Many complaints about his lack of discipline – independence – disobeying orders. No future in the service for that kind of officer, above all with St Vincent at the Admiralty. And then I fear he may n...
If she is still there in the morning – if she has not run into the lee of Norfolk Island – and if there is no extraordinary change in the weather, I shall have to heave to. To stop,' he added, for a p...
His assistants left him pretty well alone, apart from attending to his dressings, for not only was he a dangerous patient, stubborn, dogged and even violent if attempted to be dosed according to any s...
Here Captain Babbington let fall his courses and some pretty severe remarks about the sloth of the midshipmen at the larboard gaskets, a sloth that foretoldthe ruin of the Navy within a very short lap...
He was conscientious, he did his duty as he understood it; but he was no seaman.
He heard a rushing of feet and a great terrible voice calling 'All hands, all hands ahoy! Out or down! Out or down! Rouse and bitt! Rise and shine! Show a leg there! Out or down! Here I come, with a s...
He had been quite unprepared for this particular blow, striking under every conceivable kind of armour, and for some minutes he could hardly bear the pain, but sat there blinking in the sun. 'Christ,'...
Calligraphy, said Plato, is the physical manifestation of an architecture of the soul. That being so, mine must be a turf-and-wattle kind of soul, since my handwriting would be disowned by a backward...
Boccherini,
Tergiversation
Should very much like to see your excrement.’ ‘You shall, my dear sir, you shall.
Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae,
Just before his arrival his two lieutenants had very nearly come to blows over the meaning of the word dromedary. They were both good seamen and amiable companions, but they were both given to writing...
He observed that it was strange how differently wine took different men – some grew glum and fault-finding, some quarrelsome or tearful; for his part he found it did not affect him at all, except perh...
Expressed myself badly. What I meant was that if he could induce others to believe what he said, then for him the statement acquired some degree of truth, a reflection of their belief that it was true...
All agree that the people are most uncommonly amiable and good-looking, their only faults being cannibalism and unlimited fornication. But neither of these is erected into a religious system, oh no: t...
You have not bought the right to a truthful answer: your truth has not bought it. Sincerity is not to be bought: it is given, if it comes at all—given or inflicted. And really, you cannot invade a man...
Yet,'said Maturin, pursuing his own thought, 'there is a quality in dogs, I must confess, rarely to be seen elsewhere and that is affection: I do not mean the violent possessive protective love for th...
Years had passed, and years had a bad name: a verse of Horace floated into his mind: Singula de nobis anni praedantur euntes; eripuere jocos, Venerem, convivia, ludum… and for a moment he tried to mak...
Whether Mrs Williams liked her daughters at all was doubtful: she loved them, of course, and had ‘sacrificed everything for them’, but there was not much room in her composition for liking – it was to...