Patrick O'Brian - The Wine-Dark Sea

'As taut as it is long,' said Jack, not unkindly. 'Well, Shelton, is Mr Adams to write you down as pressed or volunteer?'

'Oh volunteer, sir, if you please,' cried Shelton.

'Make it so, Mr Adams, and rate him able for the moment: starboard watch,' said Jack. He wrote on a piece of paper. 'Shelton, give this to the officer of the watch. Well, Tom,' he went on after the man had gone, 'what do you think?'

'I believe him, sir, every word,' said Pullings. 'I am not to put my opinion before yours; but I believe him.'

'So did I,' said Jack, and the old experienced Adams nodded his head. Jack rang the bell. 'Pass the word for Mr Vidal.' And a few moments later, 'Mr Vidal, when we have seen the whaler's mate and her charts, and when we have shifted as much water out of her as can be done in thirty minutes, you will take command and steer for Callao under moderate sail. We are running down no great way in the hope of a Frenchman, and it is likely we shall overtake you. If we do not, wait there. Mr Adams will give you the necessary papers and the name of our agent: he looked after the frigate's prizes on the way out. You may take the whaler's mate, bosun and cook - no arms, of course, either on themselves or in their chests - and several of our people.'

'Very good, sir,' said Vidal, unmoved.

'As for getting the water across, you have half an hour: there is not a minute to lose; and since the sea is a little choppy, spend the oil and spare not. A couple of casks are neither here nor there.'

'Aye, aye, sir: spend and spare not it is.'

'Jack!' cried Stephen, coming in to their strangely late and even twilit dinner, 'did you know that those active mariners have brought a large number of hogsheads aboard, and they filled with fresh water?"

'Have they, indeed?' asked Jack. 'You amaze me.'

'They have, too. May I have some to sponge my patients and have their clothes washed at last?'

'Well, I suppose you may have a little for sponging them - a very small bowl would be enough, I am sure - but as for washing clothes - washing clothes, good Lord! That would be a most shocking expenditure, you know. Salt does herrings no harm, nor lobsters; and my shirt has not been washed in fresh water since Heaven knows how long. It is like coarse emery-paper. No. Let us wait for the rain: have you looked at the glass?'

'I have not.'

'It began dropping in the first dog. It has already reached twenty-nine inches and it is still falling: look at the meniscus. And the wind is hauling aft. If the rain don't come down in great black squalls tonight or tomorrow, you shall have one of these hogsheads - well, half a hogshead - for your clothes.'

After a short, dissatisfied silence Dr Maturin said, 'It will be no news to you, sure, that the whaler has slipped away, going, they tell me, to Callao, if ever they can find the place God be with them.'

'I had noticed it,' said Jack through his sea-pie.

'But you may not know that two of her men forgot their pills entirely or that in his legitimate agitation Padeen gave Smyth a liniment, not telling him it was to be rubbed in rather than drunk. However, nobody, nobody has told me why we are rushing in this impetuous manner through the turgid sea, with sailors whose names I do not even know, rushing almost directly away, to judge by the sun, away from the Peru I had so longed to see and which you had led me confidently to expect before Bridie's birthday.'

'I never said which birthday, this or the next.'

'I wonder you can speak with such levity about my daughter. I have always treated yours with proper respect.'

'You called them a pair of turnip-headed swabs once, when they were still in long clothes.'

'For shame, Jack: a hissing shame upon you. Those were your very own words when you showed them to me at Ashgrove before our voyage to the Mauritius. Your soul to the Devil.'

'Well, perhaps they were. Yes: you are quite right - I remember now - you warned me not to toss them into the air, as being bad for the intellects. I beg pardon. But tell me, brother, has nobody told you what is afoot?'

'They have not.'

'Where have you been?'

'I have been in my cabin downstairs, contemplating on mercury.'

'A delightful occupation. But he is not to be seen now, you know: he is too near the sun. And to tell you the truth he is neither much of a spectacle nor a great help in navigation, though charming from the purely astronomical point of view.'

'I meant the metallic element. In its pure state quicksilver is perfectly neutral; you may swallow half a pint without harm. But in its various combinations it is sometimes benign - where would you portly men be without the blue pill? - and sometimes, when exhibited by inexpert hands, its compounds are mortal in doses so small they can hardly be conceived.'

'So you know nothing of what is going forward?'

'Brother, how tedious you can be, on occasion. I did hear some cries of "Jolly rogers - jolly rogers - we shall roger them." But in parenthesis, Jack, tell me about this word roger. I have often heard it aboard, but can make out no clear nautical signification.'

'Oh, it is no sea-term. They use it ashore much more than we do - a low cant expression meaning to swive or couple with.'

Stephen considered for a moment and then said, 'So roger joins bugger and that even coarser word; and they are all used in defiance and contempt, as though to an enemy; which seems to show a curious light on the lover's subjacent emotions. Conquest, rape, subjugation: have women a private language of the same nature, I wonder?"

Jack said, 'In some parts of the West Country rams are called Roger, as cats are called Puss; and of course that is their duty; though which came first, the deed or the doer, the goose or the egg, I am not learned enough to tell.'

'Would it not be the owl, at all?'

'Never in life, my poor Stephen. Who ever heard of a golden owl? But let me tell you why we are cracking on like this in what promises to be a very dirty night. There was an Englishman called Shelton in the whaler's crew, a foremast jack in Euryalus when Heneage Dundas had her: he told us of a French four-master, fitted out man-of-war fashion, Alastor by name, that attacks anything she can overpower, whatever its nation; a genuine pirate, wearing the black flag, the Jolly Roger, which means strike and like to or we shall kill every man and boy aboard. We ask no quarter: we give no quarter. We have checked Shelton's account; we have looked at the whaler's chart, pricked all the way from their leaving Callao to yesterday at sunset; and we know just about where the Alastor must be. She means to sail back to the coast and wait off the Chinchas for a Liverpool ship now docking at Callao for the homeward run. Listen!'

The companion overhead lit with three flashes of extreme brilliance; thunder cracked and bellowed at masthead height; and then came the all-pervading sound of enormous rain, not exactly a roar, but of such a volume that Jack had to lean over the table and raise his powerful voice to tell Stephen that 'now he could sponge his patients, aye, and wash them and their clothes too - there would be enough for the whole ship's company - the first ten minutes would carry off all the filth and then they would whip off the tarpaulins and fill the boats and scuttlebutts.'

The rain had no great effect on the swell, rolling strong from the north-west, but it flattened the surface almost as effectually as oil, doing away with countless superficial noises, so that the great voice of the rain came right down into the sick-berth itself, and Stephen, on his evening rounds, had to repeat his exclamation, 'I am astonished to see you here, Mr Martin: you are not fit to be up, and must go back to bed directly.' Of course he was not fit to be up. His eyes were deep-sunk in his now boney head, his lips were barely visible; and although he said, 'It was only a passing indisposition as I told you; and now it is over,' he had to grip the medicine-chest to keep upright. 'Nonsense,' said Stephen. 'You must go back to bed directly. That is an order, my dear sir. Padeen, help Mr Martin to his cabin, will you, now?'