21: The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey Read online

  “ Here is my reefer,” said Jack, “and the barge is along side. I thank you very heartily indeed for your hospitality, and I shall most willingly carry your nephew to the Cape. Good day to you my lord. Come, Stephen.”

  An Admiral’s barge, though spacious, is still a public place and they said little as they returned to the ship.

  Truly, once they had sunk the land it was the purest sailing: nearly 300 miles in the first day, never touching tack nor sheet, and even the Suffolk kept in splendidly. How they missed their keenest navigators Hansen and Daniel, who would so have loved drawing the almost purely straight lines cutting the parallels at even angles. But how they rejoiced their occasional northern albatross, the not infrequent whales, the almost steady companionship of quite a large variety of sharks and even rays!

  Jack noticed the twins began to grow rather offensively knowledgeable about sea-going affairs: but Padeen, though his English remained strange, incorrect and largely incomprehensible for the finer forms, managed to keep them within bounds; and what he could not do, Brigid did. It did not make them very pleasant companions but it rendered them tolerable; and the southern coast of Africa and the Portuguese possessions came daily nearer.

  Miller, who called on the ladies almost every day to suggest piquet or backgammon (with little success upon the whole) was much excited by the prospect of Loando, and he climbed as far as he dared to catch a first glimpse of the shore – conceivably a symbol of power, status and indeed perhaps marriage. However, all the bright morning light allowed was a sullen dimness on the western horizon.

  The ship continued its ordered routine with soundings, very exact observation of the sun; moon when it rose, planets and a wonderfully timely eclipse of one of Jupiter’s satellites gave them their time to the minute, or even less.

  “Now it can come hell or high water,” said Harding, the Suffolk’s first lieutenant and a prime astronomer. “Now you know exactly where we are.”

  He said this in the presence of Admiral Aubrey (no mean astronomer himself) who shook his head at the words; so did everyone else in the chartroom, sometimes imperceptibly. But imperceptibly or not, within seconds the sky split with a most enormous roar – so prodigious that the twins, well accustomed to gentler weather rushed shrieking to their mother’s bed.

  All night it bellowed and thundered. St. Elmo’s Fire appeared on three separate masts and the bowsprit. Three staysails were blown out of their bolt-ropes in the first shock, and the foretopgallant. With infinite pains, on a deck that never for a moment stopped throwing itself about in the most extravagant manner, they stowed all that could be stowed and then turned to the pump for the very serious mass of water below: and to plain swab and bucket for the knees-deep wet that washed from side to side in the sick-berth, the captain’s cabin and the lieutenant’s storeroom.

  A heavy night, with nothing to eat but wet biscuit and rum; but it did clear before dawn and rising sun showed not only a beautiful day, but the coast of Loando with its town and its bay. The sea was still grievously troubled and there were a half dozen fishing boats at least half wrecked or worse. The South African squadron as a whole had lain to very early in the night – their topsails were above he horizon – so Suffolk picked up the fishermen, and towing their boats carried them into Loando, having signalled his intentions to the squadron.

  They were most lovingly received – many of the fishermen were relatives – and they were feasted (though at short notice) in the most splendid manner, which as far as the exhausted hands were concerned, went down very well indeed. The Admiral commanding the squadron was housed in a rapidly brushed Governor’s mansion: the nominal white squadron had no flag officer of its own but Jack, who was after all a Rear Admiral of the blue, lived with all his family and senior officers in the former military command, next to a still not inconsiderable barracks.

  In spite of the shortness of the storm, the ships had suffered extremely and the Admiral, Jack and the other captains were almost perpetually in the well equipped and capable dockage. One day, as they were coming back the Governor’s house – a shingle strand with singular coconut palms and their usual birds – Stephen met them and the Admiral asked after his hernia.

  “Thank you, sir” said Stephen, “he has shown the most remarkable improvement and I think I shall operate in the next few days, now that Jacob is returned. Perhaps I shall mention it to Captain Miller.”

  “Yes, indeed: he loves medical matters. But it is not particularly bloody, is it.”

  “Oh, no, nothing like an amputation. You open intelligently and you are on the job at one.”

  “Well, in that case it would be very kind of you, I am sure.”

  Stephen carried on to the military headquarters and walking in he found Miller already there, not to his surprise as it was an almost daily occurrence, but surprising in the way the bunches of flowers had increased and in Christine’s marked unfavourable expression.

  “Oh, Captain Miller,” he said, accompanying him to the door, “I happened to tell the Admiral that I was probably operating on a favourable hernia tomorrow. Should you like to attend?”

  “Is it a bloody operation?”

  “Oh no, not what one should really call bloody. If your first incision is badly mistaken it can be somewhat distressing, but we do not usually mistake.”

  “I am sure you do not. But if I may, I will excuse myself for this occasion, though with many thanks for your polite attention. Good day to you sir.”

  “Stephen, my dear,” said Christine, “I am afraid I must beg you to tell that man not to call unless he is invited. He is becoming quite a nuisance – a wonderfully confident nuisance. He spent a long time talking to me through all these flowers and telling me that when he had taken up his appointed position at the Cape, and w hen he had married to a woman he had chosen, there would be virtually nobody in the colony to compete with him in wealth and influence. I have met with some fools in my life, even some god-dammed fools, and a good many of them; but I have never met with such a confident ass as Miller: I suppose he is completely blinded by his position, appointment, and I dare say wealth, as well as gross stupidity. Stephen, please get me rid of him. He is making me ridiculous as well as himself.”

  “My dear, I shall attend to it.”

  It was as soon as the South African squadron was fit to sail that the Admiral ordered them to sea, there to carry out a very considerable great gun exercise fairly close inshore to please their Portuguese friends. The last preparations had not yet taken place before Stephen Maturin met Captain Miller. “Oh Captain Miller,” he said, stepping aside and detaching himself from his friends. “I have a message for you (lowering his voice), Mrs Wood begs you will not call again without an invitation.” Miller could not at first grasp his meaning, though his complacent smile did fade. Stephen repeated his words.

  “It is not true,” cried Miller. “Christine never said that.”

  “I assure you those were her words.”

  “They were not!”

  “You give me the lie?” asked Stephen, very low, approaching his face.

  “Yes,” cried Miller, and struck him hard.

  “You will appoint your friends,” said Stephen. “These gentlemen” – nodding towards Harding , and Jacob who had rejoined a little after midnight – “will look after my interests. Good day to you sir, until early tomorrow morning.” He touched his hat and walked on.

  Harding was obliged to leave them to buy some particularly choice handkerchiefs for his wife; and Stephen said, “Oh my dear Jacob, how sorry I am to entangle you with that silly little affair, even before you have answered half my questions on your most admirable report on the Argentine. Shall we have time for a small, well planned, uncomplicated hernia before going deeply into politics? I shall have to get word off to Sir Joseph directly since we must sail early tomorrow afternoon.”

  “I should imagine so – a really healthy, lean patient with a simple hernia is no great matter, and I have already coded the essenc
e of my report. And a simple affair of this kind, a blow given and resented, is no great matter either: small enough on the level ground behind the groyne, a little after sunrise, with a stretcher, his man and a local surgeon. You expect no serious injury?”

  “No, a pierced shoulder at the most.”

  “Very well, let us look at our patient and perhaps operate at once, even at the cost of landing him until the exercise is over.”

  In fact, although the operation went perfectly well, the man, Haynes, was landed at the Admirals particular request on these grounds: first, that it stood to reason that some gun or other would burst or overset; and second, that the roaring of broadsides would arouse his feeling and excite the blood; whereas on shore he would be perfectly calm and rest under Mrs Aubrey’s and Mrs Wood’s care.

  But the Admiral was worried, very much worried, by his nephew’s absence in the morning, and by the rumour, brought by the Admiral’s secretary that Miller had flatly refused to fight with swords. He would pistol or he would not fight. Maturin’s seconds would have none of it: it was their principal who had been struck – it was he who chose the weapons. That was always the case: it always had been the case. It was the Law of Moses.

  “Of course it is,” said the Admiral. “I always preferred the gentleman’s weapon when I went out: except when I was the aggressor and had to take the other mans choice. Pray, Mr Martin,” he went on, “pray run out and see if you can catch them. Tell him privately from me that if he don’t fight he is disgraced forever and can expect no notice from me – nor from the Ministry. And tell him a sword wound given by a reasonably decent creature is not so wicked, particularly if you dress it with Marshmallow and Heartsease.”

  On the field, from which the few venal onlookers had been shooed with appalling violence, the scene was only just not ridiculous. Miller had been urged forward by his seconds and he kept telling them that it was perfectly unfair – he knew everything about pistols: he would meet any man with a pistol. But he knew nothing about swords. They, shamefaced, kept telling him it was the law of the duel. He could either apologise on his knees, accepting any terms that his adversary saw fit to impose, or he must fight. There was no two ways about it. Mr Martin whispered into his ear, “Your uncle will not speak to you if you do not fight.”

  They thrust a sword into his hand; pointed towards that of his adversary. The chief second held them on his outstretched blade, cried “Gentleman, engage,” and strode back. Two, three or even four clashes and Miller’s flew into the air, it landing between them. Stephen put his foot on it and his sword point against Miller’s throat. “Do you withdraw?” he asked. “Miller, do you withdraw your words entirely?”

  “I do, entirely.”

  “Yes? Then we have said enough. Good day to you gentleman; and I thank you heartily for your presence.”

  “He shocked all with a set of tarts,” said Wainwright into Killick’s eager ear. He was Miller’s servant and he cordially disliked his master: but he was a child and grandchild of Caxley House and he had learnt to express himself in gentler expressions – not that these had any currency whatsoever with Killick or nine tenths of the lower deck.

  “Where does he stow himself now?”

  “Why, in the little cabin behind his lordship: and I doubt he comes out of it so soon. It is fair wonderful what a face of brass with do, but I doubt that anyone could face the country – the English country, the part around us, or in London – having as near as damn-it refused to fight. I remember how his lordship went out a dozen times when I was young and always bloodied his sword…….Coming sir,” he cried and vanished aft.

  Killick delighted in Pineapple-shrub and in pig’s trotters; but they did not nearly reach his high and exalted pleasure in very specifically obscene stories, however improbable (which alas he could never remember accurately, if even at all) and accounts of high life .

  He did not come on deck the next day, that of the prodigious, very moving great-gun exercise; nor did he appear for the small-arms exercise in which he had trained some of the Marines. From time to time he turned into the wardroom, to pick up a newspaper, when almost nobody was there. His appearance never altered from its perpetually mottled sweating complexion, yet he frequently changed his uniform, blaming his servant perpetually for any slip.

  Some days of quite untypical South African weather slowed the squadron and it was possibly during these hours of sitting in the cabin that …….

  AFTERWORD

  by Richard Snow

  THE OTHER DAY I heard Patrick O'Brian receive about as high a compliment as a writer can get. An old friend of mine, a professor of history and literature, had just read Master and Commander again for the first time in a decade.

  “How well it holds up!” he e xclaimed. “It's amazing. That first meeting, it's like ….” He waved his hand as he searched for a comparison . “It's like Prince Hal meeting Falstaff.”

  The meeting, of course, takes place between Lieutenant (for just a few more hours) Aubrey, and a weedy-looking little physician named Maturin. It was a contentious meeting, and might well have led swiftly to the death of one of the two – most likely the young naval officer. Instead, of course, it led to the greatest friendship of modern literature, and ushered millions of twentieth-century citizens into a world warmed and clouded by sea-coal fire, rationalized and tormented by the architects of the Enlightenment, fed salvers of steaming offal washed down with suicidal quantities of claret and port, and defended by hundreds of close-packed seaborne towns whose elders’ grasp of mathematics, physics, ballistics, and meteorology was all that stood between the residents and extinction.

  My friend, who made the Shakespeare comparison, Fredric Smoler, had come early to this harsh, seducti ve world, back when its creator’s books were struggling to find an audience in the United States. Lippincott, Stein & Day, Master and Commander, Post Captain, HMS Surprise . . . the publishers tried and withdrew – after Desolation Island, permanently . Or so it seemed. During the years of drought, Patrick O’Brian’s acolytes did what they could to keep Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin in their lives. They opened accounts at the great English bookstore Hatchards; they wrote to booksellers in Canada; the most fortunate of them acquired, along with the precious novels, a correspondence with the lively and gene rous-spirited Richard Ollard, O’Brian’s English editor, and himself a formidably accomplished historian and a superb writer.

  Another friend of mine, the journalist Mark Horowitz (who would later publish an i nfluential profile of Patrick O’Brian in the New York Times Magazine), had left New York to become a belligerently loyal Angelino , and sent Fred and me messages saying that every bookshop in Los Angeles stocked imported O’Brian novels - and how do you like that, you haughty Manhattanites? (Surely this can't have been entirely true, and yet Mark always seemed to have read the latest one before we did.) In the meantime, of course, we proselytized, with the predictable success: Them: I’ve read all the Hornblower novels, and that’s enough for me. Us: But that’s like saying, I've read Robinson Crusoe so there’s no reason for me to look at Dickens. Such harangues often ended with an indulgent smirk from the victim. And why not? If this writer was really all that good, everybody would know about him, right?

  It’s a fair question, and eventually Starling Lawrence answered it. He is the editor -in-chief of W. W. Norton & Company, and in 1990 O’Brian’s agent, Vivien Green, pressed a copy of The Reverse of the Medal on him as he was leaving London bound for New York. By the time he disembarked at JFK he had been won over: he would bring out the next O’Brian, The Letter of Marque. This was a courageous decision; the series had already failed here, and it is considerably more costly to publish a writer than it is to pester your friends about him across a dinner table.

  But it turned out to be the right time. All those scattered little enclaves glowing with O’Brian enthusiasm were ready to reach combustion. The resulting blaze created rather than destroyed; so far it has cooked up five million copies and an admirable
motion picture that will continue to spread the word for years to come.

  (That the movie became the object of some prissy reproach for not more fully unfurling the characters of Stephen and Jack only ratifies the power of the books that gave it birth.) This American enthusiasm sent ripples back across the Atlantic. On a visit to London in the mid-1990s , I was gratified to see that O’Brian’s novels had been moved out of “Naval Fiction,” a bookstore section we alas don’t have over here, across the aisle i nto “Literature.”

  So in a very short time everybody finally did know about Patrick O’Brian, to a degree that when he visited our shores he attracted a following of a dedication and willingness to travel great distances to be in The Presence that seems to me equalled only by that of the Grateful Dead or the Rolling Stones. And, like Mick Jagger, he never disappointed. What writer since Hemingway – and perhaps Fitzgerald – has l ooked so thoroughly the way you’d want him to? Clean-shaven, slim, slightly below middle height but giving the impression of that “wiry strength” more often found in novels than on the speaker’s podium, and with the affect of bemusement that was, I think, a sort of courtesy to soften the impact of those daunting eyebrows and the comprehension, wit, and, occasionally, caustic scorn that flicked from him unceasingly. And then he was gone. Gone not merely from New York and Los Angeles and Seattle and all the other cities where people of high consequence were now wild to get him to their dinner parties, but from the world.

  AND YET, as the surprising volume you are holding reminds us, he is not gone at all. When death took Patrick O’Brian, this book had not been given a name. It had advanced only three chapters, 65 handwritten pages, most of which had been typed and giv en preliminary corrections by O’Brian (I say “preliminary” because there are, here and there, a few repetitions that this most scrupulous of writers would not have permitted himself). O’Brian in holograph offers advantages and drawbacks. I find his handwriting both exquisite and difficult to read, but persevering through it offers the pleasures of a wonderful bloodless duel that Stephen engineers, and a casual sketch of a seating arrangement that has the electrifying effect of making the principals see m entirely like living people. “21” is a fragment, of course, and one would expect such a document to be little more than a forlorn remnant. After all, O’Brian had been composing it during a melancholy time. His wife, Mary, had died; he was alone; he was eighty-five years old; and his newfound fame had brought his life under media scrutiny that would have dismayed people far less protective of their privacy than he.