Ramage & the Rebels

by Dudley Pope

  “Aye,” Southwick said with a prodigious sniff, “and he knows how easily he could get all three ships caught up in such a mass of tangled yards that we all end up on that reef like three battered tankards in an alehouse brawl.”

  “Two and a half pints,” Ramage said dryly. “Yes, I’m glad I’m not that Frenchman. In fact I can’t see how he can do it.”

  Aitken and Southwick both swung round to stare at him. The skin of Aitken’s face had suddenly gone taut, and Southwick ran a hand through his flowing white hair, and licked his lips uneasily. “But you—you’ve just given him the order, sir,” Southwick said nervously.

  “Yes, though I’d sooner give it than receive it.”

  “I … well, sir, should I get an anchor cleared away for letting go, sir?”

  “Won’t help much, Mr Southwick. It’s deep right up to the reef, so by the time the anchor’s beginning to get a bite we’d be on the coral. Staghorn, isn’t it? Dreadful stuff …”

  “Could we hoist out the boats ready to tow if necessary, sir?” Aitken ventured, still watching Ramage closely.

  “No,” Ramage said lugubriously, “we shouldn’t envy that poor French First Lieutenant.” He turned to Jackson, who was holding up a cutlass: “Ah yes, slide it in.” He settled the leather belt more comfortably across his shoulder. “And the pistols, thank you.” He took the pair from the American and clipped them on to the waistbelt of his trousers.

  Orsini called excitedly: “La Perle’s acknowledged the signal giving the course, sir. She took long enough.”

  “Hoping we’d made a mistake, no doubt, and would annul it,” Aitken commented as he turned to look at the frigate. “But she’s slipping along now. But that fellow hasn’t made up his mind whether to approach us on the windward or leeward side.” He looked at Ramage, who nodded as though the subject of La Perle no longer interested him.

  “I wonder what the devil all that smoke and musketry was yesterday,” Ramage said. “And the Captain of La Perle was so anxious to get to Amsterdam.”

  “Was he, sir?” Aitken said in surprise.

  “Oh yes, no bridegroom was more anxious to get to the church on time than Captain Duroc.”

  Ramage felt hot and he felt a fraud. Standing under this scorching sun, which was now directly overhead so that you had to lean forward slightly to see your own shadow, the deck was so hot that the wood could be a stove top curling the leather of the soles of your shoes. Nor was the wind doing very much to cool anything: the Calypso was making only two knots and the wind barely had the energy to lift itself over the rolls of hammocks piled in the bulwark nettings to blow across the deck. The glare from the sea, from the sails, and from the near-white sand of the beach, gave the impression of heat, even though its only real effect was to make you screw up your eyes so that you peered out on this tropical oven through slits, like a short-sighted Oriental.

  And the fraud: that was a different thing altogether. Aitken and Southwick had suddenly looked at each other and then they had laughed: the Captain, they thought, was playing a neat joke on them, pretending he did not know what would happen when La Perle arrived to carry out her orders. They were sure the Captain had a trick hidden away; a trick which would solve everything and leave them with La Perle as a prize.

  The fraud arose because he had no trick ready, and if Aitken and Southwick gave the matter any thought, they would know it was impossible to have one waiting. He had explained yesterday the only plan he had was the one which would get La Perle’s Captain on board, leaving the ship—he hoped—in the hands of less experienced officers. Well, that plan had been executed; Captain Duroc, no doubt sadder and wiser, was now sitting below in irons, with Marines guarding him.

  What happened next depended entirely on what La Perle’s First Lieutenant did. Given that he tried to carry out the order to take over the tow of the Calypso, how would he approach? How would he get that heavy cable from La Créole and secure it on board and take up the tow? Would he come up to starboard, on the windward side, or on the larboard side, which had the advantage of being to leeward but the disadvantage of being the land side, reducing the available room to the stretch between the long reef and the Calypso?

  Ironically the anonymous French lieutenant now had the advantage; that much Ramage admitted. The Frenchman knew what he was going to do, but Ramage knew nothing. It was a game of chess—that’s what neither Southwick nor Aitken realized. At this stage of this particular game, your move depended on your opponent’s move; it was a response. You hoped that your opponent moved a piece which allowed you to checkmate in one move, but there was always the danger that you would be the one who was checkmated.

  La Perle was beating up fast in the Calypso’s wake and Ramage stared at her. The three masts were in line. She could pass one side or the other at the very last moment. Suddenly he realized why she looked a little strange: all her guns had just been run in and the gun ports closed. The French Lieutenant had—wisely from his point of view and fortunately from Ramage’s—done it presumably because he wanted his men ready to handle sails and secure that cable; as far as he was concerned there was no fighting to be done; simply a problem of salvage.

  C H A P T E R N I N E

  Lieutenant de vaisseau Jean-Pierre Bazin bitterly regretted the day he had ever gone to sea. As a boy growing up in Lyon, where the placid River Saône joined the turbulent Rhône after its race through the mountains, he had watched the Saône passing within a hundred yards of his home in one of the narrow streets in the shadow of the cathedral. He had also walked the other way, to the Fort de Lovasse. He had walked up to the Fort scores of times, hundreds in fact, to watch the soldiers drilling, the bands playing, men marching and countermarching to the beat of a drum. But soldiering had never excited him; the pressed uniforms, the polished buttons, the pipeclayed belts (for this was before the Revolution) had seemed a lot of unnecessary work every day, especially to a boy who was forever accounting to his mother for the latest holes in breeches and boots.

  In contrast the rivers had captured his imagination. Along the Saône men sat on the banks or stood among the rushes, fishing from dawn to dusk, with a sleep in the middle of the day when the sun was high (as it was now, but never reaching such an altitude or heat, of course). Horses had plodded along the banks of the Saône, towing barges and disturbing the pêcheurs. The barges were usually painted in gay colours and carried cargoes from places which seemed as distant to a young boy as China: from Tournus and Chalon, and towns on the Saône’s tributaries, like Dijon and Dole.

  Then, as a change from the placid Saône, he would walk across the bridge and past the arsenal and watch the Rhône which, in spring, as the ice and snow melted up in the Swiss mountains, was a torrent. The water sluicing past, noisy over the rocks along the banks and cold, gave the impression of movement and travel; starting from way beyond Lac Léman it passed Genève and twisted and turned to Lyon; then, always rushing onwards, it began its great surge to the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean—the cradle of civilization, the route to ancient Greece and Tyre and Nineveh, or even to Corsica, where Columbus was born at Calvi, no matter what those blackguards in Genoa claimed. Born within the walls of the Citadel, he was, and a credit to the island—to the whole of France, indeed.

  Anyway, the quiet Saône and the racing Rhône (except occasionally in summer when it almost dried up, usually after a winter of only very light snow in Switzerland, and barge traffic was stopped for weeks on end) had given him the idea that they represented the two extremes of the sea, the smooth and the rough. So at the age of fifteen he had packed a bag, said goodbye to his widowed mother, travelled by barge down the Rhône to Avignon, and then ridden by cart (for the price of helping the carter with his train of four horses) to Toulon, where he had joined the French Navy. It was slavery; even in port it meant fourteen hours’ work a day while the officers spent their time on shore …

  By the time the Revolution came he was an able seaman, a nimble topman and, thanks to his mothe
r’s patient teaching, one of the few seamen who could read and write. Read well enough, fortunately, to understand the revolutionary pamphlets and help persuade the other seamen of the necessity of disposing of several royalist officers for whom the men had an absurd loyalty. For all this work the Revolutionary Council had made him a lieutenant, and he had long since learned that the Rhône at its wildest had as much similarity to the sea as—well, the grande rade of Toulon to a puddle.

  More recently, he remembered the excitement when La Perle had been at anchor in Martinique, at Fort de France, as Fort Royal was now called, and Captain Duroc had finally noticed the royalist sympathies of the frigate’s First Lieutenant, that braggart from Gascony. Denunciation, trial and execution had taken only a few days, and Citoyen Jean-Pierre Bazin, the Second Lieutenant, had suddenly found himself promoted: at thirty he was second in command of this great frigate.

  The journey from the house in the shadow of the cathedral in Lyon to walking the quarterdeck of La Perle, frigate, as the man next only to the Captain had taken but fifteen years. That showed the opportunity which the Revolution gave to men of character and leadership. Captain Duroc, for example, had been the boatswain of an old xebec trading from Sète to Marseille when the Revolution began.

  Now, though, Captain Duroc was on board that damnable prize-frigate being towed quite competently towards Amsterdam. And he, Jean-Pierre Bazin, had been left in command of La Perle for the first time. At the beginning, that had been far from daunting; with the fore-topsail backed the ship had stayed hove-to, like a gull resting on the water. The Captain’s boat had been rowed briskly to the prize-frigate, Duroc had gone on board, the boat had been hauled round to tow astern: all what one would expect, because whoever was on board the prize was obviously senior to Captain Duroc. One would have expected the Captain to return in, say, fifteen minutes, half an hour at the most, and La Perle would then continue on her way to Amsterdam: the Captain had made enough fuss about the rush to get there.

  But had Captain Duroc come back on board? Oh no, he had stayed on board the prize, no doubt clinking glasses and reminiscing. And then suddenly the signalling had started. Without any warning or explanation he had been ordered to take that thrice-damned frigate in tow. Not only that; he had to take over the tow from that damned schooner. Somehow he had to transfer the actual cable from the schooner, not pass one. How? And the fools, the criminals in the schooner, had tacked. From heading offshore, leaving plenty of room for La Perle to manoeuvre, the cretins had quite unnecessarily tacked, heading inshore, and by the time La Perle reached her there would be no room on their larboard side, which was the lee side, which meant (unless he risked running La Perle ashore) that he could only approach from the windward side.

  Merde! Approach from to windward with a ship like La Perle that handled like a haystack and was manned with crippled imbeciles who jumped to obey orders with all the alacrity of royalist mules! And if he made a mistake (because he was not given proper orders) and La Perle found herself alongside the other frigate, yards and rigging locked, or her jib-boom caught in the other frigate’s shrouds, with masts toppling like sugar cane before a machete, who would get the blame, eh? Why, he would be hauled before a tribunal and put in jail (if not worse) for damaging the property of the State. Not Duroc, will you please note, but Citoyen Bazin, who had been abandoned by his Captain.

  Just his luck, too, that most of the ship’s company were also Gascons, followers of that traitorous First Lieutenant. Little wonder that “gasconnade” had become part of the language: just listen to them now, bragging, boasting, arguing. At least they had managed to get La Perle under way without having a committee meeting about it—that was where Duroc had an advantage: he was big enough to knock down any man that argued. Lieutenant de vaisseau Bazin, on the other hand, would have to draw his sword and threaten (and risk having a man laugh in his face, as had happened once already).

  Now, anyway, La Perle was steering for the prize-frigate. The Fourth Lieutenant had reported that she had the name “Calypso” painted on her transom, but there was no such name in the list of the French Navy, so the English must have renamed her. What did it mean, anyway? The name of a town, or of a battle? Perhaps one of these barbaric Roman or Greek gods.

  It is so hot. This sun, it scorches, dazzles, and soaks you in perspiration. This island, too; what a wretched place. It looks more like a collection of rocks and sand which has been used for a camp by a passing army. Just cactus and shrub and, if Aruba was anything to go by, pudding-faced Dutch women with breasts like sacks and red-faced Dutchmen with bellies like casks who prefer their gin to the best wine.

  All this thinking is wasting time. What is he going to do? If only the schooner tacks again to head the Calypso out to sea, and then drops the cable with a buoy on it. That would be the easiest; then La Perle could heave-to, use a boat to retrieve the buoy and get a line on it, and haul it in, all without risking a collision or drifting on to the coral reef. That damned coral reef along the shore just went on and on, like the border round a flower garden, a deceptive band of brown and gold with light-blue water beyond, showing how shallow it was.

  No, he simply would not take the responsibility. Duroc was the Captain; he should be on board now. He would—ah! Suddenly, with a spasm of irritation that he had not thought of it before, Bazin saw what Duroc obviously expected him to do: pass within hail of the Calypso. Then Duroc would shout across instructions. After all, Duroc would not want to risk damage to his own ship.

  Meantime, he didn’t want those damned guns run out with all those port lids triced up so that even the slightest touch of ship against ship would tear off lids and wrench guns from their carriages. The Calypso, he noted, did not have her guns run out.

  He shouted orders to the Second Lieutenant, who was leaning on the quarterdeck rail as though expecting the ladies of the town to parade across the deck in front of him. Soon he could hear the rumble of the guns being run in, then the crash as port lid after port lid was allowed to slam shut, leaving the side as smooth as the walls of a house with the windows shut. Ah, he felt better now; he knew that Duroc would not have let him down like that. He looked round for the speaking-trumpet: he might need to reverse it and use it as an ear-trumpet. Duroc did not speak very clearly, even when sober, and he had been on board the Calypso for a good half an hour by now, so …

  Ramage looked astern at the approaching frigate. Masts still in line, her jib-boom and bowsprit sticking up at an angle directly towards him like a hussar’s lance. If you didn’t know, you’d think she was going to ram the Calypso! Was she? The thought suddenly struck him that perhaps she had discovered that the Calypso was a British frigate and, not trusting to her guns, was trying to disable her. Had he made some silly mistake in the signals (in the challenge, perhaps) that had given him away?

  Then Southwick ambled up and stood beside him, patting his ample stomach as though he’d just finished a good dinner. “So he’s unsure of himself, eh?” the Master commented. “That Frog is going to range alongside and ask for instructions on how to pick up the tow.”

  Ramage nodded, hard put to stop himself slapping Southwick on the back from sheer relief. “That must be it. He’s just run his guns in and closed the ports—must be worried in case he comes too close and rips them off.”

  Southwick glanced at him, uncertain whether the remark about ripping off gun ports was serious or not. “We’ve enough way on to be able to give ourselves a bit of a sheer one way or the other to dodge him.”

  “A bit of a sheer.” Ramage repeated Southwick’s phrase to himself and looked across the narrow stretch of sea between the Calypso and the reef. Half a mile? Already the dark blue had gone from the water; now it was much lighter, lacking the near-purple which showed extreme depth. Then, quite abruptly, the water became light green and then brown as it reached the reef. Or, rather, the brown tops of the staghorn coral showed near the surface. And then, beyond the reef, a band of very light green showed the shallow water (a
fathom or two) running up to the beach, with an occasional splash of white where a wave had enough strength to break.

  Take a bit of sheer, a bit of panic, and a bit of a chance, too! He called Orsini and snatched the signal book from him. Feverishly he flicked through the pages. And there it was, a single flag. “Hoist number eight!” Ramage snapped. It might be too late, but its very lateness might be a help.

  “Number eight, sir—’To turn to larboard.’”

  Ramage caught Southwick’s eye and smiled: he knew exactly what was passing through the Master’s mind: young Paolo seems to have memorized the whole French signal book, but he can never remember for more than a day the simplest mathematical formula.

  An intermittent mouse-like squeaking high overhead showed a halyard was spinning the sheave of a block, and Ramage deliberately continued looking astern, defying himself to glance up at the flag. The squeaking stopped; the flag must be hoisted now. And La Perle was perhaps three lengths astern, a little over a hundred yards. If it worked it was going to be a close-run affair.

  He said to Southwick: “Give her a sheer to larboard of one point.”

  The Master turned and shouted to the quartermaster.

  To Aitken, waiting by the binnacle, Ramage called: “Warn the men below to stand by!”

  He could see a Frenchman perched out on the end of La Perle’s jib-boom gesticulating aft and pointing at the Calypso, as though drawing his quarterdeck’s attention to the signal.

  Now La Perle appeared to be sliding to Ramage’s left as, below him, he could hear the rudder grinding a little as pintles rubbed against gudgeons. The Calypso’s “bit of a sheer” to larboard was beginning, swinging the ship’s bow to larboard a few degrees and moving her bodily towards the reef, narrowing the gap, like a drunken man walking along a road and curving slightly towards a wall.