The Ramage Touch

by Dudley Pope

  Now the men were coming up from below, each clutching four or five 12-pounder roundshot in their arms.

  ‘It might work,’ Southwick admitted. ‘It did for the bomb ketches on the way down to Argentario. But – forgive me asking, sir,’ he added warily, ‘what makes you think we’re not properly trimmed now?’

  The question was a fair one because the ship’s trim was the master’s responsibility and as provisions and water were consumed he had to make sure that the casks, sacks and barrels were taken from parts of the ship that ensured she remained floating level, to the marks set down by her designer.

  ‘We may well be properly trimmed,’ Ramage said, ‘but from the day we captured the ship we’ve never had anything official to go on, only the references in the French logs noting her draught forward and aft whenever the French master could be bothered to have a look and note it down.’

  ‘But she always seems to sail well enough,’ Southwick protested, feeling that his professional skill was being criticized.

  ‘Yes, she always seems to sail well enough against another British frigate of roughly the same size, but this is the first time we’ve sailed her against an identical French frigate.’

  ‘We don’t seem to be doing too badly either,’ Southwick grumbled. ‘She hasn’t gained a yard on us…’

  ‘And we haven’t gained a yard on her, either,’ Ramage said grimly.

  ‘No, sir, but we’ve spent a season in the tropics; we’ve a lot more barnacles than she has, I’m sure.’

  ‘I’m not,’ Ramage said shortly. ‘The French dockyards are overworked and have next to no materials.’

  ‘But what are you going to do now, sir?’ Southwick asked anxiously, gesturing at the crowd of seamen now gathering round the mainmast with their arms full of roundshot.

  Ramage pointed to a telescope. ‘Look at the Furet. She’s griping. They’re having to use the rudder every few moments to keep her on course. You can see the white feathers of water it pulls up, like a hen scratching in the dust.’

  ‘But so are we, sir,’ Southwick said defensively. ‘A ship always yaws when running like this, and the stunsails are out to starboard. ’Tain’t as though we’re running dead before the wind so we have stunsails set both sides.’

  ‘Go on, look,’ Ramage said firmly. ‘She’s not yawing, she’s griping. She’s down by the bow. Every time her rudder goes over it stirs up the water like an egg whisk.’

  He waited until Southwick had the telescope to his eye, and then added: ‘Now you can see…Aft she’s floating a foot or more too high; the blade of the rudder isn’t deep enough. Instead of turning the ship, it’s slowing her up, like a paddle held out sideways. Not much, but it must add up to half a knot. And we’re doing the same – I guessed as much and that’s why I had a look.’

  Southwick, still staring through the telescope, muttered in near-disbelief: ‘There…there…there…and there…and there…’

  At the same time Ramage watched the men at the Calypso’s wheel. They turned the wheel a few spokes and let it run back as though they were working in unison with the men at the Furet’s wheel.

  ‘We’re just the same,’ Ramage said as Southwick turned away and put down the telescope. ‘You never get the best out of a ship unless you have a trial of sailing against a sister ship.’

  ‘I know,’ Southwick said miserably, ‘but I’d have sworn this ship couldn’t be sailed any faster than we’ve sailed her up to now. Thousands of miles…’

  By now there were a hundred men gathered round the mainmast, each cradling roundshot. A hundred men each weighing an average of, say, eleven stone and holding sixty pounds of shot…Ramage struggled with the mathematics. That meant each man totalled 214 pounds, and a hundred of them totalled 21,400 pounds, which divided by 2,240 gave the answer in tons. Nine tons, in fact.

  ‘Distance!’ he said curtly to Southwick who, immediately grasping what Ramage had in mind, hurriedly snatched up the quadrant and then noted the angle and the time on the slate.

  Ramage picked up the speaking-trumpet, which had been left beside the binnacle. ‘You men holding shot – move over to the lee side.’

  He waited until the group was close against the bulwarks on the larboard side.

  ‘When I give the word, I want you to walk aft in pairs, up the quarterdeck ladder here on the lee side and go as far aft as possible. You can sit against the taffrail with your shot. Don’t drop ’em; I don’t want them rolling around the quarterdeck like a children’s marble alley. Right, start coming aft!’

  He called across to the men at the wheel and the quartermaster, who had overheard the conversation with Southwick and understood the purpose of the experiment: ‘Once all these men are aft, you might find the ship handles slightly differently. You, Quartermaster, watch for it; and you men at the wheel, I want you to feel it through the spokes – or not, as the case may be.’

  Two by two the barefooted seamen came tramping up the wide treads of the ladder, all of them grinning broadly, and most of them beginning to perspire with the weight of the shot.

  They passed Ramage, passed the carronades, and as the first pair reached the taffrail subsided on to the deck with groans. The rest of the men followed and within two or three minutes they had occupied one side of the deck and taken up most of the room round the two aftermost carronades.

  Ramage waited a couple of minutes and then walked over to the men at the wheel. ‘Do you feel any difference?’

  Both men nodded their heads eagerly. ‘Yes, sir, she’s a lot lighter to the touch. She always seemed to be wanting to gripe before but now – well, she’s almost sailing ’erself.’

  ‘S’fact, sir,’ the quartermaster said. ‘She ain’t yawing now, either.’ He looked at the wheel and whispered to the two men. ‘Yes, sir, she takes just a quarter of a turn on account of the stunsails up to weather, and then she’s as good as steering ’erself.’

  In a minute or two, Ramage guessed, Southwick would report that the Calypso was beginning to catch up on the Furet…In the meantime he had most of the guns’ crews squatting up here holding roundshot which, the moment they let go of them, would roll back and forth, cracking ankles and spoiling the whole trim once again.

  He snatched up the speaking-trumpet and bellowed to the men left in the waist of the ship. ‘Quickly, you men: each grab a hammock and get up here!’ He stood there impatiently and suddenly blared: ‘Don’t worry about the blasted hammock cloth – we’re expecting an action, not an admiral’s inspection.’

  It was not fair, and anyway the men were quite right because the long hammock cloth – a strip of canvas covering intended to keep the lashed-up hammocks dry – would get in the way of the guns, but the guns’ crews could get that clear when they were back at their posts.

  As men came running up the quarterdeck ladder with hammocks over their shoulders Ramage called to the boatswain, who was one of them, ‘Undo the hammock lashings and put in shot, then lash them up into bags, so the shot won’t roll all over the place. Stow ’em as far aft as you can.’

  While the men dropped the shot into the hammocks and joked as they hurried to make up the bags, some of them recognizing their own hammocks by the numbers painted on them and groaning at the thought of scrubbing out the blacking from the shot that was already making the flax look like zebra skin, Ramage was conscious out of the corner of his eye that Southwick seemed to be doing a jig just forward of the binnacle.

  ‘Well,’ Ramage demanded. ‘What’s this – the beginning of the Helston Floral Dance?’

  ‘Could be, could be, sir,’ the master said, grinning as he pointed to the slate. ‘We’ve caught up a hundred yards – leastways, what I mean is we’re now overhauling them.’ He snatched up his telescope and after examining the Furet said: ‘Take a look, sir. Three heads along the taffrail, all officers, like starlings on a bough. The third one is using a quadrant. I can almost hear him reporting that the angle is greater…and they don’t know why…’

  As soon a
s the seamen aft put down their shot they returned to their guns, all taking a good look forward as they went down the quarterdeck ladder. Normally when serving at the guns their view forward was limited by the afterside of the fo’c’sle, but now, probably for the first time in their lives, they had had a good look at the opposition; a captain-on-the-quarterdeck eye view, Ramage thought, just as he realized that the weight of a hundred men was now moving forward again, leaving only the roundshot. Too late to worry now…

  Guns loaded and run out on both sides; the starboard side manned for the moment. It would be nice to have enough men to fight both sides at once but he doubted if there was a ship in the Navy with a full complement that could do that. Anyway, the Calypso’s men were now so well trained that if he had the chance to get both broadsides fired into the French, the enemy would think both sides were manned.

  He would attack the Frenchman’s larboard side. With the wind from the north-west and on this course, it meant that if the Frenchman tried to bolt he would have to turn away to leeward – and the Calypso would be there to stop him.

  By now Aitken was back on the quarterdeck, looking with amusement at the white bags covering the larboard after corner of the quarterdeck.

  ‘Looks as though it’s done the trick, sir,’ he commented. ‘But it’s going to be a pounding match once we get alongside.’

  ‘Pound her well and then board her. We’re short of officers to lead boarding parties.’

  ‘Aye, sir: Wagstaffe, Kenton, Martin, Orsini – we could do with them now.’

  The Furet’s hull was entirely black: the only colours were the dull buff paint used on the masts and yards, and the inside of her gunports, which were red: that was traditional. And the name on the transom. The Revolution, Ramage thought, seemed to be against colour. Perhaps if equality was a colour, it was black, while fraternity was buff. The French Navy seemed to have run out of colours when they came to liberty – unless you include the blood red used inside the gunports…The Royal Navy issued no more colours than that; but neither did their writing paper have ‘Liberté’ and ‘Egalité’ printed on the top. It was hard to imagine Their Lordships in the Admiralty administering a Navy with a Tree of Liberty planted in the forecourt in Whitehall.

  He stopped his train of thought for a moment and reached for his telescope. It was curious the amount of water suddenly flowing over the side from the Furet’s scuppers and scattering into droplets like smoke as the wind caught it. They must be wetting the decks to put down more sand in anticipation of battle. There was enough heat in the sun to dry the planking very quickly, but one would have thought a few buckets of water slung over them from a tub would be enough: with this amount of water the sand must be sluicing over the side too.

  So much water, he thought, putting the telescope to his eye, that they must be using the deckwash pumps. No, it could not be that: both ships were sailing too fast for deckwash pumps to draw, even if lead piping went down the side to the water instead of canvas hose.

  Hell fire! The water was not just a spray now; it was running in a stream through the lee side scuppers – in spurts, rather like blood pulsing when a man lost a leg. The Calypso’s pump dale was also on the lee side, a wooden trough which carried the bilge water over the side from the great chain pump.

  It must be the chain pump. He pictured many men turning the big cranked handle to rotate the sprocket wheel which turned the endless chain and brought each leather disc up the pipe casing with its quota of water, emptying it into the trough of the pump dale as it came over the top and started its downward journey again.

  Then he cursed himself for his stupidity: the French captain was trying to lighten his ship in just the way Ramage himself had considered starting freshwater casks, throwing a few guns over the side and jettisoning a couple of the boats. Very sensibly the French captain had decided to sacrifice the fresh water, so that now there were thousands of gallons of water in the Furet’s bilge which his men were busy pumping out. The Calypso’s bilges were pumped every morning, on Ramage’s orders; not because she had a leak but because water left in the bilge soon began to stink. He had been in some ships of the line commanded by men who should know better whose bilges smelled like the Fleet Ditch at a midsummer noon. Anyway the chain pump leathers wanted wetting daily if they were not to dry and crack.

  Southwick looked round at him and nodded cheerfully. His latest reading with the quadrant showed the Calypso still gaining. ‘That ship is about five hundred yards ahead of us – from our jib boom to his taffrail, sir.’

  ‘It’s still going to take a long time to make up that distance,’ Ramage said gloomily. ‘Half an hour, anyway. Still, the men can have their dinner; it’s long overdue.’

  It was as if the Furet was towing the Calypso, Ramage thought irritably; despite his recent gain, the distance hardly changed now – not perceptibly, anyway; just two identical frigates surging southwards with a quartering wind, one flying the Tricolour, the other British colours. The Calypso was by far the smarter, Ramage thought; but paint did not make a ship fast nor did scrubbed decks stop barnacles and weeds growing on the bottom. No doubt the copper sheathing was by now wafer-thin in places, no longer keeping the growth away, and it was equally certain that many thin sheets would have ripped off, leaving only the stubby sheathing nails sticking out like the heads of pins pressed into a pincushion.

  He would give anything to see the face of the Furet’s captain, just to know what the man looked like. The Frenchman knew his business, that much was certain. Ramage would bet that the fellow had learned his profession under the old Navy and, having no aristocratic attachments (and no enemies to accuse him falsely), had received well-merited promotion. Ramage felt that if he could catch a glimpse of the man’s face he might be able to guess what his next move was likely to be, like a prizefighter watching his opponent’s eyes for a warning of the next punch.

  He lifted his telescope and saw the three heads facing aft at the taffrail, obviously watching the Calypso racing along in the Furet’s wake. In the tropics one would expect to see flying fish making their graceful waltzes over the wavetops, but they were nearly twenty degrees too far north…

  Suddenly men were climbing up the Furet’s starboard sbrouds, going to the stunsail booms at the ends of the yards. Perhaps the French captain knew a trick to make them draw better. Curious that so much water was still pouring through the scuppers on the lee side – the men working the pumps must be getting tired.

  ‘How long ago did you take the next to last altitude?’ he asked Southwick, who consulted his slate and then looked at his watch.

  ‘Seven minutes, sir. I’ve been taking one every four minutes.’

  He had first noticed the pumps going just before Southwick took that sight. Say eight minutes. That was a long time to have the men pumping at that rate, because there was no doubt they were making that cranked handle spin, probably with a couple of bosun’s mates standing over them with starters…Suddenly his thoughts froze as if a highwayman had jabbed him in the stomach with a pistol and demanded: ‘Your money or your life.’

  The Furet’s pumps were going, and now there were men gathered at the starboard end of each of her yards, about to do something with the stunsails. What trick was that captain up to? No answer, no hint of a reason, came to mind.

  ‘Stand by sheets and braces,’ he snapped at Aitken, who snatching up the speaking-trumpet and bellowed through it, although he was clearly startled by so unexpected an order, which would sacrifice the Calypso’s stunsails and booms.

  ‘Stand by at the larboard guns – yes, larboard, blast it!’

  Again Aitken bellowed as he repeated the order, while Southwick hurriedly snatched up his quadrant and once again moved the vernier a fraction, noted the time and wrote the figures on the slate. All this Ramage saw only from the corner of his eye because he was watching the Furet through the telescope again.

  Suddenly the head of the Furet’s maintopgallant stunsail dropped a few feet and then s
treamed forward along the starboard side, flogging and twisting like the tail of a kite, and a moment later the rest of the stunsails were cut adrift, canvas and rope threshing in unison. She was going to turn suddenly to starboard, Ramage was certain of that and he was going to turn first to cut her off. If he was wrong he would lose a few hundred yards, but he had to gamble.

  He shouted the order to Aitken and pointed at the quartermaster. An eight-point turn meant the men had to spin the great wheel several revolutions, and the quartermaster crouched ready over the binnacle, watching the compass and the dogvanes as well as glancing up at the luffs of the sails, which were beginning to flap as they lost the wind, although the yards were already being braced up.

  ‘Larboard guns to fire as soon as they bear on the target,’ Ramage said to Aitken, who again shouted the order through the speaking-trumpet, although from the sound of the Scotsman’s voice and the look on his face he probably thought his captain had suddenly gone mad because the Furet was still sailing on the same course with the Calypso astern of her.

  Then the Calypso’s bow began to swing to starboard, the Furet seeming to slide away over to the larboard bow, like an ice-skater…Ramage had guessed wrongly. Already the Calypso’s sails were slatting overhead as seamen struggled with the sheets and tacks controlling the sails and braces which trimmed the yards, the stunsails tearing adrift and the stunsail booms breaking with a noise like fresh carrots snapping.