Patrick O'Brian - The far side of the world

Four bells interrupted them, and clear round the ship came the cry of the lookouts and the sentinels: 'Lifebuoy, all's well.' 'Starboard gangway, all's well.' 'Starboard bow, all's well,' followed by all the rest. The carpenter's mate, bringing a lantern with him, reported eleven inches in the well - half an hour's pumping at dawn - and the midshipman of the watch, having fussed some little time with the lantern and the sand-glass, said, 'Seven knots one fathom, sir, if you please.' Mowett wrote this on the log-board: the lantern vanished down a hatchway, the darkness returned, even thicker than before. Stephen said, 'There was a foolish man of Lampsacus, Metrodorus by name, that explained away the gods and the heroes as personifications of this and that, of fire and water, the sky and the sun, and so on - Agamemnon was the upper air, as I recall - and then there were a great many busy fellows who found out hidden meanings in Homer by the score: and some would have it that the Odyssey in particular was an enormous great bloated metaphor, the way the writer of it would have seen a superior acrosticmonger. But as far as I know not one of the inky boobies ever saw what is as clear as the sun at midday - that as well as being the great epic of the world, the Iliad is a continued outcry against adultery. Hundreds, nay thousands of heroical young men killed, Troy town in blood and flames, Andromache's child dashed from the battlements and she led away to carry water for Greek women, the great city razed and depopulated, all, all from mere adultery. And she did not even like the worthless fellow at the end. James Mowett, there is nothing to be said for adultery.'

'No, sir,' said Mowett, smiling in the darkness, partly from recollections of his own, and partly like everybody else aboard - all the old Surprises, that is to say - he was as certain of Dr Maturin's criminal conversation with Mrs Fielding as if he had seen them kiss and clip in naked bed.

'No, sir: nothing at all. And I have sometimes thought of giving him a hint; but these things are too delicate, and I doubt it would answer. Yes, Boyle, what is it?'

'Who is this him?' said Maturin to himself.

'I beg your pardon, sir,' said Boyle, 'but I believe there is a hail from the launch.'

'Then lay aft and see what is afoot. Take my speaking trumpet, and sing out loud and clear.'

Boyle sang out loud and clear, and coming back he said, 'As far as I could make out, sir, the chaplain wishes to know whether we apprehend any worsening of the tempest.' 'it is what we have been praying for this last age, after all,' said Mowett. 'But perhaps we had better bring the launch under the counter; he may be a little uneasy in his mind. Jump down and help him up the stern-ladder; there will be plenty of light from the cabin.'

'How very kind of you,' said Martin, sitting on the capstan to recover his breath after his climb. 'The boat was plunging up and down in a most alarming fashion, and I could make no observations at all this last half hour.'

What were you observing, sir?'

'Luminous organisms, mostly minute pelagic crustaceans, copepods; but I need calmer water for it, the good calm water we have had almost all the way. How I pray it may grow quiet again before we leave the sargasso quite behind.'

'I don't know about the sargasso,' said Mowett, 'but I think you may be pretty sure of calm weather before we cross the Line.'

And indeed long, long before they crossed the Line the trade wind died in the frigate's wake and left her with her towering canvas limp, all the noble expanse she had spread to catch the lightest airs hanging there discouraged and the ship rolling horribly on the great smooth swell.

'So these are the doldrums,' said Martin, coming on deck in his best coat, the coat worn for invitations to the cabin, and looking about the hot, lowering sky and the glassy sea with great satisfaction. 'I have always wanted to see them. Yet even so, I believe I shall take off my coat until dinner-time.'

'It will make no odds,' said Stephen, whose spirit of contradiction was more lively than usual, because of a sleepless night, much of it filled with longing for his private vice, the alcoholic tincture of laudanum, a form of liquid opium that had consoled him in anxiety, unhappiness, privation, pain and insomnia for many a year but which he had given up (except medicinally) on his marriage with Diana. 'Your coat protects you from the radiant heat of the sun, and the mechanism of your body maintains it at a constant temperature: as you know, the Arab of the desert goes covered from head to foot. The apparent relief is a mere illusion, a vulgar error.'

Martin was not a man to be overborne, however; he took off his coat, folded it carefully on the hammock-cloth, and said, 'The vulgar error is wonderfully refreshing, nevertheless.'

'And as for the doldrums,' Stephen went on, 'I believe you may perhaps misuse the term. As I understand it, in nautical language the doldrums are a condition, a state; not a region. They are analogous to tantrums. A child, and God help us a grown man alas, can be in the tantrums anywhere at all. Similarly a ship may be in the doldrums wherever she is long becalmed. I may be mistaken, but Captain Aubrey will certainly know.'

Captain Aubrey knew, but since they were his guests he contrived to agree with both, though inclining somewhat in the chaplain's favour: he conceived that from seamen's slang or cant doldrums was become a general word by land, used in Mr Martin's sense of what used to be called the variables. He had a great esteem for Mr Martin; he valued him; but he did not invite him as often as he felt he should; and now by way of making amends he not only filled his glass very often and helped him to the best cuts of the leg of mutton but also strained the truth in his direction. The fact of the matter was that he felt a constraint in Martin's presence. He had known few parsons, and his respect for the cloth made him feel that a grave face and a sober discourse, preferably on topics of a moral nature, were called for in their presence; and although he did not much delight in bawdy - indeed never talked it except in bawdy company where the reverse would have seemed offensively pious - the compulsory decorum weighed upon him. Then again, although Mr Martin loved music he was an indifferent performer and after one or two sadly discordant evenings full of apology he had not been asked to play in the cabin again. Jack was therefore more than usually attentive to his guest, not, only congratulating him (quite sincerely) upon his sermon that morning, not only feeding and wining him to a pitch that few men could have withstood in a temperature of a hundred and four with a humidity of eighty-five, but telling him in some detail of the sail that was to be put over the side that afternoon for the hands to swim in: those hands, that was to say, who could not take to the sea itself, for fear of drowning. This led on to observations about seamen's, particularly fishermen's, reluctance to be taught to swim; and at the far end of the table Pullings, who as a captain by courtesy was allowed to pipe up of his own accord, said, 'It is a great while since you have saved anyone, sir.'

'I suppose it is,' said Jack.

'Does the Captain often save people?' asked Martin.

'Oh dear me, yes. One or two every commission: or more. I dare say you could man the barge with hands you have saved, could you not, sir?'

'Perhaps I could,' said Jack absently, and then, feeling that he was not doing his duty by his other guest, he said, 'I hope we shall see you over the side this afternoon, Mr Hollom. Do you swim?'

'Not a stroke, sir,' said Hollom, speaking for the first time; and he added, after a slight pause, 'But I shall join the others in splashing about in the sail; it would be a rare treat to feel cool.'