‘I believe there is just time to have a look,’ said Jack. ‘Stephen, be so kind as to entertain Blyth and Dick Richardson for a moment if they should come before I am down.’
He tossed his coat on to a chair, seized his telescope and made for the door: opening it he found himself face to face with his guests. ‘Forgive me for two or three minutes, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I am just going aloft to see what I can make of this sail.’
‘May I come too, sir?’ asked Richardson.
‘Of course,’ said Jack. On deck he hailed the lookout, telling him to move down out of the way; and while Richardson was shedding coat and waistcoat he sprang into the shrouds and so up and up into the top, where the lookout had just arrived. ‘Oh Lord, sir,’
he said, ‘how I hope I was right.’ ‘I hope so too, Jevons,’ said Jack: he grasped the windward topmast shrouds while Richardson took those to the lee, and very soon they were at the masthead, the look-out post, standing on the crosstrees and breathing a little quicker in the heat; and with one arm round the topgallantmast Jack swept an arc of the western horizon. ‘Where away, Jevons?’ he called. ‘Between
one and two points on the bow, your honour,’ came the anxious reply. ‘It came and went, like.’ He looked again, hard and steady: sea, sea and nothing more. ‘What do you make of it, Dick?’ he asked, passing the glass.
‘Nothing, sir. No. Nothing, I am afraid,’ said Richardson at last, most reluctantly.
The Diane was one of the comparatively few ships that had royal masts; they allowed her to set true royals and even skysails above them on occasion; and these royal masts rose above the topgallant, being secured by jack-crosstrees high above, by a pair of shrouds and of course by stays. But the Diane’s main royal mast was not six inches across at the thickest, while the topgallant itself was not much more, its shrouds and stays correspondingly frail; and Captain Aubrey weighed at least seventeen stone.
‘Oh, sir,’ cried Richardson, seeing him grasp the topgallant shrouds with his powerful hand. ‘I will jump up in no time at ail. Please may I have the glass?’
‘Nonsense,’ said Jack.
‘Sir, with respect, I am only just nine stone.’
‘Bah,’ said Jack, already clear of the crosstrees. ‘Keep still. You will wring the mast, leaping about like a goddam baboon.’
Richardson said, ‘Oh sir,’ again, then fairly clasped his hands in prayer as he saw Jack’s massive form mount the meagre spider’s web. The leverage of that revered bulk on so great a length of slender mast with the ship rolling fifteen degrees and pitching somewhere near five hardly bore thinking about, and he had put his hand on the topgallant-cap for signs of movement or yielding when Jack, firmly perched up there, one arm hooked into the royal shrouds, called, ‘I have them, by God. I have them. But only proas. Three sail of proas, standing south.’
They reached the deck by the backstays, gravity lending them wings or the equivalent. ‘I am very sorry to have kept you waiting, Mr Blyth,’ said Jack to the purser,
‘and I am very sorry not to bring you good news: they were only proas.’
‘Only proas. Ruined his Sabbath nankeens to see them, and
delayed the fucking poached eggs in red wine till they was fucking grape-shot in horse-piss,’ said Killick to his mate, his harsh, shrewish voice perfectly audible in the cabin.
‘As far as I could make out,’ continued Jack, ‘they were on a bowline, so perhaps our courses may converge.’
Converge they did, and with surprising rapidity: at pudding-time the word came down that they were hull-up from the deck; and when the dinner-party moved up to drink their coffee under the awning in the open air, the proas, three of them, were within gunshot – remarkably large craft, and with their outriggers remarkably stiff and fast, sailing on a wind. They were crammed with men.
‘There is not much doubt of their calling,’ observed Mr Blyth. ‘All they lack is the Jolly Roger.
‘Perhaps their presence explains the emptiness of these waters,’ said Stephen.
‘Perhaps they have swept the ocean clean.’
‘Like pike in a stew,’ said Richardson.
In his glass Jack could see their chief, a little wiry man with a green turban, high in the rigging and staring at the Diane under a shading hand. He saw him shake his
turbaned head, and a minute later the proas hauled their wind, skimming away at thirteen or even fourteen knots on the moderate breeze.
Divisions, Articles, plum-duff, proas had marked that Sunday; but there was still another event to set the day apart. As the sun went down into the sea, a great red-golden ball, so into the eastern sky there rose the moon, a great golden-yellow ball, as full as a moon could be. It was not a rare phenomenon; indeed it was a very usual one; yet this time, for purity of sky, the particular degree of humidity and no doubt a host of less obvious, rarely coinciding factors, it had an extraordinary perfection, and all hands, even the ship’s boys and the loquacious, thick-skinned Old Buggers, watched it in silence. All hands, including the Diane’s captain and most of his officers, held it to be an omen; but there was no agreement about what it foretold until the next day, when they sailed westward, passing the False Natunas within a quarter of a
mile. There was no flag, no flag whatsoever; but on the conspicuous rock, at the very top of its white streak, sat a large black bird, a cormorant with its black wings open and dangling.
It was in vain that Stephen asserted that a cormorant’s presence was perfectly natural – they were usual in the southern parts of Asia – the Chinese had tamed them these many ages past. Everyone knew from that moment on that there was no chance of a meeting at this rendezvous; and although they looked out most dutifully that night and the next day, no one was much surprised when their eastward passage, their last, proved as fruitless as the first.
Jack sailed along the chosen parallel until the end of the chosen time for conscience sake, and then, sad at heart, he gave the order to steer south-west, following the course he and the master, working throughout the afternoon on all the available charts, all Dalrymple’s and Muffitt’s notes and observations, had plotted as the best for Java. Sad at heart and angry too, or rather deeply vexed: he and his clerk had been making their usual readings of temperature, salinity and so on for Humboldt before sunset; he had all his tubes, pots and instruments by his open book in the cabin, but before recording the figures he had retired to the quarter-gallery, his privy. Sitting there he heard a crash and a confused tumbling, and when he came out he found that Stephen had fallen off the chair from which he was trying to catch a spider under the skylight and had not only flung sea-water all over his records but had broken an improbable number of instruments –
hygrometers, seven different kinds of thermometer, Crompton’s device for measuring specific gravity: practically everything made of glass. He had also contrived to shatter the hanging barometer and tear down a sword-rack: all this in a very moderate sea.
By the time the cabin was in order darkness was at hand, and after quarters Jack climbed into the maintop to watch the rising of the moon; but for once the eastern sky was barred, promising rain by night, and he sat there on the folded studdingsails, feeling tired and discouraged. It had been a distinct
effort heaving himself aloft and he had felt his weight: going much higher on Sunday he had not been aware of it at all. ‘Is this age?’ he wondered. ‘God help us, what a prospect.’ For a while he leant back against the sailcloth watching the stars right overhead and the truck of the mainmast weaving among them; without giving it any conscious attention he also heard the quiet steady working of the ship, the occasional orders, the
mustering of the watch: Richardson had taken over; Warren would have the middle and Elliott the morning watch. He found that he must have dropped off, for two bells woke him:
‘This will never do,’ he said, stretching and looking at the sky
– the moon was well up now, slightly out of shape and veiled by low cloud; the wind was much the same, but it was likely to bring up showers and thick weather.
In the cabin he found that Stephen had retired to the lower deck, so he called for toasted cheese and a long, heavily lemoned glass of grog, wrote a note in which Captain Aubrey presented his compliments to Mr Fox and had the honour of informing His Excellency that the ship was now heading for Java; that wind and weather permitting she might reach Batavia on Friday; and that it might be thought proper for the mission’s servants to begin packing tomorrow, as it was not contemplated that the Diane should make any prolonged stay in harbour, sent it round by the duty-midshipman, and turned in early.