Ramage and the Freebooters

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Tropics: to Ramage they were always magic words, but as he stood at the taffrail watching the brig's wake he knew the hot sun, blue sea and sky and the cooling Trade winds had done more than anything to make the Triton a happy ship. Now, looking at the men cheerfully going about their work or listening to them dancing to John Smith the Second's fiddle as the sun set, it was impossible to know who was an original Kathleen and who a Triton. Tanned, fit, cheery—and well-trained: all a captain could ask of a ship's company.

After finding Admiral Curtis's squadron off Brest, the Triton met Lord St Vincent's squadron twenty miles from Cadiz. After delivering the First Lord's letter, Ramage had answered ten brief questions—brief, but searching—and after a gruff 'Have a good voyage' from the Admiral, made sail bound for the Canary Islands, there to pick up the North-east Trade winds which would carry the brig before them for nearly three thousand miles in a great sweeping curve across the Atlantic to a landfall off Ragged Point, the eastern tip of Barbados.

After leaving Lord St Vincent's squadron, their last sight of land had been Cape Spartel, the north-western corner of the Barbary Coast. From then on a stiff but constant north wind gave them a fast run south towards the Canaries.

Rather man lose the chance the northerly gave them of getting as far as possible to the south with a 'soldier's wind' before meeting the Trades—as well as make an accurate departure—Ramage decided to risk a chance encounter with any Spanish warships patrolling His Most Catholic Majesty's Atlantic islands by passing close to Tenerife, me most imposing of them all.

It had come up over the horizon looking like a series of "

sharp-crested storm waves petrified in an instant by a wilful Nature in a petulant mood. And for once the sharp edges, topped by the perfect cone of the volcano Teide, were sharp and clear, instead of being hidden in cloud; through the telescope Ramage could see wide black ribbons down the side of the mountain where streams of lava recently pouring from the crater had solidified.

For a day and a night after that the Triton had run south, still holding a soldier's wind; then slowly, almost imperceptibly, the wind had in a few hours eased round to the northeast and the Triton had followed, her course curving down to the south-west, out into the open Atlantic and leaving the Cape Verde Islands just out of sight to the south.

Then the wind had picked up its strength and everyone on board knew they were in the Trades. Gradually the following seas increased in size, the Trade wind clouds arrived and settled down into their usual orderly formation.

In an hour or so, Ramage knew he must go down to his cabin and bring his log and journal up to date; but for the moment he stood in the sun, glorying at the way the Triton ran before the Trades.

Wave after wave—deep blue laced with white foam, but bright turquoise green when the sun's rays shone through the tumbling crests—swept up astern of the brig, making her yaw like a fat fishwife walking down the street.

A big crest would nudge her on the side of the counter and heave her stern round, and by the time the helmsmen had spun the wheel to bring her back on course another would have arrived to catch the opposite side and give her an unceremonious shove the other way, and the cheerfully cursing helmsmen would begin all over again.

Ramage wished he could be left alone for the whole voyage: he'd be happy enough spending it watching the clouds.

When dawn broke astern each day it usually showed a high bank of cloud to the eastward, although the night sky overhead was normally clear, speckled with so many stars that it seemed to be raining diamonds.

Soon after the sun appeared above the bank and started to get some heat in it, the mass of cloud vanished, as if dried up, and tiny clouds, just balls of white fluff, began to appear, apparently from nowhere. Within half an hour they would grow slightly and, almost imperceptibly, like dancers on an enormous ballroom floor, begin to move into a regular formation, part of a dainty quadrille repeated all over the sky.

By ten o'clock, as the hands were piped to exercise at the guns, the clouds would have formed into a dozen or so regular lines like so many skeins of swans flying one behind the other, converging on a point beyond the western horizon. Apart from the way they formed into lines, the shape of each cloud fascinated Ramage. Although the base was nearly always flat, the top was an irregular bulge and the front stretched out like a neck. Odd quirks of wind varied the shapes of the tops and fronts so that some clouds looked like a squadron of flying white dragons; others as if all the white marble effigies of recumbent knights had risen into the sky from the tops of their tombs. Still more seemed to be people's faces staring up into the sky—here a jovial and plump Falstaff sleeping off a wild night's drinking, there a lean and hungry-looking Cassius.

But whatever their shape, they always moved westward, as if drawn by some inexorable force; and below them the tumbling seas too moved westward driven, like the Triton, before the wind.

Always westward—except for the flying fish leaping up suddenly like tiny silver lances, skimming a few yards or a hundred, rising up the forward face of a wave and swooping over the crest and down again, miraculously staying a few inches above the sea until, leaving only a tiny ripple, they vanished as swiftly as they appeared. One, six, a dozen and even fifty at a time.

Then one of the crew would shout and everyone would crowd the ship's side to watch dolphins racing past, crossing close under the plunging bow, twisting swiftly in the water in a swirl of white and steely blue to pass so close across the bow again it seemed impossible the stem would not hit them. Then, a few minutes before noon each day, he and South-wick would be standing amidships, where the effect of the brig's pitching and rolling was less, quadrants in hand, taking one sight after another, a man calling the time. Minute by minute the sun's image in the quadrant's shaded mirrors —reflected down until it appeared to rest on the horizon, allowing the angle to be measured—continued rising slowly. Then it slowed and gradually came to a stop as the man called noon, and hung there a few moments, apparently motionless. Ramage and the Master would read off the highest angles shown on the quadrant and resume watching the sun until certain the altitude was beginning to drop. The ritual of the noon sight, and a few minutes of addition and subtraction soon gave them the Triton's latitude.

And then it was afternoon, with the sun—high now they were so far south and hot enough for an awning to be rigged over the quarterdeck—gradually dipping until it was dead ahead. The sunsets, different each evening, were always fantastic. The clouds would have fattened or lost formation and the setting sun, like an angry artist daubing paint, changed them into strange masses of garish yellow with red edges, or pink with a scarlet fringe, but above them and beyond them the sky too would be changing from the deep blue overhead to the palest blue on the horizon, cloud and sky contrasting raw colours and delicate tints.

Quickly the colours would go, leaving the clouds dull grey and, by comparison, menacing; then, with a suddenness surprising to anyone used to the long evenings of the northern latitudes, it would be dark. Later the clouds would vanish to leave the stars brighter than one could ever imagine. And right astern the moon slowly rose, turning the Triton's wake into a bubbling trail of silver.

And later, lying comfortably in his cot as it swung with the brig's roll, Ramage would hear the water rushing past the hull, roaring, bubbling, gurgling as the brig slowed momentarily in the trough of one wave, surged along on me forward face of the next, and then see-sawed as the crest passed beneath her and she slid into the trough.

Every glass, every bottle, every knife, fork and spoon in the sideboard rattled and clinked; everything that could move even an eighth of an inch in the cabin did so with all the noise it could muster. And the ship's hull groaned as the crests and troughs constantly stressed and supported, lifted and dropped. Stringers and futtocks, beams and knees creaked in protest. To a landman it would seem the ship was breaking up; to a seaman it meant the ship was showing its strength, bending like a flexing cane instead of remaining rigid and brittle.

But Ramage admitted there were bad days: days when the Trades suddenly stopped, leaving the Triton wallowing in a heavy sea without the press of wind in her sails to stop her rolling, the atmosphere humid and oppressive. The seas would flatten quickly, but for an hour or two it always seemed she would roll her masts out. The white puff-ball clouds disappeared and in their place grey-blue patches on the horizon would quickly spread into near black squalls rushing silently down on the ship, like a hawk dropping on its prey.

One moment she would be pitching and rolling with not enough wind to blow out a candle; then, its edge marked only by a white line of tiny crests, the squall would strike and in a matter of seconds the helmsman would be fighting the wheel to force the Triton to bear away under a reefed foretopsail.

Blinding rain, howling wind, the knowledge both you and the ship were fighting for your lives, the deck running with water from rain and driven spray, always the fear one of the masts would go by the board—and then suddenly sunshine, the wind and black clouds gone as quickly as they came and even before you could pick up the speaking trumpet to give orders, the deck steaming as the sun's heat began drying out the planking. Seamen would strip off shirts, wring out the water and put them on again. (A fortunate few would have collected some of 'die rainwater to use for washing domes.) The nights were dangerous when the Trades decided to be wilful The Triton would be running in a steady wind, the stars bright, and suddenly a lookout would call a warning, or he or Southwick would spot it: a patch of sky astern with no stars. No hint of cloud, just that the stars had vanished. A minute or so to see which stars round the patch were being obscured—to determine the course of the squall —and men all too often, a hurried call for all hands to furl everything but the foretopsail which would be double reefed...

*

Ramage was just dunking of going below when Southwick, who was officer of me watch and had been tactfully keeping to the other side of me quarterdeck, leaving him to his thoughts, came over and said casually, 'Sawbones had a bad night, sir...'

The old Master said it sympathetically but firmly. Ramage knew he was being told that the problem of the drunken surgeon, Bowen, must be tackled very soon; and in his clumsy; way Southwick was trying to prod him into doing it now, realizing how repugnant the task but knowing, with all his years at sea, that it would get worse the longer it was left Ramage nodded. 'I heard him. If he yelled to his steward for one new bottle he must have yelled for half a dozen.'

'Four times,' Southwick said grimly, 'I counted. How do you stand under the Regulations, sir; can you forbid him any liquor?'

Ramage appreciated the 'you': Southwick was well past fifty, Ramage just past twenty-one. If Southwick was anything but a good man, he'd use 'we' as much as possible, just to let the captain know how much he depended on the Master. But not Southwick: he was content and accepted the situation—and perhaps knew Ramage appreciated it Indeed he must know, since there were three or four score unemployed masters at the moment, probably even more, and Southwick knew that Ramage had asked the First Lord for him in the Triton. None of which had much relevance to Bowen's drinking.

Ramage shook his head. 'I don't think the Regulations cover it. I can suspend him from duty pending an inquiry, that I do know. But it doesn't solve the problem.'

'I agree,' Southwick nodded and Ramage, realizing the old man wanted to say more, prompted him by adding:

'We can get rid of him as soon as we get to Barbados— though how we'd find another one I don't know. But he's probably a very good doctor when he's sober and we're going to faced one in the West Indies.'

'That's what I was thinking, sir. Yellow fever, blackwater ... doesn't do to think about all the diseases, even with a good "sawbones". In fact it's got a lot worse in the last year or so, from what I heard in a letter I had in England, A lot worse.'

'In what way?'

'Just the sheer number o' men dying, sir. I kept the letter. It's from the Master of the Hannibal'—he rummaged in a pocket and brought it out. 'These are the figures he gives.

I hope they won't worry you too much, sir?'

'No,' Ramage said dryly. 'I've been to the West Indies before...'

'Well, the soldiers to start with. Out of nearly 16,000 white soldiers stationed there at the time, 6,480 died from fevers in the year ending last April—that's forty per cent. In the Santo Domingo campaign of '94, forty-six masters of transport ships and 11,000 men died. The Hannibal buried 170 of her crew in a month and lost two hundred in six months. Jamaica to Port au Prince is less than 300 miles, but the Reasonable frigate had yellow jack on board and buried thirty-six of her crew on the way. That's one man in three...'

Ramage held up a hand to stop the recital. If 16,000 troops were sent into battle and lost 6,500 killed, it would mean they'd suffered a disastrous defeat. A sail of the line going into action and losing two hundred men out of about seven hundred would mean she'd been battered and probably sinking...

'Send Bowen to the cabin.'

'He mayn't be sober, sir...'

'Probably not; but I'll see him in fifteen minutes. As sober as you can make him...'

'I understand, sir. Five minutes under the wash-deck pump, if need be!'