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

However, he returned to the quarterdeck without biting or savaging anyone in his path, peered up between the awnings at the pyramid of canvas, still just drawing, and said to Mr Hervey, ‘We will rig church, if you please.’

Chairs and benches appeared on the quarterdeck; the cutlass-​rack, decently covered with signal flags, became a reading-​desk; the ship’s bell began to toll. The seamen flocked aft; the officers and the civilians of the envoy’s suite stood at their places, waiting for Mr Stanhope, who walked slowly to his chair on the captain’s right, propped on the one side by his chaplain and on the other by his secretary. He looked grey and wan among all these mahogany-​red faces, almost ghost-​like: he had never wanted to go to Kampong; he had not even known where Kampong was until they gave him this mission; and he hated the sea. But now that the Surprise was sailing on the gentle breeze her roll was far less distressing - hardly perceptible so long as he kept his eyes from the rail and the horizon beyond - and the familiar Church of England service was a comfort to him among all these strange intricacies of rope, wood and canvas and in this intolerably heated unbreathable air. He followed its course with an attention as profound as that of the seamen; he joined in the well-​known psalms in a faint tenor, drowned by the deep thunder of the captain on his left and yet sweetly prolonged in the remote, celestial voice of the Welsh lookout high on the fore-​royal jacks. But when the parson announced the text of his sermon, Mr Stanhope’s mind wandered far away to the coolness of his parish church at home, the dim light of sapphires in the east window, the tranquillity of the family tombs, and he closed his eyes.

He wandered alone. The moment the Reverend Mr White said, ‘The sixth verse of Psalm 75: promotion cometh neither from the east, nor from the west, nor from the south,’ the flagging devotion of the midshipmen to leeward and of the lieutenants to windward revived, sprang to vivid life. They sat forward in attitudes of tense expectancy; and Jack, who might be called upon to preach himself, if he were to command a ship without a chaplain, reflected, ‘A flaming good text, upon my word.’

Yet when at length it appeared that promotion cameth not from the north either, as the sharper midshipmen had supposed, but rather from a course of conduct that Mr White proposed to describe under ten main heads, they slowly sank back; and when even this promotion was found to be not of the present world, they abandoned him altogether in favour of reflections upon their dinner, their Sunday dinner, the plum-​duff that was simmering under the equatorial sun with no more than a glowing cinder to keep it on the boil. They glanced up at the sails, flapping now as the breeze died away: they pondered on the likelihood of a studdingsail being put over the side, to swim in. ‘If I can square old Babbington,’ thought Callow, who had also been invited to dine in the gunroom at two o’clock, ‘I shall get two dinners. I can dart below the moment we have shot the sun, and -,

‘On deck there,’ came from the sky. ‘On deck there.

Sail ho!’

‘Where away?’ called Jack, as the chaplain broke off.

‘Two points on the starboard bow, sir.’

‘Keep her away, Davidge,’ said Jack to the man at the wheel, who, though in the midst of the congregation, was not of it, and who had never opened his mouth for hymn, psalm, response or prayer. ‘Carry on, Mr White, if you please: I beg your pardon.’

Looks darted to and fro across the quarterdeck - wild surmise, intense excitement. Jack felt extreme moral pressure building up all round him, but, apart from a quick glance at his watch, he remained immovable, listening to the chaplain with his head slightly on one side, grave, attentive.

‘Tenthly and lastly,’ said Mr White, speaking faster.

Below, in the airy shadowed empty berth-​deck, Stephen walked up and down, reading the chapter on scurvy in Blane’s Diseases of Seamen: he heard the hail, paused, paused again, and said to the cat, ‘How is this? The cry of a sail and no turmoil, no instant activity? What is afoot?’ The cat pursed its lips. Stephen reopened his book and read in it until he heard the two-​hundredfold ‘Amen’ above his head.

On deck the church was disappearing in the midst of a universal excited buzz - glances at the captain, glances over the hammock-​cloths towards the horizon, where a flash of white could be seen on the rise. The chairs and benches were hurried below, the hassocks turned back to wads for the great guns, the cutlasses resumed their plain Old Testament character, but since the first nine heads of Mr White’s discourse had taken a long, long time, almost till noon itself, sextants and quadrants already came tumbling up before the prayer-​books had vanished. The sun was close to the zenith, and this was nearly the moment to take his altitude. The quarterdeck awning was rolled back, the pitiless naked light beat down; and as the master, his mates, the midshipmen, the first lieutenant and the captain took their accustomed stations for this high moment, the beginning of the naval day, they had no more shadow than a little pool of darkness at their feet. It was a solemn five minutes, particularly for the midshipmen -their captain insisted upon accurate observation - and yet no one seemed to care greatly about the sun: no one, until Stephen Maturin, walking up to Jack, said, ‘What is this I hear about a strange sail?’

‘Just a moment,’ said Jack, stepping to the quarterdeck bulwark, raising his sextant, bringing the sun down to the horizon and noting his reading on the little ivory tablet. ‘Sail? Oh, that is only St Paul’s Rocks, you know. They will not run away. If this breeze don’t die on us, you will see ‘em quite close after dinner - prodigiously curious -gulls, boobies, and so on.’

The news instantly ran through the ship - rocks, not ships; any God-​damned lubber as had travelled farther than Margate knew St Paul’s Rocks - and all hands returned to their keen expectation of dinner, which followed immediately after the altitude. The cooks of all the messes stood with their wooden kids near the galley; the mate of the hold began the mixing of the grog, watched with intensity by the quartermasters and the purser’s steward; the smell of rum mingled with that of cooking and eddied about the deck; saliva poured into a hundred and ninety-​seven mouths; the bosun stood with his call poised on the break of the forecastle. On the gangway the master lowered his sextant, walked aft to Mr Hervey and said, ‘Twelve o’clock, sir: fifty-​eight minutes north.’

The first lieutenant turned to Jack, took off his hat, and said, ‘Twelve o’clock, sir, if you please, and fifty-​eight minutes north.’

Jack turned to the officer of the watch and said, ‘Mr Nicolls, make it twelve.’

The officer of the watch called out to the mate of the watch, ‘Make it twelve.’

The mate of the watch said to the quartermaster, ‘Strike eight bells’; the quartermaster roared at the Marine sentry, ‘Turn the glass and strike the bell!’ And at the first stroke Nicolls called along the length of the ship to the bosun, ‘Pipe to dinner.’

The bosun piped, no doubt, but little did the quarterdeck hear of it, for the clash of mess-​kids, the roaring of the cooks, the tramp of feet and the confused din of the various messes banging their plates. In this weather the men dined on deck, among their guns, each mess fixing itself as accurately as possible above its own table below, and so Jack led Stephen into his cabin.

‘What did you think of the people?’ he asked.

‘You were quite right,’ said Stephen. ‘It is scurvy. All my authorities agree - weakness, diffused muscular pain, petechia, tender gums, ill breath - and M’Alister has no doubt of it. He is an intelligent fellow; has seen many cases. I have gone into the matter, and I find that nearly all the men affected come from the Racoon. They were months at sea before being turned over to us.’