Ramage and the Dido

by Dudley Pope

  ‘The main thing is that I want him confined under an arrest so that he can’t fight the duel tomorrow morning, sir.’

  Rossiter shrugged his shoulders. ‘You can keep him under an arrest for a few days and then decide not to press charges…’

  ‘I don’t want the fellow on board, sir,’ Ramage said bluntly. ‘He’s obviously a bad influence, and as he’s a compulsive gambler, he’s going to come to a sticky end.’

  The admiral tapped his desk with Ramage’s letter. ‘I can send him to the guardship and give you another fifth lieutenant,’ he said slowly. ‘I am prepared to do that because I know you have your old ship’s company with you, and obviously it’s an efficient one. This fellow could be the one bad apple in the barrel.’

  ‘That would be the best way, sir: I don’t want to hang about for a court martial, but I do want to get rid of this fellow.’

  Rossiter gestured at the letter Ramage was holding. ‘Why don’t you read your orders?’

  Ramage broke the seal and opened the single sheet of paper. The orders were brief and simple: after provisioning for six months and completing the fitting-out of his ship to the satisfaction of the port admiral, Ramage was to sail to the West Indies, placing himself under the command of Rear-Admiral Samuel Cameron, the Commander-in-Chief of the Windward Islands Station at Barbados. Ramage managed to avoid giving a sigh of relief: he had not been told to escort a convoy, the dreariest task he could think of.

  ‘Well?’ asked Rossiter. ‘To your liking?’

  ‘Barbados, sir. I always like going back to the West Indies.’

  ‘Yes, nothing wrong with the place, as long as you avoid yellow fever, malaria and blackwater… You’ve been lucky so far, if my memory serves me. I seem to remember various Gazette letters from there.’

  ‘Indeed, I’ve been lucky,’ Ramage admitted. ‘Both in dodging disease and finding action.’

  ‘Very well,’ the admiral said briskly. ‘I take it you don’t want to go ahead and bring this fellow to trial as long as I can replace him?’

  ‘No, sir. I’m very grateful to you.’

  Rossiter tore up the letter he was still holding. ‘By the way, you can sleep on shore for another couple of days. Then you’ll be ready to take on powder and sail.’

  Ramage arrived on board the Dido next morning with Sarah, and was pleased to find that there were three carts alongside the ship and seamen were already busy carefully hoisting on board his furniture, using the stay tackle. The dining table, desk and drawers were packed in straw, which had been tied round the polished woodwork to protect it. The chairs looked as though they were growing out of a cornfield.

  Sarah commented on the care that the shop had taken, and Ramage said: ‘Wait until the crockery and cutlery arrives. It’s another shop, and they may not have dealt with a ship before.’

  They went to the cabin and a few minutes later sailors arrived carrying the table, having cut off the straw on deck. Ramage indicated where he wanted it put just as more men arrived with chairs. Within a quarter of an hour the rest of the furniture had been carried down and put in its place, and Ramage sat in one of the armchairs. ‘Comfortable enough,’ he told Sarah. ‘You made a good choice.’

  ‘The owner of the shop wasn’t used to having ladies come in and choose this sort of furniture. He was most concerned when he heard you commanded the Dido, and promised to change anything you did not like.’ Sarah laughed and added: ‘I told him that you would like anything I chose – and he was most impressed. At least, I think he was. He may not have believed a word I said!’

  The contrast between the pieces of furniture and the two 12-pounders was dramatic. The two barrels of the guns, which seemed to be crouching on their carriages, black and shiny like serpents, were in stark contrast to the yellow and white covers that Sarah had chosen for the settee and armchairs.

  Ramage had not been sitting down more than a few minutes before the carpenter arrived, asking permission to fit eyebolts to the deck and the underside of each piece of furniture, so that the light chairs could be attached to stop them sliding about the cabin when the Dido rolled in a seaway. Soon the cabin seemed to be full of the carpenter and his mates as they up-ended each piece of furniture and started drilling for the screws to hold the eyeplates. Finally they shackled on the chains and left.

  Chapter Six

  Ramage opened his Journal and dipped his quill in the ink. The page was headed ‘Journal of the Proceedings of his Majesty’s ship — , Captain — , Commander, between the — and the—’

  He filled in ‘Dido’ and his own name, and the dates. There were nine columns, each with its own heading, which went from the date to ‘Winds’, ‘Courses’, ‘Miles’, the latitude the ship was in and the amount of longitude made, bearing and distances at noon (they were too far out to sea to give either) and the last column, which was headed ‘Remarkable Observations and Accidents’.

  He looked at the pencilled note that Southwick had given him and started filling in the columns. The wind had been north-east, the courses had been south and south-south-west, they had covered 120 miles since noon the previous day, the present latitude was 25° 7’ North, they had stayed in the same longitude, and in the last column he wrote: ‘Weather unsettled and sighted several waterspouts. Fore topgallant badly chafed, sent down and replaced. Exercised ship’s company at great guns.’

  And that, he thought as he wiped the quill and put the cap on the ink, was all there was to say for a day in which the Dido had ploughed on just approaching the Tropics with a wind that was fitful and a sky heavy with thunderstorms.

  The entry did not tell anything of the Dido. It did not tell of Ramage’s efforts to train the two hundred or so men that had been taken from the West India and Cape convoys just before she sailed. There was the core of the Calypsos, but there were the new men to be trained in the ways of the Navy. Most of them were good seamen – that was why incoming convoys yielded a good harvest for pressgangs – but they knew little or nothing about gunnery. Few masters of merchant ships bothered to give their men any gunnery training, and few merchant ships carried anything larger than a long 6-pounder.

  So on most days since they left the Channel, the Didos had been exercising the guns: running in and running out the big 32-pounders and the 24-pounders, as well as the 12-pounders and the carronades. Every couple of days the men were switched from one calibre of gun to another, so that they soon had experience of them all; every third day the guns were actually fired, filling the ears with the thunder of the explosions and the ship with thick smoke.

  The new men were learning quickly. Most of them had got over their resentment at being snatched into the King’s service just when they were expecting to go home on well-earned leave, and most were thankful to find that their new ship had a firm and fair captain whose only quirk, it seemed, was an obsession with gunnery. In general the new men were sensible enough to appreciate that in these early days the enemy was not a French ship of the line ranged up alongside them but the watches held in the hands of the lieutenants, which relentlessly timed their activities.

  Ramage closed his Journal, put it in a drawer of his desk, and went outside for a stroll up and down his balcony. He was enjoying the balcony: it was somewhere that he could pace alone with his thoughts with the ship’s wake gurgling away below him and with just the creak of gudgeons and pintles as the rudder was turned by the men at the wheel.

  What a rush those last few days in Portsmouth had turned out to be. Apart from getting the extra men – the ship had finally sailed with a complement of 602, twenty-three short of her establishment – it was found that a good deal of the water was bad, so much had to be emptied out and pumped over the side and fresh brought from the dockyard. And at the last moment, thanks to his strong complaints, the dockyard had produced a spare suit of sails, and these had to be struck below to the sail room a matter of hours before they sailed to get the powder on board.

  Sarah had finally left – tearfully – for London
with Jessop driving the carriage, and Ramage was grateful to Admiral Rossiter for leaving them alone until the last minute. Sarah had finally admitted that she could not bear standing on Portsmouth Point watching the Dido disappear in the distance, so she had driven off as the Dido left the Camber to take on powder.

  Now the ship could be self-contained for six months, able to feed all her men and (he hoped) with enough powder and shot to fight off her enemies. But, he reflected, there was no getting away from the fact that a seventy-four was a big ship. Apart from the ship herself, 200 feet long from figurehead to taffrail, and 275 feet from the tip of her jib-boom to the end of the spanker boom, and weighing about 2,800 tons, 602 men looked to him for leadership, discipline and justice. And yes, he had to be a father to them all, as well, even though some of them – Southwick, for instance – were old enough to be his grandfather. He was the captain, with all that implied. He was responsible for feeding and fighting the ship; he had to make sure that the purser did not cheat, that the gunner looked after the guns, the surgeon the sick, the chaplain their souls, the master the sails and rigging and the first lieutenant the general running of the ship. But, he thought ruefully, if any one of his commission or warrant officers failed, the Admiralty would blame him.

  He was thankful that he had managed to get rid of that cardsharping fifth lieutenant, Hicks. If he had stayed on, the wardroom would probably be in an uproar by now; Kenton, Martin and Hill were good men, but there was obviously a limit to what they could stand. However, the new man provided by Admiral Rossiter seemed to be proving satisfactory.

  He watched as a Mother Carey’s chicken – known to some as a stormy petrel – flew across the Dido’s stern and turned to fly along her wake. Where did they sleep? There always seemed to be a few in sight. And soon they would be seeing – admittedly only occasionally – his favourite, the tropic bird. Slender and white with a very long forked tail, the tropic bird would fly steadily, never jinking, always in a straight line as though it knew exactly where it was going. But where was that? It was often 1,500 miles to the nearest land, yet the tropic bird flew on sturdily as though it was merely crossing the five miles between two neighbouring islands.

  He heard shouting and knew one of the lookouts aloft was hailing the quarterdeck. What had he sighted, so far from land? It could be a particularly large waterspout to windward, so that the officer of the deck could luff up or bear away to avoid it. Although Ramage had never been in a ship hit by a waterspout he had heard many stories about their destructive force: they could rip out masts with the sails still attached, lift anything lying around the deck and suck it up, even take up boats on the booms and hurl them over the side.

  Suddenly Aitken’s head appeared at the taffrail and called down: ‘Sir, the foremast lookout reports a sail fine on the starboard bow, and perhaps another one beyond it. Steering on an opposite course to us.’

  ‘Very well, beat to quarters. I’ll be with you in a moment.’

  That was one of the important differences between a frigate and a ship of the line: a frigate could be at general quarters in five minutes, but even with a well-trained crew it took a seventy-four at least fifteen minutes, and that was no time at all with two ships approaching each other at five or six knots: they would cover two and a half or three miles in that time.

  He reached the quarterdeck just as the two Marine drummers started clattering away, and the calls of bosun’s mates were twittering below, followed by the raucous shouts of ‘All hands to general quarters!’

  ‘What can you see?’ Ramage asked Aitken.

  ‘Just the hint of a sail from down here, sir.’

  ‘Send Orsini aloft with a bring-’em-near.’

  A sail out here? Possibly – no, in this position it would not be a convoy, or even a frigate on her way to England. In fact it was hard to guess why any ship should venture here on an opposite course, in other words beating to windward against the Trade winds. On the same course, yes; they could be overhauling a slower ship on her way to the magic position, 25° North, 25° West, when one turned to begin one’s westing. But a ship sailing north in this position?

  ‘Hoist the private signal,’ he told Aitken.

  The private signal was a challenge-and-reply code, changed every three months and known only to the King’s ships in a particular area. When two strange ships met, one or other flew the challenge and the other – if British – flew the reply, and this was followed by both ships hoisting their pendant numbers, so they could be identified from the signal book, which gave a list of all the ships in the Navy with their pendant numbers.

  He saw Orsini scrambling up the lee shrouds of the mainmast: he went up as fast as a topman, even though he was carrying a telescope.

  The Dido was now like a suddenly disturbed anthill: men were hurriedly rigging head pumps and sluicing water across the decks; others were scattering sand. The water prevented loose grains of gunpowder being ignited by, for example, the trucks of a recoiling gun carriage; the sand stopped the men slipping with their bare feet.

  More men were casting off the lashings and securing the guns and running them back ready for loading; others rolled small tubs besides the guns and filled them with water, ready for swabbing out the barrels of the guns. Rammers, mops and wormers were put ready beside the guns.

  And below, Ramage knew, the gunner had unlocked the magazine and even now was beginning to issue flintlocks, prickers and powder horns to the gun captains, while the powder monkeys were beginning to form up ready to carry cartridges up to the guns.

  In his cabin men would be shifting his furniture below to the hold to leave room to handle the guns and reduce the chance of splinters. Bulkheads were being hinged up to the deckhead or taken down, again to avoid splinters from shot smashing through the hull. It was this sort of preparation – mercifully absent when the Calypso used to go into action – that used up the quarter of an hour it took to prepare the Dido for general quarters.

  The bustle of war: to the untrained eye it seemed as though many men were running about aimlessly: to an eye trained in the ways of a ship of war, every man was moving fast to do his duty.

  Southwick came up and said: ‘An odd position to find someone steering north, sir.’

  ‘That’s what I was thinking.’

  Southwick gave one of his expressive sniffs. ‘All the gunnery exercise might come in useful sooner than we expected.’

  ‘We’ll soon know. I wish Orsini would hurry up and give us a hail – is this sail a privateer or a ship of the line?’

  Southwick shrugged his shoulders. ‘In this position it could be either. Of course, it could be someone who had been heading south, spotted us first, and hauled their wind to come north to investigate us.’

  ‘If that’s the case, I shall want to know why our lookouts were asleep.’

  ‘No,’ Southwick said, ‘on second thoughts it doesn’t seem very likely. Damnation, Orsini’s taking his time!’

  A minute or two later Orsini hailed that the sail was a frigate steering on an opposite course with everything set to the royals. ‘There’s another sail astern of her, though I can’t make out if she’s following or chasing.’

  Two ships? Two ships in this position both steering north? ‘Furl the courses, Mr Aitken,’ Ramage said. If there was any fighting to be done, let it be under topsails. With the great courses furled, only the topgallants remained to be taken in.

  The bosun’s mates piped the order, and men ran up the shrouds to the yards while others stood by at buntlines and cluelines. Soon the billowing canvas was stifled, gaskets passed and the sails were rolled up on the yards, almost as neat as if they had been given a harbour stow.

  Then Orsini hailed again. ‘The second ship is also a frigate. I think I can make out the occasional flash of guns – the bowchasers of the second ship. She’s too far away to see any smoke.’

  ‘One frigate chasing another, eh?’ commented Southwick.

  And that meant the first frigate was probably
British, steering for the Dido in the hope that she was British. A frigate running away from a frigate? Why did she not stand and fight? But a moment after Ramage puzzled over the question, Orsini hailed again.

  ‘There’s a third ship, her masts are just coming over the horizon.’

  So the first frigate could be chased by two other frigates. That would explain why she was not standing and fighting: no one expected a single frigate to fight two others of equal or greater size.

  ‘What do you make of it, sir?’ asked Aitken.

  ‘A British frigate being chased by a couple of French, and damned glad to see us ahead of her. They’re praying we’re British – they may have recognised us as British by the cut of our sails.’

  Orsini hailed again. ‘There’s a fourth ship, bigger than the others. I think she’s a ship of the line. She’s following the frigates.’

  One British frigate being chased by two French frigates and a ship of the line? The British ship was lucky to spot the Dido…

  The question was, would she reach the Dido before the frigate just astern of her ranged up alongside and began pouring in broadsides and a lucky – unlucky, rather – shot brought down a mast?

  Ramage realised he had prolonged the time before the Dido met the frigate by furling the courses, but if the Dido was going to have to fight off two frigates and a seventy-four – assuming the ship of the line was no bigger – she had to be prepared.

  ‘Mr Southwick, go down and inspect the guns. Stop and have a word with that new fifth lieutenant – this may be the first time he’s ever been in action, and he’ll be a bit nervous.’

  There was no need to worry about Kenton, Martin and Hill: they had been in action enough times in the Calypso, although this would be the first time in the Dido. Still, the only difference was that the guns were bigger; the drill was the same.