by Dudley Pope
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
By sunrise the Jocasta was running westward under studding sails with a stiff north-east wind. To the south a series of mountain peaks stretched into the distance along the coast of the Main, fading purple like old bruises, while ahead, fine on the starboard bow, was Isla de Margarita, its high mountains making it seem as if the island had been formed by a giant wrenching off a handful of the mainland and tossing it into the sea a dozen miles from the coast. There were two small islands in the channel between, Coche and Cabagua.
Daylight had been a melancholy time on board the frigate because Ramage had to conduct a funeral service for the Iwenty-three Spaniards and then for the five men from the Calypso who had been killed while boarding the Jocasta. Yet the ship's company had soon cheered up after the last body, sewn into a hammock and with a roundshot at the feet, had disappeared over the side. Ramage sensed that the men had, like him, expected far heavier casualties, and most of them were too concerned with the wonder of being alive to mourn five lost shipmates for long.
Ramage paused to look ahead at Isla de Margarita and then resumed his pacing of the starboard side of the quarterdeck. By now the Santa Barbara would be in Santa Cruz and Velasquez and Lopez - and the Captain-General's nephew - would be telling their story. By now a messenger (two or three of them if the Mayor had any sense) would be galloping along the coast, carrying the warning to the Captain-General in Caracas that La Perla had been captured. Looking across the mountains, which swept on westwards like enormous petrified waves, Ramage did not envy the messengers.
The last cast of the log showed that the Jocasta was making nine and a half knots. If they could keep up this speed they would arrive off La Guaira soon after dawn tomorrow. In fact it mattered little whether it was dawn or noon, providing they reached there in daylight and before the messengers.
"A particular cargo." The phrase nagged him. The word "particular" had a certain significance when used in the Royal Navy, usually meaning that something was both important and secret. When Admiral Nelson had been given the task of covering the English Channel against the threat of invasion, he had been given command of a squadron "to be employed upon a particular service".
Ramage cursed his deficient Spanish. Normally it was good enough to pass himself off as a Spaniard, but occasionally he was caught out by the deeper significance of a particular word. Southwick might be right; the "particular cargo" from Cartagena could be a present from the Viceroy, something intended to curry favour at Court.
In steering for La Guaira he was now acting without orders. If anything went wrong Admiral Davis would be quite justified in accusing him of actually disobeying orders, since his instructions had been commendably brief: he was to sail to the Main, recapture the Jocasta and bring her back to English Harbour. There was not an inch of slack in the wording.
If Ramage brought back a nice fat prize, the Admiral would not throw up his hands in horror and refuse his share, but if Ramage lost the Jocasta or the Calypso while going after a prize of unknown value, it would be a different story. Captain Ramage would probably spend the rest of his life on the beach on half-pay, being used as an object lesson to other young captains, like a carrion crow strung up on a piece of string beside a gamekeeper's lodge.
Should he forget about that damned merchant ship?
Supposing he managed to cut her out and found that the "particular cargo" was an elaborate suite of furniture made of some exotic tropical wood, or even cages of parrots or rare birds intended to amuse the vapid ladies of the Spanish Court? It could be something like that, because the normal exports to Spain from the Main were items like indigo, tobacco, hides and sometimes cotton.
From Admiral Davis's point of view, he could have had the Jocasta back, with the destruction of the two fortresses guarding Santa Cruz as a bonus. His orders would have been obeyed. He could report to the Admiralty that their instructions were carried out. If Ramage brought back a merchant ship full of birds and furniture as a prize it would be doubtful if the Admiral's dispatch to London would even mention it.
He picked up the telescope and looked to the north. There was no sign of the Calypso. The lookouts aloft could probably still see her sails, but from down here at deck level she had disappeared below the curvature of the earth. She was fast - faster than the Jocasta - and Wagstaffe would waste no time. Would he go along the north side of the chain of islands, or stay south? Either way there was no chance of the Jocasta catching up with her before she reached the rendezvous.
Southwick, the officer of the deck, caught his eye, obviously wanting to chat.
"The chart doesn't help us much, sir."
"It rarely does along this coast, " Ramage commented sourly. "But surely the Spanish ones I gave you are better than ours?"
"They give a few more soundings, but the current is marked 'strong and variable'. This Margarita Channel - I just hope there are no shoals the chartmakers missed."
"We'll soon know. I hadn't realized that Isla de Margarita was so mountainous."
"Aye, that peak, San Juan they call it, is more than three thousand feet high. They reckon you can see it seventy-five miles away in clear weather."
Ramage nodded. "There are more mountain peaks along this coast than I thought existed! "
"It's an iron-bound coast for sure, " Southwick said soberly. "This ahead might be called the Pearl Island but it's a rare old pile of rock! I wonder if they still find pearls?"
Ramage shrugged his shoulders. "I don't see why not. It depends on the oysters! "
"They've probably cleaned them all out, " Southwick said gloomily.
"I'm sure the King of Spain has enough pearls in his crown hy now, " Ramage said vaguely, thinking of breakfast and then a few hours' sleep. "Call me as soon as we reach the Margarita Channel."
Southwick watched Ramage disappear down the companionway and then took off his hat with all the ceremony of a bishop removing his mitre. The wind blew through his white hair and refreshed him. There were times when he felt his years. However, he felt happier now, since he was at last convinced that the Captain had given Rennick the job of capturing Castillo San Antonio only because he wanted the Master on board for the passage out of Santa Cruz.
He had been with Mr Ramage enough years now to recognize most of his moods, but he was damned if he could understand some of them. Just now, for example, he had been pacing the deck with a face as long as a yard of pump water, and snappy and sarcastic as a henpecked parson. Why? He should have been as cheerful as a bandmaster; he had just done the impossible - here was the Jocasta bowling along the coast under stunsails, and less than twelve hours ago she was moored in Santa Cruz with a Spanish captain strutting her quarterdeck. Why the long face? Yet while going in to Santa Cruz with the Calypso, playing a game of bluff where the slightest mistake would have seen the frigate blown out of the water by the batteries, the Captain had had a grin on his face like a curate who had just converted the Devil.
Perhaps he was worried about chasing after this merchant ship at La Guaira. If the Jocasta ran up on an uncharted reef - he looked ahead nervously and then glanced at the binnacle - it would be hard to explain away to the Admiral. Would he understand how that phrase "a particular cargo" had intrigued them all?
He looked astern at the Jocasta's wake. The wind was freshening as the sun came up and with the sails rap full the ship would be making more than ten knots within half an hour. He eyed the stunsail booms projecting out from the ends of the yards and wondered when they were last inspected for rot. The metal fittings were rusty - he could see stained wood from down here.
Margarita was coming up fast now. He turned to Orsini, who was pacing the deck, telescope under his arm, and no doubt dreaming, like most midshipmen on a bright sunny day, of commanding his own frigate.
"Mr Orsini! You see the island of Margarita ahead of us, on the starboard bow?"
"Aye, aye, sir."
"The tall peak is Cerro San Juan, and it is 3200 feet high. Out with your
quadrant, then, and take a vertical angle and tell me how far off it is. Step lively, though, we're approaching it at nearly ten knots! "
Paolo put his telescope in the binnacle drawer and hurried down to the midshipmen's berth for his quadrant, repeating the formula to himself. But was it the right formula? He knew the height, and he could get the angle from the quadrant. The height was 2300 feet, so - wait, was it 2300 or 3200 feet?
Accidente! where was the quadrant box? He found it propping up some books at the end of a shelf and hurried back up on deck blinking in the sunlight. Mama mia, with stunsails set and running almost dead before the wind it was hard to see forward.
He braced himself against the pitching, checked that the quadrant was set at zero, and then carefully looked through the eyepiece. It was easy enough, he told himself; none of the business of needing to know the exact time. He moved the arm until the reflection of the peak rested on the horizon, and then looked at the scale.
"Take another one, " Southwick growled. "Never rely on just one! "
Paolo wasn't sure what had happened with the first, but the second showed a difference of more than a degree. Fortunately the third agreed with the second and he hurriedly set the quadrant at zero again and took a fourth. The last three were the same.
But what was the height of San Juan, the other ingredient he needed? He could sneak into Mr Southwick's cabin and look at the chart (it was just his bad luck that it was not on top of the binnacle box; it would be later on, when the dampness had gone out of the air), but someone might think he was trying to steal something.
"Mr Orsini . . ."
The Master's voice had an odd tone.
"Sir?"
"You are sure of the angle?"
"Yes, sir: three were identical."
"What happened to the fourth?"
"I don't know, sir." There was no fooling the Master; he had sharper eyes than Uncle Nicholas.
"So now you take the angle and the height and you look it up in the tables, eh?" "Yes, sir."
"What was the height of San Juan?"
Accidente! Paolo felt someone had put the evil eye on him this morning. Was it 3200 or 2300? Better too high than too low - or was it? He tried to picture which would give the furthest distance, but mathematics were a confusing subject which he learned by rote.
"3200 feet, sir."
"Good, it's not often you remember a figure correctly, " Southwick grumbled. "Now, off with you and work it out."
Paolo hurried below, carefully wiped the quadrant with the oily rag kept in the box for the purpose - spray and even the damp salt air soon corroded the brass - and put it away. A pencil, a piece of paper and the tables ... He turned to the back of the tables, where he had long ago written notes. "Distance off by vertical angle" - and there was the formula. Hurriedly he worked out the sum and there was the answer. Two miles. But it couldn't be! He did the sum again - just over seven miles. He did the sum a third time and the answer was still seven, and he scurried up the ladder to report to the Master.
But Mr Southwick seemed far from pleased with the news; Paolo saw that the bushy grey eyebrows were pulled down over his eyes like the portcullis of the castle at Volterra.
"Just over seven miles, Mr Orsini? When was that?"
"Well, sir, when I took the angle."
"And have you any idea how long ago that was?" Southwick tapped his watch. "A quarter of an hour ago, Mr Orsini; fifteen whole minutes."
"Yes, sir, " said Paolo nervously.
"And we are making nearly ten knots, Mr Orsini, " Southwick said relentlessly. "Will you favour me by telling me how far the ship has travelled in fifteen minutes?"
Paolo's mind went blank, then he groped in his memory. One knot was one mile in an hour, which was a quarter of a mile in a quarter of an hour. So ten knots was - what?
"Two miles, sir?" he said hopefully, but the Master's furious expression made him think again. A quarter of a mile at one knot. So at ten knots - why, ten quarters! So simple! "One and a half miles, sir! "
"Mr Orsini, " Southwick said firmly, "I've no doubt that you have already calculated how far the ship travels in a quarter of an hour if she is making one knot."
"Yes, sir. A quarter of a mile."
"So if you multiply a quarter by ten, you get one and a half?"
"No, sir, " Paolo admitted ruefully, "two and a half."
"Thank you, " Southwick said sarcastically. "Just bear in mind that an error of a mile in waters like these is more than enough to see the ship hit a shoal."
"Yes, sir. It won't happen again."
"It will, Mr Orsini, it will, " Southwick said sadly. "You can knot and splice with the best o' them, but your mathematics. . ."
Just like Mr Ramage, Southwick reflected. The Captain was a fine seaman; he could handle a ship with less effort than a skilled horseman could ride a quiet nag through a gateway, but tell him that A over B equals C and ask him how to calculate what A was and his eyes went glazed. Still, one had to be fair: Southwick knew his mathematics but Bowen nearly always beat him at chess; and the surgeon could cut off a man's leg and sew it all up, but he couldn't hold a candle to the Captain when it came to guessing how the enemy would react in a given situation. And neither Aitken nor Wagstaffe, competent enough officers though they were, could spot trouble under a distant cloud like the Captain and have the ship snugly reefed down by the time a wicked squall came out of nowhere.
"The wake looks like a snake with colic, " he growled at the quartermaster. "Don't let them use so much wheel."
The big island was approaching fast now, and with the sun lifting higher he did not like the haze that was beginning to dull the outlines of the mountains, yet the glass was steady enough. That was the trouble with this damned coast; there were so many local winds. Maracaibo, another three hundred miles along the coast, was the worst; he had a note in his reference book of the chubasco which plagued the Gulf of Venezuela between May and August, coming up in the late afternoon and blowing a full gale and sometimes more for an hour, and then dying down and leaving you half-drowning in torrential rain. Along this stretch of the coast - more towards La Guaira, rather - the calderetas came screaming down from the mountains, hot, sharp blasts which could send masts by the board. His notebook mentioned just that; it was information from another master who had sailed along this coast, but there was no reference to what warning the calderetas gave - if any.
He looked at his watch: it wanted a few minutes to eight. Aitken would be on deck shortly to relieve him, so he picked up the slate and brought the details up to date.
Course, speed, distance run ... Damnation, he was tired.
The Pearl Island. It sounded romantic enough, but he would be glad when it dropped over the horizon astern and the Saddle of Caracas came in sight. That was the one thing that made a landfall at La Guaira an easy task: the high ridge joining three peaks, the Silla de Caracas, stuck out like humps on camels, with one of them only three miles from La Guaira itself. What a ride those messengers must be having, galloping westwards to tell the Captain-General in Caracas that the English heretics had just stolen La Perla from Santa Cruz. Southwick grinned to himself as he imagined the Mayor of Santa Cruz drafting the letter.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
At daybreak the following morning the Jocasta was within fifteen miles of La Guaira, running along a jagged coast where mountain peak after mountain peak reared up only a few miles from the shore, the lower slopes covered with thick green forests. The coastline was a series of bold cliffs, looking like bastions defending the coastline from the constant battering of the sea, broken by occasional gaps where sandy beaches were backed by palm trees. Almost everywhere a heavy surf broke with a thunder that could be heard a mile offshore, spray erupting in white clouds as the waves surged along the rocks.
Ramage looked down at the chart spread on the binnacle box and then glanced up at the mountains. There were two ridges, the nearest with peaks rising to 4000 feet, the second which soared up to 9000 or
more. And the three peaks that concerned him most were clear enough: the nearest was Izcaragua, nearly 8000 feet high; then six miles to the west was Pico de Naguata, the highest at 9000 feet, and joined by a long ridge which ran for seven miles to join Pico Avila, 7000 feet high and only three miles from La Guaira. Caracas, the capital of the province, was several miles inland, high among the mountains. There, thought Ramage, the Captain-General will soon be sitting down to his breakfast, blissfully unaware that horsemen are galloping over the mountains to warn him that La Perla has gone. Before they arrived, with luck, more horsemen would be galloping up the twisting road from La Guaira to tell him that La Perla was off the port.
La Guaira - he knew precious little about it. An open anchorage with deep water close to the shore, the port built on a narrow plain between two masses of rock . . . That could be almost anywhere. It was defended by the Trinchera Bastion on the eastern side and by El Vigia, a castle overlooking the port from a height of about four hundred feet. According to Southwick the anchorage was occasionally swept by enormous rollers from the north, coming two or three at a time; walls of water sometimes two miles long which wrenched ships from their anchors and tossed them up on the beach like driftwood.
And that, Ramage thought, is all we know about La Guaira, and entirely due to Southwick's habit of filling notebooks with details of places whenever he could find someone who had been there. It was the main port of the province of Caracas, and (in more peaceful times) fresh water could be obtained from a small reservoir which had been made some five hundred feet above the town by damming up a river. Southwick's notebook added that the main exports were cocoa, coffee, hides, dyewood and medicinal roots. A "particular cargo" comprising those mundane items and captured only by risking the Jocasta would make Admiral Davis explode with more flame and violence than had destroyed El Pilar . . .
