“You are coming into my way of thinking, I find: but you are not come far enough. The trouble lies much deeper, and it is through unreason that the whole nexus must be attacked. Your belladonna and your logic are pills from the same box: they only suppress the symptom.”
“How do you propose to attain this end?”
“Listen now, will you,” cried McAdam, slopping out a full tumbler and drawing his chair so near that his breath wafted in Stephen’s face, “and I will tell you.”
In his diary that night Stephen wrote, “if he could carry out a reconstruction of the Irish political and social history for the last few ages which has formed our patient, and then a similar rebuilding of his mind from its foundation in early childhood to the present day, McAdam’s scheme would be admirable. Yet even for the second part, what tools does he dispose of? A pickaxe is all. A pickaxe to repair a chronometer, and a pickaxe in drunken hands at that. For my part I have a higher opinion of Clonfert’s understanding if not of his judgment than has my poor sodden colleague.”
This higher opinion was confirmed the next evening, when the Nereide made her way through a wicked series of reefs off Cape Brabant and the gig put Stephen and the captain ashore in a little creek; and the next, when the black pilot not only took them into a still lagoon but also guided them through the forest to a village where Stephen had a conversation with a second potential ally; and again some days later during a stroll behind Port South-East with a packet of subversive papers.
As he told Jack on rejoining the Boadicea, “Clonfert may not be his own best friend in some ways, but he is capable of a steadiness and a resolution that surprised me; and I must observe that he perpetually took notes of the depth of the water and of the bearings in what I am persuaded you would call a seamanlike manner.”
“So much the better,” cried Jack, “I am delighted to hear it, upon my word and honour. I have been doing something in that line myself, with young Richardson: he promises to be a capital hydrographer. We have laid down most of the nearby coast, with double angles and any number of soundings. And I have discovered a wateringplace on Flat Island, a few leagues to the northwards; so we shall not have to be perpetually fagging out to Rodriguez.”
“No Rodriguez,” said Stephen in a low voice.
“Oh, you shall see Rodriguez again,” said Jack. “We still have to put in there for stores, turn and turn about; but not quite so often.”
Turn and turn about they went, while the French remained obstinately at peace in their deep harbour, fitting themselves out anew to the last dump bolt; and turn by turn, when he was not away in the Nereide down the coast, Stephen moved into each departing ship.
His limestone caves on Rodriguez fulfilled all their golden promise; Colonel Keating was
kindness itself, providing fatigue-parties and draining a small marsh; and by the third turn Stephen was able to report that from the bones found in the mud alone he could almost promise Jack the sight of a complete skeleton of the solitaire within the next two months, while at the same time he might partially clothe it with feathers and pieces of skin found in the caves.
For the rest of the time it was plain blockade, inshore at night, off the capes by day, but never far, lest a Frenchman should slip out on the land-breeze, go north about in the darkness and bear away for the rich waters of the Indian Ocean, leaving the squadron a great way to leeward. Up and down, up and down, and all the time their thin canvas grew thinner in the tropical sun and the sudden prodigious downpours, their running rigging, incessantly passing through the countless blocks as they trimmed sail, gradually wasted away in those wisps called shakings, and the weed accumulated on their bottoms, while through the gaps in their copper the teredos thrust their augers through the oak.
Christmas, and an immense feast on the upper deck of the Boadicea, with a barrel of providently salted penguins from off the Cape serving as geese or turkeys, according to the taste and fancy of the mess, and plum-duff blazing faint blue under the awnings spread against the fiercer blaze of the Mauritian sun. New Year, with a great deal of ship-visiting; Twelfth Night, and the midshipmen’s berth regaled the gun-room with a two-hundred-pound turtle–an unfortunate experiment, for it was the wrong kind of turtle: the shell turned into glue, and all who had eaten of the creature pissed emerald green; and now Jack began to consult his barometer every watch.
It was a handsome, heavily-protected brass instrument hanging in gimbals by the table on which they. breakfasted, and he was unscrewing its bottom when Stephen observed, “I shall soon have to think of another trip to La Reunion. This Mauritius brew is sad stuff, in comparison.”
“Very true,” said Jack. “But drink it while you may. Carpe diem, Stephen: you may not get another cup. I unscrewed this shield, because I thought the tube must have broke. But here is the quicksilver, do you see, lower than I have ever seen it in my life. You had better stow your bones in the safest place you can think of. We are in for an uncommon hearty blow.”
Stephen swept the vertebrae he had been sorting into his napkin and followed Jack on deck. The sky was pure and innocent, the swell rather less than usual: on the starboard bow the familiar landscape lay broad and green under the eastern sun. “Magicienne is at it already,” said Jack, glancing at the busy hands over the water, setting up double preventer-stays. “Nereide has been caught napping. Mr Johnson: squadron make sail; course due west; prepare for heavy weather.” He turned his glass to Port Louis: yes, there was no fear of the French slipping out. They too could read a barometer, and they too were making all fast.
“Might this portend a hurricano?” asked Stephen privately in his ear.
“Yes,” said Jack, “and we must have all the sea-room we can win. How I wish Madagascar were farther off.”
They won forty miles of sea-room; the boats on the booms could scarcely be seen for frappings; the guns were double-breeched, bowsed up against the side until they made it groan; topgallantmasts were down on deck; storm canvas bent; spare gaskets, rolling-tackles, spritsailyard fore and aft–all that a great deal of activity and experienced seamanship could accomplish was done: and all under the same pure sun.
The swell increased long before a darkness gathered in the north. “Mr Seymour,” said.
Jack, “tarpaulins and battens for the hatchways. When it comes, it will blow across the sea.”
It came, a curved white line racing across the sea with inconceivable rapidity, a mile in front of the darkness. Just before it reached them the Boadicea’s close-reefed topsails sagged, losing all their roundness; then a tearing wall of air and water ripped them from their bolt-tops with an enormous shrieking howl. The ship was on her beam-ends, the darkness was upon them and the known world dissolved in a vast omnipresent noise. Air and water were intermingled; there was no surface to the sea; the sky vanished; and the distinction between up and down disappeared. Disappeared momentarily for those on deck, more durably for Dr Maturin, who, having pitched down two ladders, found himself lying on the ship’s side. Presently, she righted and he slid down; but on her taking a most furious lee-lurch on wearing round, he shot across the deck, through all his remaining stock of Venice treacle, to land on hands and knees upon the other side, clinging to a suspended locker in the darkness, puzzled.
In time gravity reasserted itself; he climbed down, still mazed from the prodigious din and by his tumbles, and groped his way forward to the sick bay. Here Carol, nominally his assistant but in fact the virtual surgeon of the frigate, and the loblolly-boy had preserved their lantern, by whose light they were disentangling their only patient, a poxed member of the afterguard, whose hammock, twirling in the violent motion, had enveloped him like a cocoon.
Here they remained, hooting lugubriously to one another for a while. Rank had little significance in this pandemonium, and the loblolly-boy, an ancient man once sailmaker’s crew and still good at sewing, told them in his shrill, carrying voice that in Jamaica as a boy he had known seven ships of the line founder with all hands in a blow not half as hugeous as this here. Presently Stephen shouted, “Come after, Mr Carol, and let us take all the lanterns we can find. The casualties will soon be coming down.”