The Unknown Shore by Patrick O'Brian

Author:Patrick O'Brian [O'Brian, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780393315387
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 1996-10-17T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

‘YOU WILL THINK nothing of it,’ Jack had said, long ago: he had been right, and now, in a sea that outran all description, Tobias balanced between the swinging hammocks of the sick-bay without consciously noticing the tremendous roll. The motion of the ship was less down here, but even so the hammocks swung so wide that the men were obliged to be lashed in, and the lantern threw so wild a light, and so uncertain, that he made his round mostly by touch.

He moved with the cat-like wariness that he had learnt in months of storm, the worst storms in the world, and he went steadily from hammock to hammock on his round – a long round, for the sick men stretched far away into the madly tossing shadows. There was little he could do for most of them. Ever since the scurvy had started to be really bad much of his care was nearly useless; but they did not know this, and the formula of taking their pulse and asking how they did at least showed them that they were not abandoned. Besides, there were the surgical cases, the men who had been injured on deck or hurt aloft – there were life-lines rigged in plenty, but, for all that, men were continually being hurt; men who had been at sea all their lives could not keep their footing in these storms, and there were broken collar-bones, stove ribs and three broken arms for him to attend to at present, as well as sprains and dislocations.

He covered the face of a seaman at the end of the row and nodded to Andrew, who hung a mark upon the hammock: that was the third today. But death was so familiar in the sick bay of the Wager that it was accepted without any surprise: so many had died. Ever since they had come into the Southern Ocean the scurvy had been with them, and growing every day, so that now more than half the ship’s company was either so ill as to be laid up altogether or at least so kitten-weak as to fall down after five minutes at the pumps. And there was scarcely a man among those who were reckoned sound who was not affected in some degree; so that by a private calculation Tobias reckoned that unless the crew had some refreshment in their diet within seventeen days there would not be enough of them left to work the ship.

It was all a question of diet; everyone knew that. Men cannot live indefinitely upon salt beef, salt pork, dried peas and biscuit: they have to have something green and fresh, or they will eventually die. But how was greenstuff to be provided for a voyage in the far south, where for months you never see land but what you fly from it with all the sail you can bear? Mr Eliot had tried an experiment with cress and with sprouted grain; but that was in

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