The general roar of honest mirth that followed this might account for the amusement in the next division, the fore-topmen, the youngest, brightest, most highly decorated members of the ship’s company, who were led by Mr Oakes. Although he was a plain, thick-faced youth he was unusually popular; he was often drunk, always jolly, with a great flow of animal spirits; he never tyrannized nor did he report any sinner; and although he was no great seaman in the navigational or scientific way he would run up to the iron crosstrees with the best of them and there hang upside down.
‘And then another wonderful thing about Easter Island,’ said Owen, ‘is what they call moles.’
‘There is nothing wonderful about moles,’ said Philips.
‘Pipe off, Philips,’ said Stephen. ‘Go on, Owen.’
‘Is what they call moles,’ said Owen, rather more distinctly than before. ‘And these here moles is platforms built on the slopes of hills, with the walls on the seaward side maybe three hundred foot long and thirty foot high, all made of squared stone sometimes six foot long. And on the platforms there are huge great images carved out of grey rock and brought there to be set up, images of coves as much as twenty-seven foot high and eight across the shoulders. Most of them were thrown down, but some of them were still standing, with great red round stone hats on the top of their heads: and these here hats, because I sat on one with my girl, one that had been thrown down, is four foot six across and four foot four high, measured with my thumb.’
With a certain sense of relief Jack came to the forecastle, where he was received by Mr Bulkeley the bosun and Mr Bentley the carpenter, in their good West-of-England broadcloth coats, grave men, but scarcely graver than the forecastle hands, prime middle-aged seamen who, having taken off their hats to the Captain, smoothed their hair over pates that were sometimes bald on top and whose waist-length pigtails were often eked out with tow. Behind these, in the days when the Surprise was in regular commission, there would have stood the ship’s boys, under government of the master-at-arms; but a privateer had no room for boys, and their place, ludicrously enough, was now taken by two little girls of even less value in fighting the ship, Sarah and Emily Sweeting, Melanesians from the remote Sweeting’s Island, the only survivors of a community wiped out by the smallpox brought by a South Seas whaler. They had been carried aboard by Dr Maturin, and the task of looking after them naturally fell to Jemmy Ducks, the ship’s poulterer, who now whispered to them ‘Toe the line, and make your bob.’
The little girls fixed their bare black toes exactly on a seam in the deck, plucked the sides of their white duck frocks and curtseyed.
‘Sarah and Emily,’ said the Captain, ‘I hope I see you well?’
‘Very well, sir, we thank you,’ they replied, gazing anxiously into his face.
On to the galley, with its coppers shining like the sun, the cheerful cook and his sullen assistant Jack Nastyface, whose name, like Chips for the carpenter or Jemmy Ducks, went with the office. On to the lower deck, where the hammocks swung by night, but empty now, with a candle in each berth and a variety of ornaments and pictures laid out pretty on the seamen’s chests; not a hint of dust, not even a gritting of fine sand underfoot, and the light sloping down through the gratings, such elegant shafts of parallel rays. Jack’s heart lifted somewhat, and they came to the midshipmen’s berth, cabins built up on either
side and reaching as far aft as the gunroom, too small in the days when the frigate carried so many master’s mates, midshipmen and youngsters, too big now that she had only Oakes and Reade, particularly as Martin, the surgeon’s mate, and Adams, the Captain’s clerk, lived and messed in the gunroom, where the purser’s, master’s and Marine officer’s cabins all stood vacant.
They did not look into the gunroom, though it would have borne the severest, most hostile inspection, even the stretchers of the officers’ table having been polished above and below, but went down towards the sick-berth, which Stephen preferred to the traditional bay, airier but far more noisy, a place where affectionate messmates found it easier to make his patients drunk.
‘And another thing that would please you gentlemen,’ said Owen, ‘is the noddies, or terns as some say. They arrive when the stars and the moon are just so, and the people know it to a day; they arrive in thousands and thousands, all screaming, and make their nests on an island just off shore, rising like the Bass Rock, only much more so.’
‘On Norfolk Island there are millions and millions of mutton-birds,’ cried Philips. ‘They come in at dusk, dropping out of the sky and going to their burrows; for they live in burrows. And if you go to the mouth of the burrow and call ke ke ke he answers ke ke ke and pokes his head out. We used to kill twelve or fourteen hundred a night.’
‘You and your mutton-birds,’ began Owen: then he stopped, his ear cocked.
Jack opened the door: Stephen, Martin and Padeen stood up: the invalids assumed a rigid posture.
‘Well, Doctor,’ said the Captain, ‘I hope you find our pumping has answered?’ Ever since Stephen had spoken of the Surprise’s stench below as compared with the Nutmeg’s purity, sea-water had been let into her hold every night and pumped out in the morning, to purify her bilges.
‘Tolerably sweet, sir,’ said Dr Maturin. ‘But it must be confessed that this is not the Nutmeg; and sometimes, when I recall that the ship was originally French, and that the French bury their dead in the ballast, I wonder whether there may not still be something of a charnel-house down there.’
‘Quite impossible. The ballast has been changed again and again: scores of times.’
‘So much the better. Yet even so I should be grateful for another ventilating pump. In this heavy breathless air the patients have a tendency to grow fractious, even to quarrel.’
‘Make it so, Captain Pullings,’ said Jack. ‘And if any hand should presume to quarrel, let his name be entered in the defaulters’ list.’
‘Here, sir,’ said Stephen, ‘are the men I was speaking about: Philips, who knows Norfolk Island well, and Owen, who spent several months among the Easter Islanders.’
‘Ah yes. Well, Philips, how are you coming along?’
‘Wery indifferent, sir, I am sorry to say,’ said Philips in a weak, gasping voice.
‘And Owen, how are you?’
‘I do not complain, sir; but the burning pain is something cruel.’
‘Then why the Devil don’t you keep out of brothels, you damned fool? A man of your age!
Low knocking-shops in Sydney Cove of all places, where the pox is the worst in the world.
Of course you burn. And you are always at it: every goddam port … if your pay were docked for venereals as it is in the regular service you would not have a penny coming to you when we pay off, not a brass farthing.’ Captain Aubrey, still breathing hard, asked the
other patients how they did -they were all much better, thank you, sir – and returning he said to Philips, ‘So you were in Sirius when she was heaved ashore: was there no good holding-ground near the island?’
‘No, sir,’ said Philips, speaking like a Christian now. ‘It was terrible: coral rock everywhere inshore.”
‘It was far worse off of Easter Island, sir: coral rock far offshore too, then no bottom with the deep-sea line; and an almighty surf,’ said Owen, but in an undertone.
‘We could not land on the south side of the island, sir, so we went round to the north-east: and there we were lying to with a light breeze off the shore and all hands fishing for gropers when the Supply brig, who was laying outside of us, hailed Captain Hunt that we was being heaved inshore.
Which was true. It was all hands make sail, and make sail we did; but then the flood set in
– it sets from the north on that side of the island, sir – and what with that and the swell we could not make head against it, not even with the breeze on our quarter. We let go both bowers, but the coral cut their cables directly; we let go the sheet-anchor and the spare and they parted too; and at one bell in the afternoon watch we struck, drove farther over the reef, and cut away our masts. Our captain gave orders to open the after hatchway and stave all the liquor …” All this Philips had delivered with barely a pause; now he drew breath, and in the interval Owen said, ‘On Easter Island, sir . . .’