Patrick O'Brian - The Wine-Dark Sea

'Sure I saw the water and the guns; and I saw how she drew away, free of all that weight. I spent a few moments liberating poor Mr Martin from behind the seat of ease where the wreckage had imprisoned him and he so squeamish about excrement, the creature, and when I looked up again she was much smaller, flying with a supernatural velocity.'

'Yes, she holds a good wind. But she cannot cross the Pacific with what very little water she may have left - they pumped desperate hard and I saw ton after ton shoot into the sea - so she must double back to Moahu. The Sandwich Islands are much too far. I think he will put before the wind at about ten o'clock, meaning to slip past us with all lights dowsed during the graveyard watch - no moon, you know - and be well to the west of us by dawn, while we are still cracking on like mad lunatics to the eastward. My plan is to lie to in a little while, keeping a very sharp look-out; and if I do not mistake she will be in sight, a little to the south, at break of day, with the wind on her quarter and all possible sail abroad. I should add,' he went on after a pause in which Stephen appeared to be considering, 'that taking into account her leeway, which I have been measuring ever since the chase began, I mean first to take the ship quite a long way south.'

'The very same thought was in my mind,' said Stephen, 'though I did not presume to utter it. But tell me, before you lie in, do you not think it might calm our spirits if we were to contemplate let us say Corelli rather than this apocalyptic sea? We have scarcely played a note since before Moahu. I never thought to dislike the setting sun, but this one adds an even more sinister tinge to everything in sight, unpleasant though it was before. Besides, those tawny clouds flying in every direction and these irregular waves, these boils of water fill me with melancholy thoughts.'

'I should like it of all things,' said Jack. 'I do not intend to beat to quarters this evening - the people have had quite enough for one day - so we can make an early start.'

A fairly early start: for the irregular waves that had disturbed Stephen Maturin's sense of order in nature now pitched him headlong down the companion-ladder, where Mr Grainger, standing at its foot, received him as phlegmatically as he would have received a half-sack of dried peas, set him on his feet and told him 'that he should always keep one hand for himself and the other for the ship'. But the Doctor had flown down sideways, an ineffectual snatch at the rail having turned him about his vertical axis, so that Grainger caught him with one iron hand on his spine and the other on his upper belly, winding him to such an extent that he could scarcely gasp out a word of thanks. Then, when he had at last recovered his breath and the power of speech, it was found that his chair had to be made fast to two ring-bolts to allow him to hold his 'cello with anything like ease or even safety.

He had a Geronimo Amati at home, just as Aubrey had a treasured Guarnieri, but they travelled with rough old things that could put up with extremes of temperature and humidity. The rough old things always started the evening horribly flat, but in time the players tuned them to their own satisfaction, and exchanging a nod they dashed away into a duet which they knew very well indeed, having played it together these ten years and more, but in which they always found something fresh, some half-forgotten turn of phrase or of particular felicity. They also added new pieces of their own, small improvisations or repetitions, each player in turn. They might have pleased Corelli's ghost, as showing what power his music still possessed for a later generation: they certainly did not please Preserved Killick, the Captain's steward. 'Yowl, yowl, yowl,' he said to his mate on hearing the familiar sounds. 'They are at it again. I have a mind to put ratsbane in their toasted cheese.'

'It cannot go on much longer,' said Grimble. 'The cross-sea is getting up something cruel.'

It was true. The ship was cutting such extraordinary capers that even Jack, a merman if ever there was one, had to sit down, wedging himself firmly on a broad locker; and at the setting of the watch, after their traditional toasted cheese had been eaten, he went on deck to take in the courses and lie to under a close-reefed main topsail. He had, at least by dead-reckoning, reached something like the point he had been steering for; the inevitable leeway should do the rest by dawn; and he hoped that now the ship's motion would be eased.

'Is it very disagreeable upstairs?' asked Stephen when he returned. 'I hear thunderous rain on the skylight.'

'It is not so much very disagreeable as very strange," said Jack. 'As black as can be, of course - never the smell of a star - and wet; and there are strong cross-seas, apparently flowing in three directions at once, which is contrary to reason. Lightning above the cloud, too, showing deep red. Yet there is something else I can hardly put a name to.' He held the lamp close to the barometer, shook his head, and going back to his seat on the locker he said that the motion was certainly easier: perhaps they might go back to the andante?

'With all my heart,' said Stephen, 'if I might have a rope round my middle to hold me to the chair.'

'Of course you may,' said Jack. 'Killick! Killick, there. Lash the Doctor into his seat, and let us have another decanter of port.'

The andante wound its slow length along with a curious gasping unpredictable rhythm; and when they had brought it to its hesitant end, each looking at the other with reproach and disapproval at each false note, Jack said, 'Let us drink to Zephyrus, the son of Millpond.' He was in the act of pouring a glass when the ship pitched with such extraordinary violence -pitched as though she had fallen into a hole - that he very nearly fell, and the glass left the wine in the air, a coherent body for a single moment.

'This will never do,' he said: and then, 'What in Hell was that crash?' He stood listening for a moment, and then in reply to a knock on the door he called, 'Come in.'

'Mr West's duty, sir,' said Norton, the newly-appointed midshipman, dripping on the chequered deck-cloth, 'and there is firing on the larboard bow.'

'Thank you, Mr Norton,' said Jack. 'I shall come at once.' He quickly stowed his fiddle on the locker and ran on deck. While he was still on the ladder there was another heavy crash, then as he reached the quarterdeck and the pouring rain, several more far forward.

'There, sir,' said West, pointing to a jetting glow, blurred crimson through the milk-warm rain. 'It comes and goes. I believe we are under mortar-fire.'

'Beat to quarters,' called Jack, and the bosun's mate wound his call. 'Mr West - Mr West, there. D'ye hear me?' He raised his voice immensely, calling for a lantern: it showed West flat on his face, pouring blood.

'Fore topsail,' cried Jack, putting the ship before the wind, and as she gathered way he told two of the afterguard to carry West below. 'Forestaysail and jib.'

The ship came to life, to battle-stations, with a speed and regularity that would have given him deep satisfaction if he had had a second to feel it.

Stephen was already in the sick-berth with a sleepy Martin and a half-dressed Padeen when West was brought down, followed by half a dozen foremast hands, two of them walking cases. 'A severe depressed fracture on either side of the coronal suture," said Stephen, having examined West under a powerful lantern, 'and of course this apparently meaningless laceration. Deep coma. Padeen, Davies, lift him as gently as ever you can to the mattress on the floor back there; lay him face down with a little small pad under his forehead the way he can breathe. Next.'

The next man, with a compound fracture of his left arm and a series of gashes down his side, required close, prolonged attention: sewing, snipping, binding-up. He was a man of exceptional fortitude even for a foremast jack and between involuntary gasps he told them that he had been the larboard midship look-out when he saw this sudden spurt of red to windward and a glow under the cloud, and he was hailing the quarterdeck when he heard something like stones or even grapeshot hitting the topsail and then there was a great crash and he was down. He lay on the gangway staring through the scuppers with the rain soaking him through and through before he understood what had happened, and he saw that red spurt show twice: not like a gun, but more lasting and crimson: perhaps a battery, a ragged salvo. Then a cross-sea and a lee-lurch tossed him into the waist until old Plaice and Bonden fished him out.