‘This is a sloth,’ said Stephen, smiling at him. ‘A three-toed sloth, the most affectionate, discriminating sloth you can imagine!’ The sloth turned its round head, fixed its eyes on Jack, uttered a despairing wail and buried its face again in Stephen’s shoulder, tightening its grip to the strangling-point.
      3-H.M.S. Surprise, ch.6, paragraph 94

‘Come, Jack, disengage his right arm, if you please: you need not be afraid. Excellency, pray be so good – the left arm, gently disengaging the claws. There, there, my fine fellow. Now let us carry him below. Handsomely, handsomely; do not alarm the sloth, I beg.’
      3-H.M.S. Surprise, ch.6, paragraph 95

THE SLOTH WAS not easily alarmed; as soon as it was provided with a piece of hawser stretched taut in the cabin it went fast to sleep, hanging by its claws and swaying with the roll as it might have done in the wind-rocked branches of its native forest. Indeed, apart from its candid distress at the sight of Jack’s face it was perfectly adapted for a life at sea; it was uncomplaining; it required no fresh air, no light; it throve in a damp, confined atmosphere; it could sleep in any circumstances; it was tenacious of life; it put up with any hardship. It accepted biscuit gratefully, and pap; and in the evenings it would hobble on deck, walking on its claws, and creep into the rigging, hanging there upside down and advancing two or three yards at a time, with pauses for sleep. The hands loved it from the first, and would often carry it into the tops or higher; they declared it brought the ship good luck, though it was difficult to see why, since the wind rarely blew east of south, and that but feebly, day after day.
      3-H.M.S. Surprise, ch.6, paragraph 96

Yet the fresh provisions had their astonishingly rapid effect; in a week’s time the sick-bay was almost empty, and the Surprise, fully manned and cheerful, had recovered her old form, her high-masted, trim appearance. She returned to her exercising of the great guns, laid aside for the more urgent repairs, and every day the trade-wind carried away great wafts of her powder-smoke: at first this perturbed the sloth; it scuttled, almost ran, below, its claws going clack-clack-clack in the silence between one broadside and the next; but by the time they had passed directly under the sun and the wind came strong and true at last, it slept through the whole exercise, hanging in its usual place in the mizzen catharpins, above the quarterdeck carronades, just as it slept through the Marines’ musketry and Stephen’s pistol-practice.
      3-H.M.S. Surprise, ch.6, paragraph 97

Jack glanced up, and there against the Southern Cross, high on the humming topgallant forestay, was the sloth, rocking easy with the rhythm of the ship. ‘I doubt you have too much starlight,’ he said. At this speed the frigate’s bow-wave rose high, washing the lee head-rails with an unearthly blue-green light and sending phosphorescent drops over them, even more brilliant than the wake that tore out straight behind them, a ruled line three miles long gleaming like a flow of metal. For a moment Jack fixed the glowing spray as it was whirled inboard and then across the face of the foresail by the currents from the jibs and staysail, and then he turned his eyes westwards, where the planet was as low on the horizon as she could be. The round glow touched the sea, reappeared on the rise, vanished entirely; and the starlight distinctly lost in power. ‘She dips,’ he cried.
      3-H.M.S. Surprise, ch.6, paragraph 108

‘There is another,’ said Stephen, picking it up. ‘You notice that your high fishes fly paradoxically with the wind. I conceive there must be an upward draught. How they gleam – a whole flight, see, see! Here is a third. I shall offer it, lightly fried, to my sloth.’
      3-H.M.S. Surprise, ch.6, paragraph 114

‘I cannot imagine,’ said Jack, recovering the chaplain and guiding him along the gangway, ‘what that sloth has against me. I have always been civil to it, more than civil; but nothing answers. I cannot think why you speak of its discrimination.’
      3-H.M.S. Surprise, ch.6, paragraph 115

Jack was of a sanguine temperament; he liked most people and he was surprised when they did not like him. This readiness to be pleased had been damaged of recent years, but it remained intact as far as horses, dogs and sloths were concerned; it wounded him to see tears come into the creature’s eyes when he walked into the cabin, and he laid himself out to be agreeable. As they ran down to Rio he sat with it at odd moments, addressing it in Portuguese, more or less, and feeding it with offerings that it sometimes ate, sometimes allowed to drool slowly from its mouth; but it was not until they were approaching Capricorn, with Rio no great distance on the starboard bow, that he found it respond.
      3-H.M.S. Surprise, ch.6, paragraph 116

The weather had freshened almost to coldness, for the wind was coming more easterly, from the chilly currents between Tristan and the Cape; the sloth was amazed by the change; it shunned the deck and spent its time below. Jack was in his cabin, pricking the chart with less satisfaction than he could have wished: progress, slow, serious trouble with the mainmast – unaccountable headwinds by night – and sipping a glass of grog; Stephen was in the mizzentop, teaching Bonden to write and scanning the sea for his first albatross. The sloth sneezed, and looking up, Jack caught its gaze fixed upon him; its inverted face had an expression of anxiety and concern. ‘Try a piece of this, old cock,’ he said, dipping his cake in the grog and proffering the sop. ‘It might put a little heart into you.’ The sloth sighed, closed its eyes, but gently absorbed the piece, and sighed again.
      3-H.M.S. Surprise, ch.6, paragraph 117

Some minutes later he felt a touch on his knee: the sloth had silently climbed down and it was standing there, its beady eyes looking up into his face, bright with expectation. More cake, more grog: growing confidence and esteem. After this, as soon as the drum had beat the retreat, the sloth would meet him, hurrying towards the door on its uneven legs: it was given its own bowl, and it would grip it with its claws, lowering its round face into it and pursing its lips to drink (its tongue was too short to lap). Sometimes it went to sleep in this position, bowed over the emptiness.
      3-H.M.S. Surprise, ch.6, paragraph 118

‘IN THIS BUCKET,’ said Stephen, walking into the cabin, ‘in this small half-bucket, now, I have the population of Dublin, London and Paris combined: these animalculae – what is the matter with the sloth?’ It was curled on Jack’s knee, breathing heavily: its bowl and Jack’s glass stood empty on the table. Stephen picked it up, peered into its affable, bleary face, shook it, and hung it upon its rope. It seized hold with one fore and one hind foot, letting the others dangle limp, and went to sleep.
      3-H.M.S. Surprise, ch.6, paragraph 119

Stephen looked sharply round, saw the decanter, smelt to the sloth, and cried, ‘Jack, you have debauched my sloth.’
      3-H.M.S. Surprise, ch.6, paragraph 120

In the dead hour of the middle watch he appeared on deck in his night-shirt, looked attentively at the log-board by the binnacle- light, and desired Pullings to shorten sail at eight bells. He appeared again, like a restless ghost, at five bells, and backed his topsails for a while. His calculations were remarkably exact, and he brought the frigate into Rio just as the sun rose behind her and bathed the whole fantastic spectacle in golden light. Yet even this did not answer: even this did not close the breach: Stephen, on being routed out of bed to behold it, observed ‘that it was curious how vulgar Nature could be at times – meretricious, ad captandum vulgus effects – very much the kind of thing attempted to be accomplished at Astley’s or Ranelagh, and fortunately missed of’. He might have thought of other observations, for the sloth had been very slowly sick all night in his cabin, but at this moment the Surprise erupted in flames and smoke, saluting the Portuguese admiral as he lay there in a crimson seventy-four under Rat Island.
      3-H.M.S. Surprise, ch.6, paragraph 124

South and south she ran, flanking across the west wind, utterly alone under the grey sky, heading into the immensity of ocean. From one day to the next the sea grew icy cold, and the cold seeped into the holds, the berth-deck and the cabins, a humid, penetrating cold. Stephen came on deck reflecting with satisfaction upon his sloth, now a parlour-boarder with the Irish Franciscans at Rio, and a secret drinker of the altar-wine. He found the frigate was racing along under a press of canvas, lying over so that her deck sloped like a roof and her lee chains were buried in the foam; twelve and a half knots with the wind on her quarter – royals, upper and lower studdingsails, almost everything she had; her starboard tacks aboard, for Jack still wanted a little more southing. He was there, right aft by the taffrail, looking now at the western sky, now up at the rigging. ‘What do you think of this for a swell?’ he cried.
      3-H.M.S. Surprise, ch.6, paragraph 173

Ales; sherbet; mangosteens: the sky itself turned pale while they talked of Indian pastrycooks; the frigate’s voyage, her purpose and intent; Mr Stanhope, sloths, the great men of Bombay. Her only references to Canning were oblique: ‘On her good days, Lady Forbes can be an entertaining companion; and at all events she keeps me in countenance – I need it, you know’; and ‘I rode sixty miles the day before yesterday, and sixty the day before that, right over the Ghauts. That was why I was here so much earlier than I had expected. There was some tedious business to be discussed with the Nizam and suddenly I could not bear it any longer and came on alone, leaving the elephants and camels to follow. They should be here on the seventeenth.’
      3-H.M.S. Surprise, ch.7, paragraph 151

The Oedipus cleared the wharf under forestaysail and jib, with her topsails on the cap; she hoisted home her yards in the fairway and ran past the north buoy, wafting very gently and discreetly through the crowd of fishing-boats and coming to the outer roads in a little over half an hour. 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 foretold the ruin of the Navy within a very short lapse of time. He had just uttered this prophecy, which he had first heard from Jack at the age of twelve, when a tall shadow fell across the deck, and turning he saw the original prophet himself, looking nervous, apprehensive, uneasy, timid, a striking sight for one who had gone into action with Captain Aubrey as often as William Babbington.
      7-The Surgeon's Mate, ch.11, paragraph 194

Jack was indeed in a hell-fire hurry. Not only did he always long to be at sea, and even more so this time than usual, out of lawyers’ reach and before he could be saddled with a convoy, but he knew very well that the Brest squadron had been blown off their station and that he had a fair chance of snapping up any French privateer that might take advantage of their absence and of the easterly wind to run into the ocean, there to cruise for British merchantmen, privateers, or even with great luck a frigate. For although any French frigate he had ever seen would surely have the legs of the Worcester, which added sloth to unresponsiveness and lack of beauty, his ship could throw a broadside of 721 pounds from her long guns alone, enough to disable any frigate at long range, if only they were pointed straight and fired briskly.
      8-The Ionian Mission, ch.2, paragraph 91

‘I have also seen the three-toed sloth,’ said Dr Maturin.
      8-The Ionian Mission, ch.3, paragraph 119

‘You are unjust to wombats, Jack; and you were unjust to my three-toed sloth – such illiberal reflections. But leaving wombats to one side, and confining ourselves to your poltroons, Graham might reply that he had seen a good many bullies in the Navy; and for him, perhaps, the two are much the same.’
      8-The Ionian Mission, ch.10, paragraph 17

In the event he was not required to open himself, nor did he hear about Lesueur, for Wray walked off, deep in talk with the Admiral’s secretary, with no more than another bow and a significant look as though to say ‘You see how I am taken up – my time is not my own.’ During these morning hours Jack Aubrey was in the dockyard, conferring with the shipwrights far down in the bowels of his dear Surprise. The shipwrights and those who controlled them were profoundly corrupt, but they did allow that there was a world of difference between government money and private money, and that a captain’s personal outlay called for real value in return; furthermore they were capable of expert craftsmanship, and Jack was thoroughly satisfied with her fine new Dalmatian oak diagonal hanging-knees and the stringers abaft the mainchains, where the frigate had been cruelly mauled. He also believed the shipwrights when they told him that apart from saints’ days they had just over a full week’s work to do. They were tolerably vague about the number of saints’ days, however, and as Jack climbed the temporary ladders to the ravaged deck, brushing wood-shavings off his coat and breeches, they sent for the calendar, telling off the holidays one after another and disagreeing furiously about whether St Aniceto and St Cucufat amounted to twelve hours or only an afternoon for carpenters as well as caulkers. Jack wrote it all down. He knew the Admiral of old: Sir Francis might not have been the first officer in the Navy to require his people to do everything at the double, but he was certainly one of the most forceful and persistent; he hated sloth on the quarterdeck as much as anywhere else, and when he called for a decision, a report, or a statement of a ship’s condition he liked to have it very briskly. Sometimes of course these brisk decisions, reports or statements did not wear quite so well as more deliberate, pondered versions; but, as he said, ‘If you stand considering which leg to put into your breeches first, you are likely to lose your tide; and in the meanwhile your breech is bare.’ He maintained that speed was the essence of attack; and in his own actions this had certainly proved true.
      9-Treason's Harbour, ch.4, paragraph 11

In the event Lopez needed no hints. He spoke Spanish only with difficulty, and seeing that both his guests were fluent, even enormously fluent, in that language and that they agreed very well, he excused himself on the grounds of early work to be done and bade them good night, leaving them on a broad veranda with a number of domesticated creatures on it, marmosets of three different kinds, an old bald toucan, a row of sleepy parrots, something hairy in the background that might have been a sloth or an anteater or even a doormat but that it farted from time to time, looking round censoriously on each occasion, and a strikingly elegant small blue heron that walked in and out. Two bottles of white port stood between them, two hammocks hung behind, and Lopez returned for a moment to beg them to use the mosquito-netting. ‘Not that we have mosquitos in Penedo, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘but it must be confessed that at the change of the moon the vampires do grow a little importunate.’
      10-The Far Side of the World, ch.5, paragraph 5

The gunroom was kind to Mr Gill, and the other Surprises were kind to his crew, which included some of the Acapulco’s men, who, anxious to avoid the accusation of foreign enlistment or comforting the King’s enemies, told all they had learnt about the Norfolk’s movements, past and to come; but it was Caleb Gill who gave the information that relieved Jack’s mind from a most gnawing anxiety. Gill was a reading man, nearer akin to Martin and Stephen than to most of the other sailors. His interests however had more to do with men, primitive men, and less with botany or brute-beasts than theirs; he was fascinated by the idea of the noble savage and had travelled far among the native Americans, learning all he could of their social order in peace and war, their laws, customs and history; and one afternoon, when the Surprise was still stripping the Acapulco of everything that could possibly be crammed between decks and Mr Lawrence was dining with Jack, the three of them lingered in the gunroom over a bottle of madeira. ‘I was of course exceedingly mortified at being taken prisoner,’ he observed, ‘yet in a purely personal and private way I had been perhaps even more deeply mortified by being ordered to take command of that unfortunate Acapulco, since from the very beginning of the voyage my whole heart had been bent on beholding the Marquesas: your upas-tree, sir, your two-toed sloth, dodo, solitary-bird, were hardly more for you than the Marquesas were for me, particularly the island Huahiva, which my uncle has always represented as a Paradise.’ ‘As a Paradise, indeed?’ asked Stephen, remembering a letter found in the Danaë’s packet, which used that very phrase. ‘Yes, sir. Not perhaps quite an orthodox Presbyterian Paradise, but one so agreeable that he means to set up a colony upon it. Indeed he even has some colonists with him. I have heard differing and often muddle-headed accounts of the islanders’ polity, but all agree that it pays great attention to various prohibitions or taboos and to relationship; and 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: the divine offerings are invariably swine, the cannibalism being simply a matter of taste or inclination; while the fornication has nothing ceremonial or compulsory about it.’
      10-The Far Side of the World, ch.6, paragraph 128

JACK AUBREY LAY in his cot, savouring his resurrection; this was Sunday morning and according to ancient naval custom the day’s life began half an hour earlier than usual – hammocks were piped up at six bells rather than seven – so that the ship’s people could wash, shave and make themselves fine for divisions and church. Ordinarily he was up and about with the rest, but today he deliberately took his ease, indulging in perfectly relaxed sloth and in the comfort of his bed, infinitely soft and well-moulded compared with harsh, scaly palm-fronds, and infinitely warm and dry compared with the open sea. The usual swabs and holystones scouring the deck a few feet above his head had not woken him, because Mowett had allowed nothing but silent, largely symbolic sweeping abaft the mainmast. But for all Mowett’s care Jack was pretty well aware of the time of the day: the intensity of the light and the smell of roasting coffee were in themselves a clock; yet still he lay, taking conscious pleasure in being alive.
      10-The Far Side of the World, ch.9, paragraph 1

‘Oh come, Jack, for all love! You are an officer and I have known you lie times without number, like Ulysses. I have seen you hang out flags stating that you were a Dutchman, a French merchant, a Spanish man-of-war – that you were a friend, an ally – anything to deceive. Why, the earthly paradise would soon be with us, if government, monarchical or republican, had but to give a man a commission to preserve him from lying – from pride, envy, sloth, gule, avarice, ire and incontinence.’
      10-The Far Side of the World, ch.10, paragraph 8

‘Drunkenness, fornication and sloth were their undoing; and they were not so much discharged as abandoned. They left their disorderly house at about noon, made their staggering, crapulous way to the strand, and found that the squadron had sailed at dawn. They have been living in squalor ever since; for although the Governor has taken some little indirect notice of them, it does not appear that their friends have relieved them in any way, possibly for want of time rather than of inclination. It does after all take an eternity for an Indiaman to come and go.’
      14-The Nutmeg of Consolation, ch.4, paragraph 57

IT WAS FROM the mizzentop that they first saw this island, or rather the little isolated flat cloud that marked its presence. So many leagues, so many degrees of longitude had passed under the Surprise’s keel, that now, patiently taught by Bonden, the medicos came up by the futtock-shrouds like Christians; and for the last fortnight they had done so without attendance, without life-lines or anything to break a headlong fall, although reaching the top in this, the seaman’s, way entailed climbing what was in effect a rope ladder inclined some fifty-five degrees from the vertical, fifty-five degrees backwards, so that one hung, like a sloth, gazing at the sky. Their movements were not unlike those of a sloth, either; but both confessed that this was a far more compendious method, and far more agreeable than their former writhing through the tightly-clustered rigging; and they were not displeased at hearing Pullings say, in the course of a dinner at which the gunroom was entertaining the Captain, that the Surprise was the only ship he had ever known in which both the doctors went aloft without using the lubber’s hole.
      14-The Nutmeg of Consolation, ch.8, paragraph 1

There was no need to hail the boat, however. A far less keen-sighted man than Jack Aubrey could tell from half a mile that they were carrying not anti-scorbutics but some such creature as a sloth or a wombat; yet even he looked a little blank when he saw them close and heard what was to be done.
      14-The Nutmeg of Consolation, ch.8, paragraph 76

‘She would certainly have told you what to do,’ said Hamlyn. ‘She is spending this very afternoon at the orphanage. We have a great many little bastards here, you know, begotten by the Lord knows who during the voyage and often abandoned. And as you say, she is the most amiable of ladies: we passed the chief of the morning discussing plans for the hospital.’ Stephen and the surgeon did the same until it was time for each to talk to his other neighbour. Hamlyn was at once engaged in a close and even passionate argument about some horses that were to race presently; but on Stephen’s right hand the penal secretary, whom he thought of as Mealy-Mouth but whose name was in fact Firkins, was already taken up with a four-or five-handed conversation about convicts, the irredeemable wickedness, sloth, immorality of convicts, the assignment of convicts, their dangerous nature; and for some time he was able to survey the table. Mealy-Mouth, he observed, was a water-drinker; but Stephen, having taken a sip of the local wine, could hardly blame him for that. Immediately opposite was a big, dark-faced man, as big as Jack Aubrey or even bigger; he wore regimentals that Stephen did not recognize, presumably those of the Rum Corps. His very large face had a look of stupidity and settled ill-temper; he wore a surprising number of rings. To this man’s right sat the clergyman who had said grace, and he too looked thoroughly discontented. His face was unusually round; it was red, and growing steadily redder. From the confusion of voices and the unfamiliarity of their topics it was not easy for Stephen to make out more than the general drift at first, but that was clear enough from the often-repeated ‘United Irishmen’ and ‘Defenders’ – prisoners who had been transported in large numbers, particularly after the 1798 rising in Ireland. He noticed that the Scottish officers of the Seventy-Third did not take part, but they were in the minority and the general feeling was well summed up by the clergyman, who said, ‘The Irish do not deserve the appellation of men. And if I needed an authority for the statement I should bring forward Governor Collins of Van Diemen’s Land. Those are his very words: in the second volume of his book, I believe. But no authority is needed for what is evident to the meanest understanding. And now to crown all, priests are allowed them. A cunning priest can make them do anything; and there is nothing but anarchy to be foreseen.’
      14-The Nutmeg of Consolation, ch.8, paragraph 209

‘It is a little furry creature that sleeps all day curled up in a ball with its head between its legs and then walks about very, very slowly all night, high in the trees, slowly eating leaves and creeping up on birds as they roost and eating them too. It has immense eyes, which is but reasonable. Some call it the sluggard; some the slow lemur; some the sloth, but quite erroneously, for the two have nothing in common but their modest demeanour, their inoffensive lives. The potto is the most interesting of the primates, from the anatomical point of view. Adanson saw and dissected the potto, and I fairly long to have the same happiness.’
      17-The Commodore, ch.8, paragraph 89

They spoke of Patagonia, that uncomfortable shore made glorious only by the presence of a gigantic sloth, a ground sloth, unseen it is true by literate man but certainly skinned by his earlier, illiterate cousins: Stephen possessed eighteen square inches of hide, and part of a knuckle-bone.
      18-The Yellow Admiral, ch.9, paragraph 8