Patrick O'Brian - The Nutmeg of Consolation

The dinner did not end on this solemn note; indeed it ended in very cheerful song. But the next day's breakfast was a gloomy affair, although the coast of New South Wales was clear all along the western horizon and the pilot was already aboard. There was a most unaccustomed silence on either side of the coffee-pot, and Jack for one looked yellow, puffy, liverish; he had not taken his morning swim and his eyes, usually bright blue, were now dull, oyster-like, with discoloured bags below them. His breath was foul.

'The Doctor was not drunk too, was he?' asked Bonden in the cuddy where Killick was grindingbeans for a second pot.

'Drunk, no,' said Killick. 'I wish he had been. It would make his crabbedness more natural. I don't know what has come over him, such a mild-spoken cove.'

'He slapped Sarah and Emily till they howled again; and he checked Joe Plaice something cruel for walking backwards into him on the forecastle: "Can't you see where you are a-coming to, God damn your eyes and limbs, you fat-arsed bugger of a longshoreman?" Or words to that effect.'

'I tell you what it is, Stephen,' said Jack after a prolonged silence. 'I do not think the gunroom's turtle was quite wholesome.'

'Nonsense,' said Stephen. 'Never was such a healthy, clean-run reptile. The trouble is, you ate too much, as you did the day before, and as you do habitually whenever it is there to eat. I have told you again and again that you are digging your grave with your teeth. You are at present suffering from a plethory, a common plethory. I can deal with the symptoms of this plethory; but the self-indulgence that lies behind them is beyond my reach.'

'Pray do deal with them, Stephen,' said Jack. 'We shall drop anchor this afternoon unless the breeze fails us. The Governor is sure to ask us to dinner tomorrow, and I could not face a laid table as I feel now.'

'You will have to take physic, of course; and it will confine you to the seat of ease for most of the day and perhaps part of the night. You obese subjects are often slow-working, where the colon is concerned.'

'I shall take whatever you order,' said Jack. 'To clean and refit a ship properly and without loss of time, you have to be tolerably well with the authorities, and to be tolerably well with the authorities you have to eat their food hearty and drink up their wine as though you enjoyed it. At present the thought of anything but bare biscuit' - holding up a piece - 'and thin black coffee makes my gorge rise.'

'I shall fetch what is required,' said Stephen, returning some minutes later with a pill-box, a bottle and a measuring-glass. 'Swallow this,' he said, passing a pill, 'and wash it down with that,' passing the half-filled glass.

'Are you sure it is enough?' asked Jack. 'I am not one of your light-weights, you know, not one of your borrel shrimps; and it is a very small pill.'

'Rest easy while you may,' said Stephen. 'You may be the biggest born of earth, but black draught and blue pill will search your entrails and stir your torpid liver; it will sort you out finely, so it will.' He put the cork back into the bottle with a thump and walked off, reflecting upon exasperation, an emotion aroused by some persons and some situations in an eminent degree.

Having edged three dead rats out of the sick-berth he did some work on his records: then he rolled a little paper cigar and climbed to the quarterdeck to smoke it. There had been some candid remarks about tobacco below, and he was obliged to admit that the cold stale smell of several dead cigars that seeped from his lower cabin into the gunroom did make it more like a low pot-house at dawn than was altogether agreeable.

Martin had already been on deck for some time, watching the magnificent harbour opening before them. 'Here is Sydney Cove at last,' he said, with a somewhat irritating enthusiasm.

'It grieves me to contradict you,' said Stephen, 'but this is Port Jackson. Sydney Cove is only a little small bay, about five miles down on the left.'

'Good Heavens! Do you tell me that they are the same? I had no idea.'

'Sure, I have not mentioned it above a hundred times.'

'So this is the home of the Port Jackson shark,' cried Martin, looking eagerly over the side.

'Ha, ha,' said Stephen, to whom the thought had occurred many and many a time before, but not today. 'Let us see if we can fish one up.' He picked his way through a party of men on their knees, improving the look of the quarterdeck seams, and reached for the mizentopsail halliards, to which the shark-hooks and their chains were made fast. But before he could seize them Tom Pullings was there. 'No, sir,' he said very firmly. 'Not today, if you please. There can be no shark-fishing today. We have been preddying the decks ever since two bells in the morning watch. Surely, sir, you would not want Surprise to look paltry in Sydney Cove?'

Stephen might have advanced that it was only a small inoffensive shark, not above four feet long, that it had a unique arrangement of flat grinding teeth of the first interest, and that the inconvenience would be trifling; but Tom Pullings' immovable gravity, the immovable gravity of all the Surprises on deck, who had stopped work to look at him, and even of the pilot, a man-of-war's man himself, checked the words in his throat.

'We will fish up a couple for you the day after tomorrow,' said Pullings.

'Half a dozen,' said the bosun.

'Oh if you please, sir,' cried Jemmy Ducks, coming aft at a run, 'Sarah has swallowed a pin.'

The medical men had more trouble, spent more time with this one pin than with the results of many a brisk action, with splinter-wounds, fractures and even the minor amputations; and when at last it was recovered and the exhausted, emptied child had been put to bed they found they had missed the entire approach to Sydney, the shores and the stratified cliffs of Port Jackson and the various branches of the harbour, of which Martin had heard great things. They had also missed the boarding of the ship by an officer from the shore and their dinner itself; but they cared little for either, and Stephen, observing that Captain Aubrey would certainly be indisposed by now, remained below, eating scraps with Martin. He then found himself overcome with sleep, in spite of the gunroom steward's idea of coffee, and retired to his cabin.

It was in this same cabin that he sat next day, in white breeches, silk stockings, gleaming buckled shoes, a newly-shaved face and a newly-clipped poll: his best uniform coat and his newly-curled, newly-powdered wig hung close at hand, not to be touched until the barge was lowered down.

To try his pen, a new-cut quill, he wrote Exasperation six times and then returned to his letter: 'No news, of course: Jack sent as soon as we were moored, but there was no news from home. Official papers,by way of India, yes; but all that matters is still between here and the Cape, somewhere in the southern ocean. I comfort myself by reflecting that it may come while we are still here. And I need comfort. I have told you many times I am sure that the common seaman believes that more is better and has to be watched to prevent him swallowing whole vials of physic. In this Jack is as common as any of them, and more dangerous to himself in that he has the habit of command. Late yesterday he formed the opinion that my black draught and blue pill were not working briskly enough, and while I was asleep he practised upon Martin and by means that do him no credit he obtained a second dose: now of course he cannot stir from the quarter-gallery. He is quite incapable of accepting the invitation to Government House this afternoon, and Tom Pullings and I are to go without him. It is not a dinner I look forward to with any pleasure. This morning I was ashore, looking in vain for an apothecary, merchant or medical man who might have the leaves of coca, and I found the miserable place much as I left it - squalid, dirty, formless, with ramshackle wooden huts placed without regard to anything but temporary convenience twenty years ago, dust, apathetic ragged convicts, all filthy, some in chains -the sound of chains everywhere. And turning into an unpaved, uneven kind of a square I came full upon those vile triangles and a flogging in progress, the man hanging from the apex. Flogging I have seen only too often in the Navy, but rarely more than a dozen lashes, and those laid on with a relative decency: a bystander told me that this man had already received 185 out of his 200; yet still the burly executioner stepped well back and made a double skip each time to bring his whip down with the greater force, taking off flesh at every blow. The ground was soaked with fresh blood, and there was a red darkness at the foot of the other triangles. To my astonishment the man was able to stand when he was untied: his face showed not so much suffering as utter despair. His friends led him away, and as he went the blood welled from his shoes at every step.