Ramage and the Renegades r-12

by Dudley Pope

'Ah, indeed,' Ramage said, determined to get back to the Calypso before this poor, crazy man did something absurd, like ordering his master-at-arms to arrest him.

  'Now, Ramage, let me see your orders.'

  'They are sealed orders, sir. I have only general orders to take me south, and then I open sealed orders when south ot ten degrees North.'

  'Give them to me: I can open them. All things are open to those with faith.'

  'They are locked up on board my ship, sir.'

  'Then go and unlock them, my boy,' Hamilton said in a perfectly normal voice. 'I must inspect them. One doesn't know what theymight say.'

  He spoke as though the Admiralty's orders might contain obscene phrases that Ramage was too young to read.

  Ramage nodded agreeably. 'Yes, indeed sir, who knows. You may remember that when I first came on board I said the war with France was over -'

  'Ah yes, so you did,' Hamilton interrupted. 'And if you don't refer to it again, I shan't mention it at your trial. But it is a clear breach of one of the Articles of War, number Three to be exact, "If any officer shall give, hold or entertain intelligence with an Enemy..."'

  Ramage would have agreed, in order not to provoke the man further, but the Invincible still had a couple of hundred miles to sail before she reached Spithead, during which time she could meet and sink a dozen French, Dutch or Spanish ships.

  'Sir, I have something to say that I insist is heard by your first lieutenant and at least one other officer, either the second lieutenant or your master.'

  'My dear Ramage, by all means. Tell the sentry to pass the word for them. Now, may I once again offer you refreshment? As I told you, the Madeira is good, but I have spirits, a poor brandy or some of those Dutch East Indies drinks, all spices and perfume: what shall it be?'

  Now Hamilton's voice was that of a good host: a rational man pleased at meeting another of the King's ships after a long period at sea.

  Ramage examined the bottles as Hamilton displayed them, playing for time and trying not to refuse anything until the two officers arrived. A knock on the door and a call from the sentry showed both men had been waiting close by.

  As soon as they came into the cabin, Hamilton nodded to Todd and introduced the second lieutenant, smiling as though they were all about to sit down to a specially-prepared rijstafel.

  'Gentlemen, Mr Ramage couldn't make up his mind what he wanted to drink, and asked me to send for you.'

  Todd glanced at Ramage, knowing that his captain could not see his face. It was obvious to Ramage that quite apart from Todd, the other lieutenant too was almost at the end of his rope: they had been serving many months under this mad captain. He looked at them both and said slowly and carefully: 'I have made a statement to Captain Hamilton, and I intend repeating it before the two of you. I want you to remember word for word what I say.'

  Before he had time to speak again, Hamilton said in a conversational tone: 'Yes, remember what he says, word for word, and remember the Articles of War, numbers Three, Twelve and Thirteen. I shall be bringing him to trial, of course, and we shall need all the evidence we can get.'

  'Aye aye, sir,' Todd said.

  'Now,' Ramage continued, 'a treaty of peace has been concluded between Britain and France. All hostilities have ceased -'

  'Note well what he says,' Hamilton commented. 'A clear case of "intelligence with the enemy".'

  '- between Britain on the one hand and France, Spain and the Netherlands on the other. Now, repeat that.'

  Todd repeated it word for word, with Captain Hamilton beating time with his right hand.

  As soon as the lieutenant finished, Ramage continued: 'Ratifications have been exchanged and all fighting anywhere in the world shall cease within five months of that date, which was -'

  'It's absolute rubbish,' Hamilton interrupted, 'but humour him: I've known these cases turn violent.'

  Ramage then took a folded newspaper from his pocket and gave it to the first lieutenant. 'Your captain has refused to read this. It's a copy of the Morning Post and reports the exchange of ratifications.'

  It had been lucky that there was a copy on board the Calypso: Orsini had used several to pack some crockery he had brought back from London.

  Todd nodded as he read and then passed it on to the other lieutenant. When he was holding it again he said respectfully to Captain Hamilton: 'There are various interesting items here, sir. The parliamentary news, for instance. You were worrying about your constituency

  So Hamilton was a Member of Parliament. He must be one of those Members who occasionally visited Westminster with a sprig of heather in their hair and salt staining the leather of their boots.

  'I may not still be a Member,' he said irritably. The government could have fallen and new elections been called. No letters for nearly a year . . . who knows what has happened. Still, Lord Spencer will put everything right.'

  Before he could stop himself, Ramage said: 'I've just told you, the present First Lord is St Vincent: Addington became prime minister when Pitt resigned.'

  Hamilton looked at him as a hostess might stare unbelievingly at a guest wiping dirty boots on her best Persian carpet. 'Addington? St Vincent? You'll soon be telling me that Jenks is Secretary of State!'

  Ramage sighed and took back the newspaper, which referred to Lord Hawkesbury and Otto conducting negotiations. 'Captain Hamilton, you will not accept anything I say and refuse to look at this copy of the Morning Post, which refers to negotiations with the French conducted by Jenks. However, I must delay you no longer, sir: I shall make an entry in my log concerning our encounter, note that I informed you in front of your two most senior lieutenants that the war is over and attempted to show you a newspaper, which I am giving to your first lieutenant. I must ask you to wait while I write a letter for the Board. I will send it over as soon as it is written.'

  'Stop him!' Hamilton said excitedly, 'he's under an arrest!'

  Todd did not move and the second lieutenant stopped after taking two steps.

  Ramage heard Todd ask conversationally: 'Should I pipe hands to dinner, sir, or would you prefer that we should get under way first?'

  At once Hamilton stopped, his brow wrinkled. 'Why are we hove-to?' he inquired.

  'We are receiving an extra man from a frigate, sir, a seaman Smith,' Todd said, 'and we are waiting for letters.'

  CHAPTER TEN

  As the Calypso stretched southwards towards the invisible lines round the globe marking the Tropics and the Equator, Ramage was surprised to see how many ships were at sea. While tacking across the mouth of the Bay of Biscay from Ushant to the Spanish Cabo Finisterre, still marked on the British charts by the French spelling, it had been easy to guess the ports for which merchant ships had been bound.

  Few made for Brest because it was primarily a naval port but several were probably heading for the mouth of the Seine with a following wind, hoping to catch the first of the flood to take them up to Honfleur and Rouen. Three outward bound had obviously left Bordeaux and were working their way out of the Bay with a steady westerly wind in several long tacks.

  As the Calypso sailed down the Spanish and Portuguese coast, just in sight of the high land, they could tick off the ports simply by watching the sails of ships arriving and departing: Vigo and Oporto had been followed by an increase in numbers as they approached Lisbon and the wide but treacherous entrance to the Tagus. Many ships passed inshore as the land trended away to the eastward, curving round from Cape St Vincent to Lagos, the Rio Tinto, Cadiz, Cape Trafalgar and sharply to the Strait of Gibraltar.

  'Amazing,' Southwick commented as he replaced his old but carefully preserved quadrant in its brass-cornered mahogany box. 'Half a dozen ships always in sight. In the war - surprising how long ago that seems now: all of three months, I suppose - one passed a convoy of a hundred ships, and then saw nothing for a couple of weeks. Now, the same number of ships sailing independently means you're likely to see seven a day in the Atlantic. Many more along the coasts, of course.'

/>   For young officers like Kenton, Martin and Orsini, Ramage's deliberate tack in towards Lisbon and the Tagus had given them not only their first sight of the Portuguese capital - a view which might come in very useful in future because, as Southwick commented, one look is worth two charts - but their first look at local coasting craft.

  Martin had at once compared the graceful fregatas with Thames barges, and was soon in an argument about them with Kenton and Paolo. Both types of vessel were built for the same function - to carry bulky cargoes up rivers and for short distances along the coasts. The fregatas had apple-cheeked bows and were gaily painted, often with an ancient eye painted on each side. The mast was stepped well forward but raked aft at a considerable angle like a hurricane-swept tree so that the masthead was over the cargo hatch. Nor was this a coincidence - a heavy tackle at the masthead made it easy to use the mast to hoist up the cargo, and another tackle hauled it over the side and on to the quay. The sails were loose footed and limited in size. The Thames barge, Kenton was quick to point out, was just a large box: it had none of the graceful curves of the fregata.

  The practical Martin asked the obvious question: given a vessel of, say, eighty feet in length, what did you want: beauty or cargo space? It was almost impossible, he declared, to have both. With her flat bottom, straight sides, bluff bow and almost vertical stern, a Thames barge could use every possible inch for cargo. She hoisted the head of her great mainsail up the mast, and then extended the other corner with a long sprit, so that for a given length of vessel, a Thames barge could set half as much again more canvas than a fregata. And with her flat bottom, the keel in effect on the inside of the hull, she could carry a cargo up the River Crouch, the Medway, the Colne, Orwell, Yare - not to mention the Thames and the Rother and dozens of places in the Solent - and dry out to sit on the bottom when the tide left. That often meant, said Martin triumphantly, that the cargo could be unloaded directly into carts because the horses could come over the sand.

  'Or get stuck in the mud,' Kenton said, waving aside Orsini's claims for the polacca of the Mediterranean. The argument was stopped when Southwick pointed out that not one of their noon sights agreed with another. 'According to Mr Kenton we must have made one great sternboard since noon yesterday. because he puts us so far north; Mr Martin would have us believe we've been making seventeen knots for the past twenty-four hours; and Mr Orsini must be teasing us.'

  Gradually the latitude and longitude columns in Ramage's journal began to change radically. The longitude started off from a few minutes of arc east of Greenwich, because the Calypso had sailed from the Medway, crossing the meridian while passing westward just south of Newhaven and Rottingdean. Since then the longitude had increased as they slanted southwest while the latitude grew less. Thirty-six degrees North showed they were level with the Strait of Gibraltar; thirty-five meant they were almost as far south as Rabat and bearing away to the southwest for Madeira, having completely failed to find the northeast trades which should have hurried the Calypso down the Portuguese coast.

  And at last it was getting wanner. For the time being the sun was brighter rather than hotter, but the sea was certainly not so cold and Ramage slept with the skylights propped open.

  Ramage enjoyed and relived his own first voyage into the Tropics by seeing it through the eyes of Wilkins. The present voyage must be the fifth or sixth that would take him across that magic latitude, twenty-three degrees thirty-three minutes, which marked the Tropic of Cancer, the northern limit of the band circling the earth like a cummerbund and called the 'Tropics'.

  Wilkins, his blond hair blowing in the trade winds, his blue eyes rarely still for a moment, was looking at the flowing waves, the sky dappled by trade wind clouds, the Calypso's sail, her deck, the movement of the men.

  His first attempt to paint on deck had been disastrous: he was just settling down with brushes and palette, having drawn in with a few swift charcoal strokes the curve of the mainsail, when the combination of a lurch to leeward and a sudden puff of wind caught his canvas. The wooden frame of the stretcher hooked in his easel as it blew away and in a moment both had gone over the side, leaving a startled Wilkins still sitting on his folding stool, brush in one hand and the palette and more brushes in the other.

  Ramage had run to the ship's side and seen that the easel, heavy with metal fittings, had sunk. To his surprise the seamen who had seen the accident were even more upset than Wilkins. Instead of laughing at the sight of the artist sitting on his stool apparently working on an invisible canvas, they had offered to get some more canvas from the sailmaker. Then, catching Ramage's eye and correctly interpreting the nod, the Calypso's carpenter had gone up to Wilkins and asked for a sketch of an easel with dimensions, promising a replacement by the evening in bare wood, but tomorrow evening with two coats of varnish.

  While he waited for the carpenter and his mates to produce a new easel, Wilkins talked to Ramage of his plans.

  'The amazing thing is,' he said, 'that in the last few days my entire world has changed. For the whole of my life the sea has been various shades of green, even though poets insist on calling it blue. The sky has been a pale blue, as weak in colour as the shell of a duck's egg.

  'Now, as we've come south and into this good weather, just look: the sea is adeep blue, the sky an exciting blue, the trade wind clouds are just the funny shapes you predicted.'

  Ramage had earlier tried to describe the day's routine at sea in the Tropics but Wilkins, looking at the Channel off Ushant, had not really believed him. The day, Ramage had predicted, would begin with dawn revealing a band of cloud on the eastern horizon which, as the sun was behind it, would be menacing. Then, as the sun climbed higher the band would disappear and the sky clear.

  By nine or ten o'clock, there would be an occasional tiny cloud, like white blanket fluff; within half an hour more would be gradually forming into narrow columns, like marching men, and all borne westward by the trade wind, which would be increasing as the sun rose. Although it was an optical illusion the clouds would seem to be converging on a single point on the western horizon, and each would be changing shape until the underside was flat but the upper part would turn into a strange shape. To Ramage and to Wilkins when he first saw them they looked like the white alabaster effigies he had seen on tombs: a recumbent knight in armour, feet sticking up at one end, head complete with visor, at the other. There might be one which clearly represented a woman. Then Wilkins was spotting faces: just the profile staring up into the sky as though its owner was lying flat on an invisible bed.

  The first real day of trade wind clouds had Wilkins, the botanist Garret and Ramage vying with each other to spot and then identify the faces of well-known figures. Wilkins swore he could see the head of Sir William Beechey, the artist, but both Ramage and Garret protested they did not know what he looked like. They all agreed on the Prince Regent, followed ten minutes later by the bloated face of Dundas. Neither Ramage nor Wilkins could give a verdict on Garret's recognition of Arthur Young, the Secretary of the Board of Agriculture, but all three soon spotted Evan Nepean, the Secretary to the Board of Admiralty.

  A delighted Wilkins then spotted Southwick's profile and the master, made to hurry on deck, claimed the cloud flattered him.

  Wilkins, continuing his survey of the voyage so far through an artist's eyes, had one complaint. 'You say the sea and sky will get much more blue before we reach our destination, but who in England will believe me if I paint what I see now? I hadn't realized how few of my fellow artists ever travelled south of Rome - and many, like me, haven't been able to set foot on the Continent yet because of the war. I have seen many paintings of subjects like a "Frigate action off Martinique", or "The Battle of the Saints" - they are islands nearby, are they not? The sea and the sky look like the Channel or North Sea: look like the sea should look - or so I thought. Now I realize that those artists had never seen tropical seas and skies; they were painting actions as described by individual captains, who would make sure the naval
details were correct - the position of ships, the rigging, and so on. But they never told the artists - or the artists would not believe - the colours. Why, just look at that row of fire buckets - have you ever seen polished leather look so rich in England? The canvas of the sails - white be damned; just look at how much raw umber and burnt sienna there is. I'll show you when I mix some colours.

  'Gaudy, my dear sir, that's what the Tropics are, and I love them: colours are beginning to live!'

  'For real colour you should see the West Indies,' Ramage said. 'The colour of the sea over a coral reef - light blue that seems alive, or a pale green like silk. The colours of the black women's dresses: they take three pieces of cloth of unbelievable gaudiness, put them on their bodies and on their heads, and seem more fashionable than milady riding in Rotten Row.'

  Ramage was sitting at his desk looking through the journals kept by Kenton, Martin and Orsini. They were supposed to be diaries of happenings on board the ship, with navigational facts, descriptions of 'any unusual events' and sketches of any coasts the Calypso passed. Kenton and Martin were, for practical purposes, almost illiterate, and Orsini was lazy. Kenton and Martin had gone to sea at an early age; they could knot and splice, box the compass, load a cannon and fire a musket at an age when most boys on land were still scared of the dark, but they could not parse a sentence and even now would not know what to do with an adverb. Paolo's ruthless tutors at home in Volterra made sure he had a remarkable knowledge of grammar, so he spoke English, French and Spanish fluently, as well as Italian. This was normal for most intelligent aristocrats. Paolo's trouble was sheer laziness and almost anostalgie de la boue for the rougher side of seamanship. He preferred rope-work to navigation; he would sooner paint Stockholm tar on to rigging than study elementary ballistics. He picked up a pen with the same reluctance other men might grasp a smoking grenade.

  It was curious how three clever, perceptive young men could fail to see - or, rather, to note - interesting events. A few days ago several whales were sighted, some young ones among them; last Sunday a school of dolphins played under the bow for hours like huge joyful children; on Monday seamen towing a huge hook caught a large shark and the task of killing it after it had been hoisted on board had made the decks run with blood - more blood than had ever flowed in battle. And the next day there had been a tropic bird.