‘Certainly, I have known him make his way through a sheaf of hand-written sheets seen for the very first time in a very creditable manner. What joy. Allow me to help you to Some of this capital-smelling cheese.’
4 ‘If you would be so good. What do you tell me of tomorrow’s weather? Is it likely to be suitable?’
‘I will swear to nothing, but Harding and the master, who both know Ushant well, are of the same opinion: unless it grows so thick that we cannot see our music, why then, tomorrow’
– touching wood – ‘should be all that a reasonable being could ask.’
And indeed the four reasonable beings could hardly have been better served. There was still a heavy swell from the south-west, and urged on by the making tide it broke high, white and dreadful on the islands and reefs of the Saints and the mainland cliffs, but the wind had dropped to no more than a topgallant breeze, and although Jack’s fog had made its infant appearance in the form of a veiling mist there was no question of its blurring even a hemidemisemiquaver. Yet when Jack and Stephen met for breakfast each looked at the other with a considering eye and Stephen said, ‘Melancholy, brother? Hipped?’
‘Somewhat,’ said Jack. ‘I do not much like the behaviour of the glass’ – pointing to an elegant barometer in brass gimbals – ‘Nor do I much care for poverty. I cannot afford to keep a table for my officers; I cannot afford to entertain my fellow-captains in the traditional service fashion; and what is more I cannot afford to buy extra powder to eke out our miserable allowance. Today, to the astonishment of one and all, we shall beat to quarters and carry out the great-gun exercise: but your only worthwhile exercise is with the true discharge, the furious recoil, the cloud of smoke; and even on this perfect day we can afford only two real broadsides for each battery. But Stephen, you are in much the same case, I believe? Haunted by the blue devils? Glum?’
‘It is nothing that coffee and perhaps a very lightly boiled egg will not bear away,’ said Stephen. ‘Yet I am saddened by the reflection that although age has not yet seriously decayed my powers in other directions, or so I flatter myself, I have real difficulty in
grasping the geography of this Behemoth of a vessel. The sick-bay I know perfectly well, the wardroom, and this series of booths and cabins; but when I walk about at haphazard, as I was doing when I chanced upon young Geoghegan, I grow strangely bemused, scarcely knowing front from back; whereas in the dear Surprise-‘
‘Bless her.’
‘Bless her by all means – I knew every recess, however remote, and of course all the people. Here I am something of a stranger in a largely unknown city. I do not find my not inconsiderable maritime knowledge increases; and I am by no means sure that the bold figure of speech I heard directed by an aged quartermaster at a ship’s boy, “Thou wilt never shit a seaman’s turd” may not be applied to me.’
‘Never in life,’ cried Jack. ‘You are the most seamanlike ship’s surgeon I have ever known.
Never in life. Killick. Killick, there. Light along that God-damned coffee, for Heaven’s sake.’
‘Which…’ began Killick: but seeing the Captain’s face he closed his mouth and the door.
‘Not at all, Stephen. You are to consider, you have not been aboard very long, and for most of the last commission you were either looking after the sick or travelling about the African wilderness collecting rarities, except when you were sick yourself, very sick, very nearly dead, or so weak as to be able to do no more than creep about the poop Killick
‘Which it’s coming, ain’t it?’ cried Killick from behind his loaded tray, ‘with a two-minute this morning’s egg for his Honour.’
Breakfast did indeed sweep away a good deal of superficial melancholy, and after it they walked up the poop, watching the sun rise, round and orange, over France: what mist there was (and it was thickening) did not yet hide all the ships of the inshore squadron and Jack pointed them out in the stations where Fanshawe (his senior by six months and therefore in command) had placed them. ‘There is Ramillies, right in the middle of the Iroise Passage,’ he said, nodding towards a rosy haze of topsails almost due north. ‘And if you were to jump up to the masthead and clear the haze
away you would see one of the frigates, probably Phoebe, guarding the way out of the Passage du Four: a good many vessels try to get into Brest from the north that way. And between the frigate and Ramillies you can make out a cutter even now, Fox, I believe, lying there to pass on signals.’ He ran through the meagre tale of ships posted off most of the important means of access, just as the Bellona was posted within gunshot of the Raz de Sein; and among other things
he showed him the general position of the uncharted or badly charted rock upon which HMS Magnificent struck in the year four, on Lady Day in the year four – a total loss, ‘but her people were all saved by the boats of the squadron, mostly from the Impétueux, as I recall … Mr Harding,’ he said to his hovering first lieutenant, ‘I believe you wish to speak to me?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Harding, stepping forward and taking off his hat. ‘I beg pardon for interrupting you, sir, but the Nimble is finding it hard to stem the tide, and if we want any effect of surprise among the people, perhaps we might call for the targets right away.’
‘Make it so, Mr Harding, make it so.’ And to Stephen, ‘How I ramble on.’
He rambled no longer. The Nimble had been anxiously watching the Bellona’s upper rigging, and as soon as the signals broke out her boats shoved off, towing their targets.
‘We will beat to quarters, Mr Harding, if you please,’ said Jack, and almost instantly the drum volleyed and thundered. Some few of the newer, heavier Bellonas had not caught the signs of the coming exercise – the gunner’s very particular attention to his charges, the captains of the gun-crews’ sly checking of tackles, tackle-falls, trucks, ladles, rammers, sponges, worms, and their absent-minded easing of the tompions – and those few were properly amazed by the din. But by now all except the very, very stupid landsmen at least knew their action-stations, and they ran to them; while the very few exceptions were kindly guided by the bosun’s mates.
Dr Maturin’s station was of course the after-cockpit, and here he stood with his assistants, William Smith and Alexander Macaulay, together with a few unsatisfactory makeshift loblolly-boys – farrier’s apprentices or out-of-work slaughterhouse hands – and in this space, bare except for instrument-racks and the chests of the midshipmen (its usual inhabitants) heaved together and lashed to form an operating-table, they stood silently listening.
The three foremost upper-deck starboard eighteen-pounders bore on the leading target almost at the same moment and fired with a triple crash that made the hanging lanterns tremble: they were instantly followed by the huge, much deeper voices of the gundeck thirty-two pounders, and for the next five minutes the entire hull was filled with a great bellowing din, so confused that no separate discharge other than those directly overhead could be distinguished:
at the same time powder smoke came below, wafting its heady smell about them. Then all at once a deafened silence, followed by the rumble of guns being housed.
‘Sir,’ cried William Smith, much too loud, ‘I saw a very curious thing: whenever there was a split second between the explosions just over us, each produced a different tremor in the smoke. You could distinctly see it against the lit edge
of the lantern.’ He spoke with something of the excitement of battle; and with much the same freedom Macaulay said that he did hope it had been a satisfactory exercise – there was such an agreeable feeling in the ship when they had done well. Before Stephen could reply the first of the casualties came down the after-hatch, carried by his team-mates, a young Marine who had been stationed at one of the after thirty-two-pounders to help run her up – she weighed about three tons – and who had misjudged the speed and force of the recoil.
‘A very moderate tourniquet for twenty minutes, Mr Macaulay, if you please,’ said Stephen, sewing up the gash, ‘and a spica bandage; but by no means tight.’
Macaulay had been dresser to a famous London surgeon and his bandages were marvels of regularity, the admiration of all the seamen; but regularity was often cousin to constraint, itself close kin to gangrene.
In the early days of a commission, when many of the pressed men were still sad lobcocks, without discernment or sea-legs, it was usual for these exercises to cause a fair amount of damage – so much so that when Stephen returned to the quarterdeck Jack asked, ‘What was the butcher’s bill this time?’