'I believe there are almost as many kinds of poetry as there are rigs,' observed the master.
'So there are too,' said Stephen. 'Do you remember that dear Ahmed Smyth, Mr Stanhope's oriental secretary, when we were going to Kampong? He told me of a curious Malay form of verse whose name escapes me, though I have retained an example:
The peepul-tree grows on the edge of the forest,
On the fishermen's strand nets lie in hopeless confusion;
It is true that I am sitting on your knee
But you are not therefore to suppose that you may
take any other liberty at all.'
'Did it rhyme in Malay?' asked the purser, after a silent pause.
'It did,' said Stephen. 'The first and the third .
The arrival of the pudding cut him short, a most uncommonly splendid pudding brought in with conscious pride and welcomed with applause.
'What, what is this?' cried Jack.
'We thought you would be surprised, sir,' said Mowett. 'It's a floating island, or rather a floating archipelago.'
'It is the Galapagos themselves,' said Jack. 'Here's Albemarle, here's Narborough, here's Chatham and Hood
I had no idea there was anyone aboard capable of such a thing: a masterpiece, upon my word and honour, fit for a flagship.'
'One of the whalers made it, sir. He was a pastrycook in Danzig before he took to sea.'
'I put in the lines of longitude and latitude,' said the master. 'They are made of spun sugar; so is the equator, but double thick and dyed with 'port.'
'The Galapagos,' said Jack, gazing down on them. 'The whole shooting-match: there's even the Redondo Rock and Cowly's Enchanted Isle, laid down exactly. And to think we never set foot on a single one... sometimes ours is a very demanding profession...
'Stern daughter of the voice of God! 0 Duty!' said Mowett; but Jack, musing over the archipelago, which swayed with the heave of the ship, did not hear him, and went on, 'but I tell you what, gentlemen, if we come back this way, having done what we set out to do, we shall lie in Mr Allen's cove on James Island for a few days, and everyone shall have leave to roam to his heart's content.'
'Will you not take some Galapagos, sir, before it comes adrift?' said Mowett.
'I hesitate to spoil such a work of art,' said Jack. 'But unless we are to go without our pudding' - this with a pretty knowing look as he poised his spoon above the pastry-cook's equator - 'I believe I must cut the Line.'
The Line, the Line, day after day they sailed westwards along the Line or a little south of it. They left the penguins and the seals behind almost at once, all the inshore birds and almost all the fish; they also left the gloom, the cool water and the low-hanging cloud, and they sailed over a dark blue disc, perpetually renewed, under a pale blue dome, occasionally flecked with very high white cirrus. But they did not sail at all fast. In spite of the Surprise's splendid display of light fair-weather canvas - studdingsails aloft and alow, royals and even skysails and skyscrapers - she rarely logged more than a hundred miles between one observation and the next. Almost every day the breeze dozed for two or three hours after midday, or even went fast to sleep, leaving the pyramids of sail in a dismal state of sag, while vast stretches of dead calm spread over the sea, broken only by the passage of whales, sperm whales, that would sometimes pass in wide-spaced files two and even three hundred strong, heading for Peru. And every evening at the setting of the watch the Surprise snugged down to topsails: there was no trusting the sudden flurries of the night, in spite of the lamblike innocence of the day.
These were waters largely unknown to the Navy - Byron, Wallis and Cook had kept much farther south or much farther north - and this slow creeping over an apparently infinite sea would have fretted Jack to the very heart if he had not learnt, through the master, that here it was always the case when the sun began to move backwards from the tropic: and it would be as bad for the Norfolk or possibly worse. Allen had had many a conversation with the specktioneer, a middle-aged man named Hogg, who had made the run to the Marquesas three times and the Sandwich Islands twice: and his experience, both first- and secondhand, was a great relief to all hands aboard. They sailed on as fast as they reasonably could, but not as though they had a chase in view, not wetting the sails throughout the urgent day, since they knew that the Norfolk would proceed at an even more moderate pace: and when she reached the Marquesas she would spend a great while cruising among the islands in search of the British whalers fishing there.
There was not a moment to spare, it was true; but then not every moment had to be flogged.
Once again, and with surprising speed, the ship settled down to a perfectly regular, self-sufficing existence; very soon it became the natural way of life once more, and the Surprises looked back to the remote and bitterly cold days far south of the Horn and even to their haunted passage up the coast of Chile and Peru as to another world.
The sun rose every morning exactly in the frigate's wake; it shone on the new-cleaned decks, but soon they were hidden from view by awnings, for although this was not Gulf of Guinea hot, with the pitch bubbling from the seams and tar dripping from on high, still less the Red Sea of infamous memory, the temperature was in the eighties and shade was grateful. Everybody walked about in duck, except for invitations to the cabin; and even for them the midshipmen were excused their thick kerseymere waistcoats.
Yet they were perhaps the only people who were not quite pleased about the return to proper blue-water sailoring with everything just so, shipshape and Bristol-fashion. Greek and Latin had never indeed been laid entirely aside except for the very worst days in the fifties and sixties, but now both came back with redoubled force; and now Captain Aubrey had time to lead them through the mazes of navigation, while at night he made them learn the name, declination and right ascension of a great many stars, and find out the angular distance between these and various planets or the moon. He and Mowett also had time to set about improving their morals, which in the naval context meant leaving their comfortable hammocks very early indeed, relieving the watch well before the stroke of the bell, never putting their hands in the pockets or leaning on the rail or resting on a carronade-slide, and always attending in the tops whenever sails were reefed. 'You are called reefers,' Mowett told them one day,
