David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

‘No.’ Penhaligon picks up his shaving mirror. ‘We shall reverse our reverses.’

The Captain leaves his cabin just as the sentry – Banes or Panes is the man’s name – is relieved by another marine, Walker the Scot: the pair salute. On the gun-deck, Waldron the Gunner’s Mate crouches by a cannon with a Penzance boy, Moff Wesley. In the gloom and noise of the heavy sea, they do not notice the eavesdropping Captain. ‘Speak it back, then, Moff,’ Waldron is saying. ‘First?’

‘Mop inside the barrel with the wet swab, sir.’

‘An’ if some sottish cock does a cack-thumbed job o’ that?’

‘He’ll miss embers from the last shot when we puts in the powder, sir.’

‘And blow a gunner’s arms off: I seen it once an’ once’ll do. Second?’

‘Put in the powder-cartridge, sir, or else we pours it in loose.’

‘An’ is gunpowder brought hither by scamperin’ little piskies?’

‘No, sir: I fetches it from the aft magazine, sir, one charge at a time.’

‘So you do, Moff. An’ why we don’t keep a fat stash to hand is?’

‘One loose spark’d blow us all to piss-’n’-sh- pieces, sir. Third…’ Moff counts on his fingers ‘… ram home the powder with a rammer, sir, an’ fourth is load up the shot, sir, an’ fifth is ram in a wad after the shot, sir, ’cause we may be rollin’ an’ the shot may roll out again into the sea, sir.’

‘An’ a right crew o’ Frenchmen we’d look then. Sixth?’

‘Roll out the gun, so the carriage-front is hard against the bulwark. Seventh, quill down the touch-hole. Eighth, it’s lit with a flintlock, an’ the flintman shouts “Clear!” an’ the primin’-powder sets off the powder in the barrel an’ fires out the shot, and whatever’s in its way it blows to – Kingdom Come, sir.’

‘Which causes the gun carriage,’ interjects Penhaligon, ‘to do what?’

Waldron is as startled as Moff: he stands to salute too quickly and bangs his head. ‘Didn’t notice you, Captain, beggin’ your pardon.’

‘Which causes the gun carriage,’ repeats Penhaligon, ‘to do what, Mr Wesley?’

‘Recoil shoots it back, sir, till the breech-ropes an’ cascabel stops it.’

‘What does a recoiling cannon do to a man’s leg, pray, Mr Wesley?’

‘Well… there’d not be much leg left if it caught it, sir.’

‘Carry on, Mr Waldron.’ Penhaligon continues along the starboard bulwark, recalling his own days as a powder-monkey, and steadying himself on an overhead rope. At five foot eight, he is much taller than the average sailor and must take care not to scalp himself on the deck-heads. He regrets his lack of a private fortune or prize money to buy gunpowder for firing practice. Captains who use more than a third of their quota in this way are viewed by the Sea Lords as imprudent. Six Hanoverians whom he plucked off a whaler at St Helena are doing their best to wash, wring out and hang up spare hammocks in the rolling weather. They intone, ‘Capitarn’, in one chorus, and return to industrious silence. Further along, Lieutenant Abel Wren has men scrubbing the deck with hot vinegar and holystones. Up above is dirtied for camouflage, but below-decks needs protection from mildew and bad airs. Wren whacks a sailor with his rattan and bellows, ‘Scrub it – don’t tickle it, you daisy!’ He then pretends to notice the Captain for the first time and salutes. ‘Afternoon, sir.’

‘Afternoon, Mr Wren. All well?’

‘Never better, sir,’ says the dashing, ugly Second Lieutenant.

Passing the canvas-screened galley, Penhaligon peers through a loose flap into the sooty, steamy enclosure where the mess-men help the cook and his mate chop food, keep fires alight and prevent the coppers overturning. The cook puts chunks of salt pork – Thursday being a pork day – into the bubbling mixture. Chinese cabbage, slabs of yam and rice are added to thicken the stew. Sons of the gentry may turn up their noses at the starch-and-salt-rich victuals, but ratings eat and drink better than they would ashore. Penhaligon’s own cook, Jonas Jones, claps a few times to earn the galley’s attention. ‘The wagers’re all in now, boys.’

‘So let the games,’ declares Chigwin, ‘begin!’

Chigwin and Jones each shake one chicken into a state of terror.

The dozen or so men in the galley chant in unison, ‘A-one, a-two, a-three!’

Chigwin and Jones snip off their hen’s head with a pair of secateurs and set them on the galley deck. The men cheer the blood-spouting headless corpses as they skid and flap. Half a minute later, when Jones’s fowl is still kicking on its side, the referee pronounces Chigwin’s ‘One dead fowl, boys.’ Coins change hands from scowlers to gloaters, and the birds are taken to the benches for plucking and gutting.

Penhaligon could punish the servants with the feeble charge of Disrespect to the Officers’ Dinner but carries on past the galley to the sick-bay. Its wooden partitions reach not quite to the ceiling, allowing a little light in and disease-bearing airs out. ‘Nay nay nay, you headless tit, it goes like this…’ The speaker is Michael Tozer, another Cornishman sent as a volunteer by the Captain’s brother Charlie to the Dragon, the brig whose second lieutenancy Penhaligon held eleven years ago. Tozer’s band of ten – now all able seamen – has followed their patron ever since. His broken and tuneless voice sings:

‘Don’t you see the ships a-comin’?

Don’t you see them in full sail?

Don’t you see the ships a-comin’

With the prizes at their tail?

Oh my little rollin’ sailor,

Oh my little rollin’ he;

I do love a jolly sailor,

Gay and merry might he be.’

‘ ’Tweren’t “gay”, Michael Tozer,’ objects a voice, ‘ ’twere “blithe”.’

‘ “Gay”, “blithe”, who humps a hog? What matters is what’s next so cork it:

‘Sailors they get all the money,

Soldiers they get none but brass;

Oh I do love a drink-me-down sailor,

But soldiers may all kiss my arse.

Oh my little rolling sailor,

Oh my little rolling he;

I do love a jolly sailor,

Soldiers may be damned for me.

‘That’s what the Gosport whores sing and I’d know ’cause I had one after the Glorious First o’ June an’ sunk my fork up her figgy-dowdy-’

‘Though come mornin’,’ says the voice, ‘she’d gone with his prize money.’

‘ ’Tain’t the point: the point is we’ll be pluckin’ a Dutch merchantman stuffed with the reddest, goldest copper on God’s Beautiful Globe.’

Captain Penhaligon stoops through the sick-bay’s entrance. The half-dozen bedbound inmates stiffen to guilty attention and the loblolly, a pock-scarred Londoner called Rafferty, stands, putting to one side the tray of tenaculums, ball-scoops and bone-rasps he is oiling. ‘Afternoon, sir: the Surgeon’s down on the orlop deck. Shall I send for him?’

‘No, Mr Rafferty: I make my rounds, is all. Are you mending, Mr Tozer?’

‘Can’t say my chest is better-knitted than last week, sir, but I’m grateful to be here at all. ’Twas a fair old fall without a pair of wings. An’ Mr Waldron’s been saying as he’ll find a space for me on one of his guns, so I look on it as a chance to learn a new trade an’ all.’

‘That’s the spirit, Tozer, that’s the spirit.’ Penhaligon turns to Tozer’s young neighbour. ‘Jack Fletcher: do I have it?’

‘Jack Thatcher, beggin’ your pardon, sir.’

‘Your pardon, Jack Thatcher, and what brings you to the sick-bay?’

Rafferty answers for the blushing youth: ‘Big round of applause, Captain.’

‘The clap? A souvenir of Penang, no doubt. How far advanced?’

Rafferty answers again: ‘Mr Snaky’s as scarlet as a Roman bishop’s hat, sir, an’ oozin’ curds, an’ Jack’s one eye’s all blurry, an’ widdlin’s a torture, is it not, lad? He’s been fed his mercury, but there’ll be no shuntyin’ along the yards for a while yet…’