‘I cannot possibly afford to run down the latitude,’ he said to Stephen that evening, ‘but at least I derive some comfort from the fact that the island’s peak can be seen from twenty-five leagues away. But it is of no great consequence.’
‘I am sorry you should think it of no consequence,’ said Stephen sadly.
‘I mean from the point of view of water. We are not very short, and even if we do not have the usual downpours under Capricorn, it would only mean going on short allowance for a week or two, provided the south-east trades blow with even half their
usual force. Yet if we can but hit upon the island, why, I should be very happy to put you ashore for an hour or two while the boats make a few voyages. You did say there was plenty of water, did you not?’
‘Certainly I did. Péron, my castaway, fairly revelled in it. He admitted it was a little awkward to come at, but I cannot suppose naval ingenuity likely to be baffled by awkwardness; and I am not master of words to tell you, Jack, the value of an exceedingly remote island to a naturalist, an uninhabited fertile volcanic island covered with a luxuriant vegetation, with no vile rats, dogs, cats, goats, swine, introduced by fools to destroy an Eden, an island untouched; for although Péron spent some time on it, he scarcely left the shore.’
‘Well, I could wish the weather were less thick; but we shall keep the sharpest lookout and reduce sail at night. I have little doubt we shall raise it on Tuesday or Wednesday.’
On Wednesday they did raise it. At first light they were within five miles of that unmistakable peak: a spectacularly successful landfall after five thousand miles of blue-water sailing, even without the uncertainties of chart and chronometer. But most unhappily they were directly to leeward, carried past in the darkness by a brisk westerly breeze and a powerful current setting east, in spite of close-reefed topsails and the keenest looking-out.
‘We shall never fetch it, sir,’ said the master. ‘It is right in the wind’s eye, and with this current we could ply all day and never get any nearer. I will make my affidavit it is laid down
at least a degree too far west even in the Company’s chart.’
‘Have you checked your water again, Mr Warren?’ asked Jack, leaning on the taffrail and gazing at the distant cone, as clear as could be in the dying breeze.
‘Yes, sir. Even without rain under the tropic I reckon we should do without much short allowance; and whoever passed under the tropic line without a deluge?’
‘How I shall ever tell the Doctor I do not know,’ said Jack. ‘He was so set upon it.’
‘So he was, poor gentleman,’ said the master, shaking his head. ‘But haste commands all; and perhaps all these mollymawks and albatrosses will be some comfort to him. I never saw so many all together. There’s a whale-bird. Two nellies; and a stink-pot.’
‘Stephen,’ said Jack, ‘I am very sorry to tell you I have made a cock of your island. It lies astern, directly to windward of us. We cannot beat back with this breeze and current and if we were to lie to waiting for the wind to change we should lose days that we cannot afford to lose; we must pick up the south-east trades as soon as possible, if we are to reach Pulo Prabang with the tail of the monsoon.’
‘Never grieve, soul,’ said Stephen. ‘We shall go there at our leisure in the Surprise once that Buonaparte has been knocked on the head. In the meantime I shall look at the master’s birds:
I should never have expected to see a stink-pot so far from the Cape.’
The Diane spread her royals for the first time since she reached this hemisphere and stood away to the north-east, studdingsails aloft and alow; but all day long the peak of Amsterdam Island remained in sight, a small cloud marking its top.
It had gone in the morning, however, and later in the day the sea-birds vanished with it. Jack, making his observations for Humboldt, noted so unusual a change of
temperature at the surface and at ten fathoms that he checked his readings twice before calling them out to Butcher.
A new world: and now that they were thoroughly into it all the old pattern fell into place again; and the ship’s routine, disrupted by the violent, perilous race eastward through sixty degrees of longitude, soon became the natural way of life once more, with its unvarying diet, the cleaning of decks before full daylight, the frequent call for sweepers throughout the day, the piping of all hands to witness punishment on Wednesdays (reprimand or deprivation of grog; no flogging so far in this ocean), the ritual washing of clothes and the hoisting of clothes-lines on Mondays and Fridays, quarters every weekday with a certain amount of live firing still, mustering by divisions on Sunday, followed sometimes by the reading of the Articles of War alone if the inspection had taken longer than usual, but more often by church. It was a comparatively easy life for those who were used to it, but literally and figuratively it was desperately slow: no more tearing along with everything on the point of carry away, the sea creaming along the side, filling the ship with a deep organ-noise, clear beneath the shriek of the harp-taut rigging, no more fifteen knots and better, with the reel almost snatched from the ship’s boy’s hand, no more of the wartime friendliness of shared excitement and danger. Now it was a matter of repairing or replacing everything that had been broken or strained, of painting, scouring and above all sailing the ship north-east in light and variable airs, often contrary, so that jibs and staysails called for perpetual attention; and even when they did reach the south-east trades they were found barely to deserve their name, either for strength or constancy.
Day after day they travelled slowly over a vast disk of sea, perpetually renewed; and when, as the Thane was approaching Capricorn at four knots, Captain Aubrey ended church with the words ‘World without end, amen,’ he might have been speaking of this present voyage: sea, sea, and then more sea, with no more beginning and no more end than the globe itself.
Yet this mild, apparently eternal sameness did leave time for things that had been laid aside or neglected. Jack and Stephen returned to their music, sometimes playing into the
middle watch; Stephen’s Malay increased upon him until he dreamt in the language; and as his duty required Jack resumed the improvement of his midshipmen in navigation, the finer aspects of astronomy and mathematics, seamanship of course, and in these both he and they were tolerably successful. Less so in their weakest points, general knowledge and literacy.
Speaking to young Fleming about his journal he said, ‘Well, it is wrote quite pretty, but I am afraid your father would scarcely be pleased with the style.’ Mr Fleming was an eminent natural philosopher, a fellow member of the Royal Society, renowned for the elegance of his prose. ‘For example, I am not sure that me and my messmates overhauled the burton-tackle is grammar. However, we will leave that. . . What do you know about the last American war?’
‘Not very much, sir, except that the French and Spaniards joined in and were finely served out for doing so.’
‘Very true. Do you know how it began?’
‘Yes, sir. It was about tea, which they did not choose to pay duty on. They called out No reproduction without copulation and tossed it into Boston harbour.’
Jack frowned, considered, and said, ‘Well, in any event they accomplished little or nothing at sea, that bout.’ He passed on to the necessary allowance for dip and refraction to be made in working lunars, matters with which he was deeply familiar; but as he tuned his fiddle that evening he said, ‘Stephen, what was the Americans’ cry in 1775?’
‘No representation, no taxation.’
‘Nothing about copulation?’
‘Nothing at all. At that period the mass of Americans were in favour of copulation.’
‘So it could not have been No reproduction without copulation?’
‘Why, my dear, that is the old natural philosopher’s watchword, as old as Aristotle, and quite erroneous. Do but consider bow the hydra and her kind multiply without any sexual commerce of any sort. Leeuenhoek proved it long ago, but still the more obstinate repeat the cry, bike so many parrots.’
‘Well, be damned to taxation, in any case. Shall we attack the andante?’
Fox too resumed his earlier way of life. A murrain among his remaining livestock put an end to their dining to and fro, since he would not accept invitations that he could not return, but they still played a certain amount of whist and ever since the weather had turned fair, set fair, he made his appearance on the quarterdeck twice a day, walking up and down with his silent companion in the morning and often shooting against Stephen, now a fairly even match, in the afternoon, especially when the sea was smooth and the bottle could be made out a great way off; and he returned to his frequent medical consultations.