can hardly ask more. But what of amputation, lithotomy, the use of the trephine?’
‘Bless you, sir, my father, God rest his soul’ (crossing herself) ‘was a butcher and horse-knacker in the wholesale line, down Deptford way, and my brothers and me used to play at surgeons in the jointing house: then when I was at Haslar they put me almost straight away into the theatre. So, do you see, sir, I am hardly what could be called squeamish. But may I show you my character, sir? The surgeon of my last ship, a very learned gentleman, tells what I can do better than ever I could manage.’ She passed the somewhat aged cover, and begging Jack’s pardon Stephen broke the seal. The elegant Latin testimonial to Mrs Skeeping’s worth, capabilities, and exceptional sobriety was written in a remarkably familiar hand but one to which he could not give a name until he turned the page and saw the signature of Kevin Teevan, an Ulster Catholic from Cavan, a friend of his student days and yet another Irishman who saw the Napoleonic tyranny as a far greater and more immediate evil than the English government of Ireland.
‘Well,’ he said, patting the letter affectionately, ‘anyone so highly spoken of by Mr Teevan will certainly answer for me; and since I do not yet have an assistant surgeon – he
will be coming aboard this afternoon – I will show you the sick-berth myself, if the Captain will excuse us.’
‘There,’ he went on at last, having displayed the neat arrangements of the Surprise,
‘that deals with the ventilation system: no ship of the line can show a better. Now pray tell me how Mr Teevan was when last you saw him.’
‘He was brimming full of joy, sir. A cousin with a practice in some grand part of London and with too many patients, offered him a partnership, and he left Mahon that very evening in Northumberland, going home to pay off and lay up. For that was when we thought it was all over, the pity and woe . . . that Boney.’
‘The pity and woe indeed,’ said Stephen. ‘But with the
blessing we shall soon settle his account.’ And running his eye over the neat shelves of the forward medicine chest, he said, ‘We are short of blue ointment. Do you understand the making of blue ointment, Mrs Skeeping?’
‘Oh dear me yes, sir: many is the great jar I have ground in my time.’
‘Then pray reach me down the little keg of hog’s lard, the jar of mutton suet, and the quicksilver. There are two mortars with their pestles just below the colcothar of vitriol.’
When they had ground away companionably at their ointment for perhaps half a glass Stephen said, ‘Mrs Skeeping, in my sea-time I have seen few, very few women at all, although I am told they are not in fact so very rare. Will you tell me how they come to be aboard and why they stay in a place so often damp and always so bare of comfort?’
‘Why, sir, in the first place a good many warrant-officers
– like the gunner, of course – take their wives to sea, and some captains allow the good petty-officers to do the same. Then there are wives that take a relation along – my particular friend Maggie Cheal is the bosun’s wife’s sister. And some just take passage, with the captain’s or first lieutenant’s leave. And there are a few in very hard times by land that dress as men and are not found out until very late, when no notice is taken: they speak gruff, they are good seamen, and there is not much odds after forty. And as for staying aboard, it is not a comfortable life to be sure, except in a first or second rate that does not wear a flag; but there is company, and you are sure of food; and then men, upon the whole, are kinder than women – you get used to it all, and the order and regularity is a comfort in itself. For my part it was as simple as kiss your hand. At Haslar I was put to look after an officer, a post-captain that had lost a foot – there had been a secondary resection and the dressing was very delicate. His wife, Mrs Wilson, and the children came to see him every day, and when the wound was healed and he posted to a seventy-four in Jamaica she asked me to go with them, looking after the little ones. It was a long, slow voyage with no foul weather and everybody enjoyed it, most of all the children. But they had not been there a month before they were all dead of the Yellow Jack. Luckily for me, the officer who took over Captain Wilson’s ship brought a great many youngsters aboard, more than the gunner’s wife could deal with; so we having made friends on the way over, she asked me to give her a hand – and so it went, relations in ships – I had a sister married to the sailmaker’s mate in Ajax – friends in ships, with a spell or two in naval hospitals –
and here I am, loblolly-boy in Surprise, I hope, sir, if I give satisfaction.’
‘Certainly you are, particularly as I learn from Mr Teevan that you do not play the physician, puzzle the patients with long words or criticize the doctor’s orders.’
Mrs Skeeping thanked him very kindly; but having taken her leave she paused at the door, and blushing she said, ‘Sir, might I beg you to call me just Poll, as the Captain
does, and Killick and all the others I have been shipmates with? Otherwise they would think I was topping it the knob; and that they will not abide, no, not if it is ever so.’
‘By all means, Poll, my dear,’ said Stephen.
He read a couple of pages on leeches and their surprising variety in the Transactions, and then, judging his time, summoned their common steward and said,
‘Preserved Killick, I am going to fetch Dr Jacob, my assistant surgeon, who as you know is to mess in the gunroom.’
‘Which the Captain told me,’ said Killick with a satisfied smile. ‘So did Mr Harding.’
‘And I should like you to find him a stout boy to be his servant and to bring his sea-chest down from Thompson’s in their little two-wheeled cart. You will give the gunroom cook good warning, I am sure.’
The introduction went as well and easily as Stephen could have wished. Harding, Somers and Whewell were
hospitable, civilized men, and the quiet, unpretentious Dr Jacob, willing to please and to be pleased, succeeded in both: he was somewhat older than the lieutenants, which ensured a certain respect; his friendship with their much esteemed Doctor gave rise to more; and when Woodbine, the master, hurried in he found the gunroom in a fine buzz of conversation. He excused his lateness to the president:
‘That sudden gust took Elpenor the Greek over the side, and we have been fishing him out
– a very strong and sudden gust indeed: north-east. How do you do, sir?’ – this to Jacob
– ‘You are very welcome, I am sure. A glass of wine with you, sir.’
With shore supplies at hand it was a pleasant meal, with a steady flow of talk, much of it about the sea and its wonders
– the enormous rays of the West Indies, albatrosses nesting on Desolation Island (one of the many Desolation Islands) and their tameness, St Elmo’s Fire, the Northern Lights.
Woodbine belonged to an older generation than the lieutenants: he had travelled even more widely, and encouraged by the close attention of the medical man he spoke at considerable length about some pools or natural resurgences of pitch in Mexico. ‘Not to be compared to the Pitch-Lake in Trinidad for size, but much more interesting: there is one where the tar comes bubbling up in the middle, so liquid you can take it with a ladle; and every now and then a white bone comes surging up in the great bubble. Such bones!
People may prate about their Russian mammoths, but these creatures – or some of them –
would make mammoths look like pug-dogs. The gentleman that took me there, a natural philosopher, collects the most curious, and he showed me great curved tusks, oh, three fathoms long and.. .’ Another of those curious furious blasts came down from the face of the Rock, ruffling the whole bay and heeling the Surprise so that all hands automatically reached for their glasses and the mess-servants grasped the backs of the chairs. The master, an unusually truthful, scrupulous man, an elder of the congregation of Sethians in Shelmerston, checked himself and said, ‘Well, perhaps ten foot, to be on the safe side.
And I tell you what, gentlemen, I have known this gust or warning foretell a seven-day blow out of the north-east four or even five times when my ship has been lying here.’