by Dudley Pope
“Let’s sink those we can’t take with us,” Southwick said gruffly. “They won’t yield much prize-money, anyway.”
“That Nuestra Señora de Antigua,” Wagstaffe said bitterly. “I’d like to see her burn. Pity we can’t sort out the survivors of her original crew and put them on board. Anyway, her Captain’s dead, we know that.”
“She would burn well,” Ramage said dreamily, and all movement in the cabin stopped. Suddenly he could hear the water lapping under the Calypso’s stern, and the gentle whine of the wind in the rigging, and on deck a sentry coughed and then spat over the side.
“Francis Drake, sir?” Aitken asked.
Ramage nodded. “Tonight. The wind is holding. About three o’clock, before moonrise. The explosion should take most of the tiles off Government House.”
“Shall I start the preparations, sir?”
“Here, hold hard a moment,” Southwick protested. “This is all beyond me.”
Wagstaffe laughed happily and said: “Drake … come on, old man, he was a bit before your time, but you must have heard how he launched fireships against the Spanish Armada when it anchored off Gravelines.”
“Ah, yes, but although I wasn’t there I did hear tell that he didn’t sink any Spanish ships with ‘em.”
“No, but they cut their cables and ran for their lives.”
“We don’t want the Delft cutting and running though; we want her blowing up right where she is,” Southwick declared.
Wagstaffe was enjoying teasing the Master. “Drake would have enjoyed the idea of using a French privateer with a Spanish name to blow up a Dutch frigate.”
“So would I,” Southwick said as he suddenly worked out Ramage’s intention. “And there’s a lot of work to be done preparing the Nuestra Señora. For a start she hasn’t a single sail bent on.”
Silently in the darkness, always keeping the bulk of the Calypso between them and the Delft, the British frigate’s boats had rowed back and forth to the Nuestra Señora ferrying across casks, axes and saws, grapnels, lengths of light chain, coils of ropes and several single and double blocks to make up sheets for the sails to save time searching through the schooner for the originals.
While seamen working under the boatswain and Southwick hoisted the sails up on deck and then bent them on to masts and stays, others removed all the hatches, cut big holes in the few permanent bulkheads so that the wind could blow through the ship and up the hatchways, and lifted off skylights to ensure a good draught.
More men climbed up the rigging and secured the grapnels from chains so that they hung down just above the level of the enemy bulwarks, suspended where they would hook into the Delft’s rigging. Two axes rested against the anchor cable bitts; all her guns to the starboard side had been loaded with two shots each and a treble charge of powder, although no gunners would fire them because the barrels would probably burst; only heat or sparks falling into the pans would ignite the gunpowder.
Ramage went into the captain’s cabin—it was little more than a large cuddy—and was surprised and thankful at the draught blowing through it; a draught that when the time came would fan the flames like a blacksmith’s bellows, although for the moment it did its best to remove the stench in which Brune had lived. He walked forward to where the privateersmen normally lived and where their hammocks were still slung. Several seamen were busy breaking up blocks of pitch and wedging them wherever a ledge in the planking would hold a piece. Several of the hammocks swung gently with the sharp outlines of pieces of pitch revealing their contents.
In another corner half a dozen seamen were busy chopping coils of thick rope into ten-foot lengths, while others frayed the ends and jammed them into the piles of pitch. Every few feet were small casks of tar, identifiable only by their smell, because there was always seepage between the staves. They would not be smashed or have their bungs knocked out until the last moment, and many of them rested on piles of spare sails.
Rennick and his sergeant, each with a long coil of slow match slung round his neck, were at work round the mainmast where ten half-casks of powder, each three and a half feet long, were securely lashed in place, each with its bung uppermost. From a point fifteen feet away several lengths of slow match stretched along the deck, like a thin octopus, the ends disappearing in the bung-holes, where they went down into the powder and were held lightly in position by wooden bungs.
“Burns at the rate of two feet a minute, sir,” Rennick explained. “There’s fifteen feet from this point to the casks. We don’t need a slow match to each cask, of course,” he added hurriedly. “One would be enough, because when one cask goes up they’ll all go, but we have plenty of insurance. When the time comes we light as many as possible, but there’s no need to do them all.”
“The guns?” Ramage asked.
“I finally triple-shotted them on the starboard side—those which will point at the Delft. Those on the larboard side facing us are triple-charged without shot, and the breechings are cut, so when they go off they’ll recoil right across the ship.”
“You still have the port fires to arrange?”
“Yes, sir; I thought I’d set them on deck near the wheel. It’ll help us see what we’re doing for the last minute or two.”
“And that brandy?”
“Southwick has stowed the casks on deck along the starboard side, forward. I have a Marine sentry guarding it. We were lucky to get it on board without a cask being ‘accidentally’ stove in.”
Ramage nodded. “The purser’s glad to see the back of it. He’s been worried ever since he found it.”
On deck Ramage shivered as he considered the Nuestra Señora de Antigua as a furnace: pitch and tar with frayed rope, old sails and smashed-up gratings to start a fire, brandy to increase it and finally powder to scatter it—and the schooner—over the Delft. The grapnels should catch in the Delft’s rigging and hold the Nuestra Señora to her long enough for a fatal and fiery embrace.
The men who sailed the schooner, setting fire to her at the last moment as she crashed alongside the Delft, would have to take their chance in the water, leaping over the side and swimming, and hoping that the baulks of timber hurled into the air by the explosions did not land on their heads. The Calypso’s boats should approach from the side away from the Delft and pick them up, providing that flying wreckage and sharks had left anything to save.
Southwick bustled up and said conversationally: “It’s going to take some good timing to shoot up into the wind so that she carries her way and gets alongside the Delft, sir.”
“I’ve been thinking about that.”
“Not above half a mile to get the canvas drawing well and plenty of way on her.”
“A little over half a mile.”
“Doesn’t give you much time to get the feel of the ship, and you’ll have to start lighting her up below before you’re actually alongside, or else there’s a chance the Dutchmen will get on board or cut away the grapnels—or if the chain beats ‘em, the rigging from which they’re hanging.”
“True,” Ramage said patiently.
“And an unlucky shot through that brandy won’t help either. They’ll be firing at you, of course.”
“I hadn’t anticipated them pelting me with flowers, but their broadside guns won’t bear until almost the last moment.”
“Musketry, though,” Southwick said gloomily. “There’ll be plenty of that; musket balls falling like rain. You’ll need spare men ready to take over at the tiller, because the Dutch will be aiming at them.”
“Look,” Ramage said finally, “I’ve made up my mind. I am taking the Nuestra Señora alongside, and you are staying on board the Calypso. And I don’t want to hear that sad story again of how you missed the chase across the island. If you could have run a mile you’d have been welcome. If you can swim a mile you can come with the Nuestra Señora.”
“Don’t need to swim a mile, begging your pardon.”
“You couldn’t swim a hundred yards, so let’s have no more a
rguing.”
“But you are taking Jackson, aren’t you, sir?”
“Jackson, Stafford, Rossi, Baker—he’ll take over command if anything happens to me—Rennick and fourteen more men. Twenty to handle a fireship—quite apart from those helping to hoist sails who will leave before we get under way. That’s quite enough. Half a dozen would be sufficient.”
“I wish you’d tow a boat, sir, so you can be sure of escaping.”
“We’ve gone over that,” Ramage said impatiently. “The painter will get foul of the rudder or some such thing: and a boat rowing away would make a fine target for Dutch muskets in the light of the flames. They’ll never see swimmers and even if they did they’d never hit them.”
“Well, you know what you’re doing, sir,” Southwick said in a voice which implied just the opposite.
“Thank you,” Ramage said stiffly. “If you’ll learn to swim and lose two stone in weight, you can command all the fireships you want.”
By half past two the Nuestra Señora de Antigua was ready, Jackson and Stafford stood at the big curved tiller and Ramage waited close by with Baker. Down below Rennick had several lanthorns ready, the new candles inside burning steadily but their light hidden by screens of sacking. When the word came from the quarterdeck the candles would be taken out and used to light the fuses to the powder casks and the piles of combustibles which would start the pitch and tar burning and eventually ignite the brandy in the casks. The powder exploding should in turn send off first the Nuestra Señora’s own magazine and then the Delft’s.
Ramage could feel the wind steady on his face. It had backed to the east-north-east, so that it was blowing across the channel from the Punda side to Otrabanda not quite at right-angles. The privateers, the Calypso and the Delft were all lying head to wind, their bows pointing to Punda. The moon had not yet risen—Ramage had planned his attack for an hour earlier—but the stars were bright, the banks of the channel and the quays grey ribbons with the bulky ships black between them.
There had been no sign of Dutch guard-boats; they were obviously relying on lookouts on board. What was that Captain expecting? Did he anticipate an attack by “English?” He would expect a battle of broadsides, and perhaps an attempt to board. He knew there was little chance of the Calypso weighing and trying to get alongside because the channel was too narrow (particularly without a pilot to warn of shoals) for frigates to manoeuvre drawing more than sixteen feet. By now then, the Dutch might have decided the Calypso would do nothing until daylight—or even that Ramage might realize he really was trapped and negotiate the surrender of his ship. Or—the thought had only just struck him—perhaps van Someren intended to have the big guns from the two forts hauled round to the town at daylight so that from the quays on each side they could if necessary help the Delft’s guns pound the Calypso to pieces. Each fort had twenty-five or so 24-pounders, which meant that the Calypso would be receiving the fire equivalent to a ship of the line, and unable to reply to most of it … It was curious how neither he nor any of his Lieutenants had thought of the Dutch doing it. Underestimating the enemy was a bad mistake, but the fireship idea had occupied all their thoughts.
There were groups of men at both the Nuestra Señora’s masts, ready to haul on halyards to hoist the great mainsail, foresail, forestaysail and jib. There were a couple more headsails that could be hoisted, but they would take time and meant only more sheets to be trimmed, more ropes to get snagged; trying to free a headsail because of a jammed sheet was a distraction he was anxious to avoid. As it was, the sheets had been led round so that the headsails would be hoisted backed, so that the schooner’s bow began to pay off to starboard as the anchor cable was cut, ensuring she was on the right tack and would not have to go about.
Two men waited at the bitts with axes, ready to cut the anchor cable. Rennick and his men were below—Satan and his firemen, Southwick had called them—and Rossi was here on deck with the port fires, sacking, some old sails and blocks of pitch that should cause a fine blaze, helped by the folds of the mainsail as soon as the halyards were let run.
He looked over to starboard and could just make out the black hull of the Calypso, but she had the Delft beyond and the harbour entrance. The tree frogs sounded sharp and noisy, even this far from the shore, a constant squeaky noise like a block that needed greasing. The four Dutch guards, two on the Nuestra Señora and two on the next privateer, now prisoners in the Calypso, must wonder what the devil was going on. Very soon, he thought grimly, they would be certain the end of the world had come.
Ramage, calling down to Rennick to stove in the tar barrels so that it began seeping into the wood, began to walk forward. It was a strange sensation. Like all the rest of his party he wore only trousers and a shirt; his bare feet padding over the deck, the soles of his feet detecting the unevenness of the schooner’s planking. He had a Sea Service pistol in his waistbelt, just in case, but if he had not fired it when the time came to dive overboard, it would be another weapon for the Calypso’s gunner to list as “lost in action.”
There was no point in waiting any longer to get under way because everything was ready. Everything except the Captain’s courage, which he knew had vanished: his knees had a curious springiness about them, and his shin and thigh muscles had melted; there seemed to be bile at the back of his throat and his stomach was on the verge of heaving, as though he had eaten bad meat for supper. By now he was at the mainmast, and the men were waiting expectantly. “Hoist away,” he said, “and overhaul the mainsheet. And no noise!”
The blocks had been greased within the past hour, but it usually took a few spins of the sheaves to work the grease in. The blocks on the gaff were no exception, but by the time the sail began to creep up the mast he was abreast the foremast, repeating his order for the foresail. The few remaining gaskets were taken off the foresail and its gaff began creeping up the mast, pulling up the sail and having no apparent connection with the men hauling down on the halyards.
The mainsail was up, with a few more swigs on the peak halyard needed to top up the gaff, but the canvas was only rippling, not flogging, as the wind blew down both sides so that the sail did not draw. Flogging canvas on a night like this would sound like rolling gunfire.
Now the foresail was up and as the men topped up the gaff Ramage gestured to the men at the headsail halyards. At once narrow triangles of canvas rose up the stays, but instead of taking up the bellying curve of sails drawing they became almost flattened, held aback by the sheets so that the wind pushed against them, thrusting the bow over to starboard. But by then Ramage had walked up to the bow, where the two men waited with axes.
Yes, the Nuestra Señora’s bow was being pushed round towards the entrance. “Cut!” he snapped, and the first axe blade thudded into the cable, followed by the second. Five blows and the end of the cable whiplashed out over the bow and at once the schooner, no longer held by her anchor, swung round to starboard so that she headed along the channel, pointing at the Calypso and the harbour entrance.
Without further orders men were casting off the headsail sheets and making them up on the starboard side so that the sails began to draw; three men were enough to trim the foresail sheet because for a moment there was no weight on the sail, and four more tailed on to the mainsheet.
And the Nuestra Señora de Antigua began to come alive: with all the sails drawing she was already picking up speed and Ramage called: “Sail-hoisters—to your boat!” The boat was towing astern, ready for them, and he walked aft, expecting the dozen or so extra men on board to rush past him to jump into the boat, cast off and row for the Calypso. He had reached the quarterdeck, looking up at the set of the sails and glancing forward to see the Calypso getting closer, when he realized that not a man had moved. “Sail-handlers! To your boat!” he called.
There seemed many fewer men on deck now. What the devil was going on? Or had he had a momentary lapse and not noticed the men leaving?
“Jackson! Has the sail-handling party left?”
“It—er, I haven’t been watching them, sir.”
“What the devil is happening? Where are the men?” “Hiding, sir,” Jackson said bluntly. “They want to lend a hand setting fire to the ship!”
“But what—”
“They can all swim, sir,” Jackson said, leaning against the great wooden bar of the tiller. “How close should I pass astern of the Calypso, sir? I’m wondering if this side of the channel shoals—there are no quays abreast the Delft on the Otrabanda side.”
A fireship with thirty men on board … Still, better too many than too few … “Steady as you go,” he said to Jackson. The Delft was still out of sight, hidden by the Calypso, but the schooner would pass thirty yards astern of the British frigate, which any moment would cease to hide her from lookouts in the Delft, even if the Dutchmen had not already spotted the sails. Men tended to see only what they were looking for; with luck no one had told the Dutchmen to do anything but watch the Calypso.
Mainsail drawing well—and it was a well-cut sail; he could see that much in the starlight. Foresail rather baggy, probably an older sail, but also drawing well. And the headsails trimmed to perfection, as though the men knew that Southwick had his night-glass trained on them.
And in the calm water the bow wave was a loud hiss as the schooner continued increasing speed, the wind on the larboard beam. Four knots, five and now six, Ramage estimated. Her bottom was clean, that much was certain; the copper sheathing had kept her clear of barnacles and weed. She picked up speed quickly and, he must remember, she would take time to lose way.
The Calypso was looming up fast, her three great masts and yards seeming black stripes against the stars. Still no sign of the Delft. Jackson and Stafford were quite happy at the tiller, easing the schooner slightly in puffs that were just enough to heel her a few degrees. Everyone would be watching from the Calypso, nightglasses jammed to straining eyes; lookouts on the seaward side would be hard put not to glance over their shoulders at the sight of a schooner racing up the channel in the starlight under all plain sail. There was phosphorescence in here too, so her bow wave would be a pale green flame, seeming alive.