by Dudley Pope
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
When Ramage saw the row of lanterns appear on Castillo San Antonio he gave a sigh of relief which brought a laugh from Southwick. "So you were worrying about Rennick, sir! "
"I was worrying about the job, not the man, " Ramage said impatiently. He glanced astern. "We're still in range of Santa Fe . . ."
Southwick sniffed yet again. "I still can't see the commandant ordering his gunners to open fire on the Jocasta, or whatever her Spanish name was. On the Calypso, perhaps."
"They can't tell which is which by now - ah, there are the lights on El Pilar. Both in our hands. I hope those Marines step lively on their way back to the boats."
Southwick stared up at each fort as the Jocasta passed through a line joining them. "I hope they don't make any mistake with the slow match, " he said. "I wonder how much powder they have in the magazines."
"Plenty, " Ramage said. "Poor quality but plenty of it."
"Let's hope there's enough to do the job. That San Antonio must have walls ten feet thick."
The two men watched as the Jocasta came clear of the two headlands. Ramage brought her round to starboard a couple of points, well up to windward, so that when she was hove-to the current would slowly take her back towards the entrance. The Santa Barbara was still close in with the entrance but the Calypso was now showing up clear of the headlands.
Ramage looked at his watch. "They should be spiking the guns now."
"Waste of time, to my way of thinking, " Southwick grumbled. "Double charge and three roundshot: there's no chance of repairs, then."
"Too risky, " Ramage said, remembering that Rennick had made the same argument. "Sixty-four guns altogether. Someone's bound to get excited and fire one gun too soon. And why rouse out the town and Santa Fe before we have to?"
Southwick shrugged his shoulders. The fact was that he agreed, but he was annoyed that his role in the night's activities had been slight. True, he had boarded the Jocasta, but he had expected to be given the job of taking Castillo San Antonio, and he was enjoying his grumbles.
"Take the conn, Mr Southwick, " Ramage said. "Heave-to the ship now, and make sure the Calypso heaves-to reasonably close. 1 want to go through some of those Spanish papers in my cabin."
The Spanish captain of the Jocasta, he discovered as he began reading through the papers, was Diego Velasquez, and the way the letters were kept in neat bundles tied with different coloured tapes showed that he was a careful and precise man. Red tape denoted letters and orders from the Captain-General of the province of Caracas (the bulk was due more to the thick wax seals than the amount of paper), while blue tape secured correspondence with the Mayor and junta of Santa Cruz.
A quick glance showed Ramage that the Mayor of Santa Cruz, although given a lot of power and acting more like a governor, was very careful when drawing up orders to make it clear that he was acting for the junta. If wrong orders were given, the Mayor was obviously determined that his council would at least share the blame. Every order was issued on behalf of the junta, and to make doubly sure the Mayor listed the members present at each meeting. They ranged from the judge to the city treasurer; ten of the city's leading citizens.
The Mayor's letters dealt mostly with routine matters - reporting that casks of provisions had arrived and were ready for Velasquez, asking about the progress being made in refitting the ship, complaining of the strain on the city's finances caused by the need to feed all the troops sent on board . . . Then the almost hysterical warning to Velasquez of the insurrection among the Indians in the mountains, followed by a peremptory order (in the name of the junta) to send the troops on shore for them to march inland and put down the insurrection.
The Mayor was clearly happiest when forwarding instructions to Velasquez which came from the capital of the province, Caracas, a few miles inland from the port of La Guaira. "His Excellency the Captain-General has honoured me with his latest orders, which the junta of Santa Cruz forwards to you and which I direct you to obey with all speed . . ." was his regular formula.
Ramage had begun by reading the Mayor's letters on the assumption that they would give the latest orders to Velasquez, but by the time he had read a dozen it was clear that they dealt mostly with provisioning and manning. Anything of any importance from the Captain-General had been sent direct to Velasquez. He tied up the Mayor's letters again and with a sigh turned to those from the Captain-General. Letters from the Admiralty in London were usually brief to the point of being taciturn; only formal documents like commissions used archaic and flowery language. But the Spanish were different: a letter from the Mayor telling Velasquez that ten casks of rice and five of chick peas were being sent to Santa Cruz from La Guaira meant three lines of elaborate introduction and another three to end the letter.
The first he read from the Captain-General was even worse: His Excellency referred not only to his junta - which dealt with the whole province "on behalf of his sacred Catholic Majesty" - but to the head of every department involved in the particular order. Hardly believing what he read, Ramage saw that the letter was telling Velasquez that an application for timber to replace some deck planking was not approved. Velasquez's request, the Captain-General wrote, had been submitted to the junta, which had referred it to the Intendente, the man who controlled the province's treasury. The Intendente passed it to the Commander of the Privateering Branch (apparently, Ramage noted, the Jocasta had been commissioned under the Spanish flag as a privateer, not taken into the Navy). The worthy commander had refused to pay for the wood, saying that "because of recent decisions" it was not now an item that could be charged against the Privateering Branch's funds, which were for operating privateers, and anyway had been exhausted.
The request, the Captain-General told Velasquez with all the relish of a bureaucrat saying no, had therefore been referred back once again to the Intendente, who had refused to provide the money because the junta had decided a year ago that the ship was not a regular ship of war but a privateer, and as such was not the concern of the Royal Treasury, whose funds ("which are for the moment exhausted") the Intendente administered.
Ramage, fascinated at the way a few planks of wood could cause so much trouble, re-read the letter and several others dealing with refitting the ship. Finally he realized that the Captain-General, who was the administrative ruler of the province, was at loggerheads with the Intendente, who was the head of the Treasury, and that the cause of their quarrel was the control of the Jocasta.
As a ship of the Spanish Navy she would come under the general control of the Ministry of Marine in Madrid and, if based at La Guaira, the local control of the Captain-General, with the Royal Treasury in Caracas - the Intendente, in other words - paying the bills. As privateer, she would still be under the general control of the Captain-General, but the commander of the Privateering Branch would decide how she operated, and would pay her expenses out of the Privateering Branch funds.
All that seemed straightforward but, Ramage discovered, the ship had recently been ordered by Madrid to sail to Havana and then on to Spain, which meant that the Privateering Branch would lose her, and obviously the commander did not want to pay for anything more, claiming that the Royal Treasury should foot the bill. But the Intendente would not agree - she was not a ship of the Spanish Navy (though, Ramage could see, it was clear that once she arrived in Spain she would be added to the Fleet), because she had been commissioned as a privateer.
It was hard luck for the Privateering Branch: the letters made it clear that the Branch had paid for all the refitting so far but as soon as she was ready to go to sea. she was ordered to Havana, bound for Spain. It said a lot about Spanish officials that it had taken them more than a year to commission the ship, and that the chattering of clerks - people like the Intendente might be higher up the scale, but they still had clerks' mentalities - meant that although the Jocasta had been in Spanish hands for two years all they had done was move her from La Guaira to Santa Cruz. Those Spanish clerks were the best a
llies that Britain had, Ramage reflected. The Calypso frigate had winkled her out of Santa Cruz, but the clerks had quite effectively seen to it that she stayed there until the Calypso arrived. Did his Most Catholic Majesty realize that, albeit unwittingly, his clerks were guilty of treason?
He had just picked up the next batch of the Captain-General's letters, hoping to find the latest orders to Velasquez, when he heard someone hurrying down the companionway, and a moment later the sentry called: "Mr Orsini, sir! "
Paolo knocked on the door and came in, his eyes glinting with excitement in the dim lanternlight. "Mr Southwick's compliments, sir: he says it wants about five minutes before the castles blow up! "
Ramage was tired; he was anxious to know Velasquez's orders. The castles would blow up if Rennick and his sergeant had done their work properly - and providing the slow matches burned true. But there was nothing that Nicholas Ramage, Captain, could do to help or hinder the process. For that matter, it was of no consequence as far as his orders were concerned whether the castles blew up or not. Admiral Davis would lose no sleep if both fuses went out: he would have the Jocasta back again, which was all that mattered. The castles were the bonus, and anyway Ramage wanted to continue reading the letters. But the cabin was hot and stuffy and Paolo was holding the door open, waiting to follow him on deck. How like Gianna the boy was; the same heart-shaped face, the same eyes.
Ramage put the papers in the top drawer, locked it, and stood up to find Paolo holding out a cutlass, but Ramage motioned it away.
"The ship's company aren't about to mutiny, are they, Paolo?"
"No, sir, " the boy said, "but we have more than a hundred Spanish prisoners on board! "
Ramage took the cutlass and slipped the belt over his shoulder. In the excitement of sailing out of Santa Cruz he had forgotten the prisoners; seizing the ship seemed like something that had happened last week.
On deck the stars and waning moon were enough to light up the ship. Southwick, incongruous in his mutineer's garb, waved to the south: "I didn't think you'd want to miss the excitement, sir. Any minute now, taking half an hour from the time we saw the lights."
"It should be quite a sight, " Ramage said, making an effort to sound cheerful so as not to spoil an otherwise exciting occasion: nearly every man on board except the lookouts was up in the rigging or on the hammock nettings - Southwick had obviously given permission - eagerly staring at the top of the cliffs.
The ship was lying hove-to, with the Calypso five hundred yards away to the east.
"Where's the Santa Barbara?" Ramage asked.
Southwick pointed to the west. "She's well clear of the entrance, sir. I saw her with the nightglass. Towing her boats, so she must have recovered the Marines and Spanish prisoners. She's making up for us, like you told Wagstaffe."
"Prisoners! " Ramage said crossly. "We'll soon have more Spaniards out here than there are in Santa Cruz."
"Don't forget the soldiers, sir."
Ramage gave a short laugh. "No, if we'd arrived twelve hours later we'd be the prisoners."
"I didn't mean that, sir, " Southwick protested, but Ramage felt too drained to do anything more than watch the cliffs. It was hard to believe that less then three hours earlier the Calypso had first approached Santa Cruz to begin a dangerous game of bluff. Certainly it had worked and he had hooked the Jocasta like a fisherman landing a lethargic perch, so he should be cheerful and content. Instead he felt as taut as a flying jib sheet hard on the wind. He had expected to lose half of these men who were now waiting in the shrouds and on the hammock nettings like excited starlings perched in a grove of trees. So, he told himself, he should be cheerful because only a handful had been killed.
The fact was that he was far from being a natural gambler; he had little patience with those pallid fellows crouching over the gaming tables at Buck's, terrified that the turn of a card or the tumble of a dice would ruin them, yet always hoping desperately to win. Obviously all they lived for was the fear of losing and exaltation of winning, but it was sad to think that grown men hazarded their futures on the face of a card or the spots of a dice. A house that had been a family seat for a couple of centuries often changed hands because a dice stopped rolling to show a three instead of a four.
Yet ... yet... he had just done much the same thing, except that no gambler at Buck's or one of those other elegant establishments would play against such odds: no one wagered a guinea to win a guinea, unless he was drunk or desperate, yet he had just risked a frigate, and more than two hundred lives, to win a frigate.
Castillo San Antonio suddenly exploded. A great lightning flash radiating outwards lit the surrounding hills, the entrance channel and the Calypso as though it was day and then equally suddenly plunged everything into a darkness that seemed solid. A moment later a deep rumbling coming through the water made the Jocasta tremble, while a noise like a great clap of thunder skated across the sea, followed by echoes bouncing off the mountains and gradually fading into the distance. Then came the startled mewing of seabirds wheeling in alarm and the sudden chatter of excited men.
Ramage blinked rapidly, dazzled and still hardly able to believe what he had just seen. "The nightglass! " he snapped at Southwick.
The hard, rectangular outline of the castle on top of the cliff was hidden in an enormous wreath of smoke and dust, the top of which swirled snakelike in the moonlight. Gradually it thinned out, blown clear by the wind, and finally Ramage could make out the remains of the castle.
"What can you see, sir?" Southwick asked excitedly.
Ramage realized that every man within earshot was straining to hear his reply, and he spoke loudly: "The centre has gone, right down to the foundations. The western corner is still standing ... yes, the smoke's clearing more: the whole eastern side has collapsed."
"I wonder how much powder there was in the magazine?" Southwick asked incredulously.
"Enough! Ah, there we are, the smoke has cleared completely. Yes, three quarters of the castle - all except the western end - has gone. A lot of the stonework has slid down the hill in an avalanche."
"Rennick needn't have bothered to spike the guns, " Southwick muttered, obviously determined to have the last word on the subject.
Ramage swung the nightglass to find the Santa Barbara and saw that she was still beating up to join the Jocasta. For a moment he had feared she might have been close enough to be damaged by lumps of stone hurled up by the explosion.
A red eye winked at the far end of the channel.
"Santa Fe! " he exclaimed. "They've woken up and started firing down the channel."
"Aye, they probably think the English are coming, " Southwick said contemptuously. "Look! " he added as more red flashes followed, "that first gun woke up the rest of them! "
At that moment El Pilar blew up. Again a blinding flash lit up the hills - showing San Antonio a wrecked shell, the western wall throwing the rest into heavy shadow - followed by a shock through the water and a dull blam-blam, as though the side had fallen away from a mountain.
Ramage handed Southwick the nightglass. "We'll go down to meet the Santa Barbara. The sooner our prisoners are transferred to her the better. I'm going below to finish reading the Spanish orders."
"Ah, we might find a few prizes to take back with us, " Southwick said cheerfully.
"The Jocasta's enough, " Ramage said crossly.
"Yes, sir, but don't forget that Isla de Margarita is the pearl island, and they find emeralds farther along the coast."
"We'll collect enough oysters to make a crown of pearls for you, " Ramage said sarcastically, "then hurry back to English Harbour for the coronation." With that he went below, hearing Southwick beginning the string of orders which would take the Jocasta down to the Santa Barbara.
Captain Velasquez had the irritating habit of putting the earliest letters at the top and the latest at the bottom, but Ramage was curious about the way the Captain-General had handled the Jocasta affair. Here, written at great length, was the firs
t letter to Velasquez describing how English mutineers had brought the ship to La Guaira - "under the command of an officer named Summers" - and handed her over to "the municipality". Clearly the Captain-General was determined not to take any personal responsibility even at that early stage. The junta had ordered the ship to be taken round to Santa Cruz because the port was well defended and there, the junta directed, Velasquez would take command.
That letter alone would have hanged Summers, Ramage thought, and the very next one again referred to the seaman, saying he would act as master for the voyage, and when he handed over the frigate to Velasquez he was to be allowed to return to La Guaira, unless Velasquez had any use for him in refitting the ship "in view of his particular skills".
Then came a series of orders dealing with fitting out the ship. The English were always so short-handed that they sailed the ship with fewer than two hundred men, the junta noted, but it regarded three hundred as the absolute minimum. The master shipwright had assured the junta that the frigate could carry more guns without endangering her stability, so Velasquez was to consider fitting six more, but the junta did not specify the size of the guns, nor whether they were to be mounted on the quarterdeck and fo'c'sle or on the main deck.
In later letters there were complaints - obviously referring to reports by Velasquez - about the amount of work and cost of commissioning the ship. Then, the most flowery letter so far, the junta's unanimous decision on the ship's new name, La Perla. This, the Captain-General ordered (for once he took the credit for it), was to be painted or carved on the ship's transom after all traces of the original English name had been removed, the letters painted in red on a gold background, "to match the glorious flag of Spain". The Pearl, Ramage thought, was hardly a suitable name for a ship of war.
Further letters reported that Spanish merchant seamen had been pressed and were being sent to Santa Cruz to man the ship. Another told Velasquez that soldiers were being used to make up the number, volunteers from two regiments recently arrived from Panama. These men would make excellent seamen, the Captain-General assured Velasquez.