Reade having little confidence in his powers that way.
From well before dawn the following Wednesday it was clear to everyone aboard that they were going to have it rough; but few who had not seen the appalling drop of the barometer could have imagined quite how rough they would have it, or how soon. The wind came dead foul, of course, blowing from the north-north-west with ever-increasing force and against the flow both of tide and of current. At two bells all hands were called to bring the ship to and to veer out a drogue: it was tarpaulins again and ice in the wind; and a freakish cross-current whipped the crest of a tall wave clean across her side, flooding the galley and putting out the fires.
The cold, the hard, hard, very hard toil of keeping her just so, under bare poles forward and no more than a scrap right aft – pumps going without a pause – was about as severe as anything they had gone through, bar the even more deadly threat of the massive far southern ice.
When at last it did blow itself out they were almost too tired for relief, though Jack did observe, with grave approval, that the schooner had come through quite well: her head-rails were gone, for the most part; her bowsprit was little more than a stump; and she had had to ship a new bright yellow boom; but she looked more buoyant than the Surprise.
They were lying there in a still violently agitated, dirty sea, and clearly they were nearer the land than he had reckoned. In this cloudy evening light he could not see it, but all along to starboard there were shattered trees, masses of vegetation, as though kelp-beds had been ploughed up or steep-to land carried away. Far out to westward he thought he could make out a distant light.
‘Mr. Whewell,’ he said to the officer of the watch, having pondered a while. ‘Let us signal to Ringle make what offing is feasible.’ He saw the coloured lanterns hoisted and acknowledged: told Harding that the watch below might now indeed go below once grog and a reasonable piece of smoked penguin and biscuit had been served out.
He noticed the first lieutenant’s glance at the word ‘biscuit’, but without taking it up he went below. The sick-berth was more or less what was to be expected – indeed dreaded – after so sudden and so severe a blow. Less rather than more, seeing that there were now fewer to have limbs strained, dislocated, even broken; and now all were seamen, thoroughly used to the most furious extremes of weather and to having one hand for themselves as well as one for the ship. He did what was proper and customary by each, and he observed that Stephen had been as generous as usual with his laudanum where there was severe pain: he had known surgeons who out of something like a vicarious asceticism would allow nothing but liniment for even the worst of torn muscles. ‘And for yourself?’ he asked privately. ‘How have you come through this blow?’
‘Tolerably well, my dear, I thank you,’ said Stephen, ‘but I could do with a biscuit and a swallow of brandy.’
‘The brandy we can do, at a pinch. But as for the biscuit . . . when you have a minute, come on deck: there are some prodigious curious trees a little way inshore. But the light is almost gone.’
‘I have three fractures to splint, and then I shall be with you.’
The light had indeed faded, but Stephen could still receive the strong impression of an utterly disordered ocean – uneasy, with acres of yellowish scum, irregular and sometimes conflicting waves, and wreckage from the coast all over what coherent surfaces it had –
just under the rail where he stood one of those immense Chilean pines with harshly recurved sharp-pointed leaves, was being fended off for fear its trailing roots – its roots, the whole hillside on which it grew having obviously been carried away – should foul the rudder.
‘It is indeed an astonishing sight,’ said Stephen. ‘But if you will forgive me, I believe I shall turn in. I die on my feet. Do you not find the air growing curiously thick?’
‘In another ten minutes I believe we shall not see our own bowsprit. In these waters you often get fog after foul: and by God it was foul.’
Stephen Maturin often thought – had always thought -himself justified in making quite sure of a long night’s sleep when he was very tired, by swallowing enough laudanum or
anything else that came to hand to deaden a horse. It was therefore extremely difficult to wake him early in the morning.
‘Oh go to the Devil, you hideous ape,’ he said in a tone of exasperated hatred, and he heaved over in his cot, pulling the pillow over his head.
But it would not do. Slowly, by dint of steady, unvarying repetition, the message came through. A Hull whaler was alongside, her master aboard, pleading for help with a wounded man. A man whose arm, caught in the line running furiously out as a harpooned sperm whale dived, had been horribly mangled three days ago.
‘I am no more fit to operate on a mangled arm than I am to bind up a cut finger,’ he said, sitting up and looking at his hands. ‘What is that smell?’
‘It is coffee. The whaler brought us a couple of pounds. Should you like a pot?’
‘Well, I might,’ said Stephen, looking quite human, even intelligent. And when two or three remarkably strong cups had dispelled some of the poppy, hellebore and Jamaica rum, his deeply rooted sense of duty, of medical duty, began to return; he said, ‘What is the name of my loblolly-boy?’
In a conciliating voice Jack said, ‘Poll Skeeping.’
‘Is the sea calm?’
‘Mill ponds ain’t in it.’
‘You astonish me.’
‘Did you not hear the dead flat thunderous rain all night?’
‘I did not.’
‘What am I to do?’ asked Jack, afraid that he should drop off again.
‘Why, beg her to go across and take a general view of the patient. She is an intelligent woman – they exist, whatever you may say – she had the good word of my old friend Dr.
Teevan: she has had a world of experience, and she will tell my poor battered stupefied mind what to expect.’
She told him, as she put on his clean shirt and tidied his hair, that Saint Luke and all his fellow-apostles could not save the arm now, nor the whole college of surgeons of Dublin; but she thought that his honour, if she might say so, could possibly save the poor creature’s life by taking it off at the shoulder, still quite a clean joint: and she had told the whalers what to do, what to prepare; and she had put up the usual implements.
The time to cross two decks and to descend into the well-lit cabin where the patient lay fighting his pain, his grief and his dread, was enough to restore the medical Stephen to life; and after a cursory examination that wholly confirmed what Poll had said, he carried out a rapid, unusually satisfactory amputation with excellent flaps of healthy skin, which he had scarcely dared hope for, and he murmured into the patient’s ear, ‘There: it is over.
You will do remarkably well, if you lie quite still and drink no spirits at all for a week.’
‘Is it over, sir?’ asked the patient. ‘I did not know. God bless you.’
On deck he said to the master of the ship, ‘You will stay here, beside the ship, if you please. I am reasonably sanguine about your man – your brother, I believe? – and I should like to dress his shoulder tomorrow and show the most intelligent of your shipmates how to carry on until he is quite well.’
‘I have always liked whalers,’ said Jack, still waving though they were half a mile apart on a blessed calm forenoon with a fine breeze for reaching. ‘They have to be right seamen to survive at all. People call them rough and their ships all a-hoo, and to be sure they kick up
Bob’s-a-dying on shore: but then they live rough, most uncommon rough. Yet for open-handed, I do not know their equal, though in general sailors are not often called skin-flints.
Carling there, Joseph Carling, would have emptied his hold if I had let him: but I would not accept more than a couple of casks of biscuit, once I had heard that there was a small sheltered port or rather anchorage within reach, a little place called Pillon where most of the whalers down here go for their stores. The place is kept by a Hull man married to an Indian woman and he knows just what they need.’ A pause, and Jack went on, gazing after the whaler, now hull-down, ‘It is pleasant to see how sailors recognise one another all over the world: I am sorry you were too busy aboard Ringle and with your patients here to dine with Carling and me. You would have heard about some fellow-members of the Royal. Do you remember Dobson, Austin Dobson?’