Desolation Island (19 page)

They smiled: the strongest of the three said they would see England again, and that he would like to take another hare on Mr Wilson's land. They looked at him gratefully.

He and Martin plied all the remedies they possessed, all the forms of alleviation they knew - sponging, cold affusions, shaving of the head - but the progress of the disease, from having been extraordinarily slow, now became extraordinarily rapid. As the day wore on to quarters Stephen sent a note aft, asking that the guns might not be fired, although by this time two of the men were in the coma vigil, their eyes were staring wide, but their beings so very far below the surface that no guns would ever rouse them. When hammocks were piped down, the third man entered into a muttering delirium; and at lights out he too passed into coma.

The lights burned on in the sickbay, and in his patients' gleaming eyes Stephen read ultimate disappointment, loss of trust, and deep reproach. Between two and four in the morning they all died. He and Martin closed their eyes, told the loblolly boy to send for the sailmaker as soon as it was day, and went to bed. As he walked aft to his cabin Stephen noticed that the way had come off the ship: the innumerable sounds that spoke of her movement had fallen silent, and the voice of the water, usually slipping by just above his head, had died away.

The Leopard had lost the north-east trades in 12'30°N., far earlier than Jack had expected: he resisted the notion of total loss as long as he could, but presently he was forced to admit that it was so, that this year the doldrums had moved farther north than usual, and that his ship was in them, well in, having carried the declining breath of the true breeze right down to its last expiring waft. Day after day she lay there with her head all round the compass, inanimate, her sails hanging limp, sometimes rolling so that most hands were sick all over again, rolling so heavy that he struck her topgallantmasts before she should send them overboard, sometimes motionless; and all day long the heat beat down from a veiled sun. The air was thick, with no refreshment even in the morning watch; lightning flickered all round the night horizon; and sometimes by night but more often by day, warm rain came down so hard and thick that the men on deck could hardly breathe and the scuppers on either side spurted water as though from a powerful hose.

Sometimes, after these blinding downpours, a breeze would spring up, and he would have the Leopard's head towed round to make something of it. But it was rare that the breeze was on the ship herself; far more often it ruffled the sea half a mile or more away, and then the boats would labour, double-banked, to get her there before it died -vain, exhausting labour, nine times out of ten. And these breezes, such as they were, might come from any quarter; they were as likely to push her back as to help her on. Almost all the time she lay in much the same few square miles of sea, surrounded by her own filth, with empty casks, and floating bottles from the wardroom. Yet this stretch of sea was itself in motion. Whenever he could take a good noon observation or a double amplitude, Jack fixed his position: a perfect sight of the moon and Altair proved that the chronometers he had indulged in - a superlative pair, the pride of their maker - were still within seconds of Greenwich time, and that this sea in which the Leopard wallowed was very slowly drifting west and a little south in a circular motion that would require so great a time for its completion that he looked away from his reckoning. Like every other sailor he had heard of ships in the doldrums lying helpless for weeks and even months, eating their stores and accumulating weed; he had had severe experience of it himself; and as he examined the sky, the sea, the drifting weed, the birds and fishes, the feel of the air, and all those minute differences that mean so much to a man bred to the sea, it appeared to him that the Leopard was in for a very ugly bout. A gloomy ship now, oppressed by heat, and disease, and dread of the future.

At one time a school of whales passed by, sperm whales on either side, spouting, moving steadily along the surface, half awash, diving, reappearing farther on: some fifty huge calm dark forms travelling fast, some so close to the ship that he could see their blow-holes open. One was a female with a calf no longer than the Leopard's launch. Although the ship had half a dozen whalers among her people, there was not a sound as the school moved past: the crew, frightened by the gaol-fever, dispirited, worn out by towing, merely looked over the side - an apathetic stare, no more. At another time, a great deal of weed appeared, perhaps some slow streamer from the remote Sargasso Sea, and with it a number of birds that he had never seen before.

It was no use sending for Stephen, however. Stephen was shut into the fore part of the ship: it had been transformed into one vast sickbay, sealed off by bulkheads, forbidden territory from which he never emerged except for the daily burials. Very early in the epidemic he had fumigated the whole ship, section by section, with great quantities of brimstone while the hands were sent into the boats or the tops; then he had retired with all his patients, desiring Jack to have the bulkheads caulked and tarred, in the hope of stopping the spread of the infection.

A vain hope. During the first week the log had recorded the burial of fourteen convicts, the two remaining turnkeys, and a loblolly boy, all of whom had lived or worked forward, and it had recorded them in Needham's fine copperplate: now it was Jack's far rougher hand that wrote the daily list, for his clerk had gone over the side with two cannon-balls to carry him down and his hammock for a shroud, the first of those abaft the mast to die of the disease.

Apart from the perpetual supply of fresh rain-water, the circumstances were as bad as they could be, with the enormous oppressive heat, the dispirited vitiated atmosphere, the excessive dread and general despondence that had come over all the crew; and when the disease struck the lower-deck it killed men faster than the plague. They gave up hope, and sometimes it seemed to Stephen that they would almost as soon not take his draughts, but would rather have it over as soon as might be: and soon it was, in many cases - headache, languor, a moderate rise in temperature, and despair at once, even before the rash and the appalling fever, far worse in this stifling heat, and so onwards to what he often believed an unnecessary death. He believed this all the more since his heroic exhibitions of bark and antimony had begun to have effect. There were now eleven convalescents, men who had survived their crises; yet in spite of this clear evidence, there were those who would die, who resigned themselves almost thankfully to death the moment they were brought in.

'I believe,' he said to Martin, 'that if only a French ship could be seen approaching, if only we could hear the drum beat and the sound of guns in earnest, several of our cases would cure themselves, and the admissions would fall off to a wonderful degree.'

'You arc in the right,' said Martin, taking up his book. 'Spirit is three-quarters of the remedy, as Rhazes observes. But who can dose or measure spirit?' He pressed his hands to his eyes, and went on, 'Now in the case of Roberts, you did say twenty drachms, did you not? I must note it down.'

'Twenty drachms it was: I am persuaded he can bear it. And pray do note it down. Our notes will be of capital importance. You have kept them very fully, I am sure?'

'I have indeed,' said Martin wearily.

'Mr Pullings, sir,' said the new loblolly boy.

'Bring him in. Well now, Lieutenant Pullings, my dear, you have a vile headache, you feel cold, a distinct rigor about the midriff and in the limbs? Just so. You have come to the right shop,' said Stephen, smiling. 'You are slightly affected, and we can take you in hand in time. We have a prime physic that will suit your case, and belay it with all nines: and you are to observe, Tom, that I will lay a hundred to one upon your hoisting your flag in time. Pullings never yet said die.'

An hour later Martin asked Dr Maturin to take his pulse: he did so: they looked at one another, and Stephen said, 'I am not sure. There are many other possible causes

- you have eaten nothing since yesterday evening. Take some soup and stay below. I shall go on deck this time.'

He took his best coat off the cleat and put it on, for the Leopard still did these things in the proper manner. He walked along the gangway towards the range of bodies sewn into their hammocks, as Fisher's white surplice showed on the quarterdeck. Stephen did not go farther aft than the maintack block, but stood there with his hat off while the service was read and the dead seamen moved down the slide into the viscid water.

After this he conversed with Jack at a distance of some ten yards - easy enough in that still air and that silent ship - and paced for a while on the forecastle. By the time he returned to the sickbay there was no doubt remaining as to Martin's state.

'You will take our twenty drachms?' he said.

'I will even adventure upon twenty-five,' said Martin, 'and my notes will show its progress from within.'

From that day onwards Stephen was alone. He had two literate assistants, Herapath and to some degree Fisher, but neither was a medical man, neither could compound his drugs nor judge their administration, and in neither could he confide when the enormous demand exhausted his medicine-chest, so that he was obliged to turn to placebos, mostly of powdered chalk, coloured blue or red. Day and night ran into one, separated only by those pauses when Fisher put on his surplice and followed the dead on deck to bury them. Although even before Martin's death the physic was no more than nominal, the immediate bodily and spiritual care, the nursing of the patients still remained, and to this he applied himself, teaching Herapath all he could; for as he remarked, nursing was quite half the battle. It had saved Martin, who in fact died from a pneumonia that struck him days after the favourable termination of the crisis and after he had written an exact description of the disease from the onset to the first stage of convalescence, the Latin faultless to the last.

It seemed an endless battle, yet by the calendar only twenty-three days passed before an even more violent deluge than usual brought a northerly breeze in the morning watch that wafted the Leopard down, just to the very outside limit of the region where the south-east trade-wind blew.

From the sickbay he noticed the deafening downpour, water knee-deep on the decks and cascading into the head, and he heard all hands piped to make sail in the ensuing quietness; but this had happened so often that he paid little attention. Even when he felt her heavy, deeply weeded bulk surge on and heard the growing hiss of her cutwater shearing through the swell, he was too utterly weary to be pleased, just as he had taken no real satisfaction in the diminishing mortality of these last few days and the absence of fresh cases.

He slept where he sat, occasionally waking for some call for water or to help a half-seen assistant lash a delirious man into his cot. Yet when he woke in the morning he knew that the ship was in a different world, that she was herself a different world. True, clean, breathable air was gushing down the wind-sail; his whole being was recharged with life.

These confused waking motions were confirmed on deck. The Leopard had sent up her topgallantmasts - it had taken the reduced crew three-quarters of an hour instead of the usual seventeen minutes and forty seconds -and she was running west-south-west at five or six knots under a cloud of sail. A new and brilliant day, a new and healthy sea, transparent tonic air, the ship alive. Killick had been on the watch, and now he ran forward with coffee-pot and biscuit, laid them carefully in a coil of rope at the appointed place, the limit of the forbidden ground, retreated, and called out, 'Good morning, sir. This is what we have been praying for.' Stephen nodded, took a draught, and asked how the Captain did. 'Which he's just turned in,' said Killick, 'a-laughing like a boy. Says we've cleared the doldrums: the true blessed trade, he says, and never will he touch a stitch till we're at the Cape.'

Stephen drank his coffee and soaked his biscuit standing by the rail. An extraordinary change had come over the ship: men ran, talked in low cheerful voices, looked like different beings; and there was laughter out on the bowsprit. All this time the routine of the ship had been carried on, but as though the hands were already at least half-dead; orders had been obeyed, but by slow and listless automata. Now the Leopard might have been sailing fresh from Porto Praya, apart from the fact that her decks were so thinly peopled.

The change in the sickbay was more surprising still.

Men who had been on the point of death the evening before were now straining their heads up from their cots, talking eagerly in their weak thin voices. One very feeble convalescent had actually reached the ladder, and was attempting to creep up. The eyes, the expressions, the words that he encountered as he made his rounds possessed a vitality that he had not seen for weeks, and one whose existence had almost passed from his mind.

'I doubt whether we have many fresh cases today,' he said to Herapath. He was not mistaken: no more new admissions and only three more deaths, all cases where the coma had been abnormally prolonged.

Nevertheless, it was a full week before he opened his plague-house, allowed his stronger convalescents to come up to the forecastle or return to the lower-deck, and moved aft again.

'Jack,' said he, 'I am come to sit with you a while; and then, if I may, I will beg the use of one of your little cabins. I long for a day and a night of uninterrupted sleep in luxury, swinging in an ample cot under an open skylight. You need not be afraid: I have been pumped in fresh rain-water and soaped from head to foot, and I believe the epidemic is over. Should anything untoward occur, Herapath will wake me. Herapath knows all the symptoms now, as very few men know them. Herapath will not be deceived. Now, sir!' he cried, frowning sternly at a stranger whose face was reflected in a small looking. glass. 'Jesus, 'tis myself, behind that beard.' A three-weeks' beard: with his sunken, emaciated face, it gave him the look of an El Greco, without the length. 'Beard,' he said, pulling it. 'Maybe I shall retain this beard - the torment of the razor a mere memory, no more. The Roman emperors retained their beards, in war.'