H.M.S. Surprise

by Patrick O'Brian

  All the officers were on deck, wedged into odd corners. Mr Bowes, unrecognisable in tarpaulins, caught Stephen as a weather-lurch knocked him off his balance and guided him along the life-line to the Captain, still standing there by his stanchion. He waited while Jack told Callow to go below and read the barometer, and then said, 'Woods, of the afterguard, is sinking fast; if you wish to see him before he dies, you must come soon.'

  Jack reflected, automatically calling out his orders to the men at the wheel. Dared he leave the deck at this stage? Callow came crawling aft. 'Rising, sir,' he shouted. 'It's risen two lines and a half. And Mr Hervey desires me to say, the relieving tackles are hooked on.'

  Jack nodded. 'That means a stronger blow,' he said, glancing at the foretopsail, mould-eaten in the tropics: but they had done all they could to strengthen it, and so far the storm-canvas held. 'I'll come now, while I can.' He cast himself off, called the master and Pullings to take his place, and blundered heavily below. In the cabin he drank off a glass of wine and flexed his arms. 'I am sorry to hear what you tell me about poor old Woods,' he said, still in the same hoarse roar; then, moderating his voice, 'Is there no hope?' Stephen shook his head. 'I say, Stephen, I hope Mr Stanhope and his people are not too tumbled about—not too upset.'

  'No. I told them the Surprise was a capital ship, and that all was well.'

  'So it is, too, as long as the foretopsail holds. She is the bravest ship that ever swam. And if the glass is right, this will blow out in a couple of days. Come, let us go along?'

  'Do not be too distressed: it is horrible to see and hear, but he feels nothing. It is a very easy death.' Horrible it was. Woods was a leaden blue, and the animal sound of his laboured breath sounded louder, close to, than the all-pervading din. He might have recognised Jack; he might not. His open mouth and half-closed eyes showed little change. Jack did his duty, said the words expected of a captain—it touched him to the quick—spent a few moments with the other men, and hurried back to his stanchion.

  A quarter of an hour, yet what a change! When he went below the frigate had no more than a ten-degree roll: now her larboard cathead touched green water. And still they came sweeping up from the black westwards, the gigantic streaming seas, taller than ever—impossibly tall—and their foam filled her waist five feet deep, while the whole of her forecastle vanished as she plunged. Still she rose, pouring water, spouting from her scuppers: every time she rose. More heavily now?

  In the cabin one of Mr Stanhope's servants, half drunk, had managed to blow himself up with a spirit-stove: miserably burnt, and shattered by falling against a gun, he was being patched up by the surgeons. Mr White, Mr Atkins and Mr Berkeley, all of whom had struggled earnestly in London to reach this position, sat wedged together on the couch, with their feet tucked up out of the water, staring in front of them. Hour after hour.

  On deck the day was fading, if that grey shrieking murk could be called day. Yet still Jack could see the rollers sweeping towards her stern from half a mile away, their white tops clear: their whole length traversed the sky as the frigate rolled; and two monstrous waves, too close to one another, exploded in ruin just astern, to be swept up into a still greater whole that thundered as it came, vast and overwhelming. And above the thunder as it passed his waiting ear caught a sharp gun-like crack, a crash forward, and the foremast went by the board. The foretopsail, ripped from its yard, vanished far ahead, a flickering whiteness in the gloom.

  'All hands, all hands,' he roared. Already the ship was steering wild, yawing off her course. He glanced back. They were running down into the trough: unless they could get her before the wind—could get some headsail on her—the next wave would poop her. She would broach to and take the next sea on her beam.

  'All hands—' his voice tearing blood from his throat—'Pullings, men into the foreshrouds. It's gone above the cap. Forestays'l, forestays'l! Come along with me. Axes! Axes!'

  In the momentary lull of the deepest trough he raced along the gangway, followed by twenty men: a cross-sea broke over the side waist-deep: they ploughed through and they were on the forecastle before the ship, slewed half across the wind, began to rise—before the next wave was more than half-way to them. Men were swarming up the weather ratlines, forcing themselves up against the strength of the gale; their backs made sail enough to bring her head a little round before the sea struck them with an all-engulfing crash and spout of foam—far enough round for the wave to take her abaft the beam, and still she swam. The axes cleared the wreckage. Bonden was out on the bowsprit, hacking at the foretopmast-stay that still held fast to the floating mast, slewing the ship around; holding his breath Jack swarmed out after him, his head under the foam, feeling for the gaskets of the forestaysail, snugged down tight under the stay. He had it—his hands, many hands were tearing at the lashings, so tight they would not, would not come.

  'Hold on!' roared in his ear, and there was a strong hand pressing on his neck: then an unimaginable force of water, a weight and a strength past anything—the third wave that broached the frigate squarely to.

  The pressure slackened. His head was above water, and now there were more men in the shrouds. Again the thrust of the gale on them brought her head round, helped by a savage cross-sea; but they could not hold there for ever—a few more minutes of this and the shrouds would be swept clear. Down again as she plunged, and running his hand along the sail he found the trouble—the down-hauler had fouled the clew: stray lines from the wreckage in the hanks. 'Knife!' he roared as his head came clear. It was in his reaching hand: a lightning slash, and all sprang free.

  'Hold on! Hold on!' and again the thunder of a falling sea, a mountainous wave: the intolerable pressure on his chest: the total certainty that he must not let go of the sail clutched under him: his legs curled round the bowsprit to hold on: hold on . . . strength going. But here was breath again in his bursting lungs and he reared up out of the water bawling, 'Man the halliards. D'ye hear me aft? Man the halliards there!'

  In slow jerks the sail rose up the stay, filled: they sheeted home. But now she was broadside on, wallowing. Oh would it be in time? Slowly, heavily she turned as the forestaysail took the strain, the great wave racing up—turned, turned just enough and took it on her quarter: rose to the height, and the full blast in the head-sail set her right before the wind. Faster and faster she moved, steering nimbly now; for though the last blow had flung the men from the wheel the relieving-tackles held; and the next wave passed harmlessly under her stern.

  He swarmed in, clinging to the knightheads for a moment as she plunged again, and then he was on the forecastle: it was clear of wreckage: the sail set well, He called the men down from the shrouds and moved along the gangway. 'Any hands lost, Hervey?' was asked, with his arms round the stanchion.

  'No, sir. Some hurt, but they have all come aft. Are you all right, sir?'

  Jack nodded. 'She steers better,' he said. 'Dismiss the watch below. Grog for all hands: serve it out in the half-deck. Pass the word for the bosun.'

  All night. The officers stayed on deck that endless night or spent a few brief spells in the gun-room, sitting between dreaming and waking, listening gravely, concentrated upon that one triangle of rigid canvas forward. After an hour Jack found the trembling that had affected his entire body die away, and with it even the consciousness of his body. The wheel was relieved. Relieved again: again. Continually his croaking voice called out orders, and twice he sent picked parties forward, strengthening, frapping, making all as fast as ever they could in a night that cut to the bone. A little before dawn the wind veered a point, two points, blowing with sudden flaws, vacuums that hurt his ears; it reached a screaming note more savage than anything he had heard and his heart hurt him for the staysail, for the ship—an edge of sentiment and self-pity, with Sophia's name hovering on the edge of utterance aloud. Then slowly, slowly, the shriek dropped half a tone, another, and another: a low buffeting roar at last, when the faint straggling light showed a sea white from rim to rim, with t
he steady procession of great rollers in their due solemn ordered ranks once again—vast indeed, but no longer maniac. No cross-sea; very little roll; and the Surprise scudding over the desolation, passing every sea under her counter, her waist with no more than a foot of water swirling about it. An albatross broad on the starboard beam. He cast off his lashings and moved stiffly forward. 'We will ship the pumps, Mr Hervey, if you please. And I believe we may get a scrap of maintopsail on her.'

  Peace, peace. Madagascar lay astern and the Cormorins; the shattered hulk that had crept north of the fortieth parallel, trailing ends of rope and pumping day and night, was now as trim as art and a limited supply of paint could make her. An expert eye would have seen a great deal of twice-laid stuff in the rigging and an odd scarcity of boats on the booms; it would have stared with amazement at the attachments of the rudder; and it would have noted that in spite of fair and moderate breeze the frigate carried nothing above her topsails. She dared not; although with her new foretopmast and her fresh paintwork she looked 'as pretty as a picture', her inward parts had suffered. Jack spoke so often of her butt-ends and her hanging knees that Stephen said, 'Captain Aubrey, your butt-ends and your hanging knees cannot be attempted to be rectified, as I understand you, until you have her docked, three thousand miles away; so may I beg you to clap a stopper over all and to accept the inevitable with a decent appearance of unconcern? If we fall apart, why, we fall apart, and there is the end to it. For my part, I have every confidence of reaching Bombay.'

  'What I know, and what you don't know,' cried Jack, 'is that I have not so much as a single ten-inch spike left aboard.'

  'God set a flower upon you, my dear, with your ten-inch spike,' said Stephen. 'Of course I know it: you have mentioned them daily these last two hundred leagues, together with your hanging-ends and double-sister-blocks; and nightly too, prattling in your sleep. Bow, bow to predestination or at least confine yourself to silent prayer.'

  'Not so much as a ten-inch spike, not a mast or boom but what is fished,' said Jack, shaking his head. And it was true: yet with an irritating complacency Mr Stanhope, his suite, and now even Dr Maturin cried out that this was delightful now—that was the only way of travelling—a post-chaise on the turnpike road was nothing in comparison of this—they should recommend it to all their friends.

  Certainly it was delightful for the passengers, the smooth sea, the invigorating breeze carrying them steadily into warmer airs; but in the latitude of the Isle of France Jack, his carpenter and boatswain, and all his seamanlike officers, looked out eagerly for a French privateer—a spare topmast or so, a few spars, a hundred fathoms of one-and-a-half-inch rope would have made them so happy! They stared with all their might, and the Indian Ocean remained as empty as the South Atlantic; and here there were not even whales.

  On and on she sailed, in warmer seas but void, as though they alone had survived Deucalion's flood; as though all land had vanished from the earth; and once again the ship's routine dislocated time and temporal reality so that this progress was an endless dream, even a circular dream, contained within an unbroken horizon and punctuated only by the sound of guns thundering daily in preparation for an enemy whose real existence it was impossible to conceive.

  Stephen laid down his pistols, wiped the barrels with his handkerchief and shut the case. They were warm from his practice, but still the bottle hanging from the foreyardarm swung there intact. It was not the fault of the pistols, either; they were the best Joe Manton could produce, and the purser had hit the mark three times. It was true that Stephen had been firing left-handed, the right having suffered worse at Port Mahon; but a year ago he would certainly have knocked the bottle down, left hand or not. Pressing? Trying too hard? He sighed; and pondering over the nature of muscular and nervous co-ordination he groped his way up into the mizzentop: Mr Atkins gazed after him, more nearly convinced that it would be safe to quarrel with him once they reached Bombay.

  Reaching the futtock-shrouds, Stephen took a sudden determination: if his body would not obey him in one way it should in another. He seized the ropes that ran outwards to the rim of the platform, and instead of making his way into the top by writhing through them he forced his person grunting upwards, a diagonal reversed climb with his back towards the sea and himself hanging at an angle of forty-five degrees, and so reached his goal by the path a seaman would have taken—a sailor, but no landsman bound by the ordinary law of gravity. Bonden was still peering down the lubber's hole, the way Stephen had always come before, the safe, direct, logical, but ignominious road; and his unsuccessful attempt at disguising his astonishment when he turned was a consolation to Stephen's mind: its element of vanity glowed cherry-pink. Mastering a laboured gasp that would have ruined the effect, he said, 'Let us go straight to verse.' This was all that one inspiration could accomplish and he paused, as if in thought, until his heart was beating normally. 'Verse,' he said again. 'Are you ready, Barret Bonden? Then dash away.

  Thus to the Eastern wealth through storms we go;

  But now, the Cape once doubled, fear no more:

  A constant trade-wind will securely blow,

  And gently lay us on the spicy shore.'

  'An elegant sentiment, sir,' said Bonden. 'As good as Dibdin any day. If you wanted to crab it, which far from me be it, you might say the gent was a trifle out in his trade-wind, this rightly being the monsoon, as we call it by sea. And as for wealth, why, that's poetic licence; or, as you might say, all my eye. Spice maybe; I'm not saying anything against spice, nor yet spicy shores, though most of them is shit begging your pardon, in Indian ports. But wealth, I make so bold as to laugh, ha, ha; why, sir, bating a few privateers out of the Isle of France and Reunion there's not a prize for us in this whole Indian mortal ocean, not from here to Java Head, not since Admiral Rainier cleaned up Trincomalee. Unless maybe we take on Admiral Linois on his seventy-four, that chased us so cruel hard in the poor old Sophie. God love us, he was a merry old gentleman; you remember him, sir?' Certainly Stephen remembered him; and that bitter chase in the Mediterranean—the loss of their ship—their capture. Bonden's face changed from smiling reminiscence to stony reserve: he slid his book into his bosom as Mr Callow's hideous face appeared above the rail with the Captain's compliments and did Dr Maturin intend shifting his coat?

  'Why in God's name would I shift my coat?' cried Stephen. 'What is more, I have no coat on, at all.'

  'Perhaps he thought you might like to put one on for Mr Stanhope's dinner, sir: a genteel way of alluding to it. It is within minutes of three bells, sir: the sand is almost out. And he particularly begs you, sir, to come down through the—to come down the usual way.'

  'Mr Stanhope's dinner,' said Stephen in an undertone. He stood up and stared down at the quarterdeck, where, except for her captain, all the frigate's officers were gathered in their full-dress uniforms. Just so. He had forgotten the invitation. How remote it seemed, that quarterdeck, crowded with blue coats, red coats and half a dozen black, with the busy check-shirted seamen moving among them: no great distance vertically—fifty feet or so—but still how remote. He knew all the men there, liked several of them, loved young Babbington and Pullings; and yet he had the impression of living in a vacuum. It came to him strongly now, though some of the upturned faces were winking and nodding at him: he slid his legs through the lubber's hole with a grave expression on his face and began his laborious descent.

  'So full a ship, so close-packed a world, moving urgently along, surrounded by its own vacuum; each man bombinating in his own, no doubt. My journal, re-read but yesterday, gives me this same impression: an egocentric man living amidst pale shades. It reflects none of the complex, vivid life of this crowded vessel. In its pages, my host (whom I esteem) and his people hardly exist, nor yet the gun-room,' he reflected during intervals of conversation as he sat at the envoy's left, stuffed rapidly into his best coat by Jack's powerful hand, breeched and brushed in one minute twenty seconds flat while the Marine sentry, under penalty of death, hel
d the half-hour glass concealed in his hand to prevent the striking of the bell—as he sat there eating up the last long-preserved delicacies from Mr Stanhope's store and drinking milk-warm claret in honour of the Duke of Cumberland's birthday. But he was not without a social conscience, and aware that he had caused great uneasiness, that his very, very dirty face and hands reflected discredit upon the ship, he exerted himself to talk, to be agreeable; and even, after the port had gone round and round, to sing.

  Mr Bowes, the purser, had obliged the company with an endless ballad on the battle of the First of June, in which he had served a gun: it was set to the tune of 'I was, d'ye see, a Waterman,' but he produced its slow length in an unvarying tone, neither shout nor cry but nearly allied to both, pitched in the neighbourhood of lower A, with his eyes fixed bravely on a knot in the deckhead above Mr Stanhope. The envoy smiled bravely, and in the thundering chorus of 'To make 'em strike or die' his neighbours made out his piping treble.

  The frigate could boast no high standard of musical accomplishment: Etherege had never really known the tune of his comic song; and now, bemused by Mr Stanhope's port, he forgot the words too; but when at last he abandoned it, after three heavy falls, he assured them that well sung, by Kitty Pake for example, it was irresistibly droll—how they had laughed! But he was no hand at a song, he was sorry to say, though he loved music passionately; it was far more in the Doctor's line—the Doctor could imitate cats on the 'cello to perfection—would deceive any dog you cared to bring forward.