Ramage's Trial (13 page)

The rat-a-dee-tat-a-dee-tat of the drum, Wagstaffe noted, had the same effect on the
Calypso
as scooping the top off an anthill: suddenly dozens of hitherto hidden bodies swarmed out, apparently running about aimlessly, but an experienced eye saw that every man knew exactly where he was going.

By now the cutter used for the captain's visit to the
Emerald
was towing astern – with the ship going to quarters there was no time to hoist it in and stow it on the booms amidships (where an enemy shot could shiver it into a thousand splinters which would be more lethal, because more numerous, than a keg of grapeshot).

The
Calypso
had already turned back to the southeastward, and her yards had been braced sharp up as she began to beat to windward to meet the frigate, now steering northwest.

Now Aitken came up on deck to relieve Wagstaffe so that he could go to the maindeck and stand by the division of guns that were his responsibility. Already he could see Kenton and Martin watching the men load and run out the guns in their divisions.

Aitken moved up to the quarterdeck rail, noting that Jackson had taken over as quartermaster and another two seamen had joined the two already at the wheel, not because four men were needed in this weather but they were usually the target for sharpshooters. Now Mr Ramage had come on deck, wearing a sun-bleached uniform, coat, white breeches that had long ago lost their shape, a hat which was getting decidedly floppy from a diet of spray and hot sun, and shoes that made up in comfort on the hot deck what they lacked in smartness. The uniform worn for social visits (especially where the hostess was such an elegant woman) was not the one most suitable for going into action. Except for the silk stockings – that was one of Mr Ramage's rules, and the surgeon Bowen reckoned it a very good one. Officers had to wear silk stockings in action, even if they had only one pair. The danger (and trouble for the surgeon) of wool in the wound was apparently very great.

Aitken admitted it was a damned nuisance at times, particularly if the ship was in a busy sea lane, where one might sight a dozen strange sail in an afternoon, but out here in the Western Ocean, where sighting a strange sail might happen only once a week, it did not matter. Unless, as now, one was replete with quite the most splendid dinner he had ever eaten.

“Deck there! Foretopmast here!”

Aitken snatched up the speaking trumpet and answered the hail.

“The frigate's hoisted a couple of signals, sir.”

As Orsini hastily reported: “I can see them, sir!” Aitken told the man aloft to continue to keep a sharp lookout.

Orsini put down his telescope and flipped through the pages of the signal book.

“She's the
Jason
, sir,” he reported to Ramage and added, a puzzled note in his voice: “But she's not making the right challenge.”

“Is it last month's?” Ramage inquired.

That was a not infrequent mistake, or sometimes the ship concerned had been at sea so long she did not have the latest list. But it left the question of what reply did one make? A challenge was a challenge…

“You've got our pendant number and the correct challenge bent on?” Ramage asked.

“Yes, sir. And the correct reply bent on another halyard.”

“Hoist our numbers and the challenge,” Ramage ordered.

As Wagstaffe had already reported, the approaching ship was obviously a British frigate: her sheer and the cut of her sails were borne out by her using the Royal Navy's signal book (quite apart from the fact that one was most unlikely to meet an enemy ship so close to Barbados). Nevertheless, she had hoisted the wrong challenge, and it was now important to see what reply she made to the correct one.

Ramage watched the large flags flog and flap as seamen hauled down briskly on the other end of the halyard until the top of the uppermost flag reached the block.

Orsini was watching the frigate, balancing himself on the balls of his feet to compensate for the
Calypso
's roll, and the telescope seemed a part of his body.

“She's lowering her challenge, sir,” he reported just as the lookout aloft reported the same thing. A few moments later Aitken reported to Ramage that the
Calypso
's guns were now loaded with roundshot, carronades with grape, “pistols, pikes and cutlasses issued”.

“Very well, Mr Aitken.”

The advantages of the “Captain's Standing Orders” were only too obvious at a time like this: the guns and carronades had been loaded with the correct type of shot; the small arms routinely issued without orders (which wasted time); and people like Bowen had made their own preparations. Bowen's surgical instruments would be ready, with bandages and dressings to hand, tarpaulins spread for wounded to lie on. Some captains liked to rig boarding nets, but Ramage considered they were for defence: they stopped (hindered, rather) an enemy trying to board, because like thick fish nets it took a minute or two for a cutlass to slash through it. More important, a net designed to stop the enemy from getting on board also prevented one's own men from swarming over the bulwarks and boarding the enemy.

Ramage looked across at the approaching frigate but knew that the sharp eyes of Orsini, Aitken and the masthead lookouts would keep him informed, so contented himself with an inspection of the
Calypso
. She was ready for battle, or for lining the bulwarks and giving a friendly ship a cheer.

All the guns were run out; half a dozen men were gathered round each breech, their different shirts making splashes of colour. Most of them had narrow bands of cloth tied round their heads, across their foreheads, to prevent salty perspiration running into their eyes. Cutlasses were stowed along the inside of the bulwarks where they could be snatched up in an emergency; pikes and pistols were all placed near at hand. The muskets were still in the arms lockers, thanks to Ramage's long-held view that a musket was a clumsy and bulky weapon in an open boat or a frigate, and useless (except as a heavy object to hurl at the enemy) after firing one shot.

The 12-pounder guns were shiny black cylinders: the last job for the ship's company before the
Calypso
left Carlisle Bay was to give all the guns another coat of blacking. Curious how every ship's gunner kept secret his particular recipe, but they were all much the same, depending on soot, although he recalled one gunner who swore by rust which was pounded into a fine dust and bound together by lacquer. Anyway, most of the shot the
Calypso
would need if she went into action had just been scaled of rust by men tapping away with chipping hammers. It was hard to prevent them hammering too hard and pitting the roundshot with tiny dents. Almost more important, each shot had been passed several times through a shot gauge, a brass ring with an inside diameter precisely the correct size for a 12-pounder shot, just under four and a half inches. If there were any tiny hummocks of rust, or flakes of scale, the shot would stick in the gauge and the gunner would reject it, returning it to the men for more chipping.

Now those shot were ready for use, sitting in the racks round the hatch coamings in scooped-out recesses, so that they looked like large black oranges. More shot were close to the guns held in small pyramids by shot garlands, small rings of thick rope put flat on the deck and preventing the shot in the lower tier from rolling away as more tiers were added to form a pyramid. This time they would not be needed and would have to be stowed away again as soon as the
Calypso
stood down from general quarters, but Ramage noted that each garland was full; each pyramid was finished off with a single shot at the top, so the men were not saving themselves work.

From up here on the quarterdeck the flintlocks, carefully oiled small rectangular blocks of steel which could be fitted to the breech of each gun by wing nuts in a matter of seconds, glinted in the sunlight. The lock was the most important part of each gun, holding the flint in what looked like a cockerel's head and beak. At the breech end the firing lanyard was secured to a ring so that a steady pull by the gun captain (standing behind the gun and beyond the recoil) released the powerful spring and, in effect, made the flint peck against steel, showering sparks which ignited the powder in the pan and sent a flash down the vent into the breech of the gun, firing the charge. Until the flintlock was brought into use fifty years ago, Ramage reflected, guns were fired by slowmatch (in effect a burning cord) wound round a linstock, a method little better than jabbing with a red-hot poker.

Yet flintlocks did not always work – heavy rain or a shower of spray as a ship punched to windward could put them out of action until they were carefully wiped dry, and in action there was usually no time for that. As an insurance, a couple of feet of slow match for each gun was kept alight, fitted into notches round a tub of water so that the glowing end hung over the inside, ensuring that sparks should not ignite any stray grains of gunpowder.

Sparks were not the only risk: the trucks, the wide wooden wheels on which the gun carriages recoiled, caused a good deal of friction. The metal-shod handspikes, the heavy wooden levers like massive broom handles and used to shift over the breech end of the carriage to traverse the gun, could make a spark. So the deck, drying fast although the sun was getting low on the horizon, was sluiced down with buckets of water, with sand scattered on top so that the bare-footed gunners should not slip.

All these preparations, Ramage mused, because of the approach of another frigate which had almost certainly left Barbados a couple of days after the convoy, probably calling in on her way to England for routine despatches from Rear-Admiral Tewtin after visiting English Harbour, Antigua, braving the mosquitoes and general unpleasantness there to collect letters to the Admiralty and Navy Board, letters of absolutely no consequence. English Harbour had never been anything but an expense to the Royal Navy: even Rodney, after the Battle of the Saints (fought within seventy miles of English Harbour), had scorned the place and taken all his prizes (including the
Ville de Paris
, then the largest ship of war afloat) to Port Royal, Jamaica, seven or eight hundred miles away, giving Jamaica a sight still remembered, the largest fleet of ships of war ever assembled.

Ramage suddenly became aware that Aitken was talking to him and he quickly emerged from his reverie.

“That ship hasn't answered the challenge, sir.”

Yet she had hoisted her numbers and
a
challenge. Probably some muddled lieutenant with the wrong edition of the private signals (they were changed monthly), having made the wrong challenge (therefore receiving what seemed the wrong reply), would now be scrabbling about trying to find the current signal book, being harassed by an alarmed captain.

In turn the captain would be angry because his lieutenant had made a fool of him over the challenge – and at the same time would know the seriousness of approaching a convoy and its escort without having made the correct reply to
her
challenge. Ramage was thankful not to be the lieutenant – though the fault was ultimately the captain's because the particular book of private signals with the daily challenge and reply was in his care and he should know them in case a strange sail came into sight.

He sighed: it was
always
the damned captain's responsibility, just as now he had to decide what to do about this approaching idiot…

He reached for his telescope, pulled out the tube and lined up the focusing ring. He balanced himself against the roll and was able to ignore the pitch. The view now brought closer by the telescope lenses showed a lower semicircle of dark-blue, almost purplish sea with an upper semicircle of duck-egg-blue sky, and right in the middle was the foreshortened frigate running down towards them. In a hurry, it seemed: she was still running under all plain sail, though surely a prudent captain would be clewing up the courses by now, if not actually furling, and certainly furling the royals, leaving the ship under topsails, ready to heave-to close to the
Calypso
.

Ramage studied her carefully. Sails – a few patches but everything in good condition. Paintwork – the black paint of the hull was still black (mottled with dried spray) but did not have that purple tinge which showed age, too much sun and too much sea. And the copper sheathing on the bottom, showing frequently as the ship pitched heavily in the following seas, was bright and seemingly new, as though she was not long out of drydock.

Ramage turned to Aitken. “She doesn't
look
French, from her condition. Sails and sheathing look almost new.”

“That's what I thought, sir; but ploughing down under all plain sail and not making the correct reply to the challenge…”

Ramage shrugged his shoulders. “Well, we're at general quarters so there's nothing more we can do until she gets closer.”

Aitken nodded. “That's one thing about her, sir; she's steering directly for us and not trying to dodge round to get at the convoy.”

That had been the first thing that Ramage had considered: to him a natural reaction on first sighting a strange sail was, did she menace the convoy?

“I think we'll accept that the
Jason
– if that's who she is – doesn't have such efficient officers as the
Calypso
.”

“Probably has a less tyrannical captain,” Aitken said in one of his rare flashes of dry humour.

Certainly a more erratic one, Ramage thought: the
Jason
was leaving herself with less than a mile in which to clew up courses, furl royals, round up and then back the foretopsail ready for the
Calypso
's approach, and unless she had a full ship's company (which was unlikely: if she had 150 men out of an establishment of 210 she would be lucky) the next few minutes could provide an object lesson in how not to handle a ship. A lesson which would not be lost on Aitken, Wagstaffe, Kenton and Martin, he noted grimly.