by Dudley Pope
Rondin twiddled his glass and said nothing for a full two minutes, his eyes focused on the tip of Ramage’s sword scabbard. Ramage waited, wondering if the idea would come to Rondin: it would be easier if the ship-owner thought of it: there’d be a lot more collaboration if Rondin thought he was nourishing his own plan.
Finally the man began talking, as if to himself.
‘The wolf is hiding in a wood very near to the farmhouse… Perhaps somewhere so near that no one thinks of looking there… He has powerful ears, eyes, nose… Or maybe his mate is even nearer and warns him…’
Ramage was thankful that Rondin was shrewd; but how near the farmyard would he accept as feasible? It was worth letting the idea mature a while before going into detail. So Ramage asked: ‘Can I have some facts now, Mr Rondin; details of how many ships have been lost, dates, cargoes, nationalities of their masters, where bound – that kind of thing?’
Rondin walked over to a desk. ‘I have most of the answers here: I recently wrote a report to the Governor listing the schooners lost and the dates they sailed.’
Taking out four or five sheets of paper, he glanced at them and gave them to Ramage, who asked: ‘Are schooners bound for Martinique the only ones lost?’
‘Yes.’
‘Never those for St Lucia or St Vincent?’
‘Few go to either island. Cargoes are transhipped at Martinique: that’s where the home trade assembles to wait for a convoy.’
‘Is there any pattern to the losses? Any particular cargoes or particular owners?’
‘No – I’ve looked already.’
‘And the sequence of losses – three schooners lost one after the other, say, then two get through safely?’
Rondin shook his head.
‘What about those that get through to Martinique – have any been captured on the return voyage?’
Rondin’s face suddenly became animated.
‘That’s strange – and I hadn’t thought about it! No, not one that reached Martinique has ever been captured on the way back – when it was sailing empty in other words. Surely that’s very significant?’
Ramage shook his head. ‘Only in showing a laden schooner is valuable and one in ballast isn’t. Privateersmen are interested in cargoes, not hulls. No profit in a hull – they can’t sell a schooner as a prize.’
‘What do you think they do with them?’
‘I don’t know – perhaps sink them or sail them down to the Spanish Main. That’s a possibility, but it means using a lot of men as prize crews – and getting them back again.’
‘And you don’t think it’s likely?’
‘For the moment, no,’ Ramage said. ‘But before I ask my next question, let’s go over again the facts we know. Although some schooners leaving here bound for Martinique never arrive at Fort Royal, there’s no indication they pass it. Therefore they’re captured between here and somewhere south of Martinique. Yet all the islands between Grenada and Martinique are British owned, and only St Vincent and St Lucia are of any size. No French or Spanish islands to leeward – unless you count the Spanish Main. And the privateersmen want the cargoes, not the hulls…’
Rondin said quietly, ‘I think I can guess that next question of yours. If I’d thought of it earlier, we might have solved all this business long ago. Instead it takes a young naval lieutenant who hasn’t been in Grenada for more than a few hours!’
Ramage smiled. ‘I think you’d better hear the question first and make sure it’s the same.’
‘It is; I’m certain of that. It’s the key to the whole thing. But you ask it!’
‘Very well. Where do the privateersmen dispose of the cargoes since these are all British islands?’
The ship-owner nodded. ‘And all the time we could only think of our ships being lost! We went to see the Governor; the Governor wrote to Admiral Robinson, and he sent frigates which searched… If only I’d sat down and thought!’
‘The trade returns for each of the islands,’ Ramage said. ‘How often are they produced? I mean, can we compare each island’s exports to England for say, each of the last six months and see which one’s suddenly increased?’
Rondin stood up and began walking back and forth across the room, staring out over the lagoon and towards the setting sun. Then he began talking angrily.
‘We can’t get those figures for months but, by God, they’ll not only give the answer but they’ll show what’s happening. What a fool I am! Hundreds of tons of produce leaving Grenada and then vanishing – yet it can’t vanish! But I of all men should have known: nothing has a commercial value unless there’s a market for it. Somewhere, somehow, those hundreds of tons of stolen produce are being sold and shipped to England. But sold by whom – and to whom?’
He turned to Ramage, arms outstretched. ‘Give me a frank answer. Do you think that’s the only possibility? That after the cargoes are stolen, they’re shipped out of some other island in the normal way of trade – legally as it were? That these thieves have a way of channelling their booty through plantation-owners?’
Ramage nodded. ‘It’s my guess; as you’ve just said, nothing has a value unless there’s a market for it. At least, not in this sense. Who would systematically steal something if he couldn’t dispose of it?’
Rondin flopped down in his chair and drained his glass with a gesture that seemed to Ramage approaching despair. Bellowing for the butler to refill it, he muttered: ‘It means our own people are betraying us: other plantation-owners in some other island.’
‘Only one or two, perhaps,’ Ramage pointed out, pausing as the butler came in, refilled Rondin’s glass, noted Ramage’s was still untouched, and left the room again.
‘But since the trade returns can’t help us,’ he continued, ‘we’re almost back where we started – watching the schooners sailing out of the harbour entrance and vanishing.’
‘Yes – forgive me young man: this is a hard blow for a man in my position. Competition in business, yes that’s fair and one expects it; but treachery…’
Back on board the Triton Ramage read through the papers given him by Rondin, thought briefly of the captured schooners’ cargoes, and decided to read the papers yet again, despite the fact the heat made him feel sleepy.
The figures of the losses were detailed. In the past four months, thirty-one schooners had sailed from Grenada for Martinique and twenty-one had been captured. As he read the names and the dates they sailed the drowsiness vanished: there was a pattern!
If a schooner sailed several days after another, it was captured. If a third sailed within two days it invariably arrived safely in Martinique but a fourth leaving a couple of days later would be captured. When the fifth and sixth sailed almost immediately, they’d get through. But not the seventh if it waited two or three days.
He rubbed his forehead, excited but puzzled. A pattern, yes, but what was its significance? Then in a few moments it dawned on him that the pattern was set by the time it took to unload one schooner. Unload and get rid of the cargo, to be more precise.
Again he checked through the list of ships and dates. No, although there was not one instance where the privateers had taken a schooner less than four days after capturing another, there were many cases where schooners had arrived safely in Martinique having sailed less than four days after one which had been captured.
Four days…yet Rondin had assured him it was not difficult to unload a schooner in one day, though more usually it took two.
Why four days, then? Surely the privateersmen weren’t short of men? Ramage pictured them swinging the sacks of cocoa beans and barrels of molasses up and out of the holds and over the side on to the jetty then – jetty! Did they have a jetty? A jetty with a road which carts could use to carry away sacks and barrels?
Perhaps not, he thought excitedly; supposing they had to unload in some isolated spot which could be reached only along tracks suitable for pack animals?
One or two sacks for each animal… Sacks which if left piled up on t
he ground would spoil in the heavy tropical showers: molasses barrels which would split and leak in the heat of the sun… That could reduce the unloading time to four days: four days in which they dare not bring in another prize.
Dare not? The cargo would be safe enough if left in the schooner’s hold. Well, that raised another question: why, with one prize being unloaded in their lair, did the privateersmen let another potential prize escape them? Why not capture it, leave the hatch covers on, and unload it at their leisure?
Again his imagination wandered. He thought of warships waiting at anchor for powder hoys to arrive alongside; of dozens of merchantmen lying at anchor in the Thames after a big convoy arrived in the London river at the end of a voyage from half-way round the world. At anchor, waiting until there was a space at a dock…space at a dock.
Was there room enough only for one vessel where the privateers unloaded the prize schooners – and perhaps the privateers as well? Not enough room for two? Or some reason why there shouldn’t be two? That made sense; it answered a question – or provided a possible answer.
Assume a schooner carried a hundred tons of cargo in hundredweight sacks – 2,000 sacks. And a mule could carry, say, four sacks, a donkey two, a human being one. Five hundred mule trips, a thousand donkey trips…
How the devil would privateersmen – even if in league with many plantation-owners – get enough mules or donkeys or slaves to carry that number of sacks very far? Yet surely it had to be carried a good distance to get it to a port where it could be loaded again. Unless…
He reached up for charts rolled up in the rack above his head; charts covering the islands between Grenada and Martinique, and began looking at the bays and inlets. There were dozens: the outline of each island was irregular, like a broken piece of cheese, the bays and inlets bitten out by rats.
He decided to rule out the east coasts of the island, where the bays and lagoons took the full force of the Atlantic swell, because no privateers would dare use them: too many coral reefs, and the entrances too narrow to beat out in the prevailing easterly winds to snatch their next prize.
So the hiding places had to be on the south, north or (most probably) western side of an island. The bay he was looking for would be almost completely enclosed – for concealment. There’d probably be deep water close up to the shore – for unloading the schooners. And not too far from a larger port – for carrying the stolen cargoes overland.
The major factor was concealment. A concealed bay, or a bay in which a schooner and a privateer could hide without being seen from to seaward or being too obvious from the land. After half an hour’s search of the charts he knew there was only one way of finding the likely ones – he’d have to go up the islands in the Triton and look. He hadn’t yet paid a courtesy call on the Governor, but that would have to wait. He shouted to the sentry to pass the word for the Master.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
As the Triton sailed back from Martinique, passing southwards along the west side of Grenada, Ramage stood on the larboard side looking at the mountains covering the island and reviewing the voyage. He admitted with ill grace that he was still no wiser than before.
Plenty of wide, open bays, almost enclosed bays, big bays and small bays; but none holding a privateer. Working north from Grenada, there’d been the small rocky islets just north of the island – among them the pointed Kick ’em Jenny, as aptly named a place as he’d ever come across, since the Trade winds and current flowing into the Caribbean knocked up a vicious, confused sea round it; then the large, narrow island of Carriacou, a thousand or so people living on it, and a couple of uninhabited and desolate islets just east of it.
Both islets had bays on the leeward side which could be used as anchorages – indeed were by small open fishing boats. They were picturesque; the water startlingly clear; but not only was there no sign of a privateer but the local fishermen swore they’d never seen any and Maxton, who’d done the questioning, was satisfied they’d been telling the truth.
Then the Triton had visited the larger Union Island to the north of Carriacou, with Chatham Bay on the lee side and several small islets on the other three sides. Again plenty of possible anchorages but all much too open for secrecy. Then Mayero and the Tobago Cays with more islets to the north, and Cannouan, larger and mountainous but hopeless for unloading schooners because of the swell.
On then to Bequia, more hilly than mountainous, with strong currents and a large open anchorage. Admiralty Bay, and a thriving whaling industry run mostly by Scotsmen.
They were curious men and Ramage wanted to know more about them. From what he could gather they were descendants of former Scots taken prisoner in the fighting against Cromwell’s Ironsides during the Civil War of 1648. And Cromwell had shown no mercy: these men who’d fought unsuccessfully for Prince Charles had been shipped out to the West Indies and treated like slaves. Now most of their descendants, skin burned red by the sun, many with red hair, made a living as fishermen or working on the plantations.
They had their women with them – also descendants of the women who’d elected to be transported with their menfolk – and although treated like the native slaves, refused to have anything to do with the coloured people, behaving with a pride which should have shamed many of the white plantation-owners who employed them. Already there were signs of too much inbreeding.
But whatever the rights and wrongs of their being transported to the West Indies, Ramage believed their assurances that privateers never visited Admiralty Bay.
St Vincent, a few miles across the channel to the north, was very large – much bigger than Grenada, with the port and capital of Kingstown in the south-west corner. Mountainous, fertile, a great green mass of sloping hills, terraces and forests, it had plenty of bays – among them Wallilabu, Cumberland, Château Belaire (with a small harbour) – but nothing that hid a privateer.
So far Ramage had not felt disappointed: he was sure he would find the answer in St Lucia, the last big island before Martinique. From the north end of St Vincent there was a clear view of St Lucia twenty-four miles to the north. More mountainous than St Vincent, the island seemed to attract all the rain in the Caribbean (though he remembered the prize usually went to Dominica, way to the north). At the south end, like two enormous thumbs sticking up in the air, were the cone-shaped twin mountains of the Pitons. And all along the west coast up to the capital, Castries, and beyond, were many bays.
Even before leaving Grenada Ramage had half hoped he’d spotted on the St Lucia chart the place the privateers were using – Marigot Bay. Shaped like the glass stopper of a decanter, the bay’s entrance was a 200-yard-wide gap in the cuffs and it ran inland for 600 yards before a low sandspit on either side narrowed the channel to less than fifty yards.
Beyond the sandspits the bay suddenly opened out again into a circular lagoon.
Less than ten miles south of the port of Castries and completely surrounded by high hills, it had seemed an ideal spot, and as the Triton approached, Ramage had ordered Southwick to beat to quarters.
There was a natural platform in the otherwise sheer cliff on the south side of the entrance – a couple of guns mounted there could prevent anything approaching the entrance, and although the north side was not so sheer there were several positions where guns could be hidden.
But the Triton had gone right up to the entrance and hove-to, every gun of the starboard broadside aimed at the southern platform, while both he and Southwick had looked carefully, first for signs of guns, then through the entrance and across the first bay at the two sandspits which almost sealed it off from the lagoon beyond.
But the spits were low, covered with palms, and there had been no signs of a ship’s masts in the lagoon. Some of the palms on the northern spit were withering, the fronds turning brown in the hot sun. Perhaps the river flowing into the lagoon had recently flooded, washing away the earth and sand from round the roots; or maybe some animal had eaten away the bark. It wasn’t often one saw a dead palm tree �
�� they seemed to live forever.
So Marigot Bay wasn’t the privateersmen’s nest; and as he’d ordered the yards to be braced round to get the Triton under way to call in at the island’s capital, Castries, and then check the north side of the island before going on to Martinique, he knew why the two frigates had failed.
There’d been no clues in Castries or in Fort Royal at Martinique. Talks with the governors of both islands – and schooner-owners and captains – yielded plenty of criticisms of the Royal Navy, but no ideas; indeed, all of them talked of the privateers as if they were evil spirits manifesting themselves out of the misty rain forest in the darkness of a tropical night. And in an atmosphere thick with voodoo, superstition, witch doctors and ignorance, it wasn’t surprising.
Southwick had been unusually silent for the past hour as the Triton sailed down the last few miles back to St George.
Away over the starboard bow the headland of Point Saline was just coming up over the horizon, but only the caps of the smoothly rounded hills forming the peninsula were visible so that it seemed like a sea monster wriggling along in the water.
Southwick pulled his hat forward to shield his eyes.
’Twas a waste of time, that trip.’
Ramage shrugged his shoulders. ‘The only way to be sure was to look for ourselves. And now we all know what the islands look like.’
‘That Marigot Bay… I was sure we’d find them there.’
Southwick pronounced the ‘t’ and Ramage just checked himself from correcting him yet again. Instead he nodded. ‘I’d have bet on it.’
‘Marigot, or the privateers coming down from north of Martinique.’
That was Southwick’s particular pet idea; that the privateers were based north of Martinique and sailed down past Fort Royal, captured the schooners and took them back somewhere to the north: some isolated lair in Dominica, Guadeloupe or the dozen or so smaller islands up towards Antigua. But the authorities in Martinique had ruled it out: their only contribution to the scant information available was that there were enough fishing boats working out to leeward of Fort Royal both by day and night to be sure no privateers passed.
