Did Maturin take a deliberate dive in The Surgeon's Mate?

I was listening to The Surgeon's Mate last night and caught this passage, where Maturin goes to Grimsholm in hopes of convincing the Catalan garrison there to defect from the French side:

Wittgenstein spun the little boat about and made a stern-board so that it bumped against the jetty. Stephen stood up, hesitated, leapt for a bollard with a sergeant standing by it, and missed his hold. He fell between the jetty and the boat, and coming to the surface called out in Catalan, ‘Pull me out. Hell and death.’

‘Art a Catalan?’ cried the sergeant, amazed.

‘Mother of God, of course I am,’ said Stephen. ‘Pull me out.’

‘I am amazed,’ said the sergeant, staring; but two corporals next to him flung down their muskets, leaned over, took Stephen’s hands, and drew him up.

‘Thank you, friends,’ said he above a whole crowd of voices that wanted to know where he came from, what he was doing here, what news of Barcelona, Lleida, Palamos, Ripoll, what the ship had brought, and was there any wine. ‘Now tell me, where is Colonel d’Ullastret?’

I didn't realize until this, my second go-around, that Maturin might well have fallen into the water on purpose on this singular occasion. By calling out in Catalan in an apparent moment of distress (when his natural habit at this time would have been to use English) he eliminated any suspicion that he might be anything other than Catalan, and he knows from his history of mishaps that the people who rescue him from the water will tend to be sympathetic to him. The boat had "bumped against the jetty", yet Maturin managed to fall between the jetty and the boat. The jump can't have been that far, and it wasn't like trying to go up the side of a large ship from a small boat in open water, where Maturin most frequently has trouble. If he didn't contrive to fall in, it was certainly clever of him to capitalize on it by calling for help in Catalan.