Desolation island

by Patrick O'Brian

  Mr Jay's mission and then to another in St Petersburg, where he may yet remain. Has published a comedy, The Distressed Lovers, under the name of John Doe, and a volume of poems, Thoughts on Liberty, by a Lady. Why, why did Blaine not find me copies? Nothing betrays a man like his book. Means of support unknown: irregular remittances from Philadelphia: considered an unsound risk by Morgan and Levy and the principal London money-lenders: presumably combines the higher prostitution with intelligence."

  A more than usually thunderous din made his ink-horn tremble. He thrust his balls of wax still deeper into his ears, but it was no use. The Leopard's last boat-loads of water were coming aboard, the great casks plunging from the main-hatch into her bowels and there rolling to their place, growling as they went, ton after ton ranged in the echoing hold, bung up and bilge free. At the same time her people prepared to unmoor, and shortly after the last boat had been hoisted in, her eighteen-inch cables began to fill the tiers, bringing with them a great deal of water and the distinctive smell of Porto Praya ooze, which at least made a change in the stagnant fetor of the orlop. Few naval operations are carried out in silence, and now the tierers worked with a rhythmic howl, interspersed with oaths, while the fifer on the capstan-head blew with all his might, and the hands at the bar were encouraged to 'stamp and go, stamp and go' by men with brazen lungs: orders echoed from the quarterdeck and the forecastle, and above all an enormous voice cried passionately, "Will you light along those - nippers, there?" There was indeed far more noise than usual, since all Jack's care had not kept the hands from the distillery; and while many of them were partly dazed, others were so elevated that they grew jocose, tripping their mates, adopting antic postures, affecting lameness or even palsy, and laughing immoderately.

  Yet eventually the clamour died away, and when

  Stephen came on deck he found all the visible Leopards but six busy coiling down, fishing the anchors, and clearing away: the six lay in the lee gangway, and a swabber phlegmatically directed a hose upon them, while his companions worked the head-pump. The sober Leopards had made sail; the topgallants had been sheets home an hour ago and the little town was far astern: overhead white clouds moved steadily south-west across a deep blue sky; the air was warm but brisk, most gratefully fresh after the sheltered anchorage; and as he gazed about he saw the first tropic-bird of their voyage, gleaming white in the sun: the yellow-billed tropic-bird, clipping fast away to the south with strong quick strokes, its long tall stiff behind. He watched it out of sight, and walked forward to the convicts' sickbay.

  It smelt strongly of the vinegar with which he had had it washed; the fresh white paint made it fairly light; it was as clean as the swabber's art could make it; and pure sea-air came down through the windsail. The patients were still much the same: three men in a low fever, with grave prostration, a weak thready intermittent pulse, fetid breath, severe headache, contracted pupils. The same disease was on all three: but what disease? Its course was following no description that he or Martin or the Phoebe's two surgeons had ever read. Yet as he leant over them, watching intently, he felt that the fever would soon declare itself, that the crisis was not far distant, and that in a little while he would not only know his enemy but have the power of bringing all his allies into action. "Carry on with the slime-draughts, Soames,"he said to the attendant, and stepped aft to the other bay. The only man there, apart from Herapath, was his old shipmate Jackruski, a Pole, in a deep alcoholic coma once again. "How their bodies stand it," he said, "I cannot tell. I can but suppose that sea-air, one solid meal a day, more or less continual damp, heavy labour, no more than four hours of uninterrupted sleep at a time, and that taken in such a-tight-packed crowd of

  unwashed sweating bodies as would be thought severe in a Dublin doss-house, must be what the human frame in fact requires to keep it thoroughly robust; and that our notions of hygiene are quite fallacious. Herapath, how do you do?"

  "Far better, sir, I thank you," said Herapath.

  Stephen peered into his eyes, felt his head and took his pulse, and said, "Show me your hands. Still more raw flesh than undamaged skin, I see. You will have to wear mittens, when you hale upon a rope again: canvas mittens, until the horny integument shall have had time to grow. Will you take off your shirt, now? You are strangely emaciated, Herapath, and must put on some flesh before you return to your labours: our diet may not be delicate, but it is wholesome, and as you see, men may thrive with nothing else. It will never do, to be over-nice. A proud stomach will not answer, Herapath."

  "No, sir," said Herapath, and he murmured something about 'biscuit excellent - he ate any amount of biscuit, when off duty' before saying, "Might I beg you to advise me, sir?" Stephen gave him a questioning, noncommittal look, and he went on, "I should like to thank the Captain for taking me from the water. But I do not know whether I should address him through my immediate superior, nor whether it would be proper at all - I am at a loss."

  "In service matters, the first lieutenant, Mr Pullings, would be the intermediary, I believe: yet since your relationship with the Captain was in the ocean, rather than aboard, and was therefore that of one private person with another, it seems to me that a direct acknowledgement on your part would be perfectly proper. And if, as I suppose, that note is intended for the Captain, I will undertake to be your messenger."

  Carrying the note, Stephen unlocked Mrs Wogan, and, roaring above the din of the carpenter's crew nailing sheet-tin to the outside of her cabin, stated that if she were at leisure, he proposed attending her to the poop. He noticed that she looked less composed than usual, and that

  there was a singular tension on the silent quarterdeck as they made their way across it. A small awning had been rigged for her, and as its shade fell amidships, there she took her paces walking round and round the cabin skylight. After a while she said hesitantly, "I hope your patient is doing well, sir?"

  "Which patient, ma'am?"

  "The young man with long curling hair; the young man the Captain saved so heroically when he fell into the sea."

  "Young Icarus? I never noticed that his hair curled. Oh, he comes along, sure: only a few ribs stove, and what are a few ribs? We all have four and twenty, whatever Genesis may say. We shall pull him through this awkward pass; but sometimes I fear that we shall do so only to see him deperish from mere inanition and want of nourishment - such a waste of all our effort. That reminds me, I have a note from him to the Captain. Pray forgive me."

  Ile walked down the poop ladder to the cabin door, but there the Marine sentry stopped him: only Captain Moore could be received at present. Ile returned in time to point out another tropic-bird, and he was speaking with somewarmth of their nesting-habits when below them the sentry clashed his musket, opened the door, and cried, "Captain Moore, sir."

  "Captain Moore," said Jack, "I have sent for you because it has come to my knowledge that certain officers have seen fit to disobey my express orders, and to attempt to enter into communication with the female prisoner abaft the cable-tiers."

  Moore's face flushed as red as his coat and then turned whitey-yellow. "Sir," he said.

  "You are aware of the consequences of disobedience to orders, Captain Moore, I believe . . . "

  "Perhaps we had better move away," said Mrs Wogan. But it was no use: Jack Aubrey's strong voice, though inaudible on the quarterdeck because of the intervening sleeping and dining cabins, came up through the skylight

  and pervaded the whole poop.

  furthermore," the awful voice went on, "one of your subalterns has endeavoured to bribe the armourer to make him a key to her cabin."

  "Oh!" cried Mrs Wogan.

  if this criminal state of affairs is the result of one month's sailing with that infernal woman, what will it be like by the end of a voyage of half a year or more? What have you to say, Captain Moore?"

  Very diffidently, very tentatively, Captain Moore mentioned the sudden warmth of the tropics - they would soon get used to it - and the very large quantities of fresh m
eat, and lobsters, at St Jago.

  "I am weighing in my mind," said Captain Aubrey, dismissing the heat, the beef, and the lobsters with a wave of his hand, "whether it may not be my duty to return to St Jago, to set these unreliable people ashore, and continue the voyage with those who can exercise some mastery over their passions."

  "Such as your Turk, for example," murmured Stephen, aside.

  "There is no shadow of a doubt that any court-martial, upon the view of my order-book, signed by all the officers in question, would break them instantly: there is no possible defence - a plain order has been given, and it has been disobeyed. Still, I am unwilling to break men for what may have been a lunatic whim. But I tell you, Captain Moore," said Jack with a shocking cold ferocity, "that I will not have my ship run like a bawdy-house: I will have a taut ship. I will have my orders obeyed. And if there is the least hint of recurrence, by God I shall break them without mercy. Now, sir, if there are any of your men who understand what orders mean, after this disgraceful exhibition on the part of their officers, be so good as to have a sentry posted at the lady's door. And pray tell Mr Howard that I wish to see him at once."

  Howard did not last long. Having got wind of this affair

  long before the sleeping Captain Moore, he had been preparing for the interview for an hour at least: he was double-shaved, his uniform was speckless, his stock as tight as a stock can be; and he had swallowed four glasses of brandy and water. What he had to say did not reach the poop, but its nature could be surmised from Jack's explosive 'Contemptible, sir, contemptible! The most disgraceful mean shuffling ungentlemanly defence I have ever heard in my life. The most infernal sneaking scrub ever whelped in a gutter would be ashamed . . . Killick, Killick there," pealing on his bell, "Call the sentry and carry Mr Howard away. He is took ill. And pass the word for Mr Babbington."

  Babbington received the expected summons, cast a pitiful look at Pullings, licked his lips, looking absurdly like his anxious, apprehensive dog, and stepped aft, quite bowed.

  But Babbington was executed in the stern-gallery, where the overhang muted the sound; and the Leopard being close-hauled to weather Fogo, even those muted notes were borne away by the wind.

  "The smoke over there," said Stephen, "is Fogo, the volcano."

  "Dear me," said Mrs Wogan, "how very shocking.' She paused, and said, "So now I have seen a volcano, as well as having heard one.' This reference was contrary to their tacitly agreed rules of intercourse, but Mrs Wogan was clearly upset, and she showed this a moment later by the ineptitude of her return to Herapath. "So your patient can read and write? Surely that is unusual in a common sailor?"

  Stephen considered for a while. Although she had uttered this with a creditable air of detached curiosity, its timing was wretchedly ill-judged, and he was inclined to make her pay for her want of professional skill. Yet he wasfeeling benign, and she had just been called that infernal woman, together with several other disobliging names, so he replied, "tie is not a common sailor. He appears to be a

  young man of good family and of a certain education who has run away to sea because of some misfortune or distress, presumably of an erotical nature. Perhaps he has run from an unkind mistress."

  "What a romantic thought. But if he is shot of the lady, why should he perish away? People do not die of love, you know."

  "Do they not, ma'am? I have known them brought pretty low, however, and to take to mighty strange courses, ruin their happiness, career, prospects, reputation, honour, estate, and wits, break with their families and their friends, run mad. But in this case, I fear he may perish away not so much from a wounded heart, as from an empty belly. You cannot conceive the promiscuity of the seaman's life, nor its total lack of privacy. The seamen, upon the whole, are a very decent set of men; but to one bred up in a different way of life, their company can be strangely burdensome. What they eat, for example, and their way of eating it - the noise, the open-mouthed champing, the primitive gestures, the borborygms, the belching, the roaring jocularity, the - I will spare you many aspects, but I assure you that to an educated man, who has no very robust vital principle, who knows nothing of the sea except perhaps the Dover packet, who has lived retired, and who has been much reduced by unhappiness, all these things together can bring about a morbid state, an anorexy; and he may literally starve in the midst of plenty. Poor Herapath - for Herapath is his name - is already skin and bone. I feed him up with my portable soup, and the Captain sent him a chicken from his table; but I look to see him buried, bone alone, before he can come to relish . . . The bell! The bell! Come, there is not a moment to be lost."

  The Marine sentry was already on the door, and it was therefore in a very low voice that Mrs Wogan said, "Having been present at the young man's rescue, I feel a certain interest in him. I have vast quantities of stores. May I beg

  you to be so humane as to allow me to send him this canister of Naples biscuits, and a tongue?"

  Stephen returned to the cabin, and this time he was admitted. He found Jack looking old and tired. "I have had a damned unpleasant afternoon, Stephen,"he said. "How it does take it out of you, being angry. Those lecherous sodomites have been sending Mrs Wogan billets doux, bribing people right, left and centre cannot keep their breeches on, the hounds. And this evening I shall beat the oldsters, the whole after-cockpit. No dry flogging, neither. Seized to that gun, and a hearty score or so on the bare breech. God rot them all. Would you believe it, Stephen? They bored holes in the bulkhead of her cabin, and stood there in rows, to see her in her shift. Oh, the odious wench. How I wish I were rid of her. I have always loathed women, from clew to earing; hook, line and sinker; root and branch. I always said this would happen, you remember; I was against it from the start. Damn her for a flibbertigibbet, the hussy. Without her we would be sailing along as sweet as for the moment nothing typically sweet occurred to his mind, so he added 'swans' in an angry growl. "God-damned swans."

  "Here is a note for you from Herapath."

  "Eh? Oh, Herapath: yes. Thankee. Forgive me.' He read it, smiled and said, "Very prettily put. Could not have put it prettier myself. The civilest line I ever had from anyone I pulled out: wrote pretty, too; an elegant hand. Well, I take that very kindly. He shall have another fowl. Killick! God damn that stone deaf Beelzebub. Killick, there's a cold fowl left, ain't there? Send it along to Herapath, in the sickbay. Can he take a little wine, Stephen? No wine, Killick: but rouse out a bottle of sherry for us."

  "Listen now, will you," said Stephen, when the bottle was half out. "In the matter of this lady, you are excessive; you are unjust. She shares in the sin of Eve, sure; but otherwise she is blameless. Not a leer, not a wink, not a

  handkerchief dropped. And I am to tell you, joy, that I require a free hand with Mrs Wogan."

  "You too, Stephen?"cried Jack, colouring. "By God, I -

  "Do not mistake me, Jack, I beg,"said Stephen, drawing his chair close and speaking into his car. "These are not carnal words. I will say no more than this: her arrest was in fact connected with intelligence. That is the meaning ofthe words you found on the superintendent's instruction "all facilities will be afforded to Dr Maturin, without question". I did not explain them at the time, because the least said in these matters the better. But you will now permit me to observe that the Marine would be better marching up and down the passage, not listening at the door: he would also find it less dull. And in time he might be withdrawn entirely."

  "The least said the better," said Jack. "Just so. It shall be as you direct.' He paced to and fro, his hands behind his back. He had boundless confidence in Stephen, but deep in his mind there was a sense of having been - not tricked, not quite manoeuvred: perhaps managed was the word. He did not care for it at all. It wounded him. He took up his fiddle, and standing there facing the open stern window and looking out on to the wake, he stroked a deep note from the G string and so played on, an improvisation that expressed what he felt as no words could have done. But when Stephen behind him, speaking over the
sound, said, "Forgive me, Jack: sometimes I am compelled to be devious. I do not do it from choice," the music changed, ended in an abrupt, cheerful pizzicato, and he sat down again. As they finished their bottle, they talked about tropic-birds, the flying-fish they had eaten for breakfast, the very curious phenomenon of a high haze moving in the same direction as the much lower cumulus - something that Jack had never seen in the Trades, where the upper and the lower winds were always contrary - and about the unusual aspect of the sea itself.

  "You know I am to dine with you tomorrow,"said Jack,

  after a pause. "I have been wondering, after today's wretched business, whether not to cry off."

  "It would disappoint Pullings," said Stephen. "And Macpherson, who sees to the catering: he has laid on a haggis and some uncommon claret. It would also disappoint Fisher, and no doubt the midshipman Holles, who is also to be our guest."

  "Holles will eat standing, if I have anything to do with it," said Jack. "But perhaps I should come: it might look shabby else, and resentful. Though I doubt it will be such a jovial feast as Tom Pullings might wish in his heart."

  The wardroom's dinner to the Captain was indeed heavy going at the start, although the Leopard had just run one of her finest distances in this or any other of her voyages, tearing along, top-gallants just holding in the splendid breeze on her quarter, the log racing astern glass after glass, reeling off ten and eleven knots at every cast, and filling all hands with pleasurable excitement. Perhaps haggis was not quite the dish for the occasion: perhaps it was not possible to make a total divorce between service and social matters. Howard was still too shocked to attempt much in that line, but Babbington and Moore did their utmost, drinking with Jack in the most sociable manner, and the purser's droll stories were a very great resource, while the chaplain told them of an unusually well authenticated ghost; the Captain himself produced a creditable flow of small but convivial talk; and when the flaccid remains of the haggis had given way to Jack's favourite dish, soused hog's face, the proper sound of naval gaiety was beginning to build up to its full volume. But now Grant struck in with a singularly misplaced disquisition on the right place to cross the equator. He maintained that twelve degrees west was the only proper longitude; anything more would bring you on to St Roque, anything less into the adverse currents, the swell, and the