As he spoke the Prabang fortress began to boom out a farewell salute; the Diane answered it, and they were still firing, gun for gun, with the smoke drifting away to leeward, as she passed through the channel into the open sea.
'Mr Warren,' said Jack, 'the course will be north-east by east a half east; and that, I trust, will bring us to our rendezvous with the Surprise.'
Chapter 9
The Diane had not run off two degrees of longitude before the old pattern of sea-going life was as firmly settled as if it had never been interrupted. It is true that she ran them off slowly, rarely exceeding five knots and never logging more than a hundred miles from noon to noon. This was not because she did not try, not because she was too early for her rendezvous: far from it: at present, with the balmy air coming in one point abaft the beam, she had a magnificent display of canvas spread, with studdingsails aloft and alow, royals and even skyscrapers, and a variety of rarely-set objects on the stays; yet the balmy air was so languid that she only just had steerage-way.
Jack Aubrey, having done all that could be done, paced fore and aft on the windward side of the quarterdeck according to his habit before dinner with his mind perfectly at ease on that point if not on all others; the greater part of a lifetime afloat had convinced him that railing at the weather only spoilt one's appetite, which was always a pity and which would be even more of a pity today, when he and Stephen, alone for once, were to eat some particularly fine fish, bought from a proa that morning.
'What is it that you wish me to see?' asked Stephen, coming up the companion-ladder with his usual precautions, although there was scarcely any movement at all under his feet.
'You cannot see it from here, because of the awning,' said Jack. 'But come with me along the weather gangway, and I will show you something that perhaps you have never seen before.' They went forward, and some of the hands in the waist nodded and smiled significantly. The Doctor was going to be stunned, amazed, taken aback all standing. 'There,' said Jack, pointing upwards. 'Abaft the topsailyard, right up against the trestletrees. Have you ever seen that before?'
'The thing like a tablecloth pulled out at one corner?' asked Stephen, who could be sadly disappointing on occasion.
'Well, it is a mizen topgallant staysail,' said Jack, who had expected little more. 'You can tell your grandchildren you saw one.' They walked back to the quarterdeck and resumed the pacing; Jack accommodating his long-legged stride to keep in step.
'As I understand it,' said Stephen, 'we keep our appointment with Tom Pullings off the False Natunas and then drop Fox in Java to take an Indiaman home; but is it not a strangely roundabout way, as if one should go from Dublin to Cork by way of Athlone?'
'Yes. His Excellency was good enough to point that out to me yesterday - perhaps he showed you the same map- - and I will make the same reply to you as I did to him: as the prevailing winds lie at this season, it is quicker to go back to Batavia by the False Natunas than by the Banka Strait. And then' (lowering his voice) 'which is more to my purpose though not perhaps to his, there is our rendezvous.'
'Well, I am content. There is, I presume, a convenient harbour in the False Natunas? And, by the way, why False? Are the inhabitants unusually treacherous?'
'Oh no. There is no harbour. That is only a sea-going expression, a hyperbole, as I believe you would say: they are only a parcel of uninhabited rocks, like the Dry Salvages. It is understood that we cruise for a week in their latitude or in fact a trifle south of it. Their longitude has not yet been fixed with any certainty, but as you know we can be reasonably sure of our latitude; and so we cruise along it, a glass at every masthead, and at night we may lie to, with a lantern in each top. As for their being false...
The ship's bell stopped him in mid-stride, mid-sentence, and together they hurried below, their mouths watering steadily.
'.... as for their being false,' said Jack, after a long and busy pause, 'that arose when the Dutch were- first making their conquests in these parts. The master of some ship bound for the real Natunas but who was sadly out in his dead-reckoning, raised them one foggy morning and cried, 'I have made the perfect landfall! Ain't I the cheese!' The Dutch cheese of course, ha, ha, ha! But, however, when the mist lifted they proved to be these mere God-damned barren rocks, looming large in the thick weather; so he put them down in his chart as the False Natunas. The South China Sea is full of places like that, imperfectly fixed, mistaken for one another; and vast areas outside the Indiamen's track are not charted at all - just hearsay of islands, reefs and shoals picked up from proas or junks that can only give the vaguest of bearings for the places they are talking about.'
'I am sure you are right. Yet it does seem strange to a landsman. These are populated waters: at this very moment I can see....' He was looking out of the stern-window, his eyes narrowed against the brilliance of the day.'.... six, no, seven vessels: two junks, one large proa, four small things with outriggers paddling fast, whether fishermen or pirates on a modest scale I cannot tell.'
'It is just as occasion offers, I believe. In the South China Sea, by all accounts, the rule is to take anything you can overcome, and avoid or trade with anything you cannot.'
'I am afraid it was much the same with us until very recently. I have read strange accounts of Maelsechlinn the Wise, son of Eric and he the kindest of men by land. But these are populated waters, as I was saying, and the Chinese who sail them belong to a very highly civilized, literate community, while the Malays are by no means ignorant of letters, as we know very well. Why, then, do we swim in this cloud of uncertainty?'
'Because junks never draw more than a few feet of water - they are flat bottomed - and proas even less. Whereas a ship the line, a seventy-four, draws 22 or 23; even our light raught aft is close on fourteen foot, and with stores and all very much more: I am never happy unless we have at least four fathoms under our keel even in smooth weather. A shoal that a junk would scarcely notice, much less mark down, might rip our bottom out as easy as kiss my hand. These are the very words I shall use when I explain sailing in uncharted waters elsewhere, after dinner,' he said with the significant look that often passed between them in this sounding-box of a divided cabin.
Stephen nodded, put his perfectly clean skeleton on to the dish in the middle, took another Java sea-perch, looked at Jack's unseemly heap of bones, and observed, 'You have to be a Papist to eat fish, I find. Pray tell me how you arrange private meetings at sea, half the world apart.'
'They cannot be at all precise, at such a distance, but it is remarkable how often they answer. The usual thing is to give three or four cruising-grounds, always if possible near some island where a message can be left after the agreed cruising-time is over; and then if circumstances call for it we set a final rendezvous where one or the other can lie at anchor until a stated time. Ours is Sydney Cove.'
