Book 5 - Desolation Island Page 12

  The tall gentleman looked taller than usual when Stephen, carrying his 'cello, found him in the cabin. 'There you are, Stephen,' he cried, his strong, stern face lightening. 'I thought it was Turnbull. Forgive me a few minutes, will you? I must have a word with him. Take Grant's observations into the stern gallery; they will interest you—he speaks of the birds.'

  Stephen took the slim, neatly-written book and sat with it in a swinging chair out on the splendid kind of balcony that overhung the sea. It was an account of a voyage of discovery made by a sixty-ton brig, the Lady Nelson, which sailed from England to the Cape and then to New Holland by way of the Bass Strait, under the command of Lieutenant James Grant, RN, in 1800, taking eleven months to do so.

  From time to time he heard Jack's or rather the Captain's voice, cold, distant, and full of authority. It was not raised, but it had remarkable carrying power: remarkable crushing power, too. Mr Turnbull had not sailed with Captain Aubrey before and at first he tried to defend himself against the charge of brutality, incompetence, and ungentlemanly behaviour; but very soon his voice was heard no more, and his very large deeply displeased Captain told him in the clearest possible manner that none but a fool started, struck, beat or abused hands for not knowing their duty when those hands could not conceivably know it, having only just gone to sea; that any officerlike man knew the names of all the people in his watch; that it was quite as easy to call out Herapath as You, sir; and that no gentleman used foul language when a lady was within earshot—any whore's bully on Portsmouth Point could outdo Mr Turnbull in that line. Discipline and a taut ship were one thing: bullying and an unhappy ship were another. The hands would always respect an officer who was a seaman, without having to be knocked about: but how could Mr Turnbull hope for their respect when they were treated to the spectacle of the headsails trimmed as Captain Aubrey had seen them trimmed this afternoon? Words on the proper trimming of headsails followed: Mr Turnbull might do well to remember the difference between a sail bowsed tight as a board and a sail with a belly in it, that could draw. It was some years since Stephen had heard Jack reprove one of his officers, and he was much struck by the remarkable advance in efficacity, by the impersonal, God-like, severe authority that could not possibly be feigned or assumed by any man who did not naturally possess it. It was the kind of wigging that Lord Keith might have delivered, or Lord Collingwood: few others had the same awful quality.

  'There, Stephen,' said Jack's more familiar voice close behind his back. 'That is over and done with. Come and have a glass of grog.'

  'It is indeed an interesting account,' said Stephen, waving the book. 'The writer has sailed the very waters that we are to traverse; and he is not an unobservant man, though what birds he can mean by haglets I cannot tell. Is he any kin to our Mr Grant?'

  'The man himself. He had the Lady Nelson. That is why I was required to take him,' said Jack, with a shade of displeasure crossing his face. 'Because of his experience, you know. But he did not go as high south as I intend to go; he kept pretty close to the thirty-eighth parallel, whereas I mean to go well into the forties—you remember the dear old Surprise, Stephen, and the westerlies down there?'

  Stephen had the clearest recollection of dear old Surprise in the roaring forties; and he closed his eyes: yet on the other hand, those were the albatross latitudes. 'Tell me,' he said, having thought, 'how does it come about that Mr Grant was not promoted for this feat? For feat it was, sure, with so small a ship?'

  'She was a brig, Stephen,' said Jack. 'A brig. But a feat it was, as you say, particularly as she was one of those vile things with sliding keels; and after that wicked Polychrest I never wish to see another as long as I live. As for promotion,' he went on evasively, 'why, promotion is a tricky affair at the best of times, and I believe Grant contrived to get the wrong side of the civilians, both over there and at home. He fouled their hawse, and they cut his cable: perhaps he may not have all the tact in the world. I think there was some other cause of dissatisfaction too, because at one time he was put at the bottom of the lieutenants' list, and that is why I was able to have Tom Pullings as my premier, he being now senior to Grant. But be damned to all that,' he cried, reaching for his violin, his sea-going fiddle, for his precious Amati was not to be exposed to the tropical heat, the antarctic cold. 'Killick! Killick, there! Bear a hand.'

  Killick's voice could be heard coming nearer: 'No peace, no bleeding peace in this barky,' and as the door opened, 'Sir?'

  'Toasted cheese for the Doctor, half a dozen mutton-chops for me, and a couple of bottles of the Hermitage. D'ye hear me there? Now, Stephen, give me an A.'

  They tuned their strings, that pleasant tentative wailing, and as they tuned he said, 'What do you say to our old Corelli in C major?'

  'With all my heart,' said Stephen, poising his bow. He paused, and fixed Jack's eye with his own: they both nodded: he brought the bow down and the 'cello broke into its deep noble song, followed instantly by the piercing violin, dead true to the note. The music filled the great cabin, the one speaking to the other, both twining into one, the fiddle soaring alone: they were in the very heart of the intricate sound, the close lovely reasoning, and the ship and her burdens faded far, far from their minds.

  Chapter Four

  Every day at noon, when the sky was clear, the Leopard fixed her position by the sun; and every day the sun climbed higher in the south. As the crucial moment approached, the moment when it should cross the meridian, her captain, her master, all the watch-keeping officers, and all the young gentlemen would train their instruments, hold their breath, bring the sun's limb to the horizon, and record the result. The master would report, 'Noon, sir', to the officer of the watch; the officer of the watch would cross the quarterdeck to the Captain, take off his hat, and say, 'Noon, sir, if you please', and the Captain, who knew it perfectly well from his own sextant, even if he had not heard the master's voice a few yards from him, would say, 'Make it twelve, Mr Babbington' (or Grant or Turnbull, as the case might be) thus setting the boundary between one naval day and the next.

  Jack's reading generally agreed with the master's and Grant's to within a few seconds, but sometimes, when Mr Larkins's morning whet had bleared his eye, there was a discrepancy, and in that case Jack preferred his own observation to appear in the log. To a knowing eye that harsh, laconic record, usually concerned with nothing but figures and the occasional disaster, betrayed something like ecstasy in its steady sequence of 'Clear weather, fresh breezes', of splendid distances run, often as much as two hundred nautical miles a day, and in the rapidly diminishing latitude. '42°5'N, 12°41'W—37°31'N, 14°49'W—34°17'N, 15°3'W—32°17'N, 15°27'W.' At this point they left Madeira broad on the starboard beam at noon, and the next day they also passed by the Dry Salvages. Stephen gazed wistfully at them from the main-top: once he would have begged Jack to stop the ship, to abandon this wild, unthinking race into the south-southwest, and to allow him a pause, if only for half a day, to look into the insect and arachnid population of these interesting rocks; but now he saved his breath. He saved it too when the loom of the Canaries crept along the eastern horizon hour after hour, the Peak of Teneriffe soaring white far over there to larboard: he knew from long, sad experience that once the steady naval routine, with its sense of unremitting urgency, had started, no plea of his would make the slightest difference.

  This routine had started long before the Dry Salvages. In spite of the port-admiral's ravages an unusually high proportion of the Leopard's crew were man-of-war's men; they settled into their accustomed way of life as soon as Cape Finisterre was astern, and the desk was priddied, and they drew all the raw hands after them. The glorious run, from the height of Finisterre to the tropic line, with the wind strong and steady and abaft the beam almost all the time—only a single day of calm—made all things easier, and church had not been rigged twice before the dank mists of Portsmouth belonged to another world. Before the bright dawn the decks were washed, holystoned and dried; hammocks were piped up; Jack
breakfasted with Stephen, and often with the officer of the morning watch and one of the midshipmen, and then led the youngsters through Mackay on the Longitude; Stephen and Martin made their rounds; the convicts were exercised; the half-hour glass turned again and again and again, the bell struck, the watches changed, four dinners in succession made their appearance, the hands', the convicts', the wardroom's, and the cabin's; the afternoon wore on until the first dog-watch, quarters, and then, before the hammocks were piped down again, the evening guns: for Jack was a comparatively wealthy commander; he had supplemented the official hundred rounds a gun and the official supply of powder, and it was rare that the Leopard ended the day without a savage roar or two, spitting orange flames into the twilight, He had started the voyage with good captains for almost every gun and good crews for more than half, and he meant to cross the equator with excellent full teams for all fifty, being profoundly convinced that all the seamanship in the world, all the skill in manoeuvring a ship to within range of an enemy, was of little use if the great guns could not hit him hard and fast.

  Very soon life became so regular that those whose duty did not require them to record the day could remember it only by church, washing-day (when the Leopard rigged lines fore and aft, and the clean clothes hung out to dry, presenting a strangely unwarlike appearance, particularly since some of the garments were female), or by the grim pipe of All hands to witness punishment, which meant that it was Saturday, for the Leopard punished only once a week. Day after day Mrs Wogan walked on the poop, sometimes with her maid, often with Dr Maturin, always with the dog and goat; but she might have been a ghost, passing across the quarterdeck unseen, for alt the disturbance that she caused at present; for not only had Captain Aubrey given particularly stringent orders on the subject of leering, and of dumb or verbal communication, but it had come to be thought in the wardroom, the gun-room, and indeed throughout the ship, that Mrs Wogan was the Doctor's private property, and no one wished to quarrel with him. Yet unseen is too strong a word: as the distance from land increased, so the general desire for women strengthened; and an unusually handsome woman, her looks much improved since her first appearance, could not but attract many a covert look, many a longing sigh.

  The days were not uneventful, however. In a ship racing through the sea under a captain who loved cracking on just this side of rashness, there was a continual tension; some dockyard inadequacy might reveal itself at any moment, and once, in fact, a nave-line parted without a word of warning, while on another occasion the ill-coaked fishes of the maintopsailyard sprang, so that the yard had to be struck down on deck in a hurry. And although they had seen nothing but a distant xebec, far to windward, since they left soundings, it was always possible that an enemy might heave in sight at any moment, a battle if she were a man-of-war, a potential fortune if she were a merchantship. And even on their one day of calm there was a pleasurable excitement.

  It happened to be a Saturday, judgement day, and at six bells in the forenoon watch. the bosun and his mates uttered their dismal pipe; all hands flocked aft, where each watch gathered in an amorphous heap on its respective side of the quarterdeck; nothing could induce them to form in an orderly group, except at divisions, nor to take their hands from their pockets, and they stood in dégagé attitudes, gazing at the Marines, drawn up in scarlet perfection on the poop with fixed bayonets, at the grating rigged against the break, and at the officers and young gentlemen assembled behind their Captain, all wearing their gold-laced hats and swords or dirks. The master-at-arms brought up his prisoners: three cases of drunkenness—grog stopped for a week, and ordered to pump ship for four, six, and eight hours during their watches below: a Turk, caught stealing four pounds of tobacco and a silver watch, the property of Jacob Styles, yeoman of the sheets: the goods produced, sworn to, the case proved, the prisoner mute.

  'Have his officers anything to say for him?' asked Jack. Mr Byron put forward the plea that the man was a eunuch, and that the watch would not go. 'That will not do,' said Jack. 'His—his matrimonial prospects are neither here nor there; nor is the condition of the watch.' To the Turk, 'Strip.' To the quartermaster, 'Seize him up.'

  'Seized up, sir,' said the quartermaster, the Turk spread-eagled on the grating.

  Jack and all the officers took off their hats; the clerk passed the book, and Jack read out the thirtieth Article of War: 'All robbery committed by any person in the fleet shall be punished by death'—an awful pause—'or otherwise, as a court-martial, upon consideration of the circumstances, shall find.' He put on his hat again, and said, 'Nine strokes. Skelton, do your duty.'

  The bosun's mate brought the cat out of its red baize bag: nine hearty strokes, nine appalling falsetto screams of a shrillness and a volume enough to mark the day as quite uncommon, and to gratify that part of the ship's company which took pleasure in bull-baiting, bear-baiting, prize fighting, pillories, and executions—perhaps nine-tenths of those present. Next came Herapath, foretopman, starboard watch, guilty of absence from the muster when the watch was set on Friday night: he was pale, as well he might be, for ever since the offence his messmates had been exercising their wit—it was the worst crime in a ship, they told him, looking grave, and the punishment was five hundred lashes, followed by a keel-hauling if you were lucky. What is more, for the first time in his life (since Jack rarely flogged except for theft) he had just seen and heard the spectacular effects of the cat.

  'What have you to say for yourself?' asked the Captain.

  'Nothing, sir, except that I regret my absence extremely.'

  'Have his officers anything to say for him?' Babbington stated that Herapath had not offended before, was willing and obedient, though unhandy; would no doubt apply himself in future. Jack then represented to Herapath the folly and wickedness of his conduct, observed that if everybody were to imitate it, the ship would be in a pretty state of anarchy, told him to mind Mr Babbington's words and apply himself, and so dismissed him.

  Later in the day, when the Leopard was ghosting along over a glassy sea with only enough high moving air to fill her royals, Jack ordered the jolly-boat away, to pull round the ship and observe her trim, and to have a bathe. At much the same time Michael Herapath, in the relief of his heart, decided to apply himself and to learn the rudiments of his trade. Being slim and light he had been allotted to the foretop, that is to say, to the upper yards above that point, but hitherto One-eyed Miller, the captain of the foretop, had never sent him above the top itself, there to haul on the rope put into his hand at the word of command; now he approached Miller as he sat there on the forecastle making himself a pair of duck trousers, surrounded by others doing the same or weaving sennit hats or combing out their pigtails in readiness for divisions and church tomorrow, this being their watch below, and said, 'Mr Miller, with your leave, I should like to go up to the royal yard.'

  Miller was Bonden's cousin, and Herapath had Bonden's good word as 'a poor unfortunate bugger, that means no harm'. In any case, he was a good-natured man: he turned his hideous face, deeply pocked with powder from an exploding cartridge-box, and his one brilliant eye upon Herapath with a look of kindly contempt, and said, 'Well mate, I'll find someone to carry you up. You couldn't a chose a sweeter day, so still up there. I doubt even a new-born lamb could fall off of the truck. You want to take care of your hands, though: the premier don't like blood on the standing rigging.' Herapath's soft palms were in fact deeply scored from hauling on bristly ropes, and there was a danger of his leaving criminal stains. Miller looked about among the tie-for-tie pairs busy plaiting each other, and his eye fell upon a young fellow who followed the new fashion, his hair cut short. 'Joe,' he said, 'just you carry Herapath aloft. Show him where to put his feet, like. Show him how to run out on a yard. Don't you come it any of your fucking bum-boy capers,' he added mildly, 'and I dare say you will see some of his evening grog.'

  Up and up they went, beyond the top to the crosstrees and higher still, the horizon spreading enormously as they climbed, Joe movin
g easy, and, as he said with a chuckle, 'showing Herapath the ropes'. They paused for a while out on the yardarm to let a couple of skylarking youngsters hurtle past, and Joe showed him how to run out on the yard. 'Now for the jack,' said Joe. 'You want to look out here, mate; there ain't no ratlines.'

  The fore royal yard itself, six inches across at the slings and fine footing; an incredible expanse of sea on either hand, of sky above and of canvas below. 'This is magnificent,' cried Herapath. 'I had no conception . . .'

  'Watch me shin up to the truck,' said Joe.

  'I shall run out on the yard,' said Herapath. This he did, and Joe, reaching the truck, looked down in time to see him miss his hold. He saw Herapath's face, diminishing with hideous speed, staring up at him in total horror: Herapath struck the starboard topgallant lift a glancing blow that bounced him well clear of the foretopsail, and he plunged into the sea with an enormous splash. Joe let out a shrill, broken-voiced screech of 'Man overboard', and instantly the cry was taken up on deck. Seamen milled about the forecastle, their long hair flying loose: a Marine flung a swab and a bucket somewhere near the splash.