H.M.S. Surprise

by Patrick O'Brian

  The albatross came nearer and nearer, following the ship's wake in a sinuous path, never moving its wings but coming up at such a pace that what was a remote fleck when Stephen first saw it was an enormous presence by the time Bonden had finished his receipt for albatross pie. An enormous white presence with black wing-tips, thirteen feet across, poised just astern: then it banked, shot along the side, vanished behind the cloud of sails, and reappeared fifty yards behind the ship.

  Messenger after messenger ran into the mizzentop. 'Sir, there's your albatross, two points on the larboard quarter.' Achmet reported it in Urdu, and immediately afterwards his dull blue face was thrust aside by a ship's boy from the quarterdeck with 'Captain's compliments, sir, and he believes he has seen the bird you was asking after.' 'Maturin, I say, Maturin, here's your albatross!' This was Bowes, the purser, clambering up by the power of his hands, trailing his game leg.

  At last Bonden said, 'My watch is called, sir. I must be going, asking your pardon, or Mr Rattray will give me the rub. May I send up a pea-jacket, sir? 'Tis mortal cold.'

  'Ay, ay. Do, do,' murmured Stephen, unhearing, rapt in admiration.

  The bell struck, the watch changed. One bell, two bells, three; the drum for quarters, the beating of retreat—no guns for once, thank God; and still he gazed and still in the fading light the albatross wheeled, dropped astern, occasionally alighting for some object thrown overboard, ran up in a long series of curves, the perfection of smooth gliding ease.

  The days that followed were among the most trying that Stephen had spent at sea. Some of the forecastlemen, old South Sea whalers, were passionate albatross-fishers: after his first vehement outburst they would not offer to do it when he was on deck, but as soon as he went below a line would be privily veered out and the great bird would come flapping in, to be converted into tobacco-pouches, pipe-stems, hot dinners, down comforters to be worn next the skin, and charms against drowning—no albatross ever drowned: as many as half a dozen were following the ship now, and not one of them was ever seen to drown, blow rough, blow smooth. He knew that morally his case was weak, for he had bought and skinned the first specimens: he was most unwilling to invoke authority, but he was much occupied in the sick-bay—the opening of case 113 (three-year old pork that had seen its time in the West Indies station) had produced something surprising in the dysentery way: two pneumonias as well—and in the end, worn out by darting up and down, he appealed to Jack.

  'Well, old Stephen,' said he, 'I will give the order, if you wish: but they won't like it, you know. It's against custom: people have fished for albatrosses and mutton-birds ever since ships came into these seas. They won't like it. You will get wry looks and short answers, and half the older hands will start prophesying woe—we shall run into a widow-maker, or hit a mountain of ice.'

  'From all I read, and from all Pullings tells me, it would be safe enough to foretell a gale of wind, in forty degrees south.'

  'Come,' said Jack, reaching for his fiddle. 'Let us play the Boccherini through before we turn in. We may not have another chance this side of the Cape, with your upsetting the natural order of things.'

  The wry looks, the reproachful tones, began the next morning; so did the prophecies. Many a grizzled head was shaken on the forecastle, with the ominous words, profoundly true and not altogether outside Stephen's hearing. 'We shall see what we shall see.'

  South and south she ran, flanking across the west wind, utterly alone under the grey sky, heading into the immensity of ocean. From one day to the next the sea grew icy cold, and the cold seeped into the holds, the berth-deck and the cabins, a humid, penetrating cold. Stephen came on deck reflecting with satisfaction upon his sloth, now a parlour-boarder with the Irish Franciscans at Rio, and a secret drinker of the altar-wine. He found the frigate was racing along under a press of canvas, lying over so that her deck sloped like a roof and her lee chains were buried in the foam; twelve and a half knots with the wind on her quarter—royals, upper and lower studdingsails, almost everything she had; her starboard tacks aboard, for Jack still wanted a little more southing. He was there, right aft by the taffrail, looking now at the western sky, now up at the rigging. 'What do you think of this for a swell?' he cried.

  Blinking in the strong cold wind Stephen considered it: vast smooth waves, dark, mottled with white, running from the west diagonally across the frigate's course, two hundred yards from crest to crest: they came with perfect regularity, running under her quarter, lifting her high, high, so that the horizon spread out another twenty miles, then passing ahead, so that she sank into the trough, and her courses, her lower sails, sagged in the calm down there. In one of these valleys that he saw was an albatross flying without effort or concern, a huge bird, but now so diminished by the vast scale of the sea that it might have been one of the smaller gulls. 'It is grandiose,' he said.

  'Ain't it?' said Jack. 'I do love a blow.' There was keen pleasure in his eye, but a watchful pleasure too; and as the ship rose slowly up he glanced again at the topsail-studdingsail. As she rose the full force of the wind laid her over, and the studdingsail-boom strained forward, bending far out of the true. All the masts and yards showing this curving strain: they all groaned and spoke; but none like the twisting studdingsail-booms. A sheet of spray flew over the waist, passing through the rigging and vanishing over the larboard bow, soaking Mr Hailes the gunner as it passed. He was going from gun to gun with his mates, putting preventer-breechings to the guns, to hold them tighter against the side. Rattray was among the booms, making all fast and securing the boats: all the responsible men were moving about, with no orders given; and as they worked they glanced at the Captain, while he, just as often, put out his hand to test the strain on the rigging, and turned his head to look at the sky, the sea, the upper sails.

  'This is cracking on,' said Joliffe.

  'It will be cracking off, presently,' said Church, 'if he don't take in.'

  For a glass and more the watch on deck had been waiting for the order to lay aloft and reduce sail before the Lord reduced it Himself: yet still the order did not come. Jack wanted every last mile out of this splendid day's run; and in any case the frigate's tearing pace, the shrill song of her rigging, her noble running lift and plunge filled him with delight, a vivid ecstasy that he imagined to be private but that shone upon his face, although his behaviour was composed, reserved and indeed somewhat severe—his orders cracked out sharp and quick as he sailed her hard, completely identified with the ship. He was on the quarterdeck, yet at the same time he was in the straining studdingsail-boom, gauging the breaking-point exactly.

  'Yes,' he said, as though a long period of time had not passed. 'And it will be more grandiose by half before the end of the watch. The glass is dropping fast, and it will start to blow, presently. Just you wait until this sea gets up and starts to tumble about. Mr Harrowby, Mr Harrowby, another man to the wheel, if you please. And we will get the flying jib and stuns'ls off her.'

  The bosun's pipe, the rush of feet, and her tearing speed sensibly diminished. Mr Stanhope, clinging to the companion-ladder, cruelly in the way, said, 'It is a wonder they do not fall off, poor fellows. This is exhilarating, is it not? Like champagne.'

  So it was, with the whole ship vibrating and a deep bass hum coming from the hold, and the clean keen air searching deep into their lungs: but well before nightfall the clean keen air blew so strong as to whip the breath away as they tried to draw it in, and the Surprise was under close-reefed topsails and courses, topgallant-masts struck down on deck, running faster still, and still holding her course south-east.

  During the night Stephen heard a number of bumps and cries through his sleep, and he was aware of a change of course, for his cot no longer swung in the same direction. But he was not prepared for what he saw when he came on deck. Under the low grey tearing sky, half driving rain, half driving spray, the whole sea was white—a vast creaming spread as far as eye could see. He had seen the Bay of Biscay at its worst, and the great south-west gale
s on the Irish coast: they were nothing to this. For a moment the whole might have been a wild landscape, mountainous yet strangely regular; but then he saw that the whole was in motion, a vast majestic motion whose size concealed its terrifying dreamlike speed. Now the crests and troughs were enormously greater; now they were very much farther apart; and now the crests were curling over and breaking as they came, an avalanche of white pouring down the steep face. The Surprise was running almost straight before them, east by south; she had managed to strike her mizzentopmast at first light—anything to diminish the wind-pressure aft and thus the risk of broaching-to—and man-ropes were rigged along her streaming deck. As his eyes reached the level of the quarterdeck he saw a wave, a green-grey wall towering above the taffrail, racing towards them—swift inevitability. He strained his head back to see its top, curving beyond the vertical as it came yet still balancing with the speed of its approach, a beard of wind-torn spray flying out before it. He heard Jack call an order to the man at the wheel: the frigate moved a trifle from her course, rose, tilting her stern skywards so that Stephen clung backwards to the ladder, rose and rose; and the mortal wave swept under her counter, dividing and passing on to smother her waist in foam and solid water, on to bar the horizon just ahead, while the ship sank in the trough and the shriek of the rigging sank an octave as the strain slackened.

  'Seize hold, Doctor,' shouted Jack. 'Take both hands to it.'

  Stephen crept along the life-line, catching a reproachful look from the four men at the wheel, as who should say 'Look what you done with your albatrosses, mate', and reached the stanchion to which Jack was lashed. 'Good morning, sir,' he said.

  'A very good morning to you. It is coming on to blow.'

  'What?'

  'It is coming on to blow,' said Jack, with greater force. Stephen frowned, and looked astern through the haze of spray; and there, whiter than the foam, were two albatrosses, racing across the wind. One wheeled towards the ship, rose to the height of the taffrail and poised there in the eddy not ten feet away. He saw its mild round eye looking back at him, the perpetual minute change of its wing-feathers, its tail; then it banked, rose on the wind, darted down, and its wings raised high it paddled on the face of an advancing cliff of water, picked something up and shot away along the valley of the wave before it broke.

  Killick appeared with a sour, mean look on his face, all screwed up against the wind; he passed the coffee-pot from the bosom of his jacket; Jack put the spout into his mouth and drank. 'You had better go below,' he shouted to Stephen. 'Go below and have some breakfast: you may not get another hot meal, if it turns nasty.'

  The gun-room was of the same opinion. They had their table spread with boiled ham, beef-steaks, and a sea-pie, all held down as tight as double-rove fiddles would hold them, but all mingling their gravy in reckless confusion.

  'Sea-pie, Doctor?' said Etherege, beaming at him. 'I have kept you a piece.'

  'If you please.' Stephen held out his plate, received the piece on the top of the rise; and as the frigate shot down the face of the wave so the pie rose in the air. Etherege instantly pinned it with his practised fork, held it until she reached the trough and gravity went to work again.

  Pullings gave him a selected biscuit, and told him with a smile 'that the glass was falling yet; it had to be worse before it got better', and begged him 'to blow out his luff while he might'.

  The purser was telling them of an infallible method of calculating the height of waves by simple triangulation when Hervey plunged into the gun-room, spouting water like an inverted fountain. 'Oh dear, oh dear,' he said, throwing his tarpaulins into his cabin and putting on his spectacles. 'Give me a cup of tea, Babbington, there's a good fellow. My fingers are too numb to turn the tap.'

  'The tea has gone by the board, sir. Would coffee do?'

  'Anything, anything, so long as it is warm and wet. Is there any sea-pie left?' They showed him the empty dish. 'Why, here's a pretty thing,' he cried. 'All night on deck, and no sea-pie.' When ham had mollified him, Stephen said, 'Why did you spend all night on deck, pray?'

  'The skipper would not go below, though I begged him to turn in; and I could not very well do so with him on deck. I have a noble nature,' said Hervey, smiling now through the ham.

  'Are we in extreme peril then?' asked Stephen.

  Oh yes, they assured him, with grave, anxious faces; they were in horrid danger of foundering, broaching-to, running violently into Australia; but there was a hope, just a very slight hope, of their meeting with a mountain of ice and clambering on to it—as many as half a dozen men might be saved.

  When they had exercised their wit for some considerable time, Hervey said, 'The skipper is worried about the foretopmast. We went aloft to look at it, and—would you credit it?—the force of the wind upon us as we went aloft threw the ship a point off her course. The coaking just above the cap is not what any of our friends could wish; and if a cross-sea sets in, and we start to roll, I shall start saying my prayers.'

  'Mr Stanhope begs Dr Maturin to spare him a minute, when conwenient,' said Killick in his ear.

  He found them sitting in the cold dark cabin by the light of a purser's dip: Mr White, Atkins, a young attaché called Berkeley, on chairs with their feet in the water that swilled fore and aft with a dismal sound, all wearing greatcoats with the collars turned up; Mr Stanhope half lying on the couch; servants lurking in the shadows. Apparently they had not been fed; and their spirit-stoves would not work. They were all quite silent.

  Mr Stanhope was extremely obliged to Dr Maturin for coming so quick; he did not wish to give the least trouble, but should be grateful if he might be told whether this was the end? Water was coming in through the sides; and a seaman had given his valet to understand that this was the gravest sign of all. One of the young gentlemen had confirmed this to Mr Atkins, adding, that being pooped was more likely than actual foundering, or breaking in two; though neither possibility was to be overlooked. What did being pooped imply? Could they be of any use?

  Stephen said that as far as his understanding went, the real danger lay in a following wave striking the back of the ship such a buffet as to twirl it sideways to the wind, when it would lie down, receive the next wave broadside-on, and so be overwhelmed; hence the necessity for speed, for flying before the wind with all sail that could be set, and for steering with due attention, to outrun and to avoid these blows. Yet they were to consider, that as the ship was exposed to the full force of the blast when it was on the top of the monstrous wave, so it was sheltered in the hollow some fifty feet below, where nevertheless the forward speed must be maintained, to enable the ship to be guided in the desired direction and to diminish the relative velocity of the ensuing wave; and that this necessarily called for a nice adjustment of the various sails and ropes in all their complexity. But as far as he could tell, all these things were being done with conscientious diligence; and for his part, under such a commander, with such a crew and such a vessel, he felt no rational apprehension whatsoever. 'Captain Aubrey has repeatedly stated in my hearing, that the Surprise is the very finest frigate of her tonnage in the Royal Navy.' The water coming in was inconvenient and even disconcerting, but it was a usual phenomenon in such circumstances, particularly in aged vessels; it was what the mariners termed 'the working of the ship'. And he cautioned them against too literal a belief in the words of the sailors: 'They take an obscure delight in practising upon us landlubbers.'

  Once he was relieved of the sensation of imminent death, Mr Stanhope relapsed into the appalling dry seasickness that had struck him in the night. As Stephen and the chaplain helped him into his cot he said, with an attempt at a smile, 'So grateful—not quite suited for sea-travel—never undertake sea-voyage again—if there is no way home by land, shall stay in Kampong for ever.'

  But the others grew indignant, shrill and vocal. Mr White thought it scandalous that government should have sent them in so small a boat, and one that leaked. Did Dr Maturin realise that it was very cold at
sea? Far colder than on land. Mr Atkins said that the officers he had questioned replied in an off-hand manner or not at all; and that surely the Captain should have waited upon His Excellency with an explanation before this. Last night's supper had been disgracefully underdone: he should like to see the Captain.

  'You will find him on the quarterdeck,' said Stephen. 'I am sure he will be happy to listen to your complaints.'

  In the silence that followed this Mr Berkeley said in a lugubrious tone, 'and all our chamber-pots are broken'.

  Stephen made his way forward to the sick-bay, through the soaking, smelly berth-deck where the watch below were sleeping, fully-clothed, sleeping in spite of the tremendous pitch and the roar, for all hands had been called three times that night. He found the usual accidents, the bangs and bruises of a furious storm; one man had been flung against the fluke of an anchor, another had pitched head-first down the fore-hatch as it was being battened down, another had contrived to impale himself on his own marlinspike; but nothing that went beyond the surgeons' powers. What worried them was their worst pneumonia, an elderly seaman named Woods; it had been touch and go with him before the storm, and now the prodigious shaking, the absence of rest, had turned the scale. Stephen listened to his breathing, felt his pulse, exchanged a few low words with M'Alister, and finished his round in silence.

  On deck he found the scene changed once more. The wind had increased and it had backed three points; the nature of the sea had changed. Now, instead of the regular procession of vast rollers, there was a confusion of waves running across, bursting seas that filled the valleys with leaping spray: the underlying pattern was still the same, but now the crests were a quarter of a mile apart and even higher than before, though at times this was less evident because of the turmoil between. There were no albatrosses anywhere in sight. Yet still the frigate ran on at this racing speed under the precious scrap of canvas forward, rising nobly to the gigantic waves, shouldering the cross-seas aside: the launch had been carried away in spite of the bosun's treble gripes, but there seemed to be no other damage. She was beginning to roll now, as well as pitch; and on each plunge her head and the lee side of her forecastle vanished under white water.