Blue at the Mizzen (23 page)

'William signals land thirty-odd miles to the northward that may be Cape Pilar, which is laid down in just about that position.'

'I am so sorry. I thought we had done with capes. Take a little more wine, for your stomach's sake.'

'Well, if you insist... but let me tell you, Stephen, that although Cape Pilar or Cape Deseado as some say, forms part of Desolation Island - yet another Desolation Island, for all love - it is a wonderfully comfortable sight to a seaman bound for the Chilean coast, because just beyond that blessed cape lies the Pacific Ocean.'

'Do you mean we may survive?'

'Oh, I should not go as far as that; but presently I shall desire Ringle to reduce sail and ask William to dine with us after we have both made a very, very careful noon-observation. Then we shall compare positions and rejoice or lament as the case may be. Killick. Killick, there.'

'Sir?'

'Pass the word for the acting-master.'

'Pass the word for the master it is, sir,' replied Killick with (for him) an extraordinary degree of good humour.

'And Killick, tell my cook to lay on as decent a dinner as the barky can provide: Ringle will be coming aboard.' When Killick had gone, Jack said, 'Stephen, I do not suppose the sick-bay's comforts could be laid under contribution for the feast?'

'I might be able to spare a little, a very little, portable soup,' said Stephen, 'and I will myself look through my stores for two or three decent bottles of wine. And so this, you tell me, is virtually the Pacific?'

'Unless dear William has totally lost his wits with longing, the waters of the two oceans mingle off the seaward point of that Cape Pilar; and the Pacific, you will recall, bathes the coasts of Chile and Peru, stretching up to the Isthmus of Panama, on and on to Nootka Sound and the frigid Canadian shore. Come in, Mr. Daniel: let me tell you that one of your first duties as master's mate of this ship is to make a most meticulously exact noon-observation. For as I dare say you have heard, Ringle, far ahead, has signalled a probable sighting of Cape Pilar, with something very near the right bearing. And please tell Mr. Harding, with my compliments, that I should like him to make all reasonable sail to close the schooner.'

Within moments there was the sound of intense activity on deck: the bosun's oddly cracked bellow urging people 'to tally and belay', the thump of racing feet and the creak of blocks; and all the countless notes that made up the ship's voice rose in pitch and intensity, while the run of the sea from her cutwater aft grew more urgent by far.

The sea, if it teaches nothing else, does at least compel a submission to the inevitable which resembles patience. And all those concerned contained themselves with a decent appearance of that virtue through the clear hours of approach. To be sure, for both cabin and gunroom there was the delightful discovery (at least for those who understood navigation) that their positions coincided in the most gratifying manner; and then of course there was the feast, during which it was found that a really full-bodied burgundy went admirably with seal steaks. But the real, truly relished delight came well after this, when, well topped up with American rum, they stood in the foretop, Jack Aubrey calling up the midshipmen one by one and bidding them take the most particular note of that tall naked mountain at the tip of the island just ahead, the mountain with two pillars of rock on the seaward side, the higher quite black. They were never to forget that landfall, because it marked the western end of Magellan's Strait: and then from these tolerable luck and a west or north-west breeze a ship could be carried through to the Atlantic in a week.

They had perfectly delightful weather after Cape Pilar, with clear skies, topgallant western breezes with none of that cruel bite of ice, a truly blessed sea with great smooth rollers riding gently in towards a shore so distant that it was only the faintest loom, a sea with here and there a whale, and fine fresh fish taken over the side in God's plenty. And above all this sea was pacific - no sudden dreadful squalls, never a night when all hands were called, plucked from their half-warmed hammocks to confront hail and ice-caked decks, tops and ratlines: health began to return, and with it laughter, capers, mirth; and at last the African cats came from their refuge in the galley, where they had what very little warmth was available, south of the Horn.

This enchanting weather lasted from one Wednesday until the next, and on the intervening Sunday they rigged church, all hands in pretty good clothes (though few chests had escaped a soaking), trimmed by the barber and his mate, pigtails combed and replaited, and the singers, who made up most of the ship's crew, in good, hearty voice. Jack read them one of Taylor's sermons on intemperance, to which they listened gravely; while the Ringles, just under their lee, had to put up with the Articles of War yet again, Mr. Reade having little confidence in his powers that way.

From well before dawn the following Wednesday it was clear to everyone aboard that they were going to have it rough; but few who had not seen the appalling drop of the barometer could have imagined quite how rough they would have it, or how soon. The wind came dead foul, of course, blowing from the north-north-west with ever-increasing force and against the flow both of tide and of current. At two bells all hands were called to bring the ship to and to veer out a drogue: it was tarpaulins again and ice in the wind; and a freakish cross-current whipped the crest of a tall wave clean across her side, flooding the galley and putting out the fires.

The cold, the hard, hard, very hard toil of keeping her just so, under bare poles forward and no more than a scrap right aft - pumps going without a pause - was about as severe as anything they had gone through, bar the even more deadly threat of the massive far southern ice.

When at last it did blow itself out they were almost too tired for relief, though Jack did observe, with grave approval, that the schooner had come through quite well: her head-rails were gone, for the most part; her bowsprit was little more than a stump; and she had had to ship a new bright yellow boom; but she looked more buoyant than the Surprise. They were lying there in a still violently agitated, dirty sea, and clearly they were nearer the land than he had reckoned. In this cloudy evening light he could not see it, but all along to starboard there were shattered trees, masses of vegetation, as though kelp-beds had been ploughed up or steep-to land carried away. Far out to westward he thought he could make out a distant light.

'Mr. Whewell,' he said to the officer of the watch, having pondered a while. 'Let us signal to Ringle make what offing is feasible.' He saw the coloured lanterns hoisted and acknowledged: told Harding that the watch below might now indeed go below once grog and a reasonable piece of smoked penguin and biscuit had been served out.

He noticed the first lieutenant's glance at the word 'biscuit', but without taking it up he went below. The sick-berth was more or less what was to be expected - indeed dreaded - after so sudden and so severe a blow. Less rather than more, seeing that there were now fewer to have limbs strained, dislocated, even broken; and now all were seamen, thoroughly used to the most furious extremes of weather and to having one hand for themselves as well as one for the ship. He did what was proper and customary by each, and he observed that Stephen had been as generous as usual with his laudanum where there was severe pain: he had known surgeons who out of something like a vicarious asceticism would allow nothing but liniment for even the worst of torn muscles. 'And for yourself?' he asked privately. 'How have you come through this blow?'

'Tolerably well, my dear, I thank you,' said Stephen, 'but I could do with a biscuit and a swallow of brandy.'

'The brandy we can do, at a pinch. But as for the biscuit... when you have a minute, come on deck: there are some prodigious curious trees a little way inshore. But the light is almost gone.'

'I have three fractures to splint, and then I shall be with you.'

The light had indeed faded, but Stephen could still receive the strong impression of an utterly disordered ocean - uneasy, with acres of yellowish scum, irregular and sometimes conflicting waves, and wreckage from the coast all over what coherent surfaces it had - just under the rail where he stood one of those immense Chilean pines with harshly recurved sharp-pointed leaves, was being fended off for fear its trailing roots - its roots, the whole hillside on which it grew having obviously been carried away - should foul the rudder.

'It is indeed an astonishing sight,' said Stephen. 'But if you will forgive me, I believe I shall turn in. I die on my feet. Do you not find the air growing curiously thick?'

'In another ten minutes I believe we shall not see our own bowsprit. In these waters you often get fog after foul: and by God it was foul.'

Stephen Maturin often thought - had always thought -himself justified in making quite sure of a long night's sleep when he was very tired, by swallowing enough laudanum or anything else that came to hand to deaden a horse. It was therefore extremely difficult to wake him early in the morning.

'Oh go to the Devil, you hideous ape,' he said in a tone of exasperated hatred, and he heaved over in his cot, pulling the pillow over his head.

But it would not do. Slowly, by dint of steady, unvarying repetition, the message came through. A Hull whaler was alongside, her master aboard, pleading for help with a wounded man. A man whose arm, caught in the line running furiously out as a harpooned sperm whale dived, had been horribly mangled three days ago.

'I am no more fit to operate on a mangled arm than I am to bind up a cut finger,' he said, sitting up and looking at his hands. 'What is that smell?'

'It is coffee. The whaler brought us a couple of pounds. Should you like a pot?'

'Well, I might,' said Stephen, looking quite human, even intelligent. And when two or three remarkably strong cups had dispelled some of the poppy, hellebore and Jamaica rum, his deeply rooted sense of duty, of medical duty, began to return; he said, 'What is the name of my loblolly-boy?'

In a conciliating voice Jack said, 'Poll Skeeping.'

'Is the sea calm?'

'Mill ponds ain't in it.'

'You astonish me.'

'Did you not hear the dead flat thunderous rain all night?'

'I did not.'

'What am I to do?' asked Jack, afraid that he should drop off again.

'Why, beg her to go across and take a general view of the patient. She is an intelligent woman - they exist, whatever you may say - she had the good word of my old friend Dr. Teevan: she has had a world of experience, and she will tell my poor battered stupefied mind what to expect.'

She told him, as she put on his clean shirt and tidied his hair, that Saint Luke and all his fellow-apostles could not save the arm now, nor the whole college of surgeons of Dublin; but she thought that his honour, if she might say so, could possibly save the poor creature's life by taking it off at the shoulder, still quite a clean joint: and she had told the whalers what to do, what to prepare; and she had put up the usual implements.

The time to cross two decks and to descend into the well-lit cabin where the patient lay fighting his pain, his grief and his dread, was enough to restore the medical Stephen to life; and after a cursory examination that wholly confirmed what Poll had said, he carried out a rapid, unusually satisfactory amputation with excellent flaps of healthy skin, which he had scarcely dared hope for, and he murmured into the patient's ear, 'There: it is over. You will do remarkably well, if you lie quite still and drink no spirits at all for a week.'

'Is it over, sir?' asked the patient. 'I did not know. God bless you.'

On deck he said to the master of the ship, 'You will stay here, beside the ship, if you please. I am reasonably sanguine about your man - your brother, I believe? - and I should like to dress his shoulder tomorrow and show the most intelligent of your shipmates how to carry on until he is quite well.'

'I have always liked whalers,' said Jack, still waving though they were half a mile apart on a blessed calm forenoon with a fine breeze for reaching. 'They have to be right seamen to survive at all. People call them rough and their ships all a-hoo, and to be sure they kick up Bob's-a-dying on shore: but then they live rough, most uncommon rough. Yet for open-handed, I do not know their equal, though in general sailors are not often called skin-flints. Carling there, Joseph Carling, would have emptied his hold if I had let him: but I would not accept more than a couple of casks of biscuit, once I had heard that there was a small sheltered port or rather anchorage within reach, a little place called Pillon where most of the whalers down here go for their stores. The place is kept by a Hull man married to an Indian woman and he knows just what they need.' A pause, and Jack went on, gazing after the whaler, now hull-down, 'It is pleasant to see how sailors recognise one another all over the world: I am sorry you were too busy aboard Ringle and with your patients here to dine with Carling and me. You would have heard about some fellow-members of the Royal. Do you remember Dobson, Austin Dobson?'

'The entomologist?'

'Just so.'

'Of course I do. The Proceedings would not be what they are without him. There are no less than three beetles named after Austin Dobson: in fact there may by now even be a fourth.'

'Have you heard about his inheritance?'

'Come, my dear, pray do not let us tease one another with question and answer. I find that I am somewhat fractious today - I have been made to work far too hard: I am nourished on most indifferently preserved penguins and seals. And I desire you to give me a plain straightforward sea-manlike account of our colleague.'

'Very well. Let us go below and sit in comfort. There: put up your feet and calm your spirit. Austin Dobson, now, had a remote cousin whom he did not know - had barely met - who lived in gloomy splendour somewhere far in the north, where coal is mined and shipped from Newcastle.

Now this cousin died, and Dobson inherited some ludicrous sum: millions - I do not know how many, but millions. And he instantly set about doing what he had always longed to do. He bought the Lisbon packet, a very stout serviceable craft designed to make rapid passages across the Bay of Biscay, and with an adequate crew and five or six friends, all Fellows of the Royal Society, botanists or entomologists and one authority on marine life - all men of wide interests - he set off by way of the Cape to India, Ceylon, the Spice Islands and so across the Pacific. They looked into Juan Fernandez and now they are working up the Chilean and Peruvian coasts as far as the Panama Isthmus, where two mean to cross and take ship the other side, carrying the seeds and more delicate specimens - they have university commitments - while Dobson and his remaining friends carry on to Nootka Sound, returning by way of Kamschatka, where two of them mean to study the Economical Rat of those parts.'