which it does quite often.'
'Pray pass the rosin,' said Jack; and before dashing away into the allegro vivace of their Boccherini he added, 'I may see little of you in the morning: we shall spend much of our time exercising the great guns. But you will never forget that I am to be your guest for dinner in the gunroom, I am sure.' Nothing could have been less certain. Dr Maturin had been so engrossed in the preliminary unpacking, sorting, registering, cleaning and roughly preserving the collections that had come aboard from the balsa that he was perfectly capable of forgetting all ordinary duties other than those of the sick-berth, and all social decencies. 'He is also capable of supposing that the ship's company is still much as he left it,' reflected Jack, and at the end of the movement he said, 'I believe you have not dined in the gunroom yet?'
'I have not,' said Stephen. 'With the sick-berth and my collections to sort, I have scarcely been on deck, either, or asked half my shipmates how they do. You cannot readily conceive the fragility of an undressed bird's skin, my dear.'
'Then perhaps I should tell you of some changes you will see. Vidal has left the ship with two of his Knipperdolling cousins, and he has been replaced in the gunroom by William Sadler, a thorough-going seaman. And then before the mast, there was poor John Proby, who lost the number of his mess two days out of Callao.'
'That I knew. He was in a sad decline, in spite of what little we could do for him in the way of bark and steel and linctus. But Fabien very kindly kept me one of his hands, recollecting my interest in the singular calcification of its sinews. Fabien is a most valuable assistant.'
Jack could still be made uneasy by remarks of this kind, and it was a little while before he went on, 'And you will not see Bulkeley any more, either.'
'The facetious bosun?'
'Just so. He had also been a bosun in the Navy, you know; and with the Surprise being run man-of-war fashion he slipped back more and more into his old service ways. You know the expression capabarre, I dare say?'
'Certainly. I am no new-fledged canvas-climber, I believe. It is the topmost summit, the ultimate pinnacle of some towering mast.'
'No doubt. But we commonly use it for that tendency in the bosuns of King's ships to steal all marine stores not immovably screwed down. I checked him once for a missing kedge in Annamooka and again for a coil of three-inch manilla at Moahu, with God knows how many things in between; and he promised to reform. But in Callao he made off with several lengths of chain, a can-hook, and our lightning-conductor, our best Snow Harris lightning- conductor; and when I told him of it he had the provoking effrontery to defend his action on the grounds that everyone knew that metal attracts the flesh and that a glass ball at the masthead was the only true safeguard. And as for the other things, they were quite worn out.'
Discussing the perils of the sea in general and of lightning in particular came very near to talking shop, an act less criminal than sodomy (which carried the death sentence) but not very much so, and the gunroom cast some nervous looks at their guest the Captain, a stickler for naval etiquette; but since it was clear both from his thoroughly amiable expression and his own anecdotes that lightning was this side of the barrier between right and wrong, the subject occupied the company for the not inconsiderable time they took to eat a noble turtle and empty the dish.
The gunroom was less crowded, now that the merchants and ransomers had left, and it was more nearly naval: Jack, Stephen and Tom Pullings were in fact serving officers; Adams had walked the quarterdeck for most of his active life; Wilkins had served in half a dozen King's ships as midshipman or master's mate; and Grainger, together with his brother-in-law Sadler, had taken on the local colour in the most natural way. The conversation therefore had a greater freedom, all the more so since the frigate was homeward bound.
'This very ship was struck by a levin-flash off Penedo in the Brazils,' observed Stephen, 'and she lost the mast, the spar, the thing in front - the bowsprout. I was asleep at the time, and for a moment I thought we were in the midst of a fleet action, the noise was so great.'
'Was there anyone killed, Doctor?' asked Grainger.
'There was not.'
'Ah,' said William Sadler, 'my cousin Jackson was carpenter's crew in the Diligent when she was struck by forked lightning near the Island of a Thursday. Which three hands were killed in the maintop; and he said their bodies stayed warm till Sunday after church, when they were obliged to be put over the side.'
'The Repulse was laying off Spain in the year ten,' said Pullings. 'It was a Thursday too, and all hands had washed clothes. Towards evening clouds began to gather thick, and the watch below, afraid their laundry would be rained upon when the things were nearly dry, jumped aloft to take it in. There was a single flash, and seven dropped down dead on deck, while thirteen more were horribly burnt.'
'When Prince William had the Pegasus,' said Jack, 'a single stroke utterly destroyed her mainmast.'
General considerations on lightning followed this - most frequent between the tropics - certain trees more liable to be struck than others: willows, ash, solitary oaks to be avoided -sultry, oppressive weather favourable - tolerably common in the temperate zone - unknown in Finland, Iceland and Hudson's Bay - presumably even more unknown nearer to either pole, probably because of the northern lights. But these remarks together with speculation on the nature of the electric fluid were interrupted by the appearance of a roast sucking-pig, borne in on a splendid Peruvian silver dish, the rescued merchants' present to the Surprise, and set down according to custom before Dr Maturin, whose skill as a carver was intimately known to many of those present. The talk grew more cheerful: pigs at home, how best dressed - pigs, wild, on a remote island in the South China Sea, that had nourished Captain Aubrey and his people for a great while - a little tame black sow at Pullings' father's farm on the edge of the New Forest that would find you a basket of trubs, or truffles as some called them, in a morning, winking and grinning at you with each trub, never eating a single one herself.
By the time they reached the port the conversation was more cheerful still, the words 'homeward bound' recurring very often, with conjectures about the delightful changes to be seen in children, gardens, shrubberies and the like.
'My grandfather,' said Grainger, 'was sailmaker's mate in the Centurion when Commodore Anson took the Acapulco galleon in forty-three: he had his share of the one million, three hundred and thirteen thousand, eight hundred and forty-two pieces of eight they found in her - a figure I always remember -and that made him right glad, as you may well suppose; but when he learnt that now they were to steer for home he used to say it made him happier still.'
'Ha, ha,' cried Wilkins, somewhat flushed with his wine, 'homeward bound is very well, but homeward bound
