David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

To blame, Penhaligon reflects, is the Navy’s policy of charging sailors for the treatment of venereal disease, thereby encouraging the men to try every Sea-Daddy’s cure before coming to the ship’s surgeon. When I am made a peer in the Lords, thinks Penhaligon, I shall rectify this pious folly. The Captain, too, once contracted the French Disease at an Officers Only bagnio on St Kitts and was too scared and too shy to speak to the Trincomolee’s surgeon until passing water was the purest agony. Were he a petty officer still he’d share this story with Jack Thatcher, but a captain should not dent his authority. ‘One trusts you learnt the true price a doxy’s cully must pay, Thatcher?’

‘I’ll not forget it in a hurry, sir, this I swear.’

Yet you’ll lie with another, Penhaligon foresees, and another, and another… He speaks briefly with the other patients: a feverish landsman pressed at St Ives, whose crushed thumb may or may not have to come off; a luckier Bermudan, glassy-eyed with pain from an abscessed molar; and a Shetlander with more beard than face and a severe case of Barbados Leg which has swollen his testicles to the size of mangoes. ‘I’m fit as a smashed fiddle,’ he reports, ‘God bless you for asking, Captain.’

Penhaligon rises to leave.

‘Beg pardon, sir,’ asks Michael Tozer, ‘might you settle a dispute for us?’

Pain shoots through Penhaligon’s foot. ‘If I may, Mr Tozer.’

‘Shall sailors in sick-bay still get their rightful slice of the prize, sir?’

‘The Naval Rule Book, which I uphold, states that the answer is yes.’

Tozer fires an ‘I told you so’ glare at Rafferty. Penhaligon is tempted to quote the proverb about birds in hands and bushes, but leaves the Phoebus’s rising morale untouched. ‘There are some miscellaneous matters,’ he tells the loblolly, ‘on which I should like to consult Surgeon Nash, after all. He is most likely in his cabin down below, you mentioned?’

A mongrel stink smothers the Captain as he descends, step by jolting step, to the berth-deck. It is dark, cold and damp in winter, and dark, hot and airless in the summer: ‘snug’, the ratings call it. In unhappy ships, despised officers are well advised not to venture too far from the companionways, but John Penhaligon has no undue worries. The larboard watch, about a hundred and ten men, are sewing or whittling in the wells of dim light from above, or moaning, shaving or curling up for a cat-nap in improvised booths between sea-chests, hammocks being unstrung during the day. The Captain’s shoes and buckles are recognised before the rest of him: a cry rings out, ‘Captain on deck, lads!’ The nearest sailors stand to attention, and the Captain is gratified that resentment at his intrusion is concealed, at least. He hides the pain in his feet. ‘I’m on my way down to the orlop, lads. As you were…’

‘Shall y’ be needin’ a lantern or a support, sir?’ one of the men asks.

‘No need. Blindfolded, I’d find my way around my Phoebus’s guts.’

He continues down to the orlop deck. It reeks of bilge-water; though not, as on a captured French ship he once inspected, of decayed corpses. Water sloshes, the sea’s belly churns, and the pumps clunk and squelp. Penhaligon grunts as he reaches the bottom, and half feels his way down the narrow passage. His fingertips identify the powder-store, the cheese-hold, the grog-store, with its heavy padlock, the cabin of Mr Woods, the boys’ careworn tutor, the rope-store, the Surgeon’s dispensary and, last, a cabin no bigger than his water-closet. Bronze light escapes and boxes are shifted. ‘It is I, Mr Nash, the Captain.’

‘Captain.’ Nash’s voice is a husky West Country wheeze. ‘What a surprise.’ His lamp-lit face appears, like a fanged mole, betraying no surprise at all.

‘Mr Rafferty said I might find you here, Surgeon.’

‘Aye, I came down for Sulphide of Lead.’ He places a folded blanket on the chest by way of a cushion. ‘Take the weight off your feet, if you’d care to. Your gout bites back, does it, sir?’

The tall man fills the poky cabin. ‘Is it so obvious, then?’

‘Professional instinct, sir… Might I inspect the area?’

Awkwardly, the Captain removes his boot and sock, and places his foot on a trunk. Nash brings his lamp close, his apron stiff and rustling with dried blood, and frowns at Penhaligon’s maroon swellings. ‘An angry tophus on the metatarsus… but no secretions, as yet?’

‘None as yet, but it’s looking damned similar to this time last year.’

Nash pokes at the swelling and Penhaligon’s foot jerks in pain.

‘Surgeon, the Nagasaki mission cannot afford for me to be invalided.’

Nash polishes his glasses on his grimy cuffs. ‘I prescribe Dover’s Remedy: it speeded your recovery in Bengal, it may postpone the attack this time. I want six ounces of blood from you, too, to reduce friction against the arteries.’

‘Let us waste no more time.’ Penhaligon removes his coat and rolls up his shirt-sleeves while Nash decants liquids from three different medicine bottles. Nobody could accuse the Surgeon of being one of those gentleman-physicians one occasionally meets in the Service, men who adorn the ward-room with erudition and verve – but the steady Devonian can amputate one limb per minute during engagements, pulls teeth with a steady hand, bends his accounts no more than is decent, and never blabs about officers’ complaints to the ratings. ‘Remind me, Mr Nash, what goes into this Dover’s.’

‘A variant of Ipecacuanha Powder, sir, being opium, ipecac, saltpetre, tartar and liquorice.’ He measures out a spatula of pale powder. ‘Were you a common Jack, I’d add castoreum – what the medical fraternity call rancid cod-oil – so you’d feel properly physicked. This trick I tend to spare the officers.’

The ship rolls and her timbers creak like a barn in a gale.

‘Have you considered turning apothecary ashore, Mr Nash?’

‘Not I, sir.’ Nash does not smile at the pleasantry.

‘I can see Nash’s Patented Elixir arrayed in a row of china bottles.’

‘Men of commerce, sir…’ Nash counts out laudanum drops into the pewter beaker ‘… for the most part, had their consciences cut out at birth. Better an honest drowning than slow death by hypocrisy, law or debt.’ He stirs the compound and hands the beaker to his patient. ‘Down in a single draught, Captain.’

Penhaligon obeys and winces. ‘Rancid cod-oil may improve it.’

‘I shall bring a dosage daily, sir. Now for the blood-letting.’ He produces a bleeding dish and a rusty lancet and holds the Captain’s forearm. ‘My sharpest blade: you shan’t feel a -’

Penhaligon bites on his ouch!, his oath and a shudder of pain.

‘- thing.’ Nash inserts the catheter to prevent scabbing. ‘Now…’

‘Stay still. I know.’ Slow drips of blood form a puddle in the dish.

To distract himself from the seepage, Penhaligon thinks about dinner.

‘Paid informers,’ avows Lieutenant Hovell, after half-drunk Daniel Snitker has been helped to his cabin to sleep off his mountainous dinner, ‘serve up that same dish their patrons most wish to -’ the ship sways, shudders, and the bulkhead lamps circle in their gimbals ‘- to dine upon. During his ambassadorship at The Hague, my father placed the word of one informer of conscience above the affidavits of ten spies working for lucre. Now, this is not to say that Snitker is ipso facto deceiving us, but we are well advised to swallow not a crumb of his “Prize Intelligence” without further verification – least of all his sunny prediction that the Japanese shall watch us seize their ancient ally’s assets without so much as a murmur.’