by Dudley Pope
“They’ve probably cleaned them all out,” Southwick said gloomily.
“I’m sure the King of Spain has enough pearls in his crown by now,” Ramage said vaguely, thinking of breakfast and then a few hours’ sleep. “Call me as soon as we reach the Margarita Channel.”
Southwick watched Ramage disappear down the companion-way and then took off his hat with all the ceremony of a bishop removing his mitre. The wind blew through his white hair and refreshed him. There were times when he felt his years. However, he felt happier now, since he was at last convinced that the Captain had given Rennick the job of capturing Castillo San Antonio only because he wanted the Master on board for the passage out of Santa Cruz.
He had been with Mr Ramage enough years now to recognize most of his moods, but he was damned if he could understand some of them. Just now, for example, he had been pacing the deck with a face as long as a yard of pump water, and snappy and sarcastic as a henpecked parson. Why? He should have been as cheerful as a bandmaster; he had just done the impossible—here was the Jocasta bowling along the coast under stunsails, and less than twelve hours ago she was moored in Santa Cruz with a Spanish Captain strutting her quarterdeck. Why the long face? Yet while going in to Santa Cruz with the Calypso, playing a game of bluff where the slightest mistake would have seen the frigate blown out of the water by the batteries, the Captain had had a grin on his face like a curate who had just converted the Devil.
Perhaps he was worried about chasing after this merchant ship at La Guaira. If the Jocasta ran up on an uncharted reef—he looked ahead nervously and then glanced at the binnacle—it would be hard to explain away to the Admiral. Would he understand how that phrase “a particular cargo” had intrigued them all?
He looked astern at the Jocasta’s wake. The wind was freshening as the sun came up and with the sails rap full the ship would be making more than ten knots within half an hour. He eyed the stunsail booms projecting out from the ends of the yards and wondered when they were last inspected for rot. The metal fittings were rusty—he could see stained wood from down here.
Margarita was coming up fast now. He turned to Orsini, who was pacing the deck, telescope under his arm, and no doubt dreaming, like most midshipmen on a bright sunny day, of commanding his own frigate.
“Mr Orsini! You see the island of Margarita ahead of us, on the starboard bow?”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“The tall peak is Cerro San Juan, and it is 3200 feet high. Out with your quadrant, then, and take a vertical angle and tell me how far off it is. Step lively, though, we’re approaching it at nearly ten knots!”
Paolo put his telescope in the binnacle drawer and hurried down to the midshipmen’s berth for his quadrant, repeating the formula to himself. But was it the right formula? He knew the height, and he could get the angle from the quadrant. The height was 2300 feet, so—wait, was it 2300 or 3200 feet?
Accidente! where was the quadrant box? He found it propping up some books at the end of a shelf and hurried back up on deck blinking in the sunlight. Mama mia, with stunsails set and running almost dead before the wind it was hard to see forward.
He braced himself against the pitching, checked that the quadrant was set at zero, and then carefully looked through the eyepiece. It was easy enough, he told himself; none of the business of needing to know the exact time. He moved the arm until the reflection of the peak rested on the horizon, and then looked at the scale.
“Take another one,” Southwick growled. “Never rely on just one!”
Paolo wasn’t sure what had happened with the first, but the second showed a difference of more than a degree. Fortunately the third agreed with the second and he hurriedly set the quadrant at zero again and took a fourth. The last three were the same.
But what was the height of San Juan, the other ingredient he needed? He could sneak into Mr Southwick’s cabin and look at the chart (it was just his bad luck that it was not on top of the binnacle box; it would be later on, when the dampness had gone out of the air), but someone might think he was trying to steal something.
“Mr Orsini …”
The Master’s voice had an odd tone.
“Sir?”
“You are sure of the angle?”
“Yes, sir: three were identical.”
“What happened to the fourth?”
“I don’t know, sir.” There was no fooling the Master; he had sharper eyes than Uncle Nicholas.
“So now you take the angle and the height and you look it up in the tables, eh?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What was the height of San Juan?”
Accidente! Paolo felt someone had put the evil eye on him this morning. Was it 3200 or 2300? Better too high than too low—or was it? He tried to picture which would give the farthest distance, but mathematics were a confusing subject which he learned by rote.
“3200 feet, sir.”
“Good, it’s not often you remember a figure correctly,” Southwick grumbled. “Now, off with you and work it out.”
Paolo hurried below, carefully wiped the quadrant with the oily rag kept in the box for the purpose—spray and even the damp salt air soon corroded the brass—and put it away. A pencil, a piece of paper and the tables … He turned to the back of the tables, where he had long ago written notes. “Distance off by vertical angle”—and there was the formula. Hurriedly he worked out the sum and there was the answer. Two miles. But it couldn’t be! He did the sum again—just over seven miles. He did the sum a third time and the answer was still seven, and he scurried up the ladder to report to the Master.
But Mr Southwick seemed far from pleased with the news; Paolo saw that the bushy grey eyebrows were pulled down over his eyes like the portcullis of the castle at Volterra.
“Just over seven miles, Mr Orsini? When was that?”
“Well, sir, when I took the angle.”
“And have you any idea how long ago that was?” Southwick tapped his watch. “A quarter of an hour ago, Mr Orsini; fifteen whole minutes.”
“Yes, sir,” said Paolo nervously.
“And we are making nearly ten knots, Mr Orsini,” Southwick said relentlessly. “Will you favour me by telling me how far the ship has travelled in fifteen minutes?”
Paolo’s mind went blank, then he groped in his memory. One knot was one mile in an hour, which was a quarter of a mile in a quarter of an hour. So ten knots was—what?
“Two miles, sir?” he said hopefully, but the Master’s furious expression made him think again. A quarter of a mile at one knot. So at ten knots—why, ten quarters! So simple!
“One and a half miles, sir!”
“Mr Orsini,” Southwick said firmly, “I’ve no doubt that you have already calculated how far the ship travels in a quarter of an hour if she is making one knot.”
“Yes, sir. A quarter of a mile.”
“So if you multiply a quarter by ten, you get one and a half?”
“No, sir,” Paolo admitted ruefully, “two and a half.”
“Thank you,” Southwick said sarcastically. “Just bear in mind that an error of a mile in waters like these is more than enough to see the ship hit a shoal.”
“Yes, sir. It won’t happen again.”
“It will, Mr Orsini, it will,” Southwick said sadly. “You can knot and splice with the best o’ them, but your mathematics …”
Just like Mr Ramage, Southwick reflected. The Captain was a fine seaman; he could handle a ship with less effort than a skilled horseman could ride a quiet nag through a gateway, but tell him that A over B equals C and ask him how to calculate what A was and his eyes went glazed. Still, one had to be fair: Southwick knew his mathematics but Bowen nearly always beat him at chess; and the Surgeon could cut off a man’s leg and sew it all up, but he couldn’t hold a candle to the Captain when it came to guessing how the enemy would react in a given situation. And neither Aitken nor Wagstaffe, competent enough officers though they were, could spot trouble under a distant cloud like t
he Captain and have the ship snugly reefed down by the time a wicked squall came out of nowhere.
“The wake looks like a snake with colic,” he growled at the quartermaster. “Don’t let them use so much wheel.”
The big island was approaching fast now, and with the sun lifting higher he did not like the haze that was beginning to dull the outlines of the mountains, yet the glass was steady enough. That was the trouble with this damned coast; there were so many local winds. Maracaibo, another three hundred miles along the coast, was the worst; he had a note in his reference book of the chubasco which plagued the Gulf of Venezuela between May and August, coming up in the late afternoon and blowing a full gale and sometimes more for an hour, and then dying down and leaving you half-drowning in torrential rain. Along this stretch of the coast—more towards La Guaira, rather—the calderetas came screaming down from the mountains, hot, sharp blasts which could send masts by the board. His notebook mentioned just that; it was information from another master who had sailed along this coast, but there was no reference to what warning the calderetas gave—if any.
He looked at his watch: it wanted a few minutes to eight. Aitken would be on deck shortly to relieve him, so he picked up the slate and brought the details up to date.
Course, speed, distance run … Damnation, he was tired.
The Pearl Island. It sounded romantic enough, but he would be glad when it dropped over the horizon astern and the Saddle of Caracas came in sight. That was the one thing that made a landfall at La Guaira an easy task: the high ridge joining three peaks, the Silla de Caracas, stuck out like humps on camels, with one of them only three miles from La Guaira itself. What a ride those messengers must be having, galloping westwards to tell the Captain-General in Caracas that the English heretics had just stolen La Perla from Santa Cruz. Southwick grinned to himself as he imagined the Mayor of Santa Cruz drafting the letter.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
AT DAYBREAK the following morning the Jocasta was within fifteen miles of La Guaira, running along a jagged coast where mountain peak after mountain peak reared up only a few miles from the shore, the lower slopes covered with thick green forests. The coastline was a series of bold cliffs, looking like bastions defending the coastline from the constant battering of the sea, broken by occasional gaps where sandy beaches were backed by palm trees. Almost everywhere a heavy surf broke with a thunder that could be heard a mile offshore, spray erupting in white clouds as the waves surged along the rocks.
Ramage looked down at the chart spread on the binnacle box and then glanced up at the mountains. There were two ridges, the nearest with peaks rising to 4000 feet, the second which soared up to 9000 or more. And the three peaks that concerned him most were clear enough: the nearest was Izcaragua, nearly 8000 feet high; then six miles to the west was Pico de Naguata, the highest at 9000 feet, and joined by a long ridge which ran for seven miles to join Pico Avila, 7000 feet high and only three miles from La Guaira. Caracas, the capital of the province, was several miles inland, high among the mountains. There, thought Ramage, the Captain-General will soon be sitting down to his breakfast, blissfully unaware that horsemen are galloping over the mountains to warn him that La Perla has gone. Before they arrived, with luck, more horsemen would be galloping up the twisting road from La Guaira to tell him that La Perla was off the port.
La Guaira—he knew precious little about it. An open anchorage with deep water close to the shore, the port built on a narrow plain between two masses of rock … That could be almost anywhere. It was defended by the Trinchera Bastion on the eastern side and by El Vigia, a castle overlooking the port from a height of about four hundred feet. According to Southwick the anchorage was occasionally swept by enormous rollers from the north, coming two or three at a time; walls of water sometimes two miles long which wrenched ships from their anchors and tossed them up on the beach like driftwood.
And that, Ramage thought, is all we know about La Guaira, and entirely due to Southwick’s habit of filling notebooks with details of places whenever he could find someone who had been there. It was the main port of the province of Caracas, and (in more peaceful times) fresh water could be obtained from a small reservoir which had been made some five hundred feet above the town by damming up a river. Southwick’s notebook added that the main exports were cocoa, coffee, hides, dyewood and medicinal roots. A “particular cargo” comprising those mundane items and captured only by risking the Jocasta would make Admiral Davis explode with more flame and violence than had destroyed El Pilar …
Rennick was parading his Marines. They looked smart enough, and Ramage thought he detected a satisfied swagger in their bearing since they had blown up the forts. It would do no harm; they had a right to be proud of themselves and their officer. Although even Rennick did not know it yet, they would soon have to go below and take off their uniforms and put on seamen’s clothing. Any sharp-eyed watcher on shore with a telescope would spot those uniforms and know they were not Spanish; moreover, some of the Jocasta’s mutineers might be living in La Guaira, only too anxious to help their Spanish masters.
The Marines to wear seamen’s clothes, Ramage reflected, is about all I have decided about how we are going to cut out this merchant ship. Rennick has paraded his men, the gunner has been round inspecting the guns, Southwick and the bosun have checked over the tiller ropes and are now busy making sure that they missed nothing in yesterday’s examination of sheets, braces and halyards. Aitken has the conn, and every one of them, from the First Lieutenant to the cook’s mate, assumes that Mr Ramage has a completely foolproof plan for cutting out the ship, just as they were now convinced that he planned the Jocasta’s capture to the last detail from the first moment he sighted the Santa Barbara.
His plan at the moment was to haul down that Spanish ensign as soon as possible; the sooner the Jocasta was sailing under her proper colours the better, although for the time being, to avoid raising the alarm, because they were now barely a mile from the shore, the red and gold flag of Spain was streaming in the wind. The frigate was still La Perla as far as the Spaniards were concerned—at least at this end of the Main.
Everyone on board was cheerful enough—except Paolo. Since the funeral services he had been taking many vertical angles of every peak that Southwick clapped eyes on and had the height noted on the chart. Ramage doubted if Paolo’s book of tables had ever been used so much as it had in the past hour or two. The Master was being deliberately harsh with the boy, beginning with the way he stood as he held the quadrant. “Balance yourself as the ship rolls by swaying your body from the hips upwards,” he had growled. “Don’t move your buttocks; you look like a fish-wife walking down Billingsgate Hill!”
Now half a dozen seamen were hoisting up the grindstone: after the fighting across the Jocasta’s decks there were many cutlasses with nicks in the blades which would have to be ground out, and Ramage shuddered at the thought of having to listen to the scraping once again. The cook would come up on deck soon, announcing to anyone who cared to listen that he had “to put a sharp” on his cleavers: cutting up salt tack always took the edge off them. He always appeared when the grindstone was set up; he always made the same announcement, and no one ever listened. But when they had boarded the Jocasta, Ramage had seen the cook join one of the boarding parties, a meat cleaver in each hand. He was a deceptive man, so thin he seemed to be starving, and normally so quiet that no one would guess he enjoyed nothing better than boarding an enemy ship.
Once again Ramage looked along the line of mountains. He had never seen a shoreline so constantly beaten by rollers; there was always a jagged line of boiling surf thundering into the foot of the cliffs, flinging up fine spray which hung as a heavy mist, blurring the slots and crevices. Yesterday he had occasionally seen small boats inshore, fishermen from the villages built wherever there was a gap in the cliffs or where a bend in the coast formed a sheltered bay and gave them a lee. They must be hardy men, working under a blazing sun with a heavy sea running most of the
time. Presumably starvation faced them if a week of heavy rollers prevented them from launching their boats.
The Jocasta was making a fast passage: with this soldier’s wind the hourly cast of the log showed she was making an effortless ten knots. During the night he had expected the stunsails to carry away at times as occasional but brief gusts came up astern without warning.
The Main was a strange and unpredictable coast, and he wished he had sailed it before. This curious light over the mountains, for instance: as the sun came up it had not washed the peaks in its usual pinkness; instead it had cast a cold, almost whitish light, bringing with it an almost frightening clarity and throwing harsh, sharp-edged shadows. Every crack and crevice, valley and distant precipice showed up in the telescope as though it was only five miles away, instead of twenty. In contrast, there had been a haze yesterday which, up in the Leeward and Wind-ward Islands, always warned of strong winds to come. Now today there was this clearness. It could mean anything or nothing. Southwick’s notebook referred to calderetas sweeping down from the mountains, but gave no further details. Still, if they occurred only once or twice in a year there was no reason to suppose they would bother the Jocasta …
He was getting jumpy; it was as simple as that. He had been lucky at Santa Cruz and if he had had any sense he would be on his way back to English Harbour. Instead he was bound for La Guaira, commanding—as far as any onlooker was concerned—His Most Catholic Majesty’s frigate La Perla. Only another dozen miles to go; already Pico Avila was looming up high, towering over La Guaira just as Pico de Sante Fé stood at the back of Santa Cruz.
He looked down at his clothes. Providing he did not wear a hat, they were similar enough to the Spanish naval uniform. Southwick, with his chubby face and flowing white hair, would hardly pass for a Spaniard but, he told himself, people usually saw what they expected to see: at La Guaira they were waiting for Captain Velasquez to arrive in La Perla …
Southwick walked up to report on his inspection: “The tiller ropes are sound, sir, and so are the relieving tackles. Hardly a new rope in the ship but nothing needs changing. Just as well, since there isn’t a spare coil anywhere. We might get some from the Calypso when we meet her.”
