‘Oh sir, if you please,’ cried Poll, ‘Dr Jacob says Captain Hobden has fallen down in a fit and please would you come and look at him?’
It was clear that Jacob, though an experienced physician by land, had not served at sea long enough to make an instant and correct diagnosis of alcoholic coma, a state not uncommon in officers aboard His Majesty’s ships, they (unlike the hands) being allowed to bring any quantity of wine and spirits aboard, according to their taste and pocket.
And in any event, his practice had been largely among Jews, who drink very little, and Moslems, who at least in theory drink nothing at all.
Hobden was carried by two admiring, envious seamen to his cot, where he lay motionless, breathing (but only just), his face devoid of expression apart from its habitual look of discontent. ‘There we may leave the sufferer,’ said Stephen. ‘Or rather the sufferer to be: there is a word for the morning state, but it escapes me.’
‘Crapula,’ said Jacob. ‘A very loathsome condition that I have rarely encountered.’
Stephen returned to the great cabin, where he found Jack dictating a letter to his clerk: and Mr Candish the purser was sitting by with a pile of dockets to be checked and countersigned. In any case it was almost time for his evening rounds: they amounted to a
couple of obstinate gleets and a tenesmus, and when they had been attended to he said to Jacob, ‘I shall look after Daniel’s last dressing with Poll, if you like to sit with your comatose patient and take notes on pulse, rate of breathing and sensitivity to light.’
The dressing was a simple exercise, but Poll, running her hand over Daniel’s shoulder, cried, ‘There we are, sir!’
‘Well done, Poll,’ said Stephen, ‘there we are indeed. Bring me a lancet and the fine pincers and we will have it out in a moment.’ Poll ran to the dispensary and back. ‘There,’
he said to Daniel, showing him a splinter of bone, ‘that will allow a quick, clean, painless healing. I congratulate you: and I congratulate you too, Poll. Now,’ he went on, Poll having blushed, hung her head, and carried the old dressings and implements away, ‘a little while ago you were telling me about the beauty and fascination of number: do you think it allied to the pleasures of music?’
‘Perhaps it is, sir: but I have heard so little I can hardly give a sensible answer. Yet as for this splinter, sir’ – holding it up – ‘it may be that my bones are like shaky timber, liable to part, because I had just such a piece come out some years ago. I was in Rattler, sixteen, and we were cracking regardless after a French privateer out of La Rochelle that had taken two West Indiamen in the Bay: she was making for home, deep-laden, with everything she could bear, and our skipper drove the ship, drove her and every man aboard, and although our bottom was dirty from lying weeks on end in the Bight of Benin we were gaining on the chase when the maintopgallant carried away. I was aloft, and down I came. I was stunned and out of my wits for a great while, and when I came to I found my mates all disconsolate. We had lost the Frenchman of course, but Dolphin had snapped her up next morning and carried her into Dartmouth. She was condemned out of hand, and she, hull, goods, headmoney and all, was worth £120,000 odd pence. A hundred and twenty thousand pound, sir! Can you conceive such a sum?’
‘Only with great difficulty.’
‘And since we were very short-handed from fever in the Bight, my one and a half shares as seaman would have been
£768. Seven hundred and sixty-eight pound. Happily they did not tell me until I was over the worst of my wound – it was when my head was being shaved that the splinter of bone I was telling you about came through my scalp – or I think I should have run mad. Even as it was I was haunted, right haunted, by that sum. Seven hundred and sixty-eight pound. It was not a beautiful prime or anything like that:
nor it was not what people would ordinarily call a fortune; but for me it was or rather would have been freedom from hard labour and above all freedom from the continual anxiety that runs through ordinary people’s life – loss of employ, loss of customers, even loss of liberty. At five per cent it would bring in £38.8.o a year, or £2.18.11d a month – a lunar month, Navy fashion; whereas even an able seaman has no more than £1.13.6d No, it was not what would be called wealth, but it would have meant a quiet life at home, reading and going much farther into the mathematics, and sometimes fishing – I used to delight in fishing. Dear Lord, when that Paradise was lost I could not keep my mind clear of it – £768
and how many groats, farthings or penny pieces it contained – to just this side of madness: though to be sure some of it was madness too, since the fever took me every other day or so. But, Lord, sir, I have worn your kind patience cruelly, a-pitying of myself, and prating so.’
‘Not at all, John Daniel: yet just tell me succinctly about naval prize-money, will you, and then I must go. I have heard of it for ever, but I have never retained the principles.’
‘Well, sir, the captain has two eighths of the value of the prize; but if he is acting under a flag-officer he must give the admiral a third of what he receives: then the lieutenants, master and captain of the Marines have equal shares of one eighth: then the Marine lieutenants, surgeon, purser, bosun, gunner, carpenter, master mates and chaplain, equal shares in another eighth; while everybody else shares the remaining half, though not equally, the reefers having four and a half shares each, the lower warrant-officers like the cook and so on, three; the seamen, able and ordinary, one and a half, landmen and servants one, and boys half a share each.’
‘Thank you, Mr Daniel: I shall try to keep it in my mind. At present I shall bid Poll make you comfortable: give you good night, now.’
Cape Bon had been a disappointment. Algiers and the Bay of Algiers were not.
Commodore Aubrey sent one of the boys wished upon him in Gibraltar by former shipmates
a short-legged, long-armed little creature, very like an ape
– to rouse Stephen Maturin at the crack of dawn and to beg him to come at once, in his nightshirt or a dressing-gown or whatever he pleased, but anyhow at once.
‘Lord, how brilliant,’ he cried, blundering up the ladder to the quarterdeck, his eyes half-closed against the light. Tack gave him a hand up the last step, saying, ‘Look! Look!’
‘Where
away?’
‘On the starboard quarter – about a cable’s length on the starboard quarter.’
Powerful hands gently swivelled him about, his nightshirt flying in the breeze, and there he saw a fine great company of egrets, snowy white, so near that he could make out their yellow feet; and somewhat beyond them another even larger band, all flying with a steady concentration northwards, presumably to some Balearic swamp. And with the first group there flew a glossy ibis, absurdly black in this light and company, and continually uttering a discontented cry, something between a croak and a quack: from time to time it darted across the path of the leading birds with a louder shriek.
Stephen had the impression that the ibis was extremely indignant at the egrets’
conduct: and indeed so late a migration, well on in the month of May, was unusual, unwise, against all established custom. Yet the beautiful white birds would not attend, and presently the ibis left them with a final screech and hurried as fast as it could to the farther group, which might, perhaps, listen to its advice.
Stephen never knew the outcome, for Jack led him to the starboard bow – the ship was ghosting along under courses and a forestaysail – and from here he beheld a vast expanse of gloriously blue sea and a great convoy of merchantmen upon it, perhaps a hundred sail of ships, British, Dutch, Scandinavian and American, gathered from Tripoli, Tunis and further east, with the two corvettes and the sloop that Jack had sent to protect them strung out to windward, while still farther off a practised eye could make out some long, low-built corsairs waiting their opportunity.
‘That gives you some notion of the trade, don’t you find?’ asked Jack. ‘Prodigious.
But come over this side, and you will see another sight.’ He held back the forestaysail and guided Stephen to the larboard cathead, where they stood gazing across an even deeper blue expanse of sea to the African shore. The Surprise had already opened the bay