14 The Nutmeg of Consolation by O'Brian Patrick

Author:O'Brian, Patrick [O'Brian, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Retail
ISBN: 9780007429400
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

It was from the mizzentop that they first saw this island, or rather the little isolated flat cloud that marked its presence. So many leagues, so many degrees of longitude had passed under the Surprise’s keel, that now, patiently taught by Bonden, the medicos came up by the futtock-shrouds like Christians; and for the last fortnight they had done so without attendance, without lifelines or anything to break a headlong fall, although reaching the top in this, the seaman’s, way entailed climbing what was in effect a rope ladder inclined some fifty-five degrees from the vertical, fifty-five degrees backwards, so that one hung, like a sloth, gazing at the sky. Their movements were not unlike those of a sloth, either; but both confessed that this was a far more compendious method, and far more agreeable than their former writhing through the tightly-clustered rigging; and they were not displeased at hearing Pullings say, in the course of a dinner at which the gun-room was entertaining the Captain, that the Surprise was the only ship he had ever known in which both the doctors went aloft without using the lubber’s hole.

Yet though they had made such progress, and though the ship had advanced so far eastwards, they had not yet exhausted Martin’s South American observations – he was still engaged with his particular part of the Amazonian forest, with its extraordinary floor of dead vegetation, huge fallen trees lying across one another, so that in some places there was a great depth of rotting wood and a man had to choose the most recent (hardly discernible sometimes because of the dense clothing of lianas) and soundest trunk in order not to fall twenty and even thirty feet into a chaos of decay: twilight at noonday in those deeper parts and almost devoid of mammals, birds – all high, high above in the sunlit tops – and even reptiles, but oh Maturin what a wealth of beetles! Nor had they done more than touch upon some aspects of Java, with Pulo Prabang still to come (though the bird-skins and the deeply interesting foot-bones of Tapirus indicus had been shown), when they heard the cry of ‘Land ho!’ from the lookout, high above them on the maintopmast crosstrees. ‘Land one point on the larboard bow.’

The cry cut their conversation short. It also cut short many a quiet natter in the waist or on the forecastle, for this was during the afternoon watch of a make-and-mend day: and many of the younger, more ardent Surprises flung down their needles, thread, thimbles and ditty-bags. They ran eagerly aloft, crowding the upper yards and shrouds: they made way for Oakes however, since as the lightest and nimblest of those who walked the quarterdeck he had been sent up to the jack itself with a telescope.

‘I have it, sir,’ he called down. ‘I have it on the top of the rise: green with a broad rim of white. About five leagues, almost exactly to leeward, just under that little cloud.

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