MAD3PAD 34-36

[Toby G Levy]

        They are finally at sea, and pass by the site of the naval
disaster at the Bolt where the Ramilles went down, referred to by Hepsie
a few pages back.

        The sailors are nervous until they reach the open seas, but they
sing a lighthearted song about Sumatra.

        The Seahorse is described as "Sixth Rate" which is defined in
Wickipedia as follows:

Sixth-rate was the designation used by the Royal Navy for small warships
mounting between 18 and 28 nine-pounder guns on a single deck, sometimes
with guns on the upper works and sometimes without. Sixth-rate ships
typically had a crew of about 150 and measured between 450 and 550 tons.
Usually sixth-rates were small frigates. Some larger ship-rigged,
flush-decked vessels, were rated, which meant they were large enough to
rate a Post-Captain in command, instead of a Lieutenant or Commander.

vw#12: Corposant - an electrical discharge accompanied by ionization of
surrounding atmosphere

        Captain Smith muses back on his first glimpse of the Seahorse.
These lines sound like they could have come right out of several places
in Gravity's Rainbow:

"Yet, yet,...through the crystalline spray, how gilded comes she, -- how
corposantly edg'd in a persisting and, if Glories there be, glorious
light....and he knows her, it must be a Dream, how could it be other? A
Light in which all Pain and failure, all fear are bleached away...."

        The Captain is met, as he first boards the ship,  by a seaman
named Blinky. Blinky was "recruited but recently in a press-gang sweep"
which was kind of like an early version of the military draft we know
today.

        Wicks recalls his first meeting with Mason and Dixon, in which
they discuss Captain Smith. They question his ability to wage war. The
Seahorse itself though had seen action successfully at Quebec in 1759.

        Pynchon quotes Samuel Johnson who said that "being in a ship is
being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned."

        The actual term for a sixth rate frigate lacking a couple of
large guns is "jackass," whose irony with a ship named The Seahorse is
not lost on the Captain.

        Mason and Dixon muse on the meaning of the motto of The
Seahorse: Eques Sit Aeguus, which Wicks parses as "Let the Sea-Knight
who would command this Sea-Horse be ever fair minded..."

        A Lieutenant Unchleigh reports to the Captain that they think
they've spotted a French ship in the distance. Smith tells him to go up
the mast with Bodine and make sure.

Toby