Patrick O'Brian: The Wine-Dark Sea

PATRICK O'BRIAN

The Wine-Dark Sea

W.W. Norton & Company

New York * London

Chapter One

A purple ocean, vast under the sky and devoid of all visible life apart from two minute ships racing across its immensity. They were as close-hauled to the somewhat irregular north-east trades as ever they could be, with every sail they could safely carry and even more, their bowlines twanging taut: they had been running like this day after day, sometimes so far apart that each saw only the other's topsails above the horizon, sometimes within gunshot; and when this was the case they fired at one another with their chasers.

The foremost ship was the Franklin, an American privateer of twenty-two guns, nine-pounders, and her pursuer was the Surprise, a twenty-eight-gun frigate formerly belonging to the Royal Navy but now acting as a privateer too, manned by privateersmen and volunteers: she was nominally commanded by a half-pay officer named Thomas Pullings but in fact by her former captain, Jack Aubrey, a man much higher on the post-captain's list than would ordinarily have been found in so small and antiquated a ship - an anomalous craft entirely, for although she purported to be a privateer her official though unpublished status was that of His Majesty's Hired Vessel Surprise. She had set out on her voyage with the purpose of carrying her surgeon, Stephen Maturin, to South America, there to enter into contact with those leading inhabitants who wished to make Chile and Peru independent of Spain: for Maturin, as well as being a doctor of medicine, was an intelligence-agent exceptionally well qualified for this task, being a Catalan on his mother's side and bitterly opposed to Spanish - that is to say Castilian - oppression of his country.

He was indeed opposed to oppression in all its forms, and in his youth he had supported the United Irishmen (his father was a Catholic Irish officer in the Spanish service) in everything but the violence of 1798: but above all, far above all, he abhorred that of Buonaparte, and he was perfectly willing to offer his services to the British government to help put an end to it, to offer them gratis pro Deo, thus doing away with any hint of the odious name of spy, a vile wretch hired by the Ministry to inform upon his friends, a name associated in his Irish childhood with that of Judas, Spy-Wednesday coming just before the Passion.

His present undertaking, resumed after a long interruption caused by the traitorous passing of information from London to Madrid, gave him the greatest satisfaction, for its success would not only weaken the two oppressors but it would also cause extreme anger and frustration in a particular department of French intelligence that was trying to bring about the same result, though with the difference that the independent South American governments should feel loving and strategically valuable gratitude towards Paris rather than London.

He had had many causes for satisfaction since they left the Polynesian island of Moahu in pursuit of the Franklin. One was that the American had chosen to rely on her remarkable powers of sailing very close to the wind on a course that was leading them directly towards his destination; another was that although her sailing-master, an old Pacific hand from Nantucket, handled her with uncommon skill, doing everything in his power to run clear or shake off his pursuer by night, neither his guile nor his seamanship could outmatch Aubrey's. If the Franklin slipped a raft over the side in the darkness, lighting lanterns upon it, dowsing her own and changing course, she found the Surprise in her wake when the day broke clear; for Jack Aubrey had the same instinct, the same sense of timing and a far greater experience of war.

Still another cause for satisfaction was that every successive noonday observation showed them slanting rapidly down towards the equator and some two hundred miles or more closer to Peru, a country that Dr Maturin associated not only with potential independence but also with the coca plant, a shrub whose dried leaves he, like the Peruvians, was accustomed to chew as a relief from mental or spiritual distress and physical or intellectual weariness as well as a source of benignity and general well-being. Rats, however, had eaten his store of leaves somewhere south of Capricorn. Coca leaves could not be replaced in New South Wales, where the Surprise had spent some dismal weeks, and he looked forward eagerly to a fresh supply: ever since he last heard from his wife - letters had caught up with the ship off Norfolk Island - he had felt a deep indwelling anxiety about her; and the coca leaves might at least dispel the irrational part of it. They sharpened the mind wonderfully; and he welcomed the prospect of that familiar taste, the deadening of the inside of his mouth and pharynx, and the calming of his spirit in what he termed 'a virtuous ataraxy', a freedom that owed nothing to alcohol, that contemptible refuge, nor even to his old love opium, which might be objected to on physical and even perhaps on moral grounds.

This was scarcely a subject that so discreet, private and indeed secretive a person as Stephen Maturin was likely to discuss, and although it flashed into his mind as a piece of green seaweed rose momentarily on the bow-wave, all he said to his companion was 'It is a great satisfaction to see the ocean a colour so near to that of new wine - of certain kinds of new wine - as it comes gushing from the press.'

He and Nathaniel Martin, his assistant-surgeon, were standing in the frigate's beakhead, a roughly triangular place in front of and below the forecastle, the very foremost part of the ship where the bowsprit reached out, where the seamen's privy was to be found, and where the medicoes were least in the way, not only of the hands trimming the sails to capture the greatest possible thrust from the wind but, and above all, of the gunners serving the two bow-chasers on the forecastle, guns that pointed almost directly forward. The gun-crews in question were commanded by Captain Aubrey himself, who pointed and fired the windward chaser, a long brass nine-pounder called Beelzebub, and by Captain Pullings, who did the same for the leeward gun: they both had much the same style of firing, which was not surprising, since Captain Pullings had been one of Jack's midshipmen in his first command, a great while ago in the Mediterranean, and had learnt all his practical gunnery from him. They were now very carefully aiming their pieces at the Franklin's topsail yards with the intent of cutting halyards, backstays and the whole nexus of cordage at the level of the mainyard and even with luck of wounding the mainyard itself: in any case of delaying her progress without damage to her hull. There was no point in battering the hull of a prize, and a prize the Franklin seemed fated to be in the long run - perhaps even today, since the Surprise was perceptibly gaining. The range was now a thousand yards or even a little less, and both Jack and Pullings waited for just before the height of the roll to send their shot racing over the broad stretch of water.

'The Captain does not like it, however,' observed Maturin, referring to the wine-dark sea. 'He says it is not natural. He admits the colour, which we have all seen in the Mediterranean on occasion; he admits the swell, which though unusually broad is not rare but the colour and the swell together..."

The crash and rumble of the Captain's gun, followed with scarcely a pause by Pullings', cut him short: smoke and smouldering scraps of wad whistled about their heads, yet even before they swept away to leeward Stephen had his spyglass to his eye. He could not catch the flight of the ball, but in three heartbeats he saw a hole appear low in the Frenchman's topsail, joining a score of others. To his astonishment he also saw a jet of water shoot from her lee scuppers, and above him he heard Tom Pullings' cry. 'They are starting their water, sir!'