16 The Wine-Dark Sea - Libro della tutto

Patrick O'Brian The Wine-Dark Sea
or shake off his pursuer by night, neither his
guile nor his seamanship could outmatch Aubrey's.
If the Franklin slipped a raft over the
side in the darkness, lighting lanterns upon it,
dowsing her own and changing course, she
found the Surprise in her wake when the day
broke clear; for Jack Aubrey had the same instinct,
the same sense of timing and a far
greater experience of war.
Still another cause for satisfaction was that
every successive noonday observation showed
them slanting rapidly down towards the equator
and some two hundred miles or more
closer to Peru, a country that Dr Maturin associated
not only with potential independence
but also with the coca plant, a shrub whose
dried leaves he, like the Peruvians, was accustomed
to chew as a relief from mental or spiritual
distress and physical or intellectual weariness
as well as a source of benignity and gen-