‘Keep her away, Davidge,’ said Jack to the man at the wheel, who, though in the midst of the congregation, was not of it, and who had never opened his mouth for hymn, psalm, response or prayer. ‘Carry on, Mr White, if you please: I beg your pardon.’
Looks darted to and fro across the quarterdeck - wild surmise, intense excitement. Jack felt extreme moral pressure building up all round him, but, apart from a quick glance at his watch, he remained immovable, listening to the chaplain with his head slightly on one side, grave, attentive.
‘Tenthly and lastly,’ said Mr White, speaking faster.
Below, in the airy shadowed empty berth-?deck, Stephen walked up and down, reading the chapter on scurvy in Blane’s Diseases of Seamen: he heard the hail, paused, paused again, and said to the cat, ‘How is this? The cry of a sail and no turmoil, no instant activity? What is afoot?’ The cat pursed its lips. Stephen reopened his book and read in it until he heard the two-?hundredfold ‘Amen’ above his head.
On deck the church was disappearing in the midst of a universal excited buzz - glances at the captain, glances over the hammock-?cloths towards the horizon, where a flash of white could be seen on the rise. The chairs and benches were hurried below, the hassocks turned back to wads for the great guns, the cutlasses resumed their plain Old Testament character, but since the first nine heads of Mr White’s discourse had taken a long, long time, almost till noon itself, sextants and quadrants already came tumbling up before the prayer-?books had vanished. The sun was close to the zenith, and this was nearly the moment to take his altitude. The quarterdeck awning was rolled back, the pitiless naked light beat down; and as the master, his mates, the midshipmen, the first lieutenant and the captain took their accustomed stations for this high moment, the beginning of the naval day, they had no more shadow than a little pool of darkness at their feet. It was a solemn five minutes, particularly for the midshipmen -their captain insisted upon accurate observation - and yet no one seemed to care greatly about the sun: no one, until Stephen Maturin, walking up to Jack, said, ‘What is this I hear about a strange sail?’
‘Just a moment,’ said Jack, stepping to the quarterdeck bulwark, raising his sextant, bringing the sun down to the horizon and noting his reading on the little ivory tablet. ‘Sail? Oh, that is only St Paul’s Rocks, you know. They will not run away. If this breeze don’t die on us, you will see ‘em quite close after dinner - prodigiously curious - gulls, boobies, and so on.’
The news instantly ran through the ship - rocks, not ships; any God-?damned lubber as had travelled farther than Margate knew St Paul’s Rocks - and all hands returned to their keen expectation of dinner, which followed immediately after the altitude. The cooks of all the messes stood with their wooden kids near the galley; the mate of the hold began the mixing of the grog, watched with intensity by the quartermasters and the purser’s steward; the smell of rum mingled with that of cooking and eddied about the deck; saliva poured into a hundred and ninety-?seven mouths; the bosun stood with his call poised on the break of the forecastle. On the gangway the master lowered his sextant, walked aft to Mr Hervey and said, ‘Twelve o’clock, sir: fifty-?eight minutes north.’
The first lieutenant turned to Jack, took off his hat, and said, ‘Twelve o’clock, sir, if you please, and fifty-?eight minutes north.’
Jack turned to the officer of the watch and said, ‘Mr Nicolls, make it twelve.’
The officer of the watch called out to the mate of the watch, ‘Make it twelve.’
The mate of the watch said to the quartermaster, ‘Strike eight bells’; the quartermaster roared at the Marine sentry, ‘Turn the glass and strike the bell!’ And at the first stroke Nicolls called along the length of the ship to the bosun, ‘Pipe to dinner.’
The bosun piped, no doubt, but little did the quarterdeck hear of it, for the clash of mess-?kids, the roaring of the cooks, the tramp of feet and the confused din of the various messes banging their plates. In this weather the men dined on deck, among their guns, each mess fixing itself as accurately as possible above its own table below, and so Jack led Stephen into his cabin.
‘What did you think of the people?’ he asked.
‘You were quite right,’ said Stephen. ‘It is scurvy. All my authorities agree - weakness, diffused muscular pain, petechia, tender gums, ill breath - and M’Alister has no doubt of it. He is an intelligent fellow; has seen many cases. I have gone into the matter, and I find that nearly all the men affected come from the Racoon. They were months at sea before being turned over to us.’
‘So that is where the mischief lies,’ cried Jack. ‘Of course. But you will be able to put them right. Oh yes, you will set them up directly.’
‘U wish I could share your confidence; I wish I could feel persuaded that our lime-?juice were not sophisticated. Tell me, is there anything green grows upon those rocks of yours?’
‘Never a blade, never a single blade,’ said Jack. ‘And no water, either.’
‘Well,’ said Stephen, drawing up his shoulders. ‘I shall do my best with what we have.’
‘I am sure you will, my dear Stephen,’ cried Jack, flinging off his coat and with it part of his care. He had an unlimited faith in Stephen’s powers; and although he had seen a ship’s company badly hit by the disease, with hardly enough hands to win the anchor or make sail, let alone fight the ship, he thought of the forties, of the great western gales far south of the line, with an easier mind. ‘It is a great comfort to me to have you aboard: it is like sailing with a piece of the True Cross.’
‘Stuff, stuff,’ said Stephen peevishly. ‘I do wish you would get that weak notion out of your mind. Medicine can do very little; surgery less. I can purge you, bleed you, worm you at a pinch, set your leg or take it off, and that is very nearly all. What could Hippocrates, Galen, Rhazes, what can Blanc, what can Trotter do for a carcinoma, a lupus, a sarcoma?’ He had often tried to eradicate Jack’s simple faith; but Jack had seen him trepan the gunner of the Sophie, saw a hole in his skull and expose the brain; and Stephen, looking at Jack’s knowing smile, his air of civil reserve, knew that he had not succeeded this time, either. The Sophies, to a man, had known that if he chose Dr Maturin could save anyone, so long as the tide had not turned; and Jack was so thoroughly a seaman that he shared nearly all their beliefs, though in a somewhat more polished form. He said, ‘What do you say to a glass of Madeira before we go to the gunroom? I believe they have killed their younger pig for us, and Madeira is a capital foundation for pork.’
Madeira did very well as a foundation, burgundy as an accompaniment, and port as a settler; though all would have been better if they had been a little under blood-?heat. ‘How long the human frame can withstand this abuse,’ thought Stephen, looking round the table, ‘remains to be seen.’ He was eating biscuit rubbed with garlic himself, and he had drunk thin cold. black coffee, on grounds both of theory and personal practice; but as he looked round the table he was obliged to admit that so far the frames were supporting it tolerably well. Jack, with a deep stratum of duff upon a couple of pounds of swine’s flesh and root-?vegetables, was perhaps a little nearer apoplexy than usual, but the bright blue eyes in his scarlet face were not suffused - there was no immediate danger. The same could be said for the fat Mr Hervey, who had eaten and drunk himself out of his habitual constraint: his
