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

He sat for a long while, gazing down. With the long, slow pitch - no roll - they were swept fifty feet forward through the air each time the frigate put her head down; then slowly up to the vertical, a pause, and the forward rush again. ‘How much airier it is, at this great height,’ he observed at last.

‘Yes,’ said Jack. ‘It is always so. In the light air, for example, your royals will give you as much thrust as the courses. Even more.’ He looked up at the royal pole, rising bare into the unclouded sky, and he was weighing the dynamic advantages of a fidded mast with one part of his mind when another part told him he was being uncivil - that Stephen had asked him a question, and was waiting for an answer. He reconstructed the words as well as he could - ‘had he ever considered the ship thus seen as a figure of the present - the untouched sea before it as the future - the bow-​wave as the moment of perception, of immediate existence?’ and replied, ‘I cannot truly say I have. But it is a damned good figure; and all the more to my liking, as the sea is as bright and toward today as ever your heart could wish. I hope it pleases you, old Stephen?’

‘It does indeed. I have rarely been more moved -delighted; and am most sensible of your kindness in carrying me up. I dare say you, for your part, have been here pretty often?’

‘Lord, when I was a mid in this very ship, old Fidge used to masthead me for a nothing - a fine seaman, but testy: died of the yellow jack in ninety-​seven - and I spent hours beyond number here. This is where I did nearly all my reading.’

‘A venerable spot.’

‘Ah,’ cried Jack, ‘if I had a guinea for every hour I have spent up here, I should not be worrying about prizes; nor discounting bills on my next quarter’s pay. I should have been married long ago.’

‘This question of money preoccupies your mind. Mine, too, at times: how pleasant it would be, to be able to offer one’s friend a rope of pearls! And then again, such deeply stupid men are able to come by wealth, often by no exertion, by no handling or even possession of merchandise, but merely by writing figures in a book. My Parsee, for example, assured me that if only he had the hard word about Linois’s whereabouts, he and his associates would make lakh upon lakh of rupees.’

‘How would he do that?’

‘By a variety of speculations, particularly upon rice. Bombay cannot feed itself, and with Linois off MahŽ, for instance, no rice ships would sail. Clearly the price would rise enormously, and the thousands of tons in the Parsce’s nominal possession would sell for a very much greater sum. Then there are the funds, or their Indian equivalent, which lie far beyond my understanding. Even an untrue word, intelligently spread and based upon the statement of an honest man, would answer, I collect: it is called rigging the market.’

‘Aye? Well, damn them for a pack of greasy hounds. Let me show you my relic. I preserved it south of Madagascar, and I preserved it in Bombay. You will have to stand up. Steady, now - clap on to the cheek-​bolt. There!’ He pointed to the cap, a dark, worn, rope-​scored, massive block of wood that embraced the two masts. ‘We cut it out of greenheart in a creek on the Spanish main: it is good for another twenty years. And here, do you see, is my relic.’ On the broad rim of the square hole that sat on the topmast head there were the initials JA cut deep and clear, supported on either side by blowsy forms that might have been manatees, though mermaids were more likely -beer-​drinking mermaids.

‘Does not that raise your heart?’ he asked.

‘Why,’ said Stephen, ‘I am obliged to you for the sight of it, sure.’

‘But it does raise your heart, you know, whatever you may say,’ said Jack. ‘It raises it a hundred feet above the deck. Ha, ha - I can get out a good thing now and then, given time - oh ha, ha, ha! You never smoked it - you was not aware of my motions.’

When Jack was as amused as this, so intensely amused throughout his whole massive being, belly and all, with his scarlet face glorious and shining and his blue eyes darting mirth from their narrowed slits, it was impossible to resist. Stephen felt his mouth widen involuntarily, his diaphragm contract, and his breath beginning to come in short thick pants.

‘But I am truly grateful to you, my dear,’ he said, ‘for having brought me to this proud perilous eminency, this quasi-​apex, this apogee; you have indeed lifted my heart, in the spirit and in the flesh; and I am now resolved to mount up daily. I now despise the mizentop, once my ultima Thule; and I even aspire to that knob up there,’ - nodding to the truck of the royal. ‘What an ape, or even I may say an obese post-​captain can accomplish, that also I can do.’

These words, and the conviction with which they were uttered, wiped the laugh off Jack’s face. ‘Each man to his own trade,’ he began earnestly. ‘Apes and I are born . .

The lookout’s hail ‘On deck there,’ directed nevertheless straight up at the captain, ’sail ho!’ cut him short.

‘Where away?’ he cried.

‘Two points on the larboard bow, sir.’

‘Mr Pullings. Mr Pullings, there. Be so good as to send my glass into the fore crosstrees.’

A moment later Mr Callow appeared,, having run from the cabin to the crosstrees without a pause; and the white fleck in the south-​east leapt nearer - a ship, close-​hauled on the starboard tack: topsails and courses, taking it easy. Already there was a hint of her dark hull on the rise. She would be about four leagues away. At the moment the Surprise was running seven or eight knots with no great spread of canvas; and she had the weather-​gauge. There was plenty of time.

‘Lose not a minute’ was engraved on his heart, however, and saying ‘Shin up to the jacks, Mr Callow: do not watch the chase, but the sea beyond her. Doctor, pray do not stir for the moment,’ he hailed the deck for his coxswain and swung himself into the shrouds with a speed just short of hurry. He met the ascending Bonden, said, ‘Bring the Doctor down handsomely, Bonden. He is to be dressed, full rig, in the top,’ and so reached the quarterdeck.

‘What have they seen, Captain?’ cried Atkins, running towards him. ‘Is it the enemy? Is it Linois?’

‘Mr Pullings, all hands to make sail. Maintopgallants’l, stuns’ls and royal; and scandalise the foretops’l yard.’

‘Maintopgallants’l, stuns’ls and royal, and scandalise foretops’l yard it is, sir.’

The boatswain’s call piped with a fine urgency; the ship was filled with the unaccustomed click of Sunday shoes; and Jack heard Atkins’s shrill voice cut off suddenly as the afterguard bowled him over; in a few moments the wild melee had resolved itself into ordered groups of men aloft and alow, each at his appointed rope. The orders came in the dead silence: in quick succession the sails were sheeted home, and as each filled on the steady breeze so a stronger impulse sent the ship faster through the water -her whole voice changed, and the rhythm of her pitch; all far more living, brilliantly awake. At the last cry of ‘Belay’ Jack looked at his watch. It was pretty well; they were not Livelies yet, not by a minute and forty seconds; but it was pretty well. He caught a look of whistling astonishment on his new first lieutenant’s face, and he smiled privately.

‘South-​south-​west a half south,’ he said to the helmsman. ‘Mr Pullings, I believe you may dismiss the watch below.’

The watch below did in fact vanish into the berth-​deck, but only to take off its best shirts, embroidered at the seams with ribbons, its spotless white trousers, and little low-​cut shoes with bows; it reappeared a few minutes later in working clothes and gathered on the forecastle, in the head and the foretop, staring fixedly at the sail on the horizon.