Book 13 - The Thirteen-Gun Salute

by Patrick O'Brian

  Left-handed it might have been, but it was an unusually happy and successful one. The gun-room table blazed from a great gilt tureen at its foot to the golden mizzenmast in the middle and then to another gilt tureen at its head, and they standing in a spring-tide of silver, exactly squared and set so thick that there was scarcely room for bread between. No direct sun reached it, but in the diffused light the general effect was extraordinarily rich, and the hands brought aft on various pretexts felt that it did their ship the utmost credit.

  The splendour had the curious effect of doing away with the stiffness and solemnity that usually and perhaps necessarily attended the Captain's ordinary visits to the gun-room: from the beginning it was clear that this was not going to be one of those many, many Yes, sir, no sir dinners through which Jack Aubrey had sat since his very first command, labouring in an occasionally successful attempt at making official entertainment somewhat less forbidding. It had not needed as much as a single bottle of wine to set the table in a pleasant hum of conversation, though the stream that flowed throughout the meal certainly helped. Nothing particularly brilliant was said, but all the officers sitting there were pleased with their company, pleased with their fare, and pleased with the glory. Another point was the servants. Every man had one behind his chair, sometimes a Marine, sometimes a ship's boy, and although they were well turned out, clean and attentive, they were not highly trained; even the comparatively rigid Marines took a certain part in the feast—much more than usual on this glittering occasion, which pleased them even more than the guests—and the attendants' smiles, nods, becks (for there was no pretence of not listening to what was said at table) and cheerful faces added to the general gaiety. At one point they added too much. Welby, the Marine officer, was almost as inept a teller of anecdotes or jokes as Captain Aubrey, but he did have one story in which he could scarcely go wrong: it was true, it was decent, he had told it many, many times, and it had no pitfalls. Now, in very fine form after his second helping of goose and his sixth glass of wine, he launched upon it. He caught Jack's eye during a momentary lull in the conversation, smiled at him and said, 'A curious thing happened to me, sir, when I was acting as recruiting officer in the year eight. A young fellow, a fine upstanding young fellow though rather ragged came to the rendezvous: I was sitting there at a table with the clerk, and my sergeant behind me, and I said to him, "You look as if you might suit us. Where do you come from?" "Ware," says he. "Yes, where?" says I, and the sergeant says rather louder, "the Captain asks where you come from—what is your parish?" "Ware," says he. "No," says I, louder still, "Where was you born?" "Ware," says he in a shout, looking dogged, and the sergeant was going to learn him his duty when the clerk whispered, "I believe, sir, he means Ware, the town of Ware, in Hertfordshire." '

  At this Macmillan's servant, a ship's boy more used to the midshipmen's berth than the gun-room, burst into a half-strangled hoot of laughter, a hideous adolescent crowing that set off two other boys. They could not look at one another without starting again and they were obliged to be put out: they missed the rest of Welby's tale, a fictitious addition that had just occurred to him in which the recruit's name was Watt.

  'A glass of wine with you, Mr Welby,' said Jack when at last the laughter had died away. 'Yes, Mr Harper, what is it?'

  'Mr Richardson's compliments and duty, sir, and there is land bearing north-north-east about five leagues.'

  The news of land spread through the ship, and after dinner the mission came on deck to gaze at the horizon on the larboard bow, where the False Natunas, already clear from the tops, might soon be seen by those that did not choose to climb. Stephen met Loder, the least objectionable of the Old Buggers, on the companion-ladder.

  'You seem to have had a very cheerful time in the gun-room,' said Loder.

  'It was most agreeable,' said Stephen. 'Good company, a great deal of mirth, and the best dinner I remember ever to have eaten at sea—such a turtle, such Java geese!'

  'Ah,' said Loder, meaning by this that he regretted the turtle and the geese, that he thought Fox's refusal for his colleagues an abuse of authority, and that he for one dissociated himself from the barbarous incivility: a considerable burden for a single 'ah', but one that it bore easily. Stephen had in fact already noticed a decline in the suite's excitement, something of a return to everyday sobriety, though Fox's exaltation was still at the same high and surely very wearing pitch. 'May I consult you, Doctor, when you have a spare moment?' asked Loder in a discreet voice. 'I do not like to speak to the ship's young man.'

  'Certainly. Come to the dispensary tomorrow at noon,' said Stephen, and he went on to meet Macmillan himself. They made their round together—the usual port diseases had made their appearance—and when they, for want of an intelligent reliable loblolly boy, had rolled their own pills, prepared their own draughts and triturated their own quicksilver in hog's lard for blue ointment, Stephen said to Macmillan, 'Among your books, do you have Willis on Mental Derangement or any of the other authorities?'

  'No, sir. I am sorry to say I have not. All I have in that line is an abstract of Cullen: shall I fetch it?'

  'If you would be so very kind.'

  He returned to his cabin, carrying the book, by way of the quarterdeck, and there he saw Fox at the lee hances, staring intently at the Natunas, the False Natunas.

  All the species and degrees of madness which are hereditary, or that grow up with people from their early youth, are out of the power of physic; and so, for the most part, are all maniacal cases of more than one year's standing, from whatever source they may arise, he read, nodded, and turned the page. Another remarkable circumstance is, that immoderate joy as effectually disorders the mind as anxiety and grief. For it was observable in the famous South Sea year, when so many immense fortunes were suddenly gained, and as suddenly lost, that more people lost their wits from the prodigious flow of unexpected riches, than from the entire loss of their whole substance. 'That is something to the point,' he said, 'but what I really want is a case of the sudden onset of folie de grandeur.' He glanced at the measures recommended: diet low but not too low, bleeding of course, cupping, saline purgatives, emetics, camphorated vinegar, the strait waistcoat, blistering the head, chalybeate waters, the cold bath; and closed the book.

  Presently, heavy with turtle soup, goose and a number of side-dishes, he closed his eyes as well.

  The Diane stood off and on all night, just south of the False Natunas, and quite early in the morning Captain Aubrey stood tall and shadowy by Stephen's cot. 'Are you awake?' he asked in a soft voice.

  'I am not,' said Stephen.

  'We are going ashore in the new pinnace, and I thought you might like to come too. There may be a whole colony of nondescript boobies.'

  'So there may—how truly kind—I shall be with you in a minute.'

  So he was, unwashed, unshaved, tucking his nightshirt into his breeches as he tiptoed across the twilit deck, now being flogged dry after a thorough swabbing. They helped him down into the boat: 'Why, it has masts,' he exclaimed as he sat in the stern-sheets. 'I had not noticed before.' The faces of the boat's crew lost all expression: they gazed into vacancy.

  'We take them down when she is hoisted in, you know,' said Jack. 'It makes stowing one inside the other so much easier.' And turning to the coxswain's seat he asked, 'How does she handle, Bonden?'

  'Fine and stiff, sir, and answers very quick. So far I should say she is a rare pretty job, for a country-boat.'

  She was pretty—fine-grained teak, carvel-built, as smooth as a dolphin's skin—but Stephen's eyes were fixed on the island ahead, as black and jagged a mass of tumbled rock as could be desired and surely uninhabited, but by no means as barren as he had supposed. There were coconut-palms growing at odd angles here and there, with a curious grey vegetation between the naked boulders: at midday it might look as repulsive as a slag-heap, but now in the perfect clarity of growing daybreak it had a severe beauty of its own, a moderate surf white against the black and the w
hole bathed in an indescribably soft and gentle light. Furthermore, so exceptional a mass of rock, largely earthless, baked by a tropical sun and soaked by tropical rains, was likely to have an exceptional flora and fauna.

  'Bear a hand with the lead,' said Jack; and sounding as they went they coasted along to a little bay, dropped a grapnel and pulled in to the low-tide shore, one part white where the currents laid down coral sand, the other the unredeemed dull black of the mother-rock. Two hands leapt out with a gang-plank. Jack and Stephen went ashore, followed by Seymour and Reade, Bonden and a young foretopman called Fazackerley: they carried a compass, tools, a bottle, and a pot of paint, and as they walked up the damp sand to the tide-mark the sun rose behind them. They turned to look: pure sea, pure sky, and the sun, at first an orange arc in the faint haze, then a half-disk, still to be borne with narrowed eyes, and at last a blinding sphere, heaving clear from the horizon entirely and providing them with long dark shadows.

  Jack took the bearings, stared inland for some while, and then, nodding towards a crag he said, 'I am afraid there is no paint upon it, but that is probably the most conspicuous rock, do you not agree, Doctor?'

  'Certainly it stands well above its fellows; but why should there be any paint upon it, at all?'

  'It was agreed that the first to come should leave his message twenty-two yards north of a conspicuous rock marked with white.'

  'Twenty-two yards, for all love?'

  'It is the length of a cricket-pitch.'

  They left their message in its bottle, they left their mark, and they sailed back to the ship, carrying a collection of plants and insects that would have been very much larger if at last the Captain had not cried 'Come: we shall miss our tide. There is not a moment to lose.'

  All these things were handed up the side, and some of them, in pill-boxes, accompanied Stephen to breakfast. 'It would have been worth getting up before dawn merely for the splendid appetite it engenders,' he said, 'but when to the appetite you add anomalous annelids and some of these plants . . . When I have finished my kedgeree I will show you the isopod crustaceans I found under a fallen branch. They are almost certainly close kin to our own woodlice, but with some most unusual adaptations to this climate. How Martin would love to see them!'

  'I hope he will, before long. We are on our true parallel, and as we sail to and fro upon it we may meet with them at any time. Today we shall stand to the east, perhaps lying-to at night; and tomorrow to the westward, and so on for a whole week.'

  'You have been out in the new pinnace, I hear,' said Loder, who had kept his appointment in the dispensary to the minute but who now seemed unwilling to state his symptoms. 'How does she handle?'

  'Very well, I believe. You are a sailor, sir?'

  'I have always loved it. We had a yacht in England, and I have a little yawl here, a country-boat like yours, but clinker-built. I sailed her right round Java last year, with a couple of hands. She is half-decked.'

  'Pray take off your clothes and lie on this couch, or padded locker,' said Stephen: and some time later he said, as he washed his hands, 'I am afraid you were right in your surmise, Mr Loder; but we have caught it early, and this ointment, these pills, will probably check it in no great length of time. You must apply the one and swallow the others with exact regularity, however: the Prabang infection is particularly virulent. Come tomorrow at the same time and I will see how you are getting on. You will strictly observe your diet, of course: no wine or spirits, very little meat.'

  'Of course. Thank you very much indeed, Doctor: I am extremely obliged to you.' Loder dressed, put the remedies in his pocket, and went on, 'Extremely obliged, both for these and your great care, and for not being lectured. There is no fool like an old fool, as I know very well; but the old fool don't like being told of it.' He paused and then said rather awkwardly, 'By the way, I suppose you cannot tell me when we shall be back in Batavia? I should love to see how my English lettuces are coming along; and of course Fox is in a tearing hurry.'

  'As I understand it we are to sail up and down for a while in the hope of meeting another ship and then sheer off for Java or possibly New South Wales; but I may well be mistaken. If Mr Fox were to ask Captain Aubrey, the fount of orders, directions and all proper information, I dare say he would be told with greater certainty.'

  But Fox did not ask Aubrey. They moved their hats to one another and sometimes exchanged a 'Good morning, sir,' when they took their exercise on the quarterdeck, the Captain on his holy weather side, the envoy and his suite on the other, but it went no further and what communication existed was carried on in an oblique, rather furtive way by means of Loder's conversations with Maturin and Edwards's with the gun-room, his friendship with the officers being unaffected.

  The ship sailed east with a steady breeze on her larboard beam, still in this fine clear weather and in a springing cheerful atmosphere of hope. The hope was not fulfilled that day, but it was with no real disappointment that she wore round on the starboard tack a little after sunset and proceeded slowly westwards under close-reefed topsails and a blaze of lanterns.

  Westward to the night of Thursday, and turn again, the lookouts eagerly making the whole deliberate sweep of the horizon from their mastheads: they could see fifteen miles of ocean in every direction before the curve of the earth carried it below their range, but even then a ship sailing on the hidden surface as far as fifteen miles beyond would still show the far white fleck of her topgallantsails to the watchful eye.

  At noon the officers on deck took the altitude of the sun once more: their course was exactly true. Far below, Stephen, having finished with his patient and having prepared the physic while the patient babbled on—nervousness made Loder talkative—said, 'In answer to your first question, yes, your informant was perfectly in the right of it. Captain Aubrey is member for Milport, a family borough; he is a wealthy man, with estates in Hampshire and Somerset, and he is very well with the Ministry. And in answer to your second, or the implication of your second, no, I will not act as a go-between.' He said this rather loud, to be heard through the din of the hands being fed. It was wonderful how a mere two hundred men could fill the entire ship with noise; but once each mess had been provided with Thursday's salt pork the sound died away, and by the time Stephen came on deck to ask for another wind-sail in the sick-bay there was quietness enough for him to hear the run of the water along the ship's side, the familiar creak of rigging, the sound of blocks and the general continuo of the wind blowing across a thousand cords, lines and ropes of varying tautness.

  Jack and Fielding were looking down into the new pinnace, whose foremast was having its step moved four inches forward, but after a few minutes' earnest conversation Jack turned, and seeing him called out, 'There you are, Doctor. Should you like to go into the top and view the False Natunas again?'

  'Few things would give me greater pleasure,' said Stephen, lying in his heart: he had never overcome his dread of height, his distrust of these insecure swaying rope ladders, ill-adapted for their purpose, more suitable for apes than rational beings. Yet as he climbed he reflected that the distinction was unsound; Muong was an ape; Muong, though slow-witted at times and occasionally stubborn, was a rational being.

  'There,' said Jack, passing his telescope. 'I can make out our white streak, where young Booby spilt the paint-pot. But I am afraid the answering flag ain't there. They have not passed by yet.'

  He said the same on Friday: just such a day, just such a course, still with lively expectations aboard, hope not disappointed but only deferred. And again Stephen, before beginning his horrifyingly inept descent, remarked upon the total absence of ships, vessels, smallcraft—an ocean strangely deserted, even by the sea-birds themselves. 'It was perhaps unreasonable to hope for the Philippine pelican; yet this is supposed to be an archipelago.'

  It was during these days that Stephen, who usually took up his after-dinner station by the taffrail, sometimes gazing at the wake, sometimes gazing forward, noticed signs not exactly of
disaffection among the envoy's suite but rather of an increasing lack of the first eager enthusiasm and deference, even toadyism; Fox seemed unaware of it however and his own excitement was undiminished, his voice loud and confident, loud and high-pitched, his eyes unusually bright, his step elastic. On Saturday he met Stephen walking along the half-deck and cried, 'Why, Maturin, how do you do? It is a great while since we exchanged more than a good day. Will you indulge me in a game of backgammon?'

  Fox played with a great want of attention, and having quite unnecessarily lost the second game—a downright backgammon, with one on the bar and one in Stephen's home table—he said, 'As you may imagine, I am extremely eager that our triumph should be known in England as soon as possible, because . . .' He had emphasized the our, but with Stephen's cool, thoroughly informed eye upon him he felt unable to produce any of the high political and strategic reasons he had mentioned to Loder, and after a pause for coughing and blowing his nose he went on, 'So naturally I should very much like to know what Captain Aubrey has in mind—whether he still intends to pursue the course we spoke of earlier, or whether this more or less mythical ship I hear of has suddenly assumed great importance.'

  'I am sure he would tell you, were you to ask him.'

  'Perhaps so. But I do not choose to risk a snub. He spoke to me in a most intemperate manner the other day, enlarging upon the powers of the captain of a man-of-war, his unaccountability to any but his own superiors in the service, and his complete autonomy afloat—an absolute monarch. He spoke with a masterful, domineering authority and dislike that shocked me extremely. And this was not the first example of ill-will by any means, an ill-will that I find absolutely incomprehensible, gratuitous and incomprehensible.'

  'I do not believe it exists. A brief, strongly-expressed vexation about the incident some nights ago, certainly, since for a sea-officer it was a most heinous offence; but as to any settled ill-will, no. Oh no, no, not at all.'