gone; and with Edwards settled at a desk Jack began from his informal and often cryptic notes: ‘Purser: provisions for nine weeks full, of all species except wine: of that only thirtynine days. Master: one hundred and thirteen tons of water, beef very good, pork sometimes shrinks in the boiling, the rest of the provisions very good. In cutting up provisions, master’s mate, bosun’s mate, captain forecastle, captain tops, and quartermaster. Pretty well supplied with stores; rigging and sails in good order; two pair of main shrouds cut in the eyes. Gunner: eighteen rounds of powder filled: plenty of wads, forty rounds. Carpenter: hull in good state. Knee of the head supported by two cheeks. Masts and yards in good state. Pretty well stored…’
‘That was a very glorious piece, the glorious piece of the world, indeed,’ said Stephen as he and Geoghegan separated outside the wardroom – the purser had already gone forward.
‘So it was, too,’ said Geoghegan. ‘And how I admired the Captain’s double-stopping –
yours too, sir. But I am glad it did not go on. It was perfect like that; and I was afraid that if we started again it might take a great while, and I should miss the last dog.’
‘A particularly amiable creature, I make no doubt.’
‘Oh, sir,’ said Geoghegan, with that delicate kindness the young sometimes reserve for the old, ignorant, and stupid. ‘I should have said watch. The last dog watch, the second of those short ones at the end of the day, you know. When we are going along under a very moderate sail, and there is nothing much to do, no possibility of all hands being called, we reefers whose watch is not on deck often play about aloft. We call it skylarking.’
‘I have heard of it: indeed, I have not infrequently seen the phenomenon. Yet it is not invariably confined to the young and light-built. Captain Aubrey and Admiral Mitchel once raced to the topmost point of a vessel whose name escapes me, for a dozen of champagne.’
‘Heavens, sir! Pray who won?’
‘Faith, the Admiral said he did: and who is to contradict an admiral, a senior? Superiores priores, you know.’
‘Yes, indeed, sir. But if you will excuse me now, sir, I must go below and stow my pipe and change my clothes. Old Dormer and I are to see which can touch the maintopgallant truck first.’
Geoghegan ran down the ladder and in the lightness of his heart he kicked both his best silver-buckled shoes far into the cockpit. Callaghan was the only other person in the berth: he was writing a letter by the light of a purser’s dip, writing with close concentration to his young woman; but he looked up and asked how dinner in the cabin had gone. ‘Oh,
very well indeed, once I got started: codlings, of course, then a pair of huge enormous great prodigious fowls, capons, I think, and the Doctor kept carving me glorious great bits and passing sausages. I could not in decency say no. And then there was an apple pie the bigness of a moderate wheel:
and cheese, of course.’
‘What did you drink?’
‘Sherry-wine, claret, and then port.’ During his discourse Geoghegan had taken off and folded away all his good clothes, and now he was in a striped Guernsey shirt and old sailcloth trousers.
‘Well, I hope you did not eat too much. You must take it easy at first. Many a reefer have I known throw up his dinner merely from topping it the nimble ape among the royals and topgallants too soon after a meal.’
The ships that blockaded Brest off Ushant or nearer inshore in the bay itself were so very often blown and battered by strong south-westers, often bringing rain, or by north and north-east winds which might allow the enemy to come out, therefore calling for the closest attention, that the ship’s boys and young gentlemen, to say nothing of the more athletic officers, had little chance of skylarking; and when it came they made the most of it.
Stephen Maturin, though very much a spectator aboard, and very much given to standing on the poop or quarterdeck of a healthy ship (in a sickly one he spent most of his time below) and there watching the various manoeuvres or, in times of relative idleness, the dancing on the forecastle and the skylarking, had rarely seen so numerous a gathering.
Right forward there was a fiddler and a man with a tabor playing hornpipes for a close-packed group on the forecastle, where the more expert dancers carried out some very elaborate steps indeed,
to the delight of their friends, who clapped hands in time; but what caught his eye more immediately was the number of boys. The Bellona carried fifty or more, officers’
servants,
apprentices to the gunner, bo’sun, carpenter or the like, arM plain ship’s boys, and nearly all of them were gathered either along the larboard gangway leading from the quarterdeck to the forecastle or were already aloft, tearing about among the rigging and sometimes making great swings from one part to another like gibbons, high, high above the deck.
Some were racing, some were merely having fun, moving with wonderful ease and certainty. The midshipmen on the other hand – using the term in its widest sense from master’s mate right down to first class volunteer: the ‘young gentlemen’ as a whole – kept to the starboard side, either on the quarterdeck itself, which was their right, or along the starboard gangway; and they too were spending much of their time high in the air apparently weightless except when they slid with enormous speed down a stay, landing with a thump. While Stephen stood there, a fat midshipman called Dormer, the boy that Geoghegan was to race, came down the main-topgallant backstay into the mainchains with such force that his knees buckled under him. Stephen helped him over the hammock-netting on to the deck and asked whether the friction did not scorch his hands. ‘Not much, sir,’ he replied with a pleasant confidence, ‘because now I am a really hardened old salt,
and I check the rush with my feet.’ He showed his palms, and although they were much stained with tar there was no trace of a burn. ‘Now, sir,’ he said, ‘I am going to make the great traverse.’
‘I shall watch you with close attention,’ said Stephen; and he certainly meant to do so. But there were such numbers of boys and young men (the Bellona had about six hundred people aboard) moving in every direction, up, down, side- ways and diagonally, often very fast, that he soon lost sight of Dormer – all the sooner since an ambiguous tern came’
over, together with two gannets.
Having fixed the tern (an immature Sandwich in a sad state of moult) he returned to his contemplation of the skylarkers, and after a while his earlier impression was confirmed: although the ship’s boys kept to the larboard and the young gentlemen to the starboard, and although there
was virtually no direct communication between them, there was nevertheless a tacit rivalry. Some uncommonly agile boy, often the bo’sun’s servant, would perform an exceptional – and exceedingly dangerous – feat; and with nothing but looks of intelligence between the more expert reefers, their champion would do the same or better. He watched this for some time and quite suddenly he recognized young Geoghegan in the striped-Guernsey-shirted boy who was obviously doing his utmost to outpace Dormer on his way up the main topmast rigging.
He was clearly less experienced than Dormer, but Dormer had already taken a great deal of exercise, he was fat, and he was tiring fast. They were on opposite sides of the main topmast shrouds, ‘high up where they narrowed to pass through the topgallant crosstrees.
Very near the top, where the main topgallant futtock-shrouds diverged, far from the vertical, Geoghegan leant backwards, one hand whipping out for the futtock, the other for the forward crosstrees; and here, both holds slipping in his haste, he fell: fell almost straight, just brushing the maintop in his fall and striking one of the starboard quarterdeck carronades, not a yard from the officer of the watch.
Stephen had been walking aft to meet Jack as he came from talking to the master by the wheel. At the general cry he turned, and calling out ‘Do not move him’ he ran to Geoghegan hoping that there might not be too much damage
– that taken below with great care he might be recovered. After a moment’s examination he could only report instant death.
Jack picked the boy up and carried him into the great cabin, tears running down his face.
Later that evening they sewed him into his hammock with thirty-two-pound roundshot at his feet and buried him over the side according to the custom of the sea.
The fog increased that night, and Jack spent most of his time on deck, together with Woodbine and Harding, both of them experienced navigators with a fair knowledge of the waters off Brest. The Bellona had lain-to near the Ar Men rock for the brief ceremony and she had now to feel her way across some twenty miles of often dangerous water to a point