The Nutmeg of Consolation

'Of course you are not to pick up Padeen.'

  'But Jack, I told you I should warn him. I told you before Martin and I set off, when you said we were to sail on the twenty-fourth. I have warned him, and he will be waiting there on the strand.'

  'I certainly did not understand anything of the kind. Stephen, I have had endless trouble with convicts trying to escape. The officials have harassed and badgered me for that reason among others and have stinted my stores, supplies and repairs, and to avoid anything really ugly I had to warp out into the bay, which delayed everything still farther. When the Governor came back I went to see him and stated the case as fairly as I could: he admitted that searching the ship without my consent was improper and asked whether I desired an apology. I said no, but that if he would give me an undertaking that nothing of the kind would happen again, I for my part should undertake that no convict would leave Sydney Cove in my ship, and so leave the matter there. He agreed, and we warped in.'

  'We are speaking of a shipmate, Jack. I am committed.'

  'So am I. In any case, how can you ask the captain of a King's ship to do such a thing? I will make every possible representation in Padeen's favour, but I will not countenance a convict's escape. I have turned several away already.'

  'Is that what I am to say to Padeen?'

  'My hands are tied. I have given the Governor my word. It would be said that I was abusing my authority as a post-captain and my immunity as a member.'

  Stephen looked at him for some time, weighing the value of any reply: the look conveyed or was thought to convey something of pity and contempt and it stung Jack extremely. He said, 'You have brought this on yourself.' Stephen turned, and seeing Kill ick with the tankards he took one, said 'Thankee, Killick,' and carried it below.

  Davidge was sitting in the gun-room; he told him that Martin was down among the specimens, putting the bird-skins into the brine-tub, and he went on 'What a wretched dinner that was, upon my word. I am sure that Jack Nastyface, being so disgruntled, poured salt in by the ladle; and any gate the civilians were like a set of funeral mutes. I tried as hard as I could, but they would not be pleased. I dare say it was the same at your end of the table. No wonder you look hipped.'

  'Martin,' said Stephen when he reached the store-room and the smell of feathers, 'it appears that there has been a misunderstanding and that I may not take Padeen aboard. I am not quite sure what I shall do. However, the boat will be ready at three bells in the morning watch. Would you care to come with me? I ask, because at dinner Dr Redfern told me that the colonial name for the platypus is water-mole, which I did not know when your friend Paulton told us that water-moles lived in the Woolloo-Woolloo stream. This might be your last chance of seeing one.'

  'Thank you very much,' said Martin, looking into his face by the lantern-light and quickly turning away. 'I shall be ready at three bells.'

  Stephen asked for a hand to get at his chest, took out a fair sum in gold and notes, locked it again, gave Martin the key and said 'If I should not return to the ship tomorrow will you be so good as to have this sent to my wife?'

  'Of course,' said Martin.

  'I do not think I have ever felt such strong and conflicting emotions in my life,' he reflected, walking out of Sydney on the Parramatta road. His intention was to diminish their force by walking far and fast: physical weariness, he had found before, could do away with subsidiary aspects, such as in this case mere exasperation, and after some hours the right course of action would appear. Yet in the hours he walked now nothing of the kind took place. His mind perpetually dropped the problem and flew back to his happiness, his present and future happiness. He walked a great way in the darkness, and that part of his mind which was free to be astonished was astonished by the number of nocturnal animals he heard and occasionally saw in the faint moonlight, and they so near the settlement: phalangers, bandicoots, a koala, wombats. 'As for Jack,' he said, 'his hero Nelson would not have acted so: but Nelson was not a righteous man; he had no sudden rush of virtue to the head. Middle age has come upon Jack Aubrey at last, the creature. I never thought it would.' He said this without rancour, as one stating a fact; but he also said 'One of the great advantages of wealth is that you are not obliged to eat toads. You can do what you think right.'

  The question of what he thought right in these circumstances was not solved by the time the moon set and he turned back. His consideration of the problem was often interrupted by actions of grace, one of which, a plain-chant thanksgiving he had often heard at Montserrat before the French sacked, desecrated and destroyed the monastery, took him a mile and a half to sing. It was not solved by the time he reached the ship, footsore and wet from a shower out of the south-east; nor yet when after a troubled waking night he heard Bonden's discreet voice in his ear, telling him the cutter was alongside.

  Joy revived, and sorrow with it. He dressed, tiptoed into the gun-room not to wake the other officers, murmured a good morning to Martin, and drank a cup of coffee.

  The cutter's masts were already stepped; and as he made his way down into it Stephen noticed with satisfaction that the crew were all old shipmates, men-of-war's men. Bonden, who had no notion of the Doctor's common sense, whatever his book-learning might be, nor of Mr Martin's, had provided boat-cloaks against the keen night air; and he said 'Now where away, sir, if you please?'

  'Do you know Bird Island?'

  'Yes, sir: saw it as we were coming in, and Captain Pullings took a fix on it.'

  'Well now, before that island there is a point, two or three miles to the south; and south again of that point, on the flat coast there is the entrance to a lagoon, marked by a flagstaff and a cairn. That is where we must go. How long do you think it will take?'

  'With this breeze on the quarter, sir, we should be there by noon, easy. Shove off afore, Joe.'

  By the time they had sailed down the long harbour dawn was just beginning to break, a dawn so pure and exquisite that even Joe Plaice, who had seen ten thousand of them at sea, looked at it with mild approval, and Martin clasped his hands. Stephen saw nothing of it: he was asleep, wrapped in the boat-cloak. The cutter passed the headlands, met the wide-spaced waves of the open sea, made a little offing close-hauled and then steered north-east, which changed the boat's motion to a corkscrew roll of the kind that may make even hardened seamen uneasy if they have been ashore for some while. Stephen slept on: he slept on when the surface ripple caused by the changing tide brought spray sweeping diagonally across. Martin arranged the cloak to cover Stephen's head, and seeing that he was not easily to be woken said to Bonden in a low tone, 'We are going at a fine pace.'

  'Yes, sir,' said Bonden. 'We shall have time and to spare, and I should stand off the shore to keep the Doctor a little drier, only I am afraid of missing the flagstaff.'

  'Do you think we are near?' asked Stephen, suddenly awake.

  'Well, sir, I reckon we can't be a great way off.'

  'Then as soon as we raise Bird Island I shall watch the shore with my glass; and as for getting wet, the sun will soon dry us. It is much higher than I had expected, and exceptionally warm.'

  So they sailed on, the hands forward talking quietly, the boat all alive with the breeze, the sun climbing until cool spray was welcome and cloaks were laid aside.

  'There is your island, sir,' said Bonden; and on the rise Stephen saw it clear, nicking the horizon beyond the point.

  'So it is,' he said, and both he and Martin took out their telescopes. Steadily the low sandy coast filed by; and presently they agreed that this part or that might be familiar. Yet from the sea one dune or even one clump of stunted trees looks very like another and there was no certainty until once again, and with something of the same relief, they saw the flagstaff and its cairn.

  'And it is not yet eleven o'clock,' said Stephen. 'I am afraid I have roused you men from your hammocks too early.'

  'Never you mind us, sir,' said Plaice with a chuckle. 'We should have been swabbing decks else. This is more like a picnic, as they say.'
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  Bonden steered for the opening. To his surprise Stephen was able to tell him that there was a fathom of water over the bar at the lowest tide, and a deeper passage with the cairn and the flagstaff in a line, bearing due east. He took the cutter through the moderate flurry of breaking waves, along the entrance, into the quiet waters of the lagoon, and so to the stage where the Woolloo-Woolloo harvest was brought down to the brig.

  'Now, Bonden,' said Stephen, 'make a fire—you have brought your dinners, sure?'

  'Yes, sir; and Killick put up this parcel of sandwiches for you and Mr Martin.'

  'Very good. Make a fire, then, eat your dinner, and go to sleep in the sun if you like. The ship is to pick us up off Bird Island this evening. I may not come down, but Mr Martin will, not later than two or half past. And let nobody stray. There may be venomous creatures in these reeds.'

  There were certainly butterflies, some of the same kinds that they had seen before, others larger and still more spectacular; and as they walked up along the stream through the reeds and bushes they netted several. But the extreme contradiction of spirit was still as strong on Stephen as ever, the ebullient joy and the wound; and his heart was not in it. Nor was Martin's: Stephen, though never loquacious, was rarely as silent as this—the mood was catching.

  They passed through the reed-bed to the firm ground and the open air, the vast sky, of the meadow. The stream was on their left hand, whereas on their first visit it had been on their right and they had crossed it much higher up. 'We are in a new part of the pasture,' observed Stephen. 'I can just make out the cabin, a good half-mile farther off than I had expected.' Lambs; a flight of whiter cockatoos; far over a drift of smoke. 'We might walk a furlong or so along the stream,' he went on. 'We are much too early.'

  In time of flood the stream was clearly ten or fifteen yards in breadth, with deep-cut banks; but there had been no flood for some years and now they were covered with a fair number of bushes and tall soft grass growing between them, while the stream itself, winding through the meadow, was no more than a stride across, a rivulet connecting a series of pools. The first of these pools had some interesting plants, which they collected, and a millepede; at the second Martin, who was ahead on the path, whispered 'Oh my God!', stopped, stepped cautiously back. 'There they are,' he whispered in Stephen's ear.

  They crept along the top of the bank foot by foot, bent, so that when they raised their heads and peered through the fringe of leaves and reed-plumes they could just command the surface of the pool. The platypuses took no notice: they had been swimming round and round when first Martin saw them. They went on swimming round and round, one after the other, in a broad ring, lost and absorbed in their ritual. They both swam low, surprisingly low, in the water, but the light struck the surface at such an angle that for the watchers there was no reflection: they could see everything below, from that scarcely believable duck's bill to the broad flattened tail, with the four webbed feet between them.

  Presently Stephen whispered 'I believe we can creep nearer still.' Martin nodded, and with infinite caution they edged slanting down the side, Stephen steadying himself with the handle of the net. It was inch by inch now, each bush, each young tree, each tuft of grass very carefully negotiated. At water-level the going was easier and they carried on their serpentine approach to the soft damp mud of the pool-shore itself, each behind a clump of rushes, peering through the shaded gap between them. As he had done when he was a boy, reaching a point within hand's touch of a cock capercaillie calling and displaying in the spring, Stephen closed his mouth, so that the sound of his heart, loud in his throat like a hoarse old clock, should not be heard.

  He might have left it open. The platypuses were wholly given over to their dance. Stephen and Martin sat there, easy on the yielding ground, watching, noting, comparing; and still the platypuses turned. Their ring took them far out over to the other side, where the sun showed their fine brown perfectly, and it brought them in towards the shadow, quite close to the rushes.

  A laughing-jackass called, and under the din Stephen said 'I am going to try to catch one.' Slowly, slowly he sank the net when they were at their farthest turn; slowly, slowly he edged it out into the pool, under their invariable path. Twice he let them pass over it: the third time he raised the leading edge just in front of the second, the pursuing animal. It dived instantly: but into the net. He stepped through the rushes waist-deep into the pool, trusting neither the handle nor the stuff with so much weight; and with great strides he waded to the bank, his shining face turned to Martin and his gentle hand feeling into the purse. Warm, soft, wet fur and a strongly beating heart: 'I mean you no harm, my dear,' he said and instantly he felt a piercing stab. A shocking pain ran up his arm. He scrambled to the bank, dropped the net, sat down, looked at his arm—bare shirt-sleeved arm—and saw a puncture with a livid swollen line already running up from wrist to elbow. 'Take care, Martin,' he said. 'Put it back. Knife—handkerchief.'

  He cut deep and twisted the tourniquet hard, but already there was a stiffness in his throat and his voice was growing thick. He lay back in the mud and explained that he had known similar idiosyncratic cases—a bee-sting, a scorpion, even a large spider—several cases—some survived, some did not—over in a day, one way or the other—but there hanging over him was Padeen's anguished face, and Paulton was saying 'Oh dear oh dear Martin, I thought a naturalist would know the male has a poisonous spur: oh dear oh dear, he is swelling—he is turning blue.'

  'A poisonous spur?' asked Stephen through his pain, hoarse, unrecognizable. 'The male alone? In all the whole class of mallamia, mammalia . . .'

  The more or less coherent, rational hurry of words stopped, because the power of speech left him, and presently the power of sight. Yet he was still present, though at a great distance, and not in darkness though he could see nothing but rather in a deep violet world that reminded him of a previous state when, surprised by grief and an involuntary overdose of laudanum, he had plunged right down the inside of a lofty tower in Sweden: in this state too he could hear the remote voices of his friends, but now the hallucinations were absent or benign.

  The voice he particularly heard was Paulton's, who seemed oppressed by guilt and who explained again and again that everyone at Woolloo-Woolloo knew that you had to take great care of the water-mole—by warning cries and vivid signs the black men had said 'Touch him not'—he had seen an European dog die within minutes—he blamed himself extremely for not having mentioned the danger—had supposed it was common knowledge. 'How can you speak so, John?' said Martin. 'No more than two or three dried, shrivelled, imperfect specimens were ever seen in London, and those only female.' 'How I regret it,' said Paulton. 'How bitterly I regret it.'

  There were gaps not so much in Stephen's consciousness as in his perception of things; and after one such blank or pause it was Bonden he heard, telling Padeen 'to lift his head easy, mate, and lay it on my shoulder: never mind the blood'.

  A strong voice said 'We must get him back to the ship', and now no doubt he was being carried; but that part of his mind which was not taken up with the burning pain and the unearthly violet in which he had his being observed that the seamen took Padeen's presence for granted and that they comforted him in his distress.

  Now there was the easy motion of the boat, the creak of thole-pins, the sea-air on his stiff, tumid, sightless face; and now among the perceptions that failed him were those of pain and of time, so that although he heard both Jack's deeply anxious voice saying to Padeen 'Lay him in my cot, Colman, and then jump down to the gun-room for his leather cushion: you know where it is,' and the often-repeated explanations at the ship's side, he could not set them in order; nor had order any significance in this immeasurably deep violet well.

  Then his concern at the loss of sequence disappeared; and with the eventual return of light and a confused sense of time his recollection of the loss faded. Time started again quite far back, with the strong voice saying they must return to the ship; and the events
leading to those words and the reason for his present inner happiness fell into place, though not without a lingering dreamlike imprecision as he lay there at his ease, contemplating.

  'Back to the ship': and indeed here was the old familiar rise and heave, the creak of his hanging cot, the attenuated smell of sea and tar. But it was not quite right either, for now here again was Padeen's face hanging over him: which was nearer delirium or dream than reality. Yet at all hazards he wished the face a good day, and Padeen, straightening with a great smile on his solid factual face said 'And God and Mary and Patrick be with your honour,' then in English 'Captain, sir, he . . . he . . . he has spoken in his . . . his . . . senses.'

  'Dear God, I am so happy to hear it,' said Jack, and very gently, 'Stephen, how do you do?'

  'I have survived, I find,' said Stephen, taking his hand. 'Jack, I cannot tell you how ardently, how very ardently, I look forward to going home.'

  The Naval World

  of Jack Aubrey

  N. A. M. RODGER

  THE PERIOD which Patrick O'Brian has made his own, the Great Wars against France, is at once the least and the best known part of all British naval history. It is often referred to as the 'classical' age of navel history, and it is almost always the period to which both academic historians and common readers refer when they think of the history of the Royal Navy under sail. The reasons for this have to do both with scholarship and literature. Among serious historians of the Navy, this was almost the first period to be thoroughly treated. The scholars of what might be called the first great age of British naval history (say from 1890 to 1914), looked back on the Great Wars as the last, and also the longest and fiercest, real naval war, the culmination of centuries of experience, the reference point by which the Navy's development both before and after might be judged.

  To their labours we are indebted for a mass of detailed analysis of how and why the wars were fought at sea which is still unequalled for any other period with the possible exception of Queen Elizabeth's reign. Of the forty-eight volumes published by the Navy Records Society between its foundation in 1893 and the outbreak of the First World War, twenty-two dealt wholly or partly with the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. At the same time this was the first period of British history when the Navy and its activities attracted detailed interest from the public at large, and when the Service itself generated a substantial professional literature. This is the era of the first naval periodicals and annuals, of Steel's Navy List, of the Naval Chronicle, of the biographical dictionaries of Charnock and Marshall. (John Charnock, Biographia Navalis). It is the era in which newspaper coverage of naval affairs increased enormously, and about which many officers and not a few ratings subsequently wrote memoirs. Moreover this was the period depicted in fiction by the naval historical novelists, of which Patrick O'Brian is the latest, and the first was probably John Davis, the anonymous author of The Post-Captain, or The Wooden Walls Well-Manned of 1805. The first great age of the naval historical novel was in the 1820s and 1830s, when the three Captains, William Glascock of The Naval Sketch Book, Frederick Marryat of Peter Simple and Midshipman Easy, and Frederick Charmier of The Life of a Sailor and Ben Brace were writing lightly fictionalised accounts of their own services, for the entertainment, in many cases, of men of their own generation. (This subject is studied generally in C. N. Robinson, The British Tar in Fact and Fiction) Marryat had served as a midshipman under Lord Cochrane, and incidents from the spectacular career of that most theatrical and flamboyant of officers appears both in Marryat's novels and in Patrick O'Brian's. (For Marryat see: Christopher Lloyd, Captain Marryat and the Old Navy. Much of Master and Commander is drawn from Cochrane's command of the ill-named sloop Speedy, which in 1801 he captured the Spanish frigate El Gamo.)