Desolation Island (38 page)

'I might say something about pearls before swine - the pearls being these priceless eggs, if you follow me - were I to attempt a repartee in the same order of magnitude.'

'I did not fag all the way up here to be insulted about my wit, which, I may tell you, is more generally appreciated in the service than you may suppose,' said Jack, 'but to bemoan my lot; to sit upon the ground and bemoan my lot.'

Stephen looked at him sharply: in themselves the words were cheerful, facetious, jocose, and they matched the apparent well-being of Jack's face; but there was something very slightly false about the note or time or emphasis. Throughout his service in the Navy, Stephen had observed the steady, almost mechanical, and as it were obligatory facetiousness that pervaded the various gun-rooms and wardrooms he had known; the stream of small merriment, long-established jokes, proverbial sayings and more or less droll allusions that made up so large a part of his shipmates' daily intercourse. It seemed to him a particularly English characteristic and he often found it wearisome; on the other hand he admitted that it had a value as a protection against morosity and that it encouraged fortitude. It also protected those who had to live together from those more adult forms of discussion in which men could commit themselves entirely, confronting one another in strong disagreement: whether that was its underlying purpose or whether it was no more than a manifestation of national levity and disinclination for intellectual pursuits he could not determine; but he did know that Jack Aubrey was so much in tune with this tradition, that he so entirely shared the notion of there being something indecent in solemnity, that he could only with real difficulty bring himself to speak of matters outside the running of the ship without a smile - he would go to his death with a pun half-formed, if he could think of nothing better.

But when this facetiousness rang false, it rang very false indeed. It reminded Stephen of a 'cello suite that he had often tried to play, with small success; one in which, through very slight successive changes a simple, artless air in the adagio took on a nightmare quality. He recognized something of this nature now, and his sharp look detected an extreme weariness behind Jack's smiling eye, as though he were not far from despair. Why he not seen this before? The fantastic wealth of Desolation must have absorbed him very deeply: indeed, it had - birds as he had always dreamed of seeing them, birds that he could touch; a whole flora and fauna almost unknown, and time for once to study them. He said, 'Why, brother, what's amiss? Is the leak broke out again?'

'No, no, the leak will do very well - better than new. No: it is the rudder.'

During this long period of clearing the hold and repairing the leak Stephen had been satisfied with a vague general view of the progress: few of those concerned had troubled him with technical details and in any case he was usually too wet, cold, tired, by the end of the day, too filled with his own fascinating discoveries to attend closely to those few descriptions he heard as he sat blinking and gaping by the seal-oil fire. He had been content to let experts carry on with their own tasks, while he carried on with his. He had seen the bright new planks entirely covering the leak inside and out; he had seen the fine new rudder, carefully sawn from spare topmasts and to his eye indistinguishable from the old; and his only fear was that the Leopard, dry, well-found and weatherly, should sail long before his collections were more than a skimming of the surface.

Now he heard a technical description indeed, and he learnt that the experts' darkest foreboding had been realized. The essential connection of the rudder to the hull could not be accomplished, or at any rate had not been accomplished; and Jack could not tell how to bring it about. The sternpost, constructed on new principles and a sad gimcrack affair that Jack had disliked from the beginning, had proved horribly defective, so damaged by the ice and so deeply rotten behind its sheathing that 'poor old Gray absolutely shed tears when we cut into it'. The only way of attaching the rudder was to forge new gudgeons,

the massive iron braces with eyes that received the rudder's pintles, and to forge them with much longer arms so that they should reach the body of the ship, where there were solid timbers to hold them. But although the Leopard could be made to provide enough iron, she had no forge. It had gone overboard, together with the anvil, the sledgehammers and all the armourer's other tools, when the guns and anchors and so many other heavy objects were sacrificed to keep the ship afloat. Almost all the coal had either been whipped up in sacks or, washing about in fragments down below, had been pumped over the side; and although seal-oil kept the huts and the 'tween-decks warm, it could not bring iron to the welding point. Even if it could, the iron could scarcely be worked without heavy hammers and an anvil.

'But what a crow I am, for God's sake,' said Jack. 'I talk as though this were the end of the world, which it ain't. I have some notion of an improved blast, blowing on bones soaked in oil, and of weighing one of the carronades and fashioning an anvil and a couple of sledges out of it - cold chisels and files can do wonders, with patience. And even if in the end it proves impossible to ship the rudder, we can build a boat, a half-decked cutter, say, and send Babbington off for help with a dozen of our best hands.'

'Could a boat ever live in these seas?'

'With a fair amount of luck, it could. Grant certainly thought he had a reasonable chance. Though to be sure, he had not much above a thousand miles to go, and we have as much again. But a boat can't be built quick, and with the ice moving north as the nights grow longer, I dare say we shall have to winter here. You may like that, Stephen, although it means knocking a good many more of your seals on the head; but nobody else will, with the rum almost gone and the tobacco running out.' He shied as an albatross passed within inches of his head, stood up, and said, 'We are not come to that yet, however: I have some other shots in my locker - a better sort of bellows, for example, and a new kind of hearth. Still, I must make preparations, and unless there is some progress before the end of the week, I shall set about drawing up plans for the boat.' Seeing Stephen's grave, concerned expression he said, 'It is a great relief to whine a little, rather than play the perpetual encouraging know-all, so I lay it on a trifle thick: don't take me too seriously, Stephen.'

The week passed, and another: all over Stephen's Paradise the albatrosses hatched, and the cabbages came into flower. But on shore parties still battered iron amidst shattered heaps of stone, with no real success; and the general plan for next year's boat began to take shape.

With the shorter days the weather had turned fine, perhaps ominously fine; on shore the killing increased, and the cooper packed cask after cask of meat and bird-flesh, cooked in seal-oil, for they had little salt, and that was needed for the barrelled cabbages. It would not be pleasant eating but it would keep them alive, they thought, over the antarctic winter, when all the seals and birds were gone. By now the rum was down to one tot to each mess of eight men, the tobacco to half an ounce a week a head. As a physician, Stephen could not but applaud this weaning from noxious substances: as a member of the ship's company, he felt the gloom that weighed upon those to whom drink and tobacco were among the few positive pleasures in life, and he spent even more of his time upon the island; the hepaticas and lycopods were coming into their own, and he was deep in the various lichens.

After a long evening among them he returned to the shelter, where Herapath had passed the day, sometimes fishing, sometimes gazing at his love upon the shore through a small telescope bought from Byron for three ounces of tobacco - money had long since ceased to have any value among them.

'I have caught five small fishes,' he said in rather a loud voice - the crab-seals had begun their evening chorus, WOW, WOW, WOW.

'A capital omen,' said Stephen. 'More would have been superfluous. But what have you done with the boat, at all?'

'The boat?' said Herapath, smiling. 'Good God, the boat!' he cried, with a horrified look on his face. 'It is gone!'

'Perhaps we did not attend to the painter with sufficient care. It is not gone very far, however: see, it lies between the islands at the entrance of the bay.'

'Shall I swim for it?'

'Could you indeed swim so far? I could not. And even if I could, I doubt I should adventure upon it. No, Mr Herapath, put on your coat. We are very short-handed, and Captain Aubrey would never forgive me if a froward killer-whale, or a sea-leopard, or dampness next the skin were to deprive him of a man. No, let us rather hail the shore. They will launch the jolly-boat, take up the skiff, and rescue us.'

'To be sure,' said Herapath, doing up his buttons, 'I am under great obligations to the Captain: he saved my life, as you recall.'

'Sure, you have often mentioned it. Now both together: Hola, the shore.'

Hola the shore, they cried; and the crab-seals barked louder still. Presently they were joined by the sea-elephants, and the little shrill-voiced otaries. Once they thought they saw a remote figure give an answering wave in the deepening twilight; but this proved an illusion.

'They will never send,' said Herapath. 'Those on shore will suppose we are in the ship; those in the ship, on shore.'

'How well you put the case,' said Stephen. 'And now the mortal rain has begun again. Presently it will freeze, and we will think of the warm clothes, the impermeable sealskin cloaks lying in our cabins with an even greater longing.'

They sat in the mouth of the shelter, looking through the drizzle at the distant lights; and after a while Stephen said, 'How active the smaller petrels grow, at this time of the day. But come, here is a boat that will deliver us. To the right of the rock with a shag upon it. Just entering the bay.'

'It is not the jolly-boat! It is far larger than the jolly-boat!'

'What of that? Unless rowed by bears or Huns, it will deliver us. Hola the boat!'

'Ahoy!' answered the boat, resting on its oars.

'Pray be so good as to tow the little canvas skiff on your left towards us. It is out of our reach, and we are, as it were, marooned.'

Mutterings in the boat. A churning of oars, the little craft secured, the whale-boat pulling in. 'You say you're marooned?' asked a tall figure, leaping over the bows as they grounded.

'Figuratively marooned,' said Stephen. 'The rope holding our boat became untied, and we are cut off from our friends. I am very much obliged to you, sir. Have I the pleasure of addressing Mr Reuben?'

'That's him,' said the man on shore, pointing back into the whale-boat.

Mr Reuben scrambled through the rowers, sprang to the land, and lowered his face to the level of Stephen's with a look of extreme amazement. 'I reckon you are off of an English ship,' he said at last. His breath was extraordinarily offensive, his face puffy; it was clear to Stephen that he was suffering from scurvy, moderately advanced.

'Just so,' said Stephen.

'Well,' said someone in the boat, 'this beats the band.'

'For the land's sake,' said another.

'Are we at war with England yet?' asked Reuben.

'No,' said Herapath. 'Not when we quitted Portsmouth. You hail from the States, I guess?'

'Now, if you will excuse me, gentlemen,' said Stephen, bowing under a fresh sweep of rain as he stepped carefully into his fragile skiff, 'we must reassure our friends. Many thanks again, and I trust you will honour us with a visit. Come, Mr Herapath.'

'You ain't touched none of our cabbages?' called a voice after them.

'Cabbages?' said Stephen. 'Cabbages, forsooth.'

The rising sun, clear once again, swept away the darkness that hung over this encounter. It showed two vessels in the bay, the Leopard of course, and the brig La Fayette of Nantucket, Winthrop Putnam, master. The brig came right into the bay on the early tide and a little later her master, with his first mate Reuben Hyde, pulled ashore and walked up to the flagstaff. Here they met Captain Aubrey, who, although the La Fayette had not saluted the Leopard, wished them a good morning, produced a bottle, held out his hand and invited them to breakfast.

'Well, sir,' said Captain Putnam, taking the hand with no great eagerness, 'I am obliged to you, but - 'he caught the whiff of fresh-brewed coffee, coming from Jack's booth, coughed, and went on, 'You mean here on shore, I guess? Why, then, I don't mind if I do.'

He was a tall, spare, able-looking man with a blue nose and a blue, piercing eye: one side of his face much swollen. Taciturn and reserved, if not wary: from time to time he put his hand to his cheek, and his lips clamped tight with pain.

He was two and a half years out of Nantucket, had done tolerably well in whale-oil and spermaceti and sealskins, and was going home as soon as he had picked up a load of cabbages for the run: he had a good deal of scurvy aboard, he said; scurvy and a good deal of other sickness.

'You must let my surgeon look at your invalids,' said Jack.

'You have a surgeon aboard, have you?' cried Captain Putnam. 'We lost ours off South Georgia, with the griping of the guts.'

'Yes, and a rare hand he is with scurvy; while as for sawing off a leg, he can beat any surgeon in the fleet.'

Putnam made no reply for some time. 'Well, to tell you the truth, sir,' he said, with another twitch of pain, 'I do not care to ask a favour of King George's navy.'

'Ah?' said Jack.

'And I will tell you this, sir, that I should not care to set foot aboard the Leopard neither. We recognized her the moment we came in. I do not say this for you, sir, because she had another captain in the year seven, when she killed my cousin in the Chesapeake, pressing men out of her, but I had rather see the Leopard at the bottom of the ocean, than sailing on its surface. I reckon that is the view of most Americans.'

'Well, Captain,' said Jack, 'I am heartily sorry for it.' He was too: most heartily sorry. He was well aware of the incident that rankled in the skipper's mind: in 1807 the Leopard, then commanded by Buck Humphreys, had fired three broadsides into an unprepared American man-of-war, the Chesapeake, killing or wounding a score of her men and forcing her to strike: had he been an American he would never have forgiven or forgotten such an insult. He too would have wished the Leopard at the bottom of the sea. For his own part he utterly condemned the whole business: he would never have gone to such lengths to take a few deserters nor even a hundred of them. But he could not say this to a foreigner, a pretty inimical foreigner at that. Instead he proposed another cup of coffee - the La Fayette had drunk the last of hers south of the Horn - and said something more in praise of Dr Maturin. 'He also has an American assistant,' he added. 'They are the gentlemen your boat rescued last night.'