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

He swarmed in, clinging to the knightheads for a moment as she plunged again, and then he was on the forecastle:

it was clear of wreckage: the sail set well, He called the men down from the shrouds and moved along the gangway. ‘Any hands lost, Hervey?’ was asked, with his arms round the stanchion.

‘No, sir. Some hurt, but they have all come aft. Are you all right, sir?’

Jack nodded. ‘She steers better,’ he said. ‘Dismiss the watch below. Grog for all hands: serve it out in the half-​deck. Pass the word for the bosun.’

All night. The officers stayed on deck that endless night or spent a few brief spells in the gunroom, sitting between dreaming and waking, listening gravely, concentrated upon that one triangle of rigid canvas forward. After an hour Jack found the trembling that had affected his entire body die away, and with it even the consciousness of his body. The wheel was relieved. Relieved again:

again. Continually his croaking voice called out orders, and twice he sent picked parties forward, strengthening, frapping, making all as fast as ever they could in a night that cut to the bone. A little before dawn the wind veered a point, two points, blowing with sudden flaws, vacuums that hurt his ears; it reached a screaming note more savage than anything he had heard and his heart hurt him for the staysail, for the ship - an edge of sentiment and self-​pity, with Sophia’s name hovering on the edge of utterance aloud. Then slowly, slowly, the shriek dropped half a tone, another, and another: a low buffeting roar at last, when the faint straggling light showed a sea white from rim to rim, with the steady procession of great rollers in their due solemn ordered ranks once again - vast indeed, but no longer maniac. No cross-​sea; very little roll; and the Surprise scudding over the desolation, passing every sea under her counter, her waist with no more than a foot of water swirling about it. An albatross broad on the starboard beam. He cast off his lashings and moved stiffly forward. ‘We will ship the pumps, Mr Hervey, if you please. And I believe we may get a scrap of maintopsail on her.’

Peace, peace. Madagascar lay astern and the Cormorins; the shattered hulk that had crept north of the fortieth parallel, trailing ends of rope and pumping day and night, was now as trim as art and a limited supply of paint could make her. An expert eye would have seen a great deal of twice-​laid stuff in the rigging and an odd scarcity of boats on the booms; it would have stared with amazement at the attachments of the rudder; and it would have noted that in spite of fair and moderate breeze the frigate carried nothing above her topsails. She dared not; although with her new foretopmast and her fresh paintwork she looked ‘as pretty as a picture’, her inward parts had suffered. Jack spoke so often of her butt-​ends and her hanging knees that Stephen said, ‘Captain Aubrey, your butt-​ends and your hanging knees cannot be attempted to be rectified, as I understand you, until you have her docked, three thousand miles away; so may I beg you to clap a stopper over all and to accept the inevitable with a decent appearance of unconcern? If we fall apart, why, we fall apart, and there is the end to it. For my part, I have every confidence of reaching Bombay.’

‘What I know, and what you don’t know,’ cried Jack, ‘is that I have not so much as a single ten-​inch spike left aboard.’

‘God set a flower upon you, my dear, with your ten-​inch spike,’ said Stephen. ‘Of course I know it: you have mentioned them daily these last two hundred leagues, together with your hanging-​ends and double-​sister-​blocks; and nightly too, prattling in your sleep. Bow, bow to predestination or at least confine yourself to silent prayer.’

‘Not so much as a ten-​inch spike, not a mast or boom but what is fished,’ said Jack, shaking his head. And it was true: yet with an irritating complacency Mr Stanhope, his suite, and now even Dr Maturin cried out that this was delightful now - that was the only way of travelling - a post-​chaise on the turnpike road was nothing in comparison of this - they should recommend it to all their friends.

Certainly it was delightful for the passengers, the smooth sea, the invigorating breeze carrying them steadily into warmer airs; but in the latitude of the Isle of France Jack, his carpenter and boatswain, and all his seamanlike officers, looked out eagerly for a French privateer - a spare topmast or so, a few spars, a hundred fathoms of one-​and-​a-​half-​inch rope would have made them so happy! They stared with all their might, and the Indian Ocean remained as empty as the South Atlantic; and here there were not even whales.

On and on she sailed, in warmer seas but void, as though they alone had survived Deucalion’s flood; as though all land had vanished from the earth; and once again the ship’s routine dislocated time and temporal reality so that this progress was an endless dream, even a circular dream, contained within an unbroken horizon and punctuated only by the sound of guns thundering daily in preparation for an enemy whose real existence it was impossible to conceive.

Stephen laid down his pistols, wiped the barrels with his handkerchief and shut the case. They were warm from his practice, but still the bottle hanging from the foreyardarm swung there intact. It was not the fault of the pistols, either; they were the best Joe Manton could produce, and the purser had hit the mark three times. it was true that Stephen had been firing left-​handed, the right having suffered worse at Port Mahon; but a year ago he would certainly have knocked the bottle down, left hand or not. Pressing? Trying too hard? He sighed; and pondering over the nature of muscular and nervous co-​ordination he groped his way up into the mizentop:

Mr Atkins gazed after him, more nearly convinced that it would be safe to quarrel with him once they reached Bombay.

Reaching the futtock-​shrouds, Stephen took a sudden determination: if his body would not obey him in one way it should in another. He seized the ropes that ran outwards to the rim of the platform, and instead of making his way into the top by writhing through them he forced his person grunting upwards, a diagonal reversed climb with his back towards the sea and himself hanging at an angle of forty-​five degrees, and so reached his goal by the path a seaman would have taken - a sailor, but no landsman bound by the ordinary law of gravity. Bonden was still peering down the lubber’s hole, the way Stephen had always come before, the safe, direct, logical, but ignominious road; and his unsuccessful attempt at disguising his astonishment when he turned was a consolation to Stephen’s mind: its element of vanity glowed cherry-​pink. Mastering a laboured gasp that would have ruined the effect, he said, ‘Let us go straight to verse.’ This was all that one inspiration could accomplish and he paused, as if in thought, until his heart was beating normally. ‘Verse,’ he said again. ‘Are you ready, Barret Bonden? Then dash away.

Thus to the Eastern wealth through storms we go;

But now, the Cape once doubled, fear no more:

A constant trade-​wind will securely blow,

And gently lay us on the spicy shore.’

‘An elegant sentiment, sir,’ said Bonden. ‘As good as Dibdin any day. If you wanted to crab it, which far from me be it, you might say the gent was a trifle out in his trade-​wind, this rightly being the monsoon, as we call it by sea. And as for wealth, why, that’s poetic licence; or, as you might say, all my eye. Spice maybe; I’m not saying anything against spice, nor yet spicy shores, though most of them is shit begging your pardon, in Indian ports. But wealth, I make so bold as to laugh, ha, ha; why, sir, bating a few privateers out of the Isle of France and Reunion there’s not a prize for us in this whole Indian mortal ocean, not from here to Java Head, not since Admiral Rainier cleaned up Trincomalee. Unless maybe we take on Admiral Linois on his seventy-​four, that chased us so cruel hard in the poor old Sophie. God love us, he was a merry old gentleman; you remember him, sir?’ Certainly Stephen remembered him; and that bitter chase in the Mediterranean - the loss of their ship - their capture. Bonden’s face changed from smiling reminiscence to stony reserve: he slid his book into his bosom as Mr Callow’s hideous face appeared above the rail with the Captain’s compliments and did Dr Maturin intend shifting his coat?