he sent light hawsers and cablets to the mastheads, and although they made the ship look barbarously ugly they did keep her masts standing, where in another ship with the same thrust acting on her they would have carried away, shrouds, backstays, preventer-backstays and all.
The moon sailed across the pure sky, and the pale stars in their due sequence; the ship followed her nightly routine with the same kind of ordered regularity. The log was heaved –
five knots to five knots two fathoms, no more – the log-board marked by the glow of the binnacle
– the depth of water in the well reported – the glass was turned, the bell struck, the helm relieved, and all round the ship the lookouts cried ‘All’s well’.
At four bells in the middle watch the breeze hauled a little forward, so that Jack filled the mainsail, but apart from that both ships raced over the sea with never a change, as though they were running in a timeless dream.
A little before dawn, with the moon right low astern, Mars blazing in the east, and the head-pump already setting the forecastle awash for the swabbers, the sharp scent of coffee pierced through his reflexions. He walked into his lit cabin, and with half-closed eyes he looked at the quicksilver in the glass: it had not actually gone down, but the top of the column was concave rather than the other way about – there was at least a reasonable hope of wind. Killick brought him the pot and some very old rye bread toasted and asked
in a subdued, dutiful tone whether there was anything else he would like. ‘Not for the moment,’ said Jack. ‘I suppose the Doctor is not about?’
‘Oh no, sir.’ Stephen was a bad sleeper, but he disapproved of the habitual use of soporifics on medical and moral grounds and he usually delayed the taking of his pill or draught until two in the morning, so that he was rarely to be seen before eight or nine o’clock.
‘When he is up, say that I should be happy to see him and Mr Martin to dinner, wind and weather permitting. And pass the word for the officer of the watch.’ ‘Mr Allen,’ he said to that officer, ‘I shall turn in for a few hours, but I am to be called at the slightest change, either in the weather or the chase.’
A few hours, he said, and they carefully refrained from any noise abaft the mizenmast, cleaning the deck only with silent swabs; but at the changing of the watch there he was, stalking forward to stare at the chase in the brilliant morning. She was almost exactly the same, only sunlit rather than moonlit; she had perhaps drawn a little ahead, but she had not altered her sails – there was indeed very little she could add – and, what was more important, she had not deviated half a degree from her course, northeast by east.
The night’s chase had been dreamlike; the day’s was scarcely less so, for although there was the prevailing sense of urgency and even crisis and although there was the engine in the tops, squirting with all its might, while the brass long nines stood ready on the forecastle, trained right forward, with their garlands of smooth shot beside them, there was remarkably little to do. With the perfect steadiness of the breeze, it was like rolling down the trades to the Cape, never touching sheet or brace for days and even weeks on end; but whereas in the trades there was always cleaning, painting ship, washing clothes, making and mending, and the many forms of exercise, to say nothing of church and divisions, here nothing was appropriate but the making of wads and the chipping of roundshot. And so to the click-click of fifty or sixty hammers the Surprise ran on, going as fast as the most careful attention to brace and helm could drive her, pursuing a chase that lay perpetually half way to a horizon that perpetually receded before them both.
It was to the distant accompaniment of this sound that Jack and his guests ate their dinner. Shaved and shining after a cat-nap, Jack was in fine form; yesterday’s intense frustration belonged to history; he had not felt so well or so alive since the horrible days of the court-martial, and he enjoyed his company. Neither Stephen nor Martin was a sailor nor indeed anything remotely like a sailor; neither believed in the sacred majesty of a post-captain and both talked quite freely – a great relief. Furthermore, the glass was sinking, a sure sign of wind; and throughout the meal the steady chipping of shot told him that all was well on deck. A chase in sight, his ship in perfect order, and a blow coming on: this was real sailoring – this was why men went to sea. It is true that the chaplain’s presence was usually something of a constraint upon him, and that since the appearance of Sam his troubled conscience had made Jack almost mealy-mouthed when they conversed; but
today an abundance of vitality thrust conscience to one side and they talked away in a very pleasant manner. He told them that he was now quite sure the privateer was running for Brest, which was one of her home ports; that he hoped they might come up with her long before Ushant and its tangle of inshore reefs and islands; but there was no certainty of it at all. The chase had shown no signs of distress; she had not started her water over the side, still less her boats and guns. But from the look in his bright-blue, cheerfully predatory eye both his listeners concluded that his unspoken mind was less reserved, less cautious towards fate. Martin said he supposed that the engine, pumping with such force upon the sails, striking them from behind, as it were, must urge the boat along, and so increase its speed.
‘There cannot be the least doubt of it,’ said Stephen.
‘When virtue spooms before a prosperous gale My heaving wishes help to fill the sail says Dryden, that prince of poets, and the dear knows we spoom in the most virtuous manner. I suggest we all go and blow into the mainsail; or that some blow while others tie a rope to the back of the ship and pull forwards as hard as ever can be, ha, ha, ha!’ He cackled for a short while at his own wit, and in doing so (the exercise being unusual with him) choked on a crumb. When he recovered he found that Martin was telling Jack about the miseries of authors: Dryden had died in poverty – Spenser was poorer still – Agrippa ended his days in the workhouse. He might have gone on at very great length, for the material was not wanting, but that Mowett sent to report the appearance of a parcel of bankers on the starboard bow. They were of no great consequence from the warlike point of view,
being fishermen from Biscay and the north of Portugal on their way to fish for cod on the Newfoundland banks, but even a single sail in mid-ocean was something of an event; Jack had often travelled five thousand miles in quite frequented sea-lanes without seeing another ship, and when dinner was over he suggested that they should take their coffee on to the forecastle to look at the spectacle.
Killick could not actually forbid the move, but with a pinched and shrewish look he poured the guests’ coffee into villainous little tin mugs: he knew what they were capable of, if entrusted with porcelain, and he was quite right – each mug was dented when it came back, and the captain of the head had to deplore a trail of dark brown drops the whole length of his snowy deck. It was not that the wind had yet increased, but during dinner the beginning of a swell from the south had reached these waters, and the Surprise’s skittish roll almost always caught them on the wrong foot.
By the time they reached the forecastle the foremost vessels of the straggling fleet of bankers was right ahead of the Spartan and in one view the eye could embrace the picture of peaceful, if rather slow and slovenly industry, and of striving war – of one set of ships creeping in a formless, talkative heap north-westward, while the other raced through them, running east with the utmost efficiency as fast as ever they could move, wholly taken up with mutual violence.
An hour or so later the Biscayans had vanished over the edge of the world, taking all philosophical reflections with them, and Stephen and Martin had retired below, but Jack Aubrey was still there on the forecastle, considering the chase, the frigate’s magnificent spread of canvas, and the weather. He was also a little uneasy about her trim: she might be a trifle by the stern, and he was afraid she would resent it, if a full gale were to come on.