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Certainly he had heard of Homer, and had indeed looked into Mr Pope’s version of his tale; but for aught he could make out, the fellow was no seaman. Admittedly Ulysses had no chronometer, and probably no sextant neither; but with no more than log, lead and lookout an officer-like commander would have found his way home from Troy a d—d sight quicker than that. Hanging about in port and philandering, that was what it amounted to, the vice of navies from the time of Noah to that of Nelson. And as for that tale of all his foremast-hands being turned into swine, so that he could not win his anchor or make sail, why, he might tell that to the Marines. Besides, he behaved like a very mere scrub to Queen Dido – though on second thought perhaps that was the other cove, the pious Anchises. But it was all one: they were six of one and half a dozen of the other, neither seamen nor gentlemen, and both of ’em God d—d bores into the bargain. For his part he far preferred what Mowett and Rowan wrote; that was poetry a man could get his teeth into, and it was sound seamanship too.

‘Why, as to that,’ said Jack, blowing on his coffee-cup and staring out of the stern-window at the harbour, ‘as to that . . . if you do not choose to call him a pragmatical clinchpoop and kick his breech, which you might think ungenteel, perhaps you could tell him to judge the pudding by its fruit.’ ‘You mean, prove the tree by its eating.’ ‘No, no, Stephen, you are quite out: eating a tree would prove nothing. And then you might ask him, had he ever seen many poltroons in the Navy?’ ‘I am not quite sure what you mean by poltroons.’ ‘You might describe them as something that cannot be attempted to be tolerated in the Navy – like wombats,’ he added, with a sudden recollection of the creatures Stephen had brought aboard an earlier command. ‘Mean-spirited worthless wretches: cowards, to put it in a word.’ ‘You are unjust to wombats, Jack; and you were unjust to my three-toed sloth – such illiberal reflections.’

Jack, seeing Stephen coming aft from his elm-tree pump, said, ‘My God, it is prime to be at sea again. Don’t you feel like a badger in a barrel, on shore?’ ‘A badger in a barrel?’ said Stephen, thinking of badgers he had known. ‘I do not.’

He knew very well that Jack would act on the ancient seafaring belief that more is better and dose himself into Kingdom Come if not closely watched, and he stood there reflecting upon the passage of authority from one to the other in relationships of this kind (or rather of potential authority, for they had never entered into any actual collision) as Jack gasped and retched over his nauseous dose. Ever since Stephen Maturin had grown rich with their first prize he had constantly laid in great quantities of asafetida, castoreum and other substances, to make his medicines more revolting in taste, smell and texture than any others in the fleet; and he found it answered–his hardy patients knew with their entire beings that they were being physicked.

Girls when the delights are earthly