Blue At The Mizzen Part 9

It was inconceivable that the deluge should last till dawn - the sky could not hold so much - but it did, leaving them stunned, deafened, amazed at the light of day to eastward and the familiar sails of Ringle making three or even four knots towards them, the tiny breeze right aft. Incomprehensibly the deck had become littered, even covered in places, with strange forms of deep-sea life, presumably sucked up by some remote series of waterspouts and liberated here.

But Jack Aubrey was having absolutely none of them: Surprise's only care, and Ringle's too, was to get out of this odious part of the sea without a moment's pause - no breakfast, even, until they were well under way with clear decks, rigging free of seaweed, flying squids and various monsters - Stephen had to content himself with pocketing the less gelatinous creatures and hurrying them below before his stony-faced captain had him forcibly removed.

Still, breakfast there was, in time - at least for those not labouring at the pumps, shooting out thick jets of water on either side - when humanity returned to Captain Aubrey's face and Stephen asked him timidly 'did he think they were out of the doldrums yet?'

'I hope so, I'm sure,' said Jack. 'When the belt - the convergence - is very narrow and concentrated as I think this one was, it sometimes ends in a furious tantrum like this, as who should say...' Meeting the cats' steady, attentive gaze, he changed his mind and finished ' "Fare you well, ye Spanish ladies". Killick, Killick there.'

'Sir?'

'Pa.s.s the word for Poll Skeeping. Forgive me, Stephen, I trespa.s.s upon your ground.'

'Sir?' said Poll Skeeping, tying on a new ap.r.o.n.

'Be so good as to remove those cats. They know perfectly well that they are not allowed in the cabin.'

They did, indeed, and suffered themselves to be carried away, one in each hand, limp, meek, with lowered eyes.

'How glad I was to see Ringle,' said Stephen after a while.

'So was I, by G.o.d: she is only a little thing; and at times the weather was close on as heavy as weather comes.'

'Would it be improper, unlucky, to ask where we are? I mean, just a very vague approximation.'

'After taking the sun's height at noon, which I think we shall achieve, I hope to be able to tell you in rather finer limits than that: but even now I shall hazard the guess that by tomorrow morning we shall be in the steady south-east trades, not much above a week's sailing from Rio, according to how strong they prove.'

'Good, good: very good. You ease my mind: but tell me, Jack - for I see that in spite of a sleepless night you are eager to be up and about, inspecting booms, gunwales, lifts... Pray tell me when you are inclined to sit down quietly and talk about the less physical aspects of our affair.'

Jack looked at him thoughtfully, revolving the less physical aspects: then smiling he said, 'Although I have a very good first lieutenant, there are many things aloft that I should not rest easy without seeing. And below too, of course. Let us say after dinner, over a private pot of coffee.'

Jack Aubrey pushed back his chair, loosened his waistcoat, and said, 'I had no idea I was so hungry: I am afraid I must have eaten like an ogre.'

Killick could be seen to smile: Jack's appet.i.te always pleased him - his one deviation into amiability.

'Oh come,' said Maturin. 'Six mutton chops is not at all excessive in a man of your weight: an abstemious ogre would call it moderation. Those dear Americans said that the animal came from some favoured state: indeed it was both succulent and tender.'

They toyed with an elderly Ess.e.x cheese, much helped by burgundy; and Jack, recalled to a sense of his duty, asked whether Stephen's inspection had been as satisfactory as his own.

'It was pretty well, I thank you: not quite as good, since three recent fractures will have to be re-set. But upon the whole I cannot complain. They were tumbled about, to be sure; yet most - not that there are many in the sick-berth at present - withstood the tumbling and the uneasy motion of the s.h.i.+p very well. I have often noticed that a prolonged and violent blow tends to dispel the megrims; and it may well be that the visible approach of death, the immediate horror of the last, may restore a virtuous equilibrium.'

'Killick,' called Jack. 'Light along the coffee, there.'

It took a little longer than usual and Killick - the door held by his mate Grimble - entered crabwise> the great pot and its cups flanked by a decanter. 'With Delaware's compliments, sir: Dutch schnapps.'

'They have won again,' said Jack, shaking his head. 'How I hope that we gave them something, at least.'

'I did have half a carboy of tincture of hogweed conveyed into their boat,' said Stephen in a doubtful voice. 'It was the best hogweed,' he added, with even less certainty.

'Well, may it prosper them,' said Jack. 'Though they are little better than republicans and democrats, may it prosper them.'

'Amen,' said Stephen, and they fell to drinking alternate sips.

'You are in the moon, brother,' said Jack after a while. 'What are you thinking about?"

'My transition to a C major pa.s.sage in the adagio,' said Stephen, and he whistled it.

'I know the piece.'

'It seemed to me, out of nothing, during the blast, that it was out of place, a little flashy.'

'I should never, never say flashy: but out of place - well, perhaps.'

'Thank you, Jack. I shall leave it out. Now may I pour you a cup of coffee and leap on to Rio?'

'By all means.'

'You have told me a certain amount about Sir David Lind-say, but not as I remember a considered opinion in a consecutive narrative. Do you feel inclined to do so now? He may possibly be of the first importance in our enterprise."

'That is scarcely my line of country, you know, Stephen. Even a pretty simple dispatch in which I know all the details comes out looking like an unravelled stocking, even when you and Adams have had a hand in it.'

'Certainly: an impersonal account for official publication must be shockingly difficult to write, and the Dear knows that very few admirals or their secretaries manage it handsomely. But as between friends in a s.h.i.+p that seems to be sailing along in an exemplary fas.h.i.+on - these are the southeast trades, I gather? - could you not tell me roughly what to expect?'

'Well,' said Jack, 'no one can say he is not a good seaman. He has fought two or three creditable sloop or frigate actions and he handles a s.h.i.+p well; yet he does not look at all like a sailor. If you were to see him in civilian clothes you might put him down for a soldier; and I think that is because, being rather on the small side, he holds himself up quite straight. He is a gentlemanlike fellow. I know nothing about his family, but they have had a baronetcy for a couple of generations and I believe they live in the north country or just in Scotland. He speaks - perhaps rather too much and too long... but Stephen, do not think I am taking the man to pieces: I am just speaking openly, as I would not speak at anyone else.'

'I fully understand you, my dear.'

'Well, since I have said so much, I will tell you that he is extremely touchy - cannot bear interruption, and the least aspersion on his understanding or his knowledge of the world, let alone his family, is very ill-received indeed. Oh, and I should have said before this that he was bred in one of the great English public schools, until an uncle took him aboard as a rather elderly mid. During his time there he did much more reading, came by more Latin and Greek than most people in the service, which is no doubt one of the reasons for his talking so. But to go back to his touchiness: if you go on prating to that extent, somebody is sure to interrupt or contradict, and that, as I said, he cannot bear.'

'Yet he must have borne both at school?'

'And in the mids.h.i.+pmen's berth as well. But once he had the King's commission and the implied licence that goes with it, he had a pretty free hand. He was in fact extremely quarrelsome, and I do not think anyone went out in the special sense of pistols for two and coffee for one, so often as Lindsay. I do not think it increased his reputation for courage: probably the reverse, it being forced and exaggerated. Yet courage was there, without a doubt: you do not board an enemy of equal strength and carry her unless you are tolerably brave.'

'Certainly.'

'But it was that touchiness, impatience of control, or possibly courage, which proved fatal to him. During fleet exercises, when his 28-gun frigate was being coppered, he was given a s.h.i.+p-sloop, and he let her fall very badly from her station, spoiling the line in a shocking manner. The admiral sent for him and, from what I have heard, uttered a long and particularly scathing reproach. Lindsay bore it; but in the morning he sent the admiral a challenge. How he induced anyone to carry it I do not know, because calling your superior officer out - above all a flag-officer - is just plain impossible in the service. Calling him out for having given you a punishment or an order or a reproach that you do not like, is just plain impossible, as any friend would have told him. He had few friends, I think. At all event, he was taken up, laid by the heels, court-martialled and dismissed the service.

'For some time he ranged up and down, making speeches about injustice and spending a mint of money on lawyers -he had inherited - and then he vanished, coming into these parts, as I understand it, with the reputation of one who loved freedom and who had suffered for it. There are a good many English merchants in Chile and the Argentine: some of them liked having a genuine baronet about, and some of them and of their South American friends were all in favour of freedom, so long as it was freedom from Spain - freedom to shoot your admiral in Hyde Park was another matter, but it was swept along with the general cry of liberty.'

'By the way, does the gentleman speak Spanish?'

'Oh, remarkably well, I am told.'

CHAPTER SEVEN.

On a singularly beautiful morning well south of those vile calms and enervating breathless heat the Surprise hauled to the wind well off the looming American coast, and Jack, walking up and down with a piece of toast in his hand, said, 'Stephen, do you choose to go into the top? With this gentle, steady roll the masts scarcely move at all.'

'Is it the Sugar Loaf you wish to see?'

'I should be happy to see the Loaf- indeed, I can already make him out on the rise - but for this occasion I could wish him away, since what really concerns me at present is the activity in the port, the coming and going, the yards: and the Sugar Loaf hides almost everything. But I shall have to send Ringle in any case, to arrange for victuals, water and wood: perhaps you had rather go in her?'

'Not at all. I am perfectly willing to climb to whatever pinnacle you choose.'

'Mr. Hanson,' called Jack. 'Mr. Wells. The Doctor is going aloft. You will act as hand and foot fasts, as and when required.'

'Aye-aye, sir, aye-aye,' they replied; and he swung himself into the absurdly familiar ladder-way, mounting with the smooth ease of a powerful, very well trained body to the maintop, where he greeted the look-out and drew breath for a while to ease his friend's somewhat more laborious progress.

Stephen arrived, pale and if not anxious then truly worn, followed by his attendants, and they all sat for a while, gazing at the mainland and the schooner with the Captain's gla.s.s.

It was quite true: the masts were in no considerable state of motion. Yet even so, at the next stage, the not very awful crosstrees, Jack said that that would answer very well. He gazed for a while, pointing out various remote inland heights; and then, reaching out for a backstay, his own expeditious form of descent, he desired the young men to see the Doctor safely bestowed when he wished to return to the deck, and so vanished.

Arriving with little more than a m.u.f.fled thump, he caused Ringle's signal to be thrown out, requiring her to come within hail; and then, spurred by the scent of breakfast, he hurried into the cabin. Presently Stephen joined him, paler still, but with the a.s.surance of one who now walked upon comparatively firm ground: Killick plied him with coffee, bacon, sausage, toast; and quite soon his equanimity and even cheerfulness resumed their usual placid height.

'I do hope,' said Jack, 'that Dr. Jacob would be so good as to accompany William into Rio, and speaking Portuguese find out all he discreetly can about the Asp: William will know all the questions to ask, but it would come much better through someone not obviously English - someone, say, who was acquainted with her in Valletta, before she left the service, and who naturally takes an interest in her.'

'Am I right in supposing that ideally William should be a pa.s.sing figure, preoccupied with other maritime affairs, and that Jacob should be an idle pa.s.senger, walking about the docks to see something of Brazil, largely ignorant of the sea, but interested in his earthbound fas.h.i.+on?'

'You are wholly in the right of it, brother: that is exactly what I should have asked. A trifle of coffee?'

At this point Killick announced Mr. Woodbine's desire to see the Captain directly or almost so; the near approach of Ringle; and the news that those African cats had got at the mangoes - 'And what they ain't ate, they've spoilt,' he added with an obscure surly triumph.

Mr. Woodbine's mission was concerned solely with a certain deviation from truth on the part of the pintles, observed and exactly measured in this pellucid calm - a deviation forecast by Mr. Seppings when he installed the new stern-post, the correction being provided by three simple operations, clearly figured by young Mr. Seppings in a drawing to be found in the case holding the necessary implements. The next interview was nothing like so satisfactory: William Reade did not feel that his explanations of a series of basic questions about the revived Asp had penetrated the layers of Dr. Jacob's ignorance of both English and Portuguese nautical language. He knew very well what Captain Aubrey wanted to learn, but he felt that apart from making the usual arrangements for water and stores, he was going on a fool's errand. 'You might as well try to shave with a b.u.t.ter-knife,' he muttered, taking his seat next to a sombre Jacob in Ringle's gig.

On the other hand, Jacob, though indeed as impenetrably stupid in some respects as the most prejudiced seaman could wish, was also a remarkable draughtsman. This was of course most apparent in his beautifully exact and explicit anatomical drawings; but he was perfectly capable of changing scale, att.i.tude and nature of description; and his drawings, produced in the cabin from rough sketches and combined with Reade's vivid technical description, gave Jack Aubrey a very clear impression of the renewed, the almost entirely rebuilt Asp.

'I doubt I should have recognised her, sir, with this fine long line running aft' - he traced in on Jacob's profile - 'and I must do the Doctor the justice of saying that he could not have struck it off better had he been bred to the trade. My only question is whether, with these extra feet, she will be as windwardly as she was - her one good point. Faster, for sure: but as windwardly? I wonder.'

'I dare say you are right.' Jack did not choose to be more specific, but he spoke gravely; and as William Reade carried on with his description of the Asp's improved armament, including a most elegant pair of long bra.s.s chasers right forward, his face, ordinarily so cheerful, grew graver still.

'My dear,' wrote Stephen, 'many a year have I spent sailing the sea in s.h.i.+ps, but rarely have I felt such a corporate sense of concern: it is certainly not a defined uneasiness, for the Surprise is sound, as all hands know, she is well supplied, and she carries an ample crew of seamen perfectly well used to working together. Yet there is a want of cheer, of those conventional jokes, semi-insults and jocular repartees that make up so much of the very small change in s.h.i.+pboard life; and what puzzles me extremely is that it is quasi-universal. It may spare the mids.h.i.+pmen's berth and the little small gathering of s.h.i.+p's boys, but it is fairly general elsewhere. I noticed it first when we were lying in the wholly sunless estuary of the River Plate, having sent the tender over that vast and as far as I could see birdless waste to Buenos Aires, carrying among other burdens a message to you in which I pointed out the extraordinary contrast between your African water, teeming with both familiar and wildly exotic duck, geese, anhingas, waders from the most minute of stints to Ardea goliath, and this prodigious desert, inhabited perhaps to the extreme limit of my gla.s.s by one moulting black-crested grebe. How ardently I hope that my note may reach you in Dorsets.h.i.+re, bearing as it does more affection than is ordinarily enclosed in a common sailcloth cover.

'It is true that I date this - gloom, untoward atmosphere - from our dreary sojourn in the River Plate, and for a while I foolishly tried to account for its mood by the absence of creatures: but of course that was sad nonsense. As soon as the schooner rejoins, and as soon as we resume our course we shall necessarily begin to see the southern birds; already, before we dropped anchor here, a few skuas from the Falk-lands had been observed and in a very short time the various penguins will be commonplace.

'No. I must find a more rational basis for this prevalent mood. Part of it may arise from the odd in-between nature of the season, neither one thing nor another: much more from the general knowledge that we are to sail into the Pacific by way of the Horn rather than attempt Magellan's Strait, which Jack Aubrey dislikes extremely, taken from east to west, the farther reaches calling for some manoeuvres that are exceptionally perilous in a strong westerly blow.

'I think it may fairly be said that no one man in a s.h.i.+p has as much influence as her captain: and I believe that the strength of that influence is very, very much increased when the captain has commanded the s.h.i.+p, her officers and her company for many years, which is of course the case with Captain Aubrey. His expression, his daily mood, his tone of voice are naturally, automatically and universally observed - not out of curiosity or intense personal interest but as any man - sailor, farmer, fisherman - subject to the weather frequently looks at the sky. Now except as a friend I am not particularly subject to the great man's state of mind, his etat d'ame, yet I find myself curiously affected...'

Here the letter came to a halt, starting again many days later with a different pen, dipped into a different ink, and written on a somewhat discoloured sheet of paper: 'My dear, it is not without a real regret that I see the absolute loss of so many pages, swept off by an intemperate gust, pummelled and pounded by intrusive sea-water intimately mixed with ice swilling with the utmost violence about the sodden cabin while poor Surprise lay on her beam-ends on one of the innumerable uncharted reefs in this forbidding part of the world and while I and the blessed Poll Skeeping bandaged, splinted and dosed the hands injured by a gun forced from its emplacement by the furious thrust of ice. At present we are on an even keel once more, gliding under courses and close-reefed topsails along the inward - the leeward - side of one of the countless islands that fringe this desolate end of the world.

'These pages, now reduced to pulp, were little more than a kind of diary, a daily musing that I liked to share with you - reports of the increasing numbers of penguins (even some emperors), albatrosses, petrels great and small, seals of course and sea-lions, and that beautiful sinister creature the killer whale, sometimes in numerous bands. But they did contain an apology for addressing you in this familiar style, which I justified by the fact that as I was not an absolutely and formally rejected suitor, such a degree of ease could be considered permissible (though perhaps blameworthy: even indelicate). And they contained a pa.s.sage that described our coming to the Cape of the Eleven Thousand Virgins, beyond which lay the broad and tranquil mouth of Magellan's Strait, perhaps a dozen miles across: the wind was fair, on our larboard quarter; yet there was no call to change sail or course. The seamen lined the landward side and they watched the strait go by, most with a face as grave as their captain's. No remarks of any kind: the silence broken only by the regular stroke of the bell.

'Since then, and since our pa.s.sage of the Strait Le Maire, which leads only from one part of the main ocean to a worse part a little south, we have had foul weather, far, far more ice than is usual at this time of the year, and the very strong wind has a far greater southerly component than most s.h.i.+ps encounter; and of course this makes the ice much more dangerous, much more plentiful. It is mostly floe-ice, great flat sheets of no great depth, rarely more than our skilled whalers (and we have several aboard) and the bowgrace with which we are adorned can deal with; but occasionally great ice-mountains are to be seen - sometimes, when the sky is clear, of an extraordinary green, blue or turquoise beauty. Our whalers say that as the season advances, above all with so much south in the wind, we shall see many more. From a purely aesthetic point of view, they are a most n.o.ble spectacle; for these great and continuous winds, with so very long a fetch, build up monstrous waves, perhaps a hundred feet tall, and when they break against an even taller ma.s.s of ice with enormous, deliberate force, it is a very magnificent spectacle.

'Yet their presence, and the presence of the vast waves, the largely adverse winds, oblige us to make what westward advance we can achieve under the lee - the sometimes astonis.h.i.+ngly complete lee - of the many, many islands. Sometimes, after days of perpetual and wearing fight against the weather, we will put into a sheltered bay, rest, fish (mostly for a kind of succulent cod) and dredge up enormous mussels from no great depth.

'We are lying in just such a bay at present, and Jack Aubrey and I have supped on these same delights. As I think you know, when he was a boy he was acquainted with the Byron family. There may have been some family connexion - I am not sure - but in any case he knew the Admiral, nicknamed Foul-Weather Jack in the service, admired him greatly and often repeated his anecdotes. You may recall that when he was a mids.h.i.+pman the Admiral sailed in the unfortunate Wager, one of the squadron with which Anson made his famous circ.u.mnavigation: the Wager was wrecked in the Chonos archipelago, and Byron and some of his s.h.i.+pmates lived among the Indians of those parts - lived very, very hard indeed. And he would tell how the women, some of whom were quite kind to him, would do practically all the work. It was they who handled the canoes, for example - fragile craft perpetually over-setting - and few of the men could swim, whereas the women were taught from childhood. And they did the fis.h.i.+ng, laying out nets and then setting their dogs to drive the fish into them, little intelligent smooth dogs, sometimes painted, that could dive and swim under water. They cooked too, and made what few clothes any of them ever had: but most went bare, or with just a piece of seal-skin slung about them and kept to windward. The men walked about the strand gathering fuel, sometimes hunting, but not with much success. They did make fires, however, even when everything was sopping wet, as it usually was; and they signalled with the smoke, pa.s.sing messages to a considerable distance. But, my dear, I wander, and it is time for my rounds. Hands have been piped to weigh the anchor; the deck echoes with the steady tramp of feet, the click-click-click of the pawls as the cable comes home; and I remember now that we were to profit by the making tide to move to a headland from which we could see the main ocean, the open sea.'

Eight bells: the usual morning rituals, one of which was Stephen's rounds. The sick-berth was spa.r.s.ely inhabited at present, but one cot, containing a Swedish whaler called Bjorn, who had broken three ribs in a recent blow, already had a visitor - Hanson, to whose division the seaman belonged.

'You are doing very well,' said Stephen in that rather loud, distinct voice that even quite intelligent medical men use to their foreign patients, 'and if Mr. Hanson will call a s.h.i.+pmate to make sure you do not fall, you may go up on deck for a while, now that the s.h.i.+p is so still.'

The morning ceremonies also included breakfast, and while they were eating it, Stephen said, 'It is very pleasant to see how the young men take care of the hands who belong to their division. Ever since the boisterous weather that filled the sick-berth, there has not been a day when two or three of them have not come to ask how their s.h.i.+pmates do.'

'It would be a d.a.m.ned odd, unhappy s.h.i.+p where they did not,' said Jack. 'There is no right feeling where the officers do not feel a real concern for their men: if you were to serve in other s.h.i.+ps, I think you would find it much the same throughout the service."

Stephen did not wholly agree, but he said nothing; and before he had poured his next cup of coffee Whewell, the officer of the watch, came in and said, 'I beg pardon for interrupting you, sir, but we have just opened the strait and I am afraid it is blowing very hard outside, and the making tide is coming through like a millstream, carrying d.a.m.ned - carrying awkward great lumps of ice.'

'I am sorry to hear it, Mr. Whewell,' said Jack, 'but unless our reckoning is very far out it will be slack-water before long. Pray drop a kedge, but keep the breeze right aft, so that we can look through the strait when we choose. I shall be on deck directly.'

'My dear,' wrote Stephen, 'I followed them on deck: we were still in the lee of the tall black cliff to larboard, with just steerage-way on us; but overhead the wind raced across the gap with a deep and steady roar, while through the pa.s.sage to the open sea the 'awkward great lumps of ice' to which Mr. Whewell referred were irregular ma.s.ses the size of a moderate haystack, presumably the fragments of some huge ice-mountain that had driven with full shattering forces on the outer cliff. We (though not Ringle) might have survived a glancing blow from one of them, but there seemed no hope whatsoever for the canoe that was trying to cross the tide at its farther extremities - I mean on our right-hand or starboard side, where the current ran violently up the sh.o.r.e.

'For some moments I did not understand what was happening, but then Hanson and his seamen quickly explained, and pa.s.sed me a telescope. In the canoe was a young woman with a piece of seal-skin over one shoulder and a paddle in both hands: in the floor of the canoe, covered with nets, half a dozen small crouching dogs, right aft an older woman, completely naked, holding a basket of fish and an equally naked baby. They all glistened with the rain and flying spray: it was just not freezing. The girl, with an extraordinary mastery of her craft, tried again and again to slip between the great blocks of ice, often touching but never being upset. We watched with the most extreme attention and anxiety. At last, the blocks coming in an almost uninterrupted train, she spun the craft round, and now running with the current as it curved across the channel to our side, she ran within hail. Captain Aubrey called out, offering a rope. She dared not take it: I think the check would have destroyed the frail canoe. Bjorn shouted and she replied. Someone threw a blanket, clear into the older woman's grasp: she was seen to smile and they were swept on along the sh.o.r.e, checking their way on a small s.h.i.+ngly strand with something of a hovel behind it, smoke from a fire, and some naked men who sauntered down for the fish, the dogs and the blanket.

'Very soon after this, with one of those dream-like changes, the tide fell still. Jack hailed Ringle, lying there under our lee, and desired her to look out through the pa.s.s, the channel, and report on the state of the sea and the ice. Then calling Hanson and Bjorn, he told them to join us in the cabin: there he gave them some coffee, and speaking mainly through Hanson, who was not only Bjorn's immediate officer but who was thoroughly used to his way of speaking, he asked for a general account of the situation. For example, did Bjorn understand the language of these parts?

'Yes, sir, he did: more or less. Had been wrecked in the Ingeborg, out of Malmo, some way to the west, in Wigwam Reach and beyond - s.h.i.+p burnt to the waterline and only five men reached the sh.o.r.e - the people were quite kind -took most of their belongings, but gave them food - they were mad for knives - had no knives, no metal - they gave him a girl for his second-best knife - so after a year or two - he lost count of time - he came to understand them quite well - they were fairly decent people - but they did not know cleanliness. Their language was called Tlashkala: no, it was not spoken right along the Reach: far from it. Another nation lived say fifty miles westward, and they could not understand it at all. When the two nations met they usually fought and the stronger side took everything they could carry. And beyond that nation, the Wona, there was yet another, and so all along Wigwam Reach. Some of them ate men's flesh: some did not. But they all signalled to their friends with smoke. A pause, and Bjorn murmured to Hanson, "Would the Captain know about Wigwam Reach?"

'Hanson blushed, overcame his confusion, and said "Sir: Bjorn wonders whether you know about Wigwam Reach?"

"Please ask him to tell me all he can."

"Well, sir," said Bjorn, "I don't want to shove my oar in, but Malmo and Gothenburg whalers, homeward bound and in no hurry from the far south fisheries, quite often use it, above all when there is so much south in the winds off the Horn, like it is now. The Wigwam Reach is a sheltered pa.s.sage - not this one just west of us at present, but the next after it. A continual lee, and slow of course; but it goes on and on a hundred and fifty miles or more, past Cabo Pilar into the Pacific. It is the far end of the Magellan Strait. To be sure, the Indians are mostly wicked, which worries the whaling s.h.i.+p: but a man-of-war has nothing to fear."

"Well, thank you, Mr. Hanson," said Jack, standing up. "Thank you, Bjorn; and I hope your poor ribs will be better very soon."'

'My dear,' wrote Stephen again, in a jagged, uneven hand although he and his stool and his desk were so clamped together that nothing but his wrist had independent freedom: the s.h.i.+p and the sea upon which she was at least for the moment suspended knew no such limit, 'we are in the boundless ocean once again, and blessed by what they very oddly call a favourable wind we are sent in our tumultuous headlong way something north of west. We have of course as I probably told you in one of these countless rambling disconnected and profoundly ignorant pages long since rounded the dreaded Cape Horn, and now Captain Aubrey has decided that duty requires him to waste not a minute in the placid navigation of slow, sheltered waters, but to press on come tempest, come dreadful ice, come wounded spars and threadbare, wounded ropes: and now, come the approach of famine. Our supplies of everything but water are running very, very low.

'The shortage is already perceptible in the sick-bay, where old wounds open for a nothing, where there is evident debility and perhaps the first signs of scurvy. Three men and a boy have died of plain uncomplicated pneumonia, and poor old Mr. Woodbine is sinking fast under a complication of inveterate self-treated maladies: but what can medicine do in such cases other than ease the end without deliberately provoking it?

'Himself, and by that I mean Jack Aubrey for he does indeed personify the s.h.i.+p, has become grave, stern, unapproachable. He asks no man's opinion, and I have the impression that he knows exactly what he is doing - that he sails with the same determination and clarity of mind as the great albatrosses that sometimes accompany us, black-browed, wandering, and royal.

'Although I am by now quite an ancient mariner, long accustomed to the ways of the service and the sea, it does surprise me to observe the steady force of usage, custom, necessity and discipline. The people, weakened by loss and now by short rations, are worked very hard indeed: putting a s.h.i.+p about in such seas and with such winds, in very, very cold weather, is extremely wearing: and they have been kept to it for what seems an unaccountably long time. Yet I have heard no complaints, no short answers, no cursing of an awkward s.h.i.+pmate. The gaiety is gone, of course it is: but an astonis.h.i.+ng fort.i.tude remains, even among the s.h.i.+p's remaining boys and the mids.h.i.+pmen. Once or twice I have heard the Captain check an officer: but it is very rare.

'He and I eat together, as we have always done; yet this, clearly, is not a time for intimacy. And it is a great while since we candidly exchanged our minds. I only remember him nodding his head over the last of the coffee, and telling me that towards the end of the graveyard watch he had suddenly remembered the Delaware's present of some bottles of Jamaica rum, as yet unbroached in his private store-room. "The men will go through h.e.l.l and high-water to save the barky," he observed. "But if you touch their grog, I should not like to answer for even the best of them." 'So the grog is safe for a while at least; and unless I quite misunderstood the conversation in the gunroom, the extreme anxiety of our dwindling stores - our very few casks of barely edible h.o.r.n.y beef - is likely to be relieved, since we are steering, or attempting to steer, towards a small group of islands laid down on three separate charts reasonably near what pa.s.ses for the coast in these lat.i.tudes. For this, though you may find it as hard as I do to believe, is the beginning of the Antarctic spring: the whole cycle of life begins again, and we hope thereby to preserve our own. What light there was is fading, but not, this evening, under the usual cloud of small-flaked snow but of a sombre driving rain: and so, my dear, I bid you good night: G.o.d bless.'

Some days later, on Thursday, a very weary Dr. Maturin eased himself into the same writing-place, looked automatically at his close-scrubbed hands again, and dipped his pen. 'My dear,' he wrote, 'it is perhaps no more than a piece of hedge-law, but I have heard men say that butchers cannot be allowed on a jury, they being so daily accustomed to blood that all tenderness is washed out of them: and for my own part, during my medical studies, I was intimately familiar with the dissection of the dead. It is true that at first I had to overcome a certain reluctance, indeed an extreme reluctance, but I thought I had conquered it entirely. Not at all. The carnage of yesterday and the day before distressed and sickened me beyond what I had thought possible. The weather was exceptionally kind and we, Surprise and Ringle, headed into a sheltered bay, there dropping anchor in perhaps twenty fathom of water, pulling in to the sh.o.r.e over a moderate swell, through ice that presented no great difficulty. Yet already there was death at hand: just by the blue cutter in which I sat a leopard-seal made a lunge at one of the smaller penguins which shot into the air like a little rocket or a cork from the bottle, landing on a small ice-floe. The sh.o.r.e itself was a most striking spectacle, divided into rookeries (as they say) for the various kinds of penguin -various levels for the different species - and then strands, rocky or smooth, appropriated to the seals according to their kind, and one particular cove to the vast sea-elephants, whose enormous males as I am sure you know wear a fleshy great proboscis and rearing up utter a h.e.l.lish roar. Above them all, on the spa.r.s.e herbage of the upper island, wheeled terns, three or perhaps four kinds of albatross, petrels and skuas; and with a gla.s.s one could make out sitting birds by the hundred.

'As I think I have said before, several of our hands have sailed in whalers or sealers and they were perfectly accustomed to the slaughter: the others, after the initial bawling and excitement, settled down deliberately to knocking the medium-sized seals on the head, while those with some knowledge of butchering cut them into reasonable joints for salting. What merriment or wanton brutality there was soon died away and I was able to prevent some unnecessary suffering with a scalpel. It was an extraordinarily b.l.o.o.d.y, extraordinarily unpleasant exercise, carried out for the most part in a phlegmatic, workaday fas.h.i.+on. It distressed most of the boys extremely: excited a few others. By good fortune or perhaps I should say good management we had salt in plenty: so there is our hold, and Ringle's hold, filled with barrels of seal and sea-lion flesh, as rich and nouris.h.i.+ng a meat as you could wish.

'I did however notice that although the very real fear of running out of provisions in the far south sea had certainly vanished, yet a certain cloud hung over the s.h.i.+p. It disappeared after grog and an enormous supper of fresh seal steaks: and stupidly I did not attend to the proportion of those who were affected and those (mostly countrymen and accustomed to killing as a matter of course from childhood) who were not; yet I did notice, since we were in the same boat, that Hanson and his particular friend Daniel did what little they could to hide their distress in our many b.l.o.o.d.y voyages to and fro, with the skuas screaming just over our heads.'