16 The Wine-Dark Sea - Libro della tutto

Patrick O'Brian The Wine-Dark Sea
A vast number indeed: a vaster number of
objects than Dr Maturin had supposed to exist
in any ship afloat. Long, long ago, at the beginning
of Stephen's naval career, Pullings,
then a long, thin midshipman, had shown him
over His Majesty's ship Sophie, a brig, Jack
Aubrey's first, dwarfish command: he had
done so kindly, conscientiously, but as a subordinate
displaying her main features to a
landsman. Now it was a captain showing his
new ship to a man with many years of seaexperience,
and Stephen was spared nothing
at all: a fancy-line rigged on new principles,
these cross-catharpins of course, drawings of
an improved dumb-chalder to be shipped
when she docked at Callao. Yet although his
guide was now burlier by far, and almost unrecognizable
from his frightful wound, there
was the same ingenuous open friendliness, an
unchanged pleasure in life, in sea-going life,