The Unknown Shore (11 page)

‘I do not know how you can be so ungrateful,’ said Tobias, ‘for I told the commodore, as we rowed along, what a worthy, deserving creature you were; and he was visibly impressed by my words.’

There were a good many points upon which Jack and Tobias did not see eye to eye, apart from the desirability of chatting with captains and commodores; one difference concerned the proportion of their cabin that could reasonably be devoted to reptiles, and another was about the relative worth of their ship, considered either as a man-of-war or as a home.

Jack was very good in the matter of birds and mammals; fish he admitted without a word; even the octopus glowed faintly through the night in its bell-jar without protest from him, and the interesting Madeiran wood-slugs crept about in the company of their insect friends with no more than a silent shudder: but when a man comes down at the end of the middle watch, fagged out and ready to turn in, only to find that the scorpions have got out and are playing in his bed, together with a large assortment of serpents – why, then, in Jack’s opinion, things have gone too far.

Then, as to the
Wager
herself, Jack judged her with a mind formed
by a certain amount of naval experience: he had not been a great while at sea, but the service he had seen was remarkably various. In any case, it did not need any extraordinary degree of penetration to see that the
Wager
was not an ideal ship. To begin with, she had more than her fair share of rogues aboard: if the crew had been sorted out, one third would have been good, steady seamen, quite reliable afloat, if somewhat given to the bottle when ashore; another third neither good nor bad – apt to follow the lead in either direction; but the last third was made up of the sweepings of various prisons and houses of correction. There were many landsmen in this last third, naturally; but there were some seamen in it too, and among these were faces that would have looked quite natural on Execution Dock, where pirates are hanged. Jack had served on the West Indies station, and he had seen a good many pirates – hard, brutal, very stupid and profoundly disagreeable men, for the most part. She was lucky not to have more, for Commodore Anson’s squadron had been manned after two admirals commanding important fleets had had their pick; and just as the squadron came after the fleets, so the poor
Wager
came after the other ships of the squadron. The Navy was used to dealing with such people, and with bitterly resentful sailors pressed out of merchant ships coming into port after long voyages; but it meant rigid discipline and a great deal of punishment, and floggings every other day do not make for happiness. And then the
Wager
was not particularly fortunate in her warrant officers, either: for the Navy, though capable of almost anything, is not infallible, and the bo’sun (who has a great deal to do with the immediate direction of the hands) was so evil-tempered a fellow – unreliable and drunken – that it was a wonder that he had ever been given his warrant; the gunner, who had been a mate in the merchant service and who kept the master’s watch when the master was ill, was almost as quarrelsome as the bo’sun, and prided himself beyond measure on his ability to navigate; and the sailing-master – the man who would have been the captain had the
Wager
been a merchant ship – was old, tired and ailing. As for Mr Bean, the only commissioned officer aboard other than the captain, Jack did not know what to make of him. In a fit of spleen he had described him to Keppel as ‘an old woman', but this was by no means his considered opinion; the lieutenant had a curious hesitation in his speech that
sometimes made him appear uncertain, he had the peculiarity of never swearing and he was an unusually quiet, reserved man. He was old for a lieutenant – grey-haired – but there had been a long period of peace, with little likelihood of promotion for anyone, and scarcely any at all for a man without interest, so that did not necessarily reflect upon his ability. The first lieutenants of Jack’s last two ships had been tremendous fire-eaters, exceedingly fierce in word, deed and appearance, and Mr Bean showed palely in contrast with them: but he was obviously a good seaman.

Tobias, however, could never be brought to see that the
Wager
was anything but perfect – ‘a very happily conceived vessel, with a great deal of room downstairs, and a sick-bay better than any other in the squadron.’ But, then, Tobias’ point of view was entirely unlike Jack’s: for one thing, he was not there to see that work was properly done, but to help make the men well if they were sick; he had no authority over them, and they looked upon him in quite a different light; and whereas Jack was not altogether enchanted with his superiors, Tobias was perfectly content with his – he was immediately subject only to Mr Eliot, and Mr Eliot suited him very well.

Mr Eliot was not entirely perfect; he could be ill-tempered and sharp, and he had a reasonable number of bees in his bonnet; but he was an able surgeon, and he was very much concerned with curing his patients. He was much esteemed aboard, very much more than his military colleague, Mr Oakley, who was there to look after the marines, and who (like too many army and navy surgeons) believed every man who reported sick to be a malingerer until he was proved to be ill.

Mr Eliot was also pretty well acquainted with malingering; he was no fool, and he had not treated some thousands of sailors without learning something of their tortuous mental processes; but, as he said to Tobias, he would rather have a dozen malingerers impose upon him than turn away one genuinely sick man. In fact, he was very rarely deceived – far less often than Mr Oakley.

One result of this was that as the ship settled down and the lower-deck began to understand the nature of the officers, marines who felt unwell would insinuate themselves into the group of sick seamen, to be treated by the naval surgeon – a proceeding which led to the most violent resentment on the part of Mr Oakley. Mr
Eliot utterly discountenanced it, for one of the first principles of medical practice is that another man’s patients must never be taken from him, nor his treatment adversely criticised. But discountenancing a practice does not always abolish it, and the ship’s company remained obstinately attached to Mr Eliot in time of sickness.

An instance of this arose on that very morning, four days out from Madeira: it was a Tuesday, a very pleasant, warm and sweet-tempered Tuesday, with the sun two hours above the horizon on their larboard quarter, and a steady north-east breeze sending them roundly away under all plain sail on their south-western course over the width of the Atlantic for Brazil. The squadron was sailing in close, rigid formation, with the
Pearl
hull-down ahead, looking out for the Spaniards, and for once the
Wager
was keeping her station without any particular effort: she could sail well enough with a following or a quartering wind, and it was only when the wind came forward of her beam that she turned into a heavy, awkward and cross-grained slug.

They had scarcely had a single day of quartering wind all the way until this, the thirtieth parallel, but now the
Wager
was doing very well, and as Tobias stepped on deck a few minutes after the change of the morning watch, he saw her looking at her charming best: immediately before and above him the vast spread of the mainsail reflected the sun with a splendid whiteness on to the already whitened deck, left scrubbed and spotless by the departing watch, and under the steady thrust of the wind the lower edge of the huge sail swept in a pure, unchanging curve above the waist of the ship; the shadow of the mainsail, with this same curve repeated, fell across the foc’s’le, above which the foresail made the same strong arc; on the foresail itself, as Tobias could very well see from the gangway, lay the shadow of the maintopsail and the crescent of blinding sunlight that shot between the topsail and the mainyard; and so throughout – a brilliant impression of enormous parallel curves, the strong lines of the yards across and the intensely blue and luminous sky. The
Wager
was running easily, making a good eight knots, and the long Atlantic swell came from the north – a following sea that passed under her nobly carved stern-gallery, where Captain Murray sat drinking coffee in a coffee-cup and admiring the glorious royal-blue ocean, under her counter to give her a long easy lift from behind;
the whole ship was alive, and the wind sang in her rigging. Her easy pitch was one of the rare motions that did not make Tobias sick: he walked forward champing with delight.

There was a good deal of animation on deck, quartermasters roaring, anxious seamen running and rope’s ends flying, for the new captain had changed the
Wager
from a ship that kept watch and watch to a three-watch ship; the hands were not used to it yet, and the duller landsmen could not understand it at all. They blundered about in every direction, so Tobias made his way forward but slowly. Kindness and consideration had suggested this change: under the three-watch system a man may sometimes turn in for the whole night instead of never having more than four hours of sleep; and all the thanks the captain had was to be wished to the bottom of the sea ‘with his new ways, damn ‘un… not what we are used to.’ They had been barely six weeks afloat, but custom had already grown very strong, almost immemorial: there is nothing like the sea for conservatism, and Tobias felt it as much as any; three months ago he had never seen a pair of trousers – seafaring garments unknown a mile inland – but now he wore them to the manner born, a working pair made of the strongest canvas known to man, by the sailmaker.

In this immemorial garment, therefore, he paced to the foremast, where Andrew awaited him with the great brass mortar; here he turned about and took up his immemorial position three paces to the starboard of the galley grating and five paces forward of the
Wager’s
bell, while Andrew beat on the mortar and uttered his immemorial cry.

There were three cases of chronic indigestion, one sad toothache – remanded to the cockpit for extraction later – and then John Duck, able seaman, presented himself. He was a big fellow, rosy, powerful and in shining health; in a fine strong voice he proclaimed himself ‘right poorly within, if you please, and no stomach for his meat.’ He described a number of symptoms that he could not possibly have had, with a bare-faced mendacity that made Tobias stare: they were symptoms, however, that were entirely compatible with an attack of dysentery, and Tobias, not knowing what to say about it, said nothing for the present, but considered within himself. These public consultations on the foc’s’le were very popular, sailors as a class being fascinated by disease, and there was a tendency on the part of the
patients to exaggerate their sufferings, from vainglory: but it was rare that a hand should invent a malady altogether, particularly with such skill. Tobias looked at John Duck, who wore an expression of glazed and simpering innocence: he glanced at the onlookers, and noticed that their faces were unnaturally wooden.

‘Why is John Duck telling such monstrous lies?’ he asked himself: he looked up to the sky as he reflected upon this problem, and there between himself and heaven he saw Jack, casually suspended from the main topmast stay. He watched Jack as he walked over the yard and vanished behind the sail into the shrouds, where he and his party were setting up cat-harpings – the new captain’s recipe for making the
Wager
sail closer to the wind. Looking away from this, Tobias brought his gaze to the ship’s bell, which hung under an elegant little arch. ‘Does he think that we shall believe him?’ he wondered, and he peered through the little arch to the quarter-deck, where Mr Eliot was taking his half-dozen turns, a very recognisable figure in his black coat and full wig: behind him there were two of the marine officers – two splashes of red – and the blue of the officer of the watch. Mr Eliot always took a certain number of turns at this time, to show his independence of set hours and duties; when he had demonstrated this to his own satisfaction he invariably came to the foremast to see if there were anything interesting and to receive Tobias’ report.

As Tobias watched him he turned short in his walk and stepped to the gangway, where Joe, the senior loblolly-boy, stood in expectation of his coming.

‘John Duck,’ said Tobias, ‘stand aside. Good morning, sir.’ 

‘Good morning, Mr Barrow,’ said the surgeon. ‘Do not let me interrupt you.’

‘Not at all, sir. We have here a case of hypertrophy of the sollertia.’

Mr Eliot listened to Duck’s tale, pommelled his sturdy frame and took his pulse; and then suddenly said, ‘When did you say it began? It is of the first importance.’

John Duck, quite flustered by now, sought anxiously among the bystanders until he found a sad, wan marine, who held up three fingers.

‘Three days, your honour,’ said Duck.

‘Three days? Are you quite sure?’ The marine nodded: Duck
nodded. ‘In that case,’ said the surgeon, ‘you may drink rice-water and eat nothing for three days; then you will find yourself much improved. Rice-water, my man, but without a grain of salt. One grain of salt and you are a corpse, a cadaver, a subject for dissection, food for the gentleman over the side; the late John Duck, A. B., formerly of the Royal Navy, amen. Sometime of his Majesty’s ship
Wager,
his hash was settled by a grain of salt, in latitude 30°N., much regretted by his comrades.’

‘Aye-aye, sir,’ said the seaman, in a faint voice; and some of his shipmates, infinitely impressed, murmured ‘Amen.’

‘We must have him out this afternoon,’ said Mr Eliot, walking over to the side and looking down through the clear blue water to the shark that swam under the curve of the bows, conveniently placed for anything that might be thrown from the galley. ‘We must have him on deck, and I will show you what I mean about the piscine heart. What was that noise?’

‘That metallic crash, sir, and the shrieking?’

‘Yes.’

‘We are immediately above the midshipmen’s berth, sir.’

‘That is Mr Cozens, doctor,’ put in the ship’s barber, who tended to presume upon the ancient association of barbers and surgeons. ‘It is his joke. He empties water on the other young gentlemen, for a joke, ha, ha.’