At two bells the idlers were called; the sentinels all round the ship cried ‘All’s well’; the mate of the watch, having heaved the log, reported to Miller, third lieutenant and officer of the watch, ‘Four knots exactly, sir, if you please,’ and this he wrote on the log-board, together with the Bellona’s present course of south-south-west; the hoarser of the carpenter’s mates whispered, ‘Four and half inches in the well, sir,’ into Miller’s ear; and Miller, turning to the Captain and taking off his hat, repeated all this to him in a voice calculated to be heard above the din of hand-pumps, buckets, swabs and holystones of various sizes that were preparing to clean the deck in the first half-lights of the coming day. But before they could begin Jack called, ‘Belay, there,’ and more gently, ‘Mr Miller, we
will wear ship, if you please, and stand east-south-east and a half east. The watch will suffice.’
Jack rarely tacked a line-of-battle ship when he had sea-room to wear her, letting her head fall off from the wind and come right round to the desired bearing: it was slower and less spectacular than coming up into the wind’s eye, crossing through and steadying on the new course, but it called for fewer hands and it preserved both spars and rigging. He now watched the manoeuvre attentively. It was carried out smoothly; not very fast, but smoothly, with no bellowing or damning of eyes, and when the quartermaster at the con, seeing the compass dead on the true bearing, called to the helmsman ‘Thus, thus: very well thus,’ Jack went below, reasonably satisfied, but still low in his spirits: he hated to think of Stephen wandering about there on a hostile shore, among so many more or less trustworthy foreigners.
He sat there, reflecting, while the series of bells that had accompanied his life at sea for so many years continued their unchanging pace, bringing up hammocks with a fine rush of feet at the seventh set of strokes and news of breakfast at the eighth.
Almost the only advantage of being on the Brest blockade was that the victuals were usually fresh and plentiful; and breakfast, perhaps Jack’s favourite meal apart from dinner, was fairly sure of being able to provide capital sausages and bacon, while the hens (and the Bellona was unusually well-found in poultry) being still in something like their native air, gave almost a superfluity of eggs.
Yet this was a lonely breakfast. Obviously, in the nature of things, the captain of a man-ofwar, above all one who could not afford to keep a table (and this was Jack’s case at present) must eat many and many a solitary meal; but for a great while Jack Aubrey had sailed with Stephen Maturin, and now he missed his companion quite severely – a wholly human and often contradictory companion, essentially different from the only other guests he could invite, lieutenants, master’s mates or midshipmen, who were all debarred by custom, and by common prudence, from disagreeing with the skipper on any point whatsoever: and who in any case were not to speak until they had been spoken to.
‘Come in,’ he called.
‘Sir,’ said a midshipman, opening the cabin door, ‘Mr Somers’ compliments and duty, and the Alexandria is in sight.’
‘Thank you, Mr Wetherby. Is she within signalling distance?’
‘Oh, sir, I am sure I cannot tell,’ said Wetherby, aghast
– he was a first voyager – ‘Shall I run up and ask?’
‘Never trouble. I shall be on deck directly.’
‘She might conceivably be bringing us our post,’ reflected Jack. ‘How I should love a fat parcel of letters – news of the girls – word of the village and that reptile Griffiths – and perhaps the Proceedings will be out.’ He had combined his last visit to London but one to criticizing the naval estimates in the Commons as member for Milport and to reading a second paper on the precession of the equinoxes to the Royal Society as a fellow of that august and learned body:
for he was a late-blooming but quite highly esteemed
mathematician, specializing in the problems of celestial navigation. Uncommon mathematical and musical abilities are quite often to be found in men wholly ignorant of the laws of prosody and barely capable of assembling two score words of prose in a passably elegant, coherent and grammatical form. ‘And there might even be an encouraging letter from Lawrence,’ he went on: but the word letter reminded him of the shockingly painful one to the Reverend Mr Geoghegan that he must write out fair – he could scarcely ask his clerk to do so – in order that it should go to the flag as soon as possible: and to change the current of his mind he swallowed the last of his coffee and walked forward along the quarterdeck, all its inhabitants silently moving over to the larboard side as he appeared.
‘Where away?’ he asked.
‘Two points on the starboard bow, sir,’ said Somers, the officer of the watch, and two of the midshipmen exchanged a knowing look, for most of the people could see her perfectly well.
It was fully day now, though the sun was still hidden by cloud low over the distant land, and there was mist over the sea itself, and presently Jack, bringing his good eye to bear with a now habitual twist of his neck, made out the little frigate, her sails whiter than the whiteness between the two ships.
‘She is heading for the Black Rocks,’ said Jack. ‘Has she uttered?’
‘She dipped a topsail, sir,’ said Somers. ‘But that was probably just Captain Nasmyth’s fun.’
‘Give her a waft,’ said Jack, who was much senior to Nasmyth, the frigate’s commander,
‘and throw out Desire to speak you.’
The signal midshipman, an oldster named Callow who had sailed with Jack before, and the yeoman were expecting this and the signal raced up, breaking out directly.
The Alexandria put before the wind, spread studdingsails and began throwing a bow-wave, most creditable in this moderate breeze.
‘Say Dyce: come no higher,’ called Jack. ‘Then Have you any news, any letters?’
A short pause, in which all the telescopes on the Bellona’s quarterdeck focused earnestly upon the frigate: and even before Callow could read out the answer an audible sigh arose from the quicker-minded watchers. ‘No news, sir. No letters. Regret. Repeat regret.’
‘Reply Many thanks: the Lord will provide. Carry on.’
The Alexandria carried on, vanishing entirely within half an hour as their courses diverged, Jack beating up for his usual station at this time of day off Dinant Point, where he might possibly fall in with the Ramillies coming down from St Matthews, or one of the cutters that plied between the squadrons.
But for the time being he was to attend to the young gentlemen. They were gathering there on the quarterdeck behind him, accompanied by the schoolmaster, and although
some were furtively giggling, treading on one another’s toes, most were decently apprehensive.
‘Very well, gentlemen, let us begin,’ said Jack in their direction, and he led the way into the fore-cabin. Here they showed up their day’s workings, which, as there had been no noon observation the day before, were necessarily the product of dead reckoning, and they differed little, except in neatness.
Both Walkinshaw and Jack were perfectly at home with the mathematics of navigation and it was difficult for either to understand how very deeply ignorant it was possible for the young and feather-brained to be, particularly those young men who had spent most of their school-time ashore learning Latin and in some cases Greek and even a little Hebrew
– possibly some French. This occurred to Jack with some force in the silence that followed his commendation of the neat and his giving back the workings; and out of this silence he said to a dwarfish twelve-year-old, the son of one of his former lieutenants, ‘Mr Thomson, what is meant by a sine?’
He glanced round the general blankness and went on,
‘Each of you take a piece of paper and write down what is meant by a sine. Mr Weller’ –
this to a boy who had been to a nautical academy at Wapping – ‘you are whispering to your neighbour. Jump up to the masthead and stay there until you are told to come down.
But before you go, gather the papers and show them to me.’
It was difficult to tell whether the schoolmaster or his pupils felt the more distressed as the Captain looked through the undeniable proof of such very complete ignorance of the first elements. ‘Very well,’ he said at last, ‘we shall have to start again with the ABC. Pass the word for my joiner.’ The joiner appeared, brushing chips from his apron. ‘Hemmings,’ said Jack, ‘run me up a blackboard, will you? A flat dead paint that will take chalk handsomely, and let me have it by this time tomorrow.’ To the youngsters he said, ‘I shall write definitions and draw diagrams, and you will get them by heart.’ He was not in the best of moods, and his absolute determination, together with his bulk and his immense authority on board, was singularly impressive. They filed out in silence, looking grave.