The Unknown Shore

  ‘Are you not cutting it uncommon fine?’ asked the surgeon.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Jack, who was all too vividly aware of the racing hours and the horrifying speed with which Saturday, his last day in England, was rushing towards him.

  The surgeon, in spite of Jack’s short answers and unhappy face, sat down by him, and said, ‘I am up myself only because of my infernal mate, and I shall take the mail-coach down this evening.’ He explained that he was very particular in his choice of assistants, that he could not bear the confident, half-licked cubs that were usually wished upon him by the Navy Office – had even paid one to go away out of the Wager and transfer himself elsewhere – and that he was now waiting for a young man who had been strongly recommended to him as a person of a truly scientific cast of mind. ‘Such a rare creature, these days,’ said Mr Eliot. ‘It was quite different when I was young.’ Here a group of officers came in, brown-faced men whose voices reverberated in the big room, filling it with sound; another naval surgeon came just behind them, Mr Woodfall of the Centurion, and he stopped by Mr Eliot to wish him good day and to tell him that Mr Anson had been to the Admiralty already.

  Mr Anson, the captain of the Centurion and the commodore of the squadron, appeared as if by magic as the surgeon spoke his name, stood there for a moment, looking for someone, and then walked away: in spite of his preoccupation and state of dismal worry, Jack looked with the closest attention at his commanding officer, a tall man, upright, with the head of a Roman emperor, though tanned and weather-beaten – a plainly dressed man: blue coat, buff waistcoat, hat with the King’s cockade and nothing more, a plain steel-hilted sword.

  ‘Let us have a pot of chocolate together,’ said Mr Eliot to Mr Woodfall. ‘Hey there. Ho. Ahoy. A pot of chocolate here.’ The older waiters at Thacker’s were used to being called as if they were three miles off in an impenetrable fog, but the new ones were rendered nervous by it, and were sometimes obliged to give up their places. ‘As I was telling our young friend here,’ continued Mr Eliot, ‘a decent surgeon’s mate is scarcely to be found in these degenerate days.’ He went on to speak of the desirable qualities of the young man who was to come: learned, even to the point of knowing some Greek, skilled, and above all interested in his profession, in its widest aspects, in its philosophical implications – qualities all too rare in the common run of modern surgeon’s mates. ‘Where,’ he cried, ‘will you find a young fellow nowadays who will purchase a dead baboon at the cost of his suppers for six months, and preserve its vitals in spirits of wine for the pure love of anatomy? Best rectified spirits of wine at eighteenpence the Winchester quart.’

  ‘Ah,’ said his colleague mournfully, ‘where indeed? But have you not left it very late, my dear sir?’

  ‘For such a paragon it is worth it,’ said Mr Eliot. ‘And so you would say if you had seen the fellow the Navy Office sent me last month – a very mere rake indeed. Besides,’ he added confidentially, ‘I though it prudent to wait until my brother-in-law and our friend Bartholomew were both on the board of examiners – it is their turn now, you know – in case of any little difficulty with this young man’s qualifications. His indentures are regular, but he has not quite served out his time. I prefer to take him to the Hall myself, see him examined and certificated, take him to the Navy Office, see to his warrant directly, and so carry him down to Portsmouth, all in one.’

  ‘Well,’ said Mr Woodfall, getting up, ‘I wish you joy of him. I am sure a good mate is a wonderful comfort to a man, particularly on a voyage …’ He walked away, puffing and holding his arms wide apart to indicate the extraordinary length of the intended voyage.

  ‘Come, Mr Byron, another cup of chocolate?’ said Mr Eliot; and looking at him more keenly he asked, ‘Are you feeling quite well?’

  ‘Oh, I’m well enough, thankee, sir,’ said Jack wearily; then suddenly, unburdening himself, he said, ‘The truth of the matter is that I have lost my friend, and your talking about a philosophical cove dissecting things brought him so clearly to my mind, I could cry like a girl. Upon my honour I could. Toby would dissect you anything you like, a baboon, or a horse, or a mole. Anything. I sit here all day long in case he should find his way – I’ve left instructions at the house, of course. He had only been one day in London. Blast and crush me down,’ cried Jack, wiping his eye, ‘you talk about your fellow knowing some Greek: why, Toby Barrow was speaking it as quick as I speak English when he was only ten; and Latin too, like a bench of infernal bishops, rot them all.’

  ‘Quietly now, Mr Byron; do not curse the bishops so. Perhaps I could help you, if you would tell me clearly what has happened.’

  His listened attentively, and he was advising Jack to apply to the magistrate at Bow Street and to the Mansion House when a thin young man with knock knees and a cheese-coloured face was brought up to him by the waiter: this person carried a bridal posy in one hand and a letter in the other. ‘Be not severe,’ he said, putting the letter into Mr Eliot’s hand. ‘Severity were out of place,’ he said, with an arch simper, and left them gazing after him.

  The youth, Mr Eliot’s supposed assistant, had escaped from his family’s control and had married; and this was the bride’s brother to bring the news that the paragon did not choose to go round the world any more.

  Mr Eliot took no notice of this other than by checking an oath and saying, ‘Perhaps we are as well shot of him: his father told me that he was attached to some odious wench. But as I was saying, the magistrate at Bow Street has proper officers for this kind of enquiry: I will step in at his office, if you wish, and find whether they have any news.’

  ‘It is exceedingly good in you, sir,’ said Jack, ‘particularly when you have been so disappointed –’ nodding towards the letter.

  ‘As for that, I say nothing: it is no use running your head against a brick wall. I cannot unmarry the fellow; and by not giving vent to my vexation I shall certainly feel less of it. Did you say that your friend was properly indentured?’

  ‘Yes, sir; his paper is still at the house. It has a chart of a mole’s innards on the back of it, though.’

  Mr Eliot stood for a moment in thought. ‘I shall have to see what they have at the Navy Office,’ he said. ‘I shall have to see what they have to offer me. Though if they have nothing better than the common run of ‘prentice sawbones, I shall sail without one. I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again,’ he said, nodding very firmly and moving off. ‘But,’ he said, coming back, ‘if your friend should be found before we sail, I may be able to serve him.’

  Jack sat down again and leant back against the partition of his box; he was feeling tired and stupid, for he had scarcely been to bed these three nights past; and as well as searching the vast expanse of London he had been obliged to go down to the Nore and back. But he felt comforted by Mr Eliot’s kindness, and he closed his eyes for a catnap. ‘I shall take a quarter of an hour’s sleep,’ he said to himself. ‘And I wish those infernal swabs would make less of a din.’

  The infernal swabs were a party of midshipmen in the box behind him: they had been roving about all night, in a greater or less degree of intoxication, and they were still inclined to be troublesome and obnoxious. They were arguing now, interminably and without the least hope of reaching a conclusion, about the identity of certain monstrous birds that had been seen upon the Monument the day before. Storks, pelicans and frigate-birds were suggested, rocs, phoenixes and tabernacles: here they drifted off on to a profitless discussion of tabernacles, whether birds or no, and Jack began to sink down into his nap. He had heard of these birds several times already: they had perched up there on the gilt ball of the Monument for an hour or more, during the time he was coming up from the Nore in the press smack; they had attracted an immense crowd and a great deal of speculation. They were universally held to be portents; but what they portended was less certain.

  ‘In my opinion,’ said a milk-faced midshipman (whose mother would have wept to see him, unwashed, slobbered with brandy that he c
ould scarcely drink and smelling of tobacco that he could scarcely smoke) ‘in my opinion those fowl mean a frightful prodigious ghastly disaster, which would probably be a very bad thing.’

  Jack leapt to his feet as if he had been stung and ran with astonishing speed to the door, where he cannoned from a rear-admiral into a post-captain and fell heavily over Ransome’s feet. They asked him what he thought he was doing, and where he thought he was going, and the admiral struck him repeatedly with a gold-headed cane from the Malacca Straits; ordinarily Jack would have resented this, admiral or no, but now he scrambled to his feet, seized Ransome by the hand and ran furiously down the street, crying out, ‘Come on,’ in a very vehement tone.

  Coming to the river stairs, he bawled for a pair of oars. ‘Give way,’ he said, thrusting Ransome into the boat, and he exhorted the rowers to pull with all the force and eloquence that ever he had learnt at sea, directing them to pass straight down the river to the press tender in the Pool. At the sound of the words ‘press tender’ the watermen paused, and Jack cried, ‘Give way, can’t you? You have got your infernal certificates, han’t you?’ The watermen certainly had, and they could not be taken by the press-gang nor kept aboard the press tender; but, as the bow oar explained, ‘It makes the blood go thin as gin in my arteries.’

  ‘Veins,’ said stroke.

  ‘Arteries,’ said bow.

  ‘Ransome,’ said Jack, ‘you have heard about these birds on the Monument? Well, don’t you see that they would bring Toby out of his grave, if they were to appear again? You must go ashore at Old Swan stairs, buy a couple of turkeys – turkeys, mind you, Ransome; none of your common geese – and hoist them at the top of the Monument. And I will go down to the tender – Dick Penn is in command – and bring up a thundering great party to stop every alley, once the crowd has gathered. Do you understand? Have you any money?’

  Ransome struck the side of his nose with his finger to indicate comprehension, jingled his pocket to show his wealth, and remarking that Jack was a credit to his Ma, stepped on to a lighter that was moving in to the shore, and thence, in order to lose no valuable seconds, to a wherry, adjuring it ‘to shove in, cully, and do the handsome thing for once in its – life,’ words which the wherry recognised as its native tongue, and which it complied with, wafting the intruder ashore with all the elegance that a wherry is capable of.

  Some hours earlier than this the first lieutenant of the guard-ship had told Mr Richard Penn, the fifth lieutenant (and until recently a midshipman and a colleague of Jack’s) that what he, the first lieutenant, wanted was a little zeal, initiative and mother-wit on the part of Mr Penn. The first lieutenant freely acknowledged that it would be vain to look for seamanship, intelligence or beauty in Mr Penn; but at least the first lieutenant had a right, he hoped he had a right, to expect Mr Penn, when in command of the press smack, to bring back something better than crippled half-wits with certificates of exemption. Were there no idle apprentices left in the City of London, no stout, able-bodied young men? Did the entire uncertificated population resemble Mr Penn?

  These harsh words were still rankling in the bosom of the press-tender’s captain when Jack appeared on the river, and crying, ‘Hoy, Dick,’ darted up the side.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Byron,’ said Dick coldly.

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ said Jack, saluting and growing quite red. ‘May I have a word with you?’

  ‘I am going below, Mr Hape,’ said the captain to a dwarfish midshipman, and led the way into a kind of moist cupboard.

  ‘Now, Jack?’ he said, sitting down and waving to an empty locker.

  ‘I am very sorry I forgot myself just now,’ said Jack earnestly, ‘but I am in a great taking, Dick, and I rely upon you absolutely. Do you know about those birds at the Monument?’

  At the Monument itself Ransome was having difficulties that he had not allowed for: he had bought his turkeys easily enough, and although the poultryman had foisted the oldest, stringiest birds in the market upon him – birds that had proved unnaturally strong, cunning, malignant and resourceful – he had them under control by now, and he had reached the door of the Monument, only to be told that he might not bring them in.

  ‘No turkeys. No fowls whatsoever,’ said the keeper of the Monument, who, seeing that Ransome was a sailor, supposed that he was drunk. ‘And no tarpaulins, either,’ he added, with offensive sobriety.

  ‘In the King’s name,’ cried Ransome, in a hoarse wheeze.

  The keeper hesitated for a moment; but the turkeys, who were peering at him inquisitively with their little beady eyes, were too preposterous to have been brought on his Majesty’s service, and the keeper turned his back. How unwise was this, how imprudent a move, and how sincerely the keeper regretted his temerity when he felt an iron hand upon his neck and found himself dashed with appalling force into the Monument.

  The Monument, as the world in general knows, is a hollow column, with a spiral staircase inside it: for a brief interval this tube was filled with a whirling mass of keeper, turkey and enraged sailorman, a confused mass that ascended to emerge crimson and breathless on the square parapet under the brass knob that tops the edifice.

  Ransome always carried a knife and a piece of line; he would have felt indecently naked without them. ‘Now, brother,’ he said, showing them to the keeper, ‘you must bear a hand. Because why? Because it’s in the King’s name, that’s why; and I swear I’ll have the quivering liver out of you, else.’ He tapped the keeper pleasantly in the region of his liver, and passed him the turkeys.

  ‘Do you swear it’s in the King’s name?’ asked the keeper in gasps, when he could fetch his breath.

  ‘Yus,’ said Ransome, spitting on his hands and eyeing the brass flames that sprang from the upper part of the Monument.

  ‘I wouldn’t give no countenance otherwise,’ said the keeper. ‘Have you got a wipe?’

  Ransome passed him the powerful square of canvas that served him for a handkerchief, and the keeper neatly hooded the turkeys with it; the birds at once become docile and motionless. ‘You don’t know nothing about fowls,’ he said, with surly self-approbation.

  ‘Now listen, cock,’ said Ransome from amidst the flames, ‘I shall let you down this line, and you must make ‘em fast when I’m atop. And then, do you see, I shall haul ‘em up: and a flaming multitude will turn out: and we shall press a tidy few.’ He spoke slowly, for the top of the Monument is quite unlike the rigging of a ship, and although the two-hundred-foot drop did not worry him, the arrangement of the flames did; for whereas the rigging of a ship is based upon utility, monumental brass flames are there for architectural effect – a wholly different principle.

  ‘If you had said you was the press earlier, we could of walked up like Christians,’ said the keeper sulkily. ‘Three hundred and forty-five steps, run up like Barbary apes.’

  ‘What?’ called Ransome, round the curve, and perilously engaged with some artistic flames.

  ‘Three hundred and forty-five steps,’ shouted the keeper. ‘Six inches thick.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘And ten and a half wide.’

  ‘All hands aft, Mr Hape,’ said the captain of the press smack.

  The vessel was not so large that all hands could not hear this perfectly well, but they would not have considered it manners to move before the order was officially relayed. All hands, having been properly summoned, stood facing the quarter-deck, not in the stiff, wooden rigidity of soldiers, but in the easy, dégagée attitude of sailors – looking, it must be admitted, not unlike a band of dutiful gorillas: for these were the press-gang, equally impervious to the blows of the pressed and to the temptations of the shore.

  ‘Listen to Mr Byron,’ said the captain, whose mind was reeling with the magnitude of the design, and who did not trust himself to do it justice.

  Jack explained it, to the infinite delight of the crew, and said, ‘But this is the great point: I am confident that a friend of mine will be there. He was lost, by reaso
n of being freshly come up from the country. Now here’s a guinea,’ he cried out, pulling one out, ‘and here’s a guinea’ – pulling out another – ‘and if I had any more I would put it down – I can’t say fairer than that, damn your eyes. And the first man to clap him to, shall have them both. He is a little cove, ugly, with light green eyes and a pale face: wears an old black coat and sad-coloured breeches. Though he may have had the coat stolen off his back by now. He has an odd fashion of staring about him and jerking his head, and you might think he was simple; but he is a very learned cove indeed, and must be civilly used.’

  ‘Deck,’ hailed Mr Hape, who had taken a glass to the masthead, and who had been training it on the shining top of the Monument these ten minutes past, ‘Deck there. I see two birds broke out on the top of the flaming urn.’

  Tobias’ dress did not excite much comment: there were too many people in London who had sold their shirts in Rag Fair or who had lost them for one more to make people stare. He was clad in a sack; it had a hole in each corner for his legs, and it looked not altogether unlike the trunk-hose worn in an earlier age: it had been a very good sack, once, but it did impede his progress – having no belt, he was obliged to hold it up all the time, and he reached Fish Street Hill (the Monument is set in Fish Street Hill, not far from Pudding Lane) in a fume of anxiety, much later than the bulk of the spectators. Between twenty and thirty thousand people had already found leisure to come and stare, and already there were some twenty-five thousand opinions on the birds.

  ‘They are vultures,’ said a thin citizen, ‘a bird well known in the Orient.’

  ‘They are halieutic eagles,’ said a clergyman.

  ‘They are common turkeys,’ said Tobias.

  This was not at all well received: there were cries of ‘Who are you, to put in your word?’ ‘Ragged muffin!’ ‘Saucy fellow!’ ‘Teach him better manners,’ and he was nudged, pushed and attempted to be cuffed by the thin citizen, who bore such malice that he repeatedly forced his way through the crowd to get in his blow.