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

So there Jack sat, sponging him from time to time, and the watches changed and the ship ran on and on, and he thanked God he had officers he could trust to see to her routine, He sat sponging him, fanning him, and listening against his will, distressed, anxious, wounded at times, bored.

He was no great hand at sitting mute and still hour after hour, and the stress of hearing painful words was wearing - the stimulus lost its point in time - and a jaded weariness supervened: a longing for Stephen to be quiet. But Stephen, so taciturn in life, was loquacious in delirium, and his subject was the human state as a whole. He also had an inexhaustible memory: Jack heard whole chapters of Molina, and the greater part of the Nicomachean Ethics.

Embarrassment and shame at his unfair advantage were bad enough, but even worse was the confusion of all his views: he had looked upon Stephen as the type of philosopher, strong, hardly touched by common feelings, sure of himself and rightly so; he had respected no landsman more. This Stephen, so passionate, so wholly subjugated by Diana, and so filled with doubt of every kind, left him aghast; he would not have been more at a loss if he had found the Surprise deprived of her anchors, ballast and compass.

‘Arma virumque cano,’ began the-​harsh voice in the darkness, as some recollection of Diana’s mad cousin set Stephen’s memory in motion.

‘Well, thank God we are in Latin again,’ said Jack.

‘Long may it last.’

Long indeed; it lasted until the Equatorial Channel itself, when the morning watch heard the ominus words.’ . ast illi solvuntur frigore membra vitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras’,

followed by an indignant cry for tea - for ‘green tea, there. Is there no one in this vile ship that knows how to look after a calenture? I have been calling and calling.’

Green tea, or a change in the wind (it was now a little west or north), on the intercession of St Stephen, lowered the fever from one hour to the next, and M’Alister kept it down with bark; but it was succeeded by a period of querulous peevishness that Jack found as trying as the Aeneid; and even he, with his experience of the seaman’s long-​suffering kindliness to a shipmate, wondered to see how they bore it: the surly, spoilt, consequential Killick called ‘that infamous double-​poxed baboon’ and yet running with all his might to bring a spoon; Bonden submitting patiently to assault with a kidney-​dish; elderly, ferocious forecastlemen soothing him as they gently carried his chair to favoured points on deck, only to be cursed for every breeze, and every choice.

Stephen was a wretched patient; sometimes he looked to M’Alister as an omniscient being who would certainly produce the one true physic; sometimes the ship resounded to the cry of ‘Charlatan’, and drugs would be seen hurtling through the scuttle. The chaplain suffered more than the rest: most of the officers haunted other parts of the ship when the convalescent Maturin was on the quarterdeck, but Mr White could not climb and in any case his duty required him to visit the sick - even to play chess with them. Once, goaded by a fling about Erastianism, be concentrated all his powers and won: he had to bear not only the reproachful looks of the helmsman, the quartermaster at the con, and the whole gunroom, but a semi-​official rebuke from his captain, who thought it ‘a poor shabby thing to set back an invalid’s recovery for the satisfaction of the moment’, and the strokes of his own conscience. Mr White was in a hopeless position, for if he lost, Dr Maturin was quite as likely to cry out that he did not attend; and fly into a passion.

Stephen’s iron constitution prevailed, however, and a week later, when the frigate lay off a remote uninhabited island in the Indian Ocean whose longitude was set down differently in every chart he went ashore; and there, on a day to be marked with a white stone, a white boulder indeed, he made the most important discovery of his life.

The boat pulled through a gap in the coral reef to a strand with mangroves on the left and a palm-​capped headland to the right; a strand upon which Jack had set up his instruments and where he and his officers were gazing at the pale moon, with Venus clear above her, like a band of noon-​day necromancers.

Choles and M’Alister lifted him out and set him on the dry sand; he staggered a little, and they led him up the beach to the shade of an immense unnamed ancient tree whose roots formed a comfortable ferny seat and whose branches offered fourteen different kinds of orchids to the view. There they left him with a book and a paper of cigars while the surveying of the anchorage and the astronomical observations went forward, a work of some hours.

The instruments stood on a carefully levelled patch of sand, and as the great moment approached the tension could be felt even from the tree. A deadly hush fell over the group, broken only by Jack’s voice reading off figures to his clerk-

‘Two seven four,’ he said, straightening his back at last. ‘Mr Stourton, what do you find?’

‘Two seven four, sir, exactly.’

‘The most satisfactory observation I - have ever made,’ said Jack. He clapped the eyepiece to and cast an affectionate glance at Venus, sailing away up there, distinct in the perfect blue once one knew where to look. ‘Now we can stow all this gear and go aboard.’

He strolled up the beach. ‘Such a charming observation, Stephen,’ he called out as he came near the tree. ‘I am sorry to have kept you so long, but it was worth it. All our calculations tally, and the chronometers were out by twenty-​seven mile. We have laid down the island as exactly- my God, what is that monstrous thing?’

‘It is a tortoise, my dear. The great land-​tortoise of the world: a new genus. He is unknown to science, and in comparison of him, your giants of Rodriguez and Aldabra are inconsiderable reptiles. He must weight a ton. I do not know that I have ever been so happy. I am in such spirits, Jack! How you will ever get him aboard, I cannot tell; but nothing is impossible to the Navy.’

‘Must we get him aboard?’

‘Oh, no question about it. He is to immortalise your name. This is Testudo aubreii for all eternity; when the I hero of the Nile is forgotten, Captain Aubrey will live on in his tortoise. There’s glory for you.’

‘Why, I am much obliged, Stephen, I am sure. I suppose we might parbuckle him down the beach. [low did you come by him?’

‘I wandered a little way inland, looking for specimens -that box is filled with ‘em: such wealth! Enough for half a dozen monographs - and there he was in an open space, eating Ficus religiosa. I plucked some high shoots he was straining for, and he followed me down here, eating them. He is the most confiding creature, wholly without distrust. God help him and his kind when other men find out this island. See his gleaming eye! He would like another leaf. It does me good to see him. This tortoise has quite recovered me,’ he cried, putting his arm round the enormous carapace.

The tortoise turned the scale, as M’Alister said, his wit heated by the tropical sun; its presence had a more tonic effect than all the bark, steel and bezoar in the frigate’s

medicine-​chest. Stephen sat with Testudo aubreii by the hen-​coops day after day as the Surprise ran down her southing; he increased in weight; his temper grew mild,

equable, benevolent.

On her outward voyage the Surprise had done well enough, when she was neither crippled nor headed by foul winds; and it might have been thought that zeal had done all it could. But now she was homeward-​bound. The words were magic to her people, many of whom had wives or sweethearts; even more so to her captain, who was (he hoped) to be married, and who was heading not only for a bride but also for the real theatre of war, for the possibility of distinction, of a Gazette to himself, and indeed of prizes, too. Then again the Company had done her proud - no royal dockyard’s niggling over a halfpennyworth of tar - and her sumptuous refit, her new sails, new copper, beautiful Manilla cordage, had brought back much of her youth: it had not dealt with certain deep-​seated structural defects, the result of age and the Marengo’s handling of her, but for the moment all was well, and she raced southwards as though she had a galleon in chase.