The Unknown Shore (12 page)

‘Mr Cozens and his joke,’ said the bystanders, with benign approval. ‘He loves his joke, ha, ha.’

‘But there is the whole upper deck and the galley between us and the midshipmen’s berth,’ said the surgeon.

‘Mr Cozens is wery fond of his joke, sir,’ they told him.

He shrugged his shoulders, and the morning’s consultation being done he walked away aft with Tobias, explaining the mild duplicity of John Duck.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Tobias, ‘I thought as much. But I do not understand you in the article of salt. I speak under correction, but I cannot conceive that the marine would perish from a grain of salt – from ten grains of salt – from a peck of salt.’

‘Can you not, Mr Barrow?’ said the surgeon, looking at him side-ways. ‘Can you not? Well, we have twenty minutes before we go into the sick-bay, so perhaps we may consider the physical nature
of salt, and the metaphysical nature of salt, in my cabin. I say its metaphysical nature, Mr Barrow.’

Tobias made no reply, but gazed earnestly into his chief’s face, and followed him along the quarter-deck, under the break of the poop, where stood the wheel with its two solemn quartermasters: one of these was Rose, and he winked secretly as Tobias passed, at the same time imitating the agony of one who has been bitten behind, by way of acknowledging Tobias’ attention to a wound that he had received at Madeira.

The surgeon’s cabin was against the bulkhead of the coach, on the starboard side; it was spacious, comfortable and particularly well lit. Waving Tobias to a seat, he said, ‘If I am never better lodged than this, I shall die content. Now salt, Mr Barrow, has physical properties, as we all know; and it may have metaphysical properties …’

Mr Eliot held that nothing cures like faith: he held this very strongly and he could bring many examples from his own experience and from books to confirm his doctrine. He divided diseases into three sorts: those which could be treated by the knife, and which belonged to the chirurgeon; those few which would yield to drugs, and which fell to the physicians (a pompous, fanciful set of men in general, Mr Barrow), and those, the most numerous class, which were to be healed by the imagination – which were to be attacked through the imagination of the patient himself. Among these he ranged melancholy, dyspepsia, seasickness (whatever you may say, Mr Barrow) and, extraordinarily enough, scurvy.

‘I have seen men within twelve hours of their death from scurvy who have been roused from their lethargy by the cry of a sail: that was in the year of Vigo, when we were cruising upon the Spaniards, much as we are doing now. I hope that this cruise may show you the same effect, from the same cause; for at Vigo, Mr Barrow, we took a million pieces of eight, which was pretty handsome, I believe. But that is nothing, they say, to the treasure that is waiting for us round the Horn – Chile, Peru and Panama …’ He lapsed into a reverie for some minutes, and at the same time glided a guinea from the back of his hand to his palm, and from his palm away into his sleeve – an habitual gesture with him, performed with wonderful ease and celerity.

Mr Eliot took a harmless delight in conjuring, and by a happy coincidence his pastime and his profession could be practised together, the one helping the other; hitherto he had been shy of opening himself up on this subject to Tobias, because the practice was not only far from orthodox but it also had a certain remote hint of – his mind would not, even silently, pronounce the word
quackery,
but that was the expression that an enemy might have used.

‘Let it be supposed, Mr Barrow,’ he said, ‘that Martha Smith comes to me, complaining of a headache, and I find that this headache is of the immaterial, or imaginary class. I can bleed her, of course, and cup her, and apply Spanish fly; but unless I can play upon her imagination (the soul of the trouble) her head will ache still. Do you follow me, Mr Barrow? Tobias Barrow, do you pursue my line of reasoning? Yes. Now it may very well be that this young lady supposes that an earwig has gained an entry to her brain, and is feasting upon it: a very usual idea, Mr Barrow. We may tell her that she is mistaken, that physically speaking she has no earwig and no headache at all; but will this make her feel any better? No, my dear sir, it will not. But if we syringe the young lady’s meatus auditorius (always use a warm lixivium, Mr Barrow), and if in the bowl we find a fine brisk earwig? Eh?’

Tobias began to understand the reason for the existence of an old, worn, partially bald, very familiar white mouse, and of a grass-snake, a small eel whose water was surreptitiously changed from time to time, and a toad, all of whom led a very private and secluded life in a recess of the surgeon’s cabin, together with the more legitimate leeches.

‘To revert now to your seaman and his salt, Mr Barrow: certainly he may eat as much salt as the next man, and so may his dysenterical friend, the marine. But the man must drink his rice-water, and he must not eat. We cannot see him dosed, nor can we ensure that he will starve: how then are we to impress the importance of our recommendation upon his mind? Why, by coupling it with a surprising, an astonishing prohibition that will impinge upon his leaden, clownish imagination. And the more extravagant the assertion, so long as it remains just within the bounds of credibility, the better; for man has a natural gust for marvels, and he loves to believe that his complaint is cousin to a marvel – a very rare complaint. What
do you say to that, Mr Barrow?’ he asked, with an affectation of indifference.

‘Sir,’ said Tobias, ‘I honour your penetration.’

‘You are an honest fellow,’ cried the surgeon, shaking him warmly by the hand; and as if to underline his words the number one quarter-deck gun went off with its usual unholy bang about six feet from their ears: it was followed by the other quarter-guns, and then, one after another, by the nine-pounders of the starboard broadside, so that in a moment the whole ship was vibrating and so filled with sound, from the high shriek of the recoiling carriages to the deep reverberation of the beams as they took the impact of the recoil, that it was quite impossible to elaborate the moral point at issue.

The bald mouse, a man-of-war’s mouse, born in a nest of oakum, moved as fast as its old limbs would carry it towards the surgeon’s spence, a triangular cupboard in which particular delicacies were kept, and whose door had been known to open of itself in time of gunfire.

Mr Eliot looked at his watch, went through the motions of saying ‘We must go along to the sick-bay,’ nodded with great meaning, and changed his wig for a nightcap. They walked into the sharp smell of powder, and descending the companion-way to the upper-deck they picked their way cautiously through the acrid smoke to the fore-hatch – cautiously, because the guns were firing independently, not in broadsides, and each gun, as it fired, sprang back; Mr Eliot had treated the results of carelessness, and he walked behind the guns with as much attention as if they had been so many ill-tempered mules.

It was a remarkable spectacle, this long deck swirling with smoke; the brilliant sun came in through the gratings and the gun-ports, and its beams, sharply defined in the smoke, were all shaped by the squares that let them in. The gunner hurried up and down the deck, from crew to crew; the powder-boys ran behind the guns, flitting in the gloom; there was water, wet sand and wet sawdust everywhere, and in barrels by the guns the slow match burnt portentously, with the particular crackle of saltpetre. Mr Eliot stopped by number seven: the captain of the gun had laid it and he was waiting for the roll of the ship to bring the sight up to the mark, a raft of barrels that had been thrown out for the
Wager
by the next in line ahead, the
Severn.
The ship rose on the swell, up and up; the layer glared along the barrel of his gun. With a grunt he clapped the linstock to the touchhole: there was the smallest conceivable pause, then the bellowing roar. The gun shot back under the arched body of the layer, whipped back past the crew kneeling on either side of it, until the breechings brought it up – ropes fastened to strong rings, that gave a great deep twang as they tightened. The square of the port was darkened with smoke and pieces of the wad; then the wind cleared it and they saw the ball hit the water near the mark and skip on with three gigantic bounds. Without more than a moment’s pause the swabber doused and cleaned the gun, they charged, loaded, wadded and rammed it, and ran it up to the sill of the port, primed and ready to fire again.

It was a beautiful sight, in its way; but Mr Eliot had seen it so many times in the last forty years, and Tobias was impervious to this kind of beauty; they walked on, thinking only of the number of casualties this gunnery practice would bring them.

Early in the voyage, when the new hands were quite green, every exercise with the great guns had brought crushed fingers and toes down to the cockpit. There had been a great many, for the commodore ordered practice on every possible occasion: any morning might show a superior Spanish force to the windward, and with his ships undermanned and overloaded (in spite of the two victuallers that accompanied them, the squadron had to carry so much that at this stage the two-deckers could scarcely open their lower gun-ports, and their decks were much encumbered by stores), he could only hope to equalise the contest by superiority in gun-fire. The Spaniards, of course, having ports on the other side of the ocean, were not obliged to carry the same overwhelming burden of provisions. To begin with there had been many casualties, but today no one was hurt except an enthusiastic boy – one Diego, who had stowed himself away under the
Wager’s
yawl when they were in Funchal, and whose natural curiosity had now induced him to put his face so near the mouth of a gun that his hair had been burnt off in patches and his wits sent all astray.

Yet if there were no casualties to fill the sick-bay there were nevertheless several regular inmates swinging there in their hammocks: they were very old men, worn out in the King’s service,
many of them with inveterate wounds, and the history of their coming aboard was discreditable to all who were concerned with it. The administration, unable or unwilling to put an adequate number of marines aboard the squadron, had seized the Chelsea pensioners (who were subject to military law) and had sent five hundred of them down to Portsmouth; half of them had deserted, but enough remained for twenty-seven to fall to the share of the
Wager.
This was typical of the difficulties that had beset Mr Anson from the beginning – the long-winded hesitations that had destroyed all hope of reaching the Horn by December and had probably done away with all secrecy, so that the Spaniards might be waiting, anywhere along the course fully prepared and heavily armed.

It was a depressing thought that the ship was to carry these poor old men away from their homes, south across the equator and both the tropics, through the great heat down to the southernmost extremity of the known world, round it and up into an almost unknown sea, there to fight for their lives – if indeed any of them survived so far. But on the other hand it must be admitted that on that particular day the invalids presented an excellent example in support of Mr Eliot’s theory on the power of imagination. The smell of powder had reached the sick-bay, and the roaring of the guns could not possibly be kept out of it: the old gentlemen were much enlivened by both; they piped away in their high old quavering voices about battles long ago, they prated about their knowledge, experience and wisdom, and wondered what would be for dinner with a vivacity that would have been remarkable in a pack of boys.

‘What will be for dinner? What indeed?’ said Mr Eliot, as they left the sick-bay. ‘Sea-pie, perhaps. That cook, old Maclean, is eighty-one, to my certain knowledge. Did you know that, Mr B? It is a comforting reflection, is it not? He makes an excellent sea-pie; an admirable sea-pie. There is no sea-pie like Maclean’s.’

B
LOOD, BLOOD
in the scuppers, blood tinging the sea, blood all over the deck, blood everywhere, blood under the tropical sun. Buckets of blood. There had been four buckets full, to be exact, carefully filled and set aside until the next should be brimming and ready to join them: Mr Eliot made it a fixed rule to bleed all the men in his charge the moment they passed beneath the tropic of Cancer, and the operation was now taking place on the foc’s’le. There had been the usual number of faintings, and a carpenter’s mate called Mitchel, perhaps the most savage and vicious man aboard, had chosen to pass away into, upon and among the buckets that Mr Eliot and Tobias had preserved, for philosophical purposes: this accounted for the shocking appearance of the deck and for the look of vexation upon the surgeons’ faces. Some of the
Wager’s
people positively liked being bled, because they felt better after it; some did not mind it; but some, though reasonably courageous, manly and resolute, turned greenish-yellow at the sight of the instruments, and, without being touched, collapsed like so many maidens. And there were some who were terrified by the whole proceeding: Moses Lewis, Nicholas Griselham and George Bateman were discovered trying to hide themselves in a perfectly inadequate triangle of space between the cutter and the booms. They belonged to Jack’s watch and division, and he was responsible for their appearance; he adjured them ‘to come out of there as quick as they liked, the swabs', and then, less ferociously, he assured them ‘that it was nothing at all – did not hurt in the least – all over in a moment'. And to encourage them still further, he said that he would go along with them, although the officers were pierced in decent privacy.

‘Come along,’ he said, ‘and we shall all be bled together. You will see, there is nothing in it.’

As it happened, Jack did not know what he was talking about;
although it was so common, he had never been bled and he had never seen the thing done. Now, standing there under the blazing sun and watching, he wondered how he had come to speak so lightly of it, and how people could say, with such indifference, ‘Was you let blood? – There is nothing like a little blood-letting, for the good of the system.’

Two stools were there, and the victims came in pairs, sometimes with unstudied calm, sometimes with ostentatious bravery, sometimes with reluctance bordering upon mutiny. Tobias took the larboard man, Mr Eliot the other; the patient sat and presented his arm, the surgeon turned a handkerchief tight about it, picked a vein and lanced it, while the loblolly-boy held a basin. Mr Eliot used a large horse-fleam, Tobias a thin lancet; but there was no difference in the grave, detached zeal of their approach. Jack wondered at it: there was something inhumanly authoritative about the way Tobias seized an arm, considered it and then with the utmost equanimity cut into the living flesh. Repulsively unfeeling, thought Jack, looking away. There was a great deal of joking between those who were standing about with their arms bent to close the vein and those who had not yet been done; Jack thought the laughter very much out of place.

He looked at other things, to divert his attention – the foresail hanging without enough air to round it, for the expected north-east trade wind failed them day after day. He looked at the glazed hat of the bo’sun, who, having quarrelled with the gunner and the carpenter, kept very much among the hands forward, trying to make himself popular; he was the only warrant-officer on the foc’s’le. Just beyond the bo’sun’s hat there was the sinister face of the man Sirett, who had escaped the gallows only by informing on his own brother – a face that was now turning horribly pale.

A reek of butchery rose upon the still, hot, damp air. Jack swallowed hard, gave Griselham, Lewis and Bateman a smile, a ghastly smile that was meant to keep their spirits up, and looked studiously away, far away, to the leeward.

There, wallowing along under the protection of the men-of-war, were the two victuallers, the
Anna
and the
Industry,
pinks that had been chartered to carry stores for the squadron as far as the tropic. They were merchantmen, of course, and by naval standards they
sailed along in a very haphazard sort of way, as if they had their hands in their pockets, shabby, with washing hanging out in incongruous places; but they were always there, and sometimes they were in their proper stations. Jack fixed the
Industry
with his eyes: if he did not concentrate, something dreadful would happen.

The
Industry
was a family concern, from the West Country, and the family was a whiggish, nonconformist, Hanoverian sort of a family: most of the crew were called George or William.

‘What do ‘ee make ‘un, George?’ asked the swabber of the first mate.

‘But thirty-nine, I doubt,’ said the first mate, lowering his quadrant.

‘You’m not holding of ‘un right,’ said the cook, coming out of the galley and wringing a piece of wet salt pork as he spoke.

‘Now then, our George,’ cried the mate, quite vexed, ‘if so be you mind your pot as good as I mind my latitude …’

The captain of the
Industry
came out of the round-house, where he had been figuring on his slate. ‘What do ‘ee make ‘un, William?’ asked the swabber.

‘What’s five nines?’ asked the captain.

Here followed a very long, slow and ill-formed family wrangle, at the end of which the
Industry
decided that she had probably reached 23° 27’ N., that she had fulfilled her agreement, and that she would signal the commodore to that effect.

A flag mounted uncertainly on the
Industry’s
signal halliard: when it was broken out it proved to be upside down, and it stated, with great emphasis, I AM TAKING GUN POWDER ABOARD
.

Jack saw this: he knew that the
Wager
should repeat the signal to the
Centurion,
and he knew that as soon as the look-out hailed the deck with the news of a signal flying, it would be his duty, as midshipman of the watch, to run aft and cope with the repetition. But the look-out was a morbid creature, fascinated by the scene below, and although he now and then looked at the
Centurion
(the only probable source of signals) and gazed around the horizon, he devoted most of his time to peering down through the rigging at the bloody deck.

‘Next,’ said Tobias, and to his horror Jack saw that there was nothing between himself and the stool, although indeed Nicholas
Griselham stood beside him. ‘Go on, Griselham,’ he said; ‘go in and win’ – smiling very hypocritically.

He glared up at the masthead, and there was the look-out leering down at him instead of minding his duty: Jack shook his fist at the fellow, but it was no good. Griselham’s faint gasping shriek reached his ears, and Jack closed his eyes: then suddenly everybody was roaring out ‘Mr Byron, Mr Byron', and his neighbours were nudging him and saying ‘Quarter-deck, sir. Mr Bean is passing the word for you.’

Passing the word was a faint expression for the lieutenant’s clamour: he had seen the signal and he now wanted to know where the midshipman was; and Jack, with a speed and a devotion to duty rarely paralleled, raced aft to satisfy the lieutenant’s curiosity.

‘You may not like phlebotomy,’ said Tobias, ‘but where would you be without it?’

‘Where indeed?’ said Jack, rather vaguely, for his attention was taken up by the curious yawing of the
Wager’s
barge. The squadron was lying-to, taking in stores from the
Industry,
and the boats were plying to and fro over the still face of the sea: it looked very much as though the barge and the
Gloucester’s
longboat were going to collide, but at the last moment they ran past one another with their oars shipped and rude words flying free – Cozens’ voice came very loud and plain over the water, followed by a bellow of laughter from the barge.

‘When I went aboard the
Centurion,’
continued Tobias, ‘their sick-bay was so full that the men’s hammocks were touching, and the other surgeons made the same report – fevers, calentures and agues, and scurvy, in every ship but the
Wager.
And we are the only ship to use phlebotomy. I really must insist upon opening your vein this afternoon: come, Jack, it is a very mere trifle.’

‘It is not your infernal splashing about in blood that makes the difference,’ said Jack, ‘it is that they cannot open their lower ports, and we can, being higher in the water. Did you not notice the vile rank smell as soon as you went below? Keppel says that there is some very extraordinary scheme afoot – some idea of making the men wash, every day. It will never do, however.’

‘I did notice the smell,’ admitted Tobias. He could scarcely have
missed it: the
Centurion
had more than five hundred men aboard and most of them were crammed into the gun-deck, which (she being a two-decker) also had to find room for two dozen huge twenty-four pounders; she was so deeply laden, being victualled for a voyage no less than the circumnavigation of the whole world itself, that the sills of her lower gun-ports were nearly awash, and the gun-deck was therefore quite unventilated, although the heat down there was enough to make a man choke, whether he was used to the tropics or not. The heat also enabled vermin to breed very fast, and the
Centurion
was much infested; but she was not unique in that, by any means – every ship in the squadron had her cargo of parasites, and the
Wager
was amply supplied with fleas, bugs and lice.

‘But,’ continued Tobias, ‘they are to cut holes in the deck, to let in sweet air.’

‘Scuttles, Toby; surely it was scuttles? They could not have said holes.’

‘I had understood them to be holes, indeed: large square gaps, with canvas funnels leading down.’

‘Yes. Scuttles. I thought so.’

‘Are they not holes, then?’

‘Oh yes, they are holes, in their way. But we call them scuttles. Not holes.’

‘Very good. We are to have them too, and Mr Eliot is talking about the one for the sick-bay with the carpenter at this moment.’

‘The hands will not like it,’ said Jack. ‘Any change makes them uneasy. I tell you what, Toby,’ he added, moving along the rail to the shadow of the maintop. ‘I wish it would snow. Or blow. I do not give a rap for foul weather, so long as we are not on a lee-shore, but this sticky heat undoes me. I do not know how you can bear a coat – to say nothing of that vile hat,’ he said, looking with distaste at the yellowish-white woollen nightcap of Portuguese origin which Tobias had worn, upon philosophical principles, since latitude 25°N.

‘Was you to be blooded,’ said Tobias, fingering a small lancet in his pocket, ‘you would feel cooler directly.’

‘How you do go on,’ cried Jack, moving a little farther off. ‘You are exactly like a flaming horse-leech. Now there’s a fellow that needs your attention. Look at him. He’ll have the boat over if he carries on like that.’ Cozens was weaving the barge about in a very
extraordinary manner: the
Wager’s
cutter was alongside unloading at that moment, and Cozens was profiting by the interval to hinder the progress of the other boats, in a most jovial and hilarious way.

The cutter, with Campbell in charge, lay hooked on at the mainchains, with a pyramid of barrels carefully arranged in it, and from the yard-arm swung a tackle. With mechanical regularity the tackle descended, raised a barrel, swung it inboard, lowered it into the main-hatch and reappeared empty; everyone who was not on duty watched this with close attention; all the heads followed the descending tackle down into the cutter, saw the two loops put about the barrel, heard the cry, saw the barrel rise vertically, rotating slowly, until the inhaul party drew it over the hatchway, and vanish to more cries of ‘Easy – handsomely now.’ The movements were all the same; the shouts never varied; the hot, still air was heavy with the smell of rum. It was rum and little else that they were taking out of the
Industry
– the remaining stores were to stay aboard the
Anna
pink, and she to keep in company while the
Industry
went off on her own occasions. No ship in the squadron could find space for any more flour, biscuit or beef, but they could all make just enough room for their full share of rum, although it meant great discomfort in the crowded ‘tween-decks; they would make sure of the rum, at any event.

Now the cutter had discharged its load and was pulling away for the pink again, and the barge took the cutter’s place. Cozens’ big red face was turned up to them as he sprawled in the stern-sheets; as a general rule it was not a very attractive face, being exceedingly coarse and somewhat hairy, and now its charm was further diminished by crimson blotches and a staring, almost lunatic expression. The redness was shared by the barge’s crew, and it was perfectly evident that they had all been getting at the rum. The steadier men in the barge were trying to cover up the midshipman’s state, but their efforts were spoilt by his activity: he would keep trying to fasten the tackle, and he would not be quiet – had not sense enough left to be quiet. Jack looked anxiously over his shoulder, but the officer of the watch, Mr Clerk, was at the fife-rail of the mainmast, shouting through the hatch to the deck below. Mr Bean was in his cabin, writing letters that the
Industry
was to carry over to the West Indies, and although Mr Hamilton, the senior marine lieutenant, was
watching from the poop, he was a redcoat, and did not count. And the captain was aboard the commodore, so perhaps it would pass off well enough.

But Cozens had not had time to cut one more elephantine caper before the voice of the look-out floated down, quite conversational in the calm, ‘Deck oh! The yawl is pulling away.’ Captain Murray had left the
Centurion,
and in a few minutes he would be received aboard his own ship with the proper ceremony, the shrilling of bo’suns’ calls and the dutiful attendance of the officers: captains come up the starboard side, and it was on the starboard side that the barge was unloading. There was no possibility that Cozens’ state would remain unnoticed.