The Ionian Mission. Patrick O’Brian

not said a word about his extreme displeasure at the arrival of Mr Somers rather than either of the lieutenants he had applied for, nor of his intimate conviction that the young man had been in Plymouth for several days, reporting aboard only when the hard labour of fitting the Worcester for sea was done. But the parsons were no part of the ship’s company; they were passengers; they might be discussed, and Stephen described them briefly. One was a West Country rector, an invalid who hoped to find health in the Mediterranean, where his cousin commanded the Andromache. ‘I wish he may get there, at all: such a cachexy I have rarely seen ambulant’ – all the others were unbeneficed clergymen: two had been ushers in schools for young gentlemen, and thought any other life preferable to that, even on shipboard; two had tried long and hard and unsuccessfully to live by their pens – they were pitifully thin and shabby – and one, from the West Indies, had ruined himself by the invention of a double-bottomed defecator. ‘It appears that the machine, which is designed to purify sugar, requires only the investment of a little more capital to sweep the board; and that any gentleman with a few hundreds to spare might set up his coach on the profits within a very short space of time. But come, joy, are we ever to attack Scarlatti, the poor soul, or are we to sit here until the crack of doom, as windbound as our unhappy argosy?’

      ‘There is not a moment to be lost,’ said Jack, reaching for his bow. ‘Let the battle begin.’

      The grey days crept by with continual heavy rain and the gale working up a sea that made the Worcester pitch and roll at her moorings to such a degree that most of the black coats deserted the wardroom table and even ship-visiting came to a stop. But on the afternoon of Tuesday the wind backed into the east, just far enough to allow the Worcester to warp out into the Sound and shape a course, every staysail set, topsailyards braced up cracking taut, all seamen on deck, all landsmen ordered below, for Penlee Point. Then, shaving the headland so close that the quarterdeck held its collective breath, while Stephen privately crossed himself, she edged away, brought the breeze on to her larboard quarter, dropped her courses, and ran clear out into the Channel under all plain sail, the first to leave Plymouth apart from a revenue cutter since the blow began.

      ‘The skipper is in a hell-fire hurry,’ observed Somers to Mowett, as Jack cast a look at Rame Head, looming through the rain on the starboard beam, and stepped purposefully below.

      ‘Wait until you see him at quarters,’ said Mowett. ‘There will be an exercise tonight, and you will have to rattle your guns out pretty brisk to please him.’

      ‘Oh, as for that,’ said Somers, ‘I am not at all afraid. I know how to make my men skip, I believe.’

      Jack was indeed in a hell-fire hurry. Not only did he always long to be at sea, and even more so this time than usual, out of lawyers’ reach and before he could be saddled with a convoy, but he knew very well that the Brest squadron had been blown off their station and that he had a fair chance of snapping up any French privateer that might take advantage of their absence and of the easterly wind to run into the ocean, there to cruise for British merchantmen: privateers, or even with great luck a frigate. For although any French frigate he had ever seen would surely have the legs of the Worcester, which added sloth to unresponsiveness and lack of beauty, his ship could throw a broadside of 721 pounds from her long guns alone, enough to disable any frigate at long range, if only they were pointed straight and fired briskly.

      He was in a hurry, but a cheerful hurry: he had brought his ship to sea after a delay far shorter than many he had known, in spite of the time spent in reducing her masts to something more near his liking; thanks to Fanshaw’s kindness and Mowett’s zeal his people amounted to 613 souls, only twenty-seven short of the Worcester’s official complement, with a far higher proportion of seamen than he had any right to expect; and although thanks to her Captain’s weakness she carried the usual nursery of very young gentlemen, some useless mids, and a lieutenant he did not care for, Jack had upon the whole been let off very lightly.

      With his first lieutenant and the gunner he plunged down into the familiar reek of the lower deck: bilge-water, cable-slime, mould, hard-worked unwashed men. Well over five hundred hands slept here, close-packed; and since it had been impossible to open the gunports or pipe up hammocks this last week and more the reek was even stronger than usual although the long low space was empty now, apart from a couple of heaps of hopelessly seasick landsmen, apparently dead, and a few swabbers. But Jack was not concerned with them, nor with the stench, a part of life from his earliest days: his business was with the ship’s main armament, the two tiers of massive guns, thirty-two pounders, stretching fore and aft in the gloom, bowsed tight up against the side, uttering squeaks and groans as the roll shifted their concentrated three tons an inch or so in spite of the well-heaved frapping. With the light crew that brought the Worcester down he had not been able to fire the lower-deck guns, but he was confident that with the weather clearing he should do so later in the day and he was eager to begin – gunnery was his passion and he could not rest easy until he had at least started the long and arduous process of working up the gun-crews to his own exacting standards of rapid and above all accurate fire. Holding a lantern he walked bent low along the tiers, each gun neat and square with its sponge, worm, rammer, powder-horn, bit, quoin and handspikes laid just so; he listened attentively to Borrell’s account of each and to Pullings’ provisional arrangements for the crews, and once again he blessed the luck that had given him reliable officers, as well as enough right men-of-war’s men to provide at least an experienced first and second captain for every piece.

      ‘Well,’ he said at the end of their tour, ‘I believe we may have some live practice this evening. I hope so, indeed. We can afford quite a number of rounds: my Dock powder was a most amazing bargain, and we fairly cleared the widow’s shop. You have plenty filled, Mr Borrell?’

      ‘Oh yes, sir. But I was obliged to fill promiscuous, which some of the kegs had no marks and others two or three; and very old-fashioned some of it smelled and tasted, too. Not that it was not very fine-corned and bold and dry, sir: I mean no reflection.’

      ‘I am sure you do not, master gunner. But I hope you did not taste much of the powder with antimony in it. Antimony is ticklish stuff, they say. It is most uncommon damp down here,’ he added, pushing his finger deep into the mould on the beam over his bowed head. ‘We certainly need a thorough house-warming, as you might put it.’

      ‘Much of the wet comes through the hawse-holes and the manger, sir,’ said Pullings, who was very willing to find some virtue in his ship. ‘The bosun has a party there with extra hawse-bags. But upon the whole, sir, she is pretty tight – tighter than I had expected, with this swell. She certainly labours much less with these new topgallantmasts, and she scarcely heaves under the chains at all.’

      ‘Oh, a swell like this don’t put her out,’ said Jack. ‘As far as she was designed at all, she was designed for the Atlantic. But what she will do in those short steep Mediterranean seas that cut up so quick – well, it will be interesting to find out. And it will be interesting to see the effect of antimony. The effect on the guns, I mean, Mr Borrell; I am sure you would have to eat a peck of it to do a man of your constitution any harm.’

      ‘Pray, Dr Maturin,’ he said on the quarterdeck, ‘what is the effect of antimony?’

      ‘It is a diaphoretic, an expectorant and a moderate cholagogue; but we use it chiefly as an emetic. You have heard of the everlasting antimony pill, sure?’

      ‘Not I.’

      ‘It is one of the most economical forms of physic known to man, since a single pill of the metal will serve a numerous household, being ingested, rejected, and so recovered. I have known one handed down for generations, perhaps from the time of Paracelsus himself. Yet it must be exhibited with discretion: Zwingerius likens it to the sword of Scanderberg, which is either good or bad, strong or weak, as is the party that prescribes or uses it, a worthy medicine if it be rightly applied to a strong man, otherwise it may prove but a froward vomit. Indeed, the name is said to signify monk’s bane.’

      ‘So I have always understood,’ said Jack. ‘But what I really meant was its effect on guns, was a little mixed with the powder.’

      ‘Alas, I am wholly ignorant