‘Mr Mowett,’ he said, returning aft, ‘I believe we may ship rolling-tackles, strike the carronades down into the
hold, and make ready to start maybe ten tons of water from the aftermost casks. And pray ask the bosun to have cablets and the like ready to his hand, in case it should come on to blow – the glass is sinking. I am just going to show the youngsters how to find whether the chase is gaining or not with a sextant and then I shall turn in for a while.’
It was as well that he did, for with the rising of, the moon the wind increased, blowing straight into her round, foolish face and across the growing swell. By the time he came on deck Mowett had already taken in the lower studdingsails, and as the night wore on more and more canvas came off until she was under little more’ than close-reefed fore and main topsails, reefed courses and trysails, yet each time the reefer of the watch cast the log he reported with mounting glee, ‘Six and a half knots, if you please, sir. – Seven knots two fathoms.
Almost eight knots. – Eight knots and three fathoms. -Nine knots. – Ten knots! Oh sir, she’s doing ten knots!’
With the courses reefed Jack could see his quarry from the quarterdeck, see her plain in the bright moon, for though the wind was in the west, backing a little south, there were few clouds in the sky, and those few were thin racing diaphanous veils, no more. The sea, though not yet really heavy – short and choppy rather than Atlantic-rough
– had a torn white surface, and the Spartan showed up strangely black, even when the moon was well down the western sky and far astern. She had much the same sail as the Surprise, and though twice she tried a foretopgallant, each time she took it in.
From time to time Jack took the wheel. At this kind of speed the complex vibrations reaching him through the spokes, the heave of the wheel itself, and the creak of the raw-hide tiller-ropes told him a great deal about the ship:
whether she was being overpressed or whether she would bear a reef shaking out, even an inner jib hauled half way up. He spoke little to the succession of officers who took the watch, Maitland, Honey and the master, yet even so the night seemed short. At first dawn he took his first breakfast: the barometer had continued its steady fall and although this could not yet be called a hard gale it was certainly a stiff one, and likely to grow stiffer; he decided to have his cablets sent up to the mastheads in good time, as soon as hammocks were piped up and he had both watches on deck.
‘I beg pardon, sir, said Mowett in the doorway, ‘but the privateer has taken a leaf out of our book and she has sent hawsers aloft.’
‘Has she?’ cried Jack. ‘Oh, the wicked dog. Come, have a cup of coffee to keep your spirits up, Mowett; then we shall go on deck, where virtue spooms before the goddam gale, and our heaving wishes will help to fill the sail, ha, ha, ha! That is Dryden, you know.’
On deck he found that the privateer had indeed forestalled him in fortifying her masts and was now outstripping him in speed. With her full topsails she was already making something like eleven knots or even more to the Surprise’s ten, and she was throwing a spectacular bow-wave as she did so, clearly to be seen some three miles away. ‘All hands,’ called Jack, and down below came the cry ‘Rouse out, you sleepers. Rise and shine, there, rise and shine. Heave ho, heave ho, lash up and stow.’
This sending up of hawsers and cablets was a simple, even an obvious idea, and Jack had often wondered why so very few commanders resorted to it in heavy weather; but it was also time-consuming, and before the very powerful extra supports were made fast and heaved taut aboard the Surprise the Spartan had gained horribly. She was now hull-down except on the top of the roll, tearing along under an extraordinary press of sail. ‘If a banker crossed her hawse at this moment,’ reflected Jack, with his glass trained on her,
‘she would sheer clean through.’
He sent the hands to breakfast watch by watch and began cautiously packing on, sail by sail. The ship’s
speed mounted; the whole sound, the whole vast chord of her motion changed, rising through two whole tones; and out of the corner of his busy eye he noticed all the reefers and many of the larboard watch along the weather rail and gangway, eating their biscuit and grinning with delight at the flying, swooping speed.
But he also noticed, and this was much more to the immediate point, that the wind was strengthening and backing farther still. This continued throughout the forenoon watch, and as the gale became more distinctly a south-wester so it brought racing cloud low across the sea. The dawn itself had been grey, but now really thick and dirty weather threatened, and although the Surprise had regained one of her lost miles by the end of the watch -she was indeed the faster ship in a heavy sea – Jack was very much afraid that if he did not come up with the Spartan before nightfall he would lose her in the murk.
Furthermore, as the wind backed so it blew in the same direction as the growing swell, and the seas grew heavier by far. Both wind and swell were right aft by the time the gunroom sat down to dinner with their guests, Captain Aubrey and Mr Midshipman Howard, and the ship was pitching through forty-one degrees. All those present had known a good deal worse far south of the Horn, but even so it took away from the splendour of the feast. The gunroom had meant to regale their Captain on fresh turtle to begin with and then a variety of other delights, but the early extinction of the galley fires, put out as soon as the men’s salt beef had been boiled, had reduced them to a cold, or sometimes luke-warm, collation; however, it included soused pig’s face, one of Jack’s favourite dishes, and treacle pudding, which he always said ate better if it did not scald your gullet.
‘You were speaking of the miseries of authors,’ said Stephen across the table to Martin,
‘but neither of us thought to mention poor Adanson. Do you know, sir,’ -addressing himself to Jack – ‘that Michael Adanson, the
ingenious author of the Families naturelles des Plantes, to which we all of us owe so much, submitted twenty-seven large manuscript volumes relating to the natural classification of all known beings and substances, together with a hundred and fifty – I repeat, a hundred and fifty – others containing forty thousand species arranged alphabetically, and a completely separate vocabulary containing two hundred thousand words, and they explained, as well as detached memoirs and forty thousand figures and thirty thousand specimens of the three kingdoms of nature. He presented them, I say, to the Academy of Sciences in Paris, and they were received with the utmost applause and respect. Yet when this great man, after whom Linnaeus himself named the baobab tree Adansonia digitata, was invited to become a member of the Institute a little before I had the honour of addressing it, he did not possess a whole shirt nor yet an untorn pair of breeches in which he could attend, still less a coat, God rest his soul.’
‘That was very bad, I am sure,’ said Jack.
‘And I might have remembered Robert Heron,’ said Martin, ‘the author of The Comforts of life, which he composed in Newgate, and many another more learned work. I wrote out his appeal to the Literary Fund, his hand being then too weak, and in it he truthfully stated that he worked from twelve to sixteen hours a day. When the physicians examined him they found him totally incapacitated by what they termed the indiscreet exertion of his mind in protracted and incessant literary labours
Jack’s attention was, as to three parts, elsewhere, for the altered motion of the deck under his feet and the wine in his glass told him that the wind was backing farther still, backing fast with some nasty flaws and gusts; several of the miseries and calamities of authors therefore escaped him, but he returned in time to hear Stephen say, ‘Smollett observed that had his friends told him what to expect in the capacity of an author “I should in all probability have spared
myself the incredible labour and chagrin that I have undergone.”‘
‘Think of Chatterton,’ cried Martin.
‘Nay, think of Ovid on the dank and fetid shores of the old cold Black Sea: Omnia perdidimus, tantummodo vita relicta est, Praebeat Ut sensum materiamque mali.’