Patrick O'Brian - The Nutmeg of Consolation

Nor did he stop; but he modified the strict rule by easing his sheets as his ship, a slab-sided, Dutch-built vessel on her way to India by Torres Strait swept past the stationary, wallowing Surprise within twenty yards, both captains standing on the hammock-netting.

'How do you do, Billy?' called Jack, waving his hat.

'Jack, how do you do?' replied Billy.

'What news?'

'In India they say Boney has done it again, somewhere in Germany - Silesia, I think. Two hundred and twenty guns taken, the Prussian right wing cut to pieces.'

'What news from home?'

'None when I left Sydney Cove. Amelia four months overdue and no...'

The rest of his words were lost, the strong wind sweeping them along with the ship. All the Surprise's people had been listening openly, without shame: all faces showed the same disappointment; and when Jack gave the order 'Brace up and haul aft,' they carried it out with less than their usual zest and spring.

'I am so sorry you will not see Captain Holroyd this bout,' said Jack as they gathered for supper. 'You would like him, I am sure. He has a very pure sweet voice, a true tenor, which is a rare thing in a service that requires you to roar like a bull in a basin. But still, I hope we shall profit from Killick's thorough search of the pantry. There may be some Java delicacies that Mrs Raffles was so kind as to put up for us.'

By this time the watch had been set, topgallants taken in long since and topsails double-reefed; and when three bells in the first watch struck they could be heard in the great cabin, remote but clear, the last note hanging up unpaired. Automatically Jack glanced at the dining-cabin door, which ordinarily opened as regularly as that of a cuckoo-clock, with Killick in the place of the bird saying 'Supper is on table, sir, if you please,' or 'Wittles is up,' according to the company.

It did not open, though there appeared to be a scrabbling behind it, and Jack poured more madeira. 'But now I come to think of it, Mr Martin,' he said, 'I believe you prefer sherry as a whet. Pray forgive me...' He reached for the other decanter.

'Not at all, sir, not at all,' cried Martin. 'I had far rather drink madeira. I should not change this madeira for any kind of sherry. It is dry but full of body; it has given me the appetite of a lion.'

Stephen walked over to his 'cello and sitting on the stern-window locker he played over the Rakes of Kerry in pizzicato. 'You should hear that at some far grassy crossroads on a fine Beltane night with the fire on the hill and the pipes playing and five fiddles and the young men dancing as though they were possessed and the young women as demure as mice but never missing a step.'

'Pray play it again,' said Jack. He did; then again with variations and even some thoughts of his own. At length the door opened and Killick stood there in the opening, pale and apparently demented. 'Is supper ready?' asked Jack.

'Well, the soup part of it is, sir,' said Killick hesitantly. 'Sort of. But sir,' he burst out, 'the rats has ate the smoked tongues, ate the preserves, ate the potted char... ate the last of the Java pickles... And they are walking about there, paying no heed... staring... saucy... I turned everything over, sir; everything. It took me hours.'

'Well, at least they cannot have got at the wine. Put that on the table, serve the soup and tell my cook to do what he can. Bear a hand, bear a hand, there.'

'A Barmecide feast, sir, I am afraid,' said Jack.

'Not at all, sir,' said Martin. 'There is nothing I prefer to...' He hesitated, trying to find a name for salt beef, eighteen months in the cask, partly de-salted, cut up very small and fried with crushed ship's biscuits and a great deal of pepper: '... to a fricassee.'

'Still,' said Jack, 'I am sure the Doctor's divertimento in C major will...' He almost said 'divert our minds' but in fact ended with 'prove a compensation.'

It was some days later, after a violent blow that was said, and rightly said, to foretell a calm, when they were no more than a couple of hundred miles from Sydney, that Stephen, finding his bedside box of coca-leaves empty, went down to the store-room he shared with Jack to bring up a new supply. The leaves were packed tight in soft leather sausages sewn over with a neat surgical stitch, each in a double oiled-skin envelope against the damp. He had almost exactly calculated the duration of each and, apart from the current, already-opened pouch, there were easily enough of the comfortable little parcels to last till he should reach Callao; for it was from Peru that the coca-leaves came.

The pouches were in a particularly massive and elegant ironwood chest with intricate Javanese brasswork over its top and sides and although he had heard and seen much of the strange confident behaviour of the rats he had no fear of them in this particular instance: apart from anything else this store-room was used for wine, cold-weather clothes, books -it had nothing to do with the pantry. Yet he was not the first sailor to be deceived by a rat. They had gnawed their way up through the very plank, up through the bottom of the chest itself. There was nothing left but rat-dung. Nothing. They had eaten all the leaves and all the leather impregnated with the scent of the leaves and they were clearly eager to get at the chest again, a group of them standing just outside the lit circle of his lantern, waiting impatiently to gnaw at the wood on which the pouches had lain.

'I must take care of our herbs and the portable soup,' he reflected, and he walked into the sick-berth, where Martin was taking stock of the medicine-chest in the hope of replenishing it at Sydney. 'Listen, colleague,' he said, 'those infernal rats have eaten my coca-leaves - those leaves, you recall, that I chew from time to time.'

'I remember them well. You gave me some off the Horn, when we were so very cold and hungry, but I am afraid I disappointed you by complaining that the ensuing numbness or insensibility of my palate - indeed of my whole mouth -made what little food we had miserably insipid, and that I felt no good effect at all.'

'Sure it differs according to idiosyncrasy. For me and I think most Peruvians it induces a mild euphory, an absence of untimely sleepiness and hunger, a tranquillity of mind and perhaps enhanced powers of reflexion. And it is plain that rats feel this even more strongly. I remember now when last I was at that chest, filling my bedside box from an opened pouch perhaps a fortnight ago, I spilt some on the floor; and in the insolence of my wealth I did not gather it all up but left the smaller pieces and the dust. This they must have found and eaten; and they were so pleased with the result that they tried by all means to get at the rest, eventually gnawing a hole through the bottom. So I think we should put all our herbs and the like into metal-lined boxes. The animals having derived such satisfaction from the coca, and having finished it to the last leaf, are now no doubt eagerly, fearlessly searching for more.'

'That would account for the devastation in the Captain's pantry, never attacked before.'

'It would also account for this whole change in behaviour that we have observed: their mildness, their confident wandering about the ship and contemplating the passers-by - this when they had had their leaves. And their eagerness to get more. They stood about me as I gazed at the ruins of my store - my only indulgence, Martin - gibbering, barely able to contain themselves.'

'I am afraid it must be a sad vexation to have had your whole supply destroyed,' said Martin. 'But I hope it is not as serious as the loss of tobacco to a smoker.'

'Oh no: it does not cause a vehement addiction, as tobacco sometimes does; though curiously enough some of its effects are not unlike; and it quite does away with the need to smoke.