Ramage & The Drum Beat

by Pope, Dudley

  Over on the larboard beam the Captain was keeping perfect station on the ships ahead and astern and beyond Ramage could see most of the ships in the other division. The sun, weak as it was, tinged the banks of haze with a pink which brought out the colour of the sails. The sight of the two- and three-deckers trying to keep their sails full (but the tiny feathers of white at their bows showing how slowly they were going) was a splendid subject for a painter. The gun port lids, painted red on the inside, here now open and triced flat back against the ships’ sides, making a checkerboard of red squares along the white or yellow strakes painted on black hulls which gleamed wetly, while the muzzles of the guns poked out like accusing fingers.

  The haze softened the lines of the ships, and the tiny water droplets clinging to the rigging reflected the light like dew on spiders’ webs. How could a painter capture the colour of those sails? The warm tint of umber with a little raw sienna or perhaps a touch of yellow ochre? (But no painter would want to spoil the effect by showing the dark, uneven blotches of damp along the heads of the sails.)

  ‘Tuppence worth o’ leg of beef soup and a penn’orth o’ bread, that’s wot I’d like,’ he heard Stafford’s Cockney voice declare to one of the other men. ‘Minnie’s place at the back o’ me farver’s shop – though I ’aven’t bin there since the press took me up. Yus, I could do wiv that, but thanks to the Dons it’ll be cold ’ash for us today.’

  He spat over the side through the gun port and grumbled, ‘This’ll be the fourth watch me jaws ’ave over’auled this chaw o’ baccy an’ it’s got abaht as much guts left in it as a bit o’ sail clorf, s’fact.’

  Southwick suddenly paused in his march back and forth across the deck and snapped at Jackson, ‘The flagship’s signalling!’

  Jackson snatched the telescope. ‘General – preparative – number thirty-one. Then compass, south-west.’

  Southwick flicked through the pages of the signal book ‘“Form line of battle ahead and astern of the admiral as most convenient…”’

  He looked up to make sure Ramage had heard and grumbled, ‘Unless we get a breeze those wine-swilling, fish-on-Fridays, priest-ridden gallows birds’ll be in Cadiz, their yards sent down and everyone home for Easter before we form the line. Bah – chasing at a couple o’ knots indeed!’

  With that he banged the scabbard of his enormous sword against his boot. The sword intrigued Ramage and he’d watched how carefully Southwick had honed it the previous evening.

  ‘How did you come by that meat cleaver, Southwick?’

  ‘My father was a butcher, sir,’ he grinned, ‘but I bought this one at the best sword cutler’s in London, Mr Prater’s at Charing Cross. Paid for it with the first prize money I ever had. ’Scuse me sir – Jackson! Watch for–’

  ‘Preparative’s coming down, sir!’ called Jackson.

  ‘Very well.’

  Ramage knew for the next minutes there’d be something of a free-for-all as the fifteen ships in two columns manoeuvred to form a single line, each captain determined to get as near as possible to the head of it, using the excuse that the position conformed with the admiral’s signal as being ‘most convenient’.

  For all the polite but determined jostling the Fleet might be manoeuvring at a Royal Review at Spithead: a topsail backed here, lower yards braced sharp up there, a jib let fly for a minute or two, and quickly the two columns of ships merged into a single line nearly two miles long. The Captain was so close to the Namur that her jib-boom almost overhung the taffrail, and Ramage could imagine how the Commodore had been urging on Captain Miller, who commanded the Captain, and guess what Captain Whitshed was thinking as he looked anxiously astern from the Namur’s quarterdeck.

  ‘The Culloden’s done it!’ Southwick exclaimed. ‘Trust Captain Troubridge!’

  The Culloden had managed to lead the line, the Victory was seventh, followed by Vice-Admiral Waldegrave in the Barfleur, with Vice-Admiral Thompson and the Britannia eleventh. The Captain – hmm, thought Ramage, the Commodore’s the thirteenth in the line – would it be his unlucky day? The fifteenth and last – ‘the whipper-in’, as Southwick called her – was the Excellent, commanded by Captain Collingwood.

  Neither Ramage nor Southwick made any attempt to hide their excitement at the sight of the fifteen great ships in line of battle. Each knew he was watching one of the greatest sights of his lifetime; yet each saw it differently.

  Southwick’s professional eye noted whether each ship was the correct distance astern of her next ahead and that all her sails were drawing. The banks of haze into which they sailed from time to time were to him only simple problems in station keeping not, as Ramage saw them, delicate veils softening the ships’ lines, giving them the same air of mystery and enigmatic beauty that real veils gave to an otherwise naked woman.

  Nor would Southwick ever understand a thought passing through Ramage’s mind – that the great two- and three-deckers were magnificent monuments to the muddled world in which they lived. The largest wooden objects ever made by man, and designed solely to fight the elements and kill the enemy, they were, nevertheless, among man’s most beautiful creations.

  A ship like the Captain was built of a couple of thousand oak trees grown in the clay soil of Sussex (from acorns, Ramage calculated, which would have been sprouting at the time Cromwell won his victory over the King at Worcester). She’d be fastened with about thirty tons of copper nails and bolts, and ten thousand or so treenails. Such a ship’s lower masts probably came from America, from the forests of Maine or New Hampshire, where pine trees of the necessary diameter were still abundant, while the topmasts and yards were shaped from trees that grew on the shores of the Baltic.

  The seams of her decks and hull would be caulked and payed with ten tons of oakum and four of pitch; even the paint would weigh a couple of tons. Ten thousand yards of material would have gone into her sails. (It was ironic to think the entire weight of the Kathleen was a lot less than that of the men in the Captain’s ship’s company and their gear, and the standing and running rigging and blocks.)

  Yet the beauty of these great ships was similar to the beauty of a woman: there was no single thing that made them beautiful: it was the total effect of many, like the tiny individual marble chips that made up a mosaic. And the beauty of even a particular part was hard to define – the curves of a woman’s lips might differ only slightly from her sister’s, while the sweep of one ship’s sheer varied only a fraction from another’s. And yet, although the tiny differences defied description or explanation, one woman’s mouth had the beauty her sister’s lacked; one ship had a pleasing sheer and the other had not.

  Each ship sat in the water with the same elegant yet solid, four-square sense of belonging to the sea as an Elizabethan mansion house belonged on a gently sloping hill cradled among beech trees. Each hull had the symmetry of Grecian statuary – nowhere did the eye catch a straight line or harsh curve: from the end of the jib-boom one’s glance travelled quite naturally down to the fo’c’sle and on to the waist and then up again to the taffrail, carried along easily by the sweeping sheer. The bow was bluff – yet the cutwater and the elegant beakhead and figurehead made it comely, not plump; although the stern was square the transom itself raked aft with the studied elegance of a cavalry officer’s shako.

  From this distance the stout masts, too, seemed slim and rakish, and it was hard to believe a mainmast was three feet in diameter at the step, and from the waterline to the maintopgallant truck was more than 180 feet. The forty or so tons of rope for the rigging made an ugly pile of coils in the dockyard, but when fitted aloft to the masts and yards it took on the tracery of Flanders lace. Yet however beautiful and powerful were the ships, they could fight only as well as the men in them. In that case, he thought, glancing along the line, the onus was now on the men because most of the ships had long since proved themselves in battle.

  The Culloden, leading the line, had been with Howe at the Glorious First of June three years ago, when six French s
ail of the line had been captured and a seventh sunk. The third in the line, the Prince George, was with Admiral Keppel in 1778 when he fought Comte d’Orvilliers’ fleet off Ushant, and with Rodney off the Saints in 1782, when five French sail of the line were captured. The Orion, fourth in the line, fought with Howe on the Glorious First of June. The sixth was also one of the newest as far as Ramage could remember – the Colossus had been launched within the past three years, while her next astern, the Victory, was well over thirty years old and had been Keppel’s flagship at Ushant. The Barfleur was Admiral Hood’s flagship in Rodney’s action, while the Egmont had been with Keppel at Ushant and in Admiral Hotham’s action off Genoa a couple of years ago, when Captain Nelson in the Agamemnon had played a leading part in the capture of the Ça Ira and Censeur. She was followed by the Britannia, Hotham’s flagship at the time, while the Namur had been with Rodney. The Captain had been badly cut up in Hotham’s action and was followed by the Diadem, which had been with her. And the little Kathleen, Ramage thought wrily – well, she’d ventured a lot in the past few weeks, even if she hadn’t achieved much…

  Fifteen ships. Yet with the French Fleet at Brest probably waiting for the Spanish to join them for an attempt at invasion, the whole safety of England depended not only on the fighting ability of each of those ships but on the tactical ability of one man, Sir John Jervis. If he made one bad mistake this afternoon he might lose the war; one bad mistake leading to his defeat would leave the Channel an open highway for a Franco-Spanish Armada, for the Admiralty wouldn’t be able to concentrate enough ships in time to do more than harry them. One man, one mistake: it was a heavy responsibility. Yet he wondered if it bothered Sir John. The old man was this very moment making the first moves in his task of destroying Cordoba’s fleet simply because it was a duty for which a lifetime’s training had prepared him. Ramage remembered his own father would want to hear about every move made in the battle and, knowing he would not be able to trust his memory, sent a man below to fetch a pad and pencil. Just as he sketched in the positions of the two Fleets Southwick asked: ‘What d’you make of the Dons, sir?’

  To windward, over the starboard bow, Ramage could see Cordoba’s division of nineteen sail of the line, among them the Santísima Trinidad. If they’d ever been in any recognized formation it was now but a memory: they were like a flock of sheep being driven in for shearing, two, three and four abreast. They were running eastward, intending to cross ahead of the British line to join the second division, six sail of the line which were over on the Kathleen’s larboard bow and now trying desperately to claw their way up to Cordoba’s ships before the British line cut them off. Two flocks of sheep, in fact, trying to join up before a pack of wolves got between them, since it was through the ever-narrowing gap that the Culloden was leading the British line.

  ‘What d’you make of the Dons, sir?’ Southwick repeated and Ramage, lost in thought, realized he had not answered.

  ‘They’re paying the price for bad station-keeping during the night, Mr Southwick, and for relaxing because they thought they were near home,’ Ramage said sourly, intending the lesson would not be lost but knowing he’d merely been pompous.

  ‘You don’t think it’s a trap?’

  ‘Trap? If it is, someone forgot to set it!’

  ‘But might I–’

  ‘Yes, you can ask why I think that. Cordoba probably has at least twenty-seven sail of the line – though we can see only twenty-five at the moment – against our fifteen. If he’d kept them together he could match them two to one against thirteen of our ships and still have one left to deal with our remaining two. Just think of the Captain, for example, being attacked by the Santísima Trinidad to windward and a seventy-four to leeward. Two hundred and four Spanish guns against the Captain’s seventy-four.

  ‘Instead of that, you can see Cordoba has nineteen up there to windward and six more down to leeward. And with a bit of luck we’ll manage to get inbetween and stop them joining up.’

  ‘Yes,’ admitted Southwick, ‘they’ve split themselves up nicely, Cordoba’s letting us match our fifteen against six, or fifteen against nineteen. Sounds easy enough!’

  ‘It isn’t though – there’s one big “if”. If those two Spanish divisions do manage to close that gap, Cordoba will form his line of battle at the last moment right across our bows. All their broadsides against our leading ships – and we won’t be able to bring a single gun to bear…’

  ‘But d’you reckon Cordoba has a chance of doing it?’

  ‘About fifty-fifty at the moment – it’ll be a close-run affair. If the wind pipes up a bit, Cordoba’s nicely up to windward so he’ll get in first and bring it down with him. It might be just enough to turn the trick.’

  Jackson said: ‘Victory’s hoisted her colours, sir!’

  Ramage motioned to Southwick and the Kathleen’s colours soared up to the peak of the gaff, and one after another the rest of the ships hoisted theirs.

  Almost at once Jackson sang out gleefully, ‘There she goes! Number five, sir!’

  Two or three men started cheering and then the whole ship’s company took it up. It was the one signal that they all knew by heart, ‘To engage the enemy’.

  Southwick sidled over to Ramage and said quietly, ‘I think the men would appreciate a few words, sir.’

  ‘A few words? What do you mean?’ The idea irritated Ramage.

  ‘Well, sir, a little speech or something. It’s – well, customary, sir.’

  ‘Customary in a seventy-four but hardly appropriate to us, surely? I said all I had to say when I came on board at Gilbraltar.’

  ‘I still think they’d like it,’ Southwick said doggedly.

  Ramage saw the men had moved instinctively nearer their guns and were all watching him expectantly, and was unaware that to the men his lean, tanned face, and piercing eyes made him look like a buccaneer leader of earlier days. Then he heard himself speaking to them quietly.

  ‘This may be the biggest battle you’ll ever see in your lives, but our part in it is simply to repeat the Commodore’s signals. We are just one of the crowd watching the prize fighters knocking each other’s heads off.’

  That’ll cool them off a bit, he thought; then when he saw their eager faces he felt ashamed of such a sneer. Southwick’s face, too, had that familiar taut look, eyes almost glazed and bloodshot with the prospect of battle.

  Jackson, watching the Victory with the telescope, reported the order for a slight alteration of course, then exclaimed: ‘There’s another, sir! General, number forty.’

  He fumbled through the signal book, and it was one Ramage could not remember.

  ‘“The admiral means to pass through the enemy’s line”.’

  ‘What? Check that again!’ exclaimed Southwick.

  Jackson looked through the telescope. ‘It’s number forty all right, sir.’

  Southwick snatched the signal book and looked for himself. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said to Ramage. ‘That’s what it says.’

  ‘Quite so, Mr Southwick. Don’t forget we’ve only assumed that’s what the admiral intended doing. He has to give the order and he’s left it as late as possible in case the Dons did something unexpected. You don’t want the Victory festooned with “Annul previous signal” do you?’

  A moment later he realized it was an unfair remark but Southwick took it cheerfully, disregarding Ramage’s words and thinking to himself it had taken Sir John a long time to come round to Mr Ramage’s way of thinking.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  As Ramage looked through his telescope at the six Spanish ships trying to claw across the head of the British line to join Cordoba’s division to windward he was reminded of two stage-coach drivers racing each other to a crossroad, one coming along the northern road, the other the eastern. And he knew from bitter experience the almost paralysing tension that must now be gripping each of the Spanish captains.

  Ahead of them, less than three miles away, was the safety offered by their Commander-i
n-Chief and nineteen comrades; but approaching rapidly on their starboard side was the British line, led by the Culloden, intent on cutting them off.

  Somewhere out there on the surface of the sea, he mused, is a spot unmarked by even a wavelet, and it’s the crossroads, the point where an invisible line drawn along the course the British are sailing crosses a similar line along which the Spanish are steering. Whoever reaches that point first wins the race.

  For a moment he felt sympathy for the Spanish captains. Even now each of them must be bending over the compass, taking a bearing of the Culloden and comparing it with a previous one. In a couple of minutes each will again bend over the compass and take yet another. And every successive bearing tells each captain how the race is going, a race which means all the difference between life and death for many of the men of both sides.

  It’s all beautifully and brutally simple: if the latest compass bearing shows the Culloden more to the north, the Spaniards know they are winning the dash for that unmarked crossroad; if more to the west, then the British are winning. And if the bearing stays the same, then they’ll collide.

  Even as he watched, Ramage was half-ashamed to admit his sympathy for the Spaniards was growing: he was sure they were losing and a little later he was certain.

  Since Sir John had already hoisted signal number five, ‘Engage the enemy’, all the British ships were free to fire as soon as they had a target. At this moment, he mused, every gun in the Culloden is loaded; every gun on her larboard side is ready to fire. And from what he’d heard of Captain Troubridge, he’d be waiting until the last possible moment for the maximum effect, knowing the smoke of his first broadside (almost always the best-aimed) would then hinder his gunners by drifting to leeward and masking the enemy.