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

‘Seize hold, Doctor,’ shouted Jack. ‘Take both hands to it.’

Stephen crept along the life-​line, catching a reproachful look from the four men at the wheel, as who should say ‘Look what you done with your albatrosses, mate’, and reached the stanchion to which Jack was lashed. ‘Good morning, sir,’ he said.

‘A very good morning to you. It is coming on to blow.’

‘What?’

‘It is coming on to blow,’ said Jack, with greater force. Stephen frowned, and looked astern through the haze of spray; and there, whiter than the foam, were two albatrosses, racing across the wind. One wheeled towards the ship, rose to the height of the taffrail and poised there in the eddy not ten feet away. He saw its mild round eye looking back at him, the perpetual minute change of its wing-​feathers, its tail; then it banked, rose on the wind, darted down, and its wings raised high it paddled on the face of an advancing cliff of water, picked something up and shot away along the valley of the wave before it broke.

Killick appeared with a sour, mean look on his face, all screwed up against the wind; he passed the coffee-​pot from the bosom of his jacket; Jack put the spout into his mouth and drank. ‘You had better go below,’ he shouted to Stephen. ‘Go below and have some breakfast: you may not get another hot meal, if it turns nasty.’

The gunroom was of the same opinion. They had their table spread with boiled ham, beef-​steaks, and a sea-​pie, all held down as tight as double-​rove fiddles would hold them, but all mingling their gravy in reckless confusion.

‘Sea-​pie, Doctor?’ said Etherege, beaming at him. ‘I have kept you a piece.’

‘If you please.’ Stephen held out his plate, received the piece on the top of the rise; and as the frigate shot down the face of the wave so the pie rose in the air. Etherege instantly pinned it with his practised fork, held it until she reached the trough and gravity went to work again.

Pullings gave him a selected biscuit, and told him with a smile ‘that the glass was falling yet; it had to be worse before it got better’, and begged him ‘to blow out his luff while he might’.

The purser was telling them of an infallible method of calculating the height of waves by simple triangulation when Hervey plunged into the gunroom, spouting water like an inverted fountain. ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ he said, throwing his tarpaulins into his cabin and putting on his spectacles. ‘Give me a cup of tea, Babbington, there’s a good fellow. My fingers are too numb to turn the tap.’

‘The tea has gone by the board, sir. Would coffee do?’

‘Anything, anything, so long as it is warm and wet. Is there any sea-​pie left?’ They showed him the empty dish. ‘Why, here’s a pretty thing,’ he cried. ‘All night on deck, and no sea-​pie.’ When ham had mollified him, Stephen said, ‘Why did you spend all night on deck, pray?’

‘The skipper would not go below, though I begged him to turn in; and I could not very well do so with him on deck. I have a noble nature,’ said Hervey, smiling now through the ham.

‘Are we in extreme peril then?’ asked Stephen.

Oh yes, they assured him, with grave, anxious faces; they were in horrid danger of foundering, broaching-​to, running violently into Australia; but there was a hope, just a very slight hope, of their meeting with a mountain of ice and clambering on to it - as many as half a dozen men might be saved.

When they had exercised their wit for some considerable time, Hervey said, ‘The skipper is worried about the foretopmast. We went aloft to look at it, and - would you credit it? - the force of the wind upon us as we went aloft threw the ship a point off her course. The coaking just above the cap is not what any of our friends could wish; and if a cross-​sea sets in, and we start to roll, I shall start saying my prayers.’

‘Mr Stanhope begs Dr Maturin to spare him a minute, when conwenient,’ said Killick in his ear.

He found them sitting in the cold dark cabin by the light of a purser’s dip: Mr White, Atkins, a young attachŽ called Berkeley, on chairs with their feet in the water that swilled fore and aft with a dismal sound, all wearing greatcoats with the collars turned up; Mr Stanhope half lying on the couch; servants lurking in the shadows. Apparently they had not been fed; and their spirit-​stoves would not work. They were all quite silent.

Mr Stanhope was extremely obliged to Dr Maturin for coming so quick; he did not wish to give the least trouble, but should be grateful if he might be told whether this was the end? Water was coming in through the sides; and a seaman had given his valet to understand that this was the gravest sign of all. One of the young gentlemen had confirmed this to Mr Atkins, adding, that being pooped was more likely than actual foundering, or breaking in two; though neither possibility was to be overlooked. What did being pooped imply? Could they be of any use?

Stephen said that as far as his understanding went, the real danger lay in a following wave striking the back of the ship such a buffet as to twirl it sideways to the wind, when it would lie down, receive the next wave broadside-​on, and so be overwhelmed; hence the necessity for speed, for flying before the wind with all sail that could be set, and for steering with due attention, to outrun and to avoid these blows. Yet they were to consider, that as the ship was exposed to the full force of the blast when it was on the top of the monstrous wave, so it was sheltered in the hollow some fifty feet below, where nevertheless the forward speed must be maintained, to enable the ship to be guided in the desired direction and to diminish the relative velocity of the ensuing wave; and that this necessarily called for a nice adjustment of the various sails and ropes in all their complexity. But as far as he could tell, all these things were being done with conscientious diligence; and for his part, under such a commander, with such a crew and such a vessel, he felt no rational apprehension whatsoever. ‘Captain Aubrey has repeatedly stated in my hearing,that the Surprise is the very finest frigate of her tonnage in the Royal Navy.’ The water coming in was inconvenient and even disconcerting, but it was a usual phenomenon in such circumstances, particularly in aged vessels; it was what the mariners termed ‘the working of the ship’. And he cautioned them against too literal a belief in the words of the sailors: ‘They take an obscure delight in practising upon us landlubbers.’

Once he was relieved of the sensation of imminent death, Mr Stanhope relapsed into the appalling dry seasickness that had struck him in the night. As Stephen and the chaplain helped him into his cot he said, with an attempt at a smile, ‘So grateful - not quite suited for sea-​travel - never undertake sea-​voyage again - if there is no way home by land, shall stay in Kampong for ever.’

But the others grew indignant, shrill and vocal. Mr White thought it scandalous that government should have sent them in so small a boat, and one that leaked. Did Dr Maturin realise that it was very cold at sea? Far colder than on land. Mr Atkins said that the officers he had questioned replied in an off-​hand manner or not at all; and that surely the Captain should have waited upon His Excellency with an explanation before this. Last night’s supper had been disgracefully underdone: he should like to see the Captain.

‘You will find him on the quarterdeck,’ said Stephen. ‘I am sure he will be happy to listen to your complaints.’

In the silence that followed this Mr Berkeley said in a lugubrious tone, ‘and all our chamber-​pots are broken’.

Stephen made his way forward to the sick-​bay, through the soaking, smelly berth-​deck where the watch below were sleeping, fully-​clothed, sleeping in spite of the tremendous pitch and the roar, for all hands had been called three times that night. He found the usual accidents, the bangs and bruises of a furious storm; one man had been flung against the fluke of an anchor, another had pitched head-​first down the fore-​hatch as it was being battened down, another had contrived to impale himself on his own marlinspike; but nothing that went beyond the surgeons’ powers. What worried them was their worst pneumonia, an elderly seaman named Woods; it had been touch and go with him before the storm, and now the prodigious shaking, the absence of rest, had turned the scale. Stephen listened to his breathing, felt his pulse, exchanged a few low words with M’Alister, and finished his round in silence.