‘Heisa, heisa,’
followed by his mates in perfect unison,
‘Heisa, heisa,
Vorsa, vorsa,
Vou, you.
One long pull
More power
Young blood
Ha ha ha hough.’
They sang on a scale unknown to Jack, with intervals he had never heard; and the last line, a falsetto shriek as the blocks clashed together, quite astonished him.
He looked aft, where Stephen would ordinarily be leaning over the taffrail gazing at the wake. No Stephen. ‘I suppose the Doctor has gone below,’ he said. ‘He would have liked that. We might ease off again and ask him to come on deck.’
‘I doubt we might get a short answer,’ said Pullings in a low voice. ‘He is sitting there with so many papers he might be paying off a first-rate, and he roared at Mr Martin just now like a bull.’
As far as devotion was concerned, Nathaniel Martin’s was directed more towards Maturin than Aubrey, and Stephen’s snappishness had quite wounded him – a snappishness that Martin had scarcely known in him before, but that seemed to be growing sharper and more frequent.
There was to be sure some excuse for it on this occasion, since a moderate lee-lurch had sent Martin staggering from one piled chair to another, upsetting and mingling four carefully separated heaps of paper, while the draught he let in spread them over the cabin deck like a whitish carpet,
Their presence arose from the fact that the British government was not alone in wishing to change the state of affairs in the Spanish and even Portuguese possessions in South America: the French hoped to do the same, and well before London’s tentative contacts with the potential rebels in Chile, Peru and elsewhere, the French had carried their much more ambitious (and much more avowable) plans to the verge of action. They had equipped a new frigate that was to cruise upon Allied merchantmen and particularly South Sea whalers while at the same time landing agents, arms and money on the coast of Chile. It was this frigate, the Diane, that Jack Aubrey had cut out from St Martin’s just before she sailed, and in her he had captured all the French agents’ information and instruction, all their correspondents’ views of the various local situations, all the names of French sympathizers and of those whose loyalty had been or could be purchased. All this was encoded according to four separate systems, and it was these systems that Martin had upset, together with their substrata of Maturin’s involved private business – university chairs, annuities, settlements and the like. All the French papers would have to be sorted all over again, ‘then read in clear, digested and committed to memory, with perhaps some of the more forgettable points re-encoded for future reference. Ordinarily the great bulk of
this work would have been done by Sir Joseph’s department, but in this instance both he and Stephen agreed that they should keep the existence of the whole mass of papers to themselves.
Martin retired to the orlop, where by the light of a battlelantern he finished entering the ship’s medical stores in a book and then wrote labels for the bottles and boxes in the medicine-chest, a new, particularly massive affair with two locks.
From these he went on to check their surgical instruments, the grim saws, retractors, artery-hooks, gags, leather-covered chains; and then the more massive substances such as portable soup, stored in flat wooden cases of thirty-six slabs apiece, lime and lemon juice, plaster of Paris for healing broken limbs in
the oriental manner (much favoured now by Dr Maturin), and neat square bales of lint, each marked with the broad arrow. He was turning over the last (already attacked by rats) when Stephen joined him. ‘Everything seems to be in order,’ said Martin, ‘except that I have not been able to find more than this single case-bottle quart of laudanum, instead of all our usual five-gallon carboys.’
‘There is only that one quart,’ said Stephen. ‘I have decided to employ it no more, except in the greatest emergency.’
‘It used to be your panacea,’ observed Martin, his mind drifting away to the builders at home: were they attending to the roof at this moment? He doubted it: he would send a note to Mr Huge by the Plymouth pilot-boat.
‘I am no more infallible than Paracelsus, who used antimony for a great many years,’
replied Maturin. ‘There are grave objections to the frequent exhibition of laudanum, I find.’
‘Yes, yes, of course,’ said Martin, clapping his hand to his forehead. ‘I beg your pardon.’
There were indeed very grave objections. Padeen, Stephen’s Irish servant and loblolly-boy, often in and about the sick-berth and the medical stores, had become deeply addicted to laudanum, the alcoholic tincture of opium. Stephen, late in discovering the fact, had done what he could, but what he could do was not enough; and at the time he was disabled. Padeen deserted the ship when she touched at Leith, and being unable to get his opium by fair means- he was illiterate, barely comprehensible in English, and he knew the substance only by the name of tincture – had taken it by force, breaking into an apothecary’s house by night and tasting till he found it.
This had happened in Edinburgh, far from Stephen’s knowledge until the very end; but all the talent of the Scottish bar could not disguise the fact that a capital offence had been committed or that the big wild Papist at the bar was guilty of it. Padeen was sentenced to death, and it had required all the force of Jack Aubrey’s influence as member for Milford to have the hanging commuted to transportation. Padeen had been sent, with many hundred more, in the next convoy to Botany
Bay; but at least he carried an earnest recommendation from Dr Martin to the surgeon of the ship and the medical officer in the colony and one from Sir Joseph Banks to the Governor of New South Wales.
‘I beg your pardon,’ said Martin again. ‘How my mind came to.
A hail on deck, the distant reverberation of running feet, the perceptible rotation of the deck and the dying away of the complex sound of a ship in motion relieved him from his embarrassment. ‘It is stopping,’ he said.
‘We are lying up,’ said Stephen. ‘Let us go above, having first locked the chest and dowsed the light.’
They climbed quite nimbly up the dim, familiar ladders – seamen in this if in nothing else –
and emerged blinking into the brilliant light of day; and there was the Eddystone a mile to the north-westward, with the mainland rather hazy beyond it and four ships of the line close hauled for the Sound.
‘Are you not amazed, Doctor?’ asked Davidge, the officer of the watch.
‘Certainly,’ said Stephen, looking at the lighthouse with the ring of surf at its foot and the halo of gulls over its head. ‘As noble an erection as could well be conceived.’
‘No, no,’ said Davidge. ‘The decks, the brasswork, the squared yards, all fit for an admiral’s inspection.’
‘Nothing could be neater, or more trim,’ said Stephen; and still gazing at the lighthouse he saw a pilot-cutter, obviously bound for the frigate and obviously receiving signals from her and replying to them.
‘Thank God I have my letters prepared,’ he cried, and ran down to his cabin. By the time he had actually found the letters and brought them on deck, direct hailing had replaced the signals, and he heard the cutter being desired to come under the ship’s lee and to pass up the parcels first.
‘I told you I mean to carry out a chain of observations for Humboldt, did I not?’ said Jack, breaking off his conversation with the pilot. ‘A chain right round to the Pacific. There is an improved dipping-needle in one of those cases, together with
a very delicate hygrometer of his own invention, a better azimuth-compass than anything I possess, and a Geneva cyanograph, as well as spare thermometers graduated by Ramsden. The pilot says they can go into a man’s pocket, with a shove; but I shall not trust them to anything but a whip: in any case there is the post.’
The cutter came alongside, Mr Standish, the frigate’s new purser, beaming up at his friends. ‘Now just you sit there, sir,’ said the pilot, guiding him to a coil of rope, ‘and stay quiet while the valuables are got aboard.’
The mail-bag came first, and Jack, sorting its meagre contents, said, ‘A bundle of letters for you, Doctor, and a parcel, as heavy as one of the girls’ plum-puddings: post paid, I am happy to say.’ This was followed by a number of little cases, Standish’s violin, and an object that looked like a telescope but that was a rolled-up chart showing Humboldt’s maximum and minimum sea-temperatures over a vast stretch of ocean, all placed successively in a net attached to a whip from the yard-arm which gently rose and gently fell to the traditional cry of Two – six, two – six, the nearest thing to a shanty (apart from the bowline-haul) countenanced by the strictly Royal Navy members of the crew.