Patrick O'Brian - Desolation island

"In that case, may I beg you to be so kind as to leave this with the consul of the United States?" He produced a

letter: Stephen put it in his pocket.

Late, late that night, with no sound in the ship but the tradewind singing quietly in the rigging, the occasional movement of the anchor-watch, the bells and the cry of All's well from the sentries that followed each half-hourly stroke, Stephen snuffed his candle, pressed his hands to his aching, red rimmed eyes, took up his diary, and wrote, "I have seen Jack glow with pleasure when he has made a perfect landfall: when he has calculated his tides, his currents, and his shifting winds, and the event proves him right; and for this once my prediction too has been as exact as I could wish. Poor lady, how she must have laboured with her coding; and how heartily she must have cursed Fisher when he would be reading her South on Resignation. judging from what she had not time to encode, I believe Sir Joseph's experts will extract a remarkably complete picture from the rest, and that he will be gratified by the spectacle of a nascent system of intelligence: infant steps, perhaps, but surely those of a promising, even of a prodigious infant. I feel for her, with that good man prosing on and on, and her precious moments racing by. Her seal, though artful enough with its double guard of hair, showed evident marks of impatience. When we meet tomorrow I have little doubt that our eyes will match, like those of a pair of albino ferrets; for although my copies and my letters to Sir Joseph in duplicate may have been longer, I am more accustomed to the act than she. I do not have to count on my fingers for my code, blot and write again, with little calculations in the margin; nor did I have to contend with extreme vexation of spirit. I must keep the triumph from my glowing eye, however: perhaps I shall wear green spectacles."

He closed his book, itself a monument of cryptography, and lay down in his cot. Sleep was welling up to dowse his mind, but for a while it still burned clear, reflecting both upon the satisfactions of his trade and upon its very dirty sides - the constant dissimulation, the long-lived lie

soaking into the liar's deepest fibre, however justified the lie - the sacrifice, in some cases he had known, not only of the agent's life but also of his private essence - upon whales - upon the curious division of the wardroom into two parties, Grant, Turnbull, and Larkin on the one side, and Babbington, Captain Moore, and Byron, the new acting fourth lieutenant, on the other, with the purser Benton and the insignificant Marine lieutenant Howard in between. Perhaps Fisher too; although of recent days his friendship with Grant had increased. An odd creature, the chaplain, perhaps somewhat shallow, unsteady; his conduct during the height of the epidemic had disappointed Stephen, as far as he had had time to be disappointed; more promise than performance: too much taken up with his own troubles? More willing to receive comfort than to give it? Certainly most reluctant to handle filth. And this marked concern for Mrs Wogan's welfare . . . They were not parties opposed by any animosity, however, at least not evident animosity; they rather represented different attitudes and they were probably to be found throughout the ship, with Jack's old shipmates and volunteers on the one hand and the rest of the crew on the other. "Will he find any more men?" was the last of these thoughts that had coherent form.

The next day brought the answer: twelve black Portuguese, and Jack was to try again in the afternoon, his last chance before the Leopard sailed on the evening tide. "But," observed Bonden, rowing Stephen to the apothecary's for his final lading, "I doubt he'll find another soul."

"May not he press some from the English ship that has just come in?"

"Oh no, sir," said Bonden, laughing, "not in a foreign port, he can't. Besides, she's a whaler for the South Sea, so most of her men will have protections, even if we meet her far out in the offing. Nor he won't get no volunteers out of her, neither, not for the old Leopard, if they haven't sailed with him before. No, no, they won't go into the Leopard of

their own free will, not an old wessel of her unlikely rep.' 'But surely she is a very fine ship? Better than new, the Captain said."

"Well, now," said Bonden, "I don't go for to set myself up as a King Solomon, but I know what the common chap that has used the sea for some time says to himself. He says, this here old Leopard may have a good skipper, no preachee-floggee hard-horse, as we say, but she is very old, and cruet short handed: we shall be worked to the bone, so damn the Leopard. For why? Because she is a floating coffin, and unlucky at that."

"Nay, Bonden, the Captain told me distinctly, and I recall his very words, that she had been thoroughly overhauled, with Snodgrass's diagonal braces, and Roberts's iron-plate knees, so that she was now the finest fifty-gun ship afloat."

"As to her being the finest fifty-gun ship afloat, why, fair enough. Because why? Because there's only Grampus in the ring, bar two or three more we call the Baltic Hearses. But as for them knees and braces . . . Well now, sir,"said Bonden, glancing over his shoulder and shooting the boat through a gap between a mob of small craft and the outer buoy. He did not speak again for some while, and when he did it was to say in an obstinate, contentious voice, "They can talk to me about Captain Seymour and Lord Cochrane and Captain Hoste and all the rest of them, but I say our skipper's the finest fighting captain in the fleet; and I served under Lord Viscount Nelson, didn't I? I'd like to see the man that denies it. Who wiped a Spanish frigate's eye In a fourteen-gun brig, and made her strike? Who fought the Polychrest till she sunk under him, and swapped her for a corvette cut out from right under their guns?"

"I know, Bonden," said Stephen mildly. "I was there."

"Who set about a French seventy-four in a twenty-eight gun frigate?" cried Bonden, angrier still. "But then," he went on in quite another tone, low and confidential, "when we're ashore, sometimes we're a little at sea, if you

understand me, sir. Which, being as straight as a die, we sometimes believe them quick-talking coves are dead honest too, with their patent knees and braces and goddam silver-mines, pardon the expression, sir. Now 'tis natural for any captain to think his command the finest ship that ever was: but sometimes, being stuffed up with knees and braces, we might perhaps think her finer than is quite reason, and believe it and say it too, without a he."

"Leopard," called the master of that fine American bark the Asa Foulkes, who recognized the boat.

"Asa Foulkes," replied Bonden, with an offensive variation of the name and a scornful laugh.

"Do you lack for any hands? We got three Liverpool Irishmen aboard, and a quartermaster that ran from the Alelampus. Why don't You come and press them?" Merriment aboard the bark, and cries of 'Bloody old Leopard."

"From the look of your topsides and your harbour stow," said Bonden, now abreast of the Asa Foulkes, "you ain't got a single seaman in the barky for us to take. My advice to you, old Boston Bean, is to go right back to Sodom, Massachusetts, by foot, and try to find a real sailorman or two.' A general roar from the Asa Foulkes, a bucket of slush thrown in the direction of the boat, and Bonden, who had never at any time looked at the American, said, "That settled his hash. Now where to first, sir?"

"I must go to the apothecary, the hospital, and the American consul. Pray choose the point most nearly equidistant from all three."

To this point, no later than Bonden, from long experience, had expected him to be, Stephen returned, bearing a parrot for the carpenter. lie was followed by two slaves carrying drugs enough to dose the whole ship's company for eighteen months, and by two nuns with an iced pudding wrapped in wool. "Ten thousand thanks again, dear mothers," he said. "This is for your poor; and pray for the soul of Stephen Maturin, I beg.' To the slaves, "Gentlemen, here is for your trouble: commend me to the