Desolation Island (Aubrey & Maturin #5)

by Patrick O'Brian

But Grant was a dead weight. His service had been limited to transports, harbour duties, and exploration, and through no fault of his own he had never been in battle; he was a good navigator, but he could not know the inward nature of a fight at sea: nor did he seem willing to learn. It was as though he did not really believe in the possibility of action or the need for anything but formal preparation for it; and his attitude, his tolerably obvious attitude, infected many of those whose idea of battle was as hazy as his own – a general smoke and thunder at close quarters, with the Royal Navy winning as a matter of course. After one or two private interviews with Grant which did not succeed in shaking the older man’s obstinate self-complacency, in spite of his perfectly correct ‘Yes, sir’ at every pregnant pause, Jack wrote him down as just one more burden to be borne, by no means inconsiderable, but far less important than the herd of landsmen on the lower deck; and he carried on with the task of turning the Leopard into a fighting-machine as efficient as his means would allow, entirely changing his methods, suiting them to his strange little crew and, as he put it himself, ‘cutting his coat according to his cloth.’