Patrick O'Brian - The Thirteen Gun Salute

The news of land spread through the ship, and after dinner the mission came on deck to gaze at the horizon on the larboard bow, where the False Natunas, already clear from the tops, might soon be seen by those that did not choose to climb. Stephen met Loder, the least objectionable of the Old Buggers, on the companion-ladder.

'You seem to have had a very cheerful time in the gunroom,' said Loder.

'It was most agreeable,' said Stephen. 'Good company, a great deal of mirth, and the best dinner I remember ever to have eaten at sea - such a turtle, such Java geese!'

'Ah,' said Loder, meaning by this that he regretted the turtle and the geese, that he thought Fox's refusal for his colleagues an abuse of authority, and that he for one dissociated himself from the barbarous incivility: a considerable burden for a single 'ah', but one that it bore easily. Stephen had in fact already noticed a decline in the suite's excitement, something of a return to everyday sobriety, though Fox's exaltation was still at the same high and surely very wearing pitch. 'May I consult you, Doctor, when you have a spare moment?' asked Loder in a discreet voice. 'I do not like to speak to the ship's young man.'

'Certainly. Come to the dispensary tomorrow at noon,' said Stephen, and he went on to meet Macmillan himself. They made their round together - the usual port diseases had made their appearance - and when they, for want of an intelligent reliable loblolly boy, had rolled their own pills, prepared their own draughts and triturated their own quicksilver in hog's lard for blue ointment, Stephen said to Macmillan, 'Among your books, do you have Willis on Mental Derangement or any of the other authorities?'

'No, sir. I am sorry to say I have not. All I have in that line is an abstract of Cullen: shall I fetch it?'

'If you would be so very kind.'

He returned to his cabin, carrying the book, by way of the quarterdeck, and there he saw Fox at the lee hances, staring intently at the Natunas, the False Natunas.

All the species and degrees of madness which are hereditary, or that grow up with people from their early youth, are out of the power of physic; and so, for the most part, are all maniacal cases of more than one year's standing, from whatever source they may arise, he read, nodded, and turned the page. Another remarkable circumstance is, that immoderate joy as effectually disorders the mind as anxiety and grief. For it was observable in the famous South Sea year, when so many immense fortunes were suddenly gained, and as suddenly lost, that more people lost their wits from the prodigious flow of unexpected riches, than from the entire loss of their whole substance. 'That is something to the point,' he said, 'but what I really want is a case of the sudden onset of folie de grandeur.' He glanced at the measures recommended: diet low but not too low, bleeding of course, cupping, saline purgatives, emetics, camphorated vinegar, the strait waistcoat, blistering the head, chalybeate waters, the cold bath; and closed the book.

Presently, heavy with turtle soup, goose and a number of side-dishes, he closed his eyes as well.

The Diane stood off and on all night, just south of the False Natunas, and quite early in the morning Captain Aubrey stood tall and shadowy by Stephen's cot. 'Are you awake?' he asked in a soft voice.

'I am not,' said Stephen.

'We are going ashore in the new pinnace, and I thought you might like to come too. There may be a whole colony of nondescript boobies.'

'So there may - how truly kind - I shall be with you in a minute.'

So he was, unwashed, unshaved, tucking his nightshirt into his breeches as he tiptoed across the twilit deck, now being flogged dry after a thorough swabbing. They helped him down into the boat: 'Why, it has masts,' he exclaimed as he sat in the stern-sheets. 'I had not noticed before.' The faces of the boat's crew lost all expression: they gazed into vacancy.

'We take them down when she is hoisted in, you know,' said Jack. 'It makes stowing one inside the other so much easier.' And turning to the coxswain's seat he asked, 'How does she handle, Bonden?'

'Fine and stiff, sir, and answers very quick. So far I should say she is a rare pretty job, for a country-boat.'

She was pretty - fine-grained teak, carvel-built, as smooth as a dolphin's skin - but Stephen's eyes were fixed on the island ahead, as black and jagged a mass of tumbled rock as could be desired and surely uninhabited, but by no means as barren as he had supposed. There were coconut-palms growing at odd angles here and there, with a curious grey vegetation between the naked boulders: at midday it might look as repulsive as a slag-heap, but now in the perfect clarity of growing daybreak it had a severe beauty of its own, a moderate surf white against the black and the whole bathed in an indescribably soft and gentle light. Furthermore, so exceptional a mass of rock, largely earthless, baked by a tropical sun and soaked by tropical rains, was likely to have an exceptional flora and fauna.

'Bear a hand with the lead,' said Jack; and sounding as they went they coasted along to a little bay, dropped a grapnel and pulled in to the low-tide shore, one part white where the currents laid down coral sand, the other the unredeemed dull black of the mother-rock. Two hands leapt out with a gang-plank. Jack and Stephen went ashore, followed by Seymour and Reade, Bonden and a young foretopman called Fazackerley: they carried a compass, tools, a bottle, and a pot of paint, and as they walked up the damp sand to the tide-mark the sun rose behind them. They turned to look: pure sea, pure sky, and the sun, at first an orange arc in the faint haze, then a half-disk, still to be borne with narrowed eyes, and at last a blinding sphere, heaving clear from the horizon entirely and providing them with long dark shadows.

Jack took the bearings, stared inland for some while, and then, nodding towards a crag he said, 'I am afraid there is no paint upon it, but that is probably the most conspicuous rock, do you not agree, Doctor?'

'Certainly it stands well above its fellows; but why should there be any paint upon it, at all?'

'It was agreed that the first to come should leave his message twenty-two yards north of a conspicuous rock marked with white.'

'Twenty-two yards, for all love?'

'It is the length of a cricket-pitch.'

They left their message in its bottle, they left their mark, and they sailed back to the ship, carrying a collection of plants and insects that would have been very much larger if at last the Captain had not cried 'Come: we shall miss our tide. There is not a moment to lose.'

All these things were handed up the side, and some of them, in pill-boxes, accompanied Stephen to breakfast. 'It would have been worth getting up before dawn merely for the splendid appetite it engenders,' he said, 'but when to the appetite you add anomalous annelids and some of these plants.... When I have finished my kedgeree I will show you the isopod crustaceans I found under a fallen branch. They are almost certainly close kin to our own woodlice, but with some most unusual adaptations to this climate. How Martin would love to see them!'

'I hope he will, before long. We are on our true parallel, and as we sail to and fro upon it we may meet with them at any time. Today we shall stand to the east, perhaps lying-to at night; and tomorrow to the westward, and so on for a whole week.'

'You have been out in the new pinnace, I hear,' said Loder, who had kept his appointment in the dispensary to the minute but who now seemed unwilling to state his symptoms. 'How does she handle?'

'Very well, I believe. You are a sailor, sir?'

'I have always loved it. We had a yacht in England, and I have a little yawl here, a country-boat like yours, but clinker-built. I sailed her right round Java last year, with a couple of hands. She is half-decked.'