This sending up of hawsers and cablets was a simple, even an obvious idea, and Jack had often wondered why so very few commanders resorted to it in heavy weather; but it was also time-consuming, and before the very powerful extra supports were made fast and heaved taut aboard the Surprise the Spartan had gained horribly. She was now hull-down except on the top of the roll, tearing along under an extraordinary press of sail. 'If a banker crossed her hawse at this moment,' reflected Jack, with his glass trained on her, 'she would sheer clean through.'
He sent the hands to breakfast watch by watch and began cautiously packing on, sail by sail. The ship's speed mounted; the whole sound, the whole vast chord of her motion changed, rising through two whole tones; and out of the corner of his busy eye he noticed all the reefers and many of the larboard watch along the weather rail and gangway, eating their biscuit and grinning with delight at the flying, swooping speed.
But he also noticed, and this was much more to the immediate point, that the wind was strengthening and backing farther still. This continued throughout the forenoon watch, and as the gale became more distinctly a south-wester so it brought racing cloud low across the sea. The dawn itself had been grey, but now really thick and dirty weather threatened, and although the Surprise had regained one of her lost miles by the end of the watch -she was indeed the faster ship in a heavy sea - Jack was very much afraid that if he did not come up with the Spartan before nightfall he would lose her in the murk.
Furthermore, as the wind backed so it blew in the same direction as the growing swell, and the seas grew heavier by far. Both wind and swell were right aft by the time the gunroom sat down to dinner with their guests, Captain Aubrey and Mr Midshipman Howard, and the ship was pitching through forty-one degrees. All those present had known a good deal worse far south of the Horn, but even so it took away from the splendour of the feast. The gunroom had meant to regale their Captain on fresh turtle to begin with and then a variety of other delights, but the early extinction of the galley fires, put out as soon as the men's salt beef had been boiled, had reduced them to a cold, or sometimes luke-warm, collation; however, it included soused pig's face, one of Jack's favourite dishes, and treacle pudding, which he always said ate better if it did not scald your gullet.
'You were speaking of the miseries of authors,' said Stephen across the table to Martin, 'but neither of us thought to mention poor Adanson. Do you know, sir,' -addressing himself to Jack - 'that Michael Adanson, the ingenious author of the Families naturelles des Plantes, to which we all of us owe so much, submitted twenty- seven large manuscript volumes relating to the natural classification of all known beings and substances, together with a hundred and fifty - I repeat, a hundred and fifty - others containing forty thousand species arranged alphabetically, and a completely separate vocabulary containing two hundred thousand words, and they explained, as well as detached memoirs and forty thousand figures and thirty thousand specimens of the three kingdoms of nature. He presented them, I say, to the Academy of Sciences in Paris, and they were received with the utmost applause and respect. Yet when this great man, after whom Linnaeus himself named the baobab tree Adansonia digitata, was invited to become a member of the Institute a little before I had the honour of addressing it, he did not possess a whole shirt nor yet an untorn pair of breeches in which he could attend, still less a coat, God rest his soul.'
'That was very bad, I am sure,' said Jack.
'And I might have remembered Robert Heron,' said Martin, 'the author of The Comforts of life, which he composed in Newgate, and many another more learned work. I wrote out his appeal to the Literary Fund, his hand being then too weak, and in it he truthfully stated that he worked from twelve to sixteen hours a day. When the physicians examined him they found him totally incapacitated by what they termed the indiscreet exertion of his mind in protracted and incessant literary labours
Jack's attention was, as to three parts, elsewhere, for the altered motion of the deck under his feet and the wine in his glass told him that the wind was backing farther still, backing fast with some nasty flaws and gusts; several of the miseries and calamities of authors therefore escaped him, but he returned in time to hear Stephen say, 'Smollett observed that had his friends told him what to expect in the capacity of an author 'I should in all probability have spared myself the incredible labour and chagrin that I have undergone.''
'Think of Chatterton,' cried Martin.
'Nay, think of Ovid on the dank and fetid shores of the old cold Black Sea:
Omnia perdidimus, tantummodo vita relicta est,
Praebeat Ut sensum materiamque mali.'
'Yet perhaps, gentlemen,' said Mowett, beaming on them, 'there may be some happy authors.'
Both Martin and Stephen looked extremely doubtful, but before either could reply a fierce, savage, triumphant roar broke out overhead, drowning the powerful voice of the wind and the sea and just preceding the appearance of Calamy in his streaming tarpaulin jacket, reporting that the chase had split her foresail.
So she had, and although she set her close-reefed foretopsail in the most seamanlike fashion, the Surprise gained more than a mile before she was running at anything near her former pace.
Jack and Mowett stood there on the forecastle, studying the Spartan. 'I wonder, I wonder,' murmured Jack: if he could gain five or six hundred yards more he could fire his chaser with some hope of cutting up her rigging, knocking away a spar, or at least holing her drum-tight canvas: with that done he should certainly be able to lay her aboard before dark. The Surprise was now rolling heavily as well as pitching, but she carried her weather chaser so much the higher, and with very good gunners dangerous fire would still be possible for a while. A veil of small rain swept between them and the Spartan vanished. 'I believe she will wear it,' he said. 'Let the reefs be shaken out of the maintopsail. And tell the gunner to stand by to try for the range.'
A solid packet of water sweeping from aft soaked him as he hurried, bent low, along the gangway, but he hardly noticed it: the air was full of flying spindrift, and it looked as though they were in for a thoroughly dirty night. He had already shifted sail for the shift of wind, and she had a fine press of canvas: as the reefs came out of the maintopsail she heeled still farther, so that the deck sloped another five degrees, and his hand automatically reached out for the backstay: there was a pure keen delight in this flying speed, the rushing air, and the taste of sea in his mouth. He was not the only one to appreciate it, either: the four men at the wheel and the quartermaster at the con had the same expression of grave pleasure; and when two bells in the first dog-watch struck a few moments later the midshipman who heaved the log reported 'Eleven and a half knots exactly, sir, if you please,' with a look of perfect bliss. And certainly. although the difference between two knots and three was neither here nor there, at this pace even half a knot more made an immense change in the feeling of speed: it was also very hard to attain. But two bells already: that meant there was precious little daylight left; it would be a damned near-run thing, if indeed it could be done at all. And now in his glass he saw the Spartan starting her water over the side, two thick jets of it flying to leeward, relieving her of many tons.
Right forward, just as the ship was reaching the height of her rise, the gunner let fly. At almost the same moment an extraordinarily violent gust split the Surprise's maintopsail.
The men leapt to the sheets, halliards, buntlines and clewlines and the moment he gave the order the flapping, cracking, streaming sailcloth was gathered into the top, there to be mastered, unbent and sent down -
