Patrick O'Brian - The Wine-Dark Sea

'After endless lamentations and if only's', said Jack as he and Stephen were settling to their music, 'it was decided that by using the launch's mast and the rough-tree rail we could raise stump enough and gaff enough to spread a tolerable mizen. Enough, at all events, to sail with the wind ahead at a moderate pace without straining the rudder right off its pintles; and if it ain't elegant why, be damned to elegance.'

'What are pintles?'

'Those right-angled pieces in the front of the rudder that hook into rings or braces as we say at the back of the stern-post so that the rudder can swing like a door on its hinges.'

And when they had finished their piece, a gentle, meditative anonymous manuscript duet bought at an auction, he said, 'Lord, Stephen, when you remember how hot we were after those China ships so short a while ago, and how simple we should have looked if we had taken them, with that devilish great eighteen-pounder frigate and the brig coming down on us with the weather-gage; and when you consider how happy we are now, to have come off with the loss of no more than our mizen, why, it makes you think.'

'I do not know that I should go quite so far as that,' said Stephen.

'Oh, very well, very well. You may be as satirical as you please; but I think we have come out of it most uncommon well. I for one never supposed that tonight we could turn in and sleep in peace.'

In peace they slept, profound peace, the peace of physically exhausted but easy-minded and very well fed men, at least until the graveyard watch. On the moonlit deck Wilkins, on being relieved by Grainger at eight bells, said, 'Here you have her: reefed courses, foretopsail atrip; course north-east by north; Captain's orders in the binnacle drawer.' Then, in a conversational tone, 'You may have something of a ducking in an hour or so.'

'Yes,' said Grainger, also looking into the north-east, where low dark clouds quite hid the sky, 'I dare say we shall. A drop of rain and this precious cold will wake me up. Dear Lord, how fast asleep I was, and warm!'

'I shall be the same in two minutes. It was a right hard day and night.' He paused with one foot on the ladder and said, 'Surely it is uncommon to see lightning in these latitudes?'

'Oh, I have known it often enough,' said Grainger. 'Not so often as between the tropics, but pretty often. Only down here you don't linger on deck, so perhaps it seems much rarer.'

Four bells, and it began to snow: the Surprise was keeping to her sober five knots.

Six bells, and the wind strengthened, growing so changeable that once the ship was almost taken aback. Grainger close-reefed the foretopsail, and almost immediately afterwards the sky was covered entirely - no moon, no stars - and without a warning a violent rain, mixed with sleet, came hurtling down, so violent and so continued, with water jetting wide from the leeward scuppers and the watch huddled under the break of the quarterdeck, that it was impossible to strike seven bells.

Yet half-past three in the morning it was; Stephen's watch said so, and as it was telling the hour so Stephen, for the second time in his life and in the same ship, was woken by an enormous noise or combination of noises that he instantly recognized. The frigate had surely been struck by lightning.

She had indeed. Her mainmast was utterly shattered, its fragments flung into the sea: its yards, however, lay athwartships, and like the foremast they were quite untouched. The ship had at once put before the wind, whatever the helmsmen might do; but as the snow and rain had calmed the sea she was reasonably steady, though unmanageable, and Stephen was soon called down to the sick-berth.

There were only three casualties: one man, a Knipperdolling named Isaac Rame, apparently uninjured apart from a black mark the size of a shilling over his heart, but completely, profoundly insensible - listening to its completely disordered beat Stephen shook his head - and two other foremast hands strangely burnt. These burns, though superficial, caused much distress; they were extensive, branching all over the men's backs in a close-set network of divergent lines, and it took Stephen, Padeen and Fabien so long to dress them that a pale daylight was showing upon the table when Stephen came into the cabin for breakfast.

'Well, here's a pretty go,' cried Jack. 'Here's a pretty mess. Have a cup of coffee,' - pouring it. He sounded quite cheerful, as though the loss of the ship's mainmast were of slight importance; and so it was, compared with what followed. 'When we have finished breakfast - pray help yourself to bacon and pass the dish - I will show you something more extraordinary by far. Our rudder has gone by the board.'

'Oh, oh,' cried Stephen, aghast. 'Are we rudderless, so?'

'I will not deceive you, brother: we are without a rudder. Do you remember asking me about pintles?' Stephen nodded, still much concerned. 'Well, it appears that at some point in our dreadful passage through the drift-ice a great floe must have lifted the pintles off the dumb-chalder and the braces, or most of them, and destroyed the wood-locks, so that it was hanging by little more than the tiller. We did not notice it, since we barely touched the helm sailing large; but when the lightning struck the rudder-head, shattering all down to the water-line, why, it dropped clean away.' He pointed to the shattered, blackened rudder-head, now covered by a decent cloth.

'Is there any help for such a state of affairs?'

'Oh, I am sure we shall find something,' said Jack. 'May I trouble you for the marmalade? Capital marmalade, you must confess; though not quite as good as Sophie's.'

Stephen had often heard Jack say, when life at sea grew more trying than the human frame could bear, 'that it was no use whining'; but he had never seen quite this degree of insouciance, or what he felt tempted to call irresponsible levity. How much was assumed as a captain's duty in a virtually hopeless situation? How much was Jack's natural reaction? He was not a man much given to strike attitudes. How hopeless was the situation in fact? Stephen might still confuse braces and pintles, dumb-chalders and sling-dogs, but he knew enough about the sea to feel that a ship far and far from land with only one mast and no rudder at all was in a very sad way: furthermore his knowledge of sailing, though limited, did tell him that one mast and its sails in the very front of the ship could impel a rudderless vessel only directly before the wind, that the wind in these latitudes was nearly always westerly, and that there was no land ahead until they came right round the globe to Cape Horn again.

He did not like to ask directly, but he put these points to various shipmates; to his distress they all, invariably, agreed with him. 'Ah, Doctor, things is wery bad,' said Joe Plaice. 'I have never heard anything so dreadful as the loss of a rudder five thousand miles from land,' said Mr Adams, 'for in our condition, South America, dead to windward, cannot be considered as land at all.' Yet at the same time he detected much of this same cheerfulness throughout the ship and something not very far from apparent unconcern, even in so atrabilious a soul as Killick. 'Have I been plying the ocean with a parcel of Stoics all this time?' he wondered. 'Or in my ignorance am I myself somewhat over-timid?'

But then again in his frequent encounters with the foremast jacks - and his relations with them were of quite a different nature and in some ways much closer than those of any other officer - he had occasional insights that showed an entirely different aspect of the situation: of the moral situation at all events. The lower deck knew perfectly well that Vidal and his closest Knipperdolling connexions had smuggled Dutourd ashore; and they had become convinced that once ashore Dutourd had in some way informed upon the Doctor, putting his life in danger. And it was as though this treachery had brought bad luck on the Surprise, however kindly Vidal had meant his action in the first place. Bad luck was a term that embraced a greal deal: other people might have spoken of a curse, a spell, or a divine resentment of impiety. But whatever it was called they had missed the China ships, and they had been near as a toucher sunk by the Americans, by the ice-islands and by the ice-floes. And now the barky had been struck by lightning. But it was a Knipperdolling that had copped it, and once he went over the side the bad luck would be off the ship.