Ramage's Diamond

by Dudley Pope

  The second midshipman, Ramage was relieved to find, had been to sea before: Edward Benson, son of a cousin of Lord St Vincent’s wife, had spent a year in a 74-gun ship of the line and was two years older than Paolo. Red-haired and freckle-faced, he was obviously high-spirited and Ramage recalled the First Lord’s remark. Ramage had already met Edwards, the young master’s mate who would be the senior in the midshipmen’s berth, and he seemed more than capable of keeping an eye on both boys.

  At five in the afternoon Aitken reported that the Juno’s cutter had returned from the dockyard after taking all the mail on shore, and Ramage guessed that the canvas bag had contained a bizarre collection of papers. He had written to Gianna and his parents, Bowen had written to his wife, the newly joined lieutenants had scribbled letters to relatives and the seamen had sent four or five score letters telling wives and sweethearts that they were about to sail on a long voyage.

  Ramage had spent much of the previous evening and most of this morning working with his clerk, trying to get all the lists, affidavits, musters, invoices, pay tickets, surveys and inventories checked and signed where necessary. Together they accounted to the Admiralty, Navy Board, Sick and Hurt Board and the Port Admiral for just about everything on board the Juno, from her men to spare sail canvas, powder and shot to stationery, spare beer cask staves to caulkers’ mauls. Fortunately the clerk had had everything ready up to the time the previous captain went off to face the court martial, but there was no chance of Ramage checking whether all the items he was signing as having been received since then were actually on board. He would have to make up any shortages later out of his own pocket but for the time being he had to sail as quickly as possible, and he could not leave until the paperwork was done.

  The gunner, bos’n, carpenter and various others had prepared their inventories, but it would take another three days to go through the paperwork item by item – as he had every right to do – and by that time the voice of the Port Admiral would be shrill and signals from the Admiralty would be arriving on board like broadsides. That was one of the disadvantages of the new semaphore telegraph set up between Portsmouth and the Admiralty building in London. In an emergency signals could be passed in a matter of minutes, but it also meant that the First Lord could sit in his office in London and ask questions and get answers back within half an hour…

  The sentry announced the first lieutenant again. Aitken reported that all the ship’s boats had now returned and had been hoisted in and secured. The ship was trimmed correctly, and the replacement stun-sail booms had arrived from the dockyard. The guns were secured – Aitken paused a moment, thought and went on – the tiller had been checked and was moving freely, sails were ready for loosing.

  It was always a good thing for the captain to be able to remember something that the first lieutenant had forgotten: it kept him on his toes. Ramage searched his memory: ‘The sheet anchor?’

  ‘Stowed, sir; I forgot to mention it.’

  Ramage nodded. ‘We are ready to man the capstan?’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir.’

  It wanted an hour to high water and by some miracle the ship was ready a day early. Ramage picked up his hat and led the way on deck. Apart from some clouds sitting over the hills to the north, the sky was clear; the wind was from the north-west. When the Juno left Spithead – which she would do within the next fifteen minutes – she would leave behind the brief memory of a captain court-martialled for drunkenness, and another story to add to those told about Lord St Vincent’s ruthlessness: that he had cleared all the commission officers out of the Juno frigate because the captain liked to tipple. Like most such stories it would be only partly true but it might serve as a warning.

  Ramage stared for a moment at the rest of the ships at anchor nearby, and gave a shiver. The story of the Juno’s drunken captain could in fact be the story of the captain of any ship: everything depended on him. Every failure on the part of a captain showed immediately in the ship. His lack of seamanship was revealed in the way the ship was handled; his lack of leadership in the way the officers and ship’s company behaved. His courage or lack of it would be shown the moment the ship went into action. The captain was not the tip of a pyramid, as most people thought; in fact it was just the reverse: he was the spindle on which everything else balanced.

  He looked up at the waiting Aitken. ‘Is the fiddler on the quarterdeck? Ah, I see him. Very well, man the capstan!’

  CHAPTER THREE

  Ramage wiped his pen and put it away in the drawer as he waited for the ink to dry on the page of his Journal. The figures he had written in under the ‘Latitude In’ and ‘Longitude Made’ columns showed that the Juno had almost reached ‘The Corner’, the invisible turning point just short of the Tropic of Cancer where she would pick up the north-east Trade winds to sweep her for 3,000 miles across the Atlantic in a gentle curve to the south-east that would bring her to Barbados.

  The ‘Journal of the Proceedings of his Majesty’s ship Juno, Captain Nicholas Ramage, Commander’, told the story of the voyage so far in terms of winds, courses steered, miles run from noon one day to noon the next, and apart from the column headed ‘Remarkable Observations and Accidents’, mercifully almost blank, told the Admiralty all it wanted to know.

  As he flicked over the earlier pages, Ramage thought that the journal told very little of the story. His Log and the Master’s faithfully recorded the time when the Lizard sank below the horizon astern, the last sight of England for many months – the last sight ever for some of the men on board. It mentioned the westerly gale that caught them off Brest and drove them into the Bay of Biscay, noted the three occasions when they sighted other frigates and made or answered the challenge, recorded the time that the tip of the island of Madeira was sighted and its bearing… But it made no mention of the afternoon, with the Lizard still just in sight, when he had finally lost his temper with the whole ship’s company, mustered them aft, and given them a warning.

  For the first few hours after weighing from Spithead it had seemed that the men were trying, that they realized they had grown slack under the previous captain and were anxious to make amends. But as the Juno beat her way out to the Chops of the Channel they had eased off and became sullen. A topsail had been let fall with a reef point still tied so that the canvas ripped; evolutions that should have taken five minutes had taken twenty. In fact it seemed that all the work was being done by the dozen former Tritons.

  Aitken and Southwick had done their best and he could not fault the other three lieutenants. The new Marine Lieutenant, Rennick, had a firm grip on his men, who were always smartly turned out. Yet there was an insidious sullen air on the mess deck, and that afternoon Ramage had vowed to get rid of it. With the glass falling and the Juno thrashing her way westward out of the Channel, he mustered them aft and, using a speaking trumpet to make his voice heard above the howl of the wind, he had given them a solemn warning.

  The day after they reached ‘The Corner’ he would inspect the ship from breasthook to archboard; he would exercise them aloft and at the guns with a watch in his hand. If at the end of the day he was satisfied, then the rest of the voyage to Barbados would be a routine cruise; but if he found so much as a speck of dirt in even one of the coppers, if furling a topsail took thirty seconds longer than it should, if there was any hesitation or delay over emergency procedures (and here he was warning the officers more than the seamen), then he promised them 3,000 miles of misery, when they would beg for a flogging to get some relief.

  Only Southwick and the former Tritons had known he was not ruthless enough to carry out such a threat, but he could rely on them not only to warn the Junos that he was capable of doing so, but to embroider the threat that even the toughest of them would turn uneasily in their hammocks every night as the Juno made her way south-westwards to ‘The Corner’.

  Now ‘The Corner’ was less than thirty miles to the south, and unless this present calm patch lasted the Juno should pass the magic spot, twenty-five deg
rees north, twenty-five degrees west, during the night. Tomorrow would be the day the ship’s company were dreading. Yet he was certain the threat had worked; for many days now Aitken and Southwick had been licking them into shape. They had reefed and furled in all weathers, sent sails down on the deck in half a gale and hoisted them up again, sent down yards for imaginary repairs and swayed them up again as black squalls drove down on them. The men had loaded guns, run them out, fired them and loaded them again until they were ready to drop. They had been roused in the middle of the night for fire drill, hoisting up the fire engine and rigging head pumps to fill the cistern, then roused again to repel imaginary boarders, man the chain pump or find imaginary leaks. They had been startled by orders to round up and pick up a man (a dummy the sailmaker had made out of a hammock) who had fallen over the side. That, Ramage reflected, had been a disaster; the seaman ordered to keep an eye on the ‘body’ had confused it with a large patch of floating seaweed, and the sailmaker had to make another ‘body’ which even now was waiting for the moment Ramage chose to repeat the manoeuvre.

  Eventually Aitken had begun reporting much better times for sail handling, and the sullen atmosphere had gone. Perhaps the sunshine helped; they were now almost in the Tropics and the cold and damp of the Channel were but memories. Tomorrow he would know. Never before had he been forced to treat a ship’s company like this – but never before had he inherited a ship from a drunken captain and first lieutenant, when the normal methods of training and leadership had proved useless.

  It was ironic that this present calm patch was prolonging the agony: from what both Aitken and Southwick reported, the men viewed it with all the apprehension of a flogging through the fleet. Well, the Juno still had not reached ‘The Corner’ and found the Trades, although it looked as though she was going to be lucky this time. There was always an element of luck in it. Sometimes the north-east Trades arrived on time but many ships had to carry on south, down as far as the Cape Verde Islands, before picking them up. This time the wind was fitful and still mostly north, but for the past two days it had often veered north-east for an hour or two and, just as Ramage, Aitken and Southwick were congratulating each other that the Trades had arrived, it would suddenly back north and there would be a flurry of sail trimming. But they were nearly in the Tropics: the imaginary line in the heavens marking the Tropic of Cancer was almost overhead.

  The sea was a fresh, deep blue, and the spray was warm. All the men new to the Tropics were keeping an eye open for their first sight of flying fish. The canvas awning was now rigged over the quarterdeck, and by ten o’clock in the morning the deck was getting hot. In a few days, another four or five degrees farther south, the deck would be uncomfortably hot by nine in the morning and no man, whether barefoot or wearing boots or shoes would want to stand still unless he was in shade. Paint would flake more quickly, the pitch in the deck seams that at Spithead had been brittle and cracking would be sticky, and long thin cracks, or shakes, would appear in the masts as the sun dried the wood out, and no amount of oiling would prevent it. Furled sails would have to be kept aired, otherwise they mildewed overnight; cold-weather clothing that had not been carefully washed before being stowed in seabags would sprout rich, remarkably coloured mildew, which seemed to flourish on food stains.

  Already Bowen was treating half a dozen men for bad sunburn, men with very sensitive skin who had been affected before Ramage forbade anyone to be on deck without shirts for three hours either side of noon. Despite these problems caused by the hot sun, it was good to have the ship well-aired with scuttles, skylights and ports wide open; the sun, almost overhead at noon, penetrated parts of the Juno that had not seen sunlight since the ship was last in the Tropics.

  As he dried his razor and put it away in its leather case, Ramage reflected that one of the few advantages of commanding a ship the size of a frigate was that the captain could usually have hot water for shaving. Today was an exception, and his own fault, since he chose to get up a couple of hours before the galley fire was lit.

  The Juno was bowling along in the darkness – groaning along, some might say, since her timbers creaked as she pitched in a sedate seesaw motion. The Trade wind had settled steadily from the north-east and with luck they would now carry it all the way to Barbados. With the following wind came the following seas and the pitching and rolling, so that water slopped out of a basin filled more than a third full and fiddles had to be fitted to the tables – narrow battens which were the only way of preventing plates and cutlery sliding off.

  He could hear the rudder grumbling as the men at the wheel kept the frigate on course, and ropes creaked as they rendered through blocks. The pitching was just enough to make the lanthorn flicker as the flames tried to stay vertical – and enough to make him sit down as he prepared to pull his stockings on.

  Monday morning and the first full day after passing ‘The Corner’. Well, the ship’s company knew what it meant. The silk of the first stocking was cold; they would have to be a few hundred miles farther south before clothes always felt warm at this time of the day. He smoothed out the wrinkles and reached for the second one. No, there would be few men on board who were looking forward to the approaching dawn. He had not been entirely fair to the men in those early days: he had discovered, by way of his coxswain, Jackson, that the drunken captain had not been the only cause of the Juno’s condition. The one before him had been slack, had rarely made more than a cursory inspection of the ship, and his seamanship had been lamentable. Orders to reef or furl as a squall came up were usually given too late, so that men were injured and sails were ripped. As far as Ramage could make out, the men had spent most of their time repairing sails. And discipline had been almost non-existent.

  This had inevitably thrown all the responsibility on to the other officers. Had they been good men they might have been able to manage, but they were poor specimens who played the game of favourites, hoping that by toadying to a few chosen seamen and petty officers they would have a nucleus who could be relied on. As a result, the rest of the men became the scapegoats for everything that went wrong. Naturally enough, the ship’s company had split into two groups, one large and one small, the victimized and the favoured, and they had hated each other. Then that captain had been replaced by the drunkard who had cared nothing for the way the ship was run and who had brought his own drunken first lieutenant with him. Apparently this had finally proved too much for the other officers, who had begun drinking from sheer frustration.

  Because they were frequently drunk, or ill-tempered next morning from the effects of it, the victimization had become worse. The majority of the ship’s company had been reduced to sullen hulks of men who did not give a damn whether a single reef point was left tied so that a sail ripped when it was let fall, and the officers did not give a damn either, knowing that the captain would not back them up if they tried to punish delinquents.

  Ramage wriggled into his breeches, pulled on a shirt, tucked it in and buttoned up the flap. By the time Captain Ramage came on board and read himself in, the men had no faith in captains, no faith in officers and precious little faith in petty officers either, because many of them had taken advantage of the situation to indulge in bullying and they too had played favourites. It was easy enough for a bos’n’s mate to ‘start’ a seaman he did not like, giving him a slash across the back with the rattan cane that was his badge of office. A ‘starting’ took only a second but the pain lasted for hours, and the bruise for several days.

  By the time Ramage had learned all this he had been more than thankful that Lord St Vincent had let him have Southwick and the dozen Tritons and sent him Aitken. Perhaps the First Lord had known more about the situation in the Juno than Ramage realized. The Admiral was reputed to be able to see through a three-inch plank, apart from being a stern disciplinarian – very stern. As a captain he had become famous in the Navy for the fact that his ship invariably had the smallest sick list of any; he was ruthless in his determination that the ship
should be kept well-aired below, that the men’s bedding should always be clean and dry, that they should have fresh vegetables whenever possible (it was said that he paid for them out of his own pocket at times).

  As Ramage tied his stock he wondered if His Lordship had deliberately chosen him for the Juno, with all her problems. There were several 32-gun frigates in Spithead and Plymouth and any one of them would have been suitable for the West Indies. But it hardly mattered now what had been in His Lordship’s mind; the fact was that Captain Ramage now commanded the Juno and even if he had inherited two years of problems created by previous captains, the Admiralty would not give a damn: he was the commanding officer and the ship’s efficiency was his concern and his alone. If he could not knock the ship’s company into shape there were dozens of other captains at present unemployed who would leap at the opportunity. Captains with distinguished records, brave men and fine seamen, men who were relegated to half pay simply because there were not enough ships to go round. For every dozen captains ready and willing to go to sea, there was probably only one ship.

  He picked up his coat and flicked the spirals of bullion on the epaulet. A ship’s company judged its captain on performance: he was judged a fair man if he enforced discipline fairly. Contrary to what many people on shore thought, a ship’s company did not like an easy-going captain – he left them at the mercy of bullying officers and petty officers. They liked a captain who ran a taut ship and enforced a consistent discipline. In other words, if a seaman hoarded his tots of rum for a few days, contrary to regulations, got drunk and was caught, then the punishment was a dozen lashes. But it had to be a dozen for any man who got drunk, not a dozen for one man and two dozen for the next.