Master and Commander - Food in a Liar's Throat

On oaths

What does it cost to become a naval surgeon? Residency in London? Costly uniforms? As to oath-taking, Jack explains to Stephen, medical men don’t need to traipse to the Admiralty to be read “a piece about allegiance and supremacy and utterly renouncing the Pope” [until they say] ‘“to this I swear”’ (40). But Stephen wouldn’t object to taking an oath, would he? A Bible-reading sailor in a court martial, Jack recounts, refused to be sworn in because, if a man makes a promise that leads to dishonesty, he could be struck dead.

“I am not an enthusiast,” Stephen replies. “[A]n oath a childish thing” (41). Few people today “are weak enough to believe in Earl Godwin’s piece of bread” (41). When accused of betraying the Anglo-Saxon king, the earl swore on his honor he could prove he was guiltless. I will eat a hard crust of bread, he asserts, and the bulk will pass my throat unharmed. The rest is history. Or legend.

Before Edward returned to England from Normandy, his brother Alfred travelled to England and was captured. Earl Godwin took Alfred to Harold Harefoot who tortured him but Alfred died from his wounds. Edward never forgave Earl Godwin for this betrayal and years later, after his own ascension to the throne, during a banquet at Windsor accused Earl Godwin of his brother’s murder. The Earl denied the murder, claiming that if he were guilty the morsel of bread he was eating would be his last. Legend tells that the Earl then choked on his bread, and died. This scene shows Godwin at the far right of the frame, preparing to eat his bread. Source.

James Dillon’s oath to United Ireland risks a similar death. In 1796 Parliament passed the Insurrection Act, which made this oath to fight for equal representation for all Irish people a crime punishable by death. Dillon also serves in King George III’s Navy. British naval officers swore oaths as part of the Test Act—an oath of allegiance to the monarch, of supremacy to Protestant succession, and of abjuration, denying the claim of the Catholic King James II to the Crown. Dillon’s crusty double bind, a united Ireland or King George, moves the drama of Master and Commander.

With a different commander, the secret oath might be “outed.” Jack Aubrey rides a seesaw, upside brilliant, downside clueless. At his heights he is an extraordinary sailor, brilliant strategist, and perceptive leader, especially when he reads the unworded sense of his men. But Dillon characterizes his fat rear banging the ground as “beefy arrogant English insensibility” (170). Jack must place any new learning—whether there is “the very real possibility of flamingoes” (164) on the Spanish coast or who the Irish actually are—in its proper place within his imperialist vision of the King’s world. Until Stephen stops him, Jack sings Croppies Lie Down, a brutal celebration of the British destruction of Irish resistance. To illustrate with the verse’s final four lines:

A foot on the necks of the croppy we'll keep
And drink, as in bumpers past troubles we drown,
A health to the lads that made croppies lie down
Down, down, croppies lie down.

Surely everyone on board, Jack assumes, shows total allegiance to the Crown and will never lie about such joy in sacred service. Like their commander, they will find comfort and security and meaning when the Articles of War are read against any disobedience, trivial or profound, with their “echoing repetition of ‘shall suffer death.’”

Dillon, however, will not rest in the criticism he levels only with Stephen. Like any under-officer he knows how the job can be done better. Jack is dishonorably obsessed with prizes, “like a starving privateer” (174). Such an obsession harms his sense of duty, especially in his repeated straying from orders. “A privateer,” Dillon says, “does not fight for honor but for gain” (174). Jack is also too indulgent with the Master and his dishonorable pederasty (175). When Jack faces a fight against a true naval opponent, he pulls away in favor of safety, not honor. While Dillon admits his prejudice as judge-advocate, “I look for promotion: like every other sailor I value it very highly, but being under a prize-hunting captain is not the quickest path to it” (176).

Dillon survives this double bind—has apparent agency over his dilemma—by hoping for a promotion in the King’s Navy and its potential wealth and prestige while closing off his oath-taking in Ireland. He sees no necessity in changing, for Jack is too clueless to expose his lieutenant because he can’t imagine the man’s situation. But, unawares, Jack chooses Dillon to capture the Irish rebels hiding on the American ship, the John B. Christopher. The prospect of dishonoring men who might have conspired with Dillon for the United Irishmen so disturbs him—it sticks in his throat—that he risks court-martial and death by countermanding Jack’s orders to pursue. But Dillon finally must go on board. He is so troubled that he can’t decide until the last moment, when he realizes he will not capture them, which is a lie to the Crown—perhaps an easier one for an Irishman. But Father Mangan threatens to expose him “with a satisfied leer” (254) as treasonous to that very Crown. Mangan (an Irish name resonant with rebellious patriotism) removes Dillon’s agency, and the result is morally disastrous. “[Dillon] had hardly reached another breath before the squalor of the situation became unbearable … whatever course he took would be dishonorable; but he never imagined that dishonor could be so painful” (277).

“Bah,” Stephen says to Dillon, “let it go.” “[A] man would have to be three parts dead” (254) to do so, Dillon answers. This double bind leads Stephen to allude to the most famous of all liars when he says the man is “required to play Iscariot with either his right hand or with his left” (277-278). Ironically, in the same circumstances Jack might suffer the same way, for later he argues against Stephen when he says, “You can have only one king.” This is clearly the problem of the drama—bound to one king, to two kings, to three, who knows.

Jack goes on to accuse Stephen of being an antinomian, that is, that the grace of God has freed him from the obligations of morality and law. Stephen corrects him and says that he is a pragmatist. Oaths are childish things. They stick in the throat. Decision-making is a matter of practicalities and facts. Stephen is quite expert in living with multiple responses that might appear contradictory to the one-oath crowd. Choose what best serves the present purpose. Let the rest go.

Here is the paradox of Buridan’s ass. An honorable donkey is suspended between water and hay and can turn in only one direction. The donkey wants and needs both, but the choice creates inaction (Dillon is reduced to a series of invocations). If a man can have only one king, the decision to drink water or eat hay, but not both, creates despair. “What ‘balls,’” Stephen replies to Jack, “as you officers say,” and then he cites innumerable examples of the Buridan’s ass dilemma that cripples—equal devotion to more than one good woman, the Jacobites in the 1745 rebellion, and Catholic priests everyday surviving with multiple oaths. “So much pain;” he explains, “and the more honest the man the worse the pain” (Dillon). “[T]he greater mass of confusion and distress,” Stephen preaches, “must arise from these less evident divergencies—the moral law, the civil, military, common laws, the code of honor, custom, the rules of practical life, of civility, of amorous conversation gallantry, to say nothing of Christianity for those who practice it. … [I]t’s as though the poor ass were surrounded by four and twenty managers.”

Stephen cannot convert his friends to his pragmatism. Dillon’s despair becomes anger against Jack. “[T]he whole of his mind that was not taken up with increasingly mechanical prayer converted its unhappy turmoil into hatred for the established order, for authority and so for captains.” Jack is no better. “JA is still deeply wounded about some remarks concerning the Cacafuego—feels there is a reflexion upon his courage—cannot bear it—it preys upon him. And JD, though quieter now, is wholly unpredictable: he is full of contained rage and unhappiness that will break out in some way; but I cannot tell what. It is not unlike sitting on a barrel of gunpowder in a busy forge, with sparks flying about” (277).

As a pragmatist Stephen has admitted inconsistencies, but it’s a misinterpretation to conclude that a pragmatist cannot take a moral stand. Stephen’s calling is to save lives, not take them. In the battle with the Cacafuego, the sailors of the Sophie are terribly outnumbered, and Jack asks him to come on board and fight and kill the Spanish. As loyal as Stephen is to Jack and his fellow shipmates, whose lives he saves, he will not. But he will steer the ship. It is his way, intentionally or not, of helping the cause of King George. This choice is not to be forgotten, for later Patrick O’Brian’s readers will discover that Stephen is a spy who is willing to kill. For now, and in this circumstance, he does not. But in steering he has a clear view of Dillon’s death.

“I saw him through that gap where two ports were beaten into one: they were fighting by the gun, and then when you called out at the head of those stairs into the waist; and he was in front—black faces behind him. I saw him pistol a man with a pike, pass this sword through a fellow who had beaten down the boson and come to a redcoat, an officer. After a couple of quick passes he caught the man’s sword don his pistol and lunged straight into him. But his word struck on the breastbone or a metal plate, and doubled and broke with the thrust: and with the six inches left he stabbed him faster than you could see—inconceivable force and rapidity. You would never believe the happiness on his face. The light on his face!”

The description makes the death nearly beatific. It’s as if the food in his throat is a wafer. The problem is, he’s dead.