The Wine-Dark Sea

by Patrick O'Brian

'Oh, by all means, Mr Wedell,' cried Jack. 'Let him crack on till all sneers again.'

  Just how it became known throughout the ship that the Captain's chase had a beast in view, and that it was not only the joy of being homeward-bound that caused him to spread so much canvas, to spend so much time on deck, taking every possible advantage of the wind and whipping jibs and staysails in and out, could not be clearly stated; yet known it was, and no officer or master's mate ever had to emphasize, still less repeat, any order that might carry the barky more briskly to the high south latitudes.

  Some of the knowledge derived from the obvious fact that the Doctor, though incapable of telling a barque from a ship or a bowline from a midshipman's hitch, was not as simple as he looked - that indeed would have been difficult - and that he did not spend all his time on shore in bowsing up his jib or inspecting ladies in their shifts, but sometimes picked up valuable news: yet this did not account for the 'two or three China ships out of Boston' or the 'south of Diego Ramirez' that could so often be heard on the lower deck, together with the calculation that a steady five knots from noon to noon, day after day, would get them there with time and to spare, which could only come from deliberate eavesdropping or very close attention to all possible clues, such as the Captain's poring over his charts of the desolate regions south of the Horn.

  Yet this eagerness for a prize, so natural in the crew of a man-of-war, was curiously coloured and accentuated by Stephen's account of the Inca's great chain, an account that had nothing whatsoever to do with Boston merchantmen launched two hundred and fifty years later: it nevertheless suffused the whole ship's collective state of mind.

  'How much do you suppose a tolerably stout Indian could lift?' asked Reade.

  'They are natives, you know,' said Wedell, 'and everyone knows that natives can raise prodigious great burdens, though not much above five feet tall.'

  'Say two hundredweight,' said Norton.

  'That makes four hundred hundredweight for two hundred Indians,' said Reade, writing it on the slate used for his rough day's work. 'Which is twenty tons, or forty-four thousand eight hundred pounds. Which is seven hundred and sixteen thousand eight hundred ounces. What is gold worth an ounce?"

  'Three pounds seventeen and ten pence halfpenny,' said Norton. That was what Mr Adams reckoned when last prize money was shared out; and all hands agreed.'

  'Three, seventeen, ten and a half to be multiplied by seven hundred and sixteen thousand eight hundred,' said Reade. 'There ain't room enough for it on the slate, and anyhow they are avoirdupois ounces instead of Troy. But whichever way you look at it the answer is well over two millions of money. Can you imagine two millions of money?'

  Yes, they could - a deer-park, bow windows, a pack of hounds, a private band in a genteel conservatory - and so could others, before the mast and abaft; and although no one was so simple as to confuse these two quite separate ideas, the hypothetical prizes far to the south tended to glow with an additional and quite charming lustre, in spite of the fact that almost every man aboard was already richer than he had ever been in his life from the earlier captures, and that neither the frigate's captain nor her surgeon really needed any more at all.

  'There is something profoundly discreditable about this delight in taking other men's property away from them by force,' observed Stephen, tuning his long neglected 'cello, 'taking it away openly, legally, and being praised, caressed and even decorated for doing so. I quell, or attempt to quell, the feeling every time it rises in my bosom; which it does quite often.'

  'Pray pass the rosin," said Jack; and before dashing away into the allegro vivace of their Boccherini he added, 'I may see little of you in the morning: we shall spend much of our time exercising the great guns. But you will never forget that I am to be your guest for dinner in the gunroom, I am sure.' Nothing could have been less certain. Dr Maturin had been so engrossed in the preliminary unpacking, sorting, registering, cleaning and roughly preserving the collections that had come aboard from the balsa that he was perfectly capable of forgetting all ordinary duties other than those of the sick-berth, and all social decencies. 'He is also capable of supposing that the ship's company is still much as he left it,' reflected Jack, and at the end of the movement he said, 'I believe you have not dined in the gunroom yet?'

  'I have not,' said Stephen. 'With the sick-berth and my collections to sort, I have scarcely been on deck, either, or asked half my shipmates how they do. You cannot readily conceive the fragility of an undressed bird's skin, my dear.'

  'Then perhaps I should tell you of some changes you will see. Vidal has left the ship with two of his Knipperdolling cousins, and he has been replaced in the gunroom by William Sadler, a thorough-going seaman. And then before the mast, there was poor John Proby, who lost the number of his mess two days out of Callao.'

  'That I knew. He was in a sad decline, in spite of what little we could do for him in the way of bark and steel and linctus. But Fabien very kindly kept me one of his hands, recollecting my interest in the singular calcification of its sinews. Fabien is a most valuable assistant.'

  Jack could still be made uneasy by remarks of this kind, and it was a little while before he went on, 'And you will not see Bulkeley any more, either.'

  'The facetious bosun?"

  'Just so. He had also been a bosun in the Navy, you know; and with the Surprise being run man-of-war fashion he slipped back more and more into his old service ways. You know the expression capabarre, I dare say?'

  'Certainly. I am no new-fledged canvas-climber, I believe. It is the topmost summit, the ultimate pinnacle of some towering mast."

  'No doubt. But we commonly use it for that tendency in the bosuns of King's ships to steal all marine stores not immovably screwed down. I checked him once for a missing kedge in Annamooka and again for a coil of three-inch manilla at Moahu, with God knows how many things in between; and he promised to reform. But in Callao he made off with several lengths of chain, a can-hook, and our lightning-conductor, our best Snow Harris lightning-conductor; and when I told him of it he had the provoking effrontery to defend his action on the grounds that everyone knew that metal attracts the flesh and that a glass ball at the masthead was the only true safeguard. And as for the other things, they were quite worn out.'

  Discussing the perils of the sea in general and of lightning in particular came very near to talking shop, an act less criminal than sodomy (which carried the death sentence) but not very much so, and the gunroom cast some nervous looks at their guest the Captain, a stickler for naval etiquette; but since it was clear both from his thoroughly amiable expression and his own anecdotes that lightning was this side of the barrier between right and wrong, the subject occupied the company for the not inconsiderable time they took to eat a noble turtle and empty the dish.

  The gunroom was less crowded, now that the merchants and ransomers had left, and it was more nearly naval: Jack, Stephen and Tom Pullings were in fact serving officers; Adams had walked the quarterdeck for most of his active life; Wilkins had served in half a dozen King's ships as midshipman or master's mate; and Grainger, together with his brother-in-law Sadler, had taken on the local colour in the most natural way. The conversation therefore had a greater freedom, all the more so since the frigate was homeward bound.

  'This very ship was struck by a levin-flash off Penedo in the Brazils,' observed Stephen, 'and she lost the mast, the spar, the thing in front - the bowsprout. I was asleep at the time, and for a moment I thought we were in the midst of a fleet action, the noise was so great.'

  'Was there anyone killed, Doctor?' asked Grainger.

  'There was not.'

  'Ah,' said William Sadler, 'my cousin Jackson was carpenter's crew in the Diligent when she was struck by forked lightning near the Island of a Thursday. Which three hands were killed in the maintop; and he said their bodies stayed warm till Sunday after church, when they were obliged to be put over the side.'

  'The Repulse was laying off Spain in the year ten,' said Pull
ings. 'It was a Thursday too, and all hands had washed clothes. Towards evening clouds began to gather thick, and the watch below, afraid their laundry would be rained upon when the things were nearly dry, jumped aloft to take it in. There was a single flash, and seven dropped down dead on deck, while thirteen more were horribly burnt.'

  'When Prince William had the Pegasus,' said Jack, 'a single stroke utterly destroyed her mainmast.'

  General considerations on lightning followed this - most frequent between the tropics - certain trees more liable to be struck than others: willows, ash, solitary oaks to be avoided -sultry, oppressive weather favourable - tolerably common in the temperate zone - unknown in Finland, Iceland and Hudson's Bay - presumably even more unknown nearer to either pole, probably because of the northern lights. But these remarks together with speculation on the nature of the electric fluid were interrupted by the appearance of a roast sucking-pig, borne in on a splendid Peruvian silver dish, the rescued merchants' present to the Surprise, and set down according to custom before Dr Maturin, whose skill as a carver was intimately known to many of those present. The talk grew more cheerful: pigs at home, how best dressed - pigs, wild, on a remote island in the South China Sea, that had nourished Captain Aubrey and his people for a great while - a little tame black sow at Pullings' father's farm on the edge of the New Forest that would find you a basket of trubs, or truffles as some called them, in a morning, winking and grinning at you with each trub, never eating a single one herself.

  By the time they reached the port the conversation was more cheerful still, the words 'homeward bound' recurring very often, with conjectures about the delightful changes to be seen in children, gardens, shrubberies and the like.

  'My grandfather,' said Grainger, 'was sailmaker's mate in the Centurion when Commodore Anson took the Acapulco galleon in forty-three: he had his share of the one million, three hundred and thirteen thousand, eight hundred and forty-two pieces of eight they found in her - a figure I always remember -and that made him right glad, as you may well suppose; but when he learnt that now they were to steer for home he used to say it made him happier still.'

  'Ha, ha,' cried Wilkins, somewhat flushed with his wine, 'homeward bound is very well, but homeward bound with a pocketful of prize-money is better still. Huzzay for the Horn!'

  There was a good deal of cheerful noise at this, and more chuckling among the mess-attendants than was either right or decent; but Jack, recovering his gravity, shook his head, saying, 'Come, gentlemen, do not let us tempt Fate; do not let us say anything presumptuous that may prove unlucky. We must not sell the bear's skin before we have locked the stable door. And locked it with a double turn.'

  'Very true,' cried Pullings and Grainger. 'Very true. Hear him.'

  'For my part,' Jack went on, 'I shall not repine if we meet nothing off the Horn. We have to pass that way in any case; and if our hurry makes us no richer, why, it carries us home the sooner. I long to see my new plantations.'

  'I do not like the prospect of this Horn,' said Stephen in a low voice, 'or all this haste to reach it. This is in every way a most exceptional year - cranes have been seen flying north over Lima! - and the weather down there is sure to be more disagreeable than ever.'

  'But you have wonderful sea-legs, Doctor,' said Adams. 'And if we crack on we shall - we may - reach the height of the Horn at a capital time for the passage: barely a ripple, I have been told, with picnics on the island itself.'

  'It is my collection I am thinking of,' said Stephen. 'Whatever you may say, the sea around the Horn is bound to be damp, whereas my collections come from one of the driest parts of the whole terraneous globe. They need very careful attention, acres of oiled silk, weeks of calm, patient care in describing, figuring, packing. Once they are tumbled and tossed unprepared, on the gelid billows, all is lost - their pristine glory is gone for ever.'

  'Well, Doctor,' said Jack, 'some weeks I think I can promise you. Your cranes may have lost their heads, but the trades, or rather the anti-trades, have kept theirs, and they are blowing as sweetly as ever our best friends could wish.'

  The promised weeks they had, weeks of pure sailing, with the Surprise slanting cross the prevailing wind and often logging two hundred sea-miles between one noon observation and the next: weeks of close, satisfying work for Stephen, who was delighted with Fabien's exact and beautiful watercolours of the many specimens still in their full glory; weeks of ardent sailoring for Jack, with evenings full of music: fresh fish over the side, and penguins in constant attendance. And when at last the anti-trades faltered and left them, within a day the even more favourable westerlies took over.

  Those were idyllic weeks; but how difficult it was to remember them, to call them vividly to mind as an experienced reality, a fortnight after the ship had sailed into the true antarctic, and more than antarctic stream, the haunt of the wandering albatross, mollymauks in all their variety, the great bone-breaking petrel, the stinkpot and the ice-bird - had sailed into that green water at fourteen knots under topsails, fore-courses and a jib, impelled by an almighty quartering wind. The change was not unexpected. Well before this ominous parallel the frigate's people had been engaged in shifting, packing and storing her light sails and replacing them with much heavier cloth, with storm-canvas trysails and the like for emergency. Many a watch had been spent in sending up preventer backstays, braces, shrouds and stays and in attending to new earings, robands, reef-points, reef-tackles for the courses and spilling-lines for the topsails, to say nothing of new sheets and clewlines fore and aft. Then again all hands had rounded the Horn at least once, some many times, and they took their long woollen drawers, their mittens and their Magellan jackets very seriously when they were served out, while most of those who had had any foresight dug into their chests for Monmouth caps, Welsh wigs or padded domes with flaps to protect the wearer's ears and strings to tie beneath his chin.

  This serving-out happened on a Tuesday in fine clear weather, a pleasant topgallant breeze blowing from the north-west, and it seemed almost absurd: on Friday the ship was tearing eastwards with four men at the wheel, snow blurring both binnacles, hatches battened down, and the muffled watch on deck sheltering in the waist, dreading a call to grapple with the frozen rigging and board-stiff sails.

  Presently, in this incessant roar of sea and wind, and in this continual tension, the vision of the warm and mild Pacific faded, leaving little evidence apart from Stephen's collections, neatly labelled, noted and wrapped in oiled silk and then sailcloth, carefully packed into thoroughly watertight casks set up by the cooper, and stowed in the hold; and apart from the remarkable store of provisions Mr Adams had laid in. He had had a free hand; he was not bound by the pinch-penny rules of the King's service, since in her present state the Surprise was run on the privateer's tradition of the ship's own money, her personal reserve to be laid out in marine stores, food and drink, a stated share of all the prizes - a very handsome sum after the sale of the Franklin, the Alastor and the whalers - and she was sailing eastwards deep-laden with provisions of the highest quality, enough to last another circumnavigation.

  This was just as well, for after a few days of the first icy blow, when the deathly chill had worked right into the whole ship from keelson to cabin, all hands began to eat with far more than usual eagerness. Their hunger persisted, since the roaring westerly storm had sent the ship a great way, at great speed, south and east into the high fifties, a cold region at the best and now even colder in this unusual year, even without a wind: frequent rain; even more frequent sleet and snow; most hands wet most of the time; all of them always cold.

  In such very thick weather observation was impossible for days on end, and in spite of his chronometers and well-worn sextant, and of the presence of three other expert navigators aboard, Jack could not be sure of his longitude or latitude, dead-reckoning in such wind and seas being wonderfully uncertain. He therefore reduced sail, and the frigate moved eastwards at an average of no more than three knots, sometimes under bare
poles or with a mere scrap of sail right forward to give her steerage-way when the wind blew a full gale from the west. Yet there were also those strange antarctic calms, when the albatrosses (and half a dozen followed the Surprise, together with some Cape pigeons and most of the smaller petrels) sat on the heaving sea, unwilling or unable to rise; and during two of these the drum beat to quarters, as it had done all the way south from Valparaiso, and the gun-crew exercised their pieces, housing them warm, dry and new-charged, with the touch-hole covered and the tompions doubly waterproofed with grease, ready for instant service.

  It was after the second of these exercises - two fine rippling broadsides, almost up to the old Surprise's astonishing accuracy and speed - that the sky cleared and Jack had a series of perfect observations of first the sun, then Achernar, and later Mars himself, positions that were confirmed by the other officers and that showed that in spite of this dawdling their initial zeal had brought them almost to the rendezvous far too soon. The China ships intended to pass south of Diego Ramirez with the full moon, and in her present stage she was only three days old: that would mean a great deal of beating to and fro in the most inhospitable seas known to man, with no more than a passable likelihood of success after all. Quite apart from the unpredictable winds, foul weather or fair, state of the sea and so on, merchantmen on such a voyage never attempted any great accuracy of movement.

  'We shall have to stand off and on until well past the full,' said Jack at supper - fish soup, a dish of sweetbreads, Peruvian cheese, two bottles of Coquimbo claret - 'The full of the moon, of course.'

  'An uninviting prospect,' said Stephen. 'Last night I was unable to control my 'cello because of the erratic jerking of the floor, and this evening most of my soup is spread on my lap; while day after day men are brought below with cruel bruises, even broken bones, and are falling from the frozen ropes above or slipping on the icy deck below. Do you not think it would be better to go home?'