‘Doctor,’ said Jack, ‘I shall ask Mr Adams to see these men separately and take notes of what they have to say. Now I am going forward to see what your pumping has done about our rats as well as our smell. Colman, the lantern, there.’
In his hurry Padeen dropped the lantern, lit it again, dropped it once more, and was cursed for an unhandy grass-combing lubber in a tone of much greater severity and exasperation than was usual in Captain Aubrey, who left a disapproving silence behind him, and a certain consternation.
Stephen did not discuss the ship’s captain with anyone, nor obviously did he discuss his friend Jack in the gunroom; but he could perfectly well speak of the patient Aubrey with Martin, a man of strong good sense and exceptionally wide reading. Reverting to Latin he said ‘I have rarely, perhaps never, seen such a high degree of irascibility, so continuous and as it were cumulative irritation in this particular subject. It is clear that there has been no good effect from either my enemata or my cholagogue; and this steady and increasing exacerbation makes me fear that this is not an ordinary congestion of the hepatic ducts but some disease acquired in New South Wales.’
In his medical capacity Martin had nothing to do with moral values and he replied ‘When you say disease, do you refer to that which is so usual among seafaring men, high or low?’
‘Not in this case. I put the question directly: had there been any commerce with Venus?
No, said he with surprising vehemence, there had most certainly not, adding a remark that I did not catch. There is something strange here; and it is with real concern that I recall dear Dr Redfern’s account of the various forms of hepatitis he has seen in the colony, sometimes associated with hydatic cysts … he showed me one from a person who had lived entirely on kangaroo and rum, and there was an unparallelled degree of cirrhosis.
But worse than that for our purposes was his case-book showing long-drawn-out histories of general bilious indisposition, melancholy, taedium vitae sometimes reaching mere despair, extreme irascibility: all this with no known agent, though autopsy showed an
enlarged quadrate lobe studded with yellow nodules the size of a pea. He calls it Botany Bay liver, and it is this or some one of the other New Holland diseases that I fear our patient may have caught. The vexation and more than vexation of spirit is certainly present.’
‘It is deeply saddening to see what disease can do to a whole cast of mind, to a settled character,’ said Martin. ‘And sometimes our remedies are just as bad. How it appears to draw in the boundaries of free-will.’
‘The Doctor may say what he likes, Tom,’ said Captain Aubrey, ‘but I think the Surprise smells as sweet as the Nutmeg, or sweeter.’ They were approaching the cable-tier now –
for the Surprise had a cat-walk that allowed uninterrupted progress from the after-platform right forward – the cable-tier where the great ropes lay coiled, together with the hawsers and cablets. These always came aboard sodden, often stinking and covered with slime, there to lie dripping through spaces between the planks down into the hold, but now, since the Surprise had lain at moorings in Sydney Cove or had tied up to bollards, they were warm and dry: Jack remembered luxuriating in their folds when he was young, sleepy from the morning watch and willing to escape from the din of the reefers’ berth.
‘Sweet to be sure, sir,’ said Pullings, ‘but there are still vermin about for all our pumping. I have seen a score since the sick-berth.’ He made a nimble kick at one far-travelled and particularly audacious Norway rat that had come aboard at Sydney and sent it flying over the nearest coil to the lattice bulwark behind. With a shrill screech a figure darted from behind the cables, brushing the rat away.
‘What the Devil are you doing here, boy?’ cried Jack. ‘Did you not hear the drum beat for divisions? Who the Devil are you?’ Then relaxing his iron grip and standing back a little,
‘What is this, Mr Pullings?’
Pullings held up the lantern and said in a neutral voice ‘It is a young woman, I believe, sir.”
‘He is wearing a reefer’s uniform.” Jack took the lantern, and looking even bigger than usual in its light he studied her for a moment: Pullings was obviously right. ‘Who brought you here?’ he asked with cold displeasure.
‘I came of myself, sir,’ said the girl in a trembling voice.
This was utter nonsense. It could be demolished in a minute, but he did not wish to make her lie and lie until she was driven into a corner and forced to bring out the name -obvious enough, in all conscience.
‘Let us carry on, Mr Pullings,’ he said.
‘What, and leave her here?’
‘You heard me, sir. Take the lantern.’
They silently inspected the sail-rooms, the bosun’s, gunner’s, carpenter’s store-rooms, the pitch-room and so returned to the open air, where all hats came off once more and where all faces changed at the sight of Captain Aubrey’s pale severity.
‘We shall not rig church, Captain Pullings,’ he said. ‘The Articles will do very well for this occasion.’
The parade, such as it was, dissolved and the hands moved aft, lining the quarterdeck as far as the companion hatchway and sitting on benches or stools or capstan-bars poised between two match-tubs, or on the belaying-bitts round the mainmast: chairs were placed for the Captain and the officers on the windward side, for the midshipmen and the warrant-officers to the lee.
A sword-rack covered with an ensign and holding the Articles of War stood in front of Captain Aubrey; and all this time the sun shone from a clear sky, the warm air breathed across the deck, slanting from forward with just enough strength to fill her great array of canvas: there was very little sound from the breeze, the rigging or the blocks, and the water only whispered down the side. Norfolk Island, rising and falling on the long even swell beyond the larboard bow, was perceptibly nearer. Nobody spoke.
‘Silence fore and aft,’ called Pullings; and after a moment Jack stood up, opened the thin boards that held the Articles and began: there were thirty-six of them, and nineteen of the offences named carried the death sentence, sometimes qualified by the words ‘or such other punishment as the nature and degree of the offence shall deserve, and the court-martial shall impose’. He read them deliberately, with a powerful voice; and the Articles, already inimical, took on a darker, more threatening tone. When he had finished the silence was still quite as profound, and now there was a greater uneasiness in it.
He closed the boards, looked coldly fore and aft, and said ‘Captain Pullings, we will take in the royals and haul down the flying jib. When they are stowed, hands may be piped to dinner.’
It was a quiet meal, with little or none of the shouting and banging of mess-kids that usually greeted the Sunday plum-duff and the grog; and while it was being eaten Jack walked his quarterdeck as he had so very often walked it before: seventeen paces forward, seventeen paces aft, turning on a ring-bolt long since polished silver by his shoe.
Now of course the half-heard jokes, the covert allusions to Mr Oakes’s weariness, his need for a sustaining diet and so on, were perfectly clear. He turned the situation over and over in his mind; flushes of pure exasperation interrupted his judgment from time to time, but he felt in perfect command of his temper when he went below and sent for the midshipman.
‘Well, Mr Oakes,’ he said, ‘what have you to say?’
‘I have nothing to say, sir,’ replied Oakes, turning his oddly mottled face aside. ‘Nothing at all, and I throw myself on your mercy. Only we hoped – I hoped – you would carry us away from that horrible place. She was so very unhappy.’
‘I am to take it she was a convict?’
‘Yes, sir; but unjustly condemned, I am sure.’
‘You know perfectly well that I have turned away dozens, scores of others.’
‘Yet you let Padeen come aboard, sir,’ said Oakes, and then clasped his hands in a hopeless, stupid attempt at unsaying the words, doing utterly away with them.
‘Get away forward,’ said Jack. ‘I shall take no action, make no decision today, this being Sunday: but you had better pack your chest.’
When he had gone Jack rang for his steward and asked whether the gunroom had finished their dinner. ‘No, sir,’ said Killick. ‘I doubt they are even at their pudding yet.’
‘Then when they have finished – when they have quite finished, mind – I should like to see Captain Pullings. My compliments, and I should like to see Captain Pullings.’