Ramage's Challenge Read online

  Selected Historical Fiction Published by McBooks Press

  BY ALEXANDER KENT

  The Complete Midshipman Bolitho

  Stand Into Danger

  In Gallant Company

  Sloop of War

  To Glory We Steer

  Command a King’s Ship

  Passage to Mutiny

  With All Despatch

  Form Line of Battle!

  Enemy in Sight!

  The Flag Captain

  Signal–Close Action!

  The Inshore Squadron

  A Tradition of Victory

  Success to the Brave

  Colours Aloft!

  Honour This Day

  The Only Victor

  Beyond the Reef

  The Darkening Sea

  For My Country’s Freedom

  Cross of St George

  Sword of Honour

  Second to None

  Relentless Pursuit

  Man of War

  Heart of Oak

  BY PHILIP MCCUTCHAN

  Halfhyde’s Island

  Halfhyde and the Guns of Arrest

  Halfhyde to the Narrows

  Halfhyde for the Queen

  Halfhyde Ordered South

  Halfhyde on Zanatu

  BY JAN NEEDLE

  A Fine Boy for Killing

  The Wicked Trade

  The Spithead Nymph

  BY JAMES L. NELSON

  The Only Life That Mattered

  BY JAMES DUFFY

  Sand of the Arena

  The Fight for Rome

  BY DEWEY LAMBDIN

  The French Admiral

  The Gun Ketch

  A King’s Commander

  Jester’s Fortune

  BY DUDLEY POPE

  Ramage

  Ramage & The Drumbeat

  Ramage & The Freebooters

  Governor Ramage R.N.

  Ramage’s Prize

  Ramage & The Guillotine

  Ramage’s Diamond

  Ramage’s Mutiny

  Ramage & The Rebels

  The Ramage Touch

  Ramage’s Signal

  Ramage & The Renegades

  Ramage’s Devil

  Ramage’s Trial

  Ramage’s Challenge

  Ramage at Trafalgar

  Ramage & The Saracens

  Ramage & The Dido

  BY FREDERICK MARRYAT

  Frank Mildmay or The Naval Officer

  Mr Midshipman Easy

  Newton Forster or The Merchant Service

  BY V.A. STUART

  Victors and Lords

  The Sepoy Mutiny

  Massacre at Cawnpore

  The Cannons of Lucknow

  The Heroic Garrison

  The Valiant Sailors

  The Brave Captains

  Hazard’s Command

  Hazard of Huntress

  Hazard in Circassia

  Victory at Sebastopol

  Guns to the Far East

  Escape from Hell

  BY DOUGLAS W. JACOBSON

  Night of Flames

  BY JULIAN STOCKWIN

  Kydd

  Artemis

  Seaflower

  Mutiny

  Quarterdeck

  Tenacious

  Command

  The Admiral’s Daughter

  The Privateer’s Revenge

  BY JOHN BIGGINS

  A Sailor of Austria

  The Emperor’s Coloured Coat

  The Two-Headed Eagle

  Tomorrow the World

  BY ALEXANDER FULLERTON

  Storm Force to Narvik

  Last Lift from Crete

  All the Drowning Seas

  A Share of Honour

  The Torch Bearers

  The Gatecrashers

  BY C.N. PARKINSON

  The Guernseyman

  Devil to Pay

  The Fireship

  Dead Reckoning

  The Life and Times of Horatio Hornblower

  BY DOUGLAS REEMAN

  Twelve Seconds to Live

  The White Guns

  A Prayer for the Ship

  For Valour

  BY DAVID DONACHIE

  The Dying Trade

  A Hanging Matter

  An Element of Chance

  The Scent of Betrayal

  A Game of Bones

  BY BROOS CAMPBELL

  No Quarter

  The War of Knives

  Peter Wicked

  Published by McBooks Press 2002

  Copyright © 1986 by Dudley Pope

  First published in the United Kingdom in 1986 by

  The Alison Press/Martin Secker & Warburg Limited

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without the written permission of the publisher. Requests for such permissions should be addressed to McBooks Press, Inc., ID Booth Building, 520 North Meadow St., Ithaca, NY 14850.

  Cover painting by Paul Wright.

  The trade paperback version of this title was cataloged as:

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pope, Dudley.

  Ramage’s challenge / by Dudley Pope.

  p. cm. — (Lord Ramage novels ; no. 15)

  ISBN 1-59013-012-X (alk. paper)

  1. Great Britain. Royal Navy—Officers—Fiction. 2. Ramage, Nicholas (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 3. Napoleonic Wars, 1800–1815—Fiction. 4. Ship captains—Fiction. 5. Great Britain— History, Naval—19th century—Fiction. 6. Tuscany (Italy)—Fiction. I. Title

  PR6066.O5 R327 2002

  823’.914—dc21

  2002000124

  The e-book versions of this title have the following ISBNs:

  Kindle 978-1-59013-540-2, ePub 978-1-59013-541-9, and PDF 978-1-59013-542-6

  www.mcbooks.com

  For Kay

  who crossed a rubicon with me and sailed past

  Cabo Trafalgar in the moonlight.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THE Porto Santo Stefano of today was originally just “Santo Stefano,” and there were only two causeways between Argentario and the mainland until the third was built to carry modern traffic. Forte della Stella was also known as Fortino Stella; Torri and Monte dell’ Uccellina were also spelt Ucellina; Filippo Secundo was often Filipo Secundo at the time.

  DUDLEY POPE

  Yacht Ramage

  French Antilles

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE ATLANTIC entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar always reminded Ramage of a gigantic funnel lying on its side, its spout pointing towards the Mediterranean and forever replenishing the warm inland sea from the cold ocean. The lower side of the funnel was shaped by the North African coast between Casablanca and Tangier, the upper by the Spanish shore from Cadiz to Tarifa.

  However, this present stretch of Spain reaching from off Cadiz down to the actual Strait (which was known to generations of British seamen as “The Gut”) brewed the most unpredictable weather in Europe. No, that was not quite fair. Perhaps the Texel, off the north-west corner of the Netherlands, was as bad: sudden and vicious thunderstorms spawned there, too, out of a clear sky.

  Anyway, for once the wind taking the Calypso frigate diagonally across the Gulf of Cadiz, from off Faro down to the Strait, was remarkable only for its lightness; light enough to decide him to go in close to Cadiz and then stretch down towards The Gut, giving all his officers (and young Paolo, in particular) a chance to have a good look at this part of the Spanish coast. The coast was guarded by more forts and towers (one every half a dozen miles, it seemed) than anywhere he had ever seen except the Tuscan coast of Italy, which had, coincidentally, belonged to Spain for many year
s. Obviously the Dons favoured towers.

  The light breezes (admittedly from the north, giving the Calypso a soldier’s wind and calm sea and ensuring she was not off a lee shore) and a packet of sealed orders (to be opened once past

  Gibraltar) made him want to attack Cadiz just to placate his impatience.

  He glared at Paolo. “Where did Columbus sail from on his third voyage?”

  “Sanlúcar de Barrameda at the southern end of those marshes, Las Marismas,” the midshipman answered promptly. He pointed eastwards and added, “Just over there, sir.”

  “And Magellan?”

  “Same place, sir.”

  “And where did the Spanish plate fleets arrive when they bought back the gold and silver from the Main?”

  “Same place, sir, but they had to cross the bar and then sail or warp their way more than thirty miles up the River Guadalquivir to Seville, so that the bullion could be inspected by government men and officially weighed and stamped …”

  Ramage nodded and pointed first at the chart spread on the top of the binnacle box and then at the shore, running southeast, five miles away over on the larboard side. “And where are we now?”

  “Those low reddish cliffs have the Cortadura Fort at the northern end and the Torre Bermeja at the southern—you can just see the tower.”

  Ramage nodded and let his thoughts wander. He was looking at the coast of Andalusia. For more than a hundred years (beginning not so long after the Moors were driven out of Spain in 1492) an enormous quantity of gold and silver had poured into Spain from Mexico and Peru, yet a couple of centuries later Spain had nothing to show for it: no splendid palaces or new universities or even towns had been built with the money. No fleet, no army that mattered. The reason was simple enough: Philip II, who had sent the Armada against England (paying for it with the riches from the Spanish Main), and the kings succeeding him, had spent money on armies intended to turn the Protestants of Europe into Catholics, particularly the Netherlanders.

  When the navies of France and Britain, the buccaneers, pirates, and the Dutch had managed to prevent the plate fleets reaching Sanlúcar, the Spanish kings had borrowed heavily from the great bankers of Italy and Austria; the Fuggers and the Welsers, the Bardi and the Strozzi had been more than willing to lend—against the security of all the gold and silver of the Indies waiting on the Main to be shipped to Spain.

  Then the king (he could not remember which one, but it was soon after Charles II was restored to the English throne) was trapped. His enemies’ ships waited to catch the plate fleets at sea, so no bullion arrived in Spain, and with no bullion the king had no money to fit out the plate ships anyway.

  Nor did he have the money to pay the bankers’ interest on principal, so he defaulted on his debts. And that was how the Habsburgs broke the Fuggers, the enormously powerful family of merchant bankers that had (until it overextended itself with loans to Spain) financed wars, emperors, and nations.

  The Calypso’s white-haired master, Edward Southwick, stood patiently to one side, recognizing the look on Ramage’s face and waiting for him to come back from wherever his thoughts had led him.

  He offered Ramage a telescope. “That round tower is the Torre del Puerco, sir, and you can just see the waves breaking on the off-lying reef, Banco de los Marrajos, which is a couple of miles to seaward.”

  Ramage swept the coast with the glass. “Then there are cliffs and a headland, a small one.”

  “That’s right, sir,” Southwick said. “That’s Cabo Roche, a good marker for the next reef, which is Lajas de Cabo Roche, three miles offshore.”

  Ramage walked to the ship’s side and looked down at the water, and then aft at the Calypso’s wake. “We’re making about three knots and there doesn’t seem to be much current.”

  “About a knot, south-going,” Southwick said, “but we can expect a couple of knots once we get a few miles past Cabo Trafalgar.”

  “Not often the current favours us,” Ramage commented. He walked over and smoothed down the chart. “Hmm, I could just see the low, reddish cliff beyond Cabo Roche. This is a good chart—where did you get it?”

  “Bit o’ luck,” Southwick admitted. “My old one didn’t have many details, but once I heard we’d be bound through The Gut, I saw an old friend o’ mine who was the master of the flagship. I remembered he’d been along this coast several times, and he gave me a sight of the chart he’d drawn from three captured Spanish ones so I could copy it.”

  Ramage ran his finger along the coastline drawn in on the chart and beckoned to Paolo. “Medina Sidonia. What does that name mean to you?”

  The young midshipman’s brow wrinkled. “Accidente!” he exclaimed, lapsing into Italian. “An old Spanish family. That’s all that comes to mind, sir.”

  Ramage pointed over the larboard bow. “That headland there, Cabo Roche …”

  Paolo nodded.

  “North of it you see a few hills, with the mountains behind. Then you come to that sugarloaf (which must be a thousand feet high) and if you had a glass, you’d see a tower on top. That sugarloaf is called Medina Sidonia.”

  “Indeed, sir,” Paolo said politely.

  “But that sugarloaf is not the Medina Sidonia I’m referring to. Tell him, Southwick!”

  The master grinned sympathetically. The captain often shot questions like this at Midshipman Orsini as part of his self-appointed task of educating the Marchesa di Volterra’s nephew and heir.

  “Philip II put the Duke of Medina Sidonia in command of the vast Armada he sent against England in 1588, but Drake and gales did for the poor old duke, who knew nothing of the sea and was a coward anyway,” Southwick explained.

  “This was probably all the duke’s land, then,” Paolo commented.

  “Exactly,” Ramage said. “This small section of the Spanish coast, from Sanlúcar southwards, is really Spain’s history squeezed into a few miles. The duke led the Armada and was beaten, the plate fleets arriving with the gold and silver later stopped, Spain went broke and has never recovered…. It’s all here. And Medina Sidonia’s estates are just inland.

  “So now study the chart,” Ramage continued. “Get a glass and watch for the towers. If you know which is which, you’ll know exactly where we are: they’re like beacons all the way along this coast.”

  For the next couple of hours Paolo alternately bent over the chart and then scowled at the coastline through the telescope, occasionally scribbling a name and time on the slate kept in the drawer of the binnacle box, and careful to add a brief description of each one—the captain was sure to read the daily journal, which all midshipmen were required to keep and which was supposed to form a diary of the voyage, noting particularly anything of navigational interest and importance.

  Well, Paolo thought, we passed Cabo Roche a couple of miles back, so that castle must be the Castillo de Sancti Petri. The Medina Sidonia sugarloaf came next, and then the village of Conil, built on a hill sloping back from the coast and easily seen in the glare of the afternoon sun because most of the buildings were white. A cluster of spinning windmills on top of a nearby hill looked, in the distance, like a bunch of flowers. Inland, the bulky Monte de Patria was spotted by a series of towers—Torre La Atalaya, followed by the square-shaped Castilobo, which was hard to see because its grey stone blended with the land behind. Then on a small headland was Nueva, a round tower standing out among the rocks.

  As the Calypso sailed south-east along a flat stretch of the coast which ran for five or six miles, blurred by the haze thrown up as the Atlantic slapped the beaches but backed by the line of mountains, blue-grey in the distance, Paolo studied what seemed to be a small island lying just off the coast.

  Yet the chart did not show an island and, puzzled, he was just examining it with the glass for what seemed to be the tenth time when Ramage walked over. “You look worried.”

  “That island, sir,” he said, gesturing over the larboard bow. “It isn’t on the chart!”

  “Perhaps it isn’t an
island …”

  “But …” Paolo guessed the comment was a hint.

  “If you went aloft with the bring-’em-near, the extra height would show that your ‘island’ is a headland, the end of a long and low sandy spit. Look inland—that flat-topped high ridge running back to the mountains is the Altos de Meca, so …”

  “So that’s Cabo Trafalgar, sir!” Paolo exclaimed, the relief very apparent in his voice.

  “Exactly, and remember if you pass this way again close inshore, that from the north (and the south, of course) it does look like an island.” Ramage bent over the chart. “Yes, there’s a very prominent round tower at the seaward end of the Altos de Meca. Not surprisingly it’s called the Torre de Meca.”

  “Trafalgar doesn’t seem a very Spanish name,” Paolo commented, “especially compared with the towers.”

  “It’s not, and although the English call it TrafALgar with the emphasis on the second syllable, it should be on the third, TrafalGAR, because it’s taken from the Moorish name.”

  “What was its original name, then, sir?”

  “Original name? Well, the Romans were probably the first to name it—from memory something like Promontorium Junonis. Then the Moors called it Taraf el gar, which means (so Mr Southwick tells me) ‘the promontory of caves.’”

  “Are there caves there, sir?”

  “Presumably—I’ve never visited the place. By the way, the chart shows a reef just south of it, the Arrecife de Canaveral, quite apart from these reefs further offshore. Remember that, if you’re ever leading a shore party from the south!”

  “With all these towers and forts, I’d sooner stay at sea,” Paolo said with a grin. “The next tower is only three miles south-east of the cape, Torre del Tajo.”

  “No, I don’t think we shall be visiting Spain on this voyage,” Ramage said, and then remembered that until they were off Gibraltar and he could open the sealed orders, he did not know.