The Discovery Of Slowness (7 page)

‘That's not so important. There are enough big guns around here.'

At that very moment the door opened, and a large, fat man stood there with a questioning face. Obviously he wanted to come in.

‘Out with you!' Mary Rose shouted. The fat man went away.

‘That was Jack. He's a big gun, for example – in feeding himself and in guzzling.' Mary Rose was in a good humour. ‘Once when his ship had run aground they threw him overboard and the keel came free at once.' She leaned back and laughed heartily, her eyes closed. John could now view her knee and thigh and imagined
how it went on from there. He picked up his trousers from the chair, checked what was up or down. Then he rummaged until he brought out the four shillings. ‘Yes, you'll have to pay,' said Mary Rose, ‘or else you'll think you had no fun at all.' She took hold of his head. John's lips felt her eyebrows; he felt the tiny hairs. Gentle and peaceful was this feeling. No need to strain or to plan anything, for it was her hands that moved his head back and forth. ‘You're a serious lad,' she said, ‘and that's a good thing. When you get older you'll be a gentleman. Let me see you again. It'll work next time. I know that.' John rummaged in his pocket once more. ‘Here,' he began, ‘I've got a brass chainlink.' He gave it to her as a present. She took it and said nothing. When he left, she said in a rough voice: ‘Trip up old Jack when you go out, will you? If he breaks his neck I'll have the night off.'

When John got back to the ship, for once both Mockridge's eyes seemed to focus on him at the same angle. ‘How was it?' John reflected for a moment, then made a decision and stuck to it. ‘I'm in love,' he said. ‘Only I was a bit discouraged at first because of the buttons.' That was no lie, really. For a long time the pleasant scent of her skin lingered in his mind. And he continued to hope that the slowness of women had something to do with his own.

No damage to the ship below the waterline. Now Matthew also had his pass for the
Investigator
and, despite the mishaps at Dungeness, the blessing of the naval authorities. Another researcher, Dr Brown, and the long-awaited master sailmaker Thistle had also come on board; the crew was complete. Matthew gave the order to weigh anchor.

Four days later they came upon the Channel fleet – not a pleasant sight. There they were lying again, those hulks with their high decks crammed to the top with gunpowder and iron, better suited for shooting than for sailing, waiting in ambush for the French.

‘Never again,' John said with relief. They were heading for waters outside Europe where their only concern would be observations and good maps. The beautiful strange world – he
would now really have to see it, or he could no longer believe in it. The sea itself had to lift him out of his doldrums. He was no longer a child. When Sherard said once, just as in the old days. ‘I watch like hawk,' a strange feeling came over him as though he had to weep for something lost.

But now he was on the way.

Whoever goes to sea cannot be desperate for long. There was too much work for that. Matthew put his crew of farm boys through their paces until their eyes fell shut while they were still standing. John learned not only all the manoeuvres and battle stations but also every block, every fitting, every seam. He knew where ropes and chains squeezed each other, how to fit each eye into its place, how to splice rope-ends, how to fix the topmasts to the mainmasts. He knew the commands for all sailing manoeuvres from memory, and there were many of them. His only worry was the tomcat Trim, a beauty of a grey tabby who didn't feel the slightest pity. The animal sat at table in the midshipmen's mess where, he discovered, his paw could easily knock a piece of meat off the slowest midshipman's fork – to be devoured later, in some safe place. The trick succeeded much too often. John's table companions now looked forward to it, choking with laughter. Dejected, John noticed that this made Trim more and more popular. It was, however, one of those worries over which one could forget bigger ones.

The awful figure at night appeared more and more rarely. In his dreams John was now busy setting sails. He heard his own voice yelling: ‘Sheet forward! To the topsail lines! Haul tight! Hoist topsails! Belay topsail lines!' And the ship reliably did exactly what she was supposed to do.

At the outset of their navigation lessons Matthew said he didn't believe that anyone in the world could do anything without knowing the stars by name and position. Then he explained the firmament and the sextant. John already knew how to find his way, but now he held the precious instrument in his hand for the first time. Mirror and calibration marks on the segmental scale
were precise to one-sixtieth of an inch. A ruler with the Oriental girl's name of Alhidade turned in the centre. John learned first of all never to drop a sextant on the floor, and next how to operate it. ‘Either precise figures or prayers. There's no third way,' said Matthew. When he peered through the diopter to establish their bearings, he himself came to look like a precision instrument: his left eye closed, surrounded by small sixtieth-of-an-inch wrinkles, nose snubbed, upper lip pursed as though in an expression of deepest contempt for all imprecision. His chin pulled back as far as this was possible for Matthew. There stood a man who knew exactly what to look at before he acted. John and Sherard agreed that they loved Matthew best when he took bearings.

Then there were the chronometers, which Matthew lovingly called the guardians of time. Only by fixing Greenwich mean time precisely could one calculate which longitude had been reached, either west or east. These time guardians had been built individually by craftsmen working by hand over a long period of time, and they bore proud names: Earnshaw's Nos. 520 and 543; Kendall's No. 55, Arnold's No. 176. Each had its very own face – black ornaments on shining white – and each in its own sweet way was a little fast or slow. Only synchronisation guaranteed precision. Each individual quirk was brought to light through constant comparisons. Clocks were creatures. The greatest miracle about them was that the driving-power of the spring was perfectly balanced by the mysterious braking-power of the anchor. If a time guardian was slow by only one minute, the error in calculating one's position amounted to fifteen sea miles. The compass, Walker No. 1, was also a respectable figure. It was so sensitive that it tended to overreact, especially in the proximity of cannons.

John loved to look at land and sea charts. He gazed at them until he believed he understood each line as well as the causes of the earth's shape in this region. He calculated the length of the coastlines by dividing them by the distance between Ingoldmells and Skegness – a very useful measure. ‘When you get down to it, a map is something impossible,' said Matthew, ‘because it transforms something elevated into something flat.'

John liked best watching them measure speed. When for the first time he was allowed to take the measurement himself, and lovingly played out the logline, he was completely happy at last. After letting it run for eighty feet, the log was set correctly; the beginning knot zoomed forward and Sherard turned the glass. Sand and measuring-line ran for twenty-eight seconds; then John stopped it and took the reading. ‘Three and a half knots. It isn't great.' He measured again.

John would have even taken logline and hourglass into his bunk with him at night if he had been able to measure how quickly a man fell asleep or how far he could travel in his dreams.

Matthew had his quirks. Day after day he had the hammocks aired, the bulkheads washed with vinegar, and the decks holystoned. The thundering noise of those scrubbing-blocks woke any late sleepers in the morning.

They were given pickled cabbage and beer; large quantities of lemon juice were also available. In that way, Matthew wanted to prevent scurvy. ‘No one will die on my ship,' he said in a menacing tone. ‘Except at worst Nathaniel Bell, of homesickness.'

‘Or we'll all die, but not of any disease,' murmured Colpits in a circle of petty officers. He was again convinced that the prophesied beaching still lay in the future. There was a third possibility: the ship took in two inches of water per hour. The carpenter crawled about in the bilges for hours on end, emerging again on deck with a white face and asking to see Matthew privately. Rumours started at once.

‘I bet one of the planks is made of mountain ash,' one of them surmised. ‘That'll send us to the fish for certain.' ‘Don't talk nonsense,' shouted Mockridge. ‘Look at the deck planks of juniper wood. They'll compensate for any weakness.'

There was much talk while they were pumping, and no reason will help against an old story, above all when it seems to be confirmed. After three days their faces became even longer. ‘Now she takes in four inches per hour,' the First Lieutenant said. ‘Soon we'll need no cats. The rats will drown on their own.'

Madeira! John was on land again. The ground was so firm that he tottered incredulously. The war was coming closer and closer. The soldiers of the 85th Regiment had just been landed, and they were chasing away all the rabbits and lizards in the city of Funchal with their incessant trench-digging. Funchal was to be defended against a French attack. However, this attack threatened only because of their fortifying. England had occupied Portuguese Madeira in all friendship. As always when John had his own ideas about something that were perhaps not shared by others, he felt a rising concern. But, he thought, I'm not well enough informed.

In Funchal, the
Investigator
's seams were caulked. They spent nights ashore – the officers and petty officers in a hotel. John learned how many fleas and bedbugs can gather in one single place at the same time: it was something for science.

The casks were refilled with water, and Matthew bought beef. He explained to his midshipmen that one can tell the meat of an old cow from that of a young one by its bluish color. Madeira wine was too expensive for him. A barrel for forty-two pounds sterling – that was piracy by other means! Those prices might be paid by tubercular English lords and ladies who rode in ox carts and read novels.

The scientists tried to climb Pico Ruivo, a high mountain on the edge of an ancient, expansive volcanic crater. They never reached the peak because of blisters on their feet. On their way back their boat filled with water, and they lost their collection of insects. ‘What a shame! Nowhere in the world are there more interesting bugs than in Madeira,' sighed Dr Brown.

When under a gentle southerly breeze the ship left the island again, only Franklin and Taylor were on the quarterdeck; the others were eating. Taylor saw a red dust cloud sweeping over the water from the north-east. Neither of them at first drew any conclusions. John thought: desert. He imagined how the wind lifted the red sand of the Sahara, how it chased the sand beyond the shore and over the dark sea, perhaps as far as South America. Something seemed odd to John. ‘Stop!' he said, then a few minutes
later, ‘but the cloud has …' A little later all sails were taken back; a violent squall raced from the north-east and slammed into the weak south wind, plucking the rigging of the
Investigator
. One of the spars came down, crashing on the deck, and a huge chunk of elm crushed one of the cats – but not Trim the tomcat. Still, the whole thing passed without severe damage. They all feasted on a giant turtle they had fished out, and drank some Malmsey to the dead cat.

John pondered. He had seen it coming, and yet he had stood around not knowing what to do. What was needed in action was unreflective knowledge instilled by practice – the blindness. Instead of shouting, ‘Stop, the cloud …' he should have shouted, ‘The wind is veering!' A good six minutes would have remained for them to protect the spars by dropping and bracing them. They might even have been able to strike the topgallants. John became convinced that he had to practise the unforeseen. One of these days he wanted to save a ship by acting quickly and correctly.

Sherard asked him set questions: ‘There's a storm and there isn't enough space to leeward for jibbing.' Or: ‘Man overboard on a course close to the wind.' Each time, John took exactly five seconds to visualise the whole thing well in his inner eye. Then came the answer: ‘Call out “Man overboard!” Toss the man a daytime life buoy but not on top of him – makes no difference with night-time life buoys, since it's dark anyway. Heave to. Lower boat into water to leeward. One person always keeps an eye on the man.' ‘Good,' said Sherard. ‘Now you see flames on the foredeck.' Five seconds. Take a breath. Then: ‘Change course to leeward at once. Batten down hatches. Unload guns. Ammunition overboard. Shut magazine. Throw bolts. Hoist boats onto and lower to water level! …' Matthew had been standing behind him for some time. ‘Not bad,' he commented. ‘But perhaps you're starting a little late to put out the fire.' John understood slowly, then turned red. In a small voice he mumbled: ‘To the buckets …'

No land for weeks. By now it had become so warm that people didn't run around in jackets even at night. John was completely
at ease with the calm of the sea, a calm quite distinct from the strength of the wind. The crew worked better and more steadily. Even gun master Colpits became friendlier, although he could use his ammunition only for peaceful ends. When Stanley Kirkeby wounded his arm and developed a fever, he had to imbibe a mixture of gunpowder and vinegar. He was soon back on his feet!

In his dream John saw a new figure. At night the ocean suffused by moonlight became an image of itself. It reared up to a curled cloud of water circling round itself like a spiral growing larger and larger at the top, like a luxuriating plant, like a flickering and burning bush of water or a vortex created not by wind and current but by its own power. The sea gave itself its own body, being able to nod, to strike attitudes, to point the way. This gigantic figure grew effortlessly in his dream, emerging from the deceptively eternal expanse of the horizon; it was like a truth that would make everything different. A crater opened up towards heaven, a mouth or a gorge. Perhaps the whole thing was a leviathan, perhaps a dance of millions of tiny creatures. John often dreamed this dream. Sometimes far-ranging reflections followed him after awakening. Mary Rose in Portsmouth occurred to him, and the fact that what mattered to women was not an outer but a hidden, inner moment. Another time he mused about the trek of the children of Israel through the Red Sea and fancied that not God but the sea itself had arranged their rescue.