Patrick O'Brian - Post captain

By morning the wind had shifted into the west-​north-​west, and the blue peter broke out at a hundred foretopmastheads: boats by the score hurried merchant captains, mates, passengers and their relatives from Sandwich, Walmer, Deal and even Dover, and many a cruel extortionate bargain was struck when the flagship’s signals, reinforced by insistent guns, made it clear that time was short, that this time was the true departure. Towards eleven o’clock the whole body, apart from those that had fallen foul of one another, was under way in three straggling divisions, or rather heaps. Orderly or disorderly, however, they made a splendid sight, white sails stretching over four or five miles of grey sea, and the high, torn sky sometimes as grey as the one or as white as the other. An impressive illustration of the enormous importance of trade to the island, too; one that might have served the Polychrest’s midshipmen as a lesson in political economy and on the powers of the average seaman at evading the press - there were some thousands of them there, sailing unscathed from the very heart of the Impress Service.

But they, in common with the rest of the ship’s company, were witnessing punishment. The grating was rigged, the bosun’s mates stood by, the master-​at-​arms brought up his delinquents, a long tally charged with drunkenness - gin had been coming aboard from the bum-​boats, as it always did - contempt, neglect of duty, smoking tobacco outside the galley, playing dice, theft. On these occasions Jack always felt gloomy, displeased with everybody aboard, innocent and guilty alike: he looked tall, cold, withdrawn, and, to those under his power, his nearly absolute power, horribly savage, a right hard horse. This was early in the commission and he had to establish an unquestioning discipline; he had to support his officers’ authority. At the same time he had to steer fine between self-​defeating harshness and (although indeed some of these charges were trivial enough, in spite of his words with Parker) fatal softness; and he had to do so without really knowing three quarters of his men. It was a difficult task, and his face grew more and more lowering. He imposed extra duties, cut grog for three days, a week, a fortnight, awarded four men six lashes apiece, one nine, and the thief a dozen. It was not much, as flogging went; but in the old Sophie they had sometimes gone two months and more without bringing the cat out of its red baize bag: it was not much, but even so it made quite a ceremony, with the relevant Articles of War read out, the drum-​roll, and the gravity of a hundred men assembled.

The swabbers cleaned up the mess, and Stephen went below to patch or anoint the men who had been flogged - those, that is to say, who reported to him. The seamen put on their shirts again and went about their business, trusting to dinner and grog to set them right: the landsmen who had not been beaten navy-​fashion before were much more affected - quite knocked up; and the thieves’ cat had made an ugly mess of thief Carlow’s back, the bosun’s mate being first cousin to the man he robbed.

He came on deck again shortly before the men were piped to dinner, and seeing the first lieutenant walking up and down looking pleased with himself, he said to him, ‘Mr Parker, will you indulge me in the use of a small boat in let us say an hour? I could wish to walk upon the Goodwin sands at low tide. The sea is calm; the day propitious.’

‘Certainly, Doctor,’ said the first lieutenant, always good-​humoured after a flogging. ‘You shall have the blue cutter. But will you not miss your dinner?’

‘I shall take some bread, and a piece of meat.’

So he paced this strange, absolute and silent landscape of firm damp sand with rivulets running to its edges and the lapping sea, eating bread with one hand and cold beef with the other. He was so low to the sea that Deal and its coast were out of sight; he was surrounded by an unbroken disc of quiet grey sea, and even the boat, which lay off an inlet at the far rim of the sand, seemed a great way off, or rather upon another plane. Sand stretched before him, gently undulating, with here and there the black half-​buried carcasses of wrecks, some massive, others ribbed skeletons, in a kind of order whose sense escaped him, but which he might seize, he thought, if only his mind would make a certain shift, as simple as starting the alphabet at X - simple, if only he could catch the first clue. A different air, a different light, a sense of overwhelming permanence and therefore a different time; it was not at all unlike a certain laudanum-​state. Wave ripples on the sand: the traces of annelids, solens, clams: a distant flight of dunlins, close-​packed, flying fast, all wheeling together and changing colour as they wheeled.

His domain grew larger with the ebbing of the tide; fresh sandpits appeared, stretching far, far away to the north under the cold even light; islands joined one another, gleaming water disappeared, and only on the far rim of his world was there the least noise - the lap of small waves, and the remote scream of gulls.

It grew smaller, insensibly diminishing grain by grain; everywhere there was a secret drawing-​in, apparent only in the widening channels between the sandbanks, where the water was now running frankly from the sea.

The boat’s crew had been contentedly fishing for dabs all this time, and they had filled two moderate baskets with their catch.

‘There’s the Doctor,’ said Nehemiah Lee, ‘a-​waving of his arms. Is he talking to hisself, or does he mean to hail us?’

‘He’s a-​talking to hisself,’ said John Lakes, an old Sophie. ‘He often does. He’s a very learned cove.’

‘He’ll get cut off, if he don’t mind out,’ said Arthur Simmons, an elderly, cross-​grained forecastleman. ‘He looks fair mazed, to me. Little better than a foreigner.’

‘You can stow that, Art Simmons,’ said Plaice. ‘Or I’ll stop your gob.’

‘You and who to help you?’ asked Simmons, moving his face close to his shipmate’s.

‘Ain’t you got no respect for learning?’ said Plaice. ‘Four books at once I seen him read. Nay, with these very eyes, here in my head,’ - pointing to them - ‘I seen him whip a man’s skull off, rouse out his brains, set ‘em to rights, stow ‘em back again, clap on a silver plate, and sew up his scalp, which it was drooling over one ear, obscuring his dial, with a flat-​seam needle and a pegging-​awl, as neat as the sail-​maker of a King’s yacht.’

‘And when did you bury the poor bugger?’ asked Simmons, with an offensive knowingness.

‘Which he’s walking the deck of a seventy-​four at this very moment, you fat slob,’ cried Plaice. ‘Mr Day, gunner of the Elephant, by name, better than new, and promoted. So you can stuff that up your arse, Art Simmons. Learning? Why, I seen him sew on a man’s arm when it was hanging by a thread, passing remarks in Greek.’

‘And my parts,’ said Lakey, looking modestly at the gunwale.

‘I remember the way he set about old Parker when he gagged that poor bugger in the larboard watch,’ said Abraham Bates. ‘Those was learned words: even I couldn’t understand above the half of ‘em.’

‘Well,’ said Simmons, vexed by their devotion, that deeply irritating quality, ‘he’s lost his boots now, for all his learning.’

This was true. Stephen retracted his footsteps towards the stump of a mast protruding from the sand where he had left his boots and stockings, and to his concern he

-found that these prints emerged fresh and clear directly from the sea. No boots: only spreading water, and one stocking afloat in a little scum a hundred yards away. He reflected for a while upon the phenomenon of the tide, gradually bringing his mind to the surface, and then he deliberately took off his wig, his coat, his neckcloth and his waistcoat.