Constitution's cable-tier turned into one long sickbay, and many shocking wounds to deal with. It was here that he had met Mr Evans, the Constitution's surgeon, and learnt to esteem him: a bold, deft operator with a firm mind, a man whose sole aim was to preserve life and limb and who fought very hard to do so, with great skill, learning, and devotion - a man who made no difference between his own people and the prisoners, and one of the few surgeons he had known who considered the whole man, not only the wound itself. Between them they thought they had saved Captain Lambert, although they very nearly despaired of Jack when the high fever and the look of gangrene appeared: yet in both cases they were wrong - Lambert died the day he was carried ashore and Jack survived, although he was too near death to be moved before the Constitution sailed.
'Lambert died more of misery than of his wounds,' reflected Stephen. 'The third frigate to strike to the Americans! I believe it would have killed Jack, in his already weakened state, had he been in command: even so, he smelt of death.' He contemplated for a while upon stimuli, positive and negative; upon that which had filled the much weakened Leopards with prodigious strength and activity during the battle; upon that which had struck them back to a state of extreme, listless fatigue. 'He has survived, sure, and his functions are much what they should be; but he has had a shocking blow. Sometimes he is positively humble with me, diffident and as it were apologetical, as though detected in false pretences, while with others he is cold, reserved, and on occasion arrogant, so unlike his usual open friendly candour; and a relapse would not surprise me. At present, now that he can defecate with ease, his greatest difficulty is maintaining the dogged mechanical cheerfulness intended to show the American officers that he does not mind it, that he can lose as well as win. I have seen him succeed to admiration when taken by the French; but here the case is altered: these gentlemen are Americans, and the Java was the third frigate their little navy has taken, without a single victory to set off against the defeats. They are indeed a gentlemanly set, with one or two exceptions (for I cannot think highly of those who squirt tobacco-juice past my ear, however skilfully), but they would be more than human if they could conceal their cheerfulness, their sense of well-being, I might even say their perfect happiness at having defeated the first naval power on earth; and even if they could, there would be no hiding the rustic merriment of the ship's company, the jolly carpenters, the facetious men with the caulking-irons.'
A gang of these jolly carpenters moved him over to windward so that they could get at a gaping wound in the deck, hitherto covered with a tarpaulin - moved him quite gently. 'Mind where you put your foot, squire; there are holes enough to fill a wagon.' Plenty of holes indeed; the ship had been filled with the sound of hammering ever since they left San Salvador; but he was so used to it by now that this fresh outburst close at hand did not interrupt his thoughts. A gentlemanly set: he recalled their extreme care that nothing belonging to the Java's officers should be lost or looted. He remembered a huge American midshipman appearing with his diary and Jack's sheaf of papers folded into it and asking 'who the black book belonged to?' He not only still possessed his diary and his writing-case but every last handkerchief and pair of stockings bestowed upon him - some of the givers now dead, alas, more than three thousand miles astern. The word 'diary' made him frown, but the perpetual streaming wake carried his thoughts along, or rather the succession of images, and against that churning whiteness he once again beheld the ceremony in San Salvador at which the American commanding officer, Commodore Bainbridge, had addressed all his captives who were in a fit state to hear him, stating that if they would give their word not to serve against the United States until they were duly exchanged they might go straight home to England in two cartel ships. Then the more private ceremony at which General Hislop, in his own name and in that of Java's surviving officers, presented the commodore with a handsome sword in acknowledgment of his kindness to the prisoners - a kindness that extended not only to their ordinary belongings but even to the Governor's magnificent service of official plate, a circumstance that may have added to Hislop's eloquence.
Diary: the word jagged at his consciousness and he returned to consider it. He had given way to two dangerous indulgences in his time: laudanum was one, the bottled fortitude, the nepenthe that had tided him over some of his worst times with Diana Villiers and that had then turned into a tyrannical master. Diary-keeping was the other: a harmless and even a useful occupation for most, but unwise in an intelligence-agent. To be sure, in most places the manuscript was encoded three deep, in a cipher so personal that it had baffled the Admiralty's cryptographers when he challenged them with a sample. Yet there were some purely personal parts in which he had used a simpler system, one that an ingenious, puzzle-solving mind with a knowledge of Catalan could make out, if he chose to spend the necessary labour. It would be labour lost, from the point of view of intelligence, since these sections dealt only with Stephen's passion for Diana Villiers over all these years. Yet even so he was very, very unwilling that any other eye should see him naked, see him exposed as a helpless tormented lover, a nympholept furiously longing for what was beyond his reach; and even more unwilling that any man should read his attempts at verse, Catullus-and-water at the best. A very great deal of water, though the fire might perhaps be the same: nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
He did not really fear that any important part could be deciphered, but it would have been wiser to toss the diary overboard with a weight attached, as Chads had thrown the Java's signal-book in its leaden covers and General Hislop his despatches; and although he valued it extremely (apart from anything else he often needed a portable, infallible, artificial memory) he probably would have done so, if he had not had seven amputations on his hands. A foolish slip: an intelligence-agent should carry nothing that did not bear its apparent explanation on its face, nothing that could arouse suspicion of a code. He had not claimed the book until they were in San Salvador, and when he did so the Commodore asked him whether the book had anything to do with the Java's cipher or signals, or whether it was of a private nature. Mr Bainbridge was sitting in the great cabin, obviously in considerable pain from his wounded leg, with Mr Evans and a civilian beside him; and it appeared to Stephen that the three Americans looked at him very attentively as he assured the Commodore that the entries in the book were of a purely personal, medical, and philosophic nature.
'And what of these papers?' asked Bainbridge, holding up the sheaf.
'Ah, those have nothing to do with me,' said Stephen carelessly. 'I believe Captain Aubrey's steward brought them aboard: one looks very like his commission.' He leafed through the diary and showed Mr Evans various anatomical drawings - the alimentary tract of the sea-elephant that covered two pages, the whale-bird's oviducts, the flayed hand of a man suffering from calcification of the palmar aponeurosis, some dissected aborigines.
Mr Evans expressed his admiration: the civilian said, 'May I ask, sir, why the text appears to be disguised?'
'A personal diary, sir,' said Stephen, 'is best considered as a mirror in which a man may see himself: few men, who set down their shortcomings with the utmost naked candour, would wish to have them read by others. A medical diary, recording the symptoms, sufferings, and treatment of named patients, must also be secret: Mr Evans will support me when I say that secrecy, total discretion, is one of the most important duties of our profession.'
'It is part of the Hippocratic oath,' said Mr Evans.
Stephen bowed, and went on, 'And lastly, it is notorious that the natural philosopher is extremely jealous of his discoveries; he wishes to have the credit of first publication; and he would no more share the glory of a new- found species than a naval commander would wish to share his capture of a ship.'
The argument went straight home, and the commodore handed over the book. The civilian appeared somewhat less satisfied, however: who was he? The consul? He was neither named nor explained. He said, 'I believe you belonged to the Leopard, sir?'
'Just so, sir,' said Stephen, 'and it was aboard her, in the high southern latitudes, that I made the greater part of these discoveries, and these drawings.'
