Patrick O'Brian: The Thirteen Gun Salute

Much the same kind of attachment had brought and kept Jack Aubrey's regular followers aboard - his followers in the naval sense, his coxswain, his steward, his bargemen, and a considerable number of hands who had sailed with him all this war and sometimes a part of the last, like old Plaice and his cousins and a dreadful man called Awkward Davies, an uncommonly powerful, clumsy, violent, drunken and illtempered creature who had haunted him voyage after voyage in spite of all that could be said or done. For these men there was also the fact that being aboard a man-of-war run Navy fashion was the natural and proper way of life, as natural as their loose trousers and comfortable roomy frocks. Wearing long togs to astonish friends and relations ashore was gratifying to the mind, and so was screeching and hallooing around the streets of Gosport or kicking up Bob's a-dying from Wapping to the Tower; but apart from fun of that sort, the land's main function was to provide marine stores - it was not a place for real existence. Then again following the sea was what they were used to, and they liked what they were used to, a regular life with no changes of any kind, no mad interference with the steady succession of salt pork on Sunday and Thursday, salt beef on Tuesday and Saturday, with banian-days between; the sea itself could be relied upon to provide all the variety that could possibly be desired.

Obviously this attachment to the frigate and her commander and to the ordered pattern of naval life was unevenly spread among the ship's company. There were some recently-entered hands, taken on during the Surprise's journey from the Baltic, whose devotion was primarily to Mammon. They were thoroughly able seamen - they would never have been aboard otherwise - but they did not yet form part of the crew. The real Surprises, that is to say those who had sailed in her time out of mind and the men from Shelmerston who had fought in her last two actions, looked upon these Orkneymen with distant reserve, and Jack had not yet made up his mind how to deal with the situation.

A glance at the vane showed him that the breeze had backed far enough; and the sky said that in all likelihood it would go on backing until at least sunset. The gangways and the forecastle were reasonably clear, and after a considering pause he said, 'Captain Pullings, I believe we may attend to the foretopsailyard at last.'

In the present violent putting to sea, earlier than all expectation, both watches were strangely mingled, with duties and stations far out of the ordinary run; and it so happened that most of the Orkneymen were on the forecastle, gathered round their leader Macaulay. Pullings gave the orders loud and clear, the bosun piped them in the shorthand of the sea, and the hands on the forecastle instantly clapped on to the falls, Macaulay at their head.

A slight pause, and then, throwing his weight on the rope, he sang out

'Heisa, heisa,'

followed by his mates in perfect unison,

'Heisa, heisa,

Vorsa, vorsa,

You, you.

One long pull

More power

Young blood

Ha ha ha hough.'

They sang on a scale unknown to Jack, with intervals he had never heard; and the last line, a falsetto shriek as the blocks clashed together, quite astonished him.

He looked aft, where Stephen would ordinarily be leaning over the taffrail gazing at the wake. No Stephen. 'I suppose the Doctor has gone below,' he said. 'He would have liked that. We might ease off again and ask him to come on deck.'

'I doubt we might get a short answer,' said Pullings in a low voice. 'He is sitting there with so many papers he might be paying off a first-rate, and he roared at Mr Martin just now like a bull.'

As far as devotion was concerned, Nathaniel Martin's was directed more towards Maturin than Aubrey, and Stephen's snappishness had quite wounded him - a snappishness that Martin had scarcely known in him before, but that seemed to be growing sharper and more frequent.

There was to be sure some excuse for it on this occasion, since a moderate lee-lurch had sent Martin staggering from one piled chair to another, upsetting and mingling four carefully separated heaps of paper, while the draught he let in spread them over the cabin deck like a whitish carpet.

Their presence arose from the fact that the British government was not alone in wishing to change the state of affairs in the Spanish and even Portuguese possessions in South America: the French hoped to do the same, and well before London's tentative contacts with the potential rebels in Chile, Peru and elsewhere, the French had carried their much more ambitious (and much more avowable) plans to the verge of action. They had equipped a new frigate that was to cruise upon Allied merchantmen and particularly South Sea whalers while at the same time landing agents, arms and money on the coast of Chile. It was this frigate, the Diane, that Jack Aubrey had cut out from St Martin's just before she sailed, and in her he had captured all the French agents' information and instruction, all their correspondents' views of the various local situations, all the names of French sympathizers and of those whose loyalty had been or could be purchased. All this was encoded according to four separate systems, and it was these systems that Martin had upset, together with their substrata of Maturin's involved private business - university chairs, annuities, settlements and the like. All the French papers would have to be sorted all over again, 'then read in clear, digested and committed to memory, with perhaps some of the more forgettable points re-encoded for future reference. Ordinarily the great bulk of this work would have been done by Sir Joseph's department, but in this instance both he and Stephen agreed that they should keep the existence of the whole mass of papers to themselves.

Martin retired to the orlop, where by the light of a battlelantern he finished entering the ship's medical stores in a book and then wrote labels for the bottles and boxes in the medicine-chest, a new, particularly massive affair with two locks.

From these he went on to check their surgical instruments, the grim saws, retractors, artery-hooks, gags, leather-covered chains; and then the more massive substances such as portable soup, stored in flat wooden cases of thirty-six slabs apiece, lime and lemon juice, plaster of Paris for healing broken limbs in the oriental manner (much favoured now by Dr Maturin), and neat square bales of lint, each marked with the broad arrow. He was turning over the last (already attacked by rats) when Stephen joined him. 'Everything seems to be in order,' said Martin, 'except that I have not been able to find more than this single case-bottle quart of laudanum, instead of all our usual five-gallon carboys.'

'There is only that one quart,' said Stephen. 'I have decided to employ it no more, except in the greatest emergency.'

'It used to be your panacea,' observed Martin, his mind drifting away to the builders at home: were they attending to the roof at this moment? He doubted it: he would send a note to Mr Huge by the Plymouth pilot-boat.

'I am no more infallible than Paracelsus, who used antimony for a great many years,' replied Maturin. 'There are grave objections to the frequent exhibition of laudanum, I find.'

'Yes, yes, of course,' said Martin, clapping his hand to his forehead. 'I beg your pardon.'

There were indeed very grave objections. Padeen, Stephen's Irish servant and loblolly-boy, often in and about the sick-berth and the medical stores, had become deeply addicted to laudanum, the alcoholic tincture of opium. Stephen, late in discovering the fact, had done what he could, but what he could do was not enough; and at the time he was disabled. Padeen deserted the ship when she touched at Leith, and being unable to get his opium by fair means- he was illiterate, barely comprehensible in English, and he knew the substance only by the name of tincture - had taken it by force, breaking into an apothecary's house by night and tasting till he found it.