Patrick O'Brian - Desolation island

Captain Aubrey did not make much of the young man at all. lie told Stephen quite frankly, "I do not wish to crab your young man, Stephen, but do not you think that you should keep him from the bottle? He cannot hold his wine;he has no head for it. Why, on no more than three glasses, for I absolutely poured him out no more, he was on the point of singing Yankee Doodle. Yankee Doodle, in a King's ship, upon my sacred honour!"

Stephen could not reply. It was true that Herapath, though pale, drawn, and even haggard, as though from prolonged and violent labour, had behaved strangely, laughing for no apparent cause, snapping his fingers, smiling secretly, and answering very much at random and even speaking when he was not spoken to - untimely mirth, facetious expressions, a tendency to sing unasked. He changed the subject: 'These boomkin knottings, Jack: just where may they be?"

"The bowsprit netting, where the ghost is?"

"There is nothing more illiberal than the ostentatious correction of an obvious lapsus linguae: of course I meant the bowsprit netting."

"I will show you,"said Jack, and he led Stephen forward to the head, out on to the bowsprit, to the cap, and set him on the spritsall yard.

"Oh, oh, this is the noble place of the world," cried he, when he had been carefully turned about: he found himself sitting there, poised high but not too high above the sea, well outside the ship, well beyond her splendid

bow-wave, looking back at her from a distance, the Leopard perpetually advancing, a gleaming pyramid of sail, and himself as perpetually fleeing backwards over the unbroken water. "I am enraptured. I could gaze upon this for ever!"

When he could be brought to attend, Jack pointed out the horses - 'A spirited team, indeed!" - and the netting that hung from them.

"So that is the ghost's abode," said Stephen. "Had you said a nymph's or even a dryad's, it would have been more appropriate. Now tonight, brother, you must bring me here again, with a couple of blue Bengal lights. I myself have a bottle of holy water. With these I shall lay the ghost: for since the whole thing is stark raving lunacy, it evidently falls within the province of the medical man."

"At night?" said Jack.

"As soon as it is quite dark,"said Stephen. He glanced at Jack, and said, "Surely, my dear, you are not so weak as to believe in ghosts?"

"Not at all. I wonder you should make such an uncalled-for suggestion. But it so happens that tonight my time is much taken up; and in any case it occurs to me that since this is a medical matter, as you say yourself, Herapath would be far more suitable in every way."

When Jack sprang from his cot at dawn, in answer to the rapping on the door, his mind, snatched from a dream of a soft, consenting Mrs Wogan, told him that since the wind had not changed, and since the Leopard had not varied from her course nor touched a sail, it must be that God-damned ghost playing off its humours again. But in a flash, in the two strides that separated his cot from the door, his recollection corrected this, presenting a vivid image of Stephen, his blue lights and his holy water, dowsing the phantom to the satisfaction of all hands, particularly the papists among them (a good third of the

crew) - Mr Fisher's angry cry of Mumbo-Jumbo, Stephen's perhaps unfortunate reply of Venus-Wenus - the untroubled demeanour of the hands sent into the bowsprit netting a few moments later. "Good morning, Mr Holles," he said to the midshipman.

"Good morning, sir. Mr Grant's duty, and there is a ship fine on the larboard bow."

"Thank you, Mr Holles. I shall be on deck directly."

Directly it was: trousers alone, and his long hair streaming. He leant far out over the windward rail, and there she lay, almost stern-on, but her masts sufficiently out of line to show all three, her topsails nicking the red rim of the sun as it rose.

"Topgallant halliards," he cried. "Windward braces. Clew up, clew up, there. Clap on to the buntlines.'And in an angry aside to the lieutenant, "For God's sake, Mr Grant, don't you know enough to take in your topgallants in such a case?"Then aloud, very much aloud, "All hands, all hands to wear ship."

"The cursed old woman," he said, as he thrust through the hurrying seamen, the swabs, holystones, and buckets that littered the deck, and ran up to the maintop like a boy. "A matter of minutes, and he sends to wake me."

The first thing a cruising captain knew was that if he possibly could he must see and not be seen, or at least see first. That was why there were standing orders aboard the Leopard to double the lookouts and send them aloft before dawn, to take advantage of that precious morning glimpse. If those topgallants had vanished at the moment of the hall, the Leopard might have passed unnoticed. Even as it was the strange sail might not have picked her up, the Leopard being far to the west, where the night still lingered, and a certain haze.

He climbed higher as the Leopard wore smoothly round and steadied - Grant could be trusted to do that, at all events - and he stared at the remote stranger, fading fast as the Leopard stood from her, until he was blinded by the

sun. On deck once more he held his hand to his eye, seeing nothing but a blazing orange ball, and said, "Who first saw her? "

A young able seaman came running aft, looking nervous, and touched his knuckle to his forehead. "Well done, Dukes," said Jack. "You have damned good eyes."

He went below to put on more clothes. The morning was brisk, as was to be expected, since the Leopard was now well south of Capricorn and within a day of the cold currents and the vast chilly zone before the westerlies. And as he dressed the thoughts streamed through his mind. By way of data, he had very little: she was a ship, that was certain, though of what force or nature he could not tell. He was almost sure that she had been in the act of shaking a reef out of her topsails: Indiamen and Dutchmen and some Royal Navy captains had a comfortable way of reefing them at sunset. But this year's Indiamen should have reached or passed the Cape two months ago, and any stray or extra ship was most unlikely to have crossed the line so far west as to bring her here. She was not a whaler, of that he was sure. She might be an American for the far east; she might possibly belong to the Royal Navy; but the strongest likelihood was that he had just seen the Waakzaamheid.

"Forewarned is forearmed," he said to Stephen at breakfast.

"That is a very fine thought," said Stephen, "and strikingly original: pray, when did it come to you?"

"Oh very well, very well. But if you had said it in Latin or Greek or Hebrew you would triumph for half an hour together, crowing over those who can only express themselves like plain honest Christians: and yet it would be allone, you know. Should you like to be explained the position to?"

"If you please: the moment I have finished this piece of toast."

"Here we are, now," said Jack, pointing to a spot on the

chart about two-thirds of the way from South America to the tip of Africa, "not far from the pitch of the Cape. We shall still have the trade for some time, but very soon, probably today, we shall come into the cold current setting west, where the trade grows weaker - you might find some of your albatrosses even before we get to the variable breezes this side of the true westerlies."

"I saw a pintado just before I came below."

"Give you joy, Stephen. And here is the stranger, to windward, as you see. Now if he is the Dutchman, and I am bound to reckon on the worst, he is likely to make all the southing he can, to reach the forties as soon as possible, run well clear of the Cape, and so north and cast for the Indies. Even if he were an enterprising fellow, with a well-found, clean ship full of seamen, he would scarcely attempt the Mozambique channel, not with our cruisers off the Mauritius; yet on the other hand . . . "Jack went on thinking aloud, much as Dr Maturin might have worked out a diagnosis on the person of a mute colleague, and Stephen's attention wandered. He had a perfect confidence in Jack's ability to solve these problems: if Jack Aubrey could not solve them, nobody could, least of all Stephen Maturin. He secretly read the obituary in an ancient Naval Chronicle that protruded from under the chart - 'On the 19th of July last, on board the Theseus, at Port Royal, Jamaica, Francis Walwin Eves, midshipman. At St Mary's Isle, on the 25th of August, Miss Home, eldest daughter of the late Vice-Admiral Sir George Home, Bart. On the 25th September, at Richmond, the Hon. Captain Carpenter, of the Royal Navy. Suddenly, on the 14th of September, Mr Wm Murray, surgeon of His Majesty's dock-yard, Woolwich' he remembered Murray, a left-handed man, very able with his knife -'On the 21st of September, at Rotherhithe, Lieutenant John Griffiths, of the Royal Navy, aged 67.' Yet at the same time he heard Jack musing on the duty of this hypothetical Dutch captain to carry his ship to the Indies unscathed,