voyage, dispersed, the whole scheme given up, the commodore sent back among the mere post-captains and reduced to begging in the Street, having spent his last guineas on a rear-admiral’s gold lace.’
‘When do we sail?’
‘Stephen, do not be indiscreet, I beg. French spies may see all the bustle and report it by the countless smugglers, but so long as no one ever mentions the actual date, the ministry feels quite safe. All I can say is that there is not a moment to be lost. You must attend to your medical stores directly, and may the Lord have mercy on your soul.’
‘Gentlemen,’ said Stephen to his assistants in their splendid new sick-berth, full of light and air, furnished with capacious dispensaries, port and starboard, ‘I believe we may now cross off the antimonials, jalap and camphire, the eight yards of Welsh linen bandage, and the twelve yards of finer linen, which sets us up for the first month, barring the tourniquets, the mercury, and the small list of alexipharmics that Beale is sending over tomorrow. So much for our official supplies. But I have added a certain number of comforts – they are in the
cases on the left, together with a chest of portable soup infi. nitely superior to the Victualling Board’s second-hand carpenter’s glue – and a parcel of my own particular asafetida. It is imported for me by a Turkey merchant; and as you perhaps have noticed in spite of the sturgeon’s bladder in which it is enclosed it is by far the most pungent, the most truly fetid, variety known to man. For you must know, gentlemen, that when the mariner is dosed, he likes to know that he has been dosed: with fifteen grains or even less of this valuable substance scenting him and the very air about him there can be no doubt of the matter; and such is the nature of the human mind that he experiences a far greater real benefit than the drug itself would provide, were it deprived of its stench.’
‘May I ask, sir, where we are to stow it?’
‘Why, Mr Smith,’ said Stephen, ‘I had thought it would scarcely be noticed in the midshipmen’s berth.’
‘But we live there, too,’ cried Macaulay. ‘We live and sleep there, sir.’
‘You will be astonished to find how quickly it becomes indifferent, how quickly you grow used to what weak minds call the offensive odour, just as you grow accustomed to the motion of the billows. Now this second parcel, colleagues, is a substance more valuable by far than the most nauseous asafetida, or even perhaps than bark, quicksilver or opium. It does not yet figure in the London or even in the Dublin pharmacopeia; but presently it will be written in both, and in that of Edinburgh, in letters of gold.’
He opened the small, close-woven rush basket, lifted the tissue-paper and then the two layers of pale-green silk. The assistants looked attentively at the dried brown leaves within.
‘These dried brown leaves, gentlemen,’ said Stephen, ‘come from the Peruvian bush Erythroxylon coca. I do not present them as a panacea, but I do assert that they possess very great virtues in cases of melancholia, morbid depression of spirits whether rational or irrational, and the restless uneasiness of mind that so very often accompanies
fever: it brings about a euphory, a sense of well-being far more lucid, far superior in every way to that produced by opium; and it does so without causing that unhappy addiction we are all so well acquainted with. Admittedly, it does not procure sleep as opium does – a most unhealthy sleep, I may add – but on the other hand,
the patient does not require sleep: his mind rests of itself in a remarkable calm clarity.’
‘Is it in no way dangerous?’ asked Smith.
‘I heard of no untoward effects in my inquiries among medical men,’ said Stephen,
‘though it is known, esteemed, and very generally used throughout Peru. So long as man is man, there is always the possibility of abuse, sure, just as there is with tea, coffee, tobacco, wine and of course ardent spirits among us: but I never heard of an instance in some weeks’ or indeed months’ residence among the Peruvians.’
‘Is it prescribed as a specific for some Peruvian disorder, as a tonic, or as an alterative?’ asked Macaulay.
‘It is certainly used as a febrifuge and as a remedy for most ills,’ said Stephen, ‘but it is primarily taken as an enhancer of daily life, particularly by the labouring classes of men; for as well as the euphory I have spoken of, the coca also provides or perhaps I should say liberates great stores of energy, at the same time doing away with hunger for days on end. I have known thin spare men, no larger than myself, walk across mountainy country in piercing weather at a great altitude from sunrise to sunset, carrying burdens without fatigue, and without food. Yet although the uses of the coca-leaf are most evident among the poor, the field-labourers, the miners and the porters, they are even more striking among those who work with their heads. I have written all night, covering forty-three octavo pages, without mental exhaustion or even weariness, after a very hard day’s journey; and I have heard wellauthenticated reports of surgeons operating for twenty-four hours on end after a very shocking battle – operating with their abilities undiminished. But from the purely medical point of view, it seems to me that the most evident and immediate application is in everyday mental disturbance. I had great hopes of proving its value in my most recent voyage, but unhappily – I should not say unhappily, of course – all our people, officers, petty officers and seamen, were resolutely cheerful. Some frostbites off the Horn, the first hints of scurvy north of the Island, but no real depression, no moping, no sadness, no peevish quarrelling, rarely a cross word. It is true that they were buoyed up with thoughts of home, and we had been very fortunate in the matter of prizes; but their memment among the ice-floes of the south, their merriment in the heaving, sticky sea of the doldrums with the sails hanging loose day after day, would have vexed a saint. Have we any case even approaching melancholia at present?’
‘Well, sir,’ said Smith doubtfully, ‘a good many of the pressed men are low in their spirits, of course; but as for downright, clinical melancholia. .. I am sorry to disappoint you, sir.’
The young men, who had been bent over the leaves, sprung upright, and Stephen, turning, saw Captain Aubrey walk into the berth. ‘Here’s glory, upon my word,’ cried he.
‘Light and air in God’s plenty. It would be a pleasure to be sick in such a place. But come,’
– sniffing right and left – ‘has something died here?’
‘It has not,’ said Stephen. ‘The odour is that of the Smyrna asafetida, the most fetid of them all. In former times it was carried hung from the loftiest mast. Perhaps I might be
indulged in some oiled silk, and a box lapped with lead, in which the bulk may be struck into the orlop, while I keep just a little small jar on this floor for our daily use.’
‘By all means, Doctor,’ said Jack. ‘If you will come with me we can speak to Chips directly. There is a gentleman from the Sick and Hurt Board to see you in the cabin.’
The gentleman was not in fact from the Sick and Hurt Board, though he carried some of their official papers, but from the Admiralty itself, one of the more rarely seen officials in the department of naval intelligence, a gentleman often entrusted by its chief, Sir Joseph Blaine, with the most delicate missions. Neither acknowledged any former acquaintance even when Jack had left them alone. Mr Judd spoke firmly and authoritatively on some obscure points of medical administration, handed over the relevant documents with only the very slightest emphasis, and took his civil but distant leave.
Stephen walked straight into the quarter-gallery, and there, poised upon the seat of ease, he opened the packet. The papers
were straightforward, devoid of interest, their only function being to contain the note that asked him to be in the beetle wood that afternoon if he possibly could, or to catch the bearer, who would stay at the Cock for half an hour, and appoint a very early meeting.
At this stage in the Bellona’s preparations Stephen was virtually a free agent. He looked in at the Cock, spoke to his man, took a chaise back to Ashgrove, saddled his mare and rode some miles towards Lisa before branching off into a series of lanes, one of which would have brought him to a farm belonging to Sir Joseph if, before reaching it, he had not turned along a path leading to the roughest of rough and sandy pasture to a neglected wood, one of the few in England where an entomologist had a reasonable chance of finding that brilliant creature Calosoma sycophanta, as well as no less than three of the tiger beetles.