Patrick O'Brian - The Hundred Days

‘Oh dear me yes, sir: many is the great jar I have ground in my time.’

‘Then pray reach me down the little keg of hog’s lard, the jar of mutton suet, and the quicksilver. There are two mortars with their pestles just below the colcothar of vitriol.’

When they had ground away companionably at their ointment for perhaps half a glass Stephen said, ‘Mrs Skeeping, in my sea-time I have seen few, very few women at all, although I am told they are not in fact so very rare. Will you tell me how they come to be aboard and why they stay in a place so often damp and always so bare of comfort?’

‘Why, sir, in the first place a good many warrant-officers- like the gunner, of course - take their wives to sea, and some captains allow the good petty-officers to do the same. Then there are wives that take a relation along - my particular friend Maggie Cheal is the bosun’s wife’s sister. And some just take passage, with the captain’s or first lieutenant’s leave. And there are a few in very hard times by land that dress as men and are not found out until very late, when no notice is taken: they speak gruff, they are good seamen, and there is not much odds after forty. And as for staying aboard, it is not a comfortable life to be sure, except in a first or second rate that does not wear a flag; but there is company, and you are sure of food; and then men, upon the whole, are kinder than women - you get used to it all, and the order and regularity is a comfort in itself. For my part it was as simple as kiss your hand. At Haslar I was put to look after an officer, a post-captain that had lost a foot - there had been a secondary resection and the dressing was very delicate. His wife, Mrs Wilson, and the children came to see him every day, and when the wound was healed and he posted to a seventy-four in Jamaica she asked me to go with them, looking after the little ones. It was a long, slow voyage with no foul weather and everybody enjoyed it, most of all the children. But they had not been there a month before they were all dead of the Yellow Jack. Luckily for me, the officer who took over Captain Wilson’s ship brought a great many youngsters aboard, more than the gunner’s wife could deal with; so we having made friends on the way over, she asked me to give her a hand - and so it went, relations in ships - I had a sister married to the sailmaker’s mate in Ajax - friends in ships, with a spell or two in naval hospitals - and here I am, loblolly-boy in Surprise, I hope, sir, if I give satisfaction.’

‘Certainly you are, particularly as I learn from Mr Teevan that you do not play the physician, puzzle the patients with long words or criticize the doctor’s orders.’

Mrs Skeeping thanked him very kindly; but having taken her leave she paused at the door, and blushing she said, ‘Sir, might I beg you to call me just Poll, as the Captain does, and Killick and all the others I have been shipmates with? Otherwise they would think I was topping it the knob; and that they will not abide, no, not if it is ever so.’

‘By all means, Poll, my dear,’ said Stephen.

He read a couple of pages on leeches and their surprising variety in the Transactions, and then, judging his time, summoned their common steward and said, ‘Preserved Killick, I am going to fetch Dr Jacob, my assistant surgeon, who as you know is to mess in the gunroom.’

‘Which the Captain told me,’ said Killick with a satisfied smile. ‘So did Mr Harding.’

‘And I should like you to find him a stout boy to be his servant and to bring his sea-chest down from Thompson’s in their little two-wheeled cart. You will give the gunroom cook good warning, I am sure.’

The introduction went as well and easily as Stephen could have wished. Harding, Somers and Whewell were hospitable, civilized men, and the quiet, unpretentious Dr Jacob, willing to please and to be pleased, succeeded in both: he was somewhat older than the lieutenants, which ensured a certain respect; his friendship with their much esteemed Doctor gave rise to more; and when Woodbine, the master, hurried in he found the gunroom in a fine buzz of conversation. He excused his lateness to the president: ‘That sudden gust took Elpenor the Greek over the side, and we have been fishing him out - a very strong and sudden gust indeed: north-east. How do you do, sir?’ - this to Jacob.

‘You are very welcome, I am sure. A glass of wine with you, sir.’

With shore supplies at hand it was a pleasant meal, with a steady flow of talk, much of it about the sea and its wonders - the enormous rays of the West Indies, albatrosses nesting on Desolation Island (one of the many Desolation Islands) and their tameness, St Elmo’s Fire, the Northern Lights. Woodbine belonged to an older generation than the lieutenants: he had travelled even more widely, and encouraged by the close attention of the medical man he spoke at considerable length about some pools or natural resurgences of pitch in Mexico. ‘Not to be compared to the Pitch-Lake in Trinidad for size, but much more interesting: there is one where the tar comes bubbling up in the middle, so liquid you can take it with a ladle; and every now and then a white bone comes surging up in the great bubble. Such bones! People may prate about their Russian mammoths, but these creatures - or some of them - would make mammoths look like pug-dogs. The gentleman that took me there, a natural philosopher, collects the most curious, and he showed me great curved tusks, oh, three fathoms long and.. .’ Another of those curious furious blasts came down from the face of the Rock, ruffling the whole bay and heeling the Surprise so that all hands automatically reached for their glasses and the mess-servants grasped the backs of the chairs. The master, an unusually truthful, scrupulous man, an elder of the congregation of Sethians in Shelmerston, checked himself and said, ‘Well, perhaps ten foot, to be on the safe side. And I tell you what, gentlemen, I have known this gust or warning foretell a seven-day blow out of the north-east four or even five times when my ship has been lying here.’

‘In that case, God help the poor fellows in Pomone’s boats,’ said Somers: he spoke facetiously, but the master shook his head, asking, ‘Did you ever know a bad omen to be wrong, Mr Somers?’

There did indeed follow a series of strong, steady winds, scarcely varying a point in direction from north-east day after day, nor in force from full to close-reefed topsails: and during all this time Jack and David Adams, his clerk on and off these many years but now styled his secretary (and paid as such) - for although on this occasion it had been agreed that Jack, with a small squadron soon to be split up for various duties while he himself was to have such a particular mission, should not have a captain under him, he was certainly allowed a secretary during all this time they rearranged the forces at hand and the recent drafts, the Commodore exercising them at gunnery whenever it was at all possible and dining regularly with his captains. Two of them he liked very well: young Pomfret in acting command of Pomone and Harris of Briseis, both excellent seamen and both of his own mind entirely about the capital importance of rapid, accurate fire. Brawley and Cartwright of the corvettes Rainbow and Ganymede, though somewhat lacking in authority, were agreeable young men; but they were not fortunate in their officers and neither ship was in first-rate order, which was a pity, since both were Bermuda-built, dry, swift and weatherly. Ward of the Dover on the other hand was the kind of man Jack could not possibly like: heavy, graceless, dark-faced; rude, domineering and inefficient. He was said to be rich and he was certainly mean: a very rare combination in a sailor, though Jack had met it before, a man generally disliked is hardly apt to lavish good food and wine on those who despise him; and Ward’s dinners were execrable.