Book 3 - H.M.S. Surprise

by Patrick O'Brian

  Five days of variable winds and light airs, warmer by far, in which the Surprise sent up her topgallant masts for the first time in weeks, and then on a temperate, moonlit night, when Stephen was sitting by the taffrail with Mr White, watching him draw the fascinating pattern of the rigging—black shadows on the ghostly deck, pools of darkness—a waft heeled the ship, upsetting the Indian ink, and the phosphorescent water streamed along her larboard side. The heel increased: the hissing bubbles rose to a continual song.

  'If this is not the blessed trade,' said Pullings, 'I am a Dutchman.'

  No Dutchman he. It was the true south-east trade, gentle but sure, hardly varying a point. The Surprise set a noble spread of canvas and glided on for the tropic line: the days grew warmer and warmer; the hands recovered from their battle with the Cape, and now there was singing on the forecastle, and the sound of the hornpipe called The Surprise's Delight. But there was no heaving to for any thought of a swim this bout, even when they were so far beyond Capricorn once more that jack said, 'We shall raise St Helena in the morning.'

  'Shall we touch?' asked Stephen.

  'Oh no,' said he.

  'Not even for a dozen bullocks? Are not you tired of junk?'

  'Not I. And if you think there is any device, any ruse, that can take you ashore to collect bugs, pray think again.'

  And there in the brilliant dawn a black point broke the horizon, a black point with a cloud floating over it. Presently it showed clearer still, and Pullings pointed out the principal charms of the island: Holdfast Tom, Stone Top, and Old Joan Point—he had landed several times, and he did wish he could show the Doctor the bird that haunted Diana's Peak, a cross between an owl and a poll-parrot, with a curious bill.

  The frigate made her number to the tall signal-station and asked, 'Are there orders for Surprise? Is there any mail?'

  'No orders for Surprise,' said the signal-station, and paused for a quarter of an hour. 'No mail,' it said at last. 'Repeat: no orders, no letters for Surprise.'

  'Pray ask if the Lushington has passed by,' said Stephen.

  'Lushington called: left for Madeira seventh instant: all well aboard,' said the station.

  'Bear up,' said Jack, and the frigate filled and stood on. 'Muffit must have been lucky round the Cape. He will beat us to the Lizard, and make his voyage in under six months. Did he risk the Mozambique Channel, the dog?'

  Another dawn, of the exquisite purity that is frightening—the perfection must break and fade. This time it was the cry of a sail that brought all hands tumbling up faster than a bosun's pipe. She was standing southwards on the opposite tack: a man-of-war, in all probability. Half an hour later it was certain that she was a frigate, and that she was edging down: All hands stood by to clear for action, and the Surprise made the private signal. She replied, together with her number: Lachesis. The tension died away, to be replaced by a pleasant expectancy. 'We shall have some news at last,' said Jack; but as he spoke another hoist broke out, 'Charged with despatches,' and she hauled her wind. She might not heave to, not even for an admiral.

  'Ask her if she has any mail,' said Jack; and with his glass to his eye he read the answer before the signal-midshipman: 'No mail for Surprise.'

  'Well, be damned to you for a slab-sided tub,' he said as they drew rapidly apart: and at dinner he said, 'You know what it is, Stephen, I wish we did not have that parson aboard. White is a very good fellow; nothing against him personally; I like him, and should be happy to serve with him in any way, ashore. But at sea it is always reckoned bad luck to carry parsons. I am not in the least superstitious myself, as you know, but makes the hands uneasy. I would not have a chaplain in any ship of mine if I could help it. Besides, they are out of place in a man-of-war: it is their duty to tell us to turn the other cheek, and it don't answer, not in action. I did not care for that ill-looking bird that crossed our bows, either.'

  'It was only a common booby—from Ascension, no doubt. This grog is the vilest brew, even with my cochineal and ginger in it: how I long for wine again . . . a good full-bodied red. Will I tell you something? The more I know of the Navy, the more I am astonished that men of a liberal education should be so weak as to believe in bugaboos. In spite of your eagerness to be home, you declined sailing on a Friday, with your very pitiful excuse about the capstan. You will advance the plea that it is for the sake of the men; and to that I will reply, ha, ha.'

  'You may say what you please, but these things work: I could tell you tales that would raise the wig off your head.'

  'All your sea-omens are omens of disaster; and of course, with man in his present unhappy state, huddled together in numbers far too great and spending all his surplus time and treasure in beating out his brother's brains, any gloomy foreboding is likely to be fulfilled; but your corpse, your parson, your St Elmo's fire is not the cause of the tragedy.'

  Jack shook his head, unconvinced; and after chewing on his wooden beef for some time he said, 'As for your liberal education, I, too, can say ha, ha. We sailors are hardly educated at all. The only way to make a sea-officer is to send him to sea, and to send him young. I have been afloat, more or less, since I was twelve; and most of my friends never went much beyond the dame's school. All we know is our profession, if indeed we know that—I should have tried the Mozambique channel. No: we are not the sort of men that educated, intelligent, well-brought-up young women cross a thousand miles of sea for. They like us well enough ashore, and are kind, and say Good old Tarpaulin when there is a victory. But they don't marry us, not unless they do it right away—not unless we board them in our own smoke. Given time to reflect, as often as not they marry parsons, or clever chaps at the bar.'

  'Why, as to that, Jack, you undervalue Sophie: to love her is a liberal education in itself. Of course you are an educated man, in that sense. Besides, lawyers make notoriously bad husbands, from their habit of incessant prating; whereas your sailor has been schooled to mute obedience,' said Stephen; and to divert the sad current of Jack's mind he added, 'Giraldus Cambrensis asserts, that the inhabitants of Ossory can change into wolves at their pleasure.'

  Back with his cryptogams his conscience troubled him: he had been so steadily fixed upon his own pursuit—the hope of Madeira, the certainty of London—that he had paid little attention to Jack's anxiety, an anxiety that, like his own, had been growing as the vague charming future became more sharply defined, more nearly the decisive present. He, too, was oppressed by a feeling that this great happiness of travelling month after month towards a splendid end was soon to be broken: a sense not indeed of impending disaster but rather of some uneasiness that he could not well define.

  'That was the unluckiest stroke,' he said, thinking of Jack's they many parsons. 'Absit, o absit omen,' for the deepest of his private superstitions, or ancestral pieties, was naming calls.

  He found the chaplain alone in the gun-room, setting up a problem on the chess-board, 'Pray, Mr White,' he said, 'among the gentlemen of your cloth, have you ever met a Mr Hincksey?'

  'Mr Charles Hincksey?' asked the chaplain, with a civil inclination of his head.

  'Just so. Mr Charles Hincksey.'

  'Yes. I know Charles Hincksey well. We were at Magdalen together: we used to play fives, and walk great distances. A delightful companion—no striving, no competition—and he was very well liked in the university: I was proud to know him. An excellent Grecian, too, and well-connected; so well-connected that he has two livings now, both of them in Kent, the one as fat as any in the county and the other capable of improvement. And yet, you know, I do not believe any of us grudged or envied him, even the men without benefices. He is a good, sound preacher, in the plain, unenthusiastic way: I dare say he will be a bishop soon; and so much the better for our church.'

  'Has the gentleman no faults?'

  'I dare say he has,' said Mr White, 'though upon my honour I cannot call any to mind. But even if he were another Chartres I am sure people would still like him. He is one of your tall, handsome fellows, not at
all witty or alarming, but always good company. How he has escaped marriage until now I cannot tell: the number of caps set in his direction would furnish a warehouse. He is not at all averse to the state, I know; but I dare say he is hard to please.'

  Now the days flew by: each was long in itself, but how quickly they formed a week, a fortnight! The baffling winds and calms of the outward voyage restored the average by sweeping the ship northwards across the line and up into the trades with hardly a pause, and presently the peak of Tenerife lay there on the starboard beam, a gleaming triangle under its private cloud, nearly a hundred miles away.

  The first consuming eagerness to reach Madeira was in no way diminished; never for a moment did Jack cease driving the fragile ship with a spread of sail just this side of recklessness; but in both Aubrey and Maturin there was this increasing tension, dread of the event combining with the delight.

  The island loomed up in the north against a menacing sky; before sunset it vanished in rain, a steady downpour from low cloud that washed runnels in the new paint on the frigate's sides; and in the morning there was Funchal road, filled with shipping, and the white town brilliant behind it in the sparkling air. A frigate, the Amphion; the Badger sloop of war; several Portuguese; an American; innumerable tenders, fishermen and small craft; and at the far end, three Indiamen with their super yards on deck. The Lushington was not among them.

  'Carry on, Mr Hales,' said Jack; the guns saluted the castle, and the castle thundered back, the smoke rolling wide over the bay.

  'For'ard there. Let go.' The anchor splashed into the sea and the cable raced after it; but before the anchor could bite and swing the ship, there was the boom of guns again. Jack looked for a newcomer, staring seawards, before he realised that the Indiamen were saluting the Surprise. The Lushington must have told them of the brush with Linois, and they were pleased.

  'Give them seven, Mr Hales,' he said. 'Lower down the barge.'

  Stephen was to go down the side first. He hesitated in the gangway, and Bonden, taking it for a physical uncertainty, whispered, 'Easy does it, sir. Give me your foot.'

  Jack followed him to the sound of bosun's pipes, and they rowed ashore, sitting side by side in their best uniforms, facing the bargemen, all shaved, all in white frocks, wearing broad white hats with long ribbons bearing the name Surprise. The only words Jack spoke were 'Stretch out.'

  They went straight to their agent's correspondent, a Madeira Englishman. 'Welcome, sir,' cried he. 'As soon as I heard the Indiamen I know it must be you. Mr Muffit was in last week, and he told us about your noble action. Allow me to wish you joy, sir, and to shake you by the hand.'

  'Thank you, Mr Henderson. Tell me, is there any young lady in the island for me, brought either by a King's ship or an Indiaman?'

  'Young lady, sir? No, not that I know of. Certainly not in any King's ship. But the Indiamen only got in on Monday, cruelly mauled in the Bay, she might still be in one of them. Here are their passenger-lists.'

  Jack's eyes raced down the names, and instantly they fixed on Mrs Villiers. 'Two lines farther down Mr Johnstone. 'But this is the Lushington's,' he cried.

  'So it is,' said the agent. 'The others are overleaf—Mornington, Bombay Castle and Clive.'

  Twice Jack ran through them, and a third time slowly: there was no Miss Williams.

  'Is there any mail?' he asked in a flat voice.

  'Oh no, sir. Nobody would have looked for Surprise at the Island these many months yet. They would not even know you had sailed, at home. I dare say your mail is aboard Bellerophon, with the last convoy down. But now I come to think on it, there was a message left in the office for a Dr Maturin, belonging to the Surprise; left by a lady from the Lushington. Here it is.'

  'My name is Maturin,' said Stephen. He recognised the hand, of course, and through the envelope he felt the ring. He said, 'Jack, I shall take a turn. Good day to you, sir.'

  He walked steadily uphill wherever the path mounted, and in time he climbed through the small fields of sugar-cane, through the orchards, through the terraced vineyards, and to the chestnut forest. Up through the trees until they died away to scrub and the scrub to a parched meagre vegetation; and so, beyond all paths now, to the naked volcanic scree lying in falls beneath the central ridge of the island. There was a little sleety snow lying in the shadows up here, and he scooped handfuls of it to eat; he had wept and sweated all the water out of his body; his mouth and throat were as dry and cracked as the barren rock he sat on.

  He had walked himself into a dull apathy of mind, and although his cheeks were still wet—the wind blew cold upon them—he was beyond the immediate pain. Below there stretched a tormented landscape, sterile for a great way, then wooded; minute fields beyond, a few villages, and then the whole south sea-line of the island, with Funchal under his right hand; the shipping like white flecks; and beyond, the ocean rising to meet the sky. He looked at it all with a certain residual interest. Behind the great headland westwards lay the Camara de Lobos: seals were said to breed there.

  The sun was no more than a handsbreadth above the horizon, and in the innumerable ravines the shadow reached from rim to rim, almost as dark as night. 'To get down—that will be a problem,' he said aloud. 'Any man can go up—oh, almost indefinitely—but to go down and down surefooted, that is another thing entirely.' It was his duty to read the letter, of course, and in the last gleam of day he took it from his pocket: the tearing of the paper—a cruel sound. He read it with a hard, cruel severity; yet he could not prevent a kind of desperate tenderness creeping over his face at the end. But it would not do—weakness would never do—and with the same appearance of indifference he looked about for a hollow in the rocks where he could lie.

  Toward the setting of the moon his twitching exhausted body relaxed and sank into the darkness at last: some hours of dead sleep—a total absence. The circling sun, having lit Calcutta and then Bombay, came up on the other side of the world and blazed full on his upturned face, bringing him back into himself by force. He was still dazed with sleep when he sat up and although he was conscious of an extreme pain he could not immediately name it. The dislocated elements of memory fell back into place: he nodded, buried the ancient small iron ring that he had still clasped in his hand—the letter had blown away—and found a last patch of snow to rub his face.

  He was at the foot of the mountain by the afternoon, and as he was walking through Funchal he met Jack in the cathedral square.

  'I hope I have not kept you?' he said.

  'No. Not at all,' said Jack, taking him by the elbow. 'We are watering. Come and drink a glass of wine.'

  They sat down, too heavy and stupid to be embarrassed. Stephen said, 'I must tell you this: Diana has gone to America with a Mr Johnstone, of Virginia: they are to be married. She was under no engagement to me—it was only her kindness to me in Calcutta that let my mind run too far: my wits were astray. I am in no way aggrieved; I drink to her.'

  They finished their bottle, and another; but it had no effect of any kind, and they rowed back to the ship as silently as they had come.

  Her water completed and fresh provision brought a-board, the Surprise weighed and stood out to sea, going east about the island and heading into a dirty night. The gaiety forward contrasted strangely with the silence farther aft: as Bonden remarked, the ship 'seemed by the stern'. The men knew that something was amiss with the skipper, they had not sailed so long with him without being able to interpret the look on his face, the captain of a man-of-war being an absolute monarch at sea, dispensing sunshine or rain. And they were concerned for the Doctor, too, who looked but palely; yet the general opinion was that they had both eaten some foreign mess ashore—that they would be better in a day or two, with a thundering dose of rhubarb—and seeing that no rough words came from the quarterdeck they sang and laughed as they won the anchor and made sail, in tearing high spirits; for this was the last leg and they had a fair wind for the Lizard. Wives and sweethearts and paying off—Fiddler's Green in sig
ht at last!

  The heaviness in the cabin was not a gloom, but rather a weary turning back to common life, to a commonplace life without much meaning in it—certainly no brilliant colour. Stephen checked the sick-bay and had a long session with M'Allister over their books; in a week or so the ship would be paid off, and they would have to pass their accounts, justifying upon oath the expenditure of every drachm and scruple of their drugs and comforts for the last eighteen months, and M'Alister had a morbidly tender conscience. Left to himself, Stephen looked at his private stock of laudanum, his bottled fortitude: at one time he had made great use of it, up to four thousand drops a day, but now he did not even draw the cork. There was no longer any need for fortitude: he felt nothing at present and there was no point in artificial ataraxy. He went to sleep sitting in his chair, slept through the exercising of the guns and far into the middle watch. Waking abruptly he found light coming under his door from the great cabin, and there he found Jack, still up, reading over his remarks for the Admiralty hydrographer: innumerable soundings, draughts of the coastline, cross-bearings; valuable, conscientious observations. He had become a scientific sailor.

  'Jack,' he said abruptly, 'I have been thinking about Sophie. I thought about her on the mountain. And it occurs to me—the simplest thing: why did we not think of it before?—that there is no certainty whatsoever about the courier. So many, many miles overland, through wild countries and desert; and in any case the news of Canning's death must have travelled fast. It may have overtaken the courier; it must certainly have affected Canning's associates and their designs; there is every reason to believe that your message never reached her.'