Clarissa Oakes (The Truelove)

Oakes had been silent for some time. He was silent while the plum-duff was passing round; he was silent while it was being eaten; but on swallowing his last spoonful he raised his glass and smiling happily round at the company he said

'So long as we may, let us enjoy this breath

For naught doth kill a man so soon as death.'

On the other hand there was little merriment on the forecastle in the last dog-watch though the evening was calm, beautiful and in every way fit for the dancing so usual at this time of day on a Sunday: only the little girls played the northern version of hopscotch they had learned from the Orkney-men - played it quietly, watched by the seamen with barely a comment.

There was if anything less on the quarterdeck, and when Stephen came up a little before sunset he found Davidge, the officer of the watch, standing by the barricade, looking haggard, middle-aged, wretched, and Clarissa sitting in her usual place by the taffrail, quite alone.

'I am so glad you have appeared,' she said. 'I was growing as melancholy as a gib cat, which is ungrateful after such a splendid dinner; and very strange too, because I never minded being by myself when I was a girl and I longed for nothing so much as solitude in New South Wales. Perhaps I feel it here because I do so dislike being disliked . . . Reade and Sarah and Emily - we were such friends, and I cannot think how I have offended them.'

'The young are notoriously fickle.'

'Yes. I suppose so. But it is disappointing. Look, the sun is about to touch the sea.' When the last orange rim had gone and the rays alone were shooting up into the lemon-coloured haze, she said 'I suppose a sea-captain's life must be a very lonely one. Of course it is different for Captain Aubrey with you aboard, but for most of them, cooped up with nobody to talk to ... Do many take their wives or mistresses to sea?'

'Wives are uncommon - almost unheard-of on long voyages, I believe. And mistresses are in general disapproved of by everyone, from the Lords of the Admiralty to the ordinary seamen. They take away from an officer's character and his authority.'

'Do they really? Yet neither seamen nor naval officers are famous for chastity.'

'Not by land. Yet at sea a different set of rules comes into play. They are neither particularly logical nor consistent, but they are widely understood and observed.'

'Really? Really?' she asked leaning forward with intense interest: then she sighed and shook her head, saying 'But then, as you are aware, I know so little about men - men in the ordinary sense, in ordinary everyday life: men by day rather than by night.'

Chapter Eight

Monday dawned pure and fair, lighting the starboard watch as they worked aft, cleaningthe deck with wetted sand, then with holystones, and then with swabs. The sun heaved up as they neared the capstan, on which West was sitting, his trousers rolled up to keep them from the flowing tide: sunrise was usually the moment for a certain amount of discreet cheerfulness and ancient witticisms such as 'Here we are again, shipmates!' and 'Are you happy in your work?' But nothing was to be heard today apart from the conscientious grating of the stones, the clash of buckets, and a few low warnings: 'Watch out for sweepings under that old grating, Joe.' And this in spite of the brilliance of the day, the ship's fine long easy pace, slanting across the swell with a lively rise, and of the favourable easterly breeze that ruffled the sea, bringing an exquisite freshness with it.

At seven bells hammocks were piped up and the larboard watch came running on deck in the most exemplary manner, each carrying his tight, exactly-lashed cylinder, which the quartermaster stowed in the nettings, numbers uppermost, with the meticulous regularity usual before an admiral's inspection. There was no merriment among the larbowlines either: none at their first appearance in the sunlight, none half an hour later, when all hands were piped to breakfast.

The old Surprises, that is to say those who had sailed with Captain Aubrey in earlier commissions, naturally messed together, even though this entailed the often disagreeable and sometimes dangerous company of Awkward Davies; and they listened in silence to his description of the skipper's coming on deck at first light, his good morning to Mr West, cold enough to freeze his balls off - 'Just as well too,' said Wilson - his gazing sternly to windward, and his pacing fore and aft in his nightshirt, like a lion seeking whom he might devour.

'They can do nothing to me," said Plaice. 'I only done what my officer told me to do. "Belay there, Plaice, God damn your eyes" says he. So I belayed, though I knew it would bring us by the lee. Then "Let go, let go, forward there. Let go, Plaice, God damn your limbs," calls t'other, so I let go. It would have been mutiny else. I am as innocent as a drove of lambs.'

With some difficulty Padeen said that God had never created a more beautiful morning nor a more propitious wind: it would soften the heart of Hector or Pontius Pilate himself.

Padeen was esteemed for his kindness in the sick-berth and for his cruel hard times in Botany Bay; he was also thought to have absorbed wisdom from the Doctor, and some people took comfort from his words.

It was a flimsy sort of comfort, however, and it quite disappeared a little before six bells in the forenoon watch, when the officers and midshipmen appeared on the quarterdeck in their uniforms and cocked hats, wearing swords or dirks. Pull-ings gave orders to rig the grating, and Mr Adams came hurrying up the companion-ladder with the Articles of War. As soon as the sixth bell had struck, the bosun's mates piped All hands to witness punishment and the frigate's people flocked aft in a confused body, from which there arose a sense of collective guilt.

'All women below,' called Captain Aubrey. Sarah and Emily disappeared, and Pullings, at his side, said 'Mrs Oakes is already with the Doctor, sir.'

'Very well. Carry on, Captain Pullings.'

In her present state the Surprise carried no master-at-arms and Pullings himself called the wrongdoers from the throng, stating the crime of each to the Captain as he advanced. The first was Weightman. 'Insolence and inattention to duty, sir, if you please."

'Have you anything to say for yourself?' asked Jack.

'Not guilty, your honour, upon my sacred oath," said the butcher.

'Have any of his officers anything to say for him?' He waited for a moment: the breeze sang through the rigging: the officers looked into vacancy. 'Strip,' said Jack, and Weightman slowly took off his shirt. 'Seize him up.' The quartermasters tied Weightman's wrists to the grating rather above shoulder-height and cried 'Seized up, sir.'

Adams passed the Articles. Jack, followed by the officers and midshipmen, took off his hat; he then read ' "No person in or belonging to the fleet shall sleep upon his watch, or negligently perform the duty imposed on him, or forsake his station, upon pain of death or such other punishment as the circumstances of his case shall require." Twelve strokes.' And to the senior bosun's mate, 'Vowles, do your duty."

Vowles drew the cat from its red baize bag, phlegmatically took up his stance, and as the ship reached the height of her roll he laid on the first stroke. 'Oh my God,' cried Weightman, enormously loud.

Mrs Oakes and Stephen looked up. 'There is punishment carrying out forward,' he said. 'Some of the people behaved amiss in pulling up the anchor.'

'So Oakes told me,' she replied, listening to the successive shrieks with no apparent emotion. 'How many does the Captain usually give?'

'I have never known him give more than a dozen, and rarely so many. Flogging is uncommon in ships under his command.'

'A dozen? Lord, that would make them stare in New South Wales. There was a horrible parson, a magistrate, who only dealt in hundreds. Dr Redfern hated him.'

'I know it, my dear. So did I. Breathe deep, will you now, and hold it. Very well. That will do,' he said at last. 'You may put your clothes on again.'

'You say that in just the same tone as dear Dr Redfern,' said Clarissa from under the folds of her blue cotton dress: and emerging, 'How I adored that man when he told me that I was neither pregnant nor . . . nor diseased. I might well have been both. I had been raped often enough.'

'I am so sorry; so very sorry,' said Stephen.

'For some girls it would have been dreadful: it meant little to me, so long as there were no consequences.'

Flogging was indeed rare in Jack Aubrey's commands, but this time the ship had been outraged and humiliated and he punished severely, flogging seven and stopping grog right and left. Of those who were seized up, none called out except for Weightman; but none came away unmarked. As each was cast loose, Padeen stepped forward, tears streaming down his face, and sponged his shipmate's back with vinegar, while Martin swabbed the wheals with lint and passed the man's shirt, a gesture much appreciated. All this was done with the customary man-of-war formality - charge, response, evidence of character, attenuating circumstances, Captain's decision, relevant Article, sentence, punishment - and although the later sentences never exceeded six strokes, the whole took up a great deal of time which Stephen and Clarissa, for their part, spent in talking quite placidly about men in general, everyday men in their ordinary life.

The last of those to be beaten presented an unusual case. He was James Mason, a bosun's mate; he was a good seaman, and the officer spoke in his favour. But his offence had been very gross - direct disobedience - and Jack had him brought to the grating. 'In view of what your officers say, it will only be half a dozen,' he said. 'Mr Bulkeley, do your duty.' It was of course the bosun's duty to flog his mates, but the occasion very rarely arose: Bulkeley had not been called upon to officiate for years; he had lost the habit; and taking the cat from Vowles he stood there for a moment, combing its bloody tails through his fingers in a sad state of indecision. He was fond of young James, they got along well together; but the ship's company was watching most attentively and he must not be seen to favour his mate. No, indeed: and his first blow jerked a great gasp out of Mason, rock of fortitude though he was. When he was cast loose he staggered for a moment, wiped his face, and cast a reproachful look at the bosun, the embarrassed, confused and uneasy bosun.

In Stephen's cabin the conversation had moved on by way of a discussion of pain to the extraordinary difficulty of defining emotions or assigning to them any quantity quality volume or force. 'Harking back to pain,' said Stephen, 'I recall that when Captain Cook was here he used to flog the islanders for stealing: it was no use, said he: one might just as well have flogged the mainmast. And I saw Aborigines in New South Wales who utterly disregarded burns, blows and cruel thorns that I could never have borne; while in the Navy a seaman will generally take his dozen without a murmur. Yet even when all things are considered, youthful resilience, fortitude, pride, habituation and so on, I wonder that your experience did not beat the softer, kinder emotions out of you entirely, leaving you sullen, morose and withdrawn.'

'Why, as for the softer emotions, perhaps I never was very well endowed; I disliked most cats, dogs and babies; I never cared for dolls or pet rabbits and sometimes I violently resented being crossed; but I never was sullen then and I am not sullen now. Nor am I morose and withdrawn: I think I am fairly kind, or mean to be fairly kind, to people who are kind to me or those who need kindness; and I know I like being liked - I love good company and cheerfulness.

Sic erimus cuncti postquam nos auferet

Orcus ergo vivamus dum licet esse, bene.

And I also know I am not a monster incapable of affection," she said, laying a hand on Stephen's knee and flushing a little under her tan. 'Only I cannot connect it with that toying, striving, gasping - what can I call it without being gross? -with anything of a carnal nature. They seem to me poles apart.'

'I am sure they do. Sic erimus cuncti ... so that was where Mr Oakes had his couplet yesterday? I wondered.'

'Yes. It was a doggerel version I made when I was putting on my gown. But I was astonished he should remember it.'

Stephen's only patients that afternoon were the butcher and the bosun's mate, both of whom, but particularly Mason, needed dressing. Martin had applied the ordinary pads, but he had had little experience with this kind of wound, the Surprise's temper being ordinarily so mild, and a more practised hand was required to wind the cingulum that would enable them to move with something approaching ease.

Yet it was clear to the practised hand that he might have a well-populated berth quite soon. Not only was Jack tautening the ship in all points, but on excusing himself for missing dinner - 'he would take an extra bite this evening, and with the wind going down like this they might very well have some fresh fish with their music' - he had also thrown out a remark about a flying column. Quite what he meant by that Stephen had not gathered; but basing himself upon the axiom that what goes up must necessarily come down, he anticipated a fine crop of broken limbs, ribs, even skulls.

He reflected upon this as he dined in the gunroom, a rather silent gunroom, but one in which the malignance had been largely replaced by anxiety and even by a certain fellow-feeling. Martin ate wolfishly, twice desiring Pullings 'to cut him just a little more of this excellent roast pork, but when at last his empty plate was taken from him before pudding he told Stephen that he had seen a remarkable number of boobies towards the northern horizon, and that old Macaulay, who knows these seas, had confirmed him in his notion that this meant great shoals of fish. They might go a-fishing if the evening fell calm.

'You medicoes may go a-fishing,' said Pullings. 'But I very much doubt whether we do anything but exercise until next Christmas.'

Truer words he never spoke. The Surprise had by no means passed through the variables, and in the afternoon watch the breeze, which had been boxing the compass for some time, died away almost entirely; yet it did not do so until it had brought the ship within a mile or so of the zone where the boobies were fishing, and Stephen's skiff had long since been lowered down.

They rowed laboriously out, with rods, hand-nets, sieves for animalculae, pots and jars, baskets, all of which got in the way, impeding their artless progress and making them even slower, even hotter in the damp, unmoving air. Stephen, who had little sense of shame where nakedness was concerned and who had so often exposed his entire person that he feared no sunburn, took off his clothes; Martin, more shamefast by far, only unbuttoned his shirt, rolled up his trousers, and suffered.

But it was worth their toil. The fishing-ground was sharply defined, and as soon as they were over its border and among the boobies they found that it possessed at least two levels, a turmoil of squids pursuing pelagic crabs and the free-swimming larvae of various forms of marine life that neither could identify, though they were fairly confident of the pearl oyster, and two or three fathoms below these, clearly to be seen, particularly under the shade of the boat, swam schools of fishes, crossing and recrossing, all of the same mackerel-shaped kind, all flashing as they turned, and all feeding upon a host of fry so numerous that they made a globular haze in the clear green water. The boobies preyed on both, either making a slight skimming dive to snatch up a squid just under the surface, or plunging from a height like so many mortar-bombs to reach the depth where the fishes cruised. They took no notice whatsoever of the men, sometimes diving so close to the boat that they splashed water into it; and after some time the men, having classified the birds (two species, neither particularly rare), took no notice of the boobies. They scooped up the squids with their hand-nets and found that they belonged to at least eleven different kinds, two of which they could not name; they sieved great quantities of the squids' food, which they put into well-closed pots; and they caught the fishes - handsome fellows, weighing a couple of pounds - baiting their hooks with pork rind cut in the shape of a minnow.

'Paradise must have been very like this,' observed Martin, putting another into their basket: and then 'How happy they will be when we bring back our catch. There is nothing like fresh -' Here he looked towards the ship and his face changed entirely. 'Oh,' cried he, 'she has lost a mast!'

Certainly she looked horribly lopsided, or rather deformed; but Stephen replied 'Not at all, at all.' He reached among his clothes for a little pocket spy-glass, pointed, focussed, and continued 'Never in life, my dear sir: they are only shifting topmasts.'

He saw from the great activity in the maintop, where topmast shrouds were being set up afresh, that they had begun aft and were working forward in one of the most strenuous exercises known to man.

Pullings and Oakes were on the forecastle; Davidge was in the foretop; West was perched in the maintopmast crosstrees; they and all the hands under their command were all in a state of extreme activity; and Jack Aubrey, with Reade on one hand and Adams on the other, was timing them with his open watch.

'I believe you have not seen it done before,' said Stephen, passing the glass. 'Will I tell you what they are at?'

'If you would be so good.'

'First they unbend the topgallantsails and send them down and the yard after them; then they strike the topgallant mast, a manoeuvre we are all familiar with - a matter of minutes for skilful mariners, attentive to their duty. But then they do the same to the great topsail, its mighty yard and then the very mast itself, a heavy task indeed. This they have evidently done to the mizenmast and the main; now they are operating on the foremast, and I perceive from the forms creeping along the bowsprit that they contemplate shifting the jibboom too, the creatures.'

'Do they look for flaws and change the defective pieces?'

'I suppose they do. But I believe the real aim is to make them brisker, to confirm them in their seamanlike activity, and perhaps to strengthen their sense of combined, exactly synchronous effort. Sometimes it is done, not from any desire to enforce discipline and instant compliance with orders but out of a spirit of competition if not indeed of vainglory and showing away. The old Surprise, with a crew that had been together a great while, all men-of-war's men, was extraordinarily good at it; and I remember that once, in the West Indies, shifting topmasts at the same moment as the Hussar, considered a crack ship, she did so in one hour and twenty-three minutes, the hands dancing hornpipes on the forecastle before the wretched Hussars had even crossed their main topgallant yards. See, the topmast is swaying up - it rises, rises, the capstan turns - higher, higher, secured by a complex system of ropes - high enough - Tom cries "Launch ho!" - it is ridded and safe - they fling themselves upon the shrouds and cast off this and that - the brave topgallant-mast follows ..."

So it did; and once the frigate looked like a Christian ship again - for the shifting of the jibboom was neither here nor there to the medicoes - they returned to their squids, more active now than ever. 'I am almost certain that over there we have a species quite unknown,' said Martin. He leaned out with his long-handled net, but before he had even dipped it he started back. 'Oh,' he said in a shocked voice. 'Do not move. Do not hang your arm over the side. My image of Paradise was only too exact. The Evil One is with us too.'

They peered cautiously over the gunwale, and there under the frail skiff they saw the familiar form of a shark: one of the many kinds of Carcharias no doubt, though to tell just which they would have to look at its teeth; yet it seemed larger than most: far larger.

'Do you suppose it is likely to bump the boat?' asked Martin in a low voice.

'Sure he may well do so, by rising suddenly; or sometimes they are known to take a run and launch themselves bodily into the middle, or athwartships as we say, snapping right and left.'

'I wonder you can speak with such levity,' said Martin. 'And you too a married man.'

A silence fell, broken from time to time by the splash of a deep-diving booby and the remote shrilling of bosun's calls. A bird dived close at hand, down and down: the shark moved smoothly from under the boat: its bulk covered the diving form and carried on into the depths, growing steadily dimmer though still huge when it vanished. Three or four feathers floated up. 'Will he come back, do you imagine?' asked Martin, still gazing down with shaded eyes.

'I do not,' said Stephen. 'The flesh of the booby is acrid and rank, and I have no doubt he thinks we belong to the same genus at least.'

From over the sea came an urgent piping and Captain Aubrey's powerful voice urging haste. In rapid succession all the frigate's boats were lowered down; their crews leapt into them with the breakneck speed they would have shown if a valuable prize had just heaved up; and lines having been passed they began towing the ship in the direction of the boobies.

By the time the Surprise reached them the sun was already far down the sky. The fish had stopped biting; the squids and their prey had sunk out of sight; and as soon as the boats were hoisted in the hands were piped to a belated supper, with precious little rum served out.

'What a comfort it is to have solid heart of oak beneath one's feet,' said Martin as they took their pots fishes rods buckets and specimens out of the skiff. 'I had never felt the dreadful fragility of this boat - planking not half an inch thick - so much as when I saw that horrible creature almost touching it. I have never felt more uneasy in my life. As I peered down it rolled a little and gave me a cold look that I shall not soon forget.'

Supper was hardly swallowed before the drum beat for quarters. The cabins vanished in the usual clean sweep fore and aft; Stephen hid his specimens together with a large number of squids in the quarter-gallery and hurried to the sick-berth, his action-station; the great guns were cast loose, and the drooping officers reported 'All present and sober, if you please.'

They were soberer still by the time they had performed the great-gun exercise - running in the cannon (five hundredweight to a man) - running the massive object out again as far as possible, laying the tackle-falls in neat fakes - pointing the guns in a given direction - going through the motions of firing - running in, going through the motions of worming, sponging and reloading - replacing the tompion - housing and making all fast - a dozen turns apiece, each separately timed by their inflexible Captain, and then a full broadside together: all this in dumb show. They were not indulged in a single round of live ammunition, for although the magazines were tolerably full (powder being one of the few things that New South Wales could supply) Jack Aubrey had no intention whatsoever of giving them pleasure: he was profoundly displeased with his officers and men, and with himself for not having detected this spirit of faction earlier. He was in no mood for indulgence of any kind, and the hands knew it.

There was no singing or dancing on the forecastle during what little remained of the sweetest evening. The hands sat about, dog-tired, until the setting of the watch. They did not resent the skipper's anger: they knew it was justified: they hoped it would not last.

A vain hope. All through the variables they were kept on the run, manning and arming boats, lowering them down and hoisting them in until they achieved twenty-five minutes twenty seconds for the one and nineteen minutes fifty seconds for the other: they could also send up lower yards and topmasts and cross topgallant yards in four minutes four seconds; and apart from shifting topmasts every now and then there was always the bending of new sails, painting ship and a remarkable amount of small-arms and cutlass exercise.

Throughout this time Jack kept his severity for the quarterdeck: once in the cabin he was as amiable as ever. He played his violin to Stephen's 'cello with his usual wholehearted enjoyment, and apart from the deep lines in his weatherbeaten face there was little to show the strain he was under.

'Lord, Stephen,' said he, after a day of particularly wearing exercise, 'I cannot tell you what a refuge this cabin is, and what a happiness it is for me to have you to talk to and play music with. Most captains have trouble with their ship's people from time to time - on occasion it is a continual sullen covert war - and unless they make cronies of their first lieutenants, as some do, they have to chew over it alone. I do not wonder that so many of them grow strange or bloody-minded; or run melancholy mad, for that matter.'

Even when they did reach the full north-east trades there was no relaxation of his manner on deck: he was fairly cordial to Pullings, Oakes and Reade, always civil to Martin and markedly polite to Clarissa when he saw her; but he remained stern, impersonal, remote and exigent with the other officers and the foremast jacks. Nor was there much relaxation in their daily and nightly toil, for the trade-wind proved more northerly and considerably less steady than he could have wished, and this called for the nicest management of the helm, a continual attention to brace and bowline and a frequent change of jibs and staysails if the Surprise were both to keep her course and run off her two hundred sea-miles between one noon observation and the next. He spent most of his waking hours on deck with Pullings, and he liked West, Davidge and Oakes to spend much of theirs aloft, supervising the exact carrying-out of his orders or even anticipating them. They grew worn and lean; they were haunted by the dread of being found asleep on their watch; and the gunroom dinners were silent less from animosity than extreme fatigue. None of them had ever known a ship driven so hard so long.

'My dear' wrote Stephen.

'We are now in the realm of the trade wind and we fly along at an exhilarating pace; but sailing against the wind (or as nearly against it as lies within the abilities of a square-rigged ship) is very unlike sailing before it, very unlike those luxurious days of rolling down to St Helena when one sits under an awning admiring the sea or reading one's book and when the mariners are not required to touch the flowing sheet. Now we lean over to a dangerous degree, and the spray or even solid water comes sweeping back with uncommon vehemence. Jack comes down soaked: not that he comes down often, because sailing of this kind requires his presence on deck. It would be much, much easier for all concerned if he would spread fewer sails and keep the wind one point free; yet he means not only to reach Moahu as soon as ever he can but he also, and above all, wishes to deal with the present situation by recalling all hands to their duty; and he is doing so with a greater authority than I knew he possessed.

'Whether he will succeed in his purpose I do not know. He sees the trouble as being caused by the enmity between the officers who are attracted to Mrs Oakes, and these officers being supported by their own men, so that there are rival clans in the ship. But there are complexities that escape him, and now that I have time and to spare and the cabin to myself I shall endeavour to set them out as well as I can. The divisions, if I may so call them, amount to at least half a dozen: there are those (the majority) who condemn Clarissa for lying with any member of the quarterdeck at all apart from her husband; those who condemn her for lying with any officer but their own; those who support Oakes without reserve (they belong for the most part to his division and they are known as the Oak-Apples); those who condemn him for having beaten his wife; those who support their divisional officer whatever his situation with regard to her; and those who still look upon Clarissa with affectionate esteem - the sailmaker, for example, has recently made her a tarpaulin cloak, in which she now sits by the taffrail.

'Even if it were right for me to open my mind to Jack, I doubt it would be useful: I do not think I could ever make him understand that for her the sexual act is trivial, of no consequence. Our ordinary salute, the kiss, is held infamous among the Japanese if bestowed in public: with them, says Pinto, it is as much a deed of darkness or at least of total privacy as physical love-making is with us. For her, because of the particularity of her bringing-up, kiss and coition are much the same in insignificance; furthermore, she takes not the slightest pleasure in either. If therefore, through a variety of motives in which good nature and even compassion certainly have a part as well as a general desire to be liked, she has admitted some men to her bed, she has done so very innocently: "If an ill-looking pitiful fellow with say a thorn in his foot begged you to take it out, sure you would consent, even if doing so were rather unpleasant than otherwise." To her astonishment she had found herself loved and hated in various degrees, rather than merely liked, by those she obliged; and condemned by many who were in no way concerned.

'At different times I had tried to explain the violent male desire for exclusive possession - the standard by which a wide variety of partners if not promiscuity is laudable in oneself, vile in women - the want of sequence or even common honesty of mind coupled with unshakable conviction - the unreasonable yet very strong and very painful emotions that arise from jealousy (a feeling to which she is almost entirely a stranger) - and the very great force of rivalry. I also told her, with authority, that nothing can be done aboard ship without its being known. I spoke each time at some length, with real concern for her; she listened attentively and I think she believed me. In any event she is determined to renounce fornication: though how she will fare I know not. She has lit a fire that will not easily be put out; and although for the moment Jack keeps all hands in such a state of perpetual activity that the members of the gunroom mess can hardly put one foot in front of the other when they come below, these passions, confined as they are in space, may burst out later with a shocking force.'

He sat there, lost in his reflections, until Killick came in and said, as he had so often said before, 'Why, sir, you are sitting in the dark.' He brought a light, a lantern that swung in gimbals, and Stephen returned to his contemplation, holding his pen in the air.

'Scribble, scribble, scribble, Dr Maturin,' said Jack.

'You are not wet at all, I find,' said Stephen.

'No,' said Jack. 'Not to put too fine a point on it, I am quite dry; and was you to put your nose above the coaming and look at the dog-vane, you would see why. The wind has veered a whole point, and the spray goes well away to leeward. In any case the sea has gone down. Could you do with a cup of coffee and a breadfruit biscuit?'

'I could, too.'

'Killick! Killick, there.'

'Sir?' said Killick, still unnaturally meek, though a shade of the familiar shrewishness could now be detected. Indeed, he had recovered enough assurance to bring them only a meagre plate of the dried breadfruit slices, he being devoted to them himself.

The coffee came; and when half had been drunk Jack said 'Do you remember that I spoke to you about a flying column?'

'I remember it well; and I wondered at the time how and where it was to fly.'

Jack took a sheet from his desk and said 'This is Wainwright's chart of Moahu, and I am particularly grateful to him for the soundings of the reef off Pabay here in the north, and the channel into the harbour: the same for Eeahu down in the south. This hatching across the neck of the hourglass - a damned wide neck for an hourglass, I may say - represents the mountains that separate the two lobes, Kalahua's country in the top half, Queen Puolani's in the bottom. Now my plan is to sail straight into Pabay, preferably in the evening, but that depends on tide and weather, to sail in looking as like a whaler as possible, and to lay the Franklin aboard directly, dealing with her out of hand as we did the Diane at St Martin's. But time and tide may not serve, and she may have thrown up batteries on either side of the narrows, using the Truelove's guns. I may have to lie off and deal with them first. So it seems to me that if things do not go as smooth as they did at St Martin's, we should land a body of men here' -pointing to a bay half a mile south of the harbour - 'to make a diversion - to take them from behind while we are battering them from in front. That is my flying column; and what I should like you to do as a medical man is to help me choose the most active, intelligent and of course healthy of the twenty or thirty men we can afford. I do not want any poxed hands - and I know you have the usual crop after Annamooka - or bursten bellies, however brave they may be, nor any ancients, above thirty-five. They must be extremely nimble. So please look at the list Tom and I have drawn up and tell me if there is an objection to any of the names from a medical point of view.'

'Very well,' said Stephen: and having run his eyes down the list he went on 'Tell me, are we far from Moahu?'

'About four days sail. I mean to ease off tomorrow, and give them a quiet Sunday: then target-practice on Monday, to air their intellects; and in the evening I may tell them what is afoot.'

'I see. Now as to your list, I have made a mark against the least medically sound: it is not necessarily discreditable at all.'

'Many thanks. Then of course there is the command; but I hesitate to question you about your messmates ..."

Stephen's face closed: he said, 'Purely as the ship's surgeon, I should make no exception to any of them.'

'I am happy to hear it.'

There was a somewhat embarrassed silence, and to break it Stephen said 'Had we but world enough and time you could choose your band in the Irish manner. Did I ever tell you of Finn MacCool?'

'The gentleman that was so fond of salmon?'

'Himself. Now he commanded the forces of the nation, the Fianna Eirion, and none was accepted into any of the seven cohorts - I quote from a fallible memory, Jack, but at least I am sure of my figures - until he had learned the twelve Irish books of poetry and could say them without book: if the party to be accepted would defend himself with his target and sword from nine throws of the javelin from nine of the company that would stand but nine ridges from him at distance, and either cut the javelin with his sword or receive them all on his target without bleeding on him, he would be accepted; otherwise not. If the party running through the thickest wood of Ireland were overtaken by any of the seven cohorts and they pursuing him with all their might and main he would not be taken of them in their company. But if he had outrun them all without loss of any hair of his head, without breaking any old stick under his feet and he leaping over any tree that he should meet as high as the top of his head without impediment, and stooping under a tree as low as his knee and taking a thorn out of his foot (if it should chance to be in it) with his nail without impediment of his running, all which if he had done, he would be accepted as one of the company: otherwise not.'

'Twelve books, did you say?'

'Twelve, upon my soul.'

'And all by heart? Alas, with a Sunday coming between, I doubt it can be accomplished.

The Sunday in question was emphatically a day of rest, of as much rest as was feasible in a ship at sea. It is true that hammocks were piped up half an hour earlier than usual and that breakfast was swallowed fast so that the deck could be brought to a high state of perfection, with what little brass the frigate possessed blazing in the sun and all the ship's pigtails (the Surprise, rather old-fashioned in some respects, still had well over fifty, some of a most impressive length) untwined, often washed and always plaited afresh by the seaman's tie-mate, while all hands put on the clean clothes washed on Thursday and made themselves fine for divisions.

Divisions passed off perfectly well: the wind, though less powerful than it had been for some days, was steady and dead true to its quarter, with never a gust or a flurry; and the Captain, though scarcely jovial, could be said to have lost his wickedness; while when church was rigged it was observed that he had abandoned the Articles, leaving the sermon to Mr Martin.

Martin had no gift for preaching; he did not feel himself qualified to instruct others in moral, still less in spiritual, matters, and his few sermons in the Surprise, delivered long ago when he sailed as a chaplain rather than as surgeon's assistant, had been ill-received. He now therefore confined himself to reading the works of more able or at least more confident men; and as Stephen reached the half-deck on his way to the cabin from the sick-berth, where he had said a rosary with Padeen and some other Papists, he heard Martin's voice: 'Let no man say, I could not miss a fortune, for I have studied all my youth. How many men have studied more nights than he hath done hours, and studied themselves blind and mad in the mathematics, and yet wither in beggary in a corner? Let him never add, But I studied in a useful and gainful profession. How many have done so too, and yet never compassed the favour of a judge? And how many that have had all that, have struck upon a rock, even at full sea, and perished there?' And then some time later: 'What a dim vespers of a glorious festival, what a poor half-holiday, is Methusalem's nine hundred years to eternity! What a poor account hath that man that says, This land hath been in my name, and in my ancestors' from the conquest! What a yesterday is that? Not six hundred years. If I could believe the transmigration of souls and think that my soul had been successively in some creature or other since the Creation, what a yesterday is that? Not six thousand years. What a yesterday for the past, what a tomorrow for the future is any term that can be comprehended in cipher or counters?'

Jack dined that day, and dined well, off Stephen's fish, last year's lamb, and a thumping great spotted dog, his guests being Stephen himself of course, Pullings, Martin and Reade. With the ship running fast and easy, the water racing down her side in a speaking stream, they could not but be happy - a subdued happiness however in Pullings and Reade, still oppressed by the shameful exhibition at Annamooka - and after dinner they moved up to the quarterdeck for their coffee.

Mrs Oakes, who dined a little after twelve, had already been there for some time, her chair installed at the leeward end of the taffrail and her feet resting on a cheese of wads placed there by William Honey, an admirer still, like the rest of his mess. She was alone, her husband, West and even Adams being fast asleep, as indeed were almost all hands who were not actually on duty - the main and fore tops were filled with seamen asprawl on the folded studdingsails, their mouths open and their eyes shut, like Dutch boors in a harvest-field; and Davidge, the officer of the watch, had taken up his usual position by the weather hances. Jack led his troop aft and asked her how she did. 'Very well indeed, sir, I thank you,' she said. 'It would be an ungrateful woman that did not feel amazingly well, being carried over the sea in this splendid fashion. Driving fast on a turnpike in a well-hung carriage is charming, but it is nothing in comparison of this.'

Jack poured her coffee and they talked about the disadvantages of travel by land - coaches overturning, horses running away, horses refusing to run at all, crowded inns. That is to say Jack, Clarissa and Stephen talked. The others stood holding their little delicate cups, looking as easy as they could and simpering from time to time, until at last Martin contributed an account of a very wretched journey across Dartmoor in a gig whose wheels came off as night was falling, a rainstorm beating in from the west, the linch-pin lost in a bottomless mire and the horses audibly weeping. Martin was not one of those few men who can speak naturally when they are in a false position, and Stephen observed that Clarissa was secretly amused: yet she helped him along with polite attention and timely cries of 'Heavens!' 'Dear me" and 'How very horrid it must have been.'

From this, perhaps as an illustration of the greater ease of travel by sea, the conversation passed on to her foot-rest. 'Why is it called a wad of cheese?" she asked.

'A cheese of wads, I believe, ma'am," said Jack. 'Cheese because it is a cylinder like a tall thin Stilton, and wads because that is what the cloth is filled with. I dare say you have seen a man load his fowling-piece?' Clarissa bowed. 'First he puts in his powder, then his shot, and then with his ramrod he thrusts down a wad to hold everything in place until he wishes to fire. That is just what we do with the great guns; only of course the wads are much bigger.'

Again Clarissa bent her head by way of agreement, and Stephen had the impression or rather the certainty that if she had spoken her voice would have been as unnatural as Martin's.

'Now that I come to think of it,' said Jack, gazing amiably at the eastern horizon, upon which Christmas Island should soon appear if his two chronometers, his last lunars and his noonday observation were correct. 'Now that I reflect, I do not believe you have ever seen the operation: you have always been below. We mean to have target-practice tomorrow, and if it would amuse you to watch, pray come on deck. You could see everything quite well, was you to stand amidships, by the barricade. Though perhaps you may not like the explosions. I know that elegant females' - smiling - 'do not always like it when one fires even a fowling-piece at anything like close quarters."

'Oh, sir,' said Clarissa, 'I am not so elegant a female as to mind the report of a gun: and I should very much like to see your target-practice tomorrow. But now I think I must go and rouse my husband; he particularly desired me to wake him well before his watch.'

She rose; they bowed; and as she went down the companion-ladder the lookout at the masthead cried 'Land ho! On deck, there, land on the starboard bow. A low sort of long island,' he added in a subdued voice for the benefit of his friends in the maintops, 'with more of them fucking palm-trees.'

Early on Monday morning, with the sun slanting low across the long even swell so that its rounded summits, a furlong apart, were visible, though very soon they would be quite lost in the little fret of superficial waves, Captain Aubrey spread top-gallantsails, and the hands racing aloft very nearly crushed Stephen and Martin as they crouched in the mizen-top, training the glass aft over the rail, gazing back at the land and the cloud of birds over it.

'I am persuaded that it is a vast atoll,' said Stephen. 'Vast; prodigiously extensive. Were we to climb higher still we might perhaps see across it, or at least make out a segment of the great circle."

'I should be sorry to disturb the men at their work,' said Martin.

Stephen looked up as the hands came fleeting down, the outer men leaping in from the yardarm like so many gibbons, and did not press the point. He said 'We have been sailing past it almost all night: and though the rim of the lagoon may be no more than a musket-shot across at any given point, that still amounts to an enormous surface with no doubt a comparably enormous quantity of animals and vegetable life - the palms and the birds we have seen from afar, and some low bushes; but who knows what interesting predators, what wholly unexpected parasites they may have, to say nothing of undescribed forms of mollusc, insect, arachnid . . . there may even be some antediluvian mammals - a peculiar bat - that would confer immortality upon us. But shall we ever see it? No, sir. We shall not. Presently this ship will haul off, heave her wind, and spend hours, hours I say, bombarding the empty sea on the pretext of airing the mariners' intellects and in fact doing nothing but frighten the birds: yet she would never consider stopping for five minutes to let us pick up so much as an annelid.'

Stephen knew that he had said all this before, off the many, many islands and remote uninhabited shores they had passed, irretrievably passed; he knew that he might be being a bore; yet the tolerant smile on Martin's face, though very slight indeed, vexed him extremely.

After dinner - they had eaten alone - he said to Jack, 'At breakfast yesterday, when you were telling me about your first days at sea, I quoted Hobbes.'

'The learned cove that spoke of midshipmen as being nasty, brutish and short?"

'Well, in fact he was speaking of man's life, unimproved man's life: it was I that borrowed his words and applied them to the young gentlemen.' 'Very well applied too.'

'Certainly. Yet later conscience told me that my words were not only improper but also inaccurate. I looked out the passage this morning, and of course my conscience was right - is it ever wrong? - and I had omitted the words solitary and poor. "Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" was what he said. And though poor may have been appropriate ..." 'Appropriatissimo,' said Jack.

'The solitude had nothing to do with the overcrowded berth of your childhood. The false quotation was therefore one of those flashy worthless attempts at wit that I so much reprehend in others. Yet the point of all this is not to beat my breast crying mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, but rather to tell you that on the very same page I found that Hobbes, a learned cove, as you so rightly say, considered glory, after competition and diffidence, mankind's third principal cause of quarrel, so that trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion or any other sign of undervalue, were enough to bring violence about. Nay, destruction. I had read this passage before of course - it was on the same page, as I said - but its full force had escaped me until today, when just such a trifle . . .' 'Come in,' called Jack.

'Captain Pullings' compliments and duty, sir,' said Reade, 'and he believed you wished to know the moment the targets were ready.'

The targets were ready, rafts made of empty beef-casks and what odd pieces of plank and rail the carpenter could bring himself to part with, each with a square of bunting flying aloft. The gun-crews were ready too, and had been ever since the Captain's words to Clarissa were reported to the forecastle and confirmed by messages sent to the carpenter and the disappearance of the gunner and his mates into the forward magazine, where with infinite precautions they lit the lantern in the light-room and sat next door filling cartridges, stiff flannel bags made to take the due charge of powder, by the light that came through the double glass windows.

Each gun-crew naturally wished to wipe the eye of its neighbours, indeed of all other gun-crews aboard; but they were all eager to mollify their skipper, partly because it was more agreeable to sail under a captain that did not flog you and stop your grog, but even more because many were deeply attached to him and were eager to regain his esteem, while all hands freely acknowledged his seamanship and fighting qualities. Throughout the last dogwatch of Sunday, therefore, and in what few moments of leisure the forenoon and afternoon watches of Monday allowed, the captains of the guns and their crews titivated their piece, making sure that all blocks ran free, that all crows, worms, sponges, handspikes and other instruments that ought to be there were there in fact, smoothing their already well-smoothed roundshot, gently swabbing the name painted over the gun-port: Towser, Nancy Dawson, Spitfire, Revenge. This checking and re-checking was carried out by each member of the crew, by the midshipman in charge of a division of guns, by the officers, and of course by Mr Smith the gunner himself - everything was passed in review, from the upper-deck twelve-pounders and the long nines in the forecastle chase-ports to the twenty-four-pounder carron-ades on the quarterdeck.

No one therefore was either astonished or caught unprepared when, the drum having beaten to quarters and Mrs Oakes having appeared at the barricade, Captain Aubrey called 'Silence' in the midst of the expectant hush: a purely formal word, followed by 'Cast loose your guns,' and 'Mr Bulkeley, carry on.'

After this no more orders were called for. The bosun and his mates eased the first target over the headrail, paused until it was rather better than a quarter of a mile aft and to leeward, then launched another, and so until there was a string of five going away to the south-west. The Surprise had been sailing close-hauled under topsails and topgallants during this; and after a considering pause Jack bore up and brought the wind on her larboard quarter: the sail-trimmers, aware of his motions, left their guns without a word, clapping on to brace and sheet until she was steady on her new course, when they belayed and returned to the stations like automata, no words having passed.

With the wind so far abaft the beam there was much less noise in the rigging, less from the bow-wave and little indeed from the following sea. The men had mostly stripped to the waist; those with pigtails had clubbed them; many had tied black or red handkerchiefs round their heads. They stood or knelt in their set positions - the powder-man with his cartridge-box directly behind his gun far to larboard; the gun-heavers right against the ship's side with handspike or crowbar away from it; the boarders with their cutlasses and pistols, the fireman with his bucket, standing like statues; the match-holder kneeling clear of the murderous recoil; the captain glaring along the barrel; and as the target came in sight, fine on the starboard bow, a quarter of a mile away, murmuring words to his crew for pointing and elevation. And all this time the smell of slow-match in the tubs drifted along the deck.

'From forward aft,' called Jack as the first target came within range. 'D'ye hear me, there: from forward aft.'

The match-holders reached behind them, seized the match and knelt by the captain again, blowing the ashes off its glow.

'Starboard a point,' said Jack to the helmsman, and then much louder 'From forward aft: fire.'

The extreme tension broke as the bow-gun's captain whipped the proffered match across to the touch-hole and the gun went off with a deafening crash, leaping bodily from the deck and instantly racing back between its minders with frightful speed. But even before it was brought up by the breeching, the scream of its trucks and the great twang of the rope was drowned by the crash of its neighbour and so down the line in a prodigious thunder-clap that went on and on, the jets of smoke stabbed through and through with orange flame, a roar that was taken up in a different voice by the quarterdeck car-ronades. The wind drove the smoke away to leeward and the later shot could be seen raising white fountains in the general boil where the raft had been or skipping with immense bounds over the sea towards or even beyond it.

Already the foremost guns, held in on the recoil, were being wormed, sponged and reloaded; but before they were run out again one after another with the usual rumbling crash, Jack heard a clapping, thin and remote to his somewhat deafened ears, and turning he saw Mrs Oakes' delighted face. Her eyes were dark with emotion and she cried 'Oh how splendid! Oh what glory!'

Jack said 'It was just a rippling broadside, not to strain her timbers. They will start again directly.'

'How I wish Dr Maturin were here. Such prodigious ..." She could not find the word.

'Directly' in this case meant two full minutes after the first discharge, a leisurely performance compared with the Surprise's three accurate broadsides in three minutes eight seconds which she had achieved in the days when she was manned entirely by highly-trained men-of-war's men; but now many of her people were privateers who had always shipped by the lay, having no wages but sharing in the proceeds of the voyage less the expenses. They therefore had a deeply-engrained hatred of waste and they could not be brought to add to the expenses by blazing away with powder at eighteen pence a pound, as though it were free - paid for by the King. In most cases Jack had mixed the gun-crews, to avoid jealousies; but Sudden Death for example was manned entirely by the frigate's Sethians, privateers and members of a religious body in Shelmerston, excellent seamen, sober and reliable, but even more unwilling than most to waste a shot, and very deliberate in their aim. Still, by training their guns as far aft as they possibly could they did manage to send most of their shots close to the remains of the target.

'That was rather a ragged ripple, I am afraid,' said Jack to Mrs Oakes. 'I trust we shall do better next time.'

They did better, much better: one minute forty seconds between broadsides, the first raising the target high on a turmoil of white water, the second scattering it all abroad. 'Make fast your guns,' cried Jack over the cheering - Clarissa's pipe could be heard as shrill as Reade's - and he took the ship across the line of targets to engage the next two with the larboard guns, already cast loose by the second captains.

Firing from to-leeward meant that the flight and pitch of the shot could be followed more exactly, and when Jack, having given the order 'House your guns' turned to Clarissa, not without pride, and asked her how she had liked it, she cried 'Oh sir, I am quite hoarse with hallooing and amazed with the sound and the glory. Dear me, I had no notion . . . What a terrible, splendid thing a battle must be: like the Day of Judgment.' And after a pause, 'Pray what do you mean to do with the fifth?'

'That, ma'am, is for the bow-chasers.' He looked affectionately at her face, glowing with candid excitement and enthusiasm - she had never looked so animated nor half so handsome - and for a moment he was inclined to invite her to come forward and see the fine-work of firing a gun. But he hesitated, put the notion aside as out of place and walked along the gangway over the happy, sweating gun-crew in the waist as they were securing their guns, bowsing all lashings taut and talking in the loud, after-broadside voice about their wonderful accuracy and speed. 'Though mark you,' said the captain of Spitfire, 'we should have been even quicker, if some people had been more sudden than dead.' His neighbour, the bearded Sethian Slade, captain of the gun called Sudden Death, instantly replied 'And we should have been even more accurate, if some other people had been more deadly than sudden.'

Respect for their Captain, immediately overhead, restrained the Sethians' joy, but they beat Slade on the back and shook both his hands, while even the Spitfire crew laughed and said 'That got you in the balls, Ned.'

The bow-chasers on the forecastle were what the Navy called brass long nine-pounders. They were in fact made of bronze rather than brass, but the force of the word was such that the hands polished them assiduously, producing all the shine that bronze was capable of: on the other hand they were long and they did take nine-pound balls; they were also as accurate as smooth-bore cannon could well be. They both belonged to Jack: one he had bought in Sydney, the other he had had time out of mind and he knew its temper, its kick, its tendency to shoot better from the third ball to the twelfth, when it called for a rest to cool - if this were denied, it was apt to leap and break its breeching.

Both Jack and Tom Pullings loved to fire a great gun. Each had his own picked crew and each pointed his own chaser: each now fired three rounds; and as Jack himself had taught Pullings, then a long-legged midshipman in his first command, how to point a gun, their style was very much the same. One shot, though true for line, a little long; the next a trifle short; while Jack's third scattered the barrels and Pullings' leapt skipping through the wreckage. With the ship taking the swell abeam, the roll scarcely affected guns firing ahead, and she hardly pitched at all; so with a range of five hundred yards, rapidly narrowing, this was no outstanding feat of gunnery; but it thoroughly pleased the gunners and delighted the hands. Mrs Oakes' congratulations could not have been kinder, and in the excitement both West and Davidge ventured 'Give you joy of your shooting, sir.'

All this had taken a remarkably short time measured by clock rather than by activity and emotion, and a little before sunset all hands were summoned aft. When they were assembled in their usual unseemly heap their Captain surveyed them with a benevolence they had not seen this many a weary day and night and in his strong voice he said 'Shipmates, we have warmed our guns and new-charged them: no fear of damp powder or charges that have to be drawn. And that is just as well, because we may have to use them in a couple of days or so. I will tell you the position. There is a British ship and her crew captured in Moahu, the island we are heading for, by the natives and their friend an American privateer, the Franklin, ship-rigged, twenty-two nine-pounders, French crew. The island is used by some English fur-traders on the Nootka-Canton run, and by certain South Sea whalers; and she may try to snap some more of them up. She nearly had the Daisy, as you heard in Annamooka. So we must put a stop to her capers. When we cut the Diane out of St Martin's I was able to tell you just how she lay. This time I cannot do so, although the master of the Daisy gave me a chart of the harbour and the approaches; but I do not think we shall go very far wrong by laying her alongside and boarding in the smoke.'

The Surprises, who had been listening with the utmost intensity, nodded their heads and uttered an affirmative growl, interspersed with 'that's right, mate' and 'board her in the smoke, ha, ha.'

'But we want no trouble,' said Jack. 'We do not want any of our people to be knocked on the head, if we can avoid it. So since she will be pleased at the sight of a whaler, English or American, our best plan is to sail in looking as much like one as ever we can. Of course there may be no sailing in: she may have thrown up batteries each side of the narrows and she may smoke what we are at: and we may have to deal with the situation some other way. But in any case the first thing to do is to make the ship into a whaler: we turned her into a blue Spanish barque once, as I dare say you remember; and that answered quite well.' General laughter, and a cry of 'God love us, how we sweated!' 'Now I know at least a score of you have been in the Greenland or South Seas fishery at one time or another, and I want those hands to choose the three longest-headed, most experienced men among them to help us change the barky into a whaler, a tired, shabby, down-at-heel, three-years-at-sea old whaler, short-handed and peaceful.'

Chapter Nine

An old tired shabby whaler, with a crow's nest aloft, trying-out gear and general filth on deck and deeply squalid sides stood into Pabay, the north-eastern port of Moahu, in Kalahua's territory, just making headway against the ebb under a single blue-patched foretopsail.

In her crow's nest stood her even shabbier master in a blackguardly round hat, crammed up against his unshaven mate, both of them gauging the wind and the distance between the two headlands on either side of the entrance. 'We should get out in two tacks at slack water or on the ebb,' said Jack, and they returned to their examination of the far end, where the wide, sheltered bay drew in before broadening into the harbour itself.

'We shall open the narrows any minute now, sir,' said Pullings.

Jack nodded. 'I do not see a hint of a battery on either side," he said: and then as the narrows opened he called down 'Mr West, come up the sheet and drop the kedge.'

'Nor no privateer neither,' said Pullings. 'The fat round tub of a ship right down against the shore where the stream comes in is a Nootka fur-trader, if ever there was one.'

Jack nodded again: he had had her in his glass for some time and after a silence he said 'She must be the Truelove. She was hove down just there when Wainwright left her. They have come at the leak. She has crossed her yards and bent her sails, and she is riding low: stores and water aboard for sure.'

'Nothing could be a better example of Dr Falconer's general position,' said Stephen, standing with Martin in the mizentop. 'The whole is volcanic, with coral superimposed here and there and lying around the edge in reefs. That mountain, that truncated cone rising behind the jagged hills, certainly has a crater at the top. It is no doubt the volcano he wished to explore. Indeed, there is a little cloud of what may well be smoke just over it.'

'Certainly. Furthermore, the extreme luxuriance of the vegetation surely implies a volcanic soil: do but consider that impenetrable forest - I say impenetrable, but now I see a road along the stream.'

'Then again these strands, now coral, now lava-black, argue repeated eruptions.'

'We hear of submarine outbursts of extraordinary violence.'

'Iceland, says Sir Joseph Banks, is blessed not only with birds so remarkable as the gerfalcon, the harlequin duck and both phalaropes, but also with sensible volcanic phenomena at virtually all seasons.'

There is something I do not like about that village,' said Jack. 'Wainwright spoke of it as full of people - crowded -and now there are very few walking about. And they are only women and children with here and there an old man; the canoes are all drawn up, most of them high up.'

Pullings was digesting this, and the absence of nets spread out to dry, when two girls, helped by a band of children, slid a small two-hulled canoe down the sand and put off, the girls managing the immense sail with no apparent difficulty, steering very close to the wind and travelling with extraordinary speed.

Jack heaved himself out of the deep crow's nest: the top-gallantmasts gave a warning creak. 'Take care, sir,' cried Pullings: Jack frowned, let himself gently down to the cross-trees, reaching out for a standing backstay and shot down to the quarterdeck like a well-controlled meteor, landing with a thump and hands just this side the scorching-point. 'Pass the word for Owen,' he said; and to Owen, 'Hail the canoe in South Seas as it approaches the narrows: hail it very civil.'

'Very civil it is, sir,' said Owen. Yet he had no time to make his compliment, for in their friendly Polynesian way the girls hailed them first, smiling up and waving a free hand.

'Ask them to come aboard,' said Jack. 'Mention feathers, coloured handkerchiefs.'

Words passed, but the girls, though amused and half-tempted by feathers and coloured handkerchiefs, did not choose to come up the side; and to be sure, the few visible Surprises looked deeply unappetizing. Nevertheless they stayed long enough to make three rings about the ship, handling their craft with a skill that was a joy to behold, and to answer the question 'Where is the Franklin? 'Gone to chase a ship.' 'Where are all the men?' 'Gone to war. Kalahua is going to eat Queen Puolani: he has taken the gun.'

Their third remark, though shrill and high, was uttered by both at once and much of what might have been comprehensible was lost in the wind as they sped off; but it seemed to tell the Surprises, who at this point were sailing under American colours, that they would find their friend in Eeahu when the Franklin had caught her ship.

'The Truelove is lowering down a boat, sir,' said Pullings.

An eight-oared cutter: and although some of those that lowered it were sailors, those that came down into the stern-sheets were obviously landsmen. Jack considered them and their ship, their thinly-manned ship, for some time as the cutter made its way from the shore. 'Mr West,' he said, 'let all boats be ready at a moment's notice. Mr Davidge,' - calling down the hatch - 'stand by.' Davidge was in command of the flying column, armed and prepared for any emergency that might arise and kept below decks, where they fairly stifled.

He then recovered the kedge, hauled the sheet aft and stood on through the narrows, looking very attentively at the country between the village and the mountains, where the stream came towards the harbour.

When the cutter was within hail a man stood up, fell down, stood up again holding the coxswain's shoulder and called 'What ship is that?" in an approximately American voice, drawing his face in a sideways contortion to do so.

'The Titus Oates. Where is Mr Dutourd?'

'Gone a-chasing. He will join us in Eeahu in three-four days. Do you have any tobacco? Any wine?'

'Sure. Come aboard.' With the wheel in his own hands Jack stood on past the cutter and turned so that the Surprise lay between the boat and the shore; speaking to the quartermaster, one of the few hands on deck, he said quietly 'When they hook on, hoist our own colours.' It was a sophistry: the colours, streaming directly towards the shore, would be seen neither by the Truelove nor by a boat attached to the Surprise's windward mainchains. But certain forms had to be observed.

The man who hailed and three others from the stern-sheets came awkwardly up. They had pistols in their belts; so had the man they left behind. They were not seamen; the canvas strips that concealed most of the ship's guns did not surprise them, nor did her whaling gear, improbable when seen close at hand.

'The Liberator said we should soon have wine and tobacco,' said the leader, smiling as pleasantly as he could.

'Mr West,' said Jack, 'pray tell Mr Davidge that these gentlemen are to be properly served. Bilboes in the forehold might be most suitable. Go with him, Bonden,' he added, feeling that perhaps West might not quite have grasped the point of the last murmured words.

In point of fact everybody aboard, apart from these wretched white or whitish mercenaries, was aware of Captain Aubrey's motions, even Stephen and Martin, newly arrived from the mizentop; and when Jack, seeing Bonden return with a satisfied smile, said in an undertone, 'Doctor, pray get that ugly fellow in the sternsheets to come aboard,' he needed no explanation but called out in French, asking for news of Monsieur Dutourd's health and suggesting that the man should climb carefully up the side with a mariner or two capable of carrying heavy weights. One of the mariners he pointed to, stroke oar, had been gazing up for some time very earnestly, making discreet nods and becks, and Stephen was almost sure he was one of a thousand former patients.

The mercenary came up with no further persuasion and stroke oar after him. The seaman having saluted the quarterdeck instantly gave the mercenary a truly frightful kick that hurled him with stunning force against the capstan. Bonden took his pistol away as though they had practised the act for weeks; and the seaman, turning to Jack, pulled off his hat and said 'William Hoskins, sir, armourer's mate, Polychrest, now belonging to the Truelove.'

'I am heartily glad to see you again, Hoskins,' said Jack, shaking his hand. 'Tell me, are there many other Frenchmen in the Truelove?'

'About a score, sir. They was left behind to keep us at work and to stop the natives from stealing when the others went off to war with Kalahua. They cut capers over us something cruel, and spoke sarcastic, those that could speak any English.'

'Are the rest of the boat's crew Trueloves?'

'All but the coxswain, sir; and I dare say they have scragged him by now. A right bastard: he killed our skipper.'

Jack glanced over the side, and there indeed were the Trueloves busily, silently, drowning the coxswain. From a sense of duty Jack called out 'Belay, there,' and they belayed, coming aboard as nimbly as cats for a glass of grog, served out on the half-deck. 'We smoked you was no right whaler from the shore,' said one of them to Killick. 'But did we tell them infernal buggers? No, mate, we did not.'

During this time the Surprise had let fall her topsail and she was making for an anchorage close inshore on the south side of the harbour. The cutter was towing alongside and her own boats were in a high state of readiness for lowering down. 'Mr Davidge,' said Jack, 'it is of the first importance that you and your men should be on that road into the mountains, that road by the stream, before any of the Frenchmen from the Truelove. They are almost certain to run once we show them our guns, and if they get to Kalahua we are dished. He and his men are only a day's march away - perhaps not so much seeing they are trying to drag a gun.'

Even in a frigate as well worked-up as the Surprise the order 'man and arm boats' was rarely carried out in under twenty-five minutes, the system of tackles to the fore and main yardarms being so cumbrous; and the launch was scarcely in the water before the Frenchmen in the Truelove had grown suspicious. They were gathering on the shore and moving through the village southwards along the stream, carrying bundles.

The launch and blue cutter were already full of men, however, and Jack called 'Go ahead with what you have, Mr Davidge, and do your best to hold them until the rest come up.'

'I shall do my very best, sir,' said Davidge, looking up and

smiling. 'Shove off. Give way.'

The boats raced for the shore and ran far up the sand; the men bundled out, holding their muskets high, and almost at once they disappeared into the tree-ferns.

When the other cutter and the gig were on their way Jack hurried up into the foretop. The deep belt of tree-ferns thinned out to a country of tall grass scattered with bushes and small but very thick patches of wood, full of lianas. The column could be seen here and there, still in reasonable formation, but much drawn-out, the leading men doing their best to keep up with the extraordinarily agile Davidge. Their muskets gleamed in the sun, and their cutlasses as they slashed at the lianas and the undergrowth.

The Frenchmen had now started running too, throwing down their bundles but not their arms. They, like Davidge, were clearly aiming for the point where the stream broke out of the mountains in a narrow gorge; and although the distance from the column's landing-place to the gorge was much the same as that from the village, the Frenchmen had the advantage of the road cut for the gun.

'Even so,' said Jack, clasping his hands with great force, 'we had half an hour's start." The line was becoming still more drawn-out, Davidge going like a thoroughbred: he was running not indeed for his life but rather for his living, for all that made life worth while. The other boats had now landed their men, and they were tearing along the track already made - the tree-ferns could be seen waving as they passed. 'Oh no, oh no!' he cried as a body of Surprises, outstripped, tried to catch up by forcing their way straight through a brake criss-crossed with thorny creepers. 'Would God I had gone with them,' he said; and he was about to lean over and call 'Tom, try a long shot at the Frenchmen on the road,' when he realized that the sound of the gun would act as a spur, doing certain harm for almost no likelihood of good.

The Surprises had now come to fairly clear country and the two lines were converging fast. Davidge had reached the stream: he was across it: he climbed the far bank and stood in the gorge, facing the three leading French, his sword in his hand. He ran the first through the body, pistolled the second, and the third brought him down with a clubbed musket. From that moment on it was impossible to make out particular actions: more Surprises hurled themselves across the stream, more Frenchmen came up the road as fast as they could run. Dust rose over the close fighting, the hand-to-hand battle in the gorge; there was a steady crackle of musket-fire as the reinforcements came up taking the Frenchmen from behind and picking off those who were not yet engaged or those few who tried to run back.

The shouting died; the dust settled. It was clear that Davidge's men had won. Jack took the ship across to lie alongside the Truelove, landed in the jollyboat with Stephen, Martin and Owen to interpret, and walked fast along the road towards the gorge. He was silent, more exhausted than if he had taken part.

It was a small group they met, men of Davidge's division, carrying his body.

'Was anyone else killed?' asked Jack.

'Harry Weaver copped it, sir,' said Paget, captain of the foretop, 'and William Brymer, George Young and Bob Stewart were so badly hurt we dursn't move them. And there are some more their mates are helping down to the boats.'

'Did any French survivors get away?'

'There weren't no survivors, sir.'

By the height of flood everything was laid along: the wounded had been brought down, the Trueloves who had taken refuge in a puuhonua, a sanctuary so profoundly taboo that even Kalahua would not allow the French to violate it, had been recovered, and the Surprise, followed by the Truelove, had warped across the harbour to the northern side of the narrows, waiting for the first of ebb to waft them through.

As Stephen came into the cabin Jack looked up and said 'How are your patients coming along?'

'Tolerably well, I thank you. At one time I was doubtful about Stewart's leg - I even reached for the saw - but now I believe that with the blessing we may save it. The rest of our people are mostly straightforward cut or stab wounds, though some poor fellows from the Truelove are in a sad way. Is there any coffee in that pot?"

'I believe so. I had not the heart to finish it; I am afraid it may be cold.' Stephen poured his cup in silence. He knew how Jack hated watching a battle rather than take part in it, and how he would brood over orders he might have given - ideal orders that would have meant victory at no cost to his own people. 'But at least I can give you some good news,' Jack went on. 'One of the Trueloves from the taboo place was born in the Sandwich Islands - Tapia is his name, a chief's son, intelligent, speaks uncommon good English and he knows these parts very well. He it was that told the others about the puuhonua when they had to cut and run after their captain and his mate were killed. And he says he is confident that once we get out, if we get out, he can pilot us through the reefs. I am amazingly glad of it, because although Wainwright's chart is a good one, picking up his bearings on a moonless night would be a damned anxious business.'

'Sir,' said Killick, coming in with a tray, 'which I brought you a pot and a decanter.'

'God shield you from death, Preserved Killick,' said Stephen. 'I could do with both. Faith, so I could.'

'And would your honour like some hot water?'

'Perhaps I should,' said Stephen, looking at his hands, which were gloved over with brown dried blood. 'It is a curious thing, but though I nearly always clean my instruments I sometimes forget my person.' Washed and drinking coffee and brandy in alternate sips, he said 'But tell me, brother, why should you wish to grope through the darkness? The sun always rises.'

'There is not a moment to be lost. Kalahua means to attack on Friday in the morning, whether he can get his gun there in time or not: his god says he cannot fail.'

'How do you know?'

'Tapia told me: he had it from his sweetheart, who brought him food in the puuhonua, and all the news. If we do not get out on this ebb and with this moderate backing wind we may lose essential days - we may even have to wait for the change of the moon. What I hope, what I very much hope to do is to run down to Eeahu by Wednesday, tell Puolani that she is about to be attacked and that we shall defend her against Kalahua and the Franklin if she will promise to love King George, and so make our arrangements to deal with either or both with at least a day in hand.'

'Very good.' Stephen considered for a while and then asked 'What have you learnt of the Franklin?'

'It appears that although Dutourd is no great seaman he now has a Yankee sailing-master, as they say in America, who is: the ship is a flyer, and he drives his people very hard. Of course, with only twenty-two nine-pounders, a broadside of ninety-nine pounds, she is scarcely a match for us, with a hundred and sixty-eight, not counting carronades; but a fight at sea can turn on one lucky shot, as you know very well, and I had much rather not have to cope with her and perhaps her prize at the same time as Kalahua. I ought to have said, by the way, that Dutourd took all his seamen out of the Truelove to run after this chase, so he would have plenty of hands to serve his guns. Come in.'

'If you please, sir,' said Reade, 'Mr West says the tide is on the turn.'

They waited until the gentle current had grown to a stream that gurgled round their stern and tightened the hawsers from ship to shore so that they rose above the surface, almost straight, in a low dripping curve, and the palm-trees, which acted as bollards, leant still more. 'Let go,' called Jack, and the two ships moved smoothly out through the narrows.

The wealth of precautions - tow-line to the launch anchored out in the bay to heave her head to windward if she sagged, hands poised to fend her off the rock, a complication of lines to the Truelove - proved unnecessary: they both passed through with ten yards to spare and instantly flashed out topsails to gather way enough to go about on their first leg. The Surprise had a remarkably clean bottom, even now, and she had always been brisk in stays; she came round easily. But Jack, watching the deep-laden bluff-bowed Truelove, had a horrible feeling that she was not going to manage it; and that since there was no room to box off, still less to wear, Tom Pullings would have to club-haul her: a perilous manoeuvre with an unknown crew. The critical moment passed, and with it his extreme anxiety: she filled on the starboard tack - she was round, and the Surprises would have joined the Trueloves' cheer - she was an uncommonly valuable prize - if Davidge's body had not been lying there, sewn up in a hammock with four cannon-balls at his feet and an ensign over him.

The next tack took them clear of the harbour, though the Truelove was within biscuit-toss of the headland. Tapia's sweetheart, who had kept pace in her canoe, said goodbye and he took the ship along the landward side of the reef and so through the dog-leg passage, the Truelove following. Here in the fading light they both heaved to the kind and steady wind. Aboard the Surprise the ship's bell tolled; Martin said the proper, deeply moving words; men from Davidge's division fired three volleys; and his body slid over the side.

They filled again, passed two small islands with their attendant reefs - Tapia pointed out their bearings against the dark peaks of Moahu - and then they were in the open sea.

Oakes took the first watch, and while he was on duty Stephen came on deck to breathe: the air of the sick-berth, in spite of the wind-sails, was uncommonly fetid. Apart from the heat and the numbers, two of the rescued Trueloves had shockingly neglected and mortifying wounds. Clarissa was sitting there in the light of the stern lantern and for a while they talked about the extraordinary phosphorescence of the sea -the wake stretched away in pale fire until it joined the Truelove's bow-wave - and the brilliance of the stars in the black black sky. Then she said 'Oakes was very deeply grieved not to be one of the landing-party; and I am afraid Captain Aubrey was sadly upset by - by the casualties.'

'He was indeed; yet you are to observe that if fighting-men, accustomed to battle from their youth, were to mourn for their companions as long as they might in civil life, they would run melancholy mad.'

Oakes came aft: he said 'Give you joy of our prize, Doctor. I have scarcely seen you since we took her. It is true that the Truelove's guns were all spiked?'

'So I understand: all but one. Tapia told me that Captain Hardy and his mates were spiking the last when the Frenchmen killed them.'

'How do you spike a gun?' asked Clarissa.

'You drive a nail or something of that kind down the touch-hole, so that the flash of the priming don't reach the charge. You can't fire the gun till you get the spike out,' said Oakes.

'It appears that they used steel spikes, which the Franklin's gunner could not deal with. He was going to try drilling new touch-holes when they went off in chase of the ship they are still pursuing,' said Stephen.

Two bells. 'All's well' called the lookouts round the ship, and Oakes went forward to receive the quartermaster's report of 'Six knots, sir, if you please' and to chalk it on the log-board. Coming back, he said 'I know it ain't genteel to talk about money, sir, but I must say the prize could not have come at a better moment for Clarissa and me.' He spoke with a touching earnestness, and by the light of the stern-lantern Stephen caught a look of tolerant affection on her face. 'All the hands are busy reckoning their shares. The Truelove's merchant's clerk told them the worth of the cargo to the last penny, and Jemmy Ducks says the little girls may get close on nine pounds apiece - they walk about scarcely touching the deck, and thinking of presents. You, sir, are to have a blue coat lined with white, whatever it may cost.'

'Bless them,' said Stephen. 'But I did not know they formed part of the ship's company.'

'Oh yes, sir. The Captain rated them boys, third class, long ago, so that Jemmy might have their allowance, to ease his spirits.'

'Oh!' cried Clarissa. 'What, what is this?' She held up a writhing viscous object.

'A flying squid,' said Stephen. 'If you count, you will find he has ten legs.'

'Even if he had fifty, he would have no business spoiling the front of my dress,' she said quite mildly. 'Fly off, sir' - tossing it over the rail.

With the breeze steady on their larboard quarter they went easily along under single-reefed topsails, sitting in their island of lantern-light surrounded by darkness, and talking in a desultory, amiable fashion bell after bell, while the wind sang in the rigging, the blocks creaked rhythmically and the ritual cries were repeated at their due intervals.

Half-way through the watch Oakes left them. 'I am happy to have this chance of speaking to you,' said Stephen, 'because I should like to ask you whether you would welcome the opportunity of going home - of returning to England."

'I have hardly thought about it,' said Clarissa. 'My only wish was to get away from New South Wales, away rather than to anywhere. I have not really thought at all. The present, with all its inconveniences, seemed to me the natural present; and if I had not with great perseverance contrived to make myself so generally disliked I could think of nothing better than sailing on and on and on.'

'Dear Clarissa, collect yourself. I must be back in the sick-berth very soon. Suppose Captain Aubrey were to send this prize away under the command of Mr Oakes, would you rejoice at the thought of seeing England again?'

'Dear Doctor, pray consider: of course I should like to be in England again, but I was transported, and if I were to return before my time I might be taken up and sent back again, which I could not bear.'

'Not, I believe, as a married woman; and if you were to keep away from St James's Street, the likelihood of your being recognized is less than that of your being struck by a thunderbolt. And even in that case I have connexions who are as it were lightning-conductors. I am speaking to you in this fashion, Clarissa, because I believe that you are a discreet and honourable woman, one. who has a friendship for me as I have a friendship for her, one who understands the value of silence. If you return, I will give you a letter to a friend of mine who lives in Shepherd Market, a good, decent man who would like to hear all that you told me and more and who would certainly protect you in the extraordinarily unlikely event of your being taken up.'

After a long silence Clarissa said 'To be sure, I had rather be in England than anywhere else. But what could I do there? As you know, a midshipman has no half-pay; and I could not go back to Mother Abbott's: not now.'

'No, no, never in life. There is not the least question of that, at all. Captain Aubrey has considerable influence with the Admiralty; my friend more still; and if between them they did not get Oakes a ship at once, he having passed for lieutenant, you would set up house with him for a while. If they succeed, why sure, you might feel lonely, as perhaps my wife does when I am at sea, and you might stay with her. She has a vast great house in the county - whatever county it is behind Portsmouth. Far too big for a woman and she alone apart from our little Brigid and a few servants and the horses. She breeds Arabians.' He spoke a little at random; Clarissa was clearly troubled, and she probably did not attend.

'Yes,' she said, 'but suppose I had done something wrong in Botany Bay - suppose I had committed a capital crime like . . . like throwing a baby down a well, for example, and suppose that finding me gone they had sent word to England, might I not be sent back for trial?'

'Listen, my dear, with ifs you can put all Paris into a bottle. The protection I offer you will, with reasonable discretion on your part, cover you from a multitude of sins, many or even most of them capital. Here is Padeen, his soul to the Devil, and I must go. Think of what I have said, now: speak to no one - the whole thing is a mere hypothesis, since I may not persuade the Captain - tell no one at all what I have said, and let me know yea or nay with a look in the morning. Come and be examined if ever there is time. I am away. God bless, now.'

It was morning before he reached the quarterdeck again, a brilliant morning with the sun well up and green land, ending in Eeahu Point, all along the starboard beam. Tapia was at the foremasthead, guiding the ship through the passage in the south-eastern reef. 'All clear now, sir,' he hailed. 'Nine fathom water all the way till you open the bay.' He came down and continued his conversation with the two canoes that had been alongside for some time, and Jack noticed the jollyboat shove off from the Truelove's side, with his armourer in it. 'Come up the sheet a trifle,' he said, to check the frigate's way: vain words - attentive hands had already done it.

'Which the coffee is getting cold,' said Killick. 'And the squids won't be worth eating.'

'Mr Smith wishes to tell you that the armourer has unspiked all the Truelove's guns,' said Pullings, coming across the deck and taking off his hat.

The information came down the chain of command to the armourer, who stepped forward, wheezing and chuckling, gave Jack a handkerchief full of spikes, all with an internal screw-thread tapped into the thick end and all glistening with sweet oil. 'I learnt that ploy in the old Illustrious,' he said, chuckling still.

'And it was an illustrious deed, too,' said Jack. 'Well done, Rogers, upon my word. Good morning, Doctor. You could not have timed your arrival better: we have fried squids for breakfast.'

The squids dispatched, the proper enquiries after the sick-berth made, and a fresh pot of coffee begun, Jack said quietly, 'It may seem flying in the face of Providence to talk about what to do after a battle before you have fought it; but some things, like preventer-stays, have to be laid on before-hand, although in the event they may not prove useful. So I will say this: the gunroom's problems would be best resolved if I were to send Oakes in with the prize. But what would his wife think of it? I do not want to order that good modest young woman back if she don't choose to go. What do you think? You know her so much better than I do.'

'I cannot tell. But I shall be seeing her later in the morning and I will endeavour to find out. When do you propose to land?'

'Not until after dinner. I am letting the canoes come alongside and gossip, so that Queen Puolani will know everything about us and what is afoot. She will not be caught unprepared - it is a dreadful thing to have a whole carriageful of people draw up at your door and leap out grinning, the house all ahoo, carpets taken up, a great washing going on, the children bawling, yourself confined to the head, having taken physic, and your wife gone to Pompey in hopes of a new cook.'

The Queen was not to be caught unprepared; nor was the Surprise or her people. The quarterdeck carronades, so much lighter than long guns, and at short range so much more deadly, were made ready for carrying ashore, together with powder and shot, mostly case-shot, in canisters of twenty-four pounds apiece. The ship's blackened sea-service muskets were blackened again, the seaman's natural propensity to polish having made them shine more than they should, as Jack had noticed at Pabay; and now, considering the country before him and all that Tapia had to say about it, he had fair expectations of laying an ambush. Pikes, bayonets, boarding-axes, cutlasses, pistols and murdering-pieces were all laid neatly out on the one hand, only waiting the order to go ashore; and on the other bandages, splints, surgical needles and waxed thread, silk or hemp. The civil side was naturally of great importance too: presents - a large looking-glass, feathers, patterned cloth, cut-glass decanters - had been laid in a sandal-wood chest, while a crown piece, with King George's head, ringed and hung from a sky-blue ribbon, lay in Jack's pocket - and the officers, knowing the Polynesians' great regard for rank, set out silver-buckled shoes, white silk stockings, breeches, fine coats and cocked hats, and the Captain's bargemen put by their uniform dress of white trousers, light blue brass-buttoned jackets and neat little pumps with bows, agony to wear on feet long flattened by bare contact with the deck. Because of the heat, and for fear of dirtying them, however, none of these things were put on until the Surprise, followed by the Truelove and accompanied by many canoes, rounded-to opposite Eeahu, brought up in five fathom water, and flashed out a fine display of bunting.

During this long interval Clarissa came to see Stephen and for a while they talked of her health, each feeling shy of approaching yesterday's conversation. He said 'I am better pleased with you today than ever I have been before. I shall leave off the mercury, which will do away with the slight salivation you mention. It is, as you know, a specific for the malady you dreaded, but Dr Redfern was quite right in his diagnosis and I exhibited it only to clear up the trouble for which you first consulted me. It has done its work; but I think we must continue the steel and bark for a little while, to consolidate the general improvement.'

'I thank you, dear Doctor, for your very great care of me,' she said, and sat with folded hands for a while before going on, 'I have thought about returning to England, as you desired me to do; and if the possibility were to arise I should very much like to go back.'

'My dear, I am heartily glad to hear you say so. The possibility has arisen. At breakfast this morning Captain Aubrey said that he had it in mind to give your husband the Truelove to take in, but he hesitated on your account, being unsure how you would like it. He asked me to sound you. I was so nearly certain that you would say yes that I have already prepared a letter for my friend: his name is Blaine, Sir Joseph Blaine, and he has a place under government. I must apologize for its being sealed, a necessary proof of its authenticity. In it I have told him nothing of your childhood and youth, only that you were employed to keep the accounts at Mother Abbott's - he is as well acquainted with the place as I - and that you knew a great deal about what went on in the house."

'Did you tell him how I came to be sent to Botany Bay?'

'I said that a member of Black's - Sir Joseph too is a member - begged you off, and that is enough for him. He is discretion itself, the very heart of discretion, and you need fear no impertinent questions from him, no personal questions at all. If you will tell him all that you told me about Wray and Ledward and their friends he will be satisfied. And here' - holding up a small parcel - 'is a small parcel of beetles for him; he is passionately devoted to beetles, and nothing could be better to guarantee your good faith. You do not mind beetles, my dear.'

'I do not mind them at all. Indeed, I have sometimes tried to help them climb a stone, but always in vain,' said Clarissa.

'Very good. I do hate women that cry out "Oh beetles! Oh serpents! Oh mice or centipedes!" and long to knock their silly affected heads together. But now, my dear, things are likely to move very fast and we may neither of us have time to talk at our leisure. So let me tell you one or two things of importance: you will certainly go by way of Batavia, where the prize will be condemned and sold, and you will both travel to England in an Indiaman from Canton. Here is a letter to my banker in Batavia, who will provide you with funds to travel in something resembling comfort. And since East Indiamen usually put their passengers down in or near the Thames, here is a draught on my infamous London bankers that will tide you over until Mr Oakes can come at his pay and prize-money.'

'How very, very ..."

'A small loan between friends is no great thing, my dear. And here is a note for Mrs Broad, who keeps a comfortable inn in the Liberties of the Savoy: I have mentioned her before. You would do well to stay there and send a note by ticket-porter to Sir Joseph Blaine, asking for an appointment in the evening and going there by hackney-coach. You need not be afraid of him: he is appreciative of tender young charms, but he is no satyr. You will not forget the beetles, Clarissa. And lastly here is a letter for my wife. If Mr Oakes passes for lieutenant and is appointed to a ship, which I think will be the case, I believe she will ask you to stay with her until we return from the seas ... I hesitate to say anything about Mr Oakes's discretion.'

'You may rely upon it,' said Clarissa, with a curious smile, 'partly because he knows, really knows, nothing, and partly because -'

The rest of her words were drowned in a violent roaring above their heads, a piping and the rush of feet. 'Jesus, Mary and Joseph,' cried Stephen. He whipped off his canvas shoes and trousers, drew on the fine breeches laid out; she tucked his shirt in behind and fastened the strap, folding and pinning his neckcloth, put his swordbelt over his shoulders, held out his best though still sadly shabby coat, straightened his wig and passed his hat. 'God bless you, my dear,' he said and ran on deck, where a great voice was calling 'Hell and death, where is the Doctor? Will no one rouse me out that Doctor?'

They pulled ashore through the rows of Puolani's great double-hulled war-canoes, Jack and Pullings in a blaze of gold lace and epaulettes, the others in their respective degrees of glory, and they were received with a stately formal welcome; for although the Truelove was an old friend, nothing like the Surprise had been seen in these waters, with a crow's nest like a whaler but with no whale-boat at all and far, far too many guns.

Jack and Pullings, with Stephen and Martin, Oakes and Adams, with Bonden carrying the sandalwood chest and Tapia to interpret, paced up in twos from the sea, through ranks of elderly grave-faced men holding fern-palm fronds, towards a wide, open-walled building where a woman was sitting on a broad bench that ran the whole width of the house with several islanders on either side of her: Jack noticed that whereas she was wearing a splendid feather cloak all the others, old men, young men, women and girls, were bare to the waist.

When they were within ten yards of her, an ancient man, remarkably tattooed and with a white bone through the septum of his nose, gave Jack the leafy branch of a breadfruit-tree. The last men of the line threw down their fronds and Tapia said 'That is a sign they mean peace. If you put yours on top, that shows you mean peace too.'

Jack laid the branch solemnly over the fronds: the woman stood up, as tall as Jack and broad-shouldered, but not nearly so heavy. 'This is Queen Puolani,' said Tapia, taking off his shirt. Jack made his bow, his hat tucked under his left arm, an elegant leg stretched out; she stepped forward, shook his hand in the European manner - a firm, dry clasp - and led him in, seating him next to herself. He named the others by order of rank and she inclined her head to each, a welcoming, friendly smile on her handsome face, no darker than an Italian's and scarcely tattooed at all. Perhaps thirty or thirty-five. There were some forty people, men and women, sitting in this pleasant airy place, and when all the newcomers were settled there followed an exchange of compliments. A meal was proposed; Jack excused himself - they had just eaten - but happily accepted the suggestion of kava, and while it was handing round he called for the presents. They were well received, particularly the smaller bunches of feathers that, on Tapia's whispered advice, he offered to the aunts and cousins of Puolani's house. She herself, and her councillors, were clearly too anxious to pay very much attention to beads or even looking-glasses: it was also obvious, from the general course of the conversation, that many of her enquiries were a matter of form. From what her people had learnt from their friends in the Truelove and from other sources she knew most of what had happened, and asked only out of politeness.

Presently she sent most of the people away, accompanying some various distances across the square before the house, others to the threshold, while others were dismissed with a smile; and the assembly was reduced to Puolani and two councillors, Jack, Stephen and Tapia.

When Jack said 'Kalahua is about to attack you, with the help of the Americans,' she replied, 'We know. He has reached the Oratonga spring, the river that flows into our bay, with thirty-seven white men: they have muskets and a gun - a gun. They may be here early the day after tomorrow.'

'So I have heard,' said Jack. 'As for the gun, he may have dragged it up, but without a road he may never be able to drag it down - nothing so cumbrous as a gun. Yet even if he should, it is no great matter: we have many more guns, bigger and better; many, many more muskets. I must tell you, ma'am - put that as civil as ever you can, Tapia, d'ye hear me - I must tell you that the Americans are my King's enemies: the two states are at war and that we shall guard you from them and from Kalahua, who has misused our countrymen, if you will accept King George's protection - is that how I should put it, Stephen? - and promise to be a faithful, loving ally.'

The Polynesians brightened amazingly. After a few words with the old chiefs Puolani turned to Jack with sparkling eyes and a glowing face - the flush was clearly perceptible - and said 'I welcome King George's protection; and I shall be a faithful loving ally; as faithful and loving as I was to my own husband.'

Tapia translated the last words, added perhaps as an afterthought, with a particular flatness; and the councillors looked down. 'What a handsome creature she is,' thought Jack, and he said 'Very well: that is settled. Allow me to give you your protector's likeness.' He brought the shining crown from his pocket, and after a pause for the translation, hung it round her acquiescent neck. 'Now, ma'am,' he said, rising and looking at her with respectful admiration, 'if I may speak to your war-chiefs, we may start getting some of our guns ashore and making our preparations. There is not a moment to be lost.'

Not a moment was lost. By sunset both ships were moored outside the bay, under the lee of its southern headland, in good holding ground and completely invisible from the hills over which Kalahua must come; and although the emplacements had been chosen, even the carronades were not to be landed until dusk, in case some advanced party should see them being rolled up the open strand before reaching the impenetrable green. And by sunset Jack had explored the traditional battlefields, three places along the only route across the mountains for a considerable body of men, above all for men pulling a gun.

'I am so sorry you had to stay with your patients,' he said, taking his ease at last in the great cabin with a bowl of fruit to quench his thirst. 'You would have rejoiced in the birds. There was one with a beak.'

'That alone would have been worth the voyage.'

'A yellow bird, with a heavy great beak shaped like a sickle: and many others. You would have been delighted. However, you shall see them later. Well, now, there were three main battlefields by land. The first is a grassy plain between the sudden precipitous hills and the cultivated ground: there the southern people wait for the northerners, and they draw up in lines, throw spears and slingstones and then go for one another with clubs and the like in the old-fashioned way; but there is the disadvantage of three taboo groves, and if anyone passes within hand's reach, either pursuing or being pursued, he brings defeat on his side; and his soul, together with the souls of all those related to him, spend eternity in that volcano up there.'

'Is it active?'

'Pretty active, I believe. Then the next place is quite high up, a natural cleft of rather better than a cable's length, with remarkably steep sides. When our friends here learn that the northerners are coming they usually send a squadron of war-canoes up to Pabay - they are better at sea than on land -while another body hurries to this cleft and throws up a dry-stone wall: they are amazingly quick and skilful and they have the stone at hand. Sometimes they hold it, being picked men: sometimes they are overwhelmed, the attackers having the advantage of the slope. But even if that does happen, the southerners rarely suffer much, since the men from Pabay have to hurry back because of the war-canoes. The third place is where the really decisive battles have been fought. It is higher still, on a desolate lava plain flanked with cliffs; it has a damned unpleasant sulphurous smell, and it is still littered with whitened bones. I absolutely saw hundreds of skulls: perhaps thousands.'

'May I ask what you mean to do?'

'Oh, it is the cleft, every time. Kalahua knows that Puolani cannot send her war-canoes to Pabay with the Franklin likely to appear at any moment: he can use his whole force, demolish the wall at once if he has brought his gun so far, and in any case push on without fear. I will draw you the cleft. There: about two hundred yards long and twenty wide: room for Kalahua and all his men. My idea - I must repeat that they are astonishing hands at dry-stone building - is to post two carronades here at the north entrance, hidden by walls. Four more at the southern end, spaced out thus and similarly hid, two firing straight down and two, like those at the far end, firing diagonally: quite a slight angle, but enough to sweep the whole ground. I post a few of Puolani's people just beyond the cleft. When Kalahua comes up they skirmish a little to concentrate his men and then run hell-fire quick back towards us, drawing the northerners into the cleft. When they are in, the guns at the far end open fire. The northern rear presses hard up against its own van, and the guns at the southern end open up.'

'Have the northerners no retreat?'

'None.'

'I had imagined it was a military maxim that the enemy should always be left a line of retreat.'

'Perhaps that is so in the army; but the Navy is required to take, sink, burn or destroy. Pray don't look so low, Stephen. After all, the man who starts a war only gets what he asked for, you know, if he is destroyed. And he can always call for quarter.'

When Stephen had returned to the sick-berth, Jack sent for Oakes and said 'Sit down, Mr Oakes. As you know, tomorrow we shall be preparing to support Queen Puolani against the people from Pabay and the Americans. Captain Pullings and I and Mr West and most of the warrant officers will be on shore, and we shall probably sleep there, some way up the country. You will remain on board in command of the ship and Mr Reade of the prize. If during my absence the American privateer Franklin should make as if to enter the bay you are both to hoist our colours and engage her, but at no greater distance than a quarter of a mile. I shall leave you enough men to fight one side, with the gunner's mate to assist you. If you are obliged to slip rather than weigh your anchors, which is probable should the American appear, you are to buoy them with the utmost care. Should the Franklin withdraw, she is not to be pursued beyond a line joining the two headlands. I cannot emphasize that point too strongly, Mr Oakes. Have you any questions?'

'No, sir. But may I say, sir, may I say with all respect, that I never had a go at Pabay. I never had a go at what you might call - I never had a go at regaining your esteem.'

'No. It is true I was angry with you for bringing Mrs Oakes aboard, but since then you have behaved in a seamanlike, officerlike fashion and I think highly enough of your qualities to make you prizemaster of the Truelove with orders to take her to Batavia to be condemned, if the encounter goes as we wish and if you feel competent to command her.'

'Oh sir,' cried Oakes, 'I don't know how to thank you - I shall tell Clarissa - that is to say, oh yes, if you please. I am reasonable good at navigation, and I believe I know how to handle a ship - not like you, sir, of course, but tolerably well.'

'It should not be too difficult. She is well-found and you will have the monsoon with you. I shall, if all goes well, give you an acting order as lieutenant; and although she will still be a little short-handed, I shall let you have a couple of our master-mariners, Slade and Gorges for example, who can stand a watch and keep their own reckoning: the three French prisoners too - they can at least haul on a rope. And I shall make an advance on your pay and prize-money to bear your charge from Batavia home. Now, although the whole matter depends on our success the day after tomorrow, you had better go across and become acquainted with the Truelove and her people.'

'May I tell my wife first?' asked Oakes, almost laughing with pleasure.

'By all means - my best compliments wait on Mrs Oakes -and let Mr Reade know I should like to see him."

* * *

The ship's boats were coming back in the darkness, having landed the very heavy material; they were hoisted in, and when the jollyboat was safely stowed inside the launch - for the small-arms men and the gun-crews were to be taken off at dawn by Puolani's canoes, by way of precaution - West reported to Pullings, who relayed the news to Jack that all hands except two of the most notorious lechers were aboard.

'Very well,' said Jack, and he went below, sharp-set.

At supper he interrupted his steady attack upon the sea-pie to say 'I was never so much surprised in my life. Just now I told Oakes I should give him an acting order as lieutenant to take the Truelove in, if all went well on Friday. He was amazed. Delighted and amazed. His wife had not given him the slightest hint. Yet she must have known it hours before, from your questions.'

'She is a jewel of a woman,' said Stephen. 'How I value her.'

Jack shook his head and returned to the sea-pie. Eventually, leaning back, he said, 'I never asked you what you thought of Puolani.'

'I thought her a magnificent queenly woman. Juno, with the same large expressive eyes, and I hope without her faults of temper.'

'She is certainly very kind. She set her people to work making a house for me to sleep in, but I told her that tomorrow night I must be right up by the guns.' A silence for pudding, and he went on, 'I do not think I told you how pleased I was with the war-chiefs and their men - thoroughly professional and well-disciplined - not the least jealousy of the Navy, as you so often find at home. They were perfectly ready to take any suggestions I made, and I had hardly mentioned a dressing-station for you on a convenient shaded little plateau half an hour short of the cleft before they started setting it up.'

'Half an hour short of the cleft?'

'Yes. It is not the custom here to take prisoners, and I can do nothing about it. I expect something of a slaughter-house; and I cannot have a battle of this kind interrupted for a moment on humane grounds.'

'Have you ever known me interfere in any battle?'

'No. But I strongly suspect you of a tender heart, and in such a case I think you would be far better in your proper place, which is a dressing-station well to the rear, corresponding to the cockpit in a ship of the line.'

It was in this dressing-station that Jack, Stephen, Pullings, West and Adams slept on Thursday night, having walked up the broad well-beaten track, smelling of crushed green, that the carronades had taken before them, stubby short-range guns that could be manhandled for this distance and on this slope with relative ease, they weighing no more than half a ton, three times less than Kalahua's piece.

And it was here, clearly, that Stephen woke at the first hint of light. His companions had already left, moving with that silence usual among naval men in the night watches; so had most of the warriors, but as he stood in the doorway, with birds singing and calling in the trees all round and below him, more tribesmen came hurrying up the path, big brown cheerful men, some wearing matting armour, all armed with spears, clubs and sometimes dreadful hardwood swords, their edges studded with shark's teeth. They called out as they passed, smiling and waving.

When the last had gone up, running not to miss the fight, Stephen sat outside the doorway in the rising sun. Presently the birdsong diminished to a few screeches here and there (they were not a melodious choir, upon the whole), and presently Padeen succeeded in striking a light, coaxing a fire into being, and warming the coffee.

A number of birds passed close at hand, some of them probably honeysuckers; but still he waited, listening rather than seeing. Kalahua's camp fires had showed clear last night only an hour's march beyond the cleft, and even with the gun the northern men and their white mercenaries should reach it before the sun had risen another hand's breadth.

At intervals he looked at it over the immense stretch of sea ending in a taut horizon. Immobile of course. He tried thinking of that glorious Queen Puolani: it was said that her late husband, her consort, proved a man of inferior parts and that she had him set in the forefront of just such a battle in the cleft. He tried repeating verses; but those which he knew well, which came easily, did not overlay his vision of the sheer-sided defile two hundred yards by twenty, filled with men and they being fired upon from back and front and diagonally. The twenty-four pounder carronades would be using canister, about two hundred iron balls at each discharge; and they would be served by expert crews, capable of firing, reloading, aiming and firing again in less than a minute. In five minutes six carronades would discharge at least six thousand lethal shots into those trapped bodies. In his harsh unmusical voice he chanted plainsong, which had a better covering effect: he had reached a Benedictus in the Dorian mode and he was straining for a high qui venit when the clear sharp voice of gunfire - carronade-fire - cut him short. Four almost at once, it seemed to him, and then two; but the echoes confused everything. Then four quick hammer-strokes again. Then silence.

Padeen and he stood staring up the mountain. They could make out a vague roaring, but nothing more; and the birds that had started from the trees below all settled again. Perhaps battle had been joined: perhaps the carronades had been overrun.

Time passed, though less slowly now, and presently steps could be heard on the path. A young long-legged man raced down past them, a messenger of good news, his whole face alive with joy. He shouted something as he passed: victory, no doubt at all.

After him, several minutes after him, came two more, each carrying a human head by the hair, Polynesian the first, European the second. Both heads had their eyes open, indignant in the one case, perfectly blank in the other.

Then loud and clear, helped by some eddy in the wind, came the cry 'one, two, three, belay-oh!' and it was plain that a carronade was coming down the path. Long before it reached them a group of small-arms men could be heard laughing and talking, and as soon as they came in sight Stephen called 'Wilton, are many of our people hurt?'

'None that I know on, sir. Ain't that right, Bob?'

'Right as dried peas, mate. And none of the Queen's men that I see, neither.'

'But them poor unfortunate buggers in the gulley,' said the captain of the hold, an old shipmate of Stephen's and entitled to speak freely, 'God love us, sir, it was bloody murder.'

By this time the mountainside was alive with men, islanders who knew scores of paths the guns could never have taken, most of them carrying their spoils: weapons, matting, ornaments, ears.

Presently Jack appeared at the turning, with Bonden a little way behind him, looking somewhat anxious. Stephen walked up the track and as they met he said 'May I give you joy of your victory?'

'Thank you, Stephen,' said Jack, with a sort of smile.

'Are there any wounded I can look after?'

'All that did not run away are dead by now, brother. Shall we take a side path? It will get us down so long as we follow the slope and hit the Eeahu river. Tom is seeing to the carronades. Bonden, give Padeen a hand with the medical stores, will you?'

They struck off to the left, a track that led steeply down through ferns to a little purling stream; the path was too narrow and abrupt for any conversation until the place where the stream ran across, making a pool under a spreading tree. Jack knelt down, washed his face and hands and drank deep. 'Lord, that is better," he said, sitting back on a mossy root. 'Should you like to know how things went?'

'I am afraid it distresses you to speak of it at present."

'Yes, it does. But these things soon pass, you know. Well, the scheme worked perfectly, like a drill-book. They were rather tired, having come uphill nearly all the way, dragging their gun and precious short of food; and our young men, posted at the far end to provoke them and bring them on into the cleft, had plenty of time to run back behind the guns and leave the field clear. I should never have believed case-shot could do so much damage. I must say the French came on very well, leaping and scrambling over the bodies: two rounds dealt with them. But even then Kalahua's people rallied and charged with a shout, some of them almost reaching the guns before the last broadside. We stopped firing then, and those that could run ran, pursued by some of Puolani's men - not many, and they will not go far, the war-chiefs tell me, because of the broken country. We took their gun, of course, and I dare say Puolani will get it down in time.' After a pause he said 'We only fired ten rounds, Stephen, but there was a butcher's bill like a fleet action. And though the hands were pleased, of course, scarcely anyone raised a cheer; and it was not taken up.'

'You did not follow your plan of closing the other end, I collect, since some were able to run away?'

'My plan? Oh no: that did not make very good sense. I was really trying to make your flesh creep, as you do mine with your surgical horrors. It is my belief, Stephen, that you do not always know when I am being droll.'

This was the first sign of a lifting, at least a superficial lifting of his depression, and by the time they had made their slow and often mistaken way down to Puolani's village he was perfectly capable of responding to their extraordinarily happy and triumphant welcome. He had been expected by the main path through the sugar-canes, where arches of greenery with two carronades under each had been set up: the Queen led him back by a side way to the first and then through the middle of all three to an immense sound of cheering and the thunder of wooden drums. Then he was taken from one group to another - Tapia, recovered from the throng, explained that these were the various branches of the tribe - and each group in turn fell flat, though not quite so flat as to hide their delighted smiles.

The tribe had a great many branches, but the repeated ceremonies, the incessant beating of drums and blowing of conches, the feeling of great friendliness and affection as Puolani led him about and the great beauty of the day - a brilliant sky and white clouds sailing evenly from the north-east and the heat of the sun tempered by a charming scented breeze - set a barrier between now and the slaughter of the morning, and he walked into the Queen's house perfectly ready to be pleased with his entertainment. Here the whole company, all robed, stood up as he came in; and to his astonishment he saw Stephen, Pullings, West and Adams among them, wearing splendid feather cloaks, and as he stood there Puolani placed one on his shoulders, crimson from top to bottom. She smoothed it with great satisfaction and made a confidential remark. 'She says it belonged to one of her uncles, now a god,' said Tapia.

'Any god would be flattered by such a cloak,' said Jack, 'much less an humble mortal.'

'It is a present,' whispered Tapia.

Jack turned and bowed, returning his best thanks: Puolani looked modestly down, an unusual attitude for her, and motioned him to a seat beside her on the bench, or perhaps firmly padded sofa would be the better description. A yellow-feathered Pullings was on her other side; Stephen, in blue-black, on Jack's left, and to him he said in an undertone 'Are you hungry? I have never been so famished in all my life. It came over me suddenly.' Then, seeing Tapia whispering to an immensely tattooed chief beyond him he said 'Tapia, pray ask the chief if Bonden can be sent back to the ship in a canoe to tell Mr Oakes that all is well and that the boats are to come round tomorrow morning. I shall sleep ashore.'

Puolani's grandfather had acquired three ship's coppers. These vessels rarely appeared, since almost all Polynesian cooking was carried out with hot stones in an underground oven, the dish being wrapped in leaves, but now, gleaming like red gold, they were brought out by strong men and set on hearths in front of the house. An extraordinarily savoury smell wafted in and Jack swallowed painfully; to distract his mind he desired Tapia to tell the Queen how much he admired the orderliness of the gathering - to the right hand, outside the house, sat the starboard watch in due order of precedence, on the left, the larboard, all hands wearing garlands of flowers, while beyond them, closing the square, were the densely-packed islanders; and on every hand attendants were preparing food.

As well as the coppers seven china bowls had reached Moahu, and these were placed on little cushions before the Queen, Jack, Stephen and Pullings, West, Adams, and an ancient chief, together with spoons and wooden platters of mashed taro. A chorus of conches blew three great blasts. Servants stood by the coppers, looking expectantly at the Queen. 'Turtle on the left, fish in the middle, meat on the right,' whispered Tapia. The Queen looked at Jack with a smile and he, returning the smile, said 'Oh meat, ma'am, if you please.'

The bowls were filled all down the line: the Queen had chosen to begin with fish, nearly all the Surprise's officers with meat. But it was exceedingly hot, and while they toyed with their taro, slavering as they did so, Stephen noticed the unmistakable helix of a human ear in his bowl and said to Tapia 'Please tell the Queen that man's flesh is taboo to us.'

'But it is Kalahua and the French chief,' said Tapia.

'Even so,' said Stephen, and leaning to speak behind Puolani's back he said rather louder 'Captain Pullings, Mr West: this is forbidden meat.'

When the news reached Puolani she laughed cheerfully, changed bowls with Jack, and assured them that his hands were in no danger: they were being fed on pork, which happened to be taboo to her - so many taboos, she said, smiling still.

And indeed there were so many taboos, personal, tribal, national, woven into the texture of the island's life that this little gaffe passed almost unnoticed, certainly without any embarrassment on the part of Puolani, and the feast went on and on, most of the sailors soon recovering their appetite. After the fish and turtle - the best turtle in the South Seas -came fowls, cooked in the Polynesian manner, dogs, eggs and young fat pigs; all this with great quantities of chief's kava, a more heady brew than usual.

The feast, and there was a great deal of it, eaten over a very long time, was accompanied by singing, the music of flutes, drums of various pitch, and something between a harp and a lyre: and when even fruit would scarcely go down, the dancing began.

There were some of the exactly-timed evolutions and manoeuvres they had seen far to the south, in Annamooka, and they were received with applause; but not with nearly such hearty applause as the much freer hula, danced with great skill, grace and enthusiasm by a number of young women.

'I am glad Martin is not here,' said Stephen in Jack's ear. 'He could never have approved these licentious postures and wanton looks.'

'Perhaps not,' said Jack. 'For my own part I do not find them objectionable, however.'

Nor did West. His appetite had been more severely checked than most by the sight of the Frenchman's ring-finger in his bowl, but now he had recovered entirely and he was leaning forward, gazing with passionate intensity at the second girl from the left.

Jack did not object: not at all; but sleep was rising up with such force that for some time now he had not dared shut his eyes for fear of dropping off and more than off - deep, deep down. He stifled a yawn and looked wistfully at the stimulating kava bowl - the cup-bearer too was engrossed by the motions of the second girl on the left. Puolani caught his glance, reached out and filled him a bumper with kind, comforting, apologetic words.

More conches, a great howl of conches. The girls withdrew to a thunder of applause, with whistles and cheers from the frigate's crew, and to his surprise Jack saw that the sun was already dipping. Silence returned at last; and a figure eight feet tall, a man entirely covered with basket-work, came into the square before the Queen. He had two drummers with him, one deep, one shrill, and when they had beaten three measures he broke out in a high falsetto of surprising volume, rising and falling to a rhythm that certainly existed for many of his hearers, since they bowed and nodded, but that neither Jack nor Stephen could make out. Tapia whispered 'He is telling the Queen's family right back and back.' Again and again Jack tried to seize the pattern but always at some crucial point his attention wandered and all was to begin again: he closed his eyes to concentrate on the chant alone, and this was fatal.

To his extreme confusion he woke to find the whole table smiling at him. The wickerwork figure was gone, and already the fires showed red in the more than twilight.

Two powerful men heaved him gently to his feet and led him away. On the threshold he turned, as in a dream, and made his bow. Puolani, with the kindest look, returned it: then there was a warm darkness and these sure hands; they took his feather cloak, he slipped off his clothes and they lowered him on to the wonderful ease of the long, flat, soft couch in the house that had been built for him.

He had rarely been so tired, had rarely gone so very far down; yet he rose up clear and fresh, no muddiness, no staring about; he knew, as a sailor knows, that it was near the end of the middle watch, and the tide was on the turn; he knew that there was someone in the room, and as he sat up a strong arm pressed him back, a warm, scented arm. He was not altogether surprised - perhaps his half-waking mind had caught the scent - nor at all displeased: his heart began to beat violently, and he made room.

First light was coming through the door when he heard Tom Pullings' agitated whisper, 'Sir, sir, excuse me, sir. The Franklin is in the offing. Sir, sir ..."

'Pipe down, Tom,' he murmured, pulling on his clothes. She was still asleep, flat, her head back, her mouth open, looking perfectly beautiful. He slid round the opening and they hurried down. The village was still asleep, apart from a few fishermen: Oakes had sent the boats in and already a second carronade was moving down over the rollers.

'Mr Oakes's duty, sir,' said Bonden, 'and Franklin was seen in the west as soon as it was day: she stood in, doubted all was right, let fall her courses and steered south-west. She will show round the headland any minute now, sir. And sir, he sent the drum.'

'Very good, Bonden. Watkins, beat to arms. Doctor, Mr Adams, come along with me. Captain Pullings, carry on.' As the jollyboat pulled out across the bay the Franklin appeared: quite unmistakable. Long and low, a right privateer. She was suspicious, but not particularly alarmed - no topgallants, and she had not even let the night-time reef out of her topsails.

Jack felt extraordinarily well as he ran up the side. 'Good morning, Mr Oakes,' he said, 'well done indeed.' To Killick's mate (for Killick was still on shore), 'Breakfast in twenty minutes,' and to Mr Adams, just arrived, 'Mr Adams, pray write out Mr Oakes's acting order in due form, and the dispatches and letters we drafted.' He glanced at the shore, where the laggard Surprises were now hurrying about like purposeful bees, flung his shirt and trousers on to the capstan-head, and dived deep into the clear green water.

Even after breakfast the Franklin was obviously in two minds, for she threw out a signal intelligible no doubt to her countrymen; a sign to which Jack, old in deception, replied with a vague hoist that went up and down, the halliard constantly jammed, wasting irreplaceable minutes.

The carronades were coming home with incredible speed, and their munitions: there was an appearance of hopeless chaos, with people coming up the side from helping the True-love to weigh, very heavy weights being lowered, boats swinging inboard; but soon after Pullings had said 'All hands have reported, sir, and the bosun's chair is rigged," Jack turned to Oakes. 'Here is your acting order, Mr Oakes, and the large wrapper holds all the other papers: so now, if Mrs Oakes is ready, perhaps you should go aboard your command.'

Clarissa stepped from the rail and said in her high clear voice 'Please let me thank you, sir, for your great goodness to me; I shall always be extremely grateful.'

He said 'We have been very happy to have you with us. A prosperous voyage to you both, and pray give my dear love to England.'

She turned to Stephen, who kissed her on both cheeks, said 'God bless, my dear,' and handed her to the bosun's chair, which lowered her into the Truelove's boat. He watched them go aboard and heard the shout 'Three cheers for the Surprise,' followed by 'Huzzay, huzzay, huzzay!' with all the force and conviction that the rescued crew could give.

'Three cheers for Truelove,' cried Jack, and suspending their work the Surprises answered 'Huzzay, huzzay, huzzay!' with great good humour, for many of them were very fond of Oakes and all had the tenderest regard for their prize.

Now the Truelove was drawing away: Clarissa appeared at her taffrail, and she and Stephen waved.

'All hands unmoor ship,' called Jack, and to Pullings, in a conversational tone, 'We can demolish the crow's nest as we go.'

Stephen stood there while behind him the capstan turned and clicked to the usual cries; each anchor rose in turn to the invariable orders and responses; and all at once he realized that the frigate too was under way, rapidly making sail and moving faster and faster eastwards after her flying quarry, so that the distance between the ships was increasing with dreadful speed; before he was prepared for it the Truelove was no more than a remote ship upon the sea; and there was no longer any human contact at all.

End