by Dudley Pope
“No, but I thought they might,” Ramage admitted. “They can make a couple of tacks, then come out again after we’ve passed.”
Once past the entrance to Half Acre Creek the Medway widened as Sheerness came in sight to starboard and the flat expanse of the Isle of Grain stretched away to larboard, a rough green and brown carpet of marshes and saltings and mudflats that reached across to the banks of the Thames.
“Looks as though we could anchor for the night off Warden Point, after getting in the powder,” Southwick said. “We’ll be close by the entrance of the Four Fathom Channel, ready for an early start tomorrow, and there’ll be enough moon later on for the watchkeepers to see the cliffs between East End and the Point.”
Ramage nodded. “We must be one of the few ships ever to sail on the proper day after a refit.”
By dawn the Calypso was steering along the north Kent coast under all plain sail with a brisk westerly breeze and an almost calm sea. The Great Nore and the Thames narrowing on its way through Sea Reach and up to London were astern. Southwick ticked off the bays and the towns, and Ramage was reminded of his days as a young midshipman.
St Mildred’s Bay and then Margate; Palm Bay and then Long Nose Spit, with Foreness Point making the northern end of Botany Bay and White Ness the southern. Ramage called Paolo to his side and pointed out the North Foreland, the north-eastern tip of Kent, unimpressive under a watery sun to a youth who could compare it with Tuscany or some of the West Indian islands.
The Calypso then turned south to steer through the Gulf Stream, leaving the Goodwin Sands to larboard. The yards were braced up, tacks and sheets hauled, and the frigate began to pitch slightly with the two men at the wheel watching the luffs of the sails as carefully as the quartermaster and Martin, who was officer of the deck.
Ramage occasionally pointed out places of interest as the frigate sailed the fourteen miles between the North and the South Foreland, which was the official name of the famous “White Cliffs of Dover.” Seas breaking well beyond the larboard beam showed the main banks of the Goodwin Sands while on the other side of the shore was Deal, nestling amid the shingle behind the Downs, which was the favourite anchorage for ships waiting for bad weather to ease before beginning the long beat down-Channel.
A cast of the log showed the Calypso making eight knots, and soon they were hardening in sheets as the frigate passed Dover and bore up for Dungeness, the wedge of flat land, a mixture of beach and marsh, forming the south-eastern corner of the country.
With Folkestone abeam to starboard, Ramage pointed to the long, low, grey shape on the horizon to larboard. “You can see the French coast,” he told Paolo. “There’s Calais.”
Jackson was the quartermaster and standing only a few feet away. Ramage’s mind went back to the time when he had received orders from the Admiralty to see how near the French were to launching an invasion, and the only way of finding out was to go to France. He had enlisted the help of smugglers and gone to France with Jackson, Stafford and Rossi. The smuggler who risked his life for them had, ironically, been a deserter who had once served with Ramage.
“I wonder if ‘Slushy’ Dyson still smuggles out of Folkestone,” he said to Jackson.
“I was just thinking the same thing, sir; we must be crossing the wake of that boat of his. Probably a rich man by now, with a big estate!”
“Not ‘Slushy’—if you remember, he was born under an unlucky star.”
Jackson peered down at the compass on the weather side and then at the luffs of the topsails. “Not so unlucky really, sir. He should have been hanged for mutiny, but I seem to remember you gave him a couple of dozen lashes and transferred him to another ship!”
Ramage laughed at the memory. “Just as well I did; if he hadn’t become a smuggler we might never have got back from France!”
By now Paolo, all ears, was begging to be told the story, but Ramage shook his head. “Too many ships for us to watch. Every fishing boat must be out, and you saw how many merchant ships were pouring out of the Thames. No more convoys now; the first ship at the market-place gets the highest prices!”
Paolo, telescope tucked under his arm, tanned and far from the nervous youngster Ramage had first taken to sea (as a grudging gesture to Gianna, he had to admit), said: “I’ve never seen so many ships scattered across the sea, sir. But this is the first occasion I’ve ever been to sea in peacetime!”
“You get just as cold and wet and tired,” Ramage said, “with many more chances of collisions.”
“And no chance of action,” Paolo said sadly. “No more actions, no more prizes …”
Ramage spoke quietly as he said: “For a while, anyway. Remember, we were trying to persuade your aunt to stay in England.”
With that Paolo cheered up. “Yes, sir; I suppose we should consider this a holiday. Is that one of the packet boats?” he asked, pointing to a schooner crossing ahead.
Ramage looked at it with his telescope. “Yes, the Dover-Calais packet. Started again after being stopped for eight years.”
The wind remained steady in strength and direction and Ramage tacked the Calypso as they approached within six miles of Fécamp, easily recognizable because it sat in a gap in the cliffs. The frigate could comfortably steer north by west, and by nightfall they tacked to south by west as the Owers, off Selsey Bill, came abeam. Ramage’s only concession to peace was that the Calypso had four lookouts on deck at night, one on each bow and each quarter, instead of the six of wartime. With so many ships sailing up and down-Channel, the risk of collision was considerable, and the Calypso, with a newly coppered bottom, new sails and well trained ship’s company, was probably one of the fastest. This meant she faced the added risk of overtaking some merchant ship lumbering along without lights and running into her stern. Which, Ramage thought gloomily, would mean carrying away the Calypso’s jib-boom and bowsprit, and that in turn would send the foremast by the board …
Southwick, after filling in the new course and the time, put the slate back in the binnacle drawer and, as if guessing Ramage’s mood, walked over and said: “It’s like hopping across Whitehall with your eyes shut, isn’t it, sir? I’d forgotten what peacetime was like. Still, war can be worse: I remember once in a ship of the line finding myself in the middle of a West India convoy one night. More than one hundred ships, we found out afterwards.”
To Ramage it had all the qualities of a nightmare: far more dangerous than battle. A ship of the line could cut a merchant ship in half; with the bowsprits of a couple of merchant ships caught in her shrouds she could lose her masts. “What did you do?”
“Ah, Sir Richard Strachan was the Captain.” Southwick laughed at the memory. “I was only a passenger but I happened to be on deck, and so was Sir Richard. A pitch-black night; we hadn’t seen a ship for a week. Suddenly we hear shouts nearby and sails flapping. Then our lookouts start shouting; a ship on each bow and one on our larboard beam—all crossing from the starboard side. You know what a cusser Sir Richard is: well, he cusses, but in a trice he has the fore-topsail back and we heave-to on the larboard tack and start burning blue flares. That was quick thinking, I must say: we hadn’t a hope of seeing and dodging all those merchant ships; but we were so big that once they saw us—we must have looked a splendid sight, all lit up with those flares—they could do the dodging. It must have taken an hour for them to pass us, and there was Sir Richard with the speaking-trumpet swearing at every one that came within hail.”
“He can swear,” Ramage commented.
“We could hardly stand for laughing, sir. ‘Here’s another one, sir,’ the First Lieutenant would say, and if she was going to pass ahead Sir Richard would run up on the fo’c’s’le, jam the speaking-trumpet to his mouth and bellow at the Master something like ‘Call yourself a man of God, do you? You look more like Satan to me!’”
The wind veered slowly north-west during Saturday night and by dawn on Sunday the Calypso was making nine knots, steering south-west, and Ramage intended to make his depar
ture from Ushant. It was more usual to keep to the north, so that the Lizard was likely to be the last sight of land for a ship’s company. The danger of being far enough south to use Ushant was that a sudden gale usually made it a lee shore, but the weather was set fair.
Hammocks were lashed and stowed; the ship’s company had eaten breakfast; Ramage had carried out the usual Sunday morning inspection of ship and men. The smell of paint was at last disappearing. Ordering the wind sails to be rigged had helped—the tall cylinders of canvas, the tops open and winged and used in the Tropics to funnel a breeze down the hatches, had forced a strong draught through the ship which had made men shiver, but it had cleared the air.
Finally the order was given “Rig Church.” Long wooden forms, used by the men to sit at the tables on the lower-deck, were brought up to the quarterdeck, a chair was carried up from Ramage’s cabin and put in front. A large Union flag was draped over the binnacle box, which was to serve as the altar. The quartermaster would not be able to look at the compass until the service was over.
Down in his cabin Ramage changed his shoes—his steward always had his newest pair, fitted with the heavy silver buckles, ready for the Sunday service. Ramage wondered where they spent the rest of the week. He stood still while the steward fitted the sword-belt, and then slipped the sword into the frog. Just as he was looking round for his hymn book and prayer book, the Marine sentry reported the First Lieutenant’s approach.
Aitken came into the cabin. “All ready for you, sir. The chaplain is holding a bundle of papers as thick as a pound loaf. I hope they aren’t the notes for his sermon.”
“You haven’t forgotten what I said?”
“No, sir,” Aitken replied with a grin. “And the wind is freshening.”
Ramage walked across the deck and sat down in his chair, facing aft. The chaplain stood immediately behind the binnacle, just in front of the two men at the wheel. The Marines under Rennick were drawn up across the after end of the quarterdeck; most of the ship’s company were sitting on the forms. As usual Catholics sat among the Church of England men; Methodists sat near the front and John Smith the Second stood to one side with his fiddle. The ship’s officers sat on a form to one side. Ramage thought that at a time when a prime minister had resigned because he disagreed with the King over religion, it would do them all good to see practical religion functioning in a ship-ofwar. Most captains knew that sailors liked a good sing; two hundred voices seizing on to a rousing hymn, with John Smith’s fiddle to help them along, did the men good. More important, as far as the Navy was concerned, the way men sang hymns told an intelligent captain if he had a happy or a discontented ship’s company.
Stokes, watching Ramage sit down, clasped his hands as if in prayer, but there was something odd about the man. His surplice was not only creased but filthy; not the smears of some recent encounter with a dirty object but the greyness of grime: it had not been washed for months. And the man was standing strangely. The Calypso, on the starboard tack, was rolling with a slightly larger dip to larboard. Men standing on deck were tensing and flexing their knees to remain upright, but Stokes had the wrong rhythm: he was like a single stalk of corn that moved against the wind while all the others bowed away from it.
Ramage glanced across at Southwick, who was watching the chaplain closely, but none of the lieutenants had noticed anything. The man’s voice was blurred but punctuated by the hiss of passing swell waves, the creak of yards overhead, and the thud and flap of a sail momentarily losing the wind and then filling again with a thump that jerked sheet and brace.
Stokes announced a hymn, John Smith tucked his fiddle under his chin and poised the bow. Stokes lifted a hand, John Smith scratched the opening bars and the ship’s company, standing and swaying with the roll like the field of corn Ramage had pictured, bellowed away happily. Most of them knew the entire hymn by heart, and Stokes was beating time with his left hand. Not the time for the hymn and its music, Ramage noted; rather as though he was a tallyman counting as sheep ran through a gate.
There was still a little warmth in the sun but measurable only because of the chill when the increasing number of clouds hid it. The sea was a darker blue now as the Calypso approached the Chops of the Channel and deeper sea. The ship’s company was going to be lucky this year: there would be no winter for them. With more than a hint of autumn in England, they would within hours be turning south, towards the Tropic of Cancer and the Equator, before stopping just short of the Tropic of Capricorn. Ramage doubted if many of the men had ever crossed the Equator. As far as he was concerned, the ship could not get back to the Tropics fast enough. Admittedly he had returned to England after several months in the Mediterranean, but after the Tropics, the Mediterranean seemed a wretched climate: scorching hot and windless in summer, without the constant cooling breeze of the Trade winds, and bitterly cold in winter, though never a Spaniard, Frenchman or Italian would admit it, building his house as though there was always sun, and the bitter wind of winter did not blow through, chilling marble floors so that, even as far south as Rome, men and women hobbled about like lame ducks, almost crippled by chilblains. The Trade winds made the West Indies as near Paradise as Ramage could imagine; and providing one avoided yellow fever which killed, and rum, which wounded first …
He stopped daydreaming as Stokes announced his text for the day. It was, he said, from Romans, chapter fourteen, verse eight: “If the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?”
A curious text. In fact twenty or thirty seamen were openly laughing: whatever else they might consider the Captain lacked, Ramage guessed it was not an uncertain sound when the time came to prepare for battle. That was assuming that Stokes had the sense to preach a sermon remembering he was talking to seamen, to whom “battle” meant “battle” and not some philosophical state of readiness.
Stokes began talking rapidly, like a nervous child reciting something in front of grownups, something little understood so that all the pauses for breath came at the wrong time and punctuation was ignored.
Southwick glanced across at Ramage: a look that said, without equivocation: “I told you so.”
Well, the man was half drunk; Ramage was prepared to admit that, but he was also prepared to overlook it on this occasion, because a new chaplain could be forgiven for being nervous when conducting his first service.
Out of habit, Ramage glanced at his watch and slipped it back into his fob pocket. The wind was holding from the north-west; almost a soldier’s wind to round Ushant and stand across the Bay of Biscay, heading for the Spanish Finisterre. It was going to take months to get used to the idea that every ship sighted was a friend. For so many years the lookout’s hail of a sail in sight was the beginning of a sequence which involved identification and then, if French, chase and battle and, if British, the challenge and exchange of the private signals for the day and hoisting of the three-figure pendant numbers by which each ship in the King’s service could be identified by name.
Stokes was not only gabbling but he was doing it in a monotone. Ramage concentrated on listening to the words. After what seemed an hour, he looked again at his watch. Stokes had been talking for five minutes, and he kept referring to “whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth,” as though that was his text. Ramage again concentrated. Certainly there was no reference to trumpets giving uncertain sounds or anyone preparing for battle, but there was a great deal about punishing only those one loved; that one demanded higher standards from loved ones, and chastened them if they fell below them.
As Ramage reached for his watch again, he realized what had happened: Stokes was quoting from one of the two dozen sermons he had bought. Because the Captain had forbidden him to use them, he had learned one by rote, or near enough, so he would seem to be speaking without notes and apparently directly from the heart. The only trouble was that he was preaching the sermon he had learned, but he had announced the text from another—presumably the next on the pile.
The watch
showed the man had been talking for ten minutes. Ramage saw Aitken was also holding his watch and looking across at him.
Ramage stood up. “Mr Aitken, I’ll trouble you to take a reef in the fore-topsail!”
The First Lieutenant leapt up, shouting: “Topmen, look alive you topmen! Afterguard lay aft—come on, fo’c’s’lemen, I don’t see you moving!”
Southwick leapt up and jammed his hat on his head. “Clear the binnacle,” he roared, “get that flag off so we can get a sight of the compass!”
“Watch your heading!” Jackson shouted at the men at the wheel, unceremoniously pushing the chaplain to one side and helping to increase the confusion. He had more than a suspicion of what was going on, having seen the exchange of glances between the Captain and First Lieutenant. “Damnation, you’re a full point off course!” He winked at the men before they had time to heave on the spokes of the wheel.
Rennick had been too far aft to see what was going on and had never listened to a sermon in his life, having in childhood perfected the art of sleeping while looking awake, but he realized that pandemonium was required, and instead of marching his men forward and dismissing them on the gangway, he shouted: “Marines—at the double, fall out!” Three dozen Marines in heavy boots suddenly began running forward in a cloud of white pipeclay which their movement crumbled off their crossbelts.
The bosun’s mates were soon busy, repeating orders after the piercing trill of their calls. Topmen leapt over forms, knocking several over as they ran to the shrouds.
The Reverend Percival Stokes, unsure what was happening, wisely crouched down behind the binnacle, reminding Southwick of a frightened whippet cowering behind its kennel. Beside him a seaman was calmly folding the big Union flag, careful to line up the previous creases.
By now Ramage, still standing beside his chair, looked over the starboard quarter and then up at the sky. “What do you think, Mr Southwick? That squall will pass us to windward, eh?”