ailing Simmons, his predecessor, had let discipline grow slack before he died; the months in Portsmouth had done no good; and Hervey was not the man to build up an efficient crew. He was an amiable, conscientious fellow, very good company when he could overcome his diffidence, and a profound mathematician; but he could not see from one end of the ship to the other, and even if he had had the eyes of a lynx, he was no seaman. Still worse, he had no authority. His kindliness and ignorance had played Old Harry with the Surprise; and anyhow it would have called for an exceptional officer to cope with the loss of half the frigate’s people, drafted off by the port-?admiral, and their replacement by the crew of the Racoon, turned over to the Surprise in a body on returning from a four years’ commission on the North American station without being allowed to set foot on shore. The Racoons and the Surprises and the small draft of landsmen still had not mixed; there were still unpleasant jealousies, and the ratings were often absurdly wrong. The captain of the foretop did not know his business, for example; and as for their gunnery-
But this was not what he was worrying about as he walked into the galley. He had an enchanting ship, frail and elderly though she might be, some good officers, and good material. No: what haunted him was the thought of scurvy. But he might be mistaken; these dull looks might have a hundred other causes; and surely it was too early in the voyage for scurvy to break out?
The heat in the galley brought him up all standing. It had been gasping hot on deck, even with the blessed breeze: here it was like walking straight into a baker’s oven. But the three-?legged cook - three-?legged because both his own had been shot away on the Glorious First of June, and he had supplemented the two provided by the hospital with a third, ingeniously seized to his bottom, to prevent him from plunging into his cauldrons or his range in a heavy sea. The range was now cherry-?pink in the gloom, and the cook’s face shone with sweat.
‘Very trim, Johnson. Capital,’ said Jack, backing a step. ‘Ain’t you going to inspect the coppers, sir?’ cried the cook, his brilliant smile vanishing, so that in the comparative darkness his whole face seemed to disappear.
‘Certainly I am,’ said Jack, drawing on the ceremonial white glove. With this he ran his hand round the gleaming coppers, gazed at his fingers as though he really expected to find them deeply crusted with old filth and grease. A drop of sweat trembled on the end of his nose and more coursed down inside his coat, but he gazed at the pease-?soup, the ovens and the two hundredweight of plum-?duff, Sunday duff, before making his way to the sick-?bay where Dr Maturin and his raw-?boned Scotch assistant were waiting for him. Having made the round of the cots (one broken arm, one hernia with pox, four plain poxes) with what he intended to be encouraging remarks - looking better - soon be fit and well - back with their messmates for crossing the line - he stood under the opening of the air-?sail, profiting by the relative coolness of 105?, and said privately to Stephen, ‘Pray go along the divisions with Mr M’Alister while I am below. Some of the men seem to me to have an ugly look of the scurvy. I hope I am wrong - it is far too early - but it looks damnably like it.’
Now the berth-?deck, with an ill-?looking cat that sat defying them with studied insolence, its arms folded, and its particular friend, an equally mangy green parrot, lying on its side, prostrated with the heat, that said ‘Erin go bragh’ in a low tone once or twice as Jack and Hervey paced along with bowed heads past the spotless mess-? tables, kids, benches, chests, the whole clean-?swept deck checkered with brilliant light from the gratings and the hatchways. Nothing much wrong here; nor in the midshipmen’s berth, nor of course in the gunroom. But in the sail-?room, where the bosun joined them again, a very shocking sight - mould on the first stay-?sail he turned over, and worse as the others were brought out.
This was lubber’s work, slovenly and extremely dangerous. Poor Hervey wrung his hands, and the bosun, though made of sterner stuff, was quickly reduced to much the same condition. Jack’s unfeigned anger, his utter contempt for the excuses offered - ‘it happens so quick near the line - no fresh water to get the salt out - the salt draws the damp - hard to fold them just so with all these awnings’ - made a shattering impression on Rattray.
His remarks upon the efficiency required in a man-?of -war were delivered in little more than a conversational tone, but they were not inaudible, and when he emerged after having looked at the holds, cable-?tiers and fore-? peak, the frigate’s people had an air of mixed delight and apprehension. They were charmed that the bosun had copped it - all of them, that is to say, who would not be spending their holy Sunday afternoon in ‘rousing them all out, sir, every last storm-?stays’l, every drabbler, every bonnet: do you hear me, now?’ - but apprehensive lest their own sins he discovered, lest they cop it next; for this skipper was a bleeding tartar, mate, a right hard horse.
However, he returned to the quarterdeck without biting or savaging anyone in his path, peered up between the awnings at the pyramid of canvas, still just drawing, and said to Mr Hervey, ‘We will rig church, if you please.’
Chairs and benches appeared on the quarterdeck; the cutlass-?rack, decently covered with signal flags, became a reading-?desk; the ship’s bell began to toll. The seamen flocked aft; the officers and the civilians of the envoy’s suite stood at their places, waiting for Mr Stanhope, who walked slowly to his chair on the captain’s right, propped on the one side by his chaplain and on the other by his secretary. He looked grey and wan among all these mahogany-?red faces, almost ghost-?like: he had never wanted to go to Kampong; he had not even known where Kampong was until they gave him this mission; and he hated the sea. But now that the Surprise was sailing on the gentle breeze her roll was far less distressing - hardly perceptible so long as he kept his eyes from the rail and the horizon beyond - and the familiar Church of England service was a comfort to him among all these strange intricacies of rope, wood and canvas and in this intolerably heated unbreathable air. He followed its course with an attention as profound as that of the seamen; he joined in the well-?known psalms in a faint tenor, drowned by the deep thunder of the captain on his left and yet sweetly prolonged in the remote, celestial voice of the Welsh lookout high on the fore-?royal jacks. But when the parson announced the text of his sermon, Mr Stanhope’s mind wandered far away to the coolness of his parish church at home, the dim light of sapphires in the east window, the tranquillity of the family tombs, and he closed his eyes.
He wandered alone. The moment the Reverend Mr White said, ‘The sixth verse of Psalm 75: promotion cometh neither from the east, nor from the west, nor from the south,’ the flagging devotion of the midshipmen to leeward and of the lieutenants to windward revived, sprang to vivid life. They sat forward in attitudes of tense expectancy; and Jack, who might be called upon to preach himself, if he were to command a ship without a chaplain, reflected, ‘A flaming good text, upon my word.’
Yet when at length it appeared that promotion cameth not from the north either, as the sharper midshipmen had supposed, but rather from a course of conduct that Mr White proposed to describe under ten main heads, they slowly sank back; and when even this promotion was found to be not of the present world, they abandoned him altogether in favour of reflections upon their dinner, their Sunday dinner, the plum-?duff that was simmering under the equatorial sun with no more than a glowing cinder to keep it on the boil. They glanced up at the sails, flapping now as the breeze died away: they pondered on the likelihood of a studdingsail being put over the side, to swim in. ‘If I can square old Babbington,’ thought Callow, who had also been invited to dine in the gunroom at two o’clock, ‘I shall get two dinners. I can dart below the moment we have shot the sun, and -,
‘On deck there,’ came from the sky. ‘On deck there.
Sail ho!’
‘Where away?’ called Jack, as the chaplain broke off.
‘Two points on the starboard bow, sir.’
