Patrick O'Brian - Desolation island

side to side for an unguarded prey. The rain had stopped: he laid his sealskin aside - he wore it as farmhands wear a sack, over his head and shoulders - brought out his lunch, swivelled round upon his nest, and surveyed thepart of the island he had traversed. On the right hand, down by the sea, the sea elephants, each weighing several tons. Most of them were kind or at least indifferent, but there was one old twenty-foot bull with a remarkable collection of wives that still would not suffer him to come close to, although they had been acquainted for such a while: it would still rear up and writhe its person, gibbering, gnashing its teeth, blowing out its inflatable nose, and even roaring aloud. "Did he but know," reflected Stephen, "could he but imagine the present mildness of my carnal desires with regard to Mrs Wogan, he would not fear for his harem.' Then came the little fur-seals with their charming pups: he knew them well. Still farther to the left, and straggling high up the slope, the enormous penguin rookeries, myriads upon myriads of birds. And almost beyond his view, the place where sea-leopards bred: yet although in one sea-leopard's stomach he had found eleven adult penguins and one small seal, by land they were on civil terms with their prey: indeed, all the various creatures shuffled and walked about in mingled crowds, abiding by some social contract that dissolved in the sea. Another rush of wings, a screech, and the biscuit with a slice of seal that he had placed upon a tuft, vanished, born off by a skua. "Oh the thief," he said, "the black anarchist," but in fact he had already had enough, and he gazed on without the least vexation.

There, between him and the little settlement, lay the ship, the very awkward looking ship: once the bay had been sounded in every part, the Leopard had been warped across until she lay so close to a sheer-to rock that she could be partially heaved down. They had found the leak, a most terrible long gash, almost a death-wound, and it had long since been dealt with: now the great trouble

was the rudder, and she lay there with staging about her stern, absurdly down in front and up behind so that they might struggle the more effectively with her sternpost, gudgeons, pintles, and the like.

And now the jolly-boat swam into his field of vision, rowed by Bonden, with Jack and the little Forshaw jammed into the stern-sheets. It stopped at a given buoy. Jack peered at various points with his sextant, calling out figures that the midshipman wrote down in his book: he was obviously carrying on with his survey, as he did whenever the tide was unsuitable for work on the Leopard's hull. Stephen walked to the edge of the declivity from which the albatrosses commonly launched themselves, and here, as six of the enormous birds plunged into the breeze on either side and even over him, he called out, "Hola."

Jack turned, saw him, and waved: the boat pulled in. It disappeared under the land and presently Jack came tolling up the slope. It was not his leg that made him toil and puff, for the numbness had passed off some time ago, but rather his bulk. While he had only been able to stump for a hundred yards or so he had nevertheless eaten voraciously; and greed growing with its indulgence, he was now walking up the hill for his breakfast eggs.

"It seems almost sacrHegious," said Stephen, as Jack held them out. "When I think of how I prized mine, perhaps the only specimen in the three kingdoms, how I preserved it from the slightest shock in jeweller's cotton, the idea of deliberately breaking one . . . "

"You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs," said Jack quickly, before the chance should be lost for ever. "Ha, ha, Stephen, what do you say to that?"

"I might say something about pearls before swine - the pearls being these priceless eggs, if you follow me - were I to attempt a repartee in the same order of magnitude."

"I did not fag all the way up here to be insulted about my wit, which, I may tell you, is more generally appreciated

in the service than you may suppose," said Jack, "but to bemoan my lot; to sit upon the ground and bemoan my lot."

Stephen looked at him sharply: in themselves the words were cheerful, facetious, jocose, and they matched the apparent well-being of Jack's face; but there was something very slightly false about the note or time or emphasis. Throughout his service in the Navy, Stephen had observed the steady, almost mechanical, and as it were obligatory facetiousness that pervaded the various gunrooms and wardrooms he had known; the stream of small merriment, long-established jokes, proverbial sayings and more or less droll allusions that made up so large a part of his shipmates' daily intercourse. It seemed to him a particularly English characteristic and he often found it wearisome; on the other hand he admitted that it had a value as a protection against morosity and that it encouraged fortitude. It also protected those who had to live together from those more adult forms of discussion in which men could commit themselves entirely, confronting one another in strong disagreement: whether that was its underlying purpose or whether it was no more than a manifestation of national levity and disinclination for intellectual pursuits he could not determine; but he did know that Jack Aubrey was so much in tune with this tradition, that he so entirely shared the notion of there being something indecent in solemnity, that he could only with real difficulty bring himself to speak of matters outside the running of the ship without a smile - he would go to his death with a pun half formed, if he could think of nothing better.

But when this facetiousness rang false, it rang very false indeed. It reminded Stephen of a 'cello suite that he had often tried to play, with small success; one in which, through very slight successive changes a simple, artless air in the adagio took on a nightmare quality. lie recognized something of this nature now, and his sharp look detected

an extreme weariness behind Jack's smiling eye, as though he were not far from despair. Why he not seen this before? The fantastic wealth of Desolation must have absorbed him very deeply: indeed, it had birds as he had always dreamed of seeing them, birds that he could touch; a whole flora and fauna almost unknown, and time for once to study them. lie said, "Why, brother, what's amiss? Is the leak broke out again?"

"No, no, the leak will do very well - better than new. No: it is the rudder."

During this long period of clearing the hold and repairing the leak Stephen had been satisfied with a vague general view of the progress: few of those concerned had troubled him with technical details and in any case he was usually too wet, cold, tired, by the end of the day, too filled with his own fascinating discoveries to attend closely to those few descriptions he heard as he sat blinking and gaping by the seal-oil fire. lie had been content to let experts carry on with their own tasks, while he carried on with his. Lie had seen the bright new planks entirely covering the leak inside and out; he had seen the fine new rudder, carefully sawn from spare topmasts and to his eye indistinguishable from the old; and his only fear was that the Leopard, dry, well-found and weatherly, should sail long before his collections were more than a skimming of the surface.

Now he heard a technical description indeed, and he learnt that the experts' darkest foreboding had been realized. The essential connection of the rudder to the hull could not be accomplished, or at any rate had not been accomplished; and Jack could not tell how to bring it about. The sternpost, constructed on new principles and a sad gimcrack affair that Jack had disliked from the beginning, had proved horribly defective, so damaged by the ice and so deeply rotten behind its sheathing that 'poor old Gray absolutely shed tears when we cut into it'. The only way of attaching the rudder was to forge new gudgeons,