Patrick O'Brian - The Letter of Marque

Pullings shoved in among the men at the wheel - all of them Shelmerstonians as it happened - gripped the spokes, waited for her to come up after a heavy sea had knocked her head to leeward, felt the familiar hesitation, smiled, and called out 'It is only one of her little tricks in this sort of weather. She has always done it. We can let him lie in peace."

Here a singularly prolonged and vivid series of lightning flashes lit up the low black clouds and the streaming ship; an enormous thunder-clap roared out almost within hand's reach; and the wind turned without the slightest warning, filling her staysail crack-full and bringing the Surprise four points up, heading straight into a very high sea with far greater speed. Her first plunge sent her entire forecastle deep under green water. The whole ship pitched at such an angle and with such force that Jack, dead asleep in his hanging cot after thirty-six hours on deck, was dashed violently against the beams overhead.

'I doubt she will ever rise again,' said Pullings to himself: and the glow of the binnacle lights showed the same grave expectation of the end on the faces of the men at the wheel. Everything seemed to be happening very slowly: the bowsprit and part of the forecastle heaved up as dark as a whale in the white turmoil: the enormous body of water filling the waist surged aft, flooding the quarterdeck and bursting the cabin bulkhead inwards. In the almost continual lightning the men of the watch could be made out clinging in bunches to the life-lines that had long since been stretched fore and aft between the guns; and before the water had poured from the quarterdeck scuppers Jack Aubrey was seen swarming up the ladder in his nightshirt.

'Does she steer?' he cried, and without waiting for the answer he took the wheel. The subtle current of vibrations between the thrust of successive waves on the rudder told him that all was well - his ship was answering as she had always answered. But as he peered down at the compass his blood dripping over the glass turned the binnacle light red.

'You are hurt, sir,' said Pullings.

'Damn that,' said Jack, heaving on the wheel to spill the wind. 'Haul up the foresail. Forward, there, look alive. Man the fore clew-garnets.'

This was in fact the last of the storm's more outrageous freaks. At the change of the watch the wind, returning to the east-northeast, whipped the clouds off the moon, showing a tolerably dismal sight - jib-boom, spritsail yard and bumpkins carried away, bowsprit and foreyard sprung, and spanker-boom broken, together with a great deal of cordage - dismal, but by no means desperate: no hands had been lost, little water had got in below, and although the cabin was bare, damp, austere and, with the loss of its bulkhead, stripped of all privacy, by breakfast-time the ship was making a creditable five knots under topsails alone in a moderate, slackening gale, the galley fires were in full action, and Killick had recovered his coffee-mill from the bilges, where some irrational blast had hurled it when the carpenter's mate went below to attend to the well.

Jack Aubrey had a bloody bandage round his head, obscuring one eye; he usually wore his long yellow hair neatly plaited and clubbed with a broad ribbon behind his neck, but so far he had not had time to wash the pints of clotted blood out of it and the stiffened locks stood out in all direction, giving him a most inhuman look; yet he was pleased with the way the ship's company had behaved - no moaning over short commons, though biscuit and cheese and small beer had been their fare for three days, no hanging back when they were required to go aloft, no skulking below, no wry looks - and his remaining eye had a benevolent expression. 'It is a remarkable fact,' he observed at breakfast, 'that in the course of many years at sea, I have never yet come across an incompetent carpenter. Bosuns, yes: because they often top it the tyrant and turn the hands awkward. Even gunners, who cannot always be brought to accept the slightest change. But not carpenters: they seem to have their trade born in them. Our Mr Bentley has almost finished the larboard bumpkin, and the bowsprit is already fished; we can - what the devil are they hallooing about in the waist?' Bending and looking forward under the long overhang of the quarterdeck, he saw the men who had been set to repair the gripes all standing up and shouting to the lookout at the masthead.

'I beg pardon for not knocking, sir,' said Pullings, running in, 'but there is nothing to knock on. A sail, sir, hull-down to leeward.'

'Hull-down? Then in that case we have time to finish our coffee,' said Jack. 'Sit down, Tom, and let me pour you a cup. It tastes a little odd, but at least it is hot and wet."

'Hot and wet it is, sir,' said Pullings, and to Maturin, 'I am afraid you must have had quite a tiresome night of it, Doctor. Your cabin is a rare old shambles, if I may use the expression.'

'At one time I was deeply uneasy, I will admit,' said Stephen. 'It appeared to me through my dreams that some criminal hand had left the door open, and that I should be exposed to the falling damps. But then I perceived that there was no door, at all, and composed my mind to sleep.'

Immediately after breakfast the Surprise sent up her top-gallantmasts. It had soon become apparent that the chase was of no great consequence, but even so Jack began methodically spreading his canvas until she threw a fine bow-wave and the water sang down her side in a long curve, drawing a wake as straight and urgent as though she had been in pursuit of the Manilla galleon. She had the wind on her starboard quarter and now she could just bear weather studdingsails alow. This was the first time Jack had really driven her since they left Shelmerston; the first time the new hands had seen what she was capable of. The speed pleased every man aboard, and not only the speed, but the ship's gallantry - the way she took the seas under her bow and tossed them aside. Although the wind was more moderate, it now blew across the current and the remaining swell, cutting it up in an ugly fashion; yet she ran through the short, uneven seas as sweetly as ever a ship could run, and when the log was heaved at four bells in the forenoon watch, taking ten knots clean off the reel, there was a universal cheer.

There was very little likelihood of trouble, but even so Jack had the hands piped early to dinner, watch by watch; and most of them soon returned eating what they could carry, in order to miss nothing. The chase had early been seen to be a crippled fore-and-aft vessel, and the probability of her being Babbington's schooner grew stronger the nearer she came. Her foremast was sound and she had foresail, foretopsail and a fine array of jibs, while her people were working extremely hard on a jury-mainmast. But it was no use: even if they did manage to set a mainsail on it, they must be overhauled quite soon. Uninjured and beating into the wind she had outsailed- the Tartarus; but crippled and above all sailing large she was no sort of match for the Surprise.

'So that is a schooner," said Martin, as they watched her from the forecastle. 'How can you tell?'

'It has two masts. The second is now being attempted to be erected.'

'But brigs, ketches, bilanders, galliots and doggers also have two masts. What is the difference?'

'Curlews and whimbrels have a general similarity, and both have two wings; yet to any but the most superficial observer there is an evident difference.'

'There is the difference of size, eye-stripe and voice.'

'Bating the voice, much the same applies to these two-masted vessels. The accustomed eye,' said Stephen, not without a certain complacency, 'at once distinguishes the equivalent of eye-stripes, wing-bars and semi-palmated feet.'

'Perhaps I shall come to it in time,' said Martin. 'But there are also luggers, bean-cods and herring-busses.' And having considered this for a while he went on 'Yet surely it is very curious that apart from some pilchard-boats off the Lizard and the two men-of-war this should be the first vessel we have seen in such a length of days? I remember the chops of the Channel as being crowded with shipping - vast convoys, sometimes stretching over miles, and separate ships or small groups on their own.'