other hand, a young man for his important office, a seaman through and through, brought up in the North Sea colliers, was as eager as his captain to get the best out of the Boadicea, even if it meant trying something new. He spoke feelingly on the good effect of cat-harpins, well-sniftered in; he entirely agreed with the plan for raking the foremast; Jack's heart warmed to him.
At least a part of Mr Buchan's sullenness arose from hunger. The gunroom dined at one o'clock, an hour now long past; and although today dinner would have been indifferent in any case, its absence rendered the master positively morose. The bosun had dined at noon together with the carpenter and the gunner, and Buchan, smelling both food and grog upon him, hated his cheerful face; even more his steady flow of talk.
Jack too was somewhat given to worshipping his belly, and when he had dismissed them he walked into the coach: here he found Stephen and Mr Farquhar, eating cake. 'Do I interrupt you?' he asked: not at all, they said, clearing a space for him among the books, documents, maps, proclamations and broadsheets that they were trying to reassemble after the abrupt disappearance and reappearance of their quarters. 'I hope I see you well, sir?' he said to Mr Farquhar, who had suffered more than most in the Bay of Biscay and who had spent much of the time since rising from his cot in conference with Dr Maturin, the two of them deep in papers, talking foreign to the intense vexation of their servants, two ship's boys told off to look after them, who liked to indulge their natural curiosity--a curiosity much stimulated by their shipmates before the mast, eager to know what was afoot. Farquhar had lost a stone, and his lean, intelligent, hook-nosed face still had a greenish tinge, but he replied that he had never felt better in his life, that the tremendous din of battle, the more than Jovian thunder of the guns, had completed the work--with a civil bow to Stephen--of Dr Maturin's preternatural physic, so that he felt like a boy again; he had a boy's appetite, a restless eagerness to be at table. 'But,' he went on, 'you must first allow me to congratulate you most heartily upon your splendid victory. Such instant decision, such a determined onslaught, and such a happy issue!'
'You are too kind, sir, too kind by half. But as for the happy issue that you are so obliging as to mention, it has one aspect that cannot but rejoice us all. We have the French captain's cook aboard, and I am come'--turning towards Stephen -'to ask whether you think he might be persuaded . . . ?'
'I have already attended to him,' said Stephen. 'A sucking pig, one of a large surviving farrow, was one of the few casualties aboard the Hibi, and I understand that it is to provide a first example of his powers. I have also seen to it that Monsieur Bretonniere's wine and comforts have been transferred: to these I thought fit to add his late captain's stores; foie gras in jars, truffles in goose-grease, pieces of goose in goose-grease, a large variety of dried sausages, Bayonne hams, potted anchovies; and among the rest of the wine, twenty-one dozens of Margaux of '88, with the long cork, together with an almost equal quantity of Chiteau Lafite. Sure, I cannot tell how we shall ever get through them all; yet it would be the world's shame to let such noble wine go back, and in these conditions another year must see it the mere ghost of itself.'
The claret never saw another year, however, nor did that splendid vintage go to waste: with steady application and with some help from Bretonniere and other guests from the gunroom Jack and Stephen drank almost every drop as the days went by. And there were days enough in all conscience, since the kind winds of their departure deserted them well north of the line, and sometimes they would lie on the oily, heaving sea, drifting slowly towards America on the equatorial current, with the Boadicea? figurehead simpering all round the compass and the frigate nearly rolling her masts by the board. Ten days on end when she wallowed with flaccid sails on the stagnant water, clean in herself but so surrounded by the filth of three hundred men--by Admiral Brown as the old hands called it--and by her own empty beef -casks, peelings and general rubbish that Jack was obliged to take the jolly-boat a quarter of a mile away for his morning's swim, while at the same time he caused the crew to tow their ship, thus rendering the view more agreeable and training them in the art of managing an oar, so beating two birds with one bush, as he put it, or even three, since after they had pulled her for an hour or two it was the Boadicea? custom to lower a sail into the pure, tepid water, buoying its outer corners and thereby making a shallow pool in which those who could not swim--the great majority--might splash about and enjoy themselves, perhaps learning how to stay afloat in the process.
But they crossed the line itself in style, with studdingsails aloft and alow, and with more than the usual merriment, for when they reduced sail to let Neptune come aboard, accompanied by an outrageously lewd Amphitrite and Badger-Bag, he found no less than a hundred and twentythree souls who had to be made free of the equator by being lathered with rancid grease--tar was forbidden, being in short supply--and shaved with a piece of barrel-hoop before being ducked.
Southward still, with Canopus and Achernar high overhead, and Jack showed his attentive midshipmen the new constellations, Musca, Pavo, Chamaeleon and many more, all glowing in the warm, pellucid air.
Strange, unpredictable weather, for even when the Boadicea found the trades in 4' south they proved apathetic and fitful. It was clear that this was not to be a rapid passage, but although Jack often whistled for a breeze, a stronger breeze, he was not deeply worried by the length of their voyage: his ship was well- found, several storms of rain had filled her water, and her men were remarkably healthy; and as the weeks turned into months it came to him that this was a happy period, a time set apart, lying between the anxieties of home on the one hand and those that would surely be waiting for him in the Indian Ocean, where his real work would begin. And then although he longed for the 'real thing' to start, he knew that no power on earth could bring him to it any earlier: he and Fellowes had done all they could to increase the frigate's rate of sailing, and they had accomplished much; but they could not command the wind. So with a tranquil conscience and that fatalism which sailors must acquire if they are not to perish of frustration, he rejoiced in this opportunity for making the Boadicea into something like his notion of a crack frigate, a fighting-machine manned entirely by able seamen, men-of war's men, every one of them an expert gun-layer and a devil with the boarding-axe and cutlass.
Insensibly the lubberly part of the Boadicea? crew began to resemble sailormen as the unchanging naval routine came to be their only real way of life, a life in which it was natural and inevitable that all hands should be piped just before eight bells in the middle watch and that the sleepers should start from their hammocks to the muster and then to the scrubbing of the decks in the first light of dawn; that all hands should be piped to dinner at eight bells in the forenoon watch, that this dinner should consist of cheese and duff on Monday, two pounds of salt beef on Tuesday, dried peas and duff on Wednesday, one pound of salt pork on Thursday, dried peas and cheese on Friday, two more pounds of salt beef on Saturday, a pound of salt pork and some such treat as figgy-dowdy on Sunday, always accompanied by a daily pound of biscuit; that at one bell dinner should be followed by a pint of grog, that after supper (with another pint of grog) all hands should repair to their action-stations at the beat of the drum, and that eventually hammocks should be piped down so that the watch below might have four hours of sleep before being roused again at midnight for another spell on deck. This and the perpetual living movement of the deck underfoot, and the sight of nothing but the Atlantic Ocean clear round the horizon, nothing but endless sea and sky, cut them off from the land so completely that it seemed another world, with no immediacy at all, and they adopted the values of the sea.
They also came to resemble sailormen in appearance, since one hour and forty minutes after the Boadicea had passed under the tropic of Cancer the carpenter's mate banged two brass nails into the deck, exactly twelve yards apart: twelve yards of duck, needles and thread were served out to each man, together with sennet, and they were desired to make themselves hot weather frocks, trousers and broad- brimmed hats. This they did, helped by their handier colleagues, to such effect that at next Sunday's divisions the landsmen dressed in a mixture of ragfair clothes and purser's slops, old leather breeches, greasy waistcoats and battered hats, had vanished, and their captain paced along lines of men as clean and white in their way as the Marines, drawn up on the quarterdeck, were clean and red in theirs.
