‘Not at all. I am perfectly willing to climb to whatever pinnacle you choose.’
‘Mr. Hanson,’ called Jack. ‘Mr. Wells. The Doctor is going aloft. You will act as hand and foot fasts, as and when required.’
‘Aye-aye, sir, aye-aye,’ they replied; and he swung himself into the absurdly familiar ladder-way, mounting with the smooth ease of a powerful, very well trained body to the maintop, where he greeted the look-out and drew breath for a while to ease his friend’s somewhat more laborious progress.
Stephen arrived, pale and if not anxious then truly worn, followed by his attendants, and they all sat for a while, gazing at the mainland and the schooner with the Captain’s glass.
It was quite true: the masts were in no considerable state of motion. Yet even so, at the next stage, the not very awful crosstrees, Jack said that that would answer very well. He gazed for a while, pointing out various remote inland heights; and then, reaching out for a backstay, his own expeditious form of descent, he desired the young men to see the Doctor safely bestowed when he wished to return to the deck, and so vanished.
Arriving with little more than a muffled thump, he caused Ringle’s signal to be thrown out, requiring her to come within hail; and then, spurred by the scent of breakfast, he hurried into the cabin. Presently Stephen joined him, paler still, but with the assurance of one who now walked upon comparatively firm ground: Killick plied him with coffee, bacon, sausage, toast; and quite soon his equanimity and even cheerfulness resumed their usual placid height.
‘I do hope,’ said Jack, ‘that Dr. Jacob would be so good as to accompany William into Rio, and speaking Portuguese find out all he discreetly can about the Asp: William will know all the questions to ask, but it would come much better through someone not obviously English – someone, say, who was acquainted with her in Valletta, before she left the service, and who naturally takes an interest in her.’
‘Am I right in supposing that ideally William should be a passing figure, preoccupied with other maritime affairs, and that Jacob should be an idle passenger, walking about the docks to see something of Brazil, largely ignorant of the sea, but interested in his earthbound fashion?’
‘You are wholly in the right of it, brother: that is exactly what I should have asked. A trifle of coffee?’
At this point Killick announced Mr. Woodbine’s desire to see the Captain directly or almost so; the near approach of Ringle; and the news that those African cats had got at the
mangoes – ‘And what they ain’t ate, they’ve spoilt,’ he added with an obscure surly triumph.
Mr. Woodbine’s mission was concerned solely with a certain deviation from truth on the part of the pintles, observed and exactly measured in this pellucid calm – a deviation forecast by Mr. Seppings when he installed the new stern-post, the correction being provided by three simple operations, clearly figured by young Mr. Seppings in a drawing to be found in the case holding the necessary implements. The next interview was nothing like so satisfactory: William Reade did not feel that his explanations of a series of basic questions about the revived Asp had penetrated the layers of Dr. Jacob’s ignorance of both English and Portuguese nautical language. He knew very well what Captain Aubrey wanted to learn, but he felt that apart from making the usual arrangements for water and stores, he was going on a fool’s errand. ‘You might as well try to shave with a butter-knife,’
he muttered, taking his seat next to a sombre Jacob in Ringle’s gig.
On the other hand, Jacob, though indeed as impenetrably stupid in some respects as the most prejudiced seaman could wish, was also a remarkable draughtsman. This was of course most apparent in his beautifully exact and explicit anatomical drawings; but he was perfectly capable of changing scale, attitude and nature of description; and his drawings, produced in the cabin from rough sketches and combined with Reade’s vivid technical description, gave Jack Aubrey a very clear impression of the renewed, the almost entirely rebuilt Asp.
‘I doubt I should have recognised her, sir, with this fine long line running aft’ – he traced in on Jacob’s profile – ‘and I must do the Doctor the justice of saying that he could not have struck it off better had he been bred to the trade. My only question is whether, with these extra feet, she will be as windwardly as she was – her one good point. Faster, for sure: but as windwardly? I wonder.’
‘I dare say you are right.’ Jack did not choose to be more specific, but he spoke gravely; and as William Reade carried on with his description of the Asp’s improved armament, including a most elegant pair of long brass chasers right forward, his face, ordinarily so cheerful, grew graver still.
‘My dear,’ wrote Stephen, ‘many a year have I spent sailing the sea in ships, but rarely have I felt such a corporate sense of concern: it is certainly not a defined uneasiness, for the Surprise is sound, as all hands know, she is well supplied, and she carries an ample crew of seamen perfectly well used to working together. Yet there is a want of cheer, of those conventional jokes, semi-insults and jocular repartees that make up so much of the very small change in shipboard life; and what puzzles me extremely is that it is quasi-universal. It may spare the midshipmen’s berth and the little small gathering of ship’s boys, but it is fairly general elsewhere. I noticed it first when we were lying in the wholly sunless estuary of the River Plate, having sent the tender over that vast and as far as I could see birdless waste to Buenos Aires, carrying among other burdens a message to you in which I pointed out the extraordinary contrast between your African water, teeming with both familiar and wildly exotic duck, geese, anhingas, waders from the most minute of stints to Ardea goliath, and this prodigious desert, inhabited perhaps to the extreme limit of my glass by one moulting black-crested grebe. How ardently I hope that my note may reach you in Dorsetshire, bearing as it does more affection than is ordinarily enclosed in a common sailcloth cover.
‘It is true that I date this – gloom, untoward atmosphere – from our dreary sojourn in the River Plate, and for a while I foolishly tried to account for its mood by the absence of creatures: but of course that was sad nonsense. As soon as the schooner rejoins, and as soon as we resume our course we shall necessarily begin to see the southern birds; already, before we dropped anchor here, a few skuas from the Falk-lands had been observed and in a very short time the various penguins will be commonplace.
‘No. I must find a more rational basis for this prevalent mood. Part of it may arise from the odd in-between nature of the season, neither one thing nor another: much more from the general knowledge that we are to sail into the Pacific by way of the Horn rather than attempt Magellan’s Strait, which Jack Aubrey dislikes extremely, taken from east to west, the farther reaches calling for some manoeuvres that are exceptionally perilous in a strong westerly blow.
‘I think it may fairly be said that no one man in a ship has as much influence as her captain: and I believe that the strength of that influence is very, very much increased when the captain has commanded the ship, her officers and her company for many years, which is of course the case with Captain Aubrey. His expression, his daily mood, his tone of voice are naturally, automatically and universally observed – not out of curiosity or intense personal interest but as any man – sailor, farmer, fisherman – subject to the weather frequently looks at the sky. Now except as a friend I am not particularly subject to the great man’s state of mind, his etat d’ame, yet I find myself curiously affected . . .’
Here the letter came to a halt, starting again many days later with a different pen, dipped into a different ink, and written on a somewhat discoloured sheet of paper: ‘My dear, it is not without a real regret that I see the absolute loss of so many pages, swept off by an intemperate gust, pummelled and pounded by intrusive sea-water intimately mixed with ice swilling with the utmost violence about the sodden cabin while poor Surprise lay on her beam-ends on one of the innumerable uncharted reefs in this forbidding part of the world and while I and the blessed Poll Skeeping bandaged, splinted and dosed the hands injured by a gun forced from its emplacement by the furious thrust of ice. At present we are on an even keel once more, gliding under courses and close-reefed topsails along the inward – the leeward – side of one of the countless islands that fringe this desolate end of the world.