by Dudley Pope
Jackson laughed, and suddenly Stafford asked suspiciously: " 'Ere, wotcher keep lookin' at that ship for? Any women on deck?"
The American, watching the Peacock, said: "That's the one that's just joined the convoy. Her sails have got an odd cut - just look at the roach. And she's floating so high: can't be above half laden."
"Where'd she come from? 'Ere, you sure there ain't any women?"
"Yes. From the Atlantic, as far as I could see."
"Might be a light cargo. Bulky and light. Clorth, silk, that sort o' thing."
"Maybe she's a runner. But her sheer - and that forefoot. There's something -"
"Flagship," Stafford interrupted.
Jackson snatched up the telescope, looked at the flags flying from the Lion, glanced at his list, and called: "Captain, sir! Flagship to convoy: To bear away, and sail before the wind."
Ramage said, "Very well; repeat it."
Southwick walked over to him.
"'Bout time," he grumbled. "Thinks he's manoeuvring a squadron off Spithead. He'll never see this bunch of mules in such good order again."
Ramage grinned and pulled his hat forward. "If he does, he'd soon be ordering us to send over carpenter's mates to repair the damage after they ran aboard each other!"
"Captain, sir," Jackson called. "Flagship to convoy, For all ships to come under my stern."
"Repeat it."
The escorts simply repeated the Admiral's orders, hoisting the same signal so every ship in the convoy could see it.
"Follow father," Southwick grunted. "But let's hope he knows where he's going."
Once the convoy got out of the lee of Barbados it was much cooler on board the Triton: the damp, cloying atmosphere of Carlisle Bay was left behind as they sailed into the brisk freshness of the Trade winds.
The sea was now a deep blue and frequent shoals of flying fish emerged like silver darts, dropping back into the water after a brief flight a few inches above the waves. Out of the wind, the sun was scorching; the decks were still uncomfortably hot - no one stood still unless he had to - and the pitch between the seams was as soft as when the caulker first poured it. But in the wind seamen moved without bothering to seek out the shade and went less frequently to get a mug of water at the scuttle butt. The burly and red-faced Marine sentry guarding the water supply looked less wilted, although he was careful to hold his cutlass out of the sun. The heat could make metal unbearably hot to touch in less than a quarter of an hour.
"Getting away from the land is like a shower of rain on a flower garden," Southwick commented to Ramage.
"The flowers don't look so wilted!" Ramage said, gesturing towards the seamen.
"Aye, sir, the breeze freshens them up."
"No weeds, either!"
"No, we can be thankful for that," the Master said, mopping his face with a large handkerchief. "Six months and not a flogging ... never heard of longer."
During the next hour, in obedience to a stream of signal flags hoisted from the Lion, the escorts tacked and wore, cajoling and threatening the merchantmen until they were in their proper positions. Eventually the Antelope frigate was right ahead of the convoy, followed by the Lion which in turn was ahead of the leading ship in the centre column. The Lark lugger was astern with the Raisonnable frigate to leeward over on the larboard quarter and the Greyhound frigate to starboard, up to windward.
Ramage took the Triton to the position Admiral Goddard had assigned him on the windward side of the convoy, abreast the Topaz and ahead of the Greyhound.
"A pretty picture," Southwick growled, waving at the convoy. "I'd like to think these mules were secretly plotting to drive the Admiral mad," he continued maliciously, careful the seamen could not hear him. "The masters know that if they get into exactly the right position for an hour or two it'll show the Admiral they can do it, and he'll go berserk when they start spreading themselves across the ocean..."
Ramage laughed. For the moment the convoy was in perfect formation, the symmetry spoiled only by the extra ship, the eighth and last in the Topaz's column. Southwick saw him looking at her.
"Something about that ship, sir," he commented, pointing at the Peacock. "That hull wasn't built in England, nor those sails cut by Englishmen."
"Scotsmen, maybe; perhaps she's a Clyde ship!"
The Master took off his hat and scratched his head. "No, I-"
"I know what you mean, but she is probably a prize bought by someone or other. And in ballast - a runner come over to find a cargo. She looks odd with all that freeboard. You're used to seeing ships fully laden - aye, fully laden and a few tons more!"
After looking at her again through his telescope, Southwick said, "That's it; she was a prize. French built, or I'm a Dutchman."
The merchantmen and escorts were reaching to the northwest with a comfortable quartering wind and pitching only slightly.
"With a steady breeze like this, let's hope some of the mules are having another look at their standing and running rigging," Southwick said sourly.
"You're an optimist: they've already sailed four thousand miles from England with it; they're just hoping it'll last another few hundred until they get into Kingston."
As if aware that with the routine of watches this would be one of the few opportunities for chatting with his captain, Southwick said, "I still don't see why the Lion is out there ahead of the convoy, sir. Her place is to windward; she ought to be out beyond the Greyhound," he added, nodding towards the frigate astern of the Triton.
"I think it's the Admiral's idea, not Croucher's," Ramage said, since the Master was echoing the question that occurred to him the moment he received his latest orders. "Croucher's an odd fellow but he knows his job."
"Odd!" Southwick snorted. "After that court-martial you call him odd? Well, the Admiral has weakened himself by a ship o' the line by sitting out there to leeward. The Lion can't do a thing unless we meet an enemy dead ahead: she'll never be able to beat up to windward to get at a privateer unless there's a gale o' wind blowing. We ought to be ready for light airs, not a gale o' wind. Up to windward, that's where the Admiral ought to be with that haystack, so he can run down to anything. Hmmp - hey! Watch your luff!" he suddenly bellowed at the quartermaster, who gestured to the men at the wheel.
Within an hour Barbados was already so far astern that the curvature of the earth dropped the beaches on the west coast below the horizon, hiding the band of almost luminous pale green sea that marked the shallows and reefs stretching out from the shore. The palm trees had long since merged into strips of dark green, and from this distance it was clear that the land was losing its parched brown appearance as the thirsty dry earth soaked up the first heavy rains heralding the approach of the rainy season. Rainy season, Ramage thought to himself; a nice euphemism for the hurricane season.
For anyone brought up in the uncertain and unpredictable weather of European waters, the comparative predictability of the Caribbean - outside of the hurricane season - was almost unsettling, Ramage realized. It was so predictable that it made a man apprehensive; it was like worrying when too many things went right.
At this end of the Caribbean the wind always blew between north-east and south-east; wind from any other direction - apart from the land and sea breeze - usually meant the weather was about to change for the worse. And even then the change was predictable - the wind south or south-west, bringing rain and stronger, gusty winds.
Almost always the wind dropped in the evening and stayed light or calm throughout a starlit night. About nine o'clock next morning a breeze would start ruffling the water and steadily increasing until it was a fresh breeze by nine or ten o'clock. It was the best time of the day in the Caribbean - the sun bright and warm but not yet scorching, the wind cool and not yet strong, and the sea flat. It was the time the Caribbean seemed the finest sea in the world for ships and seamen. By ten-thirty it would usually be a strong breeze, except in the hurricane season, and the seas would begin to build up, short seas which sent the spray f
lying in sparkling showers from the bow of the ship beating to windward.
Small clouds would start appearing from nowhere, small balls of fluffed white cotton which soon formed into regular lines running east and west, the bottom of each cloud flattening and the top forming a weird shape. Some looked like the marble effigies of ancient knights and their wives recumbent atop their tombs; others were turtles, alligators and mythical beasts. Often they looked like the profiles of politicians lying flat on their backs, glassy-eyed and copied straight from one of Gillray's more outrageous cartoons.
By noon most well-found ships would be carrying all plain sail and making their maximum speed, while one of the King's ships in a hurry would cheerfully hoist out studding sails. Then by four o'clock the wind would start to falter and by five o'clock would be light and fitful while the clouds began shrinking and vanishing in the reverse order of the strange way they appeared. Soon after six o'clock the sun would set in an almost cloudless sky and darkness would fall with a startling suddenness, and another tropical day would be over.
Although the ritual never ceased to fascinate Ramage, who loved the Tropics and hated the chill, northern latitudes, there were exceptions to the weather pattern: the Trade winds often fell away in the hurricane season - unless there was a hurricane actually nearby - and close to the big islands like Puerto Rico, Hispaniola and Cuba, the offshore breeze of the night and onshore breeze of the day were more pronounced.
Ramage found himself brooding that it was late in the season to be fooling around with a clutch of merchantmen. He looked eastward to the broad Atlantic, which stretched three thousand miles to the coast of Africa, a great sea desert all the way. Somewhere out there - although how, where and why no man knew - the hurricanes were born. Between July and October the people living in the Caribbean waited in fear for the winds which tore down houses, sank ships and brought torrential rains that washed land into the rivers and the sea. Hurricanes could even conjure up tidal waves: in 1722 the port of Port Royal that had survived the great earthquakes of 1692 had been largely destroyed by one.
Traditionally the only early warning a hurricane gave was swell waves, which could be felt for days before it arrived, and long periods of calm. These calm periods often prevented ships from getting to shelter in time. But not all swell waves or periods of calm presaged a hurricane; probably not one in fifty. Hurricanes were so unusual and unpredictable that apart from avoiding voyages in the hurricane season one could only wait and hope.
At the convoy conference, no one had tried to gloss over the fact that the convoy was well over a month behindhand and that they were crossing the Caribbean dangerously late in the season. If anyone had wanted to make light of it, every master knew that the underwriters were already charging all those merchantmen double premium for being at sea in the Caribbean in July, and that in a couple of weeks' time all policies would be cancelled. The underwriters made good livings because of their skill in basing their premiums and wording their policies on their past experience.
Ramage felt it verged on melodrama to be so gloomy when the sun was bright and the sea such a sparkling blue, the wind steady and the sky clear. Yet the very clearness of the sky could indicate a change, since the clouds should have started forming by now.
As if reading his thoughts, Southwick said, "Swell's more noticeable now we're out of the lee of the island."
Ramage nodded. "I've noted it in the.log. About three feet high."
"Probably nothing to worry about. Not for a few days, anyway."
Ramage was fascinated by the swell waves. The short seas knocked up by the wind were streaming in from the eastward, and would disappear as the breeze died in the evening. The swell waves were much lower and less frequent and were coming in from the south-east so that their crests moved diagonally under the others, making a herringbone pattern.
Ramage could not resist the temptation to ask Southwick: "There's no rigging that should be changed, is there?"
"No, sir; everything at all doubtful was replaced the minute I clapped eyes on the first of the swell in Carlisle Bay. While you were on board the Topaz" he added, and Ramage knew the old man intended only to indicate the precise time, not make an oblique criticism of his captain's absence from the ship.
The sun was behind a small cloud but still above the western horizon, deep red, its rays already a peacock's tail of alternate stripes of orange, yellow and blue. In an hour it would be dark and the wind was becoming fitful as the clouds began dissolving.
Already the convoy was beginning to straggle. The seven leading ships were in position, and so were the next one or two in each column; but after that no telescope was needed to see men out on the yards of many ships, reefing topsails and furling topgallants.
"Look at the mules!" Southwick fumed. "They'd be slow enough if they were setting stun'sails; but they're actually furling their t'gallants..."
Ramage shrugged his shoulders, and imagined daybreak next morning when he would stand at the main shrouds and stare at the convoy with a telescope, counting the number of ships as soon as it was light enough to discern them, and then search the horizon astern for the missing ones.
Suddenly Jackson called: "Captain, sir, the flagship's signalling: our pendant, To pass within hail."
"Very well, acknowledge."
The response was mechanical, Ramage realized, but his reaction was not, and he glanced across at Southwick and told him to carry on. As the Master began bellowing the orders which sent the men running to the braces to haul round the yards and to the sheets to trim the sails as the Triton's wheel was put over, and the brig turned on to a course which would take her diagonally across the corner of the convoy, Ramage tried to guess the orders waiting for him on board the Lion.
Routine, or something to catch him out? Since they'd be shouted to him as the Triton came close alongside, there'd probably be only a few seconds for him to react: a few seconds in which to haul in what had been shouted and give the requisite orders to Southwick. But, Ramage told himself, there's one sure way of making a mess of it, and that's to start fretting ...
It was curious that the Admiral had left him alone since the convoy sailed. Perhaps he was going to send him beating all the way back to Barbados on some footling errand, with orders to rejoin the convoy by noon tomorrow. A small and unimportant task to make sure Ramage had no sleep.
Glancing at the flagship way over on the larboard bow as he went down to his cabin to rinse his face - the scorching, bright sun of the afternoon had left him sticky and slightly dazed - he knew he must beware of getting obsessed with the idea that Goddard was persecuting him. He was, but it didn't do any good to think about it; on the contrary...
He clattered down the companionway, acknowledged the Marine sentry's salute and went into his cabin, ducking his head under the low beams. It was dark down here, and everywhere he saw red orbs - the result of staring at the sun as he paused for a moment before coming below. He squeezed his eyes shut a few times and the orbs vanished. He took the deep metal jug from the rack, pulled out the wooden bung and poured water into the equally battered metal handbasin. One thing about the Caribbean, the torrential rain so frequent in late-afternoon thunderstorms, often without a lot of wind, meant that they could catch rainwater and not worry about spray making it brackish.
As Southwick brought the Triton round to larboard Ramage felt her motion change; the combined roll and pitch on her original course, with the wind on the quarter, changed to sluggish pitching as she ran almost dead before the wind to pass across the corner of the convoy. He reached for a towel, wiped his face briskly, crammed on his hat again and ducked out of the cabin.
He paused at the top of the companionway and looked astern: the swell waves were longer than he'd thought as they ran up under the wind waves. He counted to himself and saw that the interval between the crests was still the same. It must be an optical illusion; just a trick of the light that made them look longer and larger. Probably because the sun dropping had le
ngthened the shadows. And he was getting jumpy, too...
In a few minutes the Triton would be passing across the Topaz's, bow. Would Maxine be on deck? He walked aft to join Southwick, and took his telescope from the rack by the binnacle box.
The Topaz was a smart ship and Yorke a lucky man to own five more like her. Lucky and obviously shrewd, and one of the few men he knew that deserved the legacy he'd received from his grandfather. A group of people ... he put the telescope to his eye. Yes - there was Maxine, looking through a telescope held by Yorke. Her mother and father were laughing and St Cast was struggling with another telescope. Ramage waved and she waved back - and from Yorke's gesture and her wriggling he guessed she had accidentally moved the telescope and they could not train it back on the Triton's quarterdeck.
The brig was moving fast now as she headed for a point just ahead of the Lion: a point chosen by Southwick as being the place where the two ships, travelling on different courses and at different speeds, would converge after covering the minimum distance. In a few minutes Ramage could distinguish the Lion's rigging as made up of individual ropes, so she was a mile away. He took the convoy plan from his pocket, unfolded the page and glanced through the names to refresh his memory. Looking up again, he could recognize men on the Lion's decks - a third of a mile to go. Now he could pick out the gilding on her name carved across her transom. And the inside of the transom, behind the stern-lights which now reflected the evening light like dulled mirrors, the cabin in which the convoy conference had been held, and where Goddard and Croucher had clumsily revealed that they were watching - and waiting.
The Lion was pitching too, in response to this low swell; pitching more than Ramage expected. It was emphasized by her slow speed - she was already down to double-reefed topsails so that she did not outsail the convoy.
Ramage knew - for he was clasping and unclasping his hands like a nervous curate - that it was as much as he could do to leave the conn with Southwick. The old Master was more than competent to take the Triton close alongside the flagship; it was simply jumpiness on Ramage's part; as though everything would go wrong if he was not doing something active. Then he remembered a comment of his father's - true leadership is being able to sit at the back, watch everything, give the minimum of orders and yet remain in complete control.