The delight in the weather had many agreeable results, and it tended to make for general civility: Campbell, who was a morose fellow in ordinary weather, had been both friendly and communicative for some time; he too had suffered from Cozens’ hilarity (Tobias had had to sew the top of his left ear on again) and he regarded Jack as a fellow-victim; he and Jack also had this in common, that they both liked navigation, and took a keen pleasure in amplitudes, right ascension and azimuths. Campbell was not an ideal shipmate even now, but he was far less disagreeable than he had seemed to be earlier in the voyage: and at least some of his unattractive ways were due to the fact that he was Scotch, and that he felt slighted and put upon because of it. He had some reason for thinking so, for the Scotch were widely unpopular in England at that time: living in a poorer country, with an even more disagreeable climate, they were obliged to work harder, to live on less and to accept hardship without complaint; this tended to make them offensively virtuous. They were industrious and hardy; they despised the English as being idle and soft; and this alone was enough to make them disliked. But in addition to all this they were said to be rude, dirty and grasping. Perhaps the lowland Scotch were somewhat coarse in their manners, but as for dirt, there can have been no very strong contrast, seeing that the average Englishman’s washing went no further than his neck, if indeed it reached so far, and the word bathroom had no meaning in domestic architecture. However, when nations are determined to dislike one another they do not let justice or veracity stand in the way, and Campbell, having found out early in his career that his nation was a disadvantage to him, resented the discrimination most bitterly. His cast of mind was dark, unhumorous and grudging, and he exaggerated the villainy of the world. He was also of an ordinary family, which had no interest. The result of this was that if a block fell on his head he was instantly certain that it had done so because he was a Scotchman in the first place, and because he was poor in the second. He often laboured under a sense of grievance, which made him a tedious companion; but at other moments he could be quite human; and at no time could it be denied that he had valuable qualities – he was attentive to his duty, seamanlike and conscientious.
‘Will you make room there?’ he said, swinging over the side.
Jack and Tobias made him a place, and presently he and Jack were deeply engaged on a plan to find out the longitude by watching the moons of Jupiter, while Tobias fixed his gaze upon a very large dirty bird in the distance. It was brown and blackish, with an immense wing-span: yet it was not a sooty albatross. Could it be the giant petrel, the Procellaria gigantea of Mumpsimus? He would have to see its beak to make sure, the bony nostrils so typical of the petrel family: Mumpsimus particularly mentioned the point. He pointed out the bird to his companions, who gave it as their opinion that it was a pretty large sort of bird, a sea-bird, no doubt, and went to fetch his telescope from the cabin.
The door offered a slight resistance; Tobias pushed hard, and down came the usual bucket, soaking him and the books that were open on the locker. The iron rim hurt him cruelly, but the pain of seeing water all over his drawings was so much greater that he took no notice of it. There was the usual bellow of laughter from Cozens and the imitative cackle from Morris as they saw the success of their joke. Tobias knew that he must not resent it; Jack (who was a better preacher than a practicer) had told him many and many a time that it was only a joke, that they meant no harm, that one must take a laugh against oneself; so he closed the door and began to mop the water off his books. He was too late to save the wash drawing of the flying-fish’s muscular processes – many hours’ exact labour – but he was able to preserve some of his notes; and no doubt he would soon have another flying-fish to dissect. The need for putting up with barbarity was something he could not understand, however. He took Jack’s repeated assurance that it was so, but he had never been to school nor mixed with people of his own age, and the whole thing remained incomprehensible and sad.
Yet Cozens, lout though he was, had some seamanlike virtues, prompt decision being among them, and some days later when Moses Lewis, trying to spear a bonito, fell off the starboard bumkin into the sea, Cozens flung a hen-coop at him from the middle of the gangway so quickly that it struck him as he swept by. That is to say, Lewis had travelled from the bumkin to the middle of the Wager, some forty feet, at a rate of ten knots, by the time the hen-coop reached him; so Cozens had had a trifle over two seconds in which to roar ‘Man overboard’ and to act.
It is true that the coop not only drove Lewis far below the surface but also caused him to impale himself upon his fizgig, or trident. But this was a small price to pay for being kept afloat until he could be picked out of the sea, and it was generally thought that Moses Lewis should be very grateful to Mr Cozens, for his readiness of mind. Lewis was handed up the side with the fizgig still implanted in his bosom, and he was carried straight down to the cockpit in this interesting condition, looking (as the bystanders remarked) like something out of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.
‘Moses Lewis,’ said Mr Eliot, ‘put out your tongue.’ He said this almost automatically, it being his manner of gagging his patients and preventing tedious complaints: there was not much need to silence Lewis, who was still in a dismal and waterlogged condition as he lay there, with the trident’s handle held up in the air over him, but Mr Eliot said it out of habit and went on with his examination.
‘Very well,’ he said at last. ‘You will have to cut it out, Mr Barrow. It is the barbs that hold it so. It is of no consequence – you will not find the pleura affected, no, no. Oh no: the cartilago ensiformis and pectoralis major, that is all; and we need not be overtender of the pectoralis major. Use the great French scalpel, Mr Barrow, or even our dismembering catlin, if you please – it is of no consequence – as you please – I leave it entirely in your hands. Now Moses Lewis, Mr Barrow will kindly perform an ablation of the fizgig: you must not move, you know. If you was to move, the scalpel would slip, and I dare say it would put a stop to your earthly career. Should you like to be held, Moses Lewis? Yes, I think he would like to be held; he would be very sorry to move and spoil Mr Barrow’s professional reputation. Andrew, my compliments to Mr Bean, and may I have two of Moses Lewis’ messmates to hold him?’
Two very strong and eager messmates hurried in, and they pinned him at once (for his own good) with such force that the breath was squeezed from his body in a groan.
‘Now don’t you start a-bellowing,’ said one. ‘What will the doctor think of you, mate, if you start a-bellowing while he is only a whetting of his knife?’
‘Fi, Moses Lewis,’ said the other.
At all ordinary times Lewis would never have borne such liberties, but now they assumed such an overwhelming moral superiority, he being sick and therefore by tradition much the same as a child or a half-wit, that he could only gaze piteously from side to side. This, of course, could not be allowed: each seaman moved his shoulder inwards to clamp the patient’s head, which took on a compressed appearance, not unlike a lemon.
‘I do not suppose that you would have sharpened it so, if you had known where it was going to,’ said Tobias, snipping the last fibres from the nick of the fifteenth barb and disengaging the fizgig.
‘He says if you hadn’t of sharpened it, it wouldn’t of gone in so far,’ said the messmate on the right, in a voice calculated to reach Lewis’s muffled hearing.
‘You don’t want to go sharpening them nasty fizgigs so, he says,’ said the other, in a virtuous tone: the squeezed lemon gave a faint nod, instantly suppressed.
‘There,’ said Tobias, ‘you can let him go now.’
‘It’s all over, mate. We’ve got ‘un out,’ they told him, in a kindly bellow. ‘There, there, you can lay easy now. What a horrible state of dread you was in, to be sure, ha, ha. Didn’t he sweat, mate, when he see the knife a-coming? But it’s all over now, mate,’ they said, bending low over him, shouting in his ear and patting him heavily. ‘Ah, you’ve missed it all, Mr Byron, sir: we got ‘un
out five minutes ago.’
‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘I came down to see how he was. How is he?’
Lewis had been in Jack’s division before Captain Murray’s changes; he smiled to see the midshipman, for whom he had a kindness, but he thought fit to answer Jack’s inquiry by the words ‘Oh, oh, oh,’ in a gasping, fluttering voice. This was a point of manners: if the sick are being visited it is only decent that they should be sick, however well they may feel. A little conversation followed about sharpening fizgigs, edged tools and those to whom they may safely be entrusted; and the general opinion was, that you ought to be very careful; that you don’t want to go a-falling in the sea like that – which there might not be a hen-coop at hand another time, nor such a handy young gentleman as Mr Cozens; and that a bonito, or any other fish that might be named, was not worth being drowned for. An albacore was not worth being drowned for, not a barracuda; and if Moses Lewis thought a flaming dorado was worth being drowned for, he was wrong, mate, wrong.
‘Now,’ said Tobias, the seamen having gone, ‘I think that I shall bandage him with a cingulum colchicum: hold that end Jack, I beg.’ Tobias wound the bandage round and round his patient. ‘How did you come by this wound?’ he asked, looking at a remarkable scar on his back.
Lewis hesitated, but the impulsion to tell the truth to a medical man is very strong, and when he was the right way up again, he replied, with a blush, ‘that it was a ostrich, sir, if you please.’
Tobias nodded, and went on with his bandaging. There was a short silence.
‘What I do not understand,’ said Jack, ‘is how a cove can be such a muffin-handed slob with a rope, and yet be so handy with a bandage.’ The cingulum was as neat as basket-work, and Tobias patted it with some complacency.
‘Which it was a cock-ostrich,’ said Lewis, who had a painful feeling of being disbelieved. ‘A wery tall old bald one.’
‘You shall tell me about it directly,’ said Tobias. ‘But we must prop you up first, and give you a little rum to fortify the tubes. Can you take rum, Moses Lewis? It is not unpleasant, and it will improve your general condition, if you can get it down.’
In a faint invalid’s voice Lewis (Old Sponge among his friends) thought that he might manage to swallow a little, to oblige Mr Barrow; and as soon as the tot was gone he said, in his usual strong rumble, ‘It was when they laid me off of weeding in the Emperor’s garden.’ He was feeling quite well again now, expansive, benign and communicative, and upon being desired to begin the history of his wound at the beginning, he delivered himself of it thus: ‘It was when I was in the old Trent, Captain Burton, and we left the Cove of Cork in November for to convoy some store-ships and transports down to Gib and to see the India trade on their way as far as the south of Goree, along of the Suffolk, seventy, the Exeter, sixty, and the Diamond, forty – Captain Anson commanded her in his time, as my sister’s husband could tell you, being he was cox’n of the gig – my brother-in-law, as you might say. The swab.’ Lewis stared and snorted, moved by some remote villainy of his brother-in-law, and it was only with some pains that he could be brought to continue his voyage, to leave the transports bound for Gibraltar off Cape St Vincent and to stand to the south-west in dirty weather that grew dirtier with the December moon. ‘But we was all right, being she was a tight ship,’ he said, ‘and I remember thinking that before I turned in, I would have a little bit of toasted cheese. I said to William Atkins, who was outside me on the yard, “I will have a little bit of toasted cheese, before I turn in.” He was in the starboard watch too – a Plymouth man, and a wheelwright by trade. Well, we had the first watch, and it turned out very black – wind veering north-west and plenty of rain. The captain come on deck when it turned squally, but he soon went below, only telling the master to make what sail he could and not to lose sight of the commodore, no not if he carried all away. But about six bells it come on cruel and we laid aloft to hand the main tops’l: we was under our courses by the end of the watch, and so was the commodore, we reckoned, because he was right ahead, bearing south and the wind west-south-west blowing hard, but his light did not gain, as I said to William Atkins as we went below.
‘It was not long after that, which I know very well because only one side of my cheese was toasted, that we struck. Cor love you,’ he exclaimed, with the old amazement renewed in his mind, ‘we could not tell what it was. The Suffolk run foul of us, or what? Because we was a hundred miles off of the land, we thought. Then she struck again, went over to port, almost on her beam ends, and you could hear her driving over the rocks like thunder. I got on deck, and when I got there she struck for good. You could make out the rocks two cables’ lengths away, and she was lying with her broadside to windward and the sea making a breach over her: and between us and the shore it was all white water. The masts went by the board, she beat so hard, and all the ship’s people were main anxious, I do assure you: but Captain Burton told us it was all for the best. “Ha, ha,” says he, in his hailing-trumpet, “it’s all for the best. Don’t you see as how we’re sheltered from the sea? Bear a hand there, and get everything over to the larboard, or she will heel off else.” So we got everything over, and the cant of the deck sheltered us, do you see? But God’ a mercy, what a sea it was. It come up green over her broadside, curling up there the height of the to’garn crosstrees, and it come down fit to split her. Dear Lord save me from such a lee-shore again.’
‘Amen,’ said Jack.
‘Well, after a time some of the starboard watch begged leave to adventure for it in the cutter – no, I tell a lie: it was the jolly-boat. And though they was told no boat could swim, they would try: and they went down before they could even shove off. Eight of ‘em. All the other boats was stove in, so when we saw she was stuck fast, no hope, we made a raft with capstan-bars and gratings and what spars we could come at: but most of the people were drunk by then, and it was a sorry old botch of a raft.’
‘Drunk?’ cried Tobias.
‘In course we was drunk,’ replied Lewis, looking at him with surprise.
‘They had struck, you see,’ said Jack, as if that explained everything: but seeing that Tobias still looked blank he explained that once a ship had gone aground, and when everything that could be done to bring her off had been done, then it always happened that the crew would get to the spirit-room and start every barrel and bottle there, to die drunk if die they must.
‘And they put on their best clothes,’ added Lewis. ‘It is the custom, like putting pennies on a dead man’s eyes, or dressing a corpse up pretty. I had a spotted nankeen waistcoat and a round beaver hat. And when I woke up, stone-cold sober, I was still there and it was the next day: the sea had gone down a little, and them as could swim was a-swimming, because there were Moors standing there on the black rocks waving to them to come ashore, as who should say, “I’ll help you ashore, mate.” So I laid hold of a piece of the starboard trailboards – she was going all to pieces for’ard – and chanced it on the back of a wave, and the minute I come ashore a fellow in a nightshirt hauls me up the roc before the sea can pull me off. Well, I make as if to thank him, and he whips off my neck-cloth. “Avast, brother,” says I, quite surprised, and he whips off my spotted nankeen waistcoat. And when I look displeased he shows me a dagger at my throat, while an old party in a blue frock and veil (his grandma, I believe) trips me up by the heels to get at my shirt. They were doing it all along the shore, and nobody had the spirit to resist ‘em, being so cold and wet. They stripped us naked every one, and would not allow us more than an old piece of sail that came ashore to make a tent from the cold and the rain.
‘When the tide began to make the sea grew worse again, and the ship ran all to pieces, pounding and beating most horrible to see, and about high-water she broke. The fore-part turned keel up, and the midships went all abroad; but the after-part of the poop held fast for a while. About thirty men there were for’ard, and they all went, but for a few people we could pull ashore; and they mostly died from the beating of the surf. On th
e poop there was the captain and close on a hundred and fifty more, and every time a big sea come up fit to sweep ‘em off, the Moors all laughed and capered. We looked to see them go any minute, and once the fife-rail carried away with five or six men; but they held, and when the tide was at half-ebb, the sea grew a morsel less, and the armourer, name of Coleman, well-nigh the only man left aboard as could swim, came ashore with a line – touch and go, but we haled him in when he was nearly spent. So we got a rope fast to the rocks, and they began to warp themselves ashore. But the captain would not come, there being some hands as were either still dead-drunk or too fearful to venture on the rope; and the officers called out to him, that it could never hold, once the tide of flood began to make. But come he would not, not until the cox’n of the barge crossed back and in a manner of speaking obliged him to warp ashore: which was very hard, seeing the captain could not swim and was so wore out that he could scarce hold on neither. So he came ashore, and we was right pleased. The flaming blackamoors looked for to strip him too, but that we would not abide, not the captain; and presently they sheered off.
The Unknown Shore Page 14
