by Dudley Pope
“I’ve no idea what the legal position is except that Trinidade is not mentioned in Bonaparte’s treaty. Nor are many other islands, I suppose, but Trinidade is the one that interests their Lordships. Anyway, we are to take possession and plant. The potatoes and grain will run wild, but they’ll seed so that in an emergency a visiting ship will find something. If it looks a promising place it might even become a minor Ascension.”
“But anyone could seize it after we’ve gone, sir!” Southwick protested.
“Orders,” Ramage said. “We obey them. I could think of worse. It’s a cruise, really. But I imagine that if I return and report that Trinidade will make a good base, their Lordships—the government anyway—will send a garrison. If the batteries are built by us, a passing John Company ship on her way to India could land the guns and gunners and a battalion of infantry.”
Aitken asked, “Do the government think of this island as a place for the Honourable East India Company ships to call for water in an emergency?”
“I don’t really know,” Ramage admitted. “It’s rather far to the west for ships bound to and from the Cape of Good Hope and India. More likely their Lordships have in mind a wooding-and-watering island which a British squadron covering the South American coast could use. Somewhere they can refit, get fresh vegetables, land any sick . . seven hundred and fifty miles south-west to Rio, six hundred and fifty miles north-west to Bahia, and just over one thousand five hundred to the mouth of the Plate.”
“And two thousand across to the West African coast,” Southwick said. “This place begins to sound interesting. But why has no one garrisoned it before? After all, it sits astride the South Atlantic like a jockey on a nag.”
“Well, the Spanish and Portuguese don’t need it because they share all the ports from one end of South America to the other,” Ramage pointed out. “The French are really only concerned with the West Indies and India, and anyway the Dons are their allies so they can always use places like Rio—even though it is Portuguese—and the Plate for provisioning and watering. Only Britain needs bases to attack South America and cover the route to the Cape and India.”
“How big is it? How high, rather?” Southwick asked.
“No one was very sure at the Admiralty, but as far as I could discover it’s roughly a couple of miles long in a north-west, south-east direction. A mile wide and with hills in the middle a thousand feet high.”
“A thousand feet, sir? We can rely on that?”
“We can’t rely on anything. Mr Dalrymple at the Hydrographic Office admitted he knew nothing much about it—he just warned me not to hit Martin Vaz, which is either a tiny island or a reef of rocks a day’s sailing from it.”
“Once we’re through the Doldrums, we’ll get a lift to the westward from the current,” Southwick commented. “But just think of it, once we make a landfall we go on shore to plant potatoes … I hate gardening,” he admitted, “but it’ll make a change to carry a spade and not a sword!”
The Doldrums had been empty days when the Calypso sat dead on the water, the heat haze merging sea, horizon and sky into what seemed to Wilkins a pool of molten copper. It was a time when he wanted to paint, wanted to capture on canvas the sense of the empty vastness of the ocean when there was no wind, where the sails were furled on the yards because there was no point in leaving them chafing against masts and rigging with every movement of the ship. Some days there was a slight swell, and Captain Ramage said it was caused by some distant storm, probably several thousands of miles away. He wanted to put it on canvas, but the sun was too hot. Even under the awning stretched across the quarterdeck it was an oven which sapped everyone’s energy. Tempers were fraying and the sentry on the scuttlebutt watched closely as a man dropped in the dipper and took a drink.
The sheer stark simplicity of the life fascinated Wilkins. The intense heat, the lack of wind, and the fact that the Calypso was taking twice as long as expected to get through the Doldrums meant the men were twice as thirsty but had only half the water. It was interesting that the men had a basic ration, but in addition some extra was put into a butt each day and this was left by the mainmast with a Marine sentry guarding it.
And there was a dipper, a cylindrical, open-topped container, the diameter of a broom handle and about four inches long. There was a hole on each side of the top through which the line threaded, and a man was allowed to drop the dipper down through the bung-hole and draw out as much water as it would hold. But because when there was a water shortage the butt was stowed on its side with chocks, the dipper usually tilted before it could fill completely. And the Marine sentry made sure that it was “one man, one dip.”
Still, Wilkins had made up his mind about the colours, sketched in the outlines on the canvas with charcoal, and was ready when the first teasing but cooling puffs of wind had come. First of all there had been an excited hail from a lookout at the masthead—a man perched in what looked like an open-sided tent with strips of canvas to protect him from the rays of the sun. “Wind shadow on the larboard quarter!” he had shouted. A couple of minutes later he reported it was approaching, but, just as suddenly, it vanished. Five minutes later another, also on the larboard quarter, reached the ship, a wind shadow that danced across the surface of the sea like a swarm of gnats on the edge of a pond. Suddenly they all had a teasing breath of cool air, but then it was gone.
Yet Mr Ramage was quite confident the wind would set in: topmen swarmed aloft to drop the sails—”let fall,” rather. And by then more wind shadows were being reported, the men becoming excited, and he was hurriedly mixing paints on his palette, the sudden breeze blowing away the lethargy. Now they were at last in the south-east Trade winds which Southwick said started off down towards the Cape of Good Hope.
Crossing the Equator a few days later was best forgotten as far as Wilkins was concerned: Neptune had dozens of victims because the Calypso had spent most of her time in the Caribbean or Mediterranean, and few men had crossed the Line. So the unlucky ones were given stiff “tonics” of soap and water, shaved, ducked and five men, who had objected violently, were ordered by King Neptune to be tarred and feathered. Three others had their faces and backsides given a liberal coating of black gun lacquer.
Wilkins found it hard to get used to the sun’s position. It was sufficiently late in the year and they were far enough south for the sun to be almost vertically overhead, so his shadow at noon was tiny, extending only a few inches from his feet, as though he was standing in a small puddle. Flying fish skimming just above the waves like great dragonflies had been commonplace for a long time and although the Calypso was now almost midway between West Africa and South America, he was surprised by how many sea birds they saw. He had painted some of them, putting the date and position on the back of the canvas. He enjoyed painting birds in flight because it gave him good practice at painting the sea—surely the most challenging of all subjects. It was never the same, varying with the wind, cloud, sun, or rain, and, according to the Captain, with the depth of the ocean and the latitude. At Trinidade, their destination, the Captain promised that if there were reefs, he would see three or four different colours in as many hundreds of yards. For the moment, though, everyone was relieved that they were now in the south-east Trades.
Now Southwick, legs astride and balancing himself against the gentle roll, flipped down one more shade of his quadrant because he found the sun bright, once again “brought the sun down to the horizon,” rocked the quadrant slightly to make sure that the lower edge of the sun was precisely on the horizon, made a slight adjustment and a moment later saw the sun had moved. He read the figures on the ivory scale of the quadrant. The ritual of the noon sight was, as far as the sun was concerned, now over: he had measured the highest angle that it made with the horizon, and that was that: only the angle mattered, not the time: if he had measured its highest angle, then that was the angle at noon local time, and he did not have to bother to turn a half-minute glass, bellow at Orsini to note the chronometer … N
ow he had to apply some corrections, add or subtract figures from the almanac, and the answer would be the Calypso’s latitude. It was the simplest thing to do in celestial navigation; it was how the navigators from the oldest times crossed oceans—they knew the latitude of their destination and sailed along it until they arrived. The only danger was running into the land at night. Longitude was a different problem; without an accurate chronometer there was no way of being sure of one’s exact distance east or west of the Greenwich meridian.
Young Orsini was working out his answer using the top of the binnacle box. Kenton and Martin were sitting on the breeches of guns. Southwick could see Mr Ramage walking up and down on the windward side of the quarterdeck, having his spell of exercise before his meal. And waiting to hear the latitude … Normally Mr Ramage left the navigation to him, but for the last three days he had been taking a close interest. The reason was not hard to guess—the Calypso’s latitude and longitude were almost the same as the figures they had been given for Trinidade.
In fact, according to Southwick’s reckoning, they were within a hundred miles of it. Allowing for the chronometer being a bit out, he was sure that putting the point of a pair of compasses down on Trinidade and drawing a circle with a radius of fifty miles would enclose the Calypso, but there was a high haze, so it was impossible to guess whether they could see ten miles or sixty.
This was always the difficult time when making a landfall: did one set more canvas to increase speed in the hope of sighting land before nightfall, or go slowly and cautiously and hope to sight it at dawn? Martin Vaz should be on the larboard bow and Trinidade dead ahead. If one left Martin Vaz too far to larboard—thus making absolutely certain of not hitting it—there was a risk of passing Trinidade out of sight to larboard. The life of a master in the Royal Navy, Southwick thought to himself, could be summed up by that situation: trying to find one rock in the middle of an ocean without hitting another …
He wrote the final row of figures, 20° 01’ 50”. And that, he knew without looking it up, was within thirty miles of the latitude of Trinidade.
A cast of the log half an hour ago had given just over six knots and they were able to lay the course. By five o’clock they might be there; it should be in sight at the latest in an hour or two—if it was as high as reported and the chronometer was anywhere near passing for correct.
Southwick walked across the quarterdeck and reported to Ramage, who grimaced and nodded ahead. “A thousand or fifteen hundred feet high? We should be seeing it by now.”
“It’s hazier than it looks, sir,” Southwick said confidently. “Had you given any thought about who might …”
“All right, all right, pass the word through the bosun. Though why I should always pay up a guinea to the first man to sight such a place, I don’t know!”
“It’s the trickiest landfall we’ve ever made, sir. The Atlantic is two thousand five hundred miles wide here, from Trinidade to the nearest tip of West Africa, and we’re looking for somewhere two or three miles long.”
“That’s a fine argument to impress old ladies,” Ramage said unsympathetically, “and it’d impress me if I thought Trinidade could lie anywhere along that gap of two thousand five hundred miles. But you have a quadrant, almanac, tables and a chronometer that allow you to be rather more precise.”
“Well, yes sir,” Southwick agreed and added with a grin, “but I can’t make it seem too easy!”
He walked back to the binnacle to inspect the calculations made by the two young Lieutenants and Midshipman.
He looked first at Orsini’s slate and his brow furrowed. “I can assure you, Mr Orsini, that the Calypso is about seven hundred and fifty miles from Rio de Janeiro; in other words, about four-fifths of the way across the South Atlantic between the Cape of Good Hope and South America, not far from the Tropic of Capricorn. But you, Mr Orsini, seem to be not only north of the Equator, almost on the far side of the Torrid Zone, but close to the Cape Verde Islands, which the rest of us left thousands of miles away some weeks ago …”
Orsini, his face crimson, hurriedly rubbed out some writing on his slate and corrected it. “The latitude is north, not south. I’m sorry, I mean, I should have named it south, not north.”
Southwick grumbled and picked up Martin’s slate. He put it down again. “Lieutenant Martin has made a mathematical discovery of note: three and two make four. Well, the rest of us will continue to struggle along with five. And Mr Kenton? Ah, the method of calculation is correct, but the original altitude is wrong. Check your sextant, Mr Kenton; I suspect you have knocked it and it now has an error.”
Ramage had listened to this daily routine for weeks and it varied little: Orsini made some enormous mistake that was due to lack of interest in mathematics; Martin made some silly mistake; and Kenton worked out the sight correctly but had been careless with his sextant. It was almost new, and one of the few sextants on board: Southwick and Aitken used quadrants.
Yet Southwick was right to keep nagging these young officers. One of them might be in command of a prize one day when war broke out again and responsible for navigating her thousands of miles to port, or even to a rendezvous at a place like Trinidade …
The lookout’s hail came at exactly three o’clock in the afternoon; his shout was partly drowned as six bells was being struck.
There was, he called, what might be only a cloud on the horizon but it was a different shape from the Trade wind clouds and seemed to be lying athwart their course.
An excited Orsini asked “May I, sir?” and, when Ramage nodded, grabbed a telescope and raced up the shrouds, climbing the ratlines as fast as any topman.
He braced himself beside the lookout and glanced ahead as he pulled open the telescope. Low on the horizon there was something the colour of a fading bruise.
He held up the telescope, balancing against the Calypso’s roll and focused his eye in the circle of glass. It was land. As the lookout had said, it was athwart the Calypso’s course, probably lying north-west and south-east. Low at each end and rising towards the middle. There were some peaks in the centre of the island—he counted four which seemed the same height and a fifth quite a bit lower. It sounded like Trinidade, but where was Martin Vaz Rocks?
“Deck there!” he hailed. “It’s land lying across our course and I can distinguish five peaks in the centre part of the island.”
“How far?” Aitken shouted.
“Difficult to say, sir; there’s nothing to use as a scale. Fifteen miles, I reckon; I think haze must have been hiding it, then the wind cleared it away.”
Paolo felt like saying that even at this distance it looked like an island off Tuscany; cliffs with rounded hills just inland. Mr Ramage would understand—but so many islands in the West Indies looked like Tuscany, too, and neither of them wanted to be reminded that it would be months before they were back in England and receiving news of Aunt Gianna.
Down on deck Aitken and Ramage, using the only two other telescopes, sighted the island at the same moment.
“I don’t know what happened to Martin Vaz,” Ramage said, “but that must be Trinidade. We’ll pass round the southern end to the lee side, so that we can run down the west coast.”
“Supposing we don’t find an anchorage, sir?”
“Then we’ll be wasting our time, because the whole reason for taking the island will be gone.”
What Ramage did not say was that he had been thinking a great deal about that very point, which was not covered by his orders. He knew that the Admiralty’s only interest in Trinidade was as a base, and a base meant a safe bay in which ships could anchor, and with fresh water available on shore, from a river or wells. It had not occurred to their Lordships that there might be neither, although, to be fair, many ships had visited the island in the last hundred years. Presumably if they had found neither anchorage nor water they would have reported the fact: no one looked for either at Martin Vaz.
But supposing … Well, he could do one of two things: first he
could say: “This island is no use to anyone” (after having put landing parties on shore to be certain about water) and return to the United Kingdom, calling in at one of the South American ports for water before crossing the Doldrums again. That would mean the Calypso would stay less than a week.
The alternative was to do a survey of the island anyway, plant the vegetables on the basis that although there was no river there was sufficient rain, and make soundings so that their Lordships at least had a record of the island, even if it was no good to them. That would take a couple of months, perhaps longer, and he might return to England to find that their Lordships considered he had wasted their time and his own.
Although Aitken had just raised the point, Ramage had made up his mind three or four weeks ago, when he first thought of the possibilities: he would survey, sound and plant, even if the Calypso could not anchor and had to back and fill in the lee of the island for as long as it took. Two months backing and filling … if he was more sure of the situation in Rio it would have been worth landing a survey and planting party on the island, leaving them with a couple of boats, and taking the Calypso on a visit to Rio—or even up to Bahia, which was nearer—where he could also provision and water.
As he looked over the quarterdeck rail Ramage saw the surveyors and draughtsmen standing on top of the hammock nettings, eager for a sight of the island that would comprise their world for several weeks. Indeed, the Calypso at the moment looked far removed from a ship-of-war.
There were ten or eleven of Wilkins’s canvases lodged in various places on deck, to help the oil paints to dry, and his new easel was by the mainmast with a canvas clipped to it, so several square yards of deck looked like an artist’s studio.
Round the foremast several sacks of Irish potatoes and yams had been emptied out and spread over the deck, and a dozen seamen were patiently sorting them out and throwing away those that had gone rotten or showed signs of mildew. The smell drifted aft, and Ramage was reminded of a country barn. For a moment, as his memory went back to Cornwall he thought of swallows jinking through shafts of sunlight and shadow.