The Nutmeg of Consolation (15 page)

'Aikmaar, sir, from Manila to Menardo.'

'Let the master come across with her papers.'

The boat splashed down, the master came across: his papers included a licence to trade from Raffles' secretariat in Batavia and they were perfectly in order. Jack handed them back and offered the Dutchman a glass of madeira.

'To tell you the truth, sir,' said he, 'I had much rather have a keg of water, however old.' And in answer to Jack's questioning eye he went on, 'Two or three barrels would be more welcome still, if you can spare them. We have been down to half-pipkins these last days, but even so I doubt we can fetch Menardo without a recruit. The hands are mortal dry, sir.'

'I think we can manage that, Captain,' said Jack. 'But drink up your wine and tell me first how you come to speak English so well, and then how you come to be so short of water.'

'Why, as for the English, sir, I was in and out of herringbusses, Dutch or English, no matter which, when I was a little chap and a young man - in and out of Yarmouth all the time. And it was there I was pressed and sent aboard the Billy Ruffian, Captain Hammond, for close on two years, until the peace. And as for the water, we started the top two tiers over the side, running from a couple of pirate junks off the Cagayanes; but when we were free of them, I found that some fool had started almost all the ground tier too, dead against my orders. Oh, it has been a damned unfortunate voyage, sir. Next thing a French frigate - a French frigate in these here waters, sir, would you believe it? - brought us to.'

'How many guns?'

'Thirty-two, sir. Far too many for me to argue with. She was short of water likewise, but when I showed them we had barely enough to get home with, if that, whereas she had a good watering-place under her lee, since she was bound for the Passage and beyond, she let it alone. I must say they behaved quite pretty, considering - no pillaging, and left our cargo be - nothing wanton - and though they did take all our powder and all our sails bar what you see, sir, the officer spoke civil and gave us a draught on Paris that may be honoured some day, I hope.'

'How much powder?'

'Four barrels, sir.'

'Halves, I suppose?'

'No, sir, whole barrels. And best Manila large-grain cylinder-powder at that.'

'Where is the watering-place?'

'The island called Nil Desperandum, sir; not the one down in the Banda Sea, but the northern one. It is a slow business watering there because of the winding passage and the smallness of the stream - no basin - but it is the best water in these parts, and I should have gone along with them, only I could never have beat back again against the monsoon. My ship ain't the Gelijkheid. What do you call her now, sir?'

'Nutmeg,' said Jack; and after a little more conversation about the French frigate, the Corn�e of course, her crew and her qualities, and about the watering-place at Nil Desperandum, he stood up, saying 'Forgive me, Captain, but I am pressed for time. I shall have to send the water over by the fire-engine: I shall come alongside as close as I can and pass a line for the hose. You had better get back to your ship at once and lay everything along.'

The ships parted after perhaps the most unpleasant quarter of an hour in Fielding's life as a first lieutenant. There was a considerable swell; the fire-engine's hose was criminally short; the Alkmaars were criminally negligent in booming-off and the Nutmegs were not much better; they had no respect for his paintwork. And if he had heard Captain Aubrey call out that there was not a moment to be lost once he had heard him a score of times; and even after the lane of water between the ships had widened to a quarter of a mile and the Dutchmen's grateful hooting was faint on the breeze, his spirits were so ruffled that he kicked a ship's boy for pulling off loose ribbons of paint on the blackstrake.

Immediately afterwards he was summoned to the cabin, and he hobbled aft with an uneasy heart, straightening his clothes as he went. He knew very well that Captain Aubrey disliked starting with a rope's end or a cane, kicking, cobbing, and even reproachful words such as 'lubber' or 'damn your infernal limbs' unless they were uttered by himself; and the first lieutenant did not relish the prospect of reproof.

When he opened the door however he found the Captain leaning over a chart with the Doctor on one side and Mr Warren on the other. 'Mr Fielding,' said Jack, looking up with a smile, 'do you know what Nil Desperandum means?'

'No, sir,' said Fielding.

'It means Never say die, or Luck may turn yet,' said Jack, 'and it is the name of an island about 300 miles to leeward, just before the Passage.'

'Indeed, sir? I had imagined it was somewhere east of Timor.'

'No, no; that is another one. It is the same with Desolation. There are plenty of Desolation Islands, and there are plenty of Nil Desperandums too, ha, ha! With any luck we shall find the Corn�e watering there. My aim is to run in and get as close as possible to her. And for that we must look as much like a merchantman as ever we can. How I wish I had thought to exchange the Alkmaar's thin, patched, shabby sails for a suit of ours! But zeal will do wonders!

'Yes, sir,' said Fielding.

Never mind your paintwork, Mr Fielding,' said Jack, never mind your prettily blacked yards, square by lifts and braces, take your pattern from the Aikmaar, and be damned to cleanliness.'

'Yes, sir,' said Fielding, who minded very much indeed about his paintwork and who had turned the Nutmeg out with exceptional care, the trimmest twenty-gun ship in the service, fit for any admiral's inspection.

'Ha, ha,' said Maturin suddenly. 'I remember what a vile mud-scow we made of the dear Surprise, to deceive the Spartan. Turds everywhere.'

'Oh sir,' cried the master in protest.

'Mind you, Mr Fielding,' said Jack, 'the filth does not have to be fundamental. It does not have to bear very close scrutiny. We only have to look so like a merchantman that we can come within range; for once we start firing we must of course do so under our own colours.'

Stephen left them discussing the details of this horrid change and went to make his rounds. Macmillan greeted him with an anxious face and said 'I am very sorry to tell you, sir, that two dental cases have reported; and I must confess that I am at a loss, wholly at a loss.'

Macmillan uttered these words in Latin, as well he might, the patients being just at hand, their anguished eyes fixed upon the surgeons. In any case the Latin comforted them, being the tongue of the learned, not of some cow-leach who had taken the bounty and who topped it the physician on the forecastle.

'So am I,' said Stephen, having examined the teeth, awkwardly-placed, deeply carious molars in both cases. 'So indeed am I. However, we must do our best. Let me see what instruments we possess...' Looking them over he shook his head and said 'Well, at least let us apply oil of cloves and then stuff the hollows with lead in the hope they will not crumble under our forceps.'

A vain hope; and when at last he left the seamen to the care of their messmates and the ship's butcher, who had held their heads, he was paler than they.

'It is an odd thing,' he said, returning to the cabin, where Jack was settled on the rudder-casing, plucking the strings of his fiddle and watching the broad wake tear away, 'It is an odd thing, yet although I can take off a shattered limb, open a man's skull, cut him for the stone, or if he is a woman deliver him of an uneasy breech-presentation in a seamanlike manner and without a qualm - not indeed with indifference to the suffering and the danger but with what may perhaps be called a professional constancy of mind - I cannot extract a tooth without real agitation. It is the same with Macmillan, though he is an excellent young man in every other respect. I shall never go to sea again without an experienced tooth-drawer, however illiterate he may be.'

'I am sorry you had such a disagreeable time,' said Jack. 'Let us both take a cup of coffee.' Coffee was as much his universal remedy as the alcoholic tincture of opium had once been for Stephen, and he now called for it loud and clear.

Killick looked sourer than usual: coffee was not customary at this time of day. 'It will have to be black, then,' he said. 'I can't go on milking Nanny watch and watch. Do, and she will go dry. A goat ain't a cistern, sir.'

'Strong black coffee,' said Stephen some minutes later. 'How well it goes down: and how glad I am that I did not indulge myself in my coca-leaves on finishing with the sick-berth as I had intended. They calm the mind, sure, but they do away with one's sense of taste. I shall chew three when the pot is out, however.' These leaves, which he had first encountered in South America, were his present, purely personal, catholicon, and although he travelled with enough, packed in soft leather bags, to last him twice round the world, he was remarkably abstemious: these three leaves, now to be chewed so late in the afternoon, were an unusual treat. 'Surely,' he said, gazing about, 'the ship is going at a most uncommon speed? See how the water flings wide, see how the turbulence sweeps away into the past, and there is a general sound all about us -you are to observe that we both raise our voices - that cannot be located but whose predominant note is almost exactly that G your thumb is plucking'.

Hardly were these words out than Reade came bouncing in. His wound had healed wonderfully, but Stephen still made him wear a kind of padded bandolier to protect the socket in case of falls and lurches, and his empty sleeve was pinned to it. He was treated with extraordinary tenderness by all hands, he had entirely recovered his spirits and he had already developed an agility that almost compensated for his loss.

'Mr Richardson's duty, sir,' he said, and he thought you would like to know that we are doing twelve knots and one fathom almost exactly. I chalked it up myself.'

Jack laughed aloud 'Twelve knots one fathom, and that with the wind so far abaft. Thank you, Mr Reade. Pray tell Mr Richardson that he may set a skyscraper on the foremast if he sees fit: and that there will be no quarters this evening.'

'Aye aye, sir. And if you please he said that was I to see the Doctor I should tell him there is a prodigious curious bird keeping company, very like an albatross, with somewhat in its beak.'

Stephen ran up on deck in time to watch the bird's long struggle to disengage the cuttle-fish bone it had transfixed. Once the bone was free the albatross wheeled away, racing southward across the wind and vanishing almost at once among the white horses. 'I thank you heartily for showing me the bird,' he said to Richardson, who replied, 'Not at all, sir,' and then, taking him by the elbow, 'If you will stand just here and bend a little, looking at the top of the foremast, I will show you a skyscraper in a minute. We set them flying, you know.'

Stephen bent and gazed, and amidst a series of orders, pipes and the cry of Belay he saw a triangular scrap of white appear high above all the other whitenesses, clear in the sun, to the evident satisfaction of the many hands along the immaculate deck - it had just been swept for the second time since dinner.

'One of the smaller albatrosses,' he said, coming back, 'and it was in the act of detaching a cuttle bone from its upper mandible. The bird may have carried it for a thousand miles and more.'

'I wish it had been a letter from home,' said Jack. They were both silent for a moment, and then Jack went on, 'I had always connected albatrosses with the high southern latitudes. What kind was this one?'

'I cannot tell. I only know that it was not Linnaeus' exulans, though he has it wandering in the tropics. There is one species from Japan that has been described and another from the Sandwich Islands. This may have been either or some quite unknown bird; but I should have had to shoot it to make sure, and I have grown rather tired of killing... You have noticed, I make no doubt, that the horizon is now quite clear.'

'Yes. The haze vanished in the night, and we had an excellent observation of Rasaihague and the moon which confirmed not only our position by chronometer but even by our dead reckoning almost to the very minute of longitude, which was tolerably gratifying, I believe.' Then, seeing that this splendid news aroused no particular emotion nor indeed anything but a civil inclination of the head, he said 'What do you say to taking up our game where we left off? I was winning, you will recall.'

'Winning, for all love: how your ageing memory does betray you, my poor friend,' said Stephen, fetching his 'cello.

They tuned, and at no great distance Killick said to his mate, 'There they are, at it again. Squeak, squeak; boom, boom. And when they do start a-playing, it's no better. You can't tell t'other from one. Never nothing a man could sing to, even as drunk as Davy's sow.'

'I remember them in the Lively: but it is not as chronic as a wardroom full of gents with German flutes, bellyaching night and day, like we had in Thunderer. No. Live and let live, I say.'

'Fuck you, William Grimshaw.'

The game they played was that one should improvise in the manner of some eminent composer (or as nearly as indifferent skill and a want of inspiration allowed), that the other, having detected the composer, should then join in, accompanying him with a suitable continuo until some given point understood by both, when the second should take over, either with the same composer or with another. They, at least, took great pleasure in this exercise, and now they played on into the darkness with only a pause at the end of the first dog-watch, when Jack went on deck to take his readings of temperature and salinity with Adams and to reduce sail for the night.

They were still playing when the watch was set, and Killick, laying the table in the dining-cabin said 'This will stop their gob for a while, thank God. Keep your great greasy thumbs off of the plates, Bill, do: put your white gloves on. Snuff the candles close, and don't get any wax or soot on the goddam snuffers - no, no, give it here.' Killick loved to see his silver set out, gleaming and splendid; but he hated seeing it used, except in so far as use allowed him to polish it again: moderate, very moderate use.

He opened the door into the moonlit, music-filled great cabin and stood there severely until the very first pause, when he said 'Supper's on table, sir, if you please.'