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

‘So that is where the mischief lies,’ cried Jack. ‘Of course. But you will be able to put them right. Oh yes, you will set them up directly.’

‘U wish I could share your confidence; I wish I could feel persuaded that our lime-​juice were not sophisticated. Tell me, is there anything green grows upon those rocks of yours?’

‘Never a blade, never a single blade,’ said Jack. ‘And no water, either.’

‘Well,’ said Stephen, drawing up his shoulders. ‘I shall do my best with what we have.’

‘I am sure you will, my dear Stephen,’ cried Jack, flinging off his coat and with it part of his care. He had an unlimited faith in Stephen’s powers; and although he had seen a ship’s company badly hit by the disease, with hardly enough hands to win the anchor or make sail, let alone fight the ship, he thought of the forties, of the great western gales far south of the line, with an easier mind. ‘It is a great comfort to me to have you aboard: it is like sailing with a piece of the True Cross.’

‘Stuff, stuff,’ said Stephen peevishly. ‘I do wish you would get that weak notion out of your mind. Medicine can do very little; surgery less. I can purge you, bleed you, worm you at a pinch, set your leg or take it off, and that is very nearly all. What could Hippocrates, Galen, Rhazes, what can Blanc, what can Trotter do for a carcinoma, a lupus, a sarcoma?’ He had often tried to eradicate Jack’s simple faith; but Jack had seen him trepan the gunner of the Sophie, saw a hole in his skull and expose the brain; and Stephen, looking at Jack’s knowing smile, his air of civil reserve, knew that he had not succeeded this time, either. The Sophies, to a man, had known that if he chose Dr Maturin could save anyone, so long as the tide had not turned; and Jack was so thoroughly a seaman that he shared nearly all their beliefs, though in a somewhat more polished form. He said, ‘What do you say to a glass of Madeira before we go to the gunroom? I believe they have killed their younger pig for us, and Madeira is a capital foundation for pork.’

Madeira did very well as a foundation, burgundy as an accompaniment, and port as a settler; though all would have been better if they had been a little under blood-​heat. ‘How long the human frame can withstand this abuse,’ thought Stephen, looking round the table, ‘remains to be seen.’ He was eating biscuit rubbed with garlic himself, and he had drunk thin cold. black coffee, on grounds both of theory and personal practice; but as he looked round the table he was obliged to admit that so far the frames were supporting it tolerably well. Jack, with a deep stratum of duff upon a couple of pounds of swine’s flesh and root-​vegetables, was perhaps a little nearer apoplexy than usual, but the bright blue eyes in his scarlet face were not suffused - there was no immediate danger. The same could be said for the fat Mr Hervey, who had eaten and drunk himself out of his habitual constraint: his round face was like the rising sun, supposing the sun to wrinkle with merriment. All the faces there, except for Nicolls’s, were a fine red, but Hervey’s outshone the rest. There was an attaching simplicity about the first lieutenant; no striving contention, no pretence, no sort of aggression. How would such a man behave in hand-​to-​hand action? Would his politeness (and Hervey was very much the gentleman) put him at a fatal disadvantage? In any event, he was quite out of place here, poor fellow; far more suitable for a parsonage or a fellowship. He was the victim of innumerable naval connections, an influential family full of admirals whose summum bonum was a flag and who by means of book-​time and every other form of decent corruption meant to impel him into command at the earliest possible age. He had passed for lieutenant before

a board of his grandfather’s protŽgŽs, who gravely wrote that they had examined ‘Mr Hervey . . who appears to be twenty years of age. He produceth Certificates. . . of his Diligence and Sobriety; he can splice, knot, reef a sail, work a Ship in sailing, shift his Tides, keep a Reckoning of a Ship’s Way by Plane Sailing and Mercator; observe by Sun or Star, and find the Variation of the Compass, and is qualified to do the Duty of an able Seaman and Midshipman’ - all lies, but for the mathematical part, since he had almost no real sea-​going experience. He would be made commander as soon as they reached his uncle, the admiral on the East India station; and a few months later he would be an anxious, ineffectual, diffident post-​captain. He and the purser would have been happier if they had changed places; Bowes, the purser, had been unable to go to sea as a boy, but being enamoured of the naval life (his brother was a captain) he had bought a purser’s place, and in spite of his club-​foot he had distinguished himself in several desperate cutting-​out expeditions. He was always on deck, understood the manoeuvres perfectly, and prided himself on sailing a boat; he knew a great deal about the sea, and although he was not a particularly good purser he was an honest one: an uncommon bird. Pullings was much as he had always been, a thin, amiable, loose-​limbed youth, delighted to be a lieutenant (his highest ambition), delighted to be in the same ship as Captain Aubrey: how did he manage to remain so tubular, eating with the thoughtless avidity of a wolf? Harrowby, the master: a broad, spade-​shaped face set in a smile -he was smiling now, with his wide mouth open at the corners, the middle closed. It gave an impression of falsity; perhaps unfairly, for although the master was an ignorant, confident man there might be no conscious duplicity there. No teeth. Fair receding hair worn cropped; a vast domed forehead, ordinarily pale, now red and beaded with sweat. An indifferent navigator, it seemed. He owed his advance to Gambier, that evangelical admiral, and when ashore he was a lay-​preacher, belonging to some west-​country sect. Stephen often saw him in the sick-​bay, coming to visit the invalids. ‘There is good in them all,’ he said. ‘We must try to bring them up to our level.’

Maturin: ‘I low do you propose to effect this?’

Harrowby: ‘I rely upon unction and personal magnetism.’

Yet he did in fact bring them wine and chicken; he wrote letters for them and gave or lent small sums of money. He was ready and eager to give; perhaps readier than others to receive. Active: zealous; healthy; extremely clean; somewhat excited, He caught Stephen’s eye and smiled wider, nodding kindly.

Etherege, the Marine lieutenant, was as red as his coat; at the moment he was surreptitiously undoing his belt, looking round with a general benevolence. A small round-​headed man who rarely spoke; yet he gave no impression of taciturnity - his lively expression and his frequent laugh took the place of conversation. He had indeed very little to say, but he was welcome wherever he went.

Nicolls: he was something else again. The only comparatively pale face in the cheerful ring: a black-​haired man, self-​contained, not one to be pushed about. He would have been the skeleton at this orderly, somewhat formal feast if he had not been making an obvious effort at conviviality; but his face was set in unhappiness, and his present application to the port did not seem to be doing him much good. Stephen had seen much of him in Gibraltar, years before, and they had dined together with the 42nd Foot at Chatham, when Nicolls had had to be carried back to his ship, singing like a canary-​bird; but that was immediately before his marriage and no doubt he was in a state of nervous tension. In those days Stephen had thought him a typical sea-​officer, somewhat reserved but good company, one of those who naturally combined good breeding with the necessary roughness of their profession, with a bulkhead between the two. Typical sea-​officer: the phrase was not without meaning, but how to define it? In every gathering of sailors you would see a few from whom the rest seemed variants; but how few to colour a whole profession! To colour it - to set its tone. Off-​hand he could not think of more than a dozen out of the hundreds he had met: Dundas, Riou, Seymour, Jack, perhaps Cochrane; but no, Cochrane ashore was too flamboyant to be typical, too full of himself, too conscious of his own value, too much affected by that Scotch love of a grievance; and there was that unfortunate title hanging about his neck, a beloved millstone. There was something of Cochrane in Jack, a restless impatience of authority, a strong persuasion of being in the right; but not enough to disqualify him, not nearly enough; and in any case it had been diminishing fast these last years.