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j’ai pris mon bien là où je l’ai trouvé, and within a context of general historical accuracy I have changed names, places and minor events to suit my tale.
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.
As familiar to me as Tolkien. These words are a welcome home…
The order and its form had a strangely powerful effect: with as much certainty as though it had been a direct revelation, Jack knew that the men were wholly with him; and for a fleeting moment a voice told him that he had better be right, or he would never enjoy this unlimited confidence again.
Jack felt obscurely hurt, and after he had talked for a while (a dry, constrained interchange, it seemed to him; so very polite) he went up on deck again.
Citoyen Durand
Marguerite Durand? Suffragette and leading French feminist, politician, writer, journalist and publisher. She had a pet lion.
The scene of childbirth is a good gateway into the character heart of the book.
Anglo-Irish Coloniser family who opposed emancipation and hated the people. Father was nicknamed ‘the King of Ireland’ for the power he wielded and the son was a sadistic torturer.
Even then I no longer cared for any cause or any theory of government on earth; I would not have lifted a finger for any nation’s independence, fancied or real; and yet I had to reason with as much ardour as though I were filled with the same enthusiasm as in the first days of the Revolution, when we were all overflowing with virtue and love.’
I have had such a sickening of men in masses, and of causes, that I would not cross this room to reform parliament or prevent the union or to bring about the millennium. I speak only for myself, mind – it is my own truth alone – but man as part of a movement or a crowd is indifferent to me. He is inhuman. And I have nothing to do with nations, or nationalism. The only feelings I have – for what they are – are for men as individuals; my loyalties, such as they may be, are to private persons alone.’
patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile.’
Capt. Decatur (idiot but effective captain from the US Barbary campaign)
Lampooned by Chesterton : my country right or wrong, is something no patriotic would think of saying…like saying ‘my mother, drunk or sober.’
Croppies lie down
A song about ‘Croppies’ - rebels who had been tortured with boiling pitch poured on their heads and then ripped off (tar-cropped) who invariably died of shock (lie down)
am. I would not call him a gremial friend – I have not known him long enough – but I am very much attached to him. I am sorry that you are not.’
A lap friend
Or is it merely non amo te, Sabidi?’
Martial (Roman poet) and later nursery rhyme - I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
‘My heart bleeds for you. I have never yet known a man admit that he was either rich or asleep: perhaps the poor man and the wakeful man have some great moral advantage.
hortus siccus
Dried plants?
Yes - hortus siccus ( hort iculture/ desiccation siccus)
Dried herbs
Merriment, roaring high spirits before this: then some chance concatenation, or some hidden predilection (or rather inherent bias) working through, and the man is in the road he cannot leave but must go on, making it deeper and deeper (a groove, or channel), until he is lost in his mere character – persona – no longer human, but an accretion of qualities belonging to this character.
It is odd – will I say heart-breaking? – how cheerfulness goes: gaiety of mind, natural free-springing joy. Authority is its great enemy – the assumption of authority. I know few men over fifty that seem to me entirely human: virtually none who has long exercised authority.
What woman, political cause, disappointment, wound, disease, untoward child, defeat, what strange surprising accident will take it all away?
I am concerned for James Dillon: he is as mercurial as ever he was – more so – only now it is all ten octaves lower down and in a darker key; and sometimes I am afraid in a black humour he will do himself a mischief.
What if Emmet persuades the French to invade again?
1803 Robert Emmett
‘Who am I,’ he thought, ‘to affirm that the gay young ape is not merely the chrysalis, as it were, the pupa of the grim old solitary?
Malpolon monspessulanus
It is also the only snake that predates on the female of its own species
Barney, Barney, buck or doe, Has kept me out of Channel Row,’
The madhouse song from late 1700’s Dublin
John Brennan (Dublin physician, ahem), duellist, wrestler and satirical writer (so, my kinda guy). Completely mad - would wrestle all comers and break their legs, then offer to fix them for a fee.
In favour of Catholic Emancipation and wrote this song about a petition to London to ask for Catholic Emancipation
Barney Barney, Buck or Doe/ Who shall with the petition go? - satirical and edgy
This little rhyme was wildly popular and he received a pension from the GOVERNMENT (DublinCastle) of £200 per annum for how good his roast song was.
O his deathbed had gone mad, kept repeating the phrase - “B B buck or doe, has kept me from the Channel Row.”
His mum had died in the Channel Row debtors house, and so his satirical song kept him from that fate
Wow
- O’Brien brings research to a new level…
it looked happily into his face while he carried it away.
Stephen has an lámh bog (soft hand) with animals - I adore him
Señor Martinez’ patio
The Brits had commandeered the house
‘I am very happy to see you here, sir,’ said Mrs Harte, instantly prepared to dislike him very much indeed.
‘Happy,’ said Captain Harte, disliking him already, but for an entirely opposite reason, looking over Stephen’s head and holding out two fingers, only a little way in front of his sagging belly. Stephen looked deliberately at them, left them dangling there and silently moved his head in a bow whose civil insolence so exactly matched his welcome that Molly Harte said to herself, ‘I shall like that man.’
for the tide was flow...
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Jack told them, in an uninhibited wealth of sea-jargon, exactly how each chase had behaved. They listened silently, with keen attention, nodding their heads at certain points and partially closing their eyes; and Stephen observed to himself that at some levels complete communication between men was possible.
The rest of them are certainly coming ashore – they are lining the rail in their shore-going rig, with money in their pockets, their eyes staring out of their heads and their pricks a yard long.’
Fortunately she was moored with simple warps fore and aft, so there would be no slow weighing of anchors, no stamp and go at the capstan, no acid shrieking of the fiddle; in any case, the comparatively sober members of the crew were too jaded for anything but a sour, mute, expeditious casting-off – no jolly tars, no hearts of oak, no Britons never, never, in this grey stench of a crapulous dawn.
An air of surly virtue
Hangover guilt
‘You can write decently, I suppose? Otherwise you must go to school to the clerk.’ They hoped so, sir, they were sure; they should do their best. But he did not seem convinced and desired them to sit down on that locker, take those pens and these sheets of paper, to pass him yonder book, which would answer admirably for them to be read to out of from.
A lane instantly formed in front of Stephen, and he passed through with smiling faces and kind looks on either side of him; he noticed some of the men whose backs he had oiled earlier that morning looked remarkably cheerful, particularly Edwards, for he, being black, had a smile that flashed far whiter in the gloom; attentive hands tweaked a bench out of his way, and a ship’s boy was slewed violently round on his axis and desired ‘not to turn his back on the Doctor – where were his fucking manners?’ Kind creatures; such good-natured faces; but they were killing Cheslin.
‘He was a sin-eater.’ ‘Christ.’ ‘You have spilt your port.’ ‘Will you tell me about him?’ asked James, mopping at the stream of wine. ‘Why, it was much the same as with us. When a man died Cheslin would be sent for; there would be a piece of bread on the dead man’s breast; he would eat it, taking the sins upon himself. Then they would push a silver piece into his hand and thrust him out of the house, spitting on him and throwing stones as he ran away.’
‘You want to have him seized up at the gangway and given a hundred lashes, Doctor,’ called the purser from the cabin where he was casting his accounts.
We used to save a good many by touching them up with a horse-whip in the mornings. But it would be no kindness to preserve that chap, Doctor: the people would only smother him or scrag him or shove him overboard in the end.
‘I conceive he was tired of being a white crow,’
‘A remora!’ cried Stephen with all the amazement and delight the Greek and Jack had counted upon, and more. ‘A bucket, there! Be gentle with the remora, good Sponge, honest Sponge. Oh, what happiness to see the true remora!’
For a moment Stephen felt inclined to argue, to appeal to their common sense, to point to the nine-inch fish, to the exiguity of its fins; but he was too wise, and too happy, to yield to this temptation, and he jealously carried the bucket down to his cabin, to commune with the remora in peace.
But Jack had no notion of this whatsoever – he had always attributed Mr Marshall’s painstaking, scrupulous navigation and his zeal as an executive officer to natural goodness, to his nautical character;
‘Thank you, sir, thank you very much. But you know what a sad waste music is on me – pearls before swine.’
‘Well. You do not find this sense of constant hurry oppressive – jading?’ ‘Lord, no. It is as much part of our life as salt pork – even more so in tide-flow waters. Anything can happen, in five minutes’ time, at sea – ha, ha, you should hear Lord Nelson! In this case of gunnery, a single broadside can bring down a mast and so win a fight; and there’s no telling, from one hour to the next, when we may have to fire it. There is no telling, at sea.’
How profoundly true. An all-seeing eye, an eye that could pierce the darkness, would have beheld the track of the Spanish frigate Cacafuego running down to Carthagena, a track that certainly would have cut the Sophie’s if the sloop had not lingered a quarter of an hour to dowse her lighted casks; but as it was the Cacafuego passed silently a mile and a half to the westward of the Sophie, and neither caught sight of the other. The same eye would have seen a good many other vessels in the neighbourhood of Cape Nao for, as Jack knew very well, everything coming up from Almeria, Alicante or Malaga
...more
I WISH I had the balls to add a different POV in a cinematic way like this
Indeed, this awareness of Jack’s state of tension was general throughout the brig. ‘Goldilocks is in a rare old taking about the Doctor,’ they said. ‘Watch out for squalls.’
The undercurrents, acceptance and respect towards the captain’s relationship is notable here. The men know how much the Dr means to Jack (we’ll see how much they mean to them soon)and this fact is a ‘truth’of the ship almost immediately. This emotional awareness and the huggamugga life means the men HAVE to develop emotional sensitivities just to know what’s going on. Emotion is treated like a force to be respected, which I think we miss a bit now.
But Goldilocks was not the only one to be anxious, by any manner of means, and when Stephen Maturin was at last seen to walk out of the trees and cross the beach to meet the jolly-boat, a general exclamation of ‘There he is!’ broke out from waist to fo’c’sle, in defiance of good discipline: ‘Huzzay!’
They love him. Eeeeeee.
‘How are you, my dear sir? Come and breakfast directly – I have held it back on purpose. How do you find yourself? Tolerably spry, I hope? Tolerably spry?’
who indeed looked somewhat less cadaverous, flushed as he was with pleasure at the open friendliness of his welcome.
He needs to be in friendships. His own nature can often be his own island and he is seemingly surprised by how uncomplicated the emotions are
THEME: The Seaman as proto-civilised /Atavistic
‘The identity I am thinking of is something that hovers between a man and the rest of the world: a mid-point between his view of himself and theirs of him – for each, of course, affects the other continually.
A reciprocal fluxion, sir. There is nothing absolute about this identity of mine. Were you, you personally, to spend some days in Spain at present you would find yours change, you know, because of the general opinion there that you are a false harsh brutal murdering villain, an odious man.’
‘I dare say they are vexed,’ said Jack, smiling. ‘And I dare say they call me Beelzebub. But that don’t make me Beelzebu...
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