Master & Commander (12 page)

   'At least we have plenty of hands—we could fight both sides easily, which is more than any line of battle ship can say. Though I rather fancy we had the tail end of the draft from the
Burford
; it seemed to me there was an unnatural proportion of Lord Mayor's men among them. No old Charlottes, I suppose?'

   'Yes, sir, we have one—the fellow with no hair and a red handkerchief round his neck. He was a foretopman, but he seems quite dazed and stupid still.'

   'A sad business,' said Jack shaking his head.

   'Yes,' said James Dillon, looking into vacancy and seeing a leaping spring of fire in the still air, a first-rate ablaze from truck to waterline, with eight hundred men aboard. 'You could hear the flames a mile away and more. And sometimes a sheet of fire would lift off and go up into the air by itself, cracking and waving like a huge flag. It was just such a morning as this: a little later in the day, perhaps.'

   'You were there, I collect? Have you any notion of the cause? People talk about an infernal machine taken aboard by an Italian in Boney's pay.'

   'From all I heard it was some fool who allowed hay to be stowed on the half-deck, close to the tub with the slow-match for the signal-guns. It went up in a blaze and caught the mainsail at once. It was so sudden they could not come to the clew-garnets.'

   'Could you save any of her people?'

   'Yes, a few. We picked up two marines and a quarter-gunner, but he was most miserably burnt. There were very few saved, not much above a hundred, I believe. It was not a creditable business, not at all. Many more should have been brought away, but the boats hung back.'

   'They were thinking of the
Boyne
, no doubt.'

   'Yes. The
Charlotte's
guns were firing as the heat reached them, and everybody knew the magazine might go up at any minute; but even so . . . All the officers I spoke to said the same thing—there was no getting the boats close in. It was the same with my people. I was in a hired cutter, the
Dart
—'

   'Yes, yes, I know you were,' said Jack, smiling significantly.

   '—three or four miles down-wind, and we had to sweep to get up But there was no way of inducing them to pull heartily, rope's end or no. There was not a man or boy who was what you would call shy of gunfire—indeed, they were as well-conducted a set of men as you could wish, for boarding or for carrying a shore-battery, or for anything you please. And the
Charlotte's
guns were not aimed at us, of course—just going off at random. But no, the whole feeling in the cutter was different, quite unlike action or an ugly night on a lee-shore. And there is little to be done with a thoroughly unwilling crew.'

   'No,' said Jack. 'There is no forcing a willing mind.' He was reminded of his conversation with Stephen Maturin, and he added, 'It is a contradiction in terms' He might have gone on to say that a crew thoroughly upset in its ways, cut short in the article of sleep, and deprived of its trollops, was not the best of weapons either; but he knew that any remark passed on the deck of a vessel seventy-eight feet three inches long was in the nature of a public statement Apart from anything else, the quartermaster at the con and the helmsman at the wheel were within arm's reach. The quartermaster turned the watch-glass, and as the first grains of sand began their tedious journey back into the half they had just so busily emptied he called 'George,' in a low, night-watch voice, and the marine sentry clumped forward to strike three bells.

   By now there was no doubt about the sky: it was pure blue from north to south, with no more than a little violet duskiness lingering in the west.

   Jack stepped over to the weather-rail, swung himself into the shrouds and ran up the ratlines. 'This may not look quite dignified, in a captain,' he reflected, pausing under the loom of the top to see just how much more clearance well-bowsed cross-catharpings might give the yard. 'Perhaps I had better go up through the lubber's hole.' Ever since the invention of those platforms some way up the mast called tops, sailors have made it a point of honour to get into them by an odd, devious route—by clinging to the futtock-shrouds, which run from the catharpings near the top of the mast to the futtock-plates at the outer edge of the top: they cling to them and creep like flies, hanging backward about twenty-five degrees from the vertical, until they reach the rim of the top and so climb upon it, quite ignoring the convenient square hole next to the mast itself, to which the shrouds lead directly as their natural culmination—a straight, safe path with easy steps from the deck to the top. This hole, this lubber's hole, is as who should say never used, except by those who have never been to sea or persons of great dignity, and when Jack came up through it he gave Jan Jackruski, ordinary seaman, so disagreeable a fright that he uttered a thin scream. 'I thought you were the house-demon,' he said, in Polish.

   'What is your name?' said Jack.

   'Jackruski, sir. Please: thank you,' said the Pole.

   'Watch out carefully, Jackruski,' said Jack, moving easily up the topmast shrouds. He stopped at the masthead, booked an arm through the topgallant shrouds and settled comfortably in the crosstrees: many an hour had he spent there by way of punishment in his youth—indeed, when first he used to go up he had been so small that he could easily sit on the middle crosstree with his legs dangling, lean forward on his arms folded over the after tree and go to sleep, firmly wedged in spite of the wild gyrations of his seat. How he had slept in those days! He was always sleepy or hungry, or both. And how perilously high it had seemed. It had been higher, of course, far higher, in the old
Theseus
—somewhere about a hundred and fifty feet up: and how it had swung about the sky! He had been sick once, mast-headed in the old
Theseus
, and his dinner had gone straight up into the air, never to be seen again. But even so, this was a comfortable height. Eighty-seven feet less the depth of the kelson—say seventy-five. That gave him a horizon of ten or eleven miles. He looked over those miles of sea to windward—perfectly clear. Not a sail, not the slightest break on the tight line of the horizon. The topgallantsail above him was suddenly golden: then two points on the larboard bow, in the mounting blaze of light, the sun thrust up its blinding rim. For a prolonged moment Jack alone was sunlit, picked out then the light reached the topsail travelled down it, took in the peak of the boom mainsail and so reached the deck, flooding it from stem to stern Tears welled up in his eyes, blurred his vision, overspilt, rolled down his cheeks they did not use themselves up in lines upon his face but dropped, two, four, six, eight, round drops slanting away through the warm golden air to leeward.

   Bending low to look under the topgallantsail he gazed at his charges, the merchantmen: two pinks, two snows, a Baltic cat and the rest barca-longas; all there, and the rearmost was beginning to make sail. Already there was a living warmth in the sun, and a delicious idleness spread through his limbs

   'This will never do,' he said there were innumerable things to be seen to below He blew his nose, and with his eves still fixed on the spar-laden cat he reached out for the weather backstay His hand curled round it mechanically, with as little thought as if it had been the handle of his own front door, and he slid gently down to the deck, thinking, 'One new landman to each gun-crew might answer very well.'

   Four bells. Mowett heaved the log, waited for the red tag to go astern and called 'Turn.' 'Stop!' cried the quartermaster twenty-eight seconds later, with the little sand-glass close to his eye. Mowett nipped the line almost exactly at the third knot, jerked out the peg and walked across to chalk 'three knots' on the logboard. The quartermaster hurried to the big watch-glass, turned it and called out 'George' in a firm and rounded voice. The marine went for'ard and struck the four bells heartily. A moment later pandemonium broke loose: pandemonium, that is, to the waking Stephen Maturin, who now for the first time in his life heard the unnatural wailing, the strange arbitrary intervals of the bosun and his mates piping 'Up all hammocks'. He heard a rushing of feet and a great terrible voice calling 'All hands, all hands ahoy! Out or down! Out or down! Rouse and bitt! Rise and shine! Show a leg there! Out or down! Here I come, with a sharp knife and a clear conscience!' He heard three muffled dumps as three sleep-sodden landmen were, in fact, cut down: he heard oaths, laughter, the impact of a rope's end as a bosun's mate started a torpid, bewildered hand, and then a far greater trampling as fifty or sixty men rushed up the hatchways with their hammocks, to stow them in the nettings.

   On deck the foretopmen had set the elm-tree pump a-wheezing, while the fo'c'slemen washed the fo'c'sle with the fresh sea-water they pumped, the maintopmen washed the starboard side of the quarter-deck and the quarter-deck men all the rest, grinding away with holystones until the water ran like thin milk from the admixture of minute raspings of wood and caulking, and the boys and the idlers—the people who merely worked all day—heaved at the chain-pumps to clear the night's water out of the bilges, and the gunner's crew cosseted the fourteen four-pounders; but none of this had had the electrifying effect of the racing feet.

   'Is it some emergency?' wondered Stephen, working his way with rapid caution out of his hanging cot. 'A battle? Fire? A desperate leak? And are they too much occupied to warn me—have forgotten I am here?' He drew on his breeches as fast as he could and, straightening briskly, he brought his head up against a beam with such force that he staggered and sank on to a locker, cherishing it with both hands.

   A voice was speaking to him. 'What did you say?' he asked, peering through a mist of pain.

   'I said, "Did you bump your head, sir?" '

   'Yes,' said Stephen, looking at his hand: astonishingly it was not covered with blood—there was not even so much as a smear.

   'It's these old beams, sir'—in the unusually distinct, didactic voice used at sea for landmen and on land for half-wits—'You want to take care of them; for—they—are—very—low.' Stephen's look of pure malevolence recalled the steward to a sense of his message and he said, 'Could you fancy a chop or two for breakfast, sir? A neat beefsteak? We killed a bullock at Mahon, and there's some prime steaks.'

   'There you are, Doctor,' cried Jack. 'Good morning to you. I trust you slept?'

   'Very well indeed, I thank you. These hanging cots are a most capital invention, upon my word.'

   'What would you like for breakfast? I smelt the gun-room's bacon on deck and I thought it the finest smell I had ever smelt in my life—Araby left at the post. What do you say to bacon and eggs, and then perhaps a beefsteak to follow? And coffee?'

   'You are of my way of thinking entirely,' cried Stephen, who had great leeway to make up in the matter of victuals. 'And conceivably there might be onions, as an antiscorbutic.' The word onions brought the smell of them frying into his nostrils and their peculiarly firm yet unctuous texture to his palate he swallowed painfully 'What's afoot?' he exclaimed, for the howling and the wild rushing, as of mad beasts, had broken out again

   'The hands are being piped down to breakfast,' said Jack carelessly. 'Light along that bacon, Killick. And the coffee. I'm clemmed.'

   'How I slept,' said Stephen. 'Deep, deep, restorative, roborative sleep—none of your hypnogogues, none of your tinctures of laudanum can equal it. But I am ashamed of my appearance. I slept so late that here I am, barbarously unshaved and nasty, whereas you are as smug as a bridegroom. Forgive me for a moment.

   'It was a naval surgeon, a man at Haslar,' he said, coming back, smooth, 'who invented these modern short arterial ligatures: I thought of him just now, as my razor passed within a few lines of my external carotid. When it is rough, surely you must get many shocking incised wounds?'

   'Why, no: I can't say we do,' said Jack. 'A matter of use, I suppose. Coffee? What we do get is a most plentiful crop of bursten bellies—what's the learned word?—and pox.'

   'Hernia. You surprise me.'

   'Hernia: exactly so. Very common. I dare say half the idlers are more or less ruptured: that is why we give them the lighter duties.'

   'Well, it is not so very surprising, now that I reflect upon the nature of a mariner's labour. And the nature of his amusements accounts for his pox, of course. I remember to have seen parties of seamen in Mahon, wonderfully elated, dancing and singing with sad drabble-tail pakes. Men from the
Audacious
, I recall, and the
Phaëton
: I do not remember any from the
Sophie
.'

   'No. The Sophies were a quiet lot ashore. But in any case they had nothing to be elated about, or with. No prizes and so, of course, no prize-money. It's prize-money alone lets a seaman kick up a dust ashore, for precious little does he see of his pay. What do you say to a beefsteak now, and another pot of coffee?'

   'With all my heart.'

   'I hope I may have the pleasure of introducing my lieutenant to you at dinner. He appears to be a seamanlike, gentlemanly fellow. He and I have a busy morning ahead of us: we must sort out the crew and set them to their duties—we must watch and quarter them, as we say. And I must find you a servant, as well as one for myself, and a cox'n too. The gun-room cook will do very well.'

'We will muster the ship's company, Mr Dillon, if you please,' said Jack.

   'Mr Watt,' said James Dillon. 'All hands to muster.'

   The bosun sprung his call, his mates sped below roaring 'All hands', and presently the
Sophie's
deck between the mainmast and the fo'c'sle was dark with men, all her people, even the cook, wiping his hands on his apron, which he balled up and thrust into his shirt. They stood rather uncertainly, over to port, in the two watches, with the newcomers huddled vaguely between them, looking shabby, mean and bereft.

   'All hands for muster, sir, if you please,' said James Dillon, raising his hat.

   'Very well, Mr Dillon,' said Jack. 'Carry on.'