Читать книгу Master and Commander - Patrick O’Brian - Страница 10

They sat at a round table in a bow window that protruded from the back of the inn high above the water, yet so close to it that they had tossed the oyster-shells back into their native element with no more than a flick of the wrist: and from the unloading tartan a hundred and fifty feet below them there arose the mingled scents of Stockholm tar, cordage, sail-cloth and Chian turpentine.

‘Allow me to press you to a trifle of this ragoo’d mutton, sir,’ said Jack.

‘Well, if you insist,’ said Stephen Maturin. ‘It is so very good.’

‘It is one of the things the Crown does well,’ said Jack. ‘Though it is hardly decent in me to say so. Yet I had ordered duck pie, alamode beef and soused hog’s face as well, apart from the kickshaws. No doubt the fellow misunderstood. Heaven knows what is in that dish by you, but it is certainly not hog’s face. I said, visage de porco, many times over; and he nodded like a China mandarin. It is provoking, you know, when one desires them to prepare five dishes, cinco platos, explaining carefully in Spanish, only to find there are but three, and two of those the wrong ones. I am ashamed of having nothing better to offer you, but it was not from want of good will, I do assure you.’

‘I have not eaten so well for many a day, nor’ – with a bow – ‘in such pleasant company, upon my word,’ said Stephen Maturin. ‘Might it not be that the difficulty arose from your own particular care – from your explaining in Spanish, in Castilian Spanish?’

‘Why,’ said Jack, filling their glasses and smiling through his wine at the sun, ‘it seemed to me that in speaking to Spaniards, it was reasonable to use what Spanish I could muster.’

‘You were forgetting, of course, that Catalan is the language they speak in these islands.’

‘What is Catalan?’ ‘Why, the language of Catalonia – of the islands, of the whole of the Mediterranean coast down to Alicante and beyond. Of Barcelona. Of Lerida. All the richest part of the peninsula.’

‘You astonish me. I had no notion of it. Another language, sir? But I dare say it is much the same thing – a putain, as they say in France?’

‘Oh no, nothing of the kind – not like at all. A far finer language. More learned, more literary. Much nearer the Latin. And by the by, I believe the word is patois, sir, if you will allow me.’

‘Patois – just so. Yet I swear the other is a word: I learnt it somewhere,’ said Jack. ‘But I must not play the scholar with you, sir, I find. Pray, is it very different to the ear, the unlearned ear?’

‘As different as Italian and Portuguese. Mutually incomprehensible – they sound entirely unlike. The intonation of each is in an utterly different key. As unlike as Gluck and Mozart. This excellent dish by me, for instance (and I see that they did their best to follow your orders), is jabalí in Spanish, whereas in Catalan it is senglar.’

‘Is it swine’s flesh?’

‘Wild boar. Allow me…’

‘You are very good. May I trouble you for the salt? It is capital eating, to be sure; but I should never have guessed it was swine’s flesh. What are these well-tasting soft dark things?’

‘There you pose me. They are bolets in Catalan: but what they are called in English I cannot tell. They probably have no name – no country name, I mean, though the naturalist will always recognize them in the boletus edulis of Linnaeus.’

‘How…?’ began Jack, looking at Stephen Maturin with candid affection. He had eaten two or three pounds of mutton, and the boar on top of the sheep brought out all his benevolence. ‘How…?’But finding that he was on the edge of questioning a guest he filled up the space with a cough and rang the bell for the waiter, gathering the empty decanters over to his side of the table.

The question was in the air, however, and only a most repulsive or indeed a morose reserve would have ignored it. ‘I was brought up in these parts,’ observed Stephen Maturin. ‘I spent a great part of my young days with my uncle in Barcelona or with my grandmother in the country behind Lerida – indeed, I must have spent more time in Catalonia than I did in Ireland; and when first I went home to attend the university I carried out my mathematical exercises in Catalan, for the figures came more naturally to my mind.’

‘So you speak it like a native, sir, I am sure,’ said Jack. ‘What a capital thing. That is what I call making a good use of one’s childhood. I wish I could say as much.’

‘No, no,’ said Stephen, shaking his head. ‘I made a very poor use of my time indeed: I did come to a tolerable acquaintance with the birds – a very rich country in raptores, sir – and the reptiles; but the insects, apart from the lepidoptera, and the plants – what deserts of gross sterile brutish ignorance! It was not until I had been some years in Ireland and had written my little work on the phanerogams of Upper Ossory that I came to understand how monstrously I had wasted my time. A vast tract of country to all intents and purposes untouched since Willughby and Ray passed through towards the end of the last age. The King of Spain invited Linnaeus to come, with liberty of conscience, as no doubt you remember; but he declined: I had had all these unexplored riches at my command, and I had ignored them. Think what Pallas, think what the learned Solander, or the Gmelins, old and young, would have accomplished! That was why I fastened upon the first opportunity that offered and agreed to accompany old Mr Browne: it is true that Minorca is not the mainland, but then, on the other hand, so great an area of calcareous rock has its particular flora, and all that flows from that interesting state.’

‘Mr Brown of the dockyard? The naval officer? I know him well,’ cried Jack. ‘An excellent companion – loves to sing a round – writes a charming little tune.’

‘No. My patient died at sea and we buried him up there by St Philip’s: poor fellow, he was in the last stages of phthisis. I had hoped to get him here – a change of air and regimen can work wonders in these cases – but when Mr Florey and I opened his body we found so great a … In short, we found that his advisers (and they were the best in Dublin) had been altogether too sanguine.’

‘You cut him up?’ cried Jack, leaning back from his plate.

‘Yes: we thought it proper, to satisfy his friends. Though upon my word they seem wonderfully little concerned. It is weeks since I wrote to the only relative I know of, a gentleman in the county Fermanagh, and never a word has come back at all.’

There was a pause. Jack filled their glasses (how the tide went in and out) and observed, ‘Had I known you was a surgeon, sir, I do not think I could have resisted the temptation of pressing you.’

‘Surgeons are excellent fellows,’ said Stephen Maturin with a touch of acerbity. ‘And where should we be without them, God forbid: and, indeed, the skill and dispatch and dexterity with which Mr Florey at the hospital here everted Mr Browne’s eparterial bronchus would have amazed and delighted you. But I have not the honour of counting myself among them, sir. I am a physician.’

‘I beg your pardon: oh dear me, what a sad blunder. But even so, Doctor, even so, I think I should have had you run aboard and kept under hatches till we were at sea. My poor Sophie has no surgeon and there is no likelihood of finding her one. Come, sir, cannot I prevail upon you to go to sea? A man-of-war is the very thing for a philosopher, above all in the Mediterranean: there are the birds, the fishes – I could promise you some monstrous strange fishes – the natural phenomena, the meteors, the chance of prize-money. For even Aristotle would have been moved by prize-money. Doubloons, sir: they lie in soft leather sacks, you know, about so big, and they are wonderfully heavy in your hand. Two is all a man can carry.’

He had spoken in a bantering tone, never dreaming of a serious reply, and he was astonished to hear Stephen say, ‘But I am in no way qualified to be a naval surgeon. To be sure, I have done a great deal of anatomical dissection, and I am not unacquainted with most of the usual chirurgical operations; but I know nothing of naval hygiene, nothing of the particular maladies of seamen…’

‘Bless you,’ cried Jack, ‘never strain at gnats of that kind. Think of what we are usually sent – surgeon’s mates, wretched half-grown stunted apprentices that have knocked about an apothecary’s shop just long enough for the Navy Office to give them a warrant. They know nothing of surgery, let alone physic; they learn on the poor seamen as they go along, and they hope for an experienced loblolly boy or a beast-leech or a cunning-man or maybe a butcher among the hands – the press brings in all sorts. And when they have picked up a smattering of their trade, off they go into frigates and ships of the line. No, no. We should be delighted to have you – more than delighted. Do, pray, consider of it, if only for a while. I need not say,’ he added, with a particularly earnest look, ‘how much pleasure it would give me, was we to be shipmates.’

The waiter opened the door, saying, ‘Marine,’ and immediately behind him appeared the red-coat, bearing a packet. ‘Captain Aubrey, sir?’ he cried in an outdoor voice. ‘Captain Harte’s compliment.’ He disappeared with a rumble of boots, and Jack observed, ‘Those must be my orders.’

‘Do not mind me, I beg,’ said Stephen. ‘You must read them directly.’ He took up Jack’s fiddle and walked away to the end of the room, where he played a low, whispering scale, over and over again.

The orders were very much what he had expected: they required him to complete his stores and provisions with the utmost possible dispatch and to convoy twelve sail of merchantmen and transports (named in the margin) to Cagliari. He was to travel at a very great pace, but he was by no means to endanger his masts, yards or sails: he was to shrink from no danger, but on the other hand he was on no account to incur any risk whatsoever. Then, labelled secret, the instructions for the private signal – the difference between friend and foe, between good and bad: ‘The ship first making the signal is to hoist a red flag at the foretopmast head and a white flag with a pendant over the flag at the main. To be answered with a white flag with a pendant over the flag at the maintopmast head and a blue flag at the foretopmast head. The ship that first made the signal is to fire one gun to windward, which the other is to answer by firing three guns to leeward in slow time.’ Lastly, there was a note to say that Lieutenant Dillon had been appointed to the Sophie, vice Mr Baldick, and that he would shortly arrive in the Burford.

‘Here’s good news,’ said Jack. ‘I am to have a capital fellow as my lieutenant: we are only allowed one in the Sophie, you know, so it is very important … I do not know him personally, but he is an excellent fellow, that I am sure of. He distinguished himself very much in the Dart, a hired cutter – set about three French privateers in the Sicily Channel, sank one and took another. Everyone in the fleet talked about it at the time; but his letter was never printed in the Gazette, and he was not promoted. It was infernal bad luck. I wonder at it, for it was not as though he had no interest: Fitzgerald, who knows all about these things, told me he was a nephew, or cousin was it? to a peer whose name I forget. And in any case it was a very creditable thing – dozens of men have got their step for much less. I did, for one.’

‘May I ask what you did? I know so little about naval matters.’

‘Oh, I simply got knocked on the head, once at the Nile and then again when the Généreux took the old Leander: rewards were obliged to be handed out, so I being the only surviving lieutenant, one came my way at last. It took its time, upon my word, but it was very welcome when it came, however slow and undeserved. What do you say to taking tea? And perhaps a piece of muffin? Or should you rather stay with the port?’

‘Tea would make me very happy,’ said Stephen. ‘But tell me,’ he said, walking back to the fiddle and tucking it under his chin, ‘do not your naval appointments entail great expense, going to London, uniforms, oaths, levees…?’

‘Oaths? Oh, you refer to the swearing-in. No. That applies only to lieutenants – you go to the Admiralty and they read you a piece about allegiance and supremacy and utterly renouncing the Pope; you feel very solemn and say “to this I swear” and the chap at the high desk says “and that will be half a guinea”, which does rather take away from the effect, you know. But it is only commissioned officers – medical men are appointed by a warrant. You would not object to taking an oath, however,’ he said, smiling; and then feeling that this remark was a little indelicate, a little personal, he went on, ‘I was shipmates with a poor fellow once that objected to taking an oath, any oath, on principle. I never could like him – he was for ever touching his face. He was nervous, I believe, and it gave him countenance; but whenever you looked at him there he was with a finger at his mouth, or pressing his cheek, or pulling his chin awry. It is nothing, of course; but when you are penned up with it in the same wardroom it grows tedious, day after day all through a long commission. In the gun-room or the cockpit you can call out “Leave your face alone, for God’s sake,” but in the wardroom you must bear with it. However, he took to reading in his Bible, and he conceived this notion that he must not take an oath; and when there was that foolish court-martial on poor Bentham he was called as a witness and refused, flatly refused, to be sworn. He told Old Jarvie it was contrary to something in the Gospels. Now that might have washed with Gambier or Saumarez or someone given to tracts, but not with Old Jarvie, by God. He was broke, I am sorry to say: I never could like him – to tell you the truth, he smelt too – but he was a tolerably good seaman and there was no vice in him. That is what I mean when I say you would not object to an oath – you are not an enthusiast.’

‘No, certainly,’ said Stephen. ‘I am not an enthusiast. I was brought up by a philosopher, or perhaps I should say a philosophe; and some of his philosophy has stuck to me. He would have called an oath a childish thing – otiose if voluntary and rightly to be evaded or ignored if imposed. For few people today, even among your tarpaulins, are weak enough to believe in Earl Godwin’s piece of bread.’

There was a long pause while the tea was brought in. ‘You take milk in your tea, Doctor?’ asked Jack.

‘If you please,’ said Stephen. He was obviously deep in thought: his eyes were fixed upon vacancy and his mouth was pursed in a silent whistle.

‘I wish…’ said Jack.

‘It is always said to be weak, and impolitic, to show oneself at a disadvantage,’ said Stephen, bearing him down. ‘But you speak to me with such candour that I cannot prevent myself from doing the same. Your offer, your suggestion, tempts me exceedingly; for apart from those considerations that you so obligingly mention, and which I reciprocate most heartily, I am very much at a stand, here in Minorca. The patient I was to attend until the autumn has died. I had understood him to be a man of substance – he had a house in Merrion Square – but when Mr Florey and I looked through his effects before sealing them we found nothing whatever, neither money nor letters of credit. His servant decamped, which may explain it: but his friends do not answer my letters; the war has cut me off from my little patrimony in Spain; and when I told you, some time ago, that I had not eaten so well for a great while, I did not speak figuratively.’

‘Oh, what a very shocking thing!’ cried Jack. ‘I am heartily sorry for your embarrassment, and if the – the res angusta is pressing, I hope you will allow me…’ His hand was in his breeches pocket, but Stephen Maturin said ‘No, no, no,’ a dozen times smiling and nodding. ‘But you are very good.’

‘I am heartily sorry for your embarrassment, Doctor,’ repeated Jack, ‘and I am almost ashamed to profit by it. But my Sophie must have a medical man – apart from anything else, you have no notion of what a hypochondriac your seaman is: they love to be physicked, and a ship’s company without someone to look after them, even the rawest half-grown surgeon’s mate, is not a happy ship’s company – and then again it is the direct answer to your immediate difficulties. The pay is contemptible for a learned man – five pounds a month – and I am ashamed to mention it; but there is the chance of prize-money, and I believe there are certain perquisites, such as Queen Anne’s Gift, and something for every man with the pox. It is stopped out of their pay.’

‘Oh, as for money, I am not greatly concerned with that. If the immortal Linnaeus could traverse five thousand miles of Lapland, living upon twenty-five pounds, surely I can … But is the thing in itself really feasible? Surely there must be an official appointment? Uniform? Instruments? Drugs, medical necessities?’

‘Now that you come to ask me these fine points, it is surprising how little I know,’ said Jack, smiling. ‘But Lord love you, Doctor, we must not let trifles stand in the way. A warrant from the Navy Office you must have, that I am sure of; but I know the admiral will give you an acting order the minute I ask him – delighted to do so. As for uniform, there is nothing particular for surgeons, though a blue coat is usual. Instruments and so on – there you have me. I believe Apothecaries’ Hall sends a chest aboard: Florey will know, or any of the surgeons. But at all events come aboard directly. Come as soon as you like – come tomorrow, say, and we will dine together. Even the acting order will take some little time, so make this voyage as my guest. It will not be comfortable – no elbow-room in a brig, you know – but it will introduce you to naval life; and if you have a saucy landlord, it will dish him instantly. Let me fill your cup. And I am sure you will like it, for it is amazingly philosophical.’

‘Certainly,’ said Stephen. ‘For a philosopher, a student of human nature, what could be better? The subjects of his inquiry shut up together, unable to escape his gaze, their passions heightened by the dangers of war, the hazards of their calling, their isolation from women and their curious, but uniform, diet. And by the glow of patriotic fervour, no doubt.’ – with a bow to Jack – ‘It is true that for some time past I have taken more interest in the cryptogams than in my fellow-men; but even so, a ship must be a most instructive theatre for an inquiring mind.’

‘Prodigiously instructive, I do assure you, Doctor,’ said Jack. ‘How happy you make me: to have Dillon as the Sophie’s lieutenant and a Dublin physician as her surgeon – by the way, you are countrymen, of course. Perhaps you know Mr Dillon?’

‘There are so many Dillons,’ said Stephen, with a chill settling about his heart. ‘What is his Christian name?’

‘James,’ said Jack, looking at the note.

‘No,’ said Stephen deliberately. ‘I do not remember to have met any James Dillon.’

‘Mr Marshall,’ said Jack, ‘pass the word for the carpenter, if you please. I have a guest coming aboard: we must do our best to make him comfortable. He is a physician, a great man in the philosophical line.’

‘An astronomer, sir?’ asked the master eagerly.

‘Rather more of a botanist, I take it,’ said Jack. ‘But I have great hopes that if we make him comfortable he may stay with us as the Sophie’s surgeon. Think what a famous thing that would be for the ship’s company!’

‘Indeed it would, sir. They were right upset when Mr Jackson went off to the Pallas, and to replace him with a physician would be a great stroke. There’s one aboard the flagship and one at Gibraltar, but not another in the whole fleet, not that I know of. They charge a guinea a visit, by land; or so I have heard tell.’

‘Even more, Mr Marshall, even more. Is that water aboard?’

‘All aboard and stowed, sir, except for the last two casks.’

‘There you are, Mr Lamb. I want you to have a look at the bulkhead of my sleeping-cabin and see what you can do to make it a little more roomy for a friend: you may be able to shift it for’ard a good six inches. Yes, Mr Babbington, what is it?’

‘If you please, sir, the Burford is signalling over the headland.’

‘Very good. Now let the purser, the gunner and the bosun know I want to see them.’

From that moment on the captain of the Sophie was plunged deep into her accounts – her muster-book, slop-book, tickets, sick-book, complete-book, gunner’s, bosun’s and carpenter’s expenses, supplies and returns, general account of provisions received and returned, and quarterly account of same, together with certificates of the quantity of spirits, wine, cocoa and tea issued, to say nothing of the log, letter and order books – and what with having dined extremely well and not being good with figures at any time, he very soon lost his footing. Most of his dealings were with Ricketts, the purser; and as Jack grew irritable in his confusion it seemed to him that he detected a certain smoothness in the way the purser presented his interminable sums and balances. There were papers here, quittances, acknowledgements and receipts that he was being asked to sign; and he knew very well that he did not understand them all.

‘Mr Ricketts,’ he said, at the end of a long, easy explanation that conveyed nothing to him at all, ‘here in the muster-book, at number 178, is Charles Stephen Ricketts.’

‘Yes, sir. My son, sir.’

‘Just so. I see that he appeared on November 30th, 1797. From Tonnant, late Princess Royal. There is no age by his name.’

‘Ah, let me see: Charlie must have been rising twelve by then, sir.’

‘He was rated Able Seaman.’

‘Yes, sir. Ha, ha!’

It was a perfectly ordinary little everyday fraud; but it was illegal. Jack did not smile. He went on, ‘AB to September 20th, 1798, then rated Clerk. And then on November 10th, 1799, he was rated Midshipman.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said the purser: not only was there that little awkwardness of the eleven-year-old able seaman, but Mr Ricketts’ quick ear caught the slight emphasis on the word rated and its slightly unusual repetition. The message it conveyed was this: ‘I may seem a poor man of business; but if you try any purser’s tricks with me, I am athwart your hawse and I can rake you from stem to stern. What is more, one captain’s rating can be disrated by another, and if you trouble my sleep, by God, I shall turn your boy before the mast and flog the tender pink skin off his back every day for the rest of the commission.’ Jack’s head was aching; his eyes were slightly rimmed with red from the port, and there was so clear a hint of latent ferocity in them that the purser took the message very seriously. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said again. ‘Yes. Now here is the list of dockyard tallies: would you like me to explain the different headings in detail, sir?’

‘If you please, Mr Ricketts.’

This was Jack’s first direct, fully responsible acquaintance with book-keeping, and he did not much relish it. Even a small vessel (and the Sophie barely exceeded a hundred and fifty tons) needs a wonderful amount of stores: casks of beef, pork and butter all numbered and signed for, puncheons, butts and half-pieces of rum, hard-tack by the ton from Old Weevil, dried soup with the broad arrow upon it, quite apart from the gunner’s powder (mealed, corned and best patent), sponges, worms, matches, priming-irons, wads and shot – bar, chain, case, langrage, grape or plain round – and the countless objects needed (and so very often embezzled) by the bosun – the blocks, the long-tackle, single, double, parrel, quarter-coak, double-coak, flat-side, double thin-coak, single thin-coak, single strap-bound and sister blocks alone made up a whole Lent litany. Here Jack was far more at home, for the difference between a single double-scored and a single-shoulder block was as clear to him as that between night and day, or right and wrong – far clearer, on occasion. But by now his mind, used to grappling with concrete physical problems, was thoroughly tired: he looked wistfully over the dog-eared, tatty books piled up on the curving rim of the lockers out through the cabin windows at the brilliant air and the dancing sea. He passed his hand over his forehead and said, ‘We will deal with the rest another time, Mr Ricketts. What a God-damned great heap of paper it is, to be sure: I see that a clerk is a very necessary member of the ship’s company. That reminds me, I have appointed a young man – he will be coming aboard today. I am sure you will ease him into his duties, Mr Ricketts. He seems willing and competent, and he is nephew to Mr Williams, the prize-agent. I think it is to the Sophie’s advantage that we should be well with the prize-agent, Mr Ricketts?’

‘Indeed it is, sir,’ said the purser, with deep conviction.

‘Now I must go across to the dockyard with the bosun before the evening gun,’ said Jack, escaping into the open air. As he set foot upon deck so young Richards came up the larboard side, accompanied by a Negro, well over six feet tall. ‘Here is the young man I was telling you about, Mr Ricketts. And this is the seaman you have brought me, Mr Richards? A fine stout fellow he looks, too. What is his name?’

‘Alfred King, if you please, sir.’

‘Can you hand, reef and steer, King?’

The Negro nodded his round head; there was a fine flash of white across his face and he grunted aloud. Jack frowned, for this was no way to address a captain on his own quarter-deck. ‘Come, sir,’ he said sharply, ‘haven’t you got a civil tongue in your head?’

Looking suddenly grey and apprehensive the Negro shook his head. ‘If you please, sir,’ said the clerk, ‘he has no tongue. The Moors cut it out.’

‘Oh,’ said Jack, taken aback, ‘oh. Well, stow him for’ard. I will read him in by and by. Mr Babbington, take Mr Richards below and show him the midshipmen’s berth. Come, Mr Watt, we must get to the dockyard before the idle dogs stop work altogether.’

‘There is a man to gladden your heart, Mr Watt,’ said Jack, as the cutter sped across the harbour. ‘I wish I could find another score or so like him. You don’t seem very taken with the idea, Mr Watt?’

‘Well, sir, I should never say no to a prime seaman, to be sure. And to be sure we could swap some of our landmen (not that we have many left, being as we’ve been in commission so long, and them as was going to run having run and most of the rest rated ordinary, if not able…’ The bosun could not find his way out of his parenthesis, and after a staring pause he wound up by saying, ‘But as for mere numbers, why no, sir.’

‘Not even with the draft for harbour-duties?’

‘Why, bless you, sir, they never amounted to half a dozen, and we took good care they was all the hard bargains and right awkward buggers. Beg pardon, sir: the idle men. So as for mere numbers, why no, sir. In a three-watch brig like the Sophie it’s a puzzle to stow ’em all between-decks as it is: she’s a trim, comfortable, home-like little vessel, right enough, but she ain’t what you might call roomy.’

Jack made no reply to this; but it confirmed a good many of his impressions, and he reflected upon them until the boat reached the yard.

‘Captain Aubrey!’ cried Mr Brown, the officer in charge of the yard. ‘Let me shake you by the hand, sir, and wish you joy. I am very happy to see you.’

‘Thank you, sir; thank you very much indeed.’ They shook hands. ‘This is the first time I have seen you in your kingdom, sir.’

‘Commodious, ain’t it?’ said the naval officer. ‘Rope-walk over there. Sail-loft behind your old Généreux. I only wish there were a higher wall around the timber-yard: you would never believe how many flaming thieves there are in this island, that creep over the wall by night and take away my spars: or try to. It is my belief they are sometimes set on it by the captains; but captains or not, I shall crucify the next son of a bitch I find so much as looking at a dog-pawl.’

‘It is my belief, Mr Brown, that you will never be really happy until there is not a King’s ship left in the Mediterranean and you can walk round your yard mustering a full complement of paint-pots every day of the week, never issuing out so much as a treenail from one year’s end to the next.’

‘You just listen to me, young man,’ said Mr Brown, laying his hand on Jack’s sleeve. ‘Just you listen to age and experience. Your good captain never wants anything from a dockyard. He makes do with what he has. He takes great care of the King’s stores: nothing is ever wasted: he pays his bottom with his own slush: he worms his cables deep with twice-laid stuff and serves and parcels them so there is never any fretting in the hawse anywhere: he cares for his sails far more than for his own skin, and he never sets his royals – nasty, unnecessary, flash, gimcrack things. And the result is promotion, Mr Aubrey; for we make our report to the Admiralty, as you know, and it carries the greatest possible weight. What made Trotter a post-captain? The fact that he was the most economical master and commander on the station. Some men carried away topmasts two and three times in a year: never Trotter. Take your own good Captain Allen. Never did he come to me with one of those horrible lists as long as his own pennant. And look at him now, in command of as pretty a frigate as you could wish. But why do I tell you all this, Captain Aubrey? I know very well you are not one of these spendthrift, fling-it-down-the-kennel young commanders, not after the care you took bringing in the Généreux. Besides, the Sophie is perfectly well found in every possible respect. Except conceivably in the article of paint. I might, at great inconvenience to other captains, find you some yellow paint, a very little yellow paint.’

‘Why, sir, I should be grateful for a pot or two,’ said Jack, his eye ranging carelessly over the spars. ‘But what I really came for was to beg the favour of the loan of your duettoes. I am taking a friend on this cruise and he particularly desires to hear your B minor duetto.’

‘You shall have them, Captain Aubrey,’ said Mr Brown. ‘You shall most certainly have them. Mrs Harte is transcribing one for the harp at the present moment, but I shall step round there directly. When do you sail?’

‘As soon as I have completed my water and my convoy is assembled.’

‘That will be tomorrow evening, if the Fanny comes in: and the watering will not take you long. The Sophie only carries ten ton. You shall have the book by noon tomorrow, I promise you.’

‘I am most obliged, Mr Brown, infinitely obliged. Good night to you, then, and my best respects wait on Mrs Brown and Miss Fanny.’

‘Christ,’ said Jack, as the shattering din of the carpenter’s hammer prised him from his hold on sleep. He clung to the soft darkness as hard as he could, burying his face in his pillow, for his mind had been racing so that he had not dropped off until six – indeed, it was his appearance on deck at first light, peering at the yards and rigging, that had given rise to the rumour that he was up and about. And this was the reason for the carpenter’s untimely zeal, just as it was for the nervous presence of the gun-room steward (the former captain’s steward had gone over to the Pallas) hovering with what had been Captain Allen’s invariable breakfast – a mug of small beer, hominy grits and cold beef.

But there was no sleeping; the echoing crash of the hammer right next to his ear, ludicrously followed by the sound of whispering between the carpenter and his mates, made certain of that. They were in his sleeping-cabin, of course. Jets of pain shot through Jack’s head as he lay there. ‘’Vast that bloody hammering,’ he called, and almost against his shoulder came the shocked reply, ‘Aye aye, sir,’ and the tip-toe pittering away.

His voice was hoarse. ‘What made me so damned garrulous yesterday?’ he said, still lying there in his cot. ‘I am as hoarse as a crow, with talking. And what made me launch out in wild invitations? A guest I know nothing about, in a very small brig I have scarcely seen.’ He pondered gloomily upon the extreme care that should be taken with shipmates – cheek by jowl – very like marriage – the inconvenience of pragmatic, touchy, assuming companions – incompatible tempers mewed up together in a box. In a box: his manual of seamanship – and how he had conned it as a boy, poring over the impossible equations.

Let the angle YCB, to which the yard is braced up, be called the trim of the sails, and expressed by the symbol b. This is the complement of the angle DCI. Now CI:ID = rad.:tan. DCI = I:tan. DCI = |: cotan. b. Therefore we have finally |: cotan. b = A¹:B¹:tan.²x, and A^1. cotan. b = B ^tangent², and tan. ¹x = A — B cot. This equation evidently ascertains the mutual relation between the trim of the sails and the leeway…

‘It is quite evident, is it not, Jacky darling?’ said a hopeful voice, and a rather large young woman bent kindly over him (for at this stage in his memory he was only twelve, a stocky little boy, and tall, nubile Queeney sailed high above).

‘Why, no, Queeney,’ said the infant Jack. ‘To tell you the truth, it ain’t.’

‘Well,’ said she, with untiring patience. ‘Try to remember what a cotangent is, and let us begin again. Let us consider the ship as an oblong box…’

For a while he considered the Sophie as an oblong box. He had not seen a great deal of her, but there were two or three fundamentals that he knew with absolute certainty: one was that she was under-rigged – she might be well enough close to the wind, but she would be a slug before it; another was that his predecessor had been a man of a temper entirely unlike his own; and another was that the Sophie’s people had come to resemble their captain, a good sound quiet careful unaggressive commander who never set his royals, as brave as could be when set upon, but the very opposite of a Sallee rover. ‘Was discipline to be combined with the spirit of a Sallee rover,’ said Jack, ‘it would sweep the ocean clean.’ And his mind descending fast to the commonplace dwelt on the prize-money that would result from sweeping the ocean even moderately clean.

‘That despicable main-yard,’ he said. ‘And surely to God I can get a couple of twelve-pounders as chasers. Would her timbers stand it, though? But whether they can or not, the box can be made a little more like a fighting vessel – more like a real man-of-war.’

As his thoughts ranged on so the low cabin brightened steadily. A fishing-boat passed under the Sophie’s stern, laden with tunny and uttering the harsh roar of a conch; at almost the same time the sun popped up from behind St Philip’s fort – it did, in fact, pop up, flattened like a sideways lemon in the morning haze and drawing its bottom free of the land with a distinct jerk. In little more than a minute the greyness of the cabin had utterly vanished: the deck-head was alive with light glancing from the rippling sea; and a single ray, reflected from some unmoving surface on the distant quay, darted through the cabin windows to light up Jack’s coat and its blazing epaulette. The sun rose within his mind, obliging his dogged look to broaden into a smile, and he swung out of his cot.

The sun had reached Dr Maturin ten minutes earlier, for he was a good deal higher up: he, too, stirred and turned away, for he too had slept uneasily. But the brilliance prevailed. He opened his eyes and stared about very stupidly: a moment before he had been so solidly, so warmly and happily in Ireland, with a girl’s hand under his arm, that his waking mind could not take in the world he saw. Her touch was still firm upon his arm and even her scent was there: vaguely he picked at the crushed leaves under him – dianthus perfragrans. The scent was reclassified – a flower, and nothing more – and the ghostly contact, the firm print of fingers, vanished. His face reflected the most piercing unhappiness, and his eyes misted over. He had been exceedingly attached; and she was so bound up with that time…

He had been quite unprepared for this particular blow, striking under every conceivable kind of armour, and for some minutes he could hardly bear the pain, but sat there blinking in the sun.

‘Christ,’ he said at last. ‘Another day.’ With this his face grew more composed. He stood up, beat the white dust from his breeches and took off his coat to shake it. With intense mortification he saw that the piece of meat he had hidden at yesterday’s dinner had oozed grease through his handkerchief and his pocket. ‘How wonderfully strange,’ he thought, ‘to be upset by this trifle; yet I am upset.’ He sat down and ate the piece of meat (the eye of a mutton chop); and for a moment his mind dwelt on the theory of counter-irritants, Paracelsus, Cardan, Rhazes. He was sitting in the ruined apse of St Damian’s chapel high above Port Mahon on the north side, looking down upon the great winding inlet of the harbour and far out beyond it over a vast expanse of sea, a variegated blue with wandering lanes; the flawless sun, a hand’s breadth high, rising from the side of Africa. He had taken refuge there some days before, as soon as his landlord began to grow a shade uncivil; he had not waited for a scene, for he was too emotionally worn to put up with any such thing.

Presently, he took notice of the ants that were taking away his crumbs. Tapinoma erraticum. They were walking in a steady two-way stream across the hollow, or dell, of his inverted wig, as it lay there looking very like an abandoned bird’s nest, though once it had been as neat a physical bob as had ever been seen in Stephen’s Green. They hurried along with their abdomens high, jostling, running into one another: his gaze followed the wearisome little creatures and while he was watching them a toad was watching him: their eyes met, and he smiled. A splendid toad: a two-pound toad with brilliant tawny eyes. How did he manage to make a living in the sparse thin grass of that stony, sun-beaten landscape, so severe and parched, with no more cover than a few tumbles of pale stone, a few low creeping hook-thorned caper-bushes and a cistus whose name Stephen did not know? Most remarkably severe and parched, for the winter of 1799–1800 had been uncommonly dry, the March rains had failed and now the heat had come very early in the year. Very gently he stretched out his finger and stroked the toad’s throat: the toad swelled a little and moved its crossed hands; then sat easy, gazing back.

The sun rose and rose. The night had not been cold at any time, but still the warmth was grateful. Black wheatears that must have a brood not far: one of the smaller eagles in the sky. There was a sloughed snake’s skin in the bush where he pissed, and its eye-covers were perfect, startlingly crystalline.

‘What am I to think of Captain Aubrey’s invitation?’ he said aloud, in that great emptiness of light and air – all the more vast for the inhabited patch down there and its movement, and the checkered fields behind, fading into pale dun formless hills. ‘Was it merely Jack ashore? Yet he was such a pleasant, ingenuous companion.’ He smiled at the recollection. ‘Still and all, what weight can be attached to…? We had dined extremely well: four bottles, or possibly five. I must not expose myself to an affront.’ He turned it over and over, arguing against his hopes, but coming at last to the conclusion that if he could make his coat passably respectable – and the dust does seem to be getting it off, or at least disguising it, he said – he would call on Mr Florey at the hospital and talk to him, in a general way, about the naval surgeon’s calling. He brushed the ants from his wig and settled it on his head: then as he walked down towards the edge of the road – the magenta spikes of gladioli in the taller grass – the recollection of that unlucky name stopped him in his stride. How had he come to forget it so entirely in his sleep? How was it possible that the name James Dillon had not presented itself at once to his waking mind?

‘Yet it is true there are hundreds of Dillons,’ he reflected. ‘And a great many of them are called James, of course.’

‘Christe,’ hummed James Dillon under his breath, shaving the red-gold bristles off his face in what light could make its way through the scuttle of the Burford’s number twelve gunport. ‘Christe eleison. Kyrie …’ This was less piety in James Dillon than a way of hoping he should not cut himself; for like so many Papists he was somewhat given to blasphemy. The difficulty of the planes under his nose silenced him, however, and when his upper lip was clean he could not hit the note again. In any case, his mind was too busy to be seeking after an elusive neume, for he was about to report to a new captain, a man upon whom his comfort and ease of mind was to depend, to say nothing of his reputation, career and prospects of advancement.

Stroking his shining smoothness, he hurried out into the ward-room and shouted for a marine. ‘Just brush the back of my coat, will you, Curtis? My chest is quite ready, and the bread-sack of books is to go with it,’ he said. ‘Is the captain on deck?’

‘Oh no, sir, no,’ said the marine. ‘Breakfast only just carrying in this moment. Two hard-boiled eggs and one soft.’

The soft-boiled egg was for Miss Smith, to recruit her from her labours of the night, as both the marine and Mr Dillon knew very well; but the marine’s knowing look met with a total lack of response. James Dillon’s mouth tightened, and for a fleeting moment as he ran up the ladder to the sudden brilliance of the quarter-deck it wore a positively angry expression. Here he greeted the officer of the watch and the Burford’s first lieutenant. ‘Good morning. Good morning to you. My word, you’re very fine,’ they said. ‘There she lies: just beyond the Généreux.’

His eyes ranged over the busy harbour: the light was so nearly horizontal that all the masts and yards assumed a strange importance, and the little skipping waves sent back a blinding sparkle.

‘No, no,’ they said. ‘Over by the sheer-hulk. The felucca has just masked her. There – now do you see her?’

He did indeed. He had been looking far too high and his gaze had swept right over the Sophie as she lay there, not much above a cable’s length away, very low in the water. He leant both hands on the rail and looked at her with unwinking concentration. After a while he borrowed the telescope from the officer of the watch and did the same again, with a most searching minute scrutiny. He could see the gleam of an epaulette, whose wearer could only be her captain: and her people were as active as bees just about to swarm. He had been prepared for a little brig, but not for quite such a dwarfish vessel as this. Most fourteen-gun sloops were between two hundred and two hundred and fifty tons in burthen: the Sophie could scarcely be more than a hundred and fifty.

‘I like her little quarter-deck,’ said the officer of the watch. ‘She was the Spanish Vencejo, was she not? And as for being rather low, why, anything you look at close to from a seventy-four looks rather low.’

There were three things that everybody knew about the Sophie: one was that unlike almost all other brigs she had a quarter-deck; another was that she had been Spanish; and a third was that she possessed an elm-tree pump on her fo’c’sle, that is to say, a bored-out trunk that communicated directly with the sea and that was used for washing her deck – an insignificant piece of equipment, really, but one so far above her station that no mariner who saw it or heard of this pump ever forgot it.

‘Maybe your quarters will be a little cramped,’ said the first lieutenant, ‘but you will have a quiet, restful time of it, I am sure, convoying the trade up and down the Mediterranean.’

‘Well…’ said James Dillon, unable to find a brisk retort to this possibly well-intentioned kindness. ‘Well…’he said with a philosophical shrug. ‘You’ll let me have a boat, sir? I should like to report as early as I can.’

‘A boat? God rot my soul,’ cried the first lieutenant, ‘I shall be asked for the barge, next thing I know. Passengers in the Burford wait for a bumboat from shore, Mr Dillon; or else they swim.’ He stared at James with cold severity until the quartermaster’s chuckle betrayed him; for Mr Coffin was a great wag, a wag even before breakfast.

‘Dillon, sir, reporting for duty, if you please,’ said James taking off his hat in the brilliant sun and displaying a blaze of dark red hair.

‘Welcome aboard, Mr Dillon,’ said Jack, touching his own, holding out his hand and looking at him with so intense a desire to know what kind of man he was, that his face had an almost forbidding acuity. ‘You would be welcome in any case, but even more so this morning: we have a busy day ahead of us. Masthead, there! Any sign of life on the wharf ?’

‘Nothing yet, sir.’

‘The wind is exactly where I want it,’ said Jack, looking for the hundredth time at the rare white clouds sailing evenly across the perfect sky. ‘But with this rising glass there is no trusting to it.’

‘Your coffee’s up, sir,’ said the steward.

‘Thank you, Killick. What is it, Mr Lamb?’

‘I haven’t no ring-bolts anywheres near big enough, sir,’ said the carpenter. ‘But there’s a heap on ’em at the yard, I know. May I send over?’

‘No, Mr Lamb. Don’t you go near that yard, to save your life. Double the clench-bolts you have; set up the forge and fashion a serviceable ring. It won’t take you half an hour. Now, Mr Dillon, when you have settled in comfortably below, perhaps you will come and drink a cup of coffee with me and I will tell you what I have in mind.’

James hurried below to the three-cornered booth that he was to live in, whipped out of his reporting uniform into trousers and an old blue coat, reappearing while Jack was still blowing thoughtfully upon his cup. ‘Sit down, Mr Dillon, sit down,’ he cried. ‘Push those papers aside. It’s a sad brew, I’m afraid, but at least it is wet, that I can promise you. Sugar?’

‘If you please, sir,’ said young Ricketts, ‘the Généreux’s cutter is alongside with the men who were drafted off for harbour-duty.’

‘All of ’em?’

‘All except two, sir, that have been changed.’

Still holding his coffee-cup, Jack writhed from behind the table and with a twist of his body out through the door. Hooked on to the larboard main-chains there was the Généreux’s boat, filled with seamen, looking up, laughing and exchanging witticisms or mere hoots and whistles with their former shipmates. The Généreux’s midshipman saluted and said, ‘Captain Harte’s compliments, sir, and he finds the draft can be spared.’

‘God bless your heart, dear Molly,’ said Jack: and aloud, ‘My compliments and best thanks to Captain Harte. Be so good as to send them aboard.’

They were not much to look at, he reflected, as the whip from the yardarm hoisted up their meagre belongings: three or four were decidedly simple, and two others had that indefinable air of men of some parts whose cleverness sets them apart from their fellows, but not nearly so far as they imagine. Two of the boobies were quite horribly dirty, and one had managed to exchange his slops for a red garment with remains of tinsel upon it. Still, they all possessed two hands; they could all clap on to a rope; and it would be strange if the bosun and his mates could not induce them to heave.

‘Deck,’ hailed the midshipman aloft. ‘Deck. There is someone moving about on the wharf.’

‘Very good, Mr Babbington. You may come down and have your breakfast now. Six hands I thought lost for good,’ he said to James Dillon with intense satisfaction, turning back to the cabin. ‘They may not be much to look at – indeed, I think we must rig a tub if we are not to have an itchy ship – but they will help us weigh. And I hope to weigh by half-past nine at the latest.’ Jack rapped the brass-bound wood of the locker and went on, ‘We will ship two long twelves as chase-pieces, if I can get them from Ordnance. But whether or no I am going to take the sloop out while this breeze lasts, to try her paces. We convoy a dozen merchantmen to Cagliari, sailing this evening if they are all here, and we must know how she handles. Yes, Mr … Mr…?’

‘Pullings, sir: master’s mate. Burford’s long-boat alongside with a draft.’

‘A draft for us? How many?’

‘Eighteen, sir.’ And rum-looking cullies some of ’em are, he would have added, if he had dared.

‘Do you know anything about them, Mr Dillon?’ asked Jack.

‘I knew the Burford had a good many of the Charlotte’s people and some from the receiving ships as drafts for Mahon, sir; but I never heard of any being meant for the Sophie.’

Jack was on the point of saying, ‘And there I was, worrying about being stripped bare,’ but he contented himself with chuckling and wondering why this cornucopia should have poured itself out on him. ‘Lady Warren,’ came the reply, in a flash of revelation. He laughed again, and said, ‘Now I am going across to the wharf, Mr Dillon. Mr Head is a businesslike man and he will tell me whether the guns are to be had or not within half an hour. If they are, I will break out my handkerchief and you can start carrying out the warps directly. What now, Mr Richards?’

‘Sir,’ said the pale clerk, ‘Mr Purser says I should bring you the receipts and letters to sign this time every day, and the fair-copied book to read.’

‘Quite right,’ said Jack mildly. ‘Every ordinary day. Presently you will learn which is ordinary and which is not.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Here are the receipts for the men. Show me the rest another time.’

The scene on deck was not unlike Cheapside with road-work going on: two parties under the carpenter and his crew were making ready the places for the hypothetical bow- and stern-chasers, and parcels of assorted landmen and boobies stood about with their baggage, some watching the work with an interested air, offering comments, others gaping vacantly about, gazing into the sky as though they had never seen it before. One or two had even edged on to the holy quarter-deck.

‘What in God’s name is this infernal confusion?’ cried Jack. ‘Mr Watt, this is a King’s ship, not the Margate hoy. You, sir, get away for’ard.’

For a moment, until his unaffected blaze of indignation galvanized them into activity, the Sophie’s warrant officers gazed at him sadly: he caught the words ‘all these people…’

‘I am going ashore,’ he went on. ‘By the time I come back this deck will present a very different appearance.’

He was still red in the face as he went down into the boat after the midshipman. ‘Do they really imagine I shall leave an able-bodied man on shore if I can cram him aboard?’ he said to himself. ‘Of course, their precious three watches will have to go. And even so, fourteen inches will be hard to find.’

The three-watch system was a humane arrangement that allowed the men to sleep a whole night through from time to time, whereas with two watches four hours was the most they could ever hope for; but on the other hand it did mean that half the men had the whole of the available space to sling their hammocks, since the other half was on deck. ‘Eighteen and six is twenty-four,’ said Jack, ‘and fifty or thereabout, say seventy-five. And of those how many shall I watch?’ He worked out this figure in order to multiply it by fourteen, for fourteen inches was the space the regulations allowed for each hammock: and it seemed to him very doubtful whether the Sophie possessed anything like that amount of room, whatever her official complement might be. He was still working at it when the midshipman called, ‘Unrow. Boat your oars,’ and they kissed gently against the wharf.

‘Go back to the ship now, Mr Ricketts,’ said Jack on an impulse. ‘I do not suppose I shall be long, and it may save a few minutes.’

But with the Burford’s draft he had missed his chance: other captains were there before him now and he had to wait his turn. He walked up and down in the brilliant morning sun with one whose epaulette matched his own – Middleton, whose greater pull had enabled him to snap up the command of the Vertueuse, the charming French privateer that would have been Jack’s had there been any justice in the world. When they had exchanged the naval gossip of the Mediterranean, Jack remarked that he had come for a couple of twelve-pounders.

‘Do you think she’ll bear them?’ asked Middleton. ‘I hope so. Your four-pounder is a pitiful thing: though I must confess I feel anxious for her knees.’

‘Well, I hope so, too,’ said Middleton, shaking his head. ‘At all events you have come on the right day: it seems that Head is to be placed under Brown, and he has taken such a spite at it that he is selling off his stock like a fishwife at the end of the fair.’

Jack had already heard something of this development in the long, long squabble between the Ordnance Board and the Navy Board, and he longed to hear more; but at this moment Captain Halliwell came out, smiling all over his face, and Middleton, who had some faint remains of conscience, said, ‘You take my turn. I shall be an age, with all my carronades to explain.’

‘Good morning, sir,’ said Jack. ‘I am Aubrey, of the Sophie, and I should like to try a couple of long twelves, if you please.’

With no change in his melancholy expression, Mr Head said, ‘You know what they weigh?’

‘Something in the nature of thirty-three hundredweight, I believe.’

‘Thirty-three hundredweight, three pounds, three ounces, three pennyweight. Have a dozen, Captain, if you feel she will bear them.’

‘Thank you: two will be plenty,’ said Jack, looking sharply to see whether he were being made game of.

‘They are yours, then, and upon your own head be it,’ said Mr Head with a sigh, making secret marks upon a worn, curling parchment slip. ‘Give it to the master-parker and he will troll you out as pretty a pair as ever the heart of man could desire. I have some neat mortars, if you have room.’

‘I am extremely obliged to you, Mr Head,’ said Jack, laughing with pleasure. ‘I wish the rest of the service were run so.’

‘So do I, Captain, so do I,’ cried Mr Head, his face growing suddenly dark with passion. ‘There are some slack-arsed, bloody-minded men – flute-playing, fiddle-scraping, present-seeking, tale-bearing, double-poxed hounds that would keep you waiting about for a month; but I am not one of them. Captain Middleton, sir: carronades for you, I presume?’

In the sunlight once more Jack threw out his signal and, peering among the masts and criss-crossed yards, he saw a figure at the Sophie’s masthead bend as though to hail the deck, before disappearing down a backstay, like a bead sliding upon a thread.

Expedition was Mr Head’s watchword, but the master-parker of the ordnance wharf did not seem to have heard of it. He showed Jack the two twelve-pounders with great good will. ‘As pretty a pair as the heart of man could desire,’ he said, stroking their cascabels as Jack signed for them; but after that his mood seemed to change – there were several other captains in front of Jack – fair was fair – turn and turn about – them thirty-sixes were all in the way and would have to be moved first – he was precious short of hands.

The Sophie had warped in long ago and she was lying neatly against the dock right under the derricks. There was more noise aboard her than there had been, more noise than was right, even with the relaxed harbour discipline, and he was sure some of the men had managed to get drunk already. Expectant faces – a good deal less expectant now – looked over her side at her captain as he paced up and down, up and down, glancing now at his watch and now at the sky.

‘By God,’ he cried, clapping his hand to his forehead. ‘What a damned fool. I clean forgot the oil.’ Turning short in his stride he hurried over to the shed, where a violent squealing showed that the master-parker and his mates were trundling the slides of Middleton’s carronades towards the neat line of their barrels. ‘Master-parker,’ called Jack, ‘come and look at my twelve-pounders. I have been in such a hurry all morning that I do believe I forgot to anoint them.’ With these words he privately laid down a gold piece upon each touch-hole, and a slow look of approval appeared on the parker’s face. ‘If my gunner had not been sick, he would have reminded me,’ added Jack.

‘Well, thankee, sir. It always has been the custom, and I don’t like to see the old ways die, I do confess,’ said the parker, with some still-unevaporated surliness: but then brightening progressively he said, ‘A hurry, you mentioned, Captain? I’ll see what we can do.’

Five minutes later the bow-chaser, neatly slung by its train-loops, side-loops, pommelion and muzzle, floated gently over the Sophie’s fo’c’sle within half an inch of its ideal resting-place: Jack and the carpenter were on all fours side by side, rather as though they were playing bears, and they were listening for the sound her beams and timbers would make as the strain came off the derrick. Jack beckoned with his hand, calling ‘Handsomely, handsomely now.’ The Sophie was perfectly silent, all her people watching intently, even the tub-party with their buckets poised, even the human chain who were tossing the twelve-pound round shot from the shore to the side and so down to the gunner’s mate in the shot-locker. The gun touched, sat firm: there was a deep, not unhealthy creaking, and the Sophie settled a little by the head. ‘Capital,’ said Jack, surveying the gun as it stood there, well within its chalked-out space. ‘Plenty of room all round – great oceans of room, upon my word,’ he said, backing a step. In his haste to avoid being trodden down, the gunner’s mate behind him collided with his neighbour, who ran into his, setting off a chain-reaction in that crowded, roughly triangular space between the foremast and the stem that resulted in the maiming of one ship’s boy and very nearly in the watery death of another. ‘Where’s the bosun? Now, Mr Watt, let me see the tackles rigged: you want a hard-eye becket on that block. Where’s the breeching?’

‘Almost ready, sir,’ said the sweating, harassed bosun. ‘I’m working the cunt-splice myself.’

‘Well,’ said Jack, hurrying off to where the stern-chaser hung poised above the Sophie’s quarter-deck, ready to plunge through her bottom if gravity could but have its way, ‘a simple thing like a cunt-splice will not take a man-of-war’s bosun long, I believe. Set those men to work, Mr Lamb, if you please: this is not fiddler’s green.’ He looked at his watch again. ‘Mr Mowett,’ he said, looking at a cheerful young master’s mate. Mr Mowett’s cheerful look changed to one of extreme gravity. ‘Mr Mowett, do you know Joselito’s coffee-house?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Then be so good as to go there and ask for Dr Maturin. My compliments and I am very much concerned to say we shall not be back in port by dinner-time; but I will send a boat this evening at any time he chooses to appoint.’

They were not back in port by dinner-time: it would indeed have been a logical impossibility, since they had not yet left it, but were sweeping majestically through the close-packed craft towards the fairway. One advantage of having a small vessel with a great many hands aboard is that you can execute manoeuvres denied to any ship of the line, and Jack preferred this arduous creeping to being towed or to threading along under sail with a thoroughly uneasy crew, disturbed in all their settled habits and jostling full of strangers.

In the open channel he had himself rowed round the Sophie: he considered her from every angle, and at the same time he weighed the advantages and disadvantages of sending all the women ashore. It would be easy to find most of them while the men were at their dinner: not merely the local girls who were there for fun and pocket-money, but also the semi-permanent judies. If he made one sweep now, then another just before their true departure might clear the sloop entirely. He wanted no women aboard. They only caused trouble, and with this fresh influx they would cause even more. On the other hand, there was a certain lack of zeal aboard, a lack of real spring, and he did not mean to turn it into sullenness, particularly that afternoon. Sailors were as conservative as cats, as he knew very well: they would put up with incredible labour and hardship, to say nothing of danger, but it had to be what they were used to or they would grow brutish. She was very low in the water, to be sure: a little by the head and listing a trifle to port. All that extra weight would have been far better below the water-line. But he would have to see how she handled.

‘Shall I send the hands to dinner, sir?’ asked James Dillon when Jack was aboard again.

‘No, Mr Dillon. We must profit by this wind. Once we are past the cape they may go below. Those guns are breeched and frapped?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Then we will make sail. In sweeps. All hands to make sail.’

The bosun sprang his call and hurried away to the fo’c’sle amidst a great rushing of feet and a good deal of bellowing.

‘Newcomers below. Silence there.’ Another rush of feet. The Sophie’s regular crew stood poised in their usual places, in dead silence. A voice on board the Généreux a cable’s length away could be heard, quite clear and plain, ‘Sophie’s making sail.’

She lay there, rocking gently, out in Mahon harbour, with the shipping on her starboard beam and quarter and the brilliant town beyond it. The breeze a little abaft her lar-board beam, a northerly wind, was pushing her stern round a trifle. Jack paused, and as it came just so he cried, ‘Away aloft.’ The calls repeated the order and instantly the shrouds were dark with passing men, racing up as though on their stairs at home.

‘Trice up. Lay out.’ The calls again, and the topmen hurried out on the yards. They cast off the gaskets, the lines that held the sails tight furled to the yards; they gathered the canvas under their arms and waited.

‘Let fall,’ came the order, and with it the howling peep-peep, peep-peep from the bosun and his mates.

‘Sheet home. Sheet home. Hoist away. Cheerly there, in the foretop, look alive. T’garns’l sheets. Hands to the braces. Belay.’

A gentle push from above heeled the Sophie over, then another and another, each more delightfully urgent until it was one steady thrust; she was under way, and all along her side there sang a run of living water. Jack and his lieutenant exchanged a glance: it had not been bad – the foretopgallantsail had taken its time, because of a misunderstanding as to how newcomer should be defined and whether the six restored Sophies were to be considered in that injurious light, which had led to a furious, silent squabble on the yard; and the sheeting-home had been rather spasmodic; but it had not been disgraceful, and they would not have to support the derision of the other men-of-war in the harbour. There had been moments in the confusion of the morning when each had dreaded just that thing.

The Sophie had spread her wings a little more like an unhurried dove than an eager hawk, but not so much so that the expert eyes on shore would dwell upon her with disapprobation; and as for the mere landsmen, their eyes were so satiated with the coming and going of every kind of vessel that they passed over her departure with glassy indifference.

‘Forgive me, sir,’ said Stephen Maturin, touching his hat to a nautical gentleman on the quay, ‘but might I ask whether you know which is the ship called Sophia?’

‘A King’s ship, sir?’ asked the officer, returning his salute. ‘A man-of-war? There is no ship of that name – but perhaps you refer to the sloop, sir? The sloop Sophie?’

‘That may well be the case, sir. No man could easily surpass me in ignorance of naval terms. The vessel I have in mind is commanded by Captain Aubrey.’

‘Just so: the sloop, the fourteen-gun sloop. She lies almost directly in front of you, sir, in a line with the little white house on the point.’

‘The ship with triangular sails?’

‘No. That is a polacre-settee. Somewhat to the left, and farther off.’

‘The little small squat merchantman with two masts?’

‘Well’ – with a laugh – ‘she is a trifle low in the water; but she is a man-of-war, I assure you. And I believe she is about to make sail. Yes. There go her topsails: sheeted home. They hoist the yard. To’garns’ls. What’s amiss? Ah, there we are. Not very smartly done, but all’s well that ends well, and the Sophie never was one of your very brisk performers. See, she gathers way. She will fetch the mouth of the harbour on this wind without touching a brace.’

‘She is sailing away?’

‘Indeed she is. She must be running three knots already – maybe four.’

‘I am very much obliged to you, sir,’ said Stephen, lifting his hat.

‘Servant, sir,’ said the officer, lifting his. He looked after Stephen for a while. ‘Should I ask him whether he is well? I have left it too late. However, he seems steady enough now.’

Stephen had walked down to the quay to find out whether the Sophie could be reached on foot or whether he should have to take a boat to keep his dinner engagement; for his conversation with Mr Florey had persuaded him that not only was the engagement intended to be kept, but that the more general invitation was equally serious – an eminently practicable suggestion, most certainly to be acted upon. How civil, how more than civil, Florey had been: had explained the medical service of the Royal Navy, and taken him to see Mr Edwardes of the Centaur perform quite an interesting amputation, had dismissed his scruples as to lack of purely surgical experience, had lent him Blane on diseases incident to seamen, Hulme’s Libellus de Natura Scorbuti, Lind’s Effectual Means and Northcote’s Marine Practice, and had promised to find him at least the bare essentials in instruments until he should have his allowance and the official chest – ‘There are trocars, tenaculums and ball-scoops lying about by the dozen at the hospital, to say nothing of saws and bone-rasps.’

Stephen had allowed his mind to convince itself entirely, and the strength of his emotion at the sight of the Sophie, her white sails and her low hull dwindling fast over the shining sea, showed him how much he had come to look forward to the prospect of a new place and new skies, a living, and a closer acquaintance with this friend who was now running fast towards the quarantine island, behind which he would presently vanish.

He walked up through the town with his mind in a curious state; he had suffered so many disappointments recently that it did not seem possible he could bear another. What was more, he had allowed all his defences to disperse – unarm. It was while he was reassembling them and calling out his reserves that his feet carried him past Joselito’s coffee-house and voices said, ‘There he is – call out – run after him – you will catch him if you run.’

He had not been into the coffee-house that morning because it was a question either of paying for a cup of coffee or of paying for a boat to row him out to the Sophie, and he had therefore been unavailable for the midshipman, who now came running along behind him.

‘Dr Maturin?’ asked young Mowett, and stopped short, quite shocked by the pale glare of reptilian dislike. However, he delivered his message; and he was relieved to find that it was greeted with a far more human look.

‘Most kind,’ said Stephen. ‘What do you imagine would be a convenient time, sir?’

‘Oh, I suppose about six o’clock, sir,’ said Mowett.

‘Then at six o’clock I shall be at the Crown steps,’ said Stephen. ‘I am very much obliged to you, sir, for your diligence in finding me out.’ They parted with a bow apiece, and Stephen said privately, ‘I shall go across to the hospital and offer Mr Florey my assistance: he has a compound fracture above the elbow that will call for primary resection of the joint. It is a great while since I felt the grind of bone under my saw,’ he added, smiling with anticipation.

Cape Mola lay on their larboard quarter: the troubled blasts and calms caused by the heights and valleys along the great harbour’s winding northern shore no longer buffeted them, and with an almost steady tramontana at north by east the Sophie was running fast towards Italy under her courses, single-reefed topsails and topgallants.

‘Bring her up as close as she will lie,’ said Jack. ‘How near will she point, Mr Marshall? Six?’

‘I doubt she’ll do as well as six, sir,’ said the master, shaking his head. ‘She’s a little sullen today, with the extra weight for’ard.’

Jack took the wheel, and as he did so a last gust from the island staggered the sloop, sending white water along her lee rail, plucking Jack’s hat from his head and streaming his bright yellow hair away to the south-south-west. The master leapt after the hat, snatched it from the seaman who had rescued it in the hammock-netting and solicitously wiping the cockade with his handkerchief he stood by Jack’s side, holding it with both hands.

‘Old Sodom and Gomorrah is sweet on Goldilocks,’ murmured John Lane, foretopman, to his friend Thomas Gross: Thomas winked his eye and jerked his head, but without any appearance of censure – they were concerned with the phenomenon, not with any moral judgment. ‘Well, I hope he don’t take it out of us too much, that’s all, mate,’ he replied.

Jack let her pay off until the flurry was over, and then, as he began to bring her back, his hands strong on the spokes, so he came into direct contact with the living essence of the sloop: the vibration beneath his palm, something between a sound and a flow, came straight up from her rudder, and it joined with the innumerable rhythms, the creak and humming of her hull and rigging. The keen clear wind swept in on his left cheek, and as he bore on the helm so the Sophie answered, quicker and more nervous than he had expected. Closer and closer to the wind. They were all staring up and forward: at last, in spite of the fiddle-tight bowline, the foretopgallantsail shivered, and Jack eased off. ‘East by north, a half north,’ he observed with satisfaction. ‘Keep her so,’ he said to the timoneer, and gave the order, the long-expected and very welcome order, to pipe to dinner.

Dinner, while the Sophie, as close-hauled on the larboard tack as she could be, made her offing into the lonely water where twelve-pound cannon-balls could do no harm and where disaster could pass unnoticed: the miles streamed out behind her, her white path stretching straight and true a little south of west. Jack looked at it from his stern-window with approval: remarkably little leeway; and a good steady hand must be steering, to keep that furrow so perfect in the sea. He was dining in solitary state – a Spartan meal of sodden kid and cabbage, mixed – and it was only when he realized that there was no one to whom he could impart the innumerable observations that came bubbling into his mind that he remembered: this was his first formal meal as a captain. He almost made a jocose remark about it to his steward (for he was in very high spirits, too), but he checked himself. It would not do. ‘I shall grow used to it, in time,’ he said, and looked again with loving relish at the sea.

The guns were not a success. Even with only half a cartridge the bow-chaser recoiled so strongly that at the third discharge the carpenter came running up on deck, so pale and perturbed that all discipline went by the board. ‘Don’t ee do it, sir!’ he cried, covering the touch-hole with his hand. ‘If you could but see her poor knees – and the spirketting started in five separate places, oh dear, oh dear.’ The poor man hurried to the ring-bolts of the breeching. ‘There. I knew it. My clench is half drawn in this poor thin old stuff. Why didn’t you tell me, Tom?’ he cried, gazing reproachfully at his mate.

‘I dursen’t,’ said Tom, hanging his head.

‘It won’t do, sir,’ said the carpenter. ‘Not with these here timbers, it won’t. Not with this here deck.’

Jack felt his choler rising – it was a ludicrous situation on the overcrowded fo’c’sle, with the carpenter crawling about at his feet in apparent supplication, peering at the seams; and this was no sort of a way to address a captain. But there was no resisting Mr Lamb’s total sincerity, particularly as Jack secretly agreed with him. The force of the recoil, all that weight of metal darting back and being brought up with a twang by the breeching was too much, far too much for the Sophie. Furthermore, there really was not room to work the ship with the two twelve-pounders and their tackle filling so much of what little space there was. But he was bitterly disappointed: a twelve-pound ball could pierce at five hundred yards: it could send up a shower of lethal splinters, carry away a yard, do great execution. He tossed one up and down in his hand, considering. Whereas at any range a four-pounder…

‘And was you to fire off t’other one,’ said Mr Lamb with desperate courage, still on his hands and knees, ‘your wisitor wouldn’t have a dry stitch on him: for the seams have opened something cruel.’

William Jevons, carpenter’s crew, came up and whispered, ‘Foot of water in the well,’ in a rumble that could have been heard at the masthead.

The carpenter stood up, put on his hat, touched it and reported, ‘There’s a foot of water in the well, sir.’

‘Very well, Mr Lamb,’ said Jack, placidly, ‘we’ll pump it out again. Mr Day,’ he said, turning to the gunner, who had crawled up on deck for the firing of the twelve-pounders (would have crept out of his grave, had he been in it), ‘Mr Day, draw and house the guns, if you please. And bosun, man the chain-pump.’

He patted the warm barrel of the twelve-pounder regretfully and walked aft. He was not particularly worried about the water: the Sophie had been capering about in a lively way with this short sea coming across, and she would have made a good deal by her natural working. But he was vexed about the chasers, profoundly vexed, and he looked with even greater malignance at the main-yard.

‘We shall have to get the topgallants off her presently, Mr Dillon,’ he observed, picking up the traverse-board. He consulted it more as a matter of form than anything else, for he knew very well where they were: with some sense that develops in true seamen he was aware of the loom of the land, a dark presence beyond the horizon behind him – behind his right shoulder-blade. They had been beating steadily up into the wind, and the pegs showed almost equal boards – east-north-east followed by west-north-west: they had tacked five times (Sophie was not as quick in stays as he could have wished) and worn once; and they had been running at seven knots. These calculations ran their course in his mind, and as soon as he looked for it the answer was ready: ‘Keep on this course for half an hour and then put her almost before the wind – two points off. That will bring you home.

‘It would be as well to shorten sail now,’ he observed. ‘We will hold our course for half an hour.’ With this he went below, meaning to do something in the way of dealing with the great mass of papers that called for attention: apart from such things as the statements of stores and the pay books there was the Sophie’s log, which would tell him something of the past history of the vessel, and her muster-book, which would do the same for her company. He leafed through the pages: Sunday, September 22, 1799, winds NW, W, S. course N40W, distance 49 miles, latitude 37°59'N longitude 9°38'W, Cape St Vincent S27E 64 miles. PM Fresh breezes and squally with rain, made and shortened sail occasionally. AM hard gales, and 4 handed the square mainsail, at 6 saw a strange sail to the southward, at 8 more moderate, reefed the square mainsail and set it, at 9 spoke her. She was a Swedish brig bound to Barcelona in ballast. At noon weather calm, head round the compass.’ Dozens of entries of that kind of duty; and of convoy work. The plain, unspectacular, everyday sort of employment that made up ninety per cent of a service life: or more. ‘People variously employed, read the Articles of War … convoy in company, in topgallantsails and second reef topsails. At 6 made private signal to two line of battle ships which answered. All sails set, the people employed working up junk … tacked occasionally, in third reef maintopsail … light airs inclinable to calm … scrubbed hammocks. Mustered by divisions, read Articles of War and punished Joseph Wood, Jno. Lakey, Matt. Johnson and Wm. Musgrave with twelve lashes for drunkenness … PM calm and hazy weather, at 5 out sweeps and boats to pull off shore at 1/2 past 6 came to with the stream anchor Cape Mola S6W distance 5 leagues. At 1/2 past 8 coming on to blow suddenly was obliged to cut the hawser and make sail … read the Articles of War and performed Divine Service … punished Geo. Sennet with 24 lashes for contempt … Fra. Bechell, Robt. Wilkinson and Joseph Wood for drunkenness…’

A good many entries of that kind: a fair amount of flogging, but nothing heavy – none of your hundred-lash sentences. It contradicted his first impression of laxity: he would have to look into it more thoroughly. Then the muster. Geo. Williams, ordinary seaman, born Bengal, volunteered at Lisbon 24 August 1797, ran 27 March 1798, Lisbon. Fortunato Carneglia, midshipman, 21, born Genoa, discharged 1 June 1797 per order Rear-Admiral Nelson per ticket. Saml. Willsea, able seaman, born Long Island, volunteered Porto 10 October 1797, ran 8 February 1799 at Lisbon from the boat. Patrick Wade, landman, 21, born County Fermanagh, prest 20 November 1796 at Porto Ferraio, discharged 11 November 1799 to Bulldog, per order Captain Darley. Richard Sutton, lieutenant, joined 31 December 1796 per order Commodore Nelson, discharged dead 2 February 1798, killed in action with a French privateer. Richard William Baldick, lieutenant, joined 28 February 1798 per commission from Earl St Vincent, discharged 18 April 1800 to join Pallas per order Lord Keith. In the column Dead Mens Cloaths there was the sum of £8.10s. 6d. against his name: clearly poor Sutton’s kit auctioned at the mainmast.

But Jack could not keep his mind to the stiff-ruled column. The brilliant sea, darker blue than the sky, and the white wake across it kept drawing his eyes to the stern-window. In the end he closed the book and indulged himself in the luxury of staring out: if he chose he could go to sleep, he reflected; and he looked around, relishing this splendid privacy, the rarest of commodities at sea. As a lieutenant in the Leander and other fair-sized ships he had been able to look out of the ward-room windows, of course; but never alone, never unaccompanied by human presence and activity. It was wonderful: but it so happened that just now he longed for human presence and activity – his mind was too eager and restless to savour the full charm of solitude, although he knew it was there, and as soon as the ting-ting, ting-ting of four bells sounded he was up on deck.

Dillon and the master were standing by the starboard brass four-pounder, and they were obviously discussing some part of her rigging visible from that point. As soon as he appeared they moved over to the larboard side in the traditional way, leaving him his privileged area of the quarter-deck. This was the first time it had happened to him: he had not expected it – had not thought of it – and it gave him a ridiculous thrill of pleasure. But it also deprived him of a companion, unless he were to call James Dillon over. He took two or three turns, looking up at the yards: they were braced as sharp as the main and foremast shrouds would allow, but they were not as sharp as they might have been in an ideal world, and he made a mental note to tell the bosun to set up cross catharpings – they might gain three or four degrees.

‘Mr Dillon,’ he said, ‘be so good as to bear up and set the square mainsail. South by west a half south.’

‘Aye aye, sir. Double-reefed, sir?’

‘No, Mr Dillon, no reef,’ said Jack with a smile, and he resumed his pacing. There were orders all round him, the trample of feet, the bosun’s calls: his eyes took in the whole of the operation with a curious detachment – curious, because his heart was beating high.

The Sophie paid off smoothly. ‘Thus, thus,’ cried the master at the con, and the helmsman steadied her: as she was coming round before the wind the fore-and-aft mainsail vanished in billowing clouds that quickly subsided into the members of a long sailcloth parcel, greyish, inanimate; and immediately afterwards the square mainsail appeared, ballooning and fluttering for a few seconds and then mastered, disciplined and squared, with its sheets hauled aft. The Sophie shot forward, and by the time Dillon called ‘Belay’ she had increased her speed by at least two knots, plunging her head and raising her stern as though she were surprised at her rider, as well she might have been. Dillon sent another man to the wheel, in case a fault in the wind should broach her to. The square mainsail was as taut as a drum.

‘Pass the word for the sailmaker,’ said Jack. ‘Mr Henry, could you get me another cloth on to that sail, was you to take a deep goring leach?’

‘No, sir,’ said the sailmaker positively. ‘Not if it was ever so. Not with that yard, sir. Look at all the horrible bunt there is now – more like what you might call a hog’s bladder, properly speaking.’

Jack went to the rail and looked sharply at the sea running by, the long curve as it rose after the hollow under the lee-bow: he grunted and returned to his staring at the main-yard, a piece of wood rather more than thirty feet long and tapering from some seven inches in the slings, the middle part, to three at the yard-arms, the extremities.

‘More like a cro’jack than a mainyard,’ he thought, for the twentieth time since he first set eyes upon it. He watched the yard intently as the force of the wind worked upon it: the Sophie was running no faster now, and so there was no longer any easing of the load; the yard plied, and it seemed to Jack that he heard it groan. The Sophie’s braces led forward, of course, she being a brig, and the plying was greatest at the yard-arms, which irked him; but there was some degree of bowing all along. He stood there with his hands behind his back, his eyes set upon it; and the other officers on the quarter-deck, Dillon, Marshall, Pullings and young Ricketts stood attentively, not speaking, looking sometimes at their new captain and sometimes at the sail. They were not the only men to wonder, for most of the more experienced hands on the fo’c’sle had joined in this double scrutiny – a gaze up, then a sidelong stare at Jack. It was a strange atmosphere. Now that they were before the wind, or very nearly – that is to say, now that they were going in the same direction as the wind – nearly all the song had gone out of the rigging; the Sophie’s long slow pitching (no cross-sea to move her quickly) made little noise; and added to this there was the strained quietness of men murmuring together, not to be heard. But in spite of their care a voice drifted back to the quarter-deck: ‘He’ll carry all away, if he cracks on so.’

Jack did not hear it: he was quite unconscious of the tension around him, far away in his calculations of the opposing forces – not mathematical calculations by any means, but rather sympathetic; the calculations of a rider with a new horse between his knees and a dark hedge coming.

Presently he went below, and after he had stared out of the stern-window for some time he looked at the chart. Cape Mola would be on their starboard now – they should raise it very soon – and it would add a little greater thrust to the wind by deflecting it along the coast. Very quietly he whistled Deh vieni, reflecting, ‘If I make a success of this, and if I make a mint of money, several hundred guineas, say, the first thing I shall do after paying-off is to go to Vienna, to the opera.’

James Dillon knocked on the door. ‘The wind is increasing, sir,’ he said. ‘May I hand the mainsail, or reef at least?’

‘No, no, Mr Dillon … no,’ said Jack, smiling. Then reflecting that it was scarcely fair to leave this on his lieutenant’s shoulders he added, ‘I shall come on deck in two minutes.’

In fact, he was there in less than one, just in time to hear the ominous rending crack. ‘Up sheets!’ he cried. ‘Hands to the jears. Tops’l clewlines. Clap on to the lifts. Lower away cheerly. Look alive, there.’

They looked alive: the yard was small; soon it was on deck, the sail unbent, the yard stripped and everything coiled down.

‘Hopelessly sprung in the slings, sir,’ said the carpenter sadly. He was having a wretched day of it. ‘I could try to fish it, but it would never be answerable, like.’

Jack nodded, without any particular expression. He walked across to the rail, put a foot on to it and hoisted himself up into the first ratlines; the Sophie rose on the swell, and there indeed lay Cape Mola, a dark bar three points on the starboard beam. ‘I think we must touch up the look-out,’ he observed. ‘Lay her for the harbour, Mr Dillon, if you please. Boom mainsail and everything she can carry. There is not a minute to lose.’

Forty-five minutes later the Sophie picked up her moorings, and before the way was off her the cutter splashed into the water; the sprung yard was already afloat, and the boat set off urgently in the direction of the wharf, towing the yard behind like a streaming tail.

‘Well, there’s the fleet’s own brazen smiling serpent,’ remarked bow oar, as Jack ran up the steps. ‘Brings the poor old Sophie in, first time he ever set foot on her, with barely a yard standing at all, her timbers all crazy and half the ship’s company pumping for dear life and every man on deck the livelong day, dear knows, with never a pause for the smell of a pipe. And he runs up them old steps smiling like King George was at the top there to knight him.’

‘And short time for dinner, as will never be made up,’ said a low voice in the middle of the boat.

‘Silence,’ cried Mr Babbington, with as much outrage as he could manage.

‘Mr Brown,’ said Jack, with an earnest look, ‘you can do me a very essential service, if you will. I have sprung my mainyard hopelessly, I am concerned to tell you, and yet I must sail this evening – the Fanny is in. So I beg you to condemn it and issue me out another in its place. Nay, never look so shocked, my dear sir,’ he said, taking Mr Brown’s arm and leading him towards the cutter. ‘I am bringing you back the twelve-pounders – ordnance being now within your purview, as I understand – because I feared the sloop might be over-burthened.’

‘With all my heart,’ said Mr Brown, looking at the awful chasm in the yard, held up mutely for his inspection by the cutter’s crew. ‘But there is not another spar in the yard small enough for you.’

‘Come, sir, you are forgetting the Généreux. She had three spare foretopgalantyards, as well as a vast mound of other spars; and you would be the first to admit that I have a moral right to one.’

‘Well, you may try it, if you wish; you may sway it up to let us see what it looks like. But I make no promise.’

‘Let my men take it out, sir. I remember just where they are stowed. Mr Babbington, four men. Come along now. Look alive.’

‘’Tis only on trial, remember, Captain Aubrey,’ called Mr Brown. ‘I will watch you sway it up.’

‘Now that is what I call a real spar,’ said Mr Lamb, peering lovingly over the side at the yard. ‘Never a knot, never a curl: a French spar I dare say: forty-three foot as clean as a whistle. You’ll spread a mainsail as a mainsail on that, sir.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Jack impatiently. ‘Is that hawser brought to the capstan yet?’

‘Hawser to, sir,’ came the reply, after a moment’s pause.

‘Then heave away.’

The hawser had been made fast to the middle of the yard and then laid along it almost to its starboard extremity, being tied in half a dozen places from the slings to the yardarm with stoppers – bands of spun yarn; the hawser ran from the yardarm up to the top-block at the masthead and so down through another block on deck and thence to the capstan; so as the capstan turned the yard rose from the water, sloping more and more nearly to the vertical until it came aboard quite upright, steered carefully end-on through the rigging.

‘Cut the outer stopper,’ said Jack. The spun yarn dropped and the yard canted a little, held by the next: as it rose so the other stoppers were cut, and when the last went the yard swung square, neatly under the top.

‘It will never do, Captain Aubrey,’ called Mr Brown, hailing over the quiet evening air through his trumpet. ‘It is far too large and will certainly carry away. You must saw off the yardarms and half the third quarter.’

Lying stark and bare like the arms of an immense pair of scales, the yard certainly did look somewhat over-large.

‘Hitch on the runners,’ said Jack. ‘No, farther out. Half way to the second quarter. Surge the hawser and lower away.’ The yard came down on deck and the carpenter hurried off for his tools. ‘Mr Watt,’ said Jack to the bosun. ‘Just rig me the brace-pendants, will you?’ The bosun opened his mouth, shut it again and bent slowly to his work: anywhere outside Bedlam brace-pendants were rigged after the horses, after the stirrups, after the yard-tackle pendants (or a thimble for the tackle-hook, if preferred): and none of them, ever, until the stop-cleat, the narrow part for them all to rest upon, had been worked on the sawn-off end and provided with a collar to prevent them from drawing in towards the middle. The carpenter reappeared with a saw and a rule. ‘Have you a plane there, Mr Lamb?’ asked Jack. ‘Your mate will fetch you a plane. Unship the stuns’l-boom iron and touch up the ends of the stop-cleats, Mr Lamb, if you please.’ Lamb, amazed until he grasped what Jack was about, slowly planed the tips of the yard, shaving off wafers until they showed new and white, a round the size of a halfpenny bun. ‘That will do,’ said Jack. ‘Sway her up again, bracing her round easy all the time square with the quay. Mr Dillon, I must go ashore: return the guns to the ordnance-wharf and stand off and on for me in the channel. We must sail before the evening gun. Oh, and Mr Dillon, all the women ashore.’

‘All the women without exception, sir?’

‘All without their lines. All the trollops. Trollops are capital things in port, but they will not do at sea.’ He paused, ran down to his cabin and came back two minutes later, stuffing an envelope into his pocket. ‘Yard again,’ he cried, dropping into the boat.

‘You will be glad you took my advice,’ said Mr Brown, receiving him at the steps. ‘It would certainly have carried away with the first puff of wind.’

‘May I take the duettoes now, sir?’ asked Jack, with a certain pang. ‘I am just about to fetch the friend I was speaking of – a great musician, sir. You must meet him, when next we are in Mahon: you must allow me to present him to Mrs Brown.’

‘Should be honoured – most happy,’ said Mr Brown.

‘Crown steps now, and give way like heroes,’ said Jack, returning at a shambling run with the book: like so many sailors he was rather fat, and he sweated easily on shore. ‘Six minutes in hand,’ he said, peering at his watch in the twilight as they came in to the landing. ‘Why, there you are, Doctor. I do hope you will forgive me for ratting on you this afternoon. Shannahan, Bussell: you two come with me. The others stay in the boat. Mr Ricketts, you had better lie twenty yards off or so, and deliver them from temptation. Will you bear with me, sir, if I make a few purchases? I have had no time to send for anything, not so much as a sheep or a ham or a bottle of wine; so I am afraid it will be junk, salt horse and Old Weevil’s wedding cake for most of the voyage, with four-water grog to wet it. However, we can refresh at Cagliari. Should you like the seamen to carry your dunnage down to the boat? By the way,’ he added, as they walked along, with the sailors following some way behind, ‘before I forget it, it is usual in the service to draw an advance upon one’s pay upon appointment; so conceiving you would not choose to appear singular, I put up a few guineas in this envelope.’

‘What a humane regulation,’ said Stephen, looking pleased. ‘Is it often taken advantage of ?’

‘Invariably,’ said Jack. ‘It is a universal custom, in the service.’

‘In that case,’ said Stephen, taking the envelope, ‘I shall undoubtedly comply with it: I certainly should not wish to look singular: I am most obliged to you. May I indeed have one of your men? A violoncello is a bulky object: as for the rest there is only a small chest and some books.’

‘Then let us meet again at a quarter past the hour at the steps,’ said Jack. ‘Lose not a moment, I beg, Doctor; for we are extremely pressed. Shannahan, you look after the Doctor and trundle his dunnage along smartly. Bussell, you come along with me.’

As the clock struck the quarter and the note hung up there unresolved, waiting for the half, Jack said, ‘Stow the chest in the fore-sheets. Mr Ricketts, you stow yourself upon the chest. Doctor, you sit down there and nurse the ’cello. Capital. Shove off. Give way together, and row dry, now.’

They reached the Sophie, propelled Stephen and his belongings up the side – the larboard side, to avoid ceremony and to make sure they got him aboard: they had too low an opinion of landmen to allow him to venture upon even the Sophie’s unaspiring height alone – and Jack led him to the cabin. ‘Mind your head,’ he said. ‘That little den in there is yours: do what you can to make yourself comfortable, pray, and forgive my lack of ceremony. I must go on deck.

‘Mr Dillon,’ he said, ‘is all well?’

‘All’s well, sir. The twelve merchantmen have made their signal.’

‘Very good. Fire a gun for them and make sail, if you please. I believe we shall just get down the harbour with topgallants, if this fag-end of a breeze still holds; and then, out of the lee of the cape, we may make a respectable offing. So make sail; and by then it will be time to set the watch. A long day, Mr Dillon?’

‘A very long day, sir.’

‘At one time I thought it would never come to an end.’