The Reverse of the Medal. Patrick O’Brian

See how he cracks on! He will certainly run straight on to the Needham’s Point reef. He cannot possibly avoid it.’

      This seemed to be the general opinion aboard the flagship, and talk died away entirely, to revive some minutes later in laughter and applause as the Surprise, racing towards destruction under a great spread of canvas, put her helm alee, hauled on an unseen spring leading from her larboard cathead to the towline, and spun about like a cutter.

      ‘I have not seen that caper since I was a boy,’ said the Admiral, thumping the rail with pleasure. ‘Very prettily done. Though you have to be damned sure of your ship and your men to venture upon it, by God. Determined fellow: now he will come in easily on this leg. I am sure he is bringing a prize. Did you smoke the spring to his larboard cathead? Good afternoon to you, ma’am,’ – this to Mrs Goole, whose husband had abandoned her for a hundred fathoms of decayed cablet – ‘Did you smoke the spring to his larboard cathead? Richardson will explain it to you,’ he said, making his rheumatic way down the steps to the quarterdeck.

      ‘Well, ma’am,’ said Richardson with a shy, particularly winning smile, ‘it was not altogether unlike clubhauling, with the inertia of the tow taking the place of the pull of the lee-anchor...’

      The manoeuvre was particularly appreciated by the watch below, plying spyglasses at the open gunports, and as the Surprise ran in on her last leg they exchanged tales about her – her extraordinary speed if handled right and her awkwardness if handled wrong – and about her present skipper. For with all his faults Jack Aubrey was one of the better-known fighting captains, and although few of the men had been shipmates with him many had friends who had been engaged in one or another of his actions. William Harris’s cousin had served with him in his first and perhaps most spectacular battle, when, commanding a squat little fourteen-gun sloop, he boarded and took the Spanish Cacafuego of thirty-two, and now Harris told the tale again, with even greater relish than usual, the captain in question being visible to them all, a yellow-haired figure, tall and clear on his quarterdeck, just abaft the wheel.

      ‘There’s my brother Barret,’ said Robert Bonden, sail-maker’s mate, at another gunport. ‘Has been Captain Aubrey’s coxswain this many a year. Thinks the world of him, though uncommon taut, and no women allowed.’

      ‘There’s Joe Noakes, bringing the red-hot poker for the salute,’ said a coal-black seaman, having grasped the spyglass. ‘He owes me two dollars and an almost new shore-going Jersey shirt, embroidered with the letter P.’

      The smoke of the frigate’s last saluting gun had hardly died away before her captain’s gig splashed down and began pulling for the flagship in fine style. But half way across the roadstead the gig met the flotilla of bumboats bringing sixpenny whores out to the Surprise: it was a usual though not invariable practice – one that most captains liked on the grounds that it pleased the hands and kept them from sodomy, though others forbade it as bringing the pox and great quantities of illicit spirits aboard, which meant an endless sick-list, fighting, and drunken crime. Jack Aubrey was one of these. In general he loved tradition, but he thought discipline suffered too much from wholesale whoredom on board; and although he took no high moral stand on the matter he thoroughly disliked the sight of the brawling promiscuity of the lower deck of a newly-anchored man-of-war with some hundreds of men and women copulating, some in more or less screened hammocks, some in corners or behind guns, but most quite openly asprawl. His strong voice could now be heard, coming against the breeze, and the Irresistibles grinned.

      ‘He’s telling the bumboats to go and—themselves,’ said Harris.

      ‘Yes, but it’s cruel hard for a young foremast jack as has been longing for it watch after watch,’ observed Bonden, a goatish man, quite unlike his brother.

      ‘Never you fret your heart about the young foremast jack, Bob Bonden,’ said Harris. ‘He will get what he wants as soon as he goes ashore. And at any rate he knew he was shipping with a taut skipper.’

      ‘The taut skipper is going to get a surprise,’ said Reuben Wilks, the lady of the gunroom, and he laughed, deeply though kindly amused.

      ‘Along of the black parson?’ said Bonden.

      ‘The black parson will bring him up with a round turn, ha, ha,’ said Wilks; and another man said, ‘Well, well, we are all human,’ in the same tolerant, amiable tone. ‘We all have our little misfortunes.’

      ‘So that is Captain Aubrey,’ said Mrs Goole, looking across the water. ‘I had no idea he was so big. Pray, Mr Richardson, why is he calling out? Why is he sending the boats back?’ The lady’s parents had only recently married her to Captain Goole; they had told her that she would have a pension of ninety pounds a year if he was knocked on the head, but otherwise she knew very little about the Navy; and, having come out to the West Indies in a merchantman, nothing at all about this naval custom, for merchantmen had no time for such extravagances.

      ‘Why, ma’am,’ said Richardson, with a blush, ‘because they are filled with – how shall I put it? With ladies of pleasure.’

      ‘But there are hundreds of them.’

      ‘Yes, ma’am. There are usually one or two for every man.’

      ‘Dear me,’ said Mrs Goole, considering. ‘And so Captain Aubrey disapproves of them. Is he very rigid and severe?’

      ‘Well, he thinks they are bad for discipline; and he disapproves of them for the midshipmen, particularly for the squeakers – I mean the little fellows.’

      ‘Do you mean that these – that these creatures could be allowed to corrupt mere boys?’ cried Mrs Goole. ‘Boys that their families have placed under the captain’s particular care?’

      ‘I believe it sometimes happens, ma’am,’ said Richardson; and when Mrs Goole said ‘I am sure Captain Goole would never allow it,’ he returned no more than a civil, noncommittal bow.

      ‘So that is the fire-eating Captain Aubrey,’ said Mr Waters, the flagship’s surgeon, standing at the lee-rail of the quarterdeck with the Admiral’s secretary. ‘Well, I am glad to have seen him. But to tell you the truth I had rather see his medico.’

      ‘Dr Maturin?’

      ‘Yes, sir. Dr Stephen Maturin, whose book on the diseases of seamen I showed you. I have a case that troubles me exceedingly, and I should like his opinion. You do not see him in the boat, I suppose?’

      ‘I am not acquainted with the gentleman,’ said Mr Stone, ‘but I know he is much given to natural philosophy, and conceivably that is he, leaning over the back of the boat, with his face almost touching the water. I too should like to meet him.’

      They both levelled their glasses, focusing them upon a small spare man on the far side of the coxswain. He had been called to order by his captain and now he was sitting up, settling his scrub wig on his head. He wore a plain blue coat, and as he glanced at the flagship before putting on his blue spectacles they noticed his curiously pale eyes. They both stared intently, the surgeon because he had a tumour in the side of his belly and because he most passionately longed for someone to tell him authoritatively that it was not malignant. Dr Maturin would answer perfectly: he was a physician with a high professional reputation, a man who preferred a life at sea, with all the possibilities it offered to a naturalist, to a lucrative practice in London or Dublin – or Barcelona, for that matter, since he was Catalan on his mother’s side. Mr Stone was not so personally concerned, but even so he too studied Dr Maturin with close attention: as the Admiral’s secretary he attended to all the squadron’s confidential business, and he was aware that Dr Maturin was also an intelligence agent, though on a grander scale. Stone’s work was mainly confined to the detection and frustration of small local betrayals and evasions of the laws against trading with the enemy, but it had brought him acquainted with members of other organizations having to do with secret service, not all of them discreet, and from these he gathered that some kind of silent, hidden war was slowly reaching its climax in Whitehall, that Sir Joseph Blaine, the head of naval intelligence, and his chief supporters, among whom Maturin might be numbered, were soon to overcome their