Master and Commander (Aubrey & Maturin, #1)

by Patrick O'Brian

THE MUSIC-ROOM in the Governor’s House at Port Mahon, a tall, handsome, pillared octagon, was filled with the triumphant first movement of Locatelli’s C major quartet. The players, Italians pinned against the far wall by rows and rows of little round gilt chairs, were playing with passionate conviction as they mounted towards the penultimate crescendo, towards the tremendous pause and the deep, liberating final chord. And on the little gilt chairs at least some of the audience were following the rise with an equal intensity: there were two in the third row, on the left-hand side; and they happened to be sitting next to one another. The listener farther to the left was a man of between twenty and thirty whose big form overflowed his seat, leaving only a streak of gilt wood to be seen here and there. He was wearing his best uniform – the white-lapelled blue coat, white waistcoat, breeches and stockings of a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, with the silver medal of the Nile in his buttonhole – and the deep white cuff of his gold-buttoned sleeve beat the time, while his bright blue eyes, staring from what would have been a pink-and-white face if it had not been so deeply tanned, gazed fixedly at the bow of the first violin. The high note came, the pause, the resolution; and with the resolution the sailor’s fist swept firmly down upon his knee. He leant back in his chair, extinguishing it entirely, sighed happily and turned towards his neighbour with a smile. The words ‘Very finel...

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Jack Aubrey looked out of the long, elegant windows into the night: Saturn was rising in the south-south-east, a glowing ball in the Minorcan sky.

Ah, Saturn.

Jack let his face return to its expression of cold dislike – the dying remnants of his artificial rapture were peculiarly disagreeable, as they faded – and in a low voice he said, ‘My name is Aubrey, sir: I am staying at the Crown.’ ‘Mine, sir, is Maturin. I am to be found any morning at Joselito’s coffee-house. May I beg you to stand aside?’

The Ten Duel Commandments.

And with the velvet softness of the April night, and the choir of nightingales in the orange-trees, and the host of stars hanging so low as almost to touch the palms.

O'Brian and his turn of phrase.

As the door closed behind him Jack saw the man in the black coat on the other side of the road, near the coffee-house. The evening flooded back into his mind and he hurried across, calling out, ‘Mr – Mr Maturin. Why, there you are, sir. I owe you a thousand apologies, I am afraid. I must have been a sad bore to you last night, and I hope you will forgive me. We sailors hear so little music – are so little used to genteel company – that we grow carried away. I beg your pardon.’ ‘My dear sir,’ cried the man in the black coat, with an odd flush rising in his dead-white face, ‘you had every reason to be carried away. I have never heard a better quartetto in my life – such unity, such fire. May I propose a cup of chocolate, or coffee? It would give me great pleasure.’

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May I trouble you for the salt?

A most famous quote.

‘It is true that for some time past I have taken more interest in the cryptogams than in my fellow-men; but even so, a ship must be a most instructive theatre for an inquiring mind.’

Master of espionage.

‘Your coffee’s up, sir,’ said the steward. ‘Thank you, Killick. What is it, Mr Lamb?’

Killick! Killick there!

‘Plenty of room all round – great-oceans of room, upon my word,’ he said, backing a step. In his haste to avoid being trodden down, the gunner’s mate behind him collided with his neighbour, who ran into his, setting off a chain-reaction in that crowded, roughly triangular space between the foremast and the stem that resulted in the maiming of one ship’s boy and very nearly in the watery death of another.

Chain reaction.

TWO BELLS IN the morning watch found the Sophie sailing steadily eastward along the thirty-ninth parallel with the wind just abaft her beam; she was heeling no more than two strakes under her topgallantsails, and she could have set her royals, if the amorphous heap of merchantmen under her lee had not determined to travel very slowly until full daylight, no doubt for fear of tripping over the lines of longitude.

I should be podcasr reading but I'd rather be sailing!

He turned to the rail, unencumbered by hammocks at this time of day, and looked at the merchantmen: they were all there, straggling over not too vast an area of sea; and what he had taken for a far stern lantern or an uncommonly big top-light was old Saturn, low on the horizon and tangled in their rigging. To windward now, and he saw a sleepy line of gulls, squabbling languidly over a ripple on the sea – sardines or anchovies or maybe those little spiny mackerel. The sound of the creaking blocks, the gently straining cordage and sailcloth, the angle of the living deck and the curved line of guns in front of him sent such a jet of happiness through his heart that he almost skipped where he stood.

Why I love O'Brian.

He looked over those miles of sea to windward – perfectly clear. Not a sail, not the slightest break on the tight line of the horizon. The topgallantsail above him was suddenly golden: then two points on the larboard bow, in the mounting blaze of light, the sun thrust up its blinding rim. For a prolonged moment Jack alone was sunlit, picked out: then the light reached the topsail, travelled down it, took in the peak of the boom mainsail and so reached the deck, flooding it from stem to stern. Tears welled up in his eyes, blurred his vision, overspilt, rolled down his cheeks: they did not use themselves up in lines upon his face but dropped, two, four, six, eight, round drops slanting away through the warm golden air to leeward.

Sunrise.

May I offer you a whet? Our seaman’s drink, that we call grog – are you acquainted with it? It goes down gratefully enough, at sea. Simpkin, bring us some grog. Damn that fellow – he is as slow as Beelzebub … Simpkin! Light along that grog. God rot the flaming son of a bitch. Ah, there you are. I needed that,’ he said, putting down his glass.

Grog.

It was a ham that could only have come from a hog with a long-borne crippling disease, the sort of ham that is reserved for officers who buy their own provisions; and only a man versed in morbid anatomy could have carved it handsomely. While Jack was struggling with his duties as a host and adjuring the steward ‘to clap on to its beakhead’ and ‘to look alive’, James turned to Stephen with a fellow-guest’s smile and said, ‘Is it not possible that I have already had the pleasure of being in your company, sir? In Dublin, or perhaps at Naas?’

Ham.

THE DRUM ROLLED and thundered at the Sophie’s hatchway. Feet came racing up from below, a desperate rushing sound that made even the tense drum-beat seem more urgent. But apart from the landmen’s in the new draft, the men’s faces were calm; for this was beating to quarters, an afternoon ritual that many of the crew had performed some two or three thousand times, each running to a particular place by one allotted gun or to a given set of ropes that he knew by heart.

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But as soon as the sun is up I must have off the top of his skull with my little saw. You will see the gunner’s brain, my dear sir,’ he added with a smile. ‘Or at least his dura mater.’

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It was the pig that saved this melancholy feast. Impelled by a trip on the part of the steward that coincided with a sudden lurch on the part of the Sophie, it left its dish at the door of the gun-room and shot into Mowett’s lap. In the subsequent roaring and hullaballoo everyone grew human again, remaining natural long enough for Jack to reach the point he had been looking forward to since the beginning of dinner.

Meals and music, as much the sea.

‘Let us say ten minutes to run from the cove to the tower, and …’ ‘Allow twenty, if you please,’ said Stephen. ‘You portly men of a sanguine complexion often die suddenly, from unconsidered exertion in the heat. Apoplexy – congestion.’ ‘I wish, I wish you would not say things like that, Doctor,’ said Jack, in a low tone: they all looked at Stephen with some reproach and Jack added, ‘Besides, I am not portly.’ ‘The captain has an uncommon genteel figgar,’ said Mr Marshall.

Genteel.

‘Well, it is somewhat clearer than the last,’ said Stephen. ‘Though I fancy invidious might answer better than insidious.’ ‘Invidious, of course. I knew there was something not quite shipshape there. Invidious. A capital word: I dare say you spell it with a V?’

Give your father my compliments and tell him my bankers are Hoares.’ For Jack, like most other captains, managed the youngsters’ parental allowance for them. ‘Hoares,’ he repeated absently once or twice, ‘my bankers are Hoares,’ and a strangled ugly crowing noise made him turn. Young Ricketts was clinging to the fall of the main burton-tackle in an attempt to control himself, but without much success. Jack’s cold glare chilled his mirth, however, and he was able to reply to ‘And you, Mr Ricketts, have you written to your parents recently?’ with an audible ‘No, sir’ that scarcely quavered at all.

‘To tell you the truth, sir, I was so astonished at our sheering off that I have scarcely had time to relish the joke.’ ‘Why,’ said Jack, smiling, ‘what would you have had us do? Ram her?’ ‘I was persuaded that we were about to attack,’ said James passionately. ‘I was persuaded that was your intention. I was delighted.’ ‘A fourteen-gun brig against a thirty-two-gun frigate? You are not speaking in earnest?’ ‘Certainly. When they were hoisting in their launch and half their people were busy in the rigging our broadside and small-arms would have cut them to pieces, and with this breeze we should have been aboard before they had recovered.’ ‘Oh, come now! And it would scarcely have been a very honourable stroke, either.’ ‘Perhaps I am no great judge of what is honourable, sir,’ said Dillon. ‘I speak as a mere fighting man.’

ON HIS KNEES, and with his chin level with the top of the table, Stephen watched the male mantis step cautiously towards the female mantis. She was a fine strapping green specimen, and she stood upright on her four back legs, her front pair dangling devoutly; from time to time a tremor caused her heavy body to oscillate over the thin suspending limbs, and each time the brown male shot back. He advanced lengthways, with his body parallel to the table-top, his long, toothed, predatory front legs stretching out tentatively and his antennae trained forwards: even in this strong light Stephen could see the curious inner glow of his big oval eyes. The female deliberately turned her head through forty-five degrees, as though looking at him. ‘Is this recognition?’ asked Stephen, raising his magnifying glass to detect some possible movement in her feelers. ‘Consent?’ The brown male certainly thought it was, and in three strides he was upon her; his legs gripped her wing-covers; his antennae found hers and began to stroke them. Apart from a vibratory, well-sprung quiver at the additional weight, she made no apparent response, no resistance; and in a little while the strong orthopterous copulation began. Stephen set his watch and noted down the time in a book, open upon the floor. Minutes passed. The male shifted his hold a little. The female moved her triangular head, pivoting it slightly from left to right. Through his glass Stephen could see her sideways jaws open and close; then ...

‘Dr Maturin, I am so glad you were able to come,’ cried Mrs Harte, turning towards the door. ‘I have a very learned lady to introduce you to.’ ‘Indeed, ma’am? I rejoice to hear it. Pray what is she learned in?’ ‘Oh, in everything,’ said Mrs Harte cheerfully; and this, indeed, seemed to be Laetitia’s opinion too, for she at once gave Stephen her views on the treatment of cancer and on the conduct of the Allies – prayer, love and Evangelism was the answer, in both cases. She was an odd, doll-like little creature with a wooden face, both shy and extremely self-satisfied, rather alarmingly young; she spoke slowly, with an odd writhing motion of her upper body, staring at her interlocutor’s stomach or elbow, so her exposition took some time. Her husband was a tall, moist-eyed, damp-handed man, with a meek, Evangelical expression, and knock-knees: had it not been for those knees he would have looked exactly like a butler. ‘If that man lives,’ reflected Stephen, as Laetitia prattled on about Plato, ‘he will become a miser: but it is more likely that he will hang himself. Costive; piles; flat feet.’

Mr Ellis was clearly very much at home in Captain Harte’s house, for without having to ask the way he walked to the sideboard, opened the lead-lined door and took out the chamber-pot, and looking over his shoulder he went on without a pause to state that fortunately the lower classes naturally looked up to gentlemen and loved them, in their humble way; only gentlemen were fit to be officers. God had ordered it so, he said, buttoning the flap of his breeches; and as he sat down again at the table he observed that he knew one house where the article was silver – solid silver. The family was a good thing: he would drink a toast to discipline. The rod was a good thing: he would drink a toast to the rod, in all its forms. Spare the rod and spoil the child – loveth, chastitheth.

‘The man whose name I forget, the money-man, was an eminently curious study,’ said Stephen. ‘Oh, him,’ said Jack, with an utter want of interest. ‘What do you expect, when a fellow sits thinking about money all day long? And they can never hold their wine, those sorts of people. Harte must be very much in his debt to have him in the house.’ ‘Oh, he was a dull ignorant superficial darting foolish prating creature in himself, to be sure, but I found him truly fascinating. The pure bourgeois in a state of social ferment. There was that typical costive, haemorrhoidal facies, the knock-knees, the drooping shoulders, the flat feet splayed out, the ill breath, the large staring eyes, the meek complacency; and, of course, you noticed that womanly insistence upon authority and beating once he was thoroughly drunk? I would wager that he is very nearly impotent: that would account for the woman’s restless garrulity, her desire for predominance, absurdly combined with those girlish ways, and her thinning hair – she will be bald in a year or so.’ ‘It might be just as well if everybody were impotent,’ said Jack sombrely. ‘It would save a world of trouble.’

A dark form drifted from the sombre cliff-face on the starboard beam – an enormous pointed wingspan: as ominous as fate. Stephen gave a swinish grunt, snatched the telescope from under Jack’s arm, elbowed him out of the way and squatted at the rail, resting the glass on it and focusing with great intensity. ‘A bearded vulture! It is a bearded vulture!’ he cried. ‘A young bearded vulture.’ ‘Well,’ said Jack instantly – not a second’s hesitation – ‘I dare say he forgot to shave this morning.’ His red face crinkled up, his eyes diminished to a bright blue slit and he slapped his thigh, bending in such a paroxysm of silent mirth, enjoyment and relish that for all the Sophie’s strict discipline the man at the wheel could not withstand the infection and burst out in a strangled ‘Hoo, hoo, hoo,’ instantly suppressed by the quartermaster at the con.

‘What nonsense you do talk, to be sure,’ said Stephen. ‘What “balls”, as you sea-officers say: it is a matter of common observation that a man may be sincerely attached to two women at once – to three, to four, to a very surprising number of women. However,’ he said, ‘no doubt you know more of these things than I. No: what I had in mind were those wider loyalties, those more general conflicts – the candid American, for example, before the issue became envenomed; the unimpassioned Jacobite in ‘45; Catholic priests in France today – Frenchmen of many complexions, in and out of France. So much pain; and the more honest the man the worse the pain. But there at least the conflict is direct: it seems to me that the greater mass of confusion and distress must arise from these less evident divergencies – the moral law, the civil, military, common laws, the code of honour, custom, the rules of practical life, of civility, of amorous conversation, gallantry, to say nothing of Christianity for those that practise it. All sometimes, indeed generally, at variance; none ever in an entirely harmonious relation to the rest; and a man is perpetually required to choose one rather than another, perhaps (in his particular case) its contrary. It is as though our strings were each tuned according to a completely separate system – it is as though the poor ass were surrounded by four and twenty mangers.’

‘Quickly, quickly,’ cried Jack, and his men urged the prisoners below, herded them fast, for they understood the danger as well as their captain. ‘Mr Day, Mr Watt, get a couple of their guns – those carronades – pointing down the hatchways. Load with canister – there’s plenty in the garlands aft. Where’s Mr Dillon? Pass the word for Mr Dillon.’ The word passed, and no answer came. He was lying there near the starboard gangway, where the most desperate fighting had been, a couple of steps from little Ellis. When Jack picked him up he thought he was only hurt; but turning him he saw the great wound in his heart.

Dillon's course was fixed from the start.

‘Present?’ cried Mercedes, taking it with a sparkling eye, nimbly undoing the silk, tissue-paper, jeweller’s cotton, and finding a pretty little diamond cross with a chain. She shrieked, kissed him, darted to the looking-glass, shrieked some more – eek, eek! – and came back with the stone flashing low on her neck. She pulled herself in below and puffed herself out above, like a pouter-pigeon, and lowered her bosom, the diamonds winking in the hollow, down towards him, saying, ‘You like him? You like him? You like him?’ Jack’s eyes grew less brotherly, oh far less brotherly, his glottis stiffened and his heart began to thump. ‘Oh, yes, I like him,’ he said, hoarsely. ‘Timely, sir, bosun of the Superb,’ said a tremendous voice at the opening door. ‘Oh, beg pardon, sir …’ ‘Not at all, Mr Timely,’ said Jack. ‘I am very happy to see you.’

Whoops.

He tucked the fiddle under his chin, tightening his mouth and raising his head as he did so: and the tightening of his mouth was enough to release a flood of emotion. His face reddened, his breath heaved deep, his eyes grew larger and, because of the extreme contraction of their pupils, bluer: his mouth tightened still further, and with it his right hand. Pupils contract symmetrically to a diameter of about a tenth part of an inch, noted Stephen on a corner of a page. There was a loud, decided crack, a melancholy confused twanging, and with a ludicrous expression of doubt and wonder and distress, Jack held out his violin, all dislocated and unnatural with its broken neck. ‘It snapped,’ he cried. ‘It snapped.’ He fitted the broken ends together with infinite care and held them in place. ‘I would not have had it happen for the world,’ he said in a low voice. ‘I have known this fiddle, man and boy, since I was breeched.’

In the bows of the Desaix there was a sudden movement, a response to an order. Jack stepped to the wheel, taking the spokes from the quartermaster’s hands and looking back over his left shoulder. He felt the life of the sloop under his fingers: and he saw the Desaix begin to yaw. She answered her helm as quickly as a cutter, and in three heartbeats there were her thirty-seven guns coming round to bear. Jack heaved strongly at the wheel. The broadside’s roar and the fall of the Sophie’s maintopgallantmast and foretopsail yard came almost together – in the thunder a hail of blocks, odd lengths of rope, splinters, the tremendous clang of a grape-shot striking the Sophie’s bell; and then a silence. The greater part of the seventy-four’s roundshot had passed a few yards ahead of her stem: the scattering grape-shot had utterly wrecked her sails and rigging – had cut them to pieces. The next broadside must destroy her entirely. ‘Clew up,’ called Jack, continuing the turn that brought the Sophie into the wind. ‘Bonden, strike the colours.’

End of the chase.

At length the whole of the combined fleet was under way: even their jury-rigged capture, the Hannibal, towed by the French frigate Indienne, was creeping out to the point. And now the shrill squealing fife and fiddle broke out aboard the Caesar as her people manned the capstan bars and began to warp her out of the mole, taut, trim and ready for war. A thundering cheer ran all along the crowded shore, from the batteries, walls and hillside black with spectators; and when it died away there was the garrison band playing Come cheer up my lads, ’tis to glory we steer as loud as ever they could go, while the Caesar’s marines answered with Britons strike home. Through the cacophony the fife could still be heard: it was most poignantly moving.

‘Oh,’ cried Stephen. But what he had to say was never heard, for away on the horizon towards Tangiers there was a flash flash-flash, not unlike the repeated dart of lightning. They leapt to their feet and cupped their ears to the wind to catch the distant roar; but the wind was too strong and presently they sat down again, fixing the western sea with their telescopes. They could distinctly make out two sources, between twenty and twenty-five miles away, scarcely any distance apart – not above a degree: then three: then a fourth and fifth, and then a growing redness that did not move. ‘There is a ship on fire,’ said Jack in horror, his heart pumping so hard that he could scarcely keep the steady deep-red glow in his object-glass. ‘I hope to God it is not one of ours. I hope to God they drown the magazines.’ An enormous flash lit the sky, dazzled them, put out the stars; and nearly two minutes later the vast solemn long rumbling boom of explosion reached them, prolonged by its own echo off the African shore.

"There is a ship on fire."