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.’
‘Mr Cozens and his joke,’ said the bystanders, with benign approval. ‘He loves his joke, ha, ha.’
‘But there is the whole upper deck and the galley between us and the midshipmen’s berth,’ said the surgeon.
‘Mr Cozens is wery fond of his joke, sir,’ they told him.
He shrugged his shoulders, and the morning’s consultation being done he walked away aft with Tobias, explaining the mild duplicity of John Duck.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Tobias, ‘I thought as much. But I do not understand you in the article of salt. I speak under correction, but I cannot conceive that the marine would perish from a grain of salt – from ten grains of salt – from a peck of salt.’
‘Can you not, Mr Barrow?’ said the surgeon, looking at him side-ways. ‘Can you not? Well, we have twenty minutes before we go into the sick-bay, so perhaps we may consider the physical nature of salt, and the metaphysical nature of salt, in my cabin. I say its metaphysical nature, Mr Barrow.’
Tobias made no reply, but gazed earnestly into his chief’s face, and followed him along the quarter-deck, under the break of the poop, where stood the wheel with its two solemn quartermasters: one of these was Rose, and he winked secretly as Tobias passed, at the same time imitating the agony of one who has been bitten behind, by way of acknowledging Tobias’ attention to a wound that he had received at Madeira.
The surgeon’s cabin was against the bulkhead of the coach, on the starboard side; it was spacious, comfortable and particularly well lit. Waving Tobias to a seat, he said, ‘If I am never better lodged than this, I shall die content. Now salt, Mr Barrow, has physical properties, as we all know; and it may have metaphysical properties …’
Mr Eliot held that nothing cures like faith: he held this very strongly and he could bring many examples from his own experience and from books to confirm his doctrine. He divided diseases into three sorts: those which could be treated by the knife, and which belonged to the chirurgeon; those few which would yield to drugs, and which fell to the physicians (a pompous, fanciful set of men in general, Mr Barrow), and those, the most numerous class, which were to be healed by the imagination – which were to be attacked through the imagination of the patient himself. Among these he ranged melancholy, dyspepsia, seasickness (whatever you may say, Mr Barrow) and, extraordinarily enough, scurvy.
‘I have seen men within twelve hours of their death from scurvy who have been roused from their leth
argy by the cry of a sail: that was in the year of Vigo, when we were cruising upon the Spaniards, much as we are doing now. I hope that this cruise may show you the same effect, from the same cause; for at Vigo, Mr Barrow, we took a million pieces of eight, which was pretty handsome, I believe. But that is nothing, they say, to the treasure that is waiting for us round the Horn – Chile, Peru and Panama …’ He lapsed into a reverie for some minutes, and at the same time glided a guinea from the back of his hand to his palm, and from his palm away into his sleeve – an habitual gesture with him, performed with wonderful ease and celerity.
Mr Eliot took a harmless delight in conjuring, and by a happy coincidence his pastime and his profession could be practised together, the one helping the other; hitherto he had been shy of opening himself up on this subject to Tobias, because the practice was not only far from orthodox but it also had a certain remote hint of – his mind would not, even silently, pronounce the word quackery, but that was the expression that an enemy might have used.
‘Let it be supposed, Mr Barrow,’ he said, ‘that Martha Smith comes to me, complaining of a headache, and I find that this headache is of the immaterial, or imaginary class. I can bleed her, of course, and cup her, and apply Spanish fly; but unless I can play upon her imagination (the soul of the trouble) her head will ache still. Do you follow me, Mr Barrow? Tobias Barrow, do you pursue my line of reasoning? Yes. Now it may very well be that this young lady supposes that an earwig has gained an entry to her brain, and is feasting upon it: a very usual idea, Mr Barrow. We may tell her that she is mistaken, that physically speaking she has no earwig and no headache at all; but will this make her feel any better? No, my dear sir, it will not. But if we syringe the young lady’s meatus auditorius (always use a warm lixivium, Mr Barrow), and if in the bowl we find a fine brisk earwig? Eh?’
Tobias began to understand the reason for the existence of an old, worn, partially bald, very familiar white mouse, and of a grass-snake, a small eel whose water was surreptitiously changed from time to time, and a toad, all of whom led a very private and secluded life in a recess of the surgeon’s cabin, together with the more legitimate leeches.
‘To revert now to your seaman and his salt, Mr Barrow: certainly he may eat as much salt as the next man, and so may his dysenterical friend, the marine. But the man must drink his rice-water, and he must not eat. We cannot see him dosed, nor can we ensure that he will starve: how then are we to impress the importance of our recommendation upon his mind? Why, by coupling it with a surprising, an astonishing prohibition that will impinge upon his leaden, clownish imagination. And the more extravagant the assertion, so long as it remains just within the bounds of credibility, the better; for man has a natural gust for marvels, and he loves to believe that his complaint is cousin to a marvel – a very rare complaint. What do you say to that, Mr Barrow?’ he asked, with an affectation of indifference.
‘Sir,’ said Tobias, ‘I honour your penetration.’
‘You are an honest fellow,’ cried the surgeon, shaking him warmly by the hand; and as if to underline his words the number one quarter-deck gun went off with its usual unholy bang about six feet from their ears: it was followed by the other quarter-guns, and then, one after another, by the nine-pounders of the starboard broadside, so that in a moment the whole ship was vibrating and so filled with sound, from the high shriek of the recoiling carriages to the deep reverberation of the beams as they took the impact of the recoil, that it was quite impossible to elaborate the moral point at issue.
The bald mouse, a man-of-war’s mouse, born in a nest of oakum, moved as fast as its old limbs would carry it towards the surgeon’s spence, a triangular cupboard in which particular delicacies were kept, and whose door had been known to open of itself in time of gunfire.
Mr Eliot looked at his watch, went through the motions of saying ‘We must go along to the sick-bay,’ nodded with great meaning, and changed his wig for a nightcap. They walked into the sharp smell of powder, and descending the companion-way to the upper-deck they picked their way cautiously through the acrid smoke to the fore-hatch – cautiously, because the guns were firing independently, not in broadsides, and each gun, as it fired, sprang back; Mr Eliot had treated the results of carelessness, and he walked behind the guns with as much attention as if they had been so many ill-tempered mules.
It was a remarkable spectacle, this long deck swirling with smoke; the brilliant sun came in through the gratings and the gun-ports, and its beams, sharply defined in the smoke, were all shaped by the squares that let them in. The gunner hurried up and down the deck, from crew to crew; the powder-boys ran behind the guns, flitting in the gloom; there was water, wet sand and wet sawdust everywhere, and in barrels by the guns the slow match burnt portentously, with the particular crackle of saltpetre. Mr Eliot stopped by number seven: the captain of the gun had laid it and he was waiting for the roll of the ship to bring the sight up to the mark, a raft of barrels that had been thrown out for the Wager by the next in line ahead, the Severn. The ship rose on the swell, up and up; the layer glared along the barrel of his gun. With a grunt he clapped the linstock to the touchhole: there was the smallest conceivable pause, then the bellowing roar. The gun shot back under the arched body of the layer, whipped back past the crew kneeling on either side of it, until the breechings brought it up – ropes fastened to strong rings, that gave a great deep twang as they tightened. The square of the port was darkened with smoke and pieces of the wad; then the wind cleared it and they saw the ball hit the water near the mark and skip on with three gigantic bounds. Without more than a moment’s pause the swabber doused and cleaned the gun, they charged, loaded, wadded and rammed it, and ran it up to the sill of the port, primed and ready to fire again.
It was a beautiful sight, in its way; but Mr Eliot had seen it so many times in the last forty years, and Tobias was impervious to this kind of beauty; they walked on, thinking only of the number of casualties this gunnery practice would bring them.
Early in the voyage, when the new hands were quite green, every exercise with the great guns had brought crushed fingers and toes down to the cockpit. There had been a great many, for the commodore ordered practice on every possible occasion: any morning might show a superior Spanish force to the windward, and with his ships undermanned and overloaded (in spite of the two victuallers that accompanied them, the squadron had to carry so much that at this stage the two-deckers could scarcely open their lower gun-ports, and their decks were much encumbered by stores), he could only hope to equalise the contest by superiority in gun-fire. The Spaniards, of course, having ports on the other side of the ocean, were not obliged to carry the same overwhelming burden of provisions. To begin with there had been many casualties, but today no one was hurt except an enthusiastic boy – one Diego, who had stowed himself away under the Wager’s yawl when they were in Funchal, and whose natural curiosity had now induced him to put his face so near the mouth of a gun that his hair had been burnt off in patches and his wits sent all astray.
Yet if there were no casualties to fill the sick-bay there were nevertheless several regular inmates swinging there in their hammocks: they were very old men, worn out in the King’s service, many of them with inveterate wounds, and the history of their coming aboard was discreditable to all who were concerned with it. The administration, unable or unwilling to put an adequate number of marines aboard the squadron, had seized the Chelsea pensioners (who were subject to military law) and had sent five hundred of them down to Portsmouth; half of them had deserted, but enough remained for twenty-seven to fall to the share of the Wager. This was typical of the difficulties that had beset Mr Anson from the beginning – the long-winded hesitations that had destroyed all hope of reaching the Horn by December and had probably done away with all secrecy, so that the Spaniards might be waiting, anywhere along the course fully prepared and heavily armed.
It was a depressing thought that the ship was to carry these poor old men away from their homes, south across the
equator and both the tropics, through the great heat down to the southernmost extremity of the known world, round it and up into an almost unknown sea, there to fight for their lives – if indeed any of them survived so far. But on the other hand it must be admitted that on that particular day the invalids presented an excellent example in support of Mr Eliot’s theory on the power of imagination. The smell of powder had reached the sick-bay, and the roaring of the guns could not possibly be kept out of it: the old gentlemen were much enlivened by both; they piped away in their high old quavering voices about battles long ago, they prated about their knowledge, experience and wisdom, and wondered what would be for dinner with a vivacity that would have been remarkable in a pack of boys.
The Unknown Shore Page 11
