Master and Commander

by Patrick O'Brian

  An air of surly virtue hung over the Sophie as she made her tedious, frustrating way south and west towards her cruising-ground through calms, uncertain breezes and headwinds—winds that grew so perverse once they had made their offing that the little Ayre Island beyond the eastern point of Minorca hung obstinately on the northern horizon, sometimes larger, sometimes smaller, but always there.

  Thursday, and all hands were piped to witness punishment. The two watches stood on either side of the main-deck, with the cutter and the launch towing behind to make more room; the marines were lined up with their usual precision from number three gun aft; and the little quarter-deck was crowded with the officers.

  'Mr Ricketts, where is your dirk?' said James Dillon sharply.

  'Forgot it, sir. Beg pardon, sir,' whispered the midshipman.

  'Put it on at once, and don't you presume to come on deck improperly dressed.'

  Young Ricketts cast a guilty look at his captain as he darted below, and he read nothing but confirmation on Jack's frowning visage. Indeed, Jack's views were identical with Dillon's: these wretched men were going to be flogged and it was their right to have it done with due ceremony—all hands gravely present, the officers with their gold-laced hats and swords, the drummer there to beat a roll.

  Henry Andrews, the ship's corporal, brought up his charges one by one: John Harden, Joseph Bussell, Thomas Cross, Timothy Bryant, Isaac Isaacs, Peter Edwards and John Surel, all accused of drunkenness. No one had anything to say for them: not one had anything to say for himself. 'A dozen apiece,' said Jack. 'And if there were any justice on earth you would have two dozen, Cross. A responsible fellow like you—a gunner's mate—for shame.'

  It was the Sophie's custom to flog at the capstan, not at a grating: the men came gloomily forward, slowly stripped off their shirts and adapted themselves to the squat cylinder; and the bosun's mates, John Bell and John Morgan, tied their wrists on the far side, more for the form than anything else. Then John Bell stood clear, swinging his cat easily in his right hand, with his eye on Jack. Jack nodded and said, 'Carry on.'

  'One,' said the bosun solemnly, as the nine knotted cords sighed through the air and clapped against the seaman's tense bare back. 'Two. Three. Four . . .'

  So it went on; and once again Jack's cold, accustomed eye noticed how cleverly the bosun's mate set the knotted ends lashing against the capstan itself, yet without giving any appearance of favouring his shipmate. 'It's very well,' he reflected, 'but either they are getting into the spirit-room or some son of a bitch has brought a store of liquor aboard. If I could find him, I should have a proper grating rigged, and there would be none of this hocus-pocus. This amount of drunkenness was more than was right: seven in one day. It was nothing to do with the men's lurid joys ashore, for that was all over—no more than a memory; and as for the paralytic state of the seamen awash in the scuppers as the sloop stood out, that was forgotten too—put down to the easy ways of port, to relaxed harbour discipline, and never held against them. This was something else. Only yesterday he had hesitated about exercising the guns after dinner, because of the number of men he suspected of having had too much: it was so easy for a tipsy fool to get his foot under a recoiling carriage or his face in front of a muzzle. And in the end he had had them merely run in and out, without firing.

  Different ships had different traditions about calling out: the old Sophies kept mum, but Edwards (one of the new men) had been drafted from the King's Fisher, where they did not, and he uttered a great howling Oh at the first stroke, which so disturbed the young bosun's mate that the next two or three wavered uncertainly in the air.

  'Come now, John Bell,' said the bosun reproachfully, not from any sort of malignance towards Edwards, whom he regarded with the placid impartiality of a butcher weighing up a lamb, but because a job of work had to be done proper; and the rest of the flogging did at least give Edwards some excuse for his shattering crescendo. Shattering, that is to say, to poor John Surel, a meagre little quota-man from Exeter, who had never been beaten before and who now added the crime of incontinence to that of drunkenness; but he was flogged, for all that, in great squalor, weeping and roaring most pitifully, as the flustered Bell laid into him hard and fast, to get it over quickly.

  'How utterly barbarous this would seem to a spectator that was not habituated to it,' reflected Stephen. 'And how little it matters to those that are. Though that child does appear concerned.' Babbington was indeed looking a little pale and anxious as the unseemly business came to an end, with the moaning Surel handed over to his shamefaced messmates and hurried away.

  But how transient was this young gentleman's pallor and anxiety! Not ten minutes after the swabber had removed all traces of the scene, Babbington was flying about the upper rigging in pursuit of Ricketts, with the clerk toiling with laborious, careful delight a great way behind.

  'Who is that skylarking?' asked Jack, seeing vague forms through the thin canvas of the main royal. 'The boys?'

  'The young gentlemen, your honour,' said the quartermaster.

  'That reminds me,' said Jack. 'I want to see them.'

  Not long after this the pallor and the anxiety were back again, and with good reason. The midshipmen were supposed to take noon observations to work out the vessel's position, which they were to write on a piece of paper. These pieces of paper were called the young gentlemen's workings and they were delivered to the captain by the marine sentry,with the words, 'The young gentlemen's workings, sir'; to which Captain Allen (an indolent, easy-going man) had been accustomed to reply, '—the young gentlemen's workings', and toss them out of the window.

  Hitherto, Jack had been too busy working up his crew to pay much attention to the education of his midshipmen, but he had looked at yesterday's slips and they, with a very suspicious unanimity, had shown the Sophie in 39°21'N, which was fair enough, but also in a longitude that she could only have reached by cleaving the mountain-range behind Valencia to a depth of thirty-seven miles.

  'What do you mean by sending me this nonsense?' he asked them. It was not really an answerable question; nor were many of the others that he propounded, and they did not, in fact, attempt to answer them; but they agreed that they were not there to amuse themselves, nor for their manly beauty, but rather to learn their professions; that their journals (which they fetched) were neither accurate, full, nor up to date, and that the ship's cat would have written them better; that they would for the future pay the greatest attention to Mr Marshall's observation and reckoning; that they would prick the chart daily with him; and that no man was fit to pass for a lieutenant, let alone bear any command ('May God forgive me,' said Jack, in an internal aside) who could not instantly tell the position of his ship to within a minute—nay, to within thirty seconds. Furthermore, they would show up their journals every Sunday, cleanly and legibly written.

  'You can write decently, I suppose? Otherwise you must go to school to the clerk.' They hoped so, sir, they were sure; they should do their best. But he did not seem convinced and desired them to sit down on that locker, take those pens and these sheets of paper, to pass him yonder book, which would answer admirably for them to be read to out of from.

  This was how it came about that Stephen, pausing in the quietness of his sick-bay to reflect upon the case of the patient whose pulse beat weak and thin beneath his fingers, heard Jack's voice, unnaturally slow, grave and terrible, come wafting down the wind-sail that brought fresh air below. 'The quarter-deck of a man-of-war may justly be considered as a national school for the instruction of a numerous portion of our youth; there it is that they acquire a habit of discipline and become instructed in all the interesting minutiae of the service. Punctuality, cleanliness, diligence and dispatch are regularly inculcated, and such a habit of sobriety and even of self-denial acquired, that cannot fail to prove highly useful. By learning to obey, they are also taught how to command.

  'Well, well, well,' said Stephen to himself, and then turned his mind entirely back to the poor, wa
sted, hare-lipped creature in the hammock beside him, a recent landman belonging to the starboard watch. 'How old may you be, Cheslin?' he asked.

  'Oh, I can't tell you, sir,' said Cheslin with a ghost of impatience in his apathy. 'I reckon I might be about thirty, like.' A long pause. 'I was fifteen when my old father died; and I could count the harvests back, if I put my mind to it. But I can't put my mind to it, sir.'

  'No. Listen, Cheslin: you will grow very ill if you do not eat. I will order you some soup, and you must get it down.'

  'Thank you, sir, I'm sure. But there's no relish to my meat; and I doubt they would let me have it, any gate.'

  'Why did you tell them your calling?'

  Cheslin made no reply for a while, but stared dully. 'I dare say I was drunk. 'Tis mortal strong, that grog of theirn. But I never thought they would be so a-dread. Though to be sure the folk over to Carborough and the country beyond, they don't quite like to name it, either.'

  At this moment hands were piped to dinner, and the berth-deck, the long space behind the canvas screen that Stephen had had set up to protect the sick-bay a little, was filled with a tumult of hungry men. An orderly tumult, however: each mess of eight men darted to its particular place, hanging tables appeared, dropping instantly from the beams, wooden kids filled with salt pork (another proof that it was Thursday) and peas came from the galley, and the grog, which Mr Pullings had just mixed at the scuttle-butt by the mainmast, was carried religiously below, everyone skipping out of its way, lest a drop should fall.

  A lane instantly formed in front of Stephen, and he passed through with smiling faces and kind looks on either side of him; he noticed some of the men whose backs he had oiled earlier that morning looked remarkably cheerful, particularly Edwards, for he, being black, had a smile that flashed far whiter in the gloom; attentive hands tweaked a bench out of his way, and a ship's boy was slewed violently round on his axis and desired 'not to turn his back on the Doctor—where were his fucking manners?' Kind creatures; such good-natured faces; but they were killing Cheslin.

  'I have a curious case in the sick-bay,' he said to James, as they sat digesting figgy-dowdy with the help of a glass of port. 'He is dying of inanition; or will, unless I can stir his torpor.'

  'What is his name?'

  'Cheslin: he has a hare lip.'

  'I know him. A waister—starboard watch—no good to man or beast.'

  'Ah? Yet he has been of singular service to men and women, in his time.'

  'In what way?'

  'He was a sin-eater.'

  'Christ.'

  'You have spilt your port.'

  'Will you tell me about him?' asked James, mopping at the stream of wine.

  'Why, it was much the same as with us. When a man died Cheslin would be sent for; there would be a piece of bread on the dead man's breast; he would eat it, taking the sins upon himself. Then they would push a silver piece into his hand and thrust him out of the house, spitting on him and throwing stones as he ran away.'

  'I thought it was only a tale, nowadays,' said James.

  'No, no. It's common enough, under the silence. But it seems that the seamen look upon it in a more awful light than other people. He let it out and they all turned against him immediately. His mess expelled him; the others will not speak to him, nor allow him to eat or sleep anywhere near them. There is nothing physically wrong with him, yet he will die in about a week unless I can do something.'

  'You want to have him seized up at the gangway and given a hundred lashes, Doctor,' called the purser from the cabin where he was casting his accounts. 'When I was in a Guineaman, between the wars, there was a certain sorts of blacks called Whydaws, or Whydoos, that used to die by the dozen in the Middle Passage, out of mere despair at being taken away from their country and their friends. We used to save a good many by touching them up with a horse-whip in the mornings. But it would be no kindness to preserve that chap, Doctor: the people would only smother him or scrag him or shove him overboard in the end. They will abide a great deal, sailors, but not a Jonah. It's like a white crow—the others peck him to death. Or an albatross. You catch an albatross—it's easy, with a line—and paint a red cross on his bosom, and the others will tear him to pieces before the glass is turned. Many's the good laugh we had with them, off the Cape. But the hands will never let that fellow mess with them, not if the commission lasts for fifty years: ain't that so, Mr Dillon?'

  'Never,' said James. 'Why in God's name did he ever come into the Navy? He was a volunteer, not a pressed man.'

  'I conceive he was tired of being a white crow,' said Stephen. 'But I will not lose a patient because of sailors' prejudices. He must be put to lie out of reach of their malignance, and if he recovers he shall be my loblolly boy, an isolated employment. So much so, indeed, that the present lad—'

  'I beg your pardon, sir, but Captain's compliments and would you like to see something amazingly philosophical?' cried Babbington, darting in like a ball.

  After the dimness of the gun-room the white blaze on deck made it almost impossible to see, but through his narrowed eyelids Stephen could distinguish Old Sponge, the taller Greek, standing naked in a pool of water by the starboard hances, dripping still and holding out a piece of copper sheathing with great complacency. On his right stood Jack, his hands behind him and a look of happy triumph on his face: on his left most of the watch, craning and staring. The Greek held the corroded copper sheet out a little farther and, watching Stephen's face intently, he turned it slowly over. On the other side there, was a small dark fish with a sucker on the back of its head, clinging fast to the metal.

  'A remora!' cried Stephen with all the amazement and delight the Greek and Jack had counted upon, and more. 'A bucket, there! Be gentle with the remora, good Sponge, honest Sponge. Oh, what happiness to see the true remora!' Old Sponge and Young Sponge had been over the side in this flat calm, scraping away the weed that slowed the Sophie's pace: in the clear water they could be seen creeping along ropes weighed down with nets of shot, holding their breath for two minutes at a time, and sometimes diving right under the keel and coming up the other side from lightness of heart. But it was only now that Old Sponge's accustomed eye had detected their sly common enemy hiding under the garboard-strake. The remora was so strong it had certainly torn the sheathing off, they explained to him; but that was nothing—it was so strong it could hold the sloop motionless, or almost motionless, in a brisk gale! But now they had him—there was an end to his capers now, the dog—and now the Sophie would run along like a swan. For a moment Stephen felt inclined to argue, to appeal to their common sense, to point to the nine-inch fish, to the exiguity of its fins; but he was too wise, and too happy, to yield to this temptation, and he jealously carried the bucket down to his cabin, to commune with the remora in peace.

  And he was too much of a philosopher to feel much vexation a little later when a pretty breeze reached them, coming in over the rippling sea just abaft the larboard beam, so that the Sophie (released from the wicked remora) heeled over in a smooth, steady run that carried her along at seven knots until sunset, when the mast-head cried, 'Land ho! Land on the starboard bow.'

  Chapter Seven

  The land in question was Cape Nao, the southern limit of their cruising ground: it stood up there against the western horizon, a dark certainty, hard in the vagueness along the rim of the sky.

  'A very fine landfall, Mr Marshall,' said Jack, coming down from the top, where he had been scrutinizing the cape through his glass. 'The Astronomer Royal could not have done better.'

  'Thank you, sir, thank you,' said the master, who had indeed taken a most painstaking series of lunars, as well as the usual observations, to fix the sloop's position. 'Very happy to—approbation—' His vocabulary failed him, and he finished by jerking his head and clasping his hands by way of expression. It was curious to see this burly fellow—a hard-faced, formidable man—moved by a feeling that called for a gentle, graceful outlet; and more than one of the hands exchanged a
knowing glance with a shipmate. But Jack had no notion of this whatsoever—he had always attributed Mr Marshall's painstaking, scrupulous navigation and his zeal as an executive officer to natural goodness, to his nautical character; and in any case his mind was now quite taken up with the idea of exercising the guns in the darkness. They were far enough from the land to be unheard, with the wind wafting across; and although there had been a great improvement in the Sophie's gunnery he could not rest easy without some daily approach to perfection. 'Mr Dillon,' he said, 'I could wish the starboard watch to fire against the larboard watch in the darkness. Yes, I know,' he went on, dealing with the objection on his lieutenant's lengthening face, 'but if the exercise is carried on from light into darkness, even the poorest crews will not get under their guns or fling themselves over the side. So we will make ready a couple of casks, if you please, for the daylight exercise, and another couple, with a lantern, or a flambeau, or something of that kind, for the night.'

  Since the first time he had watched a repetition of the exercise (what a great while since it seemed), Stephen had tended to avoid the performance; he disliked the report of the guns, the smell of the powder, the likelihood of painful injury to the men and the certainty of a sky emptied of birds, so he spent his time below, reading with half an ear cocked for the sound of an accident—so easy for something to go wrong, with a briskly-moving gun on a rolling, pitching deck. This evening, however, he came up, ignorant of the approaching din, meaning to go forward to the elm-tree pump—the elm-tree pump, whose head the devoted seamen unshipped for him twice a day—to take advantage of the sloping light as it lit up the under-parts of the brig; and Jack said, 'Why, there you are, Doctor. You have come on deck to see what progress we have made, no doubt. It is a charming sight, is it not, to see the great guns fire? And tonight you will see them in the dark, which is even finer. Lord, you should have seen the Nile! And heard it! How happy you would have been!'