H.M.S. Surprise (12 page)

But this was not what he was worrying about as he walked into the galley. He had an enchanting ship, frail and elderly though she might be, some good officers, and good material. No: what haunted him was the thought of scurvy. But he might be mistaken; these dull looks might have a hundred other causes; and surely it was too early in the voyage for scurvy to break out?

The heat in the galley brought him up all standing. It had been gasping hot on deck, even with the blessed breeze: here it was like walking straight into a baker's oven. But the three-legged cook - three-legged because both his own had been shot away on the Glorious First of June, and he had supplemented the two provided by the hospital with a third, ingeniously seized to his bottom, to prevent him from plunging into his cauldrons or his range in a heavy sea. The range was now cherry-pink in the gloom, and the cook's face shone with sweat.

'Very trim, Johnson. Capital,' said Jack, backing a step. 'Ain't you going to inspect the coppers, sir?' cried the cook, his brilliant smile vanishing, so that in the comparative darkness his whole face seemed to disappear.

'Certainly I am,' said Jack, drawing on the ceremonial white glove. With this he ran his hand round the gleaming coppers, gazed at his fingers as though he really expected to find them deeply crusted with old filth and grease. A drop of sweat trembled on the end of his nose and more coursed down inside his coat, but he gazed at the pease-soup, the ovens and the two hundredweight of plum-duff, Sunday duff, before making his way to the sick-bay where Dr Maturin and his raw-boned Scotch assistant were waiting for him. Having made the round of the cots (one broken arm, one hernia with pox, four plain poxes) with what he intended to be encouraging remarks - looking better - soon be fit and well - back with their messmates for crossing the line - he stood under the opening of the air-sail, profiting by the relative coolness of 105°, and said privately to Stephen, 'Pray go along the divisions with Mr M'Alister while I am below. Some of the men seem to me to have an ugly look of the scurvy. I hope I am wrong - it is far too early - but it looks damnably like it.'

Now the berth-deck, with an ill-looking cat that sat defying them with studied insolence, its arms folded, and its particular friend, an equally mangy green parrot, lying on its side, prostrated with the heat, that said 'Erin go bragh' in a low tone once or twice as Jack and Hervey paced along with bowed heads past the spotless mess-tables, kids, benches, chests, the whole clean-swept deck checkered with brilliant light from the gratings and the hatchways. Nothing much wrong here; nor in the midshipmen's berth, nor of course in the gunroom. But in the sail-room, where the bosun joined them again, a very shocking sight - mould on the first stay-sail he turned over, and worse as the others were brought out.

This was lubber's work, slovenly and extremely dangerous. Poor Hervey wrung his hands, and the bosun, though made of sterner stuff, was quickly reduced to much the same condition. Jack's unfeigned anger, his utter contempt for the excuses offered - 'it happens so quick near the line - no fresh water to get the salt out - the salt draws the damp - hard to fold them just so with all these awnings' - made a shattering impression on Rattray.

His remarks upon the efficiency required in a man-of -war were delivered in little more than a conversational tone, but they were not inaudible, and when he emerged after having looked at the holds, cable-tiers and fore-peak, the frigate's people had an air of mixed delight and apprehension. They were charmed that the bosun had copped it - all of them, that is to say, who would not be spending their holy Sunday afternoon in 'rousing them all out, sir, every last storm-stays'l, every drabbler, every bonnet: do you hear me, now?' - but apprehensive lest their own sins he discovered, lest they cop it next; for this skipper was a bleeding tartar, mate, a right hard horse.

However, he returned to the quarterdeck without biting or savaging anyone in his path, peered up between the awnings at the pyramid of canvas, still just drawing, and said to Mr Hervey, 'We will rig church, if you please.'

Chairs and benches appeared on the quarterdeck; the cutlass-rack, decently covered with signal flags, became a reading-desk; the ship's bell began to toll. The seamen flocked aft; the officers and the civilians of the envoy's suite stood at their places, waiting for Mr Stanhope, who walked slowly to his chair on the captain's right, propped on the one side by his chaplain and on the other by his secretary. He looked grey and wan among all these mahogany-red faces, almost ghost-like: he had never wanted to go to Kampong; he had not even known where Kampong was until they gave him this mission; and he hated the sea. But now that the Surprise was sailing on the gentle breeze her roll was far less distressing - hardly perceptible so long as he kept his eyes from the rail and the horizon beyond - and the familiar Church of England service was a comfort to him among all these strange intricacies of rope, wood and canvas and in this intolerably heated unbreathable air. He followed its course with an attention as profound as that of the seamen; he joined in the well-known psalms in a faint tenor, drowned by the deep thunder of the captain on his left and yet sweetly prolonged in the remote, celestial voice of the Welsh lookout high on the fore-royal jacks. But when the parson announced the text of his sermon, Mr Stanhope's mind wandered far away to the coolness of his parish church at home, the dim light of sapphires in the east window, the tranquillity of the family tombs, and he closed his eyes.

He wandered alone. The moment the Reverend Mr White said, 'The sixth verse of Psalm 75: promotion cometh neither from the east, nor from the west, nor from the south,' the flagging devotion of the midshipmen to leeward and of the lieutenants to windward revived, sprang to vivid life. They sat forward in attitudes of tense expectancy; and Jack, who might be called upon to preach himself, if he were to command a ship without a chaplain, reflected, 'A flaming good text, upon my word.'

Yet when at length it appeared that promotion cameth not from the north either, as the sharper midshipmen had supposed, but rather from a course of conduct that Mr White proposed to describe under ten main heads, they slowly sank back; and when even this promotion was found to be not of the present world, they abandoned him altogether in favour of reflections upon their dinner, their Sunday dinner, the plum-duff that was simmering under the equatorial sun with no more than a glowing cinder to keep it on the boil. They glanced up at the sails, flapping now as the breeze died away: they pondered on the likelihood of a studdingsail being put over the side, to swim in. 'If I can square old Babbington,' thought Callow, who had also been invited to dine in the gunroom at two o'clock, 'I shall get two dinners. I can dart below the moment we have shot the sun, and -,

'On deck there,' came from the sky. 'On deck there.

Sail ho!'

'Where away?' called Jack, as the chaplain broke off.

'Two points on the starboard bow, sir.'

'Keep her away, Davidge,' said Jack to the man at the wheel, who, though in the midst of the congregation, was not of it, and who had never opened his mouth for hymn, psalm, response or prayer. 'Carry on, Mr White, if you please: I beg your pardon.'

Looks darted to and fro across the quarterdeck - wild surmise, intense excitement. Jack felt extreme moral pressure building up all round him, but, apart from a quick glance at his watch, he remained immovable, listening to the chaplain with his head slightly on one side, grave, attentive.

'Tenthly and lastly,' said Mr White, speaking faster.

Below, in the airy shadowed empty berth-deck, Stephen walked up and down, reading the chapter on scurvy in Blane's Diseases of Seamen: he heard the hail, paused, paused again, and said to the cat, 'How is this? The cry of a sail and no turmoil, no instant activity? What is afoot?' The cat pursed its lips. Stephen reopened his book and read in it until he heard the two-hundredfold 'Amen' above his head.

On deck the church was disappearing in the midst of a universal excited buzz - glances at the captain, glances over the hammock-cloths towards the horizon, where a flash of white could be seen on the rise. The chairs and benches were hurried below, the hassocks turned back to wads for the great guns, the cutlasses resumed their plain Old Testament character, but since the first nine heads of Mr White's discourse had taken a long, long time, almost till noon itself, sextants and quadrants already came tumbling up before the prayer-books had vanished. The sun was close to the zenith, and this was nearly the moment to take his altitude. The quarterdeck awning was rolled back, the pitiless naked light beat down; and as the master, his mates, the midshipmen, the first lieutenant and the captain took their accustomed stations for this high moment, the beginning of the naval day, they had no more shadow than a little pool of darkness at their feet. It was a solemn five minutes, particularly for the midshipmen -their captain insisted upon accurate observation - and yet no one seemed to care greatly about the sun: no one, until Stephen Maturin, walking up to Jack, said, 'What is this I hear about a strange sail?'

'Just a moment,' said Jack, stepping to the quarterdeck bulwark, raising his sextant, bringing the sun down to the horizon and noting his reading on the little ivory tablet. 'Sail? Oh, that is only St Paul's Rocks, you know. They will not run away. If this breeze don't die on us, you will see 'em quite close after dinner - prodigiously curious -gulls, boobies, and so on.'

The news instantly ran through the ship - rocks, not ships; any God-damned lubber as had travelled farther than Margate knew St Paul's Rocks - and all hands returned to their keen expectation of dinner, which followed immediately after the altitude. The cooks of all the messes stood with their wooden kids near the galley; the mate of the hold began the mixing of the grog, watched with intensity by the quartermasters and the purser's steward; the smell of rum mingled with that of cooking and eddied about the deck; saliva poured into a hundred and ninety-seven mouths; the bosun stood with his call poised on the break of the forecastle. On the gangway the master lowered his sextant, walked aft to Mr Hervey and said, 'Twelve o'clock, sir: fifty-eight minutes north.'

The first lieutenant turned to Jack, took off his hat, and said, 'Twelve o'clock, sir, if you please, and fifty-eight minutes north.'

Jack turned to the officer of the watch and said, 'Mr Nicolls, make it twelve.'

The officer of the watch called out to the mate of the watch, 'Make it twelve.'

The mate of the watch said to the quartermaster, 'Strike eight bells'; the quartermaster roared at the Marine sentry, 'Turn the glass and strike the bell!' And at the first stroke Nicolls called along the length of the ship to the bosun, 'Pipe to dinner.'

The bosun piped, no doubt, but little did the quarterdeck hear of it, for the clash of mess-kids, the roaring of the cooks, the tramp of feet and the confused din of the various messes banging their plates. In this weather the men dined on deck, among their guns, each mess fixing itself as accurately as possible above its own table below, and so Jack led Stephen into his cabin.

'What did you think of the people?' he asked.

'You were quite right,' said Stephen. 'It is scurvy. All my authorities agree - weakness, diffused muscular pain, petechia, tender gums, ill breath - and M'Alister has no doubt of it. He is an intelligent fellow; has seen many cases. I have gone into the matter, and I find that nearly all the men affected come from the Racoon. They were months at sea before being turned over to us.'

'So that is where the mischief lies,' cried Jack. 'Of course. But you will be able to put them right. Oh yes, you will set them up directly.'

'U wish I could share your confidence; I wish I could feel persuaded that our lime-juice were not sophisticated. Tell me, is there anything green grows upon those rocks of yours?'

'Never a blade, never a single blade,' said Jack. 'And no water, either.'

'Well,' said Stephen, drawing up his shoulders. 'I shall do my best with what we have.'

'I am sure you will, my dear Stephen,' cried Jack, flinging off his coat and with it part of his care. He had an unlimited faith in Stephen's powers; and although he had seen a ship's company badly hit by the disease, with hardly enough hands to win the anchor or make sail, let alone fight the ship, he thought of the forties, of the great western gales far south of the line, with an easier mind. 'It is a great comfort to me to have you aboard: it is like sailing with a piece of the True Cross.'

'Stuff, stuff,' said Stephen peevishly. 'I do wish you would get that weak notion out of your mind. Medicine can do very little; surgery less. I can purge you, bleed you, worm you at a pinch, set your leg or take it off, and that is very nearly all. What could Hippocrates, Galen, Rhazes, what can Blanc, what can Trotter do for a carcinoma, a lupus, a sarcoma?' He had often tried to eradicate Jack's simple faith; but Jack had seen him trepan the gunner of the Sophie, saw a hole in his skull and expose the brain; and Stephen, looking at Jack's knowing smile, his air of civil reserve, knew that he had not succeeded this time, either. The Sophies, to a man, had known that if he chose Dr Maturin could save anyone, so long as the tide had not turned; and Jack was so thoroughly a seaman that he shared nearly all their beliefs, though in a somewhat more polished form. He said, 'What do you say to a glass of Madeira before we go to the gunroom? I believe they have killed their younger pig for us, and Madeira is a capital foundation for pork.'

Madeira did very well as a foundation, burgundy as an accompaniment, and port as a settler; though all would have been better if they had been a little under blood-heat. 'How long the human frame can withstand this abuse,' thought Stephen, looking round the table, 'remains to be seen.' He was eating biscuit rubbed with garlic himself, and he had drunk thin cold. black coffee, on grounds both of theory and personal practice; but as he looked round the table he was obliged to admit that so far the frames were supporting it tolerably well. Jack, with a deep stratum of duff upon a couple of pounds of swine's flesh and root-vegetables, was perhaps a little nearer apoplexy than usual, but the bright blue eyes in his scarlet face were not suffused - there was no immediate danger. The same could be said for the fat Mr Hervey, who had eaten and drunk himself out of his habitual constraint: his round face was like the rising sun, supposing the sun to wrinkle with merriment. All the faces there, except for Nicolls's, were a fine red, but Hervey's outshone the rest. There was an attaching simplicity about the first lieutenant; no striving contention, no pretence, no sort of aggression. How would such a man behave in hand-to-hand action? Would his politeness (and Hervey was very much the gentleman) put him at a fatal disadvantage? In any event, he was quite out of place here, poor fellow; far more suitable for a parsonage or a fellowship. He was the victim of innumerable naval connections, an influential family full of admirals whose summum bonum was a flag and who by means of book-time and every other form of decent corruption meant to impel him into command at the earliest possible age. He had passed for lieutenant before