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

What were the constants? A cheerful resilience; a competent readiness; an open conversability; a certain candour. How much of this was the sea, the common stimuli? How much was the profession the choice of those who shared a particular cast of mind?

‘The captain is under way,’ whispered his neighbour, touching his shoulder and bending to speak in his ear.

‘Why, so he is,’ said Stephen, getting to his feet. ‘He has catted his fish.’

They slowly climbed the companion-​ladder. The heat on deck was even greater than below now that the breeze had died away entirely. On the larboard side a sail had been lowered into the water, buoyed at its extremities and weighted in the middle to form a swimming-​bath, and half the ship’s company were splashing about in it. To starboard, perhaps two miles away, lay the rocks, no longer anything like ships at all, but still dazzling white from the edge of the deep blue sea to their tops, some fifty feet above the surface in the case of the biggest - so white that the slow surf showed creamy in comparison. A cloud of gannets sailed overhead, with a mingling of dark, smaller terns: every now and then a gannet dived straight down into the sea with a splash like a four-​pounder ball.

‘Mr Babbington, pray lend me your spy-​glass,’ cried Stephen; and when he had gazed for a while, ‘Oh how I wish I were there. Jack - that is to say, Captain Aubrey - may I have a boat?’

‘My dear Doctor,’ said Jack, ‘I am sure you would not have asked, if you had remembered it was Sunday afternoon.’ Sunday afternoon was holy. It was the men’s only holiday, wind, weather and the malice of the enemy permitting, and they prepared for it with enormous labour on Saturday and on Sunday morning. ‘Now I must go below and see to that infernal sail-​room,’ he said, turning quickly away from his friend’s disappointment. ‘You will not forget that we are to call upon Mr Stanhope before quarters?’

‘I will pull you across, if you choose,’ said Nicolls, a moment later. ‘I am sure Hervey will let us have the jolly-​boat.’

‘How very good-​natured of you,’ cried Stephen, looking into Nicolls’ face - somewhat vinous, but perfectly in command of himself. ‘I should be infinitely obliged. Give me leave to fetch a hammer, some small boxes, a hat, and I am with you.’

They crawled along the barge, the launch and one of the cutters to the jolly-​boat - they were all towing behind, to prevent them opening in the heat - and rowed away. The cheerful noise faded behind them; their wake lengthened across the glassy sea. Stephen took off his clothes and sat naked in his sennit hat; he revelled in the heat, and this had been his daily practice since the latitude of Madeira. At present he was a disagreeable mottled dun colour from head to foot, the initial brown having darkened to a suffused grey; he was not much given to washing - fresh water was not to be had, in any event - and the salt from his swimming lay upon him like dust.

‘I was contemplating upon sea-​officers just now,’ he observed, ‘and trying to name the qualities that make one cry, “That man is a sailor, in the meliorative sense”. From that I went on to reflect that the typical sea-​officer is as rare as your anatomically typical corpse; that is to say, he is surrounded by what for want of a better word I may call unsatisfactory specimens, or sub-​species. And I was carried on to the reflection that whereas there are many good or at least amiable midshipmen, there are fewer good lieutenants, still fewer good captains, and almost no good admirals. A possible explanation may be this: in addition to professional competence, cheerful resignation, an excellent liver, natural authority and a hundred other virtues, there must be the far rarer quality of resisting the effects, the dehumanising effects, of the exercise of authority. Authority is a solvent of humanity: look at any husband, any father of a family, and note the absorption of the person by the persona, the individual by the role. Then multiply the family, and the authority, by some hundreds and see the effect upon a sea-​captain, to say nothing of an absolute monarch. Surely man in general is born to be oppressed or solitary, if he is to be fully human; unless it so happens that he is immune to the poison. In the nature of the service this immunity cannot be detected until late:

but it certainly exists. How otherwise are we to account for the rare, but fully human and therefore efficient admirals we see, such as Duncan, Nelson. . .’

He saw that Nicolls’s attention had wandered and he let his voice die away to a murmur with no apparent end, took a book from his coat pocket and, since the nearer sky was empty of birds, fell to reading in it. The oars squeaked against the tholes, the blades dipped with a steady beat, and the sun beat down: the boat crept across the sea.

From time to time Stephen looked up, repeating his Urdu phrases and considering Nicolls’s face. The man was in a bad way, and had been for some time. Bad at Gibraltar, bad at Madeira, worse since St Jago. Scurvy was out of the question in this case: syphilis,, worms?

‘I beg your pardon,’ said Nicolls with an artificial smile. ‘I am afraid I lost the thread. What were you saying?’

‘I was repeating phrases from this little book. It is all I could get, apart from the Fort William grammar, which is in my cabin. It is a phrase-​book, and I believe it must have been compiled by a disappointed man: My horse has been eaten by a tiger, leopard, bear; I wish to hire a palanquin; there are no palanquins in this town, sir - all my money has been stolen; I wish to speak to the Collector: the Collector is dead, sir - I have been beaten by evil men. Yet salacious too, poor burning soul: Woman, wilt thou lie with me?’

With an effort at civil interest Nicolls said, ‘Is that the language you speak with Achmet?’

‘Yes, indeed. All our Lascars speak it, although they come from widely different parts of India: it is their lingua franca. I chose Achmet because it is his mother-​tongue; and he is an obliging, patient fellow. But he cannot read or write, and that is why I ply my grammar, in the hope of fixing the colloquial: do you not find that a spoken language wafts in and out of your mind, leaving little trace unless you anchor it with print?’

‘I can’t say I do: I am no hand at talking foreign -never was. It quite astonishes me to hear you rattling away with those black men. Even in English, when it comes to anything more delicate than making sail, I find it . .

He paused, looked over his shoulder and said there was no landing this side; it was too steep-​to; but they might do better on the other. The number of birds had been increasing as they neared the rock, and now as they pulled round to its southern side the terns and boobies were thick overhead, flying in and out from their fishing-​grounds in a bewildering intricacy of crossing paths, the birds all strangely mute. Stephen gazed up into them, equally silent, lost in admiration, until the boat grounded on weed-​muffled rock and tilted as Nicolls ran it up into a sheltered inlet, heaved it clear of the swell, and handed Stephen out.

‘Thank you, thank you,’ said Stephen, scrambling up the dark sea-​washed band to the shining white surface beyond: and there he stopped dead. Immediately in front of his nose, almost touching it, there was a sitting booby. Two, four, six boobies, as white as the bare rock they sat on - a carpet of boobies, young and old; and among them quantities of terns. The nearest booby looked at him without much interest; a slight degree of irritation was all he could detect in that long reptilian face and bright round eye. He advanced his finger and touched the bird, which shrugged its person; and as he did so a great rush of wings filled the air - another booby landing with a full crop for its huge gaping child on the naked rock a few feet away. ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ he murmured, straightening to survey the island, a smooth mound like a vast worn molar tooth, with birds thick in all the hollows. The hot air was full of their sound, coming and going; full of the ammoniac smell of their droppings and the reek of fish; and all over the hard white surface it shimmered in the heat and the intolerable glare so that birds fifty yards up the slope could hardly be focused and the ridge of the mound wavered like a taut rope that had been plucked. Waterless, totally arid. Not a blade of grass, not a weed, not a lichen: stench, blazing rock and unmoving air. ‘This is a paradise,’ cried Stephen.