Patrick O'Brian - The surgeon's mate

The divisions were sadly scattered by dawn, in spite of the lights they all carried in their tops, but the good north-easter enabled them to gather in some semblance of order and carried them briskly through the difficult Fehmarn channel by sunset, when it abruptly chopped into the south and became a perfect leading-wind for the still more difficult Langelands Belt. They threaded the long channel in the night, scarcely touching a sheet or brace; and from the shore they looked like some prodigious constellation, enormously rich in stars, that had strayed to the surface of the sea. They sailed with a wind that kept the hostile gunboats in port, and the only untoward event was a Dane's diabolical attempt at insinuating himself into the procession in the hope of carrying a straggler by surprise and darting into Spodsbjerg with her; but he was detected; the signal for a stranger in the fleet brought the hindmost sloop-of-war tearing up from the rear; and although the Dane did indeed dart into Spodsbjerg he darted alone, with tattered sails and five gaping holes between wind and water, leaving no more damage behind him than three merchantmen that had fallen aboard one another in their alarm and that had to be taken in tow.

But this happened at midnight, and so far back in the immensely long convoy that the Ariel was hardly aware of it. When the grey weeping dawn began to light the greyer sea the van was already far out into the Great Belt itself, with Zealand faintly looming on the starboard beam and Funen lost in the distant rain to port.

'Well, Mr Pellworm,' said Jack, shaking the wet from his pea-jacket and looking up at the cloud racing up from the south with strong approval, 'I am afraid you are disappointed of your wind out of the north.'

'I am not complaining, sir,' said Pellworm. 'As pretty a breeze, as pretty a passage as you could wish - the answer to a maiden's prayer, as the poet says - and I dare say it will carry us right up the Cattegat; but mark my words, sir, mark my words, we shall have our blow yet, and I only hope we may have weathered the Skaw before it starts. You cannot set sail of a Friday, the thirteenth of the month, with a woman on board into the bargain, without you have a blow. I am not in the least superstitious - I leave crows and pies crossing my path and cards and tea-leaves and such to Mrs Pellworm - but it stands to reason that what seamen have found to be the case ever since the memory of man saith not to the contrary must have something in it. There is no smoke without a fire. Besides, the glass is dropping yet; and even if it were not, a Friday is always a Friday.'

'Maybe, maybe; but a good many of these omens are all cry and no wolf.'

'Is it not wool, sir?'

'Come, come, Mr Pellworm,' said Jack, laughing aloud. 'Who would cry wool too often? What would be the point of crying wool? There is no danger in wool, you know; indeed, London Bridge is founded on it, and you cannot say fairer than that, I believe. No, no: your omens keep threatening disaster - they did so before Grimsholm, and you see what happened: all cry with no wolf at the end of it. I have done with omens,' he said, grasping a belaying-pin. 'But your falling glass is another kettle of fish: your glass is scientific.'

Pellworm's face took on a dogged expression and he said, 'As you pleaser sir; but there are more things in heaven and earth, Captain Aubrey, than you philosophers dream of.'

'Philosophers, Mr Pellworm?'

'Oh, sir, that was only poetry. I meant no disrespect.'

'Philosophers, Mr Pellworm,' began Jack, but he broke off at the sight of the Ariel's master, who was approaching the first lieutenant on the leeward side of the quarterdeck with small, constrained steps, consternation all over his face, and his hands clasped in front of him. 'What's amiss, Mr Grimmond?' he cried.

'Sir,' said Grimmond in an unnatural voice, 'I am very sorry to have to report that the timepiece is broke. I dropped it on the deck.' He opened his hands, and there nestling in his handkerchief lay the wreck of the Ariel's chronometer: it had had the unluckiest fall, striking its most vulnerable joint on a ring-bolt, and now its works lay all abroad.

There was little point in asking the master why he was looking at the chronometer at this time of day, far from the regulation time for winding it, or how he came to drop it; and although these questions at once presented themselves, together with the observation that one should always take very great care when handling anything so delicate, Jack only said, 'Well, well: my hack-watch is fairly accurate. Though now I come to think on it, the Doctor's is a great deal better.'

To the Doctor he said, 'Stephen, a damned thing has happened: the timepiece is broke. Will you lend me your watch?'

'You are welcome to it, sure,' said Stephen, producing his severely beautiful Breguet. 'But what is wrong with the other chronometers?'

'There ain't any other chronometers.'

'Come, brother, I remember to have seen a whole array in our various ships, and distracted young gentlemen trying to find the mean of them all while you bullied them, holding your hack-watch in one hand and peering at the celestial bodies with the other.'

'Yes, but that was because I have always had my own, ever since I could afford it; and if a captain buys one, the Admiralty lets him have two more. Otherwise he carries just the single timekeeper, and then only if he is going foreign, in most cases.'

'The machine is used for finding out the latitude, I believe?'

'To tell you the truth, Stephen, most people rely on the sextant for their latitude: the timekeeper is more for the other thing - east and west, you know.'

'East and west of what, for all love?"

'Why, of Greenwich, naturally.'

'I am no great navigator - ' said Stephen.

'You are far too modest,' said Jack.

' Though I have often wondered how you mariners find your way about the dank wastes of ocean. But from what you tell me I see that for your countrymen Greenwich rather than Jerusalem is the navel of the universe - lo, Greenwich, where many a shrew is in, ha, ha - and secondly that whereas a poor man can fix his position only with regard to north and south, to up and down, his wealthy brother is secure to right and left as well. There is no doubt a logic in this, although it escapes me, just as the use of the timepiece escapes me, with its peevish insistence upon accuracy in the measurement of what is after all a most debatable concept, quite unknown, we are told, in Heaven. Tell me, is it really capable of telling you where you are, or is this just another of your naval - I must not say superstitions - like saluting the purely hypothetical crucifix on the quarterdeck?'

'If you have exact Greenwich time aboard - if you carry it with you - you can fix your longitude exactly by accurate observation of local noon, to say nothing of occultations and the finer points. I have a pair of Arnolds at home -how I wish I had brought 'em - that only gained twenty seconds from Plymouth to Bermuda. In these waters that would tell you where you were, east or west, to within three miles or so. Oh, the lunarians may say what they please, but a well-tempered chronometer is the sweetest thing! Suppose you were riding along, with your watch set to Greenwich time in your pocket, and suppose you happened to take a noon observation and found that the sun southed at five minutes after twelve, you would know that you were almost exactly on the meridian of Winchester, without having to search for a finger-post. And the same applies to the sea, where finger-posts are tolerably uncommon.'

'Heavens, Jack, what things you tell me. And I dare say this would answer for let us say Dublin and Galway?'

'I should not care to affirm anything about Ireland, where people have the strangest notion of time; but at sea, I do assure you, it answers very well. That is why I should like to borrow your watch.'