Desolation island Read online

  "No," said Stephen, having considered the prisons he had known. "I have not.' They had been quite as filthy particularly in Spain; they had been even wetter, in the underground vaults of Lisbon; but at least they had been stable. In them it had been possible to die of starvation and a large variety of diseases, but not of mere seasickness, the most ignominious end of all. "No. I have not. And it occurs to me that now their surgeon is so dead I shall have

  to look after their health. I quite regret my second mate.' As surgeon of a fourth-rate, Stephen was entitled to two assistants. Several well-qualified men, including some former shipmates, had applied to him, for Dr Maturin was much caressed in the physical world: his Suggestions for the Amelioration of Sick-Bays; his Thoughts on the Prevention of the Diseases most usual among Seamen; his New Operation for Suprapubic Cystotomy; and his Tractatus de Xovae Pebris Ingressu were read throughout the thinking part of the Navy; a cruise with him meant an accession of professional knowledge, the likelihood of advancement, and, since he generally sailed with Lucky Jack Aubrey, the possibility of large sums of prize-money - the assistant surgeon of the Boadicea, for example, had retired from the service on his share, had bought a practice in Bath, and had already set up his carriage. But true to that principle of isolation which prevented him from having a confidential servant, Stephen never sailed twice with the same colleague; and this time he not only declined the offers of those he knew but he also limited himself to a single man, Paul Martin, a brilliant anatomist from the Channel Islands, recommended to him by his friend Dupuy then of the Hotel Dieu: for although Martin was a British subject, or to be more exact a subject of the Duke of Normandy, who also happened to rule over the British Isles, he had spent much of his life in France, where he had recently published his De Ossibus, a work that had caused a considerable sensation on both sides of the Channel, among those who delighted much in bones. On both sides of the Channel, for science flowed freely in spite of the war: indeed, earlier in the year Stephen had been invited to address the learned of Paris at the Institute, a journey that he might have made, with the consent of both governments, had it not been for the presence of Diana Villiers and of certain scruples that were still unconquered by the time the Leopard sailed.

  "The chaplain,"he said. "The chaplain might perhaps, as

  you would say, lend a hand. I have known parsons study physic with a not inconsiderable success; they have been known to be of great help to the surgeon in the cockpit during an action. Apart from their spiritual and their pedagogical functions, they may surely be considered - since even surgeons are not immortal - as potentially useful members of a ship's company, and I have often wondered at your unwillingness to have them aboard. I do not advert to the barbarous prejudice that some untutored minds are weak enough to entertain, with regard to cats, corpses, and clergymen in a ship; for that could never have any influence with you."

  "I will tell you what," said Jack heavily. "I respect the cloth, of course, and learning; but I cannot feel that a man-of-war is the proper place for a parson. Just take this morning . . . On Sunday, when we rig church, I dare say he will tell us to treat one another like brethren, and to do unto others, you know. We will all say Amen, and the Leopard will sail on with all those people in irons in that filthy hole forward, just the same. But that is only what occurred to me this morning: in a larger way, it seems to me uncommon odd, and precious near to cant, to tell the ship's company of a man-of-war with loaded guns to love your enemy and to turn the other cheek, when you know damned well that the ship and every man Jack aboard her is there to blow the enemy out of the water if he possibly can. Either the hands believe it, and then where is your discipline? Or they don't, and then it seems to me to come hellfirc close to mockery of holy- things. I prefer reading them the Articles of War or giving them a piece about their duty: coming from me, with no bands or surplice on, why, it has another effect."

  He thought of mentioning the lamentable quality of most of the naval chaplains he had seen, and of telling the well-worn anecdote of Lord Clonearty, who, on being informed by his first lieutenant that the chaplain had been carried off by the yellow fever, and had died a Roman

  Catholic, replied, "Well, so much the better.' First lieutenant: 'Hoot awa, my lord, how can you say that of a British clergyman?" Lord Cloncarty: 'Why, because I believe I am the first captain of a man-of-war that could boast of a chaplain who had any religion at all.' But reflecting that Stephen was himself a Papist, and might be hurt, and that in any case the anecdote had something of the air of letting down his own side, he remained silent, inwardly observing, "You was precious near being brought by the lee again, Jack."

  "Sure," said Stephen, "this is a question that has troubled many a candid mind: far be it from me to propose any solution. I believe I shall step forward and look at these new patients. They will have been carried up to the forecastle, I suppose, the creatures? And then there is your Mrs Wogan: when is she to be indulged in air? For I must tell you, that I will not answer for their health if they are not aired at least an hour a day, at twice, in fine weather."

  "Lord, Stephen, I had quite forgot. Mr Needham," he cried in a strong voice, addressing his clerk in the forecabin, "pass the word for the first lieutenant.' And a moment later, when Pullings hurried in with a sheaf of papers, "No, Tom, it is not the watch-bills, for the moment. Pray have a lantern sent into the little cabin abaft the tiers - the female prisoner that berths alone.' Pullings was also to find out what arrangements the late superintendent had made for victualling the convicts, their rations, the stores available, and the practice, in common transports, for prisoners' exercise.

  "Aye aye, sir," said Pullings, in his competent, cheerful way. "And there is this stowaway, sir. What am I to do with him?"

  "The stowaway? Oh, yes, that half-starved fellow this morning. Well, now, since he is so very eager to go to sea, and since, after all, he i's at sea, I think you may enter him as a supernumerary landsman. God knows what romantic

  notions he has in his head . . . the lower deck will soon knock them out again."

  "lie is probably running from a wench, sir. Twenty young fellows in the starboard watch are in the same case."

  "It is often those slim young men who procreate so freely," said Stephen, "whereas your village champion, for all his parading like the parish bull, in fact remains comparatively chaste. For lack of opportunity? Who can tell? Is the flame more ardent in a lighter form? Does a more insinuating manner count for all? But you will not set him at work until he is restored. Such emaciation! Lie must be fed pap from a spoon, and a small spoon too, once every watch, or you will have still another corpse upon your hands - you may readily kill him with kindness and a piece of pork."

  He considered for a while, and when Pullings had gone about his innumerable duties, he said, "Jack, have you ever known any gentlemen on the lower deck?"

  "Yes: a few."

  "And how did you like it yourself, when you were a midshipman and your captain turned you before the mast for incompetence?"

  "It was not for incompetence."

  "I distinctly remember that he termed you a lubber."

  "Yes, but a lecherous lubber: I kept a girl in the cable-tiers. It was a reflection upon my morals, not my seamanship."

  "You astonish me: but tell, how did you like it?"

  "It was no bed of roses. But I was bred to the sea, and the midshipmen's berth is no bed or roses neither. For a landsman, brought up to be nice about his food and so on, it would come very hard. I knew one, a parson's son who got into trouble at college, that could not bear it, and died. On the whole I should say that if your educated man is young and healthy, if he is in a happy ship, and can stand up for himself, and can survive the first month or so, he has a fair chance. Not otherwise."

  Stephen walked forward along the weather gangway, and in spite of the unhappiness settled deep into his heart and of the craving that filled his whole being, he felt his spirits lift. The day had grown more brilliant still; the dim
inishing wind had backed a point and more abaft the beam, and the Leopard was running under courses, topsails and lower studdingsalls; and being a new suit they made a splendid expanse of white against the sky. Great smooth taut curves of a whiteness so intense that their surface was rather to be apprehended than distinctly seen, and all set among the sharp, definite, clear-cut pattern of the rigging. But above all it was the warm yet vivifying, tonic air sweeping in over the side and searching deep into his lungs that made his sad face lighten and his dull eyes come to life. He was pleased to find that his assistant-and the loblolly-boy had been on the forecastle for some while, and that Martin could give him an account of those convicts who were still prostrated. Most, however, had recovered by this time, at least enough to sit up or even stand and take some interest in life. The two older women were of this class (the half-wit girl was presumably with Mrs Wogan) and they stood leaning on the breastwork, looking down into the head, to the infinite annoyance of the hands; for the head, or that part of it on either side of the stem, was the seamen's privy, their only place of ease; and many of them were now hard-pressed. One was a middle-aged Gipsy, spare, dark, fierce, and aquiline; the other a quite remarkably vicious-looking woman, with such evident wickedness on her face and eye that it was a wonder she had ever been able to make a living in any occupation that brought her into contact with her fellow men. Yet from her bulk she must have done quite well: although diminished by imprisonment and continual seasickness so that her filthy crimson gown hung loose, she was still a flabby, swagging fifteen stone. Sparse carotty hair, the outer half dyed yellow: tiny glaucous eyes set close and deep in a vast amorphous face, an incongruous

  bar of eyebrow right across the two. Some few of the convict men might have been her cousins; other had more of a mere petty-larceny look; still others would have seemed quite ordinary if they had been wearing smock frocks; and two were idiots. They all had the deathly gaol-pallor, and all, except for the idiots, wore a hopeless, downcast expression. In their revolting clothes and their inhuman irons they were a squalid, even an abject group, herded there like cattle; they were in the way; the seamen glanced at them with disapprobation, contempt, and in some cases enmity.

  The big man who was suspected of having killed the superintendent was one of the worst cases: his powerful body still heaved convulsively from time to time, but otherwise he might have been a corpse. "Here," said Stephen to his assistant, speaking Latin, "heroic measures are meet to be used. A funnel having been introduced into his pharynx, fifty, nay threescore drops of sulphureous ether are to be administered.' He then prescribed a decoction of orange-peel and Peruvian bark for some of the others, and said, "These you will be pleased to take from our chest. For my part, I shall overhaul their late surgeon's stores, and see what they contain."

  They contained an extraordinary amount of Hollands gin, a very few books and instruments - cheap, dirty instruments, with rust and old blood still coating the whole length of the large saw - and the Home Office collection of drugs, by no means the same as those supplied to men-of-war by the Sick and Hurt Board. The Home Office pinned its faith more upon rhubarb, grey powder, and hartshorn than did the Sick and Hurt, upon Lucatellus's balsam, polypody of the oak, and, to Stephen's surprise, the alcoholic tincture of laudanum. Three Winchester quarts of it. "Vade retro," he cried, seizing the nearest and opening the scuttle: but after the first had gone he paused, and in reasonable, false, considering voice he observed that what was left should be

  preserved for the use of his patients; there were many contingencies in which the tincture might be of essential consequence to them.

  Then, pausing only to summon a wan and hopeless guard, he made his way aft to Mrs Wogan's cabin. It was filled with Mrs Wogan and her attendant, folding sheets, the girl still wearing no more than a blanket pinned across her bosom. In the ensuing fuss Stephen noted that Mrs Wogan at least was capable of decisive action: she placed a shift and a plain dress in the girl's arms, told the guard to take her back to where she had come from, and so dismissed them.

  "Good morning, ma'am," said Stephen, as they faded from view along the dim alleyway, both guard and prisoner screeching at the rats. fie advanced into the cabin, so that Mrs Wogan, failing back, received the light from the hanging lantern full in her face. "My name is Maturin: I am the surgeon of this ship and am come to enquire after your health.' Not the slightest flicker of awareness. Either the woman was the most consummate actress or she had never heard his name. Diana, he reflected bitterly, might not have been so proud of mentioning it. No: he would probe again, several times for conscience sake; but even now he would lay a thousand to one that she had never heard of Stephen Maturin.

  Mrs Wogan apologized for the confusion, begged him to sit down, and stated, with many acknowledgements of his goodness, that she was quite well.

  "Yet your face is somewhat yellower than could be wished," said Stephen. "Give me your hand.' Her pulse was normal: a strong confirmation indeed. "Now show me your tongue.' No woman can look either handsome or dignified with her mouth wide open and her tongue protruding, and there appeared to be a slight struggle in Mrs Wogan's bosom; but Stephen had all the authority of a physician, and the tongue appeared. "Well,"he admitted, " 'tis a laudable tongue. I dare say you took a good hearty

  vomit. They may cry out against the seasickness as much as ever they please, but as an evacuation of the gross humours and crudities, it has no rival."

  "To tell you the truth, sir," said Mrs Wogan, "I was not sick at all; only a little indisposed. I have made several voyages to America, and I do not find the motion very troublesome."

  "Then perhaps we should contemplate a purge. Please to inform me of the state of your bowels."

  Mrs Wogan told him frankly how they did, for Stephen had not only the medical man's authority but also his un-human quality - the Ilippocratic mask was second nature to him by now- and she might have been confiding in a graven image: yet she did start a little when he asked whether she had any reason to apprehend a pregnancy, and her reply, "None at all, sir,"was uttered with considerable reserve. There was no coldness, however in the words that followed: 'No, sir; I conceive that I am far more likely to be cribbed and cabined, than confined. And may not my yellow face," she added with an amused, good natured ghost of a smile, "be connected with my cabining? I must not presume to teach a doctor physic, Heaven forbid, but if only I might have a breath of untainted air . . . I did mention it to the very large gentleman, an officer I believe, that was here earlier in the day, but . . ."

  "You are to consider, madam, that the captain of a man-of-war has a great many things to occupy his mind."

  She folded her hands in her lap, looked down, and said, "Oh yes, to be sure," in a low, submissive voice.

  Stephen walked away, quite pleased with his pompous, official tone - a good initial position from which to retreat - and reached the forepeak, now clean and as sweet as ever it could be. While he was gazing at it, the enormous pandemonium of all hands to dinner broke out overhead, a familiar pandemonium, preceded, but only just preceded, by the striking of eight bells and the bosun's pipes. Stephen detained a deeply unwilling but civil carpenter's

  mate for close on ten minutes with his views on the proper accommodation for convicts, and then travelled aft along the lower deck, lighter now that the larboard gun-ports were open, and tight-packed with men, three hundred and more, all sitting at their tables slung between the guns, loudly eating their two pounds of salt beef and a pound of biscuit a head (for this was a Tuesday). The mess deck at dinner time was an impossible, an inconceivable place for an officer, except on Christmas Day, and those who did not know him were worried and distressed. But many of the Leopards had either sailed with Dr Maturin or knew of his ways by the reports of friends: they regarded him as a very valuable creature, but as one unaccountable for his actions outside the sickbay or the cockpit, being brutally ignorant of everything to do with the sea - could scarcely tell the difference between port and starboard, right
and wrong - almost an innocent, as one might say. A gentleman to be boasted of, being a genuine physician as well as the boldest hand with a saw in the fleet, but to be concealed from view as much as possible, when in company with other ships. "Do not stir, I beg," he cried, as he paced along between the chewing faces, friendly or bemused as the case might be; he was in something of a brown study, reflecting upon the comparison between Diana Villiers and Mrs Wogan, and it was only a particularly familiar face that brought him out of it, the large, red, smiling face of Barret Bonden, Jack Aubrey's coxswain who stood there, swaying with the motion of the ship and holding up a small spoon, clearly for his edification.

  "Barrett Bonden," he said, "what are you at? Let you all sit down, for God's love."

  The mess, eight powerful man-of-war's men with pigtails to their waists, and an insubstantial, irregular ninth sat down. "Which we are feeding Herapath, sir," said Bonden. "Tom Davis pounds the biscuit in the mess-kid here, Joe Plaice mixes in our juice in t'other, to make a

  right smooth pap, and I send it home with this little spoon, a very small spoon, like you said, your honour. A silver teaspoon Killick lent me from the cabin."

  Stephen looked at the first kid, which contained a good pound of shattered biscuit, and at the second, which held a rather greater quantity of pap: he considered Herapath (barely recognizable in his purser's slops) whose eyes were fixed with painful eagerness upon the spoon. "Well," said he, "if you give him a third part of what is in the tub, and the rest at five times, say at each eighth bell, you may make a seaman of him yet, rather than a corpse; for you are to observe, that it is less the dimenst6ns of the spoon, than the sum total, the aggregate of*the pap, that counts."