Ramage and the Freebooters

by Dudley Pope

  The nights were dangerous when the Trades decided to be wilful. The Triton would be running in a steady wind, the stars bright, and suddenly a lookout would call a warning, or he or Southwick would spot it: a patch of sky astern with no stars. No hint of cloud, just that the stars had vanished. A minute or so to see which stars round the patch were being obscured – to determine the course of the squall – and then all too often, a hurried call for all hands to furl everything but the foretopsail which would be double reefed…

  Ramage was just thinking of going below when Southwick, who was officer of the watch and had been tactfully keeping to the other side of the quarterdeck, leaving him to his thoughts, came over and said casually, ‘Sawbones had a bad night, sir…’

  The old Master said it sympathetically but firmly. Ramage knew he was being told that the problem of the drunken surgeon, Bowen, must be tackled very soon; and in his clumsy way Southwick was trying to prod him into doing it now, realizing how repugnant the task but knowing, with all his years at sea, that it would get worse the longer it was left.

  Ramage nodded. ‘I heard him. If he yelled to his steward for one new bottle he must have yelled for half a dozen.’

  ‘Four times,’ Southwick said grimly, ‘I counted. How do you stand under the Regulations, sir; can you forbid him any liquor?’

  Ramage appreciated the ‘you’: Southwick was well past fifty, Ramage just past twenty-one. If Southwick was anything but a good man, he’d use ‘we’ as much as possible, just to let the captain know how much he depended on the Master. But not Southwick: he was content and accepted the situation – and perhaps knew Ramage appreciated it. Indeed he must know, since there were three or four score unemployed masters at the moment, probably even more, and Southwick knew that Ramage had asked the First Lord for him in the Triton.

  None of which had much relevance to Bowen’s drinking.

  Ramage shook his head. ‘I don’t think the Regulations cover it. I can suspend him from duty pending an inquiry, that I do know. But it doesn’t solve the problem.’

  ‘I agree,’ Southwick nodded and Ramage, realizing the old man wanted to say more, prompted him by adding: ‘We can get rid of him as soon as we get to Barbados – though how we’d find another one I don’t know. But he’s probably a very good doctor when he’s sober and we’re going to need one in the West Indies.’

  ‘That’s what I was thinking, sir. Yellow fever, blackwater …doesn’t do to think about all the diseases, even with a good “sawbones”. In fact it’s got a lot worse in the last year or so, from what I heard in a letter I had in England. A lot worse.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Just the sheer number o’ men dying, sir. I kept the letter. It’s from the Master of the Hannibal’ – he rummaged in a pocket and brought it out. ‘These are the figures he gives. I hope they won’t worry you too much, sir?’

  ‘No,’ Ramage said dryly. ‘I’ve been to the West Indies before…’

  ‘Well, the soldiers to start with. Out of nearly 16,000 white soldiers stationed there at the time, 6,480 died from fevers in the year ending last April – that’s forty per cent. In the Santo Domingo campaign of ’94, forty-six masters of transport ships and 11,000 men died. The Hannibal buried 170 of her crew in a month and lost two hundred in six months. Jamaica to Port au Prince is less than 300 miles, but the Reasonable frigate had yellow jack on board and buried thirty-six of her crew on the way. That’s one man in three…’

  Ramage held up a hand to stop the recital. If 16,000 troops were sent into battle and lost 6,500 killed, it would mean they’d suffered a disastrous defeat. A sail of the line going into action and losing two hundred men out of about seven hundred would mean she’d been battered and probably sinking…

  ‘Send Bowen to the cabin.’

  ‘He mayn’t be sober, sir…’

  ‘Probably not; but I’ll see him in fifteen minutes. As sober as you can make him…’

  ‘I understand, sir. Five minutes under the wash-deck pump, if need be!’

  CHAPTER NINE

  Ramage looked up from the desk as the door opened. From outside a man said: ‘You thent for me, thir?’

  The blasted fellow had forgotten his false teeth.

  ‘Come in, Bowen.’

  The surgeon shuffled in like a sleepwalker, walking in a reasonably straight line but only because what would have been staggers to left and right were being counteracted by the Triton’s rhythmic rolling.

  Bowen had once been tall, and, despite a weak mouth, handsome. And from what Southwick said, once an excellent surgeon in London with a long list of fashionable patients. Then, for reasons no one knew, Bowen found his hand preferred reaching for a glass of gin rather than a scalpel.

  Ramage looked up at the man again, hating what he had to do. Bowen’s carriage had obviously once been proud and erect; but now – even allowing for the low headroom in the cabin – the shoulders were hunched and his head rested athwart them as though the neck had all but given up trying to do its job. Both arms hung loosely, the muscles slack, and being long they gave him an ape-like appearance.

  But the clothing and the face revealed the full story. His shirt, greasy with dirt, obviously hadn’t been off his back for a fortnight; the coat and breeches were stained by liquor slopping from glasses held by a shaking hand, and the humidity was producing a crop of mildew.

  The face was grey; not the greyness of someone rarely in the sun, but the greyness of a very sick man. The cheeks sagged and the mouth hung open, lips slack, as if the muscles were too gin-sodden to hold the flesh in place. There was a slight hint the muscles on the left side were still trying because the right side of the mouth hung lower, the lop-sided effect increased by a habit of permanently tilting his head to the right. His grey hair, just pushed clear of the brow, was greasy and unkempt, matted together like a wet deck mop.

  Ramage thought sourly he could well be one of the wretched, liquor-sodden creatures loitering outside some sordid gin palace, pleading with the potman for a glass of swipes or begging a penny from a customer for a drop of gin. Yet almost unbelievably those long and still delicate fingers, now trembling and spasmodically clenching, had been capable of fine and delicate surgery; that brain, now lost in the befuddling fog of gin fumes, could diagnose and treat complex illnesses. Although any man’s death was a tragedy, sometimes the way a man lived was worse.

  ‘Sit down, Bowen.’

  The man nodded gratefully and stupidly, groping for the chair and lowering himself into it. Then slowly he raised his head and tried to focus his eyes on his captain.

  At that point Ramage realized that in all the past days and hours of thinking about the man, he had not only failed to think of a solution, but now couldn’t think what to say.

  Yet ironically his position was the reverse of that of a doctor. He knew what the illness was, but until he knew what caused it neither he nor the medical world could cure it. What made a man crave liquor to the exclusion of everything? Perhaps Bowen–

  ‘I’m afraid I haven’t had much chance to get to know you, Bowen.’

  ‘Thmy fault, thir – I’ve been too beathly drunk to be fit company for anyone.’

  The answer was so honest Ramage began to feel sympathetic.

  ‘Perhaps. Tell me, how old are you?’

  ‘Fifty, thir; old enough to know better and too old to do anything about it.’

  He had obviously long since given up the struggle: Ramage sensed the man now had no desire to change.

  ‘And how long in the Service?’

  Bowen was obviously thinking hard, groping in his memory as if in a dark room scrabbling for something in a drawer.

  ‘Two yearth, thir.’

  Ramage, who constantly fought an inability to pronounce the letter ‘r’ when he was excited, knew he couldn’t stand a long conversation with a man who lisped and hissed.

  ‘Sentry! Pass the word for my steward! Now, Bowen, where the devil have you left your teeth?’

&nbs
p; ‘I… I… I can’t remember, thir.’

  ‘Think, man! You had them for breakfast, didn’t you?’

  ‘No…didn’t eat breakfatht.’

  ‘Supper, then.’

  ‘Nor thupper; at leatht, I don’t think tho.’

  Douglas, the steward, appeared as Ramage realized the man probably hadn’t eaten a proper meal for days, if not weeks.

  ‘Douglas, Mr Bowen has mislaid his teeth. They’re in his cabin somewhere – fetch them, please.’

  As Douglas left, Ramage turned back to the surgeon.

  ‘How long have you been drinking like this?’

  ‘Like what, thir?’

  The voice revealed he was – well, not exactly cringing, nor trying to seem innocent. Ashamed? Yes! So perhaps there was the remnant of pride there, and he prayed it had not sunk too deep.

  ‘Don’t play the fool,’ Ramage said harshly, hoping the man would soon be completely sober, and that a few hard words would speed up the process. ‘You’re a gin-sodden wreck; just a pig swilling from a trough. Now, how long have you been drinking like this?’

  Pressing his hands to his temples, Bowen seemed to be trying to stop his head spinning. He stared at the deck a few inches in front of Ramage’s feet and said in a near whisper: ‘Three yearth, thir.’

  ‘For a year before you joined the Service?’

  ‘Yeth…’

  ‘In other words, your first year’s drinking wrecked your life. Eventually only the Navy would employ you as a doctor?’

  ‘I thuppothe thath true, thir: I hadn’t thought of it.’

  Douglas knocked at the door, came in and discreetly handed the surgeon his teeth as though they were a pair of spectacles.

  He left the cabin and Ramage busied himself with some papers while Bowen fitted them, fumbling with shaking hands.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Ramage nodded and turned back to face him.

  ‘Tell me, Bowen,’ he said conversationally, ‘when you were a doctor in London, I imagine you often had patients who drank too much and came to you for treatment?’

  ‘I’m afraid so, sir. Drink’s a curse which afflicts the rich and poor alike. Cheap gin or expensive brandy – the effect, medically speaking, is just the same.’

  ‘If it isn’t cured, I suppose the patient dies?’

  ‘Invariably. The liver, you see: it can’t stand the damaging effect of all that liquor.’

  Ramage realized Bowen was now talking in a completely detached manner; once again a doctor discussing a medical problem. Well, he thought grimly, maybe ‘physician, heal thyself’ might work.

  ‘What do doctors consider the chances of effecting a cure? How many, say in a hundred cases?’

  ‘Depends entirely on the patient, sir. And on his family and friends. No nostrums can cure. Fashionable quacks prescribe expensive medicines and treatments, but the patients die or go mad and the quacks get rich…’

  ‘But what starts a man drinking so excessively? I mean, not every hard drinker gets like – well permanently besotted.’

  ‘Well, that’s hard to say. Most people drink a normal amount – a glass of claret, a sherry, port, a good brandy after dinner. Hot toddy on a cold night. They have a drink because it tastes well, it livens the spirit…’

  ‘But that’s far removed from being drunk all the time.’

  ‘Yes, that’s the puzzling part. It’s not a fashionable view among medical men, but I think it is an illness, like a fever. It affects some and not others. Like yellow jack. It strikes down one man and leaves another.’

  Ramage was interested now, conscious that something quite different was emerging from the drunken man seated in front of him. Bowen’s voice was becoming brisk and assured. Although the words were slightly blurred, for he was not yet fully sober, here was the man of medicine talking to the brother of a patient.

  ‘You see, sir, the strange thing is you can take two men and each can drink the same amount. Wine with the midday meal, wine and brandy at supper. Perhaps several brandies. Now one of those men will, all his life, drink the same amount with no difficulty. He’ll never feel the need to drink more.

  ‘But the other man,’ Bowen continued, his eyes brighter now and emphasizing his words with a wagging finger, ‘will find he starts having just one more drink on each occasion. Particularly in the evening. One more, then another. He doesn’t get particularly drunk – until perhaps one evening he’s enjoying an argument, or quarrels with his wife, or something is worrying him. Then he gets very drunk. The next morning…’

  Ramage nodded. He knew the feeling, though in his case because he’d drunk more in one evening than he had the previous month.

  ‘Yes,’ Bowen said sharply. ‘Next morning he feels terrible. But by midday he has got over it. But it happens a few days later. And again and again. Then some friend offers him a drink before breakfast one morning when he feels dreadful. The friend assures him one drink will make him feel better. The thought is revolting because his head is throbbing, mouth dry, stomach upset… But he takes the drink… And almost immediately he does feel better.

  ‘That,’ he almost shouted, pounding his knee with his fist, ‘that’s the moment the illness starts. I am certain that’s the point when the liquor has so penetrated the man’s essential parts that he’s lost.

  ‘But of course he doesn’t know it. On the contrary, he thinks he has made a discovery more important than finding a way of changing base metals into gold: he’s learned he can get vilely drunk but next morning feel no after-effects – as long as he can have just one drink.’

  ‘Just one?’ Ramage’s eyebrows lifted in disbelief.

  ‘Ah!’ Bowen said knowingly. ‘He thinks it’s only one, and one’s enough for a while. Then comes the day – the second stage of the fever, in fact – when one isn’t enough. He needs two to stop the headache, settle the bile, focus the eyes, stop the slight tremble which has begun to affect his hands. Then as the weeks go by it’s three, four, five – and he’s drunk by noon.’

  ‘By this time he’s past curing?’

  Bowen shrugged his shoulders. ‘By this time his life is collapsing, unless he is a man of leisure. If he’s a professional man – a man of medicine, for instance – he finds his patients complaining he’s drunk when he examines them at ten o’clock in the morning, so he sucks cashews to disguise the smell on his breath. His wife begins to complain, and he gets angry with her. A friend might drop hints. Then he suddenly finds many of his patients are calling in other doctors.’

  ‘But are his actual abilities affected by then?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Bowen admitted. ‘Probably, because he’s not so alert, and he’ll be getting worried. Fewer patients means having fewer bills…

  ‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘the man has already begun to feel ashamed. He’s already keeping a bottle hidden away, so he can have his first drinks of the day in secret. At first he thought it was secret; then he discovers everyone knows. That makes him more ashamed. Then he swears he won’t have a drink before noon – but noon gets earlier every day, and so does the evening for his evening drinks. And he finds he can’t stop. Drink, drink, drink… In secret, or openly and defiantly. He’s possessed by a devil. In lucid moments he knows his family, his career, his very life is ruined; and a drink – he thinks one drink – is enough to drown the thought for a while. It isn’t of course; it never is. Since he’s sick, the very nature of the sickness means one drink is too many – and a thousand not enough. Well-meaning friends, parsons, priests – even doctors – bid him have courage, have strength, leave the bottle alone! They extract promises – and he gladly gives them: anything for peace, anything to make them go away – so that he can get at the bottle he’s hidden somewhere.’

  ‘But the promises?’ Ramage asked.

  ‘Oh yes, they’re meant at the moment he makes them. That’s what’s so degrading because a moment later the fever drowns them. The man knows nothing can save him: he’s doomed to drink and drink unti
l he dies or kills himself.’

  ‘Why don’t more of them kill themselves?’ Ramage asked brutally.

  ‘Pride,’ Bowen answered simply. ‘Just the dregs of pride. No man wants to leave behind as his epitaph that he killed himself while blind drunk.’

  A pencil on the desk rolled back and forth in time with the Triton’s roll; glasses and decanters clinked in the racks; the bright light coming through the skylight made strange shadows dance from side to side across the cabin. And Ramage knew Bowen had given him some clues to the problem, but not enough to provide the answer. And in fifteen minutes he had to take over the watch on deck from Southwick.

  ‘Well, Bowen, this imaginary man we are talking about is, of course, you; but I am not a well-meaning friend, a parson, priest or doctor. I’m commanding the Triton and responsible to God and the Admiralty for the lives of the sixty or more men in her and for every sliver of wood and ounce of iron of which she’s made.

  ‘In a week or so we’ll be in the West Indies,’ he continued.

  ‘The Hannibal recently lost 200 men from yellow jack. In the Raisonable frigate, thirty-six of her crew – one man in three – went over the standing part of the foresheet on a voyage of 300 miles. Yellow jack, a couple of broadsides from a French frigate, a mast going by the board in a squall – this could happen to us, and you’d have thirty men to attend to. And you’d be drunk. One more drink would be too much to pull you round,’ he said angrily, throwing Bowen’s phrase back at him, ‘and a thousand wouldn’t be enough.’

  Once more Bowen’s hands were pressing his temples. The authoritative air of the man of medicine had vanished; he was staring at the deck, a crumpled, liquor-stained and liquor-sodden apology for what had once been a man.

  And, facing him, Ramage felt a desperate helplessness. Did the man need sympathy? No – he had that from the ‘well-meaning friends’. Harshness? Presumably he’d had that from his wife. Discipline? There’d be no one to enforce it.