16 The Wine-Dark Sea - Libro della tutto

Patrick O'Brian The Wine-Dark Sea
The first part of the supper came in, cold
things the Captain's cook had under his hand
with the ship lying off a plentiful market: roast
beef yielded up by the gunroom with barely a
sigh, chickens, capons, ducks, ham, quantities
of vegetables and a great bowl of mayonnaise,
decanters of Peruvian wine, a jug of
barley-water that Jack emptied without thinking
of it. He ate voraciously, swallowing as
fast as a wolf; but he both talked at quick intervals
between bites and listened. 'We had a
prisoner called Dutourd,' he said, spreading
butter on his soft-tack. 'We took him out of the
Franklin, a privateer under American colours.
He was a Frenchman with enthusiastic visionary
notions about an ideal community in a
Polynesian island – no Church, no King, no
laws, no money, everything held in common,
perfect peace and justice: all to be accomplished,
as far as I could make out, by the