Ramage's Diamond r-7

by Dudley Pope

  A dull and distant boom interrupted him.

  Ramage leapt up with an oath. 'That damned battery on Diamond Hill!'

  There was a shadow at the skylight. 'Captain, sir,' Wagstaffe called. 'The battery on the Hill - a single shot and it's fallen half a mile short.'

  Ramage acknowledged the report and followed Southwick up the companionway. He took the telescope Wagstaffe was offering him and trained it on the ridge that ran round the Hill a third of the way up. It was too late, the smoke had drifted away in the wind and there was no sign of the guns. Suddenly he spotted a brief red glow, barely a pinpoint, and then a puff of smoke.

  'Watch the fall of shot,' he snapped. 'I don't want to lose sight of the battery. A clump of six small trees permanently leaning to the west from the wind - they're growing at the eastern end of the battery, A triangular bare rock in front. Yes, there's a track running just below - probably goes round to join up with the road that runs short of the north-east side ...'

  'Fell half a mile short, sir,' Wagstaffe said.

  'Pass the word for the Marine Lieutenant,' Ramage said and, looking round, nodded. 'Ah, there you are, Rennick. Take the glass and fix the position of that battery in your mind. Mr Southwick has its position marked on the chart, but you'll have to get up it in the dark tonight, unless their shooting improves and we have to leave in a hurry.'

  A third and a fourth shot from the battery fell half a mile short, but both were in line with the Juno. Southwick gave one of his enormous sniffs of contempt but Ramage said: They're only 6-pounders. If they were 12-pounders we'd be slipping our cable in a hurry. These fellows know what they're up to; they just don't have the range.'

  'Aye, belike they'll pass the word to the Governor and he'll decide they need bigger guns,' Southwick said gloomily. 'Better we get under way now and bowl 'em over.'

  'Have a look through the glass,' Ramage said patiently. 'The battery stands well back on the ridge that spirals up the mountain. Twenty or thirty yards back, as far as I can see. Once we were close enough to open fire - don't forget they have an advantage of being five hundred feet up - that ridge protects them: it's a natural rampart. We'd need mortars to lob shells over the ridge and down on to them. A bomb ketch.'

  Southwick glanced at the Marine Lieutenant, who was slowly swinging the telescope down the side of the mountain and across to the long beach running to the eastward, and muttered: 'He'll never find his way up there in the dark.'

  Ramage saw Rennick stiffen but continue his careful survey of the coastline. He had obviously heard Southwick's comment. Then he turned, handed the telescope to Ramage and said: 'If you can spare a boat to land me and my men at the western end of that long beach, sir, I'll have those guns. I estimate the emplacement is large enough for three, though they're only firing one for ranging. I'll get them pitched over the edge within two hours.'

  Ramage nodded, pleased at the lieutenant's enthusiasm. 'You can have a couple of dozen seamen too, if you need them.'

  'Thank you, sir, but my own men will be sufficient. A few extra seamen in the boat, perhaps, in case there's cavalry patrolling along the beach.'

  'Very well, get your men ready. Mr Wagstaffe, a cutter if you please, and a dozen extra men with muskets. Make sure they have plenty of powder and shot for the boat gun - cavalry might arrive before Mr Rennick returns from the battery.'

  Half an hour later Ramage and Southwick watched the cutter run up on the beach, having stayed out of range of the battery, wait for a few minutes as the Marines scrambled on shore and then come out again, rowing round to a small cove fifty yards west of the beach and in the lee of the mountain. There, Ramage noted, the boat would be out of sight of any cavalry galloping along the beach.

  Southwick grunted in the nearest he ever came to expressing satisfaction with Marines. 'They'll be all right. Pity they can't surprise those damned Frenchmen. Well, sir, I see the men are ready to re-anchor the Surcouf to get that ten-inch cable in. I'll go over and keep an eye on them.'

  Aitken was now bringing the schooner Créole in from the westward: he had seen the Juno's signal ordering him on board and Wagstaffe was waiting with a seabag ready containing his clothes and quadrant. The Second Lieutenant was obviously excited and Ramage knew that this command, however brief it might prove to be, would make up for the disappointment of seeing the Third Lieutenant go off to Barbados in La Mutine.

  Ramage took a pencil and pad from his pocket and went aft with a telescope, sitting down on the breech of the aftermost gun. He spent the next half an hour examining the Diamond Rock with the telescope, occasionally making a sketch on the pad and scribbling notes.

  He had already drawn the south side of the great rock while in the cutter. There it was completely vertical from sea level to within a hundred feet or so of the top; then it sloped back gently for fifty feet, and then more sharply again to the peak. His sketch resembled a tooth, the raking pack at the top being the natural shape to bring the tooth to a point.

  His inspection in the cutter had confirmed what he had feared from the start: the only way of getting guns up the Diamond, to whatever height, was by jackstay. Only the gun covering the landing place was going to be straight forward - if lowering it to the sea bed from a boat and then dragging it ashore could be described as straightforward.

  He turned to a fresh page and copied the sketch he had made from the cutter, drawing the tooth-shaped rock with the vertical cliff face to the left. Then from sea level he drew a diagonal line up to the top of the cliff. That would be the jackstay, secured at the top round the rocky outcrop, and at the bottom to the anchored Juno. Running up the jackstay would be a big block, and from that would hang the gun. The block and gun would be hauled up the jackstay by a purchase, one set of blocks attached to the big block, and the other to the top of the cliff. The hauling part of the rope would come down to the Juno, where it would go round the capstan.

  As he pencilled in the lines showing the ropes it seemed almost alarmingly simple, though he could imagine the difficulty he was going to have describing it all in a letter to Gianna. Imagine, he would tell her, that you have to hoist a heavy weight from the garden up to a high window in a house. You take a clothes line and tie one end to the window ledge and the other to the base of a tree in the garden, so the line is taut and running down a steep angle.

  You put a pulley on the line (Gianna would be furious with him for using the word 'pulley' instead of the nautical 'block' which she understood well enough), and hang the weight on it. Then you hook one more pulley on the weight, and another to the window ledge. You pass a rope from the window ledge down to the pulley on the weight, back round the pulley on the window ledge and then down to the garden. Allora, cara mia, as you stand by the tree and haul on the rope, the weight will slowly rise up the line. And that, he would add, is what we did with the guns, give or take a few blocks, several hundred feet of rope and a few tons of weight. He could see her tracing with her finger as she read the letter, working it all out . . . She could never imagine just how close the Juno would be moored to the cliff, he thought grimly; so close that the ends of the yards would almost touch the rock face. He put the pad and pencil in his pocket and turned to watch the Marines attacking the battery as the Créole came in and anchored.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Next morning Ramage returned on board the Juno after inspecting the Surcouf feeling much more cheerful. Working through the night with Aitken encouraging them, the men now had the maincourse bent on the yard and furled, and the maintopsail and topgallant were both neatly faked down in slings ready for hoisting. The fourcourse was also bent on and men were sorting out the buntlines and clewlines before furling it. The foretopsail and topgallant were being hoisted up from the sail room. How they had sorted out all that running rigging by lantern light Ramage could not imagine, but by sunset the Surcouf would be ready to go into action against her erstwhile owners.

  Ramage's main worry when he first heard that the Surcouf’s sails were all on board and
stowed in the sail room was that the rats would have got at them. They were so bulky (a frigate's maincourse comprised more than 3000 square feet of canvas and a whole suit totalled 14000 square feet and weighed four tons) that it was impossible to keep them inspected properly in a sail room, and even a single rat chewing a tunnel through the folds of a stowed sail could do more damage than a dozen roundshot. However, it was clear that the French had only just put the sails on board and many small patches showed they had checked them over before doing so. '

  It had been a good idea to fetch Aitken back: he was in his element commissioning the Surcouf and Ramage had the impression he had been getting bored with tacking back and forth with the Créole. The young Scot was fascinated by the differences in the French and British ways of rigging ships. They were slight but often significant, and he pointed them out to Ramage with all the excitement of a collector. It was an enthusiasm Ramage shared; he recognized in the Scot another man like himself, a squirrel who collected odd and often useless items of information and stored them away in his head for mental winters.

  It was a habit, Ramage knew from bitter experience, that could make you unpopular in certain company. Too many men had no real interest in anything and for practical purposes were blind to most of the things that went on around them. Ramage now kept a tight rein on his tongue, but in the past had often commented on something he found interesting, only to find the other person thought he was showing off his knowledge. The episode that had made him vow he would never again begin a conversation with anyone he did not know well concerned pelicans.

  He had noticed that when these heavy birds dived at a very steep angle into the water after a fish, often from a considerable height, at the very last moment they bent their long necks close up against their bodies and, for reasons which Ramage could not work out, always surfaced facing the opposite direction. It had been a topic of conversation and observation for Ramage and Southwick for weeks the last time they had been in the Caribbean. One day Ramage had mentioned it in front of a group of captains - he had been a mere lieutenant then - and to a man the captains had stared at him as though they had suddenly found in their midst someone who had just escaped from Bedlam. All of them had served in the Caribbean for at least two years and had obviously not noticed it. Aitken, who had just arrived in the West Indies for the first time, had not only noticed it but already had several theories and, he recently told Ramage, had drawn many sketches which he intended sending to an eminent naturalist he knew in Edinburgh. Apparently he had shown the sketches to Southwick, who had been able to add to them. The two of them had settled down to try to calculate the most driving question of all: why did such a heavy bird as a pelican, diving from such great heights, not break its neck?

  As Ramage paused on the quarterdeck, trying to switch his thoughts from the pelicans diving round the Diamond to the problems facing him over the Rock itself, he realized that the Surgeon was waiting to speak to him, and with him was Rennick, the Marine Lieutenant.

  'How are the new patients, Bowen?'

  'Both in good shape, I'm happy to say, sir,' he said, handing Ramage the copy of the sick list. 'The cutlass wound was a clean cut, and I can see the healing has already begun. The other man is badly bruised but I have given him another thorough examination this morning, and there are definitely no bones broken.'

  'He must have fallen fifty feet, sir,' Rennick said apologetically.

  'Now he knows the perils of standing near a recoiling gun,' Ramage said grimly. 'I hope you've thought about what I was telling you last night...'

  'I have indeed, sir. The trouble was that I had heard of that method before - turning a gun with its breech towards the edge of a cliff and firing it. I did it because it seemed certain the recoil would run it back over the edge of the cliff.'

  'And so it would have, if the platform had been level, but there you had an uneven and rocky surface. No wonder the damned gun ran round in a curve and turned over. It only needed one of the trucks to hit a bump.'

  'Well, sir,' said Rennick defensively, 'at least we managed to roll it over the edge of the cliff in the end.'

  'Where it now lies undamaged and ready for the French to salvage, if we give them the chance,' Ramage said sharply. ‘A brass gun, too. Worth three iron guns, as you well know.' ‘We destroyed the other two, though, sir,' Rennick said contritely.

  Ramage nodded, accepting Rennick's apology. 'That's the safest way - double or triple charge, three roundshot and everyone behind some shelter when you fire. That's why you're supposed to carry an extra long trigger line when you attack a battery.'

  When the lieutenant went red, Ramage asked suspiciously: 'You did carry one, didn't you?'

  Rennick shook his head and clearly wished the deck would open up and swallow him. 'No, sir, but I joined up the three the French were using ...’

  Ramage knew that the Marine Lieutenant had learned several lessons and he would not repeat the mistakes again. Apart from that, it had been a brave and well executed attack, and he did not want Rennick to lose confidence in himself. 'Very well, you destroyed the battery, which is what matters,' he said. ‘I’ll have a word with your men later.'

  Rennick gave a relieved grin, saluted and left. Ramage looked at Bowen's sick list. 'I see you've discharged three more men.'

  'Yes, sir. At least, they asked to be discharged: I'd have kept them another day, but they insisted.'

  'Insisted?' Ramage asked curiously. 'I thought every man's ambition is to get on the sick list for a few days' rest!'

  'It is in most ships - indeed, it was for the first couple of weeks after we left England. But all that's changed; these three men apparently heard some rumour about the Diamond -' Bowen nodded towards the Rock '- and they, well, it seemed to me they wanted to join in the fun.'

  'Fun! They'll have to work so hard they'll probably end up back on the sick list suffering from heat stroke!'

  'We'll see, sir,' Bowen said with a knowing look.

  Ramage walked forward to the fo'c'sle, where Southwick was busy with a party of seamen. He was watching while the carpenter and bos'n worked on an enormous block of unusual shape. The big lignum vitae sheave fitted into a thick wooden shell, one side of which was longer than the other, and open at one end. Called a voyol block, it was a spare one and rarely used. Now it would ride up the jackstay with a gun slung underneath it. Like many things in a ship that are seldom used, the block had been stowed without being washed in fresh water, and the salt had made the sheave and pin seize up. Now the carpenter was driving out the pin with his maul. It would be cleaned and driven back after being smeared with tallow, and a liberal amount of tallow would be put on the sheave so that it turned freely.

  Large coils of five-inch circumference rope had been hoisted up from the store room and men were busy long-splicing them to make up an eighteen hundred foot length. That would be used (with the two large single-sheave blocks which had already been smeared with tallow) to make up the enormous tackle which would haul both gun and voyol block up the jackstay. More men were making up strops, using old rope that would not stretch. They would sling the gun beneath the voyol block. Mentally he ticked them off the list as he walked aft again to look over the taffrail, where Lacey, the Fourth Lieutenant, was standing and occasionally shouting down instructions. Already the Juno's two cutters were being secured together, ready to take on shore the 6-pounder gun that would cover the landing place. One spar was lashed across the bow of each of them like a narrow bridge, and another near the stern, so that they were kept eight feet apart.

  Amidships the crew of the jolly boat were about to cast off, towing the carriage of the 6-pounder and carrying the breeching, train tackle, handspikes, rammer and sponge in the boat. The gun itself was lying on the Juno's deck with slings round it, ready for hoisting out.

  Ramage shouted down to the coxswain: 'Are you ready to go?'

  'All ready, sir.'

  Ramage called to Lacey, who hurried forward to get into the boat. 'I'm afra
id the cutters aren't ready yet, sir.'

  'I'll keep an eye on them. Now, you're perfectly clear what has to be done?'

  'Aye, aye, sir: tow the carriage round to the cove. If we can float it into the cove and haul it ashore, do so; otherwise secure it so that it floats clear and come back for more men.'

  Ramage nodded and Lacey scrambled down into the jolly boat.

  Today's work towards the Diamond plan was easy; he could only pray that tomorrow - in fact for the next three days - the sea would stay as smooth, with no swell. He'd be quite content for today to get the 6-pounder mounted on that ledge, to cover the landing place.

  A lookout aloft hailed that La Créole was coming into sight round the end of Diamond Hill, but had no signals flying. Ramage, noting that Wagstaffe had searched as far as Pointe des Salines without sighting anything, acknowledged the hail and moodily began pacing the quarterdeck, occasionally going aft and looking down at the men working in the cutters. They were doing perfectly well - Lacey, like most young officers, was too keen to let men work on their own.

  Fifteen paces forward and he was abreast the skylight over his cabin, three more and he was passing the mizenmast. Three more and the wheel was abeam and the binnacle. Six more and he was passing the companionway, its coaming studded with roundshot which fitted like black oranges into cup-shaped holes cut in the wood. Now he was level with the capstan and the water cask with the Marine sentry guarding it. He had doubled the daily ration for the men while they were doing this heavy work: there was plenty to spare with the Surcouf’s casks available.

  The deck was scorching hot, even though the awning was stretched overhead, and as he turned to walk aft he felt a momentary dizziness. He was tired and bored. Tired because there was so little time for sleep, and bored because he was the Captain, the man whose life comprised weeks of boredom, of just ensuring that the day-to-day ship routine was carried out properly, punctuated every few weeks (months, more likely) by a few hours of action. He reached the taffrail, glanced down at the cutters, and began to walk forward again.