'No,' said Captain Aubrey to the master, a few feet away. 'I am afraid it is not possible.' He had been looking hungrily at the blocks of ice, all pure fresh water, floating no great way off, sometimes half a mile from the parent island.
'Not in this sea, sir,' said Warren. 'But was we to lie to for a while it would surely moderate. The surf on the island is a good third less than it was before dinner.'
Jack nodded. He looked at the oncoming waves: their tall crests were no longer being torn off so that flying water raced before them. 'Mr Bennett,' he said, 'jump up to the masthead with a glass and tell me what you see. Take your time and report to me below. Doctor, will you join me in a pot of coffee?'
They were at their second cup when Bennett knocked on the door. 'I am sorry to be so dishevelled, sir,' he said. 'I had made my hat fast with a piece of marline, but it absolutely parted—white Marline, too. I began right astern, sir, and made the sweep, but nothing did I see until one point on the starboard bow, where there was a mountain of ice, much the same size as this, about four leagues away; then three more smaller ones another point south. From the white water I thought there were some little islands after them, but I could not be sure of anything until I had come round to about due south, and there, stretching from the beam to the quarter, there were four, evenly spaced, three leagues off.'
'Thank you, Bennett,' said Jack. 'Have a cup of coffee to warm you.' And when he had gone, 'Alas, it will not do. I had hoped for a few more days of this glorious run. But it will not do. Although we are still too far west, I shall have to edge away. How I wish I had never spoken of calm: the wind has been dropping steadily ever since I said it.'
'Perhaps your unwilling mind had already perceived the signs but refused to acknowledge them. How often have I not said "Ha, it is six months since I had a cold", only to wake up the next day streaming and incapable of coherent speech?'
'What an unfailing source of cheer and encouragement you are, upon my word, Stephen. A true Job's muffler if ever there was one. And since you have now drained the pot I shall go on deck and change course. At least we shall be able to shake out a reef or two.'
A few minutes later Stephen heard pipes and the running of feet, cries of 'Belay, belay', and the frigate heeled as she brought the wind one point on her quarter, heading north-east.
The few movable objects in the cabin lurched across to starboard and Stephen, clinging to the arms of his chair, said, 'He may say what he pleases, but I am convinced the ship is travelling faster than ever: the water fairly shrieks along the side.'
Yet the next day the heel was less, though the Diane now had a fine spread of canvas abroad—indeed she had sent up her topgallantmasts in the hope of spreading more. It lessened progressively, strake by strake; and by the day young Grimble was buried the ship scarcely heeled at all.
Even so, for the convenience of his Tristan collections Stephen continued sleeping below, and on the Thursday after their meeting with the ice he walked into the gun-room for breakfast. 'Good morning, gentlemen,' he said, taking his place. 'Mr Elliott, may I trouble you for the pot?' And gazing about the table he added, 'I see we have come out in splendour once more,' for his eye had been caught, as it could scarcely have failed to be caught, by the mizzenmast. In the Diane, as in almost all frigates, it was stepped on the lower deck, in the middle of the gun-room itself, the table being built round it; but in the Diane, and this was unique in Stephen's experience, some loving French hand had encased the mast with brass from the shining table-top to the beams, and had caused the brass to be covered with the best gold leaf. Ordinarily this glory was concealed by a sleeve, fitted to protect it from the lady of the gun-room, a very stupid, very obstinate, very deaf old man who always polished everything metal with a wire brush; and it blazed out only on Sundays or particular feasts.
'Yes,' said the purser. 'We killed our last pig the day before yesterday, and we have invited the Captain to dinner.'
Stephen was about to say that the Captain had a funeral-service that morning, but reflecting upon the Navy's attitude towards death—in battle the mortally wounded were often thrown overboard—he did not. Instead he observed that the ship's progression now seemed charmingly smooth, 'with little or none of the wild bounding about we have endured these many, many days, and unless I mistake almost no heel at all. I set my cup down with little anxiety.'
'Not above a couple of strakes,' said Fielding. 'But then, Doctor, we are out of the forties, you know.'
The gun-room was of course quite right. Jack Aubrey had been present at too many of these occasions to be deeply affected by the burial of a hand he scarcely knew; yet as they always did the words of the service moved him—My soul fleeth unto the Lord: before the morning watch, I say, before the morning watch—and so did the earnest attention with which the ship's company followed them, and the grief of the dead man's friends. '. . . our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the deep,' he recited in his deep grave voice, and Arthur Grimble's messmates slid him gently over the side, sewed into his hammock, with four roundshot at his feet.
He was not deeply affected, and he enjoyed his roast pork with the gun-room; yet even so the ceremony had cast enough of a damp on his spirits to make the modest conviviality of these dinners something of an effort. After it, having drunk the usual toasts and returned proper thanks, he paced out his usual moderate-weather three miles on the windward side of the quarterdeck, two hundred and forty turns fore and aft. Moderate weather, for they had quite suddenly passed into a new world, a world of smooth seas and uncertain winds. And their passage had been unfortunate: the Diane had barely reached thirty-nine degrees before the failing remains of the western breeze veered into the north-east and headed her; and now there was this most unlucky omen. Furthermore he had the gravest doubts about Amsterdam Island. His charts all agreed in laying down its latitude as 37°47'S but they differed by well over a degree in longitude: most unhappily his two chronometers had also chosen this moment to disagree, and as the covered skies had not allowed him to make a lunar observation since they met the iceberg he was now obliged to steer for the mean of the recorded longitudes with the help of the mean of the times shown by the chronometers. This would never have been a satisfactory pursuit or one calculated to soothe an anxious mind, and now the breeze made it worse by obliging the Diane to sail close-hauled. She was a good honest sea-boat going large, but close-hauled she was heavy, slow, inclined to gripe, and unwilling to come up closer than six and a half points at the best.
'I cannot possibly afford to run down the latitude,' he said to Stephen that evening, 'but at least I derive some comfort from the fact that the island's peak can be seen from twenty-five leagues away. But it is of no great consequence.'
'I am sorry you should think it of no consequence,' said Stephen sadly.
'I mean from the point of view of water. We are not very short, and even if we do not have the usual downpours under Capricorn, it would only mean going on short allowance for a week or two, provided the south-east trades blow with even half their usual force. Yet if we can but hit upon the island, why, I should be very happy to put you ashore for an hour or two while the boats make a few voyages. You did say there was plenty of water, did you not?'
'Certainly I did. Péron, my castaway, fairly revelled in it. He admitted it was a little awkward to come at, but I cannot suppose naval ingenuity likely to be baffled by awkwardness; and I am not master of words to tell you, Jack, the value of an exceedingly remote island to a naturalist, an uninhabited fertile volcanic island covered with a luxuriant vegetation, with no vile rats, dogs, cats, goats, swine, introduced by fools to destroy an Eden, an island untouched; for although Péron spent some time on it, he scarcely left the shore.'
'Well, I could wish the weather were less thick; but we shall keep the sharpest look-out and reduce sail at night. I have little doubt we shall raise it on Tuesday or Wednesday.'
On Wednesday they did raise it. At first light they were within fi
ve miles of that unmistakable peak: a spectacularly successful landfall after five thousand miles of blue-water sailing, even without the uncertainties of chart and chronometer. But most unhappily they were directly to leeward, carried past in the darkness by a brisk westerly breeze and a powerful current setting east, in spite of close-reefed topsails and the keenest looking-out.
'We shall never fetch it, sir,' said the master. 'It is right in the wind's eye, and with this current we could ply all day and never get any nearer. I will make my affidavit it is laid down at least a degree too far west even in the Company's chart.'
'Have you checked your water again, Mr Warren?' asked Jack, leaning on the taffrail and gazing at the distant cone, as clear as could be in the dying breeze.
'Yes, sir. Even without rain under the tropic I reckon we should do without much short allowance; and whoever passed under the tropic line without a deluge?'
'How I shall ever tell the Doctor I do not know,' said Jack. 'He was so set upon it.'
'So he was, poor gentleman,' said the master, shaking his head. 'But haste commands all; and perhaps all these mollymawks and albatrosses will be some comfort to him. I never saw so many all together. There's a whale-bird. Two nellies; and a stink-pot.'
'Stephen,' said Jack, 'I am very sorry to tell you I have made a cock of your island. It lies astern, directly to windward of us. We cannot beat back with this breeze and current and if we were to lie to waiting for the wind to change we should lose days that we cannot afford to lose; we must pick up the south-east trades as soon as possible, if we are to reach Pulo Prabang with the tail of the monsoon.'
'Never grieve, soul,' said Stephen. 'We shall go there at our leisure in the Surprise once that Buonaparte has been knocked on the head. In the meantime I shall look at the master's birds: I should never have expected to see a stink-pot so far from the Cape.'
The Diane spread her royals for the first time since she reached this hemisphere and stood away to the north-east, studdingsails aloft and alow; but all day long the peak of Amsterdam Island remained in sight, a small cloud marking its top.
It had gone in the morning, however, and later in the day the sea-birds vanished with it. Jack, making his observations for Humboldt, noted so unusual a change of temperature at the surface and at ten fathoms that he checked his readings twice before calling them out to Butcher.
A new world: and now that they were thoroughly into it all the old pattern fell into place again; and the ship's routine, disrupted by the violent, perilous race eastward through sixty degrees of longitude, soon became the natural way of life once more, with its unvarying diet, the cleaning of decks before full daylight, the frequent call for sweepers throughout the day, the piping of all hands to witness punishment on Wednesdays (reprimand or deprivation of grog; no flogging so far in this ocean), the ritual washing of clothes and the hoisting of clothes-lines on Mondays and Fridays, quarters every weekday with a certain amount of live firing still, mustering by divisions on Sunday, followed sometimes by the reading of the Articles of War alone if the inspection had taken longer than usual, but more often by church. It was a comparatively easy life for those who were used to it, but literally and figuratively it was desperately slow: no more tearing along with everything on the point of carry away, the sea creaming along the side, filling the ship with a deep organ-noise, clear beneath the shriek of the harp-taut rigging, no more fifteen knots and better, with the reel almost snatched from the ship's boy's hand, no more of the wartime friendliness of shared excitement and danger. Now it was a matter of repairing or replacing everything that had been broken or strained, of painting, scouring and above all sailing the ship north-east in light and variable airs, often contrary, so that jibs and staysails called for perpetual attention; and even when they did reach the south-east trades they were found barely to deserve their name, either for strength or constancy.
Day after day they travelled slowly over a vast disk of sea, perpetually renewed; and when, as the Diane was approaching Capricorn at four knots, Captain Aubrey ended church with the words 'World without end, amen,' he might have been speaking of this present voyage: sea, sea, and then more sea, with no more beginning and no more end than the globe itself.
Yet this mild, apparently eternal sameness did leave time for things that had been laid aside or neglected. Jack and Stephen returned to their music, sometimes playing into the middle watch; Stephen's Malay increased upon him until he dreamt in the language; and as his duty required Jack resumed the improvement of his midshipmen in navigation, the finer aspects of astronomy and mathematics, seamanship of course, and in these both he and they were tolerably successful. Less so in their weakest points, general knowledge and literacy.
Speaking to young Fleming about his journal he said, 'Well, it is wrote quite pretty, but I am afraid your father would scarcely be pleased with the style.' Mr Fleming was an eminent natural philosopher, a fellow member of the Royal Society, renowned for the elegance of his prose. 'For example, I am not sure that me and my messmates overhauled the burton-tackle is grammar. However, we will leave that . . . What do you know about the last American war?'
'Not very much, sir, except that the French and Spaniards joined in and were finely served out for doing so.'
'Very true. Do you know how it began?'
'Yes, sir. It was about tea, which they did not choose to pay duty on. They called out No reproduction without copulation and tossed it into Boston harbour.'
Jack frowned, considered, and said, 'Well, in any event they accomplished little or nothing at sea, that bout.' He passed on to the necessary allowance for dip and refraction to be made in working lunars, matters with which he was deeply familiar; but as he tuned his fiddle that evening he said, 'Stephen, what was the Americans' cry in 1775?'
'No representation, no taxation.'
'Nothing about copulation?'
'Nothing at all. At that period the mass of Americans were in favour of copulation.'
'So it could not have been No reproduction without copulation?'
'Why, my dear, that is the old natural philosopher's watchword, as old as Aristotle, and quite erroneous. Do but consider how the hydra and her kind multiply without any sexual commerce of any sort. Leeuenhoek proved it long ago, but still the more obstinate repeat the cry, like so many parrots.'
'Well, be damned to taxation, in any case. Shall we attack the andante?'
Fox too resumed his earlier way of life. A murrain among his remaining livestock put an end to their dining to and fro, since he would not accept invitations that he could not return, but they still played a certain amount of whist and ever since the weather had turned fair, set fair, he made his appearance on the quarterdeck twice a day, walking up and down with his silent companion in the morning and often shooting against Stephen, now a fairly even match, in the afternoon, especially when the sea was smooth and the bottle could be made out a great way off; and he returned to his frequent medical consultations.
On the Friday after they passed under Capricorn, for example—passing, whatever the master might say, without a drop of rain, although purple-black clouds could be seen far in the west, with torrents pouring from them—he sent a ceremonious note asking whether he might impose upon Dr Maturin's good nature yet again that afternoon. Stephen had long since decided that if they were to remain on reasonably good terms and co-operate effectively in Pulo Prabang they must see little of one another in these conditions of close confinement; he was also convinced that Fox's complaint was no more than intellectual starvation and a now very great hunger for conversation at a certain level—he must have been an unusually sociable or at least gregarious man on shore. But, he reflected as he now sat in the sun on the aftermost carronade-slide with a book on his knee, he could not in decency refuse his professional advice.
Both Jack Aubrey and Fox were taking their exercise before dinner, Jack on the windward side of the quarterdeck and Fox and Edwards, who had learnt the sanctity of naval custom early in the voyage, on
the other; and from his seat Stephen could survey them both. Once again his mind turned to the question of integrity, a virtue that he prized very highly in others, although there were times when he had painful doubts about his own; but on this occasion he was thinking about it less as a virtue than as a state, the condition of being whole; and it seemed to him that Jack was a fair example. He was as devoid of self-consciousness as a man could well be; and in all the years Stephen had known him, he had never seen him act a part.
Fox, on the other hand, occupied a more or less perpetual stage, playing the role of an important figure, an imposing man, and the possessor of uncommon parts. To be sure, he was at least to some extent all three; but he would rarely let it alone—he wished it to be acknowledged. There was nothing coarsely obvious or histrionic about this performance; he never, in the lower deck phrase, topped it the knob. Stephen thought the performance was by now almost wholly unconscious; but in a long voyage its continuity made it plain, and on occasion the envoy's reaction to a real or imaginary want of respect made it plainer still. Fox did not seek popularity, though he could be good company when he chose and he liked being liked; what he desired was superiority and the respect due to superiority, and for a man of his intelligence he did set about it with a surprising lack of skill. Many people, above all the foremast hands of the Diane, refused to be impressed.
The frigate carried no trumpeter, but she had a Marine with a fine lively drum, and upon this, the moment four bells had been struck, he beat Heart of Oak for the officers' dinner. All those who were at liberty to go below hurried off, leaving Jack almost alone; he had no guests that day, and he paced on and on, his hands behind his back, thinking deeply. At five bells—for Jack dined earlier than most captains—he started out of this reverie, caught Stephen's eye and said, 'Shall we go down? There is the last of the sheep called Agnes waiting for us.'
Book 13 - The Thirteen-Gun Salute Page 17
