by Dudley Pope
Ramage saw that the second and third guns, six-pounders, were trained more to larboard, at the launch and the cutter.
“Quick,” Ramage snapped at Rennick, “have your men fire at the ports!”
He cursed himself for not doing it sooner. The chances of a musket ball hitting Frenchmen were slight—any Marine who could fire through a port from a fast-moving boat would be a king among sharpshooters—but the thud of musket balls into woodwork might spoil the enemy gunners’ concentration. The gig’s oarsmen’s ears would soon be ringing as the muskets fired over their heads, but it was the only chance of saving the men in the other boats.
Rennick snapped an order that could be heard in all the boats and in a moment the Marines were standing, one knee on the thwarts. Ramage could hear a succession of clicks as the men cocked the locks and then, within a couple more seconds, all had fired and some were coughing as the smoke drifted back and caught their throats.
Forty yards to go: Ramage could see dried salt forming a grey band two or three feet broad above the privateer’s waterline and the black paint had the mauvish tinge that came from too much sun, salt—and age. The seams of the hull planking were opening up with the heat of the sun constantly on one side.
“The bow!” he called to Jackson. “Stand by, men; we’ll board over her bow: up the bobstay, anchor cable, anchor stock—men with broad shoulders give the little chaps a leg-up!”
The Marines were frantically ramming home fresh shot as they reloaded their muskets, and now most of them were priming. “One more volley through the ports, sir?” Rennick asked. “They’ve all got pistols.”
And why not, Ramage thought: they were close enough now that at least a few shot should get through the ports, and discharged muskets could be left in the boat because, as Rennick had just pointed out, each Marine had a pistol, like the seamen.
“Very well, but aim with care!”
Again there was what seemed a ragged volley which in fact showed that each man was firing carefully, aiming for the narrow gap between gun and bulwark. There was more space at the top, but they were now so close that the barrel of the gun helped protect the French gunners.
Suddenly there was an enormous crash, a thump of invisible pressure, and smoke filled the boat, followed by a distant shriek and confused shouting. The sun darkened and then lightened, and Ramage felt his lungs burning as he breathed in gun smoke. But his men were still rowing; the oars were still squeaking in the rowlocks and they came out into the sunlight again.
He glanced round to larboard, guessing what he would see. The second gun had fired and the cutter was now just a swirl in the water with splintered planking and oars floating away. Heads were bobbing about in the wreckage—several heads. Wagstaffe and the launch were still rowing fast but farther away now because, Ramage was glad to note, the Second Lieutenant was making for the schooner’s stern, which also took him out of the arc of fire of the first gun. With Ramage’s men boarding over the bow and Wagstaffe’s over the transom, with luck Baker would board amidships, providing Ramage’s men could silence that carronade.
Ramage twisted his cutlass-belt round so that the blade hung down his back and would not trip him; he pushed the pistols more firmly into his waistband and jammed his hat firmly on his head.
Twenty yards, ten, five—and then the gig was under the privateer’s bow, the oars were backing water to stop the boat, and there was a wild scramble as men began climbing. Ramage grabbed the thick, rusty lower fluke of the spare anchor and kicked upwards. The top edge of the planking, doubled for a couple of feet below the sheer line, made a narrow ledge for his feet so that he was held horizontally. He paused for a moment and saw that one swing up with his legs would enable him to catch his feet in the bottom edge of the port for the bow-chase gun, the carronade that had missed the gig but which by now must have been reloaded and ready to fire.
He tensed his muscles and heaved upwards, and a moment later was standing spreadeagled across the port, off balance and leaning inboard with his belly against the wide muzzle of the gun. At the breech, four feet away, he saw a blur of movement: a man to one side cocked the flintlock; a second man, behind and beyond the recoil of the gun, began to take the strain on a lanyard—the trigger line which fired the gun. Within a moment the carronade would fire and blow him in half—the men were apparently aiming for Baker and the pinnace at the very moment that Ramage appeared at the port. He tugged for one of his pistols. It came clear of the waistband and his thumb cocked it as one of the Frenchmen screamed a warning to the others and lashed out at Ramage with a handspike, a six-foot-long steel-tipped lever used to move the other guns and which would have crushed Ramage’s head if the tip had not caught the side of the face of another man in the French gun’s crew.
Ramage, still seeing it all as a blur, aimed along the lanyard towards the man at the end and fired; then regaining his balance he wriggled sideways round the barrel and in through the port just as the man with the lanyard—the gun captain, in fact—collapsed within a foot of the man hit by the handspike.
As he tugged his second pistol free he sensed rather than saw men rushing past him: his own men from the gig who, coming over the bow, had not found so fast a route on board. The rest of the carronade’s crew had vanished—fled aft, presumably, when they saw the Calypsos coming over the bow. But as Ramage looked back out of the port to see where the other boats were, he realized that the fighting had stopped: the privateer’s crew were dead or had surrendered.
Then in the sea a few yards away he saw the expanding circle of splintered wood, the remains of the cutter with men clinging to the wreckage. Wagstaffe had obeyed his orders and not stopped with the launch, but now a boat could go back and pick up survivors. Jackson was standing in front of him, grinning cheerfully. “All surrendered, three wounded, and this chap here—” he pointed to the man hit by the handspike—“ and one dead, the one you shot, sir.”
“And our casualties?”
“None on board here, sir, but the cutter …”
“Yes, get back and pick up the survivors; I can see several men holding on to wreckage.”
Then Wagstaffe was reporting and then Baker, and after making sure the prisoners were being guarded, Ramage led them in a dash to the second privateer alongside, but there was no one on board. There were still eight more privateers to be secured, and after returning to the schooner and leaving instructions for securing the prisoners, he ordered the men back into the boats. As an afterthought he ordered one of the guards to lower the French flag, and the man paused a moment and said: “‘Sfunny thing, sir: she’s flying French colours, but she’s got a Spanish name on her transom: I noticed it as I climbed on board.”
“What name?”
“Can’t rightly pronounce it, sir, but summat like Newstra lady of Antigua. I know it was ‘Antigua’ ‘cos I thought of English Harbour.”
“Was it Nuestra Señora de Antigua?”
The tone of Ramage’s voice and his correct pronunciation made the seaman stare at him. “Cor, sir—then this is the privateer what murdered all them in the Tranquil!”
Ramage nodded. A French privateer with a Spanish name and probably commanded by Adolphe Brune, who had described himself as “chief of the privateers” in the letter to van Someren demanding Amsterdam’s surrender. If Brune survives this affair in Curaçao, Ramage vowed, he’ll end up dangling on a noose from one of the gibbets on the Palisades at Port Royal.
By five o’clock that evening the gig, launch and pinnace were back alongside the Calypso, secured to the boat boom. More than sixty French prisoners from the ten privateers—more than ten times the number Ramage had expected—had been ferried on shore and locked up in the town jail. Because Amsterdam was a large port and accustomed to acting as the forcible host to crowds of drunken and rioting seamen, the jail was a large stone building, and the Governor assured Ramage that the jailers were quite capable of dealing with up to a hundred prisoners without the cells seeming crowded.
&n
bsp; The capture of the rest of the privateers without a shot being fired had been luck: Ramage realized that none of the Frenchmen in the remaining eight had seen the shot smashing the cutter to pieces; the whole action had been hidden by the sheer bulk of Brune’s schooner and the ketch. They had heard a carronade and a six-pounder each fire once, apparently without effect on the British, and the nearest of them had heard a single pistol shot, and then the French flag had come down at the run on board the Nuestra Señora. That had been enough to make each of them surrender immediately one of the Calypso’s boats came alongside.
Now the ten privateers were still at anchor in Amsterdam, but on board each one were two Dutch soldiers who had simple orders: if any French came into sight on the quays and looked as though they might board, they were to light the slow matches leading to the magazines and escape in the rowing boats which had been commandeered from local fishermen. The fishermen had made no protest at losing their boats temporarily; they had lost their appetite for fishing.
Bowen was still busy patching up the wounded. Three of the cutter’s crew had been badly cut and bruised by splinters but were in no danger; two were missing and obviously killed and one man, with no mark on him, was just cold and trembling, unable to walk or talk. Kenton was once again his lively self but swearing he would always wear shoes, not knee-length boots, on any further boat operations. If he had to swim again, he declared, he could kick off shoes, but his boots had acted like ballast. An otherwise sympathetic Aitken had agreed with the problem of boots but warned Kenton against kicking off the shoes, pointing out that: “Ye never know but y’ might have to walk a long way back to the ship.” His Scots accent made “ship” sound like “sheep,” and Kenton had gone off muttering that he was a sailor, not a shepherd.
Southwick and Aitken had watched the action through their telescopes and seen Ramage momentarily draped over the muzzle of the carronade and knew it must be on the verge of firing. The Master hid his feelings with the comment to Ramage that: “Then I remembered you were wearing your oldest uniform and had left behind the new sword the Marchesa gave you, so only the pistols would be lost.” For a moment Aitken had been shocked, then he had seen Ramage’s grin and had joined in with: “Aye, I thought for a minute or two I’d be moving up a deck. I find my present cabin both small and hot in this weather …”
Then, with Southwick’s assurance that he had no wish to spend the evening on shore and Bowen declaring he would not leave his patients, Ramage and his officers went below to prepare themselves for dinner with the Governor. Ramage was worn out, but he could think of no possible excuse to avoid at least an hour or two at Government House. After going below to chat with the wounded men—and finding them cheerful but chagrined, complaining bitterly that before they could “get a swing” at the French they found themselves swimming—he went to his cabin, let Silkin pull off his boots (Kenton’s vow about shoes made sense: apart from anything else the hot decks and walking had swollen his feet so much that pulling off his boots needed as much effort—or so it seemed—as pulling off his feet), and then sat back for ten minutes, trying to relax.
Relaxing, everyone told him, was a very fine thing. Relax for ten minutes, banish all worrisome thoughts from your head, and at the end of it you were as refreshed as a flower garden after a summer shower. It probably worked for some people but it depended on relaxing in the first place. If you could not relax, then you felt (and probably looked) like a flower garden after a long drought.
His feet throbbed as though someone was pounding them with clubs; his eyes were sore from the day’s scorching sun; his hands were not visibly trembling but like his knees they gave that impression. If he tried to rest his mind for a moment—the first stage, as it were, to relaxing—he felt the muzzle of that carronade pressing against his belly, the iron barrel warm to his hands from the heat of the sun, and hunched there, unbalanced and frightened, he could smell the garlic, the Stockholm tar, the bilges and the sheer stink of unwashed French seamen. Then once again he heard, almost felt, that sharp metallic click of the gun’s second captain cocking the lock, and he could see the gun captain’s eyes staring at him, startled and momentarily paralysed by his sudden appearance at the port. The bloodshot eyes were close together, and seemed slightly out of focus, and afterwards he had noticed that the corpse reeked of wine. Drink had slowed the Frenchman’s reactions by—well, perhaps only a couple of seconds, but just long enough for Ramage to cock and fire his pistol; one of the two pistols given him by Gianna and which she had thought plain, preferring a far more ornate pair.
Well, he had not been blown in half by an enemy carronade; young Kenton had not had his head knocked off by the six-pounder shot that smashed up the cutter. There was, therefore, no more point in thinking about it. Think instead of—well, the privateers were captured, which would please old Foxey-Foote. The Admiral’s orders did not actually say the privateers in Curaçao were to be captured; from memory the orders were in fact rather vague about what was to be done. Anyway, all ten of them were captured and could be sunk, burned or blown up if necessary in minutes.
The French prisoners had sworn that those ten were the only ones using the Dutch islands of Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire as a temporary base, so any new arrivals would be ships that came in by chance. Ramage had been interested to discover that they had not been expecting La Perle, so her Captain’s story was probably true.
Suddenly he sat upright in the chair, then stood up and went over to his desk, unlocking a drawer and taking out his orders from Admiral Foxe-Foote. Yes, they were vague about exactly what he was to do about the privateers based on Curaçao, but they were quite clear on one point which had just occurred to him with the suddenness of a sword thrust: as soon as he had dealt with them he was to return to Port Royal. So, if Foxey-Foote was liverish when the Calypso finally returned, he could sermonize and wax wrathful because Ramage had paused to take the surrender of an island. Islands, after all, yielded no prize-money; nothing from which a commander-in-chief could take his eighths. Ten privateers, on the other hand, undamaged and requiring only the sails hoisting up from below and bending on …
Maria van Someren. He put his orders back in the drawer and turned the key, and then returned to the armchair. There was nothing restful about Maria van Someren. She was no blushing young girl overcome with the vapours if she saw a naval officer casting an eye over her body; nor was she one of those brazen young women who made up for dull and vacant minds and vapid personalities by wearing daringly cut dresses out of which a reasonable man could expect a bosom to pop any moment and which, temporarily, took his mind off the mental drabness of the owner.
No, like Gianna she preferred the company of men to being caught up in a crowd of women chattering about the merits of a newly-discovered dressmaker, hinting at the behaviour of some absent wife (or her husband) or (with a brisk flapping of fans) remarking how hot it was for the time of year. Or, Ramage suddenly realized, he assumed she did: he had seen her once for a few minutes, and already he thought he knew her. Instead, of course, he was creating a person in the image of the kind of woman he liked. He had seen her once, he would see her again this evening, and then it was unlikely he would ever see her again. The disappointment was physical rather than mental; he felt it in his loins. He would see Gianna naked, hold her body closely, share her bed—at least, he could have reasonable hopes of all that—but he would always wonder about Maria van Someren: was she one of those women who clasped her hands across her breasts, shut her eyes, breathed shallowly and went rigid, like a day-old corpse? Or was she—well, his mind was in enough turmoil to stop speculating further.
Many a man had metaphorically or literally lost his head because of the curve of a bosom but, he asked himself, have we anything to lose by dining at Government House tonight? The Calypso was safe enough; Southwick was quite capable of turning her on the springs and firing into the town—and likewise dealing with the unlikely prospect of a ship unexpectedly sailing in after dark. The pr
ivateers were safe enough under their Dutch guards—safe inasmuch as they could not fall into enemy hands. And since Ramage had to discuss the military situation with the Governor before doing anything about the rebels, the Calypso’s officers might just as well be present and have a good dinner afterwards.
At the moment Ramage finally stood up from the armchair, Silkin knocked on the door and came into the cabin, freshly ironed shirt, stock and stockings over his arm and polished shoes in his hand. Ramage, always irrationally irritated by Silkin’s ability to keep out of sight until the moment he was wanted, began stripping off his clothes and walked through to his sleeping cabin where he knew the handbasin would be precisely two-thirds full of water, with soap, shaving brush, razor freshly stropped, and towel neatly laid out.
Relax indeed! Those captains who were court-martialled for “not doing their utmost” against the enemy, admirals criticized after a battle for not pursuing a beaten enemy, junior officers not promoted because they lacked initiative—they were the men who could and did relax.
He soaped his body and then rinsed it. He twirled the shaving brush in the soap dish and lathered his face. He paused and rubbed the lather deeper into the skin with his fingers before resuming with the brush. Finally he picked up the razor. He had no need to test the blade; Silkin was not intelligent enough to do something wrong, like forget to put out the shaving brush, or not hone the razor, so that the Captain could spend a couple of minutes being angry, and then brighten up for the rest of the day. Instead, with nothing to grumble at, he became angry with himself for being so ill-tempered, and this discontent sometimes lasted for hours. If the ship’s company understood all this, Ramage thought to himself, they’d cut Silkin’s throat and feed him in small pieces to the gulls.
A mirror hung on the bulkhead, although Silkin knew well enough that Ramage always shaved without a mirror, a habit picked up as a lieutenant when frequently there was not enough light in a tiny cabin. Ramage rinsed the razor, wiped the blade and then closed it. Shaving was a relaxing activity. One glance at the mirror to make sure no flecks of lather remained in the ears or nostrils (he was always irritated when he saw it in other men) and he turned to the clothes, laid out neatly on the top of his cot, and began dressing.