The Wine-Dark Sea (2 page)

There was no one there of course to obey the order so he turned the glass himself and paced forward towards the belfry to strike the bell. But both gangways were obstructed with spars, cordage and a crowd of straining bodies, and he had to go down into the waist and pick his way among the carpenter and his crew as they worked sweating under the sun, now half-way to its height and terrible in the copper-coloured sky. They were shaping not only the new crosstrees but also the heel of the new topgallantmast, an intent body of men, working to very fine limits in a rolling ship, plying sharp-edged tools and impatient of the slightest interruption. But the quartermaster was a dogged soul; he had served with Nelson in the Agamemnon and the Vanguard; he was not going to be stopped by a parcel of carpenters; and presently four bells rang out their double chime. The quartermaster returned, followed by oaths and bringing with him the two helmsmen who were to take their trick at the wheel.

'Mr West,' said Stephen, 'do you suppose we shall eat our dinner today?"

Mr West's expression was difficult to read; the loss of his nose, frost-bitten south of the Horn, gave what had been a mild, good-humoured, rather stupid face an appearance of malignity; and this was strengthened by a number of sombre reflexions, more recently acquired.

'Oh yes,' he said absently. 'Unless we are in close action we always shoot the sun and pipe to dinner at noon.'

'No, no. I mean our ceremony in the gunroom.'

'Oh, of course,' said West. 'What with Reade going overboard and the chase stopping us dead and tearing away like smoke and oakum just as we were overhauling her, it slipped my mind. Masthead, there,' he hailed. 'What do you see?'

'Precious little, sir,' the voice came floating down. 'It is cruel hazy - orange sorts of haze - in the south-east; but sometimes I catch what might be a twinkle of topgallants.'

West shook his head, but went on, 'No, no, Doctor; never you fret about our dinner. Cook and steward laid it on handsome, and though we may be a little late I am sure we shall eat it - there, do you see, the crosstrees go aloft. They will be swaying up the mast directly.'

'Will they indeed? Order out of chaos so soon?'

'Certainly they will. Never you fret about your dinner.'

'I will not,' said Stephen, who accepted what seamen told him about ships with the same simplicity as that with which they accepted what he told them about their bodies. 'Take this bolus,' he would say. 'It will rectify the humours amazingly,' and they, holding their noses (for he often used asafoetida) would force the rounded mass down, gasp, and feel better at once. With his mind at ease, therefore, Stephen said to Martin 'Let us make our forenoon rounds,' and went below.

West, left to his solitude, returned to his own fretting - an inadquate word for his concern for the future and his anxiety about the present. Captain Aubrey had begun this much-interrupted voyage with his old shipmate Tom Pullings acting as his first lieutenant and two broken officers, West and Davidge, as second and third. He did not know them as anything but competent seamen, but he was aware that the sentences of their courts-martial had been thought extremely harsh in the service - West was dismissed for duelling, Davidge for signing a dishonest purser's accounts without checking them -and that reinstatement was their chief aim in life. Up until recently they had been in a fair way to it; but when the Surprise was nearly a thousand miles out of Sydney Cove, sailing eastwards across the Pacific Ocean, it was found that a senior midshipman named Oakes had stowed a young gentlewoman away in the cable-tier; and this had led almost all the gunroom officers except Dr Maturin to behave extremely badly. Her instant marriage to Oakes had set her free in that she was no longer a transported convict liable to be taken up again, but it did not liberate her from the adulterous wishes, motions, and jealousies of her shipmates. West and Davidge were the worst and Captain Aubrey, coming late to an understanding of the position, had told them that if they did not put aside the barbarous open enmity that was spreading discord and inefficiency in the ship he would turn them ashore: farewell for ever to any hope of reinstatement.

Davidge had been killed in the recent action that made the Polynesian island of Moahu at least a nominal part of the British Empire and Oakes had gone off for Batavia with his Clarissa in a recaptured prize; but so far Captain Aubrey had said nothing. West did not know whether his zeal in the approaches to Moahu and in getting the carronades up through rough country and his modest part in the battle itself had earned him forgiveness or whether he should be dismissed when the ship reached Peru: an agonizing thought. What he did know, here and in the immediate present, was that a valuable prize, in which he would share even if he were later dismissed, had almost certainly escaped. They would never catch her before nightfall and in this hazy, moonless darkness, she could run a hundred miles, never to be seen again.

That was one torment to his spirit: another was that this morning Captain Aubrey had promoted Grainger, a forecastle-man in the starboard watch, to fill the vacancy left by Davidge's death, just as he had raised a young fellow called Sam Norton to replace Oakes. West had to admit that Grainger was a capital seaman, a master-mariner who had sailed his own brig on the Guinea run until he was taken by two Salee rovers off Cape Spartel; but he did not like the man at all. He had already known what it was to be shut up in the gunroom with a shipmate he detested, seeing him at every meal, hearing his voice; and now it seemed that he should have to go through the odious experience again for at least the breadth of the Pacific. Yet more than that, far more, he felt that the gunroom and the quarterdeck, the privileged places in a man-of-war, were not only sacred in themselves but that they conferred a kind of sanctity on their rightful inhabitants, a particular being and an identity. He felt this strongly, though he found the notion difficult to express; and now that Davidge was dead there was nobody with whom he could discuss it. Pullings was a small tenant-farmer's son; Adams, though he acted as purser, was only the Captain's clerk; and Martin did not seem to think either family or caste of much importance. Dr Maturin, who lived almost entirely with the Captain, being his particular friend, was of illegitimate birth and the subject could not be raised with him; while even if West had been in high favour with his commander it would have been quite useless to suggest that if it was necessary to promote foremast jacks, as it was in this case, then they might be made master's mates, herding with the midshipmen, so that the gunroom should be preserved: useless, because Jack Aubrey belonged to an older Navy in which a collier's mate like James Cook could die a much-honoured post-captain, and a foremast-hand like William Mitchell might begin his career by being flogged round the fleet and end it as a vice-admiral, rather than to the modern service, in which an officer had not only to pass for lieutenant but also for gentleman if he were to advance.

Dr Maturin and his assistant had the usual seamen's diseases to treat and a few wounds to dress, not from the recent battle, which had been a mere point-blank butchery of an enemy caught in a narrow rocky defile, but from the wear and tear of dragging guns up and down a jungly mountainside. They also had one interesting case of a sailor who, less sure-footed by land than by sea, had fallen on to the pointed end of a cut bamboo, which let air into the cavity of his thorax, into his pleura, with the strangest effect on one lung. This they discussed at length, in Latin, to the great satisfaction of the sick-berth, where heads turned gravely from one speaker to the other, nodding from time to time, while the patient himself looked modestly down and Padeen Colman, Dr Maturin's almost monoglot Irish servant and loblolly-boy, wore his Mass-going reverential face.

They never heard the orders that attended the swaying-up of the new topgallantmast, an anxious business at such a height and with such a swell; nor did they hear the cry of 'Launch ho!' as the bosun's mate at the topmast head banged the fid home through the heel of the topgallantmast, thus supporting it on the topmast trestle-tree. The complex business of securing the long unhandy pole escaped them too - an exceedingly complex business, for although before the swaying-up the shrouds had been placed over the head of the mast, followed by the backstays, the preventer-stays and the very stay itself, they all had to be made fast, bowsed upon and set up simultaneously with all possible dispatch so that they exerted an equally-balanced force fore and aft and on either side. The rigging of the topgallant yard with all its appurtenances also passed unnoticed; so did two typical naval illogicalities, for whereas by tradition and good sense only the lightest of the topmen laid out on the lofty yard to loose the sail, this time, once it was loosed, sheeted home and hoisted, the Captain, with his acknowledged sixteen stone, ran aloft with his glass to sweep what vague horizon could still be distinguished through the growing haze.

But the medical men and their patients did make out the cheer as the ship returned to her former course, and they did feel her heel as she gathered way, running with a far more lively motion, while all the mingled sounds of the wind in the rigging and the water streaming along her side took on the urgent note of a ship chasing once more.

Almost immediately after the Surprise had settled into her accustomed pace, shouldering the strange-coloured sea high and wide, the hands were piped to dinner, and in the usual Bedlam of cries and banging mess-kids that accompanied the ceremony, Stephen returned to the quarterdeck, where the Captain was standing at the windward rail, gazing steadily out to the eastward: he felt Stephen's presence and called him over. 'I have never seen anything like it," he said, nodding at the sea and the sky.

'It is much thicker now than it was when I went below,' said Stephen. 'And now an umber light pervades the whole, like a Claude Lorraine run mad.'

'We had no noon observation, of course,' said Jack. 'There was no horizon and there was no sun to bring down to it either. But what really puzzles me is that every now and then, quite independent of the swell, the sea twitches: a quick pucker like a horse's skin when there are flies about. There. Did you see? A little quick triple wave on the rising swell.'

'I did, too. It is extremely curious,' said Stephen. 'Can you assign any cause?'

'No,' said Jack. 'I have never heard of such a thing.' He reflected for some minutes, and at each lift of the frigate's bows the spray came sweeping aft. 'But quite apart from all this,' he went on, 'I finished the draft of my official letter this morning, before we came within gunshot, and I should be uncommonly obliged if you would look through it, strike out errors and anything low, and put in some stylish expressions, before Mr Adams makes his fair copies.'

'Sure I will put in what style there is at my command. But why do you say copies and why are you in haste? Whitehall is half the world away or even more for all love.'

'Because in these waters we may meet with a homeward-bound whaler any day.'

'Really? Really? Oh, indeed. Very well: I shall come as soon as our dinner is properly disposed of. And I shall write to Diana too.'

'Your dinner? Oh yes, of course: I do hope it goes well. You will be changing very soon, no doubt.' He had no doubt at all, because his steward Killick, who also looked after Dr Maturin on formal occasions, had made his appearance, standing at what he considered a respectful distance and fixing them with his shrewish, disapproving eye. He had been with them for many years, in all climates, and although he was neither very clever nor at all agreeable he had, by mere conviction of righteousness, acquired an ascendancy of which both were ashamed. Killick coughed. 'And if you should see Mr West,' added Jack, 'pray tell him I should like to see him for a couple of minutes. I do hope your dinner goes well,' he called after Stephen's back.

The dinner in question was intended to welcome Grainger, now Mr Grainger, to the gunroom; Stephen too hoped that it would go well, and although he ordinarily ate his meals with Jack Aubrey in the cabin he meant to take his place in the gunroom for this occasion: since in principle the surgeon was a gunroom officer his absence might be taken as a slight. Grainger, a reserved, withdrawn man, was much respected aboard, for although he had not belonged to the Surprise during her heroic days as a privateer, when she recaptured a Spaniard deep-laden with quicksilver, took an American commerce-raider and cut out the Diane from the harbour of St Martins, he was well known to at least half the crew. He had joined at the beginning of this voyage, very highly recommended by his fellow-townsmen of Shelmerston, a port that had provided the Surprise with scores of prime seamen, a curious little West Country place, much given to smuggling, privateering, and chapel-going. There were almost as many chapels as there were public houses, and Grainger was an elder of the congregation of Traskites, who met on Saturdays in a severe, sad-coloured building behind the rope-walk. Although the Traskites' views were controversial, he and the younger men who came aboard with him were perfectly at home in the Surprise, which was an ark of dissent, containing Brownists, Sethians, Arminians, Muggletonians and several others, generally united in a seamanlike tolerance when afloat and always in a determined hatred of tithes when ashore. Stephen was well acquainted with him as a shipmate and above all as a patient (two calentures, a broken clavicle) and he valued his many qualities; but he knew very well how such a man, dignified and assured in his own circle, could suffer when he was removed from it. Pullings would be kindness itself; so would Adams; but kindness alone was not necessarily enough with so vulnerable a man as Grainger. Martin would certainly mean well, but he had always been more sensitive to the feelings of birds than to those of men, and prosperity seemed to have made him rather selfish. Although he was sailing as Stephen's assistant he was in fact a clergyman and Jack had recently given him a couple of livings in his gift with the promise of a valuable third when it should fall in; Martin had all the particulars of these parishes and he discussed them over and over again, considering the possibility of different modes of gathering tithes or their equivalent and improvement of the glebes. But worse than the dullness of this conversation was a self-complacency that Stephen had never known in the penniless Martin of some years ago, who was incapable of being a bore. West he was not sure of. Here again there had been change: the moody, snappish, nail-biting West of their present longitude was quite unlike the cheerful young man who had so kindly and patiently rowed him about Botany Bay, looking for seaweed.