by Dudley Pope
At first he had not understood; then he had realized his father was saying that when an earl died his eldest son became the next earl; that his father was the tenth Earl, and he had succeeded his father, Ramage’s grandfather, who was the ninth Earl and who in turn had succeeded the eighth Earl, who was Ramage’s great-grandfather.
It was great-grandfather, Charles Uglow Ramage, the eighth Earl of Blazey, about whom his father had told him the story. He could not remember many of the details—he had been so young that the story had little more significance than so many of the tales that his mother or father told him before he went to sleep at night.
But great-grandfather Charles, the second son, had been in Barbados during the Civil War, a Royalist, and for reasons which Ramage could no longer remember he had later fled the island and headed for Jamaica in the ship the family owned and which was used for supplying the plantation there. And something had happened which caused great-grandpa to become a buccaneer; he had hated the Spanish so bitterly that for years he harried the Main and the Spanish privateers—just as his great-grandson was doing now, only as a King’s officer.
Ramage could remember faintly that there was some story of a privateer, perhaps more than one—indeed there must have been many of them at one time or another—but the details had gone, lost in childish memories of stories about pixies and gnomes and fairies with magic wands.
Had great-grandfather found a similar massacre? In his voyaging in the Caribbean—they called it the North Sea then, and the Pacific was the South Sea, and men were still alive who remembered Drake fighting the Spanish Armada as it came up the Channel—had he experienced something which made him so hate the Spanish that for the rest of his life he fought them?
Then he remembered the set of silver candlesticks used at dinner at home, three-branched, candelabra, five of them but usually only two used unless there were many guests. Those candelabra had been part of the ransom paid after a raid on some town or other along the Main. There were several things—the candelabra, the smaller set of silver plate which was not used now because cleaning and polishing was wearing away the intricate design, said to be Moorish, those long-barrelled matchlock pistols and arquebuses which lined one of the halls, some of the armour, richly-chased corselets and helmets—all had been acquired by the eighth Earl during his buccaneering days.
Of course the word buccaneer was used now to mean someone akin to pirate, although in great-grandfather’s day it was generally someone who, before there was a proper Navy, held a commission from the King or a governor allowing him (encouraging him, in fact, because the expense was entirely his) to wage war against the enemy. Drake, Ralegh, Hawkins—buccaneers all.
Aitken was looking at him, apparently puzzled. What had he just said? The First Lieutenant had been about to leave the cabin and he had gestured to him to wait, and he had said something, as an explanation. But now he could not remember what it was, so it could not have been important.
“Boarders,” he said for the sake of saying something. “Exercise the boarders as much as you can. Get the grindstone up on deck and make sure the cutlasses are honed and the boarding-pikes sharp. And boats, we must exercise hoisting out boats …”
“You had mentioned that, sir,” Aitken said patiently.
“Oh yes,” Ramage said, “so I did. Very well, I think that’s all for now.”
Aitken stood up slowly, hoping the Captain would resume what he had started to say, but he had a faraway look in his eyes, and Aitken knew this was not the time to fetch him back from wherever his memories had taken him.
C H A P T E R F O U R
THE darkness immediately before dawn was depressing, chilly and damp, and Ramage pulled his boat-cloak round him, hating the way the wool smelled because the salt soaked into it had absorbed the humid night air. In three or four hours the scorching sun would make him envy the seamen wearing only light shirts and thin trousers. But now, as they all waited for dawn, it seemed as cold as the English Channel. It wasn’t, of course; he was now so accustomed to the Tropics that any time the temperature dropped below what would be a scorching day in England he felt frozen.
Baker was the officer of the deck; every ten minutes he called to the six lookouts posted round the ship, one at each bow, one amidships and one on each quarter. He called to them individually and received the same answer, that nothing was in sight, but this constant hailing was not because Baker was nervous or there was any particular danger: it was one way of ensuring the lookouts stayed awake. Staring into the darkness was peculiarly tiring; it was fatally easy to drop off to sleep, even though standing up. And sleeping on duty was a serious crime; not the mere fact of dozing but because in those minutes (even moments) of sleep an enemy could close in or a rocky shoal come into sight. One dozing man could lose the ship and kill every one of his shipmates.
Ramage accepted that lookouts might doze; his own days as a midshipman were not far behind him, and he could remember the tricks he had been reduced to as he tried to stay awake. Wetting your eyelids and facing the wind—that revived you for a few minutes, but never for long enough. Rocking back and forth on heels and toes, shaking the head like a wet dog, flexing the knees, knuckling the eyes and brow … But best of all was the officer of the deck checking every man every ten minutes, and that was in his night orders. Perhaps other captains ordered it, although he had never been lucky enough to serve with one. But never in the years he commanded a ship had he needed to flog a man for sleeping on duty.
He imagined the earth slowly turning towards the sun, bringing dawn to start the day here, bringing twilight to end the day there, somewhere at the far end of the Mediterranean. In Cornwall, dawn had arrived four hours ago; by now it would be broad daylight with St Kew bustling: breakfast would be over and what would Gianna and his parents be doing? The old Admiral would probably be astride a horse, cantering out to inspect a field of growing wheat or call on a sick tenant; his mother would be deciding the day’s menus. Gianna—perhaps Gianna would be writing to him, another page in the long letters they wrote like diary entries.
The sun already shining over England (or hiding behind cloud) was lifting across the Atlantic and it would soon be here. The theory was interesting and there was no doubt—unless the world stood still—that it would occur in practice but, Ramage thought crossly, for the moment it was damned dark and damned cold here, just north of the Dutch island, with a ten-knot breeze and all plain sail set and, from the sound of it, the drummer buckling on his instrument to beat to quarters. Every ship of the Navy in wartime met the dawn with its men at general quarters; the ever-widening circle of daylight could reveal an empty horizon, but it could also reveal an enemy ship, even a fleet, within gunshot.
He listened to the ship noises, so much a part of life that normally one did not notice them: the creak of the great yards overhead and the occasional flap of a sail, like a deep sneeze; the rumble of the barrel of the wheel as the men turned the spokes and the tiller ropes tightened or slackened, pulling the tiller below deck one way or the other, transmitting direction to the rudder to keep the ship on course and make that distant, ugly noise as gudgeons and pintles grated against each other, the metal lubricated only by the sea.
There was the creaking of the ship herself as she rolled and as the swell waves moved under her: creaks caused by slight movements of planking, of futtocks, of keel and keelson. Here, right aft, the intricate framing of the transom made more noise than in a British frigate, presumably because of some difference between British and French shipbuilding practice. The brief but deep noise of the trucks of the guns moving an inch, the distance the rope stretched when the ship rolled heavily. The lighter creak of rope shrouds stretching under strain, a curious noise which Ramage always thought rheumatism would make if it had a noise of its own. The animal squeak of the sheaves of blocks as rope rendered through them; blocks that the boatswain and his mates had missed greasing when they went round with the tallow bucket, although with all the hundreds of bl
ocks in use it was a never-ending job.
The hiss of the sea, of the white horses riding crests, was more pronounced in the darkness; occasionally there was a thump and splash as the bow caught an odd wave and sliced off the top in a shower of spray; sometimes a sudden movement in the sky as a seabird wheeled in the darkness, probably startled as it slept on the surface of the water. Sometimes sudden slight flappings on the deck showed flying fish had landed on board and the officer of the deck usually gave permission to a lookout to grab them and put them in the fish bucket kept by the main-mast for the purpose.
Ramage gave a start as the drummer began rattling away, and below decks the boatswain’s mates began their ritual, the calls shrilling with the noise that earned them their nickname, “Spit-head Nightingales,” and followed by the bellows and threats to the seamen to get them out of their hammocks.
And once again the Calypso’s ship’s company went to their stations for battle: decks were sanded, guns run out (they had been left loaded, their muzzles protected from spray and rain by ornately carved wooden tompions), cutlasses, pistols, muskets and pikes were issued to the men, the Marines formed up under Rennick’s sharp eye (Ramage had once heard a Marine grumbling that the Lieutenant was a vampire who could see in the dark).
The sea was slowly turning a dark grey: because of a trick of the light the black, oily, fast-moving waves were slowing down and seemed higher, and one could see them approaching as the sky lightened almost imperceptibly towards the cast.
Ramage saw that Southwick had come on deck and was standing at the forward side of the quarterdeck, his hands on the rail, looking forward. Of all the men on board, the Master had most invested in what daylight would reveal today: he had predicted that they would see the land of Curaçao broad on the starboard bow, distant fifteen miles, while on the larboard bow would be the much smaller island of Bonaire.
Ramage would not be sorry to see Curaçao, though for a different reason from Southwick: with the Créole keeping station astern, it was necessary to keep a poop lantern burning because it had been a dark, overcast night, and Ramage did not want to risk the schooner losing sight of the Calypso. The lantern had been badly trimmed and was smoking slightly, and the sooty smell seemed to have penetrated all of Ramage’s clothes as various random puffs of wind went round under the transom and came up over the taffrail.
Again Ramage shrugged his shoulders under his boat-cloak, trying to make it fit more closely: the downdraught from the mizen topsail was like a miniature gale blowing down his neck and always particularly bad with the wind on the beam. Well, the draught was always there, he admitted to himself; it became a habit to say it was worse from whatever quarter the wind happened to be blowing at that moment. It meant, of course, that one hoped that the next alteration of course, bearing away a point or luffing up, would send the downdraught on to some other more deserving victim. It never did, of course.
The circle of grey was extending fast now, and Baker came up to him.
“Permission to send the lookouts aloft, sir?”
“Yes,” Ramage said, “and send Orsini up with a bring-’emnear: Southwick will want to know the moment anyone sights land.”
Baker laughed, gesturing towards the Master, who was still standing at the quarterdeck rail like a nervous punter waiting for his horse to come in sight.
The Master’s navigation had been accurate; twenty minutes later, as the ship’s company hosed down the decks to get rid of the sand and secured the guns, replacing boarding-pikes in the racks round the masts, Paolo’s hail from aloft told them land was coming into sight through haze on the larboard bow, which was Bonaire, and from two to four points on the starboard beam (from south-south-west to south-west, Southwick noted on the slate kept in the binnacle drawer), which was Curaçao. There was no mistaking it: flat to the east, hills gradually rising until they ended in a cone-shaped mountain in the west, Sint Christoffelberg.
They were nicely to windward, Ramage saw; with the harbour half-way along Curaçao’s south coast, the Calypso and La Créole could run in from the north-east with a commanding wind. Any alert sentries at the eastern end of the island should spot the frigate and schooner against the sunrise, but later, as they came closer, they would be up the sun’s path and the glare would dazzle a watcher, making it more difficult for him to distinguish flags. All the more reason why such a watcher should assume that a frigate and a schooner so obviously French-built were in fact French.
Rossi swept up the last of the brickdust and looked at the brass rail on the top of the companion-way. That polish would satisfy the First Lieutenant—providing some stupido did not touch it before it was inspected. Fingermarks, fingermarks, he thought crossly. The fingers of half the men in this ship were used only to dab on newly polished brasswork, or so it seemed.
Jackson and Stafford had half a dozen leather buckets lined up by the mainmast. The water had been emptied out and they were polishing the leather before they were refilled and hung back on their hooks, firebuckets, which would be useless in case of fire but which, with the name “Calypso” painted on them, looked smart. Looked smart from that side, but anyone with a little curiosity looking at the other side would see the faint scratches and scoring in the leather, done when the paint of the original French name had been removed with a sharp knife.
“Ever been to this Kurewerko, Jacko?”
“Sounds as though you’re writing poetry. You pronounce it Cue-rah-so. No, never been there; never had anything to do with the Dutch.”
“They’re reckoned to be fighters, the Dutch.”
Jackson nodded. “Hard people, so I hear. Hard in business, hard drinkers, hard fighters.”
“What’ve they gorn into business with the Dons and the French for, then?”
The American shrugged his shoulders. “Politics or profit. Them and women are at the bottom of most things.”
“Women,” Stafford muttered nostalgically. “Them Dutch women is usually very beamy, from what little I seen of ‘em. An’ what a clatter they make, them as wears those wooden shoes.”
He held up the bucket he was polishing so that its sides caught the sun. “It’s women what make me wish we was in the Mediterranington,” he said.
“Mediterranean,” Jackson said, correcting the Cockney out of habit. “But I don’t remember reckoning you as a lady’s man when we were there.”
“Weren’t much opportunity, were there? But Italy, and Spain …”
“I’ve seen some beamy ones there too. Built like threedeckers. Corsica, as well. Remember ‘em in Bastia, selling fruit and vegetables? As round as their cabbages, some of them.”
“Oh yus, yus. And they had luvverly oranges, an’ every now and again yer saw a real beauty. Woman, I mean.”
“You might have done,” Jackson growled, “but I never did.”
“Yus, I prefer Italy. The Marcheezer,” Stafford reminded him.
“She don’t count,” Jackson said firmly. “There was only one of her in the whole of Italy.”
For the next fifteen minutes the two men reminisced about the rescue of the Marchesa from the Tuscan beaches and the subsequent voyage to Gibraltar, and then they were joined by Rossi who, finished with polishing brass, now had to help them with the buckets.
Rossi was, for once, not interested in discussing women, although it was a subject on which he claimed to be an expert. His verdict was always the same—that no women equalled those from Italy, and with it the implication that anyone who disagreed was probably a eunuch.
“These privateers, Jacko: you think we find them in Curaçao?”
“Preferably just outside,” Jackson said grimly. “Then we can sink ‘em or burn ‘em while their friends watch from the shore.”
Rossi said with relish: “Remember the Tranquil … let ‘em burn.”
One of the bosun’s mates, coming over to see how the work was progressing, looked up startled. “What’s burning?” The look in his eye showed that fire at sea was the fear of every seama
n.
“Nothin’s burning,” Stafford said soothingly. “Not yet, anyway. We’re just ‘opin’ to catch some privateers and make bonfires of ‘em.”
“Use my flint and steel, then,” the bosun’s mate said bitterly. “You should ‘ave seen those people. You did, Jacko. Slashed to pieces, particularly the women. Whoever killed those five was like a butcher’s apprentice.” He looked at Jackson, who was regarded by most of the ship’s company, quite erroneously, as being in the Captain’s confidence. “Are we reckoning on finding privateers in Curaçao? Never heard tell of them using the place before. It’s a Dutch island, ain’t it?”
The American shrugged his shoulders and ran his hand through his thinning, sandy-coloured hair. “Looks to me as though it’s turned itself into a privateers’ nest. I only know that’s why we’re going there, to look for ‘em, though why they’ve all started using it as a base I don’t know. Our frigates are probably making it too hot for them along the northern coasts, I suppose. Not many Spanish ships move around Cuba. Hispaniola’s quiet, so’s Puerto Rico.”
“That don’t leave many other places except the Main,” commented Stafford.
“You don’t understand the first thing about privateering,” Rossi said with a surprising fluency. “The privateer, he capture a ship and he capture a cargo, and sometimes he capture passengers. Three things. He is not interested in anything else.” With a wave of his hand he disposed of the victim’s crew over the side in a boat.
“He make his profit from these three things. He sell the cargo—for that he need a port and a market, a place where merchants have money. Then he sell the ship. He need the same thing. Port, merchants, men with money. For the passengers—well, collecting the ransom is hard work, and if he think he get enough profit from the ship and cargo allora, he let the passengers go in the boat—or—” he gestured to the northwards—”he kill them.”
“You seem to know about privateering,” commented the bosun’s mate.