On to West - poor noseless West, a victim of the biting frost far south of the Horn - and his division, the waisters; and as Jack inspected them, so down in the sick-berth one of their number, an elderly seaman named Owen, absent from divisions because of illness, said 'And there I was on Easter Island, gentlemen, with the Proby clawing off the lee shore and me roaring and bawling to my shipmates not to desert me. But they were a hard- hearted set of buggers, and once they had scraped past the headland they put before the wind - never started a sheet until they crossed the Line, I swear.
And did it profit them at all, gentlemen? No, sirs, it did not; for they was all murdered and scalped by Peechokee's people north of Nootka Sound, and their ship was burnt for the iron.'
'How did the Easter Islanders use you?' asked Stephen.
'Oh, pretty well, sir, on the whole; they are not an ill-natured crew, though much given to thieving: and I must admit they ate one another more than was quite right. I am not over-particular, but it makes you uneasy to be passed a man's hand. A slice of what might be anything, I don't say no, when sharp-set; but a hand fair turns your stomach. Howmsoever, we got along well enough. I spoke their language, after a fashion...'
'How did that come about?' asked Martin.
'Why, sir, it is like the language they speak in Otaheite and other islands, only not so genteel; like the Scotch.'
'You are familiar with the Polynesian, I collect?' asked Stephen.
'Anan, sir?'
'The South Sea language.'
'Bless you, sir, I have been in the Society Islands this many a time; and sailing on the fur-trade run so long, to north-west America, when we used to stretch across to the Sandwiches in the winter when trading was over, I grew quite used to their way of it too. Much the same in New Zealand.'
'Anyone can speak South Seas,' said Philips, the next patient on the starboard side. 'I can speak South Seas. So can Brenton and Scroby and Old Chucks - anyone that has been in a South Seas whaler.'
'And then I had a girl, and she helped me to a lot of their words. We lived in a house, built by the old uns a great while ago, and ruined, though our end was sound enough: it was a stone house shaped like a canoe, about a hundred foot long and twenty wide, with walls five foot thick.'
'On Norfolk Island me and my mates cut down a pine two hundred and ten foot high and thirty round,' said Philips.
Captain Aubrey, accompanied by Mr Smith the gunner and Mr Reade, reached the end of the next division, made up of the captains of gun-crews, quarter-gunners, and the armourer; and as he looked attentively at the bearded Nehemiah Slade, the captain of the gun called Sudden Death, the ship, impelled by a freakish double crest, gave a great lee-lurch. Although Jack had been at sea from his boyhood, even his childhood, he could still be caught off balance, and now, while the gunners were all heaved back to leeward against the hammock-netting, he plunged into Slade's bosom.
The general roar of honest mirth that followed this might account for the amusement in the next division, the fore-topmen, the youngest, brightest, most highly decorated members of the ship's company, who were led by Mr Oakes. Although he was a plain, thick-faced youth he was unusually popular; he was often drunk, always jolly, with a great flow of animal spirits; he never tyrannized nor did he report any sinner; and although he was no great seaman in the navigational or scientific way he would run up to the iron crosstrees with the best of them and there hang upside down.
'And then another wonderful thing about Easter Island,' said Owen, 'is what they call moles.'
'There is nothing wonderful about moles,' said Philips.
'Pipe off, Philips,' said Stephen. 'Go on, Owen.'
'Is what they call moles,' said Owen, rather more distinctly than before. 'And these here moles is platforms built on the slopes of hills, with the walls on the seaward side maybe three hundred foot long and thirty foot high, all made of squared stone sometimes six foot long. And on the platforms there are huge great images carved out of grey rock and brought there to be set up, images of coves as much as twenty-seven foot high and eight across the shoulders. Most of them were thrown down, but some of them were still standing, with great red round stone hats on the top of their heads: and these here hats, because I sat on one with my girl, one that had been thrown down, is four foot six across and four foot four high, measured with my thumb.'
With a certain sense of relief Jack came to the forecastle, where he was received by Mr Bulkeley the bosun and Mr Bentley the carpenter, in their good West-of-England broadcloth coats, grave men, but scarcely graver than the forecastle hands, prime middle-aged seamen who, having taken off their hats to the Captain, smoothed their hair over pates that were sometimes bald on top and whose waist-length pigtails were often eked out with tow. Behind these, in the days when the Surprise was in regular commission, there would have stood the ship's boys, under government of the master-at-arms; but a privateer had no room for boys, and their place, ludicrously enough, was now taken by two little girls of even less value in fighting the ship, Sarah and Emily Sweeting, Melanesians from the remote Sweeting's Island, the only survivors of a community wiped out by the smallpox brought by a South Seas whaler. They had been carried aboard by Dr Maturin, and the task of looking after them naturally fell to Jemmy Ducks, the ship's poulterer, who now whispered to them 'Toe the line, and make your bob.'
The little girls fixed their bare black toes exactly on a seam in the deck, plucked the sides of their white duck frocks and curtseyed.
'Sarah and Emily,' said the Captain, 'I hope I see you well?'
'Very well, sir, we thank you,' they replied, gazing anxiously into his face.
On to the galley, with its coppers shining like the sun, the cheerful cook and his sullen assistant Jack Nastyface, whose name, like Chips for the carpenter or Jemmy Ducks, went with the office. On to the lower deck, where the hammocks swung by night, but empty now, with a candle in each berth and a variety of ornaments and pictures laid out pretty on the seamen's chests; not a hint of dust, not even a gritting of fine sand underfoot, and the light sloping down through the gratings, such elegant shafts of parallel rays. Jack's heart lifted somewhat, and they came to the midshipmen's berth, cabins built up on either side and reaching as far aft as the gunroom, too small in the days when the frigate carried so many master's mates, midshipmen and youngsters, too big now that she had only Oakes and Reade, particularly as Martin, the surgeon's mate, and Adams, the Captain's clerk, lived and messed in the gunroom, where the purser's, master's and Marine officer's cabins all stood vacant.
