‘So you did . . .’ said Jack, shaking his head: then he stopped, listened intently, and ran on deck. Coming back, he wiped the foam and rain from his face with an habitual gesture and said, ‘Fore topmast staysail carried away – a damned awkward veering wind and as black as the Devil’s arse. But young Wilcox was up there before I reached the fo’c’sle and they were tallying the new sheet aft as though it were broad daylight and the sea as smooth as a pond. But there you are: that is your seaman. He can put up with uncommon dirty weather, endure great hardship and very short commons – a good, steady, courageous, uncomplaining creature under officers he can respect. He will bear all that, and sometimes harsh punishment, shipwreck and scurvy. What he cannot bear is sudden wealth. It goes straight to their heads, and if there is the least possibility they get drunk and disorderly, and desert in droves. In Malta it was not so bad. With the help of the whores their six dollars were soon spent; and on an island there was no chance of deserting.
But now the case is altered, and each damn-fool hand with fifty guineas in his pocket would have been blind drunk, poxed and stripped before Sunday, had we not got away: besides – what is it, Killick?’
‘Which we shall have to ship washboards athwart the coach door: green seas is coming aft as far as the capstan, and getting worse every minute. I doubt we’ll ever get your toasted cheese up dry, without I bring up the spirit-stove and do it here.’
‘Who has the deck at the moment?’
‘Why, the Master, sir, in course: and he’s just sent Mr. Daniel and a couple of strong hands aloft with a spare lantern. Which the top-light came adrift again. And sir-‘
addressing Stephen – ‘your mate – I beg his pardon: Dr. Jacob as I ought to say – has had a nasty tumble. Blood all over the gunroom.’
Stephen tried to leap to his feet, but the roll of the ship pressed him back: and when he made a second attempt on the larboard heave it flung him forward with shocking force.
Both the captain and the captain’s steward had the same notion of Stephen’s seamanship, however: between them they held him steady, and Jack, grasping his windward elbow, guided him through the coach – the anteroom, as it were, to the great cabin – and so out on to the deck, where the blast, the utter darkness, thick with racing spindrift, rain, and even solid bodies of sea-water, took his breath away, used though he was to the extremities of weather.
‘Mr. Woodbine,’ called Jack.
‘Sir,’ replied the Master, just beside the wheel, where the faint glow of the binnacle could be made out by eyes growing accustomed to the darkness.
‘How is the top-light coming along?’
‘I am afraid we shall have to rouse out the armourer, sir: I doubt Mr. Daniel can fix the bracket without heavy tools.’ Then raising his voice he called to the quartermaster stationed to windward, watching the weather-leeches. ‘Higgs, hail the top and ask if Mr.
Daniel would like the armourer.’ Higgs had an enormous voice and very keen ears: through all the shrieking of the wind in the rigging and its roaring changes he conveyed and received the message. By this time Stephen could make out the small hand-lantern high among the pattern of sails, all as close-hauled as ever they could be, with the frigate plunging westward through the tumultuous seas. He could also see the faint light reflected from the companion-ladder; and towards this he crept, holding on to everything that offered, bowed against the wind and the blinding rain. But with each tentative step he took down, the frantic uneven roll grew less – a question, as Jack had often told him, of the centre of gravity. Yet a most discreditable scene it was when he opened the larboard door of the bright-lit gunroom. Here were men, accustomed to bloodshed from their childhood, now running about like a parcel of hens, mopping Jacob’s arm with their napkins, giving advice, proffering glasses of water, wine, brandy, loosening his neckcloth, undoing his breeches at the waist and the knee. The purser was literally wringing his hands.
‘Pass the word for Poll Skeeping,’ cried Stephen in a harsh peremptory tone. He thrust them aside irrespective of rank, whipped out a lancet (always in a side-pocket), slit Jacob’s sleeve up to the shoulder, cut the shirt away, uncovered the spurting brachial artery and two other ample sources of blood on the same limb. In turning a complete somersault over both his chair and a small stool with a glass in his hand, at the moment of a double rise on the part of the frigate followed by a sickening plunge, Jacob had contrived not only to stun himself but also to shatter the glass, whose broad, sharp-edged sides had severed the artery and many other smaller but still considerable vessels.
Poll came at a run, carrying bandages, gut-threaded needles, pledgets and splints.
Stephen, who had his thumb on the most important pressure-point, desired the members of the gunroom to stand back, right back; and Poll instantly set about swabbing, dressing and even tidying the patient before he was carried off to a sick-berth cot.
All this had called for a good deal of explanation and comment: and when Jack came below, telling Mr. Harding that they were making truly remarkable way, barely six points off the wind, the whole tedious thing seemed to be happening again, with people showing just what had happened and how it had happened, when a truly enormous, an utterly shocking crash checked the frigate’s way entirely, thrusting her off her course and swinging the lanterns so violently against the deck overhead that two went out – a crash that drove all
discussion of Jacob’s injuries far, far from the collective mind. Jack shot up on deck, followed by the whole gunroom.
He could at first see nothing in the roaring darkness: but Whewell, the officer of the watch, told him that the forward starboard lookout had hailed ‘Light on the starboard bow’
seconds before the enormous impact; that he himself had seen a huge, dark, and otherwise lightless craft coming right before the wind at ten knots or more, strike the frigate’s bows, cross her shattered stem and run down her larboard side, her yards sweeping Surprise’s shrouds but always breaking free. A very heavy Scandinavian timber-carrier, he thought: ship-rigged. Could see no name, no port, no flag. No hail came across.
He had roused out the bosun and the carpenter – they would report in a moment – the ship was steering still, though she sagged to leeward.
Jack ran forward to meet them. ‘Bowsprit and most of the head carried away, sir,’ said the carpenter.
‘Nor I shouldn’t answer for the foremast,’ said the bosun.
A carpenter’s mate addressed his chief: ‘We’m making water: five ton a minute,’ in a tone of penetrating anxiety that affected all who heard him.
Harding had already called all hands, and as they came tumbling up Jack put the ship before the wind, furling everything but the main and fore courses and manning the pumps.
She answered her helm slowly, and she sailed slowly; but once Jack had her with the very strong wind and the short, pounding sea on her uninjured larboard quarter she no longer gave him that desperate sense of being about to founder any minute; and he and the carpenter and Harding, each with a lantern, made their tour of inspection: what they found was very, very bad – bowsprit, head and all the gear swept clean away – headsails gone, of course; and there were certainly some sprung butts lower down. But by the end of the middle watch, with the carpenter and his mates working as men will work with water pouring into their ship, the pumps were holding their own, or even very slightly gaining on the influx. ‘Oh, it’s only makeshift stuff, you know, sir,’ said the carpenter. ‘And if ever you can bring her inside the mole and so into the yard, I shall forswear evil living and give half my prize-money to the poor: for it is only the yard that can make her anything like seaworthy. God send we may creep inside that lovely old mole again.’
They did creep inside that lovely old mole again, and there they spent the remaining hours of the night in relative peace, the wind howling overhead but sending no more than wafts of foam and sometimes even webs of seaweed into their part of the harbour.
Early in the calm of the morning they made their way down the New Mole and the Naval Yard, doing what little they could to make the ship more nearly presentable (though for all their labour she still looked like a handsome woman who has been very severely beaten and had her nose cut off short), and Jack having sent to ask after Jacob – ‘Tolerable for the moment, but it is still too soon to speak, and Dr. Maturin begs to be excused from breakfast’ – sat down to his steak; and as he ate it so he made notes on the folded piece of paper by his side. Then he ate all the toast in his own rack and trespassed on Stephen’s, drinking large quantities of coffee: more nearly human now, after a night almost as rough as any he had known (though mercifully short) he passed the word for his clerk. ‘Mr.