by Dudley Pope
Dyson stood back from the capstan. Suddenly he bent down to pick up his shirt and put it on. Since his back looked like raw liver the movement must have been agonizing, but two Marines, not realizing for a moment what he was doing, stepped forward, the bayonets on their muskets pointing straight at him.
Then, equally unexpectedly, Dyson turned to face Ramage, who groaned inwardly. Oh no, he thought: for God’s sake no insults and defiance: you’ll have to be given another dozen if –
‘Permission to speak, sir?’
Ramage nodded.
‘I want to apologize for my behaviour, sir.’
‘Very well, I accept it,’ he said quietly, knowing that Dyson was referring to the planned mutiny. ‘Now get below and clean yourself up.’
Ten minutes later Brookland was walking forward unaided, his punishment administered, and Harris was seized to the capstan bar. For the third time Ramage read out the wording of the ‘Captain’s Cloak’; once again Evans opened a red baize bag and took out a new cat-o’-nine-tails; once again Ramage said: ‘One dozen lashes. Bosun’s mate, carry out the punishment!’
Once again the swish of the tails flying through the air; once again that noise like a wet towel hitting a baulk of timber; once again a grunt as the blow knocked the breath from a man’s lungs; once again the corporal intoned the number of the stroke.
‘One…
‘Two…
‘Three…’
Then, from aloft, a sudden shout: ‘Deck there!’
As Ramage snapped, ‘Bosun’s mate – wait!’ Southwick yelled, ‘Deck here – what’ve you sighted?’
‘Sail dead ahead, sir. Can just see her t’gallants.’
Southwick looked round for Appleby, gave him the telescope and pointed up the mainmast.
Ramage said to the master-at-arms, ‘Cut him down and get him below, Mr Southwick! Beat to quarters, if you please!’
In time of war, and particularly in this position, every ship was potentially an enemy. For the moment Ramage thought little beyond the fact it meant he was now able to stop, and could later remit, the rest of Harris’ punishment.
‘Have our pendant and the private signal ready, Mr Southwick,’ he said quite unnecessarily.
Southwick was already bellowing orders and the men were already running to their stations. The little drummer began thumping his drum with more eagerness than skill; the corporal hurriedly slashed at the seizings round Harris’ arms, eager to resume his other role as a Marine; and the Marines themselves still standing to attention, obviously uncertain whether they should obey the drum or wait for their corporal’s orders.
Ramage saw the surgeon lurching towards the companionway and called to him to attend to Dyson, Brookland and Harris. But the man did not pause, leaving Ramage unsure whether he had heard or understood but already decided that the surgeon was his next problem – if the ship ahead was not a French sail of the line.
Whatever she was, she was to leeward and Ramage dare not lose the advantage of being both to windward and being between the ship and the English coast. He ordered Southwick to bear up, and while men ran to the sheets and braces and the Master stood by the helmsmen, Ramage looked up at Appleby perched high in the mast and steadying himself against the roll of the ship, which at that height was exaggerated by the inverted-pendulum swing of the mast. The master’s mate hailed that she had three masts, was heading north-east and ‘looked large’.
Ramage called to Jackson, pointed aloft and in a moment the American was on his way up the ratlines. Although Appleby’s eyesight was good he hadn’t Jackson’s experience in identifying ships.
Considering it was the first time they had done it since he’d been in command, Ramage noted the ship’s company had gone to quarters quickly without the excited nervousness that caused delays: the guns’ crews were ready with rammers, waiting only for the powder to be brought up from below; the deck was already running with water and several men were sprinkling sand, so that bare feet would not slip and no stray grains of powder could be ignited by friction.
It was time for Ramage to go down to his cabin and check once again the day’s private signals – the secret challenge and reply by which ships of the Royal Navy could distinguish friend from foe.
The signals, kept in a locked drawer in his desk, comprised several pages held together by a heavy slotted lead seal which had been squeezed together so the slot closed tightly along the left-hand edge of the sheets. That alone indicated their importance, and a warning on the first page, twice underlined, said captains were ‘strictly commanded to keep them in their own possession, with sufficient weight affixed to them to insure their being sunk if it should be found necessary to throw them overboard’. And, it added, any officer disobeying would be court-martialled because ‘consequences of the most dangerous nature to His Majesty’s Fleet may result from the Enemy’s getting possession of these Signals’.
The signals themselves were simple to understand, listing the flags to be flown from the foretopmasthead and the maintopmasthead, and the flags to be flown as a reply by the other ship. Since both signals were given it did not matter which ship challenged first.
The important thing was the date. Only ten challenges and replies were listed, and the final figure in the date was the one that mattered. In the first column headed ‘Day of the Month’, were, one beneath the other, the figures I, II, 21 and 31. Below that was a second group, 2, 12, 22 and followed by 3, 13, 23 and so on until it reached 10, 20, 30. Beside each group were the flags to be flown on those dates – and on this occasion the Navy used civil time, the new day beginning at midnight.
Since it was the 20th day of April Ramage ran his finger along the last set of figures, ‘10, 20, 30’. Beside them it gave the first signal to be flown and the flags forming the reply.
After locking up the signals Ramage went back on deck, where Southwick was waiting.
‘Pendant over red and white at the main; white with blue cross at the fore. The reply is pendant over blue white blue at the main; blue white red at the fore.’
‘Very good, sir.’
Within a few moments he had several seamen busy bending the flags on to the appropriate halyards ready for hoisting, and then Jackson called down that he thought the ship was a British frigate.
Swiftly her sails lifted above the horizon as she sailed up over the curvature of the earth towards the Triton; soon Ramage could see her hull coming into sight.
‘Hoist the challenge, Mr Southwick!’
Suddenly the long, triangular-shaped pendant and the red and white flag soared up the mainmast, and the single white flag with a blue cross was being hoisted at the foremast.
Only a few seconds after the flags streamed out in the wind Jackson called down: ‘Deck there! She’s breaking out a couple of hoists… Blue white red at the fore… Pendant, then blue white blue at the main, sir!’
Southwick acknowledged and motioned to the men at the halyards, and immediately the two hoists were lowered.
‘Make our number, Mr Southwick!’
A few moments later the Union Flag with three flags beneath it representing the Triton’s number in the List of the Navy was streaming out from the maintopmasthead.
The frigate had been the Rover, bound for Portsmouth from Lord St Vincent’s squadron, and it had taken only fifteen minutes for Ramage to go on board and report to her captain, warning him the Fleet at Spithead was in a state of mutiny, and persuade him to take Dyson and Brookland on board without asking too many questions. Few captains raised objections to getting a couple of extra seamen.
Both men had asked to see him before leaving the Triton and, to his surprise, Dyson had requested that he be allowed to stay on board. For a moment Ramage had almost relented; then he thought of the ship’s company. He was sure the man would never try any nonsense again; but his mere presence in the Triton would be a constant reminder that a mutiny had once been planned. The former Kathleens would certainly never trust him and it might eventually make
his life unbearable and in turn lead to more trouble.
But before dismissing both men Ramage reassured them that as far as the captain of the Rover knew, they were simply two seamen just flogged for drunkenness. And that was true: for his own sake Ramage didn’t want the captain of the Rover arriving in Portsmouth with the news that the Triton had nearly been taken by a mutinous crew. As it was, the captain had been puzzled at the request and would have refused had he not known of Ramage’s part in the Battle of Cape St Vincent.
In the late afternoon the Rover’s topgallants disappeared below the horizon to the north-east. In a few hours she’d be off the Lizard and bearing away up Channel. By that time the Triton would have met Admiral Curtis’ squadron.
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’ 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 than 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, the 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 north-east 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 Southwick 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 the 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 the rainwater to use for washing clothes.)
