Read Online The Mauritius Command by Patrick O’Brian - Free Book Online Page B

pause that followed he refilled their glasses and went on, "But thank God this happened early: it could not have fallen better. The raw hands are over their sea-sickness; they are all pleased with themselves, poor honest lubbers; and every foremast Jack is richer by a year's pay, all won in a sunny morning. They must be made to understand that by teaching them their duty we are putting them in the way of getting more. They will attend now, with a good heart; no need for rattans and the rope's end. By the time we reach the Cape, gentlemen, I trust that every man and boy on the ship's books will at least be able to pull an oar, hand and reef a sail, load, point and fire a musket and a gun: and if they can learn no more than that, and to be obedient to command, why, we shall be in a fair way to meet any French frigate on the far side of it."
    With the lieutenants gone, Jack considered for a while. He had no doubt that they were entirely with him; they were the sort of men he knew and liked; but there was still a great deal to be done. With their help he might make the Boadicea into a most lethal floating battery of tremendous power; but still she had to be brought to the scene of action, brought as rapidly as the elements would allow. He sent for the master and the bosun, and to them he stated that he was not satisfied with the frigate's sailing, either in the article of speed or in that of lying close to the wind.
    There followed a highly technical conference in which he encountered steady resistance from Buchan, the master, an elderly man set in his ways, who would not admit that any restowing of the hold, any attempt to bring her by the head, would have the least favourable effect. Slow she had always been and slow she always would be: he had always stowed the hold in exactly the same way, ever since he had been in her. The bosun, on the other hand, a young man for his important office, a seaman through and through, brought up in the North Sea colliers, was as eager as his captain to get the best out of the Boadicea, even if it meant trying something new. He spoke feelingly on the good effect of cat-harpins, well-sniftered in; he entirely agreed with the plan for raking the foremast; Jack's heart warmed to him.
    At least a part of Mr Buchan's sullenness arose from hunger. The gunroom dined at one o'clock, an hour now long past; and although today dinner would have been indifferent in any case, its absence rendered the master positively morose. The bosun had dined at noon together with the carpenter and the gunner, and Buchan, smelling both food and grog upon him, hated his cheerful face; even more his steady flow of talk.
    Jack too was somewhat given to worshipping his belly, and when he had dismissed them he walked into the coach: here he found Stephen and Mr Farquhar, eating cake. "Do I interrupt you?" he asked: not at all, they said, clearing a space for him among the books, documents, maps, proclamations and broadsheets that they were trying to reassemble after the abrupt disappearance and reappearance of their quarters. "I hope I see you well, sir?" he said to Mr Farquhar, who had suffered more than most in the Bay of Biscay and who had spent much of the time since rising from his cot in conference with Dr Maturin, the two of them deep in papers, talking foreign to the intense vexation of their servants, two ship's boys told off to look after them, who liked to indulge their natural curiosity--a curiosity much stimulated by their shipmates before the mast, eager to know what was afoot. Farquhar had lost a stone, and his lean, intelligent, hook-nosed face still had a greenish tinge, but he replied that he had never felt better in his life, that the tremendous din of battle, the more than Jovian thunder of the guns, had completed the work--with a civil bow to Stephen--of Dr Maturin's preternatural physic, so that he felt like a boy again; he had a boy's appetite, a restless eagerness to be at table. "But," he went on, "you