At four bells in the forenoon watch the next day, a very pretty day with Jack’s beloved westerly breeze rippling the harbour, Surprise’s gunner, in answer to a nod from Somers, fired the foremost larboard gun. All those who had been poised to act, waiting for this signal, instantly cast off moorings, raced aloft, and watching Surprise with the closest attention, followed her movements with such exemplary success that the whole squadron of four ship-sloops and one frigate moved steadily across the harbour in an exactly straight, exactly spaced line, and, amid the cheers and applause of the multitude, into the open sea, where, again following the example of Surprise, they all steered southwest by south, to allow for the heave of the moderately powerful swell and making tide.
According to local custom, the sloops had two captains, a first and a second; and Jack had them on the quarter-deck by turn, each daylight watch – or to be more exact, from four bells in the morning watch until the end of the first dog – to show them how things were done in the Royal Navy. Three or four of them were quite fluent in English, particularly young Jose Fernandez, Carrera’s nephew, a natural-born merman if ever there was one; but even so the monoglots imposed a dreadful burden on Dr. Maturin, who, though he knew a few nautical terms, such as starboard and larboard, in English, had no notion of how to say ‘Come up the tackle-fall’ in Spanish or any other language.
‘How I wish we had Jacob,’ said Jack, one day off Talcahuano.
‘It was entirely with your own consent that we left him in Valparaiso for the possible transmission of a particular message,’ said Stephen.
‘You are entirely right: I beg your pardon, brother: it was just for the relief of bewailing my lot. An ignoble relief, I admit.’
‘Captain, dear, a glass of wine with you.’
In his youth Jack Aubrey had served under two taut captains, remarkably taut even for those rigorous days, and when he said exercising he meant it to a degree that left the poor young men pale, wan, and almost dropping as they stood; but after a few days their young frames, having slept like the dead and eaten like hyenas, gained strength: above all as his own young midshipmen and younger officers raced them from one dizzy eminence to another. And although they had already been through some fairly serious naval training, Dr. Maturin had to treat many a blistered hand and rope-burnt thigh. Yet in all this there was none of the harsh driving so usual at sea: and as far as cheerfulness and good nature were compatible with reefing a foretopsail in a very fresh breeze, the days were upon the whole cheerful and good-natured. The only occasions upon which Jack was less than kind were those upon which the young Chileans showed a really grave ignorance of navigation, of determining the ship’s course and position by the principles of geometry and nautical astronomy: here he found Daniel and Hanson of the greatest use, and although a lunar observation was harder to understand than a sheet-bend, most of the young men were convinced of the subject’s importance, and several learnt to take the sun’s altitude at noon. They were invited, usually in pairs, to dine in the cabin or the gunroom; and although language sometimes presented a certain amount of difficulty, voracious appetites made up for it.
‘What a pleasant set of young fellows they are, to be sure,’ said Jack Aubrey as he and Stephen walked on a strand by the mouth of the river Llico, ‘and many of them have a real sense of the wind and the sea. At least half a dozen will make real sailors – Lord, what a change after those miserable, untrustworthy politicians.’
‘Sure, you are in the right of it. But tell me, Jack, what are they doing to the poor Surprise, all awry there on the face of the ocean?’
‘Why, since it is so still and we so prettily embayed till the turn of the tide, Harding thought of showing the rest of the boys, those who did not pull us ashore, what half-breaming is like. Do you see, they have heaved her down as far as they decently can and they are scraping the weed from what bottom they can reach …”
His explanation went on, but presently he noticed that Stephen was looking very fixedly at a bird, by now quite remote. ‘I do beg pardon, Jack,’ he said, ‘but I am almost certain that was a snipe. Do you see it yet?’
‘Certainly not. And should give it no countenance if I did. A snipe in Chile, for all love. I should as soon expect a beaver in the Royal Exchange.’
‘And yet that dear boy Jose, whose uncle is a great shot, told me that the snipe –
becasina, Gallinago gallinago – the same bird as ours – was the very first of breeding birds that come down here on migration. Bless you: here I had been, cursing the day and kicking the ground itself because we were making this voyage, as we have made so many a voyage, in that dismal gap when the winter migrants have departed and those of the spring have not yet arrived. I am filled with hope.’ Filled he may have been; but days, even weeks later, he was sitting on the grey pebbles of an island, one of the innumerable cold grey Chonos islands, sullenly training his glass not on any wildly exotic migrant but the commonplace resident blackish (but white-footed) oyster-catcher wading about in search of its living. Farther along there was another, a lacklustre female; and neither betrayed the slightest interest in the other: clearly this was not their breeding season, whatever the
snipe might think. Not the season of sudden joys, although it was indeed the thirtieth day of the month and tomorrow must decide Jack’s fate one way or another, neither leading to any evident happiness.
Beyond the hen oyster-catcher a brig came into view, rounding one of the countless rocky eminences that Captain Aubrey and his pupils had surveyed that morning with infinite care
– they were now surveying another a little way to the south out of Stephen’s sight but within that of the brig, which now increased its already headlong speed with yet more canvas. A green brig familiar to Stephen, used as a yacht by a wealthy and amiable Chilean gem-merchant, one of Jacob’s friends, who lived in Valparaiso.
He fixed it with his telescope, and there indeed was Jacob looking at him through another and making signs – untimely mirth? Whatever the signs were they were very soon lost as the brig rounded yet another great sea-worn cliff in the direction of Surprise, and Stephen’s attention was at once seized by a very noble sight – two black-necked swans flying steadily south, quite low over the water, so low that he could hear the rhythmic beating of their wings.
‘I cannot just sit here, watching pale-footed oyster-catchers,’ said Maturin aloud. ‘But what other course is open to me?’
No other course, during the passage – always north to south – of three skuas and that revolting carrion-eater the crested caracara. Hung about Stephen’s neck and wrapped in waxed-silk bags, one inside the other – the replacement of a small and very beautiful repeating watch chimed two quarters and would have chimed a third had he not caught sight of the frigate’s jolly-boat pulling fast into the contrary wind. He leapt up and waved and hooted, terrifying the oyster-catchers but making quite sure that he was not marooned.
He came up the ship’s side with his usual elegance, and he was greeted by Dr. Jacob, on whose brow a knowing eye could read A CODED SIGNAL HAS COME THROUGH.
Stephen was led below to one of the really discreet parts of the ship and in a low voice Jacob said, ‘Jaime brought it just after the government messenger had arrived from Santiago,’ and although Jacob had not decoded anything like the whole there was an important section that he perhaps mistakenly thought should be transmitted to the person concerned at once. From the jerk of his head and upward look Stephen grasped that he was speaking of Jack: and this became yet more certain when Jacob spoke of his delight when the brig overtook and passed the heavy sloop-of-war that had set out from Valparaiso before he could find the owner of the brig.
‘You have the original and your transcript?’ asked Stephen.
‘The original, but only a little of the transcript: let me show you how far I went before deciding to come out.’
Stephen held the rough draft to the gunport and said, ‘Certainly you were quite right, dear Amos. We must tell him at once.’
‘No. He is your particular friend. Here is my copy of the D2 key: there are some difficult combinations that I did not trouble with, but the essence is quite plain and we can worry them out later.’