Ramage's Signal

by Dudley Pope

  “There may be others called Ramage, but only one would—Caramba! How did you know that at the last moment the convoy would go to Foix?”

  “I sent the signal,” Ramage said blandly. “The French semaphore system is most useful.”

  The Spaniard shrugged his shoulders, as a priest might admit the Devil’s existence. “Now you capture the whole convoy, eh? And I thought you were simply exercising your boats.”

  “Oh, but I am,” Ramage assured him. “Now, if you’ll join your men—I suggest you sit there by the mainmast. I have a few words to say to them.”

  By now the men of the gig’s boarding-party were bent down below the level of the bulwarks. Two of them returning from searching the fo’c’s’le were pushing along a man they had found sleeping.

  Ramage raised his voice. “You may sit up,” he said in Spanish, and noted there were ten men in addition to the master, and one of them was, from his dress, the mate.

  “This ship is now a British prize. You will all go down to the gig, and I warn you that if you shout or try to signal any of the ships, you’ll be run through with a cutlass. Do as you are told and you will not be hurt.”

  He walked over to Kenton and said: “I leave you to your new command. And don’t forget to hoist the signal for Southwick; he worries about you.”

  The Spanish crew of the Golondrina climbed down into the gig, in which there were only the six oarsmen, but close by Jackson steered the green cutter so that his boarding-party covered the prisoners. Ramage followed the Spanish master and took the tiller, and with a farewell wave to Kenton, the painter and stern-fast were cast off and the gig headed back for the Calypso and then, without any of the other ships noticing them, turned away for the beach.

  Ramage said to the Spanish master: “I am going to be generous. If I was an Algerine, I would cut all your throats, eh?”

  The master nodded miserably and rubbed his unshaven chin in a reflex gesture.

  “I am going to land you on the beach. You will all immediately go inland out of sight. Cagliari is to the south-east, and I suggest you follow the coast road. Do not try to raise the alarm because there are fourteen other ships in the convoy, and you could cause a great deal of bloodshed.”

  Ramage saw that the man understood. He would be marooned on an alien island, but there were many towns and ports in Sardinia, and he would eventually get back to Spain. The gig’s keel scraped on the sand, and the men of the Golondrina scrambled on shore while Jackson’s men kept them covered from the cutter.

  Southwick wrote carefully in his log, using the slate to help his memory: “Two PM wind W by S. Anchored with best bower in five fms, Vacca I. bearing SW by W, white house on S. Antioco NW by ½ W, ruin on P. Botte E by S. 2.30 PM all boats hoisted out, manned and three PM, left under general command of the Captain. Pumped ship at ten ins. Fresh water remaining twenty-one tons. 3:15 PM first ships of French convoy entering gulf and anchoring as convenient.”

  Southwick sniffed as he wiped his pen dry. “As convenient” be damned; they were just sailing in, clewing up or brailing sails, turning head to wind and tipping anchors over the side as though disposing of rubbish. The Sarazine would foul the Calypso the moment the wind had any east in it; the Golondrina needed only a north wind to bring her crashing into the Calypso, and two other ships only a little smaller than the Sarazine obviously had not let out enough scope on their cables and would drag on to the frigate if the wind picked up. And the damnable thing was that he could do nothing about it: no one left on board the Calypso spoke a word of French: Mr Ramage was away with the boats and Mr Orsini was only just now coming into sight with the Passe Partout.

  He had not heard a shot fired so far: not a pistol, not a musket, not a great gun: it was waiting for the sound of a shot that was making him so bad-tempered. If anything went wrong, what could he do, with no boats and fifty men left on board, all of them old wrecks like himself, short of wind—a quarter of them wearing trusses, half of them bleary of eye, and most shaky of gait? All of them had spirit enough, but a warlike yell and threat of a broadside would not be enough to get even one of them up to the main-yard in under five minutes.

  He, Edward Southwick, had to admit that at the moment he was a Falstaff at the head of a rag-tag and bobtail party of seamen who, when mixed with the rest of the ship’s company, did their jobs well enough: there was no need for the cook to have two legs and no reason why his mate should not be cross-eyed—except in a situation like this.

  “Signal from the Golondrina, sir,” a seaman called down.

  Cursing, Southwick grabbed his hat and sword and hurried up the ladder.

  “French flags, sir, I’ve worked it out as being this one.” He pointed to it in the signal book. “I don’t understand the lingo, sir, but the book mentions ‘charpentier.’ Perhaps it means send over the carpenter and his mates?”

  Southwick nodded, and said: “Just acknowledge it.” He did not need to know French to understand the message: it was a code arranged by Mr Ramage so that he and the other boarding parties could use the French system to send signals to the Calypso which, read by any other of the French ships, would seem innocent enough.

  So Mr Ramage had secured the Golondrina and would be leaving young Kenton in command with his party while he took the Spanish crew on shore in the gig. He opened his telescope and a few moments later saw the gig appear round the stern of the Spanish ship, followed by the green cutter. He had to admit that Mr Ramage was right; with so many of the Calypso’s boats rowing round apparently at random it all seemed quite natural and no one would notice. The mixture of French uniforms and old clothes, for example, was typically the way the French would do it, so that the gig making for the beach with ten or more Spaniards from the Golondrina looked no different from when she first went alongside with a boarding-party from the Calypso. The substitution of Spaniards for boarding-party was not noticeable.

  The Golondrina would have been no problem because, of course, Mr Ramage spoke Spanish, but what about Aitken with the Sarazine? Still, the muzzle of a pistol pointing at you had a language all of its own.

  He saw a movement of colour just as the seaman spoke: the same signal was being hoisted from the Sarazine and the launch was leaving her and rowing steadily along the coast: obviously Aitken had ordered his prisoners to be landed a long way from the Golondrina people.

  Martin steered the red cutter another point to starboard. The brig Bergère had now anchored and he could distinguish the master, a fat man wearing a beret and looking as though he would be more at home sitting under an old plane tree in the place of a small town in the south of France, and the mate, a lanky man in a red shirt. He had counted nine seamen and petty officers, only one more than Orsini had noted, so the boy had done a good job.

  He saw that both the Golondrina and Sarazine were flying the signal, so Mr Aitken and Kenton had taken their prizes.

  It was easy enough to see that the Bergère brig had been built in England and, remembering what he had learned all the time he had been growing up as the son of the master shipwright at Chatham Dockyard, he guessed from her sheer and the shape of her stern that she had been built on the south coast not too far from Portsmouth. At Bursledon perhaps, or even East Cowes. Getting on for three hundred tons and down on her marks—he could see that she was pierced for six guns and carried them, nine-pounders from the look of it. According to Orsini her holds were full of carriages for land guns, harnesses, hides and a ground tier of guns to mount on the carriages.

  There were fewer Frenchmen on deck now: with the anchor down and sails furled (bundled up, to his way of thinking) they probably thought their day’s work was over.

  “Stand by, men, I’m going alongside now.”

  He pushed the tiller over with his shoulder as he crouched for a moment to check that his pistols were held tightly by the belt-hooks.

  One of his seamen was standing up in the bow, holding a boat-hook horizontally across his chest. No one in the Bergère showed the slig
htest interest; in fact the red cutter was now so close that a man in the brig would have to stand on the bulwark and peer down to see her.

  He could scramble up the side—none of the other ships would see—or go on board in a dignified fashion, followed by his men and pretending until the last moment to be French. Mr Ramage had said they should get as far as possible with bluff, and from the indifference of the men in the Bergère, Martin was sure he and half a dozen men could get to the wheel without being challenged.

  Then the cutter was alongside, the men using the oars without orders and then boating them, while the seamen forward hooked on to an eyebolt with the boat-hook. A second seaman climbed up the ship’s side in a leisurely fashion with the painter while a third went up with the stern-fast. Martin, mouth dry, his heart seeming to skid over cobblestones rather than beat regularly, jammed his hat (according to the label inside it belonged to someone called Pierre Duhamel, now prisoner in the Calypso) firmly on his head and climbed up the side battens.

  For the last few seconds, as his head appeared over the level of the deck at the entry port, he looked round the Bergère and saw the fat man in the beret standing right aft and unaware that there was a boat alongside. Catching sight of Martin he gave a cheerful wave and bellowed for the mate, whose red shirt Martin could see on the foredeck.

  Martin waved back and walked to the centreline to leave room for his boarding-party, who were following him. As soon as the bosun’s mate who was his second-in-command arrived beside him, Martin said casually: “Everyone except the captain is forward. Secure them—watch the man in a red shirt, he’s the mate.”

  With that Martin strolled aft in what he felt was a casual manner, hoping the captain would watch him, not the boarding-party going forward.

  The Frenchman looked puzzled and called something to Martin, who grinned and waved reassuringly, increasing his pace. A few moments later there was a yell from forward and Martin guessed it was the red-shirted mate.

  Three quick strides brought him up to the master with a pistol in his right hand. He stopped and pulled the hammer back with his thumb, the click seeming to sound like a small hammer on an anvil.

  He then repeated, parrot-fashion, the French phrase that Mr Ramage had made him learn, which told the master that his ship was now a British prize and any attempt to raise an alarm would mean death. To emphasize “mort” Martin jammed the pistol in the man’s stomach, and as he bent forward in an instinctive reaction, Martin could not resist the schoolboy gesture of pulling the floppy beret down so that it covered the man’s eyes, the band jamming across his nose.

  With the captain momentarily blinded, Martin spun round to look forward in time to see the French mate collapsing into the arms of one of his own men, having just been punched in the stomach by the Calypso’s burliest boarder. The rest of the French promptly raised their arms in surrender and were told by the bosun’s mate, using sign language, to go down into the cutter.

  Martin, wanting to keep him occupied until all the men were in the cutter, pushed the French captain so that he lost his balance and fell over. At that moment one of the Calypsos, who had climbed up on to the bulwarks, called out. “The gig’s coming, sir, with the Captain!”

  Martin waved an acknowledgement: it was part of the plan that the gig or red cutter would help convoy the boats taking crews to the beach. As soon as Martin saw the red-shirted man helped down into the cutter, he jerked the captain’s beret upwards—and saw why the man wore it: he was completely bald. The Frenchman blinked in the sudden light, looked round for his men and saw Martin pointing to the entry port. He walked over to it, watched by the wary bosun’s mate with a cocked pistol, and Martin jumped up on to the bulwarks.

  Ramage saw him almost immediately, waved as if congratulating him, and then pointed aloft. For a moment Martin was puzzled. Then he remembered.

  “Bosun’s mate, hoist the signal.”

  He now had his command. Yes, he had commanded the Passe Partout for a few hours but, much as he enjoyed having Orsini with him, it was not quite the same. Now he commanded a brig of three hundred tons, worth hundreds of pounds in prize-money.

  Rennick was still circling with the pinnace, waiting for the Matilda to anchor while the bosun with the jolly-boat edged over towards the Rosette schooner, which had anchored and whose crew would, in a few minutes, be busy furling the sails and unlikely to take much notice of a frigate’s boat coming alongside.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  BY SIX o’clock in the evening fifteen ships and the Calypso frigate were at anchor in the Golfo di Palmas, and unknown to eight of them, the masters, mates and ships’ companies of the other seven, with the Foix garrison, were tramping over the Sardinian hills in the dry, dusty heat, looking in vain for a town or village which could understand their French and Spanish, give them drink, food and shelter, and help them raise the alarm. Instead, the people assumed they were bandits and opened fire with fowling pieces, unleashed their dogs and bawled threats in Italian.

  The Sarazine, the largest of the merchant ships, was providing comfortable quarters for Aitken: her master’s cabin was bigger than the coach on board the Calypso—the captain’s day cabin, bed place and dining cabin—and the Scotsman, whose own quarters in the frigate comprised a box eight feet long and seven wide, felt almost guilty at the luxuriousness of it.

  Kenton was counting himself equally lucky in the Golondrina, except for the smell of garlic. He refused to believe that the heavy smell was simply the residue over the years of masters eating garlic-treated food and breathing out garlic-laden breath: he was convinced that somewhere, having rolled under something, must be a clove which had been trodden on and squashed. He had a seaman search the cabin but without success, although the man at the end of an hour’s crouching, peering and sniffing, did comment to an exasperated Kenton that: “I’m partial to a bit of garlic meself, sir, an’ Watkins, what’s going to be the cook, has found a great string of ‘em. If you like, sir, I can get you a fresh clove.”

  In the Bergère, Martin was inspecting sails and rigging with the bosun’s mate, making his topmen let fall one sail and check it for tears or chafe, before furling it and letting fall the next. As soon as that was finished he went to the wheel and had the bosun’s mate turn it slowly while he made sure there was no wear where the ropes to the tiller went round the drum. Then together they inspected the rudder-head, tiller, wheel ropes and the relieving tackle. When they climbed back on deck the bosun’s mate, Maxwell, gave a contented sigh. “Everything seems to be all right, sir, an that’s just as well, because whatever Mr Ramage has got in mind, this old brig is going to have to sail faster than she’s done for years!”

  Martin looked at his watch. An hour to go. He could now tell the men exactly what Mr Ramage intended.

  “Muster the men aft, Maxwell,” he said, “then you’ll all know what Mr Ramage has in mind.”

  While he waited, he saw the gig go alongside the Passe Partout, take off three or four men, and then row towards the other brig in the gulf, the Caroline, smaller than the Bergère but French-built.

  Jackson took the gig alongside the Passe Partout and, while the bowman held on, scrambled up the side of the tartane to hand over sealed, written orders to Orsini.

  For a few moments the midshipman thought they must mean he had lost command of the tartane, and rather than let Jackson, Rossi and Stafford and the rest of the men see his disappointment—he knew he was not far from tears—he went aft to his cabin with the unopened orders stuck carelessly in a pocket.

  The moment he was in the cabin he shut the door, pulled out the folded paper, broke the seal and began reading. The orders comprised only a few lines—were similar in fact to those for the Passe Partout—but he read them again carefully, and then a third time. Then he sat down, angry that his hands were trembling. There was no disguising the trembling, and he knew two things were causing it. Three rather. First, the shock because he thought he was losing the tartane because the Captain was dissatisf
ied with him; second, excitement at his new command; and third, fear, or to call it by a less harsh name, apprehension.

  Who, he wondered, would not feel apprehension in his position when ordered to take possession and then command of the Caroline brig? She must be all of three hundred tons. She bore the same relationship to the tartane as a ship of the line to a frigate …

  He folded the orders and put them in his pocket, slipped the cutlass-belt over his shoulder and hooked two pistols into his belt. Then he held out his right hand, palm downwards, and examined it. It was no longer trembling, and he went out on deck to find Jackson talking to Rossi and Stafford.

  Jackson stepped forward and handed him another letter. “The Captain said to give you this, sir, after you’d read the other one.”

  Paolo grinned because there was no hiding anything from Jackson: like the Captain he seemed to be able to see through a thick plank.

  He broke the seal and read the letter. He was to take Rossi with him as second-in-command. To capture the Caroline he would use Stafford and Jackson’s boarding-party in the gig. All the ships captured so far had been taken by just boarding as though paying a friendly visit …

  “You’ve been busy,” he said to Jackson. “We missed the fun.”

  The American shook his head. “No fun, really, sir; it’s been like picking ripe apples. But they tell me you ran out of wind.”

  “Three hours and not a breath,” Paolo said angrily. “We’ve been slamming and banging a couple of miles beyond this island. Very well, now,” he pushed down on his pistols to make sure the hooks were holding, “we’ll go over and take possession of our next ship.”

  It was, he thought, a splendidly offhand remark; it was the kind of thing that Mr Ramage said so well.

  “Aye aye, sir,” Jackson said, but hesitated a moment as Rossi and Stafford led the way down to the gig.

  What was Jackson waiting for? Oh yes, the Passe Partout could not be left without someone in command of her, and the Captain had left the choice of a man to him.