Ramage and the Freebooters Read online

  Copyright & Information

  Ramage & The Freebooters

  First published in 1969

  Copyright: Kay Pope; House of Stratus 1969-2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of Dudley Pope to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2010 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  EAN ISBN Edition

  0755113438 9780755113439 Print

  0755124294 9780755124299 Pdf

  0755124464 9780755124466 Kindle

  0755124634 9780755124633 Epub

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  www.houseofstratus.com

  About the Author

  Dudley Bernard Egerton Pope was born in Ashford, Kent on 29 December 1925. When at the tender age of fourteen World War II broke out and Dudley attempted to join the Home Guard by concealing his age. At sixteen, once again using a ruse, he joined the merchant navy a year early, signing papers as a cadet with the Silver Line. They sailed between Liverpool and West Africa, carrying groundnut oil.

  Before long, his ship was torpedoed in the Atlantic and a few survivors, including Dudley, spent two weeks in a lifeboat prior to being rescued. His injuries were severe and because of them he was invalided out of the merchant service and refused entry into the Royal Navy when officially called up for active service aged eighteen.

  Turning to journalism, he set about ‘getting on with the rest of his life’, as the Naval Review Board had advised him. He graduated to being Naval and Defence correspondent with the London Evening News in 1944. The call of the sea, however, was never far away and by the late 1940’s he had managed to acquire his first boat. In it, he took part in cross-channel races and also sailed off to Denmark, where he created something of a stir, his being one of the first yachts to visit the country since the war.

  In 1953 he met Kay, whom he married in 1954, and together they formed a lifelong partnership in pursuit of scholarly adventure on the sea. From 1959 they were based in Porto Santo Stefano in Italy for a few years, wintering on land and living aboard during the summer. They traded up boats wherever possible, so as to provide more living space, and Kay Pope states:

  ‘In September 1963, we returned to England where we had bought the 53 foot cutter Golden Dragon and moved on board where she lay on the east coast. In July 1965, we cruised down the coasts of Spain and Portugal, to Gibraltar, and then to the Canary Islands. Early November of the same year we then sailed across the Atlantic to Barbados and Grenada, where we stayed three years.

  Our daughter, Victoria was 4 months old when we left the UK and 10 months when we arrived in Barbados. In April 1968, we moved on board ‘Ramage’ in St Thomas, US Virgin Islands and lost our mainmast off St Croix, when attempting to return to Grenada.’

  The couple spent the next nine years cruising between the British Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, before going to Antigua in 1977 and finally St.Martin in 1979.

  The sea was clearly in Pope’s blood, his family having originated in Padstow, Cornwall and later owning a shipyard in Plymouth. His great-grandfather had actually preceded him to the West Indies when in 1823, after a spell in Canada, he went to St.Vincent as a Methodist missionary, before returning to the family business in Devon.

  In later life, Dudley Pope was forced to move ashore because of vertigo and other difficulties caused by injuries sustained during the war. He died in St.Martin in 1997, where Kay now lives. Their daughter, Victoria, has in turn inherited a love of the sea and lives on a sloop, as well as practising her father’s initial profession of journalism.

  As an experienced seaman, talented journalist and historian, it was a natural progression for Pope to write authoritative accounts of naval battles and his first book, Flag 4: The Battle of Coastal Forces in the Mediterranean, was published in 1954. This was followed in 1956 by the Battle of the River Plate, which remains the most accurate and meticulously researched account of this first turning point for Britain in World War II. Many more followed, including the biography of Sir Henry Morgan, (Harry Morgan’s Way) which has one won wide acclaim as being both scholarly and thoroughly readable. It portrays the history of Britain’s early Caribbean settlement and describes the Buccaneer’s bases and refuges, the way they lived, their ships and the raids they made on the coast of central America and the Spain Main, including the sack of Panama.

  Recognising Pope’s talent and eye for detail, C.S. Forrester (the creator of the Hornblower Series) encouraged him to try his hand at fiction. The result, in 1965, was the appearance of the first of the Ramage novels, followed by a further seventeen culminating with Ramage and the Dido which was published in 1989. These follow the career and exploits of a young naval officer, Nicholas Ramage, who was clearly named after Pope’s yacht. He also published the ‘Ned Yorke’ series of novels, which commences as would be expected in the Caribbean, in the seventeenth century, but culminates in ‘Convoy’ and ‘Decoy’ with a Ned Yorke of the same family many generations on fighting the Battle of the Atlantic.

  All of Dudley Pope’s works are renowned for their level of detail and accuracy, as well as managing to bring to the modern reader an authentic feeling of the atmosphere of the times in which they are set.

  Some of the many compliments paid by reviewers about Dudley Pope’s work:

  ‘Expert knowledge of naval history’- Guardian

  “An author who really knows Nelson’s navy” - Observer

  ‘The best of Hornblower’s successors’ - Sunday Times

  ‘All the verve and expertise of Forrester’ - Observer

  Dedication

  For Barley Alison

  CHAPTER ONE

  As Ramage’s carriage rattled along Whitehall he was surprised to see the long and wide street was almost deserted. A file of red-coated soldiers swaggered past the end of Downing Street with the white plumes of their shakos streaming in the wind, boots gleaming black and cross-belts white from carefully applied pipe-clay. A brewer’s dray drawn by two pairs of horses and heavily laden with hogsheads precariously balanced, pyramid fashion, approached the Admiralty from Charing Cross.

  A pieman pushing his handcart, corpulent from tasting his own wares and obviously tipsy from sampling those of a brewer, stopped outside the Banqueting House of Old Whitehall Palace and as he mopped his brow bellowed, ‘Buy my plum pudden!’ A pedlar, sitting astride his spavined horse and trying to persuade the occasional passers-by to look at the remarkable bargains in lace and brocade displayed in his large leather pack, glowered at the pieman and moved on another few yards.

  On both sides of the street a few people dodging puddles left by a heavy shower of rain looked from a distance as if they were performing some complicated dance.

  Ramage sat back, squashing the upholstery which exhaled a smell of mildew, picked up his cocked hat and jammed it on his head and – as the driver swore at the horses, swinging them over to the middle of the road for the sharp left turn under the narrow arch
way and into the forecourt of the Admiralty – wished he felt more like the naval officer he was than an errant schoolboy summoned before a wrathful headmaster.

  The wheels chattered over the cobblestones before the carriage stopped in front of the four immense columns dominating the main entrance. The carriage door creaked open and a hand pulled the folding steps down. The doorman coming out of the entrance hall as Ramage alighted, stopped when he saw the visitor was a mere lieutenant and went back into the building.

  Telling the coachman to wait, Ramage walked up the steps into the spacious entrance hall where a large, six-sided glass lantern hung from the ceiling and his footsteps echoed on the marble floor. On his left the large fireplace was still full of ashes from the night porter’s fire and on each side of it were the curious hooded black armchairs which always reminded him of a widow’s bonnet.

  From one of them a liveried attendant rose with calculated languidness and, in a bored and condescending voice, asked: ‘Your business…sir?’

  The ‘sir’ was not an afterthought; from constant practice it was carefully timed to indicate lieutenants were the lowliest of commission officers and that this was the Admiralty, of whose doors the speaker was the lawful guardian.

  ‘To see the First Lord.’

  ‘I…let me look at my list.’

  Ramage tapped the floor with the scabbard of his dress sword.

  The man opened the drawer of a small table and, although the list was obviously the only thing in it, he scrabbled about for some time before taking out a sheet of paper. After glancing at it he looked at Ramage insolently before replacing it and closing the drawer. ‘You’ll have to–’

  ‘I have an appointment,’ Ramage interrupted.

  ‘Quite…sir. I’ll try to arrange for you to see one of the secretaries. Maybe even this afternoon.’

  ‘I have an appointment with Lord Spencer at nine o’clock. Please tell him I’m here.’

  ‘Look,’ sneered the man, all pretence at politeness vanishing, ‘we get lieutenants in ’ere by the gross, captains by the score and admirals by the dozen, all claiming they’ve appointments with ‘is Lordship. There’s only one person on the list to see ‘is Lordship this morning and ’e ain’t you. You can wait in there’ – he pointed at the notorious waiting-room to the left of the main doors – ‘and I’ll see if I can find someone to see you.’

  Ramage was rubbing the lower of the two scars on his right brow: an unconscious gesture which a few weeks earlier would have warned a whole ship’s company that their young captain was either thinking hard or getting angry.

  Suddenly turning to the doorman – who was obviously enjoying the episode – Ramage snapped: ‘You! Go at once and tell the First Lord that Lord Ramage has arrived for his appointment.’

  The man was scuttling for the corridor at the far end of the hall before Ramage turned back to the liveried attendant who, by now looking worried and rubbing his hands together like an ingratiating potman, said reproachfully: ‘Why, your Lordship, I didn’t realize… You didn’t tell me your name.’

  ‘You didn’t ask me and you couldn’t be bothered to see if I was the person on the list. You merely hinted that a guinea would help arrange for me to see a clerk. Now hold your tongue.’

  The man was about to say something when he saw Ramage’s eyes: dark brown and deep-set under thick eyebrows, they now gleamed with such anger the man was frightened, noticing for the first time the two scars on the lieutenant’s brow. One was a white line showing clearly against the tanned skin; the other pink and slightly swollen, obviously the result of a recent wound.

  But Ramage was still shaken – as was every other officer in the Royal Navy – by the latest news from Spithead and felt a bitter rage not with the man as an individual but as a spiteful personification of the attitude of many of the Admiralty and Navy Board civilian staff.

  By now impatiently pacing up and down the hall, Ramage thought of the dozens of assistant, junior and senior clerks, and the assistant, junior and senior secretaries now working under this very roof, all too many of whom administered the Navy with an impersonal condescension and contempt for both seamen and sea officers amounting at times to callousness.

  It was understandable because of the system; but it was also unforgivable. Many – in fact most – of these men owed their time-serving, well-pensioned jobs to the influence of some well-placed relative or friend. They filled in forms, checked and filed reports, and at the drop of a hat rattled off the wording of regulations parrot-fashion, unconcerned that the seaman they might be cheating out of a pension was illiterate and ignorant of his legal rights, or that the captain of a ship of war suddenly ordered to account for the loss of some paltry item might be almost at his wit’s end with exhaustion after weeks of keeping a close blockade on some God-forsaken, gale-swept French port.

  An inky-fingered clerk was, in his own estimation, far more important than a sea officer; ships and seamen were to him an annoyance he had to suffer. No one ever pointed out that he existed solely to keep the ships at sea, well-found, well-provisioned and manned by healthy and regularly paid seamen. No, to these damned quill-pushers a ship of war was a hole in a gigantic pile of forms and reports lined with wood and filled with convicts.

  Most of this shameful business at Spithead was due to men like this, whether a junior clerk at £75 a year humbugging the distraught widow of a seaman killed in battle or a senior secretary at £800 a year ignoring the sea officers and telling ministers what they wanted to hear. The Devil take the –

  ‘My Lord…’

  The porter was trotting alongside him and had obviously been trying to attract Ramage’s attention for some moments.

  ‘My Lord, if you’ll come this way please.’

  A few moments later he was ushering Ramage through a door saying, ‘Would you wait in here, sir: His Lordship will be with you in a few minutes.’

  As the door closed behind him Ramage realized he was in the Board Room: in here, under the ceiling decorated with heraldic roses picked out in white and gilt, the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty sat and deliberated.

  Their decisions, jotted down by the Board Secretary on scraps of paper as they were made, resulted in orders being sent out to despatch a fleet half-way round the world to the East Indies, or the 128th captain in the Navy List commanding a frigate off Brest receiving a reprimand for failing to use the prescribed wording when drawing up the report of a survey on a leaking cask of beer.

  Large or small, right or wrong, it was here in this room that the decisions were made that governed the activities of more than six hundred of the King’s ships whether they were cruising the coast of India or the Spanish Main, blockading Cadiz or acting as guardship at Plymouth. If the ships were the fighting body of the Navy, he reflected, here was its brain, working in a long room which had three tall windows along one wall and was panelled with the same oak used to build the ships.

  And Ramage saw it was an impressive room which had absorbed something of the drama and greatness of the decisions Their Lordships had made within its walls during the last five score years or more, sitting at the long, highly polished table occupying the middle of the room.

  The high-backed chair with arms at the far end was obviously the First Lord’s, and the pile of paper, quill, silver paper-knife, inkwell and sandbox in front of it indicated he probably used the Board Room as his own office.

  Ramage, intrigued by several long cylinders looking like rolled-up white blinds and fitted on to a large panel over the fireplace, walked over and pulled down one of the tassels. It was a chart of the North Sea. A convenient way of stowing them. Then he noticed the whole panel was surrounded by a frieze of very light wood covered with carvings of nautical and medical instruments and symbols of the sea.

  The instruments were beautifully carved, standing out in such relief it seemed he could reach up and use any one of them. An azimuth overlapped an astrolabe; a set of shot gauges hung over a pelorus; a cross staff used by th
e earliest navigators was partly hidden by a miniature cannon. And, emphasizing the importance of good health in a ship, especially on long voyages of discovery, the snakes and winged staff symbol of Aesculapius and a globe of the world.

  There was what seemed to be the face of an enormous clock on the wall opposite the First Lord’s chair, but instead of two hands it had a single pointer, like a compass needle. Instead of numbers round the edge, there were the points of the compass, while the map of Europe painted on its face had the axle of the pointer exactly where London was.

  He saw the pointer was moving slightly, ranging between ‘SW’ and ‘SW by W’. It was the dial that his father had long ago described to him and which, by an ingenious arrangement of rods and wheels, showed the direction the wind vane on the Admiralty roof was pointing.

  And it was very old – that much was clear from the map which showed the North Sea as ‘The British Ocean’. Calais appeared as ‘Calice’ while the Scilly Isles were simply labelled ‘Silly I’.

  Each country was indicated by the arms of its royal family, and even a casual glance showed Ramage that some of them had long since vanished, removed from their thrones by death, intrigue, revolution or conquest.

  As he reached for his watch he noticed the tall grandfather clock beside the door through which he’d entered. Ten minutes past nine. The figure ‘17’ showed in a small aperture carved in the face – the date, 17 April. Ingenious, yet the clock was obviously very old: the wood was mellow, the metal of the face – which was surrounded by elaborate gilt work – had a rich patina, the mirror on the door was dulled with age, like old men’s eyes.

  Ramage remembered something his father had told him about the clock: it was made –