HMS Surprise

when Killick appeared again. ‘Coffee’s up, sir,’ he said crossly; and as Jack hurried into his cabin he heard the words ‘stone cold now – on the table since six bells – told ’im again and again – enough trouble to get it, and now it’s left to go cold.’ They seemed to be addressed to the Marine sentry, whose look of shocked horror, of refusal to hea

Mr Smith, a sea-officer of the small, trim, brisk, round-headed, portwine kind, once shipmates with Stephen in the Lively and now second in the Goliath, rode by on a camel, with his legs folded negligently over the creature’s neck to the manner born:

Below him the deck was like an ant-hill disturbed; and he could hear the crash of the carpenters’ mallets below as the cabin bulkheads came down. It would be some minutes before the apparent confusion resolved itself into a trim, severe pattern, a clean sweep fore and aft, the guns cast loose, their crews standing by them, every man at his station,

A variety of other wise saws sprang to Stephen’s indignant mind – words and feathers are carried off by the wind; as is the wedding, so is the cake; do not speak Arabic in the house of the Moor; pleasures pass but sorrows stay; love, grief and money cannot be concealed

He was growing fat again, but in any case he had no intention of getting out of the way of running up and down the rigging, as some heavy captains did: the feel of the shrouds under his hands, the give and spring of live rigging, the heave and swing on the roll as he came over into the top made him deeply happy.

Stephen saw the first lieutenant approach, hesitate, and step back. ‘On these occasions,’ he reflected, ‘my valuable friend appears to swell, actually to increase in his physical as well as his spiritual dimensions: is it an optical illusion? How I should like to measure him. The penetrating intelligence in the eye, however, is not capable of measu

The Lively was a fine example, an admirable example, of the Whiggish state of mind at its best; and Jack was a Tory. He admired her, but it was with a detached admiration, as though he were in charge of a brother-officer’s wife, an elegant, chaste, unimaginative woman, running her life on scientific principles.

Killick was a cross-grained bastard, who supposed that if he sprinkled his discourse with a good many sirs, the words in between did not signify: but still he had procured this coffee, these eggs, this butter, this soft tack, on shore and had put them on the table the morning after a hot engagement – ship still cleared for action and the galley kno

he had paid little attention to Jack’s anxiety, an anxiety that, like his own, had been growing as the vague charming future became more sharply defined, more nearly the decisive present. He, too, was oppressed by a feeling that this great happiness of travelling month after month towards a splendid end was soon to be broken: a sense not indeed of