Patrick O'Brian - The Wine-Dark Sea

'I believe I shall meet them privately quite soon."

'Very good,' said Gayongos. 'And for these gentlemen?" He held up his list of agreed meetings.

'General Hurtado on Friday morning by all means; but it might be wiser to give the Vicar-General priority over the others - to see them having learnt his views.'

'Very much wiser.'

There seemed little more to be said at this first interview, apart from settling the place and time of Friday's expedition; but after a moment Gayongos said, 'This may be an absurd suggestion - it is most unlikely that you should have the time -but you said you longed to see the high Andes: Antisana, Cotopaxi, Chimborazo and the like. Now I shall presently have messengers going to Panama and Chagres by way of Quito. I should in any case have offered their services for any letters you might wish to have sent from the Atlantic side of the isthmus; but it occurs to me that some of these interviews may take a long while to arrange, a long while for emissaries to come and go - Potosi, Cuzco, for example - and that possibly you might find time to travel with them as far as Quito, reliable men who know the road and who could show you prodigious prospects of snow, rock and ice, volcanoes, bears, guanacoes, vicunas, eagles..."

'You tempt me strangely: I wish it could be so. I dearly love a mountain,' said Stephen. 'But I could not square it with my conscience. No. I am afraid it will have to wait until our design is carried out. But I shall certainly burden your people with my letters, if I may: many, many thanks to you, my dear sir.'

For days the wind had kept in the east, and by now there was a considerable sea running across the northward current, causing the Franklin to roll and pitch rather more than was comfortable, rather more than was usual for mustering the ship's company by divisions; but this was Sunday, the first Sunday that Jack had felt reasonably sure that his wounded leg would bear the exercise, and he decided to carry on. At breakfast the word had been passed 'clean to muster' and now the bosun was bawling down the hatchways, 'D'ye hear, there, fore and aft? Clear for muster at five bells. Duck frocks and white trousers," while his only remaining mate roared, 'D'ye hear, there? Clean shirts and shave for muster at five bells.' Many of the seamen were of course old Surprises: for them all this was part of immemorial custom, as much part of natural life as dried peas on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, and they had already washed their best shirts in readiness while on Saturday evening or early on Sunday they had combed out their pigtails and replaited them, each man for his tie-mate, before or after cornering the ship's barber for their shave. Now, apart from fitting the poor bewildered blacks into their purser's slops, brushing and tidying them as well as they could and comforting them by calling out, 'It's all right, mate: never fret,' and patting them on the back or shoulders, they were quite ready.

So was their Captain. He was about to pull on his ceremonial breeches when, through the open door, Killick cried, 'No you don't. Oh no you don't, sir. Not until I have looked at those there wounds and that there eye. It was the Doctor's orders, sir, which you cannot deny it. And orders is orders.'

He had an overwhelming moral advantage, and Jack sat down, showing his thigh, a damned great slit that had been very painful at first but that had healed to a fair extent, just as his scalp had done, though walking was still awkward. Unwillingly Killick admitted that they needed no more than the ointment; but when he unrolled the bandage covering the Captain's eye he cried, 'Now we shall have to have the drops as well as the salve -a horrid sight: like a poached egg, only bloody - and I tell you what, sir, I shall put a little Gregory into the drops.'

'How do you mean, Gregory!'

'Why, everybody knows Gregory's Patent Liquid, sir: it rectifies the humours. And don't these humours want rectifying? Oh no, not at all. I never seen anything so ugly. God love us!'

'Did the Doctor mention Gregory's Patent Liquid?'

'Which I put some on Barret Bonden's wound, a horrible great gash: like a butcher's shop. And look at it now. As clean as a whistle. Come on, sir. Never mind the smart; it is all for your own good.'

'A very little, then,' said Jack, who had in fact known of Gregory's Liquid together with Harris's Guaranteed Unguent, Carey's Warranted Arrowroot, brimstone and treacle on Friday and other staples of domestic medicine, all as much a part of daily life on land as hard-tack and mustering by divisions on Sunday at sea.

With his hat very carefully arranged over his new bandage -for in spite of his innumerable faults Killick did not lack a kind of sparse tenderness - Jack made his way up the companion-ladder at half a glass before five bells in the forenoon watch, hauling himself up step by step. It was an exceptionally beautiful day, brilliant, cloudless, with the immense sky a deeper, more uniform blue than usual and the sea, where it was not chopped white, an even deeper shade, the true imperial blue. The wind was still due east, singing quite loud in the rigging; but although the Franklin could have spread topgallant-sails she was in fact lying to, bowing the uneven seas with her main topsail aback and a balancing mizen. Under her lee lay her most recent prize, a fur-trader down from the north, a fat, comfortable vessel, but naturally so unweatherly and now so foul-bottomed as well that she was utterly incapable of working to windward at all, and Captain Aubrey was waiting for the return of the south-east or south-south-east trade to see her in. She carried no extraordinary cargo - she had meant to fill up her hold with seals' skin down at Mas Afuera - but those Surprises, and there were several of them, who had been on the Nootka run and who had conversed with their prisoners, knew that in sea-otter skins and beaver alone the able seaman's share of the prize would be in the nature of ninety-three pieces of eight; and it was a cheerful ship that her Captain was now about to inspect.

The starboard watch had already brought up their clothes bags, arranging them in a low pyramid on the booms, and the larbowlines were laying theirs in a neat square far aft on the quarterdeck when Jack appeared. As he had done a thousand times on such occasions he cast an eye at the sea, the sky, and the ship's trim: literally an eye, for even if the other had not been hidden by a bandage it could not bear this brilliant light, whilst in the dimness of his sleeping-cabin its sight was troubled, uncertain. He also absorbed the mood of the ship's company, and in spite of the severe indwelling pain and anxiety some of their cheerfulness came into his mood.

Five bells, and he nodded to Vidal, the acting first lieutenant, who cried, 'Beat to divisions.' So many people were away in various ships that the order did not run down the usual series of repetitions but came into instant effect with the thunder of the roaring drum. The recently-promoted stopgap officers, most of them Shelmerstonian master-mariners in their own right, reported that their divisions were 'present, properly dressed and clean'.

Vidal crossed the deck, took off his hat, and said, 'All the officers have reported, sir.'

'We will go round the ship, then, if you please,' replied Jack.

And round they went in the traditional manner, except that Bonden, as Captain's coxswain, accompanied them in case of a false step on the blind side: for though Bonden's ribs and breastbone had been exposed to public view in the taking of the Alastor, his wound had healed fast and his friends had taken seamanlike steps to ensure that it should not open again: first a girth of linen rubbed with hog's lard, then two of number eight sailcloth, then the same of number four, and over all a span-broad white-marline plait ending in stout knittels that could be and were hauled taut with a heaver, so taut that he could breathe only with his belly.