wind) and so of casting an eastward loop at the end of a very long run, thus, perhaps, regaining the weather-gage and freedom.
The morning sun, rising over Africa, showed the galley almost exactly where Jack had expected her, about two miles away westward: her two lateens out on either side making the most of the topgallant south-west-by-south wind: and so they ran all that pure cloudless day, and even the next, when sea, wind and current were almost exactly the same. But the extreme tension of that first day, when every man, woman and boy tried to urge the frigate on with clenched stomach muscles and extraordinary zeal in racing aloft or doing anything that might possibly increase the vessel’s speed, diminished to the extent that the people went about their ordinary duties – cleaning decks, stowing hammocks, directing the fire-hoses high into the sails to help them draw a little better, eating their
breakfast and the like – without perpetually breaking off to look at the chase. One boy even went to tell Stephen of a curious bird, a brown-faced booby; and Stephen and Jacob were much less often disturbed in their favourite observation-point right forward, by the starboard cathead. They had little or nothing to do in the sickberth that could not safely be left to Poll and Maggie. Jack was as active as any of his officers in drawing the last ounce of thrust from the breeze; and in any case Jack was disinclined for any other occupation whatsoever. He was, of course, very thoroughly acquainted with sudden death, but this time he felt the loss of Bonden, an admirable sailor, and of young Hallam, the son of an old shipmate, very deeply indeed.
This day was most uncommoply hot, and the next, a Monday, hotter still: Jacob, in the most natural way in the world, put on a turban, and Stephen, without much urging, a knotted white handkerchief. ‘This might go on for ever,’ he observed before dinner, settling down on his coil of rope.
‘To be sure, these two long wakes and the infinite quantity of sea have something of the look of eternity,’ said Jacob.
‘Or of dream. But for my part I do not think it can last much longer. I have been aboard an Algerine corsair and a Sallee rover, and since their chief aim is to take by boarding, they are usually very full of men. Furthermore, unless they intend the raiding of a distant coast –
which is not the case here – a mere dash down the Straits and so to Durazzo – they rarely carry much in the way of provisions. Then again, when the galley was using its oars at such a pace I observed the quite exceptional number of rowers: all these mouths have to be fed.’
Eight bells: the hands were piped to dinner, and they were still chewing or smelling of rum or both when they came hurrying back forward to see how the chase lay now.
‘What is your opinion, Tobias Belcher?’ asked Stephen, speaking to a grey-haired seaman from Shelmerston, a shipmate on former voyages and a member of the Sethian community, renowned for truthfulness. Belcher looked and considered, and in time he replied that ‘there was something not wholly Christian about this here weather.’
At this point the gunroom steward came to warn the doctors that dinner would be on table directly, so they hurried off with nothing more precise than a vague apprehension.
The Surprise, on reverting to a private ship, had lost her Royal Marine officer, but still with the three lieutenants, the master, the purser and her two surgeons, it was a fine full table, with a great volume of talk about the probable outcome of the day – a volume cut dead just as the pudding came in, by a magistral crash right forward, the impact of yet another ricochet from one of the galley’s stern-chasers.
Now, under the blazing sun, there began a curious form of sea-warfare: a slight strengthening of the breeze reached the frigate first and brought her within range of the galley’s chasers; but since the vessels were not directly in line, the galley, in order to aim these guns, had to shift her helm, exposing some of her quarter. This danger increased with the wind, which brought Surprise’s foremost guns, trained right forward, into play; with the further peril that she might put her helm hard over, showing the galley the whole of her flank and sending a hundred and sixty-eight pounds of round-shot into the galley’s relatively fragile timbers.
Both captains, the one right forward, the other right aft, watched one another most intently, trying to detect the slightest change and to counteract it. Jack had all his forward guns manned, of course, to give nothing away by movement; and when a favourable gust
had brought the frigate perhaps fifty yards nearer he said to Daniel, in charge of the forward guns to larboard, ‘Mr Daniel, I am going to put the helm a-lee and fire the bow-chaser: the moment she goes off, fire as they bear.’ He stepped to the port bow-chaser, a beautiful brass gun of his own, a nine-pounder: it was already at what he judged the right elevation, and kneeling to the sight he cried, ‘Helm a-lee: handsomely, now!’ And as the galley’s stern came just into view he fired. The ball skipped from the enemy’s wake and through her after-lateen, while at the same time the three foremost broadside guns sent splinters flying from the galley’s stern; but they too struck only on the rebound. Very shortly after, the gust that had brought the frigate nearer, reached and favoured the corsair, carrying her out of range.
‘By God, it’s hot,’ said Jack: he turned and drank from the scuttle-butt, imitated by all hands.
And so it went, burning day after burning day; and now even the moonlit night sky seemed to radiate heat. Day after day, with each doing all that human skill, ingenuity, craft and malevolence could do to destroy the enemy, neither gaining any decisive advantage though each wounded his enemy – wounded him, but far from mortally.
If Jack and Adams his clerk had not kept the ship’s logbook – the exact record of positions, distances made good, variations in the wind, observations on the weather, natural phenomena – he would scarcely have known that it was a Wednesday – the first Wednesday in June – when at last the wind failed them entirely, and standing in what trifling shade the limp sails could offer they watched the galley ship her oars and pull, still westwards, towards what might have been a cloud on the horizon, if this pitiless sky would have suffered even a single cloud.
This day Stephen had three cases of sunstroke, and Jack, by way of prevention and diversion, had a sail lowered over the side – all the edges well clear of this shark-infested water
– a truly shocking number of sharks – leaping in himself to encourage the crew, but finding, alas, precious little refreshment in the more than luke-warm tide.
Neither surgeon saw fit to join the splashing throng, and seeing that they were quite unwatched, Stephen undertook to guide Jacob up into the maintop, from which – the ship having swung with the current – they could see the galley with a telescope borrowed from the gunroom. It was not a very perilous ascent, but Daniel and three midshipmen, stark naked, ran up the side and into the rigging to give them not only advice but active, expert muscular heaves at moments of crisis.
From the top, Matunin sent them back to their water with many thanks and the assurance that they should be able to make their own way down with no more help than the force of gravity: and after breathing for a while he went on, ‘Amos, I believe you have never been up here before.’
‘Never,’ said Amos Jacob, ‘but I am very glad to be up here now – Lord, what an expanse: and Lord, how near the galley seems. She is in active motion. May I have the telescope? Oh God . . .’ he added in a tone of utter disgust. ‘But I had foreseen it.’
He passed the telescope. The breeze had filled the galley’s sails, and the corsairs were throwing many of their manacled rowers overboard.
They watched in a wholly disgusted silence: and then Stephen leant over and called, ‘Captain Aubrey, the galley has the wind. She is sailing towards the island we can see from up here.’
For the cloud had become island, a conical island hollowed out on the near, the eastern side.
Jack was with them in a moment, dripping wet. ‘I have heard of their doing that, to save food and water,’ he said. And after a silence, ‘I do not know that island. But then we are right off any known tract of the sea.’