Ramage & the Rebels (11 page)

“Bonaire and Aruba, yes,” Ramage agreed, “but not Curaçao: Amsterdam is reckoned to be one of the finest of the smaller harbours: a tiny Port Royal.”

Southwick glanced round at Ramage. “Have you ever seen it, sir?”

Ramage shook his head. “I've only looked at the chart. It seems to be a slot cut at right angles to the coast.”

“Aye, calling it a slot is right. A ship sailing in could hit either side of the channel with a pistol. I don't know why we ever let the Dutch keep it. Impossible to cut out a ship—unless you first capture the fort on each side of the entrance.”

“Perhaps we couldn't get them out, and usually we're at peace with them. I'd sooner have the green of Jamaica: plenty of fruit, beef, pork, fish … Here, from what I read, they live on goat, an occasional baked iguana—which doesn't appeal to me—with wild duck and snipe for the good shots. Pink flamingoes on Bonaire, I'm told. Hundreds of them.”

“Aye, they're quite a sight,” Southwick agreed. “But Amsterdam itself is just a big warehouse. Tobacco brought in from the Main, liquor smuggled out, slaves from Guinea sold in the market by the dozen, salt shipped out by the ton. They're busy enough, the
‘mynheers.'
Wherever there's a chance of trade you'll find a Dutchman.”

“You can't blame them for that,” Ramage said. “The merchants in Jamaica do their best, you know.”

“That's true,” Southwick admitted grudgingly. “But
mynheer's
a great smuggler, you know. To the Main.”

“But the Spanish are their allies,” Ramage pointed out.

“Aye, but the duty on Dutch spirits imported into Spanish ports is very high. On all Dutch goods, in fact. Leastways, that's what I've heard. So
mynheer
sails over on a dark night and lands his cargo of gin and slaves quietly up a river. Saves bothering the Spanish customs with too much paperwork …”

“They've been doing that for 150 years or more,” Ramage pointed out. “Remember their old cry, ‘No peace beyond the Line,' when Spain claimed that no foreigners could sail to the New World.”

“Ah, the buccaneers of the sixteen-fifties,” Southwick said wistfully. “No commander-in-chief, no signal books, no orders, no forms for the Navy Board … you just captured any ship that was Spanish—and raided any Spanish town that took your fancy. Choose from hundreds of miles along the Main and the Isthmus, not to mention the Mosquito Coast, New Spain, Cuba and Hispaniola …”

“And Puerto Rico,” Ramage said. “But don't forget what happened if the Dons captured you.”

The Master looked puzzled.

“The Inquisition,” Ramage reminded him. “The Jesuits. All foreign prisoners were treated as heretics. The priests believed the only way to save heretics from hellfire and damnation was to put ‘em on the rack.” He glanced at Southwick's protruding stomach and plump cheeks. “They'd halve your beam in half an hour. And by the time you'd spent the rest of your life digging in the salt mines, raking the salt pans or hammering rock into square rocks to build fortresses, you'd be as slim as a handspike.”

Southwick patted his stomach ruefully. “That's a comfortable belly …”

“Well, a hundred years ago you'd have to be a Papist, to keep it—or not get captured.”

“Just think of it, sir: suddenly sailing in over the horizon and holding a whole town to ransom …” Southwick was almost poetic. “Putting a good price on the mayor's head—and the bishop, too,” he added, obviously recalling the rack. “Searching the merchants' houses for chests of pieces of eight … killing and skinning beeves to put down fresh salt meat—aye, and finding a few demijohns of Spanish wine too … It'd have been worth it,” Southwick said with all the wistfulness of a worldly ecclesiastic condemning sin. “I'd have spent the money as fast as I won it, just like the buccaneers; but the fact is, sir, forty years in the King's service hasn't left me a rich man, either.”

With that he began examining the coastline of Curaçao with his telescope. “It's even more desolate than I remember it twenty years ago,” he said.

Ramage raised his telescope. He could just see along the south coast of the island as the
Calypso
rounded the eastern tip and then bore away to keep about two miles offshore. Thirty-eight miles long, and varying between two and a half and seven miles wide, the land was grey and arid in the glass, the sun—now almost overhead—harsh and mottling the landscape with shadows from bushes and cacti, as though each stood on a black base. Here and there the sparse divi-divi trees, each little more than a thin trunk with a wedge of thin boughs and leaves, were pointing to the west, away from the wind, like gaunt hands. Aloes—the people credited the leaves and bitter sap with magic properties, taking the pain or irritation from insect stings, burns, cuts … Ah, there were some of those huge cacti that grew like organ pipes. “Datu,” a book had called them. And there, beside that apology for a hill, a clump of kadushi, another cactus that looked like the same organ pipes but with joints in them. And round the cacti and moving over the ground, looking in the distance like swarms of insects, the flocks of goats, nibbling, ripping, finding food where most animals would starve. There a tamarind tree making arches; nearby the dark green bulk of a manchineel, and he could picture the little apples on the ground below it; apples which burned a man's mouth if he bit one, and killed him if he swallowed it. A strange tree, the manchineel; slaves always made a fuss when ordered to cut one down; they claimed the sap burned their skin, like drops of acid.

And what of the privateers? No sign of a sail, apart from some wisps of white cloth close in to the shore, little fishing boats tending pots …

T
HE study of the Governor of Curaçao at his residence in Amsterdam was hot. The ceiling of the white-painted room was high, the tall open windows facing west were shaded by jalousies, and the only one on the north wall was open, yet Governor van Someren's clothes were sticking to him, a thick and uncomfortable extra skin. He leaned forward in his chair to let the faint breeze in the room cool his back, but his feet felt swollen in his boots—and they probably were, although the damned doctor said there was nothing wrong—and his breeches were suddenly tight. Was he putting on weight? More weight, rather; the tailor had only just let out the waist and knee bands of all his breeches, and had several coats to work on.

He was not fat; rather a stocky man of medium height who, now past fifty, was getting plump. He had the high cheekbones and widely spaced blue eyes that would have betrayed him as a Dutchman anywhere, and his eyebrows were white and so thin that his face had an Oriental look about it.

He put down his long-stemmed clay pipe. It was too hot to smoke or, rather, the room was too airless. And the tobacco, a sample of the first of the Main's new crop from some plantation near Riohacha, tasted earthy. Some merchant was going to lose money, judging from the sample sent along to the Governor's palace.

There was a discreet knock on the door and a young Army officer, the cut of his uniform and aiguillettes showing that he was the Governor's chief of staff, came into the room carrying a letter. “The British frigate and the other ship, sir. She has sailed through the channel and is coming westward along the coast, about two miles out. A messenger has just ridden in. The troop of cavalry keeping abreast the ship will send off a man every fifteen minutes to keep us informed.”

The Governor nodded wearily. His pale blue eyes were bloodshot; the strain was emphasized by his lack of eyebrows, which made the eyes seem unduly swollen. “Trouble from the west, Lausser,” he said gloomily, “and now trouble from the east.”

Major Lausser, who not only liked the Governor but respected him, said: “This British frigate, sir: she's probably just patrolling.”

“You said two ships.”

“The second is small—a schooner, I think the first message called it. We have little to fear from a single frigate, Your Excellency.”

“It's not a single British frigate that concerns me, Lausser, although one should never underestimate a frigate. A frigate is like a cavalry patrol: it can warn you that an army, or a fleet, is approaching.”

Lausser's eyes dropped to the Governor's desk because van Someren was tapping a sheet of paper. “Our recent history on land—I ignore the sea for now—since we have been the ‘allies' of the French Directory has hardly been glorious. I was noting down some of it.”

He picked up the paper and began reading. “In the East Indies—we surrendered Malacca to the British in August 1795 and Amboyna and Banda in the spring of ‘96. In Ceylon we lost Trincomalee in August ‘95 and Colombo the following spring. The Cape of Good Hope went in September ‘95—although the garrison surrendered on the advice of the Stadtholder. And out here … what a sorry business: Demerara and Essequibo surrendered in April 1796, Berbice in May, and Surinam in August ‘99. Not a very inspiring history for the first few years of the Batavian Republic … The French have our home country; the British most of our colonies.”

He saw Lausser looking nervously at the door and added bitterly: “You can open the door wide and let everyone listen: with five hundred revolutionaries and French privateersmen looting the western half of this island in the name of friendship, it is not I who lacks loyalty.”

“But help is coming, Your Excellency. Our frigate is due any day.”

“Any day, any day! That's all I hear. The French could have delayed her. She could have been captured by these damned British; she could still be at anchor in the Scheldt, blockaded. She could be sunk. Who knows, eh? And even when she arrives—then, Lausser? What good are a couple of hundred seamen? They'll only reinforce the brothels. I need a thousand well-trained Dutch soldiers; men who are used to this damned heat and whose loyalty I can rely on.”

There was a tapping at the door, and a smiling young woman came in. “It's the ship, Papa!” she said cheerfully, but a moment later she stopped as both men looked away. “Is something wrong? Papa! What's the matter?”

“Nothing—apart from these French revolutionaries, my dear. But she is not the
Delft;
she's a British frigate.”

The girl sat down, carefully arranging the skirt of her blue dress, and keeping her head turned from the two men. She had long, fine golden hair, braided and held up by large tortoiseshell combs which had obviously been fashioned by a Spanish craftsman. After a minute or two she looked up at her father, dry-eyed and obviously in control of herself.

“Why are the British paying us a visit? Who invited them?”

The Governor shrugged his shoulders. “Not a visit; just a patrolling ship looking into the harbour. She'll pass by, like they always do.”

“And she'll see the only ships in it are French privateers!” the girl said bitterly. “Oh, I am sick of the French; they treat us as the Spanish did. And we lose all our ships to the British—nine over there at Saldanha Bay; another nine ships of the line and two frigates surrendered under Admiral de Winter—”

“But six escaped,” her father interrupted, “and four frigates!”

“Oh, I know that well enough: you forget Jules was serving in one of them.”

She was now on the verge of crying and her father said soothingly: “Now, now, Maria, don't upset yourself: Jules will be here any day!”

With that the girl burst into tears and ran from the room. Her father was puzzled. “What did I say wrong that time, Lausser?”

The ADC was equally puzzled. “I don't know, Your Excellency. She seemed upset over the French, but it was when you mentioned that her fiancé was due that she—er, left the room.”

“Yes, yes, that was it: the mention of Jules. It has been a long engagement—although she is the one who keeps putting off the wedding day.”

“Quite, sir,” Lausser said dryly, and deliberately changed the subject. “The British frigate will be off Sint Anna Baai in about two hours' time. Shall I tell the commanders of the forts to stand-to in an hour?”

Van Someren nodded. “I shall watch from here. If the frigate opens fire I imagine she will aim at the forts or the ships, not the Governor's residence.”

Lausser, pleased to see a twinkle in the Governor's eyes, laughed dutifully. “But where she aims at may not be where she hits, sir.”

“I'll risk that. But they'll stay well out: they've learned that our gunners are well trained. Four years ago—before you arrived, Lausser—one came in close and was becalmed, and we shot away a mast. She escaped because the current carried her clear and they could do repairs, but the British Navy learned a lesson.”

He picked up his pipe and put it down impatiently, irritated at being given a present of so much earthy tobacco. He examined a cheroot from a silver box on his desk and returned it with a grunt. “I've been smoking far too much. I think I would like a drink. Ring for the steward, will you?”

Gottlieb van Someren was tired: tired not only because he had had very little sleep in the past two weeks, thanks to the revolutionaries rioting at the western end of the island, but also because he had spent too many years on the island of Curaçao: he had been the Governor for three years when, in February 1793, the Dutch had found themselves attacked by France and two years later the Stadtholder and the Prince of Orange had to escape to England while their country was named by the French the Batavian Republic. And Gottlieb van Someren, with his wife and daughter, was left in Curaçao as the Governor, the republican king, as it were, of the three islands of Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao. France had control of the Dutch fleet and gave orders to the Dutch officers, many of whom were privately torn between their loyalty to the Stadtholder and the Dutch admirals commanding the fleet.

Like so many Dutch officers serving in distant places, van Someren had to decide whether or not to serve the new regime: did it constitute disloyalty to the Stadtholder? And like so many others he had decided the wisest thing was to carry on: to resign or flee would, in the case of the islands, risk the French sending out a French governor, or a Dutchman who was a true republican.