The Nutmeg of Consolation

  The Doctor was already in the gun-room, and he and the other officers welcomed Jack with potted meat, anchovies, hard-boiled eggs and ham, pickled gherkins, onions, mangoes; they were as hospitable as could be, and Welby mixed a bowl of cold arrack punch. Yet with Warren's chair standing there empty it was but a low-spirited meal, and towards the end of it Adams came in with a prayer-book: speaking over the crack and thunder of a stern-chaser's shot and recoil he said in Jack's ear 'I have marked the page with a piece of marline, sir.'

  'Thank you, Mr Adams,' said Jack; and having considered for a minute, 'I believe, gentlemen, that our old shipmates will forgive us if we bid them farewell in the simplest way, and in our working clothes.' There was a murmur of agreement, a shifting of chairs, a certain uneasiness about finishing the punch.

  Five minutes later, as eight bells struck and then continued with a half-second tolling, Jack took up his station by the drift of the quarterdeck. The chasers were housed and silent; all hands were present. Jack read the grave, beautiful words; the weighted hammocks slid over the side one after another with scarcely a splash, meeting the rise that answered the hollow after the bow-wave.

  The Nutmeg had put her helm down a couple of points for this ceremony; and after one unanswered shot the Cornélie, seeing what she was at, fired no more.

  When he had closed his book and the people had returned to their duty and the Nutmeg to her course, Jack said to Fielding 'We must give them a leeward gun in acknowledgement.' He told Oakes to see to it, adding 'Aftermost leeward carronade,' so that there should be no mistake: Oakes was still very much shocked by the loss of his friend. He had never seen action before, and it was much better to keep him running about. The Captain and first lieutenant walked aft to the taffrail, and as the gun fired Jack took off his hat. He was reasonably sure that the Frenchman was there on his forecastle; they had seen one another often enough through their telescopes.

  'She is still pumping,' observed Fielding.

  'So she is,' said Jack absently. 'But by God how the sun has raced across the sky; and there is that goddam moon already.' There she was indeed, discernible in the brilliant sky, pale, lopsided, stupider than usual, twenty degrees above the dark loom of the land in the east, visible this last hour and more. 'At this pace we shall never get her through the Passage before morning. I hope to God she makes more headway when she has cleared her bilges at last.'

  'Sir,' said Fielding, 'I believe she is sending something aloft. A skysail.'

  They both fixed it with their telescopes. 'It is a pair of sheets,' said Jack. 'A pair of sheets sewn athwartships and folded at the top. Well, damn my eyes: he does not lack good will.' Leaning to the companion he called down 'Avast firing, there.'

  'Out,' cried the Marine sentry next to the space ordinarily occupied by the cabin door. He turned the glass and stepped forward to strike two bells.

  Like figures on an ancient clock the midshipman of the watch and the quartermaster came from their respective stations to meet at the lee rail, the one carrying log and reel, the other a small sand-glass. The quartermaster heaved the log: the stray line ran out: 'Turn,' he said. The knotted line span off the reel, the midshipman holding the glass to his eye. 'Stop,' said he and the quartermaster checked the line.

  'What do you find, Mr Conway?' asked Jack.

  'Seven knots and a little better than three fathom, sir, if you please.'

  Jack shook his head, went below and said 'Mr White, you may encourage her with a steady fire, shot for shot. But let your balls be a little short. If we are to get her through the Passage before dawn we must not hurt a hair of her head; and it will be nip and tuck even then. Short, but lifelike, do you understand?'

  'Aye aye, sir. Short but lifelike it is,' replied the gunner. It was clear that he was not at all pleased.

  'Mr Fielding,' said Jack, returning to the quarterdeck, 'when I have had a word with Chips I am going aloft. If that skysail should bring the Cornélie up a trifle, and if her shot should come aboard, you may draw away.'

  The carpenter and his crew were busy in the waist, making a framework very like the outline of the Nutmeg's stern windows, an essential part of Jack's plan to deceive the Cornélie when the moon had set. 'How are you coming along, Mr Walker?' he asked.

  'Pretty well, sir, I thank you; but I doubt the boat may be horrid unhandy.'

  'Never fret for that, Chips,' said Jack. 'If all goes well she will not have to swim above half an hour.'

  'If all goes well,' he repeated inwardly, mounting to the foretop and so on without a pause to the crosstrees and a little way out on the yard. Sitting there he had a perfect view of the eastern half of the sky, clear and perfect and evidently domed, with a clear and perfect sea stretching half way to the horizon, where, on a line as straight as a meridian, it changed from a light-hearted, white-flecked blue to that troubled shade seen in the autumn Mediterranean that Stephen used to call wine-dark. Beyond this line, on either side, rose high land, dark, stretching away out of sight to the south-east and tending to converge: the mouth of the Salibabu Passage. It was still a great way off at this gentle rate of sailing; and from the position of the damn-fool moon he could tell that the sun, hidden by the main topsail, was already far down in the west.

  'No doubt we shall have a stronger breeze in the Passage,' he said, 'it being funnel-shaped. But even so there is the tide to reckon with. It will be a damned near-run thing.' He called an order down to the deck that altered the Nutmeg's course half a point, so that she should keep to the southern shore. This would be necessary for the eventual turn, but for the time being his aim was to avoid the full force of the tide, which would start flowing westwards in a few hours' time.

  When he was at sea, when the present and the immediate future were so much with him, and above all in even so slight an action as this, Jack Aubrey spent little time dwelling on the past; but now his spirit was oppressed. Quite against his own intellectual judgment he was, like so many seamen, a superstitious creature: he did not like the dark land, the ill-coloured sea ahead, with its hard bar; and as well as grieving him, young Miller's death had confirmed many an irrational notion.

  He sat there some considerable time: twice he felt the yard move under him as it was braced a little more truly to the wind; and throughout his meditation the guns continued, though with less zeal on the Nutmeg's side, the intervals growing longer.

  Time passed: orders, hammering in the waist, the noises of a ship running with no great urgency: the steady pitch and roll, magnified up here, but not so much as to break in upon his thoughts.

  Three bells below him. Some more or less autonomous part of his mind said 'Three bells in the first dog-watch', and at the words a sort of moderate cheerfulness returned. They reminded him of Stephen Maturin's reply to the question 'Why is it called a dog-watch': his instant 'Because it is curtailed,' which Jack thought the wittiest thing he had ever heard in his life. He valued it extremely and he often, perhaps too often, told the story, though the heavier gentlemen in company and even sometimes naval wives had to be reminded that dog-watches were made considerably shorter than the rest. Curtailed. Cur-tailed.

  The reply had been made many years ago, but it had improved with age, and now it made him smile as he swung off the yard, seized a shifting backstay, slid easily down it and dropped on to the forecastle. Walking along the gangway to the quarterdeck he noticed two new holes in the main studdingsail, and he saw Fielding and the bosun busy with tackles to hoist out the decoy-boat in the fullness of time.

  'How are we doing, Mr Richardson?' he asked, looking beyond him at the distant Cornélie.

  'Just eight knots at two bells, sir: she was gaining on us, and she hit the larboard stern-gallery again; so I hauled the sheets aft.'

  'Damn that stern-gallery. I had fitted a new basin. A new china basin, most uncommon genteel.'

  'Yes, sir. Should you like another heave, sir?'

  'No. It is almost the end of the watch.' What little haze there was in the western sky
was beginning to flush—a very delicate gold and pink—and the sun was scarcely his own width from the sea. Jack looked keenly over the side and at the wake: he was almost certain of another fathom, but the wish could so easily be farther than the thought, and he said 'Well, perhaps. It is so much easier to be sure of the glass when there is light.'

  'Eight knots and just one fathom, sir, if you please,' said Reade, the midshipman of the watch, some moments later. The Cornélie fired as he spoke and the ball sent up its plume no more than fifty yards astern: she was keeping pace. 'Come, this is encouraging,' said Jack. He stayed to see the sun go down, outlining the Frenchman in a brief blaze of glory, and when he went below five minutes later the dusk was already creeping over the sea from the east, while the moon had gained in substance.

  'Sir,' said Killick at the foot of the companion-ladder, 'I have moved your night-gear into poor Mr Warren's cabin. Which Mr Seymour is overjoyed to stay in the midshipmen's berth until your sleeping-place is set to rights.' Killick's face had the wooden expression it always wore when he was either suppressing that which was true or suggesting that which was false and Jack knew perfectly well that his steward had quite unnecessarily forced the arrangement on Seymour and the gun-room—unnecessarily, because it would certainly have been offered.

  'I see: then rouse out a case of the eighty-seven port,' he said and carried on to the gun-room, where he found all the officers apart from Richardson gathered round a chart on their long table. 'Gentlemen,' he said, 'I must trespass upon your hospitality for tonight, if I may. The cabin is to remain lit, and if the Cornélie goes on pelting us we must reply, to keep up her spirits.' The gun-room said they should be very happy; and Jack went on, 'Mr Fielding, you will forgive me speaking of service matters here, but I will just observe that once we are in the Passage, it would be as well to heave the log every bell: then again hammocks may be piped down for the watches below to get some sleep against tomorrow; and the galley fires may be lit again. And lastly, I shall take the middle watch, turning in after we have had supper—I am obliged to you for your kindness, Mr Seymour.' Seymour hung his head and searched for an elegant reply, but before he found one Jack said 'Doctor, may we look at your sick-berth while the fires are lighting?'

  'I tell you what, Stephen,' he said as they walked along, 'I know the constraint of having your captain in your bosom—all sitting straight, no belching, no filthy stories—so I have ordered up a case of our eighty-seven port. I hope you do not mind it?'

  'I mind it very much indeed. Pouring that irreplaceable liquid into my messmates is impious.'

  'But they will appreciate the gesture: it will take some of the stiffness away. I cannot tell you how disagreeable it is, feeling like a killjoy whose going will be a relief. You are luckier than I am in that way. They do not look upon you with any respect. That is to say, not with any undue respect. I mean they have an amazing respect for you, of course; but they do not look upon you as a superior being.'

  'Do they not? They certainly looked upon me as a very disagreeable one this afternoon. I was cursed sullen, snappish and dogged with them all.'

  'You astonish me. Had something put you out?'

  'I had set aside a corpse for opening, an interesting case of the marthambles; I was going to ask your good word as in duty bound, but before I could do some criminal or at least some busy hand had sewn it up and placed it among those you buried.'

  'What a ghoul you are, Stephen, upon my word.'

  Supper was a grave but extraordinarily copious meal; and although they had not served together very long they had experienced so many vicissitudes that this might have been a five-year commission, which lessened the no doubt inevitable formality. Seymour, of course, on his first day as a member of the gun-room mess, said nothing, and Stephen was as usual lost in thought; but Fielding and even more Welby felt free to tell quite long anecdotes, and in spite of the Ghoul's predictions all hands seemed thoroughly to enjoy the 1787 port, possibly to some degree because Killick said 'I have decanted the eighty-seven, sir: which it was very crusty, being so uncommon old,' the last words being uncommon loud. A third decanter was passing round when Stephen, raising his voice above the stern-chaser overhead, suddenly asked 'Would this be a sloop, at all?'

  They had heard some pretty strange things from the Doctor, but none so far beyond all probability, so very far, that for a while there was a complete silence.

  'Do you mean the Nutmeg, Doctor?' asked Jack at last.

  'Certainly. The Nutmeg, God bless her.'

  'Bless her by all means. But she could not conceivably be a sloop while I have her, you know. Was she under a commander she would be a sloop; but I have the honour to be on the post-captain's list, and that makes her as much a ship as any three-decker in the service. What put such a wild fancy into your head?'

  'I was contemplating on sloops. A friend of mine wrote a novel and showed it to me for my opinion, as a naval man.' The gun-room looked down at their plates with a certain fixity of expression. 'I thought it a very pretty tale, but I did take exception to the hero's commanding a sloop and taking a French frigate: yet just now it occurred to me that the Cornélie is undoubtedly a frigate; that we, though small, aspire to take her; that perhaps my objection was unfounded, and that sloops do in fact capture frigates.'

  'Oh no,' they cried, the Doctor was wholly in the right—never in the history of the Royal Navy has any sloop taken any frigate—it would have been flying in the face of nature.

  'But on the other hand,' said Jack, 'a post-ship of much the same displacement and broadside weight of metal as a sloop has been known to do it. It is the presence of a post-captain aboard, and his moral superiority, that turns the scale. A glass of wine with you, my dear sir. Now, gentlemen, in a few minutes' time we shall be mustering the watch, so I shall thank you for a splendid supper, take a look at the sky, and then turn in.'

  'And we must thank you for some splendid wine, sir,' said Fielding. 'It will be my standard of excellence whenever I drink port again.'

  'Hear him, hear him,' said Welby.

  On deck the breeze had freshened perceptibly, coming in warm over the rail, one point on the quarter. By the light of the binnacle the log-board showed that their speed had increased to eight knots and three fathoms: and the Cornélie was keeping up. The moon showed her clear, but it was not so brilliant that it hid the light of the battle-lanterns on her forecastle or the suffused glow from the open ports along her side, still less the stab of flame as she let fly with her starboard chaser. Both ships were now well into the Passage. To the south he could see the lights of a fishing-village, just where his chart had set it. The other side was too far off to see clearly, but it heaved up there, silvery in the moonlight with great black shadows.

  Eight bells. Seymour relieved Richardson: the watch was mustered and the starbowlines went below to get what sleep they could with the guns banging and growling on the deck above. Fielding had come up to ease Seymour into his first independent watch and he was now in the waist, going through the motions of shipping the frame and its lanterns on the decoy boat, now poised so that it could be lowered down in a moment—motions that the chosen band, made up of Bonden, two bosun's mates and a very powerful black sheet-anchor man called Darkie had already performed again and again.

  Jack watched them for a while and then walked into the bows with Fielding. 'I shall be very surprised if the Cornélie don't pipe down now,' he said. 'But in any case I mean to draw ahead another couple of cables' lengths, to prevent any stray ball doing real harm; though of course she must have our stern-windows clear in sight. I shall give the orders to brace up and ease off the buoy and then turn in. Good night to you.'

  'Good night, sir.'

  As Jack was going below the gunfire died away, the Nutmeg having the last word; and as he turned in he saw that he was not to sleep in the dead man's cot. His own, an unusually long one, had been brought down and slung fore and aft. Killick was in many ways a wretched servant, fractious, mean, overbearin
g to guests of inferior rank, hopelessly coarse; but in others he was a pearl without a thorn. For a moment Jack passed some other expressions in review, and having reached bricks without price he went to sleep.

  The familiar waking to a faint lantern in the darkness and the words 'Close on eight bells, sir.' He woke at once, as he had woken so very often since his boyhood, said 'Thank you, Mr Conway,' and swung out of his cot. Some unsleeping recorder had taken notice of the ship's progress during this time and he was not at all surprised to learn from the run of the water along her side that the Nutmeg had lost speed.

  Shirt, trousers and canvas shoes, and he walked quietly out of the dim gun-room. In the moonlit waist he cupped his hands in the scuttle-butt, dashed water into his face and came aft as the sentry went forward to strike eight bells.

  'You are a good relief, sir,' said Seymour. 'But I am very sorry to say the breeze has dropped.'

  'Nip,' cried Conway, and coming across from the lee rail he reported 'Seven, sir, seven on the knot.'

  'Good night to you both,' said Jack; and as the wheel, the con, the lookout posts and the guns changed hands he retired to the taffrail. Away on the larboard quarter now, well out in the channel, there lay the Cornélie, a little farther, a little dimmer. The moon, passing through a veil of cloud, was near her height: high water would come well after her southing and in any case the Alkmaar had stated as a known fact that it was three hours later here than at Nil Desperandum; yet even so the flood would have been setting west for some time now. With the log-board by a stern-lantern he added up the figures for the last four hours' progress. Thirty-one sea-miles. It was not what he could have wished, but it was not very bad: the issue was still open. This present watch, the graveyard watch, was the decisive period, for it was now that the tide would have its say. He had of course asked about the Passage as soon as he heard that the Cornélie was likely to take it, and he had learnt that unlike some parts of the Pacific it had two high tides in a lunar day, the first no great matter, the second, that which the Nutmeg was to stem throughout his watch, stronger. But just how much stronger no one in Batavia could tell him. Of course it depended on the age of the moon, and in her present gibbous state she would not be exerting her full influence nor anything like it. From all their calculations and from what little they had in the way of observations from Dalrymple, Horsburgh and others he and the master (an excellent navigator) had decided that at this point in the lunar month they could expect a westward current of two and a half knots; and in his plan he had allowed for rather more than three.