Patrick O'Brian: The Truelove

'Quite impossible. The ballast has been changed again and again: scores of times.'

'So much the better. Yet even so I should be grateful for another ventilating pump. In this heavy breathless air the patients have a tendency to grow fractious, even to quarrel.'

'Make it so, Captain Pullings,' said Jack. 'And if any hand should presume to quarrel, let his name be entered in the defaulters' list.'

'Here, sir,' said Stephen, 'are the men I was speaking about: Philips, who knows Norfolk Island well, and Owen, who spent several months among the Easter Islanders.'

'Ah yes. Well, Philips, how are you coming along?'

'Wery indifferent, sir, I am sorry to say,' said Philips in a weak, gasping voice.

'And Owen, how are you?'

'I do not complain, sir; but the burning pain is something cruel.'

'Then why the Devil don't you keep out of brothels, you damned fool? A man of your age! Low knocking-shops in Sydney Cove of all places, where the pox is the worst in the world. Of course you burn. And you are always at it: every goddam port ... if your pay were docked for venereals as it is in the regular service you would not have a penny coming to you when we pay off, not a brass farthing.'

Captain Aubrey, still breathing hard, asked the other patients how they did -they were all much better, thank you, sir - and returning he said to Philips, 'So you were in Sirius when she was heaved ashore: was there no good holding-ground near the island?'

'No, sir,' said Philips, speaking like a Christian now. 'It was terrible: coral rock everywhere inshore."

'It was far worse off of Easter Island, sir: coral rock far offshore too, then no bottom with the deep-sea line; and an almighty surf,' said Owen, but in an undertone.

'We could not land on the south side of the island, sir, so we went round to the north-east: and there we were lying to with a light breeze off the shore and all hands fishing for gropers when the Supply brig, who was laying outside of us, hailed Captain Hunt that we was being heaved inshore.

Which was true. It was all hands make sail, and make sail we did; but then the flood set in - it sets from the north on that side of the island, sir - and what with that and the swell we could not make head against it, not even with the breeze on our quarter. We let go both bowers, but the coral cut their cables directly; we let go the sheet-anchor and the spare and they parted too; and at one bell in the afternoon watch we struck, drove farther over the reef, and cut away our masts. Our captain gave orders to open the after hatchway and stave all the liquor ..." All this Philips had delivered with barely a pause; now he drew breath, and in the interval Owen said, 'On Easter Island, sir...'

'Doctor,' said Jack, 'I shall ask Mr Adams to see these men separately and take notes of what they have to say. Now I am going forward to see what your pumping has done about our rats as well as our smell. Colman, the lantern, there.'

In his hurry Padeen dropped the lantern, lit it again, dropped it once more, and was cursed for an unhandy grass-combing lubber in a tone of much greater severity and exasperation than was usual in Captain Aubrey, who left a disapproving silence behind him, and a certain consternation.

Stephen did not discuss the ship's captain with anyone, nor obviously did he discuss his friend Jack in the gunroom; but he could perfectly well speak of the patient Aubrey with Martin, a man of strong good sense and exceptionally wide reading. Reverting to Latin he said 'I have rarely, perhaps never, seen such a high degree of irascibility, so continuous and as it were cumulative irritation in this particular subject. It is clear that there has been no good effect from either my enemata or my cholagogue; and this steady and increasing exacerbation makes me fear that this is not an ordinary congestion of the hepatic ducts but some disease acquired in New South Wales.'

In his medical capacity Martin had nothing to do with moral values and he replied 'When you say disease, do you refer to that which is so usual among seafaring men, high or low?'

'Not in this case. I put the question directly: had there been any commerce with Venus? No, said he with surprising vehemence, there had most certainly not, adding a remark that I did not catch. There is something strange here; and it is with real concern that I recall dear Dr Redfern's account of the various forms of hepatitis he has seen in the colony, sometimes associated with hydatic cysts ... he showed me one from a person who had lived entirely on kangaroo and rum, and there was an unparallelled degree of cirrhosis. But worse than that for our purposes was his case-book showing long-drawn-out histories of general bilious indisposition, melancholy, taedium vitae sometimes reaching mere despair, extreme irascibility: all this with no known agent, though autopsy showed an enlarged quadrate lobe studded with yellow nodules the size of a pea. He calls it Botany Bay liver, and it is this or some one of the other New Holland diseases that I fear our patient may have caught. The vexation and more than vexation of spirit is certainly present.'

'It is deeply saddening to see what disease can do to a whole cast of mind, to a settled character,' said Martin. 'And sometimes our remedies are just as bad. How it appears to draw in the boundaries of free-will.'

'The Doctor may say what he likes, Tom,' said Captain Aubrey, 'but I think the Surprise smells as sweet as the Nutmeg, or sweeter.' They were approaching the cable-tier now -for the Surprise had a cat-walk that allowed uninterrupted progress from the after-platform right forward - the cable-tier where the great ropes lay coiled, together with the hawsers and cablets. These always came aboard sodden, often stinking and covered with slime, there to lie dripping through spaces between the planks down into the hold, but now, since the Surprise had lain at moorings in Sydney Cove or had tied up to bollards, they were warm and dry: Jack remembered luxuriating in their folds when he was young, sleepy from the morning watch and willing to escape from the din of the reefers' berth.

'Sweet to be sure, sir,' said Pullings, 'but there are still vermin about for all our pumping. I have seen a score since the sick-berth.' He made a nimble kick at one far-travelled and particularly audacious Norway rat that had come aboard at Sydney and sent it flying over the nearest coil to the lattice bulwark behind. With a shrill screech a figure darted from behind the cables, brushing the rat away.

'What the Devil are you doing here, boy?' cried Jack. 'Did you not hear the drum beat for divisions? Who the Devil are you?' Then relaxing his iron grip and standing back a little, 'What is this, Mr Pullings?'

Pullings held up the lantern and said in a neutral voice 'It is a young woman, I believe, sir."

'He is wearing a reefer's uniform." Jack took the lantern, and looking even bigger than usual in its light he studied her for a moment: Pullings was obviously right. 'Who brought you here?' he asked with cold displeasure.

'I came of myself, sir,' said the girl in a trembling voice.

This was utter nonsense. It could be demolished in a minute, but he did not wish to make her lie and lie until she was driven into a corner and forced to bring out the name -obvious enough, in all conscience.

'Let us carry on, Mr Pullings,' he said.

'What, and leave her here?'

'You heard me, sir. Take the lantern.'

They silently inspected the sail-rooms, the bosun's, gunner's, carpenter's store-rooms, the pitch-room and so returned to the open air, where all hats came off once more and where all faces changed at the sight of Captain Aubrey's pale severity.

'We shall not rig church, Captain Pullings,' he said. 'The Articles will do very well for this occasion.'