Patrick O'Brian - The Ionian mission

'The language, sir?' he said with a smile - he was feeling unusually cheerful, even merry, 'It was Catalan.' He had been tempted to say Aramaic, out of a spirit of fun; but Graham was too learned, too much of a linguist to swallow that.

'So you speak the Catalan, Doctor, as well as the French and Spanish?'

'I have spent much of my life on the shores of the Mediterranean,' said Stephen, 'and in my malleable youth I came by a certain knowledge of the languages spoken at its western end. I do not possess your command of Arabic, however; still less of your Turkish, God forbid.'

'To revert to our battle,' said Graham, having digested this. 'What I do not understand is why Captain Aubrey should have shot off those extraordinary coloured balls in the first place.'

'As for that,' said Stephen, smiling at Graham's notion of a battle - from their noble balcony they had the whole bay spread out before them, with Algeciras on the farther shore, where he had taken part in a real action: a hundred and forty-two casualties in HMS Hannibal alone: blood and thunder all day long - 'You must know that in their wisdom the Lords of the Admiralty have laid down that for the first six months of his commission no captain may presume to fire more shot a month than one third the number of his guns under various heavy mulcts and penalties; and after that only half as many. Whitehall supposes that the mariners know how to direct their pieces accurately and shoot them off at great speed while the ship is tossing on the billows by instinct: the captains who do not share this amiable illusion buy their own powder, if they can afford it. But powder is costly. A broadside from a ship of this size uses up some two hundredweight, I believe."

'Hoot, toot,' said Graham, deeply shocked.

'Hoot, toot, indeed sir,' said Stephen. 'And at one and tenpence farthing the pound, that comes to a considerable sum.'

'Twenty, nineteen, five,' said Graham. 'Twenty pounds English, nineteen shillings and five pence.'

'So you will understand that captains seek the best market for their private powder: this came from a fireworks manufactory - hence the unusual colours.'

'There was no intention to deceive, then?'

'Est summum nefas fallere: deceit is gross impiety, my dear sir.'

Graham stared: then his grave grey face adopted a somewhat artificial smile and he said, 'You speak facetiously, no doubt. But the false colours, the French flag, was certainly intended to draw the enemy closer, so that he might be more readily destroyed; and it almost succeeded. I wonder we did not raise the signal of distress, or even pretend to surrender: that would have brought them closer still.'

'To the nautical mind some false signals are falser than other false signals. At sea there are clearly-understood degrees of iniquity. An otherwise perfectly honourable sea-officer may state by symbol that he is a Frenchman, but he must not state that his ship has struck upon a rock, nor must he lower his colours and then start to fight again, upon pain of universal reprehension. He would have the hiss of the world against him - of the maritime world.'

'The end proposed is the same in either case, the deception equal. I should certainly hoist all the colours in the spectrum, were it to advance the fall of that wicked man by five minutes. I refer to the self-styled Emperor of the French. War is a time for efficient action, not for the display of fine feelings, nor the discussion of the relative merits of forgery and false pretences.'

'It is illogical, I admit,' said Stephen, 'but this is the moral law, as perceived by the nautical mind.'

'The nautical mind,' said Graham. 'Hoot, toot."

'The nautical mind has its own logic,' said Stephen, 'and although it may disobey many of the Articles of War with a clear conscience - swearing is forbidden, for example, and yet we daily hear warm, intemperate language, even blasphemous and obscene; so is the sudden spontaneous beating of men who are thought to move too slowly, or stoning, as we call it. But you may see a certain amount of it even in this ship, which is more humane than most. Yet all these transgressions and many more, such as that stealing of stores which we term capperbar, or the neglect of religious feasts, are carried only to certain clearly-understood traditional limits, beyond which it is mortal to go. The seamen's moral law may seem strange to landsmen, even whimsical at times; but as we all know, pure reason is not enough, and illogical as their system may be, it does enable them to conduct these enormously complex machines from point to point, in spite of the elements, often boisterous, often adverse, always damp and always capricious.'

'It is a perpetual source of wonder to me that they arrive so often,' said Graham. 'And I remember what a friend of mine wrote on the subject. Having taken proper notice of the complexity of the machine, as you so rightly observe, the infinity of ropes and cords, the sails, the varying forces that act upon them, and the skill required to manage the whole, directing the vessel in the desired direction, he went on to this effect: what a pity it is that an art so important, so difficult, and so intimately concerned with the invariable laws of mechanical nature, should be so held by its possessors that it cannot improve but must die with each individual. Having no advantages of previous education, they cannot arrange their thoughts; they can scarcely be said to think. They can far less express or communicate to others the intuitive knowledge which they possess; and their art, acquired by habit alone, is little different from an instinct. We are as little entitled to expect improvement here as in the architecture of the bee or the beaver. The species cannot improve.'

'Perhaps your friend was unfortunate in his sea-going acquaintance,' said Stephen, smiling. 'As unfortunate as he was in his reference to the bee and her building, which is surely confessed by all mathematicians to be geometrically perfect, and therefore not susceptible of improvement. But leaving the bee aside, for my part I have sailed with mariners who were not only active in improving the architecture of their machines and the art of conducting them, but who were only too willing to communicate the knowledge they possessed. Such tales have I heard of Captain Bentinck's palls, or rather shrouds, and his triangular courses, of Captain Pakenham's newly-discovered rudder, of Captain Bolton's jury-mast, of improved iron-horses, dogs, dolphins, mouses - or mice as some say -puddings..."

'Puddings, my dear sir?' cried Graham.

'Puddings. We trice 'em athwart the starboard gumbrils, when sailing by and large.'

'The starboard gumbrils... by and large,' said Graham, and with a passing qualm Stephen recalled that the Professor had an unusually good memory, could quote long passages, naming the volume, chapter and even page from which they came. 'My ignorance is painful to me. As an old experienced seafarer you understand these things, of course.'

Stephen bowed and went on, keeping to slightly safer ground, 'Not to mention the countless devices to measure the speed of the vessel through the water by means of rotating vanes or the pressure of the circumambient ocean - machines as ingenious as the double-bottomed defecator. That reminds me: pray, what qualifications are called for in an Anglican clergyman, what attendance at a seminary, what theological studies?'

'I believe he must have taken his degree at one of the universities, and certainly he must have found a bishop willing to ordain him. My impression is that nothing more is required - no seminary, no theological studies - but I am sure you know more of the Anglican polity than I, since like so many of my countrymen I am a Presbyterian.'

'Not I, since like so many of mine I am a Catholic.'

'Indeed? I had supposed that all officers in the Navy were obliged to forswear the Pope.'