'Amen,' said the others.
Far over, in the ill-defined region between sea and sky, there was an iridiscent patch, roughly oval, of the size that an outstretched hand might cover; and its colours, sometimes faint, sometimes surprisingly vivid, shifted right through the spectrum.
'A wind-gall to windward means rain, as you know very well,' said Jack. 'But a wind-gall to leeward means very dirty weather indeed. So Joe, you had better make another cast: let us eat while we can.'
The other sea-creatures were of the same opinion. The launch was now in the middle of the northward- flowing Peruvian current and for some reason the animalculae that lived there had begun one of those immense increases in population that can colour the whole sea red or make it as turbid as pea-soup. The anchovies, blind with greed, devoured huge quantities; medium-sized fishes and squids ate the anchovies with reckless abandon, scarcely aware that they themselves were being preyed upon by fishes much larger than themselves, the bonitoes and their kind, by sea-lions, by great flights of pelicans, boobies, cormorants, gulls and a singularly beautiful tern, while agile penguins raced along just beneath the surface.
The launch's crew spent most of the forenoon making all fast, sending up preventer stays and shrouds and preparing what number one canvas they possessed. A little before dinner-time, when a tall white rock, a sea-lions' island much haunted by birds, the sea-mark for Callao Head, showed plain on the starboard bow, nicking the horizon ten miles away, with the remote almost cloud-like snow-topped Andes far beyond, the wind began blowing out of a clear high pale-blue sky. It could be seen coming, a dun-coloured haze from the east, right off shore; it did not come with any sudden violence, but it increased steadily to a shrieking blast that flattened the sea, bringing with it great quantities of very fine sand and dust that gritted between their teeth and blurred their sight.
In the interval between the first pleasant hum in the rigging that woke the launch to life and the scream that overcame everything but a shout they came abreast of the tall white rock, Jack at the tiller, all hands leaning far out to windward to balance the boat and the launch tearing through the water at a pace somewhere between nightmare and ecstasy. As they passed under the lee of the island they heard the sea-lions barking and young Ben laughed aloud. 'You would laugh the other side of your face, young fellow, if you could feel how this God-damned tiller works with the strain,' said Jack to himself, and he noticed that Plaice was looking very grave indeed. Joe Plaice, he reflected, must be close on sixty: much battered in the wars.
And now at last the wind was working up an ugly sea: the waves had no great fetch and they were short and steep, growing rapidly steeper, with their crests streaming off before them. As soon as the boat was past the rock it was clear that she could not go on under this press of sail. The seamen looked aft: Jack nodded. No word passed but all moving together they carried out the perilous manoeuvre of wearing, carrying the launch back into the lee, there close-reefing the main and foresail, sending up a storm fore-staysail and creeping out to sea again.
For the rest of daylight - and brilliant daylight it was, with never a cloud to be seen - this answered well enough and they supped by watches on biscuit and oatmeal beaten up with sugar and water: grog, of course, served out by Captain Aubrey. There was even enough of a pause for Killick to dress Jack's eye and to tell him he would certainly lose it if he did not put back to the barky, where it could be kept dry.
'Nonsense,' said Jack. 'It is much better. I can see perfectly well: it is only the bright light I cannot stand.'
'Then at least let me cut a patch out of the flap of your hat, sir, so you can wear the two together, like Lord Nelson, tied over your head with a scarf, if it blows.'
It blew. The patch was barely on before the making of it would have been impossible: the voice of the wind in the rigging rose half an octave in half an hour and the boat was flung about with shocking violence. Most of that night they were obliged to lie to under a storm trysail and a scrap of the jib - a night of brilliant moon, beaming over a sea white from horizon to horizon.
Tomorrow it must blow out, they said; but it did not. The days followed one another and the nights, everything on the point of carrying away, a perpetual series of crises; sometimes they advanced until they were in sight of the island guarding Callao and the cliffs: sometimes they were beaten back; and presently, though this was approaching the austral midsummer, the wind, blowing off the high Cordillera, grew perishing cold to those who were always dripping wet. Wet, and now hungry. The unhappy Ben contrived not only to scrape his shins to the bone but also to lose their precious keg of oatmeal overboard; and on Thursday their rations were cut by half.
When Jack announced this in a shout as they huddled together in the starboard cuddy he added the ritual 'Two upon four of us Thank God there are no more of us,' and he was pleased to see an answering smile upon those worn, cruelly tired faces.
But there was no smile on Sunday, when at dawn they heard the sea-lions quite close at hand and realized that they had been driven back for the seventh time by a wind that was stronger still and even growing, a wind that must have blown the Franklin and her prize far, far into the western ocean.
Chapter Eight
Long practice and a certain natural ability enabled Stephen Maturin to compose a semi-official report of some length in his head and to encode a condensed version from memory, leaving no potentially dangerous papers after the message itself had gone. This required an exceptional power of recollection, but he had an exceptional power of recollection and it had been trained from boyhood in rote-learning: he could repeat the entirety of the Aeneid, and he had the private code by heart - the code, that is to say, in which he and Sir Joseph Blaine, the head of naval intelligence, wrote to one another.
'God between us and evil, my dear Joseph,' he began, 'but I believe I can report an uncommonly promising beginning, an uncommonly promising situation, with things moving at an extraordinary, dreamlike speed. To begin with I was introduced to General Hurtado, a former Knight of Malta, who, though a soldier, is very much in favour of independence, partly because Charles IV was rude to his father but even more because both the present Viceroy and his predecessor seemed to him trifling ill-bred upstarts; this is not an unusual pattern in Spain and here the animosity is very much increased by the fact that in a letter the present Viceroy omitted the Excelenzia to which Hurtado is by courtesy entitled; yet what is more unexpected by far is that he is strongly opposed to slavery and that although he holds a command from which most officers have hitherto retired with enough wealth to ballast the ship that took them back to Spain, he is quite poor. As for his hatred of slavery, he shares it with several of my friends who were also Knights of Malta and I believe it comes from his time in the galleys of the Order: and as for the king's rudeness, it consisted of addressing the general's father as 'my relative' rather than 'my cousin', which was due to his rank, an offence never to be forgotten, since Hurtado is immeasurably proud.
'It was indeed the Knights of Malta who brought us cordially well acquainted, for although I had an excellent introduction from a political point of view, it was our many common friends in the Order that gave our meetings quite a different aspect -our common friends and our common attachment to the Sierra Leone scheme for settling liberated slaves, to which we are both subscribers.
