It was the pig that saved this melancholy feast. Impelled by a trip on the part of the steward that coincided with a sudden lurch on the part of the Sophie, it left its dish at the
door of the gun-room and shot into Mowett’s lap. In the subsequent roaring and hullaballoo everyone grew human again, remaining natural long enough for Jack to reach the point he had been looking forward to since the beginning of dinner.
‘Well, gentlemen,’ he said, after they had drunk the King’s health, ‘I have news that will please you, I believe; though I must ask Mr Dillon’s indulgence for speaking of a service matter at this table. The a4miral gives us a cruise on our own down to Cape Nao. And I have prevailed upon Dr Maturin to stay aboard, to sew us up when the violence of the King’s enemies happens to tear us apart.’
‘Huzzay – well done – hear, hear – topping news – good
– hear him,’ they cried, all more or less together, and they looked so pleased – there was so much candid friendliness on their faces that Stephen wä intensely moved.
‘Lord Keith was delighted when I told him,’ Jack went on. ‘Said he envied us extremely –
had no physician in the flag-ship – was amazed when I told him of the gunner’s brains –
cabled for his spy-glass to book at Mr Day taking the sun on deck – and wrote out the Doctor’s order in his own hand, which is something I have never heard of in the service before.’
Nor had anyone there present – the order had to be wetted – three bottles of port, there Killick – bumpers all round – and while Stephen sat looking modestly down at the table, they all stood up, crouching their heads under the beams, and sang,
‘Huzzay, huzzay, huzzay, Huzzay, huzzay, huzzay, -Hussay, huzzay, huzzay, Huzzay.’
‘There is only one thing I do not care for, however,’ he said as the order was passed reverently round the table, ‘and that is this foolish insistence upon the word surgeon. “Do hereby appoint you surgeon . * . take upon you the employment of surgeon * . . together with such allowance
for wages and victuals for yourself as is usual for the surgeon of the said sloop.” It is a false description; and a false description is anathema to the philosophic mind.’
‘I am sure it is anathema to the philosophic mind,’ said James Dillon. ‘But the naval mind fairly revels in it, so it does. Take that word sloop, for example.’
‘Yes,’ said Stephen, narrowing his eyes through the haze of port and trying to remember the definitions he had heard.
‘Why, now, a sloop, as you know, is properly a one-masted vessel, with a fore-and-aft rig.
But in the Navy a sloop may be ship-rigged – she may have three masts.’
‘Or take the Sophie,’ cried the master, anxious to bring his crumb of comfort. ‘She’s rightly a brig, you know, Doctor, with her two masts.’ He held up two fingers, in case a landman might not fully comprehend so great a number.
• ‘But the minute Captain Aubrey sets foot in her, why, she too becomes a sloop; for a brig is a lieutenant’s command.’
‘Or take me,’ said Jack. ‘I am called captain, but really I am only a master and commander.’
‘Or the place where the men sleep, just for’ard,’ said the purser, pointing. ‘Rightly speaking, and official, ’tis the gun-deck, though there’s never a gun on it. We call it the spar-deck – though there’s no spars, neither – but some say the gun-deck still, and call the
right gun-deck the upper-deck. Or take this brig, which is no true brig at all, not with her square mainsail, but rather a sorts of snow, or a hermaphrodite.’
‘No, no, my dear sir,’ said James Dillon, ‘never let a mere word grieve your heart. We have nominal captain’s
servants who are, in fact, midshipmen; we have nominal able seamen on our books who are scarcely breeched – they are a thousand miles away and still at school; we swear we have not shifted any backstays, when we shift them continually; and we take many other oaths that nobody believes -no, no, you may call yourself what you please, so long as you do your duty. The Navy speaks in symbols, and you may suit what meaning you choose to the words.’
CHAPTER FIVE
The fair copy of the Sophie’s log was written out in David Richards’ unusually beautiful copperplate, but in all other respects it was just like every other bog-book in the service.
Its tone of semi-literate, official, righteous dullness never varied; it spoke of the opening of beef-cask no. 271 and the death of the loblolly-boy in exactly the same voice, and it never deviated into human prose even for the taking of the sloop’s first prize.
Thursday,June 28, winds variable, SE,by S, course S5OW, distance 63 miles. – Latitude 42°32’N, longitude 4°17’E, Cape Creus S76°W 12 leagues. Moderate breezes and cloudy PM. at 7 in first reef topsails. AM d° weather. Exercising the great guns. The people employed occasionally.
Friday, June 29, S and Eastward … Light airs and clear weather. Exercising the great guns. PM employed worming the cable. AM moderate breezes and clouds, in third reef maintopsail, bent another foretopsail and close reefed it, hard gales at 4 handed the square mainsail at 8 more moderate reefed the square mainsail and set it. At noon calm.
Departed this life Henry Gouges, loblolly-boy. Exercising the great guns.
Saturday, June 30, light airs inclinable to calm. Exercised the great guns. Punished Jno.
Shannahan and Thos. Yates with 12 lashes for drunkenness. Killed a bullock weight 530
lb. Remains of water 3 tons.
Sunday, July 1 * . * Mustered the ship’s company by divisions read the Articles of War performed Divine Service and committed the body of Henry Gouges to the deep. At noon d° weather.
Ditto weather: but the sun sank towards a livid, purple, tumescent cloud-bank piled deep on the western horizon,
and it was clear to every seaman aboard that it was not going to remain ditto much longer.
The seamen, sprawling abroad on the fo’c’sle and combing out their long hair or plaiting it up again for one another, kindly explained to the bandmen that this long swell from the south and east, this strange sticky heat that came both from the sky and the glassy surface of the heaving sea, and this horribly threatening appearance of the sun, meant that there was to be a coming dissolution of all natural bonds, an apocalyptic upheaval, a
right dirty night ahead. The sailormen had plenty of time to depress their hearers, already low in their spirits because of the unnatural death of Henry Gouges (had said, ‘Ha, ha, mates, I am fifty years old this day. Oh dear,’ and had died sitting there, still holding his untasted grog) – they had plenty of time, for this was Sunday afternoon, when in the course of nature the fo’c’sle was covered with sailors at their ease, their pigtails undone.
Some of the more gifted had queues they could tuck into their belts; and now that these ornaments were loosened and combed out, lank when still wet, or bushy when dry and as yet ungreased, they gave their owners a strangely awful and foreboding look, like oracles; which added to the landmen’s uneasiness.
The seamen laid it on; but with all their efforts they could scarcely exaggerate the event, for the south-easterly gale increased from its first warning blasts at the end of the last dog-watch to a great roaring current of air by the end of the middle watch, a torrent so laden with warm rain that the men at the wheel had to hold their heads down and cup their mouths sideways to breathe. The seas mounted higher and higher: they were not the height of the great Atlantic rollers, but they were steeper, and in a way more wicked; their heads tore off streaming in front of them so as to race through the Sophie’s tops, and they were tall enough to becalm her as she lay there a-try, riding it out under a storm staysail.
This was something she could do superbly well: she might not be very fast; she might not look very dangerous or high-bred; but with her topgallantmasts struck down on deck, her guns double-breeched and her hatches battened down, leaving only a little screened way to the after-ladder, and with a hundred miles of sea-room under her lee, she lay to as snug and unconcerned as an eider-duck. She was a remarkably dry vessel too, observed Jack, as she climbed the creaming slope of a wave, slipped its roaring top neatly under her bows and travelled smoothly down into the hollow. He stood with an arm round a backstay, wearing a tarpaulin jacket and a pair of calico drawers: his streaming yellow hair, which he wore loose and long as a tribute to Lord Nelson, stood straight out behind him at the top of each wave and sank in the troughs between – a natural anemometer – and he watched the regular, dreamlike procession in the diffused light of the racing moon. With the greatest pleasure he saw that his forecast of her qualities as a sea-boat was fulfilled and, indeed, surpassed, ‘She is remarkably dry,’ he said to Stephen who, preferring to die in the open, had crept up on deck, had been made fast to a stanchion and who now stood, mute, sodden and appalled, behind him.