This day Stephen had three cases of sunstroke, and Jack, by way of prevention and diversion, had a sail lowered over the side - all the edges well clear of this shark-infested water - a truly shocking number of sharks - leaping in himself to encourage the crew, but finding, alas, precious little refreshment in the more than luke-warm tide.
Neither surgeon saw fit to join the splashing throng, and seeing that they were quite unwatched, Stephen undertook to guide Jacob up into the maintop, from which - the ship having swung with the current - they could see the galley with a telescope borrowed from the gunroom. It was not a very perilous ascent, but Daniel and three midshipmen, stark naked, ran up the side and into the rigging to give them not only advice but active, expert muscular heaves at moments of crisis.
From the top, Matunin sent them back to their water with many thanks and the assurance that they should be able to make their own way down with no more help than the force of gravity: and after breathing for a while he went on, ‘Amos, I believe you have never been up here before.’
‘Never,’ said Amos Jacob, ‘but I am very glad to be up here now - Lord, what an expanse: and Lord, how near the galley seems. She is in active motion. May I have the telescope? Oh God...’ he added in a tone of utter disgust. ‘But I had foreseen it.’
He passed the telescope. The breeze had filled the galley’s sails, and the corsairs were throwing many of their manacled rowers overboard.
They watched in a wholly disgusted silence: and then Stephen leant over and called, ‘Captain Aubrey, the galley has the wind. She is sailing towards the island we can see from up here.’
For the cloud had become island, a conical island hollowed out on the near, the eastern side.
Jack was with them in a moment, dripping wet. ‘I have heard of their doing that, to save food and water,’ he said. And after a silence, ‘I do not know that island. But then we are right off any known tract of the sea.’
‘I believe I have seen it on an old Catalan map in Barcelona,’ said Stephen. ‘And as I recall its name is Cranc, a crab.’
‘The breeze is joining us,’ said Jack, and he gave orders for all hands to come aboard: within minutes the frigate was alive again, her sails full, her bow-wave mounting. And well before the hellish sun dipped down at last, they were in with the Island Crab. There was not a hand aboard who had not seen one of the rowers - slave or unransomable captive - thrown screaming into the sea, the bloody sea, and there was not one who did not hate and loathe those that did it.
The island was presumably of volcanic origin, an eruptive peak that had then blown out its east side, leaving a shallow lagoon with a high wall broken only by a narrow channel through which the sea flowed in and out. From the tops they could see the galley moored under the rock wall near the entrance, close to a battered mole and some derelict buildings. She was entirely sheltered from anything but mortars: and the frigate possessed no mortars; nor could she enter such shallow water to use her guns.
The gentle topgallant breeze carried her round the island, surveying and sounding as she went, clean round with only a single tack: deep water, no apparent reefs, almost no vegetation on the land, no sign, no sign at all of water: nor, to Stephen’s astonishment, of sea-birds. On the west side, under quite steep cliffs, there was a little grey-green strand.
Jack had himself rowed to it, with Stephen: and as they walked on what sand there was, Jack observed that this was high tide; that the surf must be very severe indeed on this side, after a strong westerly blow; and that he hoped Stephen had found some interesting creatures in that cave.
‘I found something more interesting still,’ said Stephen. ‘A total absence of life. Well into June and not a nestling petrel even. No birds, no bird-lice, no feather mites. And I tell you what it is, brother: there is an uneasy smell in that rock, those fissures - pray thrust your nose into this one. I am no chemist, God forbid, but I very much suspect the presence of a poisonous emanation. That would account for the near-absence of vegetation, even in June.’ He mused, and while he was musing Daniel came and said to Jack, ‘Sir, we have a hand in the boat, McLeod, who was in Centaur in the year four: he says the position here is very like what it was when Captain Hood took the Diamond Rock. He was a Saint Kilda cragsman in his youth, and he helped to get the guns up the cliff.’
‘It had not struck me,’ said Jack, ‘but the situation is indeed very like. Yet could he really carry a line up that cliff? McLeod,’ he called, and the tall, middle-aged seaman, a recent draught from Erebus in Gibraltar, came up, awkward and embarrassed. ‘Do you think you could take a line up that cliff? Right up that cliff?’
‘I think so, sir,’ said McLeod in his halting English, ‘with a little well-tempered hand-pick, and a stout peg with a block to send me up another twenty-five fathom. This is no so steep as Diamond Rock, but it is softer, and may be false at top.’
‘Should you like to try? If ever it grows too false you may come down with no shame - it is only an attempt, a trial.’
‘We hauled up twenty-four pounders,’ said McLeod,
