Patrick O'Brian - H.M.S. Surprise

Callow leapt, jerked almost out of his chair by Pullings’s under-​table hint, changed his Yes, sir, if you please to No, sir, thank you very much, and stood up.

‘In that case,’ said Jack, ‘perhaps you will be so good as to desire your messmates to come into the cabin, with their logs.’

The rest of the morning, until five bells in the forenoon watch, he spent with the midshipmen, then with the bosun, gunner, carpenter and purser, going over their accounts: stores were well enough: plenty of beef, pork, peas and biscuit for six months, but all the cheese and butter had to be condemned - hardened as he was, Jack recoiled from the samples Mr Bowes showed him - and worse, far worse, the water was dangerously short. Some vile jobbery in the cooperage had provided the Surprise with a ground-​tier of casks that drank almost as much as the ship’s company, and the new-​fangled iron tank had silently leaked its heart out. He was still deep in paper when Killick came in, carrying his best uniform coat, and jerked his chin at him.

‘Mr Bowes, we must finish this later,’ said Jack. And as he dressed - the good broadcloth seemed three inches thick in this shattering heat - he thought about the water, about his position, so far westward after these weeks of drifting that when they did pick up the south-​east trades he might find it difficult to weather Cape St Roque in Brazil. He could see the Surprise exactly on the chart; his repeated lunars agreed closely with the chronometers and with the master’s and Mr Hervey’s reckonings; and on the chart he could see the coast of Brazil, not much above five hundred miles away. Furthermore, near the line the trades often came from due south. While he was worrying with these problems and his buttons, neckcloth and sword-​belt, he felt the ship heel to the wind, heel again, and very gently she began to speak - the sound of live water running along her side. He glanced at the compass overhead. WSW1/2W.

Would it die at once? -

When he came on to the crowded, even hotter deck it was still blowing. She just had steerage-​way, as close-​hauled as she could be - yards braced up twanging-​taut, sails like hoards. His plump, myopic first lieutenant, Mr Hervey, sweating in his uniform, smiled nervously at him, though with more confidence than usual. Surely this was right?

‘Very good, Mr Hervey,’ he said. ‘This is what we have been whistling for, eh? Long may it last. Perhaps we might keep her a little off - fore and main-​sheets - give her a fathom.’ Hervey, thank God, was not one of your touchy first lieutenants, needing perpetual management. He had no great opinion of his own seamanship - nor had anyone else - and so long as he was treated kindly he never took offence. Hervey relayed the orders; the Surprise began to slip through the water as though she meant to cut the line diagonally before nightfall; and Jack said, ‘I believe we may beat to divisions.’

The first lieutenant turned to Nicolls, the officer of the watch, and said, ‘Beat to divisions.’ Nicolls said to the mate of the watch, ‘Mr Babbington, beat to divisions,’ and Babbington opened his mouth to address the drummer. But before any sound emerged, the Marine, with a set and hieratic expression, woke the thunder in his drum, tantarara-​tan, and all the officers hurried off to their places.

As a warning or advertisement the drumbeat was a failure, there being nothing unexpected about it whatsoever. The ship’s company had been lining the quarterdeck, the gangways and the forecastle for some time, standing along the appointed seams in the deck while the midshipmen fussed about them, trying to make them stand upright, keep in order and toe the line, tweaking neckerchiefs, lanyards, hat-​ribbons. But the muster was understood by all hands to be a formal ceremony, as formal as a dance, a slow, solemn dance with the captain opening the ball.

This he did as soon as all the officers had reported to Hervey and Hervey had informed him of the fact. He turned first to the Marines. From their position on the after part of the quarterdeck they had no benefit from the awning, but stood there in rigid pipeclay and scarlet perfection, their muskets and faces blazing in the sun. He returned their officer’s salute and walked slowly along the line. His opinion on the set of a leather stock, the amount of powder in their hair, the number and brilliance of their buttons, was of no value; in any case Etherege, their lieutenant, was a competent officer and it would certainly be impossible to fault him. But Jack’s role in all this was to be the eye of God, and he carried out his inspection with impersonal gravity. As a man he felt for the Marines broiling there; as a captain he left them to their motionless suffering - the tar was already dripping on the awnings as the sun gathered even greater strength - and with the words ‘Very creditable, Mr Etherege,’ he turned to the first division of the seamen, the forecastlemen, headed by Mr Nicolls, the second lieutenant. They were the best seamen in the ship, all rated able; most of them middle-​aged, some quite elderly; but none, in all those years at sea, had yet learnt to stand to attention. Their straw hats flew off at his approach and their toes remained fairly near the line, but this was the height of their formality. They smoothed down their hair, hitched up their loose white home-​made trousers, looked round, smiled, coughed, gaped about, staring: very unlike the soldiers. A comforting set of forecastlemen, he reflected, as he passed slowly along the silent deck with Mr Hervey, seamen salted to the bone: several bald pates strangely white in the suffused glare under the awning - a striking contrast with their dark brown faces - but all with their remaining hair gathered in a long tail behind, sometimes helped out with tow. Such a mass of sea-​going knowledge there: but as he returned Nicolls’s parting salute he noticed with a sudden shock that the lieutenant’s face was ill-​shaved and that the man himself, his linen and his uniform, were dirty. He had scarcely ever seen such a thing before in an officer: nor had he often seen such a look of veiled indifference and weariness.

On to the foretopmen under Pullings, who greeted him as though they had never met before with a ‘Present, properly dressed and clean, sir,’ and fell in behind the captain and the first lieutenant. Here was worldliness, here was sinful vanity: all hands were in their best clothes, of course, snowy trousers and frocks with blue open collars; but the younger foretopmen had ribbons sewn into their seams, gorgeous handkerchiefs shawlwise round their necks, curling sidelocks falling low and gold earrings gleaming among them.

‘What is the matter with Kelynach, Mr Pullings?’ he asked, stopping.

‘He fell off the topgallant yardarm on Friday, sir.’

Yes. Jack remembered the fall. A spectacular but a lucky one, a direct plunge on the roll that sent him clear of spars and ropes into the sea, from which he was fished with no trouble of any kind. It could hardly account for this glum look, dull eye, lifelessness. Questions yielded nothing: he was ‘quite well, sir: prime.’ But Jack had seen that puffed face and sunken eye before; he had seen it too often; and when he came to Babbington’s waisters and saw it again in Garland, an ‘innocent’ whose lifetime at sea had not taught him to wield more than a swab and that badly, a gigantic simpleton who always laughed and simpered whenever he was mustered, he said to Hervey, ‘What do you make of this man?’

The first lieutenant thrust his head forward to focus Garland’s face and replied, ‘That is Garland, sir: a good fellow, attentive to his duty, but not very bright.’

No blushing merriment, no sidling, followed this remark; the innocent stood like an ox.