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authority incarnate; and you are to observe that I am not and never have been an informer.'
       'Everyone knows how I hate a woman aboard. They are worse than cats or parsons for bad luck. But quite apart from that, quite rationally, no good ever came of women aboard—perpetual trouble, as you saw yourself at Juan Fernandez. She is an odious wench, and he is an ungrateful scrub.'
       'Have you seen her, at all?'
       'I caught a glimpse of her in the cable-tier just after leaving you this morning. Have you?'
       'I have, too. I went along to ask the little girls how they did and to hear them their piece of catechism and there I found a midshipman with them, a young midshipman I did not know, a handsome youth: then I perceived that he was a young woman and I begged her to sit down. We exchanged a few words—her name is Clarissa Harvill—and she spoke with a becoming modesty. She is clearly a woman of some family and education: what is ordinarily called a gentlewoman.'
       'Gentlewomen do not get sent to Botany Bay.'
       'Nonsense. Think of Louisa Wogan.'
       Jack gave the unanswerable Louisa a passing glance and returned to his fury. 'Bawdy-house,' he cried. 'It will be the lower deck full of Portsmouth brutes next, and a Miss in every other cabin—discipline all to pieces—Sodom and Gomorrah.'
       'Dear Jack,' said Stephen, 'if I did not know that your liver was speaking rather than your head or God preserve us your heart this righteous indignation and solemnity would grieve me, to say nothing of your broadside of first stones, for shame. As you told me yourself long ago the service is a sounding-box in which tales echo for ever, and it is perfectly well known throughout the ship that when you were about Oakes' age you were disrated and turned before the mast for hiding a girl in that very part of the ship. Surely you must see that this pope-holy sanctimonious attitude has a ludicrous as well as a most unamiable side?'
       'You may say what you please, but I shall turn them both ashore on Norfolk Island.'
       'Pray take off your breeches and bend over that locker,' said Stephen, sending a jet from his enema through the open stern window. A little later, and from this position of great moral advantage, he went on 'What surprises me extremely in this whole matter is that you should so mistake the people's frame of mind; but then in many ways, as their surgeon, I am closer to them than you are. It appears to me that you do not sufficiently distinguish between the ethos of the man-of-war and that of the privateer. The prevalent feeling or tone of this community is far, far more democratic; consensus is required; and whatever the law may say, you command the Surprise , the Surprise as a privateer, only because of the respect the people have for you. Your commission is neither here nor there: your authority depends wholly upon their respect and esteem. If you were to order them to put a callow youth and a slip of a girl down on a virtually abandoned island and sail on with me and Padeen you would lose both. You have many old followers on board who might say My Captain, right or wrong ; but you have no Marines, and I do not think the followers would prevail, with the community as it now stands and with its overriding sense of what is fair and right. You may put your breeches on again.'
       'Damn you, Stephen Maturin.'
       'And damn you, Jack Aubrey. Swallow this draught half an hour before retiring: the pills you may take if you do not sleep, which I doubt.'

Chapter Two

    Like most medical men Stephen Maturin had seen the effects of addiction, full-blown serious addiction, to alcohol and opium; and like many medical men he knew from inner experience just how immensely powerful that craving was, and how supernaturally cunning and casuistical the deprived victim might become. It was therefore only with the greatest reluctance that he had included one small square case-bottle of laudanum (the alcoholic