Patrick O'Brian - The surgeon's mate

A breathless pause, and the flash from the bow nine-pounder lit the sky, almost instantly followed by the starboard carronades in a rippling broadside.

'What did I tell you?" said the first lieutenant of the Indomitable to the master.

They both stared out northwards: the deep angry roar reached them, and a moment later the low clouds of the northern sky glowed red again. 'He has put the ship, about,' said the master. Again the distant thunder, and now a pause, while the master counted aloud. He reached seventy, and once more the long flash lit the sky.

'He will get in a fourth,' said the lieutenant. But this time he was wrong. Jack gave the order 'House your guns,' said 'A creditable exercise, Mr Hyde,' and went below smiling, his headache and ill-temper gone.

CHAPTER SEVEN

No Dutchman from the Texel or the Scheldt came out to meet the Ariel, nor did she encounter any privateers. But the Danes had never cordially loved the Royal Navy since the bombardments of their capital and the taking of their fleet; danger lay ahead, and the little ship proceeded on her way, daily more prepared to meet it.

To his satisfaction Jack found that he had inherited a better ship's company than he had expected. The gunner had served under Broke, learning his trade in the old Druid; two of his mates had belonged to the Surprise when Jack had her; and although Draper, his predecessor, had been unwilling or unable to spend much on powder and shot, he had at least fitted locks and sights to the nine-pounders, while his officers, a decent average set of young men, were perfectly willing to enter into their new captain's notion of the standard of gunnery proper to a King's ship.

The Ariel sailed north, therefore, in an often-renewed cloud of her own smoke, thundering by day and night, odd, unexpected intervals being the best training for an emergency; and although Jack could not hope for the speed he had achieved in long commissions nor anything like the accuracy - apart from all other considerations his short carronades were incapable of throwing a ball with the precision of a long gun - he was pleased with the result so far, and confident that the Ariel would do herself credit if she were to meet with a fair match. Indeed he longed for such an action, not only because of his natural love of battle - of the immense exhilaration, the magnifying of life - but because the Ariels, though a fairly good crew, were made up of three recent drafts and they did not form a whole. All through his naval life he had observed the attachment, even the affection, that sprang up between men who had been through a serious sea-fight together, and the very valuable change in -the relationship between the hands and the officers, a change that worked both ways. For example, there was a bond between him and Raikes and Harris, the gunner's mates, because they had all three been mauled by a French ship of the line in the Indian Ocean: naval custom ruled out much in the way of conversation between them, but the special relationship, the esteem, was most certainly there.

'This is more like a proper life for a man,' he observed to Stephen, after one of these exercises had caused the Heligoland Bight to ring again.

'Sure, even the complexity of a vessel with as many masts as this, with all their ropes and the nice adjustment of their dependent sails, is nothing to the difficulties of life ashore,' replied Stephen, pulling up his collar. He had always noticed that Jack was quite another man at sea, a bigger man, capable of dealing both with strange surprising situations and the common daily round, and usually a happier one; but he had rarely seen the change so strongly marked before. A bitter drizzle was sweeping down from the North Frisian islands; a short cross-sea kept sending irregular dashes of spray across the windward side of the quarterdeck; and Jack's face rose above his inadequate, hastily-purchased pea-jacket, streaming with wet but beaming like a somewhat battered rising sun. 'Perhaps to some degree it may lie in the altumal simplicity of our diet, a diet produced by no effort of our own, and served up at stated intervals; whereas on land food is a frequent subject of consideration, and the gastric juices are therefore perpetually solicited; but no doubt a more important factor on shore is the presence of an entirely different sex, of the excitation of other appetites, and of the appearance of a whole new set of social and even moral values.'

'Why, as to that,' said Jack: but he was peering and craning to see the foretopmast crosstrees, and for the moment his mind was elsewhere. 'Mr Rowbotham,' he called to a midshipman on the leeward side, 'jump up to the foretopmast crosstrees and tell Mr Jagiello, with my compliments, that I would like to speak to him, when he is at leisure. And harkee, Mr Rowbotham, he is to come down through the lubber's hole, d'ye hear me? There is to be no skylarking, no sliding down the backstays.'

'No, sir. Yes, sir,' said Rowbotham, and shot into the rigging with the speed if not the grace of his cousin the ring-tailed lemur.

'I beg your pardon,' said Jack, 'but I really cannot have him wandering aloft like that, above all with his wounded hand. He is an unlucky wight, and will certainly break his neck.' It was true. Jagiello had already taken advantage of a temporary gap in the hammock-netting to fall into the sea, from which he had been plucked, laughing heartily, by a well-aimed log-line; and of the only time a hatchway had ever been left uncovered to plunge into the hold, where nothing but a heap of empty sacks preserved him; and he had very, very nearly been destroyed when Awkward Moses dropped the mizen topgallantmast fid just between his feet from such a height that the massive piece of iron stuck in the deck like a bar-shot; while only yesterday the lock of a nine-pounder had slipped its sear when he was being shown the mechanism, almost severing one finger and pinching the rest most cruelly. He was a popular figure aboard: the hands liked him not only because he had begged Awkward Moses off his flogging but also because he was always cheerful, and apparently quite devoid of fear; the gunroom liked him because he was good company, attentive to their anecdotes and appreciative of their wit. The stupider officers, like Mr Hyde, still addressed him in a loud, slow, barbarous jargon calculated for halfwitted children and foreigners, but Graham the surgeon, a reading man when he was sober, and Fenton, the second lieutenant, maintained that it was great nonsense to say "I'm called dog's body. 'Tis pease-pudden really, but we say dog's body. You - like - 'im, dog's body?' to a man who could play such a hand at whist and beat all comers at the chess-board. And in both cases his absurd beauty and an indefinable sweetness of manner no doubt had their effect.

'Ah, Mr Jagiello,' said Jack, 'how kind of you to come. I wanted to ask you in the first place whether you would favour us with your company at dinner - I am also asking Mr Hyde - and in the second whether you have any military connections in the town of Gothenburg. Our lower tier of powder proves sadly damp, and I should very much like to replace it.'

'I should be very happy, sir,' said Jagiello. 'Thank you very much. And as for Gothenburg, I know the commandant; I am sure he will be delighted to give you powder, all the more since his mother is a Scotch.'

Stephen had spoken of the simplicity of their diet, and the Captain's dinner was a fair example of it. Apart from the marine glue, flavoured with sherry and thickened with crushed biscuit, that began the feast, and a dwarfish fowl which Stephen carefully divided into four wizzened pieces that tasted of tar, and some of yesterday's dried peas, boiled in a cloth until they merged into a homogenous mass, it was exactly the same salt horse and biscuit that had nourished the gunroom, the midshipmen's berth, and the mess-deck a little earlier in the day; for the Ariel, hurried so untimely to sea, had not had the leisure to lay in private stores. What little she had left had been devoured before she reached 54�N., and now all hands would have to be content with what the Victualling Office allowed them, at least until they reached Swedish waters.