CHAPTER FIVE

'Amen,' said Captain Aubrey in a strong voice, echoed by two hundred and nine other voices, equally strong. He rose from the elbow-chair draped with a union flag, laid his prayer-book on the small arms-chest - decently covered with bunting like the carronades on either side - and stood for a moment with his head bowed, swaying automatically to the enormous roll.

On his right hand stood the envoy and his secretary: beyond them the forty-odd Royal Marines, exactly-lined rows of scarlet coats, white trousers and white cross-belts. On his left the sea-officers, blue and gold in their full-dress uniforms, then the white-patched midshipmen, six of them, four quite tall; and beyond, right along the quarter-deck and the gangways, the foremast hands, all shaved, in clean shirts, their best bright-blue brass-buttoned jackets or white frocks, the seams often adorned with ribbon. The Marines had been sitting on benches, the officers on chairs brought from the gunroom or on the carronade slides, the seamen on stools, mess-kids or upturned buckets. Now they stood in silence, and there was silence all around them. No sound came from the sky, none from the great western swell; only the flap of the sails as they sagged on the roll, the straining creak and groan of shrouds and dead-eyes and the double breeching of the guns, the working of the ship, the strangely' deep and solemn call of penguins, and the voices, far forward, of the pagans, Mahometans, Jews and Catholics who had not attended the Anglican service.

Jack looked up, returning from whatever ill-defined region of piety he had inhabited to the anxiety that had been with him since he first saw Inaccessible Island that morning, far nearer than it should have been, in the wrong place, and directly to leeward. Three days and nights of heavy weather with low driving cloud had deprived them of exact observation; both he and the master were out in their reckoning, and this comparatively fine Sunday found them twenty-five miles south-east of Tristan da Cunha, which Jack had intended to approach from the north, touching for fresh provisions, perhaps some water, perhaps snapping up one or even two of the Americans who used the island as a base when they were cruising upon Allied shipping in the South Atlantic. A very slight anxiety at first, for although he had lain in his cot much later than usual - a long session of whist with Fox, and then half the graveyard watch on deck - and although Elliott, disregarding orders, had not sent to tell him until long after it had been sighted, the gentle air from the west was then quite enough to carry the ship clear of Inaccessible and up to the north-west corner of Tristan, where boats could land; and according to his reading of the sky the breeze would certainly strengthen before the afternoon. Yet even so, after hurrying through divisions he ordered church to be rigged on the quarterdeck rather than on the comparatively clement upper deck, so that he might keep an eye on the situation.

It was while they were singing the Old Hundredth that the breeze died wholly away, and all hands noticed that in the subsequent prayers the Captain's voice took on a harder, sterner tone than was usual on these occasions, more the tone for reading the Articles of War. For not only had the breeze failed, but the great swell, combined with the westerly current, was heaving the ship in towards that dark wall of cliffs somewhat faster than he liked.

He looked up from his meditations, therefore, said to his second lieutenant (the first being tied to his cot with a broken leg), 'Very well, Mr Elliott: carry on, if you please,' glanced at the drooping sails, and walked to the starboard rail. At once the pattern broke to pieces. The Marines clumped forward and below to ease their stocks and their pipe-clayed belts; the seamen of the larboard watch repaired, in a general way, to their stations, while the younger, more vapid starbowlines, particularly the landsmen, went below to relax before dinner; but the older hands, the able seamen, stayed on deck, looking at Inaccessible as intently as their captain.

'Well, sir,' said Mr Fox at his elbow, 'we have done almost everything that should be done in a sea-voyage: we have caught our shark - indeed a multiplicity of sharks - we have eaten our flying fishes, we have seen the dolphin die in glory, we have sweltered in the doldrums, we have crossed the Line, and now as I understand it we behold a desert island. And wet, grey and forbidding though it looks, I am glad to see solid land again; I had begun to doubt its existence.' He spoke in this easy way, standing by the Captain's side on a particularly sacred part of the quarterdeck, because church was now being unrigged: the bosun's mates were folding the perfectly unnecessary awning, and for the moment the quarterdeck, poised between two functions, no longer called for formality, secular or divine.

'Desert it is, sir,' said Jack, 'and likely to remain so. Its name is Inaccessible, and as far as I am aware nobody has ever succeeded in landing upon it.'

'Is it like that all round?' asked Fox, looking out over the grey sea. 'Those cliffs must be a thousand foot sheer.'

'It is worse on the other three sides,' said Jack. 'Never a landing-place: only a few rock-shelves and islets where the seals haul out and the penguins nest.'

'There are plenty of them, in all conscience,' said Fox, and as he spoke three penguins leapt clear of the water just by the mainchains and instantly dived again. 'So clearly we are not actually to set foot on our desert island. By definition, Inaccessible could not be our goal,' he went on.

'No,' said Jack. 'You may recall that yesterday evening I spoke of Tristan itself. If you look forward, just to the west - to the left - of the cliff, you can make out its snowy peak among the clouds, rather more than twenty miles away. It is quite clear on the top of the rise. And there is Nightingale away to the south.'

'I see them both,' said Fox, having peered awhile. 'But do you know, I believe I shall go and put on a greatcoat. I find the air a little raw. If there were any wind it would be mortal.'

'This is mid-winter, after all,' said Jack with a civil smile. He watched Fox walk off to the companion-ladder with scarcely a lurch in spite of the most uncommon roll - clear proof not only that he had an athletic frame and an excellent sense of balance but that he had been at sea without a break for some ninety degrees of latitude: never a sight of land since they cleared the Channel, Finisterre, Teneriffe and Cape San Roque all having passed in dirty weather or in darkness. Fox disappeared and Jack returned to his anxiety.

This had been an anxious voyage even before it began, with great difficulty in manning the ship in spite of Admiral Martin's good will, and the Diane had had to sail twenty-six hands short of her complement. Then there had come the heart-breaking weeks of lying windbound in Plymouth, eventually putting to sea in search of a wind the moment the weather allowed him to scrape past Wembury Point, but leaving so fast that he had had to abandon his surgeon and four valuable hands, they not having responded to the blue peter within the prescribed twenty minutes.

It was when they sank the Lizard at last, with a charming steady topgallant gale on the starboard quarter but with the plan of their voyage hopelessly disrupted, that Jack decided to go far south, keeping well over on the Brazil side for the current and the south-east trades to carry them down as quickly as possible to the forties, with their strong and constant westerly winds, leaving out the Cape of Good Hope altogether. He had long had the possibility in mind, and he had conned over Muffitt's logs, observations and charts. Now the shortage of hands seemed less disastrous, for given a moderately favourable run the Diane's provisions should certainly last; and to deal with the problem of water he, the sailmaker, the bosun and the carpenter had contrived a system of really clean sailcloth, hoses and channels, easily shipped and designed to collect the rain that often fell in such prodigious quantities in the doldrums. The doldrums had behaved perfectly; the Diane had passed through the calms in little more than a week, picking up the trades well north of the line and running down for the forties touching neither brace nor sheet, hundreds and hundreds of miles of sweet sailing.

She had not reached them yet, though in thirty-seven degrees south she was on their edge. But, thought Jack, looking at the cliff that now stretched wide on either hand, unless he took measures fairly soon she would never reach them at all. There was no anchoring here: the bottom plunged to a thousand fathoms just off shore. And the swell was heaving the ship in, broadside on, at a knot and a half or even more.

He was extremely unwilling to wreck the people's Sunday, and they in their best clothes, particularly as no one had slept for a full watch these many nights past, all hands having been called again and again; but unless his prayers were answered by seven bells he would have to order out the boats to tow her clear - very severe work indeed, with this enormous swell.

'I beg your pardon, sir,' said Elliott, crossing the deck and taking off his hat, 'but Thomas Adam, sheet-anchor man, starboard watch, was here during the peace with another whaler: in a dead calm and in just such a swell their consort was heaved ashore and destroyed. He says the current sets east much stronger close inshore.'

'Pass the word for Adam,' said Jack, and Adam came aft at the double, a reliable middle-aged seaman, now exceedingly grave. He repeated his account, adding that the other whaler rolled her mainmast by the board as they were getting out a boat, and the ship was already in the kelp before they began trying to tow: he and his friends had watched from off the southern point, unable to help in any way. No one had been saved.

'Well, Adam,' said Jack Aubrey, shaking his head, 'if we do not have a breeze before seven bells we too shall lower down the boats; and I trust we may have better luck.' He looked at the sky, still full of promise, and scratched a backstay.

'Sir,' said Elliott in a low, strangely altered voice, 'I am very sorry - I should have reported it before - the carpenter found the garstrake and two bottom planks of the launch rotten under the copper, and he has taken them out.'

Jack instantly glanced at the boats on the booms. The jolly-boat was stowed inside the launch and the work was not at all apparent, but an informed eye saw it at once. 'In that case, Mr Elliott,' he said, 'let us get what boats we have over the side at once. And I should like a word with the carpenter.'

During all this time, that is to say from the end of divisions which as acting-surgeon he attended, Stephen had been sitting on a paunch-mat, wedged between the foremast and the foretopsail-sheet bitts, gazing at the extraordinary wealth of life in, upon and over these waters: Port Egmont hens, Cape pigeons and four other kinds of petrel so far, the inevitable boobies, some prions, many terns and far, far greater numbers of penguins, some of which he could not identify at all. No great calm albatross hitherto, alas, but on the other hand the most wonderfully gratifying view of seals and fishes. The water was exceptionally clear, and as each unbreaking, untroubled wave of this prodigious swell rose and rose, towering above the ship as she lay in the trough, the inhabitants of the deep could be seen within it, seen with the utmost clarity, and seen sideways, going about their business, seen as though the observer shared their element. He sat there entranced, facing away from the island because the sun was now over the Tropic of Cancer and the light came from the north. Once Ahmed crept forward with a biscuit and said he would bring a covered mug of coffee if the tuan would like it; but otherwise there was no interruption at all.

He faintly heard the psalm; he was aware of the Sunday smells, pork and plum-duff, coming from the galley; and he had some notion that there were bosun's calls, vehement orders, the running of many feet. But piping, vehemence and running were commonplace in naval life and in any case his entire conscious attention was now wholly taken up with the most striking, moving and unexpected sight he had ever seen: as his eyes followed a penguin swimming rapidly westwards in the glassy wall rearing before him they met a vast shape swimming east. He instantly knew what it was but for a moment his mind was too astonished, amazed to cry out Whale! A whale, a young plump sperm whale, a female, slightly speckled with barnacles; and she had a calf close by her side. They swam steadily, their tails going up and down, the calf's faster than its mother's; and at a given moment they were on a level and even higher than his gaze. Then the ship in its turn rose, heeling on the crest, and they were gone, quite gone. Farther off he saw other whales spouting, but they were too far away; they belonged to the rest of the school.

Suffused with joy, he made his way aft through all the busy hands, their cries, their tight-stretched ropes, staggering on the roll and twice very nearly pitching into the waist. His expression changed when he saw Jack's face and heard him say privately, 'Stephen, you can do me an essential service: keep the civilians below, out of the way.'

He nodded and made straight for the companion-ladder. Fox and Edwards, his secretary, were just about to mount, but they stood aside to let him come down.

'I beg your pardon,' said Stephen. 'I have been banished. Apparently there is some manoeuvre toward for which the mariners require the deck quite clear.'

'Then we had better stay below,' said Fox. 'Would you like a game of chess?'

Stephen said he would be very happy. He was an indifferent player and he disliked losing; Fox played well and he liked winning; but this would keep the envoy quiet and in his cabin.

'It is curious that there should be little or no surf on that island with such a swell,' observed Fox, looking out of the scuttle as he fetched the board and men. 'We should surely see it from here. The island has come very much closer, in spite of the calm. Has the manoeuvre any connexion with it? Are we to confess our sins and make our wills?'

'I think not. I presume the activity has to do with our landing on Tristan. Captain Aubrey has promised a wind in the middle of the day, which is to waft us to the northern island. I look forward to it extremely; for among other things I hope to astonish and gratify Sir Joseph with some beetles unknown to the learned world. As to the surf, or rather its absence, the explanation, I am told, lies in a broad zone of that gigantic southern sea-wrack which some call kelp. Cook speaks of stems exceeding three hundred and fifty feet in length off Kerguelen. I have never been more fortunate than two hundred and forty.'

The game began, Stephen, who had the black men, following his usual plan of building up a solid defensive position in the middle of the board. Edwards, an obviously capable and intelligent young man, but unusually reserved, muttered something about 'a glass of negus in the gunroom' and sidled unnoticed out of the door

Stephen's hope was that Fox, in attacking his entrenchments, would leave a gap through which some perfidious knight might leap, threatening destruction, and indeed after some fifteen moves it appeared to him that such an opening would come into existence if he were to protect his king's bishop's fourth. He advanced a pawn one square.

'Quite a good move,' said Fox, and Stephen saw, with real vexation, that it was fatal. He knew that if Fox were now to castle on his queen's side and attack with both rooks, black had no defence. He also knew that Fox would take some time before he made these moves, partly to check all the possible responses twice over and partly to relish the position.

Yet Fox delayed them three rolls too long. The board survived two unusually violent lurches as the ship entered the great kelp-bed, but at the third it slid off the table, scattering the pieces all over the cabin. As he helped to pick them up Stephen remarked, 'You are cleaning your Manton again, I see.'

'Yes,' said Fox, 'the lock is such a delicate affair that I do not like to leave it to anyone else. As soon as the sea grows more reasonable, we must go back to our competition.'

Fox had two rifles, as well as fowling-pieces and some pistols, and he was a remarkably good shot: better than Stephen. But although Stephen had little hope of improvement at chess he could outdo Fox with a pistol and he thought that with practice he might perform quite well with a rifle; hitherto he had used nothing but sporting guns and the usual smooth-bore musket.

'Do you think they have finished on deck?' asked Fox. 'There seems to be less trampling.'

'I doubt it,' said Stephen. 'Captain Aubrey would surely have sent a midshipman to tell us.'

Less trampling, no outcry, no sound but the furious working on the launch, the only voice that of the white-faced sweating carpenter with his 'I always said this coppering of boats was fucking nonsense. In course their fucking bottoms rot beneath it, never seen.' The whole being of all the others was fixed upon the boats, the ten-oared pinnace, the ten-oared cutter, the four-oared jolly-boat and even the Doctor's personal skiff as they towed the ship, the rowers rising from the thwarts as they pulled, straining their oars to the breaking-point: the eyes of all but those who were labouring with such passionate zeal shifted now from the boats to the stark cliff of Inaccessible and now from the cliff to the ship's side to compare her forward progress with the sideways heave. The towing had begun quite well, but now that the ship had entered the binding weed, and now that the indraught of the current was stronger still it was clear that the boats were not pulling her ahead as fast as the swell was urging her inshore. There was only a quarter of a mile to go before the end of the cliff and the open sea beyond the island, but at this rate it was not possible that she should run that far before she touched. The anchors had been cleared away and they were hanging a-cockbill; but the lead gave no hope of a holding-ground - of any ground at all. And hands were stationed along the side with spars to boom off when the sheer rock was near enough; but that could not prolong the run more than a minute or so. Nearer; nearer with every enormous heave.

Jack gazed up at the top of the precipice. 'Mind your helm, there,' he called to the quartermaster with very great force, though the poor dazed man was within a few feet of him; and the nascent breeze he had seen stirring the grass up on that distant edge came breathing along the cliff-face. It moved the main topgallant and faded; it came again, nearly filling all three topgallants and the topsails; again, and they and even the courses bellied out. The ship distinctly gathered way, and cheering began.

'Silence fore and aft,' roared Jack. 'Man the braces.' And to the man at the wheel, 'Down with the helm.'

The carpenter came running from the waist. 'She'll swim, sir,' he said.

'Thank you, Mr Hadley,' said Jack. 'Mr Elliott, get her over the side. Launch's crew away: jump to it, there, jump to it.'

They jumped to it indeed; but even pulling to crack their spines they could not make fast at the head of the tow before the ship, slanting away from that dreadful shore, had such motion on her that the hawser was slack.

'Mr Elliott,' said Jack, when the island was clear astern and the decks were filled with grinning men, laughing and congratulating one another as they worked in a general diffused sound of the most uncommon happiness, 'the course is northeast a half east. The hands may be piped to dinner as soon as the boats are in. Mr Bennett' - to a midshipman - 'pray tell Dr Maturin with my compliments that if he is at leisure I should like to show him the north side of Inaccessible.'

Jack Aubrey sat in what remained to him of the great cabin, contemplating not only the frigate's wake stretching away and away to the north-west, but also a variety of other things: the room, though now divided by a bulkhead running fore and aft for the accommodation of the envoy, was still a fine capacious place for one brought up to the sea, with enough space to contemplate a large number of subjects, and not only space but quietness and privacy in which to do so. Relative silence, that is to say, for the stays, shrouds and backstays were being set up again after the frightful stretching they had suffered off Tristan; and no one, least of all Jack Aubrey, could expect rigging to be set up without roaring and bawling: and Crown, the bosun, had a voice fit for a line of battle ship, a first-rate line of battle ship. Furthermore Fox and Stephen were still banging away at bottles, tossed overboard and allowed to go a great way astern; while at the same time Fielding, who had been allowed on deck in this easy quartering sea, stumped about on his crutches and plastered leg, making an odd resonant sound and calling out from time to time to any of the many hands aloft who might possibly spoil the blacking of his yards. But if things of this kind had worried Jack he would have run mad long since: he let them pass by his ears as the South Atlantic was now passing by the Diane's gunports, in a smooth unnoticed flow, and he reflected upon the curiously hard fate of being unable to tell Sophie of their escape without at the same time letting her know of their danger. He had come upon this difficulty often enough in his correspondence with her, a correspondence that took the form of a serial letter that continued day by day until it could be sent, a fat bundle, by some homeward-bound chance encounter, or that was never sent at all but read aloud at home, with comments. Yet he had never come upon it so forcibly. The horror of that last cable's-length, with the ship moving with a nightmare inevitability to destruction, was still strong upon him, and he would so have liked her to share his immeasurable relief and present joy in living. He had written a watered version of the events, which he now looked over with no approval until he came to the words 'I was very pleased with the people; they behaved uncommon well' and to his praise of the ship. 'Of course, she is not the Surprise, but she is a fine responsive little ship, and I shall always love her for the way she took that breath of air off Inaccessible.'

She was not the Surprise: he had often taken the wheel and he had tried her with every conceivable combination of sails, and although she certainly proved a sound, dry, weatherly ship, carrying an easy helm, wearing and staying quick and lying to remarkably well under reefed maincourse and mizen staysail, she lacked that thoroughbred quality, that extraordinary manoeuvrability and turn of speed close-hauled. It was true that she also lacked Surprise's vices, a tendency to gripe unless her holds were stowed just as she liked them, and to steer wild in any but the most skilful hands; the Diane was an honest, well-designed, well-built frigate (though he could not yet tell how she would behave in really very strong winds); but there was no doubt which ship he wholly loved.

That brought him to the second part of his contemplation. He had longed with all his being to be part of the Royal Navy again: now his name was on the list, and at this moment the familiar coat with its crown-and-anchored epaulettes was over the back of the chair by the scuttle, ready for his dinner with the envoy; and yet again and again he found himself regretting the Surprise. Not so much HMS Surprise but Surprise as a letter of marque, sailing where she pleased and when she pleased, carrying on her private and effective war against the enemy as she saw fit, with a ship's company of picked hands, some of them very old friends indeed, all of them thoroughpaced seamen With such men, with such a status, and with such a second in command as Tom Pullings, there had been an easiness that could never be found in a King's ship nothing approaching a democracy, God forbid, but an atmosphere that made the regular Navy seem formal, starched, severe, and in the article of pressing downright cruel The foremast hands were much too far removed from those in command they were often very roughly treated by inferior officers; and one of the chief functions of the Marines was to prevent mutiny or on occasion to put it down by force.

The Diane's crew were not very ill used in this respect, for upon the whole Jack was fortunate in his officers. By this time he knew them well being perfectly able to afford it, he had reverted to the old and now declining naval custom of Inviting the officer and midshipman of the morning watch to breakfast and those of the forenoon watch to dinner, often with the first lieutenant as well; while he usually accepted the gunroom's invitation to dine on Sundays. It is true that he did not invariably follow the custom, and that when he did his guests or hosts were unnaturally well-behaved, yet even so this contact, together with seeing them on duty, brought him acquainted with their more obvious qualities. Their defects, too; and tyranny was not one of them. Fielding and Dick Richardson were excellent seamen and they were both capable of driving a sluggish watch hard on occasion, but neither was in the least brutal; nor was Elliott, whatever other faults he might possess. Warren, the master, was a remarkable disciplinarian, a man of great natural authority, and he never had to raise his voice to be obeyed; while Crown, the bosun, was much more apt to bark than bite.

And in comparison with most captains he was reasonably fortunate in his men. At least half of them had been turned over from other ships before he came, and Admiral Martin had found him several quite good draughts; yet he had been in too great a hurry to sail for the news of his appointment to bring in many volunteers, and a quarter of the men had come by way of the press or some other form of compulsion, some having been bred to the sea, others never having set their eyes upon it at all. Still, this did give the Diane a better proportion of able seamen than most ships in her circumstances, and there were few really hopeless cases among the first-voyagers.

To begin with, naturally enough, the pressed men longed for their freedom, and during the enforced stay in Plymouth it had been difficult and in two cases impossible to keep the more enterprising or desperate from deserting; and even after the ship was well out in the ocean and there was no help for it many of them remained sullen and resentful. The landsmen and indeed some of the hands who had served under captains less taut than Aubrey particularly disliked his and the first lieutenant's insistence that hammocks should be exactly rolled, lashed up and stowed in the netting within five minutes of the bosun's pipe - an insistence implemented by the bosun's mates with sharp knives in their hands ready to cut the hammocknettles and crying 'Out or down, out or down. Rise and shine, my beauties.' But by the Tropic of Cancer almost all of them, brought to it by degrees, could manage well enough; and by the Tropic of Capricorn they looked upon it as perfectly natural that a man should spring out of bed, whip on his clothes, roll his hammock and bedding into a tight cylinder lashed with seven turns, evenly spaced, and race up one or two crowded ladders to his appointed place. And by this time too each of the frigate's guns and carronades had a tolerably efficient crew, so that she could fire three quite well-directed broadsides in five and a half minutes. This was nothing like the Surprise's deadly speed and accuracy, of course, but it was more than respectable in a newly-commissioned ship; furthermore, the thunder and lightning, the shattering din, the flashes and the smoke of real gunfire almost every evening at quarters which made this result possible were, in Jack's opinion, one of the main reasons that the ship's company had shaken down so well. The powder and shot over and above the Admiralty's absurdly meagre allowance had cost him a great deal of money, but he thought it very well spent; not only could the Diane now give a fair account of herself in any well-matched action but the costly, exciting and dangerous exercise brought first the gun-crews and then the whole body of the people very much together. The men delighted in the enormous noise, the power, the sense of occasion and of wild extravagance (it was said that two broadsides cost the Captain an ordinary seaman's pay for a year); they revelled in the destruction of targets and they cossetted their eighteen-pounders, squat iron brutes of close on two tons very apt to maim their tenders, with loving care, polishing everything that could be polished and painting their names above the port. One was called Swan of Avon, but Belcher, Tom Cribb and Game Chicken were more in the usual line. The ship's unvarying routine and the perils of the sea would have welded the Dianes into a right ship's company in time, no doubt, but the violent gunnery had certainly hastened the process, which was just as well in waters where a far-ranging enemy might be encountered any day. A decent set of men: they had behaved very well off Tristan. Yet even so there were still a good many who would run if they possibly could, and that was still another reason that he was glad to be going far south of the Cape.

The Surprise that he regretted had no pressed men, of course. Desertion never entered into consideration at all; in fact the only severe punishment he had ever had to inflict was turning men ashore for misconduct. And what was rather more to the point at this moment, she had no midshipmen either. The Diane had six young gentlemen in her midshipmen's berth, two of them, Seymour and Bennett, being master's mates. There were no really small boys, no squeakers under the gunner's care, but even so Jack's responsibilities - and he was a conscientious captain where his midshipmen were concerned, leaving little to Mr Warren the master - were quite varied. Since the ship did not carry a chaplain or a schoolmaster, Harper and Reade, the youngest, needed his help with spelling hard words and with fairly simple arithmetic, let alone the elements of spherical trigonometry and navigation; while Seymour and Bennett, near the end of their servitude, would pass, or try to pass, for lieutenants at the end of this year or the beginning of next and they were already growing anxious; they were very willing, even eager, to have the finer points of their profession explained.

It was they who were due at four bells, and as the second bell struck he heard them tap at the door, clean, brushed, exactly dressed, carrying the log-books and draughts of the journals they would have to produce, together with their captain's certificates of service and good conduct, at their examination.

'Sit down, both of you,' he said, 'and let me see your journals.'

'Journals, sir?' they cried: hitherto Captain Aubrey had been concerned only with their logs, which, among other things, contained their noon observations for latitude, their lunars for longitude, and a variety of astronomical remarks. Neither he nor any other of their captains had shown the least interest in their journals.

'Yes, of course. They have to be shown up at the Navy Board, you know.'

They were shown up now, and Jack looked at what Bennett had to say about Tristan:

Tristan da Cunha lies in 57°6'S and 12°i7'W; it is the largest of a group of rocky islands; the mountain in the middle is above 7000 feet high and has very much the appearance of a volcano. In clear weather, which is rare, the snowy peak can be seen from 30 leagues away. The islands were discovered in 1506 by Tristan da Cunha, and the seas in their vicinity are frequented by whales, albatrosses, pintados, boobies, and the sprightly penguin, whose manner of swimming or as it were flying under water irresistibly brings Virgil's remigium alarum to mind. But, however, the navigator approaching from the west should take great care not to do so in a dead calm, because of the strong current setting east and the heave of the swell.

Seymour's journal, which had a drawing of Inaccessible with a ship scraping her yardarms against the face of the cliff, began:

Tristan da Cunha lies in 5706'S and 12°17'W; it is the largest of a group of rocky islands; the mountain in the middle is above 7000 feet high and has very much the appearance of a volcano.

The sprightly penguin irresistibly reminded Seymour too of Virgil, and on reaching the remigium alarum Jack cried, 'Hey, hey, this won't do. You have been cribbing from Bennett.'

No, no, sir, they said with the utmost candour, for in spite of his stern expression they were perfectly convinced that he did not intend to mangle them. It was a joint production, with the facts taken from the Mariner's Companion and the style put in by - by a friend. But they themselves had worked out the position, and for the longitude they had had a particularly fine lunar according to the method he had shown them. There were several others, almost as good, in their logs, if he chose to look at them.

'Where is the style?' asked Jack, not to be diverted.

'Well, sir,' said Seymour, 'there is the sprightly penguin, for example, and the remigium piece, and later on there is the rosy-fingered dawn.'

'Well, no doubt it is very fine: but how in Heaven's name do you expect the examining captains to swallow two sprightly penguins, one after another? It is against nature. They will come down on you like a thousand of bricks and turn you away directly, for making game of them.'

'Why, sir,' said Bennett, the more ingenuous of the two, 'our names are so far apart in the alphabet that we cannot be called the same day; and everyone says the captains never have time to read the journals anyway, certainly not to remember them.'

'I see,' said Jack. The argument was perfectly sound. What really mattered in these cases was the severe viva voce about seamanship and navigation and then the young man's family, its status, influence and naval connexions. 'But still, the captains are not to be treated with disrespect, and in decency you must strike out the style when you copy your journals fair, make some changes in each, and keep to plain official prose.'

They turned to the moons of Jupiter, which might with profit be observed on St Paul's or Amsterdam islands, should they touch there, to fix their longitude with greater certainty; and when they had finished with the moons Jack looked at his watch, saying, 'I shall just have time to speak to Clerke. Pray send him aft.'

Clerke came within the minute, looking alarmed, as well he might, for Captain Aubrey's face now wore a look of strong and perfectly genuine disapprobation. He did not invite Clerke, a leggy youth with a still uncertain voice, to sit down but instantly said to him, 'Clerke, I have sent for you to tell you that I will not have the hands blackguarded. Any low scrub can pour out foul language, but it is particularly disagreeable to hear a young fellow like you using it to a seaman old enough to be his father, a man who cannot reply. No, do not attempt to justify yourself by blaming the man you abused. Go away and close the door behind you.'

The door opened again almost immediately and Stephen, equally clean, brushed and properly dressed, was led in by Killick, who had little notion of his punctuality or sense of fitness.

'Killick tells me that your dinner for the envoy is today,' he said. 'And Fielding is of the same opinion.'

'You astonish me,' said Jack, putting on his coat. 'I had the impression it was yesterday. Killick, is everything in hand?' He spoke with some anxiety, for he had had to leave his admirable cook Adi in the Surprise, and his replacement, Wilson, was apt to grow flustered when called upon for fine work.

'All in hand, sir,' replied Killick. 'Never you fret. Which I soused the pig's face myself, and one of the afterguard caught a fine great cuttlefish to start with, fresh as a daisy.'

Fielding came stumping in, looking pleased and well; he was immediately followed by Reade, the smallest, the least useful, but also the prettiest of the midshipmen, though now looking pale and drawn with hunger - he was ordinarily fed at noon - and they sat drinking madeira until Fox and his secretary arrived. Killick disliked the envoy and allowed him only four minutes before announcing, 'Dinner is on table, sir, if you please.'

Jack's dining-cabin was now also his sleeping-cabin, and sometimes Stephen's too, but naval ingenuity made little of stowing the cots and sea-chests on the half-deck, the Marine sentry perpetually on duty at the cabin door being shown how to cover them with a hammock-cloth in case of drifting spray. Six people, and more at a pinch, could be seated comfortably at the table, placed athwartships and gleaming with silver, Killick's pride and joy. Naval ingenuity was less able to deal with the two eighteen-pounder guns that shared the cabin, but at least they could be urged as far as possible into the corners, made fast and covered with flags.

It was one of these flags or to be more exact a long pennant kicked aside by Stephen as he took his seat on the envoy's right that was Killick's undoing. After the wholly successful soused pig's face, he brought in the monstrous cuttlefish, borne high on a silver charger, cried 'Make a lane, mates,' to Ahmed and Ali, standing behind their master's chairs, and advanced to set it down in front of Jack. But his right foot trod on the pennant's end, his left caught in its substance, and down he came, flooding his captain with melted butter (the first of Wilson's two sauces) and flinging the cuttlefish to the deck.

'That was a lapsus calami indeed,' observed Stephen, when the dinner was in motion once again. It was a tolerably good remark, if taken on the bound, and like many of his tolerably good remarks it met with no immediate response whatsoever. But although Aubrey's coat, waistcoat and breeches were wrecked and Edwards had received a generous splash, Fox had been entirely spared by the melted butter; he had also gained a considerable moral advantage from the disaster and he could afford to dispense with a trifle of it. 'I do not think I quite follow you, sir,' he said.

'It is only a miserable little play on words,' said Stephen. 'This cuttlefish, which is a loligo, a calamary, has a horny internal shell like a pen, so very like that the animal is sometimes called a pen-fish. And as you will recall,' he added, speaking to his opposite neighbour, the midshipman, 'a lapsus calami is a slip of the pen.'

'I do wish I had understood at first,' said Reade. 'I should have laughed like anything.'

The dinner revived with an excellent saddle of mutton and reached its high point with a pair of albatrosses, stewed with Wilson's savoury sauce and accompanied by a noble burgundy. When they had drunk their port they returned to the great cabin for their coffee, and as they were sitting down Fox said to Stephen, 'I have at last routed out the Malay texts I spoke of. They are written in Arabic script and of course the short vowels are not shown, but Ahmed is familiar with the tales, and if he reads them to you please do not hesitate to mark the quantities. I will send them round as soon as our game is over.'

A little later Fielding took his leave, leading Reade off with him: none too soon, for the boy's second glass of port, incautiously poured by Edwards as the decanter came round, was working in him: his face was cherry red, and he was growing unsuitably loquacious. The card-table was placed and their usual game of whist began, Jack and Stephen paired against Fox and Edwards.

Although they played for low stakes, Edwards being poor, it was severe, rigorous, determined whist; reasonably amiable too, with no ill-temper, no post mortems, for in this one instance Edwards, who was certainly the best player of the four, would not defer to Fox, nor was Fox overbearing; and since Jack and Stephen usually won more rubbers than they lost it was impossible for the other side to tell them what they ought to have done. They won no rubber this time, however. The first was in the balance, at one game all, when Fielding came in, looking grave, and said, 'May I speak to the Doctor, sir!" Macmillan, Graham's youthful mate, very much needed his advice in the sick-bay Stephen went at once. He had taken Graham's place as a matter of course, Macmillan freely stating that his three months at sea did not fit him for such a charge, and although Stephen was reasonably well acquainted with seamen he was surprised to find how pleased they were It was not only that Killick and Blonden had told them that he was not a mere surgeon but a genuine certificated physician, one that had been called in to treat the Duke of Clarence and that he had been offered the appointment of Physician to the Fleet by Lord Keith; nor only that he did not make them pay for medicines against venereal diseases (an unsound measure, he thought, one that discouraged a man from presenting himself at the earliest, more easily cured stage): it was the voluntary aspect of his labours that impressed them, and his wholly professional attention to his sick-bay and his patients. To be sure, he had inherited the former surgeon's cabin, which was convenient for his specimens and for nights when the Captain snored too loud; but that did not affect the matter at all, and they were touchingly grateful.

A message came back to the cabin: Dr Maturin's regrets, but he was unable to return; he was obliged to operate. If Mr Edwards wished to be present at an amputation, he should come at once, preferably in an old coat.

Edwards excused himself and hurried off. Jack and the envoy stayed, talking in a desultory manner about common acquaintances, the Royal Society, gunnery, the likelihood of heavy weather ahead, and of their private stores running out before the ship reached Batavia; and at the end of the first dog-watch (quarters having been put back for the Captain's feast) they parted.

The relations between Fox and Aubrey were curious; although their intercourse could no longer remain formal without absurdity (and clearly implied dislike) in so confined a space, with a quarterdeck sixty-eight feet long and thirty-two feet wide as the only place for exercise, it never reached cordiality, remaining at that stage of quite close acquaintance, governed by exact civility and small good offices, which it reached after the first fortnight or so.

It had not reached cordiality by thirty-seven degrees south in spite of the daily turmoil of clearing the ship for action at quarters; in spite of the gunfire, which interested the envoy to a remarkable degree; and in spite of more or less weekly dining to and fro, a good deal of whist and backgammon and a few games of chess; nor had it any immediate chance of doing so once the Diane reached 42' 15'S and 8°35 'W after a week of unexpectedly mild topgallant and even royal breezes.

The day broke clear, but when Stephen came on deck after having made his rounds of the sick-bay he noticed that Jack, Fielding, the master and Dick Richardson were looking at the sky in a very knowing manner.

'There you are, Doctor,' said Jack. 'How is your patient?'

Stephen had several patients, two with syphilitic gummata who were near their ends and some serious pulmonary cases, but he knew that to the naval mind only an amputation really counted, and he replied, 'He is coming along quite well, I thank you: more comfortable in his mind and body than I had expected.'

'I am heartily glad of it, because I believe all your people will have to go below presently. Look at the cloud just west of the sun.'

'I perceive a faint prismatic halo.'

'It is a wind-gall.

Wind-gall at morn

Fine weather all gone.'

'You do not seem displeased.'

'I am delighted. The sooner we are in the true westerlies the happier I shall be. They have been strangely delayed, but they are likely to blow most uncommon hard, we being already so far south. Ha, Mr Crown' - turning to the bosun, who stood smiling by the hances - 'we shall have our work cut out.'

The group broke up and Fielding asked whether he might look in on Raikes, the man whose leg Stephen had taken off. 'I have a fellow-feeling for him,' he observed as they walked along the lower deck.

'Well you may,' said Stephen. 'You were very nearly in the same boat, if I may use the expression.'

It was in fact the same injury, a broken tibia and fibula, caused by the same instrument, a recoiling gun, in Fielding's case when he was showing an inexperienced crew how best to handle their piece and the captain of the gun pulled the lanyard too soon, and in Raikes's because the forward breeching had parted, throwing the gun sideways. But Raikes's had been a compound fracture and after several promising days gangrene had set in, mounting with frightful rapidity, and the leg had had to go to save his life; whereas Fielding's was now quite well.

Jack had long since made his arrangements with the bosun and the sailmaker, and double preventer-stays, light hawsers for the mastheads and backstays were laid along, together with storm-canvas in large quantities; while Mr Blyth the purser and his steward had the Magellan jackets sorted in the sloproom, ready to serve out.

And Stephen had long since made his arrangements for a subsidiary sick-berth on the after-platform of the orlop deck, taking in part of the cockpit and part of the Captain's storeroom, which would be much less liable to flooding in the kind of seas to be expected in the high latitudes. It might seem less airy, and between the tropics it certainly would not do; but south of the fortieth parallel a trifling wind-sail would bring down all the air the most asthmatic patient could desire. He and Macmillan and their loblolly-boy William Low put the last touches to it that morning and then began transferring the patients, their messmates carrying them below in their hammocks with the utmost care.

He dined in the gunroom afterwards, as he often did, not as a guest but as of right. He liked most of the people: Spotted Dick Richardson was an old friend and Fielding a particularly agreeable companion; and once they had overcome a certain shyness of the Captain's guest the mess found he fitted in very well. It so happened that he was the only one among them who had been so far south - the others had served in the West Indies, the Baltic, the Mediterranean and even the African station, but never much below the Cape - and he spent much of the meal answering questions and describing the majestic seas of the fifties with a quarter of a mile, half a mile between their lofty crests.

'How tall would they be?'

'I cannot say the number of fathoms or feet, but very tall indeed - tall enough to hide a ship of the line; and we were becalmed between them. But when the wind blew even harder than usual their tops came curling over at the crest, sometimes tumbling down the slope in a white cataract, sometimes causing the whole prodigious mass to break in an utter confusion of shattered water, disrupting those that followed. It was then, I understand, that we were in the greatest danger of being pooped, and broaching to.'

'Dear me,' said the purser, 'that must have been a most uncomfortable situation, Doctor.'

'So it was too,' said Stephen. 'But an even greater danger was that of running into a mountain of ice. They are huge, in these waters, vast beyond all imagination, with what can be seen towering high and what can not, spreading far out on either side, as perilous as any reef; they are invisible on a dark night, and even if they were not, one cannot steer as one chooses in such a preternatural blast.'

'But surely, sir,' said Welby, the Marine, 'they must be extremely uncommon, in the parts frequented by shipping?'

'On the contrary, sir,' said Stephen. 'We fleeted past scores, some of them an exquisite aquamarine blue in parts, with the surf raging against their sides, breaking mountains high; and we were partially crushed, almost sunk and quite disabled, our rudder torn off, by one that was reckoned half a mile across. This was in the Leopard, a ship of fifty guns.'

Twice that afternoon Stephen was called on deck, once to see a troop of grampuses, and once to be shown a startling change in the sea, which from a turbid, undistinguished glaucous hue had become clear, glass clear, and of that aquamarine colour which had come back to his mind when he spoke of Leopard's iceberg: the rest of the time he spent in the cabin, speaking Malay with Ahmed or listening to him read from Fox's text. Ahmed was a gentle, good-natured, cheerful young man, an excellent servant, but far too deferential to be much of a teacher; he never corrected any of Stephen's mistakes, he always agreed with Stephen's stress on a word, and he went to infinite pains to understand whatever was said to him. Fortunately Stephen had a gift for languages and an accurate, retentive ear: Ahmed had rarely been called upon to exercise much ingenuity after the first few weeks, and by now they conversed with tolerable ease.

There was no beating to quarters that evening, which was unusual, and having attended to his patients in the last dog watch, Stephen thought he would stroll on the quarterdeck and perhaps converse with Warren, the master, a well-informed and interesting man; but as he set foot on the ladder up from the orlop he was illumined by a flash of lightning so intensely vivid that its reflection pierced down hatchway after hatchway and along shadowy decks with such power that it dimmed the sick-berth lanterns. It was instantly followed by the most enormous and lasting clap of thunder, apparently breaking in the maintop itself. And by the time he had groped his way up to the gunroom bulkhead he could already hear the downpour, a rainstorm of prodigious violence.

'Come and have a look, sir,' cried Reade in great glee, checking his eager pace at the sight of the Doctor, 'I have never seen the like in all my time at sea. Nor has the master. Come along; I will fetch you a griego.'

Most of what Reade said was drowned by the thunder, but he urged Stephen up the ladder to the half-deck, fetched him a hooded watch-coat, and led him up to a total blackness filled with hurtling water, a blackness so thick that the bulwark could not be seen - nothing but a faint orange glow from the binnacle lights. But a moment later the entire horizon, clean round the ship, was lit by such lightning that everything stood out clear- sails, rigging, people, their expressions - the whole length of the ship, in spite of the rain. Stephen felt Reade pull his sleeve and saw his delighted face say something, but the continuous bellow of thunder covered the words.

Jack was standing by the weather rail with Fielding and he called Stephen over. Even his powerful voice, at close quarters, was somewhat overlaid, yet 'beats Guy Fawkes night' came through, and his smile, oddly cut by the intermittent flashes so that it appeared to spread in jerks, was quite distinct. They stood there with this stupendous display roaring and flashing for an indeterminate time and then Jack said, 'You are ankle deep and in your slippers. I will give you a tow below.'

'Lord, Jack,' said Stephen, sitting and dripping in the cabin while Ahmed pulled off his stockings, 'a fleet-action must be quite like this.'

'Very like, but for the lack of smoke,' said Jack. 'Now listen, I shall be in and out till morning, waking you with my light, because it is likely to cut up rough, so you had better sleep below. Ahmed, see that the Doctor's cot is aired, and make sure that his feet are thoroughly dry before he turns in.'

Their Guy Fawkes night was as it were a gateway from one region to another totally different: in the morning the Diane was tearing away to the east-south-east at twelve knots through a confused tumbling sea with a great deal of white water on it but also an underlying pattern of long, consistent moderate swell, a cold, cold sea and a wind with a fierce bite to it; and there was enough north in the westerly gale to make her heel some twenty-five degrees.

A fair amount of water in the form of spray and odd packets came aboard, but nothing like enough to damp the galley fires or the appetites of the officer and the midshipman of the morning watch, Elliott and Greene, who breakfasted with the Captain. They were not Jack's favourite officers, but they had had a rough time of it since four o'clock when they relieved the deck, and in any case there must be no favouritism: he was perhaps a little less genial than he might have been with Richardson and Reade, but he plied them with porridge, eggs from his twelve worthy hens, with somewhat rusty bacon, toasted Irish soda-bread - Stephen's brilliant innovation - and marmalade from Ashgrove, the coffee coming in a succession of pots.

Stephen watched them sitting there, all three haggard from their watch; and once again it occurred to him that it was not so much the iniquitous imposition of income tax that was causing the decline of this form of entertainment, but rather the boredom and the labour on the part of the host: by naval tradition Elliott could start no subject, and although as a well-bred man he made real efforts by way of response, he was no more gifted as a conversationalist than he was as a seaman, Greene, on the other hand, interrupted his steady eating only to say Yes, sir or No, sir.

'Now surely you will turn in, brother,' said Stephen, when they had gone. 'You look destroyed.'

'Oh certainly: quite soon,' said Jack. 'But first I must take some readings for Humboldt; I have not missed a day yet, and it would be a pity to start now. Perhaps I will come down and tell you the temperatures at least. We can test the salinity later. Ho, Killick, there. Pass the word for my clerk, will you?'

Elijah Butcher had been expecting the call and he came prepared, muffled up to his ears, with an inkhorn in his buttonhole, the register under his arm, hygrometer, cyanograph and a variety of thermometers in his pocket, all cased, his bright black eyes and his bright red face eager for the fray.

'Mr Butcher,' said Jack, rising, 'good morning to you. Let us get under way.'

Jack did not come down. He sent Butcher to show Dr Maturin the temperature at the surface, and ten and at fifty fathoms, together with the hygrometrical readings and a message to the effect that Captain Aubrey was obliged to stay on deck.

Stephen had expected it, because he knew very well that this was the kind of sailing that Jack loved beyond any other; but he did not know how wholly the Diane's captain would be absorbed in his task.

Jack had never really driven her before. The trades had been benign, regular, agreeable and steady, but always on the feeble side; they had hardly ever allowed him to log more than ten knots even with royal studdingsails abroad and the wind three points abaft the beam, which she liked best; and now he very earnestly wished to run off his easting as fast as ever he could make her fly. With the dear Surprise he knew exactly what sails would give her fifteen knots in these latitudes without straining, but he had little notion of what would suit the Diane. In winds of this force different ships behaved very differently on being driven; some would plunge their bows deep, shipping green seas that would tear aft; others would tuck down their sterns, and then the green seas, with a following wind, were worse by far; some might be sluggish, some might gripe, some might steer wild and even broach to with the very combination of sails that would make another fly.

As the Diane sailed south and south with even stronger winds, through even more tremendous seas, reaching forty-five degrees and then steering due east, he set about learning her true inner nature and her capabilities when she was pushed to the limit. This entailed many changes of sail, very exact trimming, very exact observation, and the closest watch on sheet and brace; but when the right set was found - they varied of course according to the amount of north or south in the great westerly winds, but they were variations on a single theme - there began a series of splendid days when she would run three hundred miles and more between noon and noon, and when Jack was rarely off the deck, appearing in the cabin only to eat or go fast asleep sitting in his elbow-chair.

This was splendid progress, the degrees of latitude passing in rapid succession; but for any but dedicated seamen the pleasure was intellectual only. This was the southern winter, the sky low and grey, the daylight sparse, the bitterly cold air filled with rain or sleet mixed with spindrift and atomized seawater, the decks permanently awash. The cry of sweepers was no longer heard; there was no dust, there were no ropeshakings nor any hint of them, and the frozen afterguard could huddle in peace beneath the booms.

Stephen came up from time to time when neither rain nor flying spray was very severe to gaze upon the albatrosses that accompanied the ship, sometimes staying for days together. Most were the Diomedea exulans of Linnaeus, the bird he loved best of all that lived at sea, the great wandering albatross, an immense creature, twelve feet across or even more, the old cock-birds a pure snowy white with black, black edgings; but there were others that he could not identify with any certainty, birds to which the sailors gave the general name of mollymawks.

'Not nearly enough serious attention has been paid to the albatrosses,' he said to Fox, who had come to consult him about pains or rather general discomfort in his lower belly, difficulties with defecation, disturbed nights.

'Nor to the digestive system,' said Fox. 'If man is a thinking reed he is also a reed that absorbs and excretes, and if these functions are disturbed so is the first, and humanity recedes, leaving the mere brute.'

'These pills will recall your colon to its duty, with the blessing, and the diet I have prescribed,' said Stephen. 'But you will admit that it is whimsical to make distinctions between the lesser pettichaps and her kin, counting their wing feathers, measuring their bills, and to neglect the albatrosses, the great soaring birds of the world.'

'They are not the same pills as before?' asked Fox.

'They are not,' said Stephen with an easy conscience, for this time to the powdered chalk he had added the harmless pink of cochineal.

Fox had consulted him quite often lately, and for a variety of disorders; but it had soon become apparent to Stephen that his trouble was loneliness. He was undoubtedly an able man- his account of the Malay rajahs and sultans, their intricate lines of descent, their connexions, feuds, alliances, past history and present policy was enough to prove that, without his profound knowledge of early Buddhism or current Mahometan law - but he had a strong, dominant personality and he had so crushed his retiring, unassertive secretary in everything except the matter of whist that the young man was no longer anything of a companion to him.

Yet although Fox might wish to be acquainted and even quite familiar with others, for his own part he did not choose to be known; he was unusually reserved. Then again there was a hint of condescension in his manner, a certain assumption of superior knowledge, status or natural parts, that prevented Jack and Stephen from looking forward to his company with very much pleasure.

Stephen had the impression that Fox thought the mission of very great consequence, in which he was probably right; and that the successful conclusion of it, the carrying home of a treaty, would gratify his ambition and self-esteem to the highest possible degree; but as well as this Stephen felt that he was more flattered by the office of envoy, and by its externals, than might have been expected in a man of his abilities. He never invited the officers, although they had been introduced to him; and if on the quarterdeck he asked them a question to do with the ship or gunnery he would listen to their explanation with a smile and a nod of his head that seemed to say that although he had not known these things the ignorance did not diminish him in any way - they were merely technical - an honnéte homme was not required to know them.

In any case at this juncture neither Jack nor Stephen had any time to spare for social intercourse. Jack was taken up with sailing his ship and Stephen, quite apart from the preservation, classification and description of his Tristan da Cunha specimens, the rich harvest of extreme activity in a cruelly limited time on the lower parts of that scientifically unknown island, inhabited by numbers of nondescript cryptogams, probably several flowering plants (though this was the wrong season for them), a quantity of beetles and other insects, some spiders, and at least two peculiar birds, a finch and a thrush, and quite apart from his Malay, had his sick-berth to look after. A full sick-berth, for sailing a ship eastwards in the forties was a dangerous business at any time and more so in the winter, when numb hands had to grapple with frozen ropes high above the deck, while on the deck itself, in spite of the life-lines stretched fore and aft, a heavy sea might dash men against guns, bitts, the capstan and even on one occasion the belfrey. Strained, twisted joints, torn muscles, cracked ribs and yet another broken leg came down, together with rope burns, ordinary burns from the cook and his mates being flung against the galley stove, and of course disabling chilblains by the score - scarcely a watch without a majority of men who hobbled.

Yet it was not always foul weather. One morning after a day and a night of such a blast that the frigate could carry no more than a close-reefed maintopsail and forestaysail, Stephen, who had had little sleep until the changing of the watch at four, made his rounds late after a solitary breakfast in the gunroom. He was showing young Macmillan an expeditious way of fastening a cingulum for a hernia case when Seymour came in with the Captain's compliments, and when Dr Maturin was at leisure he might like to come on deck. 'You will need a watch-coat, sir,' he added. 'It is right parky up there.'

So it was; but the astonishment of the brilliant blue, the sunshine and the light-filled sails quite took the sense of cold away. 'There you are, Doctor,' cried Jack, who was wearing an antique Monmouth cap as well as a pilot-jacket, 'Good morning to you, and a very pretty one it is, upon my word. Harding, jump down to the cabin and ask Ahmed to give you a comforter to wrap round the Doctor's head: he will lose his ears else.'

'Heavens, what glory,' said Stephen, gazing about.

'Yes, ain't it?' said Jack. 'The wind hauled right aft in the morning watch, so we were able to spread more canvas. As you see, we have maintopsail, forecourse and spritsail; I hope for foretopgallant if it eases a little..

The explanations continued, with some valuable remarks on scandalizing the foretopsail yard, but Stephen was taken up with piecing the elements of this stupendous scene into a whole. First there was the sky, high, pure and of a darker blue than he had ever seen. And then there was the sea, a lighter, immensely luminous blue that reflected blue into the air, the shadows and the sails; a sea that stretched away immeasurably when the surge raised the frigate high, showing an orderly array of great crests, each three furlongs from its predecessor, and all sweeping eastwards in an even, majestic procession. As each approached the Diane's stern its high white-marbled face reared to the height of the crossjack.yard, threatening destruction; then the stern rose, rose, the deck tilting forward, the force of the wind increasing, and the crest passed smoothly along the side. A few moments later the ship sank into the valley between the waves, her view confined, her sails growing limp. To these there was added the sun, unseen for so long and unseen even now, since the topsail hid it, but filling the world with an almost tangible light. It flashed on the wings of an albatross that came gliding into the wind so close to the quarterdeck rail that it could very nearly be touched.

'There is our old friend,' said Stephen as the bird turned, heeling right over at ninety degrees and showing a gap in his right-wing primaries.

'Yes. He joined company just at daybreak. Lord, Stephen, such a sun-rise!'

'I am sure; and what a scene for the sun to rise upon! There are no less than six albatrosses and one giant petrel. Should we not tell Mr Fox and his secretary?'

'Oh, I sent to let them know and they came on deck for awhile; but I am sorry to say a flaw in the wind brought a packet of sea aboard. It soaked them through and through, and they are gone below to shift their clothing. I doubt we see them again.'

Stephen observed a discreet general smile from one end of the quarterdeck to the other - discreet but for one ship's boy with a bucket of tow and sawdust for the helmsmen's hands who uttered a great horse-laugh and fled - and once more he reflected that the envoy had not succeeded in conciliating the Dianes' good will in spite of his admitted virtues: he had never at any time complained when the ship was cleared for action at quarters, really cleared, for Jack Aubrey was one of the few captains who insisted on a clean sweep fore and aft, which meant that his and Fox's cabins vanished, their contents being struck down below; and he had shown keen interest in the great-gun exercise, cheering the successful shots with real enthusiasm. But the seaman's traditional disregard for the landlubber, his scorn and even contempt, was here unmodifled: possibly increased.

Cold it was, but he had known it colder south of the Horn; and presently the sun crept round the topsail, giving a perceptible warmth as well as the brilliance that transformed this blue sky and ocean into a perpetually renewed miracle. He watched the albatrosses as they glided effortlessly down the ship's side, crossed her wake, occasionally picking something from the surface, swept diagonally across the face of the advancing wave and so shot forward again at immense speed, breaking quarter of a mile ahead and turning to begin again. He stayed there entranced, sometimes beating his arms, sometimes exchanging a few words with the master, bell after bell, until the busy movement and the gathering of all the young gentlemen told him that the sun was about to cross the meridian and that those bearing quadrants or sextants were now going to take his height.

The ceremony followed its invariable course: Warren the master reported noon and 46°39'S to Richardson the officer of the watch; Richardson stepped aft from the bulwark, took off his hat and said, 'Noon and 46°39'S, if you please, sir,' his hair streaming forward in the wind.

'Make it twelve, Mr Richardson,' said Jack.

'Make it twelve, Mr Seymour,' said Richardson to the mate of the watch.

'Strike eight bells,' said Seymour to the quartermaster, who turned to the sentry at the cabin door and called out in a voice pitched to carry through the gale, 'Turn the glass and strike the bell.'

The Marine turned the half-hour glass, which he had been privately nudging from time to time to persuade the grains of sand to run faster, thus shortening his spell, and ran forward to the belfrey, helped by the wind. He struck the four double strokes and at the last Richardson said to Crown the bosun, 'Pipe to dinner.'

Now, from a silence as profound as the shriek of the wind in the rigging, the general omnipresent roar of the waters and the more immediate working of the ship would allow, there burst out a sound equal in volume to that of the lions in the Tower when about to be fed - loud coarse hoots of merriment, a rushing of feet to the mess-deck, a clashing of plates, kids and blackjacks on the hanging tables, and a bawling of mess-cooks waiting for their turn at the galley.

This Bedlam was so familiar to Jack Aubrey that it acted as an aperitif, the more so as for the earliest, hungriest years of his naval life he, as a young gentleman, had also dined at this hour. His stomach gave a slight premonitory heave; his mouth watered: but these signs were cut short, abolished, by a cry from the lookout, humanely encased in a straw-lined cask at the masthead: 'On deck there...' The rest of his words were lost until the ship subsided into the trough of the wave, and then they came down clear: 'Mountain of ice on the starboard bow.'

Jack borrowed Richardson's telescope. As the ship rose he searched the south-eastern sea, and when the Diane was near the height of the rise he caught the ice quite near: nearer than he had expected and very much larger, a lofty mass with two peaks radiant green in the sun towering above the surf that broke to such an astonishing height on the western side.

He studied it for a while, altered course, not indeed to close the iceberg but to come within a mile, and passed the glass to Stephen, who, having stared hard for the space of three great upward heaves, most reluctantly handed it back again. 'I must go,' he said. 'I promised Mr Macmillan to be with him at noon; I am already late, and we have a delicate little undertaking in hand.'

'I am sure you will succeed,' said Jack. 'But even if you are delayed, I trust we shall meet at dinner.'

The only guest in the cabin that day was Richardson, and in his company Jack did not scruple to speak of the ship and her affairs. 'I believe we must edge away, once we have had a good look at the ice island,' he said. 'Perhaps I am mistaken, but it does not seem to me old ice at all. It may have come from behind Kerguelen, which is no great way off, and it may have a good many followers. We are well inside the northern limit. You have heard the drift-ice, Stephen, I am sure?'

'Would it be that rap, rap, rap?'

'Ay. There it is again.'

'I noticed it in the forenoon and I supposed it was the cooper or the carpenter or both; but then it occurred to me that they would hardly be working at dinner-time unless the ship were almost sinking, God forbid.'

'No. It is drift-ice. Fortunately we managed to ship a bowgrace, and it is not thick stuff. But even so it will do our copper no good.'

'Kerguelen is what some people call Desolation Island, is it not, sir?' asked Richardson.

'So they do. But it is not our Desolation Island, which is smaller, farther south and east. And there is another in about fifty-eight south, to larboard just as you clear the Magellan Strait. I believe there are a good many places that have been called Desolation at one time or another, which is a pretty comment on a sailor's life. Not that our Desolation was so bad. I do wish you had been in the Leopard, Dick. Such fun we had, shipping a new rudder; and it was possible to make some capital observations - the prettiest triple fixing of our longitude by Jupiter's moons that you can imagine, each fix coinciding with the last and with a perfect lunar distance from Achernar.'

'And you would have been enchanted with the sea-elephants, leopard-seals, penguins, sheath-bills, blue-eyed shags, petrels and above all the splendid albatrosses on their nests. They were...' began Stephen, but he was interrupted by the changing of plates, the coming-in of the pudding, and he lost his thread.

'I fear this may be the last suet-pudding until we reach Batavia,' said Jack gravely. 'Killick tells me that the rats are grown outrageous bold in this freezing weather. So let us enjoy it while we may - damnably mouldy a hundred years hence.' A silence for the first slice of pudding, and then he said, 'But what I do not like about these ice-islands, quite apart from their sinking your ship under you, is that they seem to cause or at least to come before calms. When the poor old Leopard was stove we were in a fog, with scarcely enough air to stir the topgallantsails.'

After dinner they returned to the quarterdeck. The iceberg was now much nearer, and as the sun had moved westward its light was reflected from the many surfaces, showing not only the perfect green but also a broad band of that same pure light transparent aquamarine which Stephen remembered from the Leopard's unhappy encounter. A wonderfully beautiful object, and now much more easily observable: but one to be observed from a distance. The vast mass was unstable; when both the ship and the iceberg lay in the same hollow of the sea, the ice a mile away on the frigate's beam, the watchers saw one of the peaks, the size of a spired cathedral, lean and fall and shatter, its huge component parts crashing down the slope to join the great blocks and minor bergs nearby and sending up vast jets of white seawater as they did so.

Stephen was standing just on the gangway, where a convenient stanchion allowed him to rest his telescope. He was not on the holy quarterdeck; and since all those who had ever been his patients felt that on neutral ground they were entitled to speak to him he was not surprised to hear a deep rumbling West-Country voice close to his ear saying, 'There you are, sir: just on the quarter you may see what we calls a Quaker.' Stephen looked, and there, poised on the wind like its betters, was a small undistinguished shabby brown albatross, Diomedea fuliginosa. 'We calls him a Quaker because he is dressed modest.'

'A very good name too, Grimble,' said Stephen. 'And what do you call the other one?' - nodding towards a giant petrel just beyond.

'Some says bone-breaker, and some says albatross's mate, but most says Mother Cary's goose. Goose, sir: not chicken. Her chickens you could put a dozen in your pocket.' A pause, and in a lower tone, 'If I may make so bold, sir, how does our Arthur come along?'

Arthur Grimble was one of the syphilitic gummata cases:Stephen and Macmillan had operated to relieve the pressure on his brain. 'The next few days will tell,' said Stephen. 'He is in no pain now, and he may recover. But do not tell his friends to be very hopeful: it was a last resort. And if he goes, he goes easy.'

'No,' said Captain Aubrey to the master, a few feet away. 'I am afraid it is not possible.' He had been looking hungrily at the blocks of ice, all pure fresh water, floating no great way off, sometimes half a mile from the parent island.

'Not in this sea, sir,' said Warren. 'But was we to lie to for a while it would surely moderate. The surf on the island is a good third less than it was before dinner.'

Jack nodded. He looked at the oncoming waves: their tall crests were no longer being torn off so that flying water raced before them. 'Mr Bennett,' he said, 'jump up to the masthead with a glass and tell me what you see. Take your time and report to me below. Doctor, will you join me in a pot of coffee?'

They were at their second cup when Bennett knocked on the door. 'I am sorry to be so dishevelled, sir,' he said. 'I had made my hat fast with a piece of marline, but it absolutely parted - white Marline, too. I began right astern, sir, and made the sweep, but nothing did I see until one point on the starboard bow, where there was a mountain of ice, much the same size as this, about four leagues away; then three more smaller ones another point south. From the white water I thought there were some little islands after them, but I could not be sure of anything until I had come round to about due south, and there, stretching from the beam to the quarter, there were four, evenly spaced, three leagues off.'

'Thank you, Bennett,' said Jack. 'Have a cup of coffee to warm you.' And when he had gone, 'Alas, it will not do. I had hoped for a few more days of this glorious run. But it will not do. Although we are still too far west, I shall have to edge away. How I wish I had never spoken of calm: the wind has been dropping steadily ever since I said it.'

'Perhaps your unwilling mind had already perceived the signs but refused to acknowledge them. How often have I not said "Ha, it is six months since I had a cold", only to wake up the next day streaming and incapable of coherent speech?'

'What an unfailing source of cheer and encouragement you are, upon my word, Stephen. A true Job's muffler if ever there was one. And since you have now drained the pot I shall go on deck and change course. At least we shall be able to shake out a reef or two.'

A few minutes later Stephen heard pipes and the running of feet, cries of 'Belay, belay', and the frigate heeled as she brought the wind one point on her quarter, heading north-east.

The few movable objects in the cabin lurched across to starboard and Stephen, clinging to the arms of his chair, said, 'He may say what he pleases, but I am convinced the ship is travelling faster than ever: the water fairly shrieks along the side.'

Yet the next day the heel was less, though the Diane now had a fine spread of canvas abroad - indeed she had sent up her topgallantmasts in the hope of spreading more. It lessened progressively, strake by strake; and by the day young Grimble was buried the ship scarcely heeled at all.

Even so, for the convenience of his Tristan collections Stephen continued sleeping below, and on the Thursday after their meeting with the ice he walked into the gunroom for breakfast. 'Good morning, gentlemen,' he said, taking his place. 'Mr Elliott, may I trouble you for the pot?' And gazing about the table he added, 'I see we have come out in splendour once more,' for his eye had been caught, as it could scarcely have failed to be caught, by the mizenmast. In the Diane, as in almost all frigates, it was stepped on the lower deck, in the middle of the gunroom itself, the table being built round it; but in the Diane, and this was unique in Stephen's experience, some loving French hand had encased the mast with brass from the shining table-top to the beams, and had caused the brass to be covered with the best gold leaf. Ordinarily this glory was concealed by a sleeve, fitted to protect it from the lady of the gunroom, a very stupid, very obstinate, very deaf old man who always polished everything metal with a wire brush; and it blazed out only on Sundays or particular feasts.

'Yes,' said the purser. 'We killed our last pig the day before yesterday, and we have invited the Captain to dinner.'

Stephen was about to say that the Captain had a funeral service that morning, but reflecting upon the Navy's attitude towards death - in battle the mortally wounded were often thrown overboard - he did not. Instead he observed that the ship's progression now seemed charmingly smooth, 'with little or none of the wild bounding about we have endured these many, many days, and unless I mistake almost no heel at all. I set my cup down with little anxiety.'

'Not above a couple of strakes,' said Fielding. 'But then, Doctor, we are out of the forties, you know.'

The gunroom was of course quite right. Jack Aubrey had been present at too many of these occasions to be deeply affected by the burial of a hand he scarcely knew; yet as they always did the words of the service moved him - My soul fleeth unto the Lord: before the morning watch, I say, before the morning watch - and so did the earnest attention with which the ship's company followed them, and the grief of the dead man's friends. '... our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the deep,' he recited in his deep grave voice, and Arthur Grimble's messmates slid him gently over the side, sewed into his hammock, with four roundshot at his feet.

He was not deeply affected, and he enjoyed his roast pork with the gunroom; yet even so the ceremony had cast enough of a damp on his spirits to make the modest conviviality of these dinners something of an effort. After it, having drunk the usual toasts and returned proper thanks, he paced out his usual moderate-weather three miles on the windward side of the quarterdeck, two hundred and forty turns fore and aft. Moderate weather, for they had quite suddenly passed into a new world, a world of smooth seas and uncertain winds. And their passage had been unfortunate: the Diane had barely reached thirty-nine degrees before the failing remains of the western breeze veered into the north-east and headed her; and now there was this most unlucky omen. Furthermore he had the gravest doubts about Amsterdam Island. His charts all agreed in laying down its latitude as 37 47'S but they differed by well over a degree in longitude: most unhappily his two chronometers had also chosen this moment to disagree, and as the covered skies had not allowed him to make a lunar observation since they met the iceberg he was now obliged to steer for the mean of the recorded longitudes with the help of the mean of the times shown by the chronometers. This would never have been a satisfactory pursuit or one calculated to soothe an anxious mind, and now the breeze made it worse by obliging the Diane to sail close-hauled. She was a good honest sea-boat going large, but close-hauled she was heavy, slow, inclined to gripe, and unwilling to come up closer than six and a half points at the best.

'I cannot possibly afford to run down the latitude,' he said to Stephen that evening, 'but at least I derive some comfort from the fact that the island's peak can be seen from twenty-five leagues away. But it is of no great consequence.'

'I am sorry you should think it of no consequence,' said Stephen sadly.

'I mean from the point of view of water. We are not very short, and even if we do not have the usual downpours under Capricorn, it would only mean going on short allowance for a week or two, provided the south-east trades blow with even half their usual force. Yet if we can but hit upon the island, why, I should be very happy to put you ashore for an hour or two while the boats make a few voyages. You did say there was plenty of water, did you not?'

'Certainly I did. Péron, my castaway, fairly revelled in it. He admitted it was a little awkward to come at, but I cannot suppose naval ingenuity likely to be baffled by awkwardness; and I am not master of words to tell you, Jack, the value of an exceedingly remote island to a naturalist, an uninhabited fertile volcanic island covered with a luxuriant vegetation, with no vile rats, dogs, cats, goats, swine, introduced by fools to destroy an Eden, an island untouched; for although Péron spent some time on it, he scarcely left the shore.'

'Well, I could wish the weather were less thick; but we shall keep the sharpest look-out and reduce sail at night. I have little doubt we shall raise it on Tuesday or Wednesday.'

On Wednesday they did raise it. At first light they were within five miles of that unmistakable peak: a spectacularly successful landfall after five thousand miles of blue-water sailing, even without the uncertainties of chart and chronometer. But most unhappily they were directly to leeward, carried past in the darkness by a brisk westerly breeze and a powerful current setting east, in spite of close-reefed topsails and the keenest looking-out.

'We shall never fetch it, sir,' said the master. 'It is right in the wind's eye, and with this current we could ply all day and never get any nearer. I will make my affidavit it is laid down at least a degree too far west even in the Company's chart.'

'Have you checked your water again, Mr Warren?' asked Jack, leaning on the taffrail and gazing at the distant cone, as clear as could be in the dying breeze.

'Yes, sir. Even without rain under the tropic I reckon we should do without much short allowance; and whoever passed under the tropic line without a deluge?'

'How I shall ever tell the Doctor I do not know,' said Jack. 'He was so set upon it.'

'So he was, poor gentleman,' said the master, shaking his head. 'But haste commands all; and perhaps all these mollymawks and albatrosses will be some comfort to him. I never saw so many all together. There's a whale-bird. Two nellies; and a stink-pot.'

'Stephen,' said Jack, 'I am very sorry to tell you I have made a cock of your island. It lies astern, directly to windward of us. We cannot beat back with this breeze and current and if we were to lie to waiting for the wind to change we should lose days that we cannot afford to lose; we must pick up the south-east trades as soon as possible, if we are to reach Pulo Prabang with the tail of the monsoon.'

'Never grieve, soul,' said Stephen. 'We shall go there at our leisure in the Surprise once that Buonaparte has been knocked on the head. In the meantime I shall look at the master's birds: I should never have expected to see a stink-pot so far from the Cape.'

The Diane spread her royals for the first time since she reached this hemisphere and stood away to the north-east, studdingsails aloft and alow; but all day long the peak of Amsterdam Island remained in sight, a small cloud marking its top.

It had gone in the morning, however, and later in the day the sea-birds vanished with it. Jack, making his observations for Humboldt, noted so unusual a change of temperature at the surface and at ten fathoms that he checked his readings twice before calling them out to Butcher.

A new world: and now that they were thoroughly into it all the old pattern fell into place again; and the ship's routine, disrupted by the violent, perilous race eastward through sixty degrees of longitude, soon became the natural way of life once more, with its unvarying diet, the cleaning of decks before full daylight, the frequent call for sweepers throughout the day, the piping of all hands to witness punishment on Wednesdays (reprimand or deprivation of grog; no flogging so far in this ocean), the ritual washing of clothes and the hoisting of clothes-lines on Mondays and Fridays, quarters every weekday with a certain amount of live firing still, mustering by divisions on Sunday, followed sometimes by the reading of the Articles of War alone if the inspection had taken longer than usual, but more often by church. It was a comparatively easy life for those who were used to it, but literally and figuratively it was desperately slow: no more tearing along with everything on the point of carry away, the sea creaming along the side, filling the ship with a deep organ-noise, clear beneath the shriek of the harp-taut rigging, no more fifteen knots and better, with the reel almost snatched from the ship's boy's hand, no more of the wartime friendliness of shared excitement and danger. Now it was a matter of repairing or replacing everything that had been broken or strained, of painting, scouring and above all sailing the ship north-east in light and variable airs, often contrary, so that jibs and staysails called for perpetual attention; and even when they did reach the south-east trades they were found barely to deserve their name, either for strength or constancy.

Day after day they travelled slowly over a vast disk of sea, perpetually renewed; and when, as the Thane was approaching Capricorn at four knots, Captain Aubrey ended church with the words 'World without end, amen,' he might have been speaking of this present voyage: sea, sea, and then more sea, with no more beginning and no more end than the globe itself.

Yet this mild, apparently eternal sameness did leave time for things that had been laid aside or neglected. Jack and Stephen returned to their music, sometimes playing into the middle watch; Stephen's Malay increased upon him until he dreamt in the language; and as his duty required Jack resumed the improvement of his midshipmen in navigation, the finer aspects of astronomy and mathematics, seamanship of course, and in these both he and they were tolerably successful. Less so in their weakest points, general knowledge and literacy.

Speaking to young Fleming about his journal he said, 'Well, it is wrote quite pretty, but I am afraid your father would scarcely be pleased with the style.' Mr Fleming was an eminent natural philosopher, a fellow member of the Royal Society, renowned for the elegance of his prose. 'For example, I am not sure that me and my messmates overhauled the burton-tackle is grammar. However, we will leave that... What do you know about the last American war?'

'Not very much, sir, except that the French and Spaniards joined in and were finely served out for doing so.'

'Very true. Do you know how it began?'

'Yes, sir. It was about tea, which they did not choose to pay duty on. They called out No reproduction without copulation and tossed it into Boston harbour.'

Jack frowned, considered, and said, 'Well, in any event they accomplished little or nothing at sea, that bout.' He passed on to the necessary allowance for dip and refraction to be made in working lunars, matters with which he was deeply familiar; but as he tuned his fiddle that evening he said, 'Stephen, what was the Americans' cry in 1775?'

'No representation, no taxation.'

'Nothing about copulation?'

'Nothing at all. At that period the mass of Americans were in favour of copulation.'

'So it could not have been No reproduction without copulation?'

'Why, my dear, that is the old natural philosopher's watchword, as old as Aristotle, and quite erroneous. Do but consider how the hydra and her kind multiply without any sexual commerce of any sort. Leeuenhoek proved it long ago, but still the more obstinate repeat the cry, like so many parrots.'

'Well, be damned to taxation, in any case. Shall we attack the andante?'

Fox too resumed his earlier way of life. A murrain among his remaining livestock put an end to their dining to and fro, since he would not accept invitations that he could not return, but they still played a certain amount of whist and ever since the weather had turned fair, set fair, he made his appearance on the quarterdeck twice a day, walking up and down with his silent companion in the morning and often shooting against Stephen, now a fairly even match, in the afternoon, especially when the sea was smooth and the bottle could be made out a great way off; and he returned to his frequent medical consultations.

On the Friday after they passed under Capricorn, for example - passing, whatever the master might say, without a drop of rain, although purple-black clouds could be seen far in the west, with torrents pouring from them - he sent a ceremonious note asking whether he might impose upon Dr Maturin's good nature yet again that afternoon. Stephen had long since decided that if they were to remain on reasonably good terms and co-operate effectively in Pulo Prabang they must see little of one another in these conditions of close confinement; he was also convinced that Fox's complaint was no more than intellectual starvation and a now very great hunger for conversation at a certain level - he must have been an unusually sociable or at least gregarious man on shore. But, he reflected as he now sat in the sun on the aftermost carronade-slide with a book on his knee, he could not in decency refuse his professional advice.

Both Jack Aubrey and Fox were taking their exercise before dinner, Jack on the windward side of the quarterdeck and Fox and Edwards, who had learnt the sanctity of naval custom early in the voyage, on the other; and from his seat Stephen could survey them both. Once again his mind turned to the question of integrity, a virtue that he prized very highly in others, although there were times when he had painful doubts about his own; but on this occasion he was thinking about it less as a virtue than as a state, the condition of being whole; and it seemed to him that Jack was a fair example. He was as devoid of self-consciousness as a man could well be; and in all the years Stephen had known him, he had never seen him act a part.

Fox, on the other hand, occupied a more or less perpetual stage, playing the role of an important figure, an imposing man, and the possessor of uncommon parts. To be sure, he was at least to some extent all three; but he would rarely let it alone - he wished it to be acknowledged. There was nothing coarsely obvious or histrionic about this performance; he never, in the lower deck phrase, topped it the knob. Stephen thought the performance was by now almost wholly unconscious; but in a long voyage its continuity made it plain, and on occasion the envoy's reaction to a real or imaginary want of respect made it plainer still. Fox did not seek popularity, though he could be good company when he chose and he liked being liked; what he desired was superiority and the respect due to superiority, and for a man of his intelligence he did set about it with a surprising lack of skill. Many people, above all the foremast hands of the Diane, refused to be impressed.

The frigate carried no trumpeter, but she had a Marine with a fine lively drum, and upon this, the moment four bells had been struck, he beat Heart of Oak for the officers' dinner. All those who were at liberty to go below hurried off, leaving Jack almost alone; he had no guests that day, and he paced on and on, his hands behind his back, thinking deeply. At five bells - for Jack dined earlier than most captains - he started out of this reverie, caught Stephen's eye and said, 'Shall we go down? There is the last of the sheep called Agnes waiting for us.'

'She was also the last of the flock,' he observed as Killick took the bare bones away and Ahmed changed the plates. 'We shall be down to ship's provisions tomorrow, salt horse and soaked over the side at that, because we must cut the fresh water ration. None to be spared for the steep-tubs, none for the scuttle-butt, none for washing. I shall tell the hands; and I shall turn them up for dancing this evening by way of consolation.'

When they were alone with their coffee Stephen, after a long brooding pause, said, 'Do you remember I once said of Clonfert that for him truth was what he could make others believe?'

Lord Clonfert was an officer who had served in the squadron Jack commanded as commodore in the Mauritius campaign, a campaign that had been fatal to him. He was a man with little self-confidence and a lively imagination. Jack spent some moments calling him to mind, and then he said, 'Why yes, I believe I do.'

'I expressed myself badly. What I meant was that if he could induce others to believe what he said, then for him the statement acquired some degree of truth, a reflection of their belief that it was true; and this reflected truth might grow stronger with time and repetition until it became conviction, indistinguishable from ordinary factual truth, or very nearly so.'

This time there was in fact something wrong with Mr Fox. Stephen could not tell what it was, but he did not like either the look or the feel of his patient's belly, and since Fox was somewhat plethoric he decided to bleed and purge him. 'I shall put you on a course of physic and a low diet for a week, during which you must keep your cabin. Fortunately you have your quarter-gallery, your privy, just at hand,' he said. 'At the end of that time I shall examine you again, and I think we shall find all these gross humours dissipated, this turgid, palpable liver much reduced. In the meantime I will take a few ounces of your blood; pray let Ali hold the bowl.'

Ali held the bowl; the blood flowed, fifteen ounces of it; and Stephen was touched to see its surface dappled by the young man's silent tears.

For the first few days Fox was in serious discomfort, sometimes in considerable pain, for the rhubarb, hiera picra and calomel worked powerfully; but he bore it well, and on his brief visits Stephen was surprised to find the plain uncomplicated Fox he had known only when they were shooting from the taffrail and he was wholly taken up with pointing his beautifully-made weapon and watching for the strike of his bullet. Nor was he at all fretful with his attendants, as invalids, particularly liverish invalids, were so apt to be. But Stephen had noticed his kind treatment of Ali, Yusuf and Ahmed long before this: there was of course a particular relationship where Ali was concerned, yet it appeared to Stephen that the Malayan context might be of more importance. For one thing the language required a very nice discrimination of status, there being whole series of expressions for the various ranks to use to one another, and those towards the top of the hierarchy were constantly kept in mind of it. 'But quite apart from that,' he reflected, 'perhaps he would be more at his ease in Malaya. It is, after all, his native heath.'

Edwards, the secretary, was free much of the time during Fox's physicking, and it was pleasant to see how he blossomed. He grew much more closely acquainted with the officers; he often dined or supped in the gunroom, where he was thought a valuable addition; and during Stephen's visits to the envoy's cabin he could be heard laughing on the quarterdeck. But his freedom could not last. At the end of the week Stephen examined Fox, pronounced him well, and said that he might walk for half an hour on deck, but that his diet must still be moderate. 'No beef or mutton,' he said automatically.

'Beef or mutton? Good Heavens, I am not likely to overindulge in either. I should have had nothing at all but pap if Ali had not preserved some aged fowls; and what I shall do when they are gone, I cannot tell,'

'The ship's salt beef is not unpalatable,' Stephen observed.

'It is scarcely human diet, surely?'

'Two hundred of our shipmates live upon it.'

'The iron guts of harvesters,' said Fox with a smile. 'No doubt they would prefer it to caviar.'

Remarks of that kind always irritated Stephen, a revolutionary in his youth, above all when they were applied to the lower deck, whose qualities he knew better than most men. He was about to make a sharp reply but he thought better of it and kept his mouth tight shut. Fox went on, 'I wonder whether this voyage is ever going to end. Do you know where we are?'

'I do not. But I should not be surprised if we were within a hundred miles or so of land. For these last few days I have seen increasing numbers of boobies, and on Tuesday two Indiamen were reported from the masthead, sailing from west to east. And I am told that we have succeeded in catching the tail of the monsoon, weak though it be.'

'What a satisfaction. And yet, do you know, Maturin, after all these hours of lying here I have come to the conclusion that there is something not displeasing in this solitude, perpetual travelling, perpetual confinement, remoteness from all society, cares, activity... If reasonable food were forthcoming, I am by no means sure that I should wish it ever to come to an end. There is a great deal to be said for suspended animation.' He paused, staring at the bulkhead, and then he said, 'I wonder if you know the author of the lines I have ventured to translate

When the bells justle in the tower

The hollow night amid

Then on my tongue the taste is sour

Of all I ever did.'

From Fox's tone it was evident to Stephen that this was the preliminary to a confidence, a confidence prompted not by any high degree of friendship or esteem but by loneliness and a desire to talk. From the nature of the verse it was reasonably certain that the confidence would be of a somewhat scabrous nature, and Stephen did not wish to hear it. Restored to society, cares, activity and his usual environment, Fox would undoubtedly regret having made it; he would resent Stephen's knowledge of his intimate life, and that would make working together in Pulo Prabang far more difficult. Collaboration and indifference might agree; collaboration and resentment could scarcely do so. He said, 'I do not know the author. Can you remember the original?'

'I am afraid not.'

'It cannot be an ancient: the pagans, as far as my reading goes, were never much given to self-hatred or guilt about their sexual activities. That was reserved for Christians, with their particular sense of sin; and as "all I ever did" clearly refers to ill-doing, I must suppose it to be of a sexual nature, since a thief is not always stealing nor a murderer always murdering, whereas a man's sexual instincts are with him all the time, day and night. Yet it is curious to see how the self-hater often succeeds in retaining his self-esteem in relation to others, usually by means of a general denigration: he sees himself as a worthless creature, but his fellows as more worthless still.'

As a check to unwanted confidences this was effective, but Stephen had added the last words in another spirit, following his own reflection, and the effect was too harsh by far. He saw with regret that he had wounded Fox, who, with an artificial smile, said, 'Oh, I quite agree,' and went on to a very proper speech of thanks for Dr Maturin's great kindness in looking after him and for his great skill in curing a most disagreeable complaint. He was sorry to have been such an importunate nuisance.

'Where is the moral advantage now?' Stephen asked himself, walking along the half-deck to the companion-ladder. 'Heavy stupidity, incomprehension would have been much better.' He was just about to climb up it when a boy came hurtling down, took a great leap to avoid him, missed his footing and fell flat.

'Are you quite well, Mr Reade?' he asked, picking him up.

'Quite well, sir, thank you. I beg pardon for tumbling about, but the Captain sent me to tell you we have sighted Java Head. Java Head, sir! Ain't it prime?'