Blue at the Mizzen

  He had indeed experimented, different constitutions requiring different remedies, but always, in this violent outbreak of dysentery (some of the salt pork served on the first day had already crossed the Atlantic four times, with a long pause in Kingston, Jamaica) on the general basis of similia similibus, carefully noting the various results: and watching, with an anxious eye, the frightful diminution of his stores—at one time, before they were clear of soundings, three-quarters of the Surprises had been helpless, incapable of duty, but eager and willing to take enormous doses of rhubarb.

  'But as for young Hanson—for whom, I may say, I feel a certain responsibility, as well as an affection—he was fit for duty three days ago.'

  'I am glad to hear it,' said Jack; and later that day, after a morning of paperwork with his clerk and the purser, and after dinner, he walked the quarterdeck with a coffee-cup in his hand. The day was brighter now by far, and warm: ' clouds were still scudding from the west, but the breeze had dropped, so that Surprise was now wearing her courses.

  At five bells they heaved the log. 'Eight knots and one fathom, sir, if you please,' said Mr Midshipman Shepherd to Whewell, the officer of the watch. Whewell turned to Jack, took off his hat, and said, 'Eight knots and one fathom, sir, if you please.'

  'Thank you, Mr Whewell,' said Jack, gazing up at the masts' pronounced leeward angle, 'I believe we may come up a point and a half.'

  'A point and a half it is, sir,' said Whewell, and he repeated the order to the quartermaster at the con.

  Jack moved forward to the rail and looked down into the waist of the ship. There he saw what he expected to see, some of the younger midshipmen learning the fine points of their craft—long-splicing to leeward, a complex system of pointing to windward, and just beneath him Horatio Hanson was being shown some elementary skills such as sheet-bend, bowline, clove-hitch and rolling hitch by Joe Plaice, his recently-appointed sea-daddy, already horribly loquacious and didactic, though good-natured with it all.

  'Mr Hanson,' he called.

  'Sir?' cried Horatio, dropping his fid and running up the ladder.

  'How do you feel at present?' asked Jack, looking at him attentively.

  'Very well, sir, I thank you. Prime,' he said, standing straight, his hands behind his back.

  In a private tone Jack went on, 'You do mind my words about a first-voyager being meek and mute in the berth, I trust?'

  'Oh yes, sir,' said Horatio, blushing. 'But, sir, you did say that I did not have to put up with everything, however gross.'

  'Perhaps I did.'

  'So when a—a shipmate—called me a pragmatical son of a bitch, I thought I had to resent it.'

  'Not a superior officer? Just a member of the berth?'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'Then of course you had to resent it. Show me your hands. Turn them over.' It must have been a heavy left-handed blow to split the skin to that extent. Jack shook his head. 'No, no: it will not do. I doubt anyone else in the berth will speak to you like that again—a gentlemanly lot, upon the whole: but if it should happen you must say, "Blackguard me as much as ever you choose: the Captain has tied my hands." '

  'Yes, sir,' said the boy, with proper deference and a total want of conviction.

  'Well, now: since she is not what you would call lively'—the mastheads swept out an arc of no more than forty degrees at present—'perhaps we might try the mizzen crosstrees. You remember what I said about both hands and never looking down?'

  'Oh yes, sir.'

  'Then away aloft, and I shall follow you.'

  Hanson ran aft, nipped on to the rail, and leaning out he seized the third and fourth mizzen shrouds as they rose from the channel, writhed between them, setting himself on the outward side, grasped the ratlines that ran horizontally across the shrouds and climbed a step or two of the ladder they formed, and waited.

  A moment later he felt the whole mass of rigging tighten as it took the captain's weight: then the captain's powerful hands on his ankles, shifting his feet in turn up and up and up. 'Do not look down,' said Jack presently, 'but just about level, at the mast. Just forward of the gaff there is a block.'

  'I see it, sir.'

  'It leads the starboard main-topsail-brace straight down on deck: give it a gentle pull when it is in reach and you will see the brace respond.'

  So it did: a most gratifying sweep. But now they were close to the lower side of the top, that broad platform at the head of the lower mast that bore the topmast and its matching array of shrouds, spread by the crosstrees and towering up to the topgallantmast and the upper crosstrees. From immediately under the top Jack threaded Hanson up through the lubber's hole, himself taking the backward-leaning futtock-shrouds and dropping from the rail to join him. 'You must always come up through the hole for the first seven times,' he said. 'To be sure, it looks lubberly, but seven times is the law. You will very soon get used to laying aloft, and after those holy seven times you will use the futtock-shrouds without thinking about it. Now let me show you the things in the top . . .' This he did from the top-maul to the fid, fid-plate, bolster and chock.

  Jack's voyages were rarely of a kind in which a first-voyager would be either proposed or accepted; yet some did come aboard, propelled by very high authority or the plea of old shipmates, and it was Jack's habit to take them aloft himself, at first. It established a particular contact, and it told him a great deal about the boy. Apart from anything else it made ordinary human conversation possible, a very rare thing between the extremes of rank.

  They sat in the top for a while sitting on folded studdingsails while Jack explained various points in the running rigging and Horatio gazed out with open wonder and admiration at the immense, ordered intricacy of a man-of-war, its extraordinary beauty and the even greater beauty of its surroundings.

  'I am afraid your knuckles are bleeding on your trousers,' Jack observed, after a pause.

  'Oh, I am so sorry, sir,' cried the boy, in horror. 'I am afraid they are. I beg pardon, sir. I shall wrap them in my handkerchief.'

  'The great thing for blood,' said Jack, speaking with some authority, 'is cold water. Just soak whatever it is in cold water overnight and in the morning it will be gone. But tell me about boxing, will you? Have you done much?'

  'Oh no sir. I hardly went to school: but the boys who came to be prepared for first communion by Mr Walker or my grandfather and I used to mill in the barn afterwards.'

  'Did you use gloves?'

  'No, sir: just muffles. But then there was the coachman's boy whose uncle, a real prize-fighter who kept the inn at Clumpton and who taught him a great deal—he had gloves, and he taught me.'

  'So much the better,' said Jack. 'When I was a reefer in a ship of the line with a lot of others in the berth, we used to have set matches, and we challenged other ships in the squadron. So did the ratings.'

  'That must have been capital fun.'

  'So it was, indeed. Perhaps we might do something . . . what do you weigh?'

  'Almost nine stone, sir.'

  'We must see what can be done. Are you puffed with your climb?'

  'Not in the least, sir.'

  'Then let us go up to the crosstrees. You do not mind the height?'

  'Oh no, sir, I do not mind it.'

  Jack turned him round, set him in position, both hands firm, and once again he called, 'Away aloft.' They moved briskly up the narrowing ladder, the shrouds so close at the top that Jack swung round to the larboard set, swung up to the larboard crosstree and gave the boy a hand to heave him up to the other. There they sat, one each side of the mast, each with an arm around it. They seemed incomparably higher up here, the sea stretching almost to infinity, the sky unimaginably vast: Horatio had opened his mouth to exclaim at the ethereal beauty of the ship and her setting when he remembered the words 'mute and meek' and shut it again. Jack said, 'If the breeze comes a trifle more aft, you may see stunsails set. Now cling to the crosstree with both hands once I am under you, dangle your legs and let me place your fee
t.'

  Down and down again: and on deck Jack said, 'You did pretty well. Next time you must lay aloft with one of your mates—Mr Daniel, say—and in a week you will find it as easy as kiss-my-hand.'

  'Sir, thank you very much indeed for taking me: I have never seen anything so beautiful in my whole life. I wish it could go on for ever.'

  He regretted these last words as being enthusiastic, out of place to a post-captain: but they had barely been uttered before they were drowned by a prodigious bellowing from the look-out on the foretopsail yard, a former (and most passionate) whaler. 'There she blows! Oh there she blows! Three points on the starboard bow. Pardon me, sir,' he added in a lower tone, for this was not a Royal Naval cry.

  There she blew indeed—a great dark heave in the smooth sea and then the jet—and not only she but her six companions, one after another, heaving up enormous, blowing and smoothly diving each in turn, and each heartily cheered by the Surprises. 'What kind, Reynolds?' called Jack.

  'Oh right whales, sir, as right as right could be, ha, ha, ha!'

  'Why do they say right whales?' asked William Salmon, a master's mate, when the berth had settled down to dinner—a diminished berth, now that Jack had dispensed with some of the more indifferent midshipmen.

  'Why, because they are right in every respect,' said Adams, Captain Aubrey's clerk. 'They are in the right place—off Greenland or in the Bay—they have the right whalebone, by far the best in the market—and the right amount of oil, six or seven tons of it. And the right temperament: they move slow, not dashing about like your finwhale, or turning spiteful and crushing your boat like a sperm. You cannot say fairer.'

  'No, to be sure,' said the berth, looking eagerly at the pudding as it came through the door, a fine massive plum-duff. Officially, and actually in time of dearth, the midshipmen ate the same food as the other ratings, but since their captain insisted upon quite a considerable allowance those in Surprise did very much better, having laid in stores, livestock and even a moderate quantity of wine, some of which they drank at the end of the meal.

  'Here's to a sweet and prosperous voyage,' said Daniel, raising his glass.

  'A sweet and prosperous voyage,' they echoed.

  Sweet and prosperous it was, in a way, for although the breeze was now so faint the ship could hardly log more than a hundred miles from one noon to the next (a distance very accurately measured by Daniel and Hanson) it was wholly favourable, while the calmness of the sea, the almost unmoving deck, made gunnery a rare delight, and with his wealth of powder and shot (all to be renewed in Madeira) Jack exercised his crew with live ammunition, once they had loosened their muscles by running the guns in and out half a dozen times, and now each crew had the lively satisfaction of destroying a number of empty casks, towed out sometimes to a considerable distance. Then came the repeated broadsides: this was not the dumb-show of usual practice at divisions, but the shattering din of battle, the flashing stabs of fire, the shriek of each gun's very dangerous recoil, the heady scent of powder-smoke along the decks; and there was the frigate, under her fighting topsails, in the midst of her own cloud as the breeze swept the smoke back across her—smoke lit from within, and an enormous, almost continuous roar as the firing started with the foremost starboard gun and ran right down the broadside. It was as though Surprise was fighting a dreadful battle of her own, the hands stripped to the waist, handkerchiefs round their heads, deadly serious, extremely active, checking the recoil, sponging, loading, ramming home the charge and running the ton of metal up against its port with a bang while the gun's captain aimed it and the powder-boys ran at full speed with their cartridges from the magazine, while the deck trembled and the taut shrouds vibrated.

  ' 'Vast firing,' called Jack as the aftermost gun shot inboard. 'Swab and load and run them up. Now take breath while the target is towed out, and then let us have three brisk ones.'

  Men straightened, grinned at one another, wiped their foreheads—their pale bodies gleamed with sweat—and most went to the scuttle-butt for a long and gasping drink.

  When all was ready, guns loaded and run out, Jack said, in a voice suited to the battle-deafness of all hands, 'Target's away. From forward aft, as they bear.' He spoke with a watch in his hand: most of the people knew what that meant, and the foremost gun was wonderfully prompt, followed by the rest of the broadside—a scene of extraordinary activity, since all his old shipmates were aware of the value he attached to very rapid accurate fire. 'If a ship can manage three broadsides in five minutes, there is no enemy can stand against her,' he had repeated many and many a time: and in the past he had proved it.

  The target vanished in foam before the end of the first, but with undiminished zeal, toiling like devils, the other two broadsides pounded the wreckage until the last gun bawled out and a shocked silence fell over the sea.

  'Well, shipmates,' said Jack, 'it was pretty good: I do not think there are a great many afloat that could call us slow-bellies; but by the time we reach Freetown, I think we may do better.'

  The Surprises looked a little disappointed, but none of the really expert gun-captains expected anything else; and even the heaviest of the few new hands had seen that guns three and five had checked the pure, even sequence of the broadsides.

  'It was pretty good, however, for a somewhat mixed ship's company,' said Jack as he walked into the great cabin. 'But I tell you what, Stephen: the wind is about to change.' He tapped the barometer. 'Yes: and before nightfall, too. Come in.'

  'I beg pardon, sir,' said Wells, the dwarfish midshipman, 'but Mr Harding says, with his duty, that Ringle is in sight, under a press of sail, bearing east-north-east.'

  'Thank you, Mr Wells. Now, Mr Adams, what have you there?'

  'Sir, the young gentlemen's workings, if you please. The master begged me to carry them to you, as I was on my way aft. He has to go to the seat of ease again.'

  Stephen shook his head: Mr Woodbine was one of his most obstinate cases. Was there perhaps some hidden or at least contributory cause? Patients were either intolerably garrulous about their symptoms or obscure, taciturn, even secretive, as though they suspected the medical man of trying to entrap them—perhaps even to lead them to surgery. When he had finished with these reflections, his eye caught the score of a prelude and fugue in D minor for violin and 'cello that he had composed some time ago and that he had now copied fair, profiting by the calm.

  Jack, sorting through the young gentlemen's workings—their reckoning of the ship's position by noon observation of the sun and a variety of other calculations—caught Stephen's glance and said, 'I have been making attempts on the opening page of the prelude: but Lord, Stephen, I am grown so thumb-fisted! I have scarcely had my fiddle out of its case since we sank the land, and now most of my notes are false and my bowing all astray.'

  'No. We have not played at all, these many days and more.'

  Jack agreed: then he said, 'But here is something that will give you pleasure,' and he passed two slips, both with figures neatly ranged and a resulting position that agreed within a few seconds. 'The one is John Daniel's, as you would expect from a capital hand at the mathematics; but the other is young Hanson's, and I am sure there was no copying. What a pearl Mr Walker must have been, the boy's tutor, to have shown him how to take such a pretty altitude: though to be sure the Duke did treat him to as fine an instrument as I have seen. The two of them agree in setting us within a week's sail of Madeira, and if this breeze holds, as I believe it will—or rather,' he said, touching the wooden arm of his chair, '—as I hope it will, we shall be able to say that we have done the first leg in reasonably good time, in spite of a most unpromising start.'

  The breeze did indeed hold fair, usually coming in over the starboard quarter as steadily as a trade-wind, which allowed the Surprise to spread a glorious array of royals and studding-sails that sent the water racing down her side, filling her people with such high spirits that when they were turned up in the last dog-watch they sang and danced on the forecastle to t
he sound of a fife and a drum and a small knee-harp with such spirit that it sounded like Bartholomew Fair, only more harmonious.

  It was on just such an evening, when they were within a day or two of Madeira, that Jack Aubrey squared to his desk to continue his letter to Sophie and perhaps finish it so that all his papers of every kind might go with the next packet. 'This is sailing indeed,' he wrote, 'sailing with the kindliest wind in a ship one loves and a crew most of whom one has known for years, and nearly all of them right seamen.' Here he took a new sheet and continued, 'It seems wickedly ungrateful to say so, but some of us miss that perpetual vigilance, that hawk-like scanning of the leeward horizon for a sail that may be an enemy or, praise be, a lawful prize. Yet of course this is peace-time, and peace-time in mild, favourable weather can, to a thankless mind, seem rather flat on occasion.' But having paused to sharpen his pen—he had a razor-sharp little penknife that also split quills—he looked over these last words with a more critical eye, balled up the paper and took another sheet. 'It is true that even some of our quite old shipmates can be a little difficult on occasion,' he continued. 'Your favourite Awkward Davies can be positively dogged, if crossed by a new hand: but in a boarding-party, or storming a shore-position, he is worth his weight in gold, heavy though he is. His huge bulk, his terrifying strength and activity, the awful pallor of his face and his way of foaming at the mouth when he is stirred, all make him a most dreadful opponent. What Stephen calls his berserker rage fairly clears the enemy's decks before him. He also howls. But he has other sides: not only is he very useful when you must sway up the mast shorthanded, but in sudden emergencies too. Do you remember the pitifully shy boy Horatio Hanson you were so kind to at Woolcombe? He shows remarkable promise as a navigator, but he is not much of a topman yet—how could he be?—and he got himself sadly entangled coming down from some improbable height—the fore-royal truck or something like that. Davies saw him, and shoving Joe Plaice aside—Joe is the boy's sea-daddy—he fairly swarmed aloft, seized the young fellow's shin and absolutely carried him by brute-force upside-down to the top, where he was safe, and so left him with an angry mutter . . .' He broke off. 'Now, Stephen,' he said rather pettishly, 'what are you pottering about for?'