Master & Commander a-1

by Patrick O'Brian

  The wine brought Mr Ellis into full bloom at last; the diffidence and the timidity melted away from the mound of wealth, and he told the company about discipline – order and discipline were of primordial importance; the family, the disciplined family, was the cornerstone of Christian civilization; commanding officers were (as he might put it) the fathers of their numerous families, and their love was shown by their firmness. Firmness. His friend Bentham, the gentleman that wrote the Defence of Usury (it deserved to be printed in gold), had invented a whipping machine. Firmness and dread: for the two great motives in the world were greed and fear, gentlemen. Let them look at the French revolution, the disgraceful rebellion in Ireland, to say nothing – looking archly at their stony faces – of the unpleasantness at Spitheаd and the Nore – all greed, and to be put down by fear.

  Mr Ellis was clearly very much at home in Captain Harte's house, for without having to ask the way he walked to the sideboard, opened the lead-lined door and took out the chamber-pot, and looking over his shoulder he went on without a pause to state that fortunately the lower classes naturally looked up to gentlemen and loved them, in their humble way; only gentlemen were fit to be officers. God had ordered it so, he said, buttoning the flap of his breeches; and as he sat down again at the table he observed that he knew one house where the article was silver – solid silver. The family was a good thing: he would drink a toast to discipline. The rod was a good thing: he would drink a toast to the rod, in all its forms. Spare the rod and spoil the child – loveth, chastitheth.

  'You must come to us one Thursday morning and see how the bosun's mate loveth our defaulters,' said Jack.

  Colonel Pitt, who had been staring heavily at the banker with an undisguised, boorish contempt, broke out into a guffaw and then left, excusing himself on the grounds of regimental business. Jack was about to follow him when Mr Ellis desired him to stay – he begged the favour of a few words.

  'I do a certain amount of business for Mrs Jordan, and I have the honour, the great honour, of being presented to the Duke of Clarence,' he began, impressively. 'Have you ever seen him?'

  'I am acquainted with His Highness,' said Jack, who had been shipmates with that singularly unattractive hot-headed cold-hearted bullying Hanoverian.

  'I ventured to mention our Henry and said we hoped to make an officer of him, and he condescended to advise the sending of him to sea. Now, my wife and I have considered it carefully, and we prefer a little boat to a ship of the line, because they are sometimes rather mixed, if you understand me, and my wife is very particular – she is a Plantagenet; besides, some of these captains want their young gentlemen to have an allowance of fifty pounds per annum.'

  'I always insist that their friends should guarantee my midshipmen at least fifty,' said Jack.

  'Oh,' said Mr Ellis, a little dashed. 'Oh. But I dare say a good many of the things can be picked up second-hand. Not that I care about that – at the beginning of the war all of us in the alley sent His Majesty an address saying we should support him with our lives and fortunes. I don't mind fifty quid, or even more, so long as the ship is genteel. My wife's old friend Mrs H was telling us about you, sir; and what is more, you are a thorough-going Tory, just like me. And yesterday we caught sight of Lieutenant Dillon; who is Lord Kenmare's nephew, I understand, and has a pretty little estate of his own – seems quite the gentleman, So to put it in a nutshell, sir, if you will take my boy I shall be very much obliged to you. And allow me to add,' he said, with an awkward jocularity, clearly against his own better judgment, 'what with my inside knowledge and experience of the market, you won't regret it. You'll find your advantage, I warrant you, hee, hee!'

  'Let us join the ladies,' said Captain Harte, actually blushing for his guest.

  'The best thing is to take him to sea for a month or so,' said Jack, standing up. 'Then he can see how he likes the service and whether he is suited for it; and we can speak of it again.'

  'I am sorry to have let you in for that,' he said, taking Stephen's arm and guiding him down Pigtail Stairs, where the green lizards darted along the torrid wall. 'I had no notion Molly Harte was capable of giving such a wretched dinner – cannot think what has come over her. Did you remark that soldier?'

  'The one in scarlet and gold, with boots?'

  'Yes. Now he was a perfect example of what I was saying, that the army is divided into two sorts – the one as kind and gentle as ever you could wish, just like my dear old uncle, and the other heavy, lumpish brutes like that fellow. Quite unlike the Navy. I have seen it again and again, and I still cannot understand it. How do the two sorts live together? I wish he may not be a nuisance to Mrs Harte – she is sometimes very free and unguarded, quite unsuspecting -can be imposed upon.'

  'The man whose name I forget, the money-man, was an eminently curious study,' said Stephen.

  'Oh, him,' said Jack, with an utter want of interest. 'What do you expect, when a fellow sits thinking about money all day long? And they can never hold their wine, those sorts of people. Harte must be very much in his debt to have him in the house.'

  'Oh, he was a dull ignorant superficial darting foolish prating creature in himself, to be sure, but I found him truly fascinating. The pure bourgeois in a state of social ferment. There was that typical costive, haemorrhoidal facies, the knock-knees, the drooping shoulders, the flat feet splayed out, the ill breath, the large staring eyes, the meek complacency; and, of course, you noticed that womanly insistence upon authority and beating once he was thoroughly drunk? I would wager that he is very nearly impotent: that would account for the woman's restless garrulity, her desire for predominance, absurdly combined with those girlish ways, and her thinning hair – she will be bald in a year or so.'

  'It might be just as well if everybody were impotent,' said Jack sombrely. 'It would save a world of trouble.'

  'And having seen the parents I am impatient to see this youth, the fruit of their strangely unattractive loins: will he be a wretched mammothrept? A little corporal? Or will the resiliency of childhood…

  'He will be the usual damned little nuisance, I dare say; but at least we shall know whether there is anything to be made of him by the time we are back from Alexandria. We are not saddled with him for the rest of the commission.'

  'Did you say Alexandria?'

  'Yes.'

  'In Lower Egypt?'

  'Yes. Did I not tell you? We are to run an errand to Sir Sidney Smith's squadron before our next cruise. He is watching the French, you know.'

  'Alexandria,' said Stephen, stopping in the middle of the quay. '0 joy. I wonder you did not cry out with delight the moment you saw me. What an indulgent admiral – paler classis – 0 how I value that worthy man!'

  'Why, 'tis no more than a straight run up and down the Mediterranean, about six hundred leagues each way, with precious little chance of seeing a prize either coming or going.'

  'I did not think you could have been such an earthling,' cried Stephen. 'For shame. Alexandria is classic ground.'

  'So it is,' said Jack, his good nature and pleasure in life flooding back at the sight of Stephen's delight. 'And with any luck I dare say we shall have a sight of the mountains of Candia, too. But come, we must get aboard: if we go on standing here we shall be run down.'

  Chapter Nine

  'It is ungrateful in me to repine,' he wrote, 'but when I think that I might have paced the burning sands of Libya, filled (as Goldsmith tells us) with serpents of various malignity; that I might have trodden the Canopic shore, have beheld the ibis, the Mareotic grallatores in their myriads, even perhaps the crocodile himself; that I was whirled past the northern coast of Candia, with Mount Ida in sight all day long; that at a given moment Cythera was no more than half an hour away, and yet for all my pleas no halt to be made, no "heaving to"; and when I reflect upon the wonders that lay at so short a distance from our course the Cyclades, the Peloponnese, great Athens, and yet no deviation allowed, no not for half a day – why, then I am obliged to restrain myself
from wishing Jack Aubrey's soul to the devil. Yet on the other hand, when I look over these notes not as a series of unfulfilled potentialities but as the record of positive accomplishment, how many causes have not I for rational exultation! The Homeric sea (if not the Homeric land); the pelican; the great white shark the seamen so obligingly fished up; the holothurians; euspongia mollissima (the same that Achilles stuffed his helmet with, iaith Poggius); the non-descript gull; the turtles! Again, these weeks have been among the most peaceful 1 have known: they might have been among the happiest, jf I had not been so aware that JA and jD might kill one another, in the civillest way in the world, at the next point of land: for it seems these things cannot take place at sea. JA is still deeply wounded about some remarks concerning the Cacafuego -feels there is a reflexion upon his courage – cannot bear it it preys upon him. And JD, though quieter now, is wholly unpredictable: he is full of contained rage and unhappiness that will break out in some way; but I cannot tell what. It is not unlike sitting on a barrel of gunpowder in a busy forge, with sparks flying about (the sparks of my figure being the occasions of offence).'

  Indeed, but for this tension, this travelling cloud, it would have been difficult to imagine a pleasanter way of spending the late summer than sailing across the whole width of the Mediterranean as fast as the sloop could fly. She flew a good deal faster now that Jack had hit upon her happiest trim, restowing her hold to bring her by the stern and restoring her masts to the rake her Spanish builders had intended. What is more, the brothers Sponge, with a dozen of the Sophie's swimmers under their instruction, had spent every moment of the long calms in Greek waters (their native element) scraping her bottom; and Stephen could remember an evening when he had sat there in the warm, deepening twilight, watching the sea; it had barely a ruffle on its surface, and yet the Sophie picked up enough moving air with her topgallants to draw a long straight whispering furrow across the water, a line brilliant with unearthly phosphorescence, visible for quarter of a mile behind her. Days and nights of unbelievable purity. Nights when the steady Ionian breeze rounded the square mainsail – not a brace to be touched, watch relieving watch – and he and Jack on deck, sawing away, sawing away, lost in their music, until the falling dew untuned their strings. And days when the perfection of dawn was so great, the emptiness so entire, that men were almost afraid to speak.

  A voyage whose two ends were out of sight – a voyage sufficient in itself. And on the plain physical side, she was a well-manned sloop, now that her prize-crews were all aboard again: not a great deal of work; a fair sense of urgency; a steady routine day after day; and day after day the exercise with the great guns that knocked the seconds off one by one until the day in 16°31'E., when the larboard watch succeeded in firing three broadsides in exactly five minutes. And, above all, the extraordinarily fine weather and (apart from a languid week or so of calm far to the east, a little after they had left Sir Sidney's squadron) fair winds so much so that when a moderate Levanter sprang up as soon as their chronic shortage of water made it really necessary to put into

  Malta, Jack said uneasily, 'It is too good to last. I am afraid we must pay for this, presently.'

  He had a very particular wish to make a rapid passage, a strikingly rapid passage that would persuade Lord Keith of his undeviating attention to duty, his reliability; nothing he had ever heard in his adult life had so chilled him (upon reflexion) as the admiral's remarks about post rank. They bad been kindly meant; they were totally convincing; they haunted his mind.

  'I wonder you should be so concerned over a mere title -a tolerably Byzantine title,' observed Stephen. 'After all, you are called Captain Aubrey now, and you would still only be called Captain Aubrey after that eventual elevation; for no man, as I understand it, ever says "Post-captain So-and-so".

  Surely it cannot be a peevish desire for symmetry – a longing to wear two epaulettes?'

  'That does occupy a great share of my heart, of course,

  along with eagerness for an extra eighteenpence a day. But you will allow me to point out, sir, that you are mistaken in everything you advance. At present I am called captain only by courtesy – I am dependent upon the courtesy of a parcel of damned scrubs, much as surgeons are by courtesy called Doctor. How should you like it if any cross-grained brute could call you Mr M the moment he chose to be uncivil? Whereas, was I to be made post some day, I should be captain by right; but even so I should only shift my swab from one shoulder to the other. I should not have the right to wear both until I had three years' seniority. No. The reason why every sea-officer in his right wits longs so ardently to be made post is this – once you are over that fence, why, there you are! My dear sir, you are there! What I mean is, that from then onwards all you have to do is to remain alive to be an admiral in time.'

  'And that is the summit of human felicity?'

  'Of course it is,' cried Jack, staring. 'Does it not seem plain to you?'

  'Oh, certainly.'

  'Well then,' said Jack, smiling at the prospect, 'well then, up the list you go, once you are there, whether you have a ship or no, all according to seniority, in perfect order – rear-admiral of the blue, rear-admiral of the white, rear-admiral of the red, vice-admiral of the blue, and so on, right up – no damned merit about it, no selection. That's what I like. Up until that point it is interest, or luck, or the approbation of your superiors – a pack of old women, for the most part. You must truckle to them – yes, sir; no, sir; by your leave, sir; your most humble servant… Do you smell that mutton? You will dine with me, will you not? I have asked the officer and midshipman of the watch.'

  The officer in question happened to be Dillon, and the acting midshipman young Ellis. Jack had very early determined that there should be no evident breach, no barbarous sullen inveteracy, and once a week he invited the officer (and sometimes the midshipman) of the forenoon watch to dinner, whoever he was; and once a week he in turn was invited to dine in the gun-room. Dillon had tacitly acquiesced in this arrangement, and on the surface there was a perfect civility between them – a state of affairs much helped in their daily life by the invariable presence of others.

  On this occasion Henry Ellis formed part of their protection. He had proved an ordinary boy, rather pleasant than otherwise: exceedingly timid and modest at first and outrageously made game of by Babbington and Ricketts, but now, having found his place, somewhat given to prating. Not at his captain's table, however: he sat rigid, mute, the tips of his fingers and the rims of his ears bleeding with cleanliness, his elbows pressed to his sides, eating wolf-like gulps of mutton, which he swallowed whole. Jack had always liked the young, and in any case he felt that a guest was entitled to consideration at his table, so having invited Ellis to drink a glass of wine with him, he smiled affably and said, 'You people were reciting some verses in the foretop this morning. Very capital verses, I dare say – Mr Mowett's verses? Mr Mowett turns a pretty line.' So he did. His piece on the bending of the new mainsail was admired throughout the sloop: but most unhappily he had also been inspired to write, as part of a general description:

  White as the clouds beneath the blaze of noon

  Her bottom through translucent waters shone.

  For the time being this couplet had quite destroyed his authority with the youngsters; and it was this couplet they had been reciting in the foretop, hoping thereby to provoke him still further.

  'Pray, will you not recite them to us? I am sure the Doctor would like to hear.'

  'Oh, yes, pray do,' said Stephen.

  The unhappy boy thrust a great lump of mutton into his cheek, turned a nasty yellow and gathered to his heart all the fortitude he could call upon. He said, 'Yes, sir,' fixed his eyes upon the stern-window and began,

  'White as the clouds beneath the blaze of noon Oh God don't let me die

  'White as the clouds beneath the blaze of noon

  'Her b -' His voice quavered, died, revived as a thin desperate ghost and squeaked out 'Her bottom'; but could do no more.


  'A damned fine verse,' cried Jack, after a very slight pause. 'Edifying too. Dr Maturin, a glass of wine with you?'

  Mowett appeared, like a spirit a little late for its cue, and said, 'I beg your pardon, sir, for interrupting you, but there's a ship topsails up three points on the starboard bow.'

  In all this golden voyage they had seen almost nothing on the open sea, apart from a few caiques in Greek waters and a transport on her passage from Sicily to Malta, so when at length the newcomer had come close enough for her topsails. and a hint of her courses to be seen from the deck, she was stared at with an even greater intensity than usual. The Sophie had cleared the Sicilian Channel that morning and she was steering west-north-west, with Cape Teulada in Sardinia bearing north by east twenty-three leagues, a moderate breeze at north-east, and only some two hundred and fifty miles of sea between her and Port Mahon. The stranger appeared to be steering west-south-west or something south, as though for Gibraltar or perhaps Oran, and she bore north-west by north from the sloop. These courses, if persisted in, would intersect; but at present there was no telling which would cross the other's wake.

  A detached observer would have seen the Sophie heel slightly as all her people gathered along her starboard side, would have noticed the excited talk die away on the fo'c'sle and would have smiled to see two-thirds of the crew and all the officers simultaneously purse their lips as the distant ship set her topgallants. That meant she was almost certainly a man-of-war; almost certainly a frigate, if not a ship of the line. And those topgallants had not been sheeted home in a very seamanlike way – scarcely as the Royal Navy would have liked it.