The far side of the world (24 page)

'I believe we might have run clear,' said the lieutenant, 'if we had not lost so much canvas south of the Horn and if we had had a heavier, more willing crew. But at least we have the satisfaction of having been taken by a famous flyer.'

'I dare say we could both do with some refreshment,' said Jack, leading him towards the cabin; and over his shoulder, 'Captain Pullings, carry on.'

Captain Pullings carried on with great effect, bringing the packet as close as she could lie so that the transfer might take place before the fading of the day and the almost certain coming of dirty weather; and for a while, before returning to their hanging stove, Stephen and Martin watched the boats going to and fro on the increasing swell, taking Surprises and Marines over and bringing back the former prisoners and the Americans, together with a long-legged midshipman and the Dana� books and papers.

'Here are her papers,' said Captain Aubrey when Stephen came for his conference. 'They do not tell us much, of course, since the English log stops when she was captured and the rest is just a bald account of her course and the weather since then: damned unpleasant weather, most of it. But the prisoners, and by that I mean the people that were captured and drafted into the Dana�o sail her, were more informative. Since they were taken this side of the Horn, like the packet, they do not know for a fact that the Norfolk is in the Pacific yet, but they do know that she took two of our homeward-bound whalers in the South Atlantic, one of them a ship that had been out more than three years and that had filled every barrel she possessed. But here is my draft of the official letter Tom Pullings will carry back with him. It will tell you the whole thing in a moment, and perhaps you would put in some style, just here and there, where you think it might fit.'

Stephen glanced at the familiar opening

Surprise at sea

(wind N by E with moderate weather)

49 35 'S., 63 11 'W.

My Lord,

I have the honour to acquaint your Lordship that in...

and said, 'Listen, before I read it, tell me one thing, will you now? Suppose there were treasure aboard that packet, would it be safer with us or with Tom?'

'Oh, as for the treasure, I am afraid the Norfolk snapped that up directly. Two iron chests full of gold, God love us! You would hardly expect them to leave it lying about: I am sure I should not have done so, ha, ha, ha!'

'Let it be supposed that there are documents, valuable documents concealed in her fabric,' said Stephen patiently, still in the same low tone of voice, his chair pulled up to Jack's, 'would they be more liable to loss with him or with us?'

Jack cocked a considering eye at him and said, 'The privateers are the trouble. In that craft Tom can outsail most men-of-war except in very heavy weather, but he will have to run the gauntlet of the privateers from the West Indies on, both French and American. Some of them are very fast, and he will only have a few pop-guns and muskets and precious few men to handle them. He does not run a very grave risk, there being such a prodigious quantity of salt water, but even so I should say that your hypothetical papers would be safer with us.'

'Then before it grows dark would you have the kindness to go across into the packet with me, into the room where the chests were found itself?'

'Very well,' said Jack. 'I wish to see her in any case. Should we take a bag?'

'I believe not,' said Stephen, 'but an accurate yardstick might be wise.'

His mind was uneasy. Money always had an unhealthy effect on intelligence, often confusing the issue; and it could sometimes prove a very dangerous substance to handle. He did not like the way he had been told about the hiding-place in the Dana�a recollection of the letters in which Sir Joseph had told him of the murky, troubled atmosphere in London made him like it even less, and in these altered circumstances he was tempted to leave the whole thing alone. The instructions did not cover the present situation and whatever he did might turn out to be wrong. Yet if he did nothing and the packet were taken he would look an incompetent fool: or worse. But what if he found the cache empty? What if the rats had got at the papers? What if the captured Mr Cunningham was himself kin to the rats?

These thoughts ran through and through his head as he poked about under a long recess in the side of the cabin once inhabited by Mr Cunningham and his chests - the holes for the screws that had held them down were still to be seen - and it was not without a certain relief that he turned to Jack at last, saying, 'The mad brute-beasts have given me the wrong direction, so they have. There is nothing here. Perhaps it is just as well.'

'Should you like me to look at the paper?' asked Jack.

'By all means. But it is as plain as can be. "Press the third bolt-head under the larboard shelf-piece three foot nine inches from the bulkhead."'

'Stephen,' said Jack, 'I believe that is the starboard shelfpiece you are looking at.'

'Oh your soul to the devil, Jack,' cried Stephen. 'This is my left hand, is it not?' - holding it up - 'And what is on the left or unlucky or indeed sinister side is the larboard.'

'You are forgetting that we have turned about,' said Jack. 'We are now facing aft, you know. The third bolthead, did you say?' He pressed, and instantly and with a surprisingly loud crash a metal box fell from the seam, striking the deck with one corner and bursting open. He bent to pick up scattered sheafs of bank-notes and other papers, putting his lantern down, and at the sight of the first he cried, 'God love us! What can -' But recollecting himself he gathered the bundles together in silence and handed them to Stephen, who gave them a cursory glance, shook his head with a worried, dissatisfied air, and put them back into their box. 'The best thing I can do is to seal this at once, and give it to you to keep in a safe place. Perhaps you had better carry it back to the Surprise yourself: I have slipped into the water from a boat before this.'

In the great cabin once more Stephen melted the wax, pressed his curiously engraved watch-key upon it, and handed the box over together with a small piece of paper, saying, 'This slip shows the proper recipient, if any accident should happen to me.'

'It is a damned heavy responsibility,' said Jack gravely, taking it.

'There are heavier by far, my dear,' said Stephen. 'I must be away for my rounds.'

'That reminds me,' said Jack. 'I se�hat the gunner's wife is on your sick-list. I hope she is better by now?'

'Better? She is not,' said Stephen emphatically.

'I am sorry for it,' said Jack. 'Would a visit be in order, or one of the chickens, or a bottle of port-wine? Or perhaps all three?'

'Listen,' said Stephen, 'I do not know that she will live.'

'Oh Lord,' cried Jack, 'I had no idea - I am extremely concerned - I hope there is something you can do for her?'

'As for that,' said Stephen, 'I set nearly all my trust in the resilience of youth. She is no more than nineteen, poor child, and at nineteen one can support hell and purgatory almost, and live. Tell me, Tom Pullings will not be leaving us at once?'

'No. He keeps company until the morning. I have a great deal of paper-work to do.'

'I must write at least one letter too,' said Stephen. 'And if I possibly can I will come and help you with the captured mail,' he added, knowing Jack's extreme reluctance to read other people's correspondence, even though it might contain priceless information. 'We shall have a busy night of it.'

A busy night and a sleepless one, but in the course of it they found one letter written by an officer named Caleb Gill which gave a clear statement of the Norfolk's intended movements as far as the Galapagos archipelago: from that point she was to steer westward 'to my uncle Palmer's particular Paradise, for which we have a band of colonists, who wish to be as far away from their countrymen as possible'. Uncle Palmer was obviously the captain of the Norfolk, and his particular Paradise might be anywhere in the South Seas; but by comparing dates and positions and what the whalers said about the Norfolk's sailing qualities, Jack was reasonably confident that he should come up with her well before the Galapagos, probably at the island of Juan Fernandez, where she meant to wood and water, or in the neighbourhood of Valparaiso, where she meant to refit; and Stephen would have been quite cheerful if it had not been for two patients who weighed upon his mind, the one his old friend Joe Plaice, who had brought his head against a ring-bolt in a commonplace fall down a ladder, fracturing his skull, and the other Mrs Homer, who was not responding to his treatment in any way.

'It astonishes me that our seamen can move straight from one ship to another and sail it off with no practice,' said Martin as they stood watching the Dana�part company, turning in a long pure curve until her head was pointing north-north-east while the Surprise carried on to the west of south.

'The complexity of rigging is much the same in all, I am told,' said Stephen. 'Just as we see a clear analogy between the skeletons of vertebrates, so the mariner with his boats. In a brig I believe some ropes run forward while on a threemasted ship they run backwards, yet this is no more a source of confusion for the seaman than the ruminant's multiplicity of stomachs for the anatomist, or the howler's anomalous hyoid. Yet what I wished to say was this: I know it was your kindly intention to visit the gunner's wife, but in her present state of mental agitation and extreme physical distress I really think I should beg you not to do so until there is some improvement: I have already banished her husband. On the other hand, I should be glad of your assistance in a tolerably delicate operation as soon as there is light enough: a depressed fracture. I must trepan poor Plaice and I should like to do so today; they tell me there is dirty weather ahead, and clearly one needs a steady deck underfoot and an immobile patient. I have an improved Lavoisier's trephine, a magnificent instrument with extraordinary biting power; and if you choose, you shall turn the handle!'

The Surprise's crew, like most seamen, were a hypochondriacal set of ghouls upon the whole, and they loved a surgical operation almost as much as they loved a prize. But whereas the amputation of a shipmate's arm or leg had disadvantages of which they were fully sensible, a trepanning had none: the patient had but to survive to have all his former powers restored - to be as good as new, with the glory of a silver plate and an anecdote that would last him and his friends to the grave.

It was an operation that Dr Maturin had carried out at sea before, always in the fullest possible light and therefore on deck, and many of them had seen him do so. Now they and all their mates saw him do it again: they saw Joe Plaice's scalp taken off, his skull bared, a disc of bone audibly sawn out, the handle turning solemnly; a three-shilling piece, hammered into a flattened dome by the armourer, screwed on over the hole; and the scalp replaced, neatly sewn up by the parson.

It was extremely gratifying - the Captain had been seen to go pale, and Barret Bonden too, the patient's cousin - blood running down Joe's neck regardless - brains clearly to be seen - something not to be missed for a mint of money- instructive, too - and they made the most of it. This was just as well, because it was the last gratification they had for a very long while: in some cases the last they ever had. The dirty weather, foretold by the long heavy swell from the south and west, the dropping glass and the most forbidding sky, struck them even sooner and even harder than they had expected.

Yet the Surprise was a well-found, weatherly ship, and she rigged preventer backstays, braces, shrouds, and of course stays throughout, as well as rolling tackles, a full suit of storm-canvas bent well in time and her topgallant masts struck down on deck. Although the gale was very heavy indeed, filled with blinding rain and sleet, and although at first it blew against the swell and cut up a wicked sea, it was not foul, and the frigate, under close-reefed topsails, raced south at a tremendous pace, half smothered in flying water, shipping green seas every other minute, so that her decks were aswim and men could never move without clinging to the life-lines stretching fore and aft.

Two days and three nights it blew, the storm-wrack as low as the mastheads, but the third day it cleared and they had a good noon observation: to his great pleasure Jack found that they were farther south than he had expected - farther south than their dead-reckoning allowed - and that they were within striking distance of Staten Island.

He and Allen had a long conference, with the charts spread out before them, charts that gave different longitudes for a good many awkward islands, reefs and headlands: and all the while they talked the decks as far aft as the taffrail were aflutter with sea-soaked clothes attempting to dry in the pale evening sun. Jack questioned the master again and again about Captain Colnett's accuracy, and again and again the master affirmed that he would take his Gospel oath on it. 'He was Captain Cook's pupil, sir, and he carried a pair of Arnold's chronometers: they lasted him all the way, always wound, never once stopping, right by observation to within ten seconds, until we were pooped south of St Helena, homeward bound.'

'A pair of Arnold's chronometers? Very well then, Mr Allen,' said Jack, satisfied at last, 'let us set course for Cape St John. And as you go forward, pray tell the Doctor that I shall be able to accompany him on his rounds this evening.'

'Well, Stephen,' he said, when the Doctor came to fetch him, 'you have a thundering long great sick-list today, I see.'

'The usual strained articulations, crushed fingers, broken bones,' said Stephen. 'I tell them, "You must have one hand for the ship, and another for yourself; and you must throw your nasty grog into the scuppers, if you are to go aloft within two hours," but they do not attend. They leap about the rigging, encouraged by the bosun, as though they were octopodes, with prehensile tails into the bargain; so of course every time there is a tempest my sick-bay fills.'

'Of course. But tell me about Mrs Homer: I thought of her often when we rolled and pitched to such an extent.'