Ramage & the Rebels (15 page)

Somewhere in the darkness on deck three men waited, one at each mast, for the order sending the lookouts aloft—it would come from Wagstaffe this morning—and then each would race up the ratlines like a monkey, hoping to be the first to hail the deck that the French frigate was in sight. The competition, mast against mast, was traditional.

Ramage finished his walk forward along the starboard side and crossed over to make his way back to the quarterdeck along the larboard side. There was very little sea; the
Calypso
was hardly rolling, giving a gentle pitch from time to time, almost a curtsy, as a swell wave came along the side of the island, part of the movement westward that began off the western corner of Africa, crossed the Atlantic and Caribbean, and finally ended up, thousands of miles away, in the muddy shallows of the Gulf of Mexico.

Groups of men squatted round their guns. Usually they were half asleep, but this morning they were wide awake, occasional whispers and stifled laughter showing they were cheerful enough. Ramage never understood how men could laugh and joke when, within the hour, they could be dead, shattered by grapeshot or torn apart by round shot. It was enough that they were cheerful.

Yet, he realized, they were cheerful because they were confident; they were confident that death would not touch them. And they were confident because—well, because so far, under his command, they had been lucky. All the actions of the last few months, including the original capture of the
Calypso
and
La Créole
from the French, had been fought with very few casualties.

Would there be a great change of heart among them if they fought a bloody action? Would they then be less martial? He doubted it: most of them seemed like Southwick: as keen for battle as schoolboys for a game of marbles or poachers for fat pheasants. And as his heels thumped the deck and he balanced himself against the ship's roll, he knew he was slowly becoming a better captain. It had taken long enough, but now he had finally absorbed the apparent contradiction that the captain who worried too much about his men being killed in action was likely to kill them by the dozen because he would be too timid. The boldest plan was usually the safest. He realized he had never consciously taken a ship into action with that thought uppermost, but looking back on a series of actions, the fact was that he had often escaped with only a dozen killed and wounded when a prudent man with an apparently safer (more cautious) plan might have lost four dozen.

Was he being arrogant? Perhaps, and if arrogance on his part led to confidence among his men and success to an operation, then perhaps arrogance was no great fault. And of course it was the men's arrogance (that any one of them was worth three Frenchmen) that gave them the boldness which led them to succeed. The casualty lists usually bore them out, and certainly the Admiralty seemed to assume that one of the King's ships with a hundred men should be able to board and capture a French national ship with three hundred.

“Lookouts there—away aloft!”

Wagstaffe's shouted order broke into Ramage's thoughts and he realized he had not noticed how much lighter it had become in the last few minutes, minutes when he had just stood at the gun port staring at the wavetops gliding past.

The men were getting up from the deck where they had been squatting or sitting, groaning as stretched muscles gave them a twinge, teasing each other, some shivering with the dawn chill and swinging their arms, others spitting tobacco juice over the side through the port.

Ramage climbed the quarterdeck ladder to find Wagstaffe waiting anxiously at the rail, speaking-trumpet in one hand and night-glass in the other, obviously awaiting the first hail from aloft, while Southwick stood at the binnacle talking to Aitken, who would take over from Wagstaffe if any enemy ships were in sight, leaving the Second Lieutenant free to go to his division of guns. The Marines were forming up with much stamping and thumping.

Not one of the
Calypso
's officers approved of his plan. Ramage had sensed that when he had explained it to them. Only Lacey was full of enthusiasm, and that was because his role was exciting. But the rest of them, from Southwick (who had been in battle dozens of times) to Kenton (who was relatively untried) had misgivings. None had said a word; to most captains they would have seemed full of enthusiasm.

Looking round at them in his cabin the previous day, when he had asked if there were any questions, he could guess how each man's mind was working. Each was reacting differently because he had a different personality. Southwick regarded it as wasting time: to him there was little wrong in getting alongside the other ship as quickly as possible and resolving the battle with his broadsides and boarding-pikes. The Master's strength was in his right arm, wielding a meat cleaver of a sword. Aitken, the quiet Scot, was intelligent enough to see the purpose behind Ramage's plan but he did not believe it would work, and nor did he think it necessary. Wagstaffe did not think the French would fall into the trap—that much was clear from the questions he asked—but if they did he could see the trap would then work. Young Kenton had never heard of such a plan and, because he was young, he was conservative: why fence with a foil when you could slash with a cutlass? Kenton had been at sea long enough to see that wars could not be fought without men being killed, but not long enough to try to reduce the odds. To him—and, to be fair, to the other officers, including the Marine Lieutenant—one British frigate and a schooner were a match for any French frigate, and given that historic truth, proved in hundreds of actions, why monkey about …

Aitken was a deep-thinking officer and Ramage could guess that the young Scot, wise beyond his years and almost certain to have his own command soon, was beginning to see things through the eyes of a captain, weighing risk against reward, risk against responsibility, risk against culpability. He knew that a senior officer, a commander-in-chief, their Lordships at the Admiralty, were always reading the orders and looking at the results, rarely giving praise for success but quick to select and accuse a scapegoat if they saw failure (even though, often enough, the original orders were too absurd to allow success).

Yet there were times when a captain trying to make the weights balance on those scales, putting the risk on one pan, the responsibility and culpability on the other, saw the responsibility and culpability pan drop with a decisive clang. So he did not take the risk because it would hazard his future. Rejecting the risky plan, he drew up a safe one. The risky plan might have saved many lives if it was successful; the safe plan was, all too often, safe only because the certainty of its success was bought with many men's lives.

As Ramage watched the lighter eastern sky push the darkness westward he felt his anger growing with the whole of the present system of command in the Royal Navy. It meant that no captain depending on his regular pay to support a wife and family dare take a risk where failure could blast his career. There were a few exceptions—very few indeed, and Rear-Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson was the only one who came to mind at the moment.

The officers who could and did take risks with their careers in order to save lives tended to be men who had private incomes. Alexander Cochrane, for instance, who was heir to the Earl of Dundonald, and although there wasn't much money in the family, it was just enough to make sure that Cocky would not starve if the Admiralty court-martialled him over one of his wilder exploits. Not that so far they had any reason to bring him to trial; he took quite fantastic chances—but he succeeded and his men worshipped him.

There were of course stupid officers, rich and poor, who took risks simply because they lacked brains; the kind of men who gambled every penny they had on the turn of a die without realizing that, even if they won, the low winnings compared with the high stake they could lose made the risk absurd. No, he was thinking of intelligent men; men like Aitken, who had travelled a long way from a widowed mother and that grey stone cottage in Perthshire; who had managed by sheer ability and bravery to get well up to windward in his career, but who in a very few years would be unable to risk losing it.

Which, Ramage thought bitterly, boiled down to the fact that all too often the commander-in-chief and the Admiralty judged success by the size of the butcher's bill. An action in which a French frigate was captured by a British one which lost fifty men killed and a hundred wounded was regarded as a great victory, without anyone questioning whether the casualties were necessary. After all, the French frigate was captured … capture the enemy and no one questions the casualties. But capture the same frigate with only half a dozen casualties and the captain was given little credit, authority shrugged its collective shoulders and commented that the French were poltroons.

Perhaps it was the right attitude: their Lordships could not be expected to weep because a hundred men died in a battle. If they did, the Admiralty would cease to function; no one would dare give orders. No admiral could order a ship into action if he stayed awake at night thinking of all the women who would be widowed, all the children made fatherless, as a result of his order. Admirals had to have hard hearts, and in his experience most of them did anyway, as well as an appreciation of captains responsible for payments into their prize accounts.

The trouble arose when a captain knew his ship's company too well; when he knew each man's quirks and habits, recognized his accent out of a dozen others, knew of his hopes and fears, perhaps had been asked for advice concerning some wayward wife or errant son. Then the question of taking a risk and hazarding his future did not apply. The captain was
involved:
he was the father of a large family.

Take Jackson, for instance. The muster book merely listed him as Jackson, Thomas, American, born in Charleston, Carolina, volunteer. Then there was Stafford, William, born in London, prest, and Rossi, Alberto, born in Genoa, volunteer … There were up to fifty other men now in the
Calypso
who had served with him for two or three years and sometimes more; who had been with him, for example, when the
Kathleen
cutter was rammed by the Spanish three-decker and reduced to kindling; had been in the
Triton
brig in various actions and saw her end up dismasted and wrecked on a coral reef … Yet men like Jackson, Thomas, had been with him when he rescued Gianna from the beach in Tuscany, with Bonaparte's cavalry galloping at them and Jackson making weird noises in the darkness which scared off the horses.

There was so much to remember, so many shared experiences with these people, men like Southwick, for instance, and more recently Aitken, Wagstaffe, Baker and young Lacey astern there in
La Créole.

If any one of these men was killed in battle he would mourn them like—like what, a brother, a nephew, an uncle? No, like one of his men; a curious relationship that encompassed all the others. With Southwick, for example, there was the combination of an eccentric uncle and an erratic nephew. Jackson, tall and sinewy, his sandy hair thinning, was like the most valued of family retainers. Officially he was the Captain's coxswain, but over the years he had become the equivalent of bodyguard and head gamekeeper. Jackson had saved his life several times; he had saved Jackson's. There were no debits or credits, only mutual respect.

And Stafford. Not to put too fine a point on it, Will Stafford was a bright-eyed young Cockney picklock at the time the press-gang took him up, but even if his boyhood had been spent burgling, the result as a young man was a fine seaman, fearless and loyal in a way that reminded Ramage of old stories of knightly chivalry. Stafford could just about write his name with much effort and tongue protruding, but he would give his life for his friends, men like Jackson and Rossi. He had an engaging way of mispronouncing words, and Jackson patiently corrected him.

Rossi was the third man about whom Gianna always enquired in her letters. Plump, black-haired, olive-skinned and jolly, he was a Genovesi; had left Genoa in a hurry, hated the French with a deep bitterness, was proud—and completely loyal to his adopted country. He was a volunteer and, as far as Ramage could make out, had joined the Navy because it gave him the best opportunity of killing Frenchmen. He had left Genoa before the conquering French arrived there to set up a new republic, and no doubt the city records would show that the authorities did not believe the story that Ramage had heard—that Rossi had killed the other man in self-defence—but Ramage took the attitude of most captains: that a man's life before his name went on the ship's muster list was his own affair.

Rossi was inordinately proud of Gianna: proud that the woman his Captain loved (that was no secret in the ship) was Italian. He might have a slight and secret reservation because she was not a Genovesa, but Volterra was in Tuscany and near enough to be acceptable. He would not have accepted a Neapolitan, a Sicilian or a Roman, and might have been doubtful about a Venetian, but a Tuscan was a neighbour, almost a
paisana.
Almost, but not quite; Tuscany was a different state; simply close to the Republic of Genoa.

Both Stafford (to whom she was invariably “the Marcheezer,” with Rossi trying to correct him, although the Cockney's tongue was incapable of uttering “Mar-kay-zer”) and the Genovesi regarded her as the most beautiful woman they had ever seen, and Ramage wondered if they speculated whether she would marry the Captain. Ramage sensed that Jackson had no doubt, but Jackson's relationship with Gianna was slightly different: he had been with Ramage when they had searched an Italian town for a doctor to save the life of (as they thought) a dying Gianna.

A bellowing beside him made Ramage go rigid with surprise, but it was Wagstaffe answering a hail from the mainmasthead, whose lookout then reported: “Horizon clear to the south and west, sir; only thing in sight is land to starboard!”

It was almost as if the ship shrugged and sighed with disappointment. Southwick sniffed, Wagstaffe rapped his kneecap with the speaking-trumpet, a frustrated Aitken muttered some Scottish oath, and in the half-light it seemed that the men slumped at the guns.