipping their port, pushing the decanter to and fro. Dundas told the servants to turn in, and presently he said, 'You have had a rough time of it, Jack: and so I think has Maturin.'

  'Yes, I have: pretty rough. And he has, too. Then again we have both been away a terrible long time, you know, with very little news, and that adds to the ordinary battering of a distant voyage: not that it was so ordinary on this occasion. Tell me, how are things at home?'

  'I was at Ashgrove last July, and they were all blooming—Sophie in splendid looks—her mother is living there with a friend, a Mrs Morris—children very well indeed, and the girls so pretty, modest and kind. Well, fairly modest, and very kind. I did not see Diana, though her horses do famously: she was in Ireland during my short leave. But when I called I did see Clarissa Oakes, poor young Oakes' widow, who lives there: what a fine young woman she is.' He paused again; then brightened and went on, 'But tell me, as far as you can, because Melville let me understand that there was something confidential about your voyage'—Melville, or more formally Lord Melville, was Heneage Dundas's elder brother and First Lord of the Admiralty—'as far as you properly can, then, how your enterprise went.'

  'Well, I gathered that the first part, in the East Indies, went well for Stephen—at least the French were discomforted—but I flung the Diane on a reef in the South China Sea, a total loss. And then in this second bout, now ending, thanks be, we did take a fair number of prizes to begin with and we destroyed a truly odious pirate; but then I contrived to lose three American China ships: Heavens, such wealth! It is true they were protected by a brig and a thirty-eight-gun frigate that nearly destroyed us. Oh, Hen, such wicked ice south of Diego Ramirez: and north, for that matt
er. We escaped, true enough; but even so I cannot call the enterprise anything but a failure. And I am very much afraid that Stephen was betrayed, that his plan did not come to good, and that it went right to his heart.'

  'I will fetch some brandy,' said Heneage.

  They drank it staring at the embers in the hanging stove; and when they had settled what masts and spars the Berenice could give the Surprise, with a long aside about Dundas's tender the Baltimore clipper, picked up perfect but empty—not a soul, not a scrap of paper—in the south Pacific, and her extraordinary sailing qualities, Jack said, 'No. Harking back to this voyage, I think it was a failure upon the whole, and a costly failure; but,' he said laughing with joy at the thought, 'I am so happy to be homeward-bound, and I am so happy, so very happy, to be alive.'

  In Which We Serve

  JOHN BAYLEY

  IN ALDOUS HUXLEY'S first novel, Crome Yellow, a man of action recounts an escapade of his youth, and comments that such things are only really agreeable to look back on after the event. Nothing is exciting as it happens. Warriors in heroic times only knew what they had been through when they heard about it from the bard in the mead-hall. Armchair warriors who have never performed such feats can nonetheless become connoisseurs of them at second-hand. In the same way, it is possible to become an expert on the apparatus of the old-time naval world—backstays and top-gallants, twenty-four pounders and hardtack—without having the faintest idea how to fire a gun, reef a sail, or fother a ship's bottom. Naval novels today are unique among the genre in this engaging respect: author and reader are alike innocent of the experience graphically conveyed by the one and eagerly appreciated by the other.

  This may seem a good reason for not taking such books very seriously. The Marryat who wrote Mr. Midshipman Easy and the Melville who wrote Moby-Dick had themselves been to sea, as frigate officer and as a whaling hand: they knew what they were talking about. So too with Joseph Conrad. But that is scarcely relevant to the genre of nautical fiction today, which can seem more like the genre of science fiction or fantasy, even of 'magic realism'. The fashionable thing in the theory of the novel at the present time is to do it, so to speak, without hands; to recognise the totality of fiction, its arbitrariness, its success not in relation to 'life' but in purely literary terms. On the other side the new historicism has created a genuinely authoritative style of fiction—Gore Vidal and Simon Schama are formidable exponents of it which researches the legend of the past while demonstrating the seductive unknowability of the real thing. Gore Vidal's Lincoln is a special and incontrovertible master piece of such a kind.

  Like his compatriots, J. G. Farrell and John Banville, Patrick O'Brian does not really fit into any of these more up-to-date categories. In their own different ways they are at once too traditional and too idiosyncratic. Loosely linked by the theme of an empire in its decline, the novels of Farrell's trilogy—Troubles, The Siege of Krishnapur, and The Singapore Grip—were a great success from the fashion in which they combined fantasy and erudition with an original imagination of how a particular culture saw itself, spoke, and showed off to itself. They made something new, fresh and hilarious, out of being bookish. In his own subtle and leisurely style Patrick O'Brian does something of the same sort, making extensive use of the pleasure that fiction addicts find in feeling at home, recognising old faces, old jokes, the same social occasions and regimes, the same sort of exciting situation. His most time-honoured ploy is the two-man partnership, the accidental coming together of a dissimilar pair—Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Holmes and Watson, Hergé's Tintin and Captain Haddock—who from then on are indissolubly wedded in terms of the reader's expectations and the novels' success.

  O'Brian's couples are Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, who meet at Port Mahon in Minorca in the year 1802, when Jack is a lieutenant in the British Navy hoping for promotion to commander, and Stephen is a bit of a mystery man, a half-Irish half-Catalan scholar in medicine and botany, down on his luck. After a mild quarrel at a concert—passionate music lovers both, Jack will play the violin and Stephen his cello throughout many a subsequent saga—they take to each other, and Jack offers Stephen a berth as surgeon in his first command, the fourteen-gun sloop Sophie. Master and Commander, the first in a series now approaching its fifteenth volume, inaugurates a relationship which will continue through the vicissitudes of the service in every ocean and latitude, through marriages and bankruptcies, promotions, dismissals, windfalls, and losses of prize money, until with The Nutmeg of Consolation (the name is that of a jewel of a little corvette built in Borneo to replace the ship wrecked HMS Diane) we end up on the shores of Botany Bay, among the convicts of the new colony of Australia.

  In strict terms of time and sequence the war against Napoleon should by now be over, and the Treaty of Ghent signed that ended the war of 1812 between England and the USA. But O'Brian has cunningly allowed history to expand, as it were, so that his own episodes can continue while the larger process marks time. In a recent introduction he confesses to this method, for he is too sound a chronicler to play fast and loose with what actually occurred. In the middling novels of the series there are memorable accounts of historic actions, like those of the French and English frigates and East Indiamen at Mauritius, and the unequal but epic fight in the Indian Ocean between HMS Java and the USS Constitution. The Fortune of War actually ended with the battle outside Boston harbour of the Shannon and Chesapeake, while The Surgeon's Mate opens with the burial at Halifax of Captain Lawrence, the Chesapeake's gallant commander.

  But by the time we reach The Nutmeg of Consolation such main events have tractfully withdrawn into the background and the chief action—a very thrilling one to be sure—is an attack by Dyaks and their pirate queen on the shipwrecked crew of the Surprise. (This frigate was Jack's favourite command and gave her name to the third novel in the series.) The flora and fauna of the far Orient, and of Australia itself, are of the deepest interest to Stephen and his chaplain assistant, and The Nutmeg ends with a marvellous account of the duckbill platypus and the hazardous consequences of being bitten by one.

  The above may give the idea that adventure is paramount in the series, and that the novels are further examples of the naval-romantic genre inaugurated by C. S. Forester with the exploits of Captain Hornblower, and copied since by several inferior cutlass-and-carronade performers. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many of the Hornblower books were superb examples of their craft, and Forester remains unequalled for dynamism of narrative and precision of encounter; his single ship actions are surely the best ever described. O'Brian's technique and achievement are of quite a different kind. For a start, although he is dutiful about giving us marine warfare, meticulously reconstructed and fleshed out from the dry pages of naval historians like Brenton and James, his real interest is in the ships and the crews, in naval custom, habit, and routine, the daily ritual of shipboard life and the interplay of personality in the confinement of a wooden world. His ships are as intimate to us as are Sterne's Shandy Hall or Jane Austen's village of Highbury in Emma. Like Jane Austen, O'Brian is really happiest working on two or three inches of ivory and turning to art the daily lives of three or four families in a locality—except that his village happens to be a wooden ship of war at the apogee of a great Navy's world sea-power in the days of sail, and famous for the skill and discipline of its officers and men. Jane Austen, two of whose brothers ended up as admirals, would have understood all this very well, and would no doubt warmly have approved O'Brian's spacious but modest undertaking.

  Stephen is being shown over the Sophie by young Mowett, a midshipman with a taste for writing verse, by no means a rare accomplishment at a time when learning to play the German flute was a popular relaxation in the gun-room, and captains might stitch petit point in the lofty seclusion of the great cabin.

  'You are studying trigonometry, sir?' said Stephen, whose eyes, accustomed to the darkness, could now distinguish an inky triangle.

  'Yes, sir, if you please,' said Babb
ington. 'And I believe I have nearly found out the answer.' (And should have, if that great ox had not come barging in, he added, privately.)

  'In canvassed berth, profoundly deep in thought,

  His busy mind with sines and tangents fraught,

  A Mid reclines! In calculation lost.

  His efforts still by some intruder crost,'

  said Mowett. 'Upon my word and honour, sir, I am rather proud of that.'

  'And well you may be,' said Stephen, his eyes dwelling on the little ships drawn all round the triangle. 'And pray, what in sea-language is meant by a ship?'

  'She must have three square-rigged masts, sir,' they told him kindly, 'and a bowsprit; and the masts must be in three—lower, top and topgallant—for we never call a polacre a ship.'

  'Don't you, though?' said Stephen. (Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander)

  In one sense the technique—clueless landsman much respected nonetheless as a doctor—is as time-honoured as it is in Smollett, but O'Brian contrives to give it back a sort of innocence, which goes with his extraordinarily adroit individualisation of minor figures. Two novels later in the series Jack is giving a dinner party on board his new command (he has just become a post captain) and is as relieved as a sub urban hostess would be that the burgundy and the plum duff ('Figgy-dowdy' to the service) are doing their job in loosening tongues and promoting social ease. Stephen is in conversation with the marine lieutenant, a Highlander called Macdonald, and they are growing a little warm over the Ossian question, Stephen pointing out the absence of manuscript sources: