"Master and Commander"

[fiefoe]

Narrator Patrick Tull did a tremendous job with Patrick O'Brian's story, and allowed me to power through all those sea jargons. 

• // Even an uncommonly warm and industrious imagination could scarcely produce the frail shape of Commodore Nelson leaping from his battered seventy-four-gun Captain through the quarter-gallery window of the eighty-gun San Nicolas, taking her, and hurrying on across her deck to board the towering San Josef of a hundred and twelve guns, so that ‘on the deck of a Spanish first-rate, extravagant as the story may seem, did I receive the swords of the vanquished Spaniards;
• As it could not for the moment find any outward expression, his anger took on the form of melancholy: he thought of his shipless state, of half and whole promises made to him and broken, and of the many schemes he had built up on visionary foundations. He owed his prize-agent, his man of business, a hundred and twenty pounds; and its interest of fifteen per cent was about to fall due; and his pay was five pounds twelve shillings a month.
• a tall midshipman, stiff with the sense of occasion and the rigour of his starched, frilled shirt,
• he did not respond with anything more than a mechanical jocosity and a vague dart at her bosom.
• * For an icy second the bottom of the new world that had sprung into immensely detailed life seemed to be about to drop out as his eyes focused upon the unlucky date. He held the letter up to the light, and there, as firm, comforting and immovable as the rock of Gibraltar, he saw the Admiralty's watermark, the eminently respectable anchor of hope.
     He was unable to keep still. Pacing briskly up and down the room he put on his coat, threw it off again and uttered a series of disconnected remarks, chuckling as he did so. 'There I was, worrying . . . ha, ha . . . such a neat little brig—know her well . . . ha, ha . . . should have thought myself the happiest of men with the command of the sheer-hulk, or the Vulture slop-ship . . . any ship at all . . . admirable copperplate hand—singular fine paper . . . almost the only quarterdeck brig in the service: charming cabin, no doubt capital weather—so warm . .
• even before he opened his eyes he was brimming with the knowledge of his promotion.
• The first thing he did in point of fact was to cross the road to the naval outfitter's and pledge his now elastic credit to the extent of a noble, heavy, massive epaulette, the mark of his present rank
• * (Hoopoes/epaulette:) 'Indeed?' said Maturin with a civil inclination of his head. 'A decoration, a badge of rank, I make no doubt? A most elegant ornament, so it is, upon my soul. But, my dear sir, have you not forgot the other one?' <> 'Well,' said Jack, laughing, 'I dare say I shall put them both on, by and by. Now I will wish you a good day and thank you for the excellent chocolate. I am so happy that you saw your epop.'
• by immemorial custom a captain changing ships might take his coxswain and boat's crew as well as certain followers; and if he were not very closely watched he might commit enormities in stretching the definition of either class. <> 'I can let you have a chaplain,' said the commandant, turning the knife in the wound.
• '—a most gallant, deserving officer, a thorough-paced Tory, General Aubrey's son, and he is being most abominably used . . .'
• He had been familiar with this nightmare of manning since his earliest days in the Navy, and his first serious wound had been inflicted by a woman in Deal with a flat-iron who thought her man should not be pressed;
• To his left lay the merchantmen: scores and, indeed, hundreds of feluccas, tartans, xebecs, pinks, polacres, polacre-settees, houarios and barca-longas—all the Mediterranean rigs and plenty from the northern seas as well—bean-cods, cats, herring-busses.
• * if you have no one else in mind for your clerk, you would infinitely oblige . . .' The agent's smile came and went, came and went: he was not used to be on the asking side in a favour, not with sea officers, and he found the possibility of a refusal wonderfully unpleasant.
• they saw me through the West Indies in the last war, when we lost two-thirds of the larboard watch in ten days from the yellow jack. They preserved me from that, sir, to say nothing of scurvy, and sciatica, and rheumatism, and the bloody flux; but they are of no use, we are told. Well, they may say what they please, these jumped-up young fellows from the Surgeons' Hall with the ink scarcely dry on their warrants, but I put my faith on Ward's drop.'
• 'I don't know what you think about this buggery lark, sir; but I think it's unnatural.' <> 'Why, there is something in what you say, Mr Baldick,' said Jack. Then, feeling the weight of interrogation still upon him, he added, 'I don't like it—not my line at all. But I must confess I don't like to see a man hanged for it. The ship's boys, I suppose?'
• * a vessel ready for inspection, holding her breath in case any of her beautifully trim rigging with its geometrically perfect fakes and perpendicular falls should be disturbed. She bore as much resemblance to her ordinary self as the rigid bosun, sweating in a uniform coat that must have been shaped with an adze, did to the same man in his shirt-sleeves, puddening the topsail yard in a heavy swell; yet there was an essential relationship, and the snowy sweep of the deck, the painful brilliance of the two brass quarter-deck four-pounders, the precision of the cylinders in the cable-tier and the parade-ground neatness of the galley's pots and tubs all had a meaning... He was blind to the things he was not meant to see—the piece of ham that an officious fo'c'sle cat dragged from behind a bucket, the girls the master's mates had hidden in the sail-room and who would keep peeping out from behind mounds of canvas.
• the Sophie had something archaic about her, as though she would rather have her bottom hobnailed than coppered, and would rather pay her sides than paint them. Her crew, without being at all elderly—indeed, most of the hands were in their twenties—had an old-fashioned look; some were wearing petticoat-breeches and shoes, a rig that had already grown uncommon when he was a midshipman
• * he realized the nature of this feeling. He was no longer one of 'us': he was 'they'. Indeed, he was the immediately-present incarnation of 'them'. In his tour of the brig he had been surrounded with deference—a respect different in kind from that accorded to a lieutenant, different in kind from that accorded to a fellow human-being: it had surrounded him like a glass bell, quite shutting him off from the ship's company;
• * I did come to a tolerable acquaintance with the birds—a very rich country in raptores, sir—and the reptiles; but the insects, apart from the lepidoptera, and the plants—what deserts of gross sterile brutish ignorance! ... it is true that Minorca is not the mainland, but then, on the other hand, so great an area of calcareous rock has its particular flora, and all that flows from that interesting state.'
• 'Surgeons are excellent fellows,' said Stephen Maturin with a touch of acerbity. 'And where should we be without them, God forbid: and, indeed, the skill and dispatch and dexterity with which Mr Florey at the hospital here everted Mr Browne's eparterial bronchus would have amazed and delighted you. But I have not the honour of counting myself among them, sir. I am a physician.'
• Oh, you refer to the swearing-in. No. That applies only to lieutenants—you go to the Admiralty and they read you a piece about allegiance and supremacy and utterly renouncing the Pope; you feel very solemn and say 'to this I swear' and the chap at the high desk says 'and that will be half a guinea', which does rather take away from the effect, you know. But it is only commissioned officers—medical men are appointed by a warrant.
• but there is the chance of prize-money, and I believe there are certain perquisites, such as Queen Anne's Gift, and something for every man with the pox. It is stopped out of their pay.'
• If the immortal Linnaeus could traverse five thousand miles of Lapland, living upon twenty-five pounds, surely I can . . .
• 'Certainly,' said Stephen. 'For a philosopher, a student of human nature, what could be better? The subjects of his inquiry shut up together, unable to escape his gaze, their passions heightened by the dangers of war, the hazards of their calling, their isolation from women and their curious, but uniform, diet. And by the glow of patriotic fervour, no doubt.'—with a bow to Jack—'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.'
• Think what a famous thing that would be for the ship's company!' <> 'Indeed it would, sir. They were right upset when Mr Jackson went off to the Pallas, and to replace him with a physician would be a great stroke. There's one aboard the flagship and one at Gibraltar, but not another in the whole fleet,
• Even a small vessel (and the Sophie barely exceeded a hundred and fifty tons) needs a wonderful amount of stores: casks of beef, pork and butter all numbered and signed for, puncheons, butts and half-pieces of rum, hard-tack by the ton from Old Weevil, dried soup with the broad arrow upon it, quite apart from the gunner's powder (mealed, corned and best patent), sponges, worms, matches, priming-irons, wads and shot—bar, chain, case, langrage, grape or plain round—and the countless objects needed (and so very often embezzled) by the bosun—the blocks, the long-tackle
• He takes great care of the King's stores: nothing is ever wasted: he pays his bottom with his own slush: he worms his cables deep with twice-laid stuff and serves and parcels them so there is never any fretting in the hawse anywhere: he cares for his sails far more than for his own skin, and he never sets his royals—nasty, unnecessary, flash, gimcrack things. And the result is promotion, Mr Aubrey; for we make our report to the Admiralty,
• 'Well,' said she, with untiring patience. 'Try to remember what a cotangent is, and let us begin again. Let us consider the ship as an oblong box . . .'
• at almost the same time the sun popped up from behind St. Philip's fort—it did, in fact, pop up, flattened like a sideways lemon in the morning haze and drawing its bottom free of the land with a distinct jerk.
• 'Christe eleison. Kyrie . . .' This was less piety in James Dillon than a way of hoping he should not cut himself; for like so many Papists he was somewhat given to blasphemy.
• two others had that indefinable air of men of some parts whose cleverness sets them apart from their fellows, but not nearly so far as they imagine.
• *  The three-watch system was a humane arrangement that allowed the men to sleep a whole night through from time to time, whereas with two watches four hours was the most they could ever hope for; but on the other hand it did mean that half the men had the whole of the available space to sling their hammocks, since the other half was on deck... fourteen inches was the space the regulations allowed for each hammock:
• 'There are some slack-arsed, bloody-minded men—flute-playing, fiddle-scraping, present-seeking, tale-bearing, double-poxed hounds that would keep you waiting about for a month; but I am not one of them.
• 'Sheet home. Sheet home. Hoist away. Cheerly there, in the foretop, look alive. T'garns'l sheets. Hands to the braces. Belay.' <> A gentle push from above heeled the Sophie over, then another and another, each more delightfully urgent until it was one steady thrust; she was under way, and all along her side there sang a run of living water... as for the mere landsmen, their eyes were so satiated with the coming and going of every kind of vessel that they passed over her departure with glassy indifference.
• He walked up through the town with his mind in a curious state; he had suffered so many disappointments recently that it did not seem possible he could bear another. What was more, he had allowed all his defences to disperse—unarm. It was while he was reassembling them and calling out his reserves
• * his hands strong on the spokes, so he came into direct contact with the living essence of the sloop: the vibration beneath his palm, something between a sound and a flow, came straight up from her rudder, and it joined with the innumerable rhythms, the creak and humming of her hull and rigging
• The guns were not a success. Even with only half a cartridge the bow-chaser recoiled so strongly that at the third discharge the carpenter came running up on deck, so pale and perturbed that all discipline went by the board. 'Don't ee do it, sir!' he cried, covering the touch-hole with his hand. 'If you could but see her poor knees—and the spirketting started in five separate places, oh dear, oh dear.' The poor man hurried to the ring-bolts of the breeching. 'There. I knew it. My clench is half drawn in this poor thin old stuff... there really was not room to work the ship with the two twelve-pounders and their tackle filling so much of what little space there was. But he was bitterly disappointed
• 'Now that is what I call a real spar,' said Mr Lamb, peering lovingly over the side at the yard. 'Never a knot, never a curl: a French spar I dare say: forty-three foot as clean as a whistle. You'll spread a mainsail as a mainsail on that, sir.'
• when first he used to go up he had been so small that he could easily sit on the middle crosstree with his legs dangling, lean forward on his arms folded over the after tree and go to sleep, firmly wedged in spite of the wild gyrations of his seat.... But even so, this was a comfortable height. Eighty-seven feet less the depth of the kelson—say seventy-five. That gave him a horizon of ten or eleven miles.
• pandemonium, that is, to the waking Stephen Maturin, who now for the first time in his life heard the unnatural wailing, the strange arbitrary intervals of the bosun and his mates piping 'Up all hammocks'.
• the boys and the idlers—the people who merely worked all day—heaved at the chain-pumps to clear the night's water out of the bilges,
• * 'It's these old beams, sir'—in the unusually distinct, didactic voice used at sea for landmen and on land for half-wits—'You want to take care of them; for—they—are—very—low.'
• 'The masts need support, then?'..   'Lord, sir, they'd roll themselves overboard, else. The shrouds support them sideways, and the backstays—these here, sir—backwards.'
• 'A man cannot lie in fourteen inches.' <> 'No, sir, not very comfortably. But he can in eight and twenty; for, do you see, in a two-watch ship at any one time about half the men are on deck for their watch, which leaves all their places free.'
• One of my very best friends—you would not believe how kind—was so upset when her mother married one that she took to mathematics and Hebrew directly—aleph, beth—though she was the prettiest girl for miles around—taught me navigation—splendid headpiece, bless her.
• for having committed the unnatural Crime of Sodomy on a Goat... Oh, what an infernal bore—witnesses going over to the flagship by the dozen, days lost . . . The Sophie a laughing-stock. Why will they report these things? The goat must be slaughtered—that's but fair—and it shall be served out to the mess that informed on him.' <>  'Could you not set them both ashore—on separate shores, if you have strong feelings on the moral issue—and sail quietly away?'...    'Goat's milk, sir?' 'Why, I suppose it is.'  'Perhaps without milk, then, if you please.
• 'But he is the master . . .' said Jack. If Stephen had called the Sophie's stem her stern, or her truck her keel, he would have understood the situation directly; but that Stephen should confuse the chain of command, the relative status of a captain and a master, of a commissioned officer and a warrant officer, so subverted the natural order, so undermined the sempiternal universe, that for a moment his mind could hardly encompass it. Yet Jack, though no great scholar, no judge of a hexameter, was tolerably quick,
• As the firing came aft gun by gun, so Jack's melancholy increased. One and three had not been unlucky bands of boobies: this was the Sophie's true average rate of fire. Archaic. Antediluvian.
• a continuous smile showed a gleam across the lively scarlet of his face. Something of the same change had come over the Sophie; with her big new square mainsail and her topsails immensely broadened by the studdingsails at either side of them she, like her master and commander, seemed to have doubled in size as she tore heavily through the sea.
• The Algerine was leading him on—could, in fact, run away at any moment. Why? To draw him far to the leeward of the cat, that was why: together with the real possibility of dismasting him, raking him at leisure (being independent of the wind) and making a prize of the Sophie as well. To draw him to the leeward of the convoy, too, so that the sail to windward might snap up half a dozen of them.
• just before the Sophie reached the middle of her downward roll he cried 'Fire!' and the Sophie's broadside went off as crisply as a ship of the line's, together with every musket aboard.
• Bounty: then the midshipmen, the inferior warrant officers and the marine sergeant another eighth, while the rest of the ship's company shared the remaining quarter. And it was wonderful to see how briskly minds not given to abstract thought rattled these figures, these symbols, up and down, coming out with the acting yeoman of the sheets' share correct to the nearest farthing.
• 'You know Dr Johnson—Dictionary Johnson?' <> 'Certainly,' cried Stephen, looking strange. 'The most respectable, the most amiable of the moderns. I disagree with all he says, except when he speaks of Ireland, yet I honour him; and for his life of Savage I love him.
• Conic sections and the Pentateuch came as easy as kiss my hand to her. Dear Queeney. I thought she was to be an old maid, though she was so pretty; for how could any man make up to a girl that knows Hebrew?
• * he is amazingly ancient—grey-haired, rising sixty, I dare say. Do you think, as a physician—I mean, is it possible . . .?'...  'Possibile è la cosa, e naturale,' sang Stephen in a harsh, creaking tone, quite unlike his speaking voice, which was not disagreeable. 'E se Susanna vuol, possibilissima,' discordantly, but near enough to Figaro to be recognized.
• 'Are you very much attached to money?' asked Stephen. <> 'I love it passionately,' said Jack, with truth ringing clear in his voice. 'I have always been poor, and I long to be rich.'
• * It is a false description... 'But the naval mind fairly revels in it, so it does... 
    'Why, now, a sloop, as you know, is properly a one-masted vessel, with a fore-and-aft rig. But in the Navy a sloop may be ship-rigged—she may have three masts.'
     'Or take the Sophie,' cried the master, anxious to bring his crumb of comfort. 'She's rightly a brig, you know, Doctor, with her two masts.' He held up two fingers, in case a landman might not fully comprehend so great a number. 'But the minute Captain Aubrey sets foot in her, why, she too becomes a sloop; for a brig is a lieutenant's command.'
     'Or take me,' said Jack. 'I am called captain, but really I am only a master and commander.'
• kindly explained to the landmen that this long swell from the south and east, this strange sticky heat that came both from the sky and the glassy surface of the heaving sea, and this horribly threatening appearance of the sun, meant that there was to be a coming dissolution of all natural bonds, an apocalyptic upheaval, a right dirty night ahead.
• 'I remember the fact of extreme, prostrating terror,' he said, keeping his eye on the tiny bird, 'but the inward nature of the emotion now escapes me.'...  'It is not unlike the case of a woman in childbirth,' went on Stephen, moving to the taffrail to keep the petrel in view and speaking rather more loudly. The man at the wheel and the quartermaster looked hastily away from one another: this was terrible—anybody might hear. The Sophie's surgeon, the opener (in broad daylight and upon the entranced maindeck) of the gunner's brainpan—Lazarus Day, as he was called now—was much prized, but there was no telling how far he might go in impropriety.
• What was he to do now? He wanted to think: He wanted to think there on deck, in the closest possible touch with the situation—with the shifting wind on his face, the glow of the binnacles just at hand and not the least interruption. And this the conventions and the discipline of the service allowed him to do. The blessed inviolability of a captain (so ludicrous at times, such a temptation to silly pomp) wrapped him about, and his mind could run free.
• but whether or no, she would presently be making all sail, close-hauled for Agde or Cette, crossing the Sophie's wake and relying on her lateen's power of lying nearer to run her clear to windward and so to safety before daylight. If this was so the Sophie must tack directly and work to windward under an easy sail: that should bring the polacre under her lee at first light; for it was likely that they would rely on their fore and mizzen alone—even in the chase they had been favouring their wounded mainmast.
• *    'Thank you, sir, thank you,' said the captain, his eyes brimming over again. 'I beg you to take a little something—to make yourselves quite at home.' <> This they did, sitting each in a comfortable chair and eating away at the hill of cakes laid up against young hasty's christening in Agde next week; they sat there easily enough, and next door the poor young woman slept at last, her husband holding her hand and her crinkled pink baby snorting at her bosom.
• 'Emancipation and reform. I for one had no notion of any republic; nor had my friends of the Committee, of course. With Ireland in her present state a republic would quickly become something little better than a democracy. The genius of the country is quite opposed to a republic. A Catholic republic! How ludicrous.'
• * And now, with what I saw in '98, on both sides, the wicked folly and the wicked brute cruelty, 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.'... But you know as well as I, 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.'
• 'Terrible? I cannot, by any possible energy of words, express to you the blundering, the delay, the murderous confusion and the stupidity of it all. It accomplished nothing; it delayed independence for a hundred years; it sowed hatred and violence; it spawned out a vile race of informers and things like Major Sirr. And, incidentally, it made us the prey of any chance blackmailing informer.'
• He can be a very agreeable companion, of course, but there are times when he shows that particular beefy arrogant English insensibility
• * 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. James Dillon was a delightful being. Now he is closing in. 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.
• Malpolon monspessulanus is a very innocent serpent. I think of carrying a dozen aboard, for the rats—ah, if only I had more time, and if it were not for this foolish, illiberal persecution of reptiles . . . What a pitiful figure you do cut upon that chair, to be sure.
• * 'But the fact is true. We do have a physician aboard—an amazing hand with a saw or a clyster.' Jack gazed about him in a very benevolent fashion. 'He was with me not a pint or so ago. Opened our gunner's skull, roused out his brains, set them to rights, stuffed them back in again—I could not bear to look, I assure you, gentlemen—bade the armourer take a crown piece, hammer it out thin into a little dome, do you see, or basin, and so clapped it on, screwed it down and sewed up his scalp as neatly as a sailmaker.
• * but he was flogged, for all that, in great squalor, weeping and roaring most pitifully, as the flustered Bell laid into him hard and fast, to get it over quickly. <> 'How utterly barbarous this would seem to a spectator that was not habituated to it,' reflected Stephen. 'And how little it matters to those that are.
• they agreed that they were not there to amuse themselves, nor for their manly beauty, but rather to learn their professions; that their journals (which they fetched) were neither accurate, full, nor up to date, and that the ship's cat would have written them better; that they would for the future pay the greatest attention to Mr Marshall's observation and reckoning; that they would prick the chart daily with him; and that no man was fit to pass for a lieutenant, let alone bear any command ('May God forgive me,' said Jack, in an internal aside) who could not instantly tell the position of his ship to within a minute—nay, to within thirty seconds.
• 'The quarter-deck of a man-of-war may justly be considered as a national school for the instruction of a numerous portion of our youth; there it is that they acquire a habit of discipline and become instructed in all the interesting minutiae of the service. Punctuality, cleanliness, diligence and dispatch are regularly inculcated, and such a habit of sobriety and even of self-denial acquired, that cannot fail to prove highly useful. By learning to obey, they are also taught how to command.
• * 'He was a sin-eater.'... 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.'.. But it seems that the seamen look upon it in a more awful light than other people. He let it out and they all turned against him immediately.
• * They will abide a great deal, sailors, but not a Jonah. It's like a white crow—the others peck him to death. Or an albatross. You catch an albatross—it's easy, with a line—and paint a red cross on his bosom, and the others will tear him to pieces before the glass is turned.
• The Greek held the corroded copper sheet out a little farther and, watching Stephen's face intently, he turned it slowly over. On the other side there, was a small dark fish with a sucker on the back of its head, clinging fast to the metal. <>  'A remora!' cried Stephen with all the amazement and delight the Greek and Jack had counted upon, and more... 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
• It was curious to see this burly fellow—a hard-faced, formidable man—moved by a feeling that called for a gentle, graceful outlet; and more than one of the hands exchanged a knowing glance with a shipmate. 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;
• 'No dead? No wounded?' cried Jack, his heart leaping up. <> 'No, no, no. Now my asp—' He had brought it aboard in its spirits of wine; and at some point in very recent time a criminal hand had taken the jar, drunk up all the alcohol and left the asp dry, stranded, parched. 
• In times of stress Jack Aubrey had two main reactions: he either became aggressive or he became amorous; he longed either for the violent catharsis of action or for that of making love. He loved a battle: he loved a wench.
• *   '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.'
• they went into the subject of swimming quite exhaustively—its rarity among seamen, its advantages (the preservation of life: the pleasure to be derived from it, in suitable climates: the carrying of a line ashore in an emergency), its disadvantages (the prolongation of death-agonies in shipwreck, in falling overboard unseen: flying in the face of nature—had God meant men to swim, etc.), the curious inability of young seals to swim, ...  'The only right way to swim,' said the purser for the seventh time, 'is to join your hands like you were saying your prayers'—he narrowed his eyes, joined his hands very exactly—'and shoot them out so—' This time he did strike the bottle, which plunged violently into the solomongundy and thence, deep in thick gravy, into Marshall's lap.
• 'No,' said the officer, crossing himself. 'No, no. Keep off, or we shall fire into you. Keep out to sea—the sea will cure them. God be with you, poor people. And a happy voyage to you.' He could be seen ordering the bowman to throw the boathook into the sea, and the launch pulled back fast to the bright-red xebec....   'Cacafuego,' came the answer over the widening lane of sea. 'A happy voyage.'
• * 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. .. then there was a blur of movements so rapid that for all his care and extreme attention he could not follow them, and the male's head was off, clamped there, a detached lemon, under the crook of her green praying arms. She bit into it, and the eye's glow went out; on her back the headless male continued to copulate rather more strongly than before
• Jack had cut off the rest of his hair when they came into port and had bought this wig to cover his cropped poll, but there was nothing to hide his burnt face which, moreover, had caught the sun in spite of Stephen Maturin s medicated grease, or the tumefaction of his battered brow and eye, which had now reached the yellow stage, with a blue outer ring, so that his left hand aspect was not unlike that of the great West African mandrill.
• * he dived after it, and in the hooded tent below he beheld four and twenty legs, six belonging to the table and eighteen to his temporary messmates. Miss Wade had kicked off her shoes: the woman opposite him had dropped a little screwed-up handkerchief: Colonel Pitt's gleaming military boot lay pressed upon Mrs Harte's right foot, and upon her left—quite a distance from the right—reposed Jack's scarcely less massive buckled shoe.
• 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?
• * 'O joy. I wonder you did not cry out with delight the moment you saw me. What an indulgent admiral—pater classis—O how I value that worthy man!'
     'Why, 'tis no more than a straight run up and down the Mediterranean, about six hundred leagues each way, with precious little chance of seeing a prize either coming or going.'
     'I did not think you could have been such an earthling,' cried Stephen. 'For shame. Alexandria is classic ground.'
• The Homeric sea (if not the Homeric land); the pelican; the great white shark the seamen so obligingly fished up; the holothurians; euspongia mollissima (the same that Achilles stuffed his helmet with, saith Poggius);
• * Stephen could remember an evening when he had sat there in the warm, deepening twilight, watching the sea; it had barely a ruffle on its surface, and yet the Sophie picked up enough moving air with her topgallants to draw a long straight whispering furrow across the water, a line brilliant with unearthly phosphorescence, visible for quarter of a mile behind her. Days and nights of unbelievable purity. Nights when the steady Ionian breeze rounded the square mainsail—not a brace to be touched, watch relieving watch—and he and Jack on deck, sawing away, sawing away, lost in their music, until the falling dew untuned their strings. And days when the perfection of dawn was so great, the emptiness so entire, that men were almost afraid to speak.
•  'I want you to go on to the raft and light each lantern the very moment the same one on board is put out.'
     'Aye aye, sir. Light as put out.'
     'Take this darky and clap a line round your middle.'
     It was a tricky operation, with the sea running and the sloop throwing the water about; and there was always the possibility of some busy fellow with a glass aboard the Dédaigneuse picking out a figure acting strangely abaft the Sophie's stern;...
  The raft went far astern and he felt the Sophie give a skip as she was relieved of its drag. It was a creditable imitation of her lights, although it did bob about too much; and the bosun had rigged a criss-cross of old rope to simulate the casement.
• 'My God, it is prime to be at sea again. Don't you feel like a badger in a barrel, on shore?'
• *  '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,'...
  'There are times,' said James quietly, 'when I understand your partiality for your friend. He derives a greater pleasure from a smaller stream of wit than any man I have ever known.'
• 'Look for yourself. And why is there no rogue's yarn in it, Mr Ricketts? Because it never come off of the King's yard, that's why: Mr Screw-penny Bleeding Commissioner Brown never set eyes on it. Which Goldilocks bought it out of his own pocket, as likewise the paint you're a-sitting on.
• They are strangely immature for men of their age and their position: though, indeed, it is to be supposed that if they were not, they would not be here—the mature, the ponderate mind does not embark itself upon a man-of-war—is not to be found wandering about the face of the ocean in quest of violence. For all his sensibility (and he played his transcription of Deh vieni with a truly exquisite delicacy, just before we reached Ciudadela), JA is in many ways more suited to be a pirate chief in the Caribbean a hundred years ago: and for all his acumen JD is in danger of becoming an enthusiast
• 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.
• But even if it had been a model of naval eloquence it would still have been utterly inadequate, as every sea-officer reading it would know. For example, it spoke of the engagement as something isolated in time, coolly observed, reasonably fought and clearly remembered, whereas almost everything of real importance was before or after the blaze of fighting; and even in that he could scarcely tell what came first. As to the period after the victory, he was unable to recapture the sequence at all, without the log: it was all a dull blur of incessant labour and extreme anxiety and weariness. Three hundred angry men to be held down by two dozen, who also had to bring the six-hundred-ton prize to Minorca through an ugly sea and some cursed winds; almost all the sloop's standing and running rigging to be set up anew, masts to be fished, yards shifted, fresh sails bent,
• The sound that woke him in the middle watch: a low cry mounting by quarter tones or less and increasing in volume to a howling shriek, then a quick series of spoken or chanted words, the mounting cry again and the shriek—the Irish men of the crew waking James Dillon, stretched there with a cross in his hands and lanterns at his head and his feet.
• *  'This must be what they call the vapours,' he said, trying to define something happy, tremulous, poignant, churchlike and not far from tears in his heart and bosom.
• 'It is a wound, if you wish,' said Stephen. 'But not from our battle with the Cacafuego. Some lady of your acquaintance has been too liberal with her favours, too universally kind.'
     'Oh, Lord,' cried Jack, to whom this had never happened before.
     'Never mind,' said Stephen, touched by Jack's horror. 'We shall soon have you on your feet again: taken early, there is no great problem. It will do you no harm to keep close, drink nothing but demulcent barley-water and eat gruel, thin gruel—no beef or mutton, no wine or spirits.
• Ever since Stephen Maturin had grown rich with their first prize he had constantly laid in great quantities of asafetida, castoreum and other substances, to make his medicines more revolting in taste, smell and texture than any others in the fleet; and he found it answered—his hardy patients knew with their entire beings that they were being physicked.
• 'Welcome aboard, sir,' cried Jack, who was in such charity with the present shining world that he could feel pleased to see even this ill-conditioned face, it being familiar. 'I believe this is the first time we have had the honour.' <> Captain Harte saluted the quarter-deck with a sketchy motion towards his hat and stared with elaborate disgust at the grubby sideboys,
• will be full of this fancied irregularity about the Cacafuego's command, this quibble over the officer's status. Ugly hints and delay. That is why there was nothing in the Gazette. No promotion, either: that Admiralty wrapper only held his own orders, in case I should insist upon having them in writing.'
     'Sure, his motive is obvious to a child. He hopes to provoke you into an outburst. He hopes you will disobey and ruin your career. I do beg you will not be blinded with anger.'
     'Oh, I shan't play the fool,' said Jack, with a somewhat dogged smile.
• I believe Amelia is going to cheer us.' <> Jack came blinking on deck as the first cheer roared out, a shattering wave of sound at twenty-five yards' range. Then came the Amelia's bosun's pipe and the next cheer, as precisely timed as her own broadside: and the third. He and his officers stood rigidly with their hats off, and as soon as the last roar had died away over the harbour, echoing back and forth, he called out, 'Three cheers for the Amelia!' and the Sophies, though deep in the working of the sloop, responded like heroes, scarlet with pleasure and the energy needed for huzzaying proper—huge energy, for they knew what was manners.
• Hours, days, weeks, years, centuries. Once there was an ominous clangour high overhead—flamingoes on their way to the Mar Menor, or maybe as far as the marshes of the Guadaiquivir: but for the most part it was featureless darkness, almost a denial of time.
• a common look of anxious, almost frightened concern, waiting for the roll: it came, and they gently urged their gleaming, highly-polished gun overboard—their pretty number fourteen over the side. Its splash coincided exactly with the fountain thrown up not ten yards away by a ball from the Desaix's bow-chaser, and the next gun went overboard with less ceremony... Fourteen splashes at half a ton apiece; then the heavy carriages over the rail after them, leaving the slashed breeching and the unhooked tackles on either side of the gaping ports—a desolation to be seen.
• with the help of the slight following sea her lightness and her liveliness, why, she might live to see Gibraltar yet She was so light now—a cockleshell—she might outrun them before the wind, and with any luck, turning briskly, she would gain a mile before the line-of-battle ships
• the hurried broadside lashed the sea where the sloop had been rather than where she was: the Desaix's more deliberate offering was hampered by the fear of ricochets skipping as far as the admiral, and only half a dozen of her balls did any harm—the rest fell short. <> The Sophie was through the line, not too badly mauled—
• What splendidly cut sails, he reflected, and at the same time the answer to his question came: 'By God, he's going to riddle us with grape.' That was why he had silently closed the range. Jack moved to the side; leaning over the hammock-netting he dropped his packets into the sea and saw them sink.
•  'Now,' said Stephen Maturin, 'let us take our pulses again.'
     'That pilgrim from the English sloop is mad,' the surgeon's servant told the second cook. 'Mad, twisted, tormented. And ours is not much better.'
     'I will not say it is conclusive,' said Dr Ramis. 'But it is wonderfully interesting. We must try the addition of harsh reproachful words, cruel flings and bitter taunts, but without any physical motion, which could account for part of the increase. You intend it as a proof per contra of what you advance, I take it? Reversed, inverted, or arsy-versy, as you say in English. Most interesting.'
• 'I imagine so,' said Dr Ramis. 'For example, I myself have had the honour of being your prisoner no less than four times. That,' he said with a smile, 'is one of the reasons why we are so very happy to have you with us. It does not happen quite as often as we could wish.
• I say, it would be a charitable act to prescribe me something in the poppy or mandragora line. I was strangely upset today, I must confess, and I need what is it? The knitting up of ravelled care?
• As the Caesar passed under the stern of the Audacious she hoisted Sir James's flag once more and immediately afterwards heaved out the signal weigh and prepare for battle. The execution of this was perhaps the most beautiful naval manoeuvre Jack had ever seen: they had all been waiting for the signal, they were all waiting and ready with their cables up and down; and in an unbelievably short space of time the anchors were catted and the masts and yards broke out in tall white pyramids of sail as the squadron, five ships of the line, two frigates, a sloop and a brig, moved out of the lee of the Rock and formed in line ahead on the larboard tack.