‘Ain’t he ever been turned round and round in the barky – never no wind, week after week –
nor no rain except for ten miles away, and water running cruel short, green and stinking; and that goddam sun beating down so mortal strong the tar drips off of the rigging and the seams open wide as a coach-house door?’
‘Which he was drunk: and I’ve seen you drunk, Abel Trim – pissed as a kippered herring, and speechless, many a time, in Pompey, Rotherhithe and Hackney Wick.’
‘Very well: and the same to you, Joe Plaice. But at least I did not go on in that unlucky way about longing for the doldrums. So parse that, you old bugger.’
‘My dear,’ wrote Stephen, ‘I love to think of you at Wool-combe, that kind old house which I know quite well – it forms a kind of tenuous link: and not necessarily so tenuous either, since the dawn may well show us a homeward-bound ship beating up against the trade-wind, willing and able to carry our letters to an English port. So let me beg you to go into the library, there to look into Johnson’s or Bailey’s dictionary for the etymology of doldrum.
I cannot make it out at all. The thing, the concept, I know perfectly well, having suffered from it, above all when there was gaol-fever in the ship; but how it has come by such a name I cannot tell. The French call it le pot au noir, and pretty black it can be, on occasion, when the two converging trade-winds fill a vast space more or less over the equator with clouds, gloom, thunder and lightning from both hemispheres, north and south
– a prodigious space, whose width and borders vary year by year: but a space that we have to traverse, a space that no sailor in his right mind will ever mock or put to scorn.
When we shall enter this unhappy region I cannot tell – we must be fairly near its northern limit – but I shall ask Mr. Daniel.’
He found Mr. Daniel and Horatio Hanson in the master’s day-cabin, which the pair tended to usurp now that Mr. Woodbine spent so much longer below, abstaining. They were pricking the chart, a solemn undertaking, but they left off at once and leapt to their feet.
‘Mr. Daniel,’ he said, ‘pray be so good as to tell me when we may expect to enter the doldrums.’
‘Sir,’ said Mr. Daniel, ‘we have had reports of very strong and steady south-east trades, while ours has been moderate: furthermore, the glass has been behaving in a very whimsical fashion ever since the last dog yesterday’ – he pointed to a series of barometric readings, clear proof of the instrument’s wanton conduct – ‘and I should not be surprised if we crossed its northern border tomorrow.’
‘Dear Lord! So soon?’ cried Stephen. ‘I am so glad that I asked you. I have some delicate specimens of hydrozoa that must be protected – sometimes these seas are perfectly flat, as though oppressed by the weight of the air above them, and sometimes, with no wind or very little, they lose all rhythm, all reason, and toss you about in the most extraordinary fashion.’
‘Oh, sir,’ cried Hanson, ‘I long to see it!’
‘I must bestow my pans of hydrozoa. But you will let me know, I trust, when you are sure of our more near approach.’
Stephen was now so old a sea-dog that the grind of holystones and swabs on the deck immediately above did not disturb him: yet a little after this the gentle but persistent pushing of a hand and the repeated ‘Sir, oh sir, if you please’, eventually moved him to roll over on to the other side, with an ugly snarl. It did not answer. Rearing up in his cot, he saw young Hanson holding a lantern which showed his delighted face and shining eyes.
‘Sir, you did say you should be told when the doldrums began. And they have begun!
About six bells all the stars went out, one after the other right over the sky, and there was the most prodigious thunder and lightning, better than any Guy Fawkes’ night; and the sea comes from every direction at once. There are three boobies on deck, perfectly amazed, just abaft the blue cutter. Do come and see, sir. It might all fade with the sunlight.’
It did not fade with the sunlight, which did little more than make a slightly greater extent of white-capped sea visible. The sun rose, to be sure, but it scarcely diminished the brilliance of the almost continuous lightning-flashes -the sheets, even, of lightning – that raced across the low dark base of cloud-cover, while the thunder scarcely left them a moment’s silence.
‘Do you see the sea, sir?’ called Hanson in his ear. ‘Ain’t it turbid?’
‘Lurid too, in a way. Pray lead me to the boobies.’
‘Let me give you a hand, sir,’ said Davies, dangerous in temper, not very clever nor much use except in an engagement, but much attached to Jack, Hanson, and even, in a somewhat condescending way, to Stephen.
Man-ropes had been rigged, fore and aft, and he was led, staggering, to the blue cutter.
No boobies. A bosun’s mate, strengthening the clamps that held the boat to the deck, said, ‘Boobies, sir? Mr. Harding tossed them over the side.’
‘Did they fly?’
‘They flew perfectly well. They were just swinging the lead, the creatures.’
‘Do you know why he tossed them over the side?’
‘Why, they were brown boobies, sir. And you can’t have unlucky fowl of that kind aboard the barky.’
‘Ah? I did not know.’
The bosun’s mate sniffed, and in the sniff could be read, among other things, that the Doctor, though a worthy soul, could not really distinguish between larboard and starboard, right and wrong.
From that truly apocalyptic beginning, the doldrums necessarily diminished to a rather commonplace dull, calm, low-skied greyness – commonplace in everything apart from the truly exorbitant heat. The thin cloud, though low, seemed if anything to increase the power of the sun, which showed right through the day, a vast ball, tolerable to narrowed eyes yet so powerful that, as all hands had foreseen, it brought the tar dripping black on the holy deck, angering the cats beyond description. They had been silent, meek, aghast, hiding in corners, grateful for comfort when the ship was so horribly buffeted; but now they stalked about, sometimes howling, sometimes treading in the liquid tar and withdrawing their paws with cries of disgust, perpetually searching for something like coolness, which was nowhere to be found, even deep in the hold among the great water-casks.
They complained above all of the lack of air: in reasonably hot weather it was their custom to lie their full length at the lower end of the wind-sails that ventilated the sick-berth; but at present the berth was empty both of patients and of fresh air and they stretched in vain.
The ship’s true sails hung limp from their yards; the log, when heaved, stayed just where it was, not even carrying out the stray-line, so that cast after cast was reported as ‘No knots, no fathoms, sir, if you please,’ and both smoke and smell from the galley hung about the ship until the next meal was due.
Yet she was not entirely motionless: the slight, obscure, often conflicting little currents that wafted fronds of seaweed along the ship’s side, forward or aft, also turned her, almost perceptibly, so that at four bells she would be heading south and at six bells due north.
The dog-watches, ordinarily times of cheerfulness, dancing and music, in calm, reasonably temperate waters, were now given over to weary gasping, low-voiced nattering quarrel, and unseemly nakedness.
Yet the immutable sequence of bells, relief of the watch, meals and grog, divisions, and mustering of the watch, kept them in touch with a certain reality.
‘Mr. Harding,’ said Jack, as he watched the frigate’s top-light soar up, growing dimmer, almost vanishing in the murk as it passed the topgallant yard, ‘early in the morning, when the sea may be presumed to be at its coolest, let us rouse up some pretty sound spare topsails, boom them well out amidships with a really handsome span above the surface fore and aft on either side, and so fill them with water for the people to splash about in and be cool for a while.’
These orders were being carried out the next day, after a twilit breakfast; and while Harding, the bosun and the sail-maker were making doubly sure that the swimming-bath was impregnable, even to those jellyfish that could insinuate themselves through a hole and inflict a shockingly painful sting, Stephen said, ‘My dear, should you not like your usual swim? See how the people’ – pointing to the naked, frolicking starboard watch – ‘do enjoy it. I shall leap in too, if you will, and swim a couple of lengths.’