Patrick O'Brian - Blue at the Mizzen

'It leads the starboard main-topsail-brace straight down on deck: give it a gentle pull when it is in reach and you will see the brace respond.'

So it did: a most gratifying sweep. But now they were close to the lower side of the top, that broad platform at the head of the lower mast that bore the topmast and its matching array of shrouds, spread by the crosstrees and towering up to the topgallantmast and the upper crosstrees. From immediately under the top Jack threaded Hanson up through the lubber's hole, himself taking the backward-leaning futtock-shrouds and dropping from the rail to join him. 'You must always come up through the hole for the first seven times,' he said. 'To be sure, it looks lubberly, but seven times is the law. You will very soon get used to laying aloft, and after those holy seven times you will use the futtock-shrouds without thinking about it. Now let me show you the things in the top...' This he did from the top-maul to the fid, fid-plate, bolster and chock.

Jack's voyages were rarely of a kind in which a first-voyager would be either proposed or accepted; yet some did come aboard, propelled by very high authority or the plea of old shipmates, and it was Jack's habit to take them aloft himself, at first. It established a particular contact, and it told him a great deal about the boy. Apart from anything else it made ordinary human conversation possible, a very rare thing between the extremes of rank.

They sat in the top for a while sitting on folded studdingsails while Jack explained various points in the running rigging and Horatio gazed out with open wonder and admiration at the immense, ordered intricacy of a man-of-war, its extraordinary beauty and the even greater beauty of its surroundings.

'I am afraid your knuckles are bleeding on your trousers,' Jack observed, after a pause.

'Oh, I am so sorry, sir,' cried the boy, in horror. 'I am afraid they are. I beg pardon, sir. I shall wrap them in my handkerchief.'

'The great thing for blood,' said Jack, speaking with some authority, 'is cold water. Just soak whatever it is in cold water overnight and in the morning it will be gone. But tell me about boxing, will you? Have you done much?'

'Oh no sir. I hardly went to school: but the boys who came to be prepared for first communion by Mr. Walker or my grandfather and I used to mill in the barn afterwards.'

'Did you use gloves?'

'No, sir: just muffles. But then there was the coachman's boy whose uncle, a real prize-fighter who kept the inn at Clumpton and who taught him a great deal - he had gloves, and he taught me.'

'So much the better,' said Jack. 'When I was a reefer in a ship of the line with a lot of others in the berth, we used to have set matches, and we challenged other ships in the squadron. So did the ratings.'

'That must have been capital fun.'

'So it was, indeed. Perhaps we might do something... what do you weigh?'

'Almost nine stone, sir.'

'We must see what can be done. Are you puffed with your climb?'

'Not in the least, sir.'

'Then let us go up to the crosstrees. You do not mind the height?'

'Oh no, sir, I do not mind it.'

Jack turned him round, set him in position, both hands firm, and once again he called, 'Away aloft.' They moved briskly up the narrowing ladder, the shrouds so close at the top that Jack swung round to the larboard set, swung up to the larboard crosstree and gave the boy a hand to heave him up to the other. There they sat, one each side of the mast, each with an arm around it. They seemed incomparably higher up here, the sea stretching almost to infinity, the sky unimaginably vast: Horatio had opened his mouth to exclaim at the ethereal beauty of the ship and her setting when he remembered the words 'mute and meek' and shut it again. Jack said, 'If the breeze comes a trifle more aft, you may see stunsails set. Now cling to the crosstree with both hands once I am under you, dangle your legs and let me place your feet.'

Down and down again: and on deck Jack said, 'You did pretty well. Next time you must lay aloft with one of your mates - Mr. Daniel, say - and in a week you will find it as easy as kiss-my-hand.'

'Sir, thank you very much indeed for taking me: I have never seen anything so beautiful in my whole life. I wish it could go on for ever.'

He regretted these last words as being enthusiastic, out of place to a post-captain: but they had barely been uttered before they were drowned by a prodigious bellowing from the look-out on the foretopsail yard, a former (and most passionate) whaler. 'There she blows! Oh there she blows! Three points on the starboard bow. Pardon me, sir,' he added in a lower tone, for this was not a Royal Naval cry.

There she blew indeed - a great dark heave in the smooth sea and then the jet - and not only she but her six companions, one after another, heaving up enormous, blowing and smoothly diving each in turn, and each heartily cheered by the Surprises. 'What kind, Reynolds?' called Jack.

'Oh right whales, sir, as right as right could be, ha, ha, ha!'

'Why do they say right whales?' asked William Salmon, a master's mate, when the berth had settled down to dinner - a diminished berth, now that Jack had dispensed with some of the more indifferent midshipmen.

'Why, because they are right in every respect,' said Adams, Captain Aubrey's clerk. 'They are in the right place - off Greenland or in the Bay - they have the right whalebone, by far the best in the market - and the right amount of oil, six or seven tons of it. And the right temperament: they move slow, not dashing about like your finwhale, or turning spiteful and crushing your boat like a sperm. You cannot say fairer.'

'No, to be sure,' said the berth, looking eagerly at the pudding as it came through the door, a fine massive plum-duff. Officially, and actually in time of dearth, the midshipmen ate the same food as the other ratings, but since their captain insisted upon quite a considerable allowance those in Surprise did very much better, having laid in stores, livestock and even a moderate quantity of wine, some of which they drank at the end of the meal.

'Here's to a sweet and prosperous voyage,' said Daniel, raising his glass.

'A sweet and prosperous voyage,' they echoed.

Sweet and prosperous it was, in a way, for although the breeze was now so faint the ship could hardly log more than a hundred miles from one noon to the next (a distance very accurately measured by Daniel and Hanson) it was wholly favourable, while the calmness of the sea, the almost unmoving deck, made gunnery a rare delight, and with his wealth of powder and shot (all to be renewed in Madeira) Jack exercised his crew with live ammunition, once they had loosened their muscles by running the guns in and out half a dozen times, and now each crew had the lively satisfaction of destroying a number of empty casks, towed out sometimes to a considerable distance. Then came the repeated broadsides: this was not the dumb-show of usual practice at divisions, but the shattering din of battle, the flashing stabs of fire, the shriek of each gun's very dangerous recoil, the heady scent of powder-smoke along the decks; and there was the frigate, under her fighting topsails, in the midst of her own cloud as the breeze swept the smoke back across her -smoke lit from within, and an enormous, almost continuous roar as the firing started with the foremost starboard gun and ran right down the broadside. It was as though Surprise was fighting a dreadful battle of her own, the hands stripped to the waist, handkerchiefs round their heads, deadly serious, extremely active, checking the recoil, sponging, loading, ramming home the charge and running the ton of metal up against its port with a bang while the gun's captain aimed it and the powder-boys ran at full speed with their cartridges from the magazine, while the deck trembled and the taut shrouds vibrated.