by Dudley Pope
For Ramage there were five things that he would always remember about the West Indies - the Tropics, in fact - even if he never visited them again: tropic birds, flying fish, blue sea, pelicans and palm trees. This tropic bird, the first of the voyage, had come up from the east, alone, passed high over the ship with a casual elegance, and flown on to the west - where the nearest land was nearly three thousand miles away. It was not a big bird but a striking one - all white with a very long forked tail. In fact the tail was three or four times longer than the bird - V-shaped like a swallow's, and very thin, as though each part comprised a single feather.
But there was no mention of whales, shark, dolphins or tropic bird in any of the journals. They were accepted like sunshine and squalls as part of a daily routine. How did one make people aware of their surroundings?
Ramage was just closing the last journal when the sentry at the door called: 'Mr Southwick, sir.'
The master came in, a cheerful grin on his sunburned face, his white hair now greasy because of the water shortage, and put a slip of paper on Ramage's desk. Usually he brought down the slate on which he had written the noon position, and the use of a piece of paper made Ramage look carefully at the figure.
The longitude was of course west of Greenwich and in the thirties, but the latitude stood out as though Southwick had written it in large figures: 9° 58' 12". The Calypso was now south of ten degrees North!
Ramage looked up at the old master and smiled. 'So we've crossed our own personal Equator! Pass the word for Mr Aitken while I find my keys. Time to break the seals!'
By the time the first lieutenant arrived in the cabin, Ramage had unlocked the drawer and taken out the packet with its four seals, each bearing the three anchors symbol of the Admiralty. It was addressed to him and bore the instructions: 'Not to be opened until south of the 10th parallel of latitude.'
It was far more exciting for Aitken and Southwick because Lord St Vincent had already told Ramage the Calypso's final destination although he had been unable to mention it to anyone else.
Ramage slid a paperknife under the seals, levered them up and opened the letter, which comprised two sheets of paper folded into three, the two ends then being folded inwards and a seal applied to each corner of the flaps. In the top right-hand corner was the usual 'By the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty . . .' Then the elegant copperplate opened in the time-honoured way: 'I am directed by my Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty to acquaint you . . .' He continued reading to himself.
'Having resumed command of the Calypso frigate after her refit, and received on board the extra provisions, stores and equipment listed in the margin of the second page, and having received on board the supernumeraries also listed on the second page and'... Ramage stopped: the habit of making a letter one long sentence, a series of statements linked by 'and' and 'whereas' was both confusing and tiring to read. Very well, now the Calypso is south of ten degrees North and the orders are opened.
You will make the best of your way to the Ilha da Trinidade situate to the best of our knowledge in 20° 29' South latitude and 29° 20' West longitude, or thereabouts, and upon arriving there you will take possession of the island in the King's name and erect plaques permanently recording the fact and recording your name and that of the ship and the date.
You will then cause the island to be surveyed and mapped, with particular concern for the watering places, and any sheltered bays suitable for use as anchorages should be sounded and proper charts drawn.
If wells are necessary they should be bored and lined with brick by the masons you carry; the botanist should choose and mark suitable land for the planting of maize. Irish potatoes and sweet potatoes. This land should be cleared, dug. prepared and sown under his instructions.
The surveyors, with the Marine officer, should pay particular attention to siting batteries to cover the main anchorages and the watering places, and these batteries should be built as expeditiously as possible. Appropriate magazines and kitchens should also be built.
He glanced up at Aitken and Southwick, both of whom were controlling their impatience. He resumed reading to himself.
If the island proves suitable, a signal station should be established which will also serve as a lookout tower, permitting an all-round view.
Having surveyed the island and its anchorages, provided it with batteries and a signal station, ensured a ready supply of water and planted the crops you are carrying, and having taken possession of the island in the King's name and leaving a Union flag flying at the signal station or lookout tower, you will return with your ship to the United Kingdom and report to their Lordships in detail and without delay upon your proceedings.
No surprises then, simply more details. Ramage turned to Southwick and, with a straight face said: 'Well, you take us to twenty degrees, twenty-nine minutes South, and twenty-nine degrees, twenty minutes West, and anchor as convenient.'
'Do I, by Jove,' Southwick said, his brow wrinkled as he worked out the position. 'Fernando de Noronha? No, too far south. It's about a thousand miles east of Rio de Janeiro, isn't it, sir? It'll be rather deep for anchoring...'
Aitken's eyes were shut as he searched his memory and looked at an imaginary chart. St Paul Rocks.. .no, they were north of Fernando de Noronha. Twenty south - that must be about the same as Rio de Janeiro - ah!' Abrolhos Rocks!' he said triumphantly; they were a hundred miles or so off the Brazilian coast.
Ramage shook his head.
'Martin Vaz island!' Southwick exclaimed. 'Although how we'll find it I don't know; enough people have looked.'
Again Ramage shook his head and told a crestfallen Southwick: 'You are close. Ilha da Trinidade, which is nearby.'
Southwick sniffed and Ramage recognized the sound as expressing the master's contempt. 'How big is it?'
Ramage shrugged his shoulders. 'Big enough to show on a chart; small enough, I suspect, to miss on a hazy day. I trust our chronometer is behaving itself.'
'It didn't like those couple of months in England any more than I did,' Southwick grumbled. 'My rheumatism was playing up, and so was the chronometer.'
'Might one ask why we . . .?' Aitken ventured, tactfully tapering off the sentence.
'No one can leave the ship before we arrive, so there's no reason why the pair of you don't read my orders,' Ramage said, sliding them across the desk to the first lieutenant.
Aitken was halfway down the first page when he said: 'We claim it? Who owns it now?'
'Let Southwick read it, then we can go over the questions together.'
Aitken finished the first page and then ticked off the items listed on the second page. He knew all about them, and his curiosity why one of the King's ships should be carrying bricks, plasterers' tools, spades, rakes and hoes, sacks of seed potatoes and grain as well as surveying equipment was now satisfied.
Southwick read, folded the orders and gave them back to Ramage. 'Whatever it is,' he said slowly, 'don't let's forget that the Ilha da Trinidade lies beyond the Doldrums ... At this time of the year we could take weeks to cross them.'
'The Spanish aren't very original about names, are they?' Aitken complained. 'There's the big island of Trinidad at the entrance to the Caribbean, a city in Cuba and I seem to remember seeing a reference to another island with that name off Bahia Blanca, three hundred miles or so south of Buenos Aires."
'There'll be more,' Southwick commented. 'It's like Santa Cruz. When in doubt the Dons call a place either Santa Cruz or Trinidad.'
'This one was named by the Portuguese,' Ramage said.
Southwick sniffed again. 'Not much difference, except the language. Maybe the Portuguese are better sailors.' He thought for a few moments and then amended his remark. 'They were, a couple of centuries ago, but not now. But if they named the island I presume they own it.'
'I've no idea what the legal position is except that Trinidade is not mentioned in Bonaparte's treaty. Nor are many other islands, I suppose, but Trinidade is the one that interests thei
r Lordships. Anyway, we are to take possession and plant. The potatoes and grain will run wild, but they'll seed so that in an emergency a visiting ship will find something. If it looks a promising place it might even become a minor Ascension.'
'But anyone could seize it after we've gone, sir!' Southwick protested.
'Orders,' Ramage said. 'We obey them. I could think of worse. It's a cruise, really. But I imagine that if I return and report that Trinidade will make a good base, their Lordships - the government anyway - will send a garrison. If the batteries are built by us. a passing John Company ship on her way to India could land the guns and gunners and a battalion of infantry.'
Aitken asked, 'Do the government think of this island as a place for the Honourable East India Company ships to call for water in an emergency?'
'I don't really know,' Ramage admitted. 'It's rather far to the west for ships bound to and from the Cape of Good Hope and India. More likely their Lordships have in mind a wooding-and-watering island which a British squadron covering the South American coast could use. Somewhere they can refit, get fresh vegetables, land any sick . . . Seven hundred and fifty miles southwest to Rio, six hundred and fifty miles northwest to Bahia, and just over fifteen hundred to the mouth of the Plate.'
'And two thousand across to the West African coast,' Southwick said. 'This place begins to sound interesting. But why has no one garrisoned it before? After all, it sits astride the South Atlantic like a jockey on a nag.'
'Well, the Spanish and Portuguese don't need it because they share all the ports from one end of South America to the other,' Ramage pointed out. 'The French are really only concerned with the West Indies and India, and anyway the Dons are their allies so they can always use places like Rio - even though it is Portuguese - and the Plate for provisioning and watering. Only Britain needs bases to attack South America and cover the route to the Cape and India.'
'How big is it? How high, rather?' Southwick asked.
'No one was very sure at the Admiralty, but as far as I could discover it's roughly a couple of miles long in a northwest, southeast direction, a mile wide and with hills in the middle a thousand feet high.'
'A thousand feet, sir? We can rely on that?'
'We can't rely on anything. Mr Dalrymple at the Hydrographic Office admitted he knew nothing much about it - he just warned me not to hit Martin Vaz, which is either a tiny island or a reef of rocks a day's sailing from it.'
'Once we're through the Doldrums, we'll get a lift to the westward from the current,' Southwick commented. 'But just think of it, once we make a landfall we go on shore to plant potatoes ... I hate gardening,' he admitted, 'but it'll make a change to carry a spade and not a sword!'
The Doldrums had been empty days when the Calypso sat dead on the water, the heat haze merging sea, horizon and sky into what seemed to Wilkins a pool of molten copper. It was a time when he wanted to paint, wanted to capture on canvas the sense of the empty vastness of the ocean when there was no wind, where the sails were furled on the yards because there was no point in leaving them chafing against masts and rigging with every movement of the ship. Some days there was a slight swell, and Captain Ramage said it was caused by some distant storm, probably several thousands of miles away. He wanted to put it on canvas, but the sun was too hot. Even under the awning stretched across the quarterdeck it was an oven which sapped everyone's energy. Tempers were fraying and the sentry on the scuttlebutt watched closely as a man dropped in the dipper and took a drink.
The sheer stark simplicity of the life fascinated Wilkins. The intense heat, the lack of wind, and the fact that the Calypso was taking twice as long as expected to get through the Doldrums meant the men were twice as thirsty but had only half the water. It was interesting that the men had a basic ration, but in addition some extra was put into a butt each day and this was left by the mainmast with a Marine sentry guarding it.
And there was a dipper, a cylindrical, open-topped container, the diameter of a broom handle and about four inches long. There was a hole on each side of the top through which the line threaded, and a man was allowed to drop the dipper down through the bunghole and draw out as much water as it would hold. But because when there was a water shortage the butt was stowed on its side with chocks, the dipper usually tilted before it could fill completely. And the Marine sentry made sure that it was 'one man, one dip'.
Still, Wilkins had made up his mind about the colours, sketched in the outlines on the canvas with charcoal, and was ready when the first teasing but cooling puffs of wind had come. First of all there had been an excited hail from a lookout at the masthead - a man perched in what looked like an open-sided tent with strips of canvas to protect him from the rays of the sun. 'Wind shadow on the larboard quarter!' he had shouted. A couple of minutes later he reported it was approaching, but, just as suddenly, it vanished. Five minutes later another, also on the larboard quarter, reached the ship, a wind shadow that danced across the surface of the sea like a swarm of gnats on the edge of a pond. Suddenly they all had a teasing breath of cool air, but then it was gone.
Yet Mr Ramage was quite confident the wind would set in: topmen swarmed aloft to drop the sails - 'let fall', rather. And by then more wind shadows were being reported, the men becoming excited, and he was hurriedly mixing paints on his palette, the sudden breeze blowing away the lethargy. Now they were at last in the southeast trade winds which Southwick said started off down towards the Cape of Good Hope.
Crossing the Equator a few days later was best forgotten as far as Wilkins was concerned: Neptune had dozens of victims because the Calypso had spent most of her time in the Caribbean or Mediterranean, and few men had crossed the Line. So the unlucky ones were given stiff 'tonics' of soap and water, shaved, ducked and five men, who had objected violently, were ordered by King Neptune to be tarred and feathered. Three others had their faces and backsides given a liberal coating of black gun lacquer.
Wilkins found it hard to get used to the sun's position. It was sufficiently late in the year and they were far enough south for the sun to be almost vertically overhead, so his shadow at noon was tiny, extending only a few inches from his feet, as though he was standing in a small puddle. Flying fish skimming just above the waves like great dragonflies had been commonplace for a long time and although the Calypso was now almost midway between West Africa and South America, he was surprised by how many sea birds they saw. He had painted some of them, putting the date and position on the back of the canvas. He enjoyed painting birds in flight because it gave him good practice at painting the sea - surely the most challenging of all subjects. It was never the same, varying with the wind, cloud, sun, or rain, and, according to the captain, with the depth of the ocean and the latitude. At Trinidade, their destination, the captain promised that if there were reefs, he would see three or four different colours in as many hundreds of yards. For the moment, though, everyone was relieved that they were now in the southeast trades.
Now Southwick, legs astride and balancing himself against the gentle roll, flipped down one more shade of his quadrant because he found the sun bright, once again 'brought the sun down to the horizon', rocked the quadrant slightly to make sure that the lower edge of the sun was precisely on the horizon, made a slight adjustment and a moment later saw the sun had moved. He read the figures on the ivory scale of the quadrant. The ritual of the noon sight was, as far as the sun was concerned, now over: he had measured the highest angle that it made with the horizon, and that was that: only the angle mattered, not the time: if he had measured its highest angle, then that was the angle at noon local time, and he did not have to bother to turn a half-minute glass, bellow at Orsini to note the chronometer . . . Now he had to apply some corrections, add or subtract figures from the almanac, and the answer would be the Calypso's latitude. It was the simplest thing to do in celestial navigation; it was how the navigators from the oldest times crossed oceans - they knew the latitude of their destination and sailed along it until they arrived. The only d
anger was running into the land at night. Longitude was a different problem; without an accurate chronometer there was no way of being sure of one's exact distance east or west of the Greenwich meridian.
Young Orsini was working out his answer using the top of the binnacle box. Kenton and Martin were sitting on the breeches of guns. Southwick could see Mr Ramage walking up and down on the windward side of the quarterdeck, having his spell of exercise before his meal. And waiting to hear the latitude ... Normally Mr Ramage left the navigation to him, but for the last three days he had been taking a close interest. The reason was not hard to guess - the Calypso's latitude and longitude were almost the same as the figures they had been given for Trinidade.
In fact, according to Southwick's reckoning, they were within a hundred miles of it. Allowing for the chronometerbeing a bit out, he was sure that putting the point of a pair of compasses down on Trinidade and drawing a circle with a radius of fifty miles would enclose the Calypso, but therewas a high haze, so it was impossible to guess whether they could see ten miles or sixty.
This was always the difficult time when making a landfall: did one set more canvas to increase speed in the hope of sighting land before nightfall, or go slowly and cautiously and hope to sight it at dawn? Martin Vaz should be on the larboard bow and Trinidade dead ahead. If one left Martin Vaz too far to larboard - thus making absolutely certain of not hitting it - there was a risk of passing Trinidade out of sight to larboard. The life of a master in the Royal Navy, Southwick thought to himself, could be summed up by that situation: trying to find one rock in the middle of an ocean without hitting another . . .
