Ramage's Devil r-13

by Dudley Pope

  Should he risk losing a mile or so of progress, should he risk that heart-stopping bang of sail torn in half by the brute strength of the wind and then the thudding and thumping of the pieces slatting, or should he furl everything and wait for the wind to set in properly?

  Eventually while he argued back and forth with himself and Southwick paced up and down, a lonely figure on the lee side of the quarterdeck, or Ramage stopped and barked at the quartermaster or chatted with the officer of the deck, in this case Martin, whiffles of wind had been spotted by the lookout at the foremasthead (a man having to hold on for dear life, and Ramage would have forgiven him if he had been too dizzy to spot anything). But the dancing shadows on the water were coming from the south. Anyway, anything was better than having the ship slat and bang herself to pieces, so they had braced up the yards and trimmed the sheets and found that, with the swell from the east and the lightness of the wind, the best they could lay and keep the sails asleep was west by north. They could pinch her to west by south but she slowed like a carriage miring itself in mud.

  For the rest of each of those days they had jogged along at four and five knots, with the wind falling away at night and dawn bringing more thunderstorms. And the glass had fallen a little.

  Except for this morning: while it was still dark the wind had again set in light from the south but he noticed that the glass had stopped falling and went on deck to find the sky was full of stars, already a good deal brighter than usual in northern skies. As dawn had begun to push away the dark of night the wind backed slightly - the coxswain had reported it as fluking around southeast by south, and the Calypso would just lay southwest by west. An hour later it was a steady east-southeast with the Calypso almost laying the course.

  By noon it had backed another few points so that Southwick marked the slate in the binnacle box drawer and recorded the wind as northeast by east, with the ship making seven knots with all sails set to the royals and laying the course. More important, the ship's company were getting the stunsails up on deck ready for hoisting. The Trades had really set in? They could only hope. The noon sight - with Southwick, Aitken and Ramage himself on deck with quadrants and sextants measuring the sun's altitude - gave the latitude as 24 degrees 06 minutes North. Orsini had also taken a sight, which involved only turning the adjusting screw of the sextant to get the highest angle the sun made and did not depend on the accuracy of the chronometer. The young midshipman had achieved all that without difficulty but had stumbled over the simple calculations which involved the sextant angle and the sun's declination. The latitude which he finally admitted to Southwick had to be wrong, as the master pointed out with mild irony, since it placed the Calypso on the same latitude as Edinburgh.

  Ramage was allowing a knot of southeast going current but previous experience showed this was too much. However, like Southwick who was a cautious navigator, he preferred that any error put the reckoning ahead of the ship: if the ship was ahead of the reckoning she could (and many did!) run on to unseen rocks and reefs guarding the destination.

  As he was taking the noon sight, Ramage felt sure the Trades were setting in with their usual abruptness. At the moment only a few of the typical Trade wind clouds - small, flat-bottomed with rounded tops and reminding him of mushrooms - were moving in neat lines apparently converging on a point beyond the western horizon.

  Trade wind clouds were a never-failing entertainment in the Tropics. In fact, he reflected, weather in the Trades could also be alarming for a Johnny Newcome, whether a seaman or officer fresh to the Tropics. In crossing the Atlantic, often one would find at dawn a band of low, thick cloud to the east (to windward and therefore, one would think, approaching) which would become black and menacing as the sun rose behind it: obviously, one would think, the herald of a strange tropical storm or gale, or at least a devastating squall.

  The beginning of the day in the ship usually meant that for an hour or two every man was fully occupied, and then the Newcomes would suddenly remember (with more than a stab of fear) and look astern for that low, black cloud. But a quick glance to the eastward would show a clear horizon and an innocent sun rising with all the grace and smoothness of a duchess composing herself for a portrait artist.

  So by nine o'clock the sky would be clear from horizon to horizon and the sun just beginning to hint that soon it would have some warmth in it. Then the parade of the mushrooms would begin.

  He called them mushrooms but they really started in the distance as rows of white pinheads on a pale blue velvet pincushion. They would gradually move to the westward, keeping in neat lines but each pinhead beginning to expand like a fluffy ball of cotton growing on its bush. On and on to the westward they would move, and the sun warming the air would make the clouds blossom larger, but they would still stay in orderly and evenly-spaced lines, like columns of well drilled soldiers advancing across a plain. Sometimes the shapes would change: while the bottom stayed flat, the top would take up a grotesque shape, like a bun determined to alarm the baker's wife.

  For Ramage the actual growth of the lines of cloud was the least of it. The fun came in looking at each of them. With flat bottom and bulging top, many were like recumbent effigies on the tops of tombs; with others the white vapour curved and twisted into the shape of faces staring up into the sky. In the course of fifteen minutes, ten chubby, long-faced, pug-nosed or long-nosed politicians familiar from cartoonists' broadsides, a dozen friends, and a dozen more bizarre but identifiable shapes would sail past on their way westward.

  Occasionally, often in the late afternoon towards sunset, the western sky would slowly turn into the most horrifying scarlets and oranges, livid purples and ominous mauves, as though a child was being introduced to watercolour washes, and it seemed that within hours a most devastating hurricane must roar up against the wind and bring enormous seas to set them all fighting for their lives. But by nightfall the sky was usually clear again and sparkling with its full complement of stars and no hint of where the gaudy clouds had gone or why they had appeared.

  The first flying fish always excited the ship's company: as soon as the ship slipped into the warmer southern seas most men would glance over the side as frequently as possible, hoping to be the first to glimpse the tiny silver dart skimming a foot or two high in a ridge and furrow flight over the waves to vanish as quickly as it appeared. What seemed the upper quadrant of a slowly turning and very thick wheel was the curving back of a dolphin, and always good for a yell, and sometimes a dozen or so of them would play games with the ship, racing to cut across the bow from side to side and so close that it seemed the cutwater must hit them.

  For Ramage, though, there was a particular assignation in the Tropics, and he always felt cheated if he was not the first to sight it. It was the unusual rather than beautiful white bird which could be mistaken for a great tern, but for the fact that its tail, three times as long as its body, comprised a couple of long thin feathers trailing in a narrow V. The beak of the Tropic bird was red or yellow and the wings were narrow and pointed like those of the tern with the fast beat of a pigeon. Strangely enough it seemed to be a bird of the islands and headlands, one that was used to jinking and diving, and which would not stray far from land. And what was the purpose of that tail?

  The birds in fact lived in colonies - he knew of several at St Eustatius and Nevis, in the Leeward Islands (each island, coincidentally, was easily identified because of the huge topless cone at one end revealing an old volcano). A passage between St Martin and St Barthélemy on one side and Saba, St Eustatius and St Kitts and Nevis on the other usually produced a dozen or more Tropic birds flying across the channel.

  Yet Ramage had seen them here in the middle of the Atlantic, fifteen hundred miles and more from the nearest land, flying with just the same quick, almost nervous wing beats, as though due back at the nest in twenty minutes. It seemed to make little difference whether its destination was fifteen or fifty miles away. Nor fifteen hundred: that was simply the middle of the Atlantic be
tween the Canary Islands and Barbados. To reach one from the other (or any land) the bird had to fly nearly three thousand miles. Did it just fly day and night without stopping? He had never seen one resting on the water like a seagull. And another strange thing was that all those he had seen out in the Atlantic were always flying directly east or west, never to the north or south. On the last voyage, he remembered looking up at eight o'clock in the forenoon to see his first Tropic bird of the passage flying due east, directly over the ship. Then, at four o'clock in the afternoon, he had seen one flying due west, again passing right over the ship. The same bird? His ship's destination, Barbados, had been two thousand miles to the westward. Yet, he remembered, every Tropic bird he had ever seen out in the Atlantic had passed directly over the ship: he had never seen one flying past in the distance. Nor did the bird ever dip down towards the ship, as though looking for a resting place or a tasty scrap of food.

  Other species of birds often came on board, though of course they were usually much nearer land. Still, an old Barbados planter he had once spoken to said Tropic birds lived on flying fish and squid, diving down for them. The planter called it the boatswain bird, and the French had several names, different in each island - paille-en-queue, paille-en-cul, and flèche-en-cul. Straw tail, arrow tail - there were a dozen ways of translating it, but the Spanish contramaestre was the nearest to the English boatswain bird.

  He waved to Aitken to cross the quarterdeck and join him.

  'Horizon looks very empty, sir,' the young Scotsman commented. 'Seems you only realize how big the Western Ocean is when you're looking for someone.'

  'We could have overtaken her. Or she could be to the north or south. Or ahead of us.'

  'Aye, it'll be only a matter of chance if we sight her. Ten different captains have ten different routes for making this crossing.'

  'So you're not very hopeful?'

  'No, sir, not with the difference in time.'

  Ramage nodded. 'Once she was a complete night ahead of us - ten hours of darkness - there was always the chance of us accidentally overtaking her. And with two or three hundred miles' difference in position, there's the weather, too. She could be stretching along comfortably with a northerly breeze while we are beating against a southerly. She could have a soldier's wind with stunsails set and we could be becalmed.'

  'At least we're catching up now!' Aitken gestured to the stunsails, long narrow strips of sail each hanging down from its own tiny boom and hoisted by a halyard out to the end of a normal yard so each stunsail formed an extension of the sail, like an extra leaf at the end of a table.

  'Catching up or outstripping?' Ramage mused. 'I can't see Frenchmen hurrying with a ship full of prisoners: they could be treating it all as a comfortable cruise and be in no rush to get back to France - it'll be winter by then, too. They've no idea they're being chased.'

  The two men walked aft from the quarterdeck rail, past the companion way leading down to the captain's cabin, then abreast the great barrel of the main capstan, with the slots for the capstan bars now filled with small wedge-shaped drawers containing bandages and tourniquets, ready at hand if they should go into action. Past one black-painted gun on its carriage, and now a second. Then came the binnacle box, like an old chest of drawers with a window on each side, a pane of stone-ground glass revealing a compass which was far enough away not to affect the one on the other side but so placed that the man on either side of the wheel had a good view.

  Now the double wheel. Normally the man to windward did most of the work, pulling down on the spokes, but with the ship running before the wind as she was now doing, yards almost square and stunsails drawing, each helmsman paid attention and the quartermaster's eyes never stopped a circuit which covered the luffs of the sails, the telltales streaming out from the top of the hammock nettings, and the compass.

  The telltales - Ramage was thankful to see them bobbing so vigorously. Four or five corks threaded at ten-inch intervals on a length of line, with half a dozen feathers embedded in each cork, and the whole thing tied to a rod and stuck up in the hammock nettings, one each side, might not be everyone's idea of beauty, but after those days of calm and light headwinds, they were a wonderful sight.

  Now they were passing the captain's skylight - built over the forward side of the great cabin it was a mixed blessing: it provided air and light, and he could hear what was going on, but sometimes the quarterdeck was a noisy place: at night there could be the thunderous flap of sails followed at once by the officer of the deck cursing the quartermaster, and the quartermaster cursing the helmsmen for their inattention... The officer of the deck at night would regularly call to the lookouts (six of them, two on the fo'c'sle, two amidships, and one on each quarter) to make sure they were awake and alert ... Then, Ramage thought sourly, there would be one of those 'Is-it-isn't-it' conversations, probably between the sharp-eyed young Orsini and the officer of the deck. One would think he glimpsed a sail, or land, or breakers in the darkness. The other would be equally sure there was nothing. The muttered but heated debate would be enough to make sure that a drowsy Ramage wakened completely, and often, although he knew there was no land for a hundred miles, he would pull on a cloak and go on deck - there was always a chance ...

  Finally the last gun on the starboard side and a few more paces brought them up to the taffrail and time to turn back, both men turning inwards, a habit which ensured no interruption if they had been talking.

  'This Count of Rennes, sir?' Aitken said cautiously. 'You've met him?'

  'He has been a friend of my family since long before the war began.'

  'Ah, so you feel all this personally, too, sir?'

  'Yes - but he escaped to England at the Revolution and lived in England until the recent treaty. He still has an estate in Kent. But we're chasing L'Espoir because he's one of the most important French Royalists alive today.'

  'And he won't be alive for long if they get him to Cayenne. That Devil's Island is well named, so I've heard.'

  'There are two or three islands. I think the French call them the Îles du Salut. One is for convicts and another for political prisoners.'

  'I have some notes on Cayenne and the islands,' Aitken commented. 'Taken from some old sailing directions from the Seventies. They probably haven't changed much!'

  'You have them on board?'

  'In my cabin, sir. I checked as soon as you mentioned where L'Espoir was bound.'

  'We'll go over them soon, just in case.'

  'That's where you'll catch the rabbit, sir,' Aitken commented. 'A poacher doesn't set a snare in the middle of the field; no, he puts it just outside the burrow. Then you catch the rabbit when it runs for home!'

  Ramage stopped for a few moments. Yes, Aitken's simile made sense: why comb the Atlantic? Three thousand miles was the distance, and assuming the Calypso's lookouts could see ten miles on each beam in daylight, they were searching a swathe three thousand miles long and twenty miles wide - sixty thousand square miles. Which, to continue Aitken's simile, must be like walking across a county unable to see over the top of the grass. Cayenne was the burrow: that's where he had to set the noose.

  Yet... yet... He resumed walking with Aitken.

  'It doesn't leave us room or time to make any mistakes,' he said. 'If we're off the coast of Cayenne and L'Espoir heaves in sight, she only has to cover five miles or so and she's safe.'

  'But if we're patrolling that stretch of the coast with all our guns run out, sir,' Aitken protested.

  'You might just as well leave them unloaded with the tompions in,' Ramage said grimly. 'I can hardly fire into a ship where a quarter of those on board are likely to be those I'm ordered to rescue...'

  'Then how are we ... ?' Aitken broke off and came to a stop facing Ramage. He shook his head. 'I've spent many hours trying to decide the route L'Espoir would take, so that we could intercept her, but I didn't think of ... Yet it's so obvious!'

  'Not that obvious,' Ramage assured him. 'Neither the admiral nor his f
lag captain considered it in drawing up my orders!'

  'We're going to have to bluff 'em,' Aitken said dourly.

  'Bluff won't help much: the French will see Devil's Island close to leeward and all they have to do is make a bolt for it.'

  'Would they risk damage to their spars with land so close to leeward?'

  'Of course. From what I've read, it's a mud-and-mangroves-and-sand coast and it's theirs, so even if we sent all their masts by the board, the ship would drift on to a friendly lee shore and the French would march their prisoners off at low water. Not quite that, because there's ten feet or so of tide, but you know what I mean.'

  'But L'Espoir's people would know they'd then be marooned there for months, until the next batch of prisoners are sent out. Worse than that, until the next ship arrives that manages to break our blockade of Brest.'

  Ramage thought of the problem often facing captains: how to train their officers fully to consider all the enemy's advantages without getting too overwhelmed or depressed to think of ways of overcoming them. An overwhelmed or depressed officer was almost as dangerous as an overconfident one. Well, perhaps Aitken would get there by himself.

  'The French captain may have guessed that a British frigate is after him,' Ramage said, without adding the corollary that he would have had a long time to think of his advantages and disadvantages.

  'I don't see why, sir,' Aitken said politely but firmly. 'In fact, if you'll pardon me, I think it'll be just the opposite. He'll be treating it like an unexpected cruise.'

  'But he can't be sure he won't be intercepted somewhere by a patrolling British frigate.'

  Ramage almost grinned at the effort Aitken, usually a very patient man, was making not to show his complete disagreement with this sort of reasoning. In other words, Ramage thought, it's working: Aitken really is considering!

  'Sir, no ship that he meets, not one, whether French or British, Spanish or Dutch, will know that the war has started again: the news can't possibly have reached them yet. Cayenne and Devil's Island won't know of the new war until L'Espoir arrives, and her captain knows that as long as he smiles and waves if he sights a British frigate, he's in no danger because the British frigate will think the world is at peace.